Editing Recapitulation theory (section)

===Music criticism===

The musicologist [[Richard Taruskin]] in 2005 applied the phrase "ontogeny becomes phylogeny" to the process of creating and recasting music history, often to assert a perspective or argument. For example, the peculiar development of the works by modernist composer [[Arnold Schoenberg]] (here an "ontogeny") is generalized in many histories into a "phylogeny" – a historical development ("evolution") of Western music toward [[atonal]] styles of which Schoenberg is a representative. Such [[Historiography|historiographies]] of the "collapse of traditional tonality" are faulted by music historians as asserting a rhetorical rather than historical point about tonality's "collapse".<ref name=Taruskin>{{cite book | last=Taruskin | first=Richard | title=The Oxford History of Western Music | volume=4 | year=2005 | publisher=Oxford University Press | location=New York | isbn=978-0-195-38630-1  | pages=358–361}}</ref>

Taruskin also developed a variation of the motto into the pun "ontogeny recapitulates ontology" to refute the concept of "[[absolute music]]" advancing the socio-artistic theories of the musicologist [[Carl Dahlhaus]]. [[Ontology]] is the investigation of what exactly something is, and Taruskin asserts that an art object becomes that which society and succeeding generations made of it. For example, [[Johann Sebastian Bach]]'s ''[[St. John Passion]]'', composed in the 1720s, was appropriated by the [[Nazi]] regime in the 1930s for [[propaganda]]. Taruskin claims the historical development of the ''St John Passion'' (its ontogeny) as a work with an [[anti-Semitic]] message does, in fact, inform the work's identity (its ontology), even though that was an unlikely concern of the composer. Music or even an abstract visual artwork can not be truly autonomous ("absolute") because it is defined by its historical and social reception.<ref name=Taruskin/>