Why did Eduard Hanslick argue that music is independent from the other arts?

Eduard Hanslick, often regarded as the father of modern musical criticism, argued for the autonomy of music in his seminal work, The Beautiful in Music (1854).12

Hanslick’s position was rooted in formalism, which maintains that music is an art of intrinsic principles and ideas that "means itself". By emphasizing that music is independent of the other arts, he rejected the prevailing Romantic tendency to view music as a vehicle for expressing extramusical emotions or embodying poetic and literary ideas.312

Instead of relying on descriptive or emotional interpretations—which he found redundant or meaningless—Hanslick advocated for an analytical approach. He posited that the sense of music lies in the acoustic patterns themselves. By distancing music from external referents, Hanslick sought to establish it as a self-contained art form defined by its own internal structure rather than its ability to communicate feelings or represent non-musical concepts.231