The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy 9780199367313, 0199367310

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

W E ST E R N M USIC A N D PH I L O SOPH Y

The Oxford Handbook of

WESTERN MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY Edited by

TOMÁS MC AULEY, NANETTE NIELSEN, AND JERROLD LEVINSON, with

ARIANA PHILLIPS-HUTTON, Associate Editor

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–936731–3 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi List of contributorsxiii

Introduction Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson

1

PA RT I   M A P P I N G T H E F I E L D 1. Historical Musicology and Philosophy Julian Johnson

11

2. Music Theory and Philosophy Alexander Rehding

27

3. Ethnomusicology and Philosophy Ellen Koskoff

45

4. Analytic Philosophy of Music David Davies

65

5. Continental Philosophy of Music Christopher Norris

89

PA RT I I   H I S TORY 6. Ancient Greece Armand D’Angour

117

7. The Middle Ages Elizabeth Eva Leach

137

8. The Early Modern Period Bruce R. Smith

157

9. The Enlightenment Tomás McAuley

181

vi   contents

10. The Nineteenth Century Andreas Dorschel

207

11. The Twentieth Century Tamara Levitz

225

PA RT I I I   P H I L O S OP H IC A L T R A DI T ION S A N D P R AC T IC E S 12. Epistemologies Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert

265

13. Ethics Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen

283

14. Phenomenology Simon Høffding

307

15. Ontology Charles O. Nussbaum

325

16. Theology Jeremy Begbie

345

17. Philosophy of Language Hanne Appelqvist

361

18. Hermeneutics Lawrence Kramer

385

19. Deconstruction Naomi Waltham-Smith

403

20. Posthumanism Gary Tomlinson

415

PA RT I V   M U SIC A L T R A DI T ION S A N D P R AC T IC E S 21. Improvisation Bruce Ellis Benson

437

22. Composition Joseph Dubiel

451

contents   vii

23. Performance Paul Thom

467

24. Listening Marcel Cobussen

483

25. Vocal Music Freya Jarman

499

26. Electronic Music Joanna Demers

519

27. Popular Music Theodore Gracyk

533

28. Blacksound Matthew D. Morrison

555

29. Jazz Garry L. Hagberg

579

30. Opera Michael Fend

601

PA RT V   K E Y C ON C E P T S 31. Absolute Music Sarah Collins

631

32. Consciousness David Clarke

653

33. Evolution Stephen Davies

677

34. Expression Mark Evan Bonds

705

35. Gender J. P. E. Harper-Scott

723

36. The Ineffable (and Beyond) Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope

741

37. Meaning and Autonomy Max Paddison

763

viii   contents

38. Meaning and Scepticism Paul Boghossian

785

39. Mercy Martha C. Nussbaum

803

40. Nature Stephen Decatur Smith

823

41. Making Sense Andrew Bowie

843

42. Society Michael Gallope

859

43. Space Andrew Kania

879

44. Time Christopher Hasty

895

PA RT V I   C OL L I SION S A N D C OL L A B OR AT ION S 45. Authenticity Julian Dodd and John Irving

923

46. Beauty Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton

941

47. Emotion Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers

967

48. Enchantment Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham

983

49. Expectations Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay

997

50. Galant Music Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jerrold Levinson, with an introduction by Naomi Waltham-Smith

1019

contents   ix

5 1a. Perception Christopher Peacocke

1029

51b. Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception Nicholas Cook

1057

52a. Subjectivities Susan McClary

1065

52b. Response to Susan McClary: Subjectivities Jeanette Bicknell

1075

Index

1083

Acknowledgements

This large-scale project has been under way for a number of years and more people have been involved at various stages than it is possible to recount here. Building on the rich history that we highlight in the Introduction, dialogue between musicologists, philosophers, and scholars in a range of related disciplinary areas has, since 2010, flourished at the particular meeting point that has been the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (RMA MPSG). It was at this group’s conferences, bristling with ideas, debates, and passion, that the initial seeds for the current Handbook were sown. All three of the main Handbook editors have been immersed in these events from the  start: McAuley and Nielsen as founding RMA MPSG committee members, and Levinson as advisory board member and, in 2017, as keynote speaker. We thus express our gratitude here to the institutions that have made these conferences happen, notably the Royal Musical Association, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Departments of Music and of Philosophy at King’s College London, but also the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Music & Letters Trust, the Mind Association, the University of Nottingham, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the University of Hull, Cambridge University (both the Faculty of Music and the Margaret Beaufort Institute for Theology), the University of London’s Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck, University of London. We are also grateful to the many associated groups that supported the conferences, whether by organizing individual panels or by collaborating on whole events. Amongst the numerous individuals whose work made the conferences possible, we thank our many previous co-organizers and colleagues—not to mention our successors—on the committee of the RMA MPSG, and offer particular thanks to Susan Bagust, John Deathridge, Víctor Durà-Vilà, and Michael Fend, whose encouragements formed the cornerstone of the group’s foundation. That said, for all its historical, practical, and emotional roots in the RMA MPSG, this Handbook remains a free-standing project, one that reflects the collective goals, values, and aspirations of its individual authors and editors, rather than those of any particular organization. We also note appreciatively the work of music and philosophy study/­interest groups in the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, and of the British Society of Aesthetics and the American Society for Aesthetics, which have formed natural homes for the work of many scholars represented in the pages that follow. Given the wide scope of the present volume, we took the unusual decision to have its chapters peer-reviewed individually by readers expert in each given area. As such,

xii   acknowledgements thanks are owed to a veritable army of anonymous reviewers, scholars who gave generously when their time was already significantly in demand. We are deeply grateful for all of the invaluable feedback and suggestions for improvements: the Handbook would not have reached its current state without them. Our work has been very ably supported by Rachel McCarthy and Anika Babel, who provided editorial assistance during the final months of the project, and by Oliver Chandler, who helped to set numerous music examples. A very special thanks goes to Ariana Phillips-Hutton, who started work on this project as an editorial assistant, but whose outstanding contribution to the project grew through its final years to a position where the title of Associate Editor seemed more fitting. Finally, none of the editorial assistance would have been possible without generous support from the University of Cambridge (Returning Carers Scheme), University College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. The editorial work of McAuley was itself generously supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Rowena Anketell, whose meticulous final copyedit improved the text in innumerable places, and to the dedicated staff at Oxford University Press, in particular to Suzanne Ryan, whose enthusiasm, encouragement, and wisdom allowed this project to happen, and to Lauralee Yeary, who answered more practical queries than was reasonable with patience and grace. Many other individuals have offered invaluable encouragement and advice at various stages of the project, notably: Mark Evan Bonds, Andrew Bowie, Michael Gallope, Sarah Hibberd, Kathleen Higgins, Stephen Hinton, Julian Johnson, Frank Paul Silye, Elizabeth Swann, and Benjamin Walton. More essential still, though with considerable overlap, has been the outstanding work of our various authors, not to mention their patience in seeing the book into print. Finally, we note with appreciation that there has for some years now already existed a high-quality Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. Though the present book is significantly different in its aims, we share freely our admiration for that earlier project, and acknowledge with gratitude the role it has played in helping the field of music and philosophy to grow and to mature. We also thank Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, the editors of that 2011 volume—both of whom have generously contributed to the present Handbook—for their good humour and encouragement.

List of Contributors

Carolyn Abbate, Harvard University Hanne Appelqvist, University of Helsinki Jeremy Begbie, Duke University and University of Cambridge Bruce Ellis Benson, University of St Andrews and University of Vienna Jeanette Bicknell, Independent Scholar Paul Boghossian, New York University Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London Scott Burnham, City University of New York David Clarke, Newcastle University Marcel Cobussen, Leiden University Sarah Collins, University of Western Australia Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge Ian Cross, University of Cambridge Armand D’Angour, University of Oxford David Davies, McGill University Stephen Davies, University of Auckland Joanna Demers, University of Southern California Julian Dodd, University of Leeds Andreas Dorschel, University of the Arts, Graz Joseph Dubiel, Columbia University Michael Fend, King’s College London Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota Theodore Gracyk, Minnesota State University, Moorhead

xiv   list of contributors Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Royal Holloway, University of London Christopher Hasty, Harvard University Stephen Hinton, Stanford University Simon Høffding, University of Oslo and University of Southern Denmark John Irving, Guildhall School of Music & Drama Freya Jarman, University of Liverpool Julian Johnson, Royal Holloway, University of London Jenny Judge, New York University Andrew Kania, Trinity University Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford Jerrold Levinson, University of Maryland Tamara Levitz, University of California, Los Angeles Derek Matravers, The Open University Tomás McAuley, University College Dublin Susan McClary, Case Western Reserve University Matthew D. Morrison, New York University Bence Nanay, University of Antwerp Jean-Luc Nancy, The European Graduate School Nanette Nielsen, University of Oslo Christopher Norris, University of Cardiff Charles O. Nussbaum, University of Texas at Arlington Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago Max Paddison, Durham University Christopher Peacocke, Columbia University and Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London Ariana Phillips-Hutton, University of Cambridge

list of contributors   xv Alexander Rehding, Harvard University Stephen Decatur Smith, Stony Brook University Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool Paul Thom, University of Sydney Elizabeth Tolbert, Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University Gary Tomlinson, Yale University Naomi Waltham-Smith, University of Warwick Nick Zangwill, University College London

I n troduction Tomás M c Auley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson

Meeting Points Among its many achievements, music has often been a catalyst for philosophical engagement and thought.1 Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, an idealized and idealizable creation, or the most embodied and humanly engaging sonic art form, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. The traffic, however, has never been one-way: philosophy has long provided a catalyst for musical engagement and thought. Musicians of all stripes have drawn on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement. Further, scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into both music and the worlds that sustain it. One way to conceptualize this rich history is as a series of meeting points between these two overlapping yet distinct spheres of human activity. As a result of these meeting points, the scholarly community can today draw on a massive legacy of interaction between music and philosophy. The aim of this Handbook is to draw together and drive forward key debates at the heart of this legacy. In common with the aims of the Oxford Handbook series as a whole, each essay sets out to “evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate.” Naturally, each author has chosen to interpret this remit slightly differently, and so each essay finds its own place on the sliding scale between coverage and contention. Yet all essays exhibit something of both, and the purpose throughout remains not only to summarize debates, but also to move them forward. The word “and” in the title of this Handbook is crucial to its dialogic aims. The “of ” in the common phrase “philosophy of music” can suggest a certain sense of possession: music and its elements are seen as objects in need of definition from philosophy. The “and” in the title of this Handbook, by contrast, does not seek to exclude philosophical

2   Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson insights into music, but allows equally for musical insights into philosophy, and avoids any connotation of a superior discipline. In so doing, it pays full respect to ongoing work in the philosophy “of ” music—and seeks to represent that work to the fullest possible extent—yet sees such work as but one part of the broader interdisciplinary field of music and philosophy. Beyond this broad orientation, we do not attempt to define “music and philosophy”: to capture its essence or to set its boundaries.2 Rather, we intend for the Handbook as a whole to provide—by implication and alongside its more explicit goals—such a definition, one comprising numerous perspectives and infinitely richer than a small team of editors could provide alone, even whilst it remains inevitably incomplete. That said, the shape of the final Handbook remains palpably tied to decisions that were made early on as to its structure and scope. With that in mind, what follows is an overview of the Handbook that attempts not to summarize each individual essay, but rather to share the reasoning behind the choices of topics and groupings that determine its particular topography.

An Overview of the Handbook Mapping the Field: The Handbook starts with a set of five essays that aim to “map” the field of music and philosophy. They do so by introducing the topic from the perspective of the three main subdisciplines of music studies (with chapters on Historical Musicology, Music Theory, and Ethnomusicology) and the two main orientations towards contemporary philosophy (Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy). We recognize that these divisions reflect historical tensions that are often specific to particular geopolitical regions, and that are increasingly being called into question. The distinction between historical musicology and music theory, for example, is characteristic of, though by no means exclusive to, North American music studies in particular, and even there belies often-fluid boundaries between these endeavours. The distinction between historical musicology and ethnomusicology, in turn, must answer to competing claims that either all music scholars (Cook 2008) or no music scholars (Amico 2020) could or should self-identify as practising some form of ethnomusicology.3 More disputed still is the division between analytic and continental philosophies, a division that, as many have pointed out, confuses methodology with geography. The result is what Bernard Williams once called, in a remark cited tellingly by Tamara Levitz later in this Handbook, “a strange cross-classification—rather as though one divided cars into frontwheel drives and Japanese” (Williams 1996, 25). One might also ask why work from (particular parts of) one continent should deserve the label “continental” any more than that from any other continent. Yet for all their faults, these divisions continue to guide much current work in each discipline, as reflected in the departments in which different scholars work, the journals in which they publish, and the societies with which they affiliate themselves. Within a

Introduction   3 North American context at least, the latter is perhaps the most straightforwardly revealing: for all their open-mindedness and attempts at rapprochement, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology remain three distinct bodies—as do the American Society for Aesthetics (broadly analytic in orientation) and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (devoted to continental philosophy). Rather than ignore these divisions, we chose to commission a set of essays that take a self-conscious and critical approach to each tradition and we are grateful to the authors of these essays for tackling their topics with such sensitivity and grace. We also acknowledge that much relevant work comes from outside any of the subdisciplines of music studies and philosophy, whether from practising musicians who might eschew, or be denied the opportunity for, any kind of academic orientation, or from scholars in disciplines such as film studies, sound studies, media studies, art ­history, literature, cultural studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, sociology, performance studies, and intellectual history. Yet the five overlapping areas mapped here have  nonetheless remained a primary focal point for a very significant amount of recent work. History: If the Handbook started with a present-day road map to the field of music and philosophy, it now provides a different kind of road map, one that reaches back to the past, by charting the history of music and philosophy. This history, spanning more than two millennia, does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather seeks to highlight a set of key meeting points between music and philosophy through time. Some of these essays, namely those on Ancient Greece and The Middle Ages, follow cultural-temporal divisions that are common across all of this volume’s cognate disciplines. As this set of essays moves from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, however, they follow standard period divisions not of the European history of concert music, with its focus on Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, but rather of Western intellectual and literary history, with essays on The Early Modern Period and The Enlightenment. Its final two essays move to century periodizations—The Nineteenth Century and The Twentieth Century—yet do so again with the aim of drawing out key meeting points within these centuries, rather than seeking to construct narratives that start or stop artificially at the turn of each century. Philosophical Traditions and Practices: Having begun with a set of essays highlighting the importance of disciplinary and subdisciplinary differences, the volume now continues with two sets of essays that highlight traditions and practices that, taken as a whole, bear no particular allegiance to any particular discipline, often cutting across or between them. The first, Philosophical Traditions and Practices, ranges from topics that might be seen as subdisciplines of philosophy (Epistemologies, Ethics, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics) to those that would more naturally seem to be approaches to philosophy as a whole, or perhaps even in some cases partner disciplines to philosophy (Phenomenology, Theology, Deconstruction, Posthumanism). Though some of these (say, Deconstruction) might seem to fall easily on one side of a perceived analytic–continental divide, others (say, Ethics or Ontology) represent topics that are, in

4   Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson their own ways, equally central to both traditions. Others (notably Posthumanism and Hermeneutics) reach beyond this division to embrace the terrain of literary, cultural, and critical theory. Musical Traditions and Practices: The second of these sets of essays shifts its focus from philosophical to musical traditions and practices. It starts with a quartet of essays on musical process and experience: Improvisation, Composition, Performance, and Listening. It continues with an overview of some key musical genres or approaches to music-making: Vocal Music, Electronic Music, Popular Music, Blacksound, Jazz, and Opera. To a large extent, these essays comprise philosophically oriented examinations of each tradition or practice. As such, this part might come closest to an overview of “the philosophy of music” as it is usually practised. Yet even here, the musical traditions and practices are frequently understood as sources from which philosophy might take inspiration, rather than simply as objects for philosophy to examine. Key Concepts: In terms of sheer number of essays, the next part, Key Concepts, is the largest. It is also the most diverse. Many of these essays have a strong historical bent, yet bring the histories that they uncover into dialogue with more recent work (Absolute Music, Expression, Making Sense, Mercy, Nature, Society). Another (Evolution) extends its focus back further still to music’s prehistory. Several engage in particular the vexed question of music’s potential political power (Gender, The Ineffable (and Beyond), Absolute Music). Another focus is on interactions between music, philosophy, and the “hard” sciences (Consciousness, Evolution). An unintentional but fortuitous pairing is the inclusion of a pair of essays on Space and Time. In two cases (Meaning and Autonomy, Meaning and Scepticism), the focus is not on a single concept, but rather a pairing of concepts—though in reality, if not quite to the same extent, all of the essays in this part range beyond any single concept. Collisions and Collaborations: This whole project is intended as a kind of dialogue. It deliberately sets essays from diverse disciplinary traditions alongside one another, in the hope that such collisions might inspire further collaboration. Yet the Handbook finishes with a set of essays that embody this purpose in an especially explicit way, in that they are all collaborative endeavours by two authors from differing disciplinary backgrounds. This collaboration takes a variety of forms. Several essays (Authenticity, Emotion, Expectations) are co-written such that they present a single joint perspective on their topic even whilst that perspective ranges more widely than would otherwise have been possible. Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham’s essay on Enchantment speaks with a single voice, yet notes at its outset the ways in which different parts of the essay highlight the contribution of each author. Two other pieces (Perception, Subjectivities) take the form of essay and response. Finally, one piece, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay on Galant Music, started as a solo-authored essay written in French, but involved an act of translation (by Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jerrold Levinson), to which was added a substantial introduction (by WalthamSmith), such that the final product seemed ideally suited as a contribution to this part of the Handbook.

Introduction   5

Scope and Lacunae We are conscious that we have attempted to cover a vast range of topics—a total of fiftytwo essays, involving sixty-two authors, and spread across all areas of music and philosophy. Yet the more comprehensive a volume like this is, the more glaring its omissions. For all our attempts at inclusion, in other words, we remain aware that the Handbook contains numerous lacunae. One such lacuna that goes to the heart of the Handbook is the inclusion of the word “Western” in its title. This word was not, in fact, present in the initial proposal that we submitted for this project. That proposal was for, more simply, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy. Its proposed contents were broadly similar to those of the present volume, except that it included an additional part entitled “Geographies” that aimed to introduce the field of music and philosophy from the perspective of six different continents. As one of the anonymous peer reviewers of the original proposal correctly noted, however, the proposed volume still remained largely focused on Western musics and Western philosophies. As such, our attempts to provide a global perspective—wellintentioned though they may have been—risked tokenizing (or worse still, ghettoizing) the very perspectives they sought to highlight. Better, we thought, to be upfront about this; to admit that our own editorial expertise lay primarily in the musics and philosophies of the West; to avoid the pretence that the topics covered would be representative of music and philosophy everywhere; and to respect the uniqueness and complexity of alternate traditions by refusing to collapse them into a Western framework. We do this with the aspiration that future research in music and philosophy will continue to become more attentive to the unique worlds of non-Western musics and philosophies. Except: non-Western? The very objectionability of this term—a term that suggests that a majority of the world’s cultures can grouped into a single whole and defined by what they are not—highlights issues of talking about Western music and Western philosophy, or indeed any kind of Western culture. The case against talking about “Western” culture has recently been made powerfully by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the final chapter of his widely read 2018 book The Lies that Bind, itself based on Appiah’s 2016 BBC Reith Lectures. Here, Appiah notes that the now-predominant conception of the West first emerged in the early years of the Cold War, in the form of a “Plato-to-NATO” narrative of Western culture. In this narrative, “Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific” (Appiah 2018, 201). As Appiah goes on to observe, however, these values are neither exclusive to “the West” nor ubiquitous within it. Indeed, notes Appiah, from a longer historical perspective, these values were, on the whole, entirely foreign to premodern Europe. In our use of the term “Western,” then, we reject any sense that so-called Western values might be somehow superior to those of other cultures. On the contrary, a number of essays in this Handbook highlight the complicity of Western cultures with oppressive

6   Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson and unjust regimes of power and of colonial power in particular. More fundamentally, we also reject any sense that any such set of uniquely Western values might exist in the first place. Rather, we use the term “Western” to refer to a broad and varied set of musical and philosophical traditions clustered historically around Europe and the North Atlantic. With this in mind, we recognize that much recent scholarship has replaced talk of Western and non-Western with that of a Global North and a Global South. We note with appreciation that, in comparison to their forebears, these terms are both more inclusive and more attentive to the economic inequalities that have emerged in the wake of colonialism. Although almost all of the regions discussed in the present volume fall within the Global North, however, that term also customarily encompasses a number of regions that, for the most part, lie outside the remit of the present volume, notably Russia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Further, as Martin Müller (2020) has noted, this North–South division comes with its own exclusions, leaving too little room in particular for many formerly Communist countries. As such, we do not use those terms here. Ultimately, and in common with many areas of study in the humanities and social sciences, the field of music and philosophy has yet to develop a truly inclusive vocabulary for global comparativism. In the meantime, we use the term “Western” only with reluctance, and in full awareness that, the proclivities of Eurocentric map-drawers aside, no place on the planet is ultimately, in purely geographical terms, any further east or west than any other. Within the broad, difficult realm of the “Western,” we have aimed for a diverse coverage of topics and approaches. In particular, we have taken care to avoid a volume that leans excessively on a small number of canonical composers of Western concert music. Rather, we have included essays on topics such as Jazz, Popular Music, and Electronic Music. Yet we have not sought to make canonical figures off-limits either; on the contrary, we have aimed to highlight their historical significance and ongoing influence. Michael Fend’s essay on Opera, for example, makes sure to include the likes of Wagner and Verdi; Christopher Hasty’s essay on Time pauses to dwell on the opening of one of Beethoven’s most temporally perplexing string quartets (Op. 132); and Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham draw their study of Enchantment together with an analysis of Chopin’s Prelude No. 7 in A major. As with music, so too with philosophy. That is, we have taken care to avoid a volume that relies excessively on a small number of canonical thinkers. In particular, we have consciously avoided the common approach of dedicating whole essays to particular historical philosophers. Yet we have endeavoured nonetheless to include reference to vitally important figures such as Kant (whose critique of instrumental music is discussed in Max Paddison’s essay on Meaning and Autonomy), Schopenhauer (a foundational figure in Alexander Rehding’s critical introduction to Music Theory), Hegel (brought into dialogue with more recent theorists in Stephen Decatur Smith’s essay on Nature), and Derrida (central to Naomi Waltham-Smith’s essay on Deconstruction), even whilst placing these thinkers alongside figures, such as Du Bois (a key thinker in Michael Gallope’s essay on Society), who have remained for too long on the margins of both music studies and philosophy.

Introduction   7 More importantly still, we have sought to include a variety of viewpoints on these issues. Matthew D. Morrison, for example, argues in his essay on Blacksound that the very concept of a musical work “was developed in relation to, not apart from, ideologies of race and racism that took hold during the three centuries of slavery that helped to construct Western empires and their cultural productions.” And Tamara Levitz opens her historical essay on The Twentieth Century by suggesting that a reliance on canonical works of philosophy “allows ‘great texts’ to float in an immaterial void that masks white privilege, structural inequality, and difference.” Yet in his essay on Gender, J. P. E. HarperScott argues with equal conviction that it is “only by a radical return to the canon that a progressive future for musicology can be carved out from the proliferating identitarian logic of capitalist postmodernity.” Our intention here is neither to privilege nor to censure any of these viewpoints; rather, our concern as editors is simply to note, with gratitude, that each of these essays—in common with all of the contributions to this Handbook—remains self-aware, self-critical, and an important milestone in pulling such debates together and propelling them forward. Even amidst this diversity, however, we acknowledge wholeheartedly that the volume contains gaps. Notably, amidst the broad reach of “the Western,” the volume privileges dominant trends in anglophone scholarship, with a particular focus on English-, German-, and French-speaking musicians and philosophers. This bias is not, of course, the fault of any individual contributor. Nor is there any essay included herein that we would not gladly include were we to start this project from scratch. Yet, with hindsight, it remains a source of regret that, amongst much else, the Handbook does not include more coverage of thinkers from the critical perspective of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called “black study” (Harney and Moten  2013; see also, inter alia, Crawley 2017); that women composers are not more fully represented; and that Latinx scholarship does not feature more prominently. On all of these fronts, we hope that future work will take these lacunae as a spur to continue to build an ever more inclusive music-philosophical community. Further, even insofar as the volume seeks to range across those troublesome divisions in music studies (historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology) and philosophy (analytic philosophy and continental philosophy), it does so with a certain unevenness. Within music studies, essays from historical musicology are in a clear majority, and the majority of philosophers with whom they engage hail from the continental tradition. Yet in terms of essays written by philosophers, these tend strongly towards essays by thinkers in the analytic tradition. This is perhaps not surprising: after all, the analytic tradition has made a significant contribution to music-philosophical discourse over the past half-century, and there is plenty of substance and inspiration to be drawn from that work. Lest this Introduction seem in danger of going too far in the direction of self-­criticism, let us conclude by stating clearly that we are delighted with the variety of approaches that are covered in this Handbook—and delighted in particular to be crossing those divisions within music studies and philosophy that have all too often splintered the field. We are also pleased with the balance we have struck between including well-established

8   Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson scholars and upcoming thinkers of a younger generation. As such, we hope that the essays in this Handbook will, both individually and collectively, encourage further dialogue among all those interested in music and philosophy, regardless of their disciplinary background, career stage, or any other factor. We hope, in other words, that meeting points between music and philosophy will continue to prosper, to multiply, and to diversify—and that this Handbook might play a small part in that process.

Notes 1. For extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this Introduction, our thanks go to Michael Gallope and Ariana Phillips-Hutton. 2. It is worth noting that one of the editors has already published a short overview of various possible relationships between music and philosophy (Levinson 2009). 3. Among the many responses to these debates, see in particular those included alongside the original publication of Amico  2020, namely Fox  2020, Schulz  2020, and WalthamSmith 2020.

Works Cited Amico, Stephen. 2020. “ ‘We Are All Musicologists Now’; or, The End of Ethnomusicology.” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 1–32. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture. London: Profile. Crawley, Ashon T. 2017. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2008. “We Are All (Ethno)Musicologists Now.” In The New (Ethno) Musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 48–70. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Fox, Aaron  A. 2020. “Divesting from Ethnomusicology.” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 33–38. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Levinson, Jerrold. 2009. “Philosophy and Music.” Topoi 28 (2): 119–123. Müller, Martin. 2020. “In Search of the Global East: Thinking Between North and South.” Geopolitics 25 (3): 734–755. Schulz, Anna. 2020. “Still an Ethnomusicologist (for Now).” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 39–50. Waltham-Smith, Naomi. 2020. “For Transdisciplinarity.” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 51–62. Williams, Bernard. 1996. “Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look.” In The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, 25–37. Oxford: Blackwell.

pa rt I

M A PPI NG T H E FIELD

chapter 1

Histor ica l M usicol ogy a n d Phil osoph y Julian Johnson

Whose Musicology? Which Philosophy? Musicology is not quite sure what it is; but then, that has been the case for a while. More than thirty years ago, Joseph Kerman suggested that “thinking about music seems to be undergoing a rather rapid change just now” (Kerman 1985, 9). But this self-doubt has far more ancient roots; it has to do with an irresolvable antinomy at the heart of our urge to bring together mousikē and logos. On the one hand, as the editors of a recent ­collection of essays put it, “it is impossible not to speak of music, for language and music are inextricably linked” (Chapin and Clark 2013, 1); on the other, this compulsion is ­provoked by the incommensurability of one to the other, a non-continuity masked by the neologism musicology and largely ignored by the academic discipline it names. Of course, thinking, speaking, and writing about music have ancient roots, appearing in diverse forms from speculative theory to scientific investigation, philosophical inquiry to music criticism, treatises on techniques of composition, performance, instrument manufacture, and tuning systems to histories, encyclopedias, and dictionaries of music. The academic discipline of musicology, as we understand the term today, however, is of more recent origin. Its first journal, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, was founded in 1885. The first issue included Guido Adler’s foundational article, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft,” in which he outlined the shape of the discipline that would determine it for many decades. The scientific study of music, in Adler’s definition, took as its object not only the history of music but also its wider (non­historical) theorization in terms of acoustics, aesthetics, psychology, and physiology.

12   Julian Johnson Whereas, in Adler’s system, the subdivision “musicology” (Musikologie) denoted the study of music from outside the European art music tradition, the French used the term musicologie to refer to the whole field of possible study equivalent to Adler’s Musikwissenschaft. Grand historical surveys from the later nineteenth century, such as the Histoire de la musique (1869–76) by François-Joseph Fétis, sometimes included the study of folk music and non-European music, but these soon gave way to the more specialized study of “comparative musicology” or, a half-century later, “ethnomusicology.” Though the legacy of these divisions persists, in its current form musicology largely resists both the systematic sweep of Adler’s model and its hard subdivisions. In the absence of any unitary definitions today we generally accept the pragmatic reality that contemporary musicology is simply the work pursued in musicology departments and through musicological publications by professional musicologists. Depending on your point of view, this suggests either a valuable diversity of approaches and objects of study, or an increasingly contested field. For the purposes of this volume, the discipline finds itself with three faces (historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory), a division made partly according to the object of study and partly based on methodologies, although plenty of musicological work regularly crosses the divisions these imply, or takes place outside of them altogether.1 That said, it is worth pausing on the distinction made between historical musicology and ethnomusicology because it has to do with fundamental ideas about how we think about music. Put very broadly, historical musicology takes its primary object to be musical works, while ethnomusicology takes its primary object to be people who participate in cultures of music-making. The latter approach is characterized by a musical ethnography which, as Henry Stobart puts it, “requires researchers to become familiar with, document, and analyse how people involved in the creation, performance, and reception of music go about their lives, and how they make, talk, and think about music” (Stobart 2009, 104). By such a definition, ethnomusicology’s lean towards anthropology complements historical musicology’s lean towards works and their history.2 But the methodological distinction is not absolute. By inverting the same terms, a traditional view of historical musicology might be given as one which requires researchers to become familiar with, document, and analyse musical works in terms of their creation, performance, and reception, and how they relate to the lives of the people they involve. One starts with people and their material practices (including musical ones), the other begins with musical works and explores outwards through music-making to people and their wider material lives. One tends to privilege oral traditions, the other, scripted music. Both aim at understanding better how human beings make sense of the world through music; they simply move in different directions. At a conference held in 2001, Nicholas Cook famously declared “we’re all (ethno) musicologists now,” a thought-provoking summing-up of his argument that the wider turn to cultural contexts in historical musicology and music theory amounted to “a kind of ‘ethnomusicalization’ of the discipline” as a whole, central to which had been the performative turn in musicology and an approach that “shifts the emphasis from the meaning that is encoded in music to the meaning that is performed by it” (Cook 2008, 50–55).

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   13 At the same meeting, Jim Samson similarly suggested that the usual subdisciplinary divides “may soon have outlived their usefulness,” advocating that historical musicology (traditionally understood as centred on the study of musical works) might learn to foreground practices more, and that ethnomusicology might attend more to the status of the aesthetic (Samson 2008, 23). The convergence between the two approaches was underlined by the anthropologist Michelle Bigenho in her explanation of why she resisted calling herself an ethnomusicologist: “constructing music participation as a privileged realm,” she suggested, “works hand in hand with an ethnocentric ideology that affords music an autonomous space” (Bigenho 2008, 29). In other words, the very idea of music as a separate and special realm of anthropological activity has its roots in an idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic derived from Western musical practices. The move within historical musicology, from the study of texts and composers to “music as cultural practice,” to borrow a title from Lawrence Kramer, has been widely understood under the rubric of the New Musicology of the 1980s and 1990s in which Kramer was himself a central figure.3 This is partially true, though it is important to remember that in a wider historical and geographical context historical musicology has always included questions of philosophical, political, psychological, and cultural meaning (witness the work of Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Carl Dahlhaus, Janós Maróthy, and Georg Knepler, among many others). The “new” is, of course, perennial to a modernity as defined by a sense of historical time rather than mythic or natural time, and historical musicology is no exception.4 Taking a longer view quickly makes clear the pattern of pendulum swings that have shaped the discipline: too much emphasis on an intra-musical, formalist approach produced a pendulum swing to music as cultural practice and extra-musical meanings; too narrow a world-view defined by Western art music produced a corrective swing to the global perspectives of world music and popular music studies. To outsiders these are surely positions within a larger field, not exclusive binaries—the multiple faces of a multiple cultural practice—and it is certainly more accurate to talk about the to and fro of the disciplinary pendulum, or the ebb and flow of intellectual tides, than any notion of historical progress. Our -ologies are no more true today than last year, or fifty, or a hundred years ago. To believe otherwise would mean (re)investing the humanities with a model of technological progress, to imagine that we take part in a project that moves ever closer to discovering “the truth” about music. It would make musicology like the all-too-logical Golaud in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande; as his demands for a statement of “la verité!” become increasingly frustrated to the point of violence, Mélisande, like music itself, can only remain mute in the face of such uncomprehending questions. It is precisely in this gap that the most recalcitrant but productive questions of historical musicology are to be found, in the tension between mousikē and logos, between embodied musical encounters and the linguistic discourses by which we attempt to engage them. Considering how that gap is approached, through the interaction of historical musicology and philosophy, is the focus of this chapter. Its argument will be that just as music, in all its ungraspable diversity, challenges the nature of musicology, so too does it challenge any philosophy of music. Specifically, my focus is the category of the

14   Julian Johnson aesthetic—an idea whose status is fragile today, even within historical musicology.5 I use the term broadly to designate the space of an experiential encounter with music that is neither subsumed nor explained away by approaches to music as cultural practice, social history, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science—or philosophy. Entangled in all of these spheres, it also resists them. Nothing is more short-sighted in the politics of contemporary musicology than the idea that a concern with the aesthetic is itself ideological or outdated; nothing is more pressing, if music is not to become the mute object of the social sciences, than a thinking about music (to say nothing of an experience of music) that makes space for the aesthetic. Without this, the silent Mélisande is simply bullied into submission by the violent rationalism of Golaud. One might think that the very existence of a philosophy of music—as of art more ­generally—acknowledges that the stakes of such questions are high, that the aesthetic has to do with ways of knowing the world (ourselves included). But such a position is by no means obvious in practice. It is fair to say that until quite recently historical ­musicology’s engagement with philosophy has been patchy in the extreme and generally bracketed away as a further subdivision of the discipline. Undergraduate courses are more likely to be called “The Aesthetics of Music” or “Musical Aesthetics” than “The Philosophy of Music,” implying that such approaches arise within and from musical practices rather than philosophy as such, a disciplinary starting point that few musicologists can claim with any authority.6 It is not insignificant that such studies have most often reflected the same historical focus that shapes a historical musicological approach to the Western art music tradition more generally. The major textbooks of musical aesthetics have thus been broad historical surveys built around substantial passages extracted from original texts, mapping the unfolding of a historical idea of music—­ witness those written and edited by Bujic (1988), Fubini (1991), Katz and Dahlhaus (1987–93), LeHuray and Day (1981), and Lippman (1986–90,  1992). This contrasts strongly with most work pursued in the ­philosophy of music by philosophers, shaped around the development of thematic and conceptual arguments rather than historical reflection. But both approaches have in common that they leave music essentially untouched. Historical surveys of aesthetics (who said what and when) are not generally connected with contemporary musical practice and have little impact on the rest of the discipline, while contemporary philosophical inquiries tend not to speak beyond the discipline of philosophy itself (in the past, such work has often referenced neither musicology nor music, and thus has tended not to be read by musicologists). On one level then, roughly that of undergraduate syllabi, the meeting of historical musicology and the philosophy of music has largely been a narrative of the history of ideas; less doing philosophy in relation to music, and more plotting a history of those who did. The definitive historical orientation of musicology has thus shaped philosophy to its own ends, imparting to the philosophy of music the same trajectory of evolutionary development imposed on music itself. It is no coincidence that such historical accounts of musical aesthetics have often culminated in readings of Theodor Adorno, whose importance to historical musicologists often bewilders their philosopher counterparts. But for all the problems associated with

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   15 his work, Adorno presents the very rare case of an individual able to span the divisions between musical, philosophical, social, historical, and political thought. Although he died in 1969, much of his writing on music only became available in the decades after his death and his principal works on music were only gradually published in English translation.7 No longer in intellectual fashion in his native Germany, his standing grew steadily in Anglo-American scholarship across a broad range of humanities disciplines (including literature, music, and film) and became a touchstone for most scholars wrestling with questions of aesthetics and politics in the broad movement of modernism.8 This enthusiasm was not matched within philosophy itself, at least not in AngloAmerican circles where the turn to the analytical tradition in most departments militated against it. In terms of musicological engagements with philosophy, it made for some strange bedfellows. Historical surveys of musical aesthetics, from the eighteenth century to the present, thus tended to culminate with Adorno alongside the work of analytical philosophers like Malcolm Budd, Stephen Davies, or Peter Kivy. Students’ experience of the obvious disjunction was felt most at the level of philosophical language: Adorno chimed with the complex language use of nineteenth-century ­ German philosophy (Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) where Kivy  or Davies seemed plain-speaking and logical; where one seemed partisan and political (pro-­modernist and anti-popular culture) the other seemed refreshingly ­neutral and objective. That said, it is fair to say that for most historical musicologists the work of analytical philosophers has often had relatively little appeal or impact. There are two principal reasons for this. In most cases, the concern of an analytical approach is for what can be said about music in a general way, through the exploration of categories that might apply equally to all music—or at least to all music of a certain type or genre.9 For the musicologist this fails, firstly, to address the specificity of any individual work in terms of the particularity of its materials; Brahms’s Intermezzo in A, Op. 118 no. 2, for example, is made of these materials and unfolds in these particular ways, as opposed to merely being an instance of some genus or type. Secondly, it fails to understand the musical work as historically shaped and located; the particularity of this Brahms intermezzo is in part a product of its multiple relations to the tradition which it references while departing from it at the same time. The two problems are clearly connected: they concern the special way in which artworks—and the aesthetic experience occasioned by them—­ reconfigure a relation of the general and the particular. All the key questions asked by the analytical philosopher as conceptual and therefore universal (issues of musical beauty, taste, expression, representation, language, m ­ eaning, ontology) are, for the historical musicologist, impossible to understand without reference to their historical construction. The idea that there is any normative and ahistorical value in relation to any of these things is, for musicologists, disproved by music history at every turn—by practices of composition, performance, and listening, as much as by music theory, criticism, and interpretation. Overwhelmingly, philosophy has taken as normative the common practice of tonality in Western art music from Bach through to Brahms, investing it with a similar status to that of natural language in philosophy and thus implicitly requiring common-sense agreement; where this is not forthcoming,

16   Julian Johnson either the music in question or the interlocutor is aberrant in some way. But what purport to be universal conceptual categories are quite clearly derived from a very particular historical and geographical moment, retrospectively applied to the music from which they were deduced, and which, unsurprisingly, seem to legitimate them. To take a single example, the case of electronic music is used to raise questions about the boundaries of music, properly speaking, only to be dismissed as not music because it fails to fulfil some of the expectations we have of Western art music (Graham 2007). Faced with such philosophical reasoning, the astonished musicologist might recall Stravinsky’s tale of the old Russian peasant who, on seeing a camel for the first time in his long but narrow life, “examines it at length, shakes his head and, turning to leave, says, to the great delight of those present: ‘It isn’t true’ ” (Stravinsky 1947, 49). Most philosophical inquiries into the idea of musical expression demonstrate this ­circularity. Despite the problems associated with treating music primarily as the expression of emotion, most musicologists would agree that emotional response is a key part of the creation and reception of certain genres of music. That itself is not the problem. So when the philosopher asks, in relation to Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 118 no. 2, “What does it mean to hear this music as sad?,” why does the musicologist switch off? Because, to a musicologist, the question is at the same level as “What does it mean to read Kant as pedantic?” or “What does it mean to read Wittgenstein as difficult?” To ignore the complex proposition of the (aesthetic) text in exclusive favour of one’s own affective reaction is simply to miss a major part of what music does, just as it would be in the case of reading philosophy. But there is more. Consider a similar question (which nobody asks, including philosophers of art), in relation to Monet’s paintings of water lilies: “What does it mean to see Monet’s pond as blue?” Firstly, the object is itself multiple. Just as the Brahms Intermezzo exists through hundreds of performances, Monet painted the pond at Giverny dozens of times. Even if we focus on a single painting, the huge canvas is itself multiple and highly detailed in its disposition of colour, including infinitely varied shades of blue, bluegreen, violet-blue, jade, turquoise, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, blue-grey . . . and so on. On one level, the whole point of Monet’s multiple studies of the play of light and colour on the surface of the lily pond is to open up an infinitesimal degree of colouristic particularity which the singularity and anonymity of the word blue serves only to close down. For anyone who enters into the presence of the painting, the gap between the richness of its material play and the paucity of the linguistic term is not only glaring, but touches on one of the reasons we have art in the first place. A far more significant question would be the one provoked by the artwork: What does Monet’s painting do to our perception of form, colour, light, and time? What kind of knowledge of the world does Monet’s painting make available to us? The “blueness” of the painting is hardly immaterial—it works through the materiality of colour—but the value we accord to our experience of the painting derives from the gap that opens up between this material particularity and the paucity of language in relation to perceiving or knowing the world through colour. Language simply has ­variants of blue (see above); Monet’s painting, on the other hand, has a universe of colouristic inflections and contrasts, intensity of tone, brushwork, movement, surface,

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   17 and depth. And so equally with the Brahms Intermezzo. Of course, Brahms draws on a range of musical topics that provoke, in the encultured listener, associations of loss or melancholy (the turn to the minor key, the falling figure, the sombre tone, the use of passing dissonances, and so on), but these are merely its common building blocks rather than what is specific to this particular work, and which makes it move and speak in these unique ways. Inquiries into the sadness of Brahms’s music miss, over and again, the infinite nuances that make it this piece and no other, as distant from the reductive sad as Monet’s painting is from blue. Listening to musical specificity, we are not moved by a common-or-garden type emotion as denoted by the linguistic labels that may rush in afterwards to fill the linguistic vacuum; we are moved precisely by the momentary experience of an affective and cognitive being outside of language. Musicians tend to have little interest in a philosophy of music that neither seems to address itself to the particularity of music nor to emerge from it. If speaking about music does not begin with the music, it can never do anything more than reproduce an understanding of the world already embedded in habitual ways of speaking. That is the solipsistic circularity of all philosophy of music that begins and ends with philosophy rather than music. Without allowing music to challenge the habitual categories through which we think it, we merely confirm the assumptions and restrictions of language and learn nothing from music. The possibility that music might itself constitute a kind of non­linguistic thought is central here. The idea is rarely entertained by philosophers, though Jerrold Levinson offers a refreshing exception in an essay entitled simply “Musical Thinking?” (Levinson 2006, 209–219). Levinson suggests that Wittgenstein’s affirmative answer to the question “Is music thought?” might be over-hasty, mistaking the metaphorical “music is like thought” for an equivalence that is not the case. Levinson distinguishes between an embodied thinking which “we ascribe to the music, as something it appears to be doing” and the implied thinking which we ascribe to the composer (214). Clearly, music is not itself a mind and cannot therefore be said to think, but the unfolding of a complex piece often seems to exhibit what Levinson examines as “intrinsic musical thinking.” I agree with Levinson that music is a mode of thought even though we cannot, literally, say that music itself thinks. But I would ask the question the other way around. The pressing question, it seems to me, is not whether Beethoven’s music qualifies as thinking in the strict sense of the activity of a conscious mind, but rather: How does this music mediate thought (that of a composer, a performer, a listener—a culture, even)? What is its relation to thought? These are not questions that aim to decide on matters of definition, to place music inside or outside a predetermined category. They are, rather, questions that challenge the categorical predetermination itself.10 To explore the gaps between music and philosophy it will not do merely to keep repeating the same structures of language. It would be better “to establish a collaborative space between the two, in which the limit is at once established, transgressed, and deterritorialized,” as Andrew Clark and Keith Chapin put it (2013, 6). In other words, what is needed is an inquiry that moves between modes of aesthetic experience and reflection upon that experience. A philosophy of music, and indeed a musicology, should surely be located in this intermedial ground but, at least for the moment, such a perspective seems curiously distant to work in both disciplines. For that reason, it is not hard to see why the

18   Julian Johnson critical self-reflection on the limits of language in continental philosophy currently holds far more interest for musicologists. Firstly, it shares the idea of a self-critical activity with much of the musical repertoire central to historical musicology. There are obvious relations between the critical thought of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, and Nancy on the one hand, and on the other, the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Boulez, and Saariaho. Secondly, in both cases, the category of history is tied up with a discourse of value in which aesthetics and politics are intertwined. But there are problems of a different kind in musicology’s engagement with continental thought. Not least is the way in which the musicologist is overawed and seduced by the apparent complexity of the philosophical system and the essentially untransposable language of which it is made. The result (seen all too often in scholarly articles and conference papers) is the unsatisfying exercise of a lengthy exegesis of the philosophical system in question (usually unaddressed to music) belatedly applied to some mute musical specimen in the final paragraph or two. The gain of such an approach seems to be that the music can now enter the (pre-existing) discourse of the philosophical method. Not once is there any hint of how the music might challenge or reroute the philosophy. Once again, this is resolutely one-way traffic. This is the wider problem of the engagement of musicology and philosophy today. On one level, musicologists can justly complain that while they spend long hours reading everything from political theory to philosophy, psychoanalysis to sociology, nobody else reads musicology. But the problem goes deeper; it has to do with the muteness of music in these transactions. I do not think that this has to be the case and, in the second part of this chapter, I explore what seem to me to be some promising ways forward. There are strong signs, within historical musicology, of a new and growing interest in how music and philosophy might meet in more material ways, particularly among younger musicologists—witness the recent success of the meetings of Music and Philosophy Study Groups (in North America under the auspices of the American Musicological Society and, in the United Kingdom, of the Royal Musical Association), recent special issues and round tables devoted to Music and Philosophy in key musicology journals (Scherzinger  2012,  2014; Gallope and Kane  2012; McAuley and Nielsen 2013), and the launch of new online journals (such as the Performance Philosophy Journal in 2015). All of these testify not only to a desire to connect music with philosophy, but also to the development of material and concrete ways of doing so.

Listening to Music In his editorial introduction to the double issue of Contemporary Music Review in 2012 given over to “Music and Philosophy,” Martin Scherzinger suggested that the work of the scholars published there and the continental philosophers whose work they discussed, was an example of how recent writing is “tackling the relationship between

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   19 ­ hilosophy and music in a qualitatively new way,” specifically, that it “turns the tables on p the relation between music and philosophy. Instead of bringing philosophy to musicology, this work critically analyses how music inhabits philosophy itself ” (Scherzinger 2012, 345). In what follows I consider how such a “qualitatively new” relationship might be made between musicology and the philosophy of music. The precondition of such a development, however, is an openness to reconceive each discipline in the light of the other, to allow each to challenge the assumptions of the other, and—above all—to consider how both might respond to the mute but highly articulate propositions of music, rather than taking it as the dumb object of a monological discourse. I have sketched out below, under four related headings, what seem to me to be key issues for such a new relationship.

The Persistence of the Aesthetic Historical musicology is internally divided because music is both historical and not. Who thinks of history when they play or listen to music? Play, after all, is precisely a free elaboration of the present moment, and music comes before musicology in terms of personal experience as well as of logical anteriority. Students are rightly suspicious when their lecturers present an account of musical works as if their main purpose, interest, and value lay in what they can tell us about history (the essay assignment “What does the Eroica Symphony tell us about Beethoven’s times?” is still alive and well). Even worse, music history has often become merely a history of artefacts—in which musical works are allotted the same status as musical instruments, concert halls, and audiences—all treated as the equivalents of objects like wigs, frock-coats, or newspapers. Consider two fictional, but perfectly plausible PhD theses: “Keys to Success: Public Performance and the Development of the Keyboard Sonata in London, 1750–1765” and “Getting Ahead: Social Status and the Manufacture of Wigs in London, 1750–1765.” Is there any essential difference in either the object or the intellectual assumptions at work here? No wonder Kerman commented in 1985 that “musicology is perceived as dealing essentially with the factual, the documentary, the verifiable, the analysable, the positivistic. Musicologists are respected for the facts they know about music. They are not admired for their insight into music as aesthetic experience” (Kerman 1985, 12). Kerman’s words were surely a challenge to a discipline that still believes itself concerned with music, not just the history of music. This internal division is played out in some odd ways—witness the paradox of musicologists who make their living denouncing the idea of “the aesthetic,” of “great works,” and “the music itself,” while privately weeping at performances of the same music they disavow publicly. It calls to mind Karl Kraus’s wonderful quip, in relation to prostitution in fin de siècle Vienna, about male establishment figures who enjoyed by night what they condemned by day. I caricature (only slightly) in order to draw out a disjunction at the heart of the discipline. The fact is that historical musicology is founded on a contradiction that has never been resolved and which is an uncomfortable and unspoken presence in every seminar, lecture,

20   Julian Johnson c­ onference paper, article, and monograph: the tension between the study of history as material practices and the investigation of aesthetic objects. Even the latter is conflicted. Is the analysis of musical works a means of acquiring objective knowledge of the technical construction of music, or—half a century after Roland Barthes—an exercise in a reading of the text that produces musical meanings? The same tensions beset debates in musical performance, in the psychology of music, and in musical reception. In short, except in the most empirical and factual of its activities, almost all of historical musicology is conflicted—productively, as we will see—precisely because it takes place on the shoreline between the rational, quasi-scientific activity of inquiry (the -logical part) and a subjective experience of the world, of which music is a special kind. For a growing number of philosophically-inclined musicologists, the aesthetic realm reasserts itself today as a critical force—as a means of reconfiguring representations of the world and thus in opposition to the quasi-scientific positivism of much recent musicology. It is notable that such perspectives are often to be found in the work of a new generation of scholars who reject any simplistic binary of the social and the aesthetic. The critical force of the aesthetic requires space if it is not to be subsumed simply as material stuff (like cars or pianos or wigs) or as an empty sign (like money). A musicology that makes no space for the aesthetic has little understanding of either art or its political potency. The recent turn to philosophers like Žižek, Badiou, Rancière, Agamben (and, once more, Bloch and Adorno) reflects the persistence of this awareness and an insistence, in Scherzinger’s (2012, 475) words, that “it is music qua music that proffers negations, transitions, and perspectives not readily available with other communicative media.”11

The Restoration of the Body As Don Ihde put it more than a decade ago, “Bodies, bodies everywhere. Philosophy, feminist thought, cultural studies, science studies, all seem to have rediscovered bodies” (Ihde 2002, xi). Though a relative latecomer, musicology has been no exception to this corporeal turn within the humanities, a movement that stretches back to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and beyond. Of course, it has not entirely avoided disciplinary pendulum swings that reinscribe old binaries in new ways. Amy Cimini suggests, for example, that one effect of Carolyn Abbate’s “Drastic or Gnostic” essay (Abbate 2004) was to reinforce the duality of a “mind-centric hermeneutics and embodied listening and performance” (Cimini 2012, 354).12 Any resolution of Abbate’s either/or question will always misrepresent music, since all music is always the activity of a mindful body/embodied mind. Making space for such a quality in the realm of speaking, writing, and thinking— within the -logical activity of musicology and philosophy—is thus a daunting challenge. That said, the increasing importance within musicology of issues of performance, sound, agency, and place are evidence of attempts to do just that: to reassert the bodily, sonorous, and material economies of music that had for so long been bracketed out by concerns with structure, syntax, and style history.

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   21 For all the differences between musicology and the philosophy of music, they have this tension in common: they both take place around an absent centre—the aesthetic experience of music, which is to say, an experience that is both sonorous and embodied, and that takes place in a particular place and within a particular time. Both disciplines are predicated on bringing the abstractions of linguistic discourse to bear on this primarily non-linguistic and embodied practice. The relationship is thus defined by noncontinuity—by a permanent gap—and it is precisely here that the most challenging and interesting questions for both musicology and a philosophy of music are to be found. How might we understand music better not as the object of language but as a kind of counterpoint to language, one that offers a productive critique of linguistic constructions of the world? How can musicology, no less than philosophy, suspend for a moment its rush of words in order to listen to what it is that music does?

Listening At the start of an important essay on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy asks: “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable?” He continues: “Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears (and who hears everything), but who cannot listen, or who, more precisely, neutralizes listening within himself, so that he can philosophize?” (Nancy 2007, 1). The English translation necessarily misses the play between the two French verbs ­entendre (to hear, but also to understand) and écouter (to listen), a distinction which maps on to Nancy’s central play between sense as abstract signification and sense as the activity of the senses. Laura Odello develops the same observation (albeit using the two verbs interchangeably to make her broader point): The philosopher does not want to know anything about listening; hearing is of no use to the philosopher because the end as well as the beginning of all philosophizing resides in the intellectual understanding: sonorities are superfluous, secondary, unnecessary for the silent vision of the logos, of the idea, of the ideal signified, which alone serves to grasp the truth.  (Odello 2013, 41)

Philosophy is hardly alone here; oddly, we might say the same about musicology. The imperative of the -logical attitude is precisely to abstract from individual particularity to the general case, and thus quite opposite to the attitude of listening and of aesthetic experience rooted in the sensuous particular of this encounter in this moment. Peter Szendy imagines a musicology that might be different: Musicology—which we could define in a very economical way as the practice of speaking of music—then, does not come after the fact, in the more or less scholarly belatedness of a logos (discourse, speech, or reason) that would tell and establish what the music was or what it meant. If there is something like musicology, it will have begun from within the music: in the gap that opens between the music and its quest for itself as music.  (Szendy 2013, 189)

22   Julian Johnson It is, once again, precisely the gap that is most important here—the gap between music and language, sense and signification, listening and understanding. Not a gap in the sense of a divide that cuts one off from the other absolutely, but the gap that defines the two modalities and is thus constitutive of them, a gap bridged by an equation of nonidentity, a highly-charged space which sparks across the tension between like and notlike, between the assumption of linguistic manners and the myriad ways in which they are displaced, deformed, undercut, or ignored. One marker of a more dialogical relation between musicology and its object, as too of a different practice in the philosophy of music, is thus a different kind of language use. Jairo Moreno (2013, 213–14) points to such a reorientation of language in the presence of music—in Roland Barthes “famously denouncing the poverty of the adjective,” in Christopher Small’s insistence on the doing of musicking over “music as object,” and so on in Heidegger, Levinas, Nietzsche, Schumann, Wittgenstein, and many others. On the one hand, as Lawrence Kramer insists, speaking about music is no more problematic than speaking about anything else—or else, “it is the same problem as the problem of speaking at all” (Kramer 2013, 19). On the other hand, the special kind of highly articulate but linguistically mute silence that music creates, is arguably punctured the moment that words rush in. The greatest value that words can have in relation to music is thus to make this silence resonate within language itself. Odello suggests not only that philosophy “cripples” music, that “music starts to get sick insofar as the word tries to cure it” (Odello 2013, 44), but also that in doing so language damages itself: In neutralizing music as the otherness that must be excluded in order to keep the logos unharmed, the logos not only loses music, but it jeopardizes its own integrity, since it loses the constitutive alterity that lies at the heart of its very ipseity. (Odello 2013, 47–48)

Andrew Bowie (2007, 2015) has been suggesting for a while that we drop the idea of a philosophy of music, as yet another variant of the formula “the philosophy of x,” in favour of the far more radical idea of a philosophy that arises from music. While it may not be necessary to choose one approach over the other, it is certainly true that we have hardly begun to take seriously the consequences of the latter. Key to such an approach would be the turn from collapsing music into language in favour of listening, in Nancy’s usage, and thus finding in music a mode of embodied thought, a thinking through particularity, that resists the abstraction of the concept.

Contemporary Musical Thought Musicians have no problem with the idea of thinking with their ears,13 with thinking through musical sound, tone, and gesture, in the same way that mathematicians think through numbers, chess players think through the spatial possibilities of the chess board, and philosophers think through concepts. For the latter, of course, thinking outside of concepts would not be philosophy just as, for musicians, thinking outside of

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   23 music would not be music. But if a philosophy of music is to be more than a solipsistic exercise confined to reproducing the terms of philosophy prior to its encounter with music, it may be time for it to try a new starting point, from the ramifications of the idea that music is also a kind of thinking and a kind of knowing. The alternative—insisting on tightly-drawn traditional disciplinary norms—means that music and philosophy may have nothing to say to each other. Should this be so difficult? After all, no less a ­philosopher than Kant, at the outset of modern aesthetic theory, allowed that music was a free play of the cognitive faculties, a formulation exactly contemporary with the music of Beethoven which exhibits, according to Adorno drawing on Kant, a kind of thinking without concepts, or “Music is the logic of the judgement-less synthesis” (Adorno 1998, 11). One of the most important roles of Western art music within the broad period of modernity from the age of Descartes and Monteverdi to the present has been to offer an embodied, sonorous counterpoint to the working-out of the abstract reason of philosophical language. It has done so not by being its opposite but through a play of ­imitation and difference—hence the diversity of music’s modes of engagement with language.14 If the syntax of eighteenth-century Classicism comes close to a mimesis of language, the eruption of sonority over grammar in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music has often emphasized its refusal of such mimesis. The obsession within much philosophy of music with a musical repertoire from the nineteenth century and its topics of expression and representation not only misconstrues music as a whole, but also wilfully ignores the musical thought that has taken place since. Why does contemporary philosophy, almost without exception, ignore the substance of contemporary music? We smile indulgently at the failure of Kant or Hegel to grasp the significance of the new instrumental music of their own time, their clinging to music with words in the face of the vertiginous challenge of the wordless logic of the sonata or symphony, but the no less epochal changes in music after 1900 are still routinely ­dismissed by philosophers in much the same way as Stravinsky’s peasant dismissed the existence of the camel (see Roger Scruton on atonality [1997, 239–308] or on the validity of certain composers [2009, 162–182], for example). If music is in part a kind of thinking, related to the faculty of language but also quite different, and if music, like thought, is also historical, then it follows that no genuine philosophy of music can afford to neglect contemporary music. This is not a question of championing one repertoire over another or of any residual trace of the historical necessity of modernism or the avant-garde. Rather, it is simply to insist on contemporary musical thought as something that embraces not only current thinking about music but also the thinking that takes place in and through music.

Notes 1. The legacy of these divisions can still be found in areas of study that have developed since Adler (such as the study of popular music or film music) as well as within the tendency to more hybrid methodological approaches.

24   Julian Johnson 2. Kerman (1985, 14) suggests that just as (historical) musicology is methodologically aligned with history, so ethnomusicology is aligned with anthropology. 3. The so-called New Musicology was recently summed up by Josh Epstein (2014, xix) thus: “An analogue to literary cultural studies, the new musicology draws from materialist, psychoanalytic, semiotic, gender, and other cultural theory to interpret music as freighted with ideology and subjectivity—revealing the historical specificity of ‘the universal language’.” 4. I have explored the competing historical models for the idea of musical modernity in Johnson 2015, 1–12. 5. Stephen Downes in his editorial preface to Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives suggests that, in recent musicology, “the notion of an ‘aesthetic’ seemed to be neglected, rejected, even pilloried” (2014, x). 6. In an excellent and detailed account of the current state of aesthetics within musicology, Stephen Downes (2014, 1–22) points out there is no self-standing entry on aesthetics in the Grove Music Online. His 2014 volume as a whole brings together musicological writing on aesthetics that remains close to the notes. 7. Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949) did not appear in English translation until 1973. The monographs on Mahler (1960) and Berg (1968) were not translated until the 1990s. The posthumous publication of Adorno’s text for Aesthetische Theorie (1970) did not appear in English until 1984 and his sketches for the Beethoven book were not published in German until 1993 and in English until 1998. 8. In Anglo-American musicology, the work of Max Paddison (1993) and Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1991, 1996) (among many others) was key for the reception of Adorno’s work. 9. There are some notable exceptions to this where philosophers have taken individual works or even passages of music as their object. For example, Jerrold Levinson (2011, 336­–375) explores a short passage in Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture in terms of music’s capacity to express a higher emotion. But elsewhere, even when specific pieces of music are cited, they often function as placeholders for an idea of music more generally. 10. For a detailed historical account of the idea of music as thought, see Bonds 2006. 11. Among others, the turn to these philosophers can be found in the work of scholars such as Paul Harper-Scott, Naomi Waltham-Smith, James Currie, Stephen Decatur Smith, and Michael Gallope. 12. For a reaction to some of the debates ensuing from Abbate’s article, see her essay with Michael Gallope on “Ineffability” in this volume. 13. Mit den Ohren denken (To Think with One’s Ears) was the title of a book edited by Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (1998) on Adorno’s philosophy of music. 14. I have elaborated this idea at length in chapters 7 and 8 of Johnson 2015.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30: 505–536. Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bigenho, Michelle. 2008. “Why I’m Not an Ethnomusicologist; A View from Anthropology.” In The New (Ethno)musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 28–39. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press.

Historical Musicology and Philosophy   25 Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2015. “The ‘Philosophy of Performance’ and the Performance of Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy Journal 1: 51–58. Bujic, Bojan, ed. 1988. Music in European Thought, 1851–1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapin, Keith, and Andrew H. Clark, eds. 2013. Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous. New York: Fordham University Press. Cimini, Amy. 2012. “Vibrating Colors and Silent Bodies: Music, Sound and Silence in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Dualism.” In Scherzinger 2012, 353–570. Cook, Nicholas. 2008. “We Are All (Ethno)musicologists Now.” In The New (Ethno)musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 48–70. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press. Downes, Stephen. 2014. Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Epstein, Josh. 2014. Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fubini, Enrico. 1991. A History of Music Aesthetics. London: Macmillan. Gallope, Michael and Brian Kane, eds. 2012. “Roundtable on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring): 215–256. Graham, Gordon. 2007. “Music and Electro-sonic Art.” In Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work, edited by Kathleen Stock, 209–225. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ihde, Don. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, Julian. 2015. Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, Ruth and Carl Dahlhaus, eds. 1987–93. Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music. 4 vols. New York: Pendragon Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1985. Musicology. London: Fontana. Klein, Richard and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, eds. 1998. Mit den Ohren denken. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Kramer, Lawrence. 2013. “Speaking of Music.” In Chapin and Clark 2013, 19–38. LeHuray, Peter and James Day. 1981. Music and Aesthetics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. “Musical Thinking.” In Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics, ­209–219. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. “Hope in The Hebrides.” In Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 336–375. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lippman, Edward  A. 1992. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lippman, Edward A., ed. 1986–90. Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader. 3 vols. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. McAuley, Tomás, and Nanette Nielsen, eds. 2013. “Opera and Philosophy.” Special issue, Opera Quarterly 29 (3–4): 183–376. Moreno, Jairo. 2013. “On the Ethics of the Unspeakable.” In Chapin and Clark 2013, 212–241. New York: Fordham University Press.

26   Julian Johnson Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Odello, Laura. 2013. “Waiting for the Death Knell: Speaking of Music (So to Speak).” In Chapin and Clark 2013, 39–48. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Samson, Jim. 2008. “A View from Musicology.” In The New (Ethno)musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 23–27. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press. Scherzinger, Martin, ed. 2012. “Music and Philosophy.” Special issue, Contemporary Music Review 31 (5–6): 345–542. Scherzinger, Martin, ed. 2014. Music in Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Routledge. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2009. “True Authority: Janáček, Schoenberg and Us.” In Understanding Music. Philosophy and Interpretation, 162–182. London: Continuum. Stobart, Henry. 2009. “World Musics.” In An Introduction to Music Studies, edited by J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Jim Samson, 97–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1991. Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1996. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Szendy, Peter. 2013. “Parole, parole: Tautegory and the Musicology of the (Pop) Song.” In Chapin and Clark 2013, 186–192.

chapter 2

M usic Theory a n d Phil osoph y Alexander Rehding

If we look for the first figure to fulfil concurrently the roles of philosopher and music theorist, we can do worse than to point to Aristoxenus of Tarentum in third-century Greece bce.A gifted and fiery philosopher in Aristotle’s peripatetic school at the Lyceum in Athens, Aristoxenus was rumoured to be the anointed heir as the next scholarch, the head of the school. Cicero would later call him musicus idemque philosophus (musician and philosopher)—stressing the close connection, indeed the sameness, of both vocations.1 It seems, however, that things did not go so well for Aristoxenus. When the changing political climate in the wake of Alexander the Great’s death forced Aristotle to leave Athens, the directorship of the school passed on to Theophrastus—much to the dismay of Aristoxenus, who left the school in anger and disgrace.2 Of the four hundred and fifty-three books that Aristoxenus allegedly wrote, none have survived, save a substantial part of a treatise on music theory, the Elements of Harmony, as well as fragments on rhythm and metre.3 Though his influence on the subsequent development of philosophy was negligible, his work remains a major source of knowledge in ancient music theory. We may be inclined to read Aristoxenus’s story, this attempted marriage between ­philosophy and music theory during this early stage of both fields’ institutional histories with its unhappy outcome, as an allegory of the complexities and complications between the two fields. By music theory I mean that branch of the study of music that is concerned, on the broadest level, with questions of how music works, and specifically, over the last two centuries or so, how musical works cohere. If we take the short view, that is, within the current institutional structures that go back to the nineteenth century, then technical skills such as harmony and counterpoint seem central to the discipline of music theory, which has been closely allied with pedagogy on the one hand and with composition on the other. But over the long term of its two-thousand-year history in the West it is not clear how representative this current constellation really is (for an elaboration of this point see Rehding 2016). For a far longer time compositional and analytical

28   Alexander Rehding concerns were comparatively irrelevant (see Christensen  2002; Blasius  2002). The polemical parts of Aristoxenus’s work, in fact, give a useful introduction to some of the overriding speculative questions that captivated music theory over the centuries. Specifically, Aristoxenus railed against the mathematical outlook of Pythagorean music theorists, who tried to understand the entire world—from musical intervals to ­astronomy—in terms of numerical relations. For a Pythagorean, music was a representation of an underlying arithmetic truth. Against this, Aristoxenus argued that music is a phenomenon in its own right, which only exists in our perceptual experience. And he was prepared to defend the consequences of this position: for a Pythagorean, intervals that were based on impure ratios were musically impossible; for Aristoxenus, by ­contrast, ratios were irrelevant as long as the interval sounded good. Changing constellations of these two fundamental positions can be traced throughout the history of music theory, which variously takes the form of oppositional pairs such as internal– external, subjective–objective, or psychological–physical—and is ultimately part of the overriding sensus–ratio debate, that is, the long-lived question of whether reliable knowledge is ultimately based on sensory impression or rational reflection. To be sure, it is possible to construct something of a beauty parade of philosophers with an interest in, and often considerable knowledge of, music—ranging from Boethius and Augustine, via René Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno, all the way to more contemporary figures such as Roger Scruton and Stanley Cavell, or to Peter Szendy and Jean-Luc Nancy. But being a philosopher with an interest in music theory is very different from being a music theorist with an interest in philosophy. It would be difficult to come up with a similarly recognizable list of philosophically inclined music theorists—only few names are known outside of specialist circles. Eduard Hanslick, who can justifiably be called a music theorist even though he did not emphasize that term, has the best chances of being recognized and respected by philosophers (see, for instance, Zangwill 2004). This problematic reciprocity is an issue that has a significant impact on the ways in which we can approach the task of mapping the field. A consequence arising from this imbalance is that, in some ways, this essay cannot help but work within and perpetuate this lopsided nexus. In attempting to map the field I am in fact negotiating two distinct territories, or rather the intersections between the two territories. I am invariably doing this from the safe disciplinary ground of my chosen discipline, music theory, and am reaching across to the other side, to philosophy, and in particular to the tradition of continental philosophy. A view from analytical philosophy surveying the map of music theory would doubtless come to different conclusions. Moreover, even if we look at the list of important philosophers across history with an interest in music, it would be difficult to construe a coherent narrative: the differences between the principles of their philosophies are as vast as those between specific musictheoretical concerns at the heart of their inquiries. Boethius did not write about the same things as Adorno, and Rousseau’s ideas about music and philosophy had little in common with those of Nietzsche. To make matters worse, not only do musically inclined thinkers disagree with their disciplinary colleagues on questions of music-theoretical and philosophical substance,

Music Theory and Philosophy   29 but music theorists also often disagree with what philosophers have to say about music, and vice versa. Adorno’s notorious essays on jazz may be a case in point, just as the composer and theorist August Halm’s peculiar slant on Hegelian history may be mentioned here as a questionable reading of a canonical philosopher (for reconsiderations of Adorno, see Witkin 2000; Robinson 1994; for Halm, see Rothfarb 2009). At least, we might add, Adorno was a trained and pedigreed composer who had studied with Alban Berg, whereas Halm’s philosophical credentials were shakier.4 But the point here is not merely one of the disciplinary authority with which one is at liberty to make pronouncements about the other field; there may well be further-reaching implications. It is perhaps not unfair to ask whether music theorists should worry that Descartes confessed he could not hear the difference between a fifth and an octave, which to any musician are two profoundly different intervals (Gaukroger 1995, 74)? Asking more broadly, what is the value to the other discipline of such transdisciplinary contributions if we do not always agree on fundamentals? When we map out the field in this chapter, this cannot be a whistle-stop tour in the history of ideas, or a series of glosses on different individual ongoing encounters between the two fields. Rather, it makes the most sense to focus on the encounter between philosophy and music theory in a specific context to pursue precisely the questions we have just arrived at. For this purpose, I will consider an example from what is arguably a most central period, nineteenth-century Germany, the age in which music was at its most philosophical and philosophy at its most musical. Clichés aside, there were substantive reasons for this convergence: since Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica of 1750, which was both a philosophy of sensory perception and of beauty, and especially after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), the spotlight on explorations in aesthetics in nineteenth-century German thought fell particularly on the philosophy of art. And conversely, owing ultimately to a number of cultural, political, and socio-economic factors amply discussed elsewhere, works of music in nineteenth-century Germany were thought to possess philosophical import, in a way that they did not have in previous centuries (see, for example, Gramit 2002; Leppert and McCrary 1987; for an account emphasizing developments in contemporary aesthetics, see Bonds 2006; for an account of developments in contemporary philosophy outside of aesthetics, see McAuley 2013). The question that we shall ask here, then, is a simple one: How much music theory can we get out of philosophy, and how much philosophy out of music theory?

Schopenhauer’s Music Theory No nineteenth-century German philosopher is more central in the history of music than Arthur Schopenhauer. It is widely known that his pessimistic philosophy became required reading for a whole generation of composers walking in Richard Wagner’s shadow.5 This is not the place to rehearse the intricacies of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic

30   Alexander Rehding metaphysics of the will, save to remind ourselves why he placed music at the top of his hierarchy of the arts. Uniquely among the arts, he argued, music offered a direct representation of the will, untrammelled by concepts. Music, he held, resembled the will in every respect, with the important difference that it harboured no physical pain and suffering, of the kind that otherwise marks our earthly existence (Schopenhauer  1969, 1:267).6 Never had music occupied a more central role in philosophical thought. If we read his World as Will and Representation from the perspective of the music theorist, however, it is striking that the two mighty tomes that make up the treatise, in which music plays a central role, contain only a single music example, and a curious one at that. Schopenhauer’s example is reproduced in Example 2.1.7 Music-theoretical arguments are commonly organized around music examples, so this seems like an obvious place to start. In a context that habitually associates the depths of Schopenhauer’s philosophy with the most advanced chromatic harmonies of Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, this short melody seems out of place. Its four-square, question-and-answer pattern appears laughably simple—more Johann Stamitz than Richard Wagner. How can we work with this? This monophonic example is perhaps made particularly puzzling, certainly to music theorists, by Schopenhauer’s admonition that melody could not be considered except together with harmony. A melody without harmony—something “desired exclusively by Rousseau”—Schopenhauer explains incredulously, would be like a “mere moral philosophy without an explanation of nature” (1969, 1:265). Before reviewing what exactly Schopenhauer has to say about this musical phrase, it is worth highlighting the second passage that has typically raised music-theoretical eyebrows: Schopenhauer offers an anachronistic and outright bizarre interpretation of the four musical voices—bass, tenor, alto, and soprano—as representing the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms in ascending order (1969, 2:447). This classification scheme, which resonates with Aristotelian and Platonic ideas on the one hand and Indian philosophy on the other, would appear to have its home in esoteric traditions for which modern music theorists tend to have very little time. Is there in fact anything that music theorists can take away from Schopenhauer’s explanations of music? It seems that Schopenhauer’s music theory has often failed to impress. Take, for instance, the early twentieth-century German scholar Franz Joseph Wagner, who completed a dissertation on this topic. He finds the analysis of the single music example the “most confusing and most forced part of the treatise” (Wagner 1910, 52), and proclaims that the derivation of musical voices from the four kingdoms “bears the stamp of caprice” (49). Or, for a more contemporary example, take the American music theorist

Example 2.1  The music example from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation.

Music Theory and Philosophy   31 Lawrence Ferrara, who considers the analytical description of the musical passage ­adequate, but faults Schopenhauer for adhering to false music-theoretical precedents and therefore missing something important in the music. Echoing American musictheoretical orthodoxy of the 1980s, Ferrara laments if only Schopenhauer had read the eighteenth-century Austrian music theorist Johann Joseph Fux, rather than his French contemporary Jean Philippe Rameau, he would have been able to better understand music in the way “actually practiced by the masters of Western music” (Ferrara 1996, 191). It is possible to defend Schopenhauer against his detractors. Schopenhauer was in fact a keen reader of recent music theory, particularly Ernst F. F. Chladni, dubbed the father of acoustics.8 Unlike Fux, who was interested in compositional technique, specifically counterpoint, Rameau and Chladni were more interested, each in their own way, in extracting the physical qualities of musical sounds. Or, exaggerating slightly, whereas Fux was primarily interested in notes, Rameau and Chladni were interested in tones. Thus Schopenhauer knew that each musical sound is not restricted to a single pitch, but rather contains a whole harmonic spectrum. Like Rameau, Schopenhauer projected this acoustical fact onto the structure of chords and harmonies. Sons harmoniques, as Schopenhauer (1969, 1:258) explained using Rameau’s terminology, contained full triadic harmonies. Using the harmonic series as a yardstick, Schopenhauer made some very detailed, though perhaps overly restrictive, deductions concerning compositional technique, including the assertion that correct harmonies should be spaced so that the three upper voices are placed two octaves above the bass note (1969, 2:447). We can best understand this claim in terms of the distribution along the harmonic spectrum, where the major triad is located at the fourth, fifth, and sixth partial, with the fundamental being exactly three octaves underneath the fourth partial. This exact spacing is relatively irrelevant from the perspective of compositional technique, but it serves to underline how closely aligned Schopenhauer’s thought was to the acoustical basis of music. While Schopenhauer explains that all four voices in a typical tonal texture are projections of the fundamental bass, the bass is also the slowest moving voice and the most restricted in its movements.9 “The fundamental bass is in harmony what inorganic nature, the crudest mass on which everything rests and from which everything originates and develops, is in the world” (1969, 1:258, translation modified). He follows Rameau in proscribing stepwise IV–V movement of the bass and arguing that bass motion is primarily in fourths and fifths (1:259, 2:452). It is the soprano part that shows the most agile movement and is allowed melodic contour. We can see where this is leading within Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: the soprano part is the most individualized of all the voices. In the tenor and alto parts, the harmonybearing voices “between the bass and the leading voice singing the melody, I recognize the whole gradation of the Ideas in which the will objectifies itself ” (1969, 1:258). It is from this angle that we have to understand the otherwise puzzling division of voices along the Neoplatonic Great Chain of Being. The slow-moving bass represents the kingdom of “minerals” in analogy with his metaphysics of the will: “Just as a certain degree of

32   Alexander Rehding pitch is inseparable from the tone as such, so a certain grade of the will’s manifestation is inseparable from matter” (1:258). The bass is declared to be material, ultimately, in order that the soprano can then be equated with the human individual. Schopenhauer explains: Melody alone has significant and intentional connexions from beginning to end. Consequently, it relates the story of the intellectually enlightened will, the copy or impression whereof in actual life is the series of its deeds. Melody, however, says more: it relates the most secret history of the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason.  (1969, 1:259)

Schopenhauer is so eager to bring his point across that the melody relates directly to the will that he even underlines it multiple times in a row. The point matters because, like the principium individuationis that Schopenhauer dismisses as a mere illusion, the soprano melody does not exist in its own right. Even though the melody may appear autonomous, self-contained, and separated from the other voices—“progressing with unrestrained freedom,” as Schopenhauer (1969, 1:259) puts it—it is always carried by the other voices, which all emanate from the same son harmonique, from the bass upwards. Thus, when we read the solitary music example in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, we must not only focus on the notes we read on the page. We have to imagine that there is a whole harmonic underpinning that is an integral part of the ­melody—so integral and inseparable, in fact, that it is unnecessary to write down the underlying harmonies. Schopenhauer is particularly concerned about the excursions of melodic movement, away from the first scale degree, the keynote, “to the extreme intervals” and the more unstable scale degrees, but always returning to it. This melodic motion, Schopenhauer explains, “expresses the many different forms of the will’s efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately finding again a harmonious interval, and still more the keynote” (1969, 1:260). The aspect that distinguishes the melodic line most from the bass and the middle parts is its explicit rhythmic structure, an aspect that Schopenhauer, like the German Romantics Friedrich Schelling and Novalis before him, considers to be the central dimension of music. Schopenhauer does not carefully distinguish between metre and rhythm, and he is particularly interested in the question of metric weight in conjunction with underlying harmonies. He interprets the metric-rhythmic structure of his solitary music example in great detail. Observing that the first strong beat articulates the tonic harmony, Schopenhauer argues that the upward arpeggiation of bar 1 reaches the upper octave on the fourth eighth note, the weak beat, which initiates a move down to the seventh of the scale in bar 2. From a perspective in which the tonic represents stability and consonance, Schopenhauer argues, the sounding of the keynote on a weak beat introduces a “disunity”—a mismatch between harmony and metric weight—which “does not obtain any satisfaction.” The move to the seventh scale degree is, for Schopenhauer, in

Music Theory and Philosophy   33 itself a certain kind of dissonance, in the sense of instability, that is introduced on the strong beat in bar 2. Schopenhauer regards the unstable melodic scale degree introduced on a strong beat as another kind of “disunity” that makes the listener “feel disquieted.” More conventionally, in our music-theoretical discourse we would point to the relative instability, the drive to move beyond this point towards closure, of third of the dominant. (For Schopenhauer, by contrast, the dominant harmony only emerges as a consequence of the melodic need to resolve back to the tonic—or, as he puts it: “because the most deeply felt satisfaction and complete relief can follow only the most pressing desire” [1969, 2:456].) The destabilized arpeggiated figure in bar 3 follows the same outline, which initiates a return to the stability of the tonic. Schopenhauer sounds almost Hegelian in his explanation that from a metric-harmonic standpoint, the short phrase outlines an initial assertion, followed by a “discord” between harmony and metre in bars 2 and 3, and culminating in a final “reconciliation” in bar 4. But rather than fleshing out this dialectic, Schopenhauer points out that these terms are easily translated into the metaphysics of the will, as “the copy of the origination of new desires, and then of their satisfaction” (2:455). What is perhaps most important about Schopenhauer’s reflections on music, and on melody in particular, is the explicit and essential temporal dimension that his philosophy introduces, which is distinctly different from the other arts—even including poetry. He was insistent that music “exists in time alone, without any reference to space” (1969, 1:266). In a context in which the experience of music came to be connected with a sense of subjectivity, as well as specifically the problem of the finitude of human life, it becomes understandable why this evanescent art form would suddenly rise to new philosophical heights.

Music as a Medium of Philosophy The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler has drawn attention to the role of Schopenhauer in making music a central object within the discourse of philosophy (Kittler 1995, 83–99). Schopenhauer’s definition of musical sound is curiously complicated and reflects the magnitude of his task. Even though, as we saw, Schopenhauer is centrally interested in the soprano line and the human kingdom, he emphatically builds his philosophy on instrumental sounds, not on the human voice.10 Crucially, it is the human subject as a whole who is turned into an instrument: “We ourselves,” Schopenhauer proclaims, in analogy to the Pythagorean monochord, “are now the vibrating string that is being stretched or plucked” (1969, 2:450–451). With this striking image he brings together two traditions that had seemed irreconcilable for most of the history of music theory: acoustical ratios, traditionally associated with the mathematical Pythagorean position, and musical experience, first articulated by Aristoxenus. Schopenhauer conceives of sounds not only in terms of the physics of acoustical vibrations, but also in terms of music that is perceived by listening (or sounding, or sympathetically resonating) subjects.

34   Alexander Rehding Kittler notes that Schopenhauer’s re-evaluation of music within the hierarchy of the arts introduced a mismatch between the sounding medium of music and the literary medium in which philosophy normally operates. Schopenhauer references Leibniz’s rationalistic definition “musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescentis se numerare animi” (music is an unconscious arithmetic exercise in which the soul is not aware of its own counting), but he changes it from numerare to philosophari—from counting to philosophizing.11 This subtle change captures this momentous paradigm shift: music is no longer something to count, that is, something that relates to the science of acoustics, but it is something to philosophize about. The vibrations emitted by the “human monochord” may still be the same as those that Leibniz wanted to count, but they no longer matter as frequencies; they only matter as tones that reach the ear and that form part of a piece of music. Schopenhauer now deals with a new kind of material, sound—or more specifically, musical sounds, that is, tones, which are the fabric of musical compositions and which can be written down in their very own system of notation. From this perspective, the inclusion of the music example in World as Will and Representation is instructive: it highlights the uneasy cohabitation of two fundamentally different systems of notation, text and music, which corresponds to the material difference of the new medium that Schopenhauer elevates to the level of philosophy. Kittler argues (with characteristic hyperbole) that a generation later this mismatch of media would lead Nietzsche to take the radical but logical consequence of abandoning philosophical aesthetics, which he redefined as nothing other than “applied physiology.” As applied physiology, the gap between the medium of music, working directly on the body, and that of aesthetics is closed again, though at the expense of any verbal philosophizing about art. Put differently, whereas Kant excluded music from philosophy because it does not use words, Nietzsche decided to give up philosophy altogether in favour of dance. In this view, the composer Wagner becomes the true heir of the trend that Schopenhauer, and to a lesser extent Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, initiated earlier in the nineteenth century. Simply put, what makes music so special to Schopenhauer, over and above the other arts, is that its experience is not located representationally in the world, but is felt diffusely in the body (see Foster 1996, 245). And his description of music, especially his analysis of the music example, goes a long way to put this sensation into technical language. In short, there is more music-theoretical interest to Schopenhauer than we generally admit. Kittler’s critique takes issue with some aspects of Schopenhauer’s move, but he appreciates the bold step that Schopenhauer took in making music worthy of philosophy.12 Above all, Kittler underscores that music theorists would do well to take Schopenhauer’s aesthetics seriously: Schopenhauer is more sensitive to music-theoretical concerns than meets the eye (or the ear). The reason music theorists have tended to overlook the specific qualities of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is probably related to the fact that for the longest time music theory was in thrall to those aspects of the musical work that related to the composer’s craft (see Goehr 1992 for a trenchant discussion of the work concept; amongst a large

Music Theory and Philosophy   35 number of responses, see Talbot 2000). We remember that this comes to the fore ­particularly in Ferrara’s (1996) critique, insisting again and again on how the great composers learned their trade. (To be sure, Schopenhauer does have something to say about that too, in the guise of the famous “sleepwalker” image [1969, 1:260] with which he characterizes the creative process, but this particular metaphor is of little interest to music-theoretical concerns.) At first blush, it is true: the passages on music in World as Will and Representation do not include anything that would offer  radically new music-theoretical insights. Ferrara’s indifferent assessment of Schopenhauer’s analysis as no more and no less than “adequate” is an indication of this. However, Schopenhauer’s analysis in fact foregrounds an aspect—the move from “desire” to “satisfaction”—that is so fundamental to the musical experience, and to the way in which we talk about music as to appear completely self-­evident to us. It is easy to overlook the impact of the psychological language Schopenhauer employs in his analytical example, because his observations—when couched in slightly updated language, as “tension” and “resolution”—seem entirely familiar to modern readers and listeners. A quick comparison with melodic analysis from Schopenhauer’s age, above all Anton Reicha’s influential Traité de mélodie (1814), published four years before World as Will and Representation, suggests that this approach to music was not always so familiar. Reicha talks about compositional categories, such as how to write open and closed phrases and how to achieve cadential closure. Schopenhauer’s discussion, by contrast, operates strictly on the level of how we hear these phrases, their psychological impact on the listener, and in what ways exactly the musical elements contribute to a sense of tension and relaxation. These terms are now commonplace in music theorists, who spent the last century studying up on psychology, but Schopenhauer is at the crest of a movement here that did not come to the fore within music-theoretical circles until the end of the nineteenth century.13 Perhaps the closest music-theoretical equivalent during the first half of the nineteenth century can be found not in theories of melody, but in early efforts in musical analysis, particularly in Gottfried Weber’s celebrated experiential analysis of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet of 1832, whose central protagonist, as has been pointed out repeatedly, is “the ear.”14 Kittler may be correct in identifying the mismatch of media, between the verbal medium of philosophical aesthetics and the sounding medium of music, as a problem for the discourse network of philosophy. But Schopenhauer was nothing if not con­ sist­ent in helping move the terms of the discussion away from the traditional domain of music theory, its dual focus on pedagogy and its speculative foundations, toward a more “aisthetic,” or perceptual, outlook.15 With this shift in perspective, its new focus on the musical work and how to analyse it from the listener’s perspective, we could say—with a good dose of Kittlerian hyperbolic flair—that modern music theory as we know it was born. Put differently, our modern institution of music theory, with its emphasis on putting the listening experience into words and formalizing these efforts, set itself up as the missing link between the medial gap of verbal aesthetics and ­sounding music.

36   Alexander Rehding

Ernst Kurth as Schopenhauerian Philosopher No musical thinker has taken Schopenhauer’s position more seriously than the theorist Ernst Kurth (1886–1946). Kurth is little known outside of specialist circles, in part because of the deep-rooted idealism at the heart of his theory, which is not only difficult to translate into English, but also resists the kind of systematization that AngloAmerican music-theoretical discourse cherishes, and in part because his academic reputation never quite recovered from the restrictions under which his works were placed by the National Socialists.16 Kurth’s ambition is not less than to rectify a myopic focus of music theory: “From the moment that theory concentrated its efforts on the external sounding image, it was condemned to be left high and dry” (Kurth 1968, 12).17 He never ceases to stress that tones, the sounding phenomenon, are merely the surface phenomenon of what are ultimately, at a much deeper level, psychological impulses. Thus, his treatise on Romantic Harmony (1920) opens in medias res: “Harmonies are reflexes from the unconscious.” He is not shy to admit his Schopenhauerian leanings, in which the “will” has even morphed into a more emphatic, primordial “Ur-Willen” (Kurth’s intellectual world has been explored in Rösler 1998; Krebs 1998; Rothfarb 1990; and Tan 2014). In Kurth’s hands, meanwhile, the specifics of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics have been mediated via a proto-Freudian psychological language.18 Kurth’s music theory can best be understood as an attempt to get beneath the phenomena by capturing the sounding surface in as precise technical terms as possible. What Kurth is interested in is what actually happens between the tones, how individual tones are not heard as a series of discrete events, but hang together as melodic lines. Thus he opens his treatise on Linear Counterpoint with the pithy statement: “Melody is motion” (Kurth  1917, 1). He elaborates on his position with explicit reference to Schopenhauer, writing: “Music is not a reflection of nature, but the experience of its enigmatic energies within us, the sense of tension within us is the peculiar perception of similar vital forces, as they are manifest at the very beginning of all physical and organic life” (Kurth 1968, 4). The “sense of tension within us” that Kurth identifies seems to resonate with Schopenhauer’s image of the human “vibrating string that is being plucked.” In line with Schopenhauerian ideas, the flow of melody in “kinetic energy” is absolutely primary for him, while harmonies are nothing more than dammed-up “potential energy.” Not unlike Schopenhauer, Kurth explains that melody is the “first projection of the will onto ‘matter,’ on its appearance in time and [imagined] space” (5). In this sense, saying that a melodic line is composed of a number of discrete tones is not correct, the opposite is true in Kurth’s view: the underlying psychic energy is primary, and the individual tones simply demarcate audibly the trajectory of this energetic motion. Tones, in this conception, are nothing more than carriers of energy states in music, the “ballast of the line” (7).

Music Theory and Philosophy   37 We can use Kurth’s explanations to reinterpret Schopenhauer’s music example in terms of the underlying energies that he hears out of all tonal music. Kurth explains: “The progression from dominant to tonic is the simplest sonic tension and its discharge; its opposite—that is, Tonic–Dominant—is the creation of the most basic chordal ­tension, which yearns to return to its starting point” (1968, 111). Put differently, Kurth adds, the progression from I–V is “negation,” while V–I is “affirmation.” We can see how this closely resembles Schopenhauer’s observation that his short musical ­passage ­outlined both “discord” and “reconciliation”—with one important music-­theoretical difference, or so it appears: Schopenhauer is eager to base his observations on melodic scale degrees, not on harmonies. Kurth, however, urges his readers not to regard the chordal sonorities as foundational, but rather as a dynamic effect, based on energies and tensions. For Kurth, it is ultimately immaterial whether this tension manifests itself in melody or harmony. What is critical in this progression is the tension that resides especially in semitonal relations, in the tendency of leading tones to resolve into the keynote of the scale and the root of the tonic harmony. In Schopenhauer’s example, in the passage from a tonic C major to its dominant G major, it is especially the semitone from the stable C, root and octave of the scale, to the energetically more charged B, as the third of the dominant harmony and the leading tone of the scale, that requires a discharge back into the more stable tonic harmony. For Kurth, the play of energetic tensions that underlies these progressions and sets them in motion is a vital force, based on the generative force of leading-tone tension; it is no less than “the life of music” (136). From this energetic perspective, Kurth concludes: “The I–V–I cadence is the first cadence of music altogether” (111). These semitonal tensions can also be created within chordal formations, employing a principle that Kurth calls “alteration.” Alteration describes a principle of chromatic inflection in which chordal tones are substituted by their semitone (or in some cases even whole-tone) neighbours. Alteration not only changes the sonic structure of the sound, its “heightened sound colour play” (1968, 134), but also increases the energetic tension of the chords, which require resolution, often into distant harmonic regions. It is from this perspective that Kurth presents one of the most celebrated (and most in-depth) analyses of the Tristan chord, reproduced in Example  2.2. He begins by observing that the actual sounding structure of the chord, a half-diminished-seventh

Example 2.2  Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, opening bars.

38   Alexander Rehding chord, is nothing new. What is new, however, is the tension that is created in the specific contexts in which the Tristan chord is presented and in which it is resolved. The famous first occurrence of the chord, in bar 2 of the score, is part of a II–V progression, in which the II chord, based on B major with an added seventh, has been drastically “altered” in Kurth’s specific sense: the F♯ has been lowered to F (in the bass), and the seventh A is preceded by a long, held-out appoggiatura G♯. These alterations heighten the chromatic tensions of the chord: the F strives for resolution to E, and the G♯ will resolve upwards to A and continue to rise chromatically in the following bar. Of course, Tristan is the locus classicus not only of Schopenhauerian pessimism, but also of the intense chromatic idiom that is inextricably linked in with Wagner’s later stage works.19 In the music-theoretical imagination the two have grown so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. For Kurth (1968, 228), this style of “highly developed alteration,” with its boundless and expansive potential, its urgency, its incessant “yearning and flooding,” is the essence of Romanticism in music.

Reciprocities Is this still Schopenhauer? It is difficult to say: Kurth’s technical and metaphorical language obviously goes far beyond anything that Schopenhauer said on the topic of music. We know that Schopenhauer did not have much time for Wagner’s music: in 1854 Wagner sent him a dedicated copy of the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The ageing philosopher, who greatly preferred Mozart and Rossini, opined that Wagner would do well to give up music and focus on poetry (see Grisebach 1898, 53). But, what is more, this question is relatively unimportant. What matters is that Kurth’s music theory was written under the impression of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and that it constitutes one possible answer to his philosophy from the perspective of music theory. Kurth takes up certain features of Schopenhauer’s philosophy including aspects of Schopenhauer’s ideas on music. Kurth is more precise and more technical in his musical descriptions than Schopenhauer, which is just what one would expect. But as we saw in our brief Kurthian analysis of Schopenhauer’s music examples, there are important points of convergence. Even where Kurth does not follow Schopenhauer to the letter, in particular in his extensive theories about underlying “energies,” Kurth’s music theory occupies the discursive space that Schopenhauer’s philosophy opened up within the domain of music aesthetics. Ludwig Holtmeier (2005, 128) has astutely pointed out that Kurth’s theory falls short in one important respect—in terms of musical hearing. Though this aspect is often central to music-theoretical thought, it is in many ways negligible in this particular context: after all, Kurth is trying to get beneath the sounding surface, to understand how we experience it psychologically. Thus, Kurth prefaces his Romantische Harmonik almost dismissively with the laconic observation that “the gaze upon music is obscured by sounds” (1968, 3). Later on he elaborates on this position: “No musical style underscores more

Music Theory and Philosophy   39 clearly than that of Tristan that in all of harmony, we listen in the first place with the will, and only in the last place with our ears” (14). Kurth aims to present us with something that comes close to a seismographic reading of the elemental forces that make up the music in the first place. But is this not a contradiction in terms? Schopenhauer, after all, tried very hard to be up-to-date with theories of sound drawn from Chladni and Rameau, while Kurth dismisses the very notion of sonority from his music-theoretical thought. There is probably a certain amount of posturing involved in both cases: Schopenhauer needs to bolster his music-theoretical credentials and appeals to these important musical thinkers to legitimize his philosophy, whereas Kurth’s agenda is to show how mere music-theoretical thought falls short of capturing what is essential in music, that is, its psychological and energetic import. This dichotomy in Kurth’s and Schopenhauer’s aims and disciplinary background may seem ironic, but makes more sense if we think of it as a chiasmus (albeit a slightly lopsided one): whereas Schopenhauer is trying to formalize his metaphysics towards a sense of how a philosophy might hear music, Kurth’s aim is to formalize how a music theory might capture a profound metaphysical and psychological experience. From this perspective, it is probably not a coincidence that Kurth wrote his Schopenhauerian music theory once the full impact of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic metaphysics had been sublimated, if that is the right word, and tamed by psychology around the turn of the twentieth century. What is more, while Schopenhauer was very much de rigueur in intellectual circles in Germany in the first decades of the new century, it is undeniable that Kurth’s approach to Schopenhauer is heavily mediated via Nietzsche, Wagner, and Freud. So, what about the reciprocity that we problematized earlier? We saw how Schopenhauer gave rise to, or at least fostered, a certain branch of music-theoretical thought. Did Kurth’s work do the same in the field of philosophy? Can he be shown to have engendered further philosophy? The answer is a simple “no.” The only philosopher, as far as I am aware, who was familiar with Kurth’s work was Theodor W. Adorno, who writes about Kurth’s Musikpsychologie (1931) quite favourably.20 The reason for this mismatch, as we observed initially, is the incongruence in the scope of both fields. Thus, Kurth obviously falls far short of Schopenhauer’s wider philosophy—as any music theory necessarily would—in that it cannot adequately address the fundamental question of “How should we live?” that forms such an important part of Schopenhauer’s thought. Is the asymmetrical constellation between music theory and philosophy that we encountered here generalizable? Does the circumstance that Kurth operated more or less within the discursive space that Schopenhauer’s philosophy had opened up for the institution of music theory reflect a broader truth regarding the relationship between the two? The answer will depend on how we understand the institutional scope of the two fields. If we understand music theory in its current usage, as defined by academic practice within the Anglo-American institutional network, with its chief focus on the understanding and appreciation of musical works (either individually or grouped together as repertoires), then the shared space between music theory and philosophy

40   Alexander Rehding will fall primarily into the domain of aesthetics, a relatively small field within philosophy as it is practiced today. This framework is probably the most common usage of music theory that we are likely to come across. However, this is not the same as saying that it could not be any other way. Numerous studies have broadened the philosophical outlook of music theory, bringing it closer to big philosophical questions such as musical experience, temporality, sound, or identity (see, among many others, Hasty  1993; McClary  2001; Spitzer 2006; Heller-Roazen 2011; Kane 2014; or Waltham-Smith 2018). There are plenty of further possibilities that simply happen not to be recognized institutionally at present. To return to ancient Greece, for instance, who is to say that Plato’s Timaeus does not in fact include a fully fledged music theory that goes right to the heart of this foundational philosophical text? If we get beyond these institutional constraints and allow ourselves to take on a broader notion of music theory, perhaps we will arrive at a less lopsided relationship—something closer to the Ciceronian ideal of musica eademque philosophia. Perhaps, then, in this retelling the legend of Aristoxenus will come round to a happy ending.

Notes 1. Cicero, fr. Ia-1-05, cited in Kaiser 2010, 3. 2. As so often, the accuracy of these accounts is questionable. 3. For a recent reconsideration of Aristoxenus’s work from musical, philosophical, and philological perspectives, see Huffman 2012. 4. Halm, it seems, could at best rely on his father-in-law, Gustav Wyneken, who had received his PhD with a dissertation on Hegel. See Rehding 2001. 5. Less well-known, perhaps, are the circumstances by which Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation (1818–19) gained late recognition in the 1850s, thanks to an influential review in the English press, which also rekindled interest in continental Europe. 6. See Jacquette  1996, especially its two contrasting essays on music, Ferrara  1996 and Goehr 1996. 7. To be precise, the example appears in the second volume, which contains the additions made for the influential second edition of 1844. The first volume, published in 1819, does not contain any music examples at all. 8. Schopenhauer  1969, 1: 266. To convey a sense of Chladni’s importance: Napoleon Bonaparte was so impressed by Chladni’s work that he paid the author for a French translation of his work, which became Traité d’acoustique (Chladni 1809). 9. The fundamental bass, one of Rameau’s central concepts from the Traité de l’harmonie (1722), is an imaginary structure that differs from the sounding bass. The fundamental bass links the roots of the sounding harmonies in a progression of certain permissible intervals. Rameau (1722) contends that fifths and fourths are preferable, thirds are permissible, whereas seconds must be avoided. 10. Oddly, Franz Joseph Wagner—our early twentieth-century music theorist—flatly denies that point, arguing that Schopenhauer went wrong here because the basis of music is the human voice. This seems to be based more on personal dogma than on a careful reading of the text. Wagner’s arguments often boil down to pitting his own, often idiosyncratic,

Music Theory and Philosophy   41 views on music against Schopenhauer’s, and then to chide Schopenhauer for holding different views. 11. Leisinger 1994 points out that the printed edition of Leibniz’s famous letter to Christian Goldbach, dated 17 April 1712, mistakenly changes animae (of the soul) into animi (of the spirit) (42–43). 12. Kittler’s complaint that Schopenhauer did not go all the way when he made musical tones—rather than noise—the object of his philosophy, seems a little churlish given that in 1819 Schopenhauer did not have a chance to rely on the technological apparatus that Kittler’s unabashedly teleological perspective offers. 13. Bandur’s authoritative entry “Melodia/Melodie” (1998, 70) identifies the first conceptualization of motion or energy in Karl Fr. Krause’s short treatise Darstellungen aus der Geschichte der Musik (Krause 1827, 156), where Krause defines melody as “Die Melodie oder Tonfolge in der Zeit ist die der Entfaltung der Kraft des Gemütslebens angemessene Reihenfolge der Töne in der Zeit.” (Melody, or tonal succession in time, is the order of tones that is appropriate to the unfolding of the power of the life of the mind over time.) 14. An English translation of Weber’s essay is included in Bent  1994, 1:157–183. See also Moreno 2004. 15. Aisthesis is the chosen term of a recent branch of aesthetics, particularly in Germany, which returns to a more Baumgartian approach and aligns itself with questions of perception (aisthesis = sensation, perception). See, for instance, Barck et al. 1990. I call this outlook “perceptual” in light of our conventional distinctions. Within Schopenhauer’s concept of aesthetic contemplation, during which the contemplating subject and the art object cannot be sharply separated, this distinction would be meaningless. 16. As a professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland, Kurth himself was in relative safety during the years of the National Socialist regime. A biographical sketch is included in Willimann 1989. 17. Excerpts from Kurth’s treatises have been skillfully translated in Rothfarb 1991. 18. Freud was, of course, also a noted Schopenhauerian. See Hyer 1990 and Gardner 1996. 19. Wagner and Philosophy (McGee 2001) is published in America under the title The Tristan Chord. 20. Adorno reviewed the book in 1933, and occasionally referenced it in his own work. See, for instance, Adorno 1998, 300.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. “Vers une musique informelle.” In Quasi una fantasia, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 269–322. London: Verso. Bandur, Markus. 1998. “Melodia/Melodie.” In Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller, 1–71. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Barck, Karlheinz, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, and Stefan Richter, eds. 1990. Aisthesis— Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. Leipzig: Reclam Leipzig. Bent, Ian, ed. and trans. 1994. Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blasius, Leslie. 2002. “Mapping the Terrain.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas S. Christensen, 22–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

42   Alexander Rehding Chladni, Ernst F. F. 1809. Traité d’acoustique. Paris: Courcier. Christensen, Thomas S., ed. 2002. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrara, Lawrence. 1996. “Schopenhauer on Music as Embodiment of the Will.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Dale Jacquette, 183–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Cheryl. 1996. “Ideas and Imagination.” In The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Christopher Janaway, 213–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, Sebastian. 1996. “Schopenhauer, Will, and The Unconscious.” In The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Christopher Janaway, 375–421. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaukroger, Stephen. 1995. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1996. “Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Dale Jacquette, 200–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gramit, David. 2002. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture 1770–1848. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Grisebach, Eduard, ed. 1898. Schopenhauers Gespräche und Selbstgespräche. Berlin: Hoffmann. Hasty, Christopher F. 1993. Rhythm As Meter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. 2011. The Fifth Hammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Holtmeier, Ludwig. 2005. “Die Erfindung der romantischen Harmonik. Ernst Kurth und Georg Capellen.” WagnerSpektrum 2: 125–142. Huffman, Carl  A., ed, 2012. Aristoxenus of Tarentum. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hyer, Brian. 1990. “Musical Hysteria.” 19th-Century Music 14, no. 1 (Summer): 84–94. Jacquette, Dale, ed. 1996. Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaiser, Stefan Ikarus. 2010. Die Fragmente des Aristoxenos aus Tarent. Hildesheim: Olms. Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen. New York: Oxford University Press. Kittler, Friedrich. 1995. “Musik als Medium.” In Wahrnehmung und Geschichte: Markierungen zur Aisthesis materialis, edited by Bernhard  J.  Dotzler and Ernst Martin Müller, 83–99. Berlin: Oldenbourg Akademieverlag. Krause, Karl Friedrich. 1827. Darstellungen aus der Geschichte der Musik. Göttingen: Dieterich. Krebs, Wolfgang. 1998. Innere Dynamik und Energetic in Ernst Kurths Musiktheorie. Tutzing: Hans Schneider. Kurth, Ernst. 1917. Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Bachs melodische Polyphonie. Bern: Max Drechsel. Kurth, Ernst. 1968. Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. First published 1920. Leisinger, Ulrich. 1994. Leibniz-Reflexe der deutschen Musiktheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary, eds. 1987. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Music Theory and Philosophy   43 McAuley, Tomás. 2013. “Rhythmic Accent and the Absolute: Sulzer, Schelling, and the Akzenttheorie.” Eighteenth Century Music 20, no. 2 (September): 277–286. McClary, Susan. 2001. Conventional Wisdom. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McGee, Bryan. 2001. Wagner and Philosophy. Basingstoke, UK: Penguin. Moreno, Jairo. 2004. Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Rameau, Jean Philippe. 1722. Traité de l’harmonie. Paris: Baillard. Rehding, Alexander. 2001. “August Halm’s Two Cultures as Nature.” In Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, 142–160. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rehding, Alexander. 2016. “Three Music-Theory Lessons.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141, no. 2 (July): 251–282. Robinson, J. Bradford. 1994. “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts On Jazz Reception In Weimar Germany.” Popular Music 13, no. 1 (January): 1–25. Rösler, Hans-Peter. 1998. Die Musiktheorie von Ernst Kurth und ihr psychologischer Hintergrund. Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Verlag an der Lottbek Jensen. Rothfarb, Lee. 1990. Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rothfarb, Lee. 2009. August Halm: A Critical and Creative Life In Music. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Rothfarb, Lee, ed. 1991. Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover. Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Talbot, Michael, ed. 2000. The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Tan, Daphne. 2014. “Ernst Kurth at the Boundary of Music Theory and Psychology.” PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York. Wagner, Franz Joseph. 1910. Beiträge zur Würdigung der Musiktheorie Schopenhauers. Bonn: Hauptmann. Waltham-Smith, Naomi. 2018. Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration. New York: Oxford University Press. Willimann, Joseph, ed. 1989. Gedenkschrift Ernst Kurth (1886–1946). Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft. Neue Folge 6/7. Bern: Haupt. Witkin, Robert. 2000. “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (March): 145–170. Zangwill, Nick. 2004. “Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right About Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 1 (January): 29–43.

chapter 3

Eth nom usicol ogy a n d Phil osoph y Ellen Koskoff

Ethnomusicology is the study of music in human social and cultural life. Closely related today to the discipline of anthropology, ethnomusicology is, at its heart, interdis­ ci­pli­nary. Like anthropology, its basic method is ethnographic fieldwork; its tools are recording, transcription, and analysis; and its discourses, until quite recently, have been rooted in the philosophical and theoretical systems of Western academic study, broadly speaking. This essay first explores the history of the field, from its earliest beginnings in late nineteenth-century Europe to its present standing as a major music discipline world­ wide. The essay continues with a critical examination of current debates, theoretical directions, new practices, and challenges, concluding with some important issues affect­ ing the future of ethnomusicology. These include the effects of postmodernism on the study of music, such as the development of new paradigms focusing on fragmentation and multiple subjectivities; the rise of various technologies as harbingers of a new for­ mulation of music as simply one category of sound; the effects of globalism on musical flow, and diasporic studies; and finally, a more general discussion of sameness and dif­ ference as organizing principles of ethnomusicological analysis and practice. But first, I pose three basic questions that ethnomusicologists have asked and con­ tinue to ask as they immerse themselves in the study of (mostly) contemporary musical cultures: (1) What is music in the context of human life? (2) Why and how is music meaningful to people? and (3) How can we best transform experiences of musical sounds, structures, and meanings into spoken and written discourses to share our appreciation for all musics and to promote intercultural understanding and respect? As ethnomusicology has undergone many philosophical, theoretical, and method­ ological changes, its practitioners have dealt with a myriad of other questions related to these three. Here are just a few: What, exactly, do ethnomusicologists study—music or people? Are we more interested in the varied social and cultural systems that affect and are affected by music; or in musical sounds and their analysis? How, precisely, does any

46   Ellen Koskoff society’s music, its sounds and structures (i.e., the music itself), relate to the social lives and values of the people for whom it is meaningful? Does a musical utterance “mean” something? Can music creation, performance, and experience be reduced to an under­ lying grammar, like language, or be limited by human biology or cognition? I introduce these questions at the outset to stress not only ethnomusicology’s interdisciplinarity, but also its inherent flexibility and openness to philosophical and methodological difference.

A Brief History of the Field What follows is a brief history of ethnomusicology as it grew and developed over the past 130 years or so, from its European beginnings to today’s worldwide interests and practices.1 Along the way, I highlight certain ideas, people, and methods that have influ­ enced the field and have contributed to various ethnomusicological discourses.

Comparative Musicology: Ethnomusicology’s European Heritage, c.1885–1960 I begin with an oft-cited origin myth of the beginnings of the academic study of music— the publication of Guido Adler’s “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (“The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology”), in 1885 (see Mugglestone 1983). In his attempt to organize the many areas of music that could be studied formally, Adler was driven in part by his wish to see music taken more seriously in the academy and was drawn to new theoretical models associated with contemporary scientific (i.e., system­ atic) developments; and, although his own research focused exclusively on Western art music, he was also interested in European folk as well as non-Western musics. Using the scientific methods available to him at the time, Adler proposed a classification system for the study of all musics (i.e., musicology) in an effort to validate, in a systematic way, the study of music itself. Adler divided musicology into two overarching categories: (1) historical musicology, focusing on specific pieces and genres of music, historical accounts of composers and works, musical instruments, and historical periods, primarily through the study and interpretation of written documents; and (2) systematic musicology, originally contain­ ing four subdisciplines, focusing on the underlying, universal “laws of music”: music theory, aesthetics, pedagogy, and comparative musicology, which dealt with “compari­ son for ethnographic purposes” (Mugglestone 1983, 14–15). It is the fourth subcategory of systematic musicology—comparative musicology—with which we are concerned here, for it is this field that eventually grew and developed into the discipline of ethno­ musicology as we know it today.

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   47 Although Adler’s idea of historical musicology, like systematic musicology, appeared open to the study of all musics, its focus on written and visual documents limited its scope, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the study of musical cultures with a written language, a music notation system, and an interest in documentation— essentially those of European and some East Asian art musics. Historical musicology remains today the discipline that primarily studies Western art music, its documents, history, and philosophical underpinnings, while contemporary ethnomusicologists, using ethnographic fieldwork, primarily study the musics and people of cultures living today, often choosing to study musical cultures that are primarily oral. Unlike historical musicology, systematic musicology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on the larger questions of music’s origins, musical univer­ sals, large-scale patterns of musical diffusion, and the preservation of folk and “primi­ tive” musical cultures. These and other questions, scholars felt, could only be answered through the systematic collecting and comparing of musical entities, mostly folk songs already published or transcribed in Western notation. Thus, in its earliest stages, the underlying, implicit assumptions of this nascent field firmly situated the study of music within a scientific paradigm—an observable entity largely separated from its human performance and meaning. These analytic and theoretical perspectives often resonated with new scientific insights of the era. Influenced by the discoveries of Charles Darwin on evolution, for example, as well as by European colonialism, war, and a growing ease of travel, these men—and some women—provided a basis for what was to come. Early comparative musicologists, such as Carl Stumpf, began to apply these insights and new discoveries to music (Stumpf 1886). Looking for music’s precise point of origin, how it evolved and developed from its “primitive” birth to the high art of European classicism, and, finally, whether musical “laws,” such as tonality, harmony, and periodic melodic/rhythmic structures, were found universally in all musics, these scholars based much of their research on pre-existing, often published material. For example, the noted ballad scholar Francis James Child published a collection of 305 ballad texts as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Child 1882–98), now com­ monly known as the “Child Ballads”; but he focused on the rhetorical style of the texts to determine their relative age. It was not until sixty years later that another ballad scholar, Bertrand Bronson, added music to these texts in a monumental four-volume collection, Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959–72). In addition to providing all known variants of each of the 305 Child Ballads in Western notation, Bronson also proposed, in the same publication, an analytical model (the mode-star) that clearly showed relation­ ships between the various musical modes used in performance, placing them theoreti­ cally into related musical families. Early collecting and comparison was facilitated by three important developments at the end of the nineteenth century: (1) Hermann von Helmholtz’s invention of the Helmholtz resonator in the 1850s, which allowed for a precise, scientific measurement of musical intervals; (2) the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877, which enabled musical sounds to be captured and played back repeatedly, thus fixing musical

48   Ellen Koskoff pieces into reified entities; and, (3) the development of the cents system by Alexander J. Ellis in the 1880s, which divided the Western tempered scale into 1,200 cents (each half-step containing 100 cents) thus enabling a more precise and scientific notation of musics that did not use the Western tempered tuning system (Ellis 1880). One important, and long-lasting, system for the classification of musical instruments was also developed at this time by the German historical musicologist Kurt Sachs and the Austrian comparative musicologist Erich von Hornbostel (Hornbostel and Sachs [1914] 1961). Over a century old now, this system is still used today as a way of under­ standing the sound-producing apparatus and construction of musical instruments worldwide. The general acceptance of the Sachs–Hornbostel system of instrument clas­ sification eventually led, in the mid-twentieth century, to the development of one of today’s ethnomusicological subdisciplines, organology—the study of the world’s musi­ cal instruments. Many comparative musicologists, as noted above, depended on printed versions of folk songs that had been deposited in archives, notated, and published by others. A few, such as composers Béla Bartók in Hungary, and Cecil Sharp and his collaborator Maude Karpeles in England, spent time with live performers, collecting, notating, and incorpo­ rating many “found” songs into their own compositions (Bartók  1931; Bartók and Lord  1951; Sharp  1965; Karpeles  1958). These collector-composers and others were largely responsible for a European folk song revival in the early twentieth century and provided early standards of collection, classification, and musical analysis, based largely on models associated with Western art musics. In looking back, of course, we can now see that the goals of these early comparative musicologists carried many underlying assumptions, based on philosophies, such as social evolution or social Darwinism, and the belief that all scientific observation was objective. Later critics singled out social Darwinism as especially worrisome (Sanderson 2002). Applied to music, it equated social groups on a scale from primitive to civilized, where—when compared—some social groups and musics were believed to be less developed than others (Stumpf 1886). Creating an implicit hierarchy of cultural value, with some musics described as “less complex,” “merely functional,” “exotic,” or using “gapped” scales and “primitive” rhythms (Herzog 1934), these discourses used an implicit knowledge and understanding of Western common practice music as the norm, the standard to which all other musics were compared. Further, such descriptions were often embedded within contemporaneous racial, gendered, class, or ethnic discourses, implicitly designed and used to preserve the status quo of the late nineteenth century—white European hegemony. These values were sup­ ported by belief systems, such as “scientific racism,” a racial classification system devel­ oped and favoured by many late nineteenth-century scientists. Based on race, these scientists used physical characteristics, such as skin colour and head size, to justify racial hierarchies. (See Barkan 1992 for a good summary of this belief system, its history and critics.) Another fallacy in the work of comparative musicologists that was noted by later critics was the belief in the objectivity, or neutrality, of the Western scientific researcher,

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   49 systematically trained and empty of all value judgements. It would be another fifty years or so before postmodernism’s use of deconstruction uncovered the implicit underlying value judgements and power dynamics inherent in all social interactions. (See more on postmodernism in the subsection “Into the twenty-first century, c.1990 to the present.”) At roughly the same time as Adler and his followers were developing the foundations for a comparative musicology, a fledgling ethnomusicology—more descriptive, less sys­ tematic than its European counterpart, and based on the new ethnographic method of fieldwork—was beginning in the United States, with scholars choosing their field sites mainly among North American Indians. This was largely driven by the widespread belief at that time that the cultures of these various indigenous groups were collapsing and disappearing in the face of rapid social change, and all sorts of private and govern­ mental activity surrounding collection and preservation occurred, including the preser­ vation of American Indian musical entities (Densmore 1910). Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German physicist and geographer who emigrated to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, began to research the culture of Inuit communities living on Baffin Island, Canada. Primarily interested in understanding the differences between “objective reality” (the presumed stuff of sci­ ence) and “subjective reality” (the presumed stuff of the new psychology), Boas devel­ oped what we now regard as the practice of ethnography, where living and working alongside live informants, understanding their realities, and not comparing them to others, was to become the norm by the second half of the twentieth century (Boas 1928). Often called “The Father of Anthropology,” Boas had many influential students, among them Edward Sapir and Margaret Mead—who, along with Boas, rejected the ideas of social Darwinism, comparison, and scientific objectivity in favour of the new perspec­ tive of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism (more properly “moral relativism”; see Marcus and Fischer 1986), posited no absolute standard for religious, ethical, or moral beliefs; rather, belief systems and practices were seen as embedded within specific cultural and social norms, thus not shared universally. This perspective, related somewhat to other contemporaneous theo­ ries, such as those of psychologist Sigmund Freud, began to position cultural and indi­ vidual belief systems within humanism’s philosophical traditions. Eventually, new research techniques, based on face-to-face interactions and data collection, developed with the hope of better understanding these systems. Important work in comparative musicology and ethnomusicology of the time clearly illustrated the methodological split between the “music as entity” and “music as human behaviour” studies. Early writers on this split included the British social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote extensively on the importance of ethnography (Malinowski 1944). (See also Blacking 1974 and Merriam 1969 and 1977 for some relevant examples and good discussions of the differences between comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology.) What was changing, though, was a burgeoning interest in musics outside the West and a shift in analytic perspective from cultural outsiders to insiders.

50   Ellen Koskoff

The Birth and Early Growth of Ethnomusicology in the United States, c.1955–1990 By the mid-twentieth century in both Europe and the United States, various combina­ tions of these two approaches towards people and their musics prevailed. In Europe, the focus remained primarily on musical entities, with little attention paid to the people who performed for the collectors or on the social contexts and cultural meanings of their performances; in the United States, anthropologists interested in music continued to develop different methods for collecting, analysing, and documenting based on field­ work, but often paid little attention to music as sound and structure. Indeed, a common joke circulating at Society for Ethnomusicology conferences at the time was that the word “ethnomusicology” contained the words “no music.” And although historical musicologists had by the 1930s developed a fully-fledged academic discipline and pro­ fessional society—the American Musicological Society (AMS), founded in 1934—no such scholarly structure had yet developed for comparative musicologists in the United States. Those who wanted to use ethnographic fieldwork in their researches on living musical cultures became anthropologists, not musicologists. In 1955, at the annual meeting of the AMS in Boston, five scholars interested in music and ethnography came together to form the structure for a professional, academic soci­ ety that could support their work—the Society for Ethno-musicology (SEM). Jaap Kunst, the Dutch scholar of Indonesian musics, first coined the term “ethno-­musicology” (the hyphen was removed in 1957), stressing the field’s dual focus on living music and people. It was at this point that ethnomusicology as we know it today began to distinguish itself formally from the European-based comparative musicology. By the early 1960s the American field was fairly evenly split between those scholars trained as historical musicologists or composers, such as George Herzog, Mantle Hood, Bruno Nettl, and William Malm, and those trained as anthropologists, such as Alan Merriam, John Blacking, and David McAllester. During this time there was much dis­ agreement as to what, exactly, ethnomusicology studied, and many attempts were made to establish theoretical foundations and methods for this new field. Three books, Merriam’s The Anthropology of Music (Merriam  1964), Nettl’s Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (Nettl 1964), and Hood’s The Ethnomusicologist (Hood 1971), tradition­ ally mark the beginning of the anthropologically-oriented research and scholarship in the American field of ethnomusicology that was to prevail for the next forty years (see also Malm 1959). Merriam’s book, especially, was to become emblematic of a new ethnomusicology and his deceptively simple triangular model for the study of music in its cultural context is still taught today as a foundation for the field. Essentially, Merriam’s ideas redefined what music was for a researcher—not a set of separate entities, but rather, [S]ounds shaped by the culture of which they are a part. And, culture, in turn, is carried by individuals and groups of individuals who learn what is to be considered

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   51 proper and improper in respect to music. Each culture decides what it will and will not call music; and sound patterns, as well as behaviors, which fall outside these norms are either unacceptable or are simply defined as something other than music. (Merriam 1964, 27)

The three points of the Merriam model were thus labelled conceptualization about music, behaviour in relation to music (including physical, social, and verbal behav­ iours), and music sound itself. Although Merriam referred to this model as a set of lev­ els, he connected them, creating a loop that visually and conceptually gave the impression that the musical culture under study was self-contained and ahistoric. These critiques, however, were to come later, including from Merriam himself (Merriam 1969). Merriam’s model essentially changed the focus of ethnomusicology’s object of study, from the formal analysis and comparison of music’s sounds to sounds collectively vali­ dated as music by people existing in socially interactive worlds. This is not to say that the comparative method disappeared altogether. Perhaps the most well-known collector and scholar to employ the comparative method was Alan Lomax (1915–2002), who, along with his father, John Lomax, and sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, con­ tinued to collect and analyse folk songs in the United States and throughout Europe and Asia until his death. In addition to collecting, Lomax developed a system of music analysis called Cantometrics (Lomax  1976), which illustrated large-scale musical attributes and their diffusion worldwide. Often criticized by more fieldwork-oriented scholars at the time, who preferred looking deeply into small-scale societies, Lomax’s vast collection of thousands of song examples now resides in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and remains one of the largest collections of musical materials in the world. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, ethnomusicology had settled into an established music discipline in the United States, perhaps not quite unified theoretically, but defined largely by its subject (living musical cultures), by its method (ethnographic fieldwork), and by its analytic tools (transcription, often, but not always, using Western notation), and insiderfriendly musical analyses. This last was a response to a growing awareness of a certain cul­ tural colonialism—subjecting largely oral musics to the reification of the Western musical staff, and often led to creative experiments. (For an interesting example, see England 1964.) Turning almost fully away from a comparative approach, American ethnomusicolo­ gists focused instead on individual musical cultures, using a myriad of interpretative theories borrowed from the work of structural anthropologists, such as Lévi-Strauss (1963), and of semiotic and symbolic anthropologists, such as Geertz (1973), Turner (1969), and Douglas (1966); from the linguistic and cognitive models of Chomsky (1957) and Tyler (1969); and from many others too numerous to mention here. These models shared an important feature—they all saw culture as an ideational, symbolic system, structured by human cognitive processes, performed within the biological and physical constraints of the human body, and given meaning through social, relational interac­ tions in specific contexts. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example—influenced by the work of the early twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1966)—developed

52   Ellen Koskoff the theory we now call structuralism, whereby human cognition structured all ­knowledge in a relational, binary system, that, when understood by the researcher, could provide a universal template or scaffolding for human thinking and behaviour (Lévi-Strauss 1963). In ethnomusicology, scholars such as Steven Feld and Jean-Jacques Nattiez adopted these theories, producing important ethnographies that dealt systematically with the univer­ sals of human cognition and biology, while also embracing the creative differences they saw in fieldwork (see Feld 1874, 1984; Nattiez 1990). Clifford Geertz’s symbolic anthropology (Geertz 1973), based on the work of philoso­ phers Charles S. Pierce and Gilbert Ryle, among others, also had a profound effect on ethnomusicological research of this time. Using the metaphor of the multilayered onion to invoke the process of peeling away culture’s many cognitive and performative layers to reveal its essential, shared core, these scholars proposed a new form of narrative dis­ course, soon to be called “thick description.” Here, so-called surface events observed in the field and discussed by informants, slowly took on more and more complex, abstract, and symbolic meanings as each layer was revealed. Works by ethnomusicologists that were influenced by Geertz and Pierce include Boilés 1982; Robertson 1979; Seeger 1987; Turino 1999;  and Turino 2000. Ethnomusicologists, who saw the connection between the improvisatory relational structures of music and language, eagerly borrowed Noam Chomsky’s theory of genera­ tive grammar and other models from linguistics. Scholars such as Alton and Judith Becker, John Blacking, David Hughes, Vida Chenoweth and Darlene Bee, and Steven Feld began applying notions of the deep and surface structures of language to music and cultural analysis, creating many-layered ethnographies that integrated musical sounds with underlying human symbolic systems (Becker and Becker  1979; Blacking  1972; Hughes 1988; Chenoweth and Bee 1971; Feld 1974). Finally, Marxist theory, with its concern for historical processes, socio-economic classes, and the material basis of culture, had a great impact on the ethnomusicology of the mid– late twentieth century (see especially Appadurai 1988; Bourdieu 1986, 1991). Scholars such as Regula Qureshi (2002), Christopher Waterman (1990), Peter Manuel (1988), Timothy Rice (1994), and John Shepherd (1977) attempted to root contemporary musical practices in their historical economic contexts, stressing the materiality of musical cultures. Perhaps the most fundamental challenges to arise during this period were less closely related to what was studied than to how it was studied. Fieldwork, as a method of collecting data, and cultural analysis, as a method of making sense of data, began to come under scru­ tiny and issues of ethics, subject–object positioning, and the use of Western musical tools, such as notation, as well as scholarly language and its discourses to express music, became red flags. (See Charles Seeger (1944) for an especially prophetic statement of this problem.)

Into the Twenty-First Century, c.1990 to the Present One of the most important issues to arise in the late twentieth century was that of the ethical responsibility of the anthropologist/ethnomusicologist towards the people with

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   53 whom they worked. This concern took the form of questioning the very essence of the ethnomusicological method—fieldwork—raising core questions that resonated with new postmodern theories, such as deconstruction, embodiment, and performativity: How could researchers (forever outsiders to the cultures they studied) truly understand the other (insiders to the cultures they lived)? Who benefited most from these studies? What position did the researcher hold in relation to her insider informants? How could an anthropologist (with good intentions) truly represent, speak for, or interpret others without constructing an exoticism, a caricature of lived, collaborative experiences in the field (Slobin 1992)? These and other questions led to a moment of deep self-reflection within anthropology—­and by extension ethnomusicology—raising such ethical issues as the recognition of unequal power relations in the field, reciprocity, and the dangers of oth­ ering. This moment, often referred to as the “crisis of representation” in anthropology, called into question older ideas about objectivity, outside–inside perspectives, binaries, professionalism, and the very nature of the field. New forms of ethnographic writing appeared, including anthropological fiction where lines between convincing ethno­ graphic narratives and creative writing (that incorporated actual lived experience) were blurred. Described as “partial truths,” where partial meant “slanted toward” or “favored” (Marcus and Clifford 1986), new ethnographies came to be seen as filtered through mul­ tiple perspectives, where no single perspective presented a complete truth. This brought anthropology and related disciplines more in line with postmodern philosophy and its tendencies towards the destabilization of centres and margins, irony, and the fragmenta­ tion and overlap of self–other, inside–outside boundaries that characterized this period. (See especially Rice 1987 for a theoretical model that incorporates this basic shift in eth­ nomusicology from the study of cultural sameness to the differences of multiple perspectives.) As these and other destabilizing moments came to define the postmodern era, ethno­ musicology, like other music disciplines, began once again to adopt new methods, espe­ cially interpretative ones. (See Kramer [1999] 2002 for an excellent summary of postmodernism and music.) Influenced by hermeneutics, or the interpretation of texts and events through a specific analytic lens, ethnomusicologists began to position their work into broader social and relational categories based on identity, such as gender, race, and class, and many anthologies, providing multiple case studies focusing on a specific topic appeared. (See Radano and Bohlman [2000] on race; Moisala and Diamond [2000] and Koskoff [1987] on gender and music for some good examples.) A bit of overlapping began to occur between historical musicology and ethnomusicol­ ogy at this time, resulting in shared methodologies and a new subfield—historical ethno­ musicology. Rising primarily from Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s (1998) work with Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, historical ethnomusicology demonstrated how the naming of certain individuals and descriptions of past events present in their songs allowed for the integra­ tion, or the positioning, of the past in the present. Other scholars to combine an historical approach with ethnography included Averill (1997), Danielson (1997), and Wade (1998)—Wade's historical work with traditional North Indian miniature paintings

54   Ellen Koskoff (ragamalas) and raga classification of the Mughal period (c.1500–1800) still resonates with contemporary Hindustani musicians. One of the most profound changes in ethnomusicology to emerge early in this period was a growing internationalization of the discipline. Ethnomusicology archives and university programmes began to appear outside the United States, in Canada, Australia, India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. For example, the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), founded in London in 1947, bridged a methodological gap between comparative musicology and ethnomusicology with its biannual conferences held worldwide and with its signature publication, the Yearbook for Traditional Music. Also in England, a thriving chapter of the ICTM established its own identity as the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE); in India, the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, established in 1961, now houses the largest collection of Indian music and music scholarship in the world. Australia, too, began to develop programmes in ethnomusicology at its major universities, largely focusing on indigenous musics (see Wild  2006 for a good summary of these developments). Publications, such as MUSICultures, a journal of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music, The World of Music, the Journal of Asian Music, African Music, a journal of the International Library of African Music, and Chinese Music, of the Association for Chinese Music Research, have continued to publish current research by indigenous, as well as Western, scholars. This internationalism of the discipline, especially in previously colonized (or coloniz­ ing) areas, resonated with new postcolonialist perspectives and encouraged scholarship from scholars who, often in response to previous treatments of their culture, sought to provide different, more indigenous interpretations. Some scholars, such as Ghanaian ethnomusicologist and composer Kwabena Nketia, for example, began researching their own musics (Nketia 1974), often correcting or amending previous Eurocentric or colonialist interpretations. Kofi Agawu (1995, 2003) and Bode Omojola (2012) in Africa, Sumarsam (2013) in Indonesia, Nazir Jirazbhoy (1971) and T.  Viswanathan (1977) in India, and Inna Naroditskaya (2000) in Azerbaijan have continued to challenge accepted understandings of their cultures and have opened the political and geographic boundaries of this discipline considerably. New theoretical and interpretative models also developed here, such as those from brain and cognitive studies, based on human evolutionary and adaptive processes (Harwood 1976; Blacking 1977; Tolbert 2001; Cross 2012); diaspora studies, addressing the movements of musics and people (Rasmussen 1997; Manuel 2000); ecomusicology, or, the study of sound in the broad context of its natural ecology (Guy 2009); and, most recently, musical post-humanism, where music and new technologies combine to extend the notion of music as humanly created sound (McGraw 2016). Technology has even begun to change the nature of the field itself, making methods, such as “virtual fieldwork,” possible (Cooley, Meizel, and Syed 2008). Three other directions have also developed within recent decades: the ethnomusico­ logical study of popular music (worldwide), the study of musics produced by and associ­ ated with war and violence, and the ethnomusicology of Western art music, where the field site is the school of music. Largely spurred by Manuel (1988), Berger (1999), Turino

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   55 (2000), and Taylor (1997), popular music studies address not only the economic and social impact of popular musics worldwide, but also the creative ways in which various communities adapt Western musical styles to local practices and aesthetics (i.e., musical “glocalism”). The burgeoning of music and violence studies has been nicely summarized by Rice in an article relating to war, forced migration, and the uses of music in torture, among other themes (Rice 2014). Finally, Kingsbury (1988) and Nettl (1995) on the social structure and the performance of core values within the Western music school, remain hallmarks of this new research direction.

Ethnomusicology and Its Future I return now to the three questions I posed at the beginning of this essay: (1) What is music in the context of human life? (2) Why and how is music meaningful to people? and (3) How can we best transform experiences of musical sounds, structures, and meanings into spoken and written discourses to share our appreciation for all musics and to promote cultural understanding and respect? I now ask if these questions are still relevant and useful today in our quest to understand and explain how and why humans make and experience music. Perhaps we should be turning these questions inwards, holding them up to the mirror of self-reflection, and ask why these questions are so important to us. Although I cannot speak for all ethnomusicologists, having spent my adult life as one I can say that as a group we are motivated to do this work, at least in part, by issues of social and musical justice both outside and inside the academy. That is, we want at some level, (1) to break down the walls of white, male, European hegemony that we have inherited from the discourses and pedagogies of music scholarship since its formal beginnings in the late nineteenth century, and (2) to enlarge the discussion of what music, itself, is. Unlike the “new historical musicologists,” who, in the latter part of the twentieth century (motivated by a similar urge within Western musics, such as popular music), suddenly “discovered” the humanness in all musicking (Small  1998), ethnomusicologists have always been driven by this underlying political stance—the social and musical paradigm that declares that all people have a music (or a special set of sounds) that is meaningful, often beautiful to them, and that all musics (and their people) have equal value. Ethnomusicologists, and perhaps all musical scholars, have sought to answer the questions posed above by various disciplinary methods that have allowed us to play with notions of musical and social sameness and difference, so it is to these basic positions that I now turn. I do so to expose what I see as the largest and most difficult challenge facing the future of music scholarship—the final erasure of value systems that place peo­ ple, their musics, and their researches into hierarchies of value that reify the power sys­ tems on which they are based. Discussions of sameness and difference have been with us certainly as early as Plato’s theory of forms presented in his dialogues (see Ross 1951); they have been described as a

56   Ellen Koskoff basic cognitive dyad, one that allows humans to sort and categorize both material and ideational aspects of our worlds (Lévi-Strauss 1963). They have been used to deal with the problems of universals and specificities, and, among other things, to validate or repudiate issues of personal and social identity (Deleuze [1968] 1994; Derrida 1968). But, sameness and/or difference choices are ultimately based on culturally and individually constructed value systems (Shostak 1999, 2), where they can too easily become the justi­ fication for social and political hierarchies of power. See Jacques Derrida’s highly influ­ ential works, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference (Derrida 1997, 1968), on the implications of language in constructions of power, as well as Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault [1969] 2002) on deconstruction. Here, I am not concerned so much with the general cognitive processes of categorization based on similarity and/or difference, but rather the mini-state of ambiguity that precedes the choice: Will this hurt or kill me? Will it be beneficial? Is it like something I know? Is it so different that I have no way to process it?2 Sarah Weiss, in an interesting essay entitled “Listening to the World but Hearing Ourselves: Hybridity and Perceptions of Authenticity in World Music,” explores how a series of individual choices of what to do cognitively when first hearing a new piece of music is ultimately channelled through the discourse of authen­ ticity (Weiss 2014). This article nicely illustrates the notions of holistic (i.e., intuitive, syn­ thetic) and meristic (i.e., partial, analytic) understandings as elaborated by Immanuel Kant and others, and addressed in T. K. Seung’s Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed: “The intuitive understanding is holistic; our discursive understanding is mereistic. The latter understands the whole in terms of its parts; the former understands the parts in terms of their whole. The direction of their understanding is the direction of their explanation” (Seung 2007: 176). So, my question here is what happens in between an initial holistic consciousness of something new and its ultimate meristic, linguistic labelling in everyday discourse. I suggest here that such choices are based not only on our a priori experiences, knowl­ edge, and biological imperatives, but also on individual and personal value systems cre­ ated over a lifetime that either privilege or invalidate the new. (For more on this, see Ranyard, Crozier, and Svenson 1997; Goffman 1956; Blumer 1969.) Thus, I define the greatest challenge to the future study of music as the process of separating difference and/ or sameness from value in everyday and scholarly discourses, especially when these dis­ courses relate to living people and their musics. Sameness and difference may set up a binary, but it is the inherent hierarchy of value assigned to sameness and/or difference that ultimately becomes problematic. In briefly summarizing the history of ethnomusicology, it is easy to see the dis­ci­pli­ nary flipping between issues of musical and social sameness and difference that have characterized the field since its beginnings. Often positioned as opposites, sameness and difference cognitively and linguistically form a basic and essential binary. Early com­ parative musicologists, in looking for universal laws in music, for example, privileged sameness—albeit a sameness based on Western art music structures and principals. This perspective resulted in answers to our three questions that may have revealed, at a spe­ cific level of analysis, the presence of many different musics in the world—but few actual universals—ultimately leading to statements of relative musical and social value.

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   57 Ethnomusicologists in the United States, influenced by cultural ethnography based on fieldwork, moved in the mid-twentieth century to paradigms that privileged differ­ ence. Here, answers to our questions revealed, at a very specific level of analysis, that each social group was its own bounded universe, where everything was connected and made sense within its boundaries, but nothing could be compared outside these worlds.3 Ethnographies of this period focused on the specifics of one (often quite small) society going ever deeper into its shared core beliefs and meanings to interpret events per­ formed on the surface of everyday and ritual life. Thus, while sameness at the specific cultural level was privileged within one case study (i.e., all members of a society believe in a shared set of core values and meanings), difference was the major implicit goal (all societies and their cultures are creatively different from each other). Comparison between societies was eschewed, now largely regarded as doing violence to the inherent integrity of a specific group’s beliefs and practices. As we move into the twenty-first century, we are beginning to see a gradual flip back towards privileging sameness—this time, the sameness of human cognition and biol­ ogy, perhaps foregrounded by the work of structural, symbolic, and cognitive anthro­ pologists. Studies focusing on musical cognition, embodiment, and performativity now encourage us to address both the creativity and the constraints of the (universal?) human body—not only the cultural norms and social relations that define ourselves as members of groups. New theories, from those exploring the real-time and subjective minutiae of semiological and phenomenological approaches, to those critiquing the overarching power of economic globalism, to those who have adopted post-humanism, have caused ethnomusicologists to rethink and reconfigure the field once again, for, what exactly is the field now? What is music? What is a human? What is fieldwork? How can we deal with sameness and difference in relation to all of this flow? As stated above, creating binaries in and of itself is not a problem; it may, as structur­ alists and cognitive anthropologists have asserted, be a universal human cognitive ­process embedded in language, one that allows us to make sense of our worlds, no mat­ ter what they are, and to communicate to others in our orbits. However, there is always a danger when creating a binary to privilege one side over the other. This is no longer a question of universal cognition, however—it is one of specific, often implicit, cultural bias and value; and it is this valuing or privileging that can lead to the social hierarchies and unjust power systems that we see today on the surface of our worlds in music per­ formance and scholarship. The problem lies not so much in differentiating per se, but in valuing one category over the other. In making a choice between sameness and differ­ ence (or any other binary), one can miss an opportunity to play with their fuzzy bound­ aries, their interconnectedness, and to use this potential for embracing both sameness and difference simultaneously. Ethnomusicologists, like other music scholars, realize that social–musical sameness and difference are not always, if ever, totally opposite categories of classification, but are rather connected and dependent on each other for recognition. They are often experi­ enced as blurred, fuzzy, fluid, overlapping, and sometimes inverted categories, depend­ ing on one’s level of awareness, one’s mode of discourse, and one’s context. Many

58   Ellen Koskoff ethnomusicologists today see the interactive process of fieldwork—that method that distinguishes ethnomusicology from all other music disciplines—as a safe context for the play between sameness and difference, one that can lead to intersubjectivity—a blur­ ring of self–other boundaries that allows for simultaneous mutual understandings. (See Koskoff  2014, 180–189 for a fuller discussion of fieldwork as a site for encouraging intersubjectivity.) In their introduction to Shadows in the Field, Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley state, “The power of music resides in its liminality” (Barz and Cooley 2008, 4). “Liminality” is a word borrowed from Latin, meaning “threshold,” and has been used by scholars, such as Arnold van Gennup and Victor Turner, to describe an experiential state, defined by ambiguity, where identities are likely to merge or invert (see Gennup ([1960] 2013; Turner 1969). Anthropology has used this term most effectively in the study of ritual behaviour, where a person at one stage of life (say, a Jewish boy) moves through a ritual (a bar mitzvah), during which his understanding of his personal and social identity is ambiguous and destabilized, only to emerge at the ritual’s conclusion in a new state (adulthood, allowing him, according to Jewish law, to join a minyon), ultimately rein­ corporating himself and his new status into the adult group. It is this ambiguity that I explore here. A state of ambiguity can be frightening, puz­ zling, or delightful (and much else). Its resolution depends upon an individual’s internal emotional and cognitive structures that foster either tolerance for ambiguity or its ­opposite. Following the end of the Second World War, sociologists and psychologists began to study this issue, producing much scholarship that seemed to answer questions concerning the development of different personality types. The social psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, interested in the presence or absence of ethnocentricism in children, first introduced the phrase “intolerance of ambiguity” in an article entitled “Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable” (FrenkelBrunswik 1949). Published in the Journal of Personality, Frenkel-Brunswick’s work pre­ sented a method of measuring people’s level of tolerance for situations of conflicting social stimuli, and applied this data to the development of various personality types. (See also Adorno et al. 1950; Bochner 1965.) Other scholars, such as Stanley Budner, expanded this research. In an article, “Intolerance of Ambiguity as a Personality Variable”, published in the Journal of Personality, he posited a typology of personality types, ranging from those who were highly intolerant of ambiguity, which he labelled “authoritative personalities,” to those who were highly tolerant of ambiguity, labelled “pure liberals” (Budner  1962, 35). Personalities deemed highly intolerant of ambiguity tended to respond to conflicting stimuli with fear, and exhibited such traits as a need for certainty, an inability to allow good and bad traits to exist in the same person, and, a rejection of the unusual or differ­ ent. Personalities with a high tolerance for ambiguity seemed to embrace it, and moved towards the openness and indecision fostered by ambiguous situations. (See Kisliuk 2008 and Wong 2008 for especially rich examples of music ethnographies based on tolerance for ambiguity.) Of course, in positing these opposite personality types,

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   59 these researchers fell into the trap of constructing an obvious value-laden binary, and using it to make essentializing statements. But, what if we reconsidered FrenkelBrunswick’s and Budner’s models of personality types as existing without value, not only within two groups of personalities, but also existing, simultaneously, in the same person? In conducting fieldwork, ethnomusicologists confront difference and sameness con­ stantly; indeed, one might define fieldwork as the process of grappling with difference, since sameness is understood.4 In asking why do they do that?, why does their music sound like that?, why are these songs sung only by men?, and thousands of other ques­ tions, one quickly discovers multiple worlds of difference, and, at the same time, other, not-even-imagined worlds of sameness. Fieldwork allows for the improvised play between sameness and difference and, as a method, it may go a long way in neutralizing their relative value and in dismantling the power systems that underlie their use. Thus, the great strength of ethnomusicology lies in its flexibility and openness to new models of inquiry, and its ability to incorporate and play with new theories and perspectives ­easily—in short, its interdisciplinarity, fostered by the intersubjectivity of fieldwork. Still not unified theoretically, ethnomusicology is sometimes criticized as not having a core; but I believe that it is precisely this reluctance to reify itself that enables ethnomu­ sicology to maintain its strength. The challenge for the future then, is to remain simulta­ neously self- and other-conscious in our quest, not privileging one over another. Only then will we find meaningful answers to the questions of what music is, why it is mean­ ingful, and how to share our and others’ multiple understandings and meanings of all musics.

Notes 1. The historical discussion that follows is necessarily brief; it cannot take into account all of the intricacies and developments of highly influential theories and their impact on the comparative musicology and ethnomusicology of the late nineteenth century onwards. For a fuller and more nuanced discussion, please see the many fine books that discuss the history of ethnomusicology, its methods and theoretical models, such as Stone  2008; Nettl 2005; Myers 1992; and the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998). 2. Of course, one must be conscious of “something new” in order to be self-reflexive. A pseudo-documentary movie, What the Bleep do We Know!? (2004) explored the notion of quantum physics’ “Observer Effect,” relating to an individual’s conscious construction of reality. In the film, a group of indigenous people, when first confronted with European ships, do not consciously “see” them, as they have no previous reference with which to compare or understand them. Debunked by physicists and others, this idea persists as an urban myth. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399877/mediaviewer/rm1940363520, accessed August 7, 2016. 3. Earlier in my career, I posited that one could take the same approach with one person; see my article “The Music Network: A Model for the Organization of Music Concepts” (Koskoff 1982). 4. I am grateful to my colleague, Jennifer Kyker, for this evocative phrase.

60   Ellen Koskoff

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62   Ellen Koskoff Kingsbury, Henry. 1988. Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kisliuk, Michelle. 2008. “Undoing Fieldwork: Sharing Songs, Sharing Lives.” In Barz and Cooley 2008, 23–44. Koskoff, Ellen, ed. 1987. Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Comparison. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Koskoff, Ellen. 1982. “The Music-Network: A Model for the Organization of Music Concepts.” Ethnomusicology 26, no. 3 (September): 353–370. Koskoff, Ellen. 2014. A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kramer, Jonathan. [1999] 2002. “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism.” In Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, edited by Judy Lochhead and Joseph Aunder, 13–26. New York: Routledge. Repr. from Current Musicology 66 (Spring 1999): 7–20. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Lomax, Alan. 1976. Cantometrics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1944. A Scientific Theory of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Malm, William P. 1959. Japanese Music and Musical Instruments. Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle. Manuel, Peter. 1988. Popular Music of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University Press. Manuel, Peter. 2000. East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tān-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Marcus, George and James Clifford, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcus, George, and Michael  M.  J.  Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: The Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McGraw, Andrew. 2016. “Atmosphere as a Concept for Ethnomusicology: Comparing the Gamelatron and Gamelan.” Ethnomusicology 60, no. 1 (Winter): 125–147. Merriam, Alan. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merriam, Alan. 1969. “Ethnomusicology Revisited.” Ethnomusicology 13, no. 2 (May): 213–229. Merriam, Alan. 1977. “Definitions of ‘Comparative Musicology’ and ‘Ethnomusicology’: An Historical-Theoretical Perspective.” Ethnomusicology 21, no. 2 (May): 189–204. Moisala, Pirkko, and Beverley Diamond, eds. 2000. Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mugglestone, Erica. 1983. “Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology’ (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 13:1–21. Myers, Helen, ed. 1992. Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. New York: W.W. Norton. Naroditskaya, Inna. 2000. “Azerbaijanian Female Musicians: Women’s Voices Defying and Defining the Culture.” Ethnomusicology 44, no. 2 (Spring–Summer): 234–256. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1964. Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology. New York: Free Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy   63 Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nketia, J. H. Kwabena. 1974. The Music of Africa. New York: W. W. Norton. Omojola, Bode. 2012. Yorúba Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Qureshi, Regula 2002. Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics. New York: Routledge. Radano, Ronald, and Philip  V.  Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ranyard, Rob, W. Ray Crozier, and Ola Svenson. 1997. Decision Making: Cognitive Models and Explanations. New York: Routledge. Rasmussen, Anne K. 1997. “The Music of Arab Detroit: A Musical Mecca in the Midwest.” In Musics of Multicultural America: A Study of Twelve Musical Communities, edited by Kip Lonell and Anne K. Rasmussen, 73–101. New York: Schirmer Books. Rice, Timothy. 1987. “Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 31, no. 3 (September): 469–516. Rice, Timothy. 1994. May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rice, Timothy. 2014. “Ethnomusicology In Times Of Trouble.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 46:191–209. Robertson, Carol  E. 1979. “ ‘Pulling the Ancestors’: Performance, Practice, and Praxis in Mapuche Ordering.” Ethnomusicology 23, no. 3 (September): 395–416. Ross, W. D. 1951. Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sanderson, Stephen K. 2002. Social Evolutionism: A Critical History. Oxford: Blackwell. Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1916] 1966. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. New York: Cambridge University Press. Seeger, Charles. 1944. “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology.” Bulletin of the American Musicology Society 9/10 (June): 16. Seung, T. K. 2007. Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum. Sharp, Cecil. 1965. English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. 4th ed. Edited by Maud Karpeles. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Shelemay, Kay Kaufmann. 1998. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shepherd, John, Phil Virden, Graham Vulliamy, and Trevor Wishart. 1977. Whose Music: A Sociology of Musical Languages. London: Latimer. Shostak, Stanley. 1999. The Evolution of Sameness and Difference: Perspectives on the Human Genome Project. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers. Slobin, Mark. 1992. “Ethical Issues.” In Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, edited by Helen Myers, 329–336. New York: W.W. Norton. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Stone, Ruth M. 2008. Theory for Ethnomusicology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Stumpf, Carl. 1886. “Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer.” Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft 2:405–458. Sumarsam. 2013. Javanese Gamelan and the West. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

64   Ellen Koskoff Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge. Tolbert, Elizabeth. 2001. “Music and Meaning: An Evolutionary Story.” Psychology of Music 29, no. 1 (April): 84–94. Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of lmagination, Identity, Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 2 (Spring–Summer): 221–255. Turino, Thomas. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing. Tyler, Stephen A., ed. 1969. Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Viswanathan, T. 1977. “The Analysis of Rāga Ālāpana in South Indian Music.” Asian Music 9 (1): 13–71. Wade, Bonnie. 1998. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Waterman, Christopher. 1990. Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weiss, Sarah. 2014. “Listening to the World But Hearing Ourselves: Hybridity and Perceptions of Authenticity in World Music.” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 3 (Fall): 506–525. Wild, Stephen. 2006. “Ethnomusicology Down Under: A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes?” Ethnomusicology 50, no. 2 (Spring–Summer): 345–352. Wong, Deborah. 2008. “Moving: From Performance to Performative Ethnography and Back Again.” In Barz and Cooley 2008, 76–90.

chapter 4

A na ly tic Phil osoph y of M usic David Davies

Preliminary Concerns: What is “Analytic” Philosophy of Music? An initial challenge in this chapter is to identify in more general terms what “analytic philosophy” is and which philosophical explorations of musical matters should be classified as “analytic.” It might be thought that the musical issues that are of philosophical interest will announce themselves to thinkers quite independently of anything to which we might appeal in classifying those thinkers as “analytic” or “continental.” But, as we shall see, we cannot assume a neutral domain of musical phenomena to which all thinkers take their reflections to be accountable. As we shall also see, we need to locate analytic philosophy of music not only in relation to analytic philosophy more generally, but also in relation to analytic philosophy of art, a domain of philosophical inquiry in which the philosophy of music has an increasingly central role. Faced with a task similar to the present one, Stephen Davies tentatively endorses the idea that the defining features of analytic philosophy are methodological: “Analytic philosophy supposedly differs [from continental philosophy] in its commitment to objective, clear argument and to an interpersonal, empirically oriented approach, and it eschews grand theories in favour of treating specific philosophical issues and problems in a piecemeal and cumulative fashion” (S. Davies 2011b, 295). (For a more recent treatment in methodological terms of the difference between analytic and continental philosophy of music, see Roholt 2017). This is a view that many analytic philosophers would share, but it is one that to some extent hinders constructive engagement between analytic and continental writings in the philosophy of art in general, and in the philosophy

66   David Davies of music in particular. If someone disagrees with you about the basic ground rules for philosophical inquiry—about what makes a claim interesting or legitimate, for ­example—then you are unlikely to think that it will be fruitful to discuss with them issues of mutual concern. To stress such methodological differences is to fuel the ­complaint by some continental thinkers that analytic philosophers are obsessed with distinctions and definitions at the expense of the complexity of the phenomena themselves, and the complementary complaint by some analytic thinkers that continental philosophers are guilty of terminological obfuscation, system building, and thinking in ways untethered to clear standards of empirical accountability. This is not to deny that the methodological features of which Davies speaks are characteristic of the work I shall discuss in this chapter. But to talk merely of such features abstracts from a more important and more complex distinction in terms of which these features can be understood. This distinction is between different, if historically related, philosophical traditions that provide thinkers with the resources upon which they can draw for their own philosophical inquiries. The analytic tradition is one whose central thread is furnished by issues in the philosophy of language, where language is the means whereby the philosophical enterprise is pursued. Key issues are understanding those features of language in virtue of which it can serve as the necessary frame for thought and inquiry, the accountability (or sometimes unaccountability) of linguistically articulated thinking to the non-linguistic world, and a broadly “scientific” model of responsible thinking about any subject. The so-called linguistic turn often seen as central to contemporary work in Anglo-American philosophy (see Rorty 1967) involves a commitment to address metaphysical, epistemological, and value-related questions in a ­linguistically-inflected way. The “founders of discursivity” (Geertz 1988) in the analytic tradition are figures like Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke. To philosophically address a question within this tradition is to bring to bear on that question the broad range of philosophical resources that these philosophers and their successors have developed. The continental tradition, on the other hand, is one whose central thread is the human agent’s articulation through her diverse practices—including science—of the “lived world” in which the philosopher “always already” finds herself, a lived world whose structure and historical unfolding must be uncovered from within rather than revealed through achieving the “view from nowhere” of objective scientific inquiry. While the roots of continental philosophy lie in nineteenth-century post-Kantian German philosophy, especially Hegel and Marx, the founders of discursivity whose writings provide the principal resources for contemporary work in this tradition are Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, and more recent figures such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. Once again, to philosophically address a question within this tradition is to bring to bear on that question the broad range of philosophical resources that these philosophers and their successors have developed. Analytic philosophy so conceived is a particular philosophical tradition with respect to which an author may orient her research and upon whose resources she may draw. Contemporary works of analytic philosophy are works whose authors are

Analytic Philosophy of Music   67 so oriented and so guided in their research We might then expect analytic philosophy of music to comprise writings whose authors’ research stands in such a relation to the tradition of analytic philosophy in general, and to a particular tradition of writing in the philosophy of music that draws upon those writings in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics central to analytic philosophy. But, to the extent that we can identify such a historical tradition in analytic philosophy of music, it is an artefact rather than a determining ground of more recent work in the field. To put this point less cryptically, while writings over the past fifty years rightly identified as contributions to analytic philosophy of music qualify in virtue of how they draw upon resources in the broader tradition of analytic philosophy, earlier thinkers in the philosophy of music with whom such writings engage may be retrospectively viewed as belonging to analytic philosophy of music. To cite one example, Hanslick’s 1854 work On the Musically Beautiful (Hanslick  1986) is now regarded as a forebear of more recent formalist theories of music because of the way in which authors like Malcolm Budd (1995) and Peter Kivy (1980) recruited Hanslick’s writings in developing their own views on musical expressiveness and the nature of the musical work. Another salient example is here is R. G. Collingwood, whose Principles of Art is a work to which philosophers of art of broadly analytic sympathies have paid growing attention over the past twenty years (for example, Ridley 1997; D. Davies 2008). Collingwood’s philosophical interlocutors, however, were not figures in the analytic tradition but, rather, the British Idealists. Analytic philosophers of art in fact paid scant attention to Collingwood’s work until recently, in part because his ideas were misrepresented as an implausible form of artistic idealism by Richard Wollheim in Art and Its Objects, one of the foundational works of analytic philosophy of art, as we shall see in the section “Musical Works and Performances”. But why would we search in vain for a pre-existing tradition of analytic writing on the philosophy of music with respect to which writers like Budd and Kivy could orient themselves? The reason, put starkly, is that the mainstream analytic tradition characterized above had very little interest in matters relating to art and the aesthetic, and thus very little interest in philosophical questions about music. Aside from an occasional overlap between issues of interest to philosophers of art and issues of interest to philosophers of language—for example, Frege’s and Russell’s interests in the semantics of fictional discourse—one would be hard pressed to find any discussion of artistic matters in general, and music in particular, in the writings of the “founders of discursivity” and their disciples. Wittgenstein did indeed give lectures on aesthetics that were published some years after his death (Wittgenstein 1966), but his main legacy to the philosophy of art resides in the work of ordinary language philosophers like John Passmore (1951), Morris Weitz (1956), and William Kennick (1958) who bemoaned the “dreariness” of aesthetics and argued that what was taken to be the primary concern of traditional aesthetics—the definition of art—rested on “a mistake.” Those analytic philosophers like Quine who carried on the legacy of logical positivism in American philosophy recognized no analytically respectable philosophical investigations into artistic or aesthetic matters.

68   David Davies

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy of Music—A Brief History (Many of the issues discussed in this section will be explored in further depth in the sections “Musical Expression,” “Musical Works and Performances,” and “Engagement with Other Philosophical Traditions.”) Stephen Davies (2011b) has noted the striking growth of work in analytic philosophy of music over the past forty or so years, measured not only in its own terms but also in terms of the increasing predominance of philosophy of music in analytic philosophy of art more generally. To understand this phenomenon more fully, we need to locate it in the context of the emergence of analytic philosophy of art from the generally benighted state described in the “Preliminary Concerns” section. Two works published in 1968— Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art and Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects— played a very significant part in the development of analytic philosophy of art and, indirectly, in the development of analytic philosophy of music. These books, while in many ways very different, agreed in their response to the Wittgenstein-inspired critique of the definitional project central to traditional philosophical reflection on art. While some philosophers shifted the definitional project into a new key—seeking to define art not in terms of manifest properties but in terms of the human practices in which certain artefacts have their place (see, for example, Danto 1964, 1981; Dickie 1974)—Goodman and Wollheim focused attention on the different kinds of things that serve as the vehicles of artworks in the different arts and on salient differences between these vehicles. Goodman, offering to the traditional definitional project only the sop that there might be certain “symptoms” of the aesthetic that are broadly distinctive of the way artworks function as symbols, focused rather on the ways in which differences in the arts could be understood in terms of differences between the symbol systems to which the entities that served as their vehicles, and thereby helped to individuate works, belonged. In Languages of Art, Goodman brought to bear on issues relating to the arts resources developed in earlier valuable contributions to analytic epistemology and metaphysics (Goodman 1951, 1955). Visual artworks, as depictions, and verbal artworks, as descriptions, are taken to differ because their vehicles are characters belonging to symbol systems with significantly different constitutive properties. Musical and literary works differ from paintings in that the former, unlike the latter, can be fully appreciated through an engagement with different instances of a work, and this is possible because the properties required in well-formed instances of musical and literary works can be divorced from their histories of making through the use of a notational system. Goodman’s technically complex discussion of the distinctive features of a notation, together with his claim that the identity of a musical work must be tied to what is notatable in a score, led him to conclusions that struck many of those involved in actual musical practice as outrageous. (For how this has negatively affected the possibility of constructive interchanges between analytic philosophy of music and musicology, see

Analytic Philosophy of Music   69 the section “Engagement with Other Philosophical Traditions.”) For example, he concluded that no verbal markings on the score of a musical work can constrain correct performance of that work, and that any performance which departs in the slightest way from what is formally notated in the score of a musical work is not a performance of that work. To give a sense of what this would entail, since Italian tempo indications are not notational, a performance of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto that lasts all day would be perfectly compliant whereas a performance containing just one wrong note would not. While Goodman protested that the philosophical elucidation of our musical practices aims at a precision and understanding that can be ignored in actual practice, his claims drew the fire not only of musicologists and practising musicians but also of many analytic philosophers of music, and prompted them to develop what they viewed as more nuanced and practically realistic conceptions of the role that scores play in individuating musical works (see Wolterstorff 1975, 1980; S. Davies 2001, 154–158; D. Davies 2011, 57–67). But Goodman’s legacy is not entirely negative. His work also drew attention to philosophically interesting features of the relationship between musical works and their performances, features the exploration of which has been one of the central themes in analytic philosophy of music over the past fifty years. Wollheim, like Goodman, set aside the definitional project for something he took to be more tractable. The project of Art and Its Objects (Wollheim 1980) was to understand the nature of the things that serve as the vehicles of works in the different arts, and to explain how such things can possess the appreciable properties rightly ascribable to those works. A further theme—drawing here on the Wittgensteinian idea of a “form of life”—was to replace loose talk of an aesthetic attitude with an attention to the distinctive ways in which we engage with artworks as socially shared objects. Starting with the provisional hypothesis that all artworks are physical objects, he addressed the obvious objection that this could not be said of literary and musical works, which we take to be distinct from the particular physical objects or events—copies of novels and performances of musical works—through which they are appreciated. While Goodman (who had metaphysical scruples against positing abstract entities) suggested that a musical work is just the class of sound-sequence events that comply with a given score, Wollheim seemed to embrace the idea that some works are abstracta, maintaining that musical and literary works are “types” of which their performances are “tokens.” The refinement of this suggestion has been a central thread in analytic philosophy of music, undergoing various modulations that we shall look at in more detail in the section “Musical Works and Performances”. While the nature of musical works and the relationships in which they stand to musical performances has been one of the driving themes in the development of analytic philosophy of music, the ways in which these issues have been explored also reflect broader currents in musical and more generally artistic practice. One issue here, whose salience for theorists reflected developments in performance practice, is the nature and significance of authenticity in musical performance. Philosophers sought to disentangle different senses in which a performance might be said to be “authentic” and to determine the desirability or undesirability of performances that sought authenticity

70   David Davies understood in these different ways. A second current influencing analytic reflections on the nature of musical works and performances was artistic formalism and the idea of medium purity, something central to critical thinking about the visual arts in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. This further linked to a concern with the nature of musical expression, since the expressive properties of music might be thought to violate formalist standards. As I noted earlier, philosophy of music has become one of the dominant areas in analytic philosophy of art, and it is worth asking why this is so. One might reasonably point here to the philosophical energy and productivity of the central figures in the field—in particular, Stephen Davies, Peter Kivy, and Jerrold Levinson—who have also been among the most influential figures in analytic philosophy of art as a whole. But one should also note the richness of the philosophical issues concerning music that have lent themselves to treatment within the analytic tradition. As I suggested earlier, it would be misleading to think that there is a neutral set of issues in a particular philosophical field that present themselves as worthy of attention to all philosophers working in that field. The issues that most recommend themselves to a philosopher are those that lend themselves to treatment using the resources that her chosen philosophical tradition makes available or allows her to further refine or develop. Given that the dominant threads in analytic philosophy relate to language and its role in furthering our cognitive engagement with the world, it is not surprising that analytic philosophy of art has tended to focus on those features of artworks and our artistic practices that lend themselves to analysis in terms of artworks construed as quasi-linguistic signifiers. One set of issues relates to the nature of artistic signifiers themselves. Once attention is focused not on defining the concept “art” but on determining the nature of the entities that serve as vehicles for a work’s artistic contents in the different arts, music assumes a key role as the most philosophically rich and tractable “multiple” art form, where the latter is an art form in which works can have different instances that are fully qualified to provide the experiences necessary for proper appreciation of the work. The richness here relates in particular to works taken to fall under the “work concept” (Goehr 2007) or (relatedly) the “classical paradigm” (D. Davies 2011), where both musical works and performances of those works function as objects of appreciation. This raises interesting philosophical questions about the ways in which they and their appreciations are related and contrasts with the apparently much simpler relationships between multiple works and their instances in other multiple art forms (literature, cinema, photography, cast sculpture, and printmaking, for example.) The tractability relates to the relative “tidiness” of musical practices involving instrumental Western art music from the common practice period, as compared with the messier domain of theatre, the until recently ­little-explored domain of dance, and, as we shall see later, forms of musical practice not obviously subsumable under the classical paradigm. A related topic is the nature of the “contentful” properties of artistic signifiers that bear upon their appreciation—most obviously representational and expressive properties, but also formal properties if, as Goodman (1978, 57–70) suggested, these must themselves be understood as properties exemplified, and thus symbolized, by a work.

Analytic Philosophy of Music   71 In analytic philosophy of music, it is musical expression that has drawn the closest attention, as we shall see in the section “Musical Expression,” and philosophical attempts to understand the general nature of artistic expression have taken music as the most fruitful art form in which to pursue these issues. A third set of issues concerns the nature of our appreciation of the contentful properties of works. One very influential strand of analytic philosophical thinking about the arts takes the philosopher’s task to be in a sense metacritical, taking the practices of those who write about the arts, rather than the practices of artists themselves, to be the proper focus of philosophical attention (for example, Beardsley 1958). A different tradition of analytic thinking looks at the semantics of aesthetic predicates and aesthetic judgements (for example, Sibley et al. 2001). Once again, music has provided analytic philosophers with a rich resource for such metacritical reflections, as exemplified in some of the treatments of musical expressiveness.

Musical Expression In Plato’s Republic (1941), the best-known proposed controls on the availability of artworks in the Ideal State relate to poetry which, in association with painting, is taken merely to mirror back to receivers the appearances of things and common opinions about those appearances. Truth is taken to reside in ideal forms accessible to reflection but only incompletely instantiated in the visible world. But distinct controls are also proposed for music. What are proscribed here are certain kinds of musical forms, and this is in virtue not of any supposed representational properties of music but of the affective powers of these forms and their consequent tendency to reorganize the souls of citizens in ways disruptive of the smooth workings of the state. While popular opinion sometimes still subscribes to the idea that our personalities reflect and can be shaped by the kind of music we listen to, the more abiding legacy of Plato’s writing in the philosophy of music, both historically and in the analytic and continental traditions, is a recognition of the expressive and more broadly affective capacities of music. Musical expression has always stood in an ambiguous relationship to another feature of musical works taken to be definitive of such works, namely their structural properties. On the one hand, there has been considerable debate as to the relationship between musical affect, and musical understanding more generally, and the formal properties of musical works. An issue central to this debate is whether musical appreciation, and the grasp of a work’s affective properties, requires that we apprehend largescale formal properties of a work or movement, or whether our principal appreciative focus should be upon the momentary qualities of combinations of individual notes or harmonies. (See, for example, Tanner and Budd 1985; Levinson 1998; S. Davies 2011a). On the other hand, it is unclear how musical affect can be described, as it often is, in terms of the expression of emotional properties such as sadness, joy, exhilaration, and hope. While these issues are central to some earlier philosophical works taken up in

72   David Davies analytic philosophy of music proper and thereby incorporated retrospectively into the tradition, they find their canonical analytical formulations in reflections on the semantics of expressive predications of musical works and performances, and on the proper analysis of musical expression itself. When a listener describes a particular piece of music as sad or joyful, what is she claiming and what are the truth conditions for her claim? The simplest and perhaps the most phenomenologically accurate answer is that she is describing a perceived quality of the musical sequence to which she is listening. The philosophical problem arises when we ask how what she is listening to can have the affective properties ascribed. As one philosopher of music has put it, the philosophical issue relating to musical expression is to explain “how something inanimate and insentient such as music can be, and can be heard to be, sad, happy, and the like” (Trivedi 2011). One proposal is that we locate the sadness and joy predicated of musical works in the experience of the listener, who is clearly capable of such feelings, and think of the work itself as possessing, in virtue of its structure, the dispositional property of arousing such emotions in appropriate listeners. While sophisticated versions of arousal theories of musical expression have been defended by some authors (Matravers  1998; Nussbaum  2007), the theory in its less sophisticated versions is open to serious objections that can be traced back to Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (see Budd 1995; Kivy 1980). Music, Hanslick claimed, cannot arouse ordinary emotions of sadness and joy because the latter have an ineliminable propositional or referential component—there is something that we are sad or joyful about. But, given the non-representational nature of the work of pure music, it is incapable of articulating such a component. This is not to deny that we may experience affective responses in listening to musical works, but these, it is claimed, are better viewed as affects distinctive of musical experience rather than as the ordinary emotions of life. Such a view is reminiscent of Clive Bell’s (1914) claim that, in a proper affective response to a visual artwork, what we feel is an “aesthetic emotion” elicited by the work’s “significant form,” rather than any “everyday” emotion. A further objection to the idea that musical expression is constitutively related to the arousal of ordinary emotions is that it seems possible to recognize expressive features of a musical work without experiencing the emotion in question. An alternative response to the issue about musical expression has commended itself to those who seek to resolve philosophical questions about art by paying greater attention to the way in which our art-critical language functions. It might be said that, in expressive predications of musical works, the terms in question—“happy” and “sad,” for example—are being used metaphorically rather than literally (for example, Scruton 1997). This response is puzzling, however, since it offers no account of why the music is metaphorically sad and no explanation of what is would be to possess sadness metaphorically (S. Davies 1994). Goodman’s (1976) proposed elucidation of expression in terms of metaphorical exemplification might be thought simply to redescribe the problem—a musical work may literally exemplify its structural features but how can it thereby metaphorically exemplify sadness?

Analytic Philosophy of Music   73 Suzanne Langer (1953) responded to Bell’s claim that our affective responses to artworks are elicited by significant form by saying that this is really the starting point rather than the terminus of philosophical inquiry into the arts. The salient question, for Langer, is why we are affected by the formal properties of visual and musical artworks. She argues that, at least in the case of musical works, what makes certain structural features of such works significant for us is that they resemble general structural features of human affective experience: musical works are “tonal analogues” of human emotive life in general, rather than being expressive of particular human emotions. Analytic philosophers, claiming to find such claims obscure, have looked to less esoteric relationships of resemblance to elucidate the nature of musical expression. Peter Kivy (1980), for example, defended the idea that the application of such predicates as “sad” or “joyful” to musical works is simply an example of a more general tendency to ascribe emotional properties in an extended sense to things whose features resemble individuals who are actually in the relevant emotional states. He maintained that the musical works to which we ascribe expressive properties have structures whose contours resemble those of the behaviours and general demeanour of human agents who are sad or joyful, for example. Stephen Davies (1994, 2006) defends a similar resemblance account of musical expression, holding that “the resemblance that counts most for musical expressiveness . . . is that between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behaviour expressive of emotion” (2006, 181). Critics of resemblance views have argued that such accounts cannot accommodate the more subtle or complex emotional properties ascribable to musical works. Jenefer Robinson (2005) describes the resemblance theory as the “doggy theory,” based on the example of sad-looking dogs employed by both Kivy and Stephen Davies to illustrate their accounts. She argues that if a musical work is to express the development of our emotions through time, rather than at best an unconnected sequence of emotions, structural features of the music must be attributed by the listener to someone who is using them to express themselves. This is also necessary if, returning to Hanslick’s criticisms of arousal theories, we are to think of music as expressing emotional states that have some propositional content or some intentional object. One way of conceiving of the expressing subject of whose mental life the musical work is an expression is to identify that subject with the artist herself, as in Romantic conceptions of art. Robinson, among others, points to Collingwood’s (1938) more sophisticated notion of artistic expression, as a cognitive achievement whereby the affective states of the artist are clarified and individualized through the very process of expression. The requirement, however, that there be an expressive subject might be satisfied without identifying that subject with the actual artist. All that might be thought necessary is that we hear in the music the result of an expressive process attributable to some persona located in our experience of the music. This view has been defended most vigorously by Jerrold Levinson, who expresses the view as follows: “A passage of music P is expressive of an emotion E if and only if P, in context, is readily heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in question, as an expression of E” (Levinson 2006, 193). However, once we divorce the musical persona from the composer herself (see, for example, the discussion of the

74   David Davies “complete musical persona” in Cone 1974), Hanslickian worries resurface as to the ability of the music taken by itself to convey anything determinate about the nature of the persona and thus about the emotional states expressed by the music. Perhaps, as a number of the proponents of these different accounts suggest, it is wrong to seek a univocal account of the expressive potential of musical works. Expressionpredicates, it might be said, are applied to musical works in a number of different ways, with no need to reduce these to a common core. In some cases we are indeed talking about resemblance, in other cases about arousal, and in further cases about properties we ascribe to a heard persona. The issue of musical expression continues, however, to produce lively debate.

Musical Works and Performances The title of Stephen Davies’s 2001 book—Musical Works and Performances—captures well an increasing preoccupation of analytic philosophy of music. With the move towards more tractable questions concerning the nature of the entities serving as vehicles of artistic content in the different arts, various questions concerning the nature of musical works and their relationships to musical performances not only became salient but also seemed to lend themselves to fruitful treatment using the more general resources made available within the analytic tradition. If, as Wollheim proposed, musical works, like multiple artworks in general, are rightly viewed as types, how should those types be conceived and how are musical works, as types, to be individuated? Is it reasonable to expect a univocal answer to these questions that would apply not only to the kinds of instrumental Western art musical works central to so much analytic philosophical discourse about music but also to music belonging to other genres, traditions, and cultures? In this section I shall outline the principal positions defended on these matters by philosophers who have brought to bear upon them the resources of analytic metaphysics and epistemology. (Certain analytic philosophers of art have argued that artworks in general, as the objects of our critical and appreciative interest, are actiontypes or action-tokens [Currie 1989; D. Davies 2004]. For such philosophers, the debate between Platonists and materialists sketched below pertains to the nature of what is generated by the composer of a work of music rather than to the nature of the musical work itself.) Although Wollheim’s and Goodman’s 1968 monographs played a crucial role in inaugurating the contemporary analytic interest in the nature of and relationships between musical works and performances, it took some ten years before others began critically to explore the implications of their work. While Goodman’s philosophical aversion to abstracta led him to identify musical works with classes of performances, Wollheim’s talk of musical works as types was taken to commit him to the idea that such works are abstract entities distinct from the particular events that are their performances. Musical ontology in the analytic tradition over the past forty-odd years can be

Analytic Philosophy of Music   75 seen as a developing struggle between those seeking to clarify how musical works can indeed be rightly conceived as abstract objects of some kind (the “Platonists”), and those seeking to provide an alternative materialist account of the musical work (the “materialists”). Much of this discussion has focused on instrumental Western art music dating from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century but it has been generally assumed that the model taken to be appropriate for works that fall under Goehr’s (2007) “work concept” or D.  Davies’s (2011) “classical paradigm” also apply mutatis mutandis to musical works and performances in general. According to the classical paradigm (D. Davies 2011, 23–50), a performance in the performing arts is generally of something else—what we can call a performable work—and plays a necessary part in the appreciation of the latter. Performable works prescribe certain things to performers, and are appreciated for the qualities realizable in performances that satisfy these prescriptions. Performers are also in a sense creators of their performances, for they are usually expected to exercise their creative freedom in interpreting what is prescribed. While some authors (for example, Levinson 1980a) are more cautious about extending this model beyond instrumental Western art music of the common practice period, others have sought to do so by building parameters into their accounts. Stephen Davies (2001), for example, seeks to bring earlier music in the Western tradition under his model by reference to its relative “thinness”—its having a narrower range of musical features as constitutive properties—and to bring rock music under the model by distinguishing between musical works for live performance and musical works for studio performance. I shall postpone until the section “Engagement with Other Philosophical Traditions” an examination of more recent attempts by analytic philosophers of music to provide a more pluralistic ontology of musical works in order to do justice to the perceived diversity of actual musical practice—such work marks one kind of convergence between analytical and continental thinking about such matters. The dominant thread in mainstream analytic ontology of music is Platonism. The interpretation of Wollheim as a founding figure in contemporary musical Platonism dates from Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s attempts (1975, 1980) to refine the former’s views in two respects. First, Wollheim sought to distinguish the types with which he identified musical works from other things capable of having particulars falling under them (classes and universals) in terms of the mutual transmission of properties between types and their tokens (and thus between musical works and their performances). This was intended to explain how works, while not themselves particulars, can have the properties of the particular performances through which they are appreciated. Wolterstorff however insisted that works, as abstracta, could not possess such properties. What are shared, he maintained, are not properties like being stirring, but predicates like “is stirring.” These predicates are used “analogically” when applied to works, picking out a different but systematically related property—for example, being such that all of its proper performances are stirring—to the one ascribable to their performances. Second, where Wollheim had spoken of works as types, Wolterstorff insisted that, in virtue of admitting of both correct and incorrect instances, they are properly thought of as “norm-types,” individuated in terms of the properties they require in their correct instances. It is this

76   David Davies idea of musical works as norm-types that is developed by Julian Dodd (2007) in the most discussed recent work in the Platonist tradition. Much of the subsequent discussion in the Platonist camp has turned on the question: what are the properties that a musical work requires in its well-formed instances and that thereby serve to individuate the work? The simplest answer to this question is some form of sonicism. The distinctive claim of the sonicist is that “whether a sound-event counts as a properly formed token of [a performable work] W is determined purely by its acoustic qualitative appearance” (Dodd 2007, 201); that is to say, purely by the way the performance sounds. Sonicism comes in two flavours. Pure sonicists hold that the kinds of features prescribed for correct performance of a musical work are restricted to structural or organizational properties—pitch, rhythm, harmony, and melody (see, for example, Kivy 1983, 1988; Scruton 1997). For the pure sonicist, a musical work can have correct performances on an array of different instruments, with very different timbral properties. Timbral sonicists, on the other hand, maintain that the timbre of the notes produced, which will vary according to the instruments used in generating those notes, is an essential part of what the composer prescribes for well-formed performances of the work (see, for example, Dodd 2007). The timbral sonicist makes the timbral qualities of a sound sequence partly constitutive of the performable work. But she doesn’t require that, in well-formed performances, this sound sequence is actually produced on the instruments with which we naturally associate those timbral qualities. Instrumentalists, on the other hand, insist that a correct performance of a performable work must not only have the prescribed timbral qualities, but must also be performed on the prescribed instruments. Jerrold Levinson argued for instrumentalism in his landmark paper “What a Musical Work Is” (1980a), maintaining that a performance of a musical work must be on the instruments prescribed by the composer, in part because some of a work’s expressive properties depend upon the physical movements necessary to produce the prescribed sounds. He also argued for the contextualist thesis that a performance of a musical work must stand in an appropriate historicalintentional relationship to the activity of the work’s composer. Works are thus instrumentally and contextually individuated, according to Levinson, and are what he terms “initiated types,” understood in something like the following way: schematically, a musical work is a sound/performance-means-structure-as-indicated-by-X-at-t, where, in the case of an individual work (say Sibelius’s Second Symphony), X is replaced by the name of the composer (Sibelius), t is replaced by the time at which the work was composed (1902), and the first part of the schema specifies the sounds to be produced and the instruments on which they are to be sounded. As initiated types, musical works are claimed to be creatable, something that Levinson takes to be a further requirement for any acceptable ontology of musical works. Levinson’s insistence on the art-historical contextualization of musical works echoes or anticipates arguments for the contextual nature of artworks in other arts (see, for example, Danto 1981 on visual artworks; Currie 1991 on literary artworks), and musical contextualism has been widely endorsed by others who do not share Levinson’s specific ontological theory (for a dissenting view, see Dodd 2007, 240–276). It has been argued, however, that, if initiated types are indeed abstracta, then they cannot in fact be created but only discovered in a way that may manifest creativity on the

Analytic Philosophy of Music   77 part of the discoverer—as is the case with scientific discoveries, for example—and that they cannot be individuated in either instrumentalist or contextualist terms (Dodd 2000, 2007). One of the virtues of Dodd’s 2007 account is that it makes it clear what one is committed to ontologically if one is a Platonist, and this has provided further impetus for some to develop non-Platonist ontologies of music that can preserve instrumentalism, contextualism, and creatability while still accounting for the multiple nature of musical works and the need for performative interpretation. Two widely discussed materialist ontologies draw on more general work in analytic metaphysics in identifying musical works with “historical” individuals somehow grounded in materially acceptable entities such as scores and performances. According to Guy Rohrbaugh (2003), musical works are continuants depending for their existence on those concrete entities that are their embodiments. An embodiment of a continuant is a spatio­temporally locatable object or event, and the continuant itself is a “higher level” object that is dependent for its existence upon its embodiments. For Ben Caplan and Carl Matheson (2006), on the other hand, musical works are perdurants, entities that are constituted by their embodiments which are taken to be their temporal parts. (For criticisms of both of these materialist theories, see Dodd 2007, 143–166.) It has also recently been argued that the Platonist thread that supposedly runs from Wollheim through Wolterstorff to Dodd is ill-grounded because Wollheim’s talk of musical works as “types” cannot be read as a commitment to any kind of Platonism. It is, rather, the denial that musical works and other multiples are particulars. Wollheim presents his suggestion that musical works are types as an answer to what he terms the “logical question”—are musical works particulars or are they non-particulars of some kind?—as contrasted with the corresponding “metaphysical question”—are musical works physical or nonphysical (abstract) entities? We posit a type, according to Wollheim, when we wish to correlate a group of particulars with a piece of human invention: a type, so conceived, is not a particular but a principle for grouping particulars. Wollheim’s talk of musical works as types is thus compatible with the idea that such a principle can exist embedded in a human practice without any need to bring in Platonic entities (D. Davies 2012). Analytic philosophy of music has until recently been interested in musical performances primarily as events that play a role in the individuation and appreciation of musical works. It is in the context of the array of ontological views of the musical work just surveyed that we can locate both (1) responses to Goodman’s claims about the requirements for performance of a work, sketched above, and (2) treatments of issues concerning authentic performance of a musical work. Goodman’s counter-intuitive views about the relationships between musical works and performances can be countered if one acknowledges, as most writers have done, that context plays a role in the identity of both works and performances. Wolterstorff (1975) notes that the composer’s prescriptions for even the purely sonic features of her work are rarely made completely explicit in a score—she relies on shared understandings in the intended performing community as to how the score should be interpreted. More significantly, Goodman’s worries about preserving the identity of the musical work from performance to performance, which motivate his insistence upon complete compliance with the score—can

78   David Davies be addressed if we tie the identity of a musical performance to the historical-intentional relationship that exists between the performers and the work performed. This admittedly sacrifices Goodman’s idea that the possibility for multiple fully qualified instances of musical works, in contrast to paintings, is to be explained in terms of the possibility— vested in a score—of divorcing something’s status as an instance of a musical work from its history of production. Musical works, for Goodman, are, in virtue of this possibility, “allographic,” where paintings, whose instances depend for their status, on their histories of making, are “autographic.” But as just noted, contextualists can argue that status as a performance of a musical work does depend upon standing in the right historical relation to the generative activity of a composer, so that, in this sense, musical works are not allographic (see, for example, Levinson 1980b). Even more obviously, the achievability or desirability of authentic performances of musical works hinges crucially on one’s views about the features of musical performances that are individuative of the works performed. The issue about authenticity is a complex one, as Peter Kivy makes clear in the fullest analytic treatment of this issue (Kivy 1995). We need to ask, first, what it is that an authentic performance is supposed to be authentic to. If the answer be the intentions of the composer, these intentions may not be jointly satisfiable (Dipert 1980; Edidin 1991), since, for example, it may not be possible, in the case of current listeners to a Baroque work, to produce the intended effect by using the intended performance means. Alternatively we might seek to reproduce the sounds that would have been heard by the composer’s contemporaries, using for this purpose period instruments and styles of playing. But to what end? If the aim of authentic performance is to enable the listener to replicate the experience of the period listener in relevant respects, this is arguably something we cannot achieve (Kivy 1995; Young 1988; but for a dissenting voice, see S. Davies 1987, 1988). If, however, the thought is that performances that are authentic in this sense help us to better appreciate the work performed, this will not speak to the pure sonicist, for whom the work is present for appreciation in any performance possessing the relevant pure sonic properties. Timbral sonicists and instrumentalists may be persuaded that the use of period instruments can help to clarify a work’s timbral properties. But, fairly clearly, the case for authentic performance speaks loudest to contextualists for whom a musical work is something partly constituted by its context of creation: an authentic performance may help to clarify why, in that context, the work was composed so that its performance would have the timbral sonic properties that it does.

Engagement with Other Philosophical Traditions and Other Studies of Music These have been recent attempts to bring about some sort of rapprochement between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions. These attempts have been localized to areas of philosophy where those working in one tradition have seen resources exploited, or

Analytic Philosophy of Music   79 concerns addressed, in the other tradition as valuable for their own projects or those of others in their tradition. This has taken its most self-conscious form in the philosophy of mind/cognitive science. Here philosophers with an analytic background wishing to explore various forms of “embodied” and “extended” cognition in light of perceived weaknesses in the “computational” model of mind dominant in the analytic tradition have sought, in the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and of o ­ thers he inspired, a philosophical discourse in which to discuss embodiment. (For works that bring analytic and continental resources together in this way, see Clark 2008; Gallagher 2005; Noe  2004.) In the central areas of analytic ­philosophy—language, metaphysics, and ­epistemology—moves towards rapprochement have been more covert, as in Robert Brandom’s attempt (1994) to reintegrate perceived Hegelian insights into the d ­ iscourse of analytic philosophy in a magisterial work where there is no explicit ­discussion of either Hegel or other figures in the continental tradition. Brandom and his Pittsburgh colleague John McDowell (1994) each take themselves to be reaffirming or reformulating insights to be found in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, a figure whose rehabilitation in the analytic canon is itself symptomatic of moves towards reconciliation with the continental tradition: Sellars famously described one of his most important papers (Sellars 1956) as “my Hegelian meditations”! In philosophy of music, as in philosophy of art more generally, what rapprochement there has been is a matter less of overt or covert cross-traditional borrowings and more of a de facto convergence in philosophical concerns. (An exception is Roholt 2017, which attempts to bring the two traditions into dialogue by contrasting their treatments of three specific questions in the philosophy of music.) While the Platonist idea of an abstract ahistorical and acontextual musical work is not completely alien to philosophy of music in the continental tradition (see Ingarden 1986), the focus for most writers with a primarily phenomenological or critical theoretical orientation has been on socially and historically embedded musical practices. A convergence of concerns between such work and analytic philosophy of music is most apparent in recent analytic explorations of the diversity of actual musical practice. This finds expression both in treatments of certain musical genres in terms that eschew the classical paradigm, and, at a methodological level, in debates over the general accountability of ontology of art to actual artistic practice. I noted in the section “Musical Works and Performances” Stephen Davies’s attempts to subsume a broader range of musical genres and traditions under the classical paradigm by refining the latter to allow for distinctions between thick and thin musical works and between works for live and for studio performance. Davies’s very sophisticated account—which pays detailed attention to musical performance and receptive practice—does not attempt to shoehorn all musical phenomena into this model. He allows for purely electronic works that are not for performance at all but for playback, and for jazz improvisations that are “after” but not of a pre-existing tune (S. Davies 2001, 10). But others in the broadly analytic tradition have more forthrightly challenged the wider applicability of the classical paradigm. In his landmark book on rock music, Theodore Gracyk (1996) argues in contrast to Davies’s claim that most rock works are

80   David Davies works for studio performance, that there is no actual or even possible live performance that sounds like what we hear when we listen to the recording of a rock work. Rather, the sound that we associate with such a work is usually the result of skilful technological manipulation in a studio. Drawing on a richly detailed survey of actual practices of producing and receiving rock works, Gracyk argues that the rock work is the recording— the electronically encoded result of what gets done in the studio that is then appreciated when played back by the listener. Andrew Kania (2006), broadly agreeing with Gracyk, describes the rock work as the “track,” something quite distinct from a much thinner work—the “song”—which is what gets performed in live performances by a rock band. Kania also defends an account of jazz according to which the appreciable work is the performance, not a distinct multiply performable work (Kania 2011; see also Young and Matheson 2000). Other work on jazz in the analytic tradition has stressed aspects of actual improvisational practice (for example, Alperson  1984; Brown  1996; Cochrane 2000) and the ways in which the availability of studio recording techniques has changed the norms operative in jazz practice (Brown 2000). What these writers have in common is their close attention to the diversity of musical practice—both that of producers and that of receivers—in these different genres. In rejecting the idea that the classical paradigm provides a good model for thinking about such practices, they echo Goehr’s strategy (2007) in her argument that the work concept had no “regulative force” in pre-19th century classical musical practice. This attention to the historicity and contextualization of artistic practice is also a prominent feature in James Hamilton’s arguments (2007) against the generally accepted idea that the classical paradigm provides the right model for theatrical performance. Hamilton’s alternative “ingredients model” for theatre is based on his participation in and close study of actual contemporary theatrical practice. In spite of this, however, very little attention has been paid by those working in the analytic tradition to the political and broadly socio-cultural dimensions of musical practice. If we search for reflection on the social role of music in recent philosophical thinking, we find this primarily in the writings of those working in the continental rather than in the analytic tradition. This includes not only Adorno’s celebration of the critical possibilities of serialism and his criticisms of popular music and of jazz for their political conservatism (Adorno 1941) but also writers who elaborate upon such ideas (see A. Hamilton 2007). There is also relatively little analytic attention to actual musical practices viewed as politically embedded and evolving forms of social behaviour. Contextualism in the analytic tradition still concerns itself with the need to understand the individual work as an entity embedded in an art-historical space—as in the very influential work of the historian of the visual arts Michael Baxandall (1972, 1985). But, in contrast to Baxandall, analytic philosophers have paid little attention to the artwork as acted upon and active within a wider social practice, or indeed to the socio-economic dimensions of artistic practice itself. A notable exception is Sherri Irvin’s work on what she terms “the artists’ sanction.” Irvin (2005) critically examines curatorial practice in the presentation of contemporary works of installation art, and the ways in which the sometimes-different interests of artists and curators are negotiated in this practice.

Analytic Philosophy of Music   81 The possibility of fruitful dialogue between analytic philosophy of music and continental philosophy of music has recently been called into question by proponents of what is termed “performance philosophy.” Performance philosophy came to the attention of a wider audience following the inauguration (2010) of a series of annual meetings held at the University of Surrey, and the subsequent emergence (2015) of a dedicated journal, Performance Philosophy. Laura Cull, one of the founders of Performance Philosophy, maintains (Cull 2014) that we should eschew the “philosophy of performance” as traditionally pursued, and seek to engage in philosophizing through participating in performance practice. Philosophy of performance, it is claimed, purports to bring superior insights to bear upon performance practice, insights grounded in the application to that practice of more general philosophical conceptual structures that are themselves justified a priori, through conceptual analysis or pure reflection. This, she argues, abstracts from crucial features of actual performance practice. Cull’s principal target is analytic philosophy of performance. The most serious proponent of performance philosophy as it applies to music is Andrew Bowie. Bowie was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural Performance Philosophy conference and his keynote address appears in the opening issue of Performance Philosophy. Bowie’s idea of what Tomás McAuley (2015) has termed “philosophy through music” is adumbrated in the following terms: If . . . we think of metaphysics as to do with “making maximal sense of things” and with “making sense of making sense,” it is worth considering whether . . . [such] sense-making may . . . . inhere in performances which reveal aspects of the world that are hidden by dominant practices and assumptions, including the assumptions of some philosophy as presently practised. . . . Performance can open up philosophical space which discursive philosophical approaches cannot.  (Bowie 2015, 51, 55)

This is promoted as an alternative to what Bowie presents as the bankrupt tradition of analytic philosophy of music which, so he claims, is the application to music of a more general project in fundamental metaphysics and is, as a result, entirely out of touch with artistic practice as an evolving and historically embedded set of activities. This “new metaphysical approach spends its time on thought experiments and the like” and “fails to connect conceptual questions to questions about what we actually do and what happens in the world, preferring to create abstract scenarios and issues, in the name of a rigour that is largely achieved by excluding the complexity of how the notional metaphysical issue of ‘fundamental things’ is manifest in the human world.” This analytic approach, he claims, “can offer little to virtually any discipline in the humanities,” whereas “communication between the humanities and the major directions in European philosophy has become an ineliminable part of the contemporary landscape. The paucity of the actual results of seeking to establish what ‘fundamental kinds of things there are’ by metaphysical reflection contrasts sharply with exploration, for example, of the nature and significance of things in phenomenology” (Bowie 2015, 53).

82   David Davies Responding to this very negative prognosis for constructive interaction between analytic and continental philosophical engagements with music, McAuley (2015) rejects both Bowie’s critique of analytic philosophy of music, and his claim that the repudiation of the latter is a consequence of taking seriously the possibility of philosophy through our engagement in musical practice. On the first point, McAuley provides a number of examples to counter Bowie’s monolithic picture of what goes on in the analytic philosophy of music: many contributors begin with musical practice, acknowledging the latter’s historical dimensions, and pay close attention to differences between musical genres (see the previous discussion of this). On the second point, he stresses how much analytic philosophy of music is itself done through engagement with musical practice. Furthermore, it might be added, if, as Bowie suggests, there are philosophical insights accessible only through musical practice, this does not show that there are not other insights that can only be grasped through discursive rationality, including insights into how it is that the former kinds of insights are possible. A further indication of the diversity of approaches within analytic philosophy of art is the very lively methodological debate (see, for example, Kania 2008) between those who wish to hold ontology of art accountable to more traditional analytic standards and those who, in a more pragmatic spirit, see it as an attempt to provide a reflectively acceptable model of actual artistic practice. Amie Thomasson (2005) has defended a traditional analytic conception of the appropriate methodology in ontology of art, taking the latter to involve an analysis of the concepts that guide those who determine the reference of art-kind terms in their referential use of those terms. It is through the analysis of these concepts that we determine the ontological status of musical works, she maintains, and, as a consequence, ontology of music cannot be revisionary of ordinary “folk” understandings of the nature of art-kinds. Dodd (2012,  2013), on the contrary, has argued that our folk understandings are no better a guide here than elsewhere to the true nature of things. He argues that our folk intuitions must be schooled by more general metaphysical principles and thus that ontology of music may be highly revisionary of folk beliefs, as in the case of his own Platonism which rejects both creatability and the idea that musical works are individuated instrumentally or contextually. An intermediate view, arguably more in tune with the concrete developments described above, maintains that ontology of music, and ontology of art more generally, must be grounded in artistic practice, but must involve rational reflection on that practice in light of its presumed goals. On this view, the aim of ontology of art is to furnish our practice with a conceptual framework that will promote both engagement in and comprehension of artistic making and reception (D. Davies 2009, 2017). A salient feature of philosophical work in the analytic tradition has been a respect for both the intersubjective standards of scientific research and the fruits of that research. It is not surprising therefore that some analytic philosophers of music have drawn upon scientific theories and empirical results in their writing. The primary resource here is cognitive science which promises to throw empirical light on the generation and reception of musical works and performances. Some scientific researchers in this field (Lerdahl and Jackendoff  1983), inspired by Chomskian linguistics, have posited an

Analytic Philosophy of Music   83 innately specified “musical grammar” which explains our ability as listeners to parse certain sounds as musical structures. Such a grammar explains how, in listening to music, we unconsciously represent the structure of a musical stimulus, thereby providing a model of musical understanding that parallels Chomskian accounts of linguistic understanding. Diana Raffman (1993) extends this idea and takes on an important theme in continental thinking about music, the supposed “ineffability” of musical content (see, for example, Jankélévitch 2003). Raffman proposes to explain musical ineffability in terms of the mechanisms whereby the mind-brain encodes musical information. She takes the most significant kind of musical ineffability to be what she terms “nuance ineffability.” Nuances, for Raffman, are those fine-grained details of performances of musical works that are not and cannot be specified in the score and that are the marks of the individual performer’s interpretation of the work. While Raffman focuses on nuances of pitch and interval, and our ability to “consciously hear ‘within-category’ phenomena such as vibrato, slides, out-of-tune intervals, and the myriad shades of pitch coloration that distinguish one performance from another” (Raffman  1993, 65), she takes nuance to be a more general feature of our musical experience. She claims that the ineffability of the nuances we experience in listening to music is a consequence of the most plausible story about our ability to hear an acoustic stimulus as a structured musical event. Like Lerdahl and Jackendoff, she posits a musical “grammar” in virtue of which we hear local structure in music. But, she further argues, there are principled reasons to think that we are able to categorize, and thereby remember, only broadly tonal properties of the musical manifolds that we hear, and not musical nuances (4). As a result, these nuanced features of our experience of music are ineffable. (For a critical response to Raffman, see Levinson 1995. For a survey of recent empirical research on music reception and comprehension, see Raffman 2011, 593–598.) More recently, the turn to “experimental philosophy” on the part of some analytic philosophers has found expression in the philosophy of music. Experimental philosophy questions the traditional reliance in analytic philosophy on “armchair intuitions” and urges that philosophers bring experimental results and sometimes experimental methods to bear on traditional philosophical concerns. An example of this strategy in the philosophy of music is a recent article by Bergeron and Lopes (2009), who cite psychological studies that show that observation of a musical performance strongly influences the expressive qualities ascribed to the music performed. The perception of musical expression is thus a function not only of auditory information but also of visual information received about the performance. But, as Bergeron and Lopes rightly note, even if aesthetic judgements do indeed differ in this way according to the circumstances of engagement with the music, we must still ask in which kind of circumstances we properly appreciate the work. While this essentially normative philosophical question is more pressing in light of the empirical research, it is not answered by that research. I have not yet said anything about scholarly engagements between analytic philosophy of music and musicology. That musicologists are not deaf to philosophical reflections upon musical practice is evident from their very positive response to Bowie’s works (especially Bowie 2007), as noted by McAuley (2015, 60). But a singular deafness on the

84   David Davies part of some musicologists to writings in analytical philosophy of music seems to be grounded in a generalization, to the latter tradition as a whole, of the perceived sins of some of its more extreme exemplars. Particularly vilified, but also taken as representative of the analytic tradition, is Goodman’s wrong-note paradox discussed previously. In a recent article, Richard Taruskin cites the latter in support of his contention that analytic philosophy is completely divorced from practical or real-life concerns: “Goodman’s stipulation [that one wrong note disqualifies a performance from being a performance of the work] puts his philosophy of performance (or, as he calls it, his theory of notation) entirely outside the realm of human transactions, along with most theories of musical performance hatched by analytical philosophers, who inhabit a world much simpler than ours, where objective authenticity is possible and perfect consistency rules” (Taruskin 2010, 451). My survey in earlier sections of the diverse strands in analytic philosophy of music, and of how analytic philosophers themselves have repudiated Goodman’s claims by attending to aspects of musical practice, gives the lie to Taruskin’s charge, and echoes McAuley’s response cited earlier to a similar misrepresentation of the analytic tradition by Bowie. To end on a more positive note, however, there have been promising attempts over the last few years to bring musicologists and analytic and continental philosophers of music into fruitful dialogue. To cite two examples, the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group annual conference features keynote speakers and scholarly presentations representative of each of these disciplines and traditions. Keynotes are encouraged to speak across disciplinary boundaries on a shared theme. Second, the Orpheus Academy, held annually in Ghent under the auspices of the Orpheus Institute, has also in recent years sought to bring together musicologists and philosophers from both traditions. This has proved fruitful not only in generating cross-disciplinary discourse and better understandings but also in leading to joint publications (for example, de Assis 2018). A shared interest in aspects of musical practice provides a common point of reference that allows disciplinary differences to be successfully negotiated. Participants in such exchanges can hope to identify elements in other traditions that can supplement the resources available in their own.

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88   David Davies Ridley, Aaron. 1997. “Not Ideal: Collingwood’s Expression Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 3 (Summer): 263–272. Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roholt, Tiger. 2017. “On the Divide: Analytic and Continental Philosophy of Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75, no. 1 (Winter): 49–58. Rohrbaugh, Guy. 2003. “Artworks as Historical Individuals.” European Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (August): 177–205. Rorty, Richard. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1956. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1. The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis. 253–329. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sibley, Frank, John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox, eds. 2001. Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanner, Michael, and Malcolm Budd. 1985. “Understanding Music.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59, no. 1 (July): 215–248. Taruskin, Richard. 2010. “Setting Limits.” In The Danger of Music and other Anti-Utopian Essays, 447–66. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Thomasson, Amie L. 2005. “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 3 (Summer): 221–229. Trivedi, Saam. 2011. “Resemblance Theories.” In Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 223–232. London: Routledge. Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 1 (September): 27–35. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1966. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and Its Objects. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1968. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1975. “Towards an Ontology of Art Works,” Nous 9, no. 2 (May): 105–142. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Young, James O. 1988. “The Concept of Authentic Performance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 28, no. 3 (March): 228–238. Young, James O., and Carl Matheson. 2000. “The Metaphysics of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 125–33.

chapter 5

Con ti n en ta l Phil osoph y of M usic Christopher Norris

What is Continental Philosophy? What’s in a Label? By “continental philosophy of music” I shall here mean the kind of philosophically informed writing about issues in musical analysis, criticism, theory, history, and ­aesthetics that has been produced by thinkers whose work is aptly described as belonging to the category of continental philosophy. It is notoriously hard, or, in the view of some partisans, downright tendentious, to specify just what is distinctive about “continental” philosophy as opposed to its “analytic” counterpart. At present, there are encouraging signs that philosophers on both sides are beginning to question the “two traditions” idea and its origin in a combative—not to say aggressively insular—phase of early analytic philosophy (Bowman 1998; Gracyk and Kania 2011; Hamilton 2007). Still, the continental label has been around long enough for it to denominate a number of approaches, interests, priorities, conceptual frameworks, and, not least, working terminologies that can fairly be called continental. In addition, there are some real (not merely notional) attributes of much that goes under the analytic label—what typically appears on music-related topics in Anglo-American journals of aesthetics, for instance—which continue to give the distinction some measure of substantive content. One of these has to do with the speculative character of typically continental thinking about music as opposed to the strong analytic proclivity for detailed analysis of the various concepts and categories that inform the discourse of received or accredited musical debate. This is a broad-brush distinction that invites all manner of case-­specific

90   Christopher Norris objections and counter-instances. Yet if the analytic–continental binary applies with good warrant anywhere across the current range of philosophical fields or disciplines, then it does so with respect to philosophies of the arts, especially those relating to literature and music. This is because the principal founding figures in the continental line, among them Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx, left such a legacy of complex and often problematical ideas in these areas that their inheritors have to press further out on a speculative limb than do those for whom they figure either as so many optional sources of insight or as so many cautionary instances of paths not to be taken. Kant is common property for both traditions since he managed to raise issues that have since provided their main supply of intellectual sustenance. In the cases of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx, however, it is only during the past decade or so that these thinkers have attracted sustained and non-prejudicial engagement from analytical philosophers, while even now it falls far short in point of refinement by comparison with the best continental commentaries. This means, in short, that there is indeed something distinctive about the work of philosophers of music whose experience of as well as thinking about music has been informed by continental philosophy. It is tempting to invoke Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science, the former (like mainstream analytic philosophy of music) getting on with the relatively everyday business of ­problem-solving with respect to a range of first-order issues while the latter (like its continental counterpart) raises questions and proposes far-reaching speculative answers that conform to no widely recognized normative agenda. Thus, analytic philosophers of music tend to address matters such as: What, if any, are the essential or constitutive features of (that which we take to be) a musical work? What, ontologically speaking, is its mode of being or existence over time under differing conditions of performance and reception? What, if anything, have issues of musical meaning or value to do with music’s (presumptive) power to express or communicate feelings and emotions? Or how, if at all, can the distinction between “form” and “content” be upheld in the face of reiterated attacks on any such crudely dualist conception? (See, for instance, Krausz  1993; Stock 2007.) Continental philosophers of music may well take an interest in such matters and themselves do a good deal of conceptual analysis, at least to the extent that they must show a constant readiness to reflect self-critically on the implications and presuppositions of their own discourse. Yet in their case, such critical reflection most often takes a very different form and aims at nothing like the same disciplinary ideal, that is, finding some definitive or clear-cut solution to some well-defined and hence properly soluble problem. For our paradigmatic continental philosopher, her project has more to do with exploring (or generating) new questions in the ever-challenging border zone between music and philosophy. Another way of putting this is to say that analytic approaches, in philosophy of music as in other areas, typically situate themselves at a once-removed level of conceptual engagement with what they set out to describe, explain, or analyse. This procedure has its source in the earliest days of analytic philosophy, when thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege encountered the paradox of self-referential expressions in set theory

Continental Philosophy of Music   91 (for example: “the barber who shaves every man in town except those who shave ­themselves”—in which case who shaves the barber?). This paradox threw a large spanner into the logical-mathematical works and persuaded Russell to introduce a rule which (arguably) avoided it. In brief, the rule distinguishes first-order (linguistic) from second-order (or higher-order, metalinguistic) statements and then requires that no statement court disaster by self-referring unless with that language–metalanguage distinction firmly in place so as to keep the levels separate. Whatever its merits, the Russell solution left a deep mark on subsequent analytic discourse, even in areas—like aesthetics or ethics—which one might think fairly remote from logic and the formal disciplines. On the continental side, conversely, the approach has very often taken a different route: not to legislate paradoxes away by stipulative fiat but to follow them through in a dialectical and speculative way to the point where they might be hoped to produce insights of an order unavailable to that other, more paradox-averse and rule-abiding discourse (Badiou 2005; Norris 2009).

Some Versions of Dialectic Analytic philosophy may be said to have started out from the prototypical—indeed ­legendary—road-to-Damascus moment when Russell abjured the dialectical apparatus of Hegelian idealism and launched an enterprise resolutely closed to such speculative pleasures and perils (Hylton  1992). Continental philosophy saw no reason for such abstention, and—by the same token—no need for that self-imposed rule of good conduct that required thinking to beat the bounds of proper (conceptually legitimate or wellformed) discourse rather than risk exceeding those bounds by pursuing notions that allowed of no such regulative limits. This means that when the arts are in question, and music especially, there tends to exist a much closer, more complex, and intimate relation between philosophy and its subject matter than usually obtains in the case of analytic work. Like Nietzsche before them, present-day continental philosophers are more apt to eschew the demanding yet self-protective rigours of a formal or meta-musical approach for the sake of an active dialectical engagement with the very process of musical thought. Thus a thinker like Theodor W. Adorno may well spend a good deal of time warning against the ideological perils of any Hegelian positive dialectic or any premature reconciliation of problems musical, philosophical, or political through the synthesizing power of imagination as expressed in musical form. Adorno suggests that only through a negative dialectic that steadfastly rejects such premature solutions can thinking retain its critical edge at a time of near total thought-control by various ideological apparatuses, while only in music that likewise holds out against the beguilements of the culture industry can we glimpse, however remotely, the prospect of a better life (Adorno  2002,  2006; Wittkin  1998). Otherwise, philosophy and music will both be condemned to underwrite the false promises of an affirmative culture that reinforces the conditions of human social servitude by blinding us to them. Yet for Adorno, just as for Nietzsche, music has its role not only in enabling the sharp-eared critic to diagnose

92   Christopher Norris the nature and sources of our current cultural ills but also in allowing us occasional, hard-won glimpses of those redemptive possibilities prefigured in certain musical works (see especially Adorno  1974). I am not saying that analytic philosophers are somehow immune to those works’ uncanny latent power to communicate such truths about aspects of the human condition. My point is rather that the dominant mode of analytic discourse, with its emphasis on philosophy as a metalanguage of conceptual exegesis, elucidation, and (where needed) critique, is apt to discourage the kind of intense dialectical engagement with music’s expressive and structural capacities that has been such a notable feature of continental work. Where the Nietzschean legacy shows through most strikingly—even in the work of thinkers who would reject many of Nietzsche’s still sharply provocative and, to some, repellent ideas—is in the way that it opened up certain musico-philosophical possibilities of speculative thought. When conjoined with the Western Marxist openness to speculative—that is, highly ­qualified—versions of socio-economic determinism, and with a range of other broadly dialectical modes of thought, together with a very mixed parentage out of Kant and Hegel, the result is a mode of philosophizing fairly described as “continental” and markedly distinct from the analytic norm.

Orders of Philosophy Above all, what sets continental philosophers of music apart is the extent to which they work on the assumption that issues of form, structure, meaning, value, or (more abstractly) ontological status can and should be treated in close conjunction with issues of politics and considerations from other disciplines of thought such as psychoanalysis and literary theory (for a range of such approaches within music studies see Cook and Everist 1999; Kerman 1985; Kramer 1995; Lochhead and Auner 2002; Solie 1993). It is this high degree of openness to (supposedly) extra-musicological sources, along with the penchant for taking a likewise broad view of what counts as a properly philosophical approach, that has led many analytically trained philosophers of music to regard their continental counterparts as hawkers of suspect goods. It is also the quality that has led those inveterately speculative thinkers to a mode of thought that engages creatively with music by suspending any categorical distinction between the second-order discourse of philosophy and that which philosophy takes as its first-order object or subject matter. Indeed, the manifest awkwardness of putting it like that—of having to acknowledge that music is both an object of philosophical interest and something that involves the ­philosopher-subject in a peculiarly complex and intimate way—is one complication in philosophy of music that continental thinkers have addressed. That is, they have not sought to exclude the element of subjective response but have tried—with or without the aid of phenomenology in the line of descent from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty—to find a place for it without retreating to a purely appreciative stance that gives up the quest for some objective correlative in terms of musical theme, form, structure, development, or other such specifiable attributes (Benson 2003; Ingarden 1986; Nancy 2007).

Continental Philosophy of Music   93 Thus there is rarely any question—as there often is among analytic philosophers of music—of a direct conflict of priorities between formalist and expressivist doctrines. If Kant (1998) famously (and problematically) wrote that “concepts without intuitions are empty” while “intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B76), continental philosophers know well enough that there is as much wrong with a formalist approach that ignores or denies music’s capacity to express or articulate feelings and emotions as there is with an approach that extols these latter while neglecting to offer any account of how they might be manifested through formal or structural properties. Some of Jacques Derrida’s most penetrating early books and essays were devoted to the way these two dimensions of the project of Husserlian phenomenology can be seen to induce a constant state of aporia—of unresolved tension, conflict, or undecidability—at certain crucial or symptomatic points (Derrida 1973, 1978). This was the starting point for Derrida’s own project of deconstruction, one that subsequently came to exert enormous influence across the whole range of the human and social sciences, musicology included. The fact that deconstruction has generally met with an indifferent, hostile, or uncomprehending response among analytic philosophers has a lot to do with its genealogy as a product of the thoroughly continental encounter between phenomenology and structuralism, or (more to the point) both between and within those two movements (see especially Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1973). For present purposes we can think of phenomenology as the mode of thought most responsive to music in its expressive aspects and structuralism as that which takes form—however defined or conceived—as the single most important aspect of music and the sole proper object of critical-philosophical attention. Instead of treating this as a conflict of views or doctrines between rival camps, deconstruction treats it as the kind of antinomy that is sure to emerge from any sufficiently rigorous reflection on the character of music and musical experience. Thus, for Derrida, phenomenology and structuralism are engaged not so much in a zero-sum contest for supremacy—as they are often represented in historical studies— but in a mutually interrogative exchange where each represents one of the directions that contemporary thinking must take in order to achieve an adequate grasp of its own scope and limits. If “a certain structuralism has always been philosophy’s most spontaneous gesture” then equally “what we cannot think in a structure is that by means of which it is not closed” (Derrida 1978, 159). Each is peculiarly suited to draw out the other’s conceptual, methodological, or indeed perceptual (in this case auditory) lacunae since each is the other’s opposite as regards the priority granted to structural or expressive properties. One could call this relationship dialectical—a matter of contradictions worked through to produce some resolution at a higher, more advanced level of thought—were it not that Derrida very often goes out of his way to stress that deconstruction is neither Hegelian nor (in any received sense) Marxist since it rejects the idea of progress conceived as knowledge moving stage by stage through successive contradictions towards ultimate truth. All the same, deconstruction (including deconstructive musicology) may be called dialectical at least in so far as it takes thinking about certain topics (among them the relation between formal structure and expressive content) to be inherently aporetic, that is, subject to antinomies, contradictions, or conflicts of priority

94   Christopher Norris which properly belong to such thinking. By “properly belong” I mean that the aporias concern issues intrinsic to any sustained, careful, and open-minded thought on those topics and cannot be legislated away by some Russell-style stipulative fiat or analytic policy-choice to treat them as delinquent notions or category-mistakes.

Adorno Versus Bloch This may help to explain why continental philosophy of music has so often been marked by passionately engaged and politically charged as well as philosophically far-reaching disputes between individual thinkers whom one might have expected to meet eye-toeye on most matters. A typical instance is Adorno’s lengthy falling-out with his erstwhile Frankfurt School colleague and fellow critical theorist Ernst Bloch (Taylor 1977). This arose chiefly from Bloch’s idea of music, along with every aspect of human culture, no matter how (seemingly) regressive or degraded, as capable of a different, hope-filled interpretation wherein it would strike the recipient as shot through with gleams of utopian promise (Bloch 1985, 1995). Adorno was himself not entirely averse to such thinking and sometimes permits himself passages that evoke that promesse de bonheur in a prose all the more haunting and powerful for its refusal to grant such promises except on condition of their breaking through against the utmost rigours of negative-dialectical thought. Nevertheless, what makes the dissension between Adorno and Bloch exemplary is that it allows no clear or valid distinction between issues that most analytic philosophers of music—as well as most music theorists and analysts uninfluenced by continental thought—would count as belonging to distinct or usefully distinguishable disciplines. Despite their emphatic differences of philosophical and socio-political-cultural outlook, Adorno and Bloch are agreed on a number of crucial precepts and commitments. These include (1) the inextricable link between modes of musical production/reception and the politics of culture, (2) the need for an adequately complex or, as Adorno insists, sufficiently “mediated” account of that relationship, and (3) the conviction—again more pronounced in Adorno—that this involves both detailed musical analysis of a more or less formal type and the kind of socio-critical analysis required to better understand the various levels and structures of mediation. From which they take it to follow (4) that the traditionally segregated practices of music analysis, musical criticism, music theory, historical musicology, and sociology of music are products of a highly suspect academic ideology, and (5) that only a dialectical, rather than a purely formal, logic can possibly have room for all this as well as maintaining a speculative openness to that which eludes its powers of critical-interpretative grasp (Adorno 1973). Furthermore, (6), the concepts required to stretch around such a challenge are not concepts whose sense, content, or range of application is thought of as static and clear-cut. Rather, these are concepts that may always undergo revision, refinement, or transformation if and when they come up against problems or resistances at any stage of the process whereby music and criticism enter into this peculiarly intimate yet dialectically fraught and reciprocally testing relation.

Continental Philosophy of Music   95

Genealogies German and French I hasten to add that I am not taking Adorno and Bloch—or Frankfurt-style Critical Theory in general—as typically continental. Still, their differences and their commonalities can give us a good handle for approaching what is historically and geo-culturally speaking an ill-defined topic. In brief: the term continental as applied to philosophy of music acquires both a reasonably localized genealogy in mainland Europe (the endlessly reworked conceptual legacy of thinkers from Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Nietzsche to Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida) and, consequently, a family resemblance—to use Wittgenstein’s (1953) handily capacious phrase—which reflects that shared range of sources and influences. My list of names in the previous sentence will strike readers as taking a very sharp midway geographical turn from Germany to France, or (in philosophical terms) from German idealism and its sceptical aftermath to phenomenology and its twentieth-century French reception history. Needless to say, this is only one way of reading the relevant history of ideas, although it happens to have become the textbook lore that informs most music-related treatments of that history. My point is that “continental philosophy of music” is a label most plausibly—or least prejudicially—interpreted as referring to the recent (roughly post-1990) uptake among music-oriented philosophers and critical theorists of a body of thought that equates with the mainly French reception of a mainly Austro-German philosophical legacy. And that encounter between France and Austro-Germany is the matrix for some of the most active and far-reaching debates in current continental philosophy of music. Having set the big-picture scene, I shall now focus in more specific detail on some of those debates as they have worked out in particular intellectual contexts.

Debates in (and beyond) Continental Philosophy Structuralism The French element of continental philosophy of music can perhaps best be summarized as a structuralist and post-structuralist take on themes descending from the broadly Idealist philosophical tradition. That claim, however, is very quickly challenged by the fact that developments in German thought from Kant to Husserl were themselves part of a longer-term legacy that started out in seventeenth-century Cartesian rationalism and continued not only through that line of descent but also, more directly, through another distinctive line which rejected anything remotely subject-centred or phenomenological (see Norris 2000; Schrift 2006). The most significant point of encounter between these is that between phenomenology and structuralism in the mid-century—an encounter that occurred primarily on the terrain of philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art.

96   Christopher Norris Merleau-Ponty had rather little to say about music, but the writings that follow his discovery of Saussure, Jakobson, and the founding texts of structuralism bear witness to his sense that issues of the utmost philosophical as well as creative-artistic importance were raised with uncommon pointedness and force by the impossibility of reconciling structuralist and phenomenological modes of thought (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1969, 1973). Yet this doesn’t mean that they cannot both be applied to the reading of texts or the analysis/interpretation of music and yield results that are all the more acutely revealing for that inbuilt conflict. It is Derrida’s (1978) point, and one borne out by a good deal of work in theoretically informed music criticism, that such conflicts are intrinsic to reflection on the character of musical works and the question—one of interest in a different way to some analytic philosophers of music—as to whether those works should properly be thought as invented or discovered. In other words, do they exist (as the musical Platonist would have it) in a realm of absolute ideal objectivity where it is the ­composer’s—and perhaps the performer’s—task somehow to make contact with them and then faithfully transcribe or project them from the virtual to the actual domain? Or is it not rather the case that composers and performers create or invent musical works with the material assistance of certain pre-existent tonal resources, harmonic conventions, melodic and rhythmic devices, and so on, but nonetheless in a way that brings something new and previously non-existent into being? (See Currie 1989; Levinson 1990; Norris 2006 for more on this.) Historically speaking, these rival views may be said to correlate with, respectively, the Classical idea of artistic forms as belonging to a fixed or timeless repertoire of ideal types and the Romantic idea of artistic genius as that which brings about a break with all such hand-me-down generic constraints. Structuralism tends to endorse the former, Classical view since it is premissed on an objectivist conception whereby a work’s structural elements are thought to exist in a certain pregiven set of relationships that are modelled on Saussure’s idea of language— la langue—as a network of immanent and purely contrastive “differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1959). Phenomenology tends to adopt the latter, Romantic view since it remains keenly attentive to whatever in a work of music, poetry, or painting goes beyond any currently existent range of techniques, conventions, or ways of ­listening, reading, or seeing. The continental way of addressing this tension has been influenced by those nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century thinkers—primarily Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Sartre—who set the course toward a philosophical mindset characterized by its strongly dialectical leaning, its phenomenological focus, its large allowance for historical factors, its consequent (Hegelian) concern with the complex and historically shifting structures of mediation between subject and object, and—subsuming all these—its often highly speculative nature. This is why continental philosophy of music has been less inclined to raise the issue about musical Platonism in its typically analytic form—are musical works discovered or created?—than to approach that issue not as one of musical ontology, but of coming to see the philosophical issue, like the work itself, as best engaged through the kind of investigative ­treatment that allows room for those problems and dilemmas in our thinking about music to inform our critical-interpretative modes of listener-response.

Continental Philosophy of Music   97

Phenomenology This approach is most notably the case with a philosopher-musician like Adorno, every aspect of whose musical, theoretical, and sociological thinking was driven by the desire to achieve not a working synthesis of those elements—a notion he deplored in Hegel and others—but a critical sense of the obstacles to any such synthesis when pursued with sufficient negative-dialectical rigour (Adorno 1973). That sense is also present in a good deal of French-language philosophy of music which comes out of the phenomenological tradition and combines an extreme sensitivity to details of melodic and harmonic nuance with a well-developed grasp of medium- and long-term musical structure and a striking capacity for evocative prose. One example is Vladimir Jankélévitch, the Russian-Jewish but French-naturalized philosopher-musicologist who wrote books about Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel, and whose work very clearly reflects the continental, and more specifically dialectical and phenomenological, bringing-together of all those constituent parts (Jankélévitch 1959, 1992, 2003, 2015). He also shows an interest in the cultural contexts of production and reception, and a constant readiness to go beyond the notes on the page or their auditory equivalent to reflection on music’s philosophical import. Among the many topoi that run through his work is that of irony, here conceived—after Socrates and Kierkegaard—as a subtle, often unsettling, and ethically charged dimension of thought and feeling which, in music as in poetry or fiction, is apt to challenge established ideas of interpretative method and truth (Jankélévitch 2011). It finds a more direct precedent in the post-Kantian poet-critics of the Jena School, among them Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, who raised this idea to a high point of doctrine (Simpson 1988). For them it signified the abyssal gulf that opens up beneath the interpreter’s feet once stable meaning gives way to unstable irony or once the regulated counterpoint of authorially controlled double-meaning gives way to a bewildering multiplicity of possible perspectives. Romantic irony of this sort—or the idea of it—became a watchword for avant-garde literary theorists and, latterly, for speculative musicologists of a deconstructive bent who appreciate its uses in subverting received notions of meaning, thematic develop­ acouement, formal unity, and so forth (Cook and Everist  1999; Nancy and L Labarthe  1988; Norris  1988). For Jankélévitch, concerned as he is with irony in its ­ethical aspect, the point is not so much to undermine all our certitudes but to emphasize how—in the encounter with certain kinds of text or music—irony can draw out otherwise unknown resources of interpretative sensitivity and tact. This is evident in his writing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French music where he discovers an extreme subtlety of thought and feeling that evokes, and indeed properly requires, an answering response in the listener. One problem here, as might be ­anticipated, is that those qualities have their local habitation in just that geo-cultural-­ temporal locale that engaged his deepest commitment. More than that: it is evident in many passages that Jankélévitch regards them as in many ways representing ­humanity’s best hope against other, as he thought, less humane, self-aware, and civilized e­ lements in European culture and political history. There is a danger of chauvinism here, or of

98   Christopher Norris presenting certain period- and culture-specific values as if they were of transhistorical or universal import. Paul de Man (1983) pointed to a similar liability in Husserl’s phenomenological project, namely the curious (and one supposes unwitting) trick of thought by which he flips across—as in the title of his late work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970)—from a localized (however large-scale) geo-cultural perspective to one that claims transcendental warrant for all human beings by virtue of their shared humanity. In Jankélévitch it is more a matter of privileging certain expressive traits that emerged most strikingly during a given period of French music and investing them with a normative or quasi-universal significance. His influence within musicology has grown since the American musicologist Carolyn Abbate translated his best-known book La Musique et l’ineffable in 2004. Abbate’s own work, likewise focused on twentieth-­century French repertoire and on Wagnerian opera—including a study of the first Parisian performance of Tannhäuser—reflects Jankélévitch’s conviction that bodily experience, rather than any form of abstract thought, provides our most vivid and immediate access to a realm beyond reach of express articulation (Abbate  1991; Abbate  2004; Jankélévitch 2003; for more, see Abbate and Gallope , “The Ineffable (And Beyond),” ch. 36, this volume; Merleau-Ponty 1969; Nancy 2007; and Nancy, “Galant Music,” ch. 50, this volume. Phenomenology is for them the discipline that comes closest to providing a philosophical account of such experiences, although it encounters a limit-point paradox in attempting to give voice to what avowedly eludes any possible statement. Abbate’s musicological work thus reveals the influence of continental philosophy in numerous ways, among them its drawing on literary-theoretical ideas from poetics and narrative theory, its emphasis on the performative or enactive dimension of music and language, and—not least—its constant invocation of structuralist ideas and motifs even when seeking to move beyond them. It also exemplifies my earlier point about the way that continental philosophy of music found its chief influences first in mainly German, then in mainly French sources or, more accurately, in a version of those same German sources refracted through the prism of post-war French thought. Thus her criticism combines an abiding interest in AustroGerman nineteenth-century opera not only with close study of its French reception-history but also with a theoretical approach deeply indebted to recent French thought. Perhaps the process of philosophical reflection on music is especially apt to generate antinomies like those of structure versus expression or universalism versus cultural particularism. In Husserl this took the form of a lifelong oscillation between the claims of “life-world phenomenology” and “transcendental phenomenology”: the former a mode of reflection rooted in the sensuous and cultural-historical specificities of human experience, the latter a more conceptually rigorous practice of abstraction from all such limiting contexts. Similar considerations arise with Ernest Ansermet’s Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (1987), a massive two-volume work by the Swiss conductor-musicologist-philosopher who offered by far the most ambitious attempt to extend Husserlian phenomenology to the domain of musical criticism, theory, and aesthetics. His book displays a strongly marked focus on French music, a bias toward contemporary (i.e., early to mid-twentieth-century) repertoire, and—subsuming these—a

Continental Philosophy of Music   99 systematic intention to establish tonality as the indispensable basis for any music that would claim to conserve and continue the great tradition of Western music. Beyond that, many passages strongly imply that Ansermet believes Western tonal music to possess certain virtues—of expressiveness, depth, harmonic resource, dynamic range, and so forth—that are not to be found in other cultures. What he proposes, in short, is a thesis concerning that tradition and its future prospects which tends, like Husserl’s in the Crisis, to alternate between universalism and cultural specificity, or a desire to stake claims of the utmost scope and an attachment to time-and-place associations much nearer home. Ansermet is nonetheless putting the case for a conception of music, its authentic character and rightful destiny—or path of development—that is point for point opposed to the conception advanced by those theorists who had placed the Austro-German line of Classical-Romantic descent squarely at the centre of their own elective genealogy (for example, Schenker 1979; for critical perspectives see Blasius 1996; Narmour 1977). For them, the great tradition was one that ran from Bach, via Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and/or Wagner, Bruckner, and thereafter any composer whose advocates could claim—with due warrant on the strength of detailed thematicstructural analysis—that they stood securely in that august line. The Ansermet– Jankélévich (basically Francophile) musical ideal was one that attached its highest estimation to values like harmonic subtlety, melodic grace, tonal nuance, delicacy of texture, orchestral colour, and the play of suggestively ironic inflections. The Austro-German ideal as handed down to present-day music analysts with a chief interest in the ClassicalRomantic tradition is one that mainly values attributes such as structural complexity, ­thematic transformation, tonal dynamism, and the long-range formal integration of maximally contrasting materials. Thus the two conceptions can be seen as involving yet another form of the generative tension between phenomenology and structuralism. Here it is played out as a cultural agon that pitches the claims of a civilized (sensitive and responsive) musical and critical discourse against those of a credo grounded on the one hand in a strain of national aestheticism and on the other in a doctrine that counts structural analysis—in whatever specific guise—the sine qua non of any criticism worthy the name.

Deconstruction and New Musicology I hope to have set the scene for more recent debates in continental philosophy of music where that old strife is still very active. First among these is a strain of deconstructive thinking that became prominent in 1980s and 1990s music studies. Sources for this thinking include Marxism, post-structuralism, certain kinds of (mainly French) feminist theory, psychoanalysis (most often a “French Freud” read via the structuralistinfluenced writings of Jacques Lacan), and that strain of radical antinomian thought taken up from Nietzsche by thinkers as different as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (some of these will be touched upon later in this chapter). What deconstructive music

100   Christopher Norris studies makes of these sources is a deep scepticism towards all notions of organic form, thematic integration, structural unity, and musical value (Kerman  1983,  1985; Korsyn 1993; Narmour 1977). Thence comes the resolve of deconstructive theorists to challenge the practice of music analysis along with what they see as its institutionally embedded, deeply conservative, and ideologically laden agenda. (See for instance Bergeron and Bohlman 1992; Cook and Everist 1999; Kramer 1993, 1995; Leppert and McClary 1987; Lochhead and Auner 2002; McClary 1991, 2004; Treitler 1989.) Analysis, as practised by mainstream music theorists, is taken to have a threefold aim: first, to establish Western art music’s high-art status and vindicate the claim in respect of particular works; second, to hold such works up as canonically acknowledged classics and thereby vindicate criteria of greatness; and third—in a perfectly circular fashion—to vindicate the analyst’s own claim to an order of perceptiveness, structural grasp, and professional competence that qualifies him or her as a worthy practitioner. The whole business as standardly practised in the best, that is to say, most accredited journals, books, and institutions of learning can be seen as a large-scale promotion exercise that both depends on those canonical works and creates the kind of academic culture where they in turn depend on the analyst’s best, most dedicated efforts to maintain their high standing. The musicologist Joseph Kerman was among the first to make this case in a hugely influential essay entitled, so as not to conceal its polemical intent, “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out” (1980). His argument—later developed into a book (Kerman 1985)—shook up the profession of musicology by questioning not only the idea of analysis as a core discipline but also prevailing conceptions of music history, musical criticism, and music theory. He advised taking a lesson from the recent history of literary studies and injecting a large measure of continental or continentally influenced theory in order to pose challenges to each of those (as he saw them) sclerotic and superannuated subdisciplines. The combined effect of exposure to (among other sources) phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, reception theory, and deconstruction would be to jolt music studies out of its jointly positivist and analytic slumbers and force it to confront the limits of its own philosophically naïve or bankrupt assumptions. Such had been the case in literary studies, Kerman maintained, where the joint hegemony of the “old” New Criticism and historical scholarship came under increasing pressure from continental imports from the late 1960s until they were compelled to vacate the intellectual high ground (compare Wimsatt 1954 and 1976). Much further back in this intellectual history, although Kerman doesn’t say as much, loomed the original falling-out between Britain and its New World colony as well as the American-French alliance of revolutionary interests that found a common inspiration in radical thinking and a common enemy in the British philosophy of empiricism. That history is subliminally present in the historical-cultural-intellectual background when the so-called Yale deconstructionists—Derrida’s cohort in the vanguard of US literary theory—deployed the ideas of continental philosophers as tactical counters against what they saw as the erstwhile dominance of a distinctively British tradition in literary studies (Hartman 1971, 1982). Certainly Kerman is looking to heterodox (continental)

Continental Philosophy of Music   101 ideas for something more theoretically substantive than their potential usefulness in dislodging an incumbent orthodoxy. Still there is more than a hint of that in the alacrity with which deconstructive music theorists and other adepts of what is sometimes called the New Musicology seize upon mainland European sources as a means of levering academic discourse away from its subscription to the Arnoldian idea of criticism as a ­second-order discourse inherently devoid of intellectual creativity or inventive flair. The most visible sign of this has been the turn against analysis—or against one specific, post-Schenkerian or principally Austro-German-derived conception of analysis— in the name of a larger, more theoretically adventurous and philosophically informed idea of what analysis might yet come to signify in a more expansive and inclusive intellectual culture (Kerman 1980; Narmour 1977). That turn has been prompted for the most part by a sense that analysis in its narrower applications—such as the strictly formalist approach of New Criticism or the protocols of Anglo-American analytic philosophy—is a mode of thought peculiarly blind to its own limitations and ideological agenda. Above all, the New Musicology (now widely seen as past its intellectual prime) sought to resist the idea of an intrinsically superior line of descent that places Austro-German composers firmly stage-centre and marginalizes music, such as that of Debussy, which fails to meet the specified standard. This was not, or not merely, a tiff between the upholders of two musical cultures with differing systems of evaluation as regards such (surely false) oppositions as structure versus texture, harmony versus melody, or—worst of all—­ formal versus expressive considerations. Rather it became a question of how far, and in what precise direction, thinkers about music were willing to press these issues towards a philosophical (and inherently speculative) mode of treatment.

French Feminism This question remains very much present in the case of music scholars influenced by the currents of thought brought together under the label of convenience “French feminism.” These include psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, a heterodox philosophy of language or discourse, and a highly critical take on earlier or non-French feminist ideas (Fraser and Bartky 1992; Irigaray 1991; Kristeva 1986; Moi 1987; Oliver 2000). Central to this approach is the idea of écriture feminine, that is to say, a mode of writing (not a style, still less a language) that may be thought to give feminine (not just biologically female) writers and readers access to as-yet-unstructured or patriarchally unprocessed libidinal energies and desires (Lacan 2006). One can see why this idea should appeal to feminist musicologists, or how they might transpose what French feminists say about practitioners of écriture feminine such as Virginia Woolf to a musical context where it likewise signifies the power of the Lacanian unconscious to disrupt and subvert the regulative structures of the socialized symbolic order. There is the version of this theory, best known through the controversial writings of Susan McClary, that compares the music of canonical composers—prototypically Beethoven and Schubert—in terms of a gendered opposition between two antithetical

102   Christopher Norris mindsets or (more to the point) two contrasted psycho-libidinal economies (McClary 1991). On the one hand are Beethovenian symphonic first-movement developmental structures that exhibit the presumptively male attributes of aggression, subordination, hierarchical order, categorical rigidity, and so on, and which thereby assert their formal claim to mastery over submissive (“merely” sensuous or female) melodic material. On the other are the more Schubertian kinds of development which allow melody its way with the structural course of things and gently though firmly resist any formal imposition—or structural-thematic-harmonic imperative—that would repress, restrain, or forcibly rechannel its natural expressive bent. Such thinking rejects any formalist or analytically oriented music criticism premissed on the classical ideas of organic unity, structural coherence, thematic development, or the ultimate integration of opposing forces through exercise of long-range structural control. There is analysis of a kind here but it is analysis deployed very much against the grain of what music analysis more typically aspires to do. This again invites comparison with the analytic–continental dualism as it figures in the lexicon and textbook account, if not so straightforwardly in the actual practice, of present-day academic philosophy. Thus the analytic variant, like musical analysis in its more resolutely score-focused versions, is typified by a programmatic aversion to what are regarded locally—and have been so regarded since Russell’s famous anti-Hegelian turn—as the speculative excesses of continental thought. Indeed, many of its central debates have had to do with issues in philosophy of language and logic that find a striking analogue in musical analysis. These included the much-discussed question whether individual words, thoughts, propositions, statements, or chunks of discourse (for which read: notes, phrases, themes, sections, movements) can be thought to make sense apart from their role in and syntactic-semantic dependence on some larger cultural-interpretative context (see Blackburn 1984). This context might be just the next size up or, quite conceivably, so large as to be deemed coextensive with the cultural horizon of linguistic or musical intelligibility at any given time. However, while analytic types in either field prefer to raise these issues in a formal way that sets their own terms for debate, continentally oriented scholars move quickly into areas—such as hermeneutics and deconstruction—where there is more going on in the way of complex inter-involvement between analysis and reflective or speculative thought.

In Structuralism’s Wake The years following the May 1968 événements saw a widespread shift in a generation of French philosophers and literary intellectuals from direct political activism to the kind of intensive theoretical engagement with issues in the cultural superstructure that enabled a certain strategic averting of one’s gaze from the melancholy failure of yet another large-scale revolutionary movement (Anderson  1976). Among the results of this superstructuralist ferment of ideas was the way that avant-garde writers and literary theorists looked to developments in the theory and practice of musical composition

Continental Philosophy of Music   103 (Harland  2002). Thus one finds Roland Barthes, in his extraordinary 1970 text S/Z, invoking the ultra-modernist composer Pierre Boulez on the topic of total serialism and treating it as somehow analogous to his own idea of the scriptible or “writerly” (= anticlassical and genre-subverting) text (Barthes 1975). What gave theoretical heart to this otherwise somewhat tenuous claim was the equation between tonality, or the hitherto dominant Western tonal system, and “classical bourgeois realism,” here conceived—in nascent post-structuralist terms—as a set of culturally enforced narrative-linguistic conventions that ultimately served the interests of entrenched socio-political power. And Boulez, sure enough, returned the compliment by citing Barthes and other writertheorists associated with the avant-garde journal Tel Quel as likewise engaged upon a thoroughly iconoclastic quest to challenge and subvert those interests (Boulez 1991). This pattern of reciprocal exchange has continued to be a prominent feature of French speculative thought during the past three decades. So Jean-François Lyotard, a leading proponent of postmodernism, turns to music as well as philosophy, literature, and world-political events in quest of further support for his claims about the postmodern “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard 1992, 1994). By this he means our supposed loss of faith in those large-scale, optimistic, ethically and politically confident narratives of nineteenth-century origin that told us that things were tending in a progressive, emancipatory direction (Lyotard 1984). Lyotard’s postmodernist rejoinder is to say that those master-narratives have broken down beyond hope of repair and that henceforth we had better get used to living with what he calls “first-order natural pragmatic narratives.” This works out in musical terms as the odd combination—though one that is growing quite familiar—of an Adorno-like emphasis on music’s development through stages of increasing tonal complexity to the point of Schoenberg’s atonal-serial breakthrough with an anti-progressivist agenda that requires contemporary music to repudiate all such suspect notions and emphasize instead its resolute indifference to values like tonal emancipation and the liberation of the dissonance. In their place, Lyotard substitutes the idea of the “sonic event” or geste that would, in exemplary postmodern style, exclude any further appeal to those purportedly obsolete values by presenting the listener with something—an auditory, sensuous, maybe tactile, anyway not harmonically or long-range thematically structured thing—that holds out against traditional (let alone Adornian) modes of analysis. Whether the non sequiturs and dubious claims have to do with Lyotard’s postmodernist conception of logic or his less than secure knowledge of contemporary music is a question I have not space to pursue. Other postmodernist writers on music take a lead from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze whose ideas, on the face of it, are much more amenable to deployment in this domain than those of Lyotard. One main focus of his work is the idea of intensive multiplicities, defined as those that involve an irreducibly qualitative range of values (like differences in heat or luminosity) and therefore cannot be precisely quantified or measured (Deleuze 1995). The distinction between intensive and extensive properties is one that goes back to Henri Bergson in the early years of the twentieth century and which goes strongly against the main current of Western philosophical thought. The great attraction of Deleuze’s metaphysics is that it opens the way to thinking of music as our best,

104   Christopher Norris most direct and intimate means of access to the experiential flux that—as Bergson claimed—precedes and underlies all the concepts and categories imposed upon it by inherited structures of thought (Bergson  2002; Deleuze  1990). This goes along with Deleuze’s replacement of the analytic dualism of possible vs. real with that of virtual vs. actual, a move that allows him to evoke the continuous passage through time and intensive modality of sonorous experience that is conveyed most vividly in music. Another theme from Deleuze that has exerted some influence on music theory is that of “minor literature,” conceived as literature produced by marginalized writers who, for a variety of geographical, historical, socio-political, cultural-linguistic, and biographical reasons, find themselves writing in a language not securely or “authentically” their own (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). This puts their writing closely in touch with what Deleuze identifies as the power of such texts (Kafka’s in particular) to turn that marginality around, so to speak, and put it to work as a means of opposing and subverting the values of a dominant language or mainstream literary culture. In musical terms this is most often seen as equating to the way that certain underground, counter-cultural, or officially sniffed-at modes of production and reception can exert their own kind of disruptive pressure on other, more orthodox or reputable modes. It connects with Deleuze’s various terminological innovations, all introduced with a view to resisting the operations of power in a social body characterized—as he sees it—by “molar,” “territorializing,” and “arboreal” structures for channelling and taming the unruly energies of an otherwise “molecular,” “deterritorializing,” and “rhizomatic” desire. Among his followers this is taken to signify a rejection of any analytic method, formal conception, or (quite simply) way of listening to music that sets up a tree-like system of hierarchical relations between the different levels or elements of a musical work. Indeed the very notion of “work” is under attack as hopelessly in hock to outmoded ideas of canonical status or organic form (Goehr 1994). Thus a Deleuze-inspired approach is apt to find its favoured instances in the practice of c­ omposers—like Luciano Berio, David del Tredici, George Rochberg, and Osvaldo Golijov—whose music complicates received ideas of unified or integrated structure.

Alain Badiou The contrasts between continental and analytic approaches that I have outlined thus far may help to explain why, for instance, a work like Alain Badiou’s Being and Event has received no attention from analytic philosophers even though it installs the mathematics of set theory at the heart of philosophical enquiry and does so, moreover, with ­constant reference to issues that are squarely in analytic philosophers’ own bailiwick (Badiou 2005; Norris 2009). The main trouble, from an analytic point of view, is that he raises those issues in a range of other contexts or connections that strike some as ­random, ill-assorted, or downright rhapsodic. Yet Badiou lays out the pertinent set-­ theoretical issues in exemplary analytic style, here taking the term in its properly evaluative sense. To that extent, it seems as though Badiou escapes the various categories of continental philosophy that I have proposed here without being enfolded into the

Continental Philosophy of Music   105 analytic tradition. Instead, he puts forward a singularly individual conception of the musico-philosophical nexus. By virtue of his bringing together such a range of intellectual forces, a slightly more detailed account of his work forms the culmination of this overview of continental debates. Being and Event combines rigorous exposition with speculative argument in a tour de force of critical-creative thought that yields nothing in conceptual precision for all its philosophically adventurous character. In crude outline, Badiou’s purpose is to specify the conditions under which there may occur genuine events—revolutions, inventions, breakthrough discoveries, moments of decisive and unpredictable change—brought about when some existing ontological scheme encounters irresolvable problems or anomalies and so gives way to another. Those conditions—science (primarily mathematics), art, politics, love—are what supply philosophy with its essential subject-matter since in itself philosophy has no such substantive contribution to make. Rather Badiou regards philosophy as the place where thought brings to bear the resources of set­theoretical reasoning so as to reflect on singular moments of transformation and also— crucially—to articulate the various orders of relationship between those four constitutive conditions of its own most productive exercise. In Badiou’s more recent work, music has figured with increasing prominence. One reason is that Logics of Worlds, Badiou’s second magnum opus and a sequel to Being and Event, is intended to answer one major criticism of the earlier work by providing a ­phenomenology of lived, that is, sensory-perceptual and real-world-situated, human experience to populate that work’s inherently austere ontological vistas (Badiou 2009). Among its more extended references to music are a remarkable discussion of Dukas’s opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and a somewhat more predictable account of the Second Viennese School which more or less follows René Leibowitz in treating the atonal-serialist revolution as, in terms of Western art music, a signal advance or paradigm event (Leibowitz 1949). Finally, Badiou’s subsequent study of Wagner strongly contests any version of the case against Wagner as some kind of proto-Nazi ideologue and argues that Parsifal can best be understood as marking the event of a purely secular (immanent) ­ritual or ceremony that involves no regressively mythical appeal to transcendent ­mysteries (Badiou 2010a). Badiou’s point is that moments of radical advance in any area, music included, are explicable only with reference to a certain decisive breakthrough whose advent was necessarily unforeseeable since it figured nowhere in the antecedent state of scientific knowledge, artistic technique, or affective-erotic relations. For him, the legacy of events such as these, in common with landmark political events like the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Paris evénéments of May 1968, is one that gives subjects the ultimate choice of working through their implications and longer-term consequences or falling back into reactive or counter-revolutionary postures (Badiou 2010b). By “subject” he means nothing like the traditional humanist or even Sartrean existentialist conception of subjectivity; rather it signifies the motivating factor, whatever that might be, that impels those militant for truth in various domains to keep faith with some past or present event whose occurrence may, at some future date, prove to have presaged developments beyond the scope of currently attainable knowledge. Thus knowledge and truth are utterly distinct, the former

106   Christopher Norris signifying just what falls within our cognitive or epistemic grasp at any given time, the latter that which we would—counterfactually—be able to grasp were it not for those gaps, unresolved problems, or (in logic, mathematics, and the formal sciences) moments of aporia that will only later be seen to have negatively indexed a future discovery. Badiou takes set theory as his starting point because it provides a rigorous basis for defining what counts retrospectively as a genuine event as opposed to those seemingly major occurrences that in truth possess no such binding force on the allegiance of later subjects. In this respect his is the single most powerful truth-based rejoinder to Kuhn’s doctrine of scientific paradigm-relativism, along with other modish cultural-relativist or “strong” sociological notions (Kuhn 1970). When conjoined with the phenomenological orientation of Logics of Worlds, however, it is also envisaged as showing how revolutions come about in spheres, such as that of music, where any such radical change must involve a lived or experiential aspect that is by no means explained or exhausted once account has been taken of its purely formal, structural, or mathematically specifiable aspects. The emphasis is on salience in worlds, or the relative degrees of prominence accorded to certain elements in a given composition, taking that term in the broadest sense that extends all the way from pictorial (painterly), musical, and literary compositions to the sociopolitical and cultural composition of this or that historical conjuncture. Those elements typically include human beings, most often occupying class positions marked out within a structural order of unequally distributed power and privilege, some of them accorded recognition—represented, acknowledged, or accredited—by the dominant “count-asone,” while others (like the sans-papiers or undocumented migrant workers) enjoy no such status. For Badiou it is precisely here, in the difference between elements belonging to and included in some given set, that modern set theory is able to capture what occurs at epochal moments in politics when—starting at some evental site or potential flashpoint—that ratio abruptly undergoes some radical shift and those who were excluded from the count thereby achieve an active and potentially world-transformative role. Badiou’s thinking about music is thus a curious mixture of: (1) a high-modernist conception premissed on the (Schoenberg-promoted) idea of Schoenberg and his school as inheritors of the great Austro-German legacy; (2) a phenomenologically oriented approach where French music tends to assume greater prominence; and (3), most prominent in his book on Wagner, a Blochian concern—sometimes expressed in opposition to Adorno—with the redemptive or transformative possibilities contained in what might seem unpromising works. In the words of the Internationale that he is understandably fond of quoting, “nous ne sommes rien, soyons tous” (we are nothing, let us become everything).

The Future of Continental Philosophy In this essay I have concentrated on ideas and movements in continental philosophy of music that I took to be of particular significance for three main reasons. In short, they merited treatment either (1) because they pointed up the difference between it and its

Continental Philosophy of Music   107 analytic counterpart, (2) because they figured importantly in the background of contemporary debates, or (3) because they seemed likely to presage future trends and developments. Thus the issue between phenomenology and structuralism, taking those terms in their widest sense, is one that will always emerge at a certain point in the process of reflecting philosophically on the relationship between feeling and form, expression and articulation, genesis and structure, or speech and language (Saussure’s parole and langue). These antinomies continue to trouble, provoke, and stimulate critical discourse, as do the issues about music’s socio-political pertinence raised most sharply between Adorno and Bloch, or the question as regards analysis—its scope, limits, and ideological baggage—posed so insistently by New Musicologists. If continental philosophy of music, like continental philosophy generally, may be said to denominate a set of approaches that possess a distinct family resemblance then it is because those concerns, and its ways of addressing them, are still quite distinct from anything to be found on the agenda of mainstream analytic philosophers. At the heart of that distinction as I have drawn it here is the extent to which continentally oriented thinking about music has involved issues of a depth, complexity, and speculative reach beyond anything envisaged by those who incline to pure-bred conceptual analysis. Indeed, as I have said, the two traditions can be seen to divide most fundamentally on just this question as to whether or not the very phrase “philosophy of music” is one where the genitive construction conceals a dualism of language and creative-artistic expression on the one hand and analytical discourse on the other. What unites all the continental thinkers I have discussed is the conviction that no such divorce can possibly do justice either to music or to philosophy.

Concluding Projections Any attempt to speculate on future developments in music and philosophy will need to start by asking what seem to be the currently most promising forms of this exceptionally close relationship. One promising direction already taken in literary studies—very often a bellwether discipline—is that of “creative criticism,” or a hybrid mode that combines fictive or poetic elements with speculative commentary either on literary texts or on issues in literary theory (Benson and Connors 2014; Norris 2016; Poovey 2000). This is just the kind of outcome one might reasonably predict if one envisaged a practice of music criticism jointly informed by phenomenology, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and also—crucially—the kinds of “post-analytic” thinking that have lately emerged among anglophone philosophers and music theorists alike (Rorty 1982, 1989, 1997). What these latter both involve, mutatis no doubt mutandis, is a willingness to press beyond received, classical modes of analysis to a point where reflection on their scope and limits produces a discourse sufficiently inventive to create or discover other possibilities yet retaining sufficient analytic (self-)awareness to make good its critical function. Something similar often happens towards the close of a period of high formalism, whether in the arts or in philosophy, when practitioners begin to

108   Christopher Norris chafe at the restrictions arbitrarily placed on their freedom to innovate in matters of style and technique. It was highly visible in the waning years of New Criticism as a dominant force in US literary academe in the late 1960s when some of the more creative (and hence more restive) amongst its erstwhile proponents began to explore the kinds of heterodox thinking that ventured beyond the tightly sealed limits of the poem as sacrosanct “verbal icon” (Wimsatt 1976; Hartman 1980). That ferment of dissident ideas, however arcane or non-world-shaking, can all the same be seen to have heralded the imminent arrival of another, this time continentally sourced, movement of thought—Derridean deconstruction—that decisively finished the job begun in such a tentative way by those first relatively timid shakers of the faith. My point here is that continental philosophy of music is currently in a fair position to undergo something like the efflorescence of critical creativity that characterized both Jena Romanticism in the period following Kant’s transcendental-idealist revolution in philosophy of mind and Yale deconstruction as it developed during the years just before and just after Derrida’s tumultuous advent (Simpson  1988; Hartman  1982; Bloom et al. 1979). The parallels are quite precise and revealing. In all three cases there is a movement through and, to some extent, beyond formal analysis such that its real ­benefits are conserved—especially its uses as a prophylactic against naïve expressivist doctrines or excesses of appreciative criticism—while its cramping effects are progressively undone by the powers of hermeneutic inventiveness. This brings about a creative transformation of conceptual resources that might offset, though without negating or countermanding, the effects of a critical-reflective approach to some of the more ideologically laden discourses of cultural value. Almost forty years ago, Roland Barthes lamented what he saw as the domestication of once radical-seeming structuralist methods, such as those he had pioneered in Mythologies, and suggested that from now on the truly radical thing to do was to practise a mode of writing that would challenge, subvert, transform, and reconstitute the structures concerned (Barthes 1977b, 2013). Only writing could do so, he thought, and then only writing which made the grade as veritable écriture, rather than everyday, functional-communicative écrivance. Such was the difference between “writerly” (scriptible) and “readerly” (lisible) texts, or those which prefigured, welcomed and celebrated and those which denied, resisted, or occluded that epochal event—the “death of the author”—which Barthes now took to be a precondition for the birth of the active, fully participant reader (Barthes 1975). Of particular interest in this regard is the extent to which Barthes articulated these ideas about literature with reference to music and, in particular, to that dimension of music that conjured a response beyond adequate description by any of the models, methods, theories, or philosophical conceptions currently on offer. His later texts include some exquisitely written and wonderfully evocative pieces about piano and vocal music—especially composers, like Schumann, whose works he loved playing—yet manage, precisely through nuances of style or idiom, to avoid ever having recourse to the kind of “adjectival criticism” that he once denounced as the last refuge of subjectivists, appreciative critics, and journalist-hucksters (Barthes 1977a, 1985). Roughly speaking, those essays occupy a zone surrounding some projected or imaginary point of

Continental Philosophy of Music   109 intersection between phenomenology, post-structuralism, semiology, somatics, and an as-yet non-existent (at least in disciplinary terms) erotics of writing, reading, and listening. If that point is off the map in current philosophical terms—if indeed it seems to elude any more secure or confident categorization—then this should perhaps be viewed by philosophers of music as a salutary challenge to their standard cartography rather than a sign that here be the dragons of post-structuralist theory. What it might restore to philosophical dignity is that whole bodily dimension in the experience of music that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology promised to retrieve and that has often been invoked by cultural theorists in revolt against overly abstract or cerebral modes of thought. Geoffrey Hartman, typecast as a Yale deconstructionist but the most creatively gifted and adventurous of literary critic-theorists, used to speak of “criticism as answerable style” at a time (the late 1970s) when he and his colleagues were tentatively feeling their way beyond the strictures of formalism (Hartman 1980). By this he meant a practice of writing that combined criticism with philosophical commentary (though not, most emphatically, in metalinguistic mode) and which also—an idea anathema to the New Critics—counted itself perfectly at liberty to use the full range of literary (for example, metaphorical) resources. Continental philosophy of music can find its own notable precedents for this in the works of, among others, E.  T.  A.  Hoffmann, the Schlegel brothers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, and Jankélévich. It is a mode of writing that would deploy its best creative resources to take criticism beyond the kinds of hobbling dualism—analytic versus appreciative, structure versus expression, form versus force, the Apollonian versus the Dionysian, and so forth—that have often seemed integrally or inescapably a part of what goes on when we think about music. Go beyond, that is, not by brusquely or casually setting them aside in some post-philosophical mood of boredom with all such problematic notions but in just the way that Hartman conducts his brilliantly suggestive critical-­ creative ventures beyond formalism, or Derrida his subtly probing analyses of numerous philosophical and literary texts, or Barthes his incomparably deft and revealing essays on literature and music. There are a great many ways that things might go with continental philosophy of music, given its diverse sources and aspects to date, but creative criticism of the sort sketched here is I think one of the most potentially rewarding.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 1991. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring): 505–536. Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Adorno, Theodor  W. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books. Adorno, Theodor  W. 2002. Essays on Music. Edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

110   Christopher Norris Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Translated and edited by Robert HullotKentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books. Ansermet, Ernest. 1987. Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Edited by Jean-Claude Piguet and Rose-Marie Faller-Fauconnet. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2010a. Five Lessons on Wagner. Translated by Susan Spitzer. London: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2010b. The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso. Barthes, Roland. 1975. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape. Barthes, Roland. 1977a. Image–Music–Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Barthes, Roland. 1977b. “Change the Object Itself.” In Barthes 1977a, 139–145. Barthes, Roland. 1985. The Responsibility of Forms. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 2013. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers and Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benson, Stephen, and Clare Connors. 2014. Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bergeron, Katherine, and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. 1992. Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, Henri. 2002. Bergson: Key Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum. Blackburn, Simon. 1984. Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blasius, Leslie  D. 1996. Schenker’s Argument and the Claims of Music Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1985. Essays on the Philosophy of Music. Translated by Peter Palmer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, Harold, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartmann, and J. Hillis Miller. 1979. Deconstruction and Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Boulez, Pierre. 1991. Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship. Translated by Stephen Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowman, Wayne D. 1998. Philosophical Perspectives on Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, eds. 1999. Re-Thinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1989. An Ontology of Art. New York: St Martin’s Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

Continental Philosophy of Music   111 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Man, Paul. 1983. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fraser, Nancy, and Sandra Lee Bartky, eds. 1992. Revaluing French Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gracyk, Theodore, and Andrew Kania, eds. 2011. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. London: Routledge. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum. Harland, Richard. 2002. Superstructuralism. London: Methuen. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1971. Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1980. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hartman, Geoffrey. 1982. Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hylton, Peter. 1992. Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingarden, Roman. 1986. The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. Translated by Adam Czerniawski. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1991. The Irigaray Reader. Edited by Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1959. Ravel. London: John Calder. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1992. Fauré et l’inexprimable. Paris: Plon. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2011. L’Ironie. Paris: Flammarion. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2015. La Musique et l’ineffable. Paris: Points. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1980. “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (Winter): 311–331. Kerman, Joseph. 1983. “A Few Canonic Variations.” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (September): 107–125. Kerman, Joseph. 1985. Musicology. London: Fontana. Korsyn, Kevin. 1993. “Brahms Research and Aesthetic Ideology.” Music Analysis 12, no. 1 (March): 89–103. Kramer, Lawrence. 1993. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

112   Christopher Norris Kramer, Lawrence. 1995. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Krausz, Michael, ed. 1993. The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Clarendon. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press. Leibowitz, René. 1949. Schoenberg and His School. New York: Philosophical Library. Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary, eds. 1987. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lochhead, Judy, and Joseph Auner, eds. 2002. Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. New York: Garland. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1992. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1994. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, Susan. 2004. Modal Subjectivities: Self-fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. Translated by Richard McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1969. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Moi, Toril, ed. 1987. French Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Narmour, Eugene. 1977. Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Music Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Norris, Christopher. 1988. Paul de Man and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology. New York: Routledge. Norris, Christopher. 2000. Minding the Gap: Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Norris, Christopher. 2006. Platonism, Music and the Listener’s Share. London: Continuum. Norris, Christopher. 2009. Alain Badiou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide. London: Continuum. Norris, Christopher. 2016. The Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism. London: Bloomsbury.

Continental Philosophy of Music   113 Oliver, Kelly, ed. 2000. The French Feminism Reader. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Poovey, Mary. 2000. “Creative Criticism: Adaptation, Performative Writing, and the Problem of Objectivity.” Narrative 8, no. 2 (May): 109–133. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Brighton: Harvester. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1997. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press. Schenker, Heinrich. 1979. Free Composition. Translated and edited by Ernst Oster. New York: Longman. Schrift, Alan D. 2006. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Oxford: Blackwell. Simpson, David, ed. 1988. The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solie, Ruth A., ed. 1993. Musicology and Difference. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stock, Kathleen, ed. 2007. Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Robert, ed. 1977. Politics and Aesthetics. London: New Left Books. Treitler, Leo. 1989. Music and the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wimsatt, W. K. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Wimsatt, W. K. 1976. Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Witkin, Robert W. 1998. Adorno on Music. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by G.  E.  M.  Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

pa rt I I

H ISTORY

chapter 6

A ncien t Gr eece Armand D’Angour

Where does music come from and what is its purpose? What effects does it have on listeners, and how can these be best exploited? How are the sounds of music to be described and analysed? Such questions were the object of keen inquiry by ancient Greeks, evidence for whose musical practices goes back to prehistoric times (Younger 1998). In the archaic, classical, and post-classical periods (spanning roughly a thousand years from around 750 bce), Greek writings present a vigorously musical environment in which emotional, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of music were subjected to a range of analysis and philosophical discourse. This extensive and sophisticated written record laid the basis for subsequent philosophizing about music in the Western world (see Bowman 1998; important modern contributions include Kivy  1984,  1997; Levinson  1990; Budd 1995; and Scruton 1997). Greeks attributed to the philosopher-sage Pythagoras of Samos (c.570–495 bce) the discovery that musical intervals can be analysed in terms of numerical ratios, as demonstrated by the way a vibrating string or a hollow pipe will produce different pitches when different proportions of their length are utilized: the octave is produced by the ratio 2:1, the fifth by 3:2, the fourth by 4:3.1 In the face of these phenomena, early Pythag­oreans ascribed a cosmic and ethical significance to music as they did to number. Music was esteemed as a tangible earthly counterpart to the mathematical pattern of the universe; and the ratios of musical attunement were believed by Pythag­oras and his successors to reflect the principle of cosmic order, the so-called harmony of the spheres, with the resulting sounds being thought to have magical and therapeutic qualities (see Rocconi 2009). In addition to sayings attributed to Pythagoras, the earliest evidence for Greek ideas about music is found in testimonies regarding the chorus director Lasus of Hermione (late sixth century bce) and citations of the sophist Damon of Oa (mid-fifth century bce); these were practising musicians and thinkers interested in analysing musical structures. Influences from these quarters, explicit or otherwise, are evident in Plato (427–347 bce) and his pupil Aristotle (384–322 bce), who along with later theorists also preserve discussions of epistemological, methodological, and metaphysical ideas

118   Armand D’Angour relating to music. Fundam­ental ancient categories of philosophical inquiry into the mimetic, inspir­ational, and ethical-emotive aspects the nature of music were laid out in the lengthy if unsystematic discussions in the dialogues of Plato, followed by the more methodical analyses of Aristotle. Subsequently, Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenus of Tarentum (born c.375 bce) made major contributions to musical theory in his voluminous writings, of which only Elements of Harmony (nearly complete) and fragments of other works survive. Later divergent treat­ ments of philosophical and theoretical importance include the On Music of the Epicurean philo­sopher Philodemus of Gadara (first century bce), the Harmonics of the mathematician Ptolemy (born c.90 ce), and the compendious On Music of Aristides Quintilianus (third century ce). In addition, the scholar-philosopher Athenaeus of Naucratis (early third century ce) provides important information about music in a discussion presented in his Deipnosophistae (Experts at Dinner); elements of all of these are valuably compiled in a work once attributed to the historian Plutarch now known as the Pseudo-Plutarchan On Music (perhaps fifth century ce). In addition to these writings there are around sixty “musical documents”, texts preserved on papyrus and stone that have come to scholarly attention since the sixteenth century, featuring ancient Greek melodic signs. The pitches indicated by the signs are known from tables preserved in a precious handbook that has survived in manuscript tradition from the time it was compiled in late antiquity (perhaps fifth century ce) by Alypius.2 Scholarship on ancient music, beginning with the important Renaissance treatise of Vincenzo Galilei Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna published in 1581, has focused on discussing and elucidating the ancient accounts.3 While the focus of attention has tended to be technical rather than philosophical, discussion has also revolved around the vexed question of the role of ethos—ethical character—in relation to the mimetic (i.e., representational or imitative) qualities of musical modes, or harmoniai. Modal ethos and mimesis were key concerns for Plato and Aristotle; but it should be noted that harmonia in archaic Greece (which has almost nothing to do with harmony in its modern sense) connotes something different from the scale-structures used in later Church music, and that Aristotle disagreed with Plato in many areas and details of the interpretation of modal ethos, as exemplified by his rejection of Plato’s commendation of the Phrygian harmonia as suitable for inculcating good character. Uncertainty about the precise sonic referents of such terms has meant that important modern discussions of ethos in ancient Greek music are prone to offer general reflections and analyses rather than to relate the issue to specific musical examples (see, for example, Lippman 1964; Anderson 1966; Mathiesen 1999; Halliwell 2002; Barker 2007; and in general Rocconi 2009). Musical referents are generally assumed to be available to be heard in discussions of more recent music, and this chapter attempts a novel approach to ancient Greek music by seeking to relate philosophical and theoretical discussions to what is known about how actual sounds might have been heard. (For a fuller account of this approach, see Phillips and D’Angour 2018.) The attempt to relate theoretical perspectives to ancient auditory realities has generally been considered an impossibility in view of the scant evidence for the actual sounds. However, a better understanding of

Ancient Greece   119 these sounds is clearly desirable, since faulty assumptions in this regard are bound to vitiate, if not altogether impugn, attempts to engage with or critique Greek philosophical approaches. If we seek, for instance, to understand what Plato meant by the calling the Dorian mode “manly” and the Ionian “effeminate,” it will help to know something of the sounds produced in practice by voices or instruments performing in those modes. The study of ancient music has also been bedevilled by excessively technical presentations and the unhelpful application of obscure ancient terms.4 In recent years, however, investigations into practical, organological, and ethnographic aspects of ancient performance have begun to illuminate how some kinds of music in ancient Greece may have sounded in practice (West 1992; Pöhlmann and West 2001; Hagel 2009).5 The task of relating these sounds to ancient musical philosophy may now be tentatively attempted: later in this chapter I discuss some actual examples of ancient Greek songs preserved on stone and papyrus, attempting to relate them directly to what we learn about music from philosophical and theoretical discourses.

Archaic Greece (c.750–500 bce): The Age of Epic and Lyric Song In ancient as in modern times, music was widely associated with religious worship and ritual activity. The Greeks believed that the gods were required to be honoured and gratified by sung invocations and prayers, and music itself was spoken of by Greek poets as being a creation and gift of the gods. The invention of the principal instruments of the string and wind families, the lyre and the aulos (double pipe), was attributed to divinities Hermes and Athena respectively.6 The found­ational literary figures of Greek culture, the epic poets Homer and Hesiod (eighth–seventh centuries bce), attribute the inspiration for their own musical practices and skills to the Muses, goddesses of song, dance, and story, who are invoked at the beginning of their songs. From the name of the Muses (Mousai) arose the technical term mousikē. This had a much wider connotation than our term “music,” embracing a variety of disciplines and genres as suggested by the names attributed to the goddesses by Hesiod that were indicative of their appropriate domains. Thus, Melpomene was later identified as the Muse of tragic song (molpē), Terpsichore the Muse of dance (choreia), and others of the nine Muses were assigned to forms of musico-poetic expression including epic song (Calliope), love songs (Erato), comedy-pastoral singing (Thaleia), and historical narrative (Clio).7 These genres are for the most part intimately wedded to discursive structures and semantic content, and their disparate character makes it difficult to ascribe to mousikē a uniform set of ethical or aesthetic categories. The musical idioms and styles of Greek song were in large part related to the natural musicality of spoken Greek: prior to the change to dynamic stress accents around the mid-second century ce, the language had a quantitative rhythmical structure and an

120   Armand D’Angour intrinsic melodic component (Horrocks 2010, 167). The rhythmic basis arose from the relative durations that were accorded in everyday speech to each syllable, which conventionally were assigned either short or long quantities. For the purposes of song, these were combined into more or less complicated regular patterns to which metrical names such as “dactyl” and “iamb” were later accorded. The melodic element of speech involved a rise or fall (or both) in pitch, usually on the vowel of one particular syllable of a word. These pitch-changes were eventually indicated by the writing of accents (acute, grave, and circumflex) over the vowels (Probert 2003, 3–8). Both the melodic and rhythmical elements formed inescapable aspects of archaic and classical song, or melos, a term that covers much of the poetic and literary output of ancient Greek song-culture. (For the notion of “song-culture” see Herington 1985, 3–4.) In the earliest literary accounts of musical practices, those depicted in the epics of Homer and Hesiod, music is presented as an adjunct to words and dancing. It is conceived as a divine gift to be enjoyed both in public (by Homeric audiences who invariably listen in silence) and in private. In a scene in Homer’s Iliad, the hero Achilles, having withdrawn from the fighting in anger at being slighted, “gladdens his heart” by singing of the feats of warriors, accompanying himself on an elaborately decorated lyre. The narrative of Homer’s Odyssey features two minstrels (evidently modelled on Homer himself) who are experts on the lyre (phorminx) and sing songs describing stories of heroes and gods, attributing their skill both to self-instruction and to divine favour (Homer, Odyssey 22.347). The sounds of the minstrels’ songs, which are likely to reflect Homer’s own output, may be speculatively reconstructed from the texts of epic poetry whose words preserve evidence for both their rhythm and melodic shape. The rhythm used by Greek bards was dactylic hexameter, called by Aristotle (Poetics 1459b34) “the stateliest and weightiest” of metres. In it, words are placed into a regular syllabic pattern consisting of six dactyls, a dactyl being ♩♪♪ or ♩♩ (the contracted form was always used in the last bar of each verse). The melody was likely to have accorded with the pitch contours inherent in Greek speech, with the melodic line restricted to a few fixed notes that follow the pitches to which the strings of the phorminx were tuned (West 1981 offers a speculative musical reconstruction). The general musical effect would have been formulaic, repetitive, and perhaps somewhat hypnotic; one of the key Greek terms used to describe its effect is thelxis (enchantment) (Halliwell 2011, 47–51). The assumption that epic songs were not melodically arresting or adventurous is supported by the fact that by the sixth century bce they were no longer sung to their original melodic formulae, but declaimed by professional reciters called rhapsodes. On contemporary vase-paintings, rhapsodes are invariably shown with an arm outstretched resting on a staff, rather than holding a musical instrument; and in the fifth century new musical settings of Homeric passages were performed by kitharodes, who sang to the accompaniment of the kithara (Power 2010). Meanwhile, new kinds of musical expression had been developed during the centuries following Homer, notably music used to accompany the solo lyric songs of poets (properly singer-songwriters) such as Sappho and Anacreon, and choral lyric songs such as those of Stesichorus and Pindar. Information

Ancient Greece   121 about how these poets’ songs and instrumental accompaniments sounded is virtually non-existent, though some indications can be derived from the texts themselves through analyses of rhythms and details provided of instrumental accompaniment. Prior to the appearance of a standard system of notation (first attested in the late fourth century and probably devised in the mid-fifth century bce), the melodies to which words were set are likely to have involved semi-formulaic manipulations of melodic shapes within a received framework of harmonic idioms. (One suggestion for a Pindaric melodic setting can be found in D’Angour 2013.)

The Classical Period (c.500–300 bce): From Lasus to Aristotle Alongside the mathematical approach to musical sound, Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries bce pondered the ethical aspects of music in relation to its role in forming character, promoting social harmony, and educating young citizens. Those influenced by Pythagorean thought made progress in investigating the acoustic underpinnings of musical sound, but alongside such scientific approaches the notion that music has a transcendent, divine origin and inspiration persisted. However, a distinction arose between the work of investigators of musical sound (mousikoi, “experts on music,” later also called harmonikoi, “experts in harmonia”) and its practical realization by singers, instru­mentalists, and choral directors. While musical composition and performance continued to follow their own practical logic, “harmonics” was to develop along its own path, eventually becoming (as music in mathematized form) one of the disciplines in the quadrivium of the Renaissance educational curriculum. Performers in the late sixth century bce are said to have made changes in many elements of traditional music, introducing fresh rhythmical and melodic forms and new harmonic modulations. Testimonies from contemporaries such as the poet Pindar and later scholarly commentators confirm the interest of the famous lyric poet and choir conductor Lasus of Hermione in questions of euphony and choral coordination. For example, he is known for having sought to reduce the unpleasant effect of clashing sibilants in the dithyramb, a ritual song in honour of Dionysus involving large forces of singer-dancers, first by removing the “s” from his compositions altogether, and later by reforming the performance arrange­ment from a line to a circle to ensure better visual and aural coordination (D’Angour 1997). The tendency towards greater complexity of melodic form and musical mimeticism brought critical reactions from traditionalists. Authoritative commentators from the late fifth century bce onwards tend to commend the simplicity and decorum of earlier music, in contrast to what they heard as the disreputable and excessive styles of later musicians, particularly the socalled New Musicians whose heyday was the mid- to late fifth century (see Csapo 2004).

122   Armand D’Angour The sophist Damon of Oa is quoted approv­ingly by Plato as insisting that “any change in styles of mousikē invariably leads to major disruptions in the political and social sphere” (Republic 424c). Taking his cue from Damon, Plato made his own determination of the right kind of music to be permitted in an ideal state by adjudicating on the presumed ethical dimensions of different modes. His discussions concentrate on the qualities of Greek song-poetry, and in particular on the ethos that might be attached to or associated with harmoniai, the specific harmonic structures recognized as underlying the melodic, non-polyphonic, expression of song (see Winnington-Ingram 1936). Plato’s main concern was that these harmoniai and the words to which they were sung have the power, via an unexplained process of mimesis, to affect the condition of the soul or psyche (psūchē). In consequence, he writes, those who are looking for the best kind of singing and music must look not for the kind that is pleasant, but that which is correct. An imitation would be correct, we claim, if it turns out to be like the object imitated in quantity and in quality. (Laws 668b4–7)

Different harmoniai were thought to possess distinguishable, intrinsic ethical qualities and effects: thus Plato claims that the Dorian harmonia is “manly and conducive to courage,” the Phrygian harmonia “represents moderation,” while the Lydian is “effeminate and over-emotional” (Republic 398d–e). He gives no account of how a particular ethos arises from the sounds produced by these harmoniai, whether on voice or instruments. Crucial to understanding the scope of Plato’s concern and of the ethical issues raised by him is the fact that the mousikē on which he focuses his attention is attached to a verbal compon­ent in genres such as epic, lyric, or tragic poetry. Although by the time of Lasus the nature and effect of musical sound was analysed separately from those of words, Plato argued that logos, which means both “reason” and “speech,” was central to all human activity. This led to his repudiation of purely musical sounds, whether they were melodic, rhythmic, or instru­mental effects, as insusceptible to and unworthy of philosophical examin­ation (Laws 669e). Given that the use of any particular harmonia was regularly associated with the singing of specific musico-poetic genres, it may seem surprising that the philosophers did not consider (as Philodemus was later to argue) that the different effects of harmoniai arose largely, if not wholly, from the semantic associations of the texts with which different harmoniai were traditionally associated. Plato’s ethical focus was to mean that issues of musical aesthetics long remained undeveloped in ancient Greek thought. Alongside his ethical preoccupations with mousikē, however, Plato acknowledged en passant that music as such can provide straightforwardly auditory pleasure. In the dialogue Philebus (51d), we read: Sounds which are smooth and clear and emit a single pure note are beautiful, not relatively, but absolutely, and there are pleasures which relate to these by nature and result from them.

Ancient Greece   123 Plato’s recognition of the sheer sensual power of sound is clear from his concern in his Republic that a young man should not be “unharmonized” by allowing music “to captivate his soul with its piping, and to pour into his soul through his ears, as through a funnel, the sweet and soft and mournful harmoniai, so that he spends his whole life humming, enraptured by song (melos)” (Republic 411a5–9). The pleasure afforded by musical sounds could, however, be guided to good purpose through the use of reason (logos): The function of compositions that make use of audible sound is to express harmony. Harmony has motions akin to the revolutions in our souls; it is a gift of the Muses if we engage with it intelligently, i.e., not for the sake of irrational pleasure in the way most people now make use of it, but as an ally for bringing order to the revolutions in souls that have lost their harmony so as to restore them to concord.  (Timaeus 47c7–d7)

Plato’s admission that “irrational pleasure” (alogos hēdonē, in literal terms “pleasure without logos”) is what most people derive from music indicates that the predominant response was held to be an aesthetic one: an engagement of the senses with musical sound rather than an ethical or cognitive approval of a song’s poetic content. But Plato advised that in practice the choice of mousikē should be guided by the judgements of older and wiser men whose notions of pleasure were better informed than those of the man in the street: I agree with the majority that pleasure is a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure felt by just anybody. The finest productions of the Muses are the ones that appeal to men of high caliber and good education, and particularly to those whose education and moral standards are superior to others.  (Laws 658e6–659a1)

Aristotle and Musical Aesthetics Aristotle took his cue from Plato by taking the mimetic basis of music as his point of departure. He argues in Politics that since music influences the character or disposition of those who listen to it, it must involve the right kind of ethical representation: Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. (Aristotle, Politics 1340a)

Aristotle takes leave of Plato, however, in arguing that music can reasonably be used for purposes of recreation and pleasure rather than solely for education, and that even purely instrumental music can be a means of relaxation and enjoyment:

124   Armand D’Angour It is generally agreed that the conduct of life should allow not only goodness but pleasure, since happiness comes from a combination of the two. We all say that music, whether purely instrumental or accompanied by song, is one of the most pleasurable things there is.  (Politics 1339b)

Despite this acknowledgement of the frankly aesthetic appeal of music per se, we find no systematic explanations of how the distinctive elements of musical sound—its specific rhythms, harmoniai, instrumental timbres, and so on—achieve their effects, pleas­ur­a­ble or otherwise. A writer of Aristotle’s school outlines an argument of the kind that the philosopher himself might have proposed: Why does everyone enjoy rhythm and melody and all concordant sounds? Is it because we naturally enjoy all natural movements? An indication of this is that children enjoy these from the moment they are born. We enjoy different kinds of melody because of their ēthos, but we enjoy rhythm because it is divided up in a distinctive and regular way and moves us in an orderly manner. Orderly movement is more closely akin to us than disorderly, so is more natural.  (Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 19.38)

Even if it were accepted that what is “natural and orderly” is a prerequisite for pleasure (and the Greeks themselves were often uncomfortably aware that unnatural soundeffects and irregular rhythms could be no less appealing to listeners), surviving ancient treatments give limited help in explaining how music achieves its impact in practice. Moreover, while Aristotle was still wedded to the notion that certain kinds of music created different ethical states in listeners, others were already inclined to deny it: the anonymous philosophical author of the Hibeh musical papyrus argues that empirical observation proves that different musical styles cannot engender the ethical qualities that are claimed as their effects.8 The strongest rebuttal of the idea of musical ethos emerges in the incompletely preserved work of the Epicurean writer Philodemus of Gadara, writing in the first century bce. Philodemus asserts that musical sound evokes solely aesthetic responses, and that the ethical effects of music arise solely from the words it accompanies. The function of music, he argues, is to provide pleasure or entertainment through sound alone, which plays no part in rational thought: Musicians also produce pieces which have no significance, such as instrumental music and trills . . . Men like Pindar and Simonides were not simply musicians, but musicians and poets: it is as musicians that they gave pleasure, and as poets that they wrote the words.  (On Music 4, 143.17–21, 27–33)

Coming after and opposing the attempts by Plato and Aristotle to find an ethical basis for music (particularly for educational purposes), such a view might be characterized as “reductive” (Halliwell  2002, 242). Philodemus’s thoughts may be related both to the argument of the Hibeh papyrus author and to modern debates about musical formalism, but he does not form part of a continuous tradition of musical philosophizing. It is

Ancient Greece   125 noteworthy that he raises a distinction between music and words in the work of two named lyric poets—a rare example of comment on the specifically musical effects created by particular ancient composers whose music the author would have been in a position to hear performed. Even less common is comment on the music of a particular song or section of song. A passage in which Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the first century bc, analyses the musical effects of some lines of a Euripidean choral song is unusual enough for Pöhlmann and West (2001, 10–11) to accord it the status of a “document of ancient music” in its own right. There is no similar commentary that might allow us to understand better the way the melody or rhythm of, say, a song of Sappho or a passage from a Homeric hymn were heard in ancient times. Rare and passing mention is found in classical writers about the musical effect of the works of composers such as the tragedian Phrynichus of Athens, who “was always sipping on the nectar of ambrosial melodies to bring forth sweet song” (Aristophanes, Birds 748–751; cf. Wasps 220); or Tynnichus of Chalcis, whose paean (prayer to Apollo) “is virtually the most beautiful of all songs” (Plato, Ion 534d5–e1). Nowhere do we find an articulation of the reasons why particular melodies should be honoured for such qualities as sweetness or beauty, let alone a description of their specific musical features. Of course, having an understanding how a particular song or piece of music sounded is not the same as having a sense of how it was heard by listeners in ancient times. The comic parodies of the dramatists’ songs in Aristophanes’s Frogs perhaps offer the most valuable (if partial and, given the context, exaggerated) evidence for the way the effects of melody or rhythm in specific instances might have been received by contemporaries. Otherwise we are largely dependent on authors of the Roman period and later for scattered and unsystematic insights into the musical impact of songs or poetic compositions. Thus, the grammarian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century bce) illustrates the way specific Homeric verses were felt to deploy rhythmic effects, while Pollux (second century ce) preserves details about the structure and intended effects of the Pythian Air (see West  1992, 212–213). Aelian (early third century ce) records how the sixthcentury statesman Solon of Athens, entranced by his nephew’s singing of a melos of Sappho, expressed the feeling that he might happily die if only he could be taught to perform the piece (fr. 187). As neither the poem in question nor the precise basis of Solon’s enthusiasm is identified, it is unclear how far the reported response should be thought to relate to the words of the song rather than to its rhythmic or melodic expression or to the particular vocal and instrumental virtues displayed on the occasion. The ecstatic response to a song performance is likely to have depended on a combination of all these factors; but the attempt to find musical commentary on a particular text is particularly impeded by the tendency of ancient authors to conflate words and music when commenting on the effect of mousikē. Many modern scholars of ancient music overlook this tendency due to the modern predilection for understanding music as distinct from semantic content. (For an approach to distinguishing words from music in ancient discussions of mousikē, see D’Angour 2015.) When the literary critic Longinus many centuries later (the date of his treatise is not certain, but is generally thought to be

126   Armand D’Angour third century ce) presents a descriptive interpretation of a specific song by Sappho, the musical dimension is wholly submerged: his treatment of a substantial portion of the poem deals exclusively with style and imagery (Longinus 10). What might account for the apparent lack of interest by ancient authors in recording and preserving the specific melodies that formed such a large part of their musico-literary heritage? One element is that while melody was not a negligible aspect of a song’s power in ancient ears, it was in theory secondary to rhythm.9 Although the particular musical realization of a song might have made a difference to its reception, the absence of comment on the nature of a melodic line or passage from the classical period may suggest that in many cases the tune was not considered to be a fixed and memorable feature of the poet’s composition. This thesis is consistent with the fact that the philosophers’ and musical theorists’ emphasis is less on melody than on harmonia.10 In the absence of a system of vocal notation classical poet-composers and singer-performers may have employed variable, orally-transmitted melodic motives conforming to appropriate harmoniai (see D’Angour 2011, 203–204). As with oral folk music traditions universally, melody will often have been applied in a flexible and relatively free fashion.11 Consequently, the melodies of most sung texts until around the mid-fifth century might seldom have been determinate or carried significant authorial status. Strikingly, no ancient source raises the distinction between the words of a song and its music as such. The disposition of rhythm, however, which was a function of the syllabic quantities of words, was to a greater extent at the author’s command, and during the earlier period of Greek musical history, when standard rhythms were being established, metre was considered of greater importance than melody.12 But equally, the rhythms that arose from words—iambic (∪ − ∪ −/∪ − ∪ − . . .), dactylic (− ∪ ∪/− ∪ ∪ . . .), paeonic (− ∪ −/− ∪ ∪∪ . . .), and so on—­ rapidly became conventional within their generic contexts. Although a few individual composers, most strikingly the fifth-century poet Pindar and the dramatists of the period (the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comic poet Aristophanes) in their choral compositions, created new and original bodies of rhythmical movement for their songs, the rhythmic effects of a particular song or passage tended to attract notice in ancient sources only if they were heard as being wilfully unconventional.13

Rhythm in Musical Texts In addition to the songs that survive solely as literary texts, some precious fragments of ancient Greek music survive inscribed on stone and papyrus, and detailed explanations of the notation used in these documents are preserved from late antiquity. The fragments offer invaluable indications of how ancient music and song were heard and played in practice, and provide a new basis for evaluating philosophical approaches to ancient music. Scholarly work in recent decades (West 1992; Pöhlmann and West 2001) has led to a more or less accurate transcription into modern musical notation of the bulk of musically notated papyri and inscriptions. What remains to be done is to elicit musical

Ancient Greece   127 sense from the scores, a task that has hitherto led to expressions of frustration such as “that way madness lies” (Matthiesen 1999, 5). Before considering the evidence of these melodic “scores,” it is worth attempting to extract the way rhythms inherent in Greek texts might repay analysis of their musical effects. The late Roman musical author Aristides Quintilianus writes: Long syllables create magnificence in diction, short ones the opposite . . . Feet in which long syllables come first, or cannot be resolved, or form the foot’s boundaries, or are in the majority, are the most elegant and dignified . . . Those in which short syllables predominate are plainer and less elevated.  (Aristides Quintilianus 2.11.35–42)

In practice, the composition of verses using predominantly long or short syllables creates a far greater variety of effects than those described. Some of these are obviously intended to be mimetic. Thus we find in the Iliad a wholly spondaic verse (twelve long syllables), the sound of which clearly aims to represent the emotional keening of Achilles over his slain companion: “repeatedly calling on the spirit of poor Patroclus” (Iliad 23.221). Elsewhere, predominantly dactylic verses depict the agitated galloping of mules (Iliad 23.116) or (in the Odyssey) imitate the clattering descent of Sisyphus’s rock as “the irrepressible boulder tumbled back down to the plain” (Odyssey 11.598). Such metrical onomatopoeia is combined with suggestive assonance and consonant clusters representing the rattling of hooves or the clattering of the boulder over rocks. Verbal music of this kind, of which many instances of a more subtle kind may be detected, is more regularly found in Latin verse; however, the occasions for purely mimetic effects in poetry are infrequent, and programmatic effects would become hackneyed if overused. While the above examples point to an undoubted awareness of Greek musician-poets and their followers that metrical devices, along with other aural techniques, might be employed for musical function and effect, they are rarely highlighted in this way by ancient theorists, who tend to concentrate on the imagery evoked by a poet’s choice of words rather than on the qualities of rhythm and sound. This may be because metrical effects were largely taken for granted; and it is also significant that the dynamic rhythm (i.e., the pulse) of Greek verse may have been articulated by bodily movement as much or more than in the enunciation of words. Aristides writes: Rhythm as a whole is perceived by these three senses: sight, as in dancing; hearing, as in melody, and touch, by which we perceive, for instance, the pulsations of our arteries. Musical rhythm is perceived by two of them, sight and hearing. In music, rhythm is imposed on the movement of the body, on melody, and on diction, either on their own or in conjunction with the others.  (Aristides Quintilianus 1.13.16–22)

While bodily sensation is the basis for both the generation of rhythm and its appeal, the purely quantitative study of metre elides any presence of a felt pulse. Aristoxenus speaks of arsis and basis in metrical feet, terms which refer literally to the “raising” and “stepping” of a dancer’s feet or body (the term thesis for “placing” is later more common), but he leaves unclear how the rhythmical pulse of a particular metre was heard in practice.

128   Armand D’Angour A few instances of the use of diacritical marks on the musical documents, in the form of dots or points (stigmai) placed above syllables and indicative of arsis, give pointers to how certain rhythms may have worked in practice. While they give invaluable indications of the rhythmic feel of some metrical systems, they equally demonstrate that we cannot wholly rely on our own rhythmic assumptions or aesthetic intuitions when attempting to appreciate the pulse underlying Greek metre. The discrepancy is demonstrated when we consider the metre of the Seikilos song, a complete four-line ditty dating from the second century ce, inscribed on a marble column (Pöhlmann and West 2001, 88–91). It may be translated thus to preserve a sense of its rhythm and rhyme: While you live, shine bright; don’t let sorrow you benight; We don’t have life for long, my friend; To everything Time demands an end.

The song’s metre is in theory iambic (the basic unit being short–long–short–long ∪ − ∪ −, or long–long–short–long − − ∪ −), and it contains both syncopation (literally elided beats, for example, ∪ − ∧−, but in vocal practice a prolongation of syllables) and resolution (two short syllables in place of a long one, for example, ∪ ∪∪ ∪ − for ∪ − ∪ −). In the absence of other indications, the second line of the song, standardly scanned in the Greek text − ∪ ∪ −/∪ − −, is likely to be read with dynamic stresses on the long positions and a compensatory shortening of the value of the double-short element, creating a somewhat insistent and offbeat effect (cf. West 1982, 23–24). The duration-signs and stigmai show, however, that the intended rhythm of those words had evenly spaced pulses, as indicated by the modern transcription in Example 6.1. The balanced musical phrases seem designed to have a tranquil and measured effect, well suited to the meaning of the song. The composition also reflects a surprisingly familiar sensibility regarding melodic shape: there are, for example, mimetically falling cadences on the word “benight” and on the plangent last syllable of the song. In its general musical effect, the melody of this late pagan music would not seem out of place in the context of Gregorian chant from seven centuries later. It seems

Example 6.1  “While you live, shine bright; don’t let sorrow you benight; we aren’t alive for long, my friend; to everything time demands an end.” Seikilos Song, transcribed from an ­inscription on stone (2nd century AD). Transcription and translation by the author.

Ancient Greece   129 perverse to rule out a connection (as scholars have been inclined to do) to the earliest acknowledged Christian roots of the Western musical tradition. Another instance of counter-intuitive rhythmic indications, this time from the classical period, appears on the papyrus fragment that contains part of a choral ode from Euripides’s Orestes (lines 338–344), including what scholars generally suppose was Euripides’s own musical setting. The ode is in dochmiacs, a metre found in choral passages in every extant Greek tragedy and known for exhibiting qualities of agitation or passion, as the accompanying words here (“I weep, I weep for you! Your mother’s blood is driving you to frenzy!”) make explicit. The agitation is inscribed into the metre’s irregular pattern of heavy and light syllables, and is intensified by its tendency to admit extensive resolution (the replacement of a heavy position by two light ones) and to drag syllables so that they become heavy where they are standardly light in that position of the metre. The basic dochmiac colon is ∪ − − ∪ − (short–long–long–short–long), and when a reader stresses the heavy positions, the result is the rhythm of the mnemonic “the wise kangaroos [. . . di dum] / prefer boots to shoes [. . . di dum].” This realization of the metre also serves to regularize it by attributing syllable durations to each metron of 1–3–2–1–3 [+2] (i.e., ending with two beats’ rest). This regularization, however, does not respect the ratio of 2:1 that ancient musical theorists propose as the standard relation of heavy to light syllables: the correct time-durations of syllables in a pair of conjoined dochmiac cola should be 1–2–2–1–2/1–2–2–1–2. The papyrus marks stigmai over the first and third syllables, thus indicating that the dancer’s feet should rest on the ground on the second and fourth + fifth elements of the pattern. If these syllables bore the resultant dynamic stress, a very different effect emerges: a more accurate mnemonic (with stresses italicized) would run “that ol’ man river, he jus’ keeps rolling” (see D’Angour 2006b, 491–492). The correct time-durations splits the colon into an unequal ratio of syllable durations (3:5), reinforcing what ancient musical authors speak of as the mixed rhythm of the dochmiac: with its cross-rhythms and offbeat stresses, this was a naturally agitated rhythm. The offbeat nature of the dochmiac bespeaks a connection between the use of particular metrical patterns and the evocation of different kinds of aesthetic appreciation. “Compound rhythms are more emotional,” writes Aristides, because the rhythms which constitute them are generally unequal. The impression they give is turbulent, because the pattern by which they are constructed doesn’t keep the same order of parts—sometimes starting long and ending short, sometimes the reverse, sometimes starting with a downstep and other times not . . . By imposing a diversity of movement on the body they lead the mind into great ­confusion.  (Aristides Quintilianus 2.15.34–44)

In a fragment from an early fifth-century satyr-chorus by Pratinas of Phlius, the dram­a­ tist employs a medley of different metrical cola, drawing explicit attention to the agitated conflict of rhythm and melody by coining an extravagant compound word “rhythm-tune-step-violating.” With their effusive verbal expressions, the satyrs

130   Armand D’Angour c­ondemn the transgressive volubility of the aulos, mimicking through sound and rhythms the restless excitement aroused by the instrument’s sonic effects: What commotion is this? What are these dance-steps? What outrage has reached the noisy altar of Dionysos? . . . . . . . . . . . . Strike the pipe with its breath of dappled toad! Burn the spit-consuming reed with its deep-voiced chatter, the rhythm-tune-step-violating body moulded by the drill! (Pratinas, Poetae Melici Graeci 708:1–2, 10–12)

The surviving lyrics of late fifth-century New Musicians such as Timotheus of Miletus demonstrate a similar rhythmic freedom and exuberance of a kind that made them feel strikingly lawless to musical traditionalists, but ensured their widespread popularity and continued appeal for centuries (Csapo and Wilson 2009).

Melody, Voice, Instruments Sound quality and melodic composition are no better served by ancient comments and analyses than are rhythm and metre. The Greek term commonly used to commend a quality of musical sound produced by voices or instruments is ligus, “clear” or “penetrating.” An Aristotelian commentator describes the quality as being pure and concentrated, like the voices of cicadas, grasshoppers, and nightingales, and generally like any pure vocal emission with no extraneous noise mixed in. It is characterized not by loud volume, low register, or interacting sounds, but by a high-pitched utterance that is pure and well-defined.  (Pseudo-Aristotle, De Audibilibus 804a21–28)

Ligus is found with reference to both human and animal voices, and to instruments that include both the lyre and the aulos. The appreciation of sonic qualities was bound to be partly a matter of taste, which Plato connected to the moral inclinations of individual hearers: People to whom what is said or sung or performed in any way is congenial (on the basis of their nature, habits, or both together) enjoy them and praise them, and are bound to call them good. Those to whose nature or disposition or habit they are contrary cannot enjoy or praise them, and must call them bad.  (Plato, Laws 655d7–e5)

Aristides Quintilianus follows Plato’s lead in connecting the enjoyment of particular instruments to the way these seem to imitate the particular ēthos of a hearer: Just as no one kind of voice or harmonia is pleasing to every listener, but one gives delight to some and another to others, so with instruments, whatever sounds a

Ancient Greece   131 ­ articular character resembles will lead him to enjoy and approve of the correp sponding instruments.  (Aristides Quintilianus 2.16.17–22)

Plato insisted, as we have seen, that music can only be judged good if it is correct in its imitation of action and character. But how should such correctness be interpreted in practice? As regards the use of instruments, Plato proposed banning the aulos altogether from his ideal state, not because of the sounds it produced (though its sheer volume and volubility may have added to its excessive and disreputable associations) but because of its suspect “panharmonism,” that is, its ability to be played in all the different harmoniai. Such versatility attested to its promiscuous character by comparison with instruments such as the lyre, whose strings would have to be tuned to one particular harmonia and ideally would not be required to deviate from that mode.14 Styles of musical composition should similarly be restricted, in Plato’s view, to what is appropriate and fitting in mimetic terms: The Muses would never make so gross an error as to compose words suitable for men and then give the melody a colouring suitable to women, to put together a melody and postures of free men, and then fit to them rhythms proper to slaves and servile persons . . . nor would they ever put together in the same piece the sounds of wild beasts and men and instruments, and noises of all sorts, ostensibly in imitation of a single object.  (Plato, Laws 669c3–d2)

The objects of Plato’s distaste will have included popular bravura instrumental performances of pieces for solo kithara or aulos, the latter being well exemplified by the “Pythian Air,” a dramatic musical depiction of the myth of Apollo’s slaying of the python at Delphi. This variegated five-part competition piece, composed and performed by the sixth-­ century piper Sakadas of Argos, included virtuoso technical devices such as the use of the aulos to imitate the hissing of the dying snake. A prize-winning fifth-century performance of the “Many-Headed Air,” a piece with similar mimetic and structural qualities depicting the slaying of the Gorgon by Perseus, may be the event celebrated by Pindar in his Twelfth Pythian Ode (Phillips 2013, 39–40). The longevity of these pieces suggests that Greek audiences were enthralled by their extravagance and variety.15 Plato’s repeated repudiation of common musical taste indicates that the majority of hearers did not share his aesthetic conservatism in this respect. A similar expressive mimeticism informed the narrative songs (nomoi) of Timotheus, which boldly exploited musical onomatopoeia and dynamic extremes: one of his pieces (“Nauplios”) had a musical representation of a storm, while another imitated Semele’s cries in labour (“Birthpangs of Semele”).16 The fact that the “Pythian Air,” as an auletic composition, had no place for words (logos) will have compounded its ethical baseness in Plato’s eyes. Correctness for Plato would require, at least partly, that musical sound conform accurately to the rhythms and pitches of spoken Greek: We should not pursue intricately varied rhythms with every kind of motion, but find the rhythms that belong to an orderly and upright life. When we have found them we

132   Armand D’Angour must make the foot and the melody follow the words proper to such a life, and not make the words follow the foot and the melody.  (Plato, Republic 399c9–400a2)

The few surviving musical scores of songs appear to obey Plato’s strictures, in that the melodies are for the most part composed according to the pitch-profiles of Greek words. This conformity would have made the melodization seem natural to traditionally minded listeners, and it was something that musically educated youngsters in classical times was trained to observe by instructors: When they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets—the lyric poets—setting their verses to the lyre, and familiarizing the children’s souls to their rhythms and harmoniai. (Plato, Protagoras 326a6–b2)

Conformity to the rhythms of everyday speech will standardly have required setting no more than a single musical note of appropriate duration to a syllable, a practice indicated by the strictness with which metres are generally handled and responsional verse is composed. “Every Greek poet was his own composer,” writes Ann Dale, “and no poet would write words in elaborate metrical schemes merely to annihilate and overlay these by a different musical rhythm” (Dale 1969, 161). While this dictum seems to be largely true of the classical period, it should not be assumed that a convention of carefully metricized verbal composition cannot coexist with a looser approach to the application of melody to words. Deliberate deviation from pitch-accents for the sake of effect in a composed melody may have been a New Musical innovation adopted or even pioneered by Euripides himself (see D’Angour 2006a). Significantly, such nonconformity is a feature of the Orestes musical papyrus, where the melodic line appears to be composed to match the words’ meanings rather than their pitch inflections: thus, the last three syllables of katolophuromai (I lament) and kathiketeuomai (I beseech) are set to a falling cadence while the final three syllables of anabakcheuei ([your heart] leaps like in frenzy) are set to a strikingly higherpitched note than what precedes them. A commentator on this text notes that when it came to the words “terrible toils,” the chorus did not sing but loudly declaimed the words, a prefiguring of the technique of Sprechstimme with a striking effect in performance. This kind of word-painting was considered a notable feature of the New Musicians’ oeuvre; to many listeners it will have represented an emotionally powerful, rather than simply disreputable, aspect of the avant-garde musical aesthetic (D’Angour 2020).

Conclusions The aim of this discussion has been twofold: first, to suggest that the understanding of musical philosophy in ancient Greece might aim to go beyond standard restatements of ancient ideas of ethos and mimesis, and secondly to indicate something of the potential

Ancient Greece   133 that exists once actual musical sounds from antiquity—some only recently revealed, but others (such as metre) often overlooked in accounts of the material—are brought into the discussion. While the unspoken assumption of modern philosophers of music is that a body of familiar sound makes references to music relatively uncontroversial, the same cannot be said for students of ancient music, for whom the philosophical approaches of ancient thinkers can pose something of a challenge and a puzzle, not least due to the lack of knowledge of sonic referents. As another part of this discussion as demonstrated, the puzzle has been further deepened by the tendency of scholars to overlook the broad and strongly verbal connotations of the Greek word mousikē when discussing ancient philosophical approaches to music. In this chapter I have tried to offer a clearer delineation of the domain of investigation, and to provide a more focused approach to how we might think of the relationship of philosophical terms such as ethos and mimesis to that domain.

Notes 1. The attribution to Pythagoras is undoubtedly fanciful: see discussion in Burkert  1972, 375–383. 2. Barker  1984–9 gives translations of musically relevant passages in Homer, Pindar, and other poets, as well as the key musical writings of Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Aristides Quintilianus, Pseudo-Plutarch, and Athenaeus. The musical documents are expertly compiled, laid out, and discussed in Pöhlmann and West 2001. 3. Galilei’s Dialogo has been translated into English, with introduction and notes, as Palisca 2003. 4. Even the significance of non-technical terms may be far from obvious: Mathiesen 1984, for example, analyses the rhythm of musical fragments using Aristides’s terminology of “masculine” and “feminine” notes, as if the aural implication of these terms were self-evident. 5. Painstaking reconstructions of ancient auloi discovered by archaeology have been undertaken since 2013 by the European Music Archaeology Project (http://www.emaproject.eu). 6. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Pindar, Twelfth Pythian Ode. 7. Hesiod, Theogony 77–9; the spheres of musico-poetic operation of the canonical Nine Muses was probably a Hellenistic (third-century bce) development. 8. Barker 1984–9, 1:183–185. The date of the author is unknown: West (1992, 247) writes “perhaps around 390 bc.” 9. See West 1992, 129–130. However, many passages of ancient poetry may be thought to suggest a play on words between mélē (songs) and mélei (it matters): see D’Angour 2005, 98. 10. Plato, for instance, while prepared to discuss the ethos of different harmoniai at length, pays little attention to the specifics effects of melos itself, and warns of the dangers of tunes generated in less admirable harmoniai; see Republic 411a5–9. 11. This is an uncontroversial point for ethnomusicologists, but it bears repetition as the stand­ard model for modern Western music (regularly projected on to ancient music) is to think of the music (that is, melody/harmony) as a determinate component. 12. Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music 1138bc (quoting Aristoxenus). How rhythm worked in nonvocal music is a matter of speculation, but some evidence may be extracted from theorists or derived from poetic sources (for example, see Phillips 2013).

134   Armand D’Angour 13. Aristophanes’s extended prolongation of the first syllable of heilissō in Frogs (1314, 1348) aims to parody Euripides’s violation of this principle; see D’Angour 2006a, 277. Although West states (1992, 201) that “no increase in duration. . . is implied or indeed admissible in these cases,” the repetition of the diphthong hei- (up to seven times, according to one MS) can hardly have failed to extend the syllable beyond its normal duration. 14. Plato, Republic 399c7–e3. The modulations employed by the New Musicians were felt to corrupt even lyre-playing, as indicated by a lively passage from the comedy Muses by Pherecrates: see D’Angour 2006a, 269. 15. A parallel may be drawn with aesthetic criteria for visual art, which emphasized illusionistic sensation and naïve representationalism, see D’Angour 2011, 151–153. 16. Athenaeus 8.337–8, 352a; see also Csapo and Wilson 2009, 283.

Works Cited Anderson, Warren D. 1966. Ethos and Education in Greek Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barker, Andrew. 1984–9. Greek Musical Writings. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barker, Andrew. 2007. The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, Wayne D. 1998. Philosophical Perspectives on Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Budd, Malcolm. 1995. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music. London: Allen Lane. Burkert, Walter. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csapo, Eric. 2004. “The Politics of the New Music.” In Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousikē” in the Classical Athenian City, edited by Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson, 207–248. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csapo, Eric, and Peter Wilson. 2009. “Timotheus the New Musician.” In The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, edited by Felix Budelmann, 277–294. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dale, Anne M. 1969. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 1997. “How the Dithyramb Got Its Shape.” Classical Quarterly 47 (2): 331–351. D’Angour, Armand. 2005. “Intimations of the Classical in Early Greek mousikē.” In Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, edited by James  I.  Porter, 89–105. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 2006a. “ The New Music: So What’s New?” In Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, 264–283. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 2006b. “Metre.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Greece and Rome, edited by Ed and Tom Harrison, 489–494. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 2011. The Greeks and the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 2013. “Sound and Music in the Dithyramb.” In Dithyramb in Context, edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson, 198–209. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Angour, Armand. 2015. “Sense and Sensation in Music.” In A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, edited by Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray, 188–203. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ancient Greece   135 D’Angour, Armand. 2020 “ ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Music: The Ideology of Mousikē.” In A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music, edited by Tosca A. C. Lynch and Eleonora Rocconi, 409–420. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Hagel, Stefan. 2009. Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2011. Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herington, John. 1985. Poetry into Drama. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Horrocks, Geoffrey. 2010. Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. 2nd ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Kivy, Peter. 1984. Sound and Semblance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1997. Philosophies of Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lippman, Edward A. 1964. Musical Thought in Ancient Greece. New York: Columbia University Press. Mathiesen, Thomas  J. 1984. “Harmonia and Ethos in Ancient Greek Music.c Journal of Musicology 3, no. 3 (Summer): 264–279. Mathiesen, Thomas J. 1999. Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Palisca, Claude V., ed. 2003. Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music by Vincenzo Galilei. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Phillips, Tom. 2013. “Epinician Variations: Music and Text in Pindar Pythians 2 and 12.” Classical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (May): 37–56. Phillips, Tom, and Armand D’Angour, eds. 2018. Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pöhlmann, Egert, and Martin  L.  West. 2001. Documents of Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Power, Timothy. 2010. The Culture of Kitharôidia. Washington, DC: Centre for Hellenic Studies. Probert, Philomen. 2003. A New Short Guide to the Accentuation of Ancient Greek. London: Bloomsbury. Rocconi, Eleonora. 2009. “Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, edited by George Boys-Stones, Barbara Graziosi, and Phiroze Vasunia, 569–578. New York: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Martin. L. 1981. “The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Greek Music.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 101: 113–129. West, Martin. L. 1982. Greek Metre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, Martin. L. 1992. Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winnington-Ingram, Reginald. P. 1936. Mode in Ancient Greek Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Younger, John  G. 1998. Music in the Aegean Bronze Age. Jonsered, Sweden: Paul Äströms Förlag.

chapter 7

The M iddl e Age s Elizabeth Eva Leach

The rather large and ill-defined time period that is problematically lumped together as the Middle Ages is far from monolithic in its attitudes to both philosophy and music. It also differs significantly from later periods in that music and philosophy are not radically separated but were tightly related and mutually informing, even if the relative neglect of medieval music and philosophy in recent musicological and philosophical scholarship obscures our contemporary understanding of that connection. The medieval discipline of musica occupies a conceptual field that overlaps with yet differs from that of the modern term “music,” being specifically a speculative science of music theory that forms a significant subset of philosophical inquiry. As I stress in the Conclusion, this means that medieval music should not be understood through the commodity filter of modernity since its definition lies beyond the sonic; and it is never acousmatic since its producers shared the same space as its listeners.1 In the early medieval period especially, some of the key texts on both musica and other, more widely applicable branches of philosophy, are by the same writers, notably Augustine and Boethius (see Dyer 2009; Rico 2005a). Moreover, the huge stylistic and institutional changes in music across the medieval period, and the highly various ­socio-political formations within which it flourished, are matched by the changing ­institutional locations of philosophical inquiry, so that eventually philosophical preoccupations surface clearly in genres of song, its interpretation, and its notational precepts. Although traces of notation specifically for music in the West only begin in the ninth century, there are frequent references to music from before this period, especially in regard to its ethical aspects. Classical authorities continued to be copied and cited throughout the Middle Ages and were highly influential as they become refocused and reinterpreted in the newly Christian environment of Western Europe. Despite the prominence of music in the writings of medieval philosophers, modern histories of medieval philosophy very rarely mention music. When they do, it is in passing as one of the disciplines of the mathematical quadrivium. Modern accounts of medieval music theory often treat musica only as a discussion of acoustics, which they consider as belonging not to philosophy, but rather to an early and speculative form of music theory, the more interesting parts of which focus on practical matters of notation,

138   Elizabeth Eva Leach modal classification, rhythm, and so on, as they relate to the actualities of musical practice. Nonetheless, even ostensibly acoustic treatises, such as Boethius’s De Musica, discussed below, yield insights beyond the merely scientific and numerical. As I am by training a musicologist and not a philosopher, what follows evaluates how musicology has understood the relation of philosophical writings—both those of the Middle Ages and, in the final section, those of later periods—to musica as a theoretical field and to surviving pieces of medieval music. In each section, I begin by outlining the current work of scholars of philosophy and music theory, and then turn to my own engagement with both primary and secondary texts from these diverse disciplines, their synthesis, and their application to seemingly unrelated themes and practices. Other treatments of this theme might have organized the reflections chronologically around particular authors of the particular branch of music theory that treats music as a part of philosophy: musica. Such an account might start with the Platonism of Augustine’s writings on music, then Boethius’s, before proceeding to the Aristotelian treatises of the later Middles Ages. I prefer, instead, to treat the issues thematically, and to include not only writing directly on musica, but also to extend the argument to aspects of musical thought and practice that can be read as having been indirectly influenced by other branches of medieval philosophy. I start, therefore, with a section on music’s definition and being, noting the implications that its numerical and rational underpinnings had for sounding musical practice. The second section treats the ethics of music, which involves a double-edged discussion. It considers, firstly, the anxieties that sounding music could elicit, anxieties that took a specific form relating to human gender, and which from time to time enabled certain strictures to be placed upon musical practices, even if these were seldom effective. It then considers, conversely, the positive uses adduced for music, from its evangelical power, through its association with good governance (of both self and polity), to its role as consolation in late medieval courts. In the third section, I adduce various ways that contemporary scholars have posited an indirect relation between medieval musical materials and discourses in medieval philosophy that do not specifically mention music. This covers innovations in grammar, logic, and dialectic, as well as the impact these appear to have had on musical notation, and the meaning inherent in specific “cross-over” genres like the motet, which seem to combine incompatibly sacred and secular materials.2 My synthesis of these materials within the present chapters suggests the potential for future directions in thinking about philosophy and music which attempt to range beyond the mere listing of musica as a subject of the medieval university’s mathematical quadrivium.

Unsound Studies: The Medieval Ontology of Music Medieval writings on musica frequently start with definitions that tend towards to the etymological, based not on scientific etymology as we would recognize it today, but on similarity of word sound. These do not talk, as definitions might today, about music as

The Middle Ages   139 sonic or as relating to human musical performance. Rather, music is typically linked to the muses (citing the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville), or to “moys,” which, various authors explain, means “water” (Swerdlow 1967). Given that the literate tradition for music in the Middle Ages is exclusively for vocal music, and that grammatica et cantus were taught together in the medieval song-school as children learned Latin by singing the Psalms, many music treatises unsurprisingly use grammar as a model for their own pedagogy (Desmond 1998; Leach 2009a; Boynton and Rice 2008). Grammar treatises typically start with a definition of vox (voice or note), the fundamental element of grammar and only a subset of the larger field of sonus (sound). Definitions of vox are thus useful in revealing the place of music as it intersects with a more general group of sounds in the Middle Ages. In mainstream medieval opinion, music is perforce a rationally engaged human production. Excluded are the writable but meaningless voices of birds and other animals, but also the music-like sounds made by human agents who are acting merely imitatively and thus not employing the reason that would distinguish their production from that of animals (Leach 2007, especially 11–54). Thus the ontological status of music as music is placed squarely in the domain of production: neither its immanent sonic properties nor the opinions of those listening have the ultimate determination, and much energy is spent in urging those listening to ascertain the source of the music in order to judge it correctly. On the one hand the emphasis on production befits a philosophical position that recognized the importance but unreliability of the senses in gaining knowledge and the elevation of God-given rationality as the defining part of the human soul. On the other hand, the emphasis on production fits the general definition of music in which audible sound (musica instrumentalis) was one of three subdivisions, the others, which drew on Classical definitions, being musica mundana (the universe’s harmonious proportions, or “music of the spheres”) and musica humana, the relation of body and soul (Ilnitchi 2002). Platonic views, for example, replicated the idea that number was at the root of musical harmony/­ concord. While Plato’s Republic excludes most sounding human music-making, his entire universe is animated by the sung notes of celestial sirens (Fritz  2000, 146–149). The idea that music’s existence is defined poietically, that is, from the perspective of its domain of production, also fits a period before acousmatic transmission was the norm, since close contact with the humans producing the music (who were normally in the same physical space as the listeners and often under their command) was usual; there was also a far smaller section of the audience who were not also the performers, since much music-making was communal, whether in various ecclesiastical spaces or in court dances. In such settings, the intention and formation of the performers was readily available to those listening, since they were often also singing: effectively they were being urged to ensure their own rational engagement and understanding. This definition of music thereby placed a strong burden on performers—mainly singers, in the literate tradition at least—to understand their practice as rational, not least because that rationality was a unique feature of the human soul that signalled humanity’s special place in the divine creation, and these singers were often involved in Christian religious

140   Elizabeth Eva Leach duties. Those who failed were no better than beasts, as the widely copied opening metrum of Guido of Arezzo’s Regulae stresses: Musicorum et cantorum magna est distancia Isti dicunt illi sciunt que componit musica Nam qui facit quod non sapit diffinitur bestia Ceterum tonantis vocis si laudent acumina, superabit philomelam vel vocalis asina. [Between musicians and singers there is a vast distance: the latter perform; the ­former know what music comprises. For he who does what he does not understand is termed a beast. Furthermore, if one praises the loudness of a thundering voice, even a jenny [she-ass] in full bray will surpass the nightingale.] (Guido d’Arezzo 1999, 330–333)

This precept was taught to boys in the medieval choir schools of Europe not just through music theory but through the practice of singing itself. The widely copied Latin song “Aurea personet lira clara modulamina”, in the same metre as Guido’s opening metrum, served similarly as a memorable means of teaching boys the correct situation of their own musical practice within a world of music-like noises. While ostensibly praising the nightingale and comparing its song to human music-making of various kinds, its ending implies the supremacy of the boys’ human voices even over that of the nightingale. At the end of the song, the singers speak about their own act of singing: Iam preclara tibi satis Que in uoce sunt iocunda Ad scolares et ad ludos Tempus adest, ut soluatur Ne fatigent plectrum lingue Ne pingrescat auris prompta

dedimus obsequia, et in verbis rithmica, digne congruentia. nostra uox armonica, contionum tedia, fidium ad crusmata.

[Now we have rendered you enough splendid services which are pleasant in sound and rhythmic in wording, worthily proper to young scholars and their pastimes. The time is at hand to end our harmonic song, lest the length of the songs should tire the plectrum of the tongue, lest the attentive ear should grow indifferent to the single notes.3] (Ziolkowski 1998, 46–47)

The nightingale, as the singing boys claim in their praise of it, excels two of the three subdivisions of sounding music (musica instrumentalis), that is, musica ritmica (instruments made to sound by striking) and musica organica (made by wind instruments). Moreover, the nightingale is the equal and mirror of the monochord, the instrument used to teach the intervals of the scale. The third division of musica instrumentalis, the music of the human voice (musica harmonica), however, is even better than the nightingale. The boys can sing the nightingale’s praises, having learned the discrete notes of the diatonic scale present in the nightingale’s song from that song’s fitting peer, the

The Middle Ages   141 ­ onochord. But singing praise requires words, and of all the kinds of music named in m this song, the joining of “rhythmic” words and “pleasant” notes is “worthily proper” only to the “young scholars” (for a longer discussion see Leach 2009a, 207–211). In short, the proper taxonomization of sounding music places human language sung by human voices to correctly tuned notes at the pinnacle of sublunary achievement.

Ethics The proper use of music was the subject of discussion in the field of ethics, since what music was for was tightly connected to theories of its affective power over the listener. Music conceived of in Platonic terms—that is, as rational proportion, which could be rendered in sound, rather than being by definition sonic—was deemed to have a character that could accord or discord with the character of the person exposed to it, emphasizing similarity and challenging difference, and, if powerful enough, changing the listener so as to became more similar to the character of the music. (On music and Platonism, see Hicks 2017.) Boethius (1989, 1–8) gives examples of warlike music making a warlike person more warlike and of an angry and vengeful lover being calmed down by music of a pacific kind. Music’s ability to act on a person’s constitution through the fact of it sharing proportions with the body–soul music of musica humana explained its efficacy as medicine, as in the biblical example of David healing Saul even though medieval authorities argued over the exact mechanism of the cure (see discussion in Hentschel 2000). These positive examples given in Boethius form the credit side of medieval discussion of musical ethics, but music’s valence was variable and twin discourses of proposal and detraction permeate its entire history, including the Middle Ages. Medieval philosophers took both sides, some, like Augustine and Boethius, representing both positions, sometimes even within the same work.

The Dangers of Musical Seduction Various medieval authorities worried about music’s power over human listeners, but its chief dangers seem to draw on worries about the interrelation between gender and sexuality, in the light of the opposition between passive and active aspects of the definitions of both these concepts.4 If singers failing to deploy due rational control over their musicmaking were no better than beasts, listeners who similarly failed to engage active ra­tional control became passive and, in line with the understanding of sexual relations as something an active male partner did to a passive female one, feminized. While this might not be a problem for female listeners, most writing addresses male listeners, who are expected to resist such aural misgendering.5 The basic set-up for this problematic is present in Augustine’s Confessions, in which, led by his senses running ahead of his

142   Elizabeth Eva Leach r­eason, Augustine worries that the pleasure he takes in hearing liturgical singing in church is a sin of the flesh. Having admitted that he sometimes desires the extreme austerity of banning singing from the Church entirely, he remembers the tears it caused him to weep when he found his faith originally, and is forced to admit that, in terms of its power to convert, singing is useful “so that by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional mood. Yet when it happens that I am more moved by the singing than by what is sung, I confess myself to have sinned wickedly, and then I would rather not have heard the singing” (10.33.49; emphasis mine).6 In De Musica, Boethius, summarizing Plato’s strictures in the Republic, defines music of the highest character as “temperate, simple, and masculine (modesta, simplex, m ­ ascula),” rather than “effeminate, violent, or fickle (effeminata, fera, varia)” (Boethius 1989, 3). These binaries are repeated verbatim by a vast array of subsequent theorists (see Leach 2006a, 2009b). In terms of medieval rhetorical tropes which insisted that gender categories were biologically determined and immutable, producing good music meant de-emphasizing passive appreciation of music’s beauty as something feminine, seductive, de-­rationalizing, effeminizing, in favour of an active engagement with music’s rationality as something masculine, numerical, quantifiable, and part of the active mental engagement of a ­performer. This was especially the case in the Christian Middle Ages when the sung ­liturgy of the Church was necessary to the everyday praise of God—banning music in church was simply impractical. To ensure that it was the right kind of music, the teaching and study of music—the discipline of musica—developed a specific pedagogy in which the very definition of what was and was not music was based on music’s expression of a rationality that belongs only to humans and not to other animals. Most typically in ­theoretical and pedagogical contexts, this rationality expressed itself in the ability to understand the mathematical ratios that underlie the correct tuning of musical intervals with the range of notes used in chant. Many later writers sought to impose strictures on what they viewed as feminine and feminizing excesses in performance. The twelfth-century writer John of Salisbury criticizes the “lightness and dissolution of dainty voices designed to achieve vain glory in the feminine manner” when singing the Divine Office. “You would think,” John cautions, “that these were the most delicious songs of very pleasing sirens—not of men—and you would marvel at the lightness of voice, which cannot be compared in all their measures and pleasing melodies to those of the nightingale or parrot, or any other more clear sounding bird that might be found” (John of Salisbury 1993, 48–49; see also discussion in Leach 2006b, 188–189, and 2007, 153, 203–209). The effeminacy and feminizing powers attributed to these male singers are stronger and all the more worrisome on account of their virtuosity. John describes the singers as more eloquent than two natural avian practitioners, but says that their sound would make a listener mistake them for sirens— women–bird hybrids—rather than men. Rationality is the defining feature of the human soul, masculinity, and musica alike, and differentiates men both from beasts (including birds) and from women. In this example, by contrast, vocal prowess and the kind of music sung to exhibit it are understood to deprive the singers of both their humanity and their masculinity, making them effeminate, monstrous, unnatural.

The Middle Ages   143

From Conversion to Consolation Via Politics Music’s positive power was noted by earlier writers and singing was a daily part of Christian worship, but that was precisely why its practice was so tightly regulated by theorizations that emphasized rationality. While being mainly anxious, Augustine also noted music’s positive effect (albeit on weaker listeners), who would be moved to Christian conversion. Augustine stresses, however, that reason must lead the senses rather than the other way round, with reason residing in the words of the chant and accessed through the sense of hearing. Many church authorities were concomitantly suspicious of untexted music, especially that used for dancing. Elsewhere in his writings, however, Augustine talks more positively about the textless, musical element of singing in his discussion of the jubilus melisma that closes the Alleluia of the Mass. The Alleluia as a whole is not entirely without text, but this long melisma at the end is so much an extension of a single syllable of text (“-a”) that it seems, according to Augustine, to give acceptable expression to pure emotion: One who jubilates does not speak words, but it is rather a sort of sound of joy without words; for the voice of the soul is poured out in joy, showing as much as it is able the feeling without comprehending the sense. A man joying in his exultation, from certain unspeakable and incomprehensible words, bursts forth in a certain voice of exultations without words, so that it seems he does indeed rejoice with his own voice, but as if, because filled with too much joy, he cannot put into words what it is in which he delights. (Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos, Ps. 99 (100), 4; translation in Holsinger 2001, 76)

The heart rejoicing in the praise of God is acceptable to Augustine, although it should be noted that he speaks of the performer’s perspective: ethics, like ontology, is a matter of production. The rise of Aristotelianism in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century saw many challenges to Platonic views of music and a broadening of its ethical uses. As ­university-trained clerics began to serve in larger numbers in secular court administrations, Aristotle’s Politics (translated into Latin in the later thirteenth century and into French in the fourteenth), contained ideas that could be used to argue that music might form an important part of the moral education of the elite. While Plato and Aristotle exhibit remarkably similar views on the proper ends of music and its ethical role in education and politics, their main difference concerns the emphasis on music’s pleasurable qualities. For Plato—at least in the Republic—nearly all kinds of music must be banned, since musical pleasures were entirely subordinated to moral goodness. For Boethius, too, the personification Lady Philosophy could only console the sorrowing narrator of The Consolation of Philosophy when the Muses were dismissed from the narrator’s bedside in Book 1, Prose 1 as “theatrical tarts.” For Aristotle, conversely, more modes and instruments could be permitted, with the proviso that a proper education would allow correct judgement of them, because he considers pleasure an integral part of a fulfilled life, provided that it is not seen as an end in itself (see Schoen-Nazarro 1978).

144   Elizabeth Eva Leach In Book 8 of his Politics, Aristotle notes music as proper to the early education of free men, an idea he explores further in his Nichomachean Ethics. Some of the precepts which apply to music’s suitability as a form of virtuous princely relaxation were already present in the Middle Ages in the works of Augustine and Isidore.7 But after the translation of Aristotle’s ethical works in the later thirteenth century, music theorists were not slow to exploit the power of Aristotle’s authority in praise of music’s virtuous power. The Prologue of Jean de Murs’s Musica speculativa in particular, a book designed to explain Boethius’s music treatise to a world that Jean alleges has deliberately forgotten the old learning it now finds too demanding, cites Aristotle on matters that pertain to issues of sensation, pleasure, relaxation, and virtue: Although we have reason to reprove the excesses of voluptuous bestiality by which the unbridled passions of taste and touch ruin the intellect (according to Aristotle, [Nichomachean] Ethics Book 1 “many savages elect to live like beasts”), we do not at all, however, condemn the ordered and moderate pleasures afforded by vision and audition, which, being filled with a purer and more generous function, are subservient to the intellect (as Aristotle says in [Nichomachean] Ethics Book 3, on the matter of the moderate man who “pursues existence with moderation as must all who wish for health and a good constitution”). Vision attracts more praise than audition “because it is the principal instrument of knowing and shows us all the diversity of things.” However, experience shows us that voices and all the subtlest sounds composed by human artifice bring to the intellect, through the intermediary of audition, the sweetest joys. Once the work which occupies all serious affairs and which human nature may not neglect without discontinuing is finished, music offers to those whose ears are prepared, the benefit of a perfectly honest repose. And this is perhaps what Ulysses wanted to say in poetry according to Aristotle’s account in the Politics Book 8[.3] when he said that he said the best leisured pursuit is when men, congregated under one roof, listen, rejoicing, to the nightingale [Odyssey 9.7–8]. (Murs 2000, 134)8

While an extensive discussion of the proper role of pleasure in promoting virtue is contained in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, it is his Politics that discusses the role of music in the education of the young and in governance specifically. Book 8 of the Politics outlines a programme of education for the young, which should feature letters and drawing, because they are useful, as well as gymnastics, because it gives health, courage, and vigour. Education should also involve music, although the reasons for, and role of, music in education are so problematic that of these four it is discussed at greatest length. Aristotle comments that although most people learn music (learn to listen to it, not play it) for pleasure, it is also potentially a form of noble leisured activity or leisured pursuit (scholē). Despite children not being capable of truly leisured pursuits, the habit of music appreciation learned young would benefit them in adulthood, allowing them to relax in a way that promotes good living.9 Everyone gains natural pleasure from music, which is why people of all ages and characters enjoy it. Nicole Oresme, who translated the Politics into French in the fourteenth century at the behest of Charles V of France, glosses this statement by citing Macrobius’s ­comments

The Middle Ages   145 that even beasts and birds appreciate the delectation naturele that music has (Menut 1970, 348). But it is not just this common pleasure that makes music suitable in the education of the young; music’s nature goes beyond usefulness to something far more laudable. First, audible music gives the listener occasion to consider inaudible kinds of music, such as the music of the spheres, preparing the soul for contemplation.10 Second, as in Plato, it affects its listener’s character and soul because rhythms and melodies contain “likenesses of the components of character.” As virtue is “a matter of enjoying, loving, and hating in the right way, it is clear that nothing is more important than that one should learn to judge correctly and get in to the habit of enjoying decent characters and noble actions” (Aristotle 1998, 235; cf. Menut 1970, 349). Music alone among perceptible objects contains such “likenesses of character (imitations ou similitudes de meurs)” (Menut 1970, 350; cf. Aristotle 1998, 235) and so teaching proper judgement of music is a way of teaching judgement of character, useful for assessing both others and the self.11 Music is therefore ideal for education and its natural sweetness enables children to learn it, even though they are as yet too young for truly leisured pursuits. Aristotle’s ethical works legitimized the pleasures of certain courtly recreations (notably hunting and listening to music), provided that self-control was exercised, and, as noted above, was formative of the views of those university-trained clerics who entered newly enlarged secular courts as administrators in increasing numbers during the long fourteenth century.12 As well as Aristotle’s works, the other key philosophical text reworked in the secular courtly context in the long fourteenth century was Boethius’s Consolation. Given that Boethius’s text is effectively a philosophical treatise with songs, this central literary activity served to relate music and philosophy within the court context (Huot 2002; Kay 2008). The reinterpretation of Boethius’s Consolation for an audience who were not only Christians serious about the state of their souls, but also nobles committed to cultural and sporting activity was considerably aided by the Aristotelian idea of leisured pursuit (scholē, scholazein). In the translated versions of Boethius’s Consolation, particular focus was given to book 2, in which Philosophy ventriloquizes the allegorical figure of Lady Fortune and suggests ways to combat her vagaries and constant inconstancy. The twin roles of Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–77) as an important composer of music and writer of poetry is significant here. Sylvia Huot (2002) has noted that Machaut’s narrative poem Le Remede de Fortune might be subtitled the “Consolation of Poetry,” with the art of love allied to the art of poetry and a full programme of courtly music copied in situ in the narrative poem to substitute for the songs in verse (metra) that had punctuated the prose of Boethius’s original. As such, the countering of Fortune’s ills through the complete dismissal of the muses in Boethius’s Consolation is recast as Machaut’s narrator learns to use the right kinds of music (ars nova notated, refrain-form lyric for communal performance) to sublimate his desire (Leach 2011a, 82–131). Gace de la Buigne’s even more widely copied mirror-of-princes and hunting-debate poem, Le Roman des Deduis, specifically cites one polyphonic piece by each of Denis le Grant and Philippe de Vitry in support of an argument for the need for aural discernment and, ultimately, as a way of proving the admonitory narrative point that that which is most pleasurable is not always

146   Elizabeth Eva Leach that which is most noble. This last point has, however, been wilfully misunderstood by modern scholars wishing to see it as auguring modern commodified musical culture by promoting purely sonic pleasure (Leach  2007, 175–237; I return to this theme in the Conclusion). Thus, it seems that writers in the fourteenth century chose to relegitimate musical pleasure under carefully controlled circumstances, using a combination of earlier philosophical texts, refracted through contemporary vernacular literary works.

Medieval Philosophy, Modern Musicology Aside from treatises on musica and other medieval philosophical discourses that specifically mention music, several other central philosophical fields in the Middle Ages can be perceived to have had an indirect influence on contemporary musical practice, even while the musical practices themselves were not directly treated. In the thirteenth­century period of systematic analysis and speculation that corresponded to “a new degree of rationalization in politics and society,” fields which saw significant development and change by later medieval thinkers included grammar, logic, mathematics (especially the tension between the arithmetic and geometric explanations of the universe), and radical nominalism (Marrone 2003, 10). Modern musicologists have adduced that these fields influenced late medieval music with particular reference to music’s highly literate aspects—the signs that make up the notation, and elite reading practices that offer interpretations of musical works that cannot be gleaned simply from hearing the music performed. As I discuss in the Conclusion, modern scholarly attitudes to literate music’s high seriousness and elite character in this period have shifted in parallel with the changes in the academy’s attitudes to elitism and popular culture. Nonetheless, I claim in this section that late medieval musical pieces were able to enact a kind of thinking, giving access to knowledge by demanding interpretation. This involved both sonic expression and auditory pleasure, but was neither defined nor limited by them. Rather, it relied on vision (reading) and memory such that music can function as itself a kind of philosophy.

Grammar, Logic, and Mathematics: Notation and the Construction of Ideas in Music Musicology has traditionally described the history of medieval musical notation as plotting a course from a mere aide-memoire of neumes that do not show even relative pitches to ever more precise, square-drawn, heighted notations showing relative pitch and, eventually, relative duration (for an accessible summary, see Kelly 2014). While one may now prefer a less triumphalist and teleological narrative, noting that increased notational prescription was accompanied by elements of loss and resistance, and that

The Middle Ages   147 older notational styles persisted well after more accurate (in our terms) notations were available, the basic outlines of a trend from non-rhythmic notation, through notation in fixed rhythmic patterns (modal notation), to mensural notation can be accepted broadly for what follows here. Accepted, too, is the fact that the earliest explicit notations of nonternary rhythmic relations between notes is a phenomenon of what has come to be called the ars nova (for binary relations) and ars subtilior (for relations in other proportions). It is in this ability to notate relative duration (often loosely referred to as rhythm) that the indirect operation of philosophical speculation can be observed. Max Haas (1982) has noted that the influence of grammar on basic medieval rhythmic pedagogies, which worked relatively well for modal rhythm, worked less well for later, mensural notation so that ars nova theorists began to adopt a frame of philosophical reference drawing instead from Aristotelian metaphysics. Late medieval philosophical interest in the meaning of signs, language, and representation has been held to have been reflected in the proliferation of musical signs (that is, musical notations) in the fourteenth century, especially in so far as such signs relate to rhythmic complexity. Dorit Tanay (1999) has argued that the rhythmic theories of the later Middle Ages reflect the pervasive influence of Aristotle (on quantity), of modal grammar (on ligatures), and of mathematics (especially in the eventual use of Arabic numerals). In particular, she claims that Ockhamist nominalism—the idea that universals are abstractions without extra-mental existence and that therefore only various individual particulars actually exist—fuelled “the quest to represent musical processes in all their possible temporal manifestations,” as, for example, in the work of Jean des Murs, a music theorist who was also a mathematician and astronomer (Tanay 1999, 9; see also Gushee 1969). For Tanay, “the context of the ontological and epistemological revolution of Ockhamist Nominalism” (Tanay 1999, 8–9) serves to explain the radical changes in the goal of musical notation in the fourteenth century, towards utmost rhythmic variety represented by figures of the utmost simplicity and immediacy. Nonetheless, the practice of notation fell somewhat short of this programme (9). In practice, sub-minim values, in various heuristic and provisional notational forms, start to appear fairly early in the history of French ars nova notation. As I have argued elsewhere (Leach 2007), on the basis that many are associated with the depiction of birds’ voices, these sub-minim values illustrate a form of resistance from singers (and composers) who resented notational prescription and overly rationalist (as opposed to pragmatic) systematization. Such pragmatic and unrationalized notations might thus be linked instead with a more heuristic, empirical attitude, drawing on what Joel Kaye (1998) has identified as a new interest in approximation, estimation, and a more geometric, relational mathematics, which arguably influenced university speculation via its more pragmatic use in the increased economic activity of this time. Tanay already diagnoses the notational puzzles of the so-called ars subtilior as part of a late medieval sophism and it seems possible to argue that several specific elements of ­fourteenth-century logical exercises might have cognate forms in musical pieces. The emphasis on the investigation of puzzles involving self-referentiality in the field of philosophical logic might readily be linked to the penchant for punning canons and picture

148   Elizabeth Eva Leach notation in mid to late fourteenth-century music, such as Jacob Senleches’s La Harpe de melodie, notated in the form of a harp, the anonymous En la maison Dedalus, written as a maze, or those songs using some other graphic oddity to point, often obliquely, to a compositional oddity, such as the upside-down writing which accompanies the retrograde canon of Guillaume Machaut’s “Ma fin est mon commencement” (R14) (see Leach 2007, 112–220). And just as the new logic extended into theology, opening up questions to new standards of proof, a theological impetus can arguably be detected behind the new logical puzzles of music: for example, Machaut’s R14 is a self-conscious song that voices the grounds for its own performance and has been read as a deep meditation on life as a Christian soul (Eisenberg 2007; Leach 2011a, 296–301; Cerquiglini-Toulet 2012; Bain 2012). Literary scholars have long noted the medieval philosophical exercise of the disputatio, a more or less formalized debate, playing out in various literary debate genres, narrative and lyric (see summary in Cayley 2006, 12–51). Some of the lyric debate forms are also musical, because they are songs, which means that troubadour tenso and joc-partit, as well as their northern French equivalent, the jeu-parti, could be said to represent a philosophically influenced musical form, associated with clerics active in northern puys (Saltzstein 2012). In my own work (Leach 2010), I have claimed the polytextual debate songs of Machaut and others as a similar staging of a quaestio (the specific question that was the subject of a given disputatio) using music’s unique ability to voice both sides of the formal debate at once.13 While no one has directly suggested that the specific form of “obligations,” where, according to Stephen P. Marrone (2003, 37), “the aim was to catch an opponent in contradiction as a result of accepting apparently quite consistent premises,” might have a musical outcome, what Thomas Brothers (1997) calls the “musica ficta essay” might readily fit this bill.14 In some of these musica ficta essays—songs where unusual or excessive placement of accidental signs triggers corollary pitch adjustments and requires solving correctly by the singer—differently notated pitches may end up sounding the same because of the logical constraints of the application of hexachordal signs (Marrone 2003, 37). Some of the “play” with musica ficta that I have diagnosed in Machaut arguably effects a smaller-scale version of such a technique, and might have served to provoke the same kinds of rational, argumentative conversation between those reading music in a court context as obligations or the afternoon philosophy lecture (the disputatio) might have done in a university context (Leach 2002, 493–495). Certainly the exploratory and performative practices of philosophy can be seen as radically congruent with similar practices in musica, itself—at least strictly and notionally—still a part of philosophy.

Philosophical Disputation, Exegesis, and the Motet: Music as Knowledge By the thirteenth century, all university disciplines accepted the disputational form as a means of disseminating knowledge.15 I have argued for the specific refraction of quaestiones and more puzzle-led forms such as obligations in polytextual music and play with

The Middle Ages   149 the logic of notational signs above. In addition, the more general admission of contradiction and the extension of the either/or of Augustinian exegesis to include the both/ and of later medieval logic, widely affected musical culture (on this shift see Newman 2013, 7–12). The central polyphonic genre of the motet often explicitly presents voices singing erotic and worldly texts, literally grounded by the lower or lowest voice, which sings a piece of liturgical chant. Love songs ambiguously praise a lady that could be an idealized and erotic courtly one or might equally be the Virgin Mary. Extremely worldly songs are copied alongside devotional and even liturgical items, in manuscripts that we know to have been housed by, and even produced for, monastic libraries. Modern musicology is polarized on the issue of how to explain the combination of apparently incompatibly sacred and secular elements in, for example, polytextual motets. One view claims that the sense of the texts is irrelevant, since they are obscured in polytextual performance, and emphasizes instead their sonic effects and pleasures (Page  1993a;  2000). For commentators holding this view, most fully articulated by Christopher Page, the modern scholarly urge to ignore the sonic in favour of the textual and to deploy elite intellectual techniques to extract meaning from textual juxtaposition is driven by those scholars’ own position as intellectuals, not performers.16 Page reacts specifically against Sylvia Huot’s (1997) approach to the motet in which she deploys sophisticated allegorical tools to diagnose medieval attempts to sacralize the secular and/or secularize the sacred. While it would be unwise to discount the possibility that the motet had an audience wider than the university-trained clerics who developed it, or that that wider audience (or anyone) could find pleasure in their purely sonic aspect, it is important to consider the way that motets’ compositional and performative contexts were inflected by scholastic philosophical norms. These norms might in fact nuance the more polarized positions in motet scholarship that have derived from the careful work of Page and Huot (Dillon 2012; Rothenberg 2011; for an attempt to bridge this gap, see Clark  2007). Such norms might at once legitimate textual reflection on oral performance (as seen, for example, in the written collections of both quaestiones and motets), and persuade us not to view the sacred and secular as a controlling binary that can be mapped onto others (Latin/vernacular; devotional/erotic, liturgical/courtly) in a simple act of allegoresis. Thinking from the perspective of medieval philosophy might demand instead that we see these elements not as contradictions, but as part of the same philosophical (and thus theological) understanding of the world, the universe, and human being. Barbara Newman’s (2013, 7) idea of “crossover” within a default category of the sacred (or, in my terms, theology in particular or even philosophy in general) approaches this perspective, although simply refusing the very terms “sacred” and “secular” removes the necessity seen in Newman to specify that the category of sacred be considered the default one without being necessarily dominant, univocal, or even theologically serious. Once one views the semantics of a genre like the motet taking place in the broad field of philosophy, there is no sacred and secular, just as there is “neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Medieval theological hermeneutics allowed at least some scholars to view a Bible full of contradiction as Scriptural truth: truth does not need to eschew contradiction. Musical forms like polytextual motets and

150   Elizabeth Eva Leach songs provide sonic proof of this knowledge by reconciling irreconcilable texts in a both/and (that is, sung simultaneously) of (literal) harmony, which is temporally animated (that is, it works contrapuntally) through its integration of dissonance. Music’s ability to concretize metaphor so powerfully lent it a special place in the cultural activity of those who found complex cogitation rewarding.

Conclusion: Modern Problems with Medieval Ideas Explicit and focused musicological interest in music’s place within the broader field of medieval philosophy is relatively rare, and medieval philosophy, similarly, is not greatly prominent within philosophy as a discipline, so that medieval philosophy of music within philosophy barely registers. Nonetheless, this chapter has outlined how some knowledge of medieval philosophy might aid an understanding of (attitudes to) medieval music, and perhaps even vice versa. Philosophy seems an irrelevance to music in the twenty-first century, largely because of music’s definition, use, and value in the modern world, in tandem with contemporary popular perception of philosophy’s own value. Music today is principally a commodity form, usually accessed purely sonically, mediated electronically, and used principally for pleasure and entertainment. Philosophy is none of those things and thus seems irrelevant to music. And relations to pleasure and entertainment are governed by a democratization of taste, deregulated by postmodern relativism, which will not brook elite university professors telling others what to listen to and how to understand it. The contrast between the present-day situation and the prevailing didacticism of, for instance, the long fourteenth century, and the idea that a reader must submit to having their mind enlarged, could not be starker (see Kay 2007, 1–4). The tendency, therefore, is to attempt to modernize the Middle Ages and to seize on any strands of medieval thought that can be read as making medieval music, musicians, and listening more like our own. Finding familiarity in the Middle Ages is not impossible because the Middle Ages is not a monolithic age. In particular, the coexistence of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas and their shifting relation, especially as new translations or more of the Aristotelian corpus became available from the thirteenth century onwards, should be recognized. This had implications for music’s ontology: Johannes de Grocheio, for example, dismisses musica humana, although his scorn is rather unique in music theory. It has nonetheless found favour with modern scholars wanting to find in medieval music and music theory something closer to the emotion-led understanding of later music (see Page 1993b). More widespread was a new attitude to the harmony of the spheres, which Aristotle denied made any sound, forcing various writers to attempt a difficult “harmonization” between the authorities of Plato and “the Philosopher” (Rico 2005b).17 Aristotle’s work was absorbed in what was still at base a Platonic form of learning, and many remained critical of Aristotle, even at the height of his influence (Marrone 2003, 34). Led by the very scant evidence for university music

The Middle Ages   151 curricula having any relation to, or influence on real music making (in Paris, for example), some have rejected the Boethian-Pythagorean strain of philosophical approaches to music as largely irrelevant, con­ven­iently dropping its attendant ethical prerogatives and prescriptive ontology. As a result, those influenced by Aristotelian ideas produce statements that speak to our age well, with a debunkingly empirical attitude to music as anything other than sound, the very aspect that is not coincidentally music’s most saleable feature in the present period of mass-market electronically mediated music. Modern anti-elitism and focus on the popular should be viewed for what it is: a late capitalist valorization of commodity, the commercial, and what can be monetized. Devaluing of expertise and the rejection of medieval seriousness about the correct judgement of the motivations of those producing what is heard is linked to the rejection of complicated reading practices as not really representing what “normal” people would think. Latent within this wish to equate medieval listening practices with our own popular listening practices is the idea of musical consumption of a fast turnover of works, listened to (or danced to) once without any explication. It seems more likely to me, however, that medieval musical pieces were appreciated over a longer time and cumulatively from many angles, including listening, performing, and discussion—perhaps even from seeing the written text, although a spoken text (lecture) is equally feasible. While nobles might lack formal training, they were apt for receiving informal (lay) instruction from their formally trained (clerical) servants at court. This is not to deny that individuals could show diversity of interest and degrees of understanding, but the prestige of elite culture was an aspirational interest of many medieval aristocrats. Contemporary narratives that see the medieval court as a refreshingly enlightened secular space in a rapidly secularizing later Middle Ages are also questionable for the post-Enlightenment (and, ultimately, postmodern) attitudes to religion that they embody. Modern attitudes to theology, (the possibility of) truth, and the intellectualemotional meaning of music affect what scholars pick and choose from medieval writings on music and philosophy. The modern appreciation of music as primarily gustative, for consumption and uncomplicated enjoyment (often physical) is partly useful (because medieval music accompanied movements in the liturgy, in dance—also sometimes liturgical!—and ceremonial), but mainly obscures the very real seriousness of music in elite discourse in the Middle Ages when it really was a branch of philosophy and could thus embody and prompt thought, even if it did so through pleasure. To claim that pleasure was not the (proper) end is not to say that medieval audiences did not enjoy music, but rather that they understood their enjoyment within a context that was distinctly pre-modern, pre-capitalist, and undemocratic. That this context was a fundamentally philosophical one did not limit it to philosophers.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Eleanor Giraud, Henry Hope, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Jonathan Morton, and Emily X. X. Tan for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. The term is taken from Newman 2013.

152   Elizabeth Eva Leach 3. See Ziolkowski 1998, 196 for note on crusma, a single discrete pitch on the lyre. 4. Some of the arguments in this section were first presented in Leach 2006a, which was later challenged in Fuller 2011. For my response to Fuller, see Leach 2011b. 5. The problem for female listeners was instead one of excessive gendering, which correlated, in line with medieval anti-feminism, with hyper-sexualization. See Leach and Zeeman, 2020. 6. The Latin text reads: “ut per oblectamenta aurium infirmior animus in affectum pietatis adsurgat. tamen cum mihi accidit ut me amplius cantus quam res quae canitur moveat, poenaliter me peccare confiteor et tunc mallem non audire cantantem.” Text is available at http://www.stoa.org/hippo/text10.html. Translation in Augustine 1955. For a fuller exposition, see Leach 2013 and Holsinger 2001, 61–83. 7. Augustine (1977, 171) explains that noblemen properly use music to relax from their labours; Isidore, Etymologies 3.17 mentions that “music soothes the mind so that it can endure toil, and song assuages the weariness encountered in any task” (McKinnon 1998, 40). 8. Homer’s text and Aristotle’s Greek refer to a human minstrel here, not a bird. Jean de Murs and Nicole Oresme probably used William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation, which has philomela at this point; see note for I, 7 in Jean de Murs 2000, 134. Oresme notes that the citations from Homer at this point are not verse in their Latin translation, are obscure, and appear in variant versions in different sources (Menut 1970, 342–3). 9. “Leisured activity” (scholē, scholazein) is happiness as an end accompanied by pleasure. See Aristotle 1998, 229. The fourteenth-century French translation by Nicole Oresme renders it as “vaquer, ce est a dire reposer en vie contemplative” (Menut 1970, 341). 10. “Et la musique sensible donne occasion de considerer de la speculative. Et ovecques ce, elle prepare l’ame a contemplation.” Menut 1970, 348. 11. Aristotle allows that objects of sight admit faint representations of character but only by use of signs for, rather than direct imitations of, character. 12. While a far older tradition of Stoic rather than Aristotelian virtue ethics already tolerated courtly pursuits (see, for example, Moos 2012), the larger number of university-trained court administrators in the later Middle Ages, led to the predominant influence of Aristotle’s political and ethical works in this period. On the changing size and shape of court personnel, see Clanchy 1993; Vale 2001. 13. More recently, Yolanda Plumley has noted that the dialogic exchanges formerly associated with the jeu-parti transferred to the updated ballade form of the fourteenth century; see Plumley 2013, 268–269. 14. More specifically, the respondent in obligationes has to follow certain rules in answering questions about a hypothetical situation (usually a counterfactual one); the person posing the questions attempts to force the respondent into self-contradiction. While the situation with the musica ficta essay is not identical, the process is arguably analogous. The interactions between singers attempting to realize such pieces might be imagined regularly to have forced such contradictions as to bring the rehearsal process to a (temporary and humorous) standstill. For more on the musica ficta essay see Brothers 1997, 138–142 and Lefferts 2007. 15. See Marenbon 1987, 14: “Gradually, the quaestio-technique became, not just a method for organizing the theological summae, but a way of thought which could be used in any subject and which shaped the practice of teaching in the medieval universities.”

The Middle Ages   153 16. For example, Page 1993a, 63–64: “It is possible to dwell in a learned paradise of documents, variant readings in chant manuscripts, and the other material deriving from clerical ‘high’ culture, forgetting all the while that medieval mechanisms for transmitting ideas and other intangible resources sometimes worked in ways that the modern bookish mind may never envisage.” 17. While the philosophical tradition inherited from the late antique schools already combined Aristotelianism and Platonism, the later Middle Ages is marked by the specific incoporation of a wider range of Aristotle’s works newly translated into Latin.

Works Cited Aristotle. 1998. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Augustine. 1955. Confessions. Translation by Albert C. Outler, available from http://www.ccel .org/ccel/augustine/confessions.txt. Augustine. 1977. “On Music.” In Writings of Saint Augustine, Vol. 2, edited by Robert Catesby Taliaferro, 151–379. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Bain, Jennifer. 2012. “ ‘…et mon commencement ma fin’: Genre and Machaut’s Musical Language in His Secular Songs.” In A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut, edited by Deborah L. McGrady and Jennifer Bain, 79–101. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. 1989. Fundamentals of Music. Translated by Calvin M. Bower. Music Theory Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Boynton, Susan, and Eric Rice, eds. 2008. Young Choristers, 650–1700. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer. Brothers, Thomas. 1997. Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript Accidentals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cayley, Emma. 2006. Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline. 2012. “ ‘Ma fin est mon commencement’: The Essence of Poetry and Song in Guillaume de Machaut.” In A Companion to Guillaume de Machaut, edited by Deborah L. McGrady and Jennifer Bain, 69–78. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Clanchy, M.  T. 1993. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Suzannah. 2007. “ ‘S’en dirai chançonete’: Hearing Text and Music in a Medieval Motet.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 16 (1): 31–59. Desmond, Karen. 1998. “Sicut in grammatica: Analogical Discourse in Chapter 15 of Guido’s Micrologus.” Journal of Musicology 16, no. 4 (Autumn): 467–493. Dillon, Emma. 2012. The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330. New York: Oxford University Press. Dyer, Joseph. 2009. “Speculative ‘Musica’ and the Medieval University of Paris.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 177–204. Eisenberg, Michael. 2007. “The Mirror of the Text: Reflections in Ma fin est mon commencement.” In Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, edited by Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn, 83–110. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters. Fritz, Jean-Marie. 2000. Paysages sonores du Moyen Âge: Le Versant épistémologique. Paris: Champion.

154   Elizabeth Eva Leach Fuller, Sarah. 2011. “Concerning Gendered Discourse in Medieval Music Theory: Was the Semitone ‘Gendered Feminine’?” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 1 (Spring): 65–89. Guido d’Arezzo. 1999. Regulae rithmice. In Guido D’Arezzo’s Regulae Rithmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation, edited by Dolores Pesce, 327–403. Musicological Studies 73. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music. Gushee, Lawrence. 1969. “New Sources for the Biography of Johannes de Muris.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 22, no. 1 (Spring): 3–26. Haas, Max. 1982. “Studien zur mittelalterlichen Musiklehre. I: Eine Übersicht über die Musiklehre im Kontext der Philosophie des 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhunderts.” In Aktuelle Fragen der musikbezogenen Mittelalterforschung: Texte zu einem Balser Kolloquium des Jahres 1975, edited by Hans Oesch and Wulf Arlt, 323–456. Forum Musicologicum 3. Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus. Hentschel, Frank. 2000. “Der verjagte Dämon: Mittelalterliche Gedanken zur Wirkung der Musik aus der Zeit um 1300, mit einer Edition der Quaestiones 16 und 17 aus Quodlibet VI des Petrus d’Auvergne.” In Geistesleben im 13. Jahrhundert, edited by Jan  A.  Aertsen and Andreas Speer, 395–421. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hicks, Andrew. 2017. Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press. Holsinger, Bruce W. 2001. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Huot, Sylvia. 1997. Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Huot, Sylvia. 2002. “Guillaume de Machaut and the Consolation of Poetry.” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November): 169–195. Ilnitchi, Gabriela. 2002. “Musica Mundana, Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and Ptolemaic Astronomy.” Early Music History 21: 37–74. Jean de Murs. 2000. Musica speculativa. In Jean de Murs: Écrits sur la musique, edited by Christian Meyer, 133–193. Paris: CNRS. John of Salisbury. 1993. Policraticus. In Ioannis Sarisburiensis Policraticus I–IV, edited by K.  S.  B.  Keats-Rohan. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio mediaeualis 118. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Kay, Sarah. 2007. The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kay, Sarah. 2008. “Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French dit.” In The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner, 21–38. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaye, Joel. 1998. Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Thomas Forrest. 2014. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York: W. W. Norton. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2002. “Death of a Lover and the Birth of the Polyphonic Balade: Machaut’s Notated Balades 1–5.” Journal of Musicology 19, no. 3 (Summer): 461–502. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2006a. “Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: FourteenthCentury Music Theory and the Directed Progression.” Music Theory Spectrum 28, no. 1 (March): 1–21. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2006b. “ ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly While the Fowler Deceives the Bird’: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages.” Music & Letters 87, no. 2 (May): 187–211.

The Middle Ages   155 Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2007. Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2009a. “Grammar and Music in the Medieval Song-School.” New Medieval Literatures 11:195–211. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2009b. “Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages.” In Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, edited by Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson, 21–39. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2010. “Music and Verbal Meaning: Machaut’s Polytextual Songs.” Speculum 85, no. 3 (July): 567–591. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2011a. Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2011b. “Reading and Theorizing Medieval Music Theory: Interpretation and Its Contexts.” Music Theory Spectrum 33, no. 1 (Spring): 90–98. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2013. “The Sound of Beauty.” In Beauty, edited by Lauren Arrington, Zoë Leinhardt, and Philip Dawid, 72–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leach, Elizabeth Eva, and Nicolette Zeeman. 2020. “Gender: The Art and Hermeneutics of (In)differentiation.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, 125–144. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lefferts, Peter M. 2007. “A Riddle and A Song: Playing With Signs in a Fourteenth-Century Ballade.” Early Music History 26 (October): 121–179. Marenbon, John. 1987. Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction. London: Routledge. Marrone, Stephen P. 2003. “Medieval Philosophy in Context.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, edited by A. S. McGrade, 10–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKinnon, James, ed. 1998. The Early Christian Period and the Latin Middle Ages. Source Readings in Music History 2. New York: W.W. Norton. Menut, Albert Douglas. 1970. “Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote, Published from the Text of the Avranches Manuscript 223.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ns 60, no. 6 (November): 1–392. Moos, Peter von. 2012. “Du miroir des princes au Cortegiano. Engelbert d’Admont (1250– 1331) sur les agréments de la convivialité et de la conversation.” In Formes dialoguées dans la littérature exemplaire du Moyen Âge, edited by Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, 103–162. Paris: Champion. Newman, Barbara. 2013. Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Page, Christopher. 1993a. Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page, Christopher. 1993b. “Johannes Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2, no. 1 (April): 17–41. Page, Christopher. 2000. “Around the Performance of a Thirteenth-Century Motet.” Early Music 28, no. 3 (August): 343–357. Plumley, Yolanda. 2013. The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. New York: Oxford University Press. Rico, Gilles. 2005a. “Music in the Arts Faculty of Paris in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.” Doctoral diss., University of Oxford. http://www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/ doctoral-dissertations/rico/. Rico, Gilles. 2005b. “ ‘Auctoritas cereum habet nasum’: Boethius, Aristotle, and the Music of the Spheres in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries.” In Citation and Authority in

156   Elizabeth Eva Leach Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: Learning from the Learned, edited by Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach, 20–28. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer. Rothenberg, David  J. 2011. The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Saltzstein, Jennifer. 2012. “Cleric-Trouvères and the Jeux-Partis of Medieval Arras.” Viator 43 (2): 147–64. Schoen-Nazzaro, Mary B. 1978. “Plato and Aristotle on the Ends of Music.” Laval Theologique et Philosophique 34 (3): 261–373. Swerdlow, Noel. 1967. “ ‘Musica dicitur a moys, quod est aqua.’ ” Journal of the American Musicological Society 20, no. 1 (Spring): 3–9. Tanay, Dorit Esther. 1999. Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation, 1250–1400. Musicological Studies and Documents 46. Holzgerlingen, Germany: Hänssler Verlag. Vale, Malcolm. 2001. The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe 1270–1380. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ziolkowski, Jan M., ed. 1998. The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia). Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

chapter 8

The Ea r ly Moder n Per iod Bruce R. Smith

As a departure point for thinking about music in early modern terms, let us consider a viola da gamba. The example in Figure 8.1 is a bass viol made by John Rose (whether the father or the son is uncertain) in London about 1600. How might we think about the viol in question? What lines of thought present themselves? Where might we find a philosophical purchase on the object in front of us? Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Categories, we might first think of Rose’s viol ontologically. We might consider it as a physical object and scrutinize what we understand it to be, how it came to be, what other objects it is related to, and how it can be used. In his treatise De inventione et usu musicae (c.1487), the first-wave Humanist theoretician Johannes Tinctoris uses the Latin word viola to designate stringed instruments descended from the lute (Woodfield 1988, 38–39). All such instruments belong to the larger lyra family. A prototypical lyra, in Tinctoris’s description, “is made of wood in the shape of a tortoise-shell, with a hole roughly in the center, and a long neck over which the strings are stretched from just below the hole up to the top of the neck” (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 133). Completing our physical anatomy of Rose’s instrument, we might distinguish it as a viola da gamba (to be placed between the legs and played with a bow) as opposed to a viola da braccio (to be placed on the arm and bowed) or a viola a mano (to be plucked with the hand, as with a lute or a guitar). Then again, we might consider the metaphysics of the viol, its instrumentality in sounding the principles of cosmic harmony. Michel de Montaigne in his “Apology for Raymond Sebound” (1580, with later revisions) recounts a familiar topos that has its ultimate textual origin in Plato’s Timaeus and Laws. “In the most famous schools of Greece,” Montaigne writes, “the world is reputed a god, framed by another greater and mightier god, and is composed of a body and a soul, which abideth in his centre, spreading itself by musical numbers unto his circumference, divine, thrice-happy, very great, most wise and eternal” (Montaigne 1613, sig. Ee5v).1 Robert Fludd’s illustration of the music of all creation, in Figure 8.2, gives visual presence to this pervasive idea.

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Figure 8. John Rose (father or son uncertain), bass viola da gamba (London, c. 1600). © Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Early Modern Period   159 Or we might consider the physics of the viol: how sound is produced by a player on the viol, how that sound is propagated in the air, and how it is received by human ears. Francis Bacon in Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History (published posthumously in 1626) observes that “if a lute, or viol, be laid upon the back with a small straw upon one of the strings; and another lute or viol be laid by it; and in the other lute or viol, the unison to that string be stricken; it will make the string move” (Bacon 1626, § 279, sig. K3v). Vibration is the material cause in Bacon’s acoustics. The rhetoric of the viol might be another concern. We might consider what music produced on the viol represents or expresses and how that music affects listeners. Tinctoris describes his rapture at hearing two blind brothers, Charles and Jean, play on an instrument he calls a viola cum arculo (viola with an arched bridge): “I heard Charles take the treble and Jean the tenor in many songs, playing the viol [probably viola in its generic sense] so expertly and with such charm that the viol has never pleased me so well” (Woodfield 1988, 78–79). This is high praise indeed, since Tinctoris considers the viola and the rebec to be “my chosen instruments, those that induce piety and stir my heart most ardently to the contemplation of heavenly joys” (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 134). Because the viola and the rebec are both stringed instruments, Tinctoris may be thinking here of the metaphysics of the music, but in describing how the sounds “stir my heart most ardently” he is also testifying to the visceral power of the music. In terms that Cicero taught early modern rhetoricians, Tinctoris was “moved” by the brothers’ violplaying, just as auditors of an oration might be “moved” by a speaker. “The French Dancing Master” in Figure 8.3 shows how that moving could be quite literal. On hearing certain kinds of music, a listener is moved to get up and dance. Finally, we might consider the ethics of the viol. In The Book of The Courtier (1528) Baldassare Castiglione has Sir Frederick, one of the main interlocutors in this Ciceronian dialogue, declare that “all instruments with frets” are becoming to a courtier, specifically mentioning the lute and viol (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 328). Blown instruments are deemed less becoming, for three reasons. First, the frets on a viol’s neck allow the instrument to be tuned according to the cosmic ratios shown in Fludd’s image of the music of the spheres (Figure 8.2). Fludd takes quite literally an idea going back to Pythagoras that the numerical ratios governing the disposition of the universe can be replicated in human music. Stringed instruments, furthermore, permit a performer to add words, imbuing the music with logos, whereas blown instruments can communicate only wordless passions. Cosmetics provides the final reason: blowing a wind instrument disfigures the performer’s face with puffed cheeks and pursed lips. The courtly rules Castiglione prescribes are part of music as “ethos”: that is to say, music considered as custom, usage, disposition, character, and social institution (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ethos, n.,” 1, 2.a), in this case music as a practice for noble males attendant on a prince. There were ethoi other than courts in early modern Europe, each with its own music and its own ways of discoursing about music. All five philosophical “takes” on music—ontological, physical, metaphysical, rhetorical, and ethical—were current in the late fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, those approaches existed in a state of confusion and contradiction.

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Figure 8.2  The tuning of the spheres, from Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (1617). By permission of the Getty Research Institute.

The Early Modern Period   161 According to Frederick Copleston in A History of Philosophy, medieval thought presents “a variety set against a common and well-defined background.” By contrast, “when one looks at Renaissance philosophy . . . one is faced at first sight with a rather bewildering assortment of philosophies. One finds for instance Platonists, Aristotelians of various kinds, anti-Aristotelians, Stoics, sceptics, eclectics and philosophers of nature . . . the over-all impression is one of a pullulating individualism” (Copleston 1963, 28). What is true of Renaissance philosophy in general is no less true of Renaissance philosophies of music. The Praise of Music (1586, published anonymously but sometimes attributed to the Aristotelian scholar John Case) is typical in drawing together ideas about music from diverse sources without worrying too much about deeper contradictions. Let us consider the five philosophical takes on music one by one. My approach here can be compared to Mladen Dolar’s organization of his 2006 book A Voice and Nothing More according to philosophical categories. In each case we shall seek out manifestations of the ideas in action by attending to particular venues, compositions, and musical practices. And we shall take seriously the “modern” in “early modern,” looking for ways in which our contemporary concerns are anticipated in fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and ­seventeenth-century philosophies of music.2 Existing scholarship on early modern music tends to favour only a single philosophical approach, whether one recognized by early modern practitioners themselves (metaphysical, for example) or one grounded in interpretative theories of our own time (social-materialist, for example, or deconstructionist). We come closer, I would argue, to early modern thought about music by putting multiple approaches into play, even as we own up to our own interpretative preoccupations. To us, as to early modern thinkers, music presents a special test case that calls into question philosophical ideas based primarily on visual experience and on words.

Ontology Focus on an instrument as a physical entity is not static. It invites us to consider not just the instrument’s materiality and form but who made the instrument and how it can be used. The template for this approach is supplied by Aristotle’s four “causes”—material, formal, efficient, and final—as articulated in Metaphysics (5.2.1013a.24–1013b.4) and elsewhere in Aristotle’s works. In The Art of Reason (1573), Ralph Lever turns these tools of “wit-craft” into plain English: There are four causes: the matter, the form, the workman, and the end. 1. Matter is the stuff, whereof a thing is made. 2. Form is the shape and fashion, which added to the matter, maketh the thing perfect, and yieldeth both name and being thereunto. 3. Workmen are doers, from whence moving first cometh. 4. An end is the use of a thing that is made, causing the workman to take the enterprise in hand.  (Lever 1573: sig. L8)

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Figure 8.3  “The French Dancing Master” from William Cavendish, The Variety (1639–42), as depicted on the title page to Francis Kirkman, The Wits (1662). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The Early Modern Period   163 For the lyra viol shown in Figure 8.1 we have ready answers to Lever’s considerations 1, 2, and 3. Following well-established ideas about “viol-ness,” John Rose fashioned this particular one out of wood, glue, and gut in his workshop in the Bridewell district of London in 1598. The fourth “cause” is more open-ended, extending beyond Rose’s immediate intentions. Once finished and sold, to what uses could Rose’s viol have been put? Private musicmaking in a well-set-up household is one possibility. Henry Peacham in The Complete Gentleman (1622) extends Castiglione’s advice about music in The Courtier to a socially broader group of music-makers: I might run into an infinite sea of the praise and use of so excellent an art, but I only show it you with the finger, because I desire not that any noble or gentleman should (save his private recreation at leisurable hours) prove a master in the same, or neglect his more weighty employments: . . . I desire no more in you than to sing your part sure, and at the first sight, withal, to play the same upon your viol, or the exercise of the lute, privately to yourself.  (Peacham 1622, sig. O4v)

Peacham’s syntax and punctuation are ambiguous, but he seems to be distinguishing here between singing and viol-playing as social activities on the one hand and lute­playing as a private activity on the other. Rose’s viol might also have been used in theatrical performances, in which case the performer would have been not an amateur, as Peacham imagines, but a professional musician. In 1598, the very year Rose finished his viol, an inventory of theatrical properties drawn up for Philip Henslowe, impresario of the acting troupe the Lord Admiral’s Men, includes four stringed instruments—a treble viol, a bass viol, a bandore, and a cittern—along with a sackbut, three timbrels, three trumpets, and a drum (Smith 1999, 218–219). Recorders were probably also in the company’s possession. Viols were essential to the cues for “soft music,” “still music,” and “solemn music” in scripts of the period (see Lindley 2006), often in moments when the music of the spheres is invoked to work supernatural effects on mortals. In Shakespeare’s plays such moments include the “still music” that accompanies the appearance of the god Hymen at the end of As You Like It (5.4.106, stage direction), the music that cures and then awakes the deranged King Lear in the first printed text of the play (The History of King Lear, sc. 21), Paulina’s bowing cue “Music; awake her, strike!” when Hermione’s statue comes to life in the last scene of The Winter’s Tale (5.2.98), and Prospero’s command for “some heavenly music” to work his final act of magic at the of The Tempest (5.1.52, cued as “solemn music” at 5.1.58 stage direction). A rather different use for a viol is suggested in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s comedy The Roaring Girl (probably first acted in 1611). (“Roaring” in early modern English meant rowdy and boisterous, and the person doing the roaring was typically a “boy.”) When Moll Cutpurse, the protagonist modelled on the real-life virago Mary Frith, threatens to draw her sword on a male antagonist, he takes down a viol from the wall, hands it to her, and asks her to sing and so allay her fury. Presumably she plays the viol a gamba, between her legs: “I’ll play my part as well as I can,” Moll quips, “it shall

164   Bruce R. Smith ne’er be said I came into a gentleman’s chamber and let his instrument hang by the walls!” (Middelton 2007: sc. 8.85–87) Her interlocutor acknowledges “there be a thousand close dames that will call the viol an unmannerly instrument for a woman” (sc. 8.96–98). In the hands of Peacham’s gentleman amateur, a viol could demonstrate social accomplishment. From the musician’s gallery in the Globe Theatre, it could sound the music of the spheres. Plucked down from a tavern wall and placed between the legs of a woman, it could raise a man’s flesh. We see in Middleton and Rowley’s jokes a verbal counterpart to the images of Fludd’s universe and the dancing French fiddler shown in Figures 8.2 and 8.3: in Figure 8.2, the viol as a symbol of rationality; in Figure 8.3, the viol as an instrument for roaring. Early modern ontology with respect to musical apparatus points us in the direction of the modern idea of “affordances,” the possibilities of action available in a given environment, given the objects available and the user’s perceptions. The term “affordances,” originally introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson in the 1970s, invites us to recognize that a viol is not a simple object with obvious uses but a complex object that can be deployed in different ways, according to the circumstances, and with differing results for listeners’ perceptions (Gibson 2015).

Metaphysics Plato’s ideas about mundane music as emanations of cosmic harmony took on new life in early modern Europe. Marsilio Ficino, resident intellectual at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, provides in De triplici vita (Three Books on Life) (1489) a key to Fludd’s finely tuned viol in Figure 8.2. “Now since the planets are seven in number,” Ficino writes, “there are also seven steps through which something from on high can be attracted to the lower things. Sounds occupy the middle position and are dedicated to Apollo” (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 386). Sounds mediate between material elements, subhuman living things, and fine powders and vapours positioned toward the bottom of the viol’s fretted neck and “forms, motions, passions” and acts of reason positioned at the top. As “a most powerful imitator of all things,” song can represent “people’s physical gestures, motions, and actions as well as their characters,” but “when it imitates the celestials, it also wonderfully arouses our spirit upwards to the celestial influence and the celestial influence downwards to our spirit” (387). In Fludd’s image the viol’s neck comprises a double octave. The lower octave passes through the spheres of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) and the spheres of the moon (stones and metals), Mercury (plants and animals), and Venus (fine powders and vapours), before closing the octave in the sphere of the sun. The upper octave ascends from the sun by eight degrees through Ficino’s “celestials.” The route from Plato to Ficino has been thoroughly charted by Gary Tomlinson in a chapter on “Modes and Planetary Song: The Musical Alliance of Ethics and Cosmology” in Music in Renaissance Magic (Tomlinson  2006, 44–66). Plato’s formulations about

The Early Modern Period   165 music begin with Pythagoras (sixth century bce), who is credited by numerous ancient and medieval authorities as being the “discoverer” of music. As Iamblichus (late third century to the early fourth century ce) tells the story in his biography of Pythagoras, one day the philosopher was passing a brass-worker’s shop and noticed familiar harmonious intervals in the striking of the brass-worker’s hammers. Rushing inside, he discovered that the differences in pitch were the result of different weights of the hammers. Back at home, Pythagoras suspended four strings from a peg in the wall, stretched them by tying hammers to the loose ends, and after experimenting with various weights found that he could reproduce the harmonic intervals by plucking the strings. What is more, those intervals turned out to be measurable in fixed ratios using only the numbers 1 to 4. Thus an octave was produced by plucking strings whose lengths were related in a ratio of 1:2, a fifth in a ratio of 3:2, a fourth in a ratio of 4:3 (Iamblichus 1926, 26). Pythagoras’s discovery helps explain why Castiglione and other early modern writers considered stringed instruments superior to other musical instruments and hence more worthy of a cultivated person’s attention. Harmony in the music that Pythagoras heard, as in Gregorian chant, as indeed in most of the world’s musics today, was monophonic: harmonic intervals measured progressions from one tone to another, not multiple tones sounding at the same time. The introduction in Western art music of polyphony, with two or more melodic lines moving simultaneously, complicated things mathematically for thinkers-about-music and practically for composers, performers, and listeners. As pointed out by both Tomlinson (2006, 71) and Penelope Gouk in Music, Science and Natural Magic in SeventeenthCentury England (Gouk 1999, 137–41), the writers who kept Pythagoras’s model current across a thousand years in fact assumed two quite different mathematical systems: one based on pitch and one based on scales. In the pitch model, as originally articulated by Pythagoras, each planet sounds out a different tone. The result is “the music of spheres” in the plural. In the scalar model, as formulated most influentially by Gioseffo Zarlino in his Institutione harmoniche (1558), each planet is associated with a different scale made up of multiple tones. For theorists taking the long view, it was immensely appealing to associate each scale with one of the ancient modes mentioned by Plato: the Lydian mode inducing sorrow, the Ionian indolence, the Dorian and the Phyrgian courage and strength (Republic 3.398–403). Writing metaphysical music—getting the numbers right—was one thing; making it work for listeners was another. The very possibility of metaphysical listening was debated. Montaigne, for example, in his essay “Of Custom” (1580), regards the music of the spheres as only an idea, not a sound-event. We cannot hear the music of the spheres for the same reason that Egyptians living near the cataracts of the Nile cannot hear the falls: We need not go seek what our neighbors report of the cataracts of Nile; and what philosophers deem of the celestial music, which is, that the bodies of its circles, being solid smooth, and in their rolling motion, touching and rubbing one against another, must of necessity produce a wonderful harmony: by the changes and

166   Bruce R. Smith i­ ntercaperings of which, the revolutions, motions, cadences, and carols of the asters and planets are caused and transported. But that universally the hearing senses of these low world’s creatures, dizzied and lulled asleep, as those of the Egyptians are, by the continuation of that sound, how loud and great soever it be, cannot sensibly perceive or distinguish the same.  (Montaigne 1613, sig. E5)

Shakespeare gives the metaphysical take on music its due when he has Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice (1597–8), looking up into the night sky, tell his new bride Jessica, There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

But Lorenzo immediately qualifies his declaration by telling Jessica that such listening, in their present circumstances, is impossible: Such harmony is in immortal souls, But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (5.1.60–5)

The witty Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (1598) is more blunt. He marvels that “sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies” (2.3.51). The year before Rose was making his viol and Shakespeare was writing Merchant and Much Ado, Thomas Morley published a book that discounted metaphysical aspirations in its very title: A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597). Morley contrasts his own interest in “practical music” with speculative “discourse of music” (Weiss and ­ Taruskin 2008, 195). And yet some people claimed to hear the music of the spheres. The English world traveller Thomas Coryat describes in 1608 the transcendental elation he experienced at hearing a musical celebration of St Roch’s feast day in Venice, a vocal and instrumental performance so good, so delectable, so rare, so super excellent that it did even ravish and stupefy all those strangers that never heard the like. But how others were affected with it I know not; for mine own part I can say this, that I was for the time even rapt up with St. Paul into the third heaven.  (MacClintock 1979, 115)

Coryat’s allusion is to 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, where Paul, presumably referring to himself in third person, describes coming into the presence of God: I know a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether he were in the body, I cannot tell, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth) which was taken up into the third heaven. And I know such a man (whether in the body, or out of the body,

The Early Modern Period   167 I cannot tell: God knoweth) how that he was taken up into Paradise, and heard words which cannot be spoken, which are not possible for man to utter. (2 Corinthians 12:2–4, Geneva Bible)

It was the stringed instruments and the singing in particular that wafted Coryat to that place. An ethereal effect seems to have been produced by three viol-players when they took up theorboes, lutes with long necks, “to which they sung also, who yielded admirable sweet music but so still that they could scarce be heard but by those very near them” (MacClintock 1979, 115). Well into the seventeenth century John Milton in his poem “At a Solemn Music” (published 1645) celebrates metaphysical listening and provides the conditions necessary for it to happen. “Voice” and “verse” in Milton’s formulation provide access to a truth higher than sense perception: Blest pair of sirens, pledges of Heav’n’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce, And to our high-rais’d fantasy present That undisturbed song of pure consent, Ay sung before that sapphire-colour’d throne To Him that sits thereon . . . (Milton 1645, 22; ll. 1–8)

To call Voice and Verse “sirens” as well as “sisters” suggests that either entity, on its own, possesses no more than sensuous power. It is their “mixt power” that allows a listener to hear the “song of pure consent.” No less important, let us note, is the faculty of “fantasy,” which in early modern psychology referred to the synesthetic fusions of sense experience, memory, and imagination that communicated directly between brain and heart (Wright 1604, sig. D7). The qualifier “solemn” in Milton’s title is more than “dignified.” Like a Missa solemnis, Milton’s “solemn music” is “associated or connected with religious rites or observances; performed with due ceremony and reverence; having a religious character; sacred” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “solemn, adj.,” 1.a). Milton’s usage should prompt us to think more precisely about the “solemn music” cued to accompany Prospero’s ministrations at the end of The Tempest. For us, “metaphysical music” might seem a superannuated, exhausted line of inquiry. Transcendental meaning has been attacked and dismissed in critical analysis of all the arts, not just music. Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967, English translation 1976) remains the foundational text for these operations. Or has Derrida’s book been turned into a transcendental text in its own right? A latter-day version of Platonic philosophy still exists, in the guise of Theory-with-a-capital-T, abstruse and abstract, disconnected from the sound in music as a sounding art. Carolyn Abbate protests against such a state of affairs when, borrowing terms from Vladimir Jankélévitch, she advances the case for

168   Bruce R. Smith “drastic music” over “gnostic music.” “Metaphysical mania,” writes Abbate, “encourages us to retreat from real music to the abstraction of the work” (Abbate 2004, 505). As yet another version of metaphysical idealism we might even consider “absolute music” of the twentieth century: Schoenberg, Webern, Hindemith, Stravinsky. In his Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the origins of this highly influential concept to Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in Music, 1854), and ultimately to Pythagoras and Plato (Bonds 2014, 17–38). Twelve-tone rows may not be so far from Pythagoras’s cosmically determined intervals, in the act of analysing if not in the experience of listening.

Physics How to turn metas into physicals: that was the problem faced by early modern thinkers about music such as Bartolomeo Ramos de Pareia (Musica practica, 1482), Ficino (De triplici vita, 1489), Francino Gafori (Practica musicae, 1496), Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, 1526), and Marin Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, 1636). Again, Tomlinson (2006, 77–97) and Gouk (1999, 277–282) have provided summaries and charts that precisely place these thinkers vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the acoustic problem at large. With two competing schemes of cosmic harmony—one based on pitch, the other on scales—just getting the numbers right was not a straightforward proposition. Practical questions about pitches and scales did not stop the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf and the composer Joachim Thibault de Courville from founding in the late 1560s a ­royally-supported Académie de musique et de poésie dedicated to reviving ancient music—and to recapturing the effects attributed to that music by ancient authorities. As stated in the academy’s statutes, the ultimate purpose of vers mesurés and its attuned musique mesurée, with rhythms regulated by the metres of Greek and Latin verse, is that “by this means the souls of listeners, accustomed and disposed to music in the very form of their faculties, might arrange themselves so as to be capable of higher knowledge, purging themselves of whatever barbarities may remain in them” (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 340). In Florence a few years later similar experiments by the Camerata assembled by Count Giovanni de’ Bardi resulted in the earliest operas, the earliest of all being Ottavio Rinnucini’s drama Dafne (1597–8), set to music by Jacopo Peri and Jacopo Corsi (Abbate and Parker 2015, 40). In Rinnucini’s drama, lyre-playing Apollo is a central figure, and he brought with him the metaphysical baggage we have observed already. According to its composer, Marco Da Gagliano, one of the later settings (1607–8) was staged so as to emphasize the cosmic powers of Apollo’s lyre and the unseen viols that were actually used to sound its powers: when Apollo sings the terzetti Non curi la mia pieanta o fiamme, o gelo he should hold his lyre against his chest . . . It is necessary that it should appear to the audience

The Early Modern Period   169 that the extraordinary melody comes from Apollo’s lyre, so place four viol players . . . in one of the rear exits in a place where, unseen by the audience, they can see Apollo, and when he applies his bow to his lyre, they can play the three written notes, taking care to draw their bows together so it will seem to be only one bow (MacClintock 1979, 193).

In practical terms, the French and Italian experiments fostered two revolutionary developments in particular: chromaticism and monody (Berger  2007, 19–42). Ironically, abandoning Pythagoras’s cosmically sanctioned intervals—or at least moving beyond them—seemed to induce the strong passions that those intervals were supposed to secure on their own. Susan McClary argues in Desire and Pleasure in SeventeenthCentury Music that one chromatic progression in particular—the leading tone—proved to be especially powerful (McClary 2012, 8). Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo: Favola in musica exemplifies “The Expansion Principle” that McClary locates in new tonalities that move in and out of traditional modes (32–39). In Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, as in Peri and Corsi’s La Dafne, it is a man with a lyre who sounds out as the protagonist. The other new development, monody, is closer to Plato’s prescriptions in carefully aligning words and music in the singing of a single voice. Again, Monteverdi’s Orfeo offers a resonant example. Plato (in Republic 398d) had defined music as consisting of three things: oration, harmony, and rhythm. Seventeenth-century monody, in operas and in lyric songs, restored oration to its proper place as the principle that guides the other two. The “solemn music” that so moved Milton may well have been monody of the sort cultivated by Henry Lawes, who collaborated with Milton on A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle [Comus] in 1634. Yet another way of conjoining the numbers of physics with practices of music is evoked in Morley’s A Plain and Easy Introduction. Morley contrasts “practical music” with “that kind of music which by mathematical helps, seeketh out the causes, properties, and natures of sounds by themselves, and compared with others proceeding no further, but content with the only contemplation of the art” (Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 195). By gesturing towards “mathematic helps” Morley is commemorating an older, already well-established science of music through its place in the medieval quadrivium alongside mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. All four are scientific subjects in that they offer ways of observing, measuring, and systematizing the world of givens within which human beings think, act, and live. Morley may also be recognizing a science of sound that was just beginning to become an independent pursuit when he published his howto-do-things-with-music guide in 1597. Gouk (1999, 3–22) has insisted that the new acoustic science of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had as much to do with “natural magic” as with what we now understand as “physics.” The “experiments” in Bacon’s Sylva Silvarum are closer to what we would call “experiences”: demonstrations of phenomena like the vibration transmitted from one viol to another that Bacon attempts to explain by using philosophical explanations that already exist. Many of his explanations assume the same occult but naturally occurring causes that distinguished “natural” magic from “demonic” magic

170   Bruce R. Smith (Gouk 1999, 157–192). Bacon knows in advance what the outcomes are going to be; he mainly wants the reader to experience the phenomena at first hand—or in the several experiments with sound, at first ear. In all these experiments Bacon is concerned with the materiality of sound: the material vibrations that are the sources of sound, the material media that transmit sound waves to the ear, the material apparatus of hearing and perception. Take, for example, his explanation of sounds made by a viol: The strings of a lute, or viol, or virginals, do give a far greater sound, by reason of the knot, and board, and concave underneath, than if there were nothing but only the flat of a board, without that hollow and knot, to let in the upper air into the lower. The cause is, the communication of the upper air with the lower; and penning of both from expense, or dispersing.  (Bacon 1626, § 145, sig. G2v)

It is possible indeed to get ahead of the air, so to speak, and “play” one’s ear using the bow from a bow-and-arrows (Bacon 1626, § 149). In another version of the experiment Bacon recommends playing one’s teeth by biting down on the bow and plucking the string (§ 700). Rather than looking for an epistemic shift in seventeenth-century thought about music, Gouk invites us to accept continuities and contradictions, just as Copleston does with Renaissance philosophy more generally. Certainly that is the case with the physics of music, even in the writings of Bacon. Multiple possibilities about the physics of music and its physiological effects are explicitly entertained by Thomas Wright in his treatise on The Passions of the Mind in General (1604). “What,” he asks, “hath the shaking or artificial crispling of the air (which is in effect the substance of music) to do with rousing up choler, afflicting with melancholy, jubilating the heart with pleasure, elevating the soul with devotion, alluring to lust, inducing to peace, exciting to compassion, inviting to magnanimity?” Wright proposes four answers. The first is “a certain sympathy, correspondence, or proportion betwixt our souls and music.” A second answer is “God’s general providence, who, when these sounds affect the ear, produceth a certain spiritual quality in the soul, the which stirreth up one or other passion, according to the variety of voices or consorts of instruments.” Third is the very sound itself, which, according to the best philosophy is nothing else but a certain artificial shaking, crispling, or tickling of the air (like as we see in the water crispled, when it is calm and a sweet gale of wind ruffleth it a little; or when we cast a stone into a calm water we may perceive divers warbling natural circles) which passeth through the ears, and by them into the heart, and there beateth and tickleth it in such sort as it is moved with semblable passions.

Finally Wright considers music’s multiple affects: “diverse comforts stir up the heart, diverse sorts of joys, and diverse sorts of sadness or pain” (Wright 1604, sigs. M4v–M6). In terms of our own categories of thought, Wright’s answers range from ontology (“correspondence” between soul and music as entities) to metaphysics (“God’s general

The Early Modern Period   171 ­ rovidence”) to physics (“a certain artificial shaking, crispling, or tickling of the air”) to p psychology (comforts, joys, sadness, pain). It is symptomatic, perhaps, of what was happening in seventeenth-century thought about music that Wright links physics and psychology. In the ears and minds of some listeners, then and now, to consider music in terms of physics is to consider too curiously. Horatio chides Hamlet for systematically reducing Alexander the Great’s mortal remains to a material substance, a wad of dust: “ʼTwere to consider too curiously to consider so” (Hamlet 5.1.201). But Bacon, true to the physiology in physics, is also attentive to the psychological reception of music. His model embraces not only periodic waves in the air but activation of the “spirits” that early modern physiology took to be the body’s internal communication system. Sound—music in particular—is judged in one of the last experiments to be a more “spiritual” medium than vision. With respect to the eye of the beholder, colours remain “out there.” Smells, tastes, and touches do engage the perceiver’s body, but sound, music in particular, communicates most directly with the perceiver’s spirits: So it is sound alone, that doth immediately, and incorporeally, affect most: this is most manifest in music; and concords and discords in music: for all sounds, whether they be sharp, or flat, if they be sweet, have a roundness and equality; and if they be harsh, are unequal: for a discord itself is but a harshness of di[v]erse sounds meeting. (Bacon 1626, § 700, sig. Z3)

In this formulation the human body, not the mathematics of the cosmos, becomes the material cause of musical effects. Bacon and Wright deliver us to the threshold of a modern psychology of music that recognizes the physics of sound, media, and individual perceptions as equally important components. They also position themselves within the approach to music that early modern listeners found to be a particularly good fit with their own experiences of music: rhetoric.

Rhetoric As much deference as early modern writers may have given to Aristotle and the causes of music, to Plato and the metaphysics of music, and to Pythagoras and the physics of music, the conceptual framework that seemed most habitable was the rhetoric of music. In his Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (1991), Mark Evan Bonds demonstrates how rhetoric/oration/persuasion functioned before 1800 as the standard model for explaining musical form, just as organic ideas of form became dominant after 1800. Aristotle’s Rhetoric was the ultimate authority for such an approach, but closer at hand for early modern thinkers were the dialogues of Cicero and Quintilian, whose precepts supplied the principles of Humanist education all over Europe. Rhetoric, as we might say today, was the default mode for talking about music,

172   Bruce R. Smith as indeed it was for talking about all forms of art down to the eighteenth century. For music in particular, rhetoric usefully combined aspects of all the other approaches: the causes of ontology, the idealism of metaphysics, the materiality of physics, and, as we shall discover, the character-formation and the sociality of ethics. “Docere, delectare, et movere”: Cicero in De Oratore (55 bce) specifies the purposes of rhetoric as “to teach, to delight, and to move” (Cicero  1942: 2.19.21). For listeners to music in early modern Europe, that formulation was attractive because it gave them permission to take visceral pleasure in what they were hearing at the same time that they could tell themselves they were experiencing something “higher.” Explicit comparisons of music and rhetoric are provided by several early modern writers. Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music (1581) is perhaps the most thorough-going. In it, Galilei gives Giovanni de’ Bardi (the same Florentine count who was so influential for the birth of opera) an oration on the fundamental difference between sixteenth-century music (“its sole aim is to delight the ear”) and ancient music (“to induce in another the same passion that one feels oneself ”). Contemporary composers can learn how to recapture the ancient effects, Galilei has De’ Bardi say, by going to the theatre: when they go for their amusement to the tragedies and comedies that the mummers act, let them a few times leave off their immoderate laughing, and instead be so good as to observe when one quiet gentleman speaks with another, in what manner he speaks, how high or low his voice is pitched, with what volume of sound, with what sort of accents and gestures, and with what rapidity or slowness his words are uttered. And so on, for gentlemen speaking with servants, servants with each other, a prince with one of his subjects or with a petitioner, angry and excited men, a married woman, a girl, a child, a harlot, a lover, a man lamenting, a man crying out, a timid man, a joyful man. From these variations of circumstance, if they observe them attentively and examine them with care, they will be able to select the norm of what is fitting for the expression of any other conception whatever that can call for their handling. (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 465–466)

The fusion of oratory, music, and theatre that De’ Bardi advocates here was realized in early operas like La Dafne and L’Orfeo. The declamatory style of these experiments—the stile rappresentativo—must have had appeal beyond the cognoscenti of De’ Bardi’s Camerata, since it was taken up within a dozen years as far afield as England in the declamatory songs that Robert Johnson contributed to plays acted by the King’s Men (including The Tempest in 1610–11) and in Lawes’s music for Milton’s Comus (1634). Music-as-rhetoric, as Tomlinson points out, was a special interest of German writers about music in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 467). In Musica Poetica (1606) Joachim Burmeister recommends that composers structure their pieces like orations. Analysis or “arrangement” of a musical piece begins and ends for Burmeister with the piece’s “affections or periods,” which he aligns with what

The Early Modern Period   173 Cicero and his early modern disciples would have called the dispositio of an oration. In this layout Burmeister distinguishes three sequential elements: (1) an exordium that captures the listener’s attention, (2) “the body of the piece,” and (3) an ending in which the forthcoming close is “clearly impressed on the listeners’ awareness” (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 469). It is the body of the piece that communicates the piece’s argument: “textual passages similar to the various arguments of the confirmatio in rhetoric are instilled in the listener’s mind in order that the proposition be more clearly grasped and considered” (469). Composing a piece of music, Burmeister proposes, is like writing an oration; listening to a piece of music, like attending to an eloquent speech. Both species of rhetoric are designed to advance an argument; both achieve their ends by “winning over” listeners’ “affections.” The example that Burmeister immediately provides is a five-voice motet by Orlando di Lasso. As other examples of Galilei’s and Burmeister’s principles we might turn to early operas. Monteverdi’s exquisitely sensitive music for Arianna’s lament in the otherwise lost opera Arianna (1608) follows the contours of the singer’s passions as she moves from grief over her abandonment by Theseus to pleading to anger to resignation. Di Lasso’s motet and Monteverdi’s aria are like orations in that both declaim words, but the argument that Burmeister has in mind need not be verbal; rather, it concerns “affections.” Abstract music, he implies, can accomplish the same goals. Musical rhetoric has succeeded if it induces in listeners the passions that the composer engages and the musician performs. So just what is a listener “moved” to do? To think, certainly. To feel, even more insistently. But above all to do something. It is the rhetorical mode of thinking about music, not just the metaphysical and the physical modes, that explains why early modern writers loved anecdotes about music’s power to change listeners’ behaviour. Hence the Count’s praise of music in Castiglione: it is written that Alexander was sometime so fervently stirred with it that (in a manner) against his will he was forced to arise from banquets and run to weapon, afterward the musician changing the stroke and his manner of tune, pacified himself again and returned from weapon to banqueting.  (Strunk and Treitler 1998, 326)

The ultimate power of music-as-rhetoric may lie in what it moves listeners to do with their bodies. In effect, listeners yield control of their bodies to music. Beginning with Plato, music was associated with gymnastics. In the Republic, Socrates lays out a scheme of education that moves from letters through music to gymnastics. The three disciplines are deployed sequentially to bring order and harmony to the student’s soul. Gymnastics figures, indeed, as the perfection of letters and music: he who best blends gymnastics with music and applies them most suitably to the soul is the man whom we should most rightly pronounce to be the most musical and harmonious, far rather than the one who composes the strings one with another. (Republic 3.18.412b, in Strunk and Treitler 1998, 18–19)

174   Bruce R. Smith With the nineteenth-century apotheosis of abstract music intruding between us and our early modern counterparts, it may be hard to understand how closely allied music was with dance even as late as W. A. Mozart in the eighteenth century. Taking survey of the major genres of music in 1597, Morley begins with the head but ends with the feet: at the top of the hierarchy he places religious motets, followed in order by “songs and sonnets,” canzonets, Neapolitan songs, villanelles, songs that can be danced to (balletti), drinking-songs, bergamasques, and pastorellas before he descends to “music which is made without ditty” (without words) beginning with fantasies and descending, in order of dignity, through pavanes, galliards, allemandes, French brawls, voltas and courantes before landing on the ground with hornpipes and jigs (MacClintock 1979, 99). Which brings us to the French dancing master in Figure 8.3. Playing a viol a braccio rather than a gamba frees the legs to realize the moving power of music along with head and heart. Thinking about music in whole-body terms, as the rhetorical model invites us, anticipates phenomenology as a modern critical practice.

Ethics “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me!” Hamlet complains to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have been sent to spy on him. He hands them a recorder. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ʼSblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (Hamlet 3.2.351–60)

In a pun typical of Hamlet’s wit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern irritate him, they make him “fret,” as well as try to play him like a viol or a lute. Most insulting of all, they take him to be a recorder. Hamlet’s outrage at being associated with a wind instrument is all the more understandable when we recall Castiglione’s counsel to his courtier and Peacham’s to his gentleman that only stringed instruments are worthy of being cultivated. Castiglione’s and Peacham’s advice is ultimately an ethical concern, in the original sense of “ethos” as “character or characterization as revealed in action or its representation” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ethos, n.,” 1). According to Aristotle in the Politics, music has the strongest power over character of all the arts. Music is uniquely able to fashion character directly, not through indirect means like colour in the case of painting or form in the case of sculpture: “mele [Aristotle’s word for instances of musical art] on the contrary do actually contain in themselves imitations of ethoses,” as we witness in the differing effects worked on listeners by different harmonies and rhythms (Politics 8.5.1340a, in Strunk and Treitler 1998, 29). The social milieux in which Castiglione and Peacham situate their readers—the court in Castiglione’s case, the upper reaches of not-necessarily-noble society in Peacham’s—remind

The Early Modern Period   175 us that ethos is also a social phenomenon: “the characteristic spirit of a people, community, culture, or era as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “ethos, n.,” 2.a). Ethos offers a way of understanding social institutions, and, in particular, social institutions situated in particular geographical, architectural, and acoustic spaces. Putting together character and cultural context we arrive at a third definition of “ethos”: as a mode of representation. Note the second phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “ethos”: “character or characterization as revealed in action or its representation” (my italics). The inventory of musical instruments drawn up for Henslowe’s acting company in 1598 suggests a range of musical ethoi as dramatic representations. Use of particular instruments could signal particular ethoi: sackbuts and trumpets for the royal court, trumpets and drums for military life, citterns and timbrels for rustic life. Musical ethoi are represented also in early modern poetry and prose narratives. Torquato Tasso, for example, evokes a Christian ethos that combines the religious and the military in Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), Book 11, when the Christians march towards the Mount of Olives and the walls of Jerusalem. The ethos that Tasso creates is totalizing. Through chants, through echoes, through choral singing, place and character become one. Edward Fairfax’s English translation Godfrey of Boulogne, or The Recovery of Jerusalem (Tasso 1600) sounds all the resonances: Hither the armies went, and chanted shrill, That all the deep and hollow dales resound, From hollow mounts and caves in every hill, A thousand echoes also sung around . . . (11.11.1–4, sig. S3)

The “pagans” gathered on the walls are at first dumbstruck, then let up a “hideous yell” (11.12.1, 6). Acoustically, as well as militarily, the crusaders prevail, inspiring Tasso to invoke the ancient contrast between string instruments and blown instruments: But yet with sacred notes the hosts proceed, Though blasphemies they hear and cursed things; So with Apollo’s harp Pan tunes his reed, So adders hiss, where Philomela sings . . . (11.13.1–4, sig. S3v)

Through music, the Christians, like Orpheus, are able to exert control over the physical world: Nor flying darts nor stones the Christians dread, Nor arrows shot, nor quarries cast from flings; But with assured faith as dreading nought The holy work begun to end they brought. (11.13.4–8, sig. S3v)

176   Bruce R. Smith Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote is particularly adept at using music and musical instruments to evoke the different ethoi—regal, mercantile, amorous—into which his knight errant wanders. At one point, for example, Don Quixote contemplates taking up the pastoral life of a shepherd: “Lord bless me, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “and what a life shall we have on’t? What a world of hornpipes, and Zamora bagpipes shall we hear? What taboring shall we have? What jangling of bells and playing on the rebec? And if to these different musics we have the albogne too, we shall have all kind of pastoral instruments.”

A rebec is a three-stringed instrument played with a bow, but Don Quixote has to tell Sancho (and us) what an albogne is: “a certain plate made like a candlestick, and being hollow, gives, if not a very pleasing or harmonious sound, yet it displeaseth not altogether, and agrees well with the rustic tabor and bagpipe” (Cervantes 1652, 2.67, sig. Xxx2). As sites for the composition and performance of music—and for talking about it—we might distinguish five ethoi in early modern Europe: (1) church, (2) court, (3) academy, (4) city and town, and (5) country and village. Each ethos had its own distinctive musical forms. Morley’s survey of “the kinds of music” or “divisions of music” begins, as we have seen, with motets and descends through various forms of dance appropriate to court and noble households, academic institutions, and the festivities and domestic life of people known in England as “the middling sort” (Wrightson 2003, 4–6) before ending with hornpipes. In a term from modern psychology, each of the five ethoi had its own “social script.” Most important for our purposes here, each ethos had its own ways of talking about music. Andrew Dell’Antonio has argued that “discourse about music” in seventeenth-century manuals of polite conversation shifted from “participatory” (which Castiglione had assumed a century earlier) to “receptive”: “The company shows itself to be both conversant with the singer’s art (though without any reference to specific sonic issues . . . ) and entirely able to contextualize that art in a more sophisticated web than a professional-class singer would have been considered able to spin” (Dell'Antonio 2011, 7). Peacham’s chapter “Of Music” in The Complete Gentleman is an example. Very briefly Peacham tells his would-be gentleman what musical skills he should cultivate and where he should use them (singing and playing the viol in company, “exercising” himself with the lute in private), but most of the chapter is devoted to cribbed ideas about music and to name-dropping, including brief accounts of major contemporary Italian composers, suitable for the reader’s own cliché-quoting and name-dropping. In just the terms that Dell’Antonio describes, Peacham articulates an ethics of music for noble (and noble-aspiring) society. Differences in discourse are to be found not only among the five ethoi but within each of them. For religious music, testimonials by Coryat and Milton demonstrate that metaphysical discourse continued well into the age of science. In the multiple, almost annual editions of English psalms inaugurated by Thomas Sternhold in 1533, syllable-bysyllable settings according to the practice of Geneva represent both a homely version of

The Early Modern Period   177 monody and a belief in music as rhetoric. Morley’s Plain and Easy Introduction, with its scepticism about “speculative” music, is designed for amateur music-making in households in cities, towns, and country houses. Discourse about music in villages and the countryside is much harder to document. It has to be inferred, not read. Magical uses of music in popular culture—in spells, in songs and dances used only at Whitsuntide and other holidays, in plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream—suggest a persistence of metaphysical ideas about music in throats and feet, not just in the heads and pens of pedants. If we want to understand ideas about music in early modern Europe beyond the social elite in books written by likes of Ficino, Galilei, Zarlino, Bacon, and Mersenne, we must extend our attention to more indirect evidence. For England, Christopher Marsh’s Music and Society in Early Modern England offers an example, with chapters on professional musicians, amateur musicians, popular ballads, dance, psalm-singing, and bell-ringing. Marsh, a social historian who plays the viola da gamba, is concerned not just with how people made music but what they thought about it. To take just one example from Marsh’s book, a London merchant’s chance inventory of a library of popular books and ballads owned by one “Captain Cox” in the 1570s (Marsh 2010, 124–126) implies, in its coherence, a philosophy of music no less than the explicit recording of commonplaces in The Praise of Music (published under academic auspices in 1586). Cox’s philosophy, however, is more fugitive. As a way of thinking about music, ethics allows us to pursue, in distinctively early modern terms, the concerns with culture, politics, and representation that have kept us preoccupied us since the 1970s. At the same time, music puts pressure on the strategies of interpretation we have invented—strategies that typically presume a verbal or visual object. Perhaps the most useful thing about ethos as a concept is that it lets us approach non-elite music and music-making on more equitable terms. Among early modern ways of thinking about music, ethos remains the most vital.

Notes 1. Spelling has been modernized in this and all other quotations from texts in early modern English. Quotations from books published before 1700 are cited, not by page numbers (which are not always accurate), but by the signature number (abbreviated “sig.”) assigned by the printer to gatherings of pages printed at the same time. Quotations from plays are cited by act, scene, and line numbers, or by scene and line numbers if no act is specified; from Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum by experiment number; from Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, by book, canto, and line numbers; from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, by book and chapter number. All quotations from Shakespeare are from Shakespeare 2005. 2. For suggestions and for reading earlier drafts of this chapter I am grateful to Christopher Brody, Tomás McAuley, Matthew Milner, Scott Trudell, and the anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press. A version of the section on ethics in this paper was circulated as part of a workshop on “Listening and Knowledge in Reformation Europe (1500–1650)” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in May 2015. I am grateful to Anna Kvičalová for inviting me and to the participants for their comments and suggestions.

178   Bruce R. Smith

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring): 505–535. Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker. 2015. A History of Opera. New York: W. W. Norton. Anonymous. 1586. The Praise of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bacon, Francis. 1626. Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History. Edited by William Rawley. London: William Lee. Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cervantes, Miguel. 1652. The History of the Valorous and Witty-Knight-Errant, Don-Quixote, of the Mancha. Translated by Thomas Shelton. London: Andrew Crooke. Cicero. 1942. De Oratore. Translated by E.  W.  Sutton and H.  Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copleston, Frederick. 1963. A History of Philosophy. Vol. 3, Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. New York: Doubleday. Dell’Antonio, Andrew 2011. Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gibson, James  J. 2015. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Classic ed. New York: Psychology Press. First published 1979. Gouk, Penelope. 1999. Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Iamblichus. 1926. Life of Pythagoras. Translated by Thomas Taylor. London: John M. Watkins. Lever, Ralph. 1573. The Art of Reason, Rightly Termed Witcraft. London: H. Bynneman. Lindley, David. 2006. Shakespeare and Music. London: Arden Shakespeare. MacClintock, Carol, ed. 1979. Readings in the History of Music in Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marsh, Christopher. 2010. Music and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClary, Susan. 2012. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Middleton, Thomas. 2007. The Roaring Girl. In Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 721–778. New York: Oxford University Press. Milton, John. 1645. Poems of Mr. John Milton. London: Humphrey Moseley. Montaigne, Michel. 1613. Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne. Translated by John Florio. 2nd ed. London: Edward Blount and William Barret. Peacham, Thomas. 1622. The Complete Gentleman. London: John Legat for Francis Constable. Shakespeare, William. 2005. Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

The Early Modern Period   179 Strunk, Oliver, and Leo Treitler, eds. 1998. Source Readings in Music History. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Tasso, Torquato. 1600. Godfrey of Boulogne, or The Recovery of Jerusalem. Translated by Edward Fairfax. London: I. Jaggard and M. Lownes. Tomlinson, Gary. 2006. Music in Renaissance Magic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weiss, Piero, and Richard Taruskin, eds. 2008. Music in the Western World: A History in Documents. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Schirmer. Woodfield, Ian. 1988. The Early History of the Viol. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Thomas. 1604. The Passions of the Mind in General. 2nd ed. London: Walter Burre. Wrightson, Keith. 2003. English Society 1580–1680. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

chapter 9

The En lightenm en t Tomás M c Auley

Steven Shapin once opened a book on the scientific revolution with the following line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it” (Shapin 1996, 1). I would like to start this chapter with a similar gambit, albeit a more narrowly focused one, and to say this: there was no such thing as Baroque musical thought, and this is a chapter about it.1 I will come back at the end of this chapter to my claim that there was no such thing as Baroque musical thought. For now, I want simply to note that there was indeed a great deal of thinking about music in the period commonly identified as the Baroque, that is, the period running from around 1600 to around 1750. (The concept of such a Baroque period is especially influential within music history pedagogy; see, for example, Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca 2019, 282.) I also want to note that this musical thought was intimately bound up with philosophy. Indeed, much of this thinking came from philosophers: almost all of the most celebrated philosophical names of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from René Descartes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, discussed music to some extent. In what follows, I start by examining earlier scholarship on musical thought in this period. In so doing, I identify two main traditions within this research: the affective­rhetorical tradition and the harmonic-scientific tradition. I go on to suggest that these two traditions stem from two competing conceptions of music in this period: a conception in which music’s purpose is to move the affects of its listeners and a conception in  which music is a sensuous embodiment of a universal harmony. My overarching argument is that these two conceptions were not as distinct as they are usually taken to be—and that the ensuing traditions of scholarship would thus benefit from something of a rapprochement. I demonstrate this point by examining a set of interactions between ideas about music and a new, “mechanical” approach to philosophy that emerged in the seventeenth century. I take this mechanical philosophy to be of foundational significance for the onset of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an epochdefining movement in European thought, starting in the later seventeenth century and running through the eighteenth. This movement took on a dizzying array of forms, but was—at least usually—united by a single common goal: the improvement of the human

182   Tomás McAuley condition. Despite significant differences across locales, this Enlightenment movement remained sufficiently coherent that it is possible to speak of a single Enlightenment, rather than multiple national Enlightenments (Robertson 2005). My examination of interactions between ideas about music and the new mechanical philosophy forms the heart of this chapter. I focus this examination on English-speaking thinkers in the period c.1660 to c.1750, but refer also to writers of the earlier seventeenth century for the sake of context and comparison. In the course of this examination, I identify three modes of interaction between musical and philosophical ideas: music as object of philosophy, music as inspiration for philosophy, and music as corroboration for philosophy. Towards the end of the chapter, I move on to explore two case studies from the later ­eighteenth century. These case studies extend my chronological remit beyond the usual end date of the “Baroque” (c.1750), through to what is usually, if less precisely, dated as the end of the Enlightenment (c.1800)—so putting what has traditionally been seen as a music-­historical period into dialogue with one that has usually been taken to denote an ­intellectual-historical movement or period. The first of these case studies explores the musical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as representative of the French “high” Enlightenment. The second hones in on the work of Immanuel Kant and his followers, seen as standing at the cusp of the transition from the late Enlightenment (in Kant) and to the ensuing philosophical context of early Romanticism (in some of his followers). Throughout all of this, I maintain a focus—pervasive if not quite exclusive—on beliefs surrounding music’s supposed ability to cure the bite of the tarantula. I conclude by returning to my opening observation that there was no such thing as Baroque musical thought, and by making the case for an alternative periodization based instead on the concept of the Enlightenment.

Two Traditions of Scholarship There are, it seems to me, two main traditions within past scholarship on musical thought in the period c.1600 to c.1750. The first is what we might call the affective-rhetorical tradition. Work in this tradition—located largely, though not exclusively, within historical musicology, and reaching out to literary history in particular—begins from the insight that musical thought in this period was premised, to a large extent, on the presumption that music should move or persuade the listener. In particular, thinkers in this period believed that music should move the affects (or the passions) of listeners. Following from this, scholars have examined a multitude of ways in which rhetoric—the art of persuasion—might relate to music. In the early days of the affective-rhetorical tradition, scholars such as Arnold Schering (1908) and Hans-Heinrich Unger ([1941] 2016) suggested that there existed a Figurenlehre, or doctrine of musical figures, conceived as self-contained music-rhetorical gestures that were intended often to arouse specific affective responses in listeners. Such a notion was critiqued in the 1980s by George Buelow (1983) and Brian Vickers (1984), before being thoroughly reimagined by Dietrich Bartel in his 1997 book Musica Poetica: Music-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music. It is worth pausing to note that the

The Enlightenment   183 scepticism of Buelow and Vickers was directed at the specific idea of a Figurenlehre (or an Affektenlehre—a doctrine of the affects). The “inextricable union” between music and rhetoric more generally was never in doubt (Buelow 1973, 250). Vickers’s argument, furthermore, was not that the idea of a Figurenlehre is historically defective—he goes to some lengths to show the range of ways in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers sought to expound on the idea of musical figures—but that the idea is conceptually defective. That is to say, for all the intellectual faults that Vickers believes this doctrine to have, he does not deny its historical influence. Other work in this affective-rhetorical tradition has moved the debate away from specific musical-rhetorical figures and towards the rhetorical process more generally. Mark Evan Bonds’s groundbreaking 1991 book, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration, for example, examined the ways in which rhetoric shaped emerging concepts of musical form. And in a pair of important articles, Bettina Varwig (2008, 2009) showed how rhetoric provided a means for Baroque composers to vary short musical phrases, and to build larger forms from them—or, at least, how rhetoric provided theorists with a ready vocabulary to describe what composers were already doing. More recently, Roger Mathew Grant (2017,  2018) has both extended and challenged this tradition with his provocative suggestion that the middle years of the eight­ eenth century saw “the theoretical displacement of mimetic representation by affective attunement” (2017, 552), a suggestion that captures something of the tumult of affective thought at this time, but which passes too quickly over manifold earlier examples—some of them discussed later in this chapter—of non-representational theories of music’s affective power. Finally, Bruce Haynes and Geoffrey Burgess’s  eloquent 2016 book, The Pathetick Musician: Moving an Audience in the Age of Eloquence, brings the insights of this tradition to bear on vexed questions of historically informed performance. The second main scholarly tradition for understanding musical thought in the period c.1600 to c.1750 is what we might call the harmonic-scientific tradition. This tradition remains rooted in historical musicology, but includes also a greater amount of work in, or in dialogue with, sister disciplines such as music theory, intellectual history, the history of philosophy, the history of science, and the history of medicine. Work in this tradition starts from the insight that music was, certainly in the earlier years of this period (and most especially in the opening decades of the seventeenth century), conceived of by many thinkers along Neoplatonic and Pythagorean lines, as an embodiment of universal harmony. It also draws heavily on the observation that music, in the broadest sense of music theory, stood alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as part of the so-called quadrivium within a medieval university curriculum that continued to exert considerable influence. Scholarship in this second tradition tends to emphasize a shift away from this older conception of music as embodying universal harmony to newer, natural philosophical or proto-scientific understandings of harmony and harmonics. Indeed, work in the ­harmonic-scientific tradition often emphasizes a growing tendency in this period to see music as an acoustic phenomenon, as a form of sound. This tendency is neatly captured in the title of an important collection, Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution (Gozza  2000; for an equally important earlier collection in this broad

184   Tomás McAuley t­ radition, see Coelho 1992). In so doing, many scholars—ranging from Claude Palisca and Stillman Drake in the 1960s and 1970s right through to Peter Pesic writing in the 2010s—have framed this process as one of the emergence of increasingly accurate and advanced ways of understanding music, ways that remain with us as part of an ongoing tradition of modern science (Palisca 1961; Drake 1970; Pesic 2014). This sense of progress is an important—though far from ubiquitous—part of this tradition. At its start, it was connected with narratives of this period as an age of ever-increasing musical autonomy (for the locus classicus of such emancipatory narratives of musical thought, see Neubauer 1986). Palisca, for example, saw “science” as setting the musician “free”: The new acoustics replaced the elaborate conglomeration of myth, scholastic dogma, mysticism, and numerology, which was the foundation of the older musical theory, with a far less monumental but more permanent and resistant base. Unlike the old metaphysics, this new science recognized the musician’s prerogative. While it taught him to understand the raw material he received from nature, it left him free to employ it according to his needs and to frame his operating rules according to purely esthetic motives.  (Palisca 1961, 137)

For Pesic, writing more recently, the sense that the musician can now operate “according to purely esthetic motives” is gone, but the excitement of progress remains, spilling over into open attempts to read past events in terms of their “important” contributions to later developments. Pesic asserts, for example, that Descartes “made an important step toward the discovery of what later were called overtones” and that the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonard Euler “discovered . . . the first important insights that later grew into the field of topology” (Pesic 2014, 93, 149).2 Other studies have avoided such presentism by drawing out the close relationships in this period between science and a range of parallel cultural concerns. Most pertinently, Penelope Gouk showed in her spellbinding 1999 book, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England, that science in this period did not immediately supplant magical thinking, but rather emerged alongside it, in dialogue with it, and in many cases precisely from it. More explicitly, H. F. Cohen long ago noted head-on that the “consonance” theory of harmony that came to dominate seventeenth-century thought was, from an outsider’s perspective, not more, but rather less cogent than its forebears (Cohen 1984, see especially ch. 7; 1985).3 Science, in other words, is not always a straightforward story of progress.

Two Traditions of Musical Thought That two such traditions of scholarship should exist alongside one another is not surprising, for so too—as I have already hinted—were there two traditions of musical thought in the period c.1600 to c.1750. Karol Berger captures this distinction succinctly

The Enlightenment   185 in a 2006 essay in which he calls the first “music as ethical imitation of human passions and characters” and the second “music as sensuous embodiment of the intelligible universal harmony.” Berger goes on to suggest that, in the period running through to the mid-sixteenth century, the idea of harmony had been dominant, but that, as he puts it: In the late sixteenth century, the balance between the two ideas shifted. The idea that in the middle of the sixteenth century stirred the imagination of [only a few] isolated humanistically-inspired visionaries—the idea of music as a mimetic art, an art able to imitate passions—came to dominate opinion in more advanced circles by the last quarter of the century. It did so, however, without eliminating the idea of harmony altogether, so that from now on the two ideas had to coexist . . . The aesthetic agenda laid out in the late sixteenth century remained valid for almost two hundred years, to be challenged only in the late eighteenth century by the new German paradigm of “absolute music.”  (Berger 2006, 313)

Key here is the tension between these two ideas, which Berger sees as exemplified in famous clashes between Nicola Vicentino and Gioseffo Zarlino in the sixteenth century, and between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau in the eighteenth. For sure, Berger is clear that these two ideas coexisted, but that very word “coexist” says it all: that both ideas continued alongside one another was, in this picture, a grudging compromise rather than a happy marriage. This tendency to see these two concepts of music as wholly distinct is, I would suggest, both cause and effect of the bifurcation of scholarship on Baroque musical thought into the affective-rhetorical and harmonic-scientific traditions. I also want to suggest, however, that these two concepts were much more closely intertwined than is often assumed. While there were certainly clashes between the two ideas on occasion, clashes that have attracted much attention in past scholarship, there are equally compelling, though less frequently discussed, examples of these two ideas working closely together. This may not always have been a happy marriage, in other words, but neither was it mere coexistence. We might rather think of these two conceptions of music as a couple that quarrels. In what follows, I investigate an especially important interaction between these two conceptions of music, and between rhetorical and scientific thought about music more broadly. The interaction in question grew out of a new way of thinking about the universe as a whole, an intellectual framework that took hold of an increasing number of European thinkers from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. This way of thinking, which had its roots in ancient atomism and which was associated in particular with the work of the French polymath Descartes—alongside a host of other seventeenth-century thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle in England—is known as mech­an­ism, or the mechanical philosophy. The exact nature of the mechanical philosophy was and remains a topic of debate, but its key features can be summarized here as a reliance on mechanical metaphors (most notably, comparing the workings of nature to those of a clock) and a commitment to explaining events in terms of efficient causes (that is, prior events in time) rather than final causes (that is, ultimate purposes).4 These features ­equated in

186   Tomás McAuley practice to explaining natural processes in material, mechanical terms, rather than by reference to supernatural causes, such as God’s special providence or the intervention of spirits. This is not to say, however, that the mechanical philosophy situated itself in opposition to more overtly theological worldviews. Rather, as Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter have noted: Although it is true that mechanistic science [i.e. the mechanical philosophy] heightened some existing tensions within the doctrine of creation, it is equally true that many of its advocates thought that it was actually more consistent with biblical statements of divine sovereignty than older, non-mechanistic views—and that this was highly relevant to its value as a theory of nature. (Editors’ Introduction to Boyle 1996, ix)

This new, mechanical philosophy spread like wildfire through seventeenth-century Europe. The works of Descartes in particular were translated quickly into other languages. To take just a single, especially relevant example, Descartes’s  1649 work Les Passions de l’âme was translated into English as The Passions of the Soule the very next year (Descartes 1649, 1650b). And 1650 saw not just an English translation of the work, but a Latin translation too (Descartes 1650a).5 Further, this new philosophy led to transformations in all areas of thought, to the extent that some have taken it to be almost synonymous with the spread of the Enlightenment itself (see, for example, Israel 2001, 14). I propose that the genesis and dissemination of the mechanical philosophy ­transformed—amongst so much else—theories of music’s affective power. This transformation has received relatively little attention from past scholarship. On the one hand, work in the affective-rhetorical tradition has tended to stress continuities with the past, in the form of links to the Renaissance revival of rhetoric, rather than substantial breaks. On the other hand, work in the harmonic-scientific tradition has often sidestepped theories of musical affect, focusing instead on questions of harmony and acoustics. (An important exception here is Gozza 2000, which seeks explicitly to place “ontological” and “psychological” perspectives alongside one another as part of the structure of the book.) Further, scholars in both traditions have often converged in their assumption— usually unstated—that ­rhetoric and science were, at this time, wholly distinct. Contrary to this shared assumption, however, rhetoric and science were closely intertwined, with early natural philosophers turning to well-established rhetorical strategies to communicate their insights (Moss 2017; Walmsley 2017), in ways that will inevitably have had a reciprocal impact on their initial scientific endeavours. In making my argument for the impact of the mechanical philosophy on music­affective thought, I build on an important 2015 article by André Redwood on the subject of the seventeenth-century French polymath Marin Mersenne, a close associate of Descartes. Prior to Redwood’s article, music scholars had considered Mersenne pri­ma­ rily from the perspective of what I have called the harmonic-scientific tradition. Redwood, however, urges that Mersenne be considered also as a rhetorician—and makes the case for this abundantly clear. Whereas previous scholarship on Baroque musical rhetoric had engaged most often with writings on musical composition, Redwood notes that Mersenne focused more on delivery, which is to say, on musical performance.

The Enlightenment   187 Mersenne’s focus on performance led him to foreground the sonorous, which in turn allowed him to frame his oratorical speculations more easily in the language of mechanical philosophy (Redwood 2015; see also Christensen 2013). Yet delivery remains a central part of the rhetorical process: mechanical philosophy and rhetoric are thus combined. I suggest here that this example is but one part of a broader transformation, in the light of the onset of mechanical philosophy, of thought about music’s affective power. In so doing, I build on the work of several other scholars. Varwig (2018) has uncovered the ways in which music’s affective power in this period was an unavoidably bodily phenomenon. Grant has observed that the older musica humana tradition—“in which the human body is described as an instrument and its parts tuned in harmonious ratios”— had “found its way into theories of the affects by the eighteenth century” (Grant 2017, 563). Maria Semi has noted that, in eighteenth-century Britain, “the discourse on the aesthetic categories of ‘imitation’ and ‘expression’ comes to intermesh with the analysis of the faculties and workings of the human mind” (Semi 2012, 19). Gouk has stressed the importance of rhetoric for Francis Bacon’s early seventeenth-century meditations on music (Gouk 1999, 162–166). And Katherine Butler has uncovered the role played by mythical ideas about music’s power in the early Royal Society (Butler 2015, 2016). I will also focus my attention on theories that relate to music’s medical power, a power that is all too often overlooked in studies of this period, and on music’s fabled ability, in particular, to cure the illness supposedly caused by the bite of the tarantula. This topic had long been central to debates surrounding music—indeed, it had already drawn interest from figures as prominent as Marsilio Ficino and Gioseffo Zarlino in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—but came to take on new significance in the period under consideration. Such a focus helps to emphasize the bodily aspects of affective thought in this period, and as such the rooting of this affective thought in natural philosophy. In this, I also build on an emerging literature—centred again around the work of Gouk (2014,  2015; see also, inter alia, Sykes 2012)—investigating connections between music and medicine in this period, a literature that can be seen in part as an extension of the harmonic-scientific tradition. (The work of Gouk and Sykes aside, this literature on music and medicine also shares the harmonicscientific tradition’s intermittent tendencies towards historiographical Whiggism, with a particular focus on identifying precursors to modern music therapy. For examples of this, see Rorke 2001 and Fancourt 2013.)

Music as Object of Investigation In making my argument, I focus on sources from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, a region that has received some attention from work in the harmonic-scientific tradition of scholarship, but almost none in the affective-rhetorical tradition. Yet it was a crucible of thought about musical affect as much as it was of thought about musical harmony. In particular, we see in this place and period a transition from broadly Pythagorean or Neoplatonic theories of music’s affective power to an explanation of musical affect that emphasizes mechanical causes.

188   Tomás McAuley In order to understand English debates on the affects in the early seventeenth century, we could do worse than to turn to Thomas Wright’s influential The Passions of the Minde in Generall of 1604, a wide-ranging and popular work that synthesises many contemporary ideas about the passions and which includes a lengthy discussion of musical passions in particular.6 In this discussion, Wright notes the strength and variety of effects that music has on its listeners. Music, says Wright: . . . moveth a man to mirth and pleasure, and affecteth him with sorow and sadnesse; it inciteth to devotion, and inticeth to dissolution: it stirreth up souldiers to warre, and allureth citizens to peace. . . . [It] mooveth men to mirth and abateth the heavie humour of melancholie.  (Wright 1604, M2r)

Not only can music lead to sadness and happiness, war and peace; it also has curative powers, for it can “abateth the heavie humour of melancholie”—a notion echoed throughout the seventeenth century by a number of writers, and expounded with particular force in Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomie of Melancholy. Here, Burton claims that “Many and sundry are the meanes, by which Philosophers and Physitians have prescribed to exhilerate a sorrowfull heart . . .; but in my judgment none so present, none so powerfull, none so apposite as a cup of strong drinke, mirth, musicke, and merry company” (Burton 1989, 2:112). Notable is that melancholy was seen in this period, following Galen, to have a physical, humour-based origin, either in an excess of black bile, or in a corruption of one or more of the other humours (Lund 2010, 9). Melancholy, that is, was an affective problem rooted in the physical. Wright, however, expresses some puzzlement at the range of music’s powers. “It is not so great a mervaile,” ponders Wright, “that meat, drinke, exercise, and aire set passions aloft, for these are divers waies qualified, and consequently apt to stirre up humors; but what qualitie carie simple single sounds and voices, to enable them to worke such wonders?” (Wright 1604, M4v). In answer, Wright suggests that there might be “a certaine sympathie, correspondence, or proportion betwixt our soules and musick . . . such is the nature of our soules, as musicke hath a certaine proportionat sympathie with them” (M4v–5r). Here, Wright appeals to the doctrine of sympathies and antipathies, a doctrine that took on an abundance of forms at this time, but which broadly suggested that things in nature either resemble and attract or oppose and repel each other.7 This explanation was popular in the seventeenth century, when it was used to explain not just music’s affective power in general, but also the power of music to cure physical maladies in particular. In his 1622 The Compleat Gentleman, for example, the writer, illustrator, and occasional composer Henry Peacham draws on the idea of sympathies to explain how music can cure the illness caused by the bite of the tarantula. Peacham writes: The physitians will tell you, that the exercise of Musicke is a great lengthener of the life, by stirring and reviving of the spirits, holding a secret sympathy with them . . . Yea, a curer of some diseases: in Apuglia, in Italy, and thereabouts, it is most certaine, that those who are stung with the Tarantula, are cured only by Musicke. (Andrews 1982, 110)

The Enlightenment   189 Fast-forward a century, however, and things could not be more different. Here is a later retelling of the same myth, this time from the apothecary Richard Browne’s Medicina Musica of 1729—a revised edition of the anonymous Mechanical Essay on Singing, Music, and Dancing of 1727, which had been the first English text “specifically devoted” to the topic of music and medicine (Gouk 2015, 45). Browne writes of the Circumstances of Persons bitten by a Tarantula, that Prodigy of Nature, and which Musick so effectually cures. Some indeed will say that there is by Nature implanted in the Tarantula an occult Antipathy against our animal Spirits, and that by Nature Musick was appointed a Specifick in expelling the Virulency of the Poison. But how much do such Suppositions expose their Ignorance? As if the Poison did not mechanically act on the Body; or as if the Musick, by producing the mechanical Alterations, did not promote the Expulsion of the Poison.  (Browne 1729, 49–50)

Browne openly mocks the model of the sympathies and antipathies on which Wright and Peacham had based their theories of music’s affective and medical powers, replacing it instead with an explicitly mechanistic theory.8 Among the details of Browne’s mechanistic theory, three features are especially relevant for our purposes here. First, Browne focuses on the underlying physical causes of music’s affective power, notably the workings of the human nervous system, as opposed to the practical means of achieving such power. Whilst Browne is vividly alert to perceived differences in the affective power of music of different tempi or of different styles, he explicitly leaves more practical considerations of music-making to “the Consideration of those who make it their Business to search into the Depths of this cœlestial Science” (Browne 1729, 34). Second, and in opposition to those aforementioned narratives of this period as an age of ever-increasing musical autonomy, Browne’s justifications for using this power are focused tightly on the achievement of specific medical goals. Hence, throughout the Medicina Musica, Browne outlines systematically the ways in which music can help to cure various diseases, ranging from the “Nervous Disorders” of melancholy, hysteria, and hypochondria, to the “Chronical Diseases” of cachexia and jaundice. Crucial, however, is that Browne is not single-handedly inventing a new tradition of music therapy, but rather transforming a much older tradition of thought stressing music’s affective and curative powers in the light of the new mechanical philosophy. In so doing, and this is the third feature of Browne’s account that I wish to highlight here, Browne also combines the affective and the harmonic, for he suggests that “the Ear, for many Reasons, seems to be so curiously form’d, purely for the Enjoyment of Harmony” (40). Browne, moreover, was no isolated case. We might, for example, point also to Richard Brocklesby’s 1749 essay Reflections on Antient and Modern Musick, with the Application to the Cure of Diseases—the second English work devoted to the topic of music and medicine (Gouk 2015, 45; see also Gouk 2000, 178). Brocklesby was altogether more circumspect than Browne towards the mechanical philosophy, complaining at attempts to “reduce all to mere mechanism” (Brocklesby 1749, 25), and rooted to a far greater extent in traditions of musical rhetoric. Yet Brocklesby also accepts explicitly aspects of the mechanical philosophy, noting, for example, that “the animal system” is subject to “the

190   Tomás McAuley laws of mechanism” (70). More pertinently, his discussion of musical rhetoric betrays a naturalism and universalism that bears the imprint of that same mechanical philosophy: For as painting represents the appearances of natural views and objects, the passions and characters of men and the like; so the imitative power of music breathes forth the airs, tones, accents, sighs, and inflections of the voice, and in a word every sound in nature, which usually impresses certain sentiments and passions of the mind: but these must surely have a more extensive power than the most persuasive eloquence, seeing all words derive their signification and force merely from custom and vague fashion; whereas natural sounds convey a universal expression and energy from the simple dictates of unbiassed nature.  (Brocklesby 1749, 16)

Brocklesby too discusses music’s fabled ability to cure the bite of the tarantula. Here, he expresses scepticism that the tarantula is the “cause” of the illness in question, but maintains faith in music as the “method of cure” (58, 60), so continuing Browne’s focus on the ability of music to achieve specific medical goals. And Brocklesby also affords pleasure in harmony a central place in explaining the workings of music, grounding his reflections in the thenfashionable theory that the human mind takes pleasure in the perception of unity in variety. He writes, for example of “a certain law of our minds, whereby, upon the perception of uniformity amidst variety, we are necessarily forced to a degree of approbation, in proportion to the absolute quantity of uniformity, amidst the greatest degree of variety” (Brocklesby 1749, 14; on the idea of unity in variety elsewhere in Europe at this time, see Beiser 2009, 1–30). Theories of musical affect, then, were not replaced by the mechanical philosophy, but rather transformed by them. Through this process, theories of music’s affective force remained intertwined with theories of musical harmony—even as older ideas of music as sounding embodiment of universal harmony were on the wane.

Music as Inspiration Thus far, I have focused on the impact of the new mechanical philosophy on ideas about music. The direction of influence, however, was not just one way. Rather, just as the mechanical philosophy impacted on ideas about music, so too did ideas about music impact on the mechanical philosophy. That this was the case has been shown clearly in the work of Gouk and Pesic. Amongst a host of examples, both scholars pick up on an especially musical moment in the early career of Isaac Newton, whose Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1687 (Newton 1999) can be taken—to indulge my own moment of presentism—to mark the founding of classical mechanics, and whose Opticks of 1704 (Newton 1952) influenced scientific understandings of the nature of light for the remainder of the eighteenth century and beyond. (On Newton as standing within the tradition of mechanical philosophy—despite his regularly unorthodox development of ideas from this ­ ­tradition—see Kochiras 2013.) As can be seen in Figures 9.1 and 9.2, Newton used the musical scale as a model for developing his famous colour circle, in which colours appear not simply on a spectrum, running from A to B, but rather in a circle, the last colour

The Enlightenment   191

Figure 9.1  Newton’s musical division of the colours from his “Hypothesis explaining the Properties of Light,” sent to the Royal Society in 1675.

Figure 9.2  Newton’s colour circle as it appeared in his Opticks (London, 1704).

192   Tomás McAuley ­ erging back into the first (Gouk 1999, 237–246; Pesic 2014, 124–131). Here, Newton did m not simply apply the principles of natural philosophy to music, but used the example of music to work out—or, at the very least, to explain—his views on the nature of light, one of the most pressing issues in the mechanical philosophy of the day. That is to say, this is an instance not simply of the mechanical philosophy impacting on musical thought, but rather of musical thought itself impacting on—indeed, inspiring—mechanical philosophy. Pesic and Gouk give a number of other examples of how particular ideas about music played crucial roles in key innovations in Enlightenment mechanical philosophy. Pesic, for instance, shows how, for Mersenne, “investigations of sound and light mutually clarify each other” and how “Mersenne’s musical motivations led him to investigate the physics of sound” (Pesic 2014, 111, 116). And Gouk shows how Robert Hooke, another influential early mechanical philosopher (and an important influence on Newton), unpacked his own range of sound–colour analogies (Gouk  1999, 215–218). Notable, though, is that these examples still concern themselves primarily with harmony and acoustics—those aspects of the musical thought of the time normally considered nowadays to have developed in tandem with early science. I want to suggest, however, that ideas about music’s affective force also played a key role in the development of the mechanical philosophy. Indeed, I argue that they played a role still more foundational than that of working through particular aspects of the mechanical philosophy, for, in one crucial instance at least, the evident power of music was taken to provide clear and persuasive corroboration for the mechanical philosophy as a whole.

Music as Corroboration With that in mind, I now turn my attention to Newton’s older contemporary, the experimental philosopher and theologian Robert Boyle. Boyle was a leading proponent of the mechanical philosophy, as defended most famously in his 1686 A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Boyle  1999, 10:437–571; for an excellent free­standing edition, see Boyle 1996). He also had a long-standing interest in acoustics in particular. Indeed, one of his earliest publications—the New Experiments PhysicoMechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects of 1660—describes an experiment that “seems to prove, that whether or no the Air be the onely, it is at least, the principal medium of Sounds” (Boyle 1999, 1:230). My interest in this chapter, however, is in Boyle’s 1663 work Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (Boyle 1999, 3:189–560). This is a book that sets out to promote not only experimental methods, but also the intellectual framework of mechanical philosophy. In this book, Boyle conceives the human body, in particular, in mechanical terms, writing: I consider the Body of a living man, not as a rude heap of Limbs and Liquors, but as an Engine consisting of several parts so set together, that there is a strange and

The Enlightenment   193 c­ onspiring communication betwixt them, by vertue whereof, a very weak and inconsiderable Impression of adventitious matter upon some one part may be able to work on some other distant part, or perhaps on the whole Engine . . .  (Boyle 1999, 3:445)

For Boyle, then, the human body is an engine or a machine, in which all the parts work together. That “weak” impressions on one part of the body can lead to effects in other parts of the body—or even on “the whole Engine”—is taken to provide proof of this. Boyle lists a number of examples in which “seemingly slight Impressions of outward Objects” can lead to “great alterations” elsewhere in the body. Central amongst these examples are sound and music: Most men may observe in themselves, that there are some such noises as those made by the grating of an ungreas’d Cart-wheele upon the Axle-tree, or the tearing of course Paper which are capable of setting the Teeth on edge, which yet cannot be done without exciting a peculiar Motion in several parts of the Head. . . . [The physician] Henricus ab Heer . . . Records a Story of a Lady, to whom he was sent for, who upon the hearing of the sound of a Bell, or any loud noise, though Singing, would fall into fits of Sounding, which was scarce distinguishable from Death; and we may confirm that this disposition depended upon the Texture of her Body in reference to Material sounds by what he subjoyns, that having well purg’d her, and given her for two Months the Spaa-waters, and other appropriate Remedies he throughly cur’d her. (Boyle 1999, 3:445–446)

Here, the power of sound over people is taken as clear evidence for a mechanical conception of the human body—and at a time when the nature of the human body was a key battleground for debates surrounding the mechanical philosophy as a whole. The impact of sound is not the only such example: Boyle also notes that tickling someone’s feet with a feather will lead to “that noise . . . which we call Laughing,” so turning sound from a cause to an effect (Boyle 1999, 3:446). The key point, though, is that, for Boyle, sound and music have such a powerful effect on the human body that, alongside an action as clearly involuntary as laughing when tickled, they can serve as a demonstration that the human body itself should be conceived in mechanical terms. In the passages quoted so far, Boyle has made no particular distinction between musical and non-musical sounds. Boyle turns his attention more specifically to music, however, in a discussion of music’s supposed ability to cure the bite of the tarantula. Earlier in this chapter, I compared tellings of this myth by Peacham in 1622 and Browne a century later in 1729. Peacham, I suggested, based his explanation for music’s curative powers on an older, Neoplatonic model of sympathies and antipathies. Browne, on the other hand, openly mocked this model, whilst offering an alternative explanation that appealed instead to music’s mechanical effect on the human body. Boyle offers another perspective on this issue: notwithstanding all the horrid Symptomes that are wont to ensue upon the biting of that Poysonous Spider, the Tarantula, that lasting and formidable Disease, which

194   Tomás McAuley often mocks all other Remedies, is by nothing so successfully oppos’d, as by Musick. Some determinate tune or other which proves suitable to the particular Nature of the Patients Body, or that / of the Poyson producing there such a motion, or determination of some former motion of the Spirits, or the Humors, or both; as by conducting the Spirits into the Nerves and Muscles inservient to the motion of the Limbs, doth make the Patient leap and dance till he have put himself into a Sweat, that breaths out much of the virulent Matter which hath been probably fitted for expulsion, by some change wrought in its Texture or Motion, or those of the Blood, by the Musick.  (Boyle 1999, 3:451–452)

Boyle considers, in the continuation of this passage, whether it might simply be the exercise of dancing that expels the tarantula’s poison, but quickly decides that this is not the case, noting that exercise alone does not, on the evidence he has available, cure the tarantula bite. Here, Boyle occupies a midpoint between Peacham and Browne. This is a strikingly early attempt to explain music’s supposed medical ability in the language of the mechanical philosophy. Its mechanical framework is clear, yet it lacks both the confidence and the detail of Browne’s account. Boyle cannot decide, for example, whether the required “determinate tune” is “suitable to” the patient’s body or to the tarantula’s poison; whether the tune acts on the humours or the spirits (or both); and whether the “virulent Matter” is driven out by a change in its texture or its motion (or by that of the blood). Though all of this, however, Boyle retains a presumption that the explanation must be mechanical; his indecision is simply as to the exact nature of the mechanism in question. More importantly, Boyle’s purpose is not merely to provide a new, mechanical explanation for the power of music. Rather, he uses this supposed medical power of music to demonstrate the coherence of the mechanical philosophy as an overall world-view. Boyle is not simply using mechanical philosophy to explain music’s supposed affective power, in other words, but is using that affective power itself to argue for the cogency of the mechanical philosophy. Further, Boyle uses the medical power of music—amongst other medical phenomena—to argue also for the usefulness, if not of the mechanical philosophy in particular, then at least of the experimental approach to natural philosophy that was, for Boyle, so closely intertwined with his mechanical world-view.9 In this place and period, then, music related to the new mechanical philosophy in at least three ways. First, it was an object of investigation for that philosophy. As such, mechanical philosophy transformed understandings of music’s affective power, as can be seen in the writings of Browne and Brocklesby. Second, music was an inspiration in working out specific problems in the mechanical philosophy, as was the case in Isaac Newton’s use of the musical scale to formulate his new theory of colour. Third, and most strikingly, music’s affective power was, in the case of Robert Boyle at least, taken as evidence for the validity of the mechanical philosophy more generally. That is to say, the power of music was taken as corroboration for the mechanical philosophy—and as a proof of its usefulness. I move now to those later moments I mentioned at the outset of this chapter. These are, I can now note, also the two moments flagged as central to eighteenth-century

The Enlightenment   195 musical thought in the essay by Berger that I discussed earlier: the mid-­eighteenthcentury clash between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau and the emergence of what Berger calls “the new German paradigm of ‘absolute music’ ” (Berger 2006, 313). I seek here to ask in particular—if, of necessity, more briefly—how can these three categories of object, inspiration, and corroboration help us better to understand these two later moments?

Rousseau and the French High Enlightenment The clash between Rameau and Rousseau, along with the debates surrounding this clash, was a cornerstone of the so-called high Enlightenment: the Enlightenment in its richest, most developed phase. As such, it has also been a linchpin for studies on music and the Enlightenment. Starting with a trio of outstanding books in the mid-nineties (Verba 1993; Christensen 1993; Thomas 1995), scholars of the past quarter-century have taken these debates as emblematic of the Enlightenment—as representative of this movement at its fullest. In so doing, they have offered a dazzling array of insights into how thinkers in this period attempted to understand music in its relation to questions of language, meaning, and expression. They have, in other words, highlighted how music remained a vitally important object of investigation. Yet this scholarship has also pointed persuasively to the role of music itself in furthering particular debates, whether that music be the Italian opera that prompted the famous Querelle des Bouffons or the compositional output of Rameau (see in particular Verba  2013 and Thomas 2002). This scholarship has, in other words, shown how music was an inspiration for philosophy. Indeed, it has done so in a more expansive sense than I have done here, since it has shown how not just ideas and general observations about music, but particular musical repertoires, have had a concrete impact on the development of philosophy. It has also shown repeatedly how thinkers turned frequently to particular musical examples to corroborate their own philosophies of music, if not necessarily broader philosophical world-views.10 It is important to pause to question, however, the assumption—however implicit— that debates in mid-eighteenth-century France were uniquely emblematic of Enlightenment thought. Rather, these debates were developments, to a large extent, of more fundamental transformations that had preceded them, none more important than the spread of the mechanical philosophy. As Jonathan Israel has put it with regard to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment as a whole, “it may be that the story of the High Enlightenment after 1750 is more familiar to readers and historians, but that does not alter the reality that the later movement was basically just one of consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier” (Israel 2001, 7).

196   Tomás McAuley That said, it is clear that debates about music in mid-century France were more than a case of “consolidating, popularizing, and annotating” earlier concepts. To show how this is the case, I cite a single example, one that is only rarely noted in the literature (for a notable exception, see Le Menthéour 2009), namely Rousseau’s discussion of music’s supposed ability to cure the bite of the tarantula, as found in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (Essay on the Origin of Languages), published posthumously in 1781. Rousseau writes: The cure of Tarantula bites is cited as a proof of the physical power of sounds. This example proves entirely the contrary. What is required to heal everyone who has been bitten by the insect is neither absolute sounds (sons absolus) nor the same tunes (les mêmes airs): each of them needs tunes of a melody (airs d’une mélodie) familiar to him and lyrics (phrases) he understands. Italian tunes are needed for the Italian, for the Turk, Turkish tunes would be needed. Each is affected (affecté) only by accents that are familiar to him; his nerves yield to them only insofar as his mind disposes them to it: he must understand the language that is spoken to him for what is said to him to be able to move him (pour que ce qu’on lui dit puisse le mettre en mouvement). Bernier’s cantatas have, it is said, cured the fever of a French musician; they would have given one to a musician of any other nation. (Rousseau 1995, 418; translation from Rousseau 1998, 324)

Contra any suggestion that this period saw “the theoretical displacement of mimetic representation by affective attunement” (Grant 2017, 552), we here see Rousseau reacting against the then-standard belief that music’s ability to cure tarantula bites is proof for “the physical power of sounds.” Indeed, that Rousseau takes the time to attempt to discredit this view is itself proof of its previous success. Rousseau argues instead that the “nerves yield . . . only insofar as [the] mind disposes them.” In so doing, Rousseau partakes in an increasing tendency, as the eighteenth century progressed, to critique universalist or purely mechanical explanations of music’s affective power.

Kant and the Late Enlightenment The apotheosis of this tendency to critique mechanical explanations of music’s power is the place of music in Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment) of 1790. Here, Kant critiques music precisely because he believes it to “speak through mere sensations (Empfindungen) without concepts”; music’s ability to move the mind is “merely the effect of an as it were mechanical association” (Kant 1900–, 5:328, 329; 2000, 205, 206). I have written elsewhere about the various ways in which Kantian philosophy undermined affective views of music’s power (McAuley, forthcoming a; see also McAuley 2020). The point I want to make here is simply that Kant’s philosophy was conceived, in large part, as a response to the dangers of philosophical mechanism taken too far: of a philosophical mechanism so far-reaching that it threatened to undermine human freedom itself (on this, see Beiser  2000, 19–25). So too was

The Enlightenment   197 Kant’s  famous dismissal of music a response to the still-dominant belief—despite Rousseau’s objections—that music has a mechanical power over its listeners. What, then, came in place of this mechanical view of music’s power? To answer this question is to reach beyond the years and ideas usually associated with the Enlightenment movement, and to address the place of music in the world of what is often called early Romanticism. (On “early Romantic” philosophical reorientations around 1800 as a development, rather than repudiation, of the Enlightenment project, see Beiser 2003.) Yet such a task has value here for the light it can shed, from a musical perspective, on the closing years of the Enlightenment—and on the scholarship surrounding those closing years. Let us undertake this task by turning to one more telling of the power of music, this time from Madame de Stäel’s 1807 novel Corinne ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy). Here, the titular character Corinne is asked by the Neapolitan Prince d’Amalfi to dance the Tarantella—a dance long associated with music’s supposed power to cure the bite of the tarantula—with him. Stäel writes: As she danced, Corinne made the spectators experience her own feelings, as if she had been improvising, or playing the lyre, or drawing portraits. Everything was language for her; as they looked at her, the musicians made greater efforts to make their art fully appreciated, and at the same time an indefinable passionate joy, and imaginative sensitivity, stimulated all the spectators of this magical dance, transporting them into an ideal existence which was out of this world.  (Staël 1998, 91)

On the one hand, the Tarantella’s power has here been strictly curtailed. No longer is it taken as a provable cure for a dreadful disease. Rather, it stands here as an elegant musical artefact; a paean to Neapolitan culture. On the other hand, however, the Tarantella in is given an even greater power than before, the power to transport the spectators to an “ideal existence,” one that is “out of this world.” Though the focus here is on the dance rather than the music, the two are impossible to separate in this situation; and so this passage provides a clear example of a new view of music that arose in German-speaking countries in the years around 1800. According to this view, music is able to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, especially into the listener’s inner self or into the ultimate nature of being. This is, in fact, the view of music that Berger described above as “the new German paradigm of ‘absolute music.’ ” Again, this is a topic I discuss at much greater length elsewhere (McAuley, forthcoming b), but three observations seem merited in the present context. The first is that, though this new paradigm arose in German-speaking lands, it quickly spread throughout Europe, as this passage from Stäel’s French novel demonstrates. Second, though this new view of music made connections between music and the absolute (das Absolute), the latter conceived as the ultimate ground of being, it did not conceive of music as absolute in the sense, dominant in more recent philosophy of music, of being wholly self-sufficient, cut off from language and from other art-forms. Indeed, the very term “absolute music” is an anachronism in this period—hence Berger’s own use of scare quotes—with the phrase first coined by Wagner in 1846 (on the history of the term, see Pederson 2009 and Bonds 2014, especially 129–140 and 143–146).

198   Tomás McAuley Third, and most importantly, this is a transformation often taken as a paradigm case of music’s role as an inspiration for philosophy. Indeed, the standard scholarly view of its causes is one where the music of this period—most especially the instrumental music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—reached such new-found heights (and depths) that contemporary philosophers were forced to transform their views of music. (Especially influential accounts that rely, at least to an extent, on such a presumption include Neubauer 1986; Chua 1999, 211–212, 276; Bowie 2001, 30–31.) The first philosophers to articulate this new view of music, however, figures including Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Friedrich Schelling, were inspired not by changes in musical practice, but rather by changes in philosophy, most especially those stemming from philosophical revolutions brought about by Kant himself (McAuley 2013, forthcoming b; on the problems with the usual explanations for this transformation, see also Bonds 2006). According to dominant scholarly presumptions, then, framed in the categories of this chapter, music in the years around 1800 was, perhaps to a previously unparalleled extent, an inspiration for philosophy. I have sought to show in this chapter, however, that music was, in the earlier Enlightenment, not just an object of philosophy, but also an inspiration for, and corroboration of, philosophy. Music in the turbulent years around 1800, on the other hand, was—at least insofar as the most epochal change in conceptions of music is concerned—precisely not an inspiration for philosophy, but merely an object of it. Nonetheless, the music of this period was taken by later thinkers as a corroboration of the new view of music that arose around this time—starting, perhaps, as early as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Hoffmann 1810, 1989)— and it is this belief that lead to its later being presumed to have been the inspiration for this view. (On the process by which Beethoven, in particular, came to be seen as inspiring so much musical thought in this period, see Bonds 2020.)

Conclusion: The Enlightenment Extending my focus to the end of eighteenth century, and to the scholarly work surrounding these two moments in particular, significantly complicates my easy characterization of past scholarship on musical thought in this period as falling into two traditions: the affective-rhetorical and the harmonic-scientific. In particular, it repeatedly highlights music’s connections with areas of philosophy beyond those relating to rhetoric and natural philosophy, most especially ethics and epistemology. Indeed, such generalizations about the state of scholarship in general must inevitably be partial and incomplete—and must sit alongside other, equally valid, generalisations that one could make. For all that, however, the basic model of two traditions of scholarship does still hold: it is simply a guiding set of tendencies, rather than an absolute division. Crucially, those tendencies do still influence much ongoing work. And so I have sought to show in this chapter that, without seeking to diminish the importance of these two traditions, there is also something to be gained by bringing them together—and by examining the overlaps between rhetorical and scientific

The Enlightenment   199 thought in this period. We might also recall the overlapping but divergent disciplinary affiliations of each tradition: the affective-rhetorical tradition weighted more heavily towards musicology and literary history; the harmonic-scientific tradition tipping its scales slightly more towards music theory, intellectual history, and the history of philosophy. Bearing these affiliations in mind, to seek to bring the two traditions closer together is also to seek to bring historical musicology into closer dialogue with several cognate disciplines, most notably intellectual history, in understanding this period. As a final word, I might note two more differences between these two traditions. Work in the affective-rhetorical tradition tends to conceive of this era, as has so much work in historical musicology, in something along the lines of the traditional Baroque period. The concept of a Baroque period running from c.1600 through to c.1750 is noteworthy for being a music-historical label (or, at most, an art-historical label) that is distinctly at odds with the period labels used in the intellectual history of this period, which are centred around the scientific revolution and the onset of the Enlightenment in the second half of the seventeenth century. In so divorcing itself from the usual ­intellectual-historical framework for understanding these centuries, the label “Baroque” suggests—in a tendency taken up by the affective-rhetorical tradition more generally—a kind of autonomy to the musical thought of this period, which is conceived of as being in dialogue with the art of rhetoric, but as separable from broader intellectual trends. The concept of a Baroque period has, of course, been critiqued repeatedly in past scholarship, and is rarely used today without scare quotes, actual or implied. One particular concern has been that the word “Baroque” was not used as a period label by seventeenth- or eighteenth-century thinkers. I hope in this chapter to have added to such criticism by highlighting the importance for ideas about music of the onset of the Enlightenment—and the crucial role that ideas about music played in turn within that onset. If the Baroque, as a catch-all period categorization, makes little sense for music alone, in other words, it makes even less sense from the perspective of music and philosophy. I have also demonstrated, however, that, in England at least, it is difficult to take those ideas about music as coalescing into any kind of self-sufficient tradition of musical thought. Indeed, my examples in this chapter have come from works of theology and philosophy, of pharmacy and medicine, rather than from works of music theory in any recognizable sense. The object of my critique, in other words, is not only the concept of the Baroque in general, but also the resulting tendency to view the musical thought of this period as at least somewhat autonomous. Work in the harmonic-scientific tradition, by contrast, and in line with dominant trends in intellectual history, tends to ignore the Baroque altogether, framing its work rather in terms of the scientific revolution, or in terms of particular movements within the scientific revolution, such as the history of the Royal Society. Further, it tends to forgo any notion of a distinct sphere of musical thought, showing instead the embeddedness of ideas about music in broader cultural concerns. To do so, however, is to risk paying insufficient attention to the very real changes in conceptions of music that took place in the years around 1600, the change in which the view of music as (to recall Berger’s words) “ethical imitation of human passions and characters” came to dominate somewhat, yet without entirely displacing the idea of music as “sensuous embodiment of the intelligible universal harmony.” These years around 1600 are usually taken as the starting point

200   Tomás McAuley of the Baroque period, and musical histories of this period have customarily highlighted the early opera that most clearly embodied that idea of “ethical imitation of human passions and characters.” Further the harmonic-scientific tradition’s focus on early science as a whole risks overlooking the extent to which scientific thinkers in this era drew on what were long-standing traditions of specifically musical ideas—ideas that were transformed over time, to be sure, but that retained distinct traditions precisely in those transformations. A final problem with the harmonic-scientific tradition’s focus on the scientific revolution is that, as this chapter’s opening words from Steven Shapin made clear, there was no such thing. Or at least, the terminology is deeply anachronistic: as Thomas Nickles has noted, the concept of a “revolution” was not applied to science until the eight­eenth century (Nickles 2017, section 2)—and, indeed, thinkers in this period referred customarily to what we now call “science” as “natural philosophy.” To rely too heavily on such terminology is to run the danger of looking for the present in the past. In our critiques of the Baroque, then, we must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In this particular context, this means not simply replacing the work of the affective-rhetorical tradition with that of the harmonic-scientific, but rather bringing these two traditions together, for a fuller, richer, and more accurate account of the musical-philosophical life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than would otherwise be possible. Such an account—already well under way in much of the scholarship discussed in this chapter—would account both for the central role of early science and for the ongoing importance of rhetoric. It would recognize both the inseparability of ideas about music from broader cultural concerns and the relative autonomy of musical thought. It would shift its emphasis away from both the Baroque and the scientific revolution in order to ­emphasize—without downplaying the importance of earlier and later developments—perhaps the most tumultuous upheaval in the history of Western thought, an upheaval that included science, rhetoric, and music alike. And in naming this upheaval, it would employ an appellation that was used by at least some of the thinkers now taken to fall under its remit: the Enlightenment.

Notes 1. Early versions of this material were presented at the 2016 meeting of the American Musicological Society (Rochester, NY), the 2017 Congress of the International Musicological Society (Tokyo), and as a keynote address at the 2018 conference XXI-st Century Challenges to the History of XVIII-th Century Musical Aesthetics (Università degli Studi di Torino). I am grateful to the audiences at all of these events for their insightful questions, and to the organizers of the last event for the invitation to participate. Research towards this chapter was funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and benefited greatly from the research assistance of Ariana Phillips-Hutton, whose own position was funded, on my return from a period of parental leave, by the University of Cambridge’s Returning Carers Scheme. For extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this material, my thanks go to Mark Evan Bonds, Austin Glatthorn, Penelope Gouk, Julian Johnson, Jerrold Levinson, Nanette Nielsen, Elizabeth Swann, and Bettina Varwig.

The Enlightenment   201 2. This historiographical tendency fits all too neatly with John W. Burrow’s helpful definition of Whig history: “The central characteristic of Whig history in the sense we derive from [Herbert] Butterfield [who coined the term] is not merely anachronistic judgement but a particular kind of selectivity: a selection from the life of the past in terms of a notion of significance which is derived not from the conversation of the past but from what appears to be pregnant or prophetic for the future, and most specifically, of ourselves” (Burrow 2006, 16). 3. For shorter, equally historically-aware, examinations of the role of music in the scientific revolution, focused more narrowly on ideas about harmony, see Gouk 2002 and 2007. For a broader contextualization of the role of musical myths in this period and preceding centuries, see Butler and Bassler 2019. For a critical analysis of the various forms of pres­ent­ism that can be found in the history of science, along with a defence of a “critical pres­ent­ism” and “historical epistemology,” see Loison 2016, 36: “Historicism pictures scientific truth as an accident frozen in time for sociological reasons whereas positivism understands it as an inescapable necessity. A third way is provided by historical epistemology, whose research programme is based—or should be based—on the idea that scientific truth is an accident made to some extent necessary. This counter-intuitive intricacy of contingency and rationality allows this research program to overcome the dead-ends of Whiggism and relativism.” 4. For a definition of mechanism founded wholly on the distinction between final and efficient causes, see Beiser 2000, 19. For a much fuller—but still succinct—overview of the mechanical philosophy, see Hattab  2011. For a useful examination of the multivalent meanings of the term “mechanical” at this time, see Gabbey 2004. On the complex roots of Descartes’s mechanical thought, see Hattab 2009. 5. For a modern English translation of the original French, see Descartes 1989. On the complex role of mechanism in Les Passions de l’âme, see Hatfield 2007. 6. This work was itself an updated and enlarged version of Wright’s The Passions of the Minde, composed in the late 1590s and published in 1601. I do not wish to overstate the extent to which Wright—a Jesuit in what was, at that time, deeply Protestant territory—was typical of his place and age. Erin Sullivan, for example, has noted that “in its emphasis on the value of both sensuality and affectivity, Wright’s The Passions reveals a veiled connection with . . . Catholic devotional practices” (Sullivan 2015, 35). 7. For an accessible introduction to this doctrine, see Floyd-Wilson 2013, 1–2. On the complexity of the history of “sympathy” in the years leading up to Wright, see FloydWilson 2013 more generally and Moyer 2015. For a brief but stimulating meditation on music and sympathy around this time, see Gerbino 2015. 8. Despite this, Browne continues to rely on a repurposed idea—within a mechanical ­framework—of a “sympathy” between “the soul” and the “Animal spirits” (Browne 1729, 7–8). 9. Boyle discusses sound, music, and tarantism in similar ways in his 1685 An Essay on the Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion, where he also pauses to dwell on the question of the reliability of second-hand stories of the power of music to cure the bite of the tarantula, but concludes—in part drawing on his own experience of music’s power— that the evidence is indeed sufficiently reliable (Boyle 1999, 10:276–279). On debates surrounding the veracity of tales of tarantism in this period, see Butler 2015, 53–56. 10. Further, just as Boyle fell back on his own musical experience in deciding on the reliability of tales of musical tarantism, so too, as Jaqueline Waeber (2009) has shown, did Rousseau’s own personal experience of music play a key role in the development of his philosophy. For a fuller overview of recent scholarship on music and the French Enlightenment, see the outstanding Epilogue to Verba 2017.

202   Tomás McAuley

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204   Tomás McAuley Gouk, Penelope. 2007. “Science and Music, or the Science of Music: Some Little-known Examples of ‘Music Theory’ Between 1650 and 1750.” In Towards Tonality: Aspects of Baroque Music Theory, edited by Peter Dejans and Sylvester Beelaert, 41–68. Collected Writings of the Opheus Institute. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Gouk, Penelope. 2014. “Music and the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century British Thought.” In Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900, edited by James Kennaway, 44–71. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gouk, Penelope. 2015. “An Enlightenment Proposal for Music Therapy: Richard Brocklesby on Music, Spirit, and the Passions.” In Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Evolution, the Musical Brain, Medical Conditions, and Therapies, edited by Eckart Altenmüller, Stanley Finger, and François Boller, 159–185. Progress in Brain Research 217. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Gozza, Paolo, ed. 2000. Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science 64. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Grant, Roger Mathew. 2017. “Peculiar Attunements: Comic Opera and Enlightenment Mimesis.” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter): 550–569. Grant, Roger Mathew. 2018. “Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects.” Representations 144, no. 1 (Fall): 34–60. Hatfield, Gary. 2007. “The Passions of the Soul and Descartes’s Machine Psychology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38, no. 1 (March): 1–35. Hattab, Helen. 2009. Descartes on Forms and Mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hattab, Helen. 2011. “The Mechanical Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, edited by Desmond Clarke and Catherine Wilson, 71–95. New York: Oxford University Press. Haynes, Bruce, and Geoffrey Burgess. 2016. The Pathetick Musician: Moving an Audience in the Age of Eloquence. New York: Oxford University Press. Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1810. “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 12 (July): 630–642, 652–659. Hoffmann, E.  T.  A. 1989. “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” In E.  T.  A.  Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana; The Poet and the Composer; Music Criticism, edited by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke, 234–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Israel, Jonathan  I. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1900–. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Royal Prussian (subsequently German then Berlin Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences. Berlin: Georg Reimer (subsequently Walter De Gruyter). Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kochiras, Hylarie. 2013. “The Mechanical Philosophy and Newton’s Mechanical Force.” Philosophy of Science 80, no. 4 (October): 557–578. Le Menthéour, Rudy. 2009. “The Tarantula, the Physician, and Rousseau: The EighteenthCentury Etiology of an Italian Sting.” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 37. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0037.003. Loison, Laurent. 2016. “Forms of Presentism in the History of Science. Rethinking the Project of Historical Epistemology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 60 (December): 29–37.

The Enlightenment   205 Lund, Mary Ann. 2010. Melancholy, Medicine, and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAuley, Tomás. 2013. “Rhythmic Accent and the Absolute: Sulzer, Schelling and the Akzenttheorie.” Eighteenth-Century Music 10, no. 2 (September): 277–286. McAuley, Tomás. 2020. “Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, 481–506. New York: Oxford University Press. McAuley, Tomás. Forthcoming a. “Immanuel Kant and the Downfall of the Affektenlehre.” In Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World, edited by Judith Lochhead, Eduardo Mendieta, and Stephen Decatur Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McAuley, Tomás. Forthcoming b. The Music of Philosophy: German Idealism and Musical Thought, from Kant to Schelling. New York: Oxford University Press. Moss, Jean Dietz. 2017. “Rhetoric and Science [Renaissance Rhetoric].” In The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, edited by Michael  J.  MacDonald, 423–436. New York: Oxford University Press. Moyer, Ann E. 2015. “Sympathy in the Renaissance.” In Sympathy: A History, edited by Eric Schliesser, 70–101. Oxford Philosophical Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press. Neubauer, John. 1986. The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Newton, Isaac. 1952. Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Based on the 4th ed., London, 1730. New York: Dover Publications. Newton, Isaac. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. A New Translation. Preceded by a Guide to Newton’s Principia by I. Bernard Cohen. Translated by I.  Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, and [assisted by] Julia Budenz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nickles, Thomas. 2017. “Scientific Revolutions.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2017 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/scientific-revolutions/. Palisca, Claude V. 1961. “Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought.” In Seventeenth-Century Science and the Arts, edited by Hedley Howell Rhys, 91–137. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pederson, Sanna. 2009. “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 240–262. Pesic, Peter. 2014. Music and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Redwood, André. 2015. “Mersenne and the Art of Delivery.” Journal of Music Theory 59, no. 1 (April): 99–119. Robertson, John. 2005. The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorke, Margaret Ann. 2001. “Music Therapy in the Age of Enlightenment.” Journal of Music Therapy 38, no. 1 (Spring): 66–73. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1995. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Bernard Gegnebin and Marcel Raymond. Vol. 5, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. Essay on the Origins of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Edited and translated by John T. Scott. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Schering, Arnold. 1908. “Die Lehre von den Musikalischen Figuren im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.” Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 21: 106–114.

206   Tomás McAuley Semi, Maria. 2012. Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Translated by Timothy Keates. Farnham: Ashgate. Shapin, Steven. 1996. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Staël, Germaine de. 1998. Corinne, Or Italy. Translated by Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sullivan, Erin. 2015. “The Passions of Thomas Wright: Renaissance Emotion across Body and Soul.” In The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan, 25–44. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sykes, Ingrid. 2012. “The Art of Listening: Perceiving Pulse in Eighteenth-Century France.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 4 (December): 473–488. Thomas, Downing  A. 1995. Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Downing A. 2002. Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Unger, Hans-Heinrich. [1941] 2016. Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im 16.–18. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Varwig, Bettina. 2008. “One More Time: J. S. Bach and Seventeenth-Century Traditions of Rhetoric.” Eighteenth-Century Music 5, no. 2 (September): 179–208. Varwig, Bettina. 2009. “ ‘Mutato Semper Habitu’: Heinrich Schütz and the Culture of Rhetoric.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 215–239. Varwig, Bettina. 2018. “Heartfelt Musicking: The Physiology of a Bach Cantata.” Representations 143, no. 1 (Summer): 36–62. Verba, Cynthia. 1993. Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a Dialogue, 1750–1764. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verba, Cynthia. 2013. Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s ‘Tragédie en Musique’: Between Tradition and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verba, Cynthia. 2017. Music and the French Enlightenment: Rameau and the Philosophes in Dialogue. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Vickers, Brian. 1984. “Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 2, no. 1 (Spring): 1–44. Waeber, Jacqueline. 2009. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘unité de mélodie’. ” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no. 1 (Spring): 79–143. Walmsley, Peter. 2017. “Rhetoric and Science [Early Modern and Enlightenment Rhetoric].” In The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, edited by Michael J. MacDonald, 547–558. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, Thomas. 1601. The Passions of the Minde. London. Wright, Thomas. 1604. The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Corrected, Enlarged, and with Sundry New Discourses Augmented. London.

chapter 10

The N i n eteen th Cen tu ry Andreas Dorschel

it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view George Eliot, Middlemarch

The Immediate Medium Music seems to touch human beings more immediately than any other form of art, yet it is also an elaborately mediated phenomenon steeped in complex thought.1 Music, we might say, is an “immediate medium.” The paradox of this “immediate medium,” discovered along with the eighteenth-century invention of “aesthetics,” features heavily in philosophy’s encounters with music during the nineteenth century. For a long time, accounts of aesthetic concerns during that century have focused on a conflict between authors who were sympathetic to either form or content in music, favouring either “absolute” or “programme music” respectively. That interpretation of the period, however, is worn out. It seems more fruitful now to unfold the paradox of the immediate medium through a web of alternative notions such as sound and matter, sensation and sense, habituation and innovation, imagination and desire, meaning and interpretation, body and gesture. With this in mind, I will focus in what follows on the writings of three authors: Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). These writers do not form a line of influence, yet they are united in their commitment to radical inquiry into that cluster of concepts.2 A philosophical basis that allows us to come to terms with music’s immediacy seems to be provided by materialism. Materialism became a dominant force in Western

208   Andreas Dorschel ­ hilosophy—perhaps for the first time—as part of the French Enlightenment. Yet the p eight­eenth century never developed a materialist philosophy of music, and so, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this became Leopardi’s quest. If the matter of music is sound, asked Leopardi, to what extent can music be understood by reference to sound? Can the empirical study of music ever square with philosophical materialism’s grand tenet that everything is (ultimately) matter? With the more advanced intellectual grasp and technological mastery of sound now available, Leopardi’s questions are there for twenty-first-century philosophers of music to tackle. Even if sound is shaped by musicians in the most considered and calculated manner, its immediate effects seem to be sensations rather than abstract ideas. Sensualism can go along with materialism but is not identical with it. The success story of the natural sciences that picked up steam in the nineteenth century is still well under way in the twenty-first century and exerts a hefty pull on psychology; within such a field of forces, sensualism will surely become a preferred psychology of music. But will it be a credible one? With Kierkegaard’s ironic reductio ad absurdum of sensualism in the philosophy and psychology of music, the way may have been paved for an account of music’s intellectual aspects. These, however, are made, not given. As Nietzsche pointed out, they get shaped, in history, from the stuff of culture. Traditional musical-philosophical histories of the nineteenth century centred on the work and the quest for music’s essence (asking in particular whether it lies in musical form or content); the revisionary account that I propose here, on the other hand, stresses music as a process and leads into a genealogy of music. To engage with the paradox of the immediate medium is to face the riddle of music’s temporality; this turns out to be the shared concern of these three unorthodox thinkers. Leopardi and Kierkegaard discover that if we listen to the unfolding of a piece of music in a meaningful way, then expectation on the one hand and memory on the other prove crucial. Nietzsche, in turn, moves one stage further, beyond the consideration of psychological time, and to a consideration of historical time.

Sound and Novelty: Giacomo Leopardi Among the many legacies that the European eighteenth century left to the nineteenth, none was more disputed than that of the Enlightenment, particularly its radical materialist strand. Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert were well versed in musical matters. But when, in D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de d’Alembert), Diderot compares the nerve fibres to vibrating strings of a harpsichord in order to explain the workings of the soul in a materialist fashion, music is merely a means of theory, not its subject (Diderot 1987, 101–103; cf. Rebejkow 1997). In contrast, what Diderot and d’Alembert (more a sceptic than a materialist anyway) have to say as music theorists could hardly be characterized as a materialist philosophy of music (see d’Alembert 1752; [1751] 1955, 68, 70, 124–128, 184, 186; Diderot 1983). If the philosophes had adjourned such

The Nineteenth Century   209 a project, perhaps as too perplexing, it was taken up in the early nineteenth century by the young Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. (On the general historical connection see Bini  1983; cf. Rosengarten  2012, 179–189.) Turned into “a professional philosopher” (Leopardi 2013, 116, fo. 144) after his intellectual crisis of 1819, Leopardi produced over the next thirteen years (until December 1832) the 4,526 manuscript pages of the Zibaldone di pensieri—a system to unsettle all systems. Music is a recurrent theme in that labyrinthine text. In his entry of 9 September 1821, Leopardi proclaims that “everything in our minds and faculties is material” (Leopardi 2013, 761, fo. 1657). This statement can, perhaps, be taken to provide a guiding thread through the Zibaldone. You must distinguish between sound (in which I also include singing) and harmony. Sound is the material of music, as colour is of painting, marble of sculpture, etc. The natural, generic effect that music has on us derives not from harmony but from sound, which electrifies and shakes us from the very first touch. (Leopardi 2013, 123, fo. 155; translation altered)

On one side stands harmony, which depends, as Leopardi explains, “on the ideas that each person has of why one thing fits better than another” (convenienza di una cosa con un’altra). On this basis, Leopardi was able, amongst much else, to account for historically changing ideas of consonance and dissonance in the history of harmony. More precisely, that which was taken initially to be ugly could be accepted as beautiful once ideas “that each person has of why one thing fits better than another” had changed. Such ideas might differ between individuals or between epochs and cultures; Leopardi mentions “nations, like the Turks, whose music to us sounds dissonant and tuneless in the extreme” (Leopardi 2013, 123–124, fo. 156). Leopardi is seeking here not to disparage Turkish music, but rather to note that the Turks appreciate their own music harmonically in a way unavailable to Leopardi’s own culture as they have, concerning music, “ideas” that are “different from our own” (Leopardi 2013, 1319, fo. 3212). On the other side of Leopardi’s distinction stands sound, which is “natural” (Leopardi 2013, 123, fo. 155). A sober attitude towards sound is a decisive element of Leopardi’s project of a materialist philosophy of music. Leopardi would have scorned mystifying idealist treatments of sound such as F. W. J. Schelling’s ([1802–3] 1859, 488) definition of Klang as “the indifference of the informing of the infinite into the finite, taken purely as indifference” ([d]ie Indifferenz der Einbildung des Unendlichen ins Endliche rein als Indifferenz aufgenommen). In the Zibaldone, far away from metaphysical infinities, sound is down to earth. It even affects animals, as when the sound of thunder sends the dog whining under the bed. In animals and humans alike, sound can produce strong emotions, such as fright. And it is not enough to say that we hear sound, true though that may be. Rather, we must be aware that sound touches us. There is sound before and beyond music and there is sound in music, but we cannot split them up along the traditional divide between the corporeal and the spiritual. On the contrary, both can “electrify and shake us,” body and mind, at the same time. The low, dark sound of an

210   Andreas Dorschel explosion; the hard, yet light and bright sound of glass breaking; the sweet sound (dolcezza) of a voice; the soft sound of a bowed catgut string; the sharp sound of a plucked metal string—each and any of these may, at certain moments, have a rousing, thrilling, or quivering effect on those who hear them or listen to them. At the same time, these sounds elude mediating signs. Sound qualities escape musical notation, and they defy literal reference, for we talk of them through images derived from sight (“dark,” “bright”), taste (“sweet”), or, especially, from touch (“hard,” “light,” “soft,” “sharp”) (cf. Leopardi 2013, 1318, fo. 3211). When tones are organized synchronically, they constitute harmony; when they are organized diachronically, we call them melody. Both harmony and melody are exclusive to the domain of music, whereas sound abounds outside of music. And yet, paradoxically, due to the strong effect of its “matter,” it is sound that “makes music special compared with the other arts”—literally “above (sopra) the other arts” (Leopardi 2013, 123, fo. 155). Matter takes precedence over form: without matter, form is nothing, while matter without form can be something. Sound that has not been stratified in terms of harmony can have a strong effect. Refined harmonic art, by way of contrast, will be ruined through performance on “a shoddy instrument”—with the sound messed up, Leopardi avers, “it will not touch you, will not move you, will not exalt you at all” (Leopardi 2013, 764, fo. 1664). Music, subjected to philosophical analysis, breaks down into component parts: sound, the most vigorous of them, is material, immediate, bodily, tangible, sensual and—to the extent that senses are similar—general; harmony and melody, which are less vigorous, are formal, mediate, intangible, intellectual, dependent upon ideas and, to that extent, relative. Or so it seems. But, in a Humean spirit,3 guided more by experience than by adherence to principles, Leopardi goes on: The pleasure we derive from sound does not come under the category of the beautiful, but is like that of taste or smell, etc. Nature has given us pleasure in all our senses. But sound is unique in producing an effect that in itself is more spiritual than food, colours, or tangible objects. And yet observe that smells, although to a much lesser extent, have a similar ability to awaken our imagination, etc. Hence the very spirituality of sound is a physical effect.  (Leopardi 2013, 125, fo. 157–158; translation altered)

Leopardi here breaks down the time-honoured dualism of mind and body. His claim that “the very spirituality of sound is a physical effect” may well be imbued with the experience of the lyrical poet working on and in words, that is, shaping meaning as sound and sound as meaning. Composers turn the matter of sound into music, organizing it into melody and harmony. In this way, they can achieve musical beauty. How, according to Leopardi, does this happen? Beauty does not inhere in particular melodic and harmonic forms. Rather, the way listeners relate to such forms through time accounts for what we call “beauty.” Beauty, Leopardi says, needs habituation (assuefazione). Even though musical beauty often seems to come to us in an instant, like a flash, a process underlies that effect, hidden at that instant. There is a conservative bent to the sense of hearing and the practice of

The Nineteenth Century   211 l­istening. The ear has “as principles only its own habits” (Leopardi 2013, 1318, fo. 3211). And are these principles at all? Habituation is “accidental” and “varies according to time, place, and nation” (Leopardi 2013, 1326, fo. 3230). The power of custom is so great, according to Leopardi, that it will determine not only whether or not a given melody is to be counted as beautiful; rather, that power will determine also which “successive arrangements of tones” will be “regarded as melodies” in the first place (Leopardi 2013, 1319, fo. 3213). But why should the power of custom hold sway in this way? Custom, suggests Leopardi, assures listeners that they have mastered a given acoustic situation. In the case of melodic beauty, in “hearing the opening sequence,” they find themselves capable of guessing “the middle, the end, and the entire development” (Leopardi 2013, 1317, fo. 3208). They know where they are vis-à-vis the music—and that state of mind they ratify with a judgement of beauty. Complete novelty in music would leave listeners at the mercy of temporal processes they could not foresee. Lacking habit, they would fail to form appropriate expectations. By handing down the verdict that new music is ugly, listeners may keep away the menace of confusion. Other harmonies and melodies that do not feature this appearance [of ugliness], or not in a marked form, and that nevertheless are regarded as if they were new (come nuove), are not new except for an unfamiliar combination of the various parts of those musical conventions that general or particular habituation causes us to consider as conventions.  (Leopardi 2013, 839, fo. 1874; translation altered)

Leopardi sets out an information theory of music (cf. Meyer 1957) without the jargon of information theory. Music without features that listeners can anticipate leaves those listeners bewildered; music delivering nothing but the expected makes them sink into tedium. Audiences will readily accept as beautiful what is unusual on the surface if it combines tokens of the usual beneath its surface: it seems new, but it is old. Such a quid pro quo may attract contempt from some, but not so from Leopardi. Rather, a solution of this kind commends itself by the twofold need for artists to come up with creations that are, at the same time, novel and intelligible. Composers have to make new music since otherwise older music, abundantly available, could simply be performed all over again; but what they make must also allow itself to be understood since otherwise listeners would turn away from it. In art, as in language, what is new is grasped in terms of what is old. Composers live up to their paradoxical task when their melodies are such that the people and generally all listeners are struck and amazed by them, as though they were hearing a new melody for the first time, while at the same time, because in fact they have become habituated to such successions of tones, they are able to identify it immediately as melody. (Leopardi 2013, 1322, fo. 3220–3221; translation altered)

Not all new music, however, is of this kind—music that is, in truth, old. Leopardi recognizes that “genuinely new compositions” also come about. As is to be expected, they are

212   Andreas Dorschel regularly reproached for lack of melody; they make us lose ground, listeners complain. Why, then, are such “genuinely new” compositions—providing music that goes beyond different rearrangements of conventional elements—brought into being? This might be due simply to the curiosity of composers; haunted by their déformation professionelle, or taken by flight of fancy, their art, “out of a desire for originality and to show off the imagination and creative faculty,” is “turned to its own extravagant and unheard of inventions.”4 The more difficult question is how and why such music can sometimes catch on and prevail—that is, in the end, reshape the habits of listeners in recognizing melody (Leopardi 2013, 1323, fo. 3222–3224; translation altered). Music may be sparing with sound qualities or it may lavish them. If we follow Leopardi’s argument, captivating—ideally overwhelming—sounds are the only thing in the world that can get audiences to listen to “genuinely new” harmonic or melodic successions of tones for a while and thus become accustomed to them (Leopardi 2013, 838, fo. 1873). Evidence for this claim (unavailable to Leopardi), may be seen in the finesse of sonorities and the extraordinary handling of timbre and dynamics among the great melodic-harmonic innovators of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries—as if, through such artifice, they sought to seduce audiences to their unusual, initially recalcitrant, constructions. Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss are cases in point. The unique emphasis that Leopardi laid on sound during the early years of the nineteenth century thus turned out to be a piece of aesthetic prophecy. Leopardi opens up a wide horizon for music. That sound is present before and beyond music does not diminish its force in music; rather, it is the backdrop of a world that sounds and resounds, electrifying and shaking sensuous beings, that makes sound so potent in music. But are there limits to music’s sensuousness? In a mazy piece of philosophizing about music, Søren Kierkegaard leads into that question.

Sensuality and Desire: Søren Kierkegaard “I am still too much of a child, or, more correctly, I am infatuated (forelsket), like a young girl, with Mozart, and I must have him rank in first place, whatever it costs” (Kierkegaard 1987, 48), A confesses frankly. A, as Kierkegaard calls him, is an aesthetician, author of a disquisition on “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” (“De umiddelbare erotiske Stadier eller det Musikalsk-Erotiske”); the above avowal appears in one of its introductory passages. It is one of the philosopher and anti-­philosopher Kierkegaard’s quips—and a rather good one at that. Kierkegaard is poking fun at the custom of aestheticians to exhibit their personal, idiosyncratic preferences as nothing less than “truth itself ”—as the grandiose phrase of a later major aesthetician (and critic of Kierkegaard) would have it (Adorno [1934] 2010, 203). A’s words encapsulate what aestheticians ought to admit more often and never do, namely that, like

The Nineteenth Century   213 t­ eenagers, they are smitten by some music and not by other music. Such infatuation, as we should expect, blinds the infatuated; but that, perhaps, is not too high a price to pay for getting what they love. Pathetically, though, they try to cover up their blindness by means of philosophical dialectics, which they use to reason their preferred art into the “first place, whatever it costs.” Here, it costs A the reader’s willingness to take him seriously—a loss for a fictitious character that means a gain in pleasure for his real audience. With its promise of neat classification, the title, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic,” suggests an academic treatise; within that genre, admitting an infatuation is a hilarious offence. Obviously, this is not going to be an investigation that leads to a result. Rather, the result—whatever it may be the result of—is fixed in advance, and argument is attached to the result in order to justify it, once again, “whatever it costs.” The incongruity marks this text—the second chapter from Kierkegaard’s 1843 Either/Or (Enten—Eller)—as parodistic: pseudo-objectivity explodes in laughter. That laughter carries an insight, namely, that if A is not to be taken seriously, Kierkegaard certainly is. Taken as a piece of controlled dramatic irony rather than at face value, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” eclipses the more academic endeavours in music aesthetics from this period. A is a Romantic who happens to have a predilection for the classical period of Viennese music, or rather for one particular work of one of its composers—W. A. Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He is not original in that regard: Jean Paul (Titan, 1800–3) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Don Juan, 1813) are obvious precursors. Yet unlike these writers of fiction, A has to produce an argument. He must construe the classical work in such a way that it will fit his Romantic taste. As if that were not difficult enough, A, being an aesthetician, must also translate his special pleading into a theory of unlimited scope. An author who sets out to develop an entire philosophy of music by reference to a single work will be hard pressed to preserve within his endeavour even a semblance of generality. Presenting his account as an aspect of a wider media (Medier) theory (Kierkegaard 1987, 54–57) will, A hopes, do the trick. To that end, Kierkegaard makes A unfold a formative notion from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon, or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 1766); in the characteristic manner of academic plagiarism—another authorial mockery of A— that debt is passed over in silence where it is central, and then acknowledged reverently in A’s speech on sorrow, “Silhouettes” (“Skyggerids”), where it is marginal (Kierkegaard 1987, 169). Different artistic media, A argues, are more or less appropriate to different content, or some sorts of content may only be appropriate to the medium of one specific art: Sculpture, painting, and music have abstract media as does architecture . . . The most abstract idea conceivable is the sensuous in its elemental originality (sandselige Genialitet). But through which medium can it be presented? Only through music. It cannot be presented in sculpture because it has a qualification of a kind of inwardness (en Art Inderlighedens Bestemmelse); it cannot be painted, for it cannot be caught in definite contours. In its lyricism, it is a force, a wind, impatience, passion,

214   Andreas Dorschel etc., yet in such a way that it exists not in one instant but in a succession of instants, for if it existed in one instant, it could be depicted or painted. That it exists in a succession of instants expresses its epic character, but still it is not epic in the stricter sense, for it has not reached the point of words; it continually moves within immediacy (Umiddelbarhed). Consequently, it cannot be presented in poetry, either. (Kierkegaard 1987, 56–57)

Language, suggests Kierkegaard, uses the sensuous as a means (Redskab, i.e., “tool,” “device”) to refer to something non-sensuous, whereas music values the sensuous as sound, for what it is (Kierkegaard 1987, 65). Whenever we enjoy language for its sound, we treat it as music. So, by way of conclusion: “The only medium that can present it [the sensuous in its immediacy] is music. Music has an element of time in itself but nevertheless does not take place in time except metaphorically” (Kierkegaard  1987, 57). The Danish adjective san(d)selig can mean “sensate,” but also “sensuous” and “sensual”—and A exploits the polysemy. Sensuousness is pertinent to A’s discussion of abstractness and immediacy; once Don Giovanni enters the philosophical scenario, however, A switches to sensuality. Indicating the semantic shift, A advances an invalid syllogism that can be set out as follows: P1 P2 P3 P4 C

Sensuousness is the most abstract content. Music is the most abstract medium. Sensuality is the essence of the figure of Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni embodies the essence of the opera whose hero he is. In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, content and medium are one.

Mimicking Hegel’s dialectics—which, Kierkegaard maintained, could prove everything, and hence nothing—A then comes up with no less than a deduction of Don Giovanni. For philosophy, nothing is easier than to derive a product of the imagination as logical necessity: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—there you are. As Bernard Williams puts it, Don Giovanni represents the third, full and final stage of three forms of sensual interest, each of which has been represented by Mozart. The first, “dreaming,” is expressed in the tranquillity, the “hushed melancholy,” of Cherubino’s feeling; the second, “seeking,” in Papageno’s craving for discovery. Giovanni combines and goes beyond both of these attitudes, in full desire, in conquest.  (Williams 2006, 33)

Williams’s phrase “in full desire” is telling, for Don Giovanni “speeds on over the abyss” (Kierkegaard 1987, 129) from one female body to the next, treating each as mere episode, just as in melody a tone must cease to appear to us for the next to be presented. For both the erotic seducer and the ear seduced by melody, only presence, the realm of consumption, truly exists. They are unconcerned about the past, unconcerned about the future. Don Giovanni devours women, as each sound devours the previous one. Yet if Don

The Nineteenth Century   215 Giovanni points to a limit of a life shaped—or rather, left shapeless—by the relentless pursuit of pleasure, then the ear seduced by melody will point to a limit of music, that art forever vanishing. As long as sensual desire is successful, it discards its objects into the indifference of statistics—when Leporello exclaims, in the course of listing the numbers of women that his master (Don Giovanni) has loved, that “ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre” (“in Spain there are already a thousand and three”), he provides the formula for emptiness dressed up as plenitude (cf. Kierkegaard 1987, 91–95). Sensual desire hits its limit if and when it is frustrated. It is then forced to reflect why it had so intensely desired the other—who thus ceases to be an object—in the first place. The dialectics of Either/Or seem to suggest that grief at being rejected has as its proper medium tragedy (the topic of the book’s subsequent essay [Kierkegaard  1987, 137–164]), thus superseding the ephemeral art of music. But just how true is this homology between music and the life of desire? A suggests that, like Don Giovanni, music knows no fidelity: the previous tone has to disappear for the next one to come forth. But does music hold nothing back? Where does music manifest if not, through the ear, in the minds of listeners? Could we even listen to melodies, let alone to Don Giovanni as a musical work, if these melodies were not directed at beings who, through memory, constantly retain features of them? This is, in fact, the perspective from which A produces his text—the opera made a lasting impression on him—but which he needs to deny. If all music were, as A says, transience, then how could A refer to a work by Mozart, a man long dead, as the steady object of his infatuation? For his theory to work, A must presuppose that music can be written down, yet he must also ignore that very same feature. Kierkegaard, the master of dramatic irony, injected these contradictions into the text.5 Throughout Either/Or, A is a dubious figure. He is characterized by the distortions that he inflicts on various subjects—and through him, so too is the way of life that Kierkegaard calls “aesthetic.” Above all, A mutilates Don Giovanni, the ultimate object of his infatuation, in order to make this opera suit his theory—“whatever it costs.” To that purpose, more than anything, the Commendatore must be done away with or, at least, pushed to the side, for he is as remote as possible from sensuous immediacy and sensual desire. A, cheeky and stubborn at once, goes about his business in the manner of a determined dogmatist—a species not uncommon in philosophical aesthetics. He resorts to the astounding claim that the Commendatore “lies outside” (ligger udenfor) the “piece” (Stykket). To say so of the figure to whom the piece’s defining D minor tonality belongs sounds absurd, and it is. A, apparently sensing the absurdity, qualifies his remark by saying that the Commendatore lies “to some degree” (til en vis Grad) outside the piece. But through that sophistry, Kierkegaard only sharpens his ironic characterization of A; how could the yes/no alternative of being outside or not amount to a matter of “degree”? To support his claim, A declares that “the Commendatore appears only two times.” This is flagrantly false. As readers of Either/Or are supposed to recognize, A leaves out the graveyard scene, the entire work’s turning point. Ultimately, a false theory can only be saved, in aesthetics as everywhere else, by twisting the facts (Kierkegaard 1987, 124).

216   Andreas Dorschel “Whatever it costs,” A attempts to diminish the Commendatore, and indeed every other part in the opera, in favour of Don Giovanni (Kierkegaard  1987, 118–119). He wishes the complex interweaving of voices that is Mozart’s Don Giovanni to be the unambiguous, direct voice of the single, titular character that he takes to be its hero. But that it isn’t makes Don Giovanni both high drama and deep music. Pseudonymity, a rare thing in philosophy, is opera’s usual procedure anyway. Mozart is neither Don Giovanni, nor the Commendatore, nor Donna Anna, nor Donna Elvira. And opera, through music, masters a feat that spoken drama lacks: it can present several voices at once. As George Steiner notes: If music, notably that of Mozart, was to Søren Kierkegaard a touchstone of the pulse of meaning, the reason is clear: he sought in his reflexes of argument and sensibility, in his prose, to translate out of music its capacities for counterpoint, for plurality of simultaneous moods and movements, for self-subversion. Like no other major thinker, perhaps, Kierkegaard is polyphonic.  (Steiner 1998, 103–104)

That music (like his philosophy) should be monophonic is what A, the anti-Kierkegaard, desires—for only then can it be immediate. “Music, like many other things, suffers most from its friends,” sighs Edmund Gurney in his Power of Sound (1880, 360). This gets close to the truth, but Kierkegaard knew even better: music suffers most from its lovers—and A has to rank high among them. While Gurney, a theorist, makes his statement in resignation, Kierkegaard, combining the roles of theorist and dramatist, enacts revenge. In a final act of supreme irony, he leads A on to try his theory on the least suitable object, the sonata architecture of the opera’s overture. Like Don Giovanni’s life, and true to A’s philosophy, music should here head restlessly from one moment to the next. But the overture to Don Giovanni is not like that; as A has to acknowledge, it forms a “totality” that is “strongly structured” (stærkt bygget)—something that Don Giovanni’s life could never reach. Readers are left with two options: either Mozart’s “perfect masterwork” (fuldendt Mesterværk) is not what it should be or A’s philosophy has gone wrong. Choosing between these two options is made easy. In his characteristic manner of indirection, Kierkegaard points to an alternate philosophical approach commensurate to music as an art form: in its temporality, music such as the overture of Don Giovanni goes beyond momentary impressions and may yield experience that lasts; that experience can, through music’s expressive and representational powers, draw in and on the ra­tional and emotional faculties of listeners, far transcending sensuous immediacy. Here we see the point of Kierkegaard’s textual strategy: an ideology of sensuous immediacy calls for complete identification, without resistance. A wishes to invite such identification. Yet the entire A-strand proves an elaborate red herring. Kierkegaard has set up his ideas for a fall: dis-identification. He educates a reader, and there are lessons for a musical listener in that education. Music’s unfolding in time has figured prominently in several philosophies of that art (see Rowell 2004). How pieces of music are temporally organized and how listeners experience them as temporally organized, though, does not exhaust the issue. Rather,

The Nineteenth Century   217 there is something else: as a man-made thing, music partakes in historical time. This participation has strangely eluded most philosophers. Among those of the nineteenth century, however, Friedrich Nietzsche makes for a great exception.

Word and Gesture: Friedrich Nietzsche In 1887, Nietzsche wrote that “all concepts (Begriffe) in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history (Geschichte) can be defined” (2006, 53). Nietzsche took it to be a fundamental naïvety of philosophers of law and morality that they attempted to define that which defies definition—but he could just as well have accused philosophers of art of the same. Music, and everything that may have made it up, has got a history and thus defies definition. Hence Nietzsche does not offer necessary and sufficient conditions for something being music or any of its supposed ingredients. A search for the essence of music may still have driven Nietzsche’s early Birth of Tragedy (1872); in Human, All Too Human, part I (1878), however, he commits philosophy to a sense of history—a commitment he would never again retract (Emden 2008). In that book, Nietzsche first develops a style of exposition that allows him to present side-by-side different perspectives on a theme. Human, All Too Human, part I consists of 638 numbered, apparently self-contained paragraphs. Yet subtle interrelations, forming a net, underscore what looks on the surface like plain juxtaposition. In ¶¶ 215–17, Nietzsche does not proffer an aesthetics of music derived from a uniform principle. He appears equally averse, however, to presenting a mere jumble of ideas. While no axiom, or set of axioms, is shared by the texts, they have something in common: in each of them, the author views music in the making—as process rather than essence. To employ a name Nietzsche would coin later, these axioms (or sets of axioms) amount to “genealogies” of music or of musical traits. The different angles from which Nietzsche explores music thus do not add up to a grand survey of its field, but nor do they result in paradox cheaply obtained by stating one thing, then its opposite. Tensions remain, and are intended. The goal is not to soothe readers, but to alert them to intricacies between the points in question. Nietzsche enters the meandering structure of ¶¶ 215–17 with a reflection on musical meaning; the terms bedeutungsvoll (meaningful) and Bedeutsamkeit (meaningfulness) provide the keynote for ¶ 215. Sounds, suggests Nietzsche in this passage, do not by themselves have a meaning. Hence the common-sense understanding of music as an immediate utterance of feeling (or language of feeling, Sprache des Gefühls) is just as misguided as its philosophical version, proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer (1988, ­1:338–353), wherein music manifests the metaphysical Will, or the Thing-in-itself. Rather, for most of its history, sounds were allied to words, to such an extent that words penetrated sounds. Thus, musical metaphysics, despite meaning to grasp music in raw being, deals with the product of such work—with music as something made. What the soul believes

218   Andreas Dorschel to be revealed to it directly is, in fact, the meaning that human minds have, over generations, conferred upon tones and combinations of tones. So-called “pure, absolute” instrumental music, then, has, through its history, been neither absolute nor pure.6 It has, rather, been in constant relation to a historical transfer from language; its phrases are sediments of words (Nietzsche 2005, 99). In ¶ 216, Nietzsche probes a different approach to music, shifting his emphasis from the use of words—a feat of the intellect—to gesture, rooted in the body. Nietzsche hones in on the concept of empathy which, he suggests, is no mere matter of mind or soul; rather, it is only through imitating another’s gestures one understands that other’s sensibility. In modern times, suggests Nietzsche, civilized manners have somewhat pushed back gestural extroversion in favour of mental introversion. The process of mirroring another’s bodily movements can still be studied, however, in the reactions of infants to their mothers. Gestures go along with tones, as does the sigh (which could be called a sounding gesture). Dance, or gestures brought into a sequence, conveys to the eye what music conveys to the ear. When gestures are omitted, the tones that remain turn into their symbols. Listeners who feel the external presence of gestures to be redundant have, claimed Nietzsche, internalized them (Nietzsche 2005, 99–100). Such listeners are able to appreciate music that is called “absolute,” but which is, in fact, relative to something. This something—words in ¶ 215, gestures in ¶ 216—once had to be explicit, but now can be left implicit. When some aestheticians call music an art of form, thinks Nietzsche, they have come to forget, in their philosophical oblivion of history, that music’s forms are traces of contents, either of words or of gestures. Nietzsche refuses to settle for reductive accounts of music; he posits neither intellect nor body as the fundamental. Instead, he sets the two perspectives—for that is how they are best understood—alongside each other. Yet, these two perspectives are not unconnected either, for consonants and vowels are positions of the organ of speech and thus also gestures. As Nietzsche puts it, “consonants and vowels are nothing but the positions of the speech organs, in short: gestures” (“Consonanten und Vokale sind. . . nichts als Stellungen der Sprachorgane, kurz Geberden” [1871] 1988b, 361). Further, word and gesture both belong to rhetoric; in the 1870s Nietzsche rediscovered the belief in the oratorical force of music that had been a commonplace until around 1750. At any rate, Nietzsche maintains that a rich philosophy of music cannot satisfy itself with a single perspective, as each point of view has limitations of its own. The perspectives that he has presented so far, however, also share a limitation, in that they are directed at a presumed origin of music. In ¶ 217, therefore, Nietzsche turns round altogether, addressing, diagnostically, the present state of music and, prognostically, its upcoming future state.7 Yet the layers music manifests as a historical phenomenon—past, present, and future—share some matter. In ¶ 217, Nietzsche goes back to the issue of ¶ 215, namely meaning (Bedeutung). He distinguishes between what a thing is and what it means on the basis that while the former can be seen, heard, or felt, the latter has to be thought. In modern music, Nietzsche suggests, meaning dominates being. Above all, Wagner is on his mind—a name deliberately never mentioned, but constantly referred to in Human, All Too

The Nineteenth Century   219 Human, part 1. The dominance of meaning over being concludes the processes set out in ¶¶ 215–16: what was once explicitly present to the senses (Sinne) is, at a later stage, left implicit and thus deferred—it has to be complemented by listeners. Then, in an unprecedented way, listeners begin to tolerate noise (Lärm) in music, for they have learned to conceive of sounds as symbols. While a particular sound may be quite unpleasant, what it stands for could still be momentous. Such extended tolerance towards ugly sounds may be seen as progress: music has conquered all that is hideous in the world by acquiring capacities to represent it. Yet tolerating noise for a long time must numb the auditory sense. The “complete dominance of the well-tempered tonal system” in modern Western culture attests already to that process of “desensualization” (Entsinnlichung); as Nietzsche suggests, “ears that can still hear the subtle distinction between for example C sharp and D flat are now exceptional.” Harmless as this may appear, Nietzsche considers it a stage in a process through which modern art defeats itself. For meaning is what an intellect projects on to sensual material; if the material repels the senses, the intellect may still deem it profoundly meaningful.8 But what of an individual intellect unwilling or unable to project in this way? It will be bound, on the sensuous level, to enjoy the ugly as such. Nietzsche, the iconoclastic philosopher, is plagued by philosophy’s ancient concern about art: the fates of beauty (Nietzsche 2005, 100–101). The way in which it plagues him, however, is not ancient but modern—it is congenial to Charles Baudelaire’s “historical theory of the beautiful,” which discredits proclamations of timeless aesthetic qualities (Baudelaire [1863] 1976, 685). These fates of beauty had, in the enthusiastic formulations of Romanticism, been driven by boundless trust in the eternal power of beauty. Nietzsche, at least at the time of Human, All Too Human, part I, continues to care for beauty in spite of grave doubt in that power. For what do we long, asks Nietzsche, when we seek beauty in music, or any of the arts? “To be beautiful ourselves: we imagine we would be very happy if we were beautiful.—But that is an error” (Nietzsche 2005, 81; translation altered).

Beyond Form and Content Much of the nineteenth century’s most significant philosophy comes from authors who were outside or on the margins of academia: Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, John Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Charles Sanders Peirce, Nietzsche,9 Gottlob Frege. That general point also holds for the philosophy of music in the nineteenth century. Music being a public art, its aesthetics could not have been confined to universities during the nineteenth century. Rather, music critics disputed one another’s claims, and those of composers, in widely-circulated journals, pamphlets, and newspapers. In the field of music criticism, “absolute music versus programme music” was a loud battle-cry. Yet none of the work of major composers from this period fits that skimpy alternative: that music is content moulded into form or that forms moved in sounding are music’s

220   Andreas Dorschel only content.10 Occasionally, nineteenth-century aesthetics was that sort of dispute, and to the extent that it was, the music of this epoch showed itself greater than the philosophy. Johannes Brahms found in Hanslick’s treatise “so many dumb things” (so viel Dummes) that he gave it up (Brahms 1927, 168). What may be worthwhile in encounters of philosophy with music during the nineteenth century must lie beyond that oncecanonical antagonism. Leopardi’s aesthetics marks a desideratum even in the twenty-first century, where a thorough philosophy of sound still seems to elude us.11 That sounds surround us both before and beyond music does not render them less important for an understanding of music, but, paradoxically, more so, for even when we do not listen to them consciously and willingly, they shape our reality. Leopardi’s distinction between matter and form may be no less vexed and troubled than the notorious divide between content and form, but in Leopardi’s conception of music as sonic practice, this distinction is a point of departure rather than the point of arrival. Kierkegaard puts the present age to shame by sparkling with wit and elegance as he approaches the much-treated issue of the medium’s expressive and representational powers. Finally, Nietzsche subverts the staple aesthetic alternatives of form and content, or absolute and dramatic music. That subversion is driven by an insight plain enough: everything humans have made—music and art just as well as religion and morality—has a history. Contemporary philosophy, busy proposing ever more new ontologies of music, still needs to come to terms with that simple, perhaps deceptively simple, discovery. But there is something else. In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel, observing in music of his times “a certain tendency . . . towards philosophy,” attempted to justify composers’ talk of “thoughts in their compositions” (Schlegel 1967, 254). Some musicologists triumphantly proclaim to have established that one or another piece of nineteenth-century music conforms exactly to one or another previous, contemporaneous, or later theory, ideology, or philosophy. Lawrence Kramer, for example, declares of a passage in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that it “conforms in every detail to the Freudian language of love” (Kramer 1990, 164). Yet such conformity is specious. The same “in every detail” would not be the same in any detail for appearing in music drama rather than a psychological treatise. Schlegel himself expresses his thought cautiously: though he did not want to rule out that music had acquired a capacity to articulate philosophical insight, he was far from suggesting that, say, Mozart is Kant in sound. Some have followed Schlegel’s lead. But where Schlegel made sweeping assertions, recent authors have attended minutely to particulars. David Schroeder (1990, 88) presents the motivic-thematic elaboration in the first movement of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 83 as imparting the ethical idea of tolerance. Roger Scruton (2016) has argued in detail how Wagner, while often undercutting the philosophical doctrines by Feuerbach or Schopenhauer with which he engages, turns music into a philosophical force. In a more general vein, Andrew Bowie speaks of the “late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” as promulgating a “philosophy which is conveyed by music itself ”; he sees the present philosophical challenge as one of “questioning philosophy via music” (Bowie 2007, 2, xi, 15). Rather than asking what philosophy had and has to pronounce about music, we are supposed to explore what music

The Nineteenth Century   221 conveys philosophically. Such claims, from Schlegel to Scruton, are as contentious as they are intriguing. They have to be probed if our understanding of the relationship between music and philosophy is meant to develop, but they must also be related to a fresh glance at the nineteenth century’s own philosophies of music.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Markus Kleinert, Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, David Trippett, and an anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press for their critical comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Ariana Phillips-Hutton assisted with rendering this chapter, as much as possible, into idiomatic English. 2. Throughout this essay I make reference to the English translations of works by these authors: Leopardi 2013; Kierkegaard 1987; Nietzsche 2005. Original-language versions of all these works can be found in Works Cited as Leopardi [1817–32] 1991, Kierkegaard [1843] 1997, and Nietzsche [1878] 1988a respectively. Translations from other non-English sources are my own. 3. Cf. Cacciapuoti 1999, xxii. For the wider philosophical background of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Martinelli 2003. 4. Cf. the description in Leopardi  2013, 1324, fo. 1691; translation altered: “enamoured of novelty and of ambitious creation and invention.” 5. Apparently forgetting his own promising initial references to “Kierkegaard’s playing with authorial roles” and “the shifting nature of the textsʼ construction,” Andrew Bowie (2007, 203–208) in the end misses the philosopher’s irony. 6. Hanslick [1854] 1990, 1:52: “reine, absolute.” The term “absolute” here must be read in conjunction with two previous uses of it in the same chapter, concerning “musical ideas,” 1:46. On the passage and its subsequent treatment, cf. Pederson, 2009, 250–3; on “purity” 252–3; on Nietzsche’s critical stance towards “the absolute,” 242; and, finally, on ¶ 215 of Human, All Too Human, pt I, 256–257. 7. Cf. Trippett 2013, 9; on the context surrounding Nietzsche’s remarks, see the introduction, 1–11, and, indeed, the entire book. 8. As with Leopardi’s thoughts on musical innovation, Nietzsche’s reflection here points forward in powerful ways to twentieth-century problems; on these see Whittall 2009. 9. Nietzsche, of course, started with exceptional success in academia when he was in his twenties, yet by 1880 he had become “an academic outsider” (Sadler 1995, 232). 10. On German music from Beethoven to Schoenberg, see Hoeckner 2002. 11. The Power of Sound of which Edmund Gurney speaks in the title of his great study in the philosophy of music turns out to be less a power of sound than a power of listeners vis-àvis sound, see Gurney 1880, 7, 236. For his use of the expression “sound,” see 27. On the state of the art in contemporary philosophy of music see Kane 2014.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. [1934] 2010. “Der dialektische Komponist.” In Musikalische Schriften IV, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 198–203. Vol. 17 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

222   Andreas Dorschel Baudelaire, Charles. [1863] 1976. “Le Peintre de la vie moderne”. In Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois, 2:683–724. Paris: Gallimard. Bini, Daniela. 1983. “Leopardi and French Materialism.” Comparative Literature Studies 20, no. 2 (Summer): 154–167. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brahms, Johannes. 1927. “Letter to Clara Schumann, 15 January 1856.” Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, edited by Berthold Litzmann, 1:166–169. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Cacciapuoti, Fabiana. 1999. “Il fundamento della filosofia moderna.” In Giacomo Leopardi, Della natura degli uomini e delle cose: Edizione tematica dello Zibaldone di pensieri, xv–lxxxii. Rome: Donzelli. D’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond. [1751] 1955. Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie, edited by Erich Köhler. Hamburg: Meiner. D’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste le Rond. 1752. Elémens de musique, théorique et pratique, suivant de M. Rameau. Paris: David l’aîne. Diderot, Denis. 1983. Musique. Edited by Jean Mayer and Pierre Citron. Vol. 19 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Hermann. Diderot, Denis. 1987. Le Rêve de d’Alembert. In Idées, part IV, edited by Jean Varloot, 23–309, Vol. 17 of Œuvres complètes. Paris: Hermann. Written in 1769 and first published anonymously in 1782. Emden, Christian  J. 2008. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurney, Edmund. 1880. The Power of Sound. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Hanslick, Eduard. [1854] 1990. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik in der Tonkunst, edited by Dietmar Strauß. 2 vols. Mainz: Schott. Hoeckner, Berthold. 2002. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kane, Brian. 2014. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1987. Either/Or, part I.  Vol. 3 of Kierkegaard’s Writings, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. [1843] 1997. Enten—Eller, part I.  Vol. 2 of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, edited by Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag. Kramer, Lawrence. 1990. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Leopardi, Giacomo. 2013. Zibaldone. Translated by Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons et al. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Leopardi, Giacomo. [1817–32] 1991. Zibaldone di Pensieri. Edited by Giuseppe Pacella. 3 vols. Milan: Garzanti. Martinelli, Bortolo. 2003. Leopardi tra Leibniz e Locke: Alla ricerca di un orientamento e di un fondamento. Rome: Carucci. Meyer, Leonard B. 1957. “Meaning in Music and Information Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15, no. 4 (June): 412–424. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1878] 1988a. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, part I. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter.

The Nineteenth Century   223 Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1871] 1988b. “Fragment 12 = Mp XII 1 d”. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 7:359–369. Berlin: de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005. Human, All Too Human, part I. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pederson, Sanna. 2009. “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 240–262. Rebejkow, Jean-Christophe. 1997. “Matérialisme et musique: Quelques réflexions à propos du Rêve de d’Alembert.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 107 (3): 302–316. Rosengarten, Frank. 2012. Giacomo Leopardi’s Search for a Common Life through Poetry. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Rowell, Lewis. 2004. “Time in the Romantic Philosophies of Music.” Indiana Theory Review 25 (2004): 139–175. Sadler, Ted. 1995. Nietzsche: Truth and Redemption. London: Athlone Press. Schelling, F. W. J. [1802/3] 1859. Philosophie der Kunst. In Sämmtliche Werke, edited by Karl Schelling, 5:353–737. Stuttgart: Cotta. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. “Athenäum-Fragment no. 444.” Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by Ernst Behler, Vol. 2. Munich: Schöningh. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1988. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, part I.  Edited by Ludger Lütkehaus. Zurich: Haffmans. Schroeder, David  P. 1990. Haydn and the Enlightenment: The Late Symphonies and Their Audience. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scruton, Roger. 2016. The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. London: Allen Lane. Steiner, George. 1998. “The Wound of Negativity: Two Kierkegaard Texts.” In Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, edited by Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée, 103–113. Oxford: Blackwell. Trippett, David. 2013. Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whittall, Arnold. 2009. “1909 and After: High Modernism and ‘New Music’.” Musical Times 150, no. 1906 (Spring): 5–18. Williams, Bernard. 2006. “Don Giovanni as an Idea.” In On Opera, 31–42. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

chapter 11

The T w en tieth Cen tu ry Tamara Levitz

Introduction: Towards a Global History of Twentieth-Century Music and Philosophy The history of music and philosophy in the twentieth century has yet to be written.1 There are several reasons why this subject has eluded philosophers and musicologists. The first concerns the entrenched tradition of conceiving of the history of philosophy in terms of connections between canonical texts, which come to stand in for historical actors, networks, events, publishers, and institutions.2 This popular yet ungrounded historiographical method allows “great texts” to float in an immaterial void that masks white privilege, structural inequality, and difference. Such historiographies necessarily bracket out discussions that are deemed unimportant or “unphilosophical,” yet which are essential to the philosophy of music. This history has likewise been obscured by the framework of an alleged ­continental–analytic divide in philosophy. In spite of its ubiquity, many philosophers worry about the ideological underpinnings of this framework, and how it warps accounts of the development of philosophical thought in the twentieth century.3 Bernard Williams put his finger on the problem decades ago when he noted that a geopolitical category (continental) cannot be opposed to a methodological category (analytical) because this involves “a strange cross-classification—rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drives and Japanese” (Williams 1996, 25). The framework proves particularly problematic for speaking about the history of music and philosophy, because the constructed continental and analytical traditions do not have the same history as what philosophers of music describe as, or assume to be, continental and

226   Tamara Levitz analytical music philosophy.4 By implementing it, philosophers raise the expectation that specific music philosophies should fit in one or the other camp—a goal achieved sometimes only by drawing analogies that disregard actual philosophical affinity, content, or historical c­ onnection. Further, applying this framework before the late 1950s, when it was invented, distorts history. Finally, in adopting this framework, philosophers falsely split philosophical thought between an Anglo-American territory and the historically contingent notion of Europe as a “continent” (by which they largely mean Germany and France), bracketing out the rest of the world, where philosophizing about music has most often taken place. A third reason this history has been relatively ignored is because the philosophy of music still lacks definition and authority as an academic subdiscipline. As a nomadic subject with porous boundaries, it has depended on situations of encounter for its development. Scholars and practitioners in unrelated disciplines—music performance, music studies, and philosophy—have had to find the chance to meet (sometimes in the body of one person) for the philosophy of music to flourish. This has happened only at specific moments and in unique, often privileged, circumstances in the twentieth century. And even then, the philosophy of music has remained peripheral to most philosophers’ and musicologists’ interests—a curious example, footnote, or aside in monographs devoted to other topics. In preparing this chapter, I tried to fill this void by tracing the material history of a wide range of texts on music and philosophy produced globally in the twentieth century. I understood that the scope of such a project could only be hinted at in the context of a chapter such as this, especially given its focus on Western music and philosophy. I was also aware that my capacity to undertake such a history was, from the start, limited significantly by the languages I read. Nevertheless, I felt it important to begin by reading as expansively as possible and by situating my investigation in a global context. I chose texts that were written by people who identified as philosophers or music thinkers, and that mentioned music or posed philosophical questions, defining both in the broadest way possible. I aimed to understand this history from the perspective neither of canonical texts nor of an assumed continental–analytic divide, but rather from the ground up and materially, in terms of all surviving media as situated within the professionalization of the humanities and modern formation of disciplines in the Westernized university in the twentieth century. In undertaking this exercise, I learned several things. First, I came to understand that the twentieth century did not form one coherent unit in terms of the history of the philosophy of music. I was particularly struck by the dramatic shifts that occurred with the acceleration of academic professionalization after the Second World War. In light of what I recognized as the significant structural differences between how philosophy was practised in the first and second halves of the twentieth century, I decided to focus solely on what I call the “modern” era, from 1900 to 1958. I end my story in 1958 because that is the year in which a symbolic rupture occurred at a conference in Royaumont, France, where the labels of analytic and continental were born. Moreover, musicologists and philosophers have paid far more attention to the history of music and philosophy after this conference, leading me to believe an overview of

The Twentieth Century   227 that later history might be less necessary. Understanding that I have only one lifetime, and that a comprehensive material history of the twentieth-century global philosophy of music would take more time than that, and more than one person, to write, I focused on creating a coherent narrative of one dominant strand of music and philosophy in a limited, largely Western geographical space that included only France, Germany, Japan, Spain, and the United States. The modern era, as I understand it, was defined by the international exchange of ideas.5 The first international conference on philosophy—the Congrès internationale de philosophie—took place at the Exposition universelle internationale in Paris in August 1900—symbolically ushering in an era in which internationalism served as a geopolitical simulacrum for universal thought. Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel, Léon Brunschvicg, André Lalande, Paul Natorp, Henri Delacroix, Bertrand Russell, Georg Simmel, and other, largely French, luminaries spoke, and members of the Comité de patronage came from France, Germany, England, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, the United States, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland— their nationalities representative of the Western states that participated in international politics at the time. Many edited the leading philosophical journals of the day (see Congrès internationale de philosophie 1900). Their vision was universal, yet their dialogue was constrained by the material circumstances of a universal exposition that championed the achievements of empire. The location set the tone: French philosophers dominated this international scene and imperialism its ideology throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Scholarly conferences—which developed dramatically in size, degree of bureaucratic organization, and geographical scope as the twentieth century wore on—became an increasingly common feature of the lives of privileged intellectual elites. They provided the primary space where music scholars and philosophers exchanged ideas. And yet, even though exhaustive reports were published for many of them, conferences are rarely the subject of historical investigation. In this chapter, I make a concerted effort to tell the story of music and philosophy from the perspective of international students and through the lens of exchanges that took place at international conferences, in this way emphasizing moments of encounter, and giving a material foundation to the history of ideas. The dialogue between music scholars and philosophers in the modern era was also facilitated by the fact that academic publishing was not yet the specialized business it would become in the second half of the twentieth century. Professional journals existed, of course, but many articles on music and philosophy appeared in “little journals”— independent, avant-garde, diverse, or eclectic publications with (sometimes) minimal distribution or limited runs that drove the modernist movement worldwide.6 The history of these journals, and their link to modernism, can be dated back symbolically to 1888, when the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío first spoke in the Chilean Revista de Artes y Letras of the moderno in Central American literature—a term he introduced to describe how having lived such a “rapid life” in “our America,” it was necessary to “give new forms to the manifestation of thought”—forms that were “vibrant, picturesque, and, especially, full of newness, as well as free and frank” (Darío  1888, 599–600).7

228   Tamara Levitz Such  journals often published an eclectic mix of materials, including short stories, poetry, ethnographic and scientific studies, photography, musical analysis, and philosophical texts. They created a remarkable space where philosophical texts could appear alongside discussions of music, and where both could become associated with the “new” and modernism. If, as Benedict Anderson has taught, imagined communities are shaped by the media in which their members communicate, and if, as Jürgen Habermas concludes, public spheres are formed by such technologies, then the disappearance of the little journals and changes in scholarly societies and conferences after the Second World War necessarily led to a dramatic shift in how the philosophy of music was practiced. These technologies could not survive the hyper-professionalization of the disciplines in the post-war era. As peer review developed, academic journals became more exclusionary, conventional, compartmentalized, and singularly focused on the work of experts—creating a different kind of academic sphere for the development of the philosophy of music. In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the British Journal of Aesthetics, for example, analytical aesthetics increasingly dominated (Goehr 1993, 101). As a consequence, philosophers today might not consider the articles from early twentieth-century little journals to be philosophy. But the point is that it was philosophy, before the notion of what that was changed during the Cold War. In the modern era, aesthetics became institutionalized as a scientific discipline and avidly cultivated as a profession. I would argue that the specifically modern form of this process began in 1906, when Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, or in 1908 when he established the Vereinigung für ästhetische Forschung in Berlin (see Beyer, Cohn, and Vladova 2010). This local association included writers, art historians, architects, professors of psychiatry, music critics, musicologists, and philosophers; as a registered union (albeit one outside the university), it created an important forum in which philosophers and musicologists had the opportunity to exchange ideas. The society grew rapidly and organized its first international conference, the Kongreß für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in Berlin in 1913. After the war, Dessoir reorganized the society as the Gesellschaft für ästhetische Forschung (1923–55). Conferences followed in Berlin (1924), Hamburg (1930), and Paris (1937). (For more, see Collenberg-Plotnikov, Maigné, and Trautmann-Waller  2016.) Such a process of professionalization of the study of art is unique to the twentieth century; soon independent institutes, associations, and journals began to crop up around the world. Yet the establishment of aesthetics as a modern science did not automatically create the conditions necessary for the development of the philosophy of music, in part because aestheticians continued to prioritize the visual arts, and in part because aesthetics remained a contested academic discipline. As a consequence, those who wanted to philosophize about music frequently sought peripheral spaces in which to do so. This was the era of the philosopher of music as “outsider”—a figure I try to highlight in this chapter. Francisco Gil Villegas Montiel (1996, 14–17, 25) argues that Georg Simmel defined the “philosophical discourse of modernity” between 1900 and 1929 by educating

The Twentieth Century   229 a generation of these “outsiders,” among them Ernst Bloch, José Ortega y Gasset, and Alain Locke.8 Simmel (1908, 509–512) was also the first to theorize the idea of the outsider from a sociological perspective. As an academic outsider himself for most of his life who began his career researching the origins of music, Simmel provided an alternative philosophical path towards objective culture, the everyday, and the fragmentary, and—with Max Weber and others—helped to encourage what became twentieth-century music philosophers’ lasting attraction to sociological perspectives. In this chapter, phenomenology emerges as the tradition that most inspired new approaches to the philosophy of music in the modern era. It may appear as if I chose to focus exclusively on phenomenology, but I would argue that phenomenology chose me. Music scholars and philosophers seeking to explain how to listen to new and unfamiliar music in the early twentieth century turned repeatedly to phenomenological texts for answers. Many developed their philosophies of music as a way of responding to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method, as this chapter will show. Neither neo-Kantians nor logical positivists appeared to play a comparable role; on the contrary, some logical positivists explicitly rejected music as a subject for philosophy. And whereas Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen boasted a robust reception throughout the twentieth century, it was not always central, and never as valued or damned until the analytic philosophers and New Musicologists came along in the 1980s. (For a nuanced history of this reception, see Wilfing 2019.) That Peter Kivy (2002, 2017) mused more than once about the absence of a tradition of philosophizing about music between Hanslick and his generation gives some indication of how lost the history of the phenomenology of music in the modern era had become. As an emblematically modern approach to philosophy, phenomenology was in the early twentieth century an exclusionary movement that perpetuated Enlightenment models of consciousness inadequate for understanding minority experience. Gail Weiss notes how Husserl neither discussed race, nor acknowledged that an individual’s racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, or bodily abilities could affect their life experiences and subjective perspective. Husserl assumed people could hold common “natural attitudes” (although he allowed for a “zone of indeterminacy” in subjective experience), for example, and thought such attitudes could be set aside in the phenomenological reduction. In Weiss’s conclusion, he failed “to acknowledge sufficiently the determining role that social and material conditions play in establishing natural attitudes in the first place” (Weiss 2017, 238). Weiss concedes that Husserl’s emphasis on unbiased descriptions of lived experience allowed later philosophers to recognize “racism, sexism, ableism, and other unjustifiable prejudices” (238), and phenomenology subsequently proved to be a very rich source for Black philosophy. But in the first half of the twentieth century, the fact that Husserl’s phenomenological method seemed to bracket out minority experience meant that those interested in music who were inspired by it failed, with few exceptions, to consider such experience as well. The Black modern phenomenological tradition of philosophizing about music began with W. E. B. Du Bois, whose career was marked by the structural changes in professional academic life I have described here: he was the first African American to receive a

230   Tamara Levitz PhD from Harvard, “little journals” played a key role in how he disseminated his ideas (from Crisis to Phylon and beyond), he organized pan-African conferences from 1919 to 1945, and he studied in Berlin, gaining a cosmopolitan, outsider perspective on the African American community that marked his work as distinctly modern (Gates 2014, ix–xxii). Influenced by neo-Hegelians with whom he studied in Berlin, Du Bois developed a phenomenological perspective that, in contrast to Husserl’s later method, allowed for a culturally embedded and socially mediated sense of self. As Nasar Meer (2019) argues, Du Bois’s phenomenology was modern in how he challenged Hegel’s master–slave dialectic by suggesting that the master could coerce the slave and that the slave could strive for a sense of self in face of misrecognition. In The Souls of Black Folks, published in 1903, Du Bois described double consciousness, or how Negros were “born with a veil and gifted with a second sight” because they always had to look at themselves “through the eyes of others” or measure their souls “by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” while simultaneously being aware of themselves as Negros and striving for “self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self ” (Du Bois 2007, 8–9). The chapter in which he defined double consciousness opened with a quote from a spiritual or “sorrow song,” as did every chapter in the book. In the final chapter, Du Bois addressed these spirituals directly, linking the phenomenology of minority experience he articulated through double consciousness to music by describing spirituals in terms of Black affirmation of self as the message of slaves to the world, and as an expression of hope that one day Blacks would be free. Yet Du Bois’s phenomenology of minority experience was largely excluded from academic philosophy in the modern era, which coincides with the period in which the doctrine of “separate but equal” was instituted in Jim Crow laws in the United States (beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and ending with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954). Du Bois himself saw the writing on the wall when—echoing Frederick Douglass—he famously announced in his “Address to the Nations of the World” at the First Pan-African Conference in London in July 1900 that The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences of race—which show themselves chiefly in the colour of the skin and the texture of the hair—will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.  (Du Bois 1900, 10)

Just as US sociologists bracketed out the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois in forming their discipline (a fact recognized only very recently), white philosophers of music bracketed out the philosophy of music he initiated (Morris 2015; Meer 2019, 47–48). Rather than attempt to include Black philosophy in this chapter by allowing rediscovered texts from other contexts to inhabit white academic spaces from which Black people were previously barred, I bear witness to the reality of their exclusion and the consequences it had for philosophy. In this way I reject a politics of inclusion that assumes a historian can smooth over racial violence by retroactively adding minority

The Twentieth Century   231 voices back to a white narrative, creating the illusion of making things whole. A better approach is to research the material and philosophical reasons for that exclusion within the Westernized academy, and to do justice to the bifurcated, fragmented histories it causes. The truth is that only very few Black intellectuals of a certain class were by fortuitous circumstances able to withstand the anti-Black racism in the Westernized university and to philosophize there about music. The philosophy of music did not develop continuously in the modern era but rather in spurts and starts, driven forward by the threats of looming crisis that marked the times. In this chapter I focus on moments when paradigms shifted. I begin with the Zweiter Kongreß für Ästhetik und allgemiene Kunstwissenschaft in Berlin in 1924, at which philosophers and musicologists discovered the possible value of phenomenology for aesthetics. I give a hint of the movement’s wide impact by describing how Husserl’s and Heidegger’s students brought the phenomenology of music to France, Japan, and Spain and note the unique circumstances that led Alain Locke to reconnect with the modern Black tradition of philosophizing about music that W. E. B. Du Bois had begun. In the second half of the chapter, I shift towards the period of the Second World War, which I describe first in terms of a widely perceived European crisis. I explore the eclecticism of the war years, and the growing chorus of critiques of Husserl’s phenomenological method, which ultimately led to the development of critical theory and analytical aesthetics. During this period, philosophers became increasingly divided on the question of metaphysics—a debate in which music played a defining role, and that culminated in the alleged break between phenomenologists and ordinary-language philosophers at Royaumont in 1958. I end with Frantz Fanon, and the founding of the Black existential tradition.

A Twentieth-Century Encounter: Phenomenology of Music as a New Science Philosophers interested in music and music critics curious about philosophy had a first significant opportunity to exchange ideas at the Zweiter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, held in Berlin from October 16 to 18, 1924, with proceedings published the following year in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (ZÄK 1925). This conference perpetuated Germany’s reputation as an important international centre for the disciplinary development of philosophy and musicology after the First World War (for more on this period see Steege, forthcoming). The highlight was the discovery of the phenomenological method as a foundation for establishing a new science of music aesthetics. The accidental encounter between music scholars and philosophers at this conference gave the impulse for a paradigmatic turn in music studies, but in spite of the energetic debate, a sense of political and ­economic crisis loomed.

232   Tamara Levitz In his welcome speech, Dessoir urged scholars to develop new methods for studying art, and also hinted at the new relation to the aesthetic object promised by phenomenology. He stressed that the goal of the conference was to justify Kunstwissenschaft (or the systematic study of art), to distinguish this new enterprise from positivist philosophy and experimental psychology. He discussed approaches to art from the perspective of gestalt (in reference to Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Bertram, and Friedrich Wolters of Stefan George’s circle) and Kant’s transcendental method of reason (Dessoir 1925, 6–7). He saw phenomenology as a third way that departed from pure consciousness but crossed over with those interested in the intense observation of the gestalt. “By switching off the facts-reality (TatsachenWirklichkeit) (including of one’s own self) and by insisting on that which remains, on the ‘phenomenon’, in other words on the essence of the sonorous (Klanghaften) or coloured (Farbigen),” he wrote, “a procedure emerges that does a service for describing and parsing the simply accepted aesthetic and artistic objects” (7–8). Dessoir worried that music was a difficult subject for exploring essences because of its temporal aspect. He concluded that the new science needed to consider the history of art, whether from the perspective of Heinrich Wölfflin’s principles of art history or Wilhelm Worringer’s history of ideas (9). During the conference, speakers emphasized the need to distinguish the new phenomenological approach to aesthetics from acoustics (as represented in Helmholtz’s 1863 Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik), and from the work of Carl Stumpf, who had first used the term “phenomenology” (Stumpf  1906, 26–32), and whose empirical investigations in experimental ­psychology of sound remained a touchstone for musicologists interested in philosophy.9 Many, including Husserl’s student Johannes Daubert, saw the new approach as a corrective to Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlungsästhetik.10 They wanted to distinguish it from the structural musical hearing championed by Hugo Riemann (1903) and from Hermann Kretzschmar’s (1902, 1905) musical hermeneutics. Their desire to consolidate the new discipline and to define its epistemological boundaries coincided with their growing concern with new art and music, and with impressionist (Debussy) and expressionist (Schoenberg) music in particular.11 Phenomenology was a revelation, if not an obvious choice, for music scholars in the twentieth century. The first phenomenologists had not addressed music in an extended way, but considered the perception of tones/sound/notes (Töne) repeatedly as they sought to define inner consciousness, inner time-consciousness, and the phenomenological act. Franz Brentano spoke of inner consciousness in terms of hearing a tone and being conscious of the mental act of hearing it in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Brentano 1874, ch. 2, paras. 7–13, 159–180). Husserl also referred to Töne in discussing the content given by Empfindungen (sensations) and by the object itself in intentional experience in his Logical Investigations of 1901. Töne interested Husserl because they hid the distinction between sensations and the object of experience without eradicating it, and thus raised questions about the line between the act of perception and the intentional object (Husserl  1992, 394–401; see also Stratilková  2016, 215–16).

The Twentieth Century   233 Following Brentano, Husserl (1928) famously discussed hearing a melody in his lectures on inner time-consciousness from 1905. Finally, in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie from 1913, Husserl had described how a violin tone (Geigenton) was given to the listener through adumbrations (Abschattungen), its means of appearance (Erscheinungsweisen) varying depending on multiple factors, including the listener’s distance from the object and the location of their experience in the concert hall or elsewhere (Husserl 1913, 81–82; see 9–15 for a discussion of the “Wesen des Tones”). In 1908–9, Waldemar Conrad had written what most consider to be the first article on the phenomenological study of a musical work, using the song “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (Conrad 1908; 1909). Like Dessoir, Conrad understood the goal of phenomenology, in what he claimed was a direct quote from Husserl, as “describing phenomena according to their purely immanent content and meaning, grasped in observing the evidence, in other words without losing oneself in the existential rules and explanations of empirical knowledge and science” (Conrad 1908, 75). This tricky definition had led Conrad to embrace musical analysis in the service of determining the essence of the ideal musical object, as distinguished from the empirical reality of the “natural” (for example, acoustic) object. Taking into account listeners’ observations as central to the phenomenological method, Conrad dissected Ton, then melody, and, finally, the relations between pitches in terms of perceiving melody (Tonlinienform), contour (Reliefplastik), psychic character or mood (psychische Charakter or Stimmungston), and key in this song. The speakers at the second aesthetics conference had only these sparse foundations to go on when they came together to discuss the phenomenology of music in 1924. The organizers gave Moritz Geiger the task of explaining the phenomenological method. He described it as the basis of aesthetics as an “autonomous discipline” distinct from “aesthetics as a subdiscipline of philosophy” (Plato, Kant, Schelling), or “area of application for other disciplines.” Aesthetics as an autonomous discipline explored “the phenomenological quality of aesthetic objects” (Geiger  1925, 31). This was an objective science, although its results could not be proven. The phenomenologist analysed all aspects of the phenomenon to determine its essence, which Geiger compared to the Platonic idea. He sharply rejected psychological aesthetics and the investigation of experience—approaches he felt lost sight of the phenomenon—but felt conflicted about how historical study contributed to determining the essence of artworks (a problem that would haunt twentieth-century music philosophy), and concluded by emphasizing how much training it took to intuit essences. In contrast to the natural sciences, which he described as democratic, phenomenology was an aristocratic science that required unique talent. Helmuth Plessner responded to Geiger and other lecturers by arguing for three types of aesthetics: psychological, value theory-critical, and phenomenological. In his view, taking sensual consciousness as a point of departure was the key to phenomenological aesthetics, which he, like Geiger, thought should address the “phenomenal quality of the aesthetic object.” He thought psychological and value-theory aesthetics also raised questions only phenomenology could answer, especially in terms of the sensual

234   Tamara Levitz f­ oundation of aesthetic consciousness of value. Plessner was most interested in what he called “asthesiological presentations of the problem,” and why perception was always associated with one sense. He asked why music-making was for the ear (Plessner 1925; see also Plessner [1923] 1980). On the third day of the conference, Hans Mersmann approached the podium as the first musicologist to speak on the phenomenology of music. Sharing his colleagues’ eagerness to categorize the new science, he began by distinguishing it from Riemann’s “psychological” aesthetics, Lipps’s Einfühlungsästhetik and Kretzschmar’s hermeneutics. He appears to have somewhat misunderstood what phenomenology was, however, describing it as the observation into the depths of the musical work reinterpreted as an organism, the appearance of which was an evolution of elementary basic forces and was independent of the listener. This approach suggested that Ernst Kurth and Wilhelm Harburger rather than Husserl had served as his models, with Riemann as his foil. He highlighted his talk with unusual original graphs, in which he charted musical form in terms of elemental forces (Mersmann 1925, 372–388). During the discussion periods between talks the audience expressed their scepticism about the new phenomenological approach. Paul Menzer called it an “art of magic” (ZÄK 1925, 52), Friedrich Raab complained about the problem of subjectivity (58), and Heinrich Scholz questioned the concept of essences (62). Gustav Becking thought there was no such thing yet as phenomenology and worried about the objectivity of the new science (388). Justus Hermann Wetzel was thrilled everybody had rejected hermeneutics, and hoped phenomenology would contribute to a discipline of music theory (391). After the conference, a flurry of articles on phenomenology of music appeared in German musicology journals, giving evidence of the shift in perspective the event had both encouraged and reflected. Paul Bekker attempted a definition of what he described as the new “fashion” in “Was ist Phänomenologie der Musik?”. Based on his shaky understanding of the lectures he attended in Berlin, he concluded that phenomenology was “the study of appearance, of the laws of their being (Wesenheit), how they arise out of this itself and in this way determine the becoming of the Gestalt” (Bekker 1925, 242). He insisted that musicologists study sound (Klang) as the primal phenomenon of music, rather than studying form, and chided Mersmann for failing to depart from a traditional hermeneutic reading in his lecture at the conference by creating graphs depicting elemental forces in music. He tried to be gentle with the “hermeneutists against their will,” however, because, as he commented, a lot of contemporary music was “hermeneutically conceived” (247). He concluded that every musical work required its own approach and aesthetic. Günther Stern-Anders’s readings in phenomenology led him to write a rather unusual essay on the problem of listening attentively (Zuhören), or having access (Zugang) to impressionistic music. He found this kind of music hard to hear because it “let itself go,” was static rather than moving forward in time, and merged with the listener (SternAnders 1926–7, 613). He thought Husserl’s idea of intentionality could help in finding a more active approach to listening to it. Like Bekker, he concluded that every new work now required its own aesthetics, and that one approach would no longer do.

The Twentieth Century   235 Public interest in phenomenology moved in a dramatically different direction as the first musicologists to study with Heidegger graduated. Heidegger rarely addressed music in his writings throughout his career, but remained interesting to music scholars. In 1925, his student Heinrich Besseler published the talk he gave at his Habilitation defence, “Grundfragen des Musikhörens” (Besseler [1925] 2011; see also Besseler 1926). He was as attuned as Husserl’s disciples were to new approaches to listening, yet analysed them from a social, rather than aesthetic, perspective. Besseler lamented how capitalist economic forms had destroyed music-making, and how an atomized public had replaced what was once a listening community in the concert hall, which he described as in “crisis” because of the introduction of early music and the “Nigger-Jazzband” (for more on this racist slur, see Besseler [1925] 2011, 49n1). Besseler sought to return focus to what he called Gebrauchsmusik—music that he described with Heideggerian terminology as “accessible” (zugänglich), and encouraging “relational” (umgangsmäßig) rather than autonomous forms of listening, as well as active participation (50, 60). Listening, Besseler argued, should not be about taste, values, inner understanding (Nachvollziehen), or aesthetic pleasure, but rather about “joining in” (mitmachen) or about “actively joining in” or performing in (mitvollziehen). Engaging with music was a way of establishing relational behaviour towards Dasein and immersing in daily life (Alltäglichkeit) (61). Besseler noted that Heidegger had inspired him to formulate this thesis about music, although his own view differed from the interpretation of art his teacher later developed in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. His theorization of Gebrauchsmusik subsequently played a role in the Jugendmusikbewegung and Nazi racial musical policy. In April 1933, Heidegger became rector of Freiburg University. A week later, Husserl was fired from the university as a consequence of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In the years to follow, Besseler compromised himself gravely with the new regime (see Schipperges 2005), while many of Husserl’s Jewish students, including Moritz Geiger, Arnold Schultz, David Katz, and Edith Stein, had to leave Germany. Dessoir lost his job; Bekker and Plessner escaped into exile. The lively conversation between phenomenologists and music scholars, and years of planning how to professionalize the discipline of aesthetics in Germany appeared to have abruptly ended.

Phenomenology Worldwide Yet the conversation did not stop. The many international students who had flocked to Germany to study philosophy had begun returning home in the 1920s, translating texts, and establishing philosophy departments, journals, and phenomenological organizations across the globe. The European exodus of philosophers (many of whom had an interest in music) in the wake of Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s dramatically accelerated this movement. (For an introduction to phenomenology as an international movement, see Tymieniecka 2002.)

236   Tamara Levitz If I focus here on phenomenology in Germany as a starting point, it is because around the world philosophers before the Second World War and decolonization tended to look to Europe, and within Europe to Germany and France, for models. Eric Hayot reminds of the power dynamics involved in such exchanges when he speaks about Chinese writers being attracted to the prestige of European modernism, or when he evokes Rey Chow’s idea of “mimetic desire,” that is, “the desire to imitate a powerful other in order to gain recognition from that other as an equal” (Hayot 2012, 3, 11). Such desire is reversible: China also had a powerful influence on the history of Anglo-European modernism. Hayot believes that the separation of the aesthetic from the technological and political allows it to function as an untouched version of traditional culture legitimized in the present; it thereby played a key role in such exchanges. Hayot’s conceptual framework is useful in considering how philosophers around the world responded to philosophical developments in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Whether a phenomenologically based philosophy of music developed in a specific country depended on the institutional support there for philosophy, who was in charge and where they had studied, which philosophical traditions had previously been cultivated, and whether they had alternative forums for exploring interdisciplinary thought or opportunities for translating and publishing philosophical texts from abroad. Take the example of Japan. (For an excellent introduction to phenomenology in Japan, see Nitta and Tatematsu 1978 and Tani 2019.) Kitarō Nishida first introduced phenomenology in Japan in two articles (Nishida 1911, 1916), and inspired a group of young philosophers to study with Husserl in Germany during the 1920s, among them Hajime Tanabe, Tokuryu Yamanouchi, Satomi Takahashi, and Risaku Mutai. An even larger number of students went to study with Heidegger—a trend so pronounced that the expression Freiburg-mō-de (Freiburg worship at the shrine) began to circulate among Japanese philosophers (Tani 2019, 631–632). A couple of Husserl’s articles also appeared in Japanese translation in these early years, including his articles on phenomenology as renewal for the literary journal Kaizo.12 Patterns of studying abroad, combined with the flourishing interwar culture of “little journals” in Tokyo, led to the conditions for the development of scattered opportunities for philosophizing about music long before phenomenology became established in Japan in the 1970s. Husserl’s geopolitical framing of the project of phenomenology as a lifesaver for European civilized humanity in his Kaizo articles may have contributed to an early attempt in Japan to link phenomenological to identitarian interests. In The Structure of Iki—drafted in Paris in 1926, but first appearing in Japan in 1930 in two instalments in the journal Shisō and then as a book—Kuki (2004, 1) gives a phenomenological description of the structure of iki sensibility—defined as the “urban, plucky stylishness” that made people true “Edokko” or residents of Tokyo. Kuki had travelled to Europe from 1921 to 1928, studying with Heinrich Rickert, Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger, the latter of whom wrote about their encounter (Heidegger 1985). In a brief subsection of The Structure of Iki, Kuki seeks phenomenological evidence for the iki sensibility in music as the foundation of Japanese cultural identity. Songs with scales that deviate from the norm while maintaining a strong tonic and dominant give a sense of duality that evokes

The Twentieth Century   237 the “coquet,” he writes, the “material cause” of iki. Iki is also evident in a melody and accompaniment that are rhythmically “out of step,” or when a musical passage is repeated several times, going from a high pitch and descending and creating sensual duality (Kuki 2004, 52–53). Kuki’s use of phenomenological observation to the end of determining essentialized national cultural sensibilities in music hints at the controversy that would later arise about his studies with Heidegger and role in the cultural formation of Japanese Fascism (see Mikkelsen  2004). Kuki’s attempt at wedding phenomenological method to national or ethnic interests points towards the difficulty of acknowledging difference within the phenomenological movement at this time, and towards the amount of class privilege it took to do so. The few philosophers who specifically addressed the issue of ethnicity or race in music worked notably outside the phenomenological tradition. Such was the case with Alain Locke, who had been the first African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and to graduate with a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard (in 1918). As a critical pragmatist who wrote his dissertation on “The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value” with Ralph Barton Perry, a student of William James, Locke was not linked with the phenomenological movement. But several events in 1910–11, when he moved to Berlin while waiting to hear if his dissertation had passed at Oxford (which it had not), led him to enter the international space I am describing here. Locke had taken classes with Max Dessoir, George Simmel, and Gustav von Schmoller (with whom Du Bois had studied), learning from Simmel not only about race as a fluid construct, but also about how a society’s best artists could become its leaders. In Jeffrey C. Stewart’s (2018, 214–222) view, Simmel as an outsider and aesthete was an important mentor for Locke, who had experienced more extreme racism in England than ever before in his life. In this brief period Locke also travelled to London (in July 1911) where he dialogued with Lionel de Fonseka about On the Truth of Decorative Art: A Dialogue Between an Oriental and an Occidental, and attended the First Universal Races Congress, where talks by W.  E.  B.  Du Bois, Franz Boas, Alfred Fouillée, Felix von Luschan, and Israel Zangwill made a strong impression on him. Locke’s 1925 publication The New Negro reflects these and many other influences. It is a quintessentially modern work in the sense I outlined in the introduction in that it consists of essays Locke collected and edited for Survey Graphic—a social work journal that did not regularly consider the arts. It situated Locke as a leader in the Harlem Renaissance and gave him a vehicle for articulating his ideas about Black music. But it also caused problems for him as a professor of philosophy at Howard University (see Rampersad 1997). In his essay on “The New Negro” (Locke [1925] 1997, 3–16), and later in The Negro and His Music (1936), Locke c­ ontributed to Black aesthetics by arguing for the particular and universal relevance, representative and non-representative function of African American art. Whereas Kuki had observed racial or national traits in music as a phenomenal object, Locke thought music became racialized through social environment and performance. Challenging Du Bois, Locke argued that the Negro ­spiritual was “racial” yet universal, originating in folk yet transcending it to become ­classical (Locke 1936, 199–213). He did not refer to double-­consciousness, but rather adopted a

238   Tamara Levitz fiercely ­affirmative stance on the possibility of a future era of African American musical self-determination. Indebted to a ­modernist understanding of culture, he urged African Americans to study spirituals now from a music-theoretical (rather than Du Bois’s affective) perspective. He likewise suggested that select African American geniuses develop them into a modern choral genre that could compete with the Russian tradition. African Americans, he thought, had a particular duty to develop, cultivate, and study these musical traditions. The questions about racial self-affirmation and culture that Locke raised were not central to phenomenology in the interwar years. Yet phenomenological approaches continued to speak to minority groups or those on the “outside” of European philosophy who struggled in one way or another to be recognized by it. José Ortega y Gasset, for example, who attended Simmel’s classes a few years before Locke, approached phenomenology within the context of his belief in the Europeanization and national unity of Spain; his work, like Locke’s, is generally omitted from English-language discussions of the philosophy of music. Ortega y Gasset had studied with the neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg in 1906, and not with Husserl or Heidegger. Nevertheless, especially after his 1911 return to Marburg he came to know their work through selected German sources including works by Max Scheler, Wilhelm Schapp’s Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung, and Husserl’s Ideen. Ortega y Gasset formulated his first thoughts on Husserl in a review of Heinrich Hofmann’s dissertation “Untersuchungen über den Empfindungsbegriff ” (Ortega y Gasset [1913] 1966, 244–260). After the First World War, he consistently integrated phenomenological perspectives into both his teaching and publications, and yet his engagement with phenomenology remained somewhat anecdotal: he fit uncomfortably within the phenomenological tradition, his status there consistently challenged (see San ­ Martín 2013). Although Ortega y Gasset did not have extended training in music, his philosophical career was marked by his exposure to it. He was shaken, in particular, by the experience of audiences protesting Debussy’s Iberia in Madrid in 1921, in a concert that also included Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony and a fragment from Wagner’s Parsifal. His shock at the unpopularity of Debussy’s work led him to suggest a social theory of a necessary elite in the articles “Musicalia I” and “Musicalia II” published in El Sol (Ortega y Gasset 1921)—an idea he expanded upon in La rebelión de las masas from 1930. The Musicalia articles also laid the foundation for La deshumanización del arte (Ortega y Gasset [1925] 1966, esp. 360–366). Throughout his career, Ortega y Gasset actively promoted philosophical thought about music in newspapers and journals in the Spanishspeaking world: he worked for the journal his grandfather founded, El Imparcial, founded the Revista de Occidente, inspired María Muñoz de Quevedo to create the Cuban music journal Musicalia, and wrote for Victoria Ocampo’s Sur in Argentina, to give only a few examples (see Vega Pichaco 2010). Ortega y Gasset’s comments on music focus on the listener’s aesthetic stance. Critical of Husserl’s and Dilthey’s idealism, he formulated an aesthetics grounded in the phenomenological notion of a self in relation to circumstances in the world. He shifted, in

The Twentieth Century   239 other words, from transcendental consciousness to concrete human existence. In a subchapter of La deshumanización del arte entitled “Unas gotas de fenomenología” (A Few Drops of Phenomenology), he used the example of a man visited by his wife, doctor, and an artist on his deathbed to explain the idea of multiple different perspectives on reality. Whereas the wife was emotionally involved and the doctor needed to rationally find a cure, the artist had the necessary distance to contemplate the scene. Ortega y Gasset associated the artist’s perspective with listening to modern as opposed to Romantic music. Having originally heard Debussy’s music juxtaposed with Wagner’s, he had come to conceive of the two in relation to each other, and to believe new music was “dehumanized” and required contemplative distance, whereas Romantic music involved pathos and the confession of emotions. Aesthetic pleasure in relation to new music had to be intelligent, he concluded, and contemplating such music had to resemble how one observed wax figures (Ortega y Gasset [1925] 1966, 360–363). Philosophers in France between the wars approached music quite differently than Ortega y Gasset or Kuki did. There were numerous reasons for this. First, there were stronger institutional connections between France and Germany. French scholars were actively engaged in the German dialogue on aesthetics and art history that I described earlier, and eager to establish Kunstwissenschaft (which they translated as science de l’art) as a discipline in their own country (see Beyer, Cohn, and Vladova 2010). The French neo-Kantians Victor Basch and his student Charles Lalo, and after them Étienne Souriau and Raymond Bayer, played key roles in this. Basch, a Hungarian Jew, began giving lectures at the Sorbonne in 1910–11 and published on German aesthetics, with a focus on Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Wilhelm Wundt, Johannes Volkelt, and Max Dessoir. He published a seminal chapter in Philosophie allemande au XIXe siècle (Basch 1912), and after 1912 grounded his approach in Volkelt’s and Lipps’s notion of Einfühlung. He shared Dessoir’s goal of establishing aesthetics systematically as a science—one founded on Kant’s disinterested contemplation; his first essays on this subject appeared in Ozenfant’s and Le Corbusier’s modernist journal L’Esprit nouveau (Basch  1920). Basch became the first person to hold a chair for science de l’art and “experimental aesthetics” in France, founded at the Sorbonne in 1928 (TrautmannWaller 2002); he also established the Association pour l’étude des arts et les recherches relatives à l’art (later the Société française d’esthétique) with Charles Lalo in 1931. Lalo, Bayer, and Souriau perpetuated Basch’s rigorous method when they co-founded the Revue d’esthétique, emphasizing in their first editorial (Lalo, Bayer, and Souriau 1948) the need for a precise language for aesthetics modelled on André Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. (On the relationship between this “rational” approach to philosophy, neo-Kantianism, aesthetics, and the educational agenda of the Third Republic, see Kleinberg 2005, 3–18.) The Second International Congress of Aesthetics in 1937 demonstrates how the study of aesthetics had become institutionalized in France. Presided over by honorary presidents Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel, Basch as president (assisted by Lalo and Beyer) organized this conference as a continuation of Dessoir’s series in Germany, labelling it the “second” conference because he and others felt the 1924 Berlin

240   Tamara Levitz c­ onference had not been international. Roman Ingarden and Emil Reich (who had received the first chair in aesthetics in Vienna in 1904) were among the guests. The fact that the conference opened with two welcome speeches, delivered by Basch and Valéry, gives an indication of the conflicting interests and traditions of studying aesthetics in France. Valéry (1937) described himself as an amateur taken by his appreciation of art, and eager to meditate on beauty, while Basch (1937) disagreed that aesthetics was about the science of beauty. He asked the perennial question of whether aesthetics was a science, then nudged Valéry back to a Kantian position, arguing that art involved a creator and an observer’s disinterested contemplation. Their dialogue shows how French aestheticians were torn in these years between what Andreas Beyer, Danièle Cohn, and Tania Vladova call a “rigidity of a normative science of the beautiful” and the seductive idea of a “descriptive science of sensual impressions” (Beyer, Cohn, and Vladova  2010, 11). Although music was mentioned, it played no substantial role in the conference. France became a centre for discussions of music and philosophy between the wars not only because of institutional support, but also because of how such discussions fit within French existentialism as it developed in response to the German phenomenological tradition. Herbert Spiegelberg (1960, 2:395–594) argues that the centre of the phenomenological movement moved to France in these years primarily because of the affinity many philosophers felt between the philosophies of Husserl and Bergson. A rich tradition of phenomenological discussions of music developed on the fringes of the French university, where the system of the agrégation de philosophie (a competitive exam or concours that licenses students for teaching philosophy in secondary and post-­secondary institutions in France) restricted students to a relatively static canon of masterworks (including, notably, Kant), and standardized their readings of them by inviting the same examiners to evaluate them year after year (Schrift  2008; see also Kleinberg 2005, 49–58). Gabriel Marcel set the tone for this “alternative” culture in his Friday evening philosophy discussion group, which Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Wahl, and others attended. Marcel had completed his agrégation de philosophie in 1910, but rejected academia after 1923 in favour of a career as a dramatist and editor. This combination of circumstances created the fortuitous conditions for the development of a specifically French twentieth-century tradition of the philosophy of music. In his long career, Marcel introduced themes that had a lasting impact on this tradition. In an article for the Revue musicale from 1925, for example, he made an influential argument as to why those studying music should care about Bergson’s philosophy. Although Bergson himself and many students and musicians had drawn connections between his philosophy and music before, Marcel’s analysis stands out in terms of how it succeeded in inserting Bergson’s ideas into French musicological discourse. Marcel canonized the already (as he called it) “famous” passage in which Bergson compared remembering the notes of a melody—“melted, so to speak, together” rather than progressing from point to point in time—as an analogy for the temporal nature of consciousness. This passage had eerie parallels with Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of melody, and laid the foundation for decades of philosophical discussions of music and

The Twentieth Century   241 time in France (Marcel 1925; see also Csepregi 2014, 27–28). Bergson’s analogy contributed to a move away from formal analysis towards a philosophy of musical presence— associated with Bergsonian spiritualism, or what many called vitalism—in France at this time (for more, see Baring 2019). A range of music critics and philosophers in France in the interwar years shared Marcel’s interests in Bergson, musical presence, and time in music. Russian émigrés Boris de Schloezer and Pierre Souvtchinsky (1939) contributed notably to this discussion, bringing to it the insights of modern Russian traditions of philosophizing about music that I can only point to here. Marcel’s work can also be linked to Vladimir Jankélévitch, whose parents were Ukrainian Jewish émigrés, and who studied with Bergson (among others), attended the École normale supérieure, and completed his agrégation in 1926, but, notably, finished his doctorate in Prague and remained somewhat outside the French establishment until after the war. One of Marcel’s most important interlocutors in the 1930s was Jean Wahl ([1932] 2004), who took discussions in a new direction with his exploration of the “concrete,” especially in the journal Recherches philosophiques, edited by Alexandre Koyré, an important disciple of Husserl (Wahl, 1932). Wahl was a rather extraordinary figure and a catalyst for the development of the philosophy of music in France. He worked both inside and outside the academy: on the one hand he completed his agrégation in 1910, and taught at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967 (except during the war years, when he was interned at Drancy and in exile in the United States). But on the other, he founded several alternative academic establishments, including, in the United States, the École libre des hautes études and the Pontigny-en-Amérique at Mount Holyoke College— where Hannah Arendt, Susanne Langer, and Rachel Bespaloff gathered (Benfey and Remmler  2006)—and, in 1946, the Collège philosophique as an alternative to the Sorbonne. Wahl also stood out for his pluralistic approach and for how he mediated between philosophical traditions, studying Bergson alongside the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Søren Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger (see Wahl 1920). Music and philosophy flourished in these peripheral institutional spaces, where philosophers challenged the dominant rationalist and materialist tendencies of the Third Republic. Levinas, who was from Kaunas, Lithuania, studied first with Husserl’s student Jean Hering in Strasbourg and then with Husserl himself in Freiburg in 1928–9, and wrote his dissertation on him; when he returned to Paris he took a job at the Alliance israélite universelle—outside the academic mainstream. Alexandre Kojève famously gave lectures on Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études from 1933 to 1939, taught at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University in Cairo, and introduced philosophy from other countries to France as editor of Recherches philosophiques. In 1929, Jean Wahl examined the young Jean-Paul Sartre for his agrégation on the works of Husserl—symbolically forging the link between Marcel, the concrete, musical presence, German phenomenology, and existentialism. Music remained mostly on the periphery of Sartre’s thoughts for most of his career. But it played a role in one of his first published works as a philosopher: L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de

242   Tamara Levitz l’imagination (1940), in which he critically interpreted Husserl’s phenomenological method to explore imagination. In the last pages of this work, he briefly contemplated the example of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He remembered a specific performance he had heard of the symphony at the Chätelet on 17 November 1938. The symphony was not that performance, he explained, but rather any performance he had heard of it. When you listened with closed eyes, it could come from anywhere, he wrote. In this sense the symphony was “not there” and “outside the real.” “It has its own time,” he explained, “which is to say it possesses an internal time, which flows from the first note of the allegro to the last note of the finale,” but is not related to the time of what came before and after the performance. Yet the symphony was not a Platonic idea or essence outside of time and space. Rather, the listener grasped the real sounds as analogons, hearing the symphony in their imagination as “outside the real, outside existence.” “I do not really hear it,” Sartre concluded, but rather “listen to it in the imaginary” (Sartre 1940, 243–244). This striking passage inspired decades of conversation in France about musical time, semiotic versus phenomenological investigations of music, and the nature of the aesthetic object. Considering even these sparse examples of how the philosophy of music developed as phenomenology spread across the globe, I am able to make a few general observations. It is clear from my summary that the phenomenological movement perpetuated the systematic racial and national exclusions characteristic of philosophy in higher education in this period. Husserl’s writings on the European crisis inspired some philosophers in Japan and elsewhere to consider music phenomenologically in relation to ethnicity and nation, initiating a practice of linking philosophical inquiry to identitarian interests. In the United States, Alain Locke developed a different approach, his experiences while in Berlin as a student in part having led him back to Du Bois’s Black modernism. Other philosophers, like Ortega y Gasset, drew on phenomenology to explain to themselves the shocking experience of witnessing audiences reject new music from Paris. Influenced by Simmel and many others, such philosophers developed sociological interpretations of who should listen to this music. Finally, in countries with a homogenous elite like France, which had strong institutional support for the study of music, aesthetics, and philosophy, racial and ethnic questions did not yet arise, phenomenological perspectives developing in opposition to scientific approaches to aesthetics that dominated in the academy. How one philosophized about music as a phenomenologist depended in this period on whether one agreed with Husserl’s transcendental idealism, and how one understood the intentional object. As we shall see, scepticism about Husserl’s idealism would grow, and come to dominate and determine the course of music philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s.

Challenging Husserl: The Crisis In a series of passionate articles appearing in the 1940s in the Argentine journal Sur, María Zambrano (1945) described the “agony of Europe,” caused by the crisis of Western reason and humanism, a blind servitude to facts, and a lack of clarity on what Europe

The Twentieth Century   243 meant as a whole. Designating St Augustine as the founding father of European philosophy, she outlined how abstract thought had emerged in Europe in violent confrontation with a creative Judaeo-Christian God, and how Europe could be reborn by a return to its mystic and divine origins. Europe was undergoing a crisis of religion, not reason or philosophy (as Husserl had argued in his Kaizo articles, and in a lecture in Vienna in 1935). Zambrano hoped to resurrect European values by appealing to “poetic reason”—a way of relating to the world through music, poetry, literature, and mystic or sensual experience (see Sternad 2018). In her final article for Sur in 1945, Zambrano came back to her teacher Ortega y Gasset’s La deshumanización del arte. Whereas Ortega y Gasset had described modernism in terms of the dehumanizing destruction of forms, she saw the potential for European renewal in participating in art, wearing the sacred masks (as Picasso had introduced them), and possessing rather than seeking to know. Only in this way could light and the sacred reemerge. Stymied by her father in her desire to become a concert pianist, Zambrano returned repeatedly throughout her life to “musical” or “acoustic” reason—or modes of thinking grounded in musical concepts—in this way breaking away from her famous teachers and forging her own original feminist path (Campos Fonseca 2011). Zambrano’s articles on the agony of Europe serve as an excellent starting point for an analysis of music and philosophy during the Second World War. She wrote them shortly after her forced departure as a Republican from Franco’s Spain, her long period of exile from 1939 to 1984 standing in symbolically for the global displacement of so many European philosophers of music, who continued to understand their place in the world within the phenomenological tradition of theorizing about the European crisis, cementing that tradition’s attachment to place in exile. Zambrano’s text also reminds us of the central importance of Spanish-speaking philosophers in establishing the philosophy of music in this period. When Marvin Farber founded the International Phenomenological Society and the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in Buffalo, New York, in 1940, for example, he commented upon the fact that philosophers in Germany and Japan did not want to join, leading him to believe that phenomenology was incompatible with totalitarianism. He noted, in contrast, how much impressive research was emerging from Latin America—in particular from Argentina, Peru, and Mexico, singling out the work of Francisco Romero, Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias, Alberto Wagner de Reyna, and Ramón Xirau. He commented how the new-found affinities between philosophers eager to establish an “American” phenomenology “signifies an active bond of unity and practical cooperation, on a level of scholarship which promises much for increased mutual understanding in the future” (Farber 1943, 210). He and his colleagues contributed to strengthening these ties through inter-American conferences on philosophy in the 1940s, and by publishing articles as well as commentaries and reviews of their publications in the earliest years of the journal. The figure of María Zambrano also points to the pivotal role women played in developing the philosophy of music in the middle and second half of the twentieth century. Russian-born Anna Tumarkin had been the first woman to enter the European academy in philosophy when she completed a Habilitation at the Universität Bern in 1898 and

244   Tamara Levitz received an honorary professorship in philosophy there eight years later. But opportunities for women in philosophy remained sporadic, with individual success depending largely on the benevolence and attention of supportive men in the discipline, access to education, and/or extraordinary circumstances created by exceptional privilege or sheer determination. In Poland, a notable number of women had studied logic and aesthetics. Kazimierz Twardowski, a pupil of Franz Brentano, played a key role in supporting women’s education and careers there, counting among his students Janina Hosiasson, Izydora Dąmbska, Maria Ossowska, Janina Kotarbińska, and Maria Kokoszyńska, who mediated between the Lvov-Warsaw School and the Vienna Circle. In England, Susan Stebbing became the first female professor of philosophy, at Bedford College, University of London, in 1933 (see van der Schaar and Schliesser 2017), while in France, Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil were among the first few women to complete the agrégation in philosophy, in 1929 (second behind Sartre) and 1931 respectively.13 De Beauvoir wrote one of the first phenomenologies of sexual difference in 1949; but she was something of an exception. Most of the women who adopted the phenomenological method in this period ignored their minority position and experiences of inequality in applying it. As a minuscule minority in the academy, women philosophers appear to have been drawn to the non-institutionalized subdiscipline of the philosophy of music, which perhaps offered greater access and creative flexibility. And yet it is Zambrano’s indirect rejection of Husserl that is the most significant aspect of her text, given how important critiques of Husserl’s phenomenological method became to the development of the philosophy of music in this period. Throughout the twentieth century, numerous philosophers had launched substantial arguments against foundational aspects of Husserl’s philosophy, from his transcendental idealism and intuition of essences to his layered ontology. Fears about Husserl’s subjectivism, or what some understood as a solipsistic return to the transcendental ego, led philosophers of music in particular to move away from explorations of the experience of music towards approaches that highlighted the musical work. In the 1930s and 1940s, some music philosophers reacted against Husserl by reinvigorating neo-Kantian aesthetics. Others revived Edward Hanslick’s writings, and yet others embraced the sociology of music, Marx, and ideology critique. Although the palette of responses was very broad, questions about the musical work dominated, leading to or supporting the development of music theory and analytical aesthetics.

Roman Ingarden and the Move Towards Ontology The immensely active Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden played a unique role in bringing about this dramatic shift in the phenomenology of music. After studying with Husserl from 1912 to 1914 and in 1915, and submitting his dissertation on intuition in Bergson in 1917, he launched his first critique of his teacher’s method in 1918, and continued to negotiate his relationship to Husserl’s phenomenological method throughout his life (Ingarden 1975, 1976; see also Mitscherling 2012). He aimed primarily in his work to

The Twentieth Century   245 explore the objects of experience, and the subject’s relation to them. In The Literary Work of Art, written in 1926 and first published in German in 1931, he investigated the ontology of the work of literature as a way of addressing what he referred to as the problem of idealism versus realism. He described the work of literature as an intentional object and potential aesthetic object. It was neither the physical, material object nor the aesthetic object it had the potential to become, but rather a “stratified formation” with notable gaps or places of indeterminacy. The reader who apprehended the work of literature filled out, actualized, or concretized these gaps. In 1928, Ingarden expanded his study of the work of art with an appendix that included music. This volume was published in German only in 1961, and in English in 1986. In it, Ingarden (1986, 2–3) had argued that the musical work was neither ideal nor real in that it was distinct from the experience of its composer and listeners, and yet could not be identified with any individual sound event, performance, or copy of the score. Like the work of literature, the musical work had “gaps” or “areas of indeterminacy.” This fact, Ingarden had written, “is sufficient reason to regard the work designated by its score as a purely intentional object whose origins spring from the creative acts of the composer and whose ontic base rests directly in the score” (117). The performers initially concretize the work, which is then apprehended by the listener who further concretizes it. Works required not only authors, but also readers, observers, and listeners.

Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Critical Theory Ingarden’s contemporary Max Horkheimer also critiqued Husserl in these years, but from a wholly different perspective. A student of neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and of Husserl himself, Horkheimer pursued a materialist, Marxian philosophy that took social and historical circumstances into account yet remained distinct from the social sciences (and from Kurt Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge). In his university lectures during the 1920s, Horkheimer critiqued Husserl—whom he judged on the basis of solely the early works—for how he defined phenomenology as a science, and for adopting a concept of apriority that was static and undialectical, and that absolutized a certain historical condition of knowledge (lectures collected in Horkheimer  1990, 169–419; see also Türker 2013). Horkheimer, in contrast, believed that knowledge was bound up with moral, psychological, and social conditions and should be explored dialectically (Horkheimer  1990, 628). In his inaugural lecture as director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt in 1931, Horkheimer (1988) proposed the development of “social philosophy” as the philosophical exploration of human fate and of phenomena that could be interpreted only in the context of social life. Critical of the Cartesian implications of Husserl’s method, Horkheimer placed him in the “traditional” camp, which he opposed to “Critical Theory” (Horkheimer 1937b). Shortly after Horkheimer became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung in 1930, his colleague Theodor Adorno held his inaugural lecture as a new professor of philosophy at the Universität Frankfurt am Main (to which the institute belonged). In this

246   Tamara Levitz lecture Adorno also critiqued Husserl but in a different way than Horkheimer, building on arguments he had developed in his dissertation with Hans Cornelius in 1924 (see Adorno [1924] 1973a). Adorno spoke of the “crisis in idealism” or “crisis in philosophy’s pretence to encompass any kind of totality” that marked current philosophy—the subject of his lecture (Adorno [1930] 1973b). Husserl had contributed to this crisis, Adorno complained, by trying to move beyond transcendental idealism while relying on its categories, particularly that of constitutive subjectivity. Husserl’s contradictions plagued Adorno to such a degree that he began a second dissertation on the subject with Gilbert Ryle while in exile at Oxford from 1934 to 1937—a project that resulted in a manuscript of more than 400 pages published in modified form as Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie in 1956 in German and in English in 1982. In this work, Adorno viciously attacked Husserl for his foundationalism—what he calls “the original sin of prima philosophia” (Adorno [1956] 1970, 18)—which Peter Gordon describes as “the ambition to transcend or merely abolish any contaminant traces of contingency and empirical residue so as to arrive at a higher stage of unconditioned necessity” (Gordon  2016, 62). An antinomy arose, Adorno argued, when Husserl grounded thing-like being in immediate facts on the one hand, while describing it as an “absolute transcendent” on the other (Adorno 1973c, quoted in Wolff 2006, 558). This antinomy manifested most strikingly in the phenomenological reduction, which considers the objective world only as it is given to the subject, something Adorno compared to a photographer who brackets out reality by creating the lighting circumstances to snap one static photograph (Adorno [1956] 1970, 199; Gordon 2016, 69). Horkheimer disagreed with Adorno’s view on Husserl, and rejected an article Adorno wrote on the subject for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1937. “I find myself unable to confirm your passionate belief that an attack on Husserl’s phenomenology as the most advanced form of bourgeois philosophy is also to refute the most important intellectual motifs leading to idealism,” he wrote to his friend (quoted in Müller-Doohm 2005, 204). Further, whereas Adorno, influenced by Walter Benjamin, felt that social contradictions appeared in the material of philosophy and could be dialectically resolved through immanent criticism, Horkheimer sought to work outside philosophy, in critical social theory (Snow  1977). Adorno (1940,  1949) subsequently found other venues for his critique. This background, and Adorno’s debates with Simmel’s students György Lukács and Ernst Bloch (among many others), explains in part the approach Adorno developed in Die Philosophie der neuen Musik, written in exile in 1941, expanded when Adorno returned to Germany in 1947, published in German in 1948, in English in 1973, and in a more accessible translation in 2007. In this highly polemical work Adorno—as a former composition student of Alban Berg and devoted music critic—resolved the antinomies he had discovered in Husserl’s work through a dialectical method rooted in a modified version of Marxian historical materialism. He made the social part of the material—­ perhaps responding to a question of relation between the two that both his and Horkheimer’s critiques of Husserl had raised—by famously arguing that music was “sedimented spirit, something social, which has been preformed by the consciousness

The Twentieth Century   247 of people” (Adorno 1975, 39), and by analysing it through immanent criticism. Notably, he remained indebted to modern music as represented by the dialectical pair of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Such music had inspired phenomenologists of music earlier in the century when it was new, but by the 1940s had become music of the past. After a half-century in which the “philosophy of music” had percolated as an idea but never achieved disciplinary clarity, Adorno established it here in his own image, through a historical materialist lens, as a distinct area of thought.

Susanne Langer’s Symbolic Forms But Adorno was not alone at this time in this endeavour. In the very year he began drafting Die Philosophie der neuen Musik, his direct contemporary, Susanne Langer, wrote Philosophy in a New Key—the first major work in which she philosophized about music. The daughter of German immigrants who had arrived in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, Langer was removed from the German philosophical context that provoked Adorno, yet still educated and widely read in selected aspects of it. A student of Alfred North Whitehead, Henry M. Sheffer, and Paul Henle at Radcliffe College in New York City who had previously published on symbolic logic, Langer aimed in her work to understand insight into musical works—or the human capacity to recognize connections between abstract patterns—by investigating music as a symbolic form. She drew on a broad range of sources in developing her theory of symbolic form, engaging philosophically with Ernst Cassirer, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Bertrand Russell, among others, but also consulting texts in German, French, and English by systematic musicologists, aestheticians, and critics, including Carroll C. Pratt and Edward Hanslick. As a consequence, Philosophy in a New Key appeared to come out of nowhere when it was published (Langer 1942). It became a popular bestseller (see Blum 1959, xii), though largely ignored by academic philosophers and musicologists until after Langer published Feeling and Form (Langer 1953; see also Lippman 1954). Langer based her work first and foremost on the theory of symbolic forms of the neoKantian philosopher of the Marburg School, Ernst Cassirer, who in the 1920s had responded to the European crisis and descent into irrationality not by establishing philosophy (phenomenology) as a science as Husserl had, but rather by seeking an anthropological definition of human beings and a function that linked their cultural aspects, the symbolic (Cassirer 1923–9; note that Langer read this work in German). In other words, although Cassirer and Husserl shared a desire to return to lived experience as a means of reconstructing rationality, they differed fundamentally in how they approached this task. Whereas Husserl believed in intuitive, immediate experience of phenomena, Cassirer presumed the fundamentally mediated character of human cognition. And whereas Husserl understood the a priori as non-historical conditions for the possibility of experience, Cassirer historicized it by introducing symbolic forms as historic modes of objectification. By applying Cassirer’s ideas about symbolic form to

248   Tamara Levitz music, Langer reasserted the importance of neo-Kantianism to the philosophy of music in the twentieth century. In Philosophy in a New Key, Langer moves between multiple philosophical traditions in defining music as a symbolic form. Music, she claims, is significant but not necessarily pleasurable. It is neither representational nor the result of self-expression. Rather, it is the “logical expression” of feelings (Langer 1942, 176; italics in the original). To explain this statement, Langer first establishes why she thinks music is not a language, referring repeatedly to Edward Hanslick’s thoughts on that subject. Whereas the symbols of language are discursive, she argues, those of art are “presentational,” in that they refer to the life of emotions, do not have permanent, definable meaning, cannot convey generalities, and cannot be combined according to certain rules (63–83). Drawing on Wittgenstein’s theory of correspondences, Langer argues that musical structures logically resemble “certain dynamic patterns of human experience” (183). “Music articulates forms which language cannot set forth” (189), she urges in emphatic italics, and, a bit later, “For what music can actually reflect is only the morphology of feeling., . . . general forms of feeling” (193). Listeners assign meaning “below the threshold of consciousness,” where the imagination, bodily rhythm, and wordless knowledge operate, she explained. Langer paid little attention to the phenomenological tradition in Philosophy in a New Key. A year after its publication, however, she attended the Pontigny Colloquia at Mount Holyoke College, where she encountered Jean Wahl, Rachel Bespaloff, Hannah Arendt, and others. Whether as a result of this encounter or not, Langer came to know the phenomenologically rooted, pre-war French debate about the meaning of time, which she addressed in Feeling and Form (1953). Citing Basil de Selincourt, Charles Koechlin, and Gabriel Marcel as some of her main sources, Langer now directly critiqued the phenomenologists for focusing on “momentary impressions” and missing the sense of time’s “passage” (Langer  1953, 113n11). She also critiqued Bergson for fearing abstraction, rejecting symbolism, setting up a task that could not be resolved discursively, and not recognizing that the time of music had more than one dimension (113–119). The essence of music, she concluded, was “the creation of virtual time, and its complete determination by the movement of audible forms” (125). By reframing Bergson’s perception of real duration within the context of her theory of symbolic forms, Langer implicitly replaced the investigation into the conditions of experience central to later phenomenologists who leaned on Bergson in favour of Cassirer’s model of cognition as mediated, leaning consequently in her work towards an ontology of the musical work.

New Generation of French Phenomenologists Like Langer, philosophers of music in France after the war tended to move quite freely between different philosophical schools. Sustained by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, however, the self-reflective and critical phenomenological tradition flourished. In his Phenomenology of Perception from 1945, Merleau-Ponty rejected Husserl’s transcendental subject in favour of a concrete subject that could sustain a vital relationship with

The Twentieth Century   249 the world; Mikel Dufrenne (1953) brought these concerns to music in his comprehensive study on the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. The differences between Ingarden, Adorno, Langer, and philosophers working in the French phenomenological tradition are evident in the work of Jeanne Vial, a student of Gabriel Marcel who passed the agrégation in 1938. In De l’être musicale, written one year before Langer’s Feeling and Form, Vial returns to classic questions of French phenomenology of music, examining four themes: “concrete thought,” or the immediate experience of music (“presence of being”), the singular idea of the musical work, precise conceptual thought (as in acoustics, for example), and the memory of music after hearing it (Vial 1952, 17–19). In her approach, she develops ideas introduced by Marcel (in his reception of Bergson), Schloezer, and Sartre. (Vial later edited a crucial collection on Marcel’s aesthetics [Parain-Vial 1980].) Sharing Langer’s appreciation of time passing, yet not her understanding of how music is perceived as a symbolic form, Vial argues that listeners hear melodies as notes that are related to each other rather than isolated in succession, but that this allows them to think concretely in terms of perceiving the music’s presence. In that moment, the music is apprehended by consciousness, rather than known conceptually. The dualism of subject and object in language obscures this experience of music on the level of being and the fact that “we are music” (Vial 1952, 10). As I have shown, Husserl’s philosophy provoked an astonishing array of responses from music philosophers worldwide from the 1930s to the 1950s, initiating one of the most richly creative periods in the history of the discipline. In their critique of Husserl’s idealism, music philosophers inched away from the listener and towards the musical work, rediscovering early twentieth-century neo-Kantians and Hanslick. Rather than react to new music as music philosophers had in the early twentieth century, they now tended to speak of the old—a rigor mortis of aesthetic imagination that became more pronounced as the century moved on. Gisèle Brelet (1958b) tried to explain these developments in a report on “Music Philosophy and Aesthetics” (see also McBrayer 2017). An accomplished pianist and prominent philosopher of music who had passed the agrégation in 1941 and ran the Bibliothèque internationale de musicologie for the Presses universitaires de France, Brelet framed her discussion within the now firmly established French discipline of aesthetics, yet attempted to define the philosophy of music within it, giving evidence that she considered the latter subdiscipline now worthy of individual attention. Brelet attributed the recent shift in focus towards the musical work to Hanslick, whom she argues initiated a third or “positive age” of “modern” or “autonomous aesthetics” in the early twentieth century (Brelet 1958b, 404–405).14 Distinguished from metaphysics, autonomous aesthetics came “from below,” or were a posteriori, because based on precise analysis of the phenomenon of music itself and its history (411–413). Over thirty years after Geiger and others had suggested the phenomenological method as the basis for an autonomous science of aesthetics, the tables had turned. Brelet’s summary of the philosophy of music in the modern era of autonomous aesthetics is succinct and accurate. Whereas the philosophy of music could have died when Hanslick invented autonomous aesthetics, she writes, it instead flourished, because “freed of old prejudices and solidly informed, it is faithful to musical experience where it

250   Tamara Levitz finds true foundations” (Brelet 1958b, 390). She thought theories of form, phenomenology, and existentialism as represented by Jankélévitch and Adorno were all examples of the philosophy of music. But it was Bergson’s discovery of “time” that in her view marked the moment when philosophy about music (sur musique) became philosophy of music (de la musique), because time introduced the “pure duration of the profound self,” and also the essential duration of the world (410–411). With her colleagues Ivo Supičić and Walter Wiora, Brelet hoped to move beyond Bergson to explore autonomous time—a shift that required her to abandon transcendental philosophy in favour of “immanent philosophy” or “the reflective analysis of concrete musical experience” (420–423; see also Brelet 1949). In this new philosophy of musical time, music was no longer a servant to philosophy, but rather philosophy asked questions of music.

Music on the Continental–Analytic Divide The “crisis of idealism” led many philosophers of music at mid-century to drift towards immanent analysis while not abandoning metaphysical projects—a position that complicated their relationship to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, as it developed in dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein.15 Philosophers like Langer defined music as a symbolic form by drawing connections to Wittgenstein’s theory of correspondences, thereby kindling a discussion that simmered for decades about whether music was a language, and, if so, of what kind. And yet, some of the logical positivists rejected the building of such bridges. In a classic essay from 1931, for example, Rudolf Carnap situated music outside philosophy in the context of explaining why he thought Heidegger’s metaphysical sentences had no theoretical content. Heidegger’s sentences did not offer a description of a state of affairs, Carnap argued, but rather provided the expression (Ausdruck) of an attitude towards life (Lebensgefühl). Music was the purest means of expression of that attitude, he thought, because it did not refer to objects. Metaphysicians lacked the ability of a Mozart or Beethoven to express their “dualistic-heroic attitude” in music, he lamented, and thus presented their ideas within philosophy as a science, unaware how they were mapping into it ideas of expression in art (Carnap 1931, 240). By excluding music from philosophy as science, Carnap created a quandary for philosophers of music invested in the methods of philosophy of language. Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics also led to disagreements with phenomenologists and proponents of critical theory like Horkheimer (1937a; see also Pearce 2006). At the Eighth International Congress on Philosophy in Prague in 1934, Ingarden (1936) challenged the logical positivists’ conception of linguistic formations and principles of verification, for example, drawing on ideas similar to those that grounded his philosophy of music. If a sentence was considered physically to be “mounds of ink,” Ingarden argued to Carnap and Otto Neurath, two members of the Vienna Circle who were in the room,

The Twentieth Century   251 its meaning could not be verified based on experience, but rather depended first on the intentional act of bestowing meaning on it. In other words, sentences acquired meaning independently of being verified and of a perceived physical origin. Carnap responded by defining syntactical sentences, and by explaining with Wittgenstein that such sentences meant nothing more than what was verifiable in them. “Setting aside other differences,” he concluded, “it appears that the main difference between the phenomenological position and that of our circle consists in the fact that we maintain that in between the empirical, synthetic sentences and the analytical sentences there are not scientific sentences of a third kind, namely the supposed results of the phenomenological ‘intuition of essences’ (Wesensschau)” (Carnap, quoted in Congrès internationale de philosophie 1936, 245). This example shows that Ingarden and Carnap rejected metaphysics to different degrees, with varying consequences for how they situated the study of music within philosophy. It also showed that logical positivism, and after it the philosophy of language, were precarious models for the analytical philosophy of music. The tension between philosophers of language and phenomenologists came to a head at a conference on “analytical philosophy” organized by Jean Wahl in Royaumont in 1958, where music also played a role.16 In the spirit of the pluralistic, transnational philosophical dialogue that had characterized his career as a philosopher, Wahl had invited to Royaumont “analytic” philosophers from the United States and Britain—among them Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, and W. V. O. Quine—to present their ideas to a group of French philosophers that included phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Herman Van Breda, who had rescued Husserl’s papers from Freiburg and founded the Husserl Archive in Leuven. In the introduction to the conference proceedings, Jean Wahl spoke of the affinities and differences between the English and French, “analytical” and “continental” traditions, noting that he had discovered the latter term in the writings of José Ferrater Mora—an erudite and prolific Catalan historian of philosophy who compiled his own vast dictionaries of philosophy in this period in Mexican and Argentine exile (Beck 1962, n.p.).17 Ferrater Mora invented the term continental from a position of being doubly outside as a Catalan in exile—the dynamic of exclusion it manifested lost on later generations. Music, notably, when mentioned at this conference, stood between the traditions, serving as a test case for exploring points of disagreement, just as it had in the preceding decades. Music served this role in Ryle’s infamous, divisive lecture on “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind’ ” (Beck 1962, 65–84; English translation in Ryle 2009 186–204). Ryle opened his talk with an attack on what he acknowledged was a “caricature” of Husserl’s philosophy, accusing Husserl of a “platonic practice of describing conceptual enquiries as enquiries into essences” (Ryle 2009, 187). Echoing his ­former doctoral student Theodor Adorno’s criticism, he admonished Husserl for prioritizing enquiries into consciousness, and for assuming philosophy was the science of all sciences. He then went on to describe how philosophers at Cambridge had transformed the theory of concepts through the study of ordinary language, and how he had gone about this task in his book The Concept of Mind. Towards the end of his presentation he turned to the subject of imagination, extrapolating on Sartre’s thought experiment about listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony to discuss how a person remembered

252   Tamara Levitz a tune in their head. Ryle admitted that the thought of a man “thinking how the tune went” in his head stumped him because such thinking had a “vividness or lifelikeness” that made the man want to compare the “merely thought-of notes” to heard notes he hadn’t heard. “He heard no notes; but he ‘heard’ them vividly,” Ryle postulated, acknowledging his defeat at explaining the “concept of the quasi-sensuousness or vividness of, e.g., auditorily imagined notes” (200–201). Music, again, stood at the boundary between analytic and phenomenological approaches. Van Breda, Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, and other audience members heard Ryle’s talk, finding in his analysis more affinities than differences with their own work, and asking thoughtful questions (Beck 1962, 85–104; for an assessment of the Royaumont conference, see Vrahimis 2013). But history was not kind to the debates that arose that day. Charles Taylor (1964) wrote a review of the conference proceedings, notably describing Royaumont in sonic terms as a “dialogue of deaf people” (dialogue des sourds) and as a failed attempt at reconciliation, marred by misunderstandings between what he called— from his positionality as a Québécois, and thus also from the outside—the “continental” and “Anglo-Saxon” camps. Other writers subsequently picked up on this idea, citing as a symptom of the unbroachable divide Leslie Beck’s comment in the preface to the volume about how Merleau-Ponty had asked Ryle at the conference if “our programme is the same,” to which Ryle had responded “I hope not”—even though this comment was based on a misreading of the dialogue in question.18 After Taylor’s review, but not because of it, the term “continental” gained currency (with Ryle’s narrow view as editor of Mind playing a key role). The continental–analytic abyss had opened, with nobody listening, and music teetering on the brink.

The End of an Era If I stop my story abruptly in the year 1958 it is because I believe the modern practice of the philosophy of music ended with the symbolic birth of the continental–analytic divide. Two years before the conference at Royaumont, Morris Weitz (an American philosopher who had studied at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle and written his dissertation on Bertrand Russell) wrote “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” thereby laying the foundation for analytic aesthetics in the United States. Appealing to Wittgenstein, Weitz rejected ontology and the formalism of Fry, Bell, and the English school in favour of linguistic analysis, concluding that “the primary task of aesthetics is not to seek a theory but to elucidate the concept of art” (Weitz 1956, 33). In the late twentieth century, philosophers of music contributed dramatically to this new project, riveted especially by Nelson Goodman’s approach to music as symbol in Languages of Art (1968). Published in coherent English translations for the first time in the 1970s and 1980s, the works of Adorno, Ingarden, and other phenomenologists struck some as polar opposites to this new science. The dramatically postponed reception of these works proved fatal to the historical consciousness of some monolingual Anglo-American philosophers of music,

The Twentieth Century   253 who in the intervening decades had apparently lost the connection to the modernist past of their discipline, and forgotten the place of phenomenology within it. During the Cold War, the colour line in philosophy hardened into an impenetrable border as the discipline professionalized. The degree to which Anglo-American philosophy began to divorce itself from identitarian interests is evinced by the fact that Weitz’s seminal essay appeared only a few years after Frantz Fanon’s Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), in which Fanon developed an approach that harked back to Du Bois’s phenomenology in how it emphasized intersubjective experience in the formation of consciousness. Fanon had studied with Merleau-Ponty, and carefully read Sartre (with whom he often disagreed), transforming the former’s ideas on lived bodily experience in the world, and the latter’s understanding of the intersubjective structure of the gaze (see Macey  1999). A few years after writing this book, and one year before Weitz’s essay, Fanon delivered a lecture on “Racisme et culture,” at the Premier Congrès des artistes et écrivains noirs in Paris—a major turning point in the history of Black aesthetics. Arguing that racism was a cultural element, Fanon explored its consequences in colonized societies. When the colonizers no longer had to reinforce their superiority on a daily basis, he explained, relations became more “cultivated,” and verbal mystification replaced cultural destruction. In this phase racism became a “subject of contemplation or means of publicity” (Fanon 1956, 126). In the United States, for example, the blues and Louis Armstrong’s music—both of which would not exist without racism and ­oppression—were offered up to the oppressors for their admiration. I end my account of the modern era, then, with Fanon bringing phenomenology back to Black aesthetics, and establishing a foundation for its institutional development after decolonization. The empowered tradition of Africana philosophizing about music he initiated continued through Amiri Baraka (Jones  1999), Angela Davis (1998), Lewis Gordon, Fred Moten (2003), and beyond. Yet, pointedly, it remained institutionally segregated from “philosophy,” the exclusions of the modern era proving hard to overcome in spite of larger numbers of Black scholars entering the academy by the end of the twentieth century. The story of those two solitudes, and of the gulf created by the continental divide, remains to be told. In the end I hope this chapter, which is necessarily limited in scope, provides a point of departure for further historical investigation. Picking up the crumbled pieces of the twentieth-century philosophy of music and integrating them into a global history that acknowledges structural inequality, white supremacy and privilege, and exclusion may be a task philosophers of music choose in the next generation.

Notes 1. I want to give a special thanks to Tomás McAuley, for his patience and immense wisdom in guiding this article, as well as to Aaron Meskin, René Jagnow, the anonymous reviewer  of this essay, and the other editors of this volume, Jerrold Levinson and Nanette Nielson, for their truly insightful commentary. I am deeply grateful as well for

254   Tamara Levitz the dialogue with Michael Gallope, Pradeep Kannan, Kyle Kaplan, Benjamin Piekut, Alejandro García Sudo, Benjamin Steege, and Jake Wilder-Smith, among very many others, about this article. 2. In the 1980s, for example, musicologists edited anthologies on aesthetics of music in which they provided excerpts from key sources introduced with short blurbs. See Dahlhaus and Zimmermann 1986; Dahlhaus and Katz 1987–93; and Lippman 1986–90. 3. For a tiny sense of this vast debate, see Glendinning 2006; Reynolds 2009; and Beaney 2013, especially 49n60. For an overview of the debate about how analytical philosophy in particular needs to be practised from a more historical perspective, see Soames 2003; and its many critical reviews, including Kremer 2005. 4. John Carvalho (2002) notes how publishers such as Blackwell and Routledge began using the term “continental” for aesthetics only around the year 2000. For examples of recent overviews that implement this framework, see Goehr et al. 2001; Gracyk 2016; Gracyk and Kania 2011; Roholt 2012, 2017. 5. I prefer the term “international” to “global,” which has become common in studies of modernism and literature since the global turn. In my view, global relations in academia were established only in the second half of the twentieth century. See, for comparison, Wollaeger 2012. 6. I am very much influenced in my understanding of “little journals” or petits journaux by Manzoni 2001. 7. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 8. I am grateful to Alejandro García Sudo for introducing me to this book. 9. Stumpf studied with Franz Brentano and also supervised Husserl’s Habilitation thesis in Halle in 1887. Stumpf critiques Husserl in his posthumous Erkenntnislehre (1939, 188–200). See also Spiegelberg 1960, 1:53–72. 10. Daubert was one of Husserl’s first students to reject Einfühlung, which he described as a person’s active creation of form when listening to music, based on feeling and spontaneity (“feeling into”). See Daubert, “Zur Philosophie des Impressonismus,” quoted in Schuhmann 1998, 70. 11. Daubert was one of the first philosophers to link phenomenology to impressionism. He was primarily interested in literature but considered Strauss’s tone poems and any of the newest music that “worked purely with tone colours” impressionist. See Daubert, cited in Schuhmann 1998, 75, 78. See also Stratilková 2016, 207–208. 12. Three of Husserl’s Kaizo articles and unpublished materials relating to them are included in Husserl 1988, 3–13, 13–20, 20–43. Remarkably, only one has been translated into English. See also Husserl 1923; Kichinosuke 1915. 13. The number of women receiving an agrégation in philosophy gradually increased throughout the 1930s and dramatically afterwards. See http://rhe.ishlyon.cnrs.fr/?q=agregsecondaire_ laureats_old#l1830; and Efthymiou 2003. 14. Brelet’s philosophy was known to a limited degree in the United States. See Brelet 1958a; Bukofzer 1952; Lippman 1986–90, 3:325–349; 1992, 443–452. 15. Wittgenstein was devoted to music yet did not write extensively on it. Nevertheless, he profoundly influenced the philosophy of music; see, for example, Hagberg 2014. 16. The date of this conference is still disputed. See Overgaard 2010, 900n1. 17. I was unable to find the text in which the immensely prolific Ferrater Mora originally used this word. 18. See “Avant-Propos,” in Beck 1962, n.p. In fact Merleau-Ponty had asked Ryle if he shared Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s programme!

The Twentieth Century   255

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PH I L O S OPH IC A L T R A DI T IONS A N D PR AC T IC E S

chapter 12

Epistemol ogies Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert

Introduction: Musical Epistemologies The fact that there can be no single epistemology of music is evident from the diverse approaches to understanding music that fall within the discipline of musicology as broadly understood. Nevertheless, with only a few exceptions, those epistemologies of music that have been explicitly articulated fall within a remarkably narrow range, making explicit or implicit appeal to broad metaphysical principles while restricting their scope to Western art music and constraining their foci to the sonic or the textual/symbolic manifestations of that music. While epistemology is concerned with understanding how it is that we know what we know (see, for example, Klein 2005), classically, it has focused on exploring and specifying conditions that enable the justification of beliefs. It has primarily been concerned with propositional or declarative knowledge, the knowledge that such-andsuch is true or false, to that end adopting either normative or naturalistic approaches. Normative approaches are marked by a reliance on foundational or basic reasons for the existence of particular beliefs, often involving explicit appeals to metaphysical principles, states, or entities, or by appeals to the coherence of sets of propositions as justification for their epistemic adequacy. Naturalistic approaches are usually marked by a concern with the conditions pertaining in the acquisition of true beliefs and are often aligned with scientific approaches, typically in the domains of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolution. The majority of classical epistemological approaches are normative: that is, foundationalist or coherentist. The basic beliefs postulated and employed by foundationalists are generally held to be derived from sensory experience or introspection, or through processes of rational intuition; the criteria for epistemic adequacy relied on by coherentists derive from the inferential relationships that each belief or proposition holds in respect of each other within a set of beliefs or propositions. Naturalistic approaches constitute a minority, but an increasingly significant minority, within epistemology; they are heterogeneous, but are united in suggesting

266   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert that an epistemology must stand in some sort of special relationship to the sciences in order to enjoy explanatory adequacy. Although there are many compelling reasons to align epistemology with science (see, for example, Maffie 1990; Stich 1993), there are domains in respect of which normative approaches are certainly warranted. Understanding the deontological concerns of ethics or of aspects of morality does not seem to be particularly commensurable with the ontological and epistemic commitments of the sciences (other, perhaps, than with those of some approaches to evolutionary biology), and is typically aligned with normative, foundationalist perspectives. Similarly, epistemologies of fields such as mathematics do not appear to be subject to the same types of constraints as are those of the natural or human sciences, and are more likely than not to be framed within coherentist perspectives (though see, for example, Lakoff 1987). Naturalized epistemologies appear to have some advantages when relating epistemology to music in that they appear to be capable of addressing issues such as that of music’s universality and diversity, and its dual manifestation as explicit knowledge and as practice. Naturalized epistemologies have become increasingly attractive as the cognitive sciences—the sciences that are loosely grouped around issues of psychology, computationalism, and neuroscience—have provided increasingly rich and efficacious accounts of how we know. There is an increasing methodological alignment between formal epistemology and the sciences by virtue of formal epistemology’s acknowledgement of the possibility of degrees of belief, and the resultant incorporation of probabilistic methods (largely Bayesian) into formal approaches to epistemic belief (Bradley 2015). Thagard (1984, 234) notes that Frege’s and Popper’s objections to naturalism (that while “Psychology describes what inferences people do make . . . logic is concerned with what inferences people should make”) can be surmounted by adopting what he terms a “weak psychologism,” which “uses empirical psychology as a starting point, since it presupposes an empirical account of what mental processes to be prescriptive about, but goes beyond mere description of actual mental processes to consider what sorts of inferential practices are normatively correct” (234). In effect, weak psychologism assents to the idea that the only type of knowledge that can comprise a properly validated epistemology is constituted of consensually specifiable propositions that reflect mental processes. It’s notable that in this form of naturalism the propositions reflect, but do not necessarily constitute, mental processes. Indeed, there is good evidence that much of the “knowledge” that is manifest in our everyday acts and thoughts is scarcely propositional, rather taking implicit and procedural forms. We have known since the 1980s that classical epistemologies based on the application of predicate calculus to explicit and consensually determinable propositions do not stand in a direct relationship to how humans know in the everyday world, which involves fast, dirty, biologically-, individually-, and culturally-shaped processing that relies on “intuition” (information derived from enculturative and overlearning processes that is typically neither consciously accessible nor verbalizable), partial “knowledge” (that may reflect confabulatory or incomplete awareness of the bases for judgements), and emotions or feelings (mind–brain–body states

Epistemologies   267 precipitated by changes in the relationships between goals and environmental events)— as well as the occasional lucid flash of conscious judgement. As Devitt notes, in defending the necessity of developing epistemologies that can cope with both knowing-that and knowing-how (after Ryle), “a non-propositional view of knowledge-how is not just philosophical prejudice or even just folk theory: it seems to be entrenched in psychology and cognitive ethology” (Devitt 2011, 215). And we need to be able to draw on both explicit and non-propositional knowledge if we wish to be able to apply epistemological approaches to understanding the sum of what we can construe to be “music.”

Western Ideas of Musical Epistemology The aspect of music that appears to be the most epistemologically tractable is the (music) theory that surrounds it, albeit that in recent Western culture “theory” ranges from the radically underdetermined (as in the work of Réti [1951]) to the quasi-mathematical constructs of Forte (1973). Music theories are generally descriptive or prescriptive systematizations of past, current, or prospective musical practices, typically being expressible in something like propositional forms that are especially amenable to assimilation into (or presentation as) epistemological frameworks. The constraints of having to conform to the exigencies of musical (and cultural) histories, structures, and styles have led to a predominance of apparently normative approaches, from the metaphysical foundationalism of Schenker to the seeming coherentism of Forte (although recourse is often made even in these approaches to ostensibly naturalistic foundations). Cook provides a comprehensive overview of epistemologies of (Western) music theory, stressing that it is “not one cultural practice but many” and hence music theories cannot be assimilated “to any one philosophical stance,” serving, as they do, purposes that may be pedagogical, intellectual, rhetorical, or political, or any combination of these (Cook 2002, 79). Indeed, Cook cheerfully—though somewhat unhelpfully—concludes by noting that “Epistemological slippage becomes not so much a defect in music theory as one of its defining characteristics” (102); if this is so, then even that aspect of music most seemingly accommodating to epistemological approaches—music theory—is likely to elude epistemic assimilation. Moreover, the vast majority of extant and explicit music theories are grounded in, and can claim explanatory status only in respect of, Western art music. This significantly limits the potential epistemological powers of conventional music theories. They are theories of highly particular sets of cultural practices, and the culturally-contingent derivations of the “basic beliefs” or the sets of inferential relationships that support them are often neither examined nor even acknowledged. As ways of understanding how we know music they afford us insights that are historically and culturally situated and that (at best) present incomplete, partial, or distorted perspectives on any forms and concepts of music that lie beyond the domain of the art world and outside the bounds of recent Western culture. For the most part, to find exceptions to these strictures one has

268   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert to look beyond the domain of “pure” music theory and perhaps away from the conventional notion of epistemology as concerned primarily with propositional knowledge. Huovinen attempts to circumvent the limitations of construing musical knowledge in wholly propositional terms by building on Eggebrecht’s (1999) distinction between “prior, non-conceptual, aesthetic,” and epistemic understandings. He proposes that these two kinds of understanding are jointly required in order to make sense of the ways in which both phenomenological and epistemological intuitions are likely to play into how music can be understood (Huovinen 2011, 127). He interprets Eggebrecht’s “nonconceptual, aesthetic” understanding as analogous to a form of understanding that emerges when “a listener perceptually grasps sounds as musically meaningful,” and proposes that epistemic understanding corresponds to “explicit knowledge concerning music: knowledge articulated in conscious beliefs and possibly also mediated through language” (124, 126). He suggests that this framework of perceptual states informed or shaped by beliefs allows for “a subjective sense of understanding as well as for the possibility of misunderstanding,” noting that “Even without relevant, culturally justified true beliefs, it may often be possible to gain some understanding of the heard sounds as music that may be enjoyed, used, and talked about” (129). Distinguishing in this way between epistemic and perceptual levels of understanding while acknowledging their interdependence appears to allow an epistemological framework to be developed that can both accommodate music beyond recent Western culture and deal with aspects of music as non-propositional. Huovinen’s approach seems to be embracing a form of naturalism in its reliance on the notion of “perceptual understanding”; however, that naturalism is undermined by a complete absence of reference to empirical research in its discussions of perception, which appear very much aligned with those criticized by Stroud (2011) as being historically rather than epistemically grounded. Hence rather than enabling escape from the confines of propositionality, Huovinen’s proposals are impeded by their dependence on unexamined and historical modes of understanding. A similar circumscription is evident in his tendency to refer to music as “works,” a historical construct that is certainly part of recent Western musical history but that has no necessary relevance to or extension beyond recent Western cultures (see Goehr  1994). Finally, Huovinen tends throughout to rely on the idea of engagement with music as engagement with sound, a position that severely compromises the generalizability of his approach. As noted in the Introduction, while much of the philosophical literature (and much recent empirical research) has tended to treat music as sound, it is undeniably the case that music cannot be understood as though it were constituted solely by sound (Cross 2012a). To regard it as such is to deal with it synecdochically or metonymically, focusing only on one facet of Merriam’s (1963) triad of “sound, concept and behavior.” One issue that Huovinen raises without clearly delineating or situating it is that of aesthetics, for example, in problematizing Eggebrecht’s claim that “aesthetic understanding has an objectivity that is grounded in the correspondence between the formal content of the music and what the listener understands” (Huovinen 2011, 128). The idea that understanding music is first and foremost an aesthetic activity exercised in respect

Epistemologies   269 of the autonomous domain that is music permeates philosophical treatments of music. Most Western musical epistemologies tend to rely on the notion of the aesthetic domain as central to their account of how we understand music. This can lead to claims that seem substantively untenable (as, for instance in the case of Zangwill’s [2011] defence of the idea of “nonperceptual aesthetic realism”) and it can reinforce conceptions of music as somehow untethered by the claims and commitments of quotidian life (as Taruskin 2007 highlights). In recent years it has been strongly criticized as historically retrogressive and class-based (see, for example, Hesmondhalgh and Pratt  2005), or unacknowledgedly culturally particular and ethnocentric (Kauffman 1969). However, while it can legitimately be claimed that aesthetics is yet another potentially narrow perspective that moulds and constricts musical epistemologies, refracting them through a prism fashioned by Western eighteenth-century thought, its pervasiveness and its protean qualities suggest that the concept may constitute something more than a relic of bourgeois Enlightenment partiality. The idea that music possesses transcendental, universal qualities and that it should be valued for its capacity to give rise to experiences that are distinctive and transformational seems to arise in different societies at different times. Its recorded origins usually have some reference to the divine, though something like a humanist turn tends to occur at different historical junctures in different musical “supercultures” (Slobin 1992) with historical parallels traceable across Western societies (see Cross and Tolbert 2016), Indian cultures (see Simms 1992–3; Ram 2011), and China (see Ho 1997, 2003). The genealogy of the idea is complicated, of course, by inter-cultural interactions, with Western musical epistemologies being diffused into or imposed onto subaltern cultures (see, for example, Lelyveld 1994 in respect of aspects of early twentieth-century Indian musical epistemologies), processes reinforced by technological developments in part driven by the dynamics of globalization over the last century (see, for example, Fiol 2012). Nevertheless, aesthetics remains a significant problem for any epistemology of music that aims to reach beyond the West; what can be interpreted as aesthetic qualities may manifest themselves quite differently in respect of the musics of different cultures (see, for example, Feld 1988; Stobart 1996). The idea that music can fulfil functions that are not primarily aesthetic, though noted above as a fundamental tenet of ethnomusicology, only recently appears to have been addressed seriously by aestheticians (for example, Davies 2006, 2010). And the notion of the aesthetic can be excised from consideration of how we understand value in culture (as in recent sociological approaches such as Bennett 2000) without appearing to destroy the notion of a value for music. While the concept of the aesthetic and its associations with autonomy and disinterestedness are at the core of most epistemologies of Western music and may constitute major obstacles to extending their scope beyond their cultures of origin, perhaps a greater impediment is the lack of attention paid in those epistemologies to music as practice. The vast majority of the philosophical literature has treated music as aesthetic object from the perspective of a listener—as sound, as score, as, at best, traces of musical behaviours. Very little attention has been devoted to accounting for music in action—to accounting for how a capacity to make music is acquired and how it is exercised, as well

270   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert as what constitutes such a capacity in the first place. Where non-Western cultures have indigenous formal systems of music learning, these tend to differ vastly from current Western models (for views of the situation in India see Chawla  2006; Clausen and Chatterjee  2012; Katz  2012). In any case, the majority of non-Western societies have tended to rely on informal, mimetic, enculturative processes of music learning (for a paradigm case see Blacking 1967), just as is the case across contemporary Western societies outwith the academy. The limited role for language, or for formal symbolic representational systems, in most musical traditions, and the resulting reliance on a link between ear (McLucas 2010) and action (see, for example, Baily 1985) as the bases for a proper knowledge of music, suggest that classical epistemology will have a hard time making sense of music in ways that can apply to most musical traditions. What is required is some way of taking account of Ryle’s “know-how” (Devitt 2011); to make sense of music we shall need epistemologies that can cope with knowing as individual and social action and as cultural enaction—the real-time construction and experience of culture and its forms through behaviour and interaction.

Epistemologies in Culture For ethnomusicologists, this issue of knowing as cultural enaction poses a dual problem: what is it that others know, and how can the ethnomusicologist know others? As Moore and Sanders note, “[a]nthropological [or in this case, ethnomusicological] epistemology is ultimately about the way we understand others as human beings” (Moore and Sanders 2006, 19). Thus, the relationship between the knowledge of the ethnomusicologist and his or her consultants is always mutually constituted, and as such, requires that ethnomusicologists acknowledge the limits to their hermeneutic strategies. The epistemology of ethnomusicological fieldwork has been discussed extensively in the areas of feminist ethnomusicology and applied ethnomusicology, interrogating issues such as gender, subjectivity, embodiment, vocality, and the status of musical knowledge itself (for example, Koskoff  2014; Kisliuk  1997; Moisala and Diamond  2000; Harrison 2012). In the first place, we need to make judgements about what constitutes “music” in other cultures. In the broadest sense it seems to be part of a communicative continuum spanning speech and song (or instrumental music) and even dance, although the way this communicative continuum is parsed is culturally specific (List 1963). For example, among the Suyá of Amerindian Brazil, genres we might in the West consider as somewhat similar to song, such as ceremonial recitatives, are classified as types of speech (Seeger 1987), as pitched sound is not used as a criterial attribute for “song” in this culture. Ethnomusicologists have long been sensitive to the problem of defining “music,” and one response has been to conceptualize music in terms of the anthropology of “sound” more broadly (for example, Feld and Brenneis 2004; Samuels et al. 2010).

Epistemologies   271 Most ethnomusicologists work from the premiss that researchers can learn about epistemologies of music from close engagement through immersive fieldwork that enables connections and resonances to be identified between the “music” and the broader dynamics, lifeways, and world-views of a culture. Thus from the ethnomusicological perspective epistemologies of music are never just about music, but are embedded in all different kinds of knowledge about the world—and this is as much the case in respect of Western art music as for any other music culture. Even when the archetypally Western concept of aesthetics is applied in ethnomusicological thinking it does not necessarily entail consideration of music as an autonomous domain; Manuel (2011) alludes to this mutual embedding of musical and non-musical knowledge in his characterization of what might constitute an ethnomusicologically salient music aesthetics. He suggests that “a conception of cross-cultural music aesthetics could include: the presence and nature of evaluative criteria for music; the relation of these criteria to judgments about other arts, natural phenomena, social interactions, moral behaviour, or the like; the coherence of ideas about music with an indigenous worldview; and the ways that musical form or “sound structure” can be seen to reflect such a broader value system, cosmology, or epistemology, constituting a “philosophy of music” that mirrors a more general philosophy of life” (Manuel 2011, 563). For example, Feld (1988) has shown that among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the trope of dulugu ganalan, “lift-up-over sounding,” is a way of describing waterfalls, insect cries, and the forest itself, which in turn serves as a model for singing and social interaction. Although a structural homology approach such as this acts as a corrective to a Western worldview centred on Western art music, it is problematic in that it essentializes structure and does not manage to completely circumvent the problems inherent in conceiving of epistemologies as necessarily explicit. By acknowledging that music is always concerned with the social, and that epistemologies of music must always be about more than music, a more inclusive approach to the epistemology of music would move out of the domain of explicit discourse and into other domains of culturally enacted knowledge, particularly implicit, affective, embodied, and intersubjectively constructed knowledge. Barth notes that “the problem of knowledge—what a person employs to interpret and act on the world,” includes “feelings (attitudes) as well as information, embodied skills as well as verbal taxonomies and concepts: all the ways of understanding that we use to make up our experienced, grasped reality” (Barth 2002, 1). Thus musical anthropology needs to be able to explore the enactive, embodied behaviour that constitutes much of musical behaviour, presently outside the remit of classical notions of epistemology in Western art music. Generally speaking, knowledge about music is both explicit and implicit. Some of the explicit knowledge about music is prescribed in music theory, while some is used in less formal discourses, and in both the oral and literate traditions. For example, there are informal discourses about music used by performers, fans, or specialists; in short, musical discourses are likely to arise whenever people are engaged in musical activity. Cultural knowledge about music is often expressed in metaphorical discourse that might be outside of the realm of formal theory, even in cultures that have extensive

272   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert f­ormal theories. For example, in Western art music we often talk about being “in” or “out” of tune, metaphorically referring to a container that a pitch is either “in” or “out” of (see, for example, Zbikowski 2002). The Kaluli refer to the melody lines of gisalo medium performance in terms of waterfall metaphors (Feld 1982), while the Temiar of Malaysia conceptualize the songs of spirit guides as metaphorical “paths” to unseen worlds (Roseman 1991). These types of musical theorizing are not categorically different from ways of knowing about music that are formalized into explicit theoretical systems such as Western tonal harmony, raga, or maqam, in that they open up the realm in which music can be talked about within an emic perspective and thus made relevant to lived experience. In such contexts “aesthetics” can be thought of in functional terms, as a matter of efficacy, and inherent to aesthetic discourse so construed is the means by which music’s efficacy is communicated. How do we know that music is doing what it’s supposed to do? Among the Finnish-Karelian lamenters, a “good” lamenter is one “who can make a stone weep” (Tolbert 1990, 1994), and thus cause all present to cry. Among the Kaluli, a successful gisalo medium is one who makes contact with spirits of ancestors through singing and dancing—his skill is acknowledged by burning him with a torch (Feld 1982). Chernoff (1979) notes that in certain West African societies good music is good consociation, which can be verified by the presence of enthusiastic dancing. Among the Shona, musicians are responsible for bringing the spirits to the Bira ceremony and if the medium falls into a trance the efficacy of the music is confirmed (Berliner 1978). The Suyá make reference to a feeling of euphoria, kïn, experienced by Suyá men during communal singing, an explicit acknowledgement that the singing is successful (Seeger 1987). Yet we must be wary of typifying non-Western epistemologies in terms of functional aesthetics as if this is the fundamental difference between so-called “Western” and nonWestern ideas about music; Western art music, indeed Western musics of all kinds, are just as “functional” as any other music. However, perhaps the most salient aspects of musical epistemology that are foregrounded by ethnomusicological considerations are not these explicit and/or formalized notions. People in a culture know how to act and interact musically. Music has a social ontology, seems to be about subjectivity and intention, and models and is about social interaction. Most music in most world cultures is encountered, learned, and understood contingently, as a consequence of living through a particular culture’s systems and processes. It appears to make sense to a member of a culture, but the grounds upon which it makes sense are usually either non-verbalizable or expressible in terms that, to an outsider, may appear to have very little to do with “music.” In other words, musical knowledge, irrespective of the culture in which it is situated, is largely nonexplicit; while it is likely to have some explicit dimensions, much of it is submerged and implicit. Its explicit dimensions are usually evident when culture members aim to account for music’s occurrence in particular sets of circumstances and for the forms that it may take; its implicit aspect inheres in those aspects that seem impervious to discourse. Furthermore, implicit and explicit forms of knowledge about music, even within a singular culture, are not necessarily congruent, nor are discourses about music within

Epistemologies   273 a particular culture necessarily consistent with one another. In this sense, an epistemology of Western art music is doing precisely the same job as an epistemology of any other music in any other culture; it makes sense of implicit knowledge by giving voice to explicit ideologies. From such a perspective the tendency to see the epistemology of Western art music as “different” from all others confuses formal Western philosophical discourse with the informal and implicit knowledge that underlies the practice of Western art music. As Manuel notes, there is a tendency to romanticize non-Western musics as irreducibly different “much music outside the geographical West—be it modern commercial popular music or neo-traditional art music, not to mention imported Western genres themselves—may be produced and apprehended in ways not markedly different from that of familiar genres in the West” (Manuel  2011, 562). Rather than exoticize non-Western epistemologies of music, it might be more fruitful to understand more general processes of knowing, while also acknowledging that cultural knowledge is necessarily radically contextualized (Feld 1984; Roseman 1984). For example, music epistemologies that arose in modernity in the West are now relevant throughout the world in the context of transnational interactions, and provide an opportunity to see new ways of knowing as they emerge. Ochoa Gautier (2006) suggests that epistemologies of “purification” underlie music in modernity in Latina America, a case study that may be instructive more broadly. Drawing on Baumann and Briggs’s (2003) theorization for language, Ochoa Gautier proposes that an epistemology of music developed in the Enlightenment that created a certain kind of “music” that removed all traces of the social to create a “pure” aesthetic musical object. Increasingly, this epistemological move informs the understanding of music in contexts of modernity as “hybrids” that develop from the mixing of “pure” forms. However, the recontextualization of “pure” musics into “hybrids” depends upon the prior separation of “music” from its social contexts, thus concealing the purifying epistemology upon which the notion of hybrid depends. It is interesting to note that this hidden purifying epistemology is now needed to understand “hybrids” in the context of “tradition,” a case where mediation between epistemologies is needed to make sense of emerging traditions. Epistemologies of music are not static; as cultures and musics change, so does the knowledge that underpins them.

Music, Science, and Naturalistic Epistemologies Ethnomusicological research and thinking suggests that music’s diversity is situated in cultural diversity. This could prompt the idea—after the tendency, noted by Manuel, to romanticize non-Western musics as irreducibly different—that what we conceive of as “music” in respect of each culture is inescapably particular, a social construct that is

274   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert bound to, and embodied only in the dynamics of, each different culture. Each culture’s “music” would be a social formation unique to, and understandable only from the perspective of, that culture, denying the possibility of any cross-culturally applicable musical epistemology. Yet there appears to be something—constellations of types of behaviours, ways of thinking (whether manifested in action, speech, or text), and patterns in sound—that we are prepared to identify as music in all societies. Much about these constellations does not seem to come in propositional packages; we know them as they are enacted by others or ourselves. They may be enmeshed in discourse, but their comprehensible actuality is grounded as much in their doing as in any theoretical reflection or institutional incarnation. The enaction of culture tends to be implicit; it is rendered explicit chiefly in moments of realization of alternative ways of doing things that may be either novel or unspokenly unsanctioned. As Bashkow notes, “culture is not only the product of but also the precondition for meaningful action, thought, and expression . . . Ideas of the foreign are culture in the guise of departure from culture” (Bashkow 2004, 452). The constellation of actions, thoughts, and sounds that comprises music within any given culture is likely to be woven so inextricably into that culture’s lifeways as to camouflage its features unless they are uncovered and questioned emically through processes of cultural change, or unmasked by encounters with strangers and their practices. A double problem appears to arise in understanding these constellations: while we can intuit their existence, we need to find some consistent way of identifying them, even instrumentally, across cultures; and they are largely implicit within cultures. However, both within and across cultures they are manifested in our actions and interactions; they are underlain by our materiality as biological beings and as interactants, by our thoughts and overt behaviours, which we can interpret as checking and shaping—though not determining—the varieties and the scope of what we might consider to be music. And overt behaviours and mental processes are susceptible to scientific exploration; a range of human sciences enables us experimentally to explore and delineate behaviours and mental processes and understand them in the context of the materialities of embodiment and interaction. Hence we can suggest that naturalistic epistemologies grounded in scientific approaches offer ways of accessing the consistencies in music as implicit, non-epistemic experience; their ontological commitment to materiality provides a basis for exploring and making sense of “music” across cultures. A strong objection to naturalistic—scientifically-grounded—approaches to understanding music is that they can be interpreted as entailing reductionist epistemologies (for example, Titon 2013) and are thus at best partial and exclusionary, and at worst misguided and harmfully coercive. They certainly entail reductionist ontologies insofar as they adopt the materialist position that “there exists nothing over and above physical objects, properties, events, facts, etc.” (Kaiser 2011, 457). They generally also entail an adherence to methodological reductionism as heuristically and historically the most fruitful way of conducting experimental research. However, as Hüttemann and Love (2011, 524) make clear, “Explanatory and methodological reduction can be decoupled because they do not entail one another: methodological reductionism does not

Epistemologies   275 g­ uarantee explanatory success and a successful explanatory reduction does not imply that methodological reduction is the most favorable strategy of inquiry.” Methodological reductionism is often a preferred research strategy as it constitutes the most parsimonious way of framing a complex problem in experimentally tractable terms as part of the process of science: but it neither excludes other ways of knowing nor can it result in claims about definitive truths. Methodological reductionism does not entail epistemological reductionism. Neither do naturalistic approaches necessarily result in the construction of a single scientifically-grounded musical epistemology. In part this is because the idea of a single, unitary science seems unsustainable in philosophical terms. As Fodor puts it, “not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds” (Fodor 1974, 113): or, in a later volume, “The world, it seems, runs in parallel, at many levels of description” (Fodor  1998a, 23). There are many apparently natural kinds that can constitute the objects or foci of scientific exploration. Hacking (1999, 104 and passim) helpfully distinguishes between indifferent and interactive kinds, the former having properties and identities that are not contingent on human thought and behaviour (for example, plutonium), the latter intimately intertwined with the ways in which they are framed and employed in thought and action (for example, autism). Each type of kind is likely to require its proper science: to return to Fodor, “For each such generalisation [kind], there is the proprietary vocabulary that is required in order for our discourse to express it. Nothing can happen except what the laws of physics permit, of course; but much goes on that the laws of physics do not talk about” (Fodor 1998b, 6). From these perspectives, the sciences can be thought of as sets of practices largely predicated on reductionist methodologies that afford access to a web of social and material facts knitting together ways of understanding, talking about, and predictively acting on, interactive and indifferent kinds. The sciences do not constitute a monolithic epistemology but rather comprise different sets of conceptual practices that are not reducible one to another but that are nonetheless reciprocally commensurable (after Lakoff 1987, 322) by virtue of being mutually comprehensible from each others’ perspectives. Over the last thirty years several cognitively-grounded theories that can be interpreted as constituting naturalistic epistemologies of music have been developed, generally being presented as contributions to music theory or cognitive musicology rather than as explicit epistemologies (see, for example, Lerdahl and Jackendoff  1983; Narmour 1989, 1992). Perhaps the most comprehensively elaborated instance of a theory presented explicitly as a naturalistic epistemology of music is that of Nussbaum (2007), who draws on close—and long—practical and theoretical engagement in music, as well as on evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, to create his explicitly naturalistic epistemology of music. His approach shares general features with that of Millikan (2004) in its reliance on the idea of mental representations which carry meanings and which are simultaneously used to derive information and guide action: in effect, to use Millikan’s term, “pushmi-pullyu” representations. Nussbaum exploits the scientific literature on music cognition as well as aspects of that on music and evolution to argue

276   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert that meaning in music is situated in a nexus of such representations, allowing musical meaning to be idiosyncratic, unmediated, abstract, expressive and embodied all at the same time. Nussbaum’s theory is, as Matravers notes, a “remarkably ambitious theory . . . that resists easy summary” (Matravers 2011, 219). It is as densely ramified by his awareness of the complexities of contemporary musical life as it is by his knowledge of the broad sweep of humanistic and scientific literatures on music. However, its status as a broad and naturalistic epistemology of music is severely compromised by its focus on explaining music as it has manifested itself in Western societies since around 1650. He states that “The present project . . . is to engage in the reflexive meta-interpretation of Western tonal art music since 1650 as a representational practice . . . situating musical experience firmly within a descriptive, broadly Darwinian evolutionary theoretical framework” (Nussbaum 2007, 20). This raises insurmountable problems; science, or the sciences, are really only applicable to the elucidation of those activities that can be shown or hypothesized to be bioculturally grounded and that can be related in a principled way to generic human capacities that may be culturally—and indeed, subculturally—particularized and hence differentiated. Moreover, Nussbaum appears to privilege scientific, empirical knowledge over other types of knowledge when he suggests that he will adhere to the principle that “results from the sciences of cognition may be relevant to, and may legitimately be used in the resolution of, some or all of the traditional philosophical problems” (Nussbaum 2007, 5). This appears problematic in that the “results from the sciences of cognition” appear to be being construed here as having a definitive epistemic status within epistemology. Such results are, on the contrary, necessarily provisional—no single finding can be definitive unless interpreted within a narrowly falsificationist framework. And scientific findings are probably better interpreted as parts of scientific processes, serving to advance scientific understandings, rather than as constituting ends in themselves. They are of a different order from the types of predicates or premisses that may constitute definitive elements in logical theories, yet they are here being treated as though they were of the same types. But the more serious problem is probably the former: what is being proposed here is to ground a philosophy of music on a foundation of scientific explorations and elucidations of a culturally-particular manifestation of music, albeit an increasingly global one. From an emic perspective, this version of “music” incorporates features that may be generic and manifested cross-culturally as well as features that are wholly culturally contingent. The difficulty lies in determining which are which; as Bruno Nettl notes, while most Western definitions of music stress attributes such as beauty, intelligibility, and expressiveness and suggest that these attributes are criterial in judging whether or not something constitutes music, “there are societies and musics where these criteria make no sense at all” (Nettl 2005, 18). The vast majority of the “results from the sciences of cognition” upon which Nussbaum grounds his theory derive from studies carried out in respect of recent Western models of music; while many of these results have illuminated the ways in which music may be manifested in mind, brain, and behaviour, as

Epistemologies   277 Cross (2012a) notes, the studies from which they emerge sample only a very limited range of phenomena that can be construed as music, explore those phenomena from quite culturally-idiosyncratic perspectives, and almost universally derive from the responses of highly enculturated Western participants. As Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan note, “Evolution has equipped humans with ontogenetic programs, including cultural learning, that help us adapt our bodies and brains to the local physical and social environment” (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010, 80; our emphasis). The social environment in which Western art music currently manifests itself (and in which it came into existence) was and is no less “local” than those that give rise to and that sustain music in other cultural contexts (whether North Indian, Marritjevin, Mbendjele, or Suyá) in respect of the adaptive pressures that it exerts. Those adaptive pressures help particularize the manifestations of music in mind and behaviour in any given cultural context and it simply cannot be assumed that a scientific understanding of “music” gained in one context will generalize to another. The results from the sciences of cognition that bear on music on which Nussbaum relies must be construed as provisional and bound to the narrow range of cultural contexts from which they are drawn, and cannot play the foundational role to which he assigns them.

Conclusion: Music as Communicative, Music as Biocultural Nonetheless, a version of something like Nussbaum’s approach that takes cross-culturally identifiable aspects of “music” as its point of departure rather than its terminus (Nussbaum himself eventually explores the implications of his theory well beyond the bounds of the Western common-practice period) has much to offer as a means of developing a framework for musical epistemology (see, for example, Higgins, 2012). While the dynamics of different cultures appear to result in radically different musics in different societies, the constellations of types of behaviours, ways of thinking, and patterns in sound that we can recognize as music in those societies are necessarily shaped—not determined—by the vicissitudes of human embodiment and by evolutionarily-­constrained human modes of interaction that can be addressed in scientific terms (see Levinson 2006; Cross 2012b; Tolbert 2001). However, a major issue in drawing on what is known about music in scientific terms is that the majority of scientific studies not only focus on Western common-practice period music but also treat music almost exclusively as audible pattern (Cross 2012a). As Turino (2008) notes, music takes many different forms in different cultures but can be characterized roughly as presentational—as in musical supercultural traditions such as Western art music and North Indian music—and participatory—as in many traditional societies, but also as in many contexts in Western societies such as religious ceremonies, team sports events, and informal social occasions. In presentational contexts there is

278   Ian Cross and Elizabeth Tolbert usually a sharp distinction between music producers and music consumers that privileges the idea of music as sonic form: in participatory contexts, all participants are equally producers and consumers, and music here is self-evidently a medium for action and interaction rather than display and reception. Only recently have preliminary studies of musical interaction taken place within a scientific framework, mostly exploring collaborative interaction in presentational musical contexts (see, for example, D’Ausilio et al. 2015). Some researchers are beginning to explore the ways in which musical interaction has parallels in other modes of communicative social interaction (for example, Moran et al. 2015) while a few are exploring music as communicative medium in its own right (for example, Cross 2014; Hawkins, Cross, and Ogden  2013). Starting from the idea that music as a manifestation of universal capacities can best be interpreted as a communicative medium embedded in the pragmatics of human interaction can help resolve many of the apparent paradoxes that a focus on Western art music in scientific approaches have thrown up, such as music’s capacity to elicit emotion, its simultaneous immediacy and indeterminacy of meaning, its apparent agency. Indeed, the idea that Western art music can be construed as traces of human behaviour and interaction, as a residue of participatory practices, or as narrative, dealing with “the vicissitudes of human intention” (Bruner 1986, 16), has formed a fruitful focus for philosophical and music-theoretic explorations to Western art music (for example, Maus 1988; Robinson and Hatten 2012) that may equally fruitfully converge with emerging scientific approaches. As noted at the outset, there can be no single epistemology of music; in order to make sense of music as discourse and as enacted experience we shall need multiple epistemologies, each addressing different facets of music in ways that are explanatory across or within particular cultures. A musical epistemology that is emically situated in one culture is likely to be difficult to distinguish from the musical practices that it purports to explain, while a musical epistemology that aims for a totalizing universality will always be too coarse-grained to account for some of music’s cultural idiosyncrasies. Naturalistic approaches can help reconcile the tension between music as universal and music as irresolvably culturally particular; however, normative approaches can also have a significant role in delineating music’s phenomenological and metaphysical dimensions in ways inaccessible to naturalistic approaches. In the end, a particular epistemology of music is as likely to be preferred as much for its rhetorical and political functions as it is for its explanatory value; but it helps if, in deciding which epistemology we wish to deploy, we are aware of all the alternatives.

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chapter 13

Ethics Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen

Introduction: Music, Ethics, Musical Ethics? The relationship between music and ethics is a topic constitutive of the philosophy of music, dating at least as far back as Plato, and has framed many musico-philosophical discussions that are current to this day.1 Despite this lengthy history and ongoing vitality, tracing the relationship between music and ethics as a distinct field remains challenging. Indeed, as Hyun-Ah Kim writes in the introduction to her The Renaissance Ethics of Music, “readers may wonder what the ethics of music is about . . . due to [a] lack of understanding of music as an ethical entity” (Kim 2015, 1). Kim suggests that this deficit can be traced both to the absence of music and ethics as a special area of study within either music studies or philosophy and to the tendency in both fields to pair music with aesthetics, rather than ethics. While these are certainly compelling reasons for the paucity of work in this area, we suggest in this chapter that the difficulty in working out a precise relationship is also due in part to the dislocation of disciplinary areas in which music’s ethical import has been studied. More precisely, whilst music and ethics is sometimes conceived as a single field of study, it has more often consisted of a series of connected but fragmented topics pursued within either music studies or philosophical ethics. One result of this slippage between music and ethics as field and as fragments is that there appear to be few major studies explicitly devoted to a holistic consideration of “music and ethics.” As part of establishing the potential scope of such a holistic consideration, this chapter begins with a brief overview of several historical strands of thought before engaging in more depth with recent studies in both musicological and philosophical literatures. One foundational study in contemporary thought is Kathleen Marie Higgins’s The Music of Our Lives (2011), which foregrounds how music is, first of all, an experience: an angle which places music with the perceiving subject,

284   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen rather than presenting it as a perceived object. This is a perspective shared by later musico-philosophical research, in particular Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen’s Music and Ethics (2012) and Jeff Warren’s Music and Ethical Responsibility (2014). These three works, which all take music and ethics as their central concern, are joined by other examinations which approach either music or ethics from the perspective of the other discipline—that is, involving some consideration of ethics as part of broader musicological arguments or, vice versa, some consideration of music as part of an ­ethical fabric. After this assessment of “music and ethics,” we seek to bring together several of these conceptual strands in order to develop a new model for thinking about the relationship between music and ethics, or what we call a musical ethics. We argue that thinking of musical ethics foregrounds the benefit of rigorous interdisciplinary consideration of music and ethics as an integrated field of inquiry that highlights the intertwining concerns as well as distinctive characteristics of the constituent parts. The chapter closes with an application of our model of musical ethics via an analysis of singer-songwriter Imogen Heap’s hit song “Hide and Seek” before drawing out some of the implications of this work for future research.

Is Music Ethical? For the ancient Greeks, ethics centred on questions about virtue (aretē), human flourishing (eudaimonia), and the nature of the soul. Thus, the question of the relationship between ethics and the arts hinged on the ability of the arts to contribute to virtue or to human flourishing, either for the individual or for society in general. Plato, for example, claimed that music and the arts possess power to influence social morals, and that artistic power needed therefore to be strictly controlled (see Book 2 of Laws, and Books 3 and 10 in Republic; for more on Platonic views on the arts and society see Gallope, “Society,” ch. 42, this volume). Aristotle likewise held a view of music as intrinsically related to moral character and of proper musical training as disposing individuals towards achieving ethical virtues through habituation and practice—though he was markedly less restrictive than Plato in evaluating specific musical practices (see chapters 5–7 in Book 8 of Politics). From a different philosophical tradition, and reflecting aspects of a wider ethical discourse in Chinese society, Confucius promoted the position that dissolute music has the power to influence society negatively and that virtuous music promotes prosocial behaviour. (See ­especially the “Yue Ji” and S. Cook 1995; Higgins 2017 examines Confucius’s vision for an ethically efficacious ritual music.) In much of the long-lived discourse on music and ethics in the Western world that followed Plato’s claim of music’s power to shape moral attitudes, the discussion centred on whether music’s ethical qualities are intrinsic or contextual (that is, a product of the contexts in which music is made and heard, rather than of the music itself). The related

Ethics   285 question of whether certain kinds of music might be said to possess positive ethical qualities, usually interpreted as upholding particular social morals, or negative ones has been perennially prominent. Among the writers who took up these questions were Boethius (c.480–524), Erasmus (1466–1536), and John Case (d. 1600). Kim (2015) argues that through such writers the strong connection between music and ethics developed in Platonic and Aristotelian moral philosophy came to play a key role in shaping Renaissance humanist ideals, reaching a peak in the early modern era. After this period, the idea that music has ethical significance itself came under stringent challenge with the application of Kantian ideas of autonomy to music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This “autonomania” (to use Aaron Ridley’s [2004] term) cast a long shadow over Western philosophy’s engagement with music such that, as Lawrence Kramer notes, the majority Western view in the twentieth century was that “music has or should have a special status beyond good and evil, and not in the Nietzschean sense. Music, and above all Western art music, should not be pestered with ethical questions” (Kramer 2002, 165).

Autonomy and Morality However prevalent such claims for the ethical transcendence of Western art music may have been, the ideological adherence to music’s autonomy from ethics was never complete and in recent years it has been severely criticized. (See McAuley 2020 for an argument outlining the ethical character of nineteenth-century philosophies of music.) In the twentieth century, much of the discussion over music and ethics focused on the relationship between Western art music (particularly the so-called masterpieces of the Western canon) and popular music; a notorious example is Theodor Adorno’s (1976) excoriation of twentieth-century popular and jazz music of the Western world as contributing to moral degeneration. In recent years, Peter Kivy (2009) and Roger Scruton (2014) have also taken up the argument that music not only possesses moral character but that this moral character can, in certain circumstances, rub off on listeners. For Kivy, this capacity is most evident in texted music and is extremely limited in the case of absolute music, while Scruton argues straightforwardly for the moral superiority of the “best” examples of Western art music—especially absolute music—as a means of moral training. Much of Kivy’s and Scruton’s work has been alternately censured and applauded depending on the orientations of their interlocutors, and in surveying the field it is hard to avoid the impression that both sides of this debate fall into well-worn grooves. For example, Damian Cox and Michael Levine’s brief 2016 article critiques Kivy (1990, 2009) in terms already covered in depth by Cobussen and Nielsen (2012) and Warren (2014) without extending those arguments. Cox and Levine’s central proposition, that “although there is no necessary connection between listening to or appreciating music and one’s moral character, the contingent connections are many and various,” is termed

286   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen only “very mildly interesting” by virtue of its widespread acceptance among those who take issue with Kivy’s or Scruton’s arguments (Cox and Levine 2016, n.p.). They conclude, contra Kivy, that “if music enlarges our capacities of emotional empathy (not for everyone, not for all music, and not on all occasions), then it straightforwardly has a role to play in building moral character” (n.p.). Despite the ease with which we might assent to Cox and Levine’s statement, its very innocuousness obscures the fact that asserting music’s potential role in building moral character does not get us very far in understanding how it is that this might come about in musical practice—or, indeed, why this should be seen as significant if we believe that music (apart from any particular instantiation) is itself amoral. Put differently, it is vital to add further substance to such a “very mildly interesting” view if we wish to interrogate music’s capacity to engender and/or emphasize ethical engagement, potential or actual. One alternative to the musical-ethical question of moral character-building is to discuss familiar concepts and challenges in novel, ethically relevant contexts. William Cheng does this in his book Just Vibrations, which grapples with the ethical culture of academic practice in musicology—a culture Cheng describes as full of “paranoid readings,” “dialectical games,” and other injurious intellectual habits that focus on defending the self against critical judgement through appeals to scholarly authority: “sounding good” at the expense of a mature understanding of the “the purpose of sounding good” (Cheng 2016, 5, 8). His call for “a reparative musicology [that] would simultaneously restore love for people and reconstruct the opportunities for care among them” (98) positions the reparative mode of scholarship as the clear ethical option, yet Kate Guthrie (2018) demonstrates that even in Cheng’s own work paranoid and reparative modes of scholarship sit alongside one another. This mutuality renders the ethical distinctions between paranoid and reparative scholarship less clear-cut than Cheng admits. Moreover, it is notable that—despite Cheng’s use of the typical paranoid appeal to authority through the scholarly apparatus of footnotes—his book lacks crossreference to extant relevant music and ethics literature. Given the complexity and malleability of the area, it is perhaps not surprising that Cheng and other studies that touch on music and ethics reveal a tendency to self-define the topic, but the resulting haze over the nature of music and ethics makes durable connections between the two difficult to sustain. Above all, this challenge suggests a continued need to do adequate justice to already existing scholarship on music and ethics through cross-critical scholarly engagement.

Ethics as Social Practice The conflict between conceptions of music as ethically charged and as ethically autonomous has a parallel in more general philosophical theories about the value of art. In general, philosophical positions on the ethical significance of art can be laid out along a spectrum ranging from radical moralism, wherein every moral fault condemns the artwork to failure, to radical autonomism, which holds that the art should not be

Ethics   287 judged by ethical norms but by aesthetic ones. In-between these poles we find articulated positions such as: • “ethicism,” defined by Berys Gaut as the view that “an artwork is aesthetically flawed in so far as it possesses an ethical flaw that is aesthetically relevant” (Gaut 2007, 10); • “moderate moralism,” or the position that “some works of art may be evaluated morally (contra autonomism) and that sometimes the moral defects and/or merits of a work may figure in the aesthetic evaluation of the work” (Carroll 1996, 236); • “ethical autonomism,” which suggests that art is autonomous in that it demands its audience take up an artistic attitude towards it, but also allows for an artwork to be evaluated morally by “art-relevant” criteria (van Gerwen 2004). Matthew Kieran (2003, 2006) stands outside this spectrum by holding that the relationship between a work of art’s ethical flaws or merits and its aesthetic de/merit is contextual and that the cognitive benefit (from which artistic value is derived) may be enhanced by an artwork’s moral defects—hence what is called “contextualism” or “immoral cognitivism.” Others, including Lydia Goehr, are more ambivalent. In Elective Affinities, Goehr maintains that the aesthetic character of art renders its ethical import intrinsically suspect. Focusing on the artistic and musical depiction of violence, Goehr suggests that, despite potential for the arts to generate renewed understanding of the causes and nature of violence, the elevation of “blood into aesthetic transcendence” occasioned by many depictions of violence should make us pause in our bestowal of ethical virtues on art (Goehr 2008, 176). While pausing in the face of problematic elevation can be prudent, this does not entail that such instances should be rendered ethically irrelevant. On the contrary, such challenging encounters could instead serve as potent reminders of the importance of reflecting critically on questionable depictions in art, rather than generalizing about their value and ethical import. While making a similar point, citing thinkers such as Bernard Williams (2007) and Andrew Bowie (2007), Cobussen and Nielsen (2012) argue that constructing a general theory of the relationship between ethics and music is counter-productive. Ethical discourse on music should, they suggest, focus instead on a critical examination of the particular conditions in which ethics is produced in and through engagement with music, for example, the cultural, historical, or social context that has shaped the particular ethically relevant musical encounter. The determination to investigate a musical ethics as something that arises from the social practices of music-making accords with much recent thought in both musicology and philosophy. In musicologically inflected work, one result of this shift towards ethics as emanating from the relational and intersubjective interactions of a performance is the upswing of interest in jazz and other forms of improvised music as important examples in music and ethics (see Benson, “Improvisation,” ch. 21, this volume; Warren 2014). Within philosophically oriented scholarship, the interest in music as an ethically charged activity is often linked to the wider resurgence of interest in the intersection of aesthetics and ethics (see especially Levinson 2008, 2010; Hagberg 2008; Kivy 2009).

288   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen For a few philosophers, music and ethics as a characteristically social practice has also served as a distinct area of study. In her aforementioned The Music of Our Lives, for example, Higgins provides a rationale for music’s ethical significance on the basis of three features: (1) its psychophysiological power to influence a listener’s outlook and behaviour, (2) its ability to develop capacities of value to ethical living, and (3) its capacity to serve in metaphoric and symbolic roles that can assist ethical reflection (Higgins 2011, 114). In a later book, The Music Between Us, Higgins extends this ethical significance to the core of what it is to be human, claiming that “by enabling us to feel our interconnection as human beings, music can help to make us more humane” (Higgins 2012, 2). Similarly, Martha Nussbaum has suggested that music’s capacity to help us feel emotions makes it a potentially valuable means for acknowledging our human vulnerability (Nussbaum 2003, 249–295). This recognition of vulnerability then leads to greater understanding of our relationships with others and our shared humanity. By placing the fullness of humanity at the core of their theories, these neo-Aristotelian philosophers demonstrate the continued relevance of ideas of well-being and virtue to engaging with intersections between music and ethics in the twenty-first century. Within music studies, the idea that music has ethical import drives other kinds of musical thought that are less closely related to philosophy, including, for example, explorations of music as individually therapeutic or as having healing or educational properties for society in music therapy and music psychology (Ansdell and DeNora  2012; Campbell  1997; DeNora  2013; Hallam, Cross, and Thaut  2009). Meanwhile, music education scholars have written on the capacity of music to provide opportunities for ethical development (Woodford 2005) or as a means of extending ethical criticism into new areas of music studies (Richerme 2017). Although few scholars would borrow Plato’s language to say that participation in the arts is a means of training the soul, the recent incorporation of music-making into larger measures of societal well-being through the funding of community arts or health schemes in the UK and elsewhere reflect the continuing conviction that the arts—or at least some art forms— can promote positive, ethically inflected social outcomes. The commitment to tracing a social ethics of music has been especially prevalent within ethnomusicology, where the long-standing attentiveness to music as a social and cultural phenomenon has prioritized such investigations (for two recent examples see Rommen  2007 and Skinner  2015). Moreover, unlike the relatively patchy scholarly engagement between music and ethical practices in the areas we have discussed so far, ethnomusicologists have been active in articulating an ethics of practice in the academic sphere (see, for example, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s (1998) “Position Statement on Ethics”). The prominence of ethical issues within ethnomusicology can be partly explained by the nature of ethnomusicological fieldwork. Most obviously, the intensely personal nature of participant-observation immediately raises ethical concerns surrounding the treatment of collaborators and informants. Other long-standing issues in the field include the ethics of documentation, preservation, and attribution of performances or other data. (See Shelemay 1999, 2013, and Slobin 1992 for overviews of ethical issues in ethnomusicology.) Furthermore, ethical discourses in ethnomusicology are

Ethics   289 strongly shaped by the concept of cultural relativism, and by the widespread acknowledgement that ethical issues and values, including what constitutes ethical scholarly behaviour, are culturally specific. In recent years, this concern with ethical research behaviour has extended to discussions over the ethical relationship of the scholar to her material outside the boundaries of the research field, with many ethnomusicologists expressing interest in what has been termed “activist” or “applied” ethnomusicology, or how to put “ethnomusicological scholarship, knowledge, and understanding to practical use” in ways that are “guided by ethical principles of social responsibility, human rights, and cultural and musical equity” (Titon 2015, 4). This circuit of different approaches to music and ethics brings us back to the central studies by Warren and by Cobussen and Nielsen. Warren takes his cue from the broader area of musical meaning, approaches meanings as experienced, and seeks—for example by engaging with improvisation and musical ownership—to account for “how musical experience creates encounters with others that lead to ethical responsibilities” (Warren 2014, 3). This relies on a discourse of Self and Other strongly influenced by the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In the case of Cobussen and Nielsen, the framework they propose rests heavily on the “ethics of ” approach, more specifically “an ethics of listening.” To that effect, and contrary to much recent analytical philosophy, Music and Ethics offers a methodological move from doing something to an object to considering the perceiving subject. The ethics proposed remains in a space between the perceiver and the perceived, in a constant state of becoming. The focus is on a state of being (-in-the-world), a kind of sonic sensibility that is inherently alert to ethical issues and relations. This involves a move in which the alertness and power rest with the perceiving subject, rather than the perceived object: music is experienced. At the same time that the methodology opens up a space founded on an awareness of subject position and possibilities, the approach tallies with the ideas about ethics as a social practice presented here, as it includes consideration of intersubjectivity: musical experience is not solitary, but involves a range of others (other bodies, other minds, whether imagined or real). Furthermore, the ethical engagement proposed in Music and Ethics is not simply a (Levinasian) passive undertaking, but a critical engagement alert to music that “demands the responsible and responsive engagement of critical agents who commit themselves to explanation” (Cobussen and Nielsen 2012, 155).

Conceptual Challenges in Music and Ethics When assessing current thought on music and ethics, one issue that becomes apparent is the conceptual challenge inherent in dealing with the field. An example can be found in Michael Gallope’s Deep Refrains (2017), which ties together ethical prescriptions for music offered by thinkers as distinct as Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. A central aspect of the investigation is the fundamentally

290   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen ethical question of how to determine which music best exemplifies the “paradox of the ineffable,” in which music appears both sensuously immediate and yet always mediated. The variety of thought with which Gallope engages ensures that “ethics” remains a fluid conceptual entity, employed variously as “a modernist ethics” (Gallope 2017, 246), “a materialist ethics of creativity” (19), an “ethics of temporal inconsistency” (219), and— more confusingly—“an attentive ethics to musical forms” (28). This occasionally gives the impression of a conceptual array lacking in-depth explanation, but it gives rise to a multiple ethics of production and composition through which, Gallope argues, we might probe music’s paradox of ineffability. There is much to commend here, yet despite the richness of the shifting perspectives on offer, we are not, in the end, left any clearer about how the relationship between music and ethics might be conceived, nor how these ethics of production or composition might relate to a musical ethics of relation or experience (for more on this see Abbate and Gallope, “The Ineffable (and Beyond),” ch. 36, this volume). To avoid the numerous pitfalls related to this kind of conceptual fluidity, in this chapter we recognize that the term “ethics” remains fundamentally resistant to precise definitions, and so we do not attempt to define it, but rather to explain and understand the concept in the context in which it is being employed. Because it can mean different things in different contexts, reflecting the breadth of conceptions of good and evil, “ethics” is similar to the term “music” which—especially if left unexplained—could potentially refer to a wide range of genres, works, and/or sound-based sensory experience and activity. The fundamental haziness of music and ethics has been compounded by a general preoccupation of both philosophers and musicologists with elucidating specific limit cases, rather than exploring the everyday situations involving music wherein many of the ethical situations to which music might speak are raised. Thus, Higgins suggests that “what philosophical ethics needs is a model of the ethical situation that allows for an open-minded imaginative approach to resolving ethical tensions” (Higgins 2011, 172). It is her contention that music offers such a model, yet she does not explore fully what this might signify. Meanwhile, numerous articles and monographs have been published on the ethics of specific musical practices or scholarly activities with little attention to the wider implications of music and ethics (see, among others, Perullo  2019; Rommen  2007; Skinner  2015; Smith 2010; Wells 2016). With this in mind, and while building on the approaches we have presented above, we now seek to bring together the abstract and the concrete elements of music and ethics by exploring one potential model that casts light on ethical situations and tensions found in our everyday musical experiences of listening and performing.

Towards a Consensual Model of Musical Ethics The foregoing review of previous literature reveals a need for an approach to music and ethics that adequately reflects both the multifaceted nature of musical experience and the contextual richness of ethics. Such an approach would bring together the concerns

Ethics   291 that have dominated the arguments surrounding music and ethics both as a field of inquiry and as a topic, but it would also move beyond current debates in the field to argue for a connection between music and ethics that is far more robust than Cox and Levine’s (2016) “very mildly interesting view”. To this end, in what follows, we begin by making a series of claims regarding the ethical import of music. Building from these, we set out the key components of one novel framework for music and ethics—which we will coin as a musical ethics—before exploring in some detail some of its characteristics. The first of these claims is that music’s primary ethical significance lies in its ability to bring participants into a fuller understanding of, and engagement with, humanity—to make us, in essence, more humane. This has echoes of Classical Greek understandings of virtue ethics, and it draws strongly on the tradition of neo-Aristotelian ethics and aesthetics as developed by Higgins and Nussbaum, amongst others. The second claim is that in order to represent adequately the ethical function of music, we should consider the features of music that distinguish it from other artistic endeavours (for example, its uniquely temporal, immersive nature). Many of these characteristics have been largely overlooked in previous literature on both music and ethics, while others have not previously been taken to be relevant to music as an ethical phenomenon. Finally, we postulate the following characteristics as contributing to music’s ethical potential:

1) A capacity for a complex and shared meaning-making that mitigates against constructing musical agents or activities as autonomous; 2) A capacity to connect mind and body both within the individual and amongst individuals; 3) A capacity for flexible constructions of ethical meanings that emerge as part of listening and performance and that can contribute to shared social patterns of ethical behaviour; 4) A capacity for suturing these ethical habits into everyday practice.

Fundamental to our endeavour is a desire to develop an open-minded and imaginative method that both positions music as an area of importance for philosophical ethics and asserts the value of rigorous engagement with ethics for music studies. This necessitates a contribution to the scholarly language of music and ethics that corresponds to the ethical fervour of everyday musical discourse and can provide a starting point for the crossfertilization of these fields of thought. We term our contribution a consensual model of musical ethics. To begin with the final component of our method’s title, why a musical ethics as opposed to, for example, ethical music or an ethics of music (or indeed, a music of ethics)? In part this stems from a desire to preserve a relationship of parity between the terms ethics and music even as we assert a strong bidirectional relationship between the two. To speak of an ethical music would seem to define the model in terms of moralist or formalist critiques of particular music genres or practices, while ethics of music partakes in the same Cartesian subject–object divide characteristic of various “philosophy

292   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen of x” subdisciplines recognized by Andrew Bowie (2007, see also his essay on “Making Sense,” ch. 41, this volume). Rather than using ethical principles to evaluate music as an object, exploring the ethical practices, encounters, critical responses, and modes of thinking generated in and through the musical experience can provide new insight. With a nod to the concept of Gibsonian affordances—in short, those aspects of experience which “[cut] across the dichotomy of subjective–objective” and that “[point] both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (Gibson 1979, 129)—our focus is on the possibilities for action and reflection that emerge at the nexus of music and ethics. Thus, to speak of a musical ethics indicates our concern not only with how musical experiences give rise to ethically laden situations but also with the ways in which ethics is experienced, understood, and acted upon through musical engagement. Likewise, the choice of the term model to describe this approach is deliberate, for a model can be thought of both as something that precedes a fully-fledged exploration (for example, a schematic diagram) and something that provides an opportunity to enact theoretical principles (for example, a prototype). Moreover, a model is something that can be tweaked, developed, and aspired to (though not necessarily reached). Accordingly, this proposal is not intended as a limit case, but as a guide for the future. As a model, this approach is flexible and inclusive, yet it is also theoretically robust and grounded in phenomenological experience. Finally, by using the term consensual to describe the type of musical ethics under discussion we position ourselves as fundamentally engaged with the human elements of musical ethics. In this usage, the term primarily indicates two linked characteristics of music that have implications for human ethics. The first is music’s ability to contribute to individual and/or collective identity formation; the second, its characteristic capacity for organizing our shared sensory perceptions in concert. Together, this is the sense of feeling together (con-sens).2 Both of these areas of music’s “visceral pedagogy” (Landsberg 2004) will be dealt with in greater detail later on in this chapter, but for the moment let us point out that feeling together in this way contributes to what we have claimed as the primary ethical function of music: namely, its making us more humane by revealing, enacting, and promoting the feeling of ethical responsibilities and sensibilities towards ourselves and one another. In addition to this primary usage is a secondary sense (perhaps the more familiar) in which we use consensual; namely, that of negotiated agreement. By including this sense in our understanding of consensuality, we acknowledge that ethical systems are both built on a negotiated process of social agreement and that they inevitably contain tensions between differing conceptions of the good. A consensual musical ethics is not the sum of individual ethical stances (communal ethics); nor is it the lowest common ethical denominator (collective ethics); nor is it necessarily one in which everyone agrees on the ethical significance of any particular experience. Rather, consensual indicates a tolerance for a wide range of responses both within any given instance of performance or listening and across multiple instances. This fundamentally both/and approach will inform our subsequent application of this model.

Ethics   293 In developing this model we address some of the shortcomings of previous attempts within the field. For example, while we acknowledge that music tends to privilege certain forms of (musical) interaction that have ethical implications, many former studies have focused on explicating this almost exclusively in the context of jazz and improvisation studies (Hagberg  2008 and “Jazz,” ch. 29, this volume; Higgins  2011, 7; Levinson 2015; Warren 2014, 89–120). There is concomitant focus on the jazz performer or ensemble that—while redressing the historic imbalance of interest in the composer in Western art music—neglects to include the audience as actively engaged participants in the musical experience. By expanding the pool of stakeholders to include all participants in a given performance, our suggested approach offers a broader base for assessment. This model also critiques the over-reliance on ideas of listening and Levinasian Otherness that have provided much of the argumentative grist in music and ethics. While ideas of receptive empathy and intellectual openness as a result of music listening may be immediately attractive, we question whether these comparatively passive phenomena can form an adequate basis for a musical ethics. In counterpoint to the demands of intersubjectivity, we insist on an active component of listening as part of the formation of subjectivity, whether this takes the form of an active appreciation (Kramer 2002, 172–173) or an imaginative engagement (Schellekens 2007; Cobussen and Nielsen 2012). The result of this active encounter is empowerment: an increase in one’s capacity for expression and creativity. In positive cases, this formation enables us to approach ourselves and one another more ethically. One further aspect is the idea of musical ethics as operative in our everyday interactions with music. In terms of music’s ethical import, we are concerned with the slow building of ethical attitudes, or what we will later discuss under the category of ethical intuitions. This focus allows us to dispense with the concerns over so-called absolute music’s lack of specific propositional content; moreover, it more accurately reflects the most common ways in which contemporary listeners (especially, though not exclusively, in the industrialized West) experience music—that is, as emotionally charged background to other activities. (For recent studies on listening habits see García Quiñones, Kassabian, and Boschi  2013; Kassabian  2013; Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi 2001.) The acknowledgement of music as a contributor to (but not necessarily a determining factor in) our ethical lives also guards against grandiosity or unsupported optimism about music’s power. Finally, a consensual musical ethics rejects the rigid pronouncements of some formalist thought (for example, Kivy 2009 or Scruton 1997 and 2014), but it does not dismiss what might be termed formalist ethics, or the idea that ethics can emerge from an encounter with musical forms and structures; in fact, it suggests that phenomenological observations and reported experience can be grounded in musical structures. In investigating how the particular can be productively related to the general, a consensual musical ethics takes a holistic view of the subject. In what follows, we unfold five attributes of this framework.

294   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen

Characteristics of Consensual Musical Ethics Relational. The first characteristic of the consensual model of musical ethics is that it is relational. In its essence, relationality asserts that things have meaning not in and of themselves but in relationship to other things. This concept has become familiar within music studies from its incorporation into the approach known as relational musicology (Born 2010; N. Cook 2012), but it also has a clear link to Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002), which suggests that certain forms of contemporary art hinge on the interpersonal encounters they engender amongst their audiences. To think about relationality in the context of ethics and music is not to collapse into either moral relativism or autonomism; rather, it captures one sense in which ethics has always to do with our relations, to ourselves and to others. If the fundamental question of ethics is how we (as individuals in groups and societies) become such that we may live well with others, the relationship of the self and other is key to our ethical understanding. As Bourriaud puts it, “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (Bourriaud 2002, 13). Previous research on music and ethics has frequently engaged with questions of interpersonal encounter. Garry Hagberg (2008), for example, lists activities such as “acknowledging the autonomy of others” and “respecting individuality” as key varieties of ethical interaction in jazz. These virtues of relationship are modelled by the musical characteristics of jazz styles, particularly the give-and-take nature of alternating solos and choruses and the productive tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility in improvisation. As Hagberg’s list of virtues suggests, however, this is predicated on a conception of the subject as autonomous and of the ethical function of music as an encounter with an Other. Without denying the richness of this account, a relational approach to subjectivity would acknowledge the multiplicity of formative influences on any given subject, from cultural norms to personal histories that render subjectivity itself subject to alteration and contingency. Intuitive. The next characteristic is drawn from social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph’s concept of intuitive ethics. Haidt and Joseph suggest that cultural virtues are linked to patterns of intuitions, and that human beings across cultures share an “innate preparedness to feel flashes of approval or disapproval” towards certain events or behaviours (Haidt and Joseph 2004, 56). These intuitions are crucial for the development of virtues within specific cultural contexts. In Haidt and Joseph’s argument, moral maturity consists in “achieving a comprehensive attunement to the world, a set of highly sophisticated sensitivities embodied in the individual virtues” (62). They make the point that these intuitive patterns develop below the level of conscious awareness, and caution that the social construction of virtues in different cultures means that societies can develop differing moral systems atop shared patterns. In the context of music, acknowledging the possibilities of similarity and difference in this way is especially pertinent when discussing music from outside the paradigm of Western art music and it offers one way of countering the argument that ethics as a discipline is fundamentally (and inescapably) bound up in Western intellectual traditions.

Ethics   295 In addition, the emphasis that thinking about intuitive ethics places on the development of ethical skills, or the gradual improvement of one’s ethical comprehension, offers a valuable nuance to the argument for music as an ethically significant practice. If cultural activities have a key role to play in developing our ethical intuitions, then musical practices can be seen as one of those activities in which we learn (even if subconsciously) what constitutes a good person. This extends James O. Young’s (1999) argument that the arts have cognitive value due to their potential for immediate demonstration via interpretative or affective representation and Jeanette Bicknell’s (2002) suggestion that music’s representations of aesthetic ideas in sound stimulate mental activity in listeners by claiming that music is a semantically dense, contentful experience in which intuitive flashes of ethical approval or disapproval may be iteratively experienced. These features point to how music’s capacity for engagement and articulation extends beyond any alleged propositional content, and tally with recent emphases on music’s crucial worlddisclosive properties when discussing the dangers inherent in trying to focus on music’s language-like properties and reduce it to semantics (for example, Bowie 2007). When both music and language are considered part and parcel of human practice, as powerful articulations of being-in-the-world, it is possible to do justice to accounting for the ways in which they engage and influence us. Music’s subconscious influence on human behaviour has gained traction among researchers in music psychology and cognitive science: witness studies such as Clarke, DeNora, and Vuoskoski (2015, 20), which demonstrates “narrow but ‘hard-nosed’ evidence” that exposure to music from different cultures can positively influence unconscious empathic responses to cultural others. Nevertheless, the reality that music’s capacity for increasing social division is equally as powerful as its capacity for increasing affiliation means that for researchers in philosophical ethics, thinking about ethics as intuitive prompts us to ask what ethical patterns are being developed in a given experience—and, perhaps more urgently, what conception of the good is being promulgated. Moreover, considering the intuitive aspects of ethics raises the point that it is not only “the seeming universality of ‘humanly organized sounds’ used to heighten and inspire the signal features and events of human and cultural life” (Higgins 2011, 114) that makes music ethically noteworthy; rather, music’s very ubiquity provides repeated opportunities for individuals to be exposed to situations where Haidt and Joseph’s ethically significant “flashes of approval and disapproval” are developed. Thus, by including music’s innate ephemerality alongside the iterative character of much modern listening, we can better evaluate music as ethically formative. The cumulative impact of this exposure is that music can shape our moral imaginations as well as serve as an expression of the intuitive ethical patterns developed by a society. Embodied. Not only is music first and foremost an experience, it is also to a great extent an embodied experience. As mentioned above, Higgins considers music’s psychophysiological power to influence a listener’s outlook and behaviour to be a feature which affords music its ethical capacity. When listening to music, we become aware of ourselves as embodied beings and become engaged physically, for example through feeling inspired to move, to sing along, or simply to breathe more consciously. Music reminds

296   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen us of our bodily engagement, of our capacity to immerse ourselves physically, and thereby enhances our sense of vitality. “Music, simultaneously engaging our physical, emotional, and intellectual receptivities, makes us feel fully alive” (Higgins 2011, 121). While activating and strengthening our sense of being human, the embodied, felt aspect of musical engagement deepens our sense of physically being-in-the-world both as individual and social selves.3 And as we sense our physical being through music and experience-embodied immersion, we can also sense those aspects of dynamism and vulnerability inherent in feeling alive that can contribute to ethical reflection and engagement. The embodied characteristic of the model can be illuminated further by considering recent “4E” approaches within cognitive science in which the mind is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted: human consciousness emerges through our embodied experience of our surroundings, it is embedded in our social and cultural existence, it thereby extends out into the world, and is manifested as we enact our relationship with and in it. These approaches thus suggest that cognition is shaped by dynamic interactions between the brain, the body, and physical and social environments (see, for example, Krueger 2019 and Herbert, Clarke, and Clarke 2019). Part of this shaping happens by a process of “mental offloading”: once we “transfer” cognitive information into our physical surroundings we engage in such offloading. Examples include tilting our heads to perceive a rotated image, or putting information into our memory-supporting smartphone such that we receive a reminder of an upcoming event. The mental offloading in turn enables novel ways in which the mind is subsequently influenced by this new mode of engagement, potentially affording new forms of thought and experience. Considering musical engagement and experience as fundamentally embodied allows for the possibilities of mental transformation that can occur through listening and/or performing. In accounting for the materiality of musical encounters, Joel Krueger argues that music can serve as a tool for offloading in a similar way as other tools and technologies. Via this offloading, “music can (at least potentially) scaffold access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour” (Krueger 2019, 55). While Krueger is concerned with music’s ability to scaffold emotional consciousness, the consensual model of musical ethics interrogates the ethical aspects of such scaffolding. While enabling us to feel human—and thereby augmenting our ethical capacity—music might scaffold access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour that offer insight into how to live well with ourselves and others. Emergent. Music is necessarily experienced in time: its progressions in tones, rhythm, form, and so on are dependent on beginnings, endings, and durations. The consensual model of musical ethics is subsequently both time-dependent and timesensitive. It is emergent in the sense that it is in a state of constant becoming, continually constructed through dynamic negotiation among various agents and contexts. Music can draw us into the present to the extent that the series of musical “nows” experienced makes us forget “external” time entirely. As it takes hold of our attention, we become emergent beings, held, captured, and guided through a state of

Ethics   297 immersive transformation: we can emerge from a listening experience feeling different, uplifted perhaps, or ignited, vulnerable, or sad. The transient experience of music can make us long for a repetition and we press play again to experience the same transformative embodied immersion (or at least one that is similar to what we’ve just encountered). Music appears to be more than simply an “image of time” (Langer 1967): it seems actively to offer a new kind of time-consciousness through which our sense of humanity can be affected and transformed. Crucially, music’s temporality enhances our awareness that we are social beings: it “engages our primitive sense of being temporal beings; and this temporal dimension is a basis for experiencing music as social” (Higgins 2011, 126). Connecting us to our social context through a shared experience of time, music offers a sense of belonging that draws us out of our individual sphere and into a social encounter of value for ethical living. The consensual model of musical ethics is sensitive to both individual and social aspects of musical experience, and seeks to develop insights into the extent to which music’s emergent attribute has ethical import. Practice-oriented: Finally, a consensual ethics is based in musical praxis. This phrase has multiple implications.4 First, it suggests that as a method, consensual ethics is concerned with investigating musical practices—that is, how people use music, whether as listeners, performers, composers, and so on. In focusing on the everyday doing or making of music (what Christopher Small [1998] terms “musicking”), this guards against an overly abstracted reification of music, but it simultaneously calls for reflexivity on the part of researchers in musical ethics. How do the particular emphases of consensual ethics allow us to interrogate our own processes of engaging with music? Taking a cue from ethnomusicology, how might a consensual ethics help us reflect on our lives and work (and those of others) in and with music? In addition to a focus on specific practices, praxis also has another implication that links it to the musico-ethical thought of ancient Greek philosophy—namely that it refers to the act of doing something or engaging with a situation in a way that combines contemplation (theoria) with knowledge. (For more on the ethical implications of the practical knowledge known in Aristotle as phronēsis, see Benson’s chapter on “Improvisation,” ch. 21, this volume.) Thinking about musico-ethical praxis encourages us to make connections between the general and the particular through close engagement with the substance and context of the music that permeates our everyday experience. We have claimed that the primary ethical function of music is to make us more humane by revealing, enacting, and promoting the feeling of ethical responsibilities and sensibilities towards ourselves and one another. Our construction of a consensual musical ethics is intended to cast light on ethical situations and tensions found in everyday musical experiences: it is a response to Higgins’s suggestion that music offers a model useful for philosophical ethics, a model that encourages an open-minded, imaginative approach to resolving ethical tensions. By outlining specific areas in which music as a relational, intuitive, embodied, emergent, and practice-oriented activity may be said to interact with ethics, we posit a consensual musical ethics as an opportunity for revealing new facets of musico-ethical situations.

298   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen With these tenets in mind, the question naturally becomes how, then, might our framework of a consensual musical ethics work in practice? In the spirit of application and reflective action, we now turn to a small-scale case study of the indie singer-songwriter Imogen Heap and her song “Hide and Seek” (2005), to explore what the song might offer in terms of ethical engagement.5 In keeping with the holistic nature of our investigation to this point, we consider the song’s sound, performing context, and reception in terms of the key aspects of our framework.

A Consensual Musical Ethics of “Hide and Seek” “Hide and Seek” was released in 2005 as the first single from Heap’s second studio album Speak for Yourself. Since then, it has become her most popular song, appearing in numerous television show soundtracks and multiple remixes, as well as being prominently sampled in Jason Derulo’s debut (and Billboard-topping) single “Whatcha Say” (2009). In this analysis, we reference three separate contexts for the song: the studio album recording, the 2005 music video directed by Joel Peissing, and a live version performed in Oslo in September 2018. Although each of these highlights different aspects of the music and of Heap’s performance, considering these versions of the song in concert with each other gives a fuller picture of the multifarious ways the song may be experienced. We begin on the level of sound and spatial design. Prior to considering any other text or context, “Hide and Seek” offers a poignant example of the relational aspect of the model in that it provides a powerful invitation to both subjective and intersubjective interaction. On the question of subjectivity, this is signalled most powerfully by the total dominance of the voice as the signifier of a body and a consciousness (see, among others, Dolar 2006). From the outset, Heap’s voice assumes an intimate proximity by being centrally located in the sonic mix, yet despite this staged centrality, the voice’s implication of a single subject is denied by the artist’s technological extension and multiplication of her voice into a multilayered haze, in which the “real” voice is often nearly subsumed. The result is a unique kind of immersion in which the sounded closeness of the multiplied voice to the listener is intense and haunting, demanding undivided attention.6 It is first and foremost this spatial design that determines the listener’s involvement, regardless of the lyrics. The intersubjective relationship thus operates on at least two distinct levels: amongst the many iterations of Heap’s voice, and between the listener and the multiplied subjectivity implied by the music. The sound design of this song is an instructive example of what we might term “relational sound” partly because the manipulation of the voice through the vocoder enhances the expression of Heap’s subjectivity through what she has called “a choir of many-mes” (Heap  2014a), and partly because the sound of the voice

Ethics   299 engages the listener in a very specific, s­ ubjectivity-shaping way. In a September 2018 interview with Nanette Nielsen, Heap explained her take on the importance of the voice, saying: Because it is just the voice, I think that’s what draws people in: there’s very little else there, and it is just the voice. It finds your place in there, that’s the core of how we are our voices. There’s something very human and close about it, and I think that—in the noise of the planet—that’s what cuts through. It’s just the simplicity and the bareness of the voice.  (Heap 2018)

If the sonic design is crucial to the subjective immersion the song offers, it is perhaps not surprising that—apart from the words “hide and seek” and possibly the opening phrase “where are we”—composing the music preceded the writing of the lyrics (Heap 2018). Nevertheless, the invitation to a shared subjectivity via the sound design is only magnified by the first words: “where are we.” If attentive to the lyrics, the listener is immediately guided towards a shared experience: it is “we,” not “you” or “I” who is driving the song. And as is familiar from childhood, “Hide and Seek” is not a solitary game. The ­reiteration of such questions as “where are we?” and “what the hell is going on?” as the opening lines in every performance also indicates the emergent character of this sonic meaning-making. Despite the initial familiarity of the titular “Hide and Seek” image, the lyrics of the song are arrestingly cryptic and open up possibilities for relational meaning on several levels. There is deliberate mystique surrounding what the song is about: fans have offered several interpretations, none of which is—according to Heap—the “right” one. (For an example, see Fenzel 2010.) When asked in interview whether she holds the key to the ultimate meaning of the song, she answers with an immediate “of course.” She keeps it hidden for personal reasons, but at the same time recognizes that the mystique makes the song very powerful: It’s a very deeply personal song, and as a result, [and with] people still being alive, I want it to remain private. It also has so much more strength in the world without people knowing what it’s about, because it gives space for the individual to breathe their own meaning into it.  (Heap 2018)

On the evening of the 2018 interview, Heap offered a further small hint in concert when introducing “Little Bird” (2009), saying: “this song is about the same people as ‘Hide and Seek’ is about. That’s all I’m going to say.” Thirteen years after the release of the song, the relational meaning of “Hide and Seek” is alive and well, neatly protected and still very powerful. (For more on the relationship between private experience and public performance in indie music see Phillips-Hutton 2018b.) Adding to this invitation to intersubjective engagement for the listener, Heap’s fans have been actively encouraged to share their personal experience of the song. Prior to a concert held at the Camden Roundhouse in London as part of the Reverb

300   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen festival curated by Heap in August 2014, fans were met with the following posting on Heap’s blog: How do you relate to Hide and Seek? A place or a person, a meeting or memory? What comes to mind when you hear this song? Immi wants to connect to your experiences with this precious song of hers, live onstage.  (Heap 2014b)

Following this message, fans were then invited to share their photos on Twitter and Instagram using particular hashtags with the aim that the photos might appear “with Imogen” during her performance of the song. By weaving together these interpretations as part of a live performance, “Hide and Seek” demonstrates how music offers opportunities to make and remake meaning as new associations emerge in the course of every performance. Taken together, these aspects contribute to making the meaning of “Hide and Seek” both inherently relational and emergent: the fans assume ownership of the song through the experience of a secret which keeps them guessing at the same time that it opens up an opportunity for them to infuse the song with thoughts, experiences, and memories of their own. Relational meaning reminds us of what it is to be human and thereby enhances our awareness of the extent of our ethical capacity: it provides a space within which we encounter ourselves and others, where we can reflect on interconnections, sense that we are not alone, and understand that our intersubjective relationships matter. In the case of “Hide and Seek,” relations are formed through the sonic design as well as through other facets of its construction such as its lyrics and the formation of secrecy surrounding its meaning. Another aspect of contemporary musical practice that highlights what it is to be human is our ever-deepening encounter with technology. In “Hide and Seek,” we are met with a sonically rich and highly effective technological manipulation of that most human of expressions: the voice. When subjected to “the choir of many-mes,” the listener becomes acutely aware of the manipulation, which is at the same time both enticing and disturbing: it appears empowering while clearly being beyond what is humanly possible. The precision of the sounded words in both pitch and time enhances the experience of Heap’s plural and extended subjectivity: it is not a robotic encounter, but rather one that augments the sound of something human, musical, and familiar. To that extent, despite its technical perfection, the polished focus is not a clinical reduction of sound; it is an encounter that—through being musical—presents the listener with an augmented humanity. Furthermore, the song’s technically-infused control is offset by the softly humane fragility of Heap’s non-manipulated voice during the refrains as she carefully navigates the higher registers above the choir of “many-mes”: this only augments the powerful meeting between technology and humanity in the song. Through the manipulation of the voice in “Hide and Seek,” we encounter both the embodied and the emergent aspects of the consensual model of musical ethics. The closeness and tightly harmonic and controlled configuration of the voice(s) invites a “felt” listening, a dynamic embodied engagement with the vocal sound structures at play. Crucial to the embodied experience is that the first thing presented to the listener is

Ethics   301 not the sounded voice, but the sounded breath: the song begins on an inhale, setting the stage for the “many-mes.” As choir singers will know, nothing is as alerting and engaging as the sound of an inhalation: here we begin, here we sync our joint participation.7 Heap had never concentrated on breaths when mixing before, but “Hide and Seek” was different: after the initial demo recording, the “foregrounded breathing” was deliberately written into the mix of the song: I couldn’t do the breaths better. I’d never really focused on breaths before, but you’ve only got singing and breath, you’ve only got melody and space. I used the original demo breaths and spliced them in. It just had something about it . . . If I had lyrics, I would have left the vocals there ’cause they were nice too. But I didn’t have lyrics. The breaths I spliced in as much as I could, so mostly the space was left in from the original demo.  (Heap 2018)

If the result of the foregrounding of breathing is a very effective invitation to embodied immersive listening, the (related) sense of space in “Hide of Seek” is no less important, and emphasizes the song’s emergent aspect, i.e., the way in which it appears to project a particular engagement with time. Part of the “immersive strength” of the song is the space it affords to breathing and to phrasing, enabling a uniquely absorbed listening experience. When asked about the tempo of the song, Heap laments how many remixes of the song have failed to get it right. At the same time that the tempo is challenging for other performers to get right, however, this observation testifies to Heap’s own, innately felt, sense of time in “Hide and Seek.” Tellingly, Heap did not use a metronome when recording and continues to perform the song without one. As she said in our interview: “I didn’t have a click [track], I didn’t have anything. And that’s unusual for me” (Heap 2018). If the sense of time in “Hide and Seek” were potentially fundamentally bound up with an embodied sense of breathing, it would contribute to the time-sensitive flow and engagement the song is capable of projecting to its listener. From this short description of some of the pertinent aspects of “Hide and Seek” as performed by Heap we can begin to engage with the kinds of ethical questions that it raises. For example, what patterns or intuitions does the experience of listening and participating with Heap develop in her audience? As the song continues to receive countless performances (both live and recorded), how do the iterated invitations to participate in relational, emergent, and embodied experience contribute to the formation of ethical attitudes? If the embodied experience of breathing or singing together (as exemplified in the opening to “Hide and Seek”) can be seen as a small-scale, but ethically significant, moment of enactment of community, what kinds of ethical communication might be enacted in the practice of these performances? Taken together, while augmenting our sense of being human, the aspects of the song covered “scaffold” new forms of thought, experience, and (potentially) behaviour that offer insight into how to live well with ourselves and others. Presenting “Hide and Seek” as a particular example is not to claim that it is somehow unique: we are not hereby suggesting that these aspects are not potentially present in most, or even all, music. Instead, we wish to argue that developing the skills

302   Ariana Phillips-Hutton and Nanette Nielsen for teasing out these ethical characteristics is crucial if we wish to offer a deeper understanding of musical ethics.

Imagining the Human: Implications of Musical Ethics By thinking about musical ethics as relational we are better able to evaluate the interpersonal encounters music engenders, fosters, allows, and sometimes demands; we are also able to evaluate the relational contexts in which the musical encounter occurs. Thinking about musical ethics as embodied sensitizes us to the effects that immersive listening has on individuals, as well as the effects that performances have on bodies, whether those of performers or of audiences. Recognizing that musical ethics is emergent might prompt us to ask how performance and listening contribute to the temporal colouring of our lives and our sense of feeling human. Thinking about musical ethics as intuitive invites us to consider what habits of subconscious feeling towards oneself and others a performance or listening might promote, or what flashes of approval or disapproval are prepared by these musical engagements and suggested to listeners. To view musical ethics as praxis is a characteristic at the very core of the model, one that nurtures a balancing of the general and the particular through close, critical engagement with our everyday musical encounters. It is our hope that all of the characteristics in the model together contribute to a reflective action, leading to—as Higgins calls for—further imaginative encounters that may help to unveil and to resolve ethical challenges and tensions. A key tenet of the consensual model of musical ethics is that it seeks to cast light upon one of our main claims, namely that music’s primary ethical significance lies in its ability to offer participants significant insights into what being human is all about.8 Our model lays forth an ambition for an everyday ethics in which our interaction with music is an active engagement, an empowering encounter that enables us to approach each other more ethically, to live well with ourselves and others. A central challenge for future research in music and ethics will be to keep up with what it means to be human in a fastdeveloping, technologically dominated, and environmentally challenged world and to explore the extent to which musical engagement and understanding can contribute to making us more humane, continually shaping the fullness of humanity.

Notes 1. This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 262762. 2. The French term sens has been the focus of a significant amount of philosophical inquiry. Jacques Rancière discusses it as signifying at once “sense,” “meaning,” and “direction” in developing his theory of the sensible (Tanke 2011, 3). Despite qualms about attributing to art an ethical function in the manner of Jean-François Lyotard, Rancière nonetheless

Ethics   303 asserts that imagination—and art as its source—is a means for transforming the sensible (Tanke 2011, 150–155). Other scholars who focus on sens include Jean-Luc Nancy for whom it is indicative of a longing for resonant, shared meaning (Nancy 2007), and Jairo Moreno and Gavin Steingo, who investigate sens in terms of an audible making of the political (Moreno and Steingo 2012). 3. For more on the implications of musical embodiment as a means of knowledge transfer and witness creation, see Phillips-Hutton 2018a. 4. Although it originates with Aristotle, praxis has been a recurring concept of interest in philosophy. Important twentieth-century writings include Arendt 1958; Freire 2006; and Gramsci 2011. 5. “Hide and Seek” appeared on Heap’s second album Speak for Yourself. Recordings are widely available, while the music video can be viewed on YouTube: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UYIAfiVGluk (accessed July 16, 2019). 6. For more on how sound design influences listener perception see Dibben  2006 and Lacasse 2001. 7. Despite the necessity for synced breathing in choral music, such inhalations are normally erased from recordings; in pop music, sounded examples of inhalations are likewise rare, though one can be heard in “I’ll Never Love Again” by Lady Gaga (2018). An instrumental example that might be seen as analogous is the opening to the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Op. 135. 8. Throughout this chapter we have focused the human side of ethics. Nonetheless, we recognize that a burgeoning area of thought is how we might productively extend the ethical in a developing posthuman or transhuman world. For more on posthumanism see Tomlinson, “Posthumanism,” ch. 20, this volume.

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chapter 14

Phenom enol ogy Simon Høffding

From a Phenomenology of Music to a Phenomenology of Musicianship Phenomenology is broadly conceived of as the study of experience. On a more narrow conception, the one I shall use for this chapter, it is a particular philosophical tradition. Founded and expounded by philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Sartre, phenomenology investigates not just the nature of experience—how something might appear to me here and now—but also the structures and conditions of the possibility of experience, how it is possible for something to appear to me in the way that it does. When coupled to music, a phenomenological investigation ought then to address both how music is experienced and what phenomenological structures allow music to be experienced in the way it is experienced.1 A number of philosophers have written on phenomenology and music. The works that most directly address this particular combination are Bruce Ellis Benson’s The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Benson 2003), Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology (Clifton 1983), Alfred Pike’s A Phenomenological Analysis of Musical Experience and Other Related Essays (Pike 1970), Alfred Schutz’s “Fragments of a Phenomenology of Music” (Schutz [1944]1976), and F.  Joseph Smith’s The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music (Smith 1979). It is worth noting how many of these titles focus on the phenomenology of music as an experience of listening. As the study of the condition of possibility of experience, phenomenology always takes the subject of experience into consideration. But do we exhaust the experience of music by referring to the listening subject? No, certainly not. In this chapter I contend that the study of performing musicians is indispensable to a fully-fledged phenomenology of music.2

308   Simon Høffding The performing professional musician, or the expert musician, is a yet-untapped resource for the phenomenology of music: spending several hours on a daily basis honing her or his skills, thinking about the meaning and message of the pieces to be played, practising the relation between the manipulation of notes and the manipulation of emotions, and not least undergoing various forms of musical absorption; all this gives the expert musician a different, and in many ways a more intimate and intense, experience of music than that of the ordinary listener. This intensity derives not least from the fact that the musician, as opposed to the listener, actively produces the music through her or his bodily movements. The looping cycles of action and perception in turn give rise to experiences of intimacy such as a peculiar form of felt fusion with the instrument, with the music, and even with one’s co-players. All of this can peak in the experience of “losing oneself ” in the music, which will be a central theme in this chapter. There is an advantage in shifting from a traditional phenomenological analysis of music listening to a more experimental analysis of music performance. A traditional phenomenological approach always departs from the first-person perspective, in other words from how “my” experience is constituted (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 13–43). It follows then, that a traditional phenomenological exploration of performance would be possible only if one was both a phenomenologist and an expert musician. This is a rare combination, which also accounts for the scarcity of literature on the phenomenology of expert musicianship. But there is another way out: one can depart from the traditional first-person phenomenological methodology and engage in a second-person methodology such as conducting phenomenologically informed interviews with musicians.3 Such a step is amenable to the kind of phenomenology informing, the (embodied) cognitive sciences informed by, and in turn ­ (Gallagher  2005; Gallagher et al.  2015; Varela,  Rosch, and Thompson  1991; Wheeler  2005). Approaching the phenomenology of musicianship in this fashion opens it to cross-examination by various quantitative measures that overall can provide a more nuanced and interdisciplinary understanding of the impact music in its various forms can have on our minds and bodies. In this chapter, I provide an overview of some of the current debates in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. This overview is informed by my own phenomenological study of musicians, a study based on qualitative, phenomenological interviews (Høffding and Martiny 2016) with several professional jazz and classical musicians, primarily those from the internationally renowned chamber ensemble the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). I present, first, a topography of absorption derived from the ­various experiences that musicians undergo while practising and performing. I then use this topography to argue against a pervasive position found in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, as well as in sports psychology, namely that thinking about or reflecting upon one’s actions during performance deteriorates the performance. Contrary to this position, I suggest, my topography reveals that some states of musical absorption are of a reflective character while others are not, which in turn implies that

Phenomenology   309 reflection cannot be an essential phenomenological structure in such absorption. In the third part of this chapter, I identify such a structure in analysing the experience of losing oneself in music and argue that musical absorption is best conceptualized as a change in one’s sense of agency. To understand musical absorption, in other words, we should look to the sense of agency rather than to reflection. Finally, I advocate in the conclusion for the use of phenomenological interviews as a research strategy for philosophical thinking on music.

A Topography of Musical Absorption When looking at a chamber ensemble performing, one can see all kinds of things. Its members—perhaps smiling, or even laughing—might look as if they are enjoying themselves, or they might look stern, serious, or absorbed. Musicians, however, qua performers, are also deceivers. From their body language, gestures, and mimicry, one cannot readily see what kinds of experiences they are undergoing. One might infer that since it is difficult to play the violin, viola, or cello and since music is complex, musicians must concentrate intensively on the task at hand. When asked, however, what happens in their minds during a performance, the DSQ—consisting of Frederik Øland (Frederik Ø) on violin, Rune Sørensen (Rune) on violin, Asbjørn Nørgaard (Asbjørn) on viola, and Fredrik Sjölin (Fredrik S) on cello—gave some interesting descriptions that are roughly categorizable as shown in figure 14.1:

fru str at ed

pl ay

in g

Topography of musical absorption min d not- -wande ri bein g-th ng ere

standard absorption

absorbed not-being-there

ex-static absorption

Figure 14.1  A topography of musical absorption. See Høffding 2019 for more details.

310   Simon Høffding If we begin with standard absorption, this is the broadest category in which the DSQ members find themselves most of the time. A core feature that brings together the various kinds of experiences in this category is a feeling that the music is somehow playing itself, as expressed by Frederik Ø: You can perhaps say that what we’re striving for, at a technical level, is that it . . . is coming by itself and that you are not too aware of it; that you do not spend any energy on it; that you just have it coming by itself but that you are aware of it maintaining itself; that there is this small control.

Standard absorption generally takes place when a performance unfolds in a pleasant manner that at least to some degree corresponds to the performance plan.4 The musicians can enjoy the sound of a chord perfectly pitched or the sight of their fingers moving in the right way. Standard absorption can also be informed by a more reflective attitude, as in Frederik Ø’s “small control” that is always present in the background in case things should go awry. Another example comes from Rune, who speaks of wondering or even worrying about whether he looks interesting or adequately expressive to the audience. On occasions, the DSQ members get distracted or absent-minded, here labelled mind-wandering not-being-there. Frederik Ø calls this “going to Netto [a Danish chain store],” which means that, for some time, one mentally leaves the performance to think about something as trivial as what one might need to shop for later. Asbjørn expresses it as follows: “It could be like if you are driving and then have driven . . . or suddenly find yourself someplace else on the road—that you suddenly are 500 metres further down the highway and cannot recollect having driven those 500 metres.”5 Both Frederik Ø and Asbjørn positively affirm that mind-wandering not-being-there is like normal absent-mindedness, as when one cannot remember whether one has locked the front door, or where one’s keys are placed. While playing, and seemingly without detracting much from the quality of the performance, the mind wanders somewhere else and thus exhibits an intentionality distinct from that of standard absorption, which is directed towards some aspect of the performance. The DSQ members recognize that this mode of awareness is different from deep absorption and unlikely to lead to anything of particular experiential or artistic value. Mind-wandering not-being-there indicates that a performance is not particularly demanding. Next to it, however, we find frustrated playing. Certain situations can impose a great deal of stress on the musicians, stress that prevents the kind of effortless execution characteristic of standard absorption. Such stress can derive from physical or mental disturbances, irritations, or pains, or from an unusually noisy or inattentive audience. Rune notes that: In the Nielsen string quartet . . . it was not a good experience to play this piece of music. You entered a kind of “to hell with it”, like [mood], which is not very good when you have to play music. It became pure survival and I had these frustrated thoughts in my head—partly because of my own playing, partly because I know we can do it better.

Phenomenology   311 The intentional attitude here is one of “pure survival,” of trying “to make one’s way back” to standard absorption, often leading to an overly technical focus or a reflective attention to specific body parts aching or functioning improperly, or to aspects of the performance not working optimally. There is a mismatch between expectation and execution that prevents the freedom experienced in standard absorption from unfolding. While frustrated playing might be greatly discouraging to the performing musicians, it is often not perceptible to the audience. At the bottom and right-hand side of the topography we find two kinds of deeply absorbed experiences, which are marked by potent changes in fundamental phenomenological structures, such as self-awareness, intentionality, and time consciousness. Deep forms of absorption are also related to more romantic and mystical conceptions of the musician as a medium, to beliefs that it is not the musician her- or himself who is playing and that the musician should lose her- or himself in the music. Deep forms of absorption are highly pleasant, existentially significant, and treasured, although very rare: the DSQ members—each with a musical track record of over thirty years—say that they have experienced it only a handful of times. If pleasant, significant, and treasured, why does such absorption occur so rarely?6 I believe that we have as yet too poor an understanding of the phenomenon to answer this question. There is no particular kind of mental action the DSQ members can produce to bring about such states of absorption. Rather, it is something that happens to them. As a passive (see Høffding 2019, ch. 10) and elusive kind of experience, neither musicians nor researchers can trace its genesis; hence, we cannot adequately answer when, why, and with what frequency it occurs. Though elusive, it is not as mystical as some musicians take it to be. It can, for instance, take two distinct and seemingly opposite forms: absorbed notbeing-there marked by a seeming absence of awareness and post-performance amnesia (see Høffding & Montero 2019); and ex-static absorption marked by unusual clarity, as if at a great distance from the performance and by a sense of omnipotence and extraordinary beauty. The cellist, Fredrik S, practising a Bach cello suite, gives an example of the former: The deeper you are in, the less you observe the world around you . . . and I had this especially powerful experience . . . where I completely disappeared. I remember that it was an incredibly pleasant feeling in the body. And it was incredibly strange to come back and at that point. I spent a few seconds to realize where I had been. I had been completely gone and with no possibility of observing . . . It was this intense euphoric joy.

Being completely gone means being unaware of one’s perceptual input, of thinking, of remembering or of any other mental function for that sake. “No possibility of observing” does not merely mean that Fredrik S wasn’t seeing anything around him or that he wasn’t listening to what he was playing. Rather, I take it to indicate that his awareness was not intentionally directed at all (on non-intentional awareness see, for instance, Thompson 2014, 231–271 on dreamless sleep). Furthermore, I take it to mean that he was

312   Simon Høffding momentarily almost deprived of the most fundamental form of self-awareness, that ­pre-reflective and ubiquitous sense of being a subject accompanying all experience (Zahavi 2005, 1999). All that remains after waking up from this (lack of) experience is a pleasant bodily sensation and a euphoric joy that is perhaps indicative of that most primal form of consciousness which Evan Thompson calls “the bare feeling of being alive” (Thompson 2014, 234–235). This feeling of being alive experienced as euphorically joyful should lead us to acknowledge the centrality of affectivity and emotion in consciousness (Colombetti 2014; Colombetti and Roberts 2015). Finally, given primarily as sensation in the body, absorbed not-being-there seems to confirm the claim found in phenomenology (Zahavi  1999, 91–109; Taipale  2014) and some strands of cognitive science (Gallagher  2005; Gallagher et al  2015; Varela, Rosch, and Thompson  1991) that consciousness is essentially embodied. To a phenomenologist, that consciousness is embodied does not trivially mean that the mind needs a brain and a body to exist. It means, rather, that the form, movement, and potential of the body shape or partially constitute the very nature of the mind. Further, one must distinguish between many different kinds of bodies. Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for instance, distinguish between the physical body (roughly speaking, the body as object) and the lived body (equally roughly speaking, the body as subject) (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 129–151). To better understand what kind of body the DSQ members rely on, let me introduce some terminology from Dorothée Legrand. To accomplish our everyday actions we do not normally pay attention to how our body moves. Its degree of manifestation is “transparent” (Legrand 2007) and its functioning pre-reflective, allowing us to focus on the world around us. We can, however, shift our focus and make our body an intentional object through a wilfull act of attention, such as counting the hairs on one’s hand. In that case, the body’s degree of manifestation will be “opaque” and its functioning will be reflective. Thus, the intentional object of my awareness is either the world or my body, never both (Ingerslev 2013). This puts the expert musician in a predicament. The musician needs their body to function pre-reflectively and automatically, that is, transparently, but they also need to be able to make very fast conscious adjustments, drawing on the opaque body. For this purpose, Legrand claims that experts develop a “performative body”: Expertise (with one’s body as in dance, or with one’s mind as in some meditative states) can . . . put this subjective character of experience “at the front” of one’s experience without turning it into a mere intentional object.  (Legrand 2007, 512)

Absorbed not-being-there is one example of how the performative body works. “At the front” of Fredrik S’s experience is an affective and bodily consciousness, yet one that is not given as an intentional object. The combined status as pre-reflective yet at the front of experience accounts for the twofold quality of such absorption, namely that it is, at one and the same time, strongly felt as well as indistinct and uncategorizable. Legrand develops this kind of thinking further with Susanne Ravn (Legrand and Ravn 2009; see also Colombetti 2014, 113–134), but I leave the discussion here with a few general remarks on her work.

Phenomenology   313 Legrand’s idea of the performative body pushes us to rethink what the body can be and she shows how thinking about expertise can develop our concepts. Further, she confirms the embodiment thesis by showing how intense training of one’s body can develop genuinely new forms of consciousness. An example of this can be found regarding ex-static absorption. Asbjørn expresses it as follows: You are both less conscious and a lot more conscious I think. Because I still think that if you’re in the zone, then I know how I’m sitting on the chair, I know if my knees are locked, I know if I am flexing my thigh muscle, I know if my shoulders are lifted, I know if my eyes are strained, I know who is sitting on the first row, I know more or less what they are doing, but it is somewhat more, like disinterested, neutrally registering, I am not like inside, I am not kind of a part of the set-up, I am just looking at it, while I’m in the zone. But if I’m not in the zone, I become a co-player, I become a part of the whole thing and cannot look at it like a bird over the waters. I become conscious of things because I am not part of them to the same extent7 . . . It is not a primitive control. It is a kind of very deep control. Ur-control. You really feel like a commander deploying the troops and control it in a way and it gives a kick that you are just a kind of pure superiority and pure control.

Asbjørn’s is a stark contrast to Fredrik S’s being “completely gone.” He reports detailed visual perception of the audience, kinaesthetic awareness of his own body, and importantly, a perspective on the performance as if it isn’t himself playing. He is “neutrally registering” things from afar and feels that he does not need to intervene, but that he, through a quasi-telekinetic control, can determine the performance without having to interfere directly. The key markers of ex-static absorption, as seen from this example, are an altered sense of phenomenal distance to one’s own experiential life accompanied by an altered sense of agency, through which one experiences an omnipotence as if the performance takes care of itself while one can enjoy the spectacle. Now that we have a brief overview of the range of experiences musicians can undergo while performing, let us look at how the topography of absorption challenges thinking on the role of reflection in expertise.

Musical Self-Awareness: Between Reflection and Coping Based on readings of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, Hubert Dreyfus has argued that our primary way of being in the world is a direct coping with our environment, a second nature whose smooth operations are impeded when thinking or reflection kicks in (Dreyfus 2005, 2007b, 2013). More precisely, Dreyfus claims that thinking and coping are mutually exclusive (Dreyfus 2007a). (For a discussion of Dreyfus’s philosophy, see

314   Simon Høffding Høffding 2014; Schear 2013; Sutton et al. 2011; Breivik 2007; Dow 2015.) To support this claim, he relies on anecdotes from various experts such as baseball and chess players who seem to demonstrate that thinking about what you’re doing as you’re doing it impedes expert performance. He claims that such experts are bereft of intentional content while optimally performing, that they are unconscious, or “like a sleepwalker” (Dreyfus 2013, 28, 38). One the one hand, Dreyfus’s conclusions are consistent with a large body of literature on expertise in psychology, in particular on “choking” (Beilock and Carr 2001; see Cappuccio 2015 for a general discussion of the concept). On the other hand, he challenges fundamental phenomenological thinking on the nature of selfawareness, most notably the thesis that all awareness necessarily entails a ubiquitous self-acquaintance or pre-reflective self-awareness, formulated by Zahavi as “the minimal self ” (Zahavi 2005; 2011). On basis of the minimal-self thesis, one would argue that a performing expert cannot be entirely unconscious, because unconsciousness would normally entail lying motionless and literally blacked-out on the ground, which is clearly not the case. In performance, even if denied in experts’ anecdotes, there must be at least some bodily proprioceptive awareness and with that an implicit minimal selfawareness. In other words, Dreyfus’s “unconscious coping” and Zahavi’s “minimal self ” cannot both be true. What does the topography above have to say in this discussion? First, it does recognize that when Dreyfus writes of expertise as unconscious sleep-walking, he is pointing to (albeit perhaps mis-characterizing) a real phenomenon, what we have described as absorbed not-being-there. The topography, however, also demonstrates that absorbed expertise is much more than sleep-walking or automatic action. Asbjørn’s ex-static experience, reported with detailed descriptions of visual and proprioceptive input, involves an abundance of intentional content, a heightened awareness that shares the distance to its intentional objects with reflective attitudes. And Rune’s thinking about how he looks to the audience while standardly absorbed shows that reflection is not exclusive of coping. Rather, we might formulate expertise as the mastery of a reflection-infused coping, a learning to master one’s reflective faculties such that they enhance, rather than impede, performance. In this fashion, expertise consists in building up a homogeneous and continuous mental space that spans from not-being-there states to reflective ones. Such an understanding of pre-reflective and reflective self-awareness in the phenomenology of expertise would also be in line with recent trends in philosophy of mind (Montero 2016) and cognitive science (Christensen, Sutton, and McIlwain 2015; Sutton et al. 2011).

Agency and Losing Oneself in Music Even if the topography of musical absorption arguably shows reflection and coping to be continuous, we’re still left with the following paradox: some DSQ members claim to have had experiences of absorbed not-being-there and these instances are of great

Phenomenology   315 emotional and existential significance to them. Even if they claim to have “completely disappeared” in the moment of absorption, these were still extraordinary and intense experiences. This phenomenological contradiction is crystallized by Frederik Ø and Asbjørn, who initiate their descriptions of deep absorption with: “it is exactly both being present and not being present simultaneously” and “you are both less conscious and a lot more conscious I think.” Frederik Ø and Asbjørn here are talking about what we might know as the experience of losing oneself in the music. What exactly is lost, when one loses oneself in the music? If the self is lost, then who is performing? And what about the minimal self? Frederik Ø and Asbjørn both describe deep absorption as “being both more and less present simultaneously,” but I suggest that such a contradiction should not be taken to invalidate their utterances. Rather, the contradiction demonstrates that we are working in uncharted mental territory that is difficult to grasp and to express for the musicians as well as for the researchers studying them. Remember that as experts, the DSQ members have trained intensively, not just in the manipulation of their instruments, but also in various mental positions, flexibilities, and techniques that go beyond the phenomenological capacities necessary for everyday living. Just as musical experts, through practising, have altered significantly their plastic brains (Vuust et al. 2005, 2009), so too have they altered their plastic minds, that is, their basic experiential structures such as the sense of agency—or so I take the phenomenological study of absorption to suggest. To conclude my critique of Dreyfus, from the topography of musical absorption we have seen that reflection accompanies some forms of absorption and not others, and that it does so without impeding performance. Reflection then cannot be an essential aspect of absorbed expertise. It is a much richer phenomenon better captured from another perspective. Turning to the topography of absorption, both standard absorption and the deeper forms of absorption can be construed as positioned on a phenomenological continuum that revolves around fluctuations in the sense of agency. (On the extensive discussion of agency see Dow 2017; Gallagher 2012, 2007; Buhrmann and Di Paolo  2017; Grünbaum  2015.) Further, an analysis of the sense of agency in musical absorption can bring us closer to answering the question of what it means to lose oneself in the music. The question of losing oneself in the music relates to the topic of agency because a ubiquitous trait of even the most minimal and pre-reflective sense of self is the sense that one is an agent who can affect change. According to Shaun Gallagher, the self involves a sense of agency, that I can initiate action, and a sense of ownership, that I am the one to whom things happen (Gallagher 2005, 173). These two senses are normally overlapping and phenomenally indistinguishable, but in certain cases they are experienced as separate: if I am tripped, for example, I did not initiate the action, but the consequences nevertheless happen to me. I am owner, but not agent of the experience of being tripped. Let us see how the experience of musical absorption can be partially grasped as a change in the musician’s sense of agency. The Danish bassoonist

316   Simon Høffding Peter Bastian writes about the sense of agency when it comes to choosing how and what to play during a performance: Sometimes you can feel that an idea is coming that you can choose to follow. That is one end of the spectrum of choice: “I choose.” Then there are the situations in which you simply are a witness to something happening, or a medium for what happens. Here, you are not to the same extent conscious of a choosing entity. The choices proceed quicker than you. Quicker than contemplative thought. It is still you choosing, but there is no distance between you, the choice, and what you choose. It is one thing. (Bastian 1987, 7; my translation)

Bastian says that it is still him choosing. But this “him” is not his ordinary self standing apart from and choosing between a number of distinctively given musical options. This “him” is rather an unusual fusion of his normal self (“you”), the options afforded or imposed by the music (“the choice”), and the music that manifests itself through the instrument (“what you choose”). The sense that it is not fully up to Bastian to choose what he wants to play begins to account for this altered sense of agency. There is a felt negotiation of agency between his normal sense of self and at least two other sources, namely the music and one’s bodily habitualities. (For further discussion, see Høffding 2019, ch. 10.)

The Agency of the Music It is trivially true that the music, understood in the Western art music tradition as the score, exerts agency on the performance. If you do not play the notes that correspond to the score of the Chaconne from J. S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, you cannot be said to be performing the Chaconne. Despite this constraint, the skilled musician finds room for musical colouring, nuancing, and interpretation and thus can exert their own agency unto the music—they are always improvising to some extent, as Bruce Benson argues (Benson 2003). When I point to the agency of the music, however, I do not refer merely to the trivial causal impact of the score on the musician. Rather, according to the DSQ, to Bastian, and to many other musicians I have interviewed, in absorbed, “authentic” performance, the music as performed seems to dictate a very specific meaning or direction that the musician is obliged to obey. It exercises not merely a causal, but a constitutive determination over the musician’s sense of agency. This was already indicated by Bastian, but here is a clearer example from Fredrik S explaining how to play a musical phrase: for each point [note] you advance, [it] provides the premise for where the next point would be because the tone itself in a sense defines the next tone, and so on, because otherwise the phrase becomes unnatural. And therefore you’re really in the tone, you’re really on and then it kind of reveals how the next tone will become . . . everything builds towards how it is going to become and it is impossible to predict how it will play out. It depends on what you laid as ground.

Phenomenology   317 Fredrik S and Frederik Ø both mention laughing and being surprised when discovering that the music sometimes is going in directions counter to what was agreed upon in prior practice. The music makes its own demands, exerts its own agency, and if not followed, “the phrase becomes unnatural.” Bastian mentions that you become “a medium for what happens” and Asbjørn that musicians can perceive themselves as a medium for composers such as Beethoven. The music exerts this kind of interactive agency, thereby influencing the musician’s own sense of agency. This is the starting point for the account of what it means to lose oneself in the music or for the sense that it isn’t oneself who is playing. The Japanese psychiatrist Bin Kimura also engages the difficulty of distinguishing between music and musician in absorption when he writes that “the music that vibrates in this virtual space of aida, inside the participants as much as outside of them, has its own autonomous life beyond that of each musician’s will” (Kimura 2000, 42; my translation). The musician plays the music, but the music also plays the musician, because in order for the performance to be “natural,” in Fredrik’s words, the musician must submit themselves to the agency, to the sense of meaning, direction, or purpose, inherent in the music. In line with enactive theories of cognition (Noë  2004; Thompson  2007; Gallagher 2017), the score and the musician enter into an interactive system that enacts or brings forth the performance. We can also say that agency is distributed between or partially offloaded to the music (Krueger 2014b; for enactive approaches to music see Krueger 2009, 2014a; Schiavio et al. 2016; Lesaffre, Maes, and Leman 2017).

The Agency of Bodily Habituality But who is the musician in this coupling with the music? Surely, they are an agent with (some degree of) agency and ownership over the performance. But they are likewise a system of bodily habits (Merleau-Ponty 2004), practised and gradually incorporated over many years. These bodily habits or techniques (Crossley 2013) enable the musician to perform authentically highly demanding music. They allow the musician to manipulate body and instrument in the way most conducive to expressive beauty. Yet paradoxically, although enabling factors of successful performance, they do not fall primarily within the musician’s sense of agency. The agency of bodily habituality (Gallagher 1986) can be understood from the perspective of the body as well as from the perspective of the music. From the perspective of the body, Rune says that “you’re surprised about how much the fingers remember themselves. Let the fingers play. Just use the activity of the brain— but not on what you’re playing. Let go and think about something else.” There is a sense of automaticity, a trust that the fingers know how to play and that you do not need to control them. From the perspective of the music, we can return to the topography of musical absorption and look at the category of standard absorption, centrally marked by the feeling that the “music is playing itself.” For Frederik Ø, unless challenges or difficulties

318   Simon Høffding emerge he does not need to “control” the music or to intervene as an agent, at least not in the motoric and technical details that are handled by the system of bodily habitualities also known as the “body-schema” (Gallagher 1986, 2005). It goes for all skilled musicians that they can direct their attention elsewhere, such as on mental imagery, musical intentions and meanings, while the body plays the notes. In this way, standard absorption lies at the heart of ex-static absorption. The body, under the agency of its habitualities, can perform on its own, while one, at some distance, observes it unfolding.

Agency and Control These observations reveal an unexpected conclusion on the relation between the sense of control and the sense of agency. Under normal circumstances we would assume a positive correlation between these. Having a high degree of control ensures a high degree of the sense of agency. The reason I lose my sense of agency when tripped is because I am not in control of the situation. The topography of musical absorption, however, challenges this assumption. When in frustrated playing, the musician is thrown out of his comfort zone and tries to regain mastery by forcefully controlling more aspects of the performance than usual. This kind of control seems to interfere with both the agency of the music and the agency of bodily habitualities and does not lead to an increased sense of agency, but, on the contrary, to a diminished one—hence the frustration. (For different line of work on the relation between the sense of control and the sense of agency or freedom in obsessive-compulsive disorder [OCD], see de Haan, Rietveld, and Denys 2015.) With respect to the sense of control, deep absorption is the opposite of frustrated playing. Think about Frederik Ø’s and Asbjørn’s sense of agency and control when they claim that rather than playing, they are observing the performance from a distance. In these situations the musicians have relinquished a great deal of control such that the agency of the music and of their bodily habitualities are coming to the fore. Relinquishing control, rather than assuming it, leads to a sharing of agency that is experienced as pleasant. It could also be described as an alteration of the sense of agency in which relinquishing or submission is experienced as coextensive with a sense of omnipotence, as when Asbjørn speaks of ex-static absorption: “It is not a primitive control. It is a kind of very deep control. Ur-control. You really feel like a commander deploying the troops and control it in a way and it gives a kick that you are just a kind of pure superiority and pure control.” Asbjørn describes feeing like a Napoleonic commander on a hilltop who, without physically interfering, can order his troops around and determine the outcome of the battle. In the performance, he doesn’t have to control little technical details. Rather he “imagine[s] the colour and then the seven technical sub-elements fall into place automatically.” He lets the agency of his bodily habitualities and of the music come forth, which is experienced like a telekinetic ability: he produces a thought or mental image and immediately the whole performance changes.

Phenomenology   319 Let us tie all these lines of thinking together. I asked near the beginning of this chapter what it might imply for the notion of the self to say that one is losing oneself in the music or that it is not the musician themselves who is playing. I began answering this question by analysing the sense of agency in the performance of members of the DSQ. Deep forms of absorption are marked by an altered sense of agency: one could say that they are constrained by the agency of the music and of bodily habitualities, but it could as well be said that they are greatly extended, fused with those alterior sources of agency. Asbjørn’s sense of omnipotence would certainly suggest the latter. Let me spell this out in greater detail. One’s sense of self is partly constituted by one’s sense of agency. With respect to the sense of agency, a primitive understanding of a performance would take the form, “I am the one playing.” But, as we’ve understood from Kimura, Bastian, and the DSQ, in deep absorption one’s sense of agency changes into something like: “playing is happening, but I’m not the doing it, at least not in the sense in which I usually do things.” Given this change, it is evident why musicians in deep absorption experience that it is not fully or only themselves who are playing. From here, we might hypothesize that the deeper the absorption, the deeper the gulf between oneself and one’s playing. This pans out in an ex-static, almost dissociative (Hurlburt 2011, 258–290), near out-ofbody experience (Hytönen-Ng 2013, 84–85), or in a absorbed not-being-there experience in which one simply cannot attribute the prior playing to one’s own agency. The uncommon and puzzling experience of the latter seemingly consists in the shut-down of one’s cognitive and conceptual faculties, which instead leaves experiential room for overwhelmingly pleasant emotions and bodily sensations. The answer to “who is playing” in absorbed not-being-there is probably something like a very minimal locus of unity and its alterior sources of agency, namely the music and the bodily habitualities. This “who” is affective, through its overwhelming emotions; embodied, through its pleasant sensations and its bodily habitualities; enacted, through the interaction of music and musician; and, finally, extended, through the agency of the music.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have not only given examples of how an investigation of expert musicians can address central topics in phenomenology, but also demonstrated how such an investigation can be used argumentatively to inform and possibly to settle disputes in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind. Further, and inversely, I have shown how a phenomenological analysis can give us a very real grasp of the experiences of expert musicians and explain mystic utterances such as “it wasn’t really me playing.” Arguing against Dreyfus, I have shown that, to the expert musician, thinking and performing are not necessarily in conflict and that musical mastery indeed consists in a merging of these two forms of mentality. I have also argued that if we want to understand musical absorption, the question of the absence or presence of reflection is an unfortunate place to begin. Instead, I have analysed the musical experience of losing

320   Simon Høffding oneself in the music by drawing on discussions of embodiment and agency. Through this perspective, I have argued that a change in the sense of agency can account for the differences and continuities between the various categories in my topography of musical absorption. Importantly, a change in the sense of agency can also explain the feeling of losing oneself in the music or that it is not oneself who is playing. In order to achieve a more comprehensive grasp of the musician’s mental life, many more themes from phenomenology should be brought to the table. Especially when it comes to a string quartet, an intricate unity of four individuals (perhaps with the agency of the music as a fifth individual), the question of intersubjectivity and we-intentionality is indispensable. The phenomenology of we-intentionality is treated in Pacherie 2014; Salmela and Nagatsu 2017; and Zahavi 2014. It is examined in conjunction with embodiment in Marratto 2012; Merleau-Ponty 1968; and Soliman and Glenberg 2014. And it is treated in conjunction with music in Salice, Høffding, and Gallagher 2019 and Høffding 2019, chap. 11. The methodological approach of combining philosophical phenomenology with qualitative interviews is relatively recent. Expert musicians exhibit changes in dimensions of consciousness of central importance to phenomenology, such as self-awareness, reflection, sense of agency perception, embodiment, affectivity, and intersubjectivity. Taken together, this methodological approach and this choice of subject provides an excellent starting point for philosophical explorations and is just starting to get off the ground.

Notes 1. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer as well as to Nanette Nielsen and Tomás McAuley for constructive criticism that has improved this chapter. 2. Performing and listening cannot be mutually exclusive. All performers are also listeners (with the exception, perhaps, of deaf performers), but most listeners are not performers. This distinction should not lead one to believe that the performer is active and the listener passive. Arnold Steinhardt, from the Guarneri String Quartet, notes how much an impact the presence of a listening audience makes on a performance (Steinhardt 1998, 135–136), so hinting at the ways in which performers and audiences are coupled. The idea of coupling also animates an enactive understanding of music listening: here I am in particular thinking of Krueger’s argument that music listening is not passive, but a “kind of doing” (Krueger 2009, 104). 3. It is a mistake to see a second-person methodology as a replacement of a first-person methodology. The two kinds of methodology yield different kinds of insights and are subject to different methodological and epistemological constraints. For a general discussion of these issues, see for instance Petitmengin 2011; Shear and Varela 1999. 4. When I write “to some degree” it is because musicians are sometimes surprised by their own performances deviating quite a bit from the plan. This can be experienced as highly pleasant and authentic, as if the music takes on its own life and directs the musicians. 5. Note the similarity to David Armstrong’s “absent-minded truck driver” (Armstrong 1981). 6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this question. 7. The transcription here is ambiguous and should be understood as follows: In “the zone,” Asbjørn becomes conscious of things as standing out to him, open to “disinterested,” “neutral registration.” When not in “the zone,” he is more immersed, “a part of the set-up” or “a part of the whole thing.”

Phenomenology   321

Works Cited Armstrong, David Malet. 1981. “The Nature of Mind.” In The Nature of Mind and Other Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bastian, Peter. 1987. Ind I Musikken: En Bog om Musik og Bevidsthed. København: Gyldendal A/S. Beilock, Sian L., and Thomas H. Carr. 2001. “On the Fragility of Skilled Performance: What Governs Choking under Pressure?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130 (4): 701–725. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breivik, Gunnar. 2007. “Skillful Coping in Everyday Life and in Sport: A Critical Examination of the Views of Heidegger and Dreyfus.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 34 (2): 116–134. Buhrmann, Thomas, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. 2017. “The Sense of Agency—A Phenomenological Consequence of Enacting Sensorimotor Schemes.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (2): 207–236. Cappuccio, Massimiliano, ed. 2015. “Unreflective Action and the Choking Effect.” Special issue, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 213–431. Christensen, Wayne, John Sutton, and Doris J. F. McIlwain. 2015. “Putting Pressure on Theories of Choking: Towards an Expanded Perspective on Breakdown in Skilled Performance.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 253–293. Clifton, Thomas. 1983. Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Colombetti, Giovanna, and Tom Roberts. 2015. “Extending the Extended Mind: The Case for Extended Affectivity.” Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1243–1263. Crossley, Nick. 2013. “Habit and Habitus.” Body & Society 19 (2–3): 136–161. Danish String Quartet. http://www.danishquartet.com. Dow, James  M. 2017. “Just Doing What I Do: On the Awareness of Fluent Agency.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (1): 155–177. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2005. “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79, no. 2 (November): 47–63. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2007a. “Response to McDowell.” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (August): 371–377. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2007b. “The Return of the Myth of the Mental.” Inquiry 50, no. 4 (August): 352–365. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2013. “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental.” In Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell–Dreyfus Debate, edited by Joseph  K.  Schear, 15–41. London: Routledge. Gallagher, Shaun. 1986. “Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification.” Journal of Mind and Behavior 7, no. 4 (Autumn): 541–554. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2007. “The Natural Philosophy of Agency.” Philosophy Compass 2, no. 2 (March): 347–357. Gallagher, Shaun. 2012. “Multiple Aspects in the Sense of Agency.” New Ideas in Psychology 30 (1): 15–31. Gallagher, Shaun. 2017. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge.

322   Simon Høffding Gallagher, Shaun, Lauren Reinerman-Jones, Bruce Janz, Patricia Bockelman, and Jörg Trempler. eds. 2015. A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder: Toward a Non-Reductionist Cognitive Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Grünbaum, Thor. 2015. “The Feeling of Agency Hypothesis: A Critique.” Synthese 192 (10): 3313–3337. de Haan, Sanneke, Erik Rietveld, and Damiaan Denys. 2015. “Being Free by Losing Control: What Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Can Tell Us about Free Will.” In Free Will and the Brain: Neuroscientific, Philosophical, and Legal Perspectives, edited by Walter Glannon, 83–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Høffding, Simon. 2014. “What Is Skilled Coping?: Experts on Expertise.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (9–10): 49–73. Høffding, Simon. 2019. A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Høffding, Simon, and Kristian Martiny. 2016. “Framing a Phenomenological Interview: What, Why and How.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (4): 539–564. Høffding, Simon, and Barbara Montero. 2019. “Not Being There: An Analysis of ExpertiseInduced Amnesia.” Mind & Language: 1–20. doi: 10.1111/mila.12260. Hurlburt, Russell T. 2011. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hytönen-Ng, Elina. 2013. Experiencing “Flow” in Jazz Performance. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Ingerslev, Line Ryberg. 2013. “My Body as an Object: Self-Distance and Social Experience.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (1): 163–178. Kimura, Bin. 2000. L’Entre: Une approche phénoménologique de la schizophrénie. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon. Krueger, Joel  W. 2009. “Enacting Musical Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (2–3): 98–123. Krueger, Joel  W. 2014a. “Musical Manipulations and the Emotionally Extended Mind.” Empirical Musicology Review 9 (3): 208–212. Krueger, Joel W. 2014b. “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind.” Frontiers in Psychology 4, article 1003: 1–13. Legrand, Dorothée. 2007. “Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: On Being Bodily in the World.” Janus Head 9 (2): 493–519. Legrand, Dorothée, and Susanne Ravn. 2009. “Perceiving Subjectivity in Bodily Movement: The Case of Dancers.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 8 (3): 389–408. Lesaffre, Micheline, Pieter-Jan Maes, and Marc Leman. eds. 2017. The Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction. London: Routledge. Marratto, Scott Louis. 2012. The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity. New York: SUNY Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2004. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Montero, Barbara. 2016. Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pacherie, Elisabeth. 2014. “How Does It Feel to Act Together?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (1): 25–46.

Phenomenology   323 Petitmengin, Claire, ed. 2011. “10 Years of Viewing from Within: Further Debate.” Special issue, Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (2): 1–166. Pike, Alfred. 1970. A Phenomenological Analysis of Musical Experience; And Other Related Essays. New York: St. John’s University Press. Salice, Alessandro, Simon Høffding, and Shaun Gallagher. 2019. “Putting Plural Self-Awareness into Practice: The Phenomenology of Expert Musicianship.” Topoi 38, no. 1 (March): 197–209. Salmela, Mikko, and Michiru Nagatsu. 2017. “How Does It Really Feel to Act Together? Shared Emotions and the Phenomenology of We-Agency.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (3): 449–470. Schear, Joseph K. 2013. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell–Dreyfus Debate. London: Routledge. Schiavio, Andrea, Dylan van der Schyff, Julian Cespedes-Guevara, and Mark Reybrouck. 2016. “Enacting Musical Emotions. Sense-Making, Dynamic Systems, and the Embodied Mind.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (5): 785–809. Schutz, Alfred. (1944) 1976. “Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music.” Edited by Fred Kersten. Music and Man 2 (1–2): 5–71. Shear, Jonathan, and Francisco J. Varela. 1999. The View from Within: First-Person Approaches to the Study of Consciousness. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Smith, F.  Joseph. 1979. The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music. New York: Gordon and Breach. Soliman, Tamer, and Arthur Glenberg. 2014. “The Embodiment of Culture.” In The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, edited by Lawrence Shapiro, 207–220. London: Routledge. Steinhardt, Arnold. 1998. Indivisible by Four. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sutton, John, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen, and Andrew Geeves. 2011. “Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (January): 78–103. Taipale, Joona. 2014. Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. London: Belknap Press. Thompson, Evan. 2014. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vuust, Peter, Leif Ostergaard, Karen Johanne Pallesen, Christopher Bailey, and Andreas Roepstorff. 2009. “Predictive Coding of Music–brain Responses to Rhythmic Incongruity.” Cortex 45, no. 1 (January): 80–92. Vuust, Peter, Karen Johanne Pallesen, Christopher Bailey, Titia L. van Zuijen, Albert Gjedde, Andreas Roepstorff. 2005. “To Musicians, the Message Is in the Meter: Pre-Attentive Neuronal Responses to Incongruent Rhythm Are Left-Lateralized in Musicians.” Neuroimage 24, no. 2 (January): 560–564. Wheeler, Michael. 2005. Reconstructing the Cognitive World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zahavi, Dan. 1999. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.

324   Simon Høffding Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. Zahavi, Dan. 2011. “The Experiential Self: Objections and Clarifications.” In Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological & Indian Traditions, edited by Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, 56–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 15

On tol ogy Charles O. Nussbaum

Introduction I conceive of this chapter as an essay on ontology as applied to music, rather than an essay focused narrowly on musical ontology. I therefore begin with some brief remarks on the history of ontology. I go on to characterize, rather selectively, some developments in contemporary analytic ontology. And only then do I take up musical ontology, the study of what sort of things musical works fundamentally are.1 Ontology, understood most generally as the philosophy of being, is an ancient study, but the word itself is relatively modern. It entered the Western philosophical lexicon through seventeenth-century Scholastic philosophy as the Latinized ontologia (from the Greek ontos and logos), and was then standardized in the works of eighteenth-century German philosophers such as Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Christian Wolff. In contemporary times, ontology is regarded as the branch of metaphysics that identifies the most fundamental or irreducible categories and modes of existence. Ontology also makes explicit the existential commitments of theories, both empirical and formal. It shows, for example, that subatomic physics is committed to the existence of quarks and that mathematical logic is committed to the existence of sets. In the view of some, ontology makes explicit the existential commitments of ordinary language itself, showing how such language is committed to the existence of everyday objects such as tables and chairs. Some time in the mid-1790s, Immanuel Kant ([1804] 1983) began, but never finished, a short treatise entitled What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?. The title question had been posed in 1788, as the topic for a prize essay, by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Kant’s response was that there had been no real progress in metaphysics at all prior to the appearance of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, a work in which he had asserted that ontology, properly conceived,

326   Charles O. Nussbaum concerns only objects of possible experience for any discursive understanding, rather than the nature of things as they are in themselves. Kant did not succeed in convincing everyone to adopt the system of philosophy, “transcendental idealism,” that he built upon this insight, though it did give rise to the distinctive philosophical tradition of German Idealism. What might be termed the Kantian paradigm, however, the view that ontology is determined by the application of a conceptual scheme, proved remarkably long-lived. According to this paradigm, ontological questions asked using a conceptual scheme are answerable, whereas questions that concern what the world is like “in itself,” or external to any scheme, are unanswerable. Reinvigorated by the so-called linguistic turn taken by early analytic philosophy, in which focus was shifted from how we think to what we say, and freed from claims of uniqueness, completeness, and necessity for Kant’s own system of categories, this Kantian paradigm arguably remained intact, even if significantly transformed, through the most significant philosophical debates of the mid-twentieth century. These debates included, notably, those conducted by Willard Van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap on the nature of language, truth, and knowledge. With this Kantian continuity in mind, we might then pose a contemporary version of the Berlin Academy’s question: What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in English-Speaking Countries Since the Time of Carnap and Quine? Answering this question will lead directly into the state of play in contemporary analytic ontology, both in its general and in its more specifically musical guises.

A Brief Look at Metaphysics and Ontology since Carnap and Quine The correct answer to our question, I believe, is that metaphysics has made some real progress since the time of Carnap and Quine. In particular, progress has been made in our understanding of modality (issues concerning possibility and necessity) and in our understanding of identity (the conditions that make a thing the definite thing it is). First, metaphysics has developed possible-worlds semantics to supply truth conditions for counterfactuals and other modal discourse. The counterfactual, “If the Axis powers had won World War II, the world would now be a very different place” is true, assuming that it is indeed true, because there is a close-by possible world in which the Axis powers did win. This world is “close-by” in that it operates in accordance with the same natural laws that govern the actual world, but differs from the actual world in relevant historical detail. Second, contemporary metaphysics has managed to separate the epistemological issue of a priori knowledge (knowledge acquired without sensory experience) from the metaphysical issue of strict necessity with which it was previously confounded, and thereby contributed to the demise of the verificationism from which Carnap and Quine never really succeeded in freeing themselves. (Verificationism is the view that s­ tatements

Ontology   327 whose truth or falsity cannot in principle be determined are meaningless, and that conceivability determines metaphysical possibility.) On these matters, there appears to be something of a growing consensus, if not unanimity, among metaphysicians. But this progress in metaphysics has come at an ontological price. For one thing, it has engendered new disputes concerning the ontology of possible worlds. For another, with the demise of verificationism and the turn to a robust ontological realism (the view that the world is the way it is apart from any and all attempts to conceptualize it) that accompanied the separation of epistemology from metaphysics, philosophers can no longer assert blithely that undecidable claims are senseless or that they lack values of truth or falsity. But most, or very many, ontological claims are, or seem to be, undecidable. That is, we cannot in principle determine whether they are true or false. In my view, the only ontological claims that are clearly decidable are those that are inconsistent in some way, whether internally inconsistent or inconsistent with some well-established principle of science (empirical, mathematical, or logical). Few ontological theses can claim such answerability. Still, in our post-verificationist, ontologically realist age, we are inclined to say that if Peter van Inwagen’s claim that tables and chairs do not exist is true, then Amie Thomasson’s opposing claim that tables and chairs do exist must be false, and vice versa, whatever the differences in their respective methodologies. Yet methodological differences are part of the problem, for the decidability of a claim requires some sort of agreement regarding testing procedures. Van Inwagen tells us that his “denial that there are tables and chairs should be understood by analogy to Copernicus’ denial that the sun moves” (van Inwagen 1990, 1). True, he only claims analogy, but even analogy would seem to require a parallel commitment to explanatory power and parsimony as theoretical virtues. Yet Thomasson deplores “a common (if recent) tendency to view metaphysics on analogy with science.” More specifically, she thinks it unfortunate that “ontological theories are generally treated (like scientific theories) as competitors to be weighed up at least in part in terms of their relative parsimony, explanatory power, and so on” (Thomasson 2007, 189). How, then, are we to decide which theorist, if either, is right? (For more on this debate, from the perspective of a defence of “quasi-scientific” ontology, see Sider 2009.) Van Inwagen and Thomasson are, furthermore, just two of a number of radically divergent theorists. (For a representatively broad sample of contemporary doctrinal and methodological divergence in the field, see Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman 2009.) Even if we can’t decide who is right in any given debate, realism would seem to mandate that there are facts of the matter for ontology to get right. Forgoing realism is not an attractive option, because it would reverse much of the progress, including the break with verificationism, just alleged to have been made in metaphysics in English-speaking countries since the time of Carnap and Quine. This opposition, between a commitment to treat ontology as akin to natural science on the one hand, and a refusal to do the same on the other, may be capable of a partial resolution, albeit something of a sceptical one.2 If we compare van Inwagen’s and Thomasson’s respective positions, one point of agreement does seem to emerge: both theorists allow, at least implicitly, the applicability to ontology of the test of reflective

328   Charles O. Nussbaum equilibrium. By way of introduction to the idea of reflective equilibrium, consider the following passage from van Inwagen: The best reasons for accepting a philosophical thesis are generally of a sort that it is difficult to capture in consecutive prose. The best reasons for accepting a philosophical thesis generally involve the ways in which a host of more or less unrelated problems, convictions, observations, and arguments interact with that thesis. (van Inwagen 1990, 115)

The verb “interact” seems here to be deliberately vague. This passage might seem to be suggesting epistemological coherentism, the view that the justification of a belief consists in its coherence within a web of other beliefs, a view that bears some resemblance to reflective equilibrium. Yet van Inwagen (1990, 115) doubts that it is possible to “prove” an ontological thesis and there is no reason to think he believes it possible to disprove one, except perhaps by inconsistency. To the extent that it is truth-conducive, coherence is a mode of epistemic justification, and epistemic justification is proof. Van Inwagen surely does not intend to limit proof to conclusive demonstration: to say that radical and farreaching philosophical theses generally cannot be conclusively demonstrated is hardly news. If they could, the discipline of ontology would not be in its current state of disunity. Reflective equilibrium, or the mutually adjusted balance between general principles and specific judgements, on the other hand, is not in the truth-seeking business. It is more naturally at home in the testing of prescriptive principles (principles concerning what ought to happen) against intuitions regarding the evaluative judgement of cases, as in ethics, than in the testing of descriptive principles (principles concerning what does happen) against observation, as in science.3 Ethical realism, the ontological claim that there is a realm of moral facts to be described, is itself undecidable. If reflective equilibrium were operative in ontology, ontology could wriggle free of the constraint that it be solely a fact-stating enterprise. Thomasson’s language concerning ontological methodology suggests something similar: the apparent role empirical investigations play in shaping the basic categories we use and associate with our terms does not require us to hold that the associated framelevel [i.e., conceptual] application and coapplication conditions [of our terms to the world] are fallible (with all meaning externally determined) rather than simply revisable in light of both empirical discoveries and our purposes in using the terms. In fact, the divergences in intuitions about what to do in different cases provide some reason in favor of the view that such discoveries push the need for a semantic decision rather than making evident a new semantic fact. (Thomasson 2007, 52; emphases mine)

This presents the possibility of a two-factor or dual-function view of ontological discourse. On the one hand, ontology may function descriptively as an object language (a theoretical language that purports to describe the world as it is in itself), as van Inwagen

Ontology   329 would have it, but one containing many undecidable statements. This accounts for the most natural interpretation of the semantics or explicit meanings of ontological claims. On the other hand, it may also function prescriptively, as a metalanguage (a language about the object language) regulating pragmatic decision-making concerning terms and categories of entities we are prepared to countenance so as to achieve equilibrium with our commitments to theoretical ideals, as Thomasson would have it. Like a natural language, ontologese (the technical language of ontology) contains its own metalanguage. The claim that “The world possesses objective structure” may function either as a statement of purported fact or as a prescription, not subject to truth conditions, that we are well advised to attribute objective structure to the world in the interest of constructing virtuous theories about it. Hence Theodore Sider, a metaphysical realist who, unlike Thomasson, does not accord ordinary language (as opposed to ontologese) special ontological significance, can write that “We ought to believe in an objective structure to reality” and that “A certain core realism is, as much as anything, the shared dogma of analytic philosophers, and rightly so” (Sider 2009, 397, 399; my emphases). These are both prescriptive claims, and a dogma is a conviction held without epistemic justification. Such a dual-function view of ontology could provide a solution, if a somewhat sceptical one, to the opposition between van Inwagen’s embrace of scientific ontology and Thomasson’s suspicion of it.

Musical Ontology In the ontology of the arts, the appeal of realism is weaker than it is in general ontology. (The discussion that follows privileges relatively recent accounts. For a historical survey of the ontology of art, see Livingston 2016.) The majority view is that works of art are artefacts, or products of human intention, and that artefacts are part of the socially constructed world. The socially constructed world, unlike the natural world, is to a significant degree a product of human stipulation. Stipulated objects pose a challenge for metaphysical realism, since they cannot be said to be as they are apart from how anyone thinks they are. Relatedly, the majority view on epistemology is, in the philosophy of the arts, anti-empiricist, in the sense that it denies that a perceptual encounter with a work of art is necessary and sufficient to give it proper regard. A perceptual encounter, according to the anti-empiricist view, may be necessary for proper regard, but it is not sufficient, for knowledge of context and provenance are also required. There is also a fairly wide agreement that ontology varies among the arts. Painting and sculpture are ontologically relatively unproblematic: a painting or a sculpture is a material particular, albeit of a special sort. Printmaking and cast sculpture are scarcely less so: a run of prints is a series of material particulars all deriving from the same printing block, a run of cast sculptures is a series deriving from the same cast. Literature and (especially) music, however, are more difficult cases. Putting literature to one side, what, then, is a work of music, the object of proper musical regard?

330   Charles O. Nussbaum Whereas ontology in general is a venerable topic, specifically musical ontology is very much a post-nineteenth-century preoccupation. Contemporary analytic approaches to musical ontology can be divided into four categories (I do not deny that there may be alternative modes of division): (1) Platonism, associated with the work of Peter Kivy and Julian Dodd, holds musical works to be eternal abstract objects discovered by their composers. (2) Compliance theory, associated with the work of Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, holds works to be classes of performances perfectly compliant with their notational scores. (3) Continuant theory, associated with the work of Guy Rohrbaugh and P. D. Magnus, holds works to be historical individuals that come into and go out of existence and can change in time. (4) Performance theory, associated with the work of Gregory Currie and David Davies, holds works themselves to be compositional performances, rather than the products of such performances. In what follows, I consider each of these perspectives in turn, before turning my attention to what I shall term deflationary views: positions that question either the existence of musical works or the philosophical relevance of the project of musical ontology. Some hybrid approaches to musical ontology combine the pure varieties with additional elements. Jerrold Levinson (1990b; 1992), for example, combines Platonism with historicism, contextualism, and compositional “indication”: a musical work is a pure sound/performance-means (S/PM) structure-as-indicated-by-a-composer at a definite time (or as-indicated-in a particular music-historical context). The S/PM structure component is an eternal abstract object, but the indicated structure that incorporates it, and which is identified as the musical work, is not eternal but created. (For a nominalist version of Levinson’s Platonist account that hews to Goodman’s compliance theory, see Predelli 1999.) Similarly, Currie’s performance theory construes musical works as performance types that are abstract Platonic objects discovered by way of a particular “heuristic path” or guiding thread (Currie 1989).

Platonism and Compliance Theory Platonism and compliance theory can both be situated usefully against what have been called the historicist-contextualist and the institutional theories of art. According to the historicist-contextualist theory of art, the work of art is not an eternal abstract object, but rather the product of particular historical processes, and objects become works of art only by appearing in particular contexts. (For a paradigm example of this view, see Levinson 1990b.) The institutional theory of art takes a similarly contextualist viewpoint, but suggests more precisely that objects become works of art only when the institution of the “art world” classes them as such. Both the historicist-contextualist theory

Ontology   331 and the institutional theory are anti-empiricist, insofar as they posit that more is required for aesthetic experience than a perceptual encounter with a work of art. Regarding music in particular, they claim that a competent listener will need also to bring to bear things such as familiarity with the style of a work, knowledge of other works by the same composer, and knowledge of the music-historical context. Pure musical Platonism denies that a perceptual encounter with a work of art is insufficient for aesthetic experience, thereby, somewhat ironically for a theory that abstracts so far from experience, establishing an alliance with empiricism. According to timbral sonicism, a variety of musical Platonism advocated by Julian Dodd (2007), a musical work is a type of sound-sequence event and nothing more. Hence, his favoured description of this position is the “Simple View.” The type is an abstract object, a “norm-type” (deriving from Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s “norm-kind” [1975]), that specifies how a performance of the work should sound. However the sounds happen to be produced, whether by performers using specified traditional instruments or by electronic synthesis, is of no consequence. There would seem to be a genuine fact of the matter in dispute here. For if the musical Platonist is right, musical works are not artefacts at all, but eternal abstract objects that, like mathematical objects on a Platonist telling, are discovered, not created. (See Predelli 1995 for a critique of norm-kind musical Platonism in particular.) Some philosophers of art (Levinson  1990b; Trivedi  2002) have attacked musical Platonism by insisting on a creatability requirement for musical works. According to this view, the requirement that musical works must be creatable is an intuition so entrenched as to be non-negotiable. I prefer not to insist on such a requirement, since doing so seems to beg the question. Peter Kivy (1993, 41), for one, argues effectively that this intuition is not as deeply entrenched as it might appear, but is rather a relatively recent inheritance from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Nevertheless, there are other compelling arguments against musical Platonism to be made, arguments that do lend support to the creatability requirement. I outline several of these arguments here, but I claim for them no more probative force than this: that they can affect the balance of reflective equilibrium concerning the problems of musical ontology. In exploring this balance of reflective equilibrium, I align myself with David Davies’s notion of pragmatic constraint, according to which our views on musical ontology must respect the aesthetic and artistic values embedded in our musical practices. Indeed, Davies himself makes this connection when he writes that “[t]his conception of a theoretical representation of our artistic practice to which our ontological theories are accountable is of course deeply indebted to the Rawlsian notion of ‘reflective equilibrium,’ and to the Goodmanian idea that a practice is justified through a ‘codification’ ” (Davies 2004, 20n19). The first argument against musical Platonism is that Platonism of any sort—defined as a commitment to the existence of abstract objects, objects that are neither physical nor mental, and that exist outside of space and time—faces formidable metaphysical and epistemological obstacles. Even in mathematics, where Platonism is most plausible, if we assume metaphysical naturalism (as I do), then it is difficult to make sense of an infinite realm, such as Platonists lay claim to, of non-physical, causally inert, eternal

332   Charles O. Nussbaum abstract objects whose existence preceded the birth of the physical universe and will succeed its heat death. Even if we could elucidate the metaphysics (and not merely the logic) of such an infinite realm, it is difficult, if not impossible, for a naturalist to explain how we might gain cognitive access even to mathematical objects in this realm. Although Dodd does make reference to the Pythagorean Theorem and to Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (Dodd 2007, 113, 133), he generally stays away from the comparison between musical works and mathematical objects. For him, musical works are norm-types and their performances are properly formed tokens. Moreover, every norm-type has a “property associate”: if we regard the grizzly bear as a norm-type, its property associate is being a properly formed grizzly bear. Both types and properties are eternal, but for Dodd, this is to say that they are conditions eternally available for tokening, even supposing that some contingently never happen to be tokened. This account is troublesome on several fronts. For a start, Dodd relies on Quine’s notion of “deferred ostension,” whereby we indirectly ostend or point to the type that “lies behind” its token (Dodd 2007, 11), yet it is far from clear how this ostension is supposed to take place (and notice too the heavy reliance on metaphor involved in such “lying behind”). Furthermore, there are numerous metaphysical obscurities concerning the means of instantiation—that is, the manner in which types are supposed to be tokened. Yet even if we were to grant the Quineian notion of deferred ostension, and to overlook the metaphysical obscurities in question, we would still have a puzzle on our hands. For Dodd, unlike Plato, believes that the only epistemological route to a type is through one of its tokens. But how, then, does a composer discover an abstract type without first tokening it? Dodd may reply that the composer discovers the type by tokening it, but how can the composer token it without first having discovered it? Yet there is more. Consider Dodd’s timbral sonicism. We are asked to believe that Wynton Marsalis’s In This House, On This Morning (1992), a multi-movement suite scored for small jazz ensemble, is an eternal sonic structure discovered by Marsalis. This would entail not only that the tonal structure of the piece is an eternal object, but also that the sounds of the various instruments themselves, including saxophones, trumpet, piano, and drums are eternal objects. But these instruments evolved from earlier versions, which had distinctive timbres. If their sonorities are eternal objects, then all these timbres are different eternal objects since such objects do not change. The timbres of woodwinds dating from the eighteenth century, for example, differ noticeably from those of their contemporary counterparts. What do we say about the timbre of the saxophone, an instrument that did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century? Did Adolphe Sax discover the pre-existing timbre of the saxophone by inventing the instrument? Or did he also discover the eternal instrumental type, now named in his honour? The piano in Marsalis’s ensemble is of course set to tempered tuning, an early ­eighteenth-century innovation. Must we conclude that the tones that constitute Western tempered scales, to all appearances a product of human calculation and decision, have always existed along with their non-tempered forebears? Do the tones of Western diatonic scales occupy their eternal places along with those of the microtonal scales of India, the pentatonic scales of the far East, and the five-tone (slendro) and seven-tone

Ontology   333 (pelog) gamelan scales of Indonesia, which do not map exactly onto the tones of the Western scales at all (O’Brien 1977, 91–92; Spiller 2004, 78, 120, 144)? And what of the gradual pitch changes that have occurred over the centuries in Western music? Current pitch is sharper by nearly a semitone than it was two centuries ago. The tuning A is just not what it used to be. Are all these tone-types discovered eternal objects? Although they do not decisively refute it, considerations such as these render musical Platonism extravagant and ad hoc. By comparison, mathematical Platonism seems modest and well behaved. To the extent that Levinson’s account rejects the simple view, it rates as a distinct improvement. But to the extent that it relies on musical Platonism for its S/PM structures it is vulnerable to similar criticisms and more. For the timbral sonicist at least need not worry about the ontological status of instrument types. But by including performance means in his abstract structures (1990b, 78), Levinson asks us to believe that the instruments indicated by composers in their scores are also, as types, eternal objects.4 Moreover, Levinson’s theory is explicitly limited to scored music that specifies instrumentation. I move on now to the topic of compliance theory. Despite sharing with Platonism a broadly empiricist outlook, compliance theory diverges from Platonism in its ontological commitments. More precisely, compliance theory—in sharp contrast to Platonism— is a form of nominalism: it recognizes the existence of no abstract musical objects, only particular scores and performances. The work of Nelson Goodman deserves highlighting here, not only because of its intrinsic interest, but also because of its historical importance. Indeed, Aaron Ridley is correct in noting that Goodman’s work strongly motivated the current “philosophical enthusiasm” for musical ontology (Ridley 2003, 203). For Goodman (1976), a musical work is the class of performances perfectly compliant with its notational score. Presumably this class is the class of all perfectly compliant performances that have occurred or will occur in the history of the universe. Goodman’s theory has the unfortunate consequence that in order to avoid a sorites or boundary-fixing problem (a sufficient number of alterations could transform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into “Three Blind Mice”), Goodman is compelled to insist that any performance that departs from the notational score even by one inaccurate note does not count as a performance of the work, a restriction he was never able to get many other than his most devoted disciples, such as Elgin (1983), to accept.5

Continuant Theory A well-regarded version of the continuant theory—which, to recall, holds works to be historical individuals that come into and go out of existence and can change in time—is that of Guy Rohrbaugh (2003). For Rohrbaugh, all artworks, not just “repeatable” ones like musical artworks, possess modal flexibility (they could have been different with respect to certain details, large and small, than they are), temporal flexibility (they can change their properties over time), and temporality (they come into and go out of ex­ist­ ence). Dodd challenges all of these alleged characteristics of artworks, but I am inclined

334   Charles O. Nussbaum to accept them, since they align with the position I developed in The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (2007). Rohrbaugh proposes a “new ontological category” to accommodate works of art, whether repeatable or not, as well as entities not artistic at all, namely the category of an embodied historical individual, a category that “cuts across some other classical distinctions in metaphysics” (Rohrbaugh 2003, 179). Unfortunately, such a category is not as new as Rohrbaugh suggests. Something very similar has been developed in great detail over the years by Ruth Millikan and is now termed by her the category of a “historical substance,” an entity whose identity conditions are established by a cluster of causal properties that render it predictable over time (Millikan 2000). Rohrbaugh’s list of embodied historical individuals, which contains novels, musical compositions, biological species, clubs, artefacts, and words of natural languages includes just the sort of entities Millikan counts as historical substances. Millikan claims, for example, that she has “illustrated the category of substance by reference to individuals, stuffs and certain kinds whose members are ordinary physical individuals. But other ontological types can be substances too. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has many properties that are unlikely to vary from performance to performance. You can recognize it and know what is coming next” (Millikan 2000, 27). Rohrbaugh is quite right in thinking that his category of the embodied historical individual, like Millikan’s historical substance, is more in line with a naturalistic world-view than are the Platonisms of Dodd or Levinson. But it is not naturalistic enough, for he seems to think that repeatable works are “non-physical” historical individuals de­pend­ ent on their particular occurrences. Musical works are abstract historical individuals “embodied” in and thus dependent on individual scores or performances, whereas nonrepeatable works such as paintings are embodied historical individuals to the extent that they are dependent on their physical parts (Rohrbaugh 2003, 198–199). But why do we need abstract non-physical historical individuals, that is, individuals that exist in time but not in space (200), at all? One key motivation seems to be that doing so offers distinctive explanatory power in the realm of biology. For Rohrbaugh, biological species are historical individuals embodied in the organisms that are their members. He writes, for example, “Man is another historical individual, an entity distinct from but de­pend­ ent on the historical succession of individual human beings” (199). Rohrbaugh’s comments on biological species are valuable for three reasons. First, they show an understanding of the identity conditions for species (what it is that makes a species the species that it is) that is not always encountered in philosophy, and that goes well beyond Wolterstorff ’s and Dodd’s outdated notion of biological norm-types. In particular, Rohrbaugh is clear (as, indeed, is contemporary biology) that the identity conditions for a species must take into account the history and causal provenance of the organisms that are members of the species, the branch (“clade”) of the historical bush of life on which they are located. Second, Rohrbaugh is explicit—as I have been in my own work—in drawing parallels between the ontology of biological species and the ontology of musical works. Third, and most precisely, they show the “reproductively established family”

Ontology   335 (an idea dating back to Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories [1984]) to be a special and, for music, a very important case of Millikan’s subsequently developed category of historical substances. In my 2007 book The Musical Representation, I attempted to clarify the ontology of musical works by construing them as reproductively established families of performances and scores sharing common origins, just as biological species are reproductively established families of organisms sharing common ancestors. To perform a musical work is to produce a sound event that has the musical attributes it has because it is produced (to a degree whose sufficiency is difficult to specify) in accordance with the instructions present in a score deriving ultimately from the composer’s autograph and because it is modelled interpretatively on earlier performances perhaps leading all the way back to the work’s premiere.6 Here intentions come to play an indispensable role in a way they do not in the case of biological species. Natural selection, after all, is the blind watchmaker. Now, should a reproductively established family be regarded as an abstract, non-physical, temporal entity? I think not. A first-order reproductively established family is a group of material particulars that derive from and share characteristics with an originating model or prototype. Non-physical historical individuals serve no purpose in a naturalistic ontology, be it one of music or of biology. Magnus (2012) takes a similar line, comparing musical works to biological species considered as historical individuals. “What suits species,” he says, “will suit musical work[s] as well” (108). Historical individuals—like species—possess clusters of contingently but stably associated properties that render them cohesive over time and their members behaviourally and developmentally predictable. This brings his position into alignment with Millikan’s historical substance view and with the account detailed in Nussbaum 2007. Unfortunately, Magnus demonstrates no awareness of Millikan’s prior efforts.

Performance Theory Performance theory, to recall, holds that works are themselves compositional performances. Ontological unification seems to be a goal of both Currie’s and Davies’s versions of performance theory. If artworks are performances, then they all belong to the same ontological category of performances, whether they are action types, as they are for Currie (1989) or token “doings,” as they are for Davies (2004). An example of an action type is driving an automobile. This type is tokened whenever any individual gets into a particular vehicle on a particular occasion and drives it. Doings are higher-level actions realized by such basic actions as moving one’s fingers. Davies chooses this expression to differentiate compositional performance tokens from events, which, once they occur, are essentially tied to a particular time and place. Davies reasonably thinks that composition of a musical work could have occurred at a slightly different time and place than when and where it did occur. For Currie, the work is a compositional action-type discovered by the composer by means of a particular heuristic path, which the listener

336   Charles O. Nussbaum must reconstruct to access the musical work as the compositional performance-type it is. For Davies, the listener is presented with a “focus of appreciation” which is the perceived product of the composer’s compositional performance-token (26). It is this compositional performance, the manipulation of an “artistic vehicle” (in the standard musical case, a set of tones), that is the object of aesthetic appreciation, an object the listener is able to access by way of the focus of appreciation and by virtue of familiarity with the norms and conventions in place in the socio-cultural context within which both composer and listener operate (the “artistic medium”). Both theories have their strengths. Notably, they both attempt to make sense of some late modern art, typically ignored by philosophers (myself included). If John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is not the manipulation of the tuning and volume controls of eight simultaneously playing radios, something that will differ on every performance occasion, but a compositional performance specifying those objects and actions, its claim to artwork status may be (somewhat) less puzzling. And by construing works as performances, both theories build provenance and achievement in context into the constitution of the musical work without having to add them on as Levinson does. But for these advantages, both theories pay a steep price. To begin with, they deny, counter-intuitively, that it is necessary—or even possible—for a listener to have perceptual access to the work, which is the compositional performance type or token, not its audible product. This offends fairly seriously against Davies’s own notion of “pragmatic constraint,” for it seemingly severs the traditional connection between aesthetics and aesthesis, or sensory experience. More precisely, it is central to our intuitions concerning the experience of musical art that we have a sensory engagement with the musical work itself, not the audible product of the compositional act, yet Davies and Currie both deny the possibility of this sensory engagement. Currie’s theory faces a further difficulty, insofar as the ontology of his position is clear, but the epistemology is problematic. Currie’s listener, it would seem, is faced with the daunting task of reconstructing the “heuristic” whereby a great composer, usually an inspired person of genius, arrived at a musical performance-type. Yet when listening even to works I know well, I often find myself asking, “How in the world did the composer come up with that?” I have no clue as to what the heuristic path was. Think, for example, of the famous eighteenth variation of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934). The variation theme is the inversion of the original. That much is clear. But the heuristic path that led Rachmaninov from the spritely A minor original to this passionate D flat major outpouring remains utterly mysterious, at least to me. The performances of composers often seem to be feats of imagination unique to the mentality of the composer, not types even minimally likely to be tokened by someone else. Compositional performance, as opposed to the heuristics of discovery in science (which inspire Currie here), seems particularly resistant to reconstruction. By contrast, we can reconstruct the thought-sequence set in motion by Newton’s proverbial falling apple, Einstein’s mounted light ray, and even Kekulé’s tail-biting snakes, thought-sequence types others might well have tokened. If reconstructing a composer’s heuristic path is requisite to engaging with a work of music, then musical experience, it seems to me, would be nearly impossible.

Ontology   337 Davies’s version of performance theory does not face this particular epistemological problem, since for him there is no heuristic path to reconstruct. Davies would have us believe that any enculturated listener will understand a compositional challenge and how it was met, how the composer manipulated the artistic vehicle (musical tones and timbres) and worked the artistic medium (the musical style and its attendant conventions) to produce the focus of appreciation that is heard, namely the “work performance.” But even this asks a great deal of the listener. Must a listener who feels a characteristic release of tension at the recapitulation in the Finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony understand the compositional challenge that Beethoven met by defying convention when reintroducing the piano version of the second motif of the Scherzo to prepare the recapitulation? Must that listener really grasp that feat of compositional performance to experience the work? I’m sceptical.7

Deflationary Views Deflationary views comprise, to recall, positions that question either the existence of musical works or the philosophical relevance of the project of musical ontology. Such views have taken at least two distinct forms, namely fictionalism and dismissivism. The first, associated in particular with the work of Andrew Kania, holds musical works to be “intentional inexistents” possessing the sort of ontological status properly accorded Sherlock Holmes or Santa Claus, individuals we think about but do not and never have existed. The second, associated in particular with the work of Aaron Ridley, deems musical ontology irrelevant, or, worse, inimical to the proper aim of the philosophy of music, which is to develop criteria of aesthetic value. I shall consider each in turn.8 In his key writing on the topic, Kania (2008a) argues only for the plausibility of musical fictionalism.9 His main concern is to make the methodological point that adopting fictionalism will allow us to take seriously musical ontology that is not revisionary but “descriptive” of musical practice, a move he seems to be recommending. Although on the fictionalist view there are, in terms of fundamental ontology, no musical works, we may in our musical practice proceed as if there were. Rather than confronting in performance an elaborately organized musical entity, a listener will hear a stream of sounds that merely supply some hints and cues concerning how the listener should construct— or, perhaps more accurately, imagine—that musical entity for him or herself. The work as such does not exist. If we accept this sort of fictionalism, the view that musical works are subjectively constructed by listeners upon hearing musical performances, that no such elaborately organized entities actually exist as public objects, and that composers, performers, and listeners are participants in the mass delusion that there are such public objects, all the puzzles of musical ontology dissolve. Since there are no musical works, no ontology of musical works need be formulated. Musical works have no distinctive ontology; they are a congeries of subjective constructions. Kania’s case for musical fictionalism is derivative of arguments for linguistic fictionalism put forward by Georges Rey (2006). According to Rey, the elaborate grammatical

338   Charles O. Nussbaum structure of natural language is not encoded in utterances or inscriptions: there are no standard linguistic entities (SLEs) such as phonemes, morphemes, noun phrases, or sentences. There are only acoustic blurs and inscriptions that, in and of themselves, display no such elaborate linguistic structuring.10 What matters is that speakers and hearers interpret them as structured, and that there is sufficient overlap among these subjective constructions for communication to succeed. Rey’s linguistic fictionalism is at least open to debate. First, one may observe that it presupposes a highly contentious interpretation of generative linguistics. Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern generative linguistics, does hold the view that spoken and written natural languages and their constituents are not proper objects of scientific study. That, however, is far from saying, as does Rey, that they are inevitable illusions in the manner of Kanizsa triangles (Rey 2006, 248). Second, historical linguists regard natural languages and their constituents as entities very much like Millikan’s historical substances, and they investigate them using techniques similar to those employed by evolutionary biologists who distinguish between homology (similarity of structure resulting from common origins) and analogy or homoplasy (similarity of structure resulting from convergence, either functional or accidental). Species, whatever the ontological difficulties they present may be, surely exist. Why, then, should we say that SLEs do not? The generative approach is not the only approach to linguistics, and historical linguists who spend their careers tracing the genealogies of grammatical forms would be shocked to learn from Rey that their objects of study are mere fictional entities that have no actual histories at all. Attacking generative linguistics, however, is not my aim, for I rely myself (though not entirely uncritically) on the musical version developed by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983). But I would be the first to insist that musical works are publicly accessible entities, albeit socially constructed ones requiring interpretation by performers and listeners. The hierarchical generative structures, including time-span and prolongation reductions, that Lerdahl and Jackendoff postulate as psychologically real place constraints on or set “parameters” for what an enculturated listener will accept as musically grammatical or well formed, just as the hierarchical structures of generative linguistics do the same for the hearer of linguistic utterances. In any event, Kania’s analogy between SLEs and musical works is not very close, for musical performances, or musical utterances as I characterized them in my 2007 book, are far more articulate than are linguistic utterances on Rey’s telling. Acceptable performances of traditional Western music produce token sequences and combinations of the discrete tones of the diatonic major and minor scales organized in a rhythmically precise manner. Listeners usually have few problems identifying “standard musical entities” such as motifs, themes, and chords. Adopting Kania’s view would require us to infer that a heard token of Wagner’s Tristan chord, an easily identifiable musical item with an actual history, is a product of a mutual or a mass delusion. For all its scepticism, fictionalism remains a bona fide attempt to do musical ontology. The same cannot be said of dismissivism. In a provocative article, Ridley (2003) suggests that the concern of the philosophy of music should be exclusively the aesthetics of music.

Ontology   339 To the extent that its focus is otherwise, argues Ridley, the philosophy of music is worthless, perhaps even detrimental for the proper appreciation of music. This is to say that the task of the philosophy of music is, or ought to be, to elucidate what it is about music that listeners find valuable, to make explicit the criteria whereby works and performances are judged good or bad. The idea seems to be that the philosophy of music should be a normative study—one that provides evaluative guidelines, not unlike normative ethics. (The very same argument, with a few minor additions, is presented in the sections entitled “Against Ontology” and “Some Objections” in Ridley 2004, 113–126.) On such a view, a metaphysics of moral agency that provided no guidance concerning how we should act, or which somehow interfered with effective moral deliberation, would either be worthless or positively self-defeating. Although Ridley entitles his article “Against Musical Ontology,” his polemic is mainly directed against musical identity theory, and only tangentially against musical ontology, for he is more bothered by philosophers’ preoccupation with identity conditions for works of music than he is by their worries about what a musical work fundamentally is. Hence Ridley claims that “any attempt to specify the conditions of a work’s identity must, from the perspective of musical aesthetics, be absolutely worthless” (Ridley 2003, 203). In truth, his article should be entitled “Against Musical Metaphysics,” a more capacious category that, in addition to ontology, includes identity theory and the theory of modality (the possible and the necessary). The core of Ridley’s argument seems to be as follows. Establishing metaphysical identity conditions for musical works is not necessary for the appreciation of musical value. Nor is it sufficient. In fact, it is irrelevant, for it has nothing to tell us about musical value. The only “identity” that counts is whatever it is about a work that a good performance must get right. Once we understand this, Ridley would have us believe, we have thereby satisfactorily identified the work. Nothing more need be said. But this is like arguing that when judges and juries accurately evaluate a defendant’s past actions and states of mind there is nothing more to be said about the identity conditions of persons, since identity conditions have nothing to tell us about the value, legal and moral, of persons and their actions. Of course judges and juries carry on, but it would be a non sequitur to conclude from this that the metaphysical conundrum of personal identity is not worth anyone’s attention. Ridley, however, has an additional, deeper argument up his sleeve. He maintains that no metaphysics or ontology of music can even get off the ground until evaluative aesthetic questions have been answered. “Music” and “performance,” he seems to be suggesting, are value-laden notions. They are honorifics, and until we have determined what sorts of things deserve these honorifics, we have no idea what it is we are after when we seek identity conditions for musical works. Looking to musical ontology for these determinations would direct our attention away from the issues of value that really matter, namely, how good the work is and how faithful the performance was. But is this a serious threat? Goodman (1976, 186) explicitly acknowledges that a genuine instance need not be a faithful performance, and Levinson (1990b, 87n34) proposes that a performance that is not a genuine instance may be a faithful, indeed a “great,” performance.

340   Charles O. Nussbaum Are we to believe that either of these philosophers would counsel musical listeners not to put their metaphysics aside for an evening and to prefer an aesthetically undistinguished, but genuine instance of a work to a faithful, great performance of it? Suppose we grant Ridley’s claim that “ontological questions about pieces of music can only be perspicuously framed, if they are framed at all, against an aesthetic backdrop of already answered questions about the value of performances of them” (Ridley 2003, 214; emphases original). Suppose we also grant his claim that “musical metaphysics is predicated,” in some sense to be made acceptably precise, “on musical aesthetics; and in musical aesthetics, ontology comes last (at the end of time, perhaps)” (215). With the exception of the hyperbolic allusion to Messiaen, granting these claims is not a problem for the musical metaphysician. In fact, they are consistent with Davies’s “pragmatic constraint,” which holds musical ontology accountable to the values that suffuse our artistic practices. Granting them is a problem only if one is labouring under an outmoded conception of ontology as foundational First Philosophy, as Aristotle termed it, and therefore as foundational to aesthetics. But this is to confuse the fundamental, with which ontology is concerned, with the foundational, with which it is no longer concerned. Ontology may not come first, but that is not to say that it comes last, much less at the end of time, or that it need never come at all because its issues have been satisfactorily resolved (or dissolved) by musical aesthetics.

Conclusion To sum up, I recommend the version of continuant theory presented in my 2007 book, and defended by Magnus (2012), as the most promising of the available accounts of musical ontology. On the one hand, it comports with compelling musical intuitions, such as the creatability requirement, and makes sense of our musical practice, while avoiding difficulties faced by the competing accounts. On the other, it is a respectable position in general ontology (vide Millikan’s work), one that honours naturalistic philosophical commitments by eschewing non-physical abstract objects of any sort. That said, my purpose in this chapter has not been simply to summarize that view, but rather to give a broader overview and assessment of music-ontological theories than was possible in the context of my earlier book, so providing a richer context both for my own view and for those of others. I have also argued in this chapter that ontology in general, to the extent it is regarded in our time as a fact-stating enterprise, is a shaky game, shaky because most of its truth claims are undecidable: we cannot in principle determine whether they are true or false. Musical ontology is particularly shaky in this regard. Works of music, like all works of art, are artefacts and so permeated with human aims and purposes. These aims and purposes tend to destabilize the ontological facts of the matter to be described.11 But ontology need not be relegated exclusively to the fact-stating line of business—though, I emphasize once more, that is not to say that it should not be regarded as fact-stating

Ontology   341 at all. We should, that is, take Davies’s “pragmatic constraint,” according to which ontology must remain accountable to the aims of our practices, very seriously and not only in the ontology of the arts. We may remain ontological realists and still accept from Carnap and Quine the idea that ontology consists in part of a meta-level pragmatic evaluation of competing options, and does not consist merely of object-level statements of purported fact. The approach to ontology I recommend is, then, a dual-function account. Statements of ontology may function descriptively, but are all too often undecidable. They may, however, also function prescriptively. To the extent that ontology does function prescriptively, it plays an indispensable regulative role in our theoretical practices, aesthetic and otherwise.

Notes 1. Thanks to Jeremy Byrd, Jerrold Levinson, Tomás McAuley, and two anonymous readers for critical comments. 2. Cameron (2008, 305) proposes resolving the differences between Thomasson and van Inwagen by saying that while van Inwagen’s claim that tables and chairs do not exist is true in the technical, quasi-scientific language of ontologese, Thomasson’s claim that tables and chairs do exist is true in ordinary English. But to accept this proposal is still to accept a version of eliminativism concerning tables and chairs: we may speak truly of them in English, but the truth makers for these claims are elementary particles arranged table-wise and chair-wise, not tables and chairs. 3. Reflective equilibrium, though not under that name, derives from Nelson Goodman’s (1955) attempt to codify prescriptive principles of inductive and deductive inference, and was thence applied to ethical theory by John Rawls (see Rawls 1971, 20, 49). 4. Levinson holds that “pure sound/performance means structures . . . cannot be created” (Levinson 1990c, 97). Since an instrument like the saxophone counts as a means of performance, it follows that the structure of the saxophone is an eternal object. But Levinson does hedge somewhat on the eternality of pure structures, asserting that “the pure structure that is embodied in the [Ford] Thunderbird has existed at least since the invention of plastic (1870)” (1990b, 81; emphasis original). 5. See Predelli 1999 for an attempt to expand Goodman’s conception of the musical score as a notational system so as to include indications of instrumental means of production as well as, by title, the original compositional event whence the score derives. Predelli does not, however, question Goodman’s standard of perfect compliance for genuine performance and work identity. It would be a mistake to assimilate Goodman’s view to that of Caplan and Matheson (2006), who defend musical perdurantism, the view that a musical work is a “fusion” of its performances and their parts through time and is therefore a mereological (part-whole) conception and not, as it would be on Goodman’s picture, a class-theoretic one. 6. A musical recording, on the other hand, is (or encodes) an interpretation type, a reproductively established family consisting of the master recording and its individual copies. A work of music (like a film score) not intended for performance would also be a reproductively established family of copies of a master. These days, the “master” would not, as of old, be a physical object like a magnetic tape but the binary states of a digital recording device.

342   Charles O. Nussbaum 7. Fred Maus, following Allen Forte, suggests that Schenkerian reduction of musical foreground to background structure is a process of “reverse variation,” which can impart “a ‘compositional’ quality” to the opposing elaboration of background into middle-ground and finally into foreground structure. But he is quick to point out that “such analyses do not claim to reproduce the thoughts of an actual composer” (Maus 2004, 29). 8. I set aside here a third deflationary view, namely eliminativism. This view, found in the work of Ross P. Cameron (2008), claims that just as a statue is nothing over and above the elementary material particles of which it is formed (an ontological position known as mereological nihilism), a musical work is nothing over and above the “indicated” pure sound structure it incorporates. This amounts, I believe, to an ontologically eliminativist reconstruction of Levinson’s hybrid musical Platonism that retains the characteristic difficulties of Platonism. (It is not clear whether Cameron endorses Levinson’s entire S/PM package.) It should be noted that Cameron himself denies that his position is eliminativist since we may truly say in English “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony exists”, despite the fact that in terms of fundamental ontology, there is no such entity as Beethoven’s Ninth (Cameron 2008, 304). When we shift from English to ontologese, however, we refer only to the abstract sound structure and Beethoven’s act of indication in 1824, and it is these, not the non-existent musical work, which make the English sentence true. 9. In “New Waves in Musical Ontology” (Kania 2008b, 28–29), Kania sketches, but does not defend, the very different realist position that musical works are types linked to compositional acts to which performances of these works are intentionally related. The work exists at any time in that it could be tokened by a performance. As such, musical works are abstract objects (types) that exist in time but not in space. This, he claims, allows such abstract objects to come into existence at some point in time, thus making their performances possible and thereby avoiding the Platonic commitment to types as eternal objects and respecting the creatability requirement. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, could not have been performed before 1824 and so did not exist before that year, when it was brought into existence by Beethoven’s act of completing the autograph score. Thereafter, it could be performed and, as a result, has existed from 1824 to the present. 10. Such acoustic blurring is oftentimes very minimal, as in one-word monosyllabic, but fully meaningful, utterances. I owe this point to linguist Alan J. Nussbaum. 11. Hence Ridley can observe, trenchantly, that “There is, so far as I am aware, no consensus— nor even a hint of it—on these [ontological] matters, except for a growing feeling that the sheer diversity of things that might, in various times and places, be thought of as music or as a performance makes it unlikely that any monolithic account, however tolerant of deviation, will suffice” (Ridley 2003, 206).

Works Cited Cameron, Ross P. 2008. “There Are No Things That Are Musical Works.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July): 295–314. Caplan, Ben, and Carl Matheson. 2006. “Defending Musical Perdurantism.” British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 1 (January): 59–69. Chalmers, David, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, eds. 2009. Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ontology   343 Currie, Gregory. 1989. An Ontology of Art. New York: St Martin’s Press. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell Press. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elgin, Catherine Z. 1983. With Reference to Reference. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1955. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press. Kania, Andrew. 2008a. “The Methodology of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism and Its Implications.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 4 (October): 426–444. Kania, Andrew. 2008b. “New Waves in Musical Ontology.” In New Waves in Aesthetics, edited by Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones, 20–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. [1804] 1983. What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? Translated by Ted Humphrey. New York: Abaris Books. Kivy, Peter. 1993. “Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense.” In The Fine Art of Repetition, 35–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray S. Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990a. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990b. “What a Musical Work Is.” In Levinson 1990a, 63–88. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990c. “Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited.” In Levinson 1990a, 89–106. Levinson, Jerrold. 1992. “Critical Notice of Gregory Currie’s An Ontology of Art.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, no. 1 (March): 215–222. Livingston, Paisley. 2016. “History of the Ontology of Art.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed March 23, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/art-ontology-history/. Magnus, P. D. 2012. “Historical Individuals Like Anas platyrhynchos and ‘Classical Gas’.” In Art and Abstract Objects, edited by Christy Mag Uidhir, 108–124. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maus, Fred  E. 2004. “The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis.” In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 13–43. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 2000. On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay about Substance Concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Charles. O. 2007. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press. O’Brien, James Patrick. 1977. Non-Western Music and the Western Listener. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Predelli, Stefano. 1995. “Against Musical Platonism.” British Journal of Aesthetics 35, no. 4 (October): 338–350. Predelli, Stefano. 1999. “Goodman and the Score.” British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 2 (April): 138–147. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

344   Charles O. Nussbaum Rey, Georges. 2006. “The Intentional Inexistence of Language—But Not Cars.” In Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, edited by Robert  J.  Stainton, 237–255. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Ridley, Aaron. 2003. “Against Musical Ontology.” Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 4 (April): 203–220. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rohrbaugh, Guy. 2003. “Artworks as Historical Individuals.” European Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 2 (August): 177–205. Sider, Theodore. 2009. “Ontological Realism.” In Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, edited by David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, 384–423. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spiller, Henry. 2004. Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia. New York: Routledge. Thomasson, Amie. 2007. Ordinary Objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trivedi, Saam. 2002. “Against Musical Works as Eternal Types.” British Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 1 (January): 73–82. van Inwagen, Peter. 2000. Material Beings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1975. “Toward an Ontology of Artworks.” Nous 9, no. 2 (May): 115–142.

chapter 16

Theol ogy Jeremy Begbie

What has theology to do with music? For some, the inclusion of this chapter in a volume such as this will provoke surprise, perhaps even disapproval. For those who hold that belief in any kind of deity is at best a mark of intellectual immaturity, and at worst a sure route to fanaticism, giving any space to theology can only be seen as a hindrance to the serious philosophical treatment of music. Yet as many chapters in this book demonstrate, such an attitude is very much the exception both historically and geographically, especially if one takes into account non-Western philosophical traditions. Whatever one’s religious commitments, it is impossible to deny that the history of philosophy has been repeatedly and profoundly interwoven with theology, directly or by implication, and the same goes for the philosophy of music. Moreover, among those whose work takes them to the interface of music and philosophy, there have been signs in recent years of a new willingness to take theology seriously (Berger  2007; Butt  2010; Shenton 2010; Scruton 2014, 140–174). Furthermore, a significant number of contemporary theologians have been venturing into musical territory (Blackwell  1999; Epstein 2005; Begbie 2000, 2007). Even in the face of the secularizing currents of modern and late modern intellectual life, theological or theologically-charged questions have not been expunged from the philosophical discourses surrounding music, and in some cases, music has been appealed to as a way of answering the very challenges that these secularizing currents pose. In this chapter I explore what a readiness to converse in depth with the world of theology might yield for those who address musical-philosophical issues. I will begin by examining some of the most prominent ways in which music has been treated theologically in the Christian tradition. My main purpose here is to show that for all the richness of these accounts, to a very large extent, and with some notable exceptions, they display only a very limited engagement with Christianity’s primary texts, the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I want to suggest that rather more attention needs to be paid to the integrating themes these writings manifest, and the distinctive imagination of the world that they open up. It is from this perspective of a “Scriptural imagination” (see Juel 2011 and Rowe 2013 for more on this term) that in the second main

346   Jeremy Begbie section of the chapter I go on to outline what I believe are some of the most fruitful avenues for conversation between theology and the philosophy of music in the future. The term theology here needs some clarification. Traditionally it has been used to refer to the study of God, and of God’s relation to all that is not God. Strictly speaking, therefore, it relates to theistic faiths (for example, Christianity, Judaism, Islam). The study of religion is a far wider enterprise, examining not only faith traditions (their beliefs, practices, narratives, and symbols systems) but also the much wider and fairly amorphous area of religious experience (and perhaps spirituality). Talk of music pervades this wider field, but our interests in this chapter are more limited—pertaining to Christian theology in particular.

Trajectories and Disjunctions With the rise of Christianity, its rapid spread into Latin- and Greek-speaking territories, and its eventual political dominance, the leading philosophical traditions of the West became entwined with the specific theological commitments of this new faith, a situation that persisted throughout the Middle Ages. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that philosophical reflection on music in these periods should be pervaded by and dependent upon many of the beliefs which give the Christian faith its coherence, and indeed, the traffic also runs in the other direction: the experience of singing and playing music sometimes played a substantial part in shaping and articulating those beliefs. However, as we will see, there are several ways in which the theology deployed to engage music came to veer away significantly from some of Christianity’s primary scriptural traditions.

The Grand Tradition Apt examples can be found if we examine the massive influence of Greek philosophical traditions on theological treatments of music, most especially those derived from the semi-fictional figure of Pythagoras and the philosopher Plato (427–347 bce). Critical to this outlook was the notion that musical sound, especially musical harmony, gives expression to cosmic order. In De Musica, St Augustine (350–430 ce)—without doubt the most influential theologian in the West until Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth ­century—claims that audible music, that is, music as practised, sung, played, and heard, can make accessible to our ears the mathematical proportions structuring the universe (Augustine  1947). These numbers derive from the unchanging eternal numbers that proceed from the Creator. Guided by divine providence, the mind is able to ascend from the lowest to the highest numbers and thus to the knowledge and love of God. The music of the cosmos is a temporal manifestation of the eternal music belonging primordially to God. A rather more systematic but no less influential vision was propounded by

Theology   347 Boethius (c.480–525 ce), for whom the physical sound of music (musica instrumentalis) is a first step (and only a first step) towards apprehending the unheard harmonies of the soul and the universe which are ultimately instantiated in God. These notions were carried forward and modified in various ways throughout the medieval period, and became deeply linked to the worship of the Church. Wherever sounded music is theorized, we find a recurring desire to root it ontologically and mathematically in a cosmos envisioned as created and maintained by the Christian God. For all its ingeniousness and imaginative power, however, there are some features of early Christian and medieval theology that sit rather uneasily with the witness of the scriptures that were officially regarded as central and normative for the Church’s life. For example, there is a tendency to underplay a central and recurrent refrain of those texts: the God-given primordial goodness and full reality of the physical world. The recurring trend of the grand cosmological tradition is to look beyond material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to—in such a way as to risk leaving them behind—resulting in a certain ambivalence about whether these sounds can be honoured as concrete embodiments of order and beauty in their own right. With this goes a tendency to set the intellectual and the sensual over and against each other and consequently to devalue the latter, thus encouraging a demotion of the bodily practices of music—making it and hearing it—in comparison with the intellectual insight they were believed to afford. All this contrasts sharply with the more integrated and less hierarchical anthropology found in, for example, the Hebrew Bible, with its heavy stress on the physical and embodied character of all human knowing. Perhaps most seriously, out of a pervasive keenness to posit direct ontological commonalities between the world and God, to give the world’s observed order an immediate divine sanction through some version of the metaphysics of the “hierarchy of being,” another repeated stress of these same scriptures tends to be obscured: that the created world glorifies God most powerfully in its very otherness from God, in its integrity as not-God. (On these disjunctions, see Begbie 2007, 77–96; 2000, 75–85.)

Disenchantment and Music Other examples of the departure of musico-theological thinking from the Church’s chief texts can be found in the way the breakdown of the grand cosmological tradition is typically narrated, and in the ways in which music was theologized in the wake of that breakdown. The transition from late medieval to early modern brought with it turbulent shifts in what Charles Taylor (2007) calls the “social imaginary,” involving seismic changes to the ways music was theorized and practised. From the late fifteenth century onwards, the kind of cosmological and metaphysical embeddedness of music assumed by most medieval music theorists was rendered deeply problematic. Musical sound now became the object of empirical investigation by the fast-developing natural sciences, and ancient theories of number were exposed as inadequate, not least in accounting for the new kinds of music emerging at the time, such as polyphony, opera, and instrumental music.

348   Jeremy Begbie Popular new methods of tuning did not obviously match up to the supposedly perfect numbers of former centuries (Isacoff 2001; Rasch 2002). By the time we reach the early eighteenth century, the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition has been largely abandoned except as a literary trope: “stars no longer sang, and scales no longer laddered the sky” (Chua 1999, 21). We see an increasing inclination to construe music primarily as an anthropological art form, a powerful tool of interhuman communication, not as a vehicle of perception into anything beyond the purely human sphere—an outlook we largely take for granted today. A common way of narrating these and subsequent changes is to view them as the inevitable result of the ever-growing explanatory power of the natural sciences. In this climate, it is said, Christianity was bound to find itself in retreat, and to be increasingly barred from those areas of inquiry that were concerned with the pursuit of publicly acceptable, verifiable truth. A huge amount has been written about the complex process sometimes referred to as “disenchantment” (after Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber), whereby the physical world comes to be regarded as no longer inhabited by gods, spirits, or transcendent forces. Certainly, modernity has witnessed various forms of naturalism, the strongest of which would hold that even entertaining the possibility of God’s ex­ist­ ence comes to be regarded not only as unnecessary but as superstitious and naïve. Admittedly, the once-popular narratives that told us that with the growth of the natural sciences and the concomitant maturation of culture, religion would simply wither away have proven patently false, and the belief that all phenomena can be accounted for wholly in terms of efficient causes (without any reference to purpose) is now relatively rare. But there is no doubt that in much of North Atlantic contemporary culture, belief in God is widely regarded as little more than a private lifestyle choice. What Charles Taylor (2007, 19) calls “exclusive humanism”—“a way of constructing meaning and significance without any reference to the divine or transcendence” (Smith 2014, 26)—is regarded as a perfectly respectable intellectual choice. In this outlook, then, it is not surprising if any attempt at a Christian theological account of music will likely be seen as at best quaint, a nostalgic harking back to an irretrievable past. However, several oddities about this kind of account are worth noting. From the scientific point of view, it is by no means obvious that a commitment to the methods of the empirical sciences requires the kind of closed world-view required of a hard-line naturalism (Plantinga 2011; Goetz and Taliaferro 2008). Even more pertinent to our particular purposes, however, two things need underlining. First, it has been frequently pointed out that modern science’s characteristic interest in discovering the world’s own order— in other words, without presuming a direct correspondence between physical processes and God at every turn—is in fact consonant with (and likely indebted to) a profoundly biblical outlook (see, for example, Harrison  1998; Hooykaas  2010). The fact that the mathematics of music turned out to be rather different from what was previously thought should not have been regarded as a problem—the mathematics of the world is to be discovered by investigating the world as it stands, not by reading it in terms of supposedly divinely sanctioned numbers. Second, the God being marginalized in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought (or in the case of rigorous atheism,

Theology   349 being rejected) more often than not turns out to be only a very distant relative of the God of Judaism or Christianity. God is typically pictured as one more worldly cause among others, an agent among agents, a being among beings (only much bigger and more powerful). As science extends its explanatory reach ever further, it is relatively easy to dismiss such a God from the cosmos and relegate him to the realm of private belief. But scripturally-grounded Jewish and Christian theism has never regarded God as a being among others, the first or one in a series of finite causes, but rather as the ground of all that is, of all causes (amongst others, see Marion  1991; Placher  1996; Carlson  2003; Shortt 2016; Lash 2008, 1–3).

Re-Enchantment Through Music? Two Examples Another more recent plot-line in the tale of music’s engagement with theology can be highlighted here, and it emerged as a kind of counter-movement to the developments we have just mentioned. It too reveals just how far the theology enlisted in relation to music can move in radically different directions from those characteristic of Christianity’s prime texts. I cite two instances of this plot-line in action. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the barrenness of a disenchanted universe of the kind sketched above was vigorously challenged, and of all the protagonists, the Romantics are probably the most celebrated. What is especially notable is that music comes to occupy a prominent place in their challenge. So, for example, for the eminent theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) music plays a key role in a rewritten Christian theology that owes much to the Romantics (Schleiermacher 1967; Stoltzfus 2006, 49–106). Others press the potential of music much further. In writers such as Novalis [G. P. F. F. von Hardenberg] (1772–1801), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and W. H. Wackenroder (1773–1798) music is accorded nothing less than a cosmic and divine potency, robed in a vibrant metaphysics of the infinite. Instrumental music, so long demoted in early modernity, now comes into its own, unencumbered as it is by words and texts. In some respects, this can be read as a revival of the grand medieval tradition. Orphaned amidst a universe seemingly rendered depthless by a certain kind of science, music once again finds an integral place in a theologically charged cosmos-wide worldview (Begbie 2013, 106–140). However, it hardly needs to be pointed out that the theology of the older tradition has been drastically reconfigured. We are a long way not only from medieval metaphysics, but from anything akin to a biblically derived one. Instrumental music “sounds” the inaudible again, to be sure, but the inaudible is not the harmony of the spheres or the ratios of the cosmos under God. Instead, the infinite play of the world’s immanent spirit coursing through all things comes to realization supremely in and through the creative productivity of the human artist-musician. This is not so much a re-embedding of music in the cosmos as a re-mythologizing of the cosmos through music and the human ego’s productivity. And this kind of grand metaphysical re-visioning was by no means to end with the Romantics. Indeed, it finds a

350   Jeremy Begbie number of expressions in the succeeding decades of the nineteenth century, perhaps most famously in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) (see Ferrara 1996). A rather subtler example of an attempt at re-enchantment comes from the late modern or postmodern context of the 1980s. In some respects, this intellectual climate is a good deal friendlier to theology than the hard-core scientific naturalism of the post-Enlightenment world. With a concern for diversity and inclusion, those previously dismissed—such as theologians—find themselves rather more welcome at the musical-philosophical table. On the other hand, the postmodern suspicions of the very notion of truth, of the claim that we might have any direct purchase on reality, and with this, of the idea that music could or should be regarded as rooted in extrahuman patterns of meaning—all this rubs up hard against the truth claims of a major theistic faith. It is with these suspicions in mind that George Steiner penned his much-discussed 1989 classic, Real Presences. Many theologians found the metaphysical suggestiveness of the book’s learned prose irresistible, especially his claim that “it is . . . poetry, art and music which relate us most directly to that in being which is not ours” (Steiner 1989, 226). Art, it transpires, is a bid for freedom in relation to God, a wrestling with the Maker and with the stubborn priority of that first “let there be.” I believe that the making into being by the poet, artist and . . . by the composer, is counter-creation . . . It is radically agonistic. It is rival. In all substantive art-acts there beats an angry gaiety. The source is that of loving rage. The human maker rages at his coming after, at being, forever, second to the original and originating mystery of the forming of form.  (Steiner 1989, 203–204)

Artistic creation is, then, at root a bid for freedom, a struggle against the Creator—even if not acknowledged as such. And it is music that exemplifies this reach for freedom more potently than any other art, for it is the least obviously imitative art, the least amenable to being explained through things that are already “there,” the art that comes closest to God’s initial act of creation. It thus implies or gestures towards an (absolutely free) presence, a transcendent postulate. It is not surprising, says Steiner, that music “has long been, it continues to be, the unwritten theology of those who lack or reject any formal creed. Or to put it reciprocally: for many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in” (Steiner 1989, 218). Once again, however, we pause to note the nature of the deity so compellingly evoked. To be sure, this God creates “in the beginning” but seems to do remarkably little subsequently, in stark contrast to the God rendered in the Bible’s narrative. And this God’s basic relation to humans is essentially antagonistic, in contrast to the biblical God, whose antagonism is not a basic attitude or posture but, where it occurs, is the result of humanity’s breach of a covenant relationship. Moreover, in Steiner we are presented, as far as one can tell, with a wholly undifferentiated, monadic God, one far removed from that of the three-fold Creator of the Christian Scriptures, who invites humans into God’s own relational life and continuing activity in the world—a vision which in turn

Theology   351 generates a markedly less oppositional account of human creativity than the one that emerges from the relatively simple God–human duality we find in Steiner.

Scriptural Imagination and Future Possibilities The purpose of this highly selective review of some prominent ways of relating music and theology has been to throw into relief some of the disjunctions between, on the one hand, the theological assumptions being employed and, on the other, the distinctive patterns of thought which give the foundational texts of the Christian tradition their coherence. My concern here is not try to demonstrate the superiority of the latter, but to urge nonetheless that any future engagement of music and theology would benefit from these texts being given more attention than they have so far received. To that end, we can highlight three areas where the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament press us in very different directions from the material we have examined, directions which open up promising vistas for future engagements between philosophers of music and theologians.

Material Environment In the historical trajectories we traced above, it is clear that the most critical question hovering in the wings, even if only silently, concerns the extent to which music’s significance for us is grounded in anything wider or deeper than the order humans construct, the meanings we make. The issue hovers over many of the current debates in the philosophy of music, perhaps more than any other. And if it does so haunt us, I suggest it is in large part because of a deep ambivalence about the value of the physical environment we inhabit, an ambivalence bequeathed to us from our culture’s journey out of the late medieval and Renaissance periods into the modern age, during which we can discern not only a disembedding of humans from their physical environment but a disembedding of the physical environment from the sense that a purpose might underwrite it as a whole. Needless to say, philosophers of music today are decidedly nervous about acknowledging that music might have any roots that go deeper than particular social and cultural determinants. And this goes much deeper than a suspicion of the kind of metaphysics to be found in the Greek-influenced medieval music theory. The very suggestion of universals is likely to come under instant suspicion as encouraging a pernicious cultural imperialism, a belief in the intrinsic superiority of this or that system of music. In many discussions of these matters, there seems to be an unquestioned assumption that discovery and creativity are inherently at odds with each other. An either/or often seems to set

352   Jeremy Begbie the stage: music is meaningful for us either because of the way it engages features of the physical world we all indwell, including constituents of our own bodily make-up, or because it is the product of our sociocultural setting, all the way from individual preferences, local customs and conventions, to broadly shared traditions and conventions. And in the current climate, the latter option will generally be favoured over the former. Although there seems to be a fairly wide consensus that the choice between the so-called natural and the so-called cultural is a false one, we seem to lack the imaginative vision that would enable us to move beyond the exclusive dichotomy. A patient re-reading of Christianity’s ancient texts, I would suggest, will at the very least lead us to question some of the assumptions on which this kind of either/or is based. For the narrative that gives these writings their coherence is one in which the physical world is seen as having been created by God with its own inherent value and order with a guaranteed future—what the New Testament calls the new heaven and earth (see Gunton 1997; Bauckham 2010; Wood 2014). The ultimate demonstration of this is the climactic two-fold act of the God of Israel: his coming as a physical, fleshly human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and his raising Jesus from the dead, which is seen as a promise of the re-creation of all material things. The physical world at large is thus not to be regarded as a temporary and disposal stage on which the human drama can be played out, merely stuff for us to tame or control, still less as something to be ignored or denigrated. It is something that calls forth respect. At the same time, the narrative invites us to think of it yielding its order—and indeed, a richer order—just as humans interact with it strenuously, as when, for example, we improvise a fugue, play in a gamelan, or sing in a resonant building. In other words, this is a vision in which there is no hint that respectful discovery and intense creativity need be opposed to each other (see Hart 2014 and Begbie 2013, 43–50). Of course, the question that is almost bound to arise from this is whether this physical order in which music is inevitably implicated has any value other than the value we give it as we shape it. If we begin to speak of “respecting” and perhaps even “trusting” the integrity of vibrating strings, the rhythms of our bodies, or whatever, as fields of fertile possibility, is it not likely that at some stage we will want to ask to what extent such language might be appropriate? Is our environment to be considered anything more than simply “there” in a bare, brute sense? More pointedly: can there be any meaning other than that which humans themselves generate? To ask these questions inevitably pushes us in theological or near-theological directions, but arguably, this is where much musical practice actually leads us. The fact that we are often reluctant to do so may signal a weakness rather than a strength. Julian Johnson’s words are worth pondering carefully: If it now strikes us as amusing that music was once linked to astronomy or natural science, that is only because we fail to recognise ourselves there and the historical development of our own attempts to understand the world. If we no longer take music seriously as a way of defining our relation to the external world, perhaps we have become not more sophisticated but simply more self-absorbed. (Johnson 2002, 13)

Theology   353

Bodily Life Striking by its absence from the theology and music conversation so far is any sustained attention to biblical traditions concerning the human body. When writers on music have engaged with Christian thought directly, it is generally assumed that some form of dualism between soul and body, mind and matter, material and non-material will be in play—the former being privileged in each case. Doubtless, there is much in the Christian tradition that has encouraged just this kind of picture. The hefty influence of Platonism in the Christian West, not least on the philosophy of music, is unquestionably a factor here. However, a patently different outlook emerges if we turn to the New Testament writings, rooted as they are in thoroughly Jewish soil: humans turn out to be not immortal souls encased in bodies, but composite agents, psychosomatic unities. It is never suggested a person consists of two discrete substances (soul/spirit and body), never implied that communion with God involves extraction from our bodies. Indeed, the entire New Testament narrative centres on a particular flesh-and-blood human being who goes to a concrete, bodily death, and through death to a radically renewed, transformed bodily life (see Wright 2003 for a monumental study of this). In short, we find little if anything to suggest a theology that would encourage us to downplay the sheer corporality of musical practices: the messy business of fingers on strings, lips on mouthpieces, grunting conductors, and noisy audiences. Needless to say, the body has become a favoured topic in recent philosophy of music (see, for example, Cook and Everist  1999; Le Guin  2006; Clayton and Leante  2013; Leman and Maes 2014). And the enemies are typically those views of music that—ironically—are presumed to be compatible with a standard Christian theology of the body: for example, the notion that music can be essentialized as disembodied sound structures, where the paradigm of musical experience is seen as the apprehension of an idea or concept supposedly perceived by a incorporeal mind, and aural perception seen as a passive process disengaged from all other bodily involvement. Another example would be accounts of musical meaning that ignore physiological and biological determinants. Still another would be theories of emotion and music which portray emotions as entirely interior private states, whose content is only contingently related to physiology or overt bodily activity. Yet another would be treating the musical “work” as an entity transcending the particularities of embodied social and cultural life. Legions of music theorists and musicologists have borne down on all such attempts to ignore or sideline music’s bodily entanglements. The hazard here, of course, as many philosophers of music will recognize, is a swing in the opposite direction: towards a crude reductionism in bodily accounts of music, where it is held that music’s value and effects can be explained entirely in terms of one level of physical process and causation, and with that, entirely using the discourse and conceptuality appropriate to a certain kind of physical science. In this light, arguably, much could be gained if in addressing questions of music and the body, something of the oft-neglected distinctiveness of the textual tradition we have cited were allowed to have its way. At the very least, this might offer philosophers of

354   Jeremy Begbie music fresh conceptual resources for articulating and developing the kind of emphases they have been seeking to recover in musical discourse—much scholarship in philosophical theology in recent times has addressed biblically grounded notions of embodiment (see, for example Jeeves 2002; Cortez 2008, 2010). It could also help guard against the kind of reductionism we have just mentioned; a biblical outlook will press towards allowing for different types of causation to be recognized at different levels of the physical world, appropriate to different ways in which entities exist and interact, thus resisting the pressure to reduce all explanation to the level of efficient causality (see Myers 2008; McKenzie 2011; Peacocke 1993, 213–254). Further, a willingness on the part of theologians to engage with music philosophers on these topics could well expose the way the Christian tradition has so often obscured and distorted the testimony of its own key writings.

Transcendence A third area of conversation between theology and philosophers of music—which we consider here at rather greater length—concerns transcendence. This is a topic we have not yet considered but which is in fact implicit in much of the material reviewed above. A flurry of writing on music and transcendence has been appearing in recent years, much of it gesturing towards the theological, although admittedly to varying degrees. Again, however, we find a striking disjunction between the operating assumptions about divine transcendence (where this is addressed) and the transcendence of God as testified in biblical texts. It is widely believed that there is an ineradicable, perhaps even essential link between music and transcendence. Many remark on the way in which words such as “tran­scend­ ent,” the “spiritual,” the “sacred,” and so forth are widely and readily used today to describe the experience of music, often outside any overtly religious faith. Related to this, the notion of ineffability has attracted much interest, the way in which music so often seems to resist expression in language. At the same time, many are nervous of some of the connotations of the concept of transcendence. For many it carries the aroma of oppression. Few will need reminding of the horrors perpetrated by those who have claimed direct and unquestionable access to a truth or authority that is believed in some way to subsist “above” all peoples and all ages, or to principles or ideals supposedly applicable to all times and places, or—most dangerous of all—to a transcendent God. Transcendence and tyranny have a nasty habit of joining hands, especially if a theistic faith is involved. Others will be suspicious of theological notions of transcendence simply because of what they see as the intellectual impossibility of belief in any kind of deity. In any case, when it comes to thinking about ways in which music might be tran­ scend­ent, it is common to find a reluctance to understand this in traditional theological terms and a keenness to find chastened, atheological conceptions of transcendence that might nonetheless still throw light on music’s powerful effects. The philosopher

Theology   355 Andrew Bowie (2007, 34), for instance, points to the way in which the development of modernity has exposed the contingency and “fragility of the subject”: our need for, and attachment to things we cannot control, things that cannot be coerced by our wills. In this context, he believes music provides a temporary solace, a “secularised [form] of transcendence,” a vehicle for us to feel temporarily at home in an age that is post-theological, and in a universe that is ultimately indifferent to all human needs and aspirations (Bowie 2007, 382; cf. Jankélévitch 2003 as another example of an atheological approach to tran­scend­ence). Others are less inclined to capitulate to such bleak assumptions, and want to give theology rather more room, in some cases arguing that music can provide intimations of a divine transcendence that challenge such bleakness. Writers in this stream are, in effect, following in the line of Steiner—examples can be found in a recent collection of essays on music and transcendence edited by Férdia Stone-Davis (2015), and in some of the work of the philosopher Roger Scruton (2014, 140–174). The ferment of interest around this theme is surely to be welcomed. But it is striking that where theological transcendence (here meaning divine transcendence) is referred to—either by those hostile to the idea or those sympathetic to it—we seem to have left anything approaching a scriptural imagination far behind. Certainly, it is generally known that it is axiomatic to the biblical narrative that God is not the world and the world is not God—that God is other than the world, that there is an absolute ontological distinction between Creator and creation; and along with this, that God cannot be contained, grasped, or held by the created world—God is not bound to the cosmos by any necessity. Most writers are aware that these two strands—otherness and uncontainability—together cover most of what is being intended by the term “transcendence” in the Christian faith. But the otherness and uncontainability of God can be understood in radically different ways depending on one’s vantage point. With an eye to future conversations, three comments are in order. First, in both “secularized” and theological accounts of music and transcendence, the overriding tendency is to philosophize (or theologize) transcendence from the perspective of our experience of, and interpretation of, human limits. There is an acute sense of the inadequacy of language and thought, the stubborn resistance of certain realities to linguistic and conceptual seizure, and the proneness of language and thought to human corruption. And an account of transcendence is elaborated from that basis. Taken into theology, the picture is fairly predictable—God is essentially beyond the knowable and the speakable, indeed in many versions, to be discovered first of all by thinking away, or negating, everything finite. In this kind of context, music is appealed to as providing a measure of access, unique access perhaps, to the unknowable and ineffable transcendent (whether imagined in theistic terms or not). For those with theological interests, the obvious weakness here is that we appear to be led towards a somewhat vacuous agnosticism. To put it bluntly, if this God is radically and wholly inaccessible to knowledge and speech, defined only by negation, what is the point of invoking such a deity at all with respect to music (or indeed anything else)? Whether we want to adopt the biblical writers’ convictions or not, their

356   Jeremy Begbie drastically different starting point for imagining transcendence does at least need to be clearly registered. Their sense of God’s transcendence does not arise in the first instance from reflecting on human limits, nor from thinking away the finite, but from God’s activity and passionate involvement with the world, God’s own personal selfpresentation. Transcendence is located where it is believed to happen, to occur: and that means supremely in the history of Israel, and the concentration of God’s presence in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, in contrast to many discussions of music and transcendence that tend to assume divine transcendence refers to God’s disengagement from the world (as if God needed to keep some kind of quasi-spatial distance from all that is not God), here we find God’s otherness and uncontainability are manifest as God engages with the world. Second, if we adopt this different outlook on transcendence, both divine ineffability and attempts to relate music to divine ineffability will need to be rethought. It becomes evident that God’s transcendence of language is not the expression of a desire on the part of God to have nothing to do with language, as if God could not bear to be in contact with anything so limited and liable to corruption. On the contrary, language, according to these texts, has been directly assumed into God’s purposes. Human speech is part of what God has acted to heal and redeem—and this is believed to have reached its climactic outworking in the coming of God as human, as a speaking agent in the person of Jesus Christ. This does not mean God is containable by human speech after all. Our finite language can never grasp, hold, encompass the divine: in this sense, God is indeed uncontainable. But neither does it mean language can or should be abandoned, nor that silence can be privileged as intrinsically superior to speech, for language has become an indispensable vehicle of God’s self-communication. In this setting, clearly, it makes little sense to appeal to music to take us beyond language—in the sense of leaving all language, and any responsibility to language behind—in order to apprehend the God who is supposedly incapable of any contact with it. It would only make sense to appeal to music to enable us to apprehend the unspeakable dimensions of meaning in the language God has already engaged (this line of thought is developed further in Begbie 2013, 194–216). In any case, here is an area where theologians can heed the music philosopher’s proper suspicion of talk of ineffability in relation to music, and in turn eschew the insipid hollowness of the theology often assumed. Third, it is arguable that a major reason why so much discourse about music and tran­ scend­ence tends to assume that divine transcendence is about God’s disengagement, indifference, or even oppressive opposition to the world, is because of the presumption that we are dealing with a God of absoluteness monadic oneness, a unitarian deity. The history and consequences of entertaining this concept in Western thought has received huge scholarly attention in academic theology in the last few decades (Gunton 1993; Lash  1993; Cunningham  1998; Tanner  2000; Coakley  2006; Volf and Welker  2006; Kärkkäinen 2007). According to the “pressure” of the biblical witness (Rowe 2002), we find that the deity embodied in Jesus Christ of the New Testament is not uninvolved, unconcerned with, or primordially opposed to the world, but actively committed to its

Theology   357 flourishing, and in a way that includes the rehabilitation of humans through patterns of loving call and response. This, it is believed, is the outward expression of who God is internally: a life of relatedness-in-love, a belief that in due course came to be known as the doctrine of the Trinity. In other words, transcendence is a function of love. The otherness of God from the world becomes the expression of concern for the integrity of the other as other; the uncontainability of the world becomes the uncontainability of the love directed to the good of the other. Clearly, if music is to be related to this kind of transcendence, the terms of the discussion take on very new colours. For example, many of the concerns of contemporary philosophers of music—for the otherness of the other, for the inherent relatedness of persons to one another, for music’s potential to release individuals from socially alienating conditions—are cast in a new light. Theologians in turn, by encountering just this kind of concern, will be reminded of the ways in which they and others have so often marginalized or simply ignored their own scriptural traditions. The future possibilities for a mutually enriching engagement between theologians and those engaged in the philosophical exploration of music look bright. But the burden of this chapter has been to suggest that there is a wealth of material that still needs to be explored—the quality of the conversation will only improve if it is.

Works Cited Augustine. 1947. “On Music (De Musica).” In The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 4:153–379. New York: CIMA Publishing. Bauckham, Richard. 2010. Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Begbie, Jeremy. 2000. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Begbie, Jeremy. 2007. Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. Begbie, Jeremy. 2013. Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Blackwell, Albert L. 1999. The Sacred in Music. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1999. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butt, John. 2010. Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carlson, Thomas  A. 2003. “Postmetaphysical Theology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, edited by Kevin  J.  Vanhoozer, 58–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chua, Daniel  K.  L. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayton, Martin, and Laura Leante. 2013. “Embodiment in Music Performance.” In Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, edited by Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, 188–207. New York: Oxford University Press.

358   Jeremy Begbie Coakley, Sarah. 2006. God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘on the Trinity’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, eds. 1999. Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cortez, Marc. 2008. Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: An Exercise in Christological Anthropology and Its Significance for the Mind/Body Debate. London: T & T Clark. Cortez, Marc. 2010. Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: T & T Clark. Cunningham, David S. 1998. These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Epstein, Heidi. 2005. Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music. London: Continuum. Ferrara, Lawrence. 1996. “Schopenhauer on Music as the Embodiment of Will.” In Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Dale Jacquette, 183–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goetz, Stewart, and Charles Taliaferro. 2008. Naturalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Gunton, Colin E. 1993. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Gunton, Colin  E., ed. 1997. The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Harrison, Peter. 1998. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, Trevor. 2014. Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Hooykaas, Reijer. 2010. Fact, Faith and Fiction in the Development of Science. New York: Springer. Isacoff, Stuart. 2001. Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jeeves, Malcolm, ed. 2002. From Cells to Souls and Beyond. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Johnson, Julian. 2002. Who Needs Classical Music? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juel, Donald H. 2011. Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Shane Berg and Matthew L. Skinner. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. 2007. The Trinity: Global Perspectives. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Lash, Nicholas. 1993. Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Lash, Nicholas. 2008. Theology for Pilgrims. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Le Guin, Elisabeth. 2006. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Leman, Marc, and Pieter Jan Maes. 2014. “The Role of Embodiment in the Perception of Music.” In “Music and Embodied Cognition,” edited by Kevin Ryan, Nicola Dibben, and Renee Timmers, special issue, Empirical Musicology Review 9 (3–4): 236–246. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God Without Being: Hors-Texte. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McKenzie, Ross H. 2011. “Emergence, Reductionism and the Stratification of Reality in Science and Theology.” Scottish Journal of Theology 64, no. 2 (May): 211–235. Myers, Benjamin. 2008. “The Stratification of Knowledge in the Thought of T. F. Torrance.” Scottish Journal of Theology 61, no. 1 (February): 1–15.

Theology   359 Peacocke, Arthur R. 1993. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural, Divine and Human. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press. Placher, William C. 1996. The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God went Wrong. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 2011. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rasch, Rudolf. 2002. “Tuning and Temperament.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas S. Christensen, 193–222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowe, C. Kavin. “The Formation of Scriptural Imagination.” Faith & Leadership, June 17, 2013. https://www.faithandleadership.com/features/articles/c-kavin-rowe-the-formationscriptural-imagination. Rowe, C. Kavin. 2002 “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics.” Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 3 (Summer): 295–312. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1967. Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation. Translated by Terrence N. Tice. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1967. Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shenton, Andrew. 2010. Messiaen the Theologian. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Shortt, Rupert. 2016. God Is No Thing: Coherent Christianity. London: C. Hirst & Co. Smith, James K. A. 2014. How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Steiner, George. 1989. Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? London: Faber & Faber. Stoltzfus, Philip Edward. 2006. Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought. London: Bloomsbury. Stone-Davis, Férdia, ed. 2015. Music and Transcendence. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Tanner, Kathryn. 2000. Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Volf, Miroslav, and Michael Welker. 2006. God’s Life in Trinity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wood, Donald. 2012. “Maker of Heaven and Earth.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 14, no. 4 (October): 381–395. Wright, N. T. 2003. The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK.

chapter 17

Phil osoph y of L a nguage Hanne Appelqvist

Introduction The same strange illusion which we are under when we seem to seek something which a face expresses whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves up to the features before us—that same illusion possesses us even more strongly if repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us, we say “This tune says something,” and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn’t say anything such that I might express in words or pictures what it says. And if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying “It just expresses a musical thought,” this would mean no more than saying “It expresses itself.”  (Wittgenstein 1958, 166)

These words from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books express powerfully a common experience which, I believe, lies behind the comparison between language and music and accordingly behind the inclusion of a chapter on philosophy of language in this volume. We can listen to music as intently as we would listen to the words of a priest or a lover, for we feel that music speaks to us, that what it says is important, and further, that we can either grasp or fail to grasp what it says. But what does it mean to say such things? Is the understanding of absolute music, i.e., music without lyrics, programme, or title, really comparable to the understanding of natural languages, and if so, what are the relevant criteria of understanding? Does music embody meaning in the sense of semantic content, accessible to all competent speakers of the relevant language? Do the notions of musical syntax or grammar compare with those we attach to language? And what does it mean to talk about musical profundity, humour, irony, narrative, or metaphor? Finally, if music can be usefully compared with language, then what philosophical work is the comparison supposed to do?

362   Hanne Appelqvist The above questions exemplify the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of music and many of them have a long history. According to Schopenhauer, “music has always been described as the language of feeling and of passion, just as words are the language of reason” (Schopenhauer [1818] 2010, 287). Stravinsky talks about a composer who “speaks the language of his craft,” but unlike Schopenhauer, he takes the content of musical language to be the specifically musical features of a given style, a given musical “physiognomy” (Stravinsky 1942, 70). This much seems clear enough: the two fields have—at least at the outset—a key question in common, namely, the question of meaning. Philosophy of language revolves around the question “In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises meaningful linguistic expressions, and in virtue of what does any particular set of marks or noises have the distinctive meaning it does?” (Lycan 1995, 589). One need only exchange the term “linguistic” for “musical” and we have a ready formulation of the parallel question in philosophy of music. This question of meaning is closely related to the question of understanding. What does it mean to understand such meaningful sets of marks or noises? What does it mean to communicate by means of them? Yet, I added the proviso “at the outset” to the initial claim about the parallel between the two fields because to connect the question of musical meaning with philosophy of language is to already make a critical move concerning the term “meaning” by connecting it to semantic content in the sense employed by philosophers of language. As will be explained below, for many contemporary writers this is not a promising way of handling the question at all, and they take the notion of meaning to stand for musical significance or expressiveness (for example, Robinson 1997). In this respect, philosophy of music has followed the general trend in philosophy by turning to metaphysics and naturalism from the language-oriented method of early analytic philosophy. However, as I will argue, the rejection of the comparison between music and language may have been too hasty and reflects an unduly narrow conception of the constitution of linguistic meaning. For while it is evident that building the comparison between music and language on such linguistic phenomena as reference and representation leads to an implausible account of musical meaning, it is not equally clear that we ought to treat reference and representation as the essence of linguistic meaning. It may turn out that philosophy of language has to draw on the resources provided by an investigation of music to complete the pursuit of a balanced account of linguistic meaning and understanding.1 Language has always been an important theme in philosophy, but as a field philosophy of language gained real significance in the early twentieth century due to the work of such figures as Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, logical positivists like Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick treated language as the source of all philosophical problems and offered logical analysis of language as the remedy. Wittgenstein’s later work gave, in turn, rise to ordinary language philosophy, which aimed at describing the nuanced ways in which language is actually used and thereby diagnosing sources of philosophical confusion. Even the works of such figures as Quine (Arrington and Glock 1996; Glock 2003), Davidson (1994), Dummett (1993), Kripke (1982), and Putnam (1994), which served to establish the debates that continue to

Philosophy of Language   363 ­ ominate the field, may be seen as responding in part to the views originally introduced d in Wittgenstein’s work. However, the prominence of language has slowly given way to a new rise of metaphysics and naturalism. This development is echoed in philosophy of music, where the frequent appeals to logic and philosophy of language that we find in the works of Deryck Cooke, Susanne Langer, and Leonard B. Meyer—all written in the golden era of philosophy of language—are less common now. Instead of arguments building on the notions of meaning and understanding as understood in philosophy of language, we often encounter arguments that appeal to evolution and psychology as the main sources of insight into the nature of musical communication (Davies 1994, 2011, 2012; Kivy 1989; Levinson 1997; and Robinson 1997, 2005).

Different Accounts of Meaning In philosophy of language we find a number of different and sometimes mutually exclusive answers to the key question of the nature and constitution of meaning. There are theories of meaning that build on reference (or denotation) between words and things (such as objects and properties) and on some kind of a representational relation between propositions and states of affairs (for example, theories by the early Wittgenstein or Frege). There are theories that focus on the communicative process from the speaker’s intention to mean something by linguistic signs to the listener who may understand this meaning (for example, those by Grice or Davidson). There are verificationist and truthconditional theories, both intensional (by Kripke, Montague) and extensional (by Davidson). There are theories that seek to explain meaning in a naturalistic fashion by appealing to evolutionarily based psychological regularities (Fodor, Millican). Finally, there are use theories of meaning that take the uses of words and sentences within a linguistic system to constitute their meaning (the later Wittgenstein, Saussure, Dummett, Quine, Brandom).2 In order to make sense of the variety of the approaches in philosophy of language that underlie the deceptively straightforward comparison between music and language, we may divide them roughly into two main approaches. The first focuses on the relation between language and something over and above language, which is treated as the meaning or semantic content of language. Language is seen as a tool in the service of the representation of states of affairs or the expression and communication of thoughts. Central notions for this approach include those of reference, symbol, and truth. The second approach is more formal, analysing or describing linguistic structures in terms of syntax, grammar, rules, conventions, or form. Sometimes this difference in approaches is expressed by reference to the distinction between semantics and syntax, with the first approach understood as semantics-driven, and the second as syntax-driven. However, while the term “semantics” is often employed narrowly to indicate a referential relation between language and the world (either actual or possible), it is equally legitimate to use “semantics” in a broader sense to include functional role semantics or use theories.

364   Hanne Appelqvist The latter theories follow the lead of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that rejects description of facts as the main function of language as well as reference as the key to explaining word-meaning and focuses instead on the variety of rule-governed ways in which language may be used in different practical contexts. In such accounts, the traditional distinction between syntax and semantics (perhaps complemented with pragmatics), or between the form and content of a language, is no longer easy to draw. Indeed, one’s understanding of the term “semantics”—be it opaque or given in the form of explicit philosophical commitments about the nature of language—has farreaching consequences for the understanding of musical meaning. For someone using the term in the narrow sense, the claim that music has semantic content entails that music refers to, denotes, connotes, exemplifies, is about, represents, or expresses something extra-musical (like emotions, landscapes, or the thing-in-itself). For another, who uses the term in the broader sense, the very same statement may indicate nothing more than the relatively uncontroversial point that the elements of music have rule-governed uses within the medium of absolute music with no necessary relation to the extra-musical. The narrow concept of semantics thus motivates accounts of music as the expression of the composer’s emotions, whereas the broader concept may be seen at work in strictly formalist accounts of music as the auditory play of specifically musical forms and structures. Philosophy of music is full of confusions on this point. Eduard Hanslick, whose Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) may be the most important classic in philosophy of music to date, is a good example of a writer who fails to use the notion of semantic content in a  consistent way. On the one hand, Hanslick passionately denies that music is a ­language, as it is not capable of unambiguously expressing, representing, or referring to extra-musical phenomena (Hanslick 1986, 43­–45). On the other hand, he systematically describes music in terminology drawn from language and talks about the grammatical rules, logic, and sense of music (11, 30). Hanslick’s use of linguistic terminology is not superfluous either, as his main thesis, namely, that “the content of music is tonally moving forms” (29), already rests on a distinction between form and content drawn from logic.3 Had he been able to foresee the later rise of use theories of meaning, Hanslick would not have had such a pressing need to stress the difference between language and music. This is because Hanslick identifies as their main difference the referentiality of the former and the strong context principle of the latter (33). But if the semantic content of words and sentences is understood in terms of their contextual uses, then the meaning of music may not be so different from the meaning of language after all. In the following, I will discuss three different approaches to semantic content as applied in philosophy of music. These approaches focus on reference and representation, expression, and the rule-governed uses of musical materials respectively. My goal is to show, first, how the historical development in philosophy of language has been echoed in philosophy of music, and second, how the turn away from language as the primary source of philosophical problems and solutions thereof is equally manifest in philosophy of music. In my analysis, a particularly decisive moment in this development is the appeal to Wittgenstein’s early idea of structural isomorphism between a

Philosophy of Language   365 picture and the pictured, first adopted as a promise towards a plausible semantics of music and then leading to a rejection of the comparison between language and music. I will argue that this comparison, evoked by the opening quotation from Wittgenstein, has not yet been exhausted as a source of philosophical illumination. In this respect, my argument runs against the grain of current philosophy of music. However, following the later Wittgenstein, I will suggest that instead of using a particular account of linguistic meaning and understanding as a tool to explain music, we ought to look to music itself as a phenomenon that serves to illuminate the nature of linguistic meaning and understanding.

Reference and Representation Recall the key question: In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises meaningful? It is natural to read this question as resting on an assumption of a vocabulary of discrete parts of a language, meaningful in and of themselves. This atomistic assumption fits well with the principle of compositionality, namely, that the meaning of larger chunks of language (for example, sentences) is reducible to the meanings of the smaller chunks (for example, words).4 Now, music consists of easily identifiable, discrete, and repeatable parts such as tones and chords. From tones and chords one can build musical phrases, themes, and cadences; from phrases, themes, and cadences one can build songs and ultimately large-scale musical works. In this respect music resembles language with its words, sentences, stories, articles, and entire literary works. To complete the picture, we even have a musical counterpart for the written and spoken forms of language in musical scores and performances thereof. Indeed, among the arts, music stands apart in having a comprehensive notational system.5 To be sure, in music there are no obvious equivalents for the singular terms of natural languages, such as proper names or definite descriptions. A composer may utilize onomatopoeia, i.e., auditory imitation of non-musical sounds like the cuckoo in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No. 6 or the church bells in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, or establish semantic associations between leitmotifs and the things they are supposed to signify such as we find in Wagner’s operas.6 However, such musical phenomena are relatively limited, and it is hard to imagine what it would mean to make a musical statement about the properties of objects thus named. Accordingly, while the truth of declarative sentences is typically seen as essential for language, it is not obvious what could be meant by the truth of a musical passage or work—in spite of Jerrold Levinson’s brave attempt to give an account of just that (Levinson 1981; cf. Davies 2003, 124–125). Still, for many, the idea that music represents or refers to something beyond itself has been compelling. How then should we explain the meaning of the basic musical elements? Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music (1959) is an ambitious attempt to construct a comprehensive musical vocabulary. Cooke adopts a strictly atomistic view of what he calls the “basic terms of musical vocabulary” that are meaningful in virtue of standing

366   Hanne Appelqvist for extra-musical entities. Musical works and larger musical structures are, in turn, constructed of these basic musical terms. In his identification of the realm of referents for his musical vocabulary, Cooke is uncritically emotionalist. Music is the expression of emotions and musical works are reports of the emotional experiences of their composers. Accordingly, the specifically musical features of musical works are not an end in themselves, but “a means of expression” (Cooke 1959, x; cf. 199–210).7 Cooke builds his musical vocabulary on the concrete musical phenomenon of tonal tension, which reflects the hierarchical nature of the major and minor scales. While one need not be a naturalist about the constitution of these scales and think that they reside, for example, in the physical properties of sound—the variation in different musical systems across cultures certainly suggests that they are not reducible to such properties—in Cooke’s view the tonal tensions between the notes of a scale are grounded in the natural harmonic series (Cooke  1959, 40­–41). Not surprisingly, he argues that the major scale expresses positive emotions like joy, love, triumph, or ­pleasure, whereas the minor scale expresses negative emotions such as sorrow, hate, despair, or pain. Cook scrutinizes every note of the diatonic scale, comparing their emotional effects in the major and minor scales respectively. He interprets less stable notes of the scale, like the sixth, as being in a state of flux. Rising in pitch indicates an outgoing variant of the given emotion, whereas descent in pitch indicates passivity or acceptance of the expressed emotion. Cooke does not forget to add that the exact nature of the emotion expressed depends further on rhythm, the “vitalizing agents of time, volume, and intervallic tensions” (70), and the “characterizing agents of tone colour and texture” (112). These contextual factors are nonetheless subordinate to the meanings of the basic terms. With this frame in place, Cooke gives a number of examples of musical terms. He argues that in major keys the meaning of a melodic ascent from the tonic (I) to dominant (V) through the mediant (III) is the outgoing, active, and assertive emotion of joy. Partially synonymous with I–III–V is the ascending melody from the dominant to the tonic and then to the mediant (V–I–II–III). In minor keys the same combinations of tonal functions express outgoing sorrow, complaint, or protest against misfortune. According to Cooke (1959, 113–167), such melodic materials have been used by different composers of the Western classical tradition from 1400 to the present to express the same emotive content. One may ask, though, how the semantic connection between a given musical phrase and its meaning is established. What is the glue that connects the musical sign to a specific emotion? Put thus, the question is not unlike Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s question about determinacy of sense, about what gives concepts their sharp, unambiguous boundaries. Wittgenstein’s early solution to this problem arguably involved an appeal to the intentions of the speaker (see Hacker 1986, 73–80; 2010). This is the route taken by Cooke as well. According to him, the ultimate criterion of music’s content resides in the mind of the speaker, that is, in the mental states of the composer. Cooke thus complements his musical vocabulary with a story about musical communication, arguing that the emotional experience of the composer is transmitted from the composer’s mind via

Philosophy of Language   367 the external musical work to the mind of the listener. If communication is successful, listeners will experience the original emotions by themselves. Cooke writes: [B]y “the content” we mean “the original emotional experience,” but the [musical] patterns are only a physical form capable of being transformed, by being played and heard, into (something in some way resembling) the original emotional experience. Properly speaking then, the “content” is in these patterns. But it cannot be got out of them except as an emotional experience gained by playing or hearing the sounds (by some mysterious process in the listener) into emotions which we feel. (Cooke 1959, 201)

Accordingly, Cooke (1959, 204) takes musical understanding to be the listeners’ ability to “respond naturally to music with their feelings”, which is not necessarily correlated with professional musical skills.8 Cooke’s view of musical understanding is thus somewhat counter-intuitive (if consistent with his other commitments) given that it distances musical understanding from practical and theoretical knowledge of music itself. Similar communication-based models of linguistic meaning have been defended in philosophy of language, most notably by Paul Grice (1957; cf. Kripke 1977 and 2013, 103–132). However, to explain meaning in terms of the speaker’s intention is not as straightforward as it may seem. The later Wittgenstein, for one, calls into question the explanatory power of intentions insofar as they are understood as language-independent mental entities. According to him, even if there were a way of identifying the speaker’s intention, for example, by applying a principle of charity whereby we “make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement” (Davidson [1974] 1984, 197), the new belief or proposition expressing the intention would be yet another sign in need of further interpreting (Wittengstein [1953] 2009, §§ 201–205).9 Besides, such a view assigns a secondary role for the external signs that are used for communication. While this may not strike us as a flaw in the case of natural languages, for music the implication is troubling. After all, a widespread assumption in our Western musical practices and music criticism is that compositions and their performances are the primary centre of attention, while the mental lives of composers have only a subordinate role. Cooke, however, insists: There is nothing more involved about [musical communication] than there is in any form of emotional expression, say, a physical movement or vocal utterance. Beethoven, to give vent to his sense of joy in “the glory of God,” might have jumped for joy, or shouted for joy (with his violent temperament, he probably did both, many times) and thus communicated his sense of joy to a few people living in Vienna at that time.  (Cooke 1959, 209)

Cooke’s account shows in detail what follows when a semantic theory based on ­reference and speaker’s intentions is applied to music, and reveals the problematic implications thereof. It is not just that Cooke’s view runs the risk of detaching musical meaning and understanding from music itself. It also assimilates a great number of

368   Hanne Appelqvist works from different historical and stylistic periods into the expression of the same basic human emotions and in this respect fails to do justice to the actual variety of music. In fact, for some of Cooke’s contemporaries, most notably ordinary language philosophers under the influence of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (cf. Austin 1975, Searle 1969), such assimilation of different functions of language, “speech acts,” or “language games” into one primary function like the representation of states of affairs is misguided in the case of language as well. The very same sentence may be used to accomplish different things and the sense of the sentence depends essentially on the linguistic and practical context into which it is put. Such contextuality seems even more essential for the constitution of musical meaning.

From Expression to Expressiveness In her influential book, Philosophy in a New Key (1942), published almost two decades before Cooke’s treatise, Susanne Langer anticipates the difficulties faced by a position like Cooke’s. She attacks the self-expression and arousal theories of music, combined in Cooke’s account of musical communication, as they reduce music to a mere symptom. In her view, music is not simply a contingent indicator of an otherwise independent emotional state of the composer or the listener, but rather embodies its semantic content. In Langer’s own vocabulary, music deserves to be treated as a symbol rather than a symptom of the private emotional life of the composer. Langer distinguishes between discursive and representational symbol systems. In her view, language is a paradigmatic example of a discursive symbol system, as it operates with elements that have stable and context-independent meanings, whereas music falls into the category of representational symbol systems. Criticizing Russell, Carnap, and the early Wittgenstein for treating all non-discursive and non-verifiable symbolic structures as merely symptomatic expressions of emotion, she argues that “there is an unexplored possibility of genuine semantic beyond the limits of discursive language” (Langer 1942, 86). She thus endorses the project of developing a semantic account of music, while acknowledging the limitations of a purely referential and representational explanation of the nature of semantics. According to her, music may be regarded as a semantic system, not because it refers to or represents emotions independent of music itself, but because “musical structures logically resemble certain dynamic patterns of human experience” (226). Hence, she argues, all the ineffable “emotional stuff ” that escapes the expressive resources of natural languages may be expressed by music, thus echoing Schopenhauer’s remark about music as the language of feeling rather than reason (101). Given that Langer criticizes Wittgenstein for contributing to an undue emphasis on discursive symbol systems, it is ironic that the central and still influential innovation of Langer’s own position goes back to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). This is the idea that music’s structural resemblance with emotions creates a semantic bond between the two. After all, according to the early Wittgenstein, the “pictorial form”

Philosophy of Language   369 shared by a picture and the pictured (for example, a proposition and the fact it depicts) is precisely that which makes picturing and ultimately linguistic sense possible (Wittgenstein [1921] 1961a, 2.17).10 Langer’s stance is not completely original in the philosophy of music either, given that Hanslick (1986, 11) claims that music is capable of presenting the dynamic aspect of emotions by being fast, slow, weak, rising, and falling, even if he ultimately finds this structural similarity insufficient for grounding music’s emotive content. Nevertheless, the reason Langer gives for rejecting the self-expression view is worth citing. According to Langer, “if music has any significance, it is semantic, not symptomatic . . . if it has an emotional content, it ‘has’ it in the same sense that language ‘has’ its conceptual content—symbolically” (Langer 1942, 218, cf. 206). Rather than composers’ selfexpression, music is the expression of their knowledge of emotions, i.e., “formulation and representation of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolution—a ‘logical picture’ of sentient, responsive life, a source of insight, not a plea of sympathy” (221–222). Their disagreement on music’s emotive content notwithstanding, Langer’s reasoning resonates again with that of Hanslick, who distinguishes between the pathological, i.e., empirically conditioned, and the aesthetic mode of musical perception and insists on the artificiality of our musical system (Hanslick 1986, 60–62, 70–71). A similar aspiration to distinguish between empirical mechanisms and semantic relations was common in philosophy of language before the turn to more naturalistic approaches during the latter half of the twentieth century. For example, Grice (1957) begins his article by distinguishing between natural meaning as exemplified by the sentence “Those spots mean measles” and non-natural, communicative meaning, before proceeding to give an account of the latter. And while Wittgenstein’s later account of language is in many respects diametrically opposed to Grice’s account, he too argues that the connection between signs and their meanings is grammatical rather than empirical (causal or psychological) (Wittgenstein [1953] 2009, §§ 496–501; cf. 1975, §§ 55–70).11 In the same vein, Langer insists that while the emotional experiences of the composer may, as a matter of empirical fact, have caused him to write the musical work, and while a performance of the work may induce emotions in the audience, these emotions are not yet a foundation for a semantics of music but ought to be treated as merely symptomatic causes or effects. However, as a semantic account, Langer’s view has a serious weakness, which Ernst Nagel brings up in his 1943 review of Langer’s book and which may also be found anticipated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ([1921] 1961a, 2.1513–2.1514). While a shared form between the symbol and the symbolized may be a necessary condition for sense, it is not yet sufficient for semantic content proper. In addition to the horizontal structural isomorphism between the picture and the pictured, semantic content requires vertical “rules of interpretation” or a “method of projection” from the representing structure to the elements of the represented structure (2.1512, 3.11–3.13). Without this additional referential component, the structure may be interpreted in a number of different ways. As mentioned, for the early Wittgenstein “One could say that the intention is the method of projection” (MS 108, quoted in Hacker 2010). Langer herself is willing to treat the ambiguity of

370   Hanne Appelqvist musical content resulting from the lack of a referential component as a strength rather than a weakness. However, from the perspective of philosophy of language, such tolerance of the ambiguity of content is deeply problematic and undermines the very project of treating music as a semantic system. If a musical phrase may be heard as signifying passionate love as well as despair, then the notion of content is already far removed from that normative notion of content that philosophers of language have sought to explain. Indeed, I would argue that it is this moment of Langer’s argument that bears the seed of the subsequent gradual abandonment of the hope for explaining music’s emotive meaning in a way comparable to language. Stephen Davies and Peter Kivy take up Langer’s idea of structural isomorphism to argue for the musical expressiveness of emotions, but whereas Langer talks about the inner phenomenology of feelings, both Kivy and Davies take music to be structurally similar to expressive human utterance and behaviour (Kivy 1989) or the gait, attitude, air, carriage, posture, and comportment of the human body (Davies 1994). Both acknowledge that resemblance, as a symmetrical relation, is not yet sufficient for objective expressiveness (Kivy 1989, 60–63; Davies 1994, 228; see also Levinson 2006, 196). Hence, they complement the structural resemblance between music and emotions with a naturalistic claim about human psychology. In their view, humans are disposed, perhaps due to evolutionary reasons, to hear music as expressive of emotions. But this just means that the understanding of music is likened to the perception of secondary properties. Accordingly, there is no point in comparing music to language. And this is indeed the stance taken by Kivy (1989, 57–63;  2007), Davies (2006), and numerous others contemporary writers (cf. Robinson 1997). In his essay “Music, Language, and Cognition: Which Doesn’t Belong?” Kivy responds to the question posed by his title: “language doesn’t belong. Music is, indeed, language-like in certain respects. Nevertheless, it is not language; it is not a language or part of a language. And thinking it is any one of these things has caused a good deal of confusion.” (Kivy 2007, 214; see also Kivy 1990, 46–56). Davies agrees. In a characteristically meticulous manner, Davies (1994) lists seven necessary conditions for languagetype meaning, originally introduced by Göran Hermerén.12 As is to be expected, music does particularly badly with respect to conditions pertaining to two central assumptions, namely, that a successful semantic account should distinguish between the sign and the signified (the symbol and the symbolized, word and object) and do justice to the assertoric or information-conveying function of language (Davies  1994, 12; cf. Davies 2003 and Clark 1982). Roger Scruton also denies that music is fruitfully compared with language. For Scruton, the champions of philosophy of language are Tarski and Kripke in the field of semantics and Chomsky in syntax. Accordingly, Scruton’s prime candidate for a musical syntax is the theory given by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, whose influential treatise A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) uses Chomsky’s theory to explain our musical intuitions based on a hierarchical system of mental procedures. According to Scruton, music is a rule-guided structure which allows us to distinguish between right and wrong musical moves and as such is similar to language. However, to count as a proper syntax, the rules of a musical grammar “should have the same generative character as the rules of syntax”

Philosophy of Language   371 and they should “determine any musical surface uniquely” (Scruton 1997, 182, 191; see also Scruton 2004). In other words, the rules of music ought to be strictly prescriptive, not mere generalizations from a given musical tradition.13 Given that the rules catalogued by Lerdahl and Jackendoff are, even by their own lights, generalizations or “preference rules,” they fall short of Scruton’s strict standard. Whatever the rules of music are, they do not fit the Chomskian model of a syntax from which “all and only acceptable” musical works could be derived (Scruton 1997, 193). Moreover, in contrast to language, which Scruton (1997, 172) takes to be “essentially an information-carrying medium,” musical meaning is “a matter of expression” (210). What Scruton calls the “meaningful quality” of the Western masterpieces cannot be explained solely by reference to syntactic correctness, given that there are a number of syntactically correct but “bland and meaningless” melodies, like “Baa, baa, black sheep.” Hence, he argues, an account of musical meaning given in terms of a grammar must be defective (180). In short, Scruton’s view of an acceptable musical syntax is as strict as his notion of musical meaning is broad. Together, these assumptions lead him to reject the notion of music as a language. In their different ways, Kivy, Davies, and Scruton alike take a step away from the notion of meaning as understood in philosophy of language and describe musical meaning in broader, more perceptual and experiential ways. For them, the understanding of music involves not just a mastery of the specifically musical features of a given genre, but also an ability to recognize the expressive character of music and to appreciate it aesthetically. In Scruton’s case, the term “meaning” itself acquires an evaluative tone of meaningfulness or significance. However, one aspect of meaning which is powerfully underscored by the comparison between language and music and which we risk losing if we abandon the original quest for musical semantics, is its independence of artistic value and appreciation. We should not forget that insofar as we are interested in semantic content, be that of sentences or musical phrases, it should not matter whether what the sentences or phrases say is significant. The most trivial cliché is as meaningful in the semantic sense of the term as the deepest wisdom. And while proper appreciation of music rests upon its understanding, understanding itself does not depend on appreciation. One can understand a musical work and find it distasteful or bland precisely because one understands. Such distinctions evaporate unless we keep the notions of meaning and meaningfulness distinct. Besides, even the new resemblance theorists like Davies and Kivy who build on Langer’s Wittgensteinian idea of the structural isomorphism between music and emotions, want to distinguish between correct and incorrect musical moves, between musical understanding and misunderstanding. In Davies’s own words, “The nature of aesthetic discussion and disagreements indicates that we accept that music is the bearer of meaning or sense and that it is this meaning or sense the listener comprehends when she is said to understand a musical work” (Davies 2003, 121). But if the notion of musical meaning is detached from the realm of semantics where a vocabulary, rules of interpretation, or semantic conventions provide the criterion of correctness, and reinterpreted in terms of perception, experience, and appreciation, then it becomes more difficult to account for

372   Hanne Appelqvist musical misunderstanding.14 We do not blame someone for an inability to perceive differences in shades of colour; neither do we blame him for a failure to appreciate certain musical styles, even if we might feel sorry for him for that reason. But insofar as the person is considered musically competent, we require that he be able to hear the difference between the major and the minor keys, between Baroque and Romantic textures, and between the timbre of the bass and that of the viola.

Grammar But why should we think of language in referential, representational, or expressive terms? In other words, why should we maintain that the sign and the signified must be kept distinct? Saussure, who first introduced the distinction into linguistics, claimed that the sign and the signified are as inseparable as two sides of a sheet of paper (Saussure 1983, 11).15 Any holistic account of meaning, such as those defended by the later Wittgenstein ([1953]  2009), Quine (1960,  1978), Dummett (1993), or Brandom (1994), takes the system of language to be the primary background against which the elements of language acquire their identity and meaning in the first place. Accordingly, the meaning of a word or a sentence is taken to be the role, function, or place it has in a system of language. Hence, in the words of Dummett (1993, 2), “To grasp the meaning of an expression is to understand its role in the language: a complete theory of meaning for a language is, therefore, a complete theory of how the language functions as a language.” We may also ask why we should grant the term “information” only to something that is distinct from the medium which carries it. While an important reason for listening to music is the pleasure one may derive from it, an equally valid reason is curiosity regarding how a particular work or performance is put together or how a particular performer treats musical material. Besides, sometimes performances are a source of boredom as well, the boredom resulting from previous knowledge or familiarity with the material. It would be odd to claim that the student of music who spends hours listening to musical samples of different historical or cultural genres does not obtain any information from the exercise, simply because the information is specifically musical rather than propositional, even if parts of that information may also be explained in technical terminology.16 A completely different approach to music and language abandons the assumption that to have meaning music must refer, represent, express, or assert something beyond itself. Instead, it takes as its starting point the age-old recognition of both music and language as rule-governed systems. As mentioned, Scruton dismisses the syntactic approach partly because he assumes that the relevant kinds of rules would have to be regulative rules, the application of which would produce all and only acceptable musical works. But Chomsky’s empirical theory of an innate and universal generative grammar is not the only way to think about grammar, syntax, or logic.

Philosophy of Language   373 For the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, logic was not a matter of psychology, and the laws of logic were not contingent, empirical laws. Instead, logic was taken to be necessary, whether because it reflected a Platonic realm of logical entities (Frege) or the most general features of reality (Russell), or because it was taken to be the necessary, transcendental condition for the very possibility of linguistic sense (the early Wittgenstein).17 Although Wittgenstein later rejected his early idea of a universal logical form as well as the idea of a general propositional form that the logician is supposed to uncover underneath the conventions of everyday language, he never abandoned the view that logical or grammatical investigation is not empirical. Instead of explaining grammar in the fashion of the natural sciences, philosophers ought to describe the rule-governed ways in which language is actually used (see Wittgenstein [1921] 1961a, 4.111–4.114; [1953] 2009, §§ 107–133). Moreover, the rules in question need not be understood as regulative rules, prescribing all and only acceptable strings of words. The rules of language, as described by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, are constitutive of the very linguistic uses and subject to historical and cultural variation and change (Wittgenstein [1953]  2009, §§ 83, 203; see also Appelqvist 2013). These questions are still under debate, and it would be premature to call the case closed for music. In musicology and philosophy of music, the variety of grammatical approaches to music is as great as in philosophy of logic. The followers of Heinrich Schenker analyse tonal music in terms of pitch hierarchies, beginning from Schenker’s claim that every musical work is built upon a simple fundamental structure (Ursatz), which is then prolongated in a unique way. The task of music analysis is to uncover that deep structure and then represent it by means of a tree diagram similar to those that have been used in linguistics (Schenker [1906]  1954; see also Seuren  1998). While Schenker’s method shares the idea of a deep structure with the Chomskian paradigm, it is more analytic than generative in orientation.18 A completely descriptive approach to musical grammar is given in Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre, originally published in 1911. Schoenberg gives a systematic, pedagogical presentation of the craft of the Western tradition of harmony. He rejects naturalistic and essentialist attempts to explain the rules of music and treats them instead as historically developing artefacts that the composer must master before he can break them (Schoenberg [1922] 1978, 7–12). In contrast to a naturalistic explanation evoking an innate and universal mental grammar, Schoenberg thus places the emphasis on the description of the concrete principles of the Western musical tradition. In doing so, Schoenberg follows Hanslick’s lead.19 If Schenker’s project to uncover the simple musical Ursatz underneath the complex surface structure of individual musical works is reminiscent of the logical analysis of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, then Leonard B. Meyer offers the musical counterpart for the more holistic approaches in philosophy of language inspired by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Criticizing the Schenkerian approach, Meyer makes a convincing case for a more systemic and contextual account of musical meaning and understanding. His overall goal is to overcome the old debate between the referentialists, who postulate a referential relation between music and something extra-musical, and the absolutists,

374   Hanne Appelqvist who take musical meaning to reside in musical processes. Hence, emotionalists may be treated as absolutists insofar as they take music’s emotive content to reside in musical forms. Meyer himself sides with the absolutists, as he argues that the meaning of music is constituted by the rules of a given musical style or genre (Meyer 1956, 1–3). Meyer’s argument starts from a relatively broad definition of meaning derived from a textbook of logic, namely that “anything acquires meaning if it is connected with, or indicates, refers to, something beyond itself, so that its full nature points to and is revealed in that connection” (Meyer 1956, 34). Meyer then notes—and this is his key move—that music may satisfy the given definition in two distinct ways. The musical stimulus may indicate either events of consequences different in kind from itself or events or consequences of the same kind as the stimulus itself. The former type of meaning Meyer calls designative, the latter embodied meaning. Musical meaning, he argues, is of the latter type: What a musical stimulus or a series of stimuli indicate and point to are not extramusical concepts and objects but other musical events which are about to happen. That is, one musical event (be it a tone, a phrase, or a whole section) has meaning because it points to and makes us expect another musical event.  (Meyer 1956, 35)

In Meyer’s view, sounds or groups of sound become meaningful “sound terms” by indicating or implying certain musical consequences within a particular style. While more complex musical phenomena are built from sound terms, the complex musical “sentences,” “paragraphs,” “chapters,” and works are treated as primary given that they influence the meanings on the lower architectonic levels by providing the specific context of the sound terms used. In short, musical elements have meaning for Meyer in virtue of having a function in the musical system (Meyer 1956, 52–54). According to Davies (1994, 27), Meyer’s account of musical semantics is not plausible because the information conveyed by music does not allow a paraphrase. But it seems that the argument reflects Davies’s referential understanding of semantics by turning once again on a pre-established notion of information. If we recognize that there is a way of grasping the content of a sentence that does not allow for a paraphrase but resides in seeing the function of the sentence within a larger context, we do not have to deny that music may have meaning in sense similar to language. That linguistic meaning and understanding face a point at which they cannot be further paraphrased is a claim made repeatedly in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 2009, §§ 201–219). Interestingly, Wittgenstein connects this insight directly to the understanding of music. He writes: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) (§531)

In Wittgenstein’s view, both uses of the term “understanding” are included in our concept of understanding.20 While it is indeed impossible to replace a theme in a musical

Philosophy of Language   375 work written by Mozart, Wagner, or Sibelius because of the value we attach to their uniqueness and originality, the same does not hold in every field of music. One could argue that the very possibility of improvisation on a jazz standard or on a Protestant chorale is based on the comparative equivalence of the meanings of certain notes, chords, phrases, and cadences. A holistic account of meaning can accommodate such cases, as it treats those meanings as functions within a system and hence replaceable by something else that has approximately the same function as the original element. But importantly, the comprehension of a musical phrase as a complete whole cannot be reduced to such musical paraphrases even if they serve to illuminate the function of the musical elements in question. Rather, the understanding of a musical phrase as a unified whole calls for a non-discursive form of understanding arising out of a perspective that looks for the internal connections within the musical system itself and ultimately leads to an ability to “feel the ending of a church mode as an ending,” as Wittgenstein suggests (§535). Meyer connects the notions of musical meaning and understanding, and in doing so accords with the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and Dummett. For Meyer, the understanding of music does not require empathic identification with the emotions supposedly felt by the composer or the ability to describe music in emotive terminology, even if the latter may suggest musical understanding provided that the descriptions relate to the specifically musical features of the work. Instead, musical understanding is the listener’s mastery of the rules of a given style, her ability to follow these rules.21 Such mastery, which Meyer explicitly compares with linguistic competence, may be tested, for example, by asking the listener to predict or extrapolate the continuation of an interrupted unfamiliar work. Whether the listener is prone to verbalize her expectations in terms of musical analysis or in emotive terms depends on her training and temperament. Since musical understanding is taken to be the listener’s ability to form expectations based on musical events and her (not necessarily conscious) knowledge of the possibilities and respective probabilities of their musical implications, it may be more or less complete or restricted to certain styles. Moreover, given that musical expectations as well as the suspense of the expected musical response to the original stimulus or an unexpected consequent are founded in the norms of the musical style itself, the analyses of musical works do not have to rely on the listener’s experiences (Meyer 1956, 32). In this respect, Meyer’s account is faithful to the ethos of early analytic philosophy, which treated logic or grammar as a normative rather than empirical phenomenon. As are so many themes discussed in this paper, Meyer’s explanation of musical understanding in terms of the listener’s expectations is rooted in Hanslick’s essay. Hanslick writes: The most significant factor in the mental process which accompanies the comprehending of a musical work . . . is the mental satisfaction which the listener finds in continuously following and anticipating the composer’s design, here to be confirmed in his expectations, there to be agreeably led astray.  (Hanslick 1986, 64)

376   Hanne Appelqvist For Hanslick the shared perspective that makes our musical expectations possible is the specifically musical rules of our Western musical system. These are not reducible to laws of nature, but have slowly developed and will continue to develop as “creations of the human spirit” (Hanslick 1986, 70). Preceding Meyer’s distinction between designative and embodied meaning, Hanslick claims that to answer the question of the content of music, we must distinguish between the notions of content and subject matter. While subject matter is something external to the medium of expression, content (Inhalt) “in its original and proper sense means what a thing holds, what it includes within itself ” (78). In the case of music, content thus understood is “tonally moving forms.” These have no other subject matter but themselves. However, precisely because music is constituted by its own specifically musical rules, its “theoretisch-grammatikalischen Regeln,” the forms are not static or dead. The elements of music have a functional role in the system of music and that is what renders them meaningful. It follows from the constitutive character of musical rules that the system of music itself grounds the possibility of musical meaning and understanding. Against those who explain music by appealing to the composer’s intentions, Hanslick claims that whatever intentions the composer may have find their expression in music and thereby cease to be mere intentions. On the other hand, if the composer fails to execute their intentions in musical forms, they are wholly irrelevant for music’s content. Indeed, in the process of composing music, the medium of thought is music itself: “The material out of which the composer creates, of which the abundance can never be exaggerated, is the entire system of tones, with their latent possibilities for melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variety” (Hanslick 1986, 28). This is to say that the rules do not prescribe musical works, as regulative rules would do, but constitute the very possibility of meaningful musical moves. The rules also provide the relevant criteria of musical understanding. Such understanding is not shown in the listener’s ability to verbally paraphrase or explain music as much as it is shown in her ability to follow and form expectations of the tonal movement of musical forms, to hear them as complete or in need of further elaboration. This conception of music, which Hanslick hesitates to compare with language as he takes the latter to entail a reference to an extra-linguistic subject matter, finds an expression in philosophy of language some hundred years later in the work of Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009, § 20) who writes: “It is only in a language that I can mean something by something.”

Concluding Remarks I began this chapter by claiming that philosophy of music and philosophy of language have their key questions in common. In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises—words, sentences, chords, cadences, and musical phrases—meaningful expressions? And what does it mean to understand those expressions? The philosophers of music I have discussed approach the question in a relatively uniform manner. They all adopt, more or less explicitly, an account of linguistic meaning and apply that to music.

Philosophy of Language   377 They differ in their respective views on how language functions, and the resulting conclusions about the nature of musical meaning and about the fruitfulness of the very comparison vary accordingly. A methodological question underlying these accounts, whether in philosophy of language or in philosophy of music, concerns the nature of the investigation language demands. Is language simply a natural phenomenon among other natural phenomena, open to empirical research that will eventually yield one true theory of its essence? If it is, then the safest choice at the moment is probably a version of a Chomskian generative grammar. Or is there room for a philosophical account of language developed independently of empirical research, as Wittgenstein maintained throughout his philosophical career? We should also ask what sort of philosophical work the comparison between music and language is supposed to do. Is philosophy of music and aesthetics in general the underdog taking its lead from the supposedly more solid field of philosophy of language? Or does music have something to offer to philosophy of language in its turn? For one can read the analogy between music and language in both directions. In the beginning I quoted Wittgenstein on the illusion that possesses us when we try to find that which music expresses. Wittgenstein concludes his discussion as follows: What we call “understanding a sentence” has, in many cases a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think. But I don’t mean that understanding a musical theme is more like the picture one tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but rather that this picture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence is much more like what really happens when we understand a tune than at first sight appears. For understanding a sentence, we say, points to a reality outside the sentence. Whereas one might say: “Understanding a sentence means getting hold of its content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence.”  (Wittgenstein 1958, 167)

Wittgenstein’s remark is significant on two levels. First, it turns around the investigation of the relation between language and music by taking musical meaning and understanding as the source of insight into the way in which language functions. For Wittgenstein himself, taking this path meant the abandonment of a fixed universal logical form as the essence of language, an increasing emphasis on the contextuality of the meaning of words and sentences, and a new account of understanding as a practical mastery of the rules that are constitutive of the different ways in which language is actually used. Moreover, as Wittgenstein’s appeal to the impossibility of replacing a musical theme with another as an illustration of the understanding of language suggests, even the mastery of language involves a point at which conceptual justifications for the application of a rule have run out and “I obey the rule blindly” (Wittgenstein [1953] 2009, §219). But this does not mean that Wittgenstein falls back on a naturalistic view of the understanding of language which explains our linguistic capacities in psychological or evolutionary terms. Nor does it mean that he gives up the central insight of the normativity of

378   Hanne Appelqvist meaning and understanding. Wittgenstein’s point is rather that the distinction between understanding and misunderstanding cannot be explained exclusively by means of conceptual resources. For the understanding of music involves a grasp of the internal purposiveness of music, which is neither prescribed by nor explicable by reference to a realm over and above music itself. Even our basic conceptual abilities rely on the kind of an experience we know from music, i.e., on an experience of the internal coherence or unity of a musical theme, made possible by the rule-governed structure of music (Appelqvist 2017; Bell 1987; Cavell [1969] 1976; Railton 1999). This is the point that the comparison between music and language can serve to elucidate. Hence, if Wittgenstein is correct, then the comparison between music and language may not be a mere source of confusion, as is nowadays widely assumed by analytic philosophers of music. Rather, turning around the investigation of the relation between music and language may show that there is still be ground to be covered at the intersection of philosophy of music and philosophy of language.

Notes 1. See Bowie 2007, 46–78. 2. General introductions to different approaches in philosophy of language are offered in Lycan 1999; Miller 1998; and Soames 2010. 3. The distinction between form and content derives from Aristotle’s logic, has a prominent role in medieval logic, and still figures in, for example, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1998, A 50–57) and even in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ([1921] 1961a, 3.31). On the role of the distinction in the development of logic, see Haaparanta 2009. 4. This is not to say that compositionality is incompatible with a more contextual understanding of word-meaning. Frege, who is usually credited with the principle of compositionality, also held a context principle regarding word-meaning, namely, that only within the context of a sentence do words have meaning. The two principles are at work also in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. According to the traditional interpretation of that work, Wittgenstein holds that the simple signs of language have meaning (stand for objects) only in the context of an elementary proposition ([1921] 1961a, 3.3). Elementary propositions, in turn, are treated as the self-standing atoms of language, as they are independent of each other (4.21–4.221). Complex propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions and hence their senses (Sinne) are reducible to the sense of elementary propositions in accordance with the principle of compositionality (5). 5. In his Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman makes much out of this feature, arguing that the identity of a musical work is determined by its score (Goodman  1976, 128, 177–192). Goodman’s work inspired various detailed accounts of musical notation; see Kurkela 1986. 6. The nature and scope of musical signs and symbols is studied in semiotics of music, which draws on the work of such figures as Charles S. Peirce, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure. For an example of the semiotic approach, see Tarasti 2002. 7. Cooke 1959, x, 199–21. 8. For other accounts of artistic communication of emotive content from the mind of the ­artist into the minds of the audience by means of external signs, see Collingwood 1938, 273–285; Tolstoy [1897] 1995, 36–42.

Philosophy of Language   379 9. On Wittgenstein’s criticism of intentionalism in the context of aesthetics, see Hagberg 1995, 75–98. 10. This is not to say that the early Wittgenstein endorses the emotionalist interpretation of music. According to his early view in the Notebooks, musical tunes are like the propositions of logic: they are not genuine pictures of reality, as they manifest only logical form (Wittgenstein 1961b, 40). On Wittgenstein’s philosophy of music, see Appelqvist 2008, 2013. 11. On Wittgenstein’s distinction between the grammatical and the empirical, see Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 2009, §§ 85, 89–90, 109, 251, 295, 360). 12. Davies’s treatment is originally offered as a critical response to Wilson Coker’s (1972) Music and Meaning as a representative of the search for musical semantics. However, Davies’s argument is intended as an argument against the fruitfulness of the project in general. According to Hermerén, language (1) has discrete and repeatable elements (letters, words, sentences; tones, chords, melodies), where (2) strings of such elements suggest ideas, emotions, or feelings; (3) has semantics, i.e. it has a codifiable vocabulary in the sense that the elements of the language refer, denote, stand for something beyond that language; (4) is capable of assertion and assertions are true or false; (5) is capable of distinguished between different modalities (possible, actual, necessary) and it has devices to show the force of what is being asserted (I hope/assert/predict/imagine/remember/etc.); (6) permits metalinguistic assertions (music may quote, allude, paraphrase, but given that it is incapable of assertion, it cannot assert about itself either); and (7) allows for truthfunctional operations (negation, conjunction, implication, quantification, etc.). See Davies 1994, 1–50. 13. It is commonplace to draw a distinction, going back to John Searle’s Speech Acts, between regulative (prescriptive) and constitutive (descriptive) rules. The former regulate an activity that exists independently of the rules (as, for example, the rules of etiquette or traffic rules); the latter are constitutive of the activity in question (as, for example the rules of chess). See Searle 1969, 33–41. 14. Perhaps the most influential work on the normativity of meaning is Kripke 1982. 15. Wittgenstein expresses the same point in Philosophical Investigations by using a simile (probably borrowed from Johann Georg Hamann): “Here the word, there the meaning. The money, and the cow one can buy with it. (On the other hand, however: money, and what can be done with it.)” (Wittgenstein [1953] 2009, §120; see also Harris 1988.) 16. One’s mastery of the specifically musical may sometimes cashed out in terms of music theory, for example by giving a verbal analysis of harmonic or contrapuntal features, orchestration, or large-scale form of a given work or a performance. However, as Hanslick (1986, 14) acutely observes, technical descriptions of music often “make a skeleton out of a flourishing organism.” Certain aspects of music as an auditory phenomenon, such as those pertaining to timbre, dynamics, phrasing, time, swing, and groove, do not readily yield to a conceptual form and are nonetheless treated as central for musical understanding. Hence, what the music student acquires in music classes is not just propositional knowledge (“This work is an example of the sonata form,” “This cadence is of the I–V– IV–I type”), but also practical or tacit knowledge of the interaction of musical material, ability to identify instruments based on their timbre or composers based on the distinctive quality of orchestration manifest in their works. 17. On the early analytic philosophy of logic, see Glock 2008. 18. See Sloboda  1985, 15. On psychological presuppositions in Schenker’s theory, see Blasius 1996.

380   Hanne Appelqvist 19. On Hanslick’s influence on Schoenberg, see Carpenter 1984. 20. For a reading of the implications of this remark and its role in Wittgenstein’s later work, see Appelqvist 2017. 21. Meyer 1956, 39. To reformulate Meyer’s point in terms of rule-following is, of course, to suggest that there is a deep affinity between Meyer’s notion of musical understanding and Wittgenstein’s later view of the understanding of language as rule-following. For a general introduction on the debate on the subsequent debate on rule-following and semantic normativity, see Kusch 2006.

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chapter 18

Her m en eu tics Lawrence Kramer

Musical Hermeneutics: Where the Wild Things Are Musical hermeneutics begins with a double paradox. It is a bad beginning, and its results are worse. On the one hand, music is thought to be the object of a special knowledge, or, what is not quite the same thing, a special object of knowledge. Interpreting music is thought to be different from interpreting anything else. On the other hand, the question of musical meaning has for centuries been bound up with the question of whether there is such a thing. Musical meaning is bounded by the spectre of its own impossibility. The link between these two paradoxes is an assumption that seems to pervade all forms of musical aesthetics no matter how widely divergent their starting points. The assumption is that any meaning music has must derive from the intrinsically musical dimension of form, technique, or structure, call it what you will. The assumption is wrong, and appreciating why it is wrong opens the possibility of framing a musical hermeneutics free of the disabling effect of the double paradox, though never of its historical reality. That possibility guides what follows. In response to the existing and competing literatures on the subject, this chapter will propose a position of its own based on the foregoing observation that almost all the literature, on all competing sides, adopts some version of the mistaken assumption that musical meaning is an epiphenomenon of musical technique. (That, or a chimera, or an expendable extra: one such version is that the priority of technique, or material sense, or performance, largely or wholly negates meaning.) The mistake is fundamental—a point I have argued elsewhere and will quickly recapitulate here before going forward. The issue of musical meaning involves a constitutive ambiguity between technique and import. Because it is independent of language and images (which does not mean

386   Lawrence Kramer unrelated to them), music exposes the universal gap between presentation and meaning that language and images tend to obscure. Language and images, which are both partners and antagonists, typically make part of their meaning deceptively manifest— deceptively, because what they say or show tends to seem more inclusive than it is. We know that one can neither say nor show everything, but one can say and show enough to give the illusion of adequacy or fullness except in extreme circumstances. Music has the opposite problem. It rarely gives that illusion because its means of “saying” and showing are more like intimations than like statements or depictions. As a result, musical aesthetics traditionally mistakes the gap at the heart of all meaning for something unique to music. Musical hermeneutics has long been hobbled by the gap thus mistaken. The rule that meaning in music must derive from form, or analytic knowledge of form, is meant to adjust for the gap. But the gap needs no adjustment; it is not a barrier to meaning but a condition of possibility for meaning. The rule is the real obstacle. It never produces enough meaning; it never produces genuine meaning at all. This impasse can be resolved only by reversing the rule. And since mere reversal normally changes nothing fundamental, the impasse can be resolved only—again: only—by transforming the rule in the course of reversing it. The possibility of that reversal is latent in the concept of care, in the philosophical sense of the term first developed by Martin Heidegger. “Care” (Sorge) for Heidegger consists in the multiplicity of our concrete engagements with the world that envelops us: “having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something, giving something up and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining” (Heidegger 1962, 83). Paul Ricoeur adapted care in this sense to fit a hermeneutics of narrative (Ricoeur 2012, 52–87). I propose to adapt it further to help open out the hermeneutics (plural, not singular) of music.1 My examples come from the classical repertoire, but the ideas they exemplify should have wider resonance. Different musical genres gravitate towards different climates of meaning, but the passage from sonority to meaning remains largely independent of the differences. An ideal sequence of observation, description, and extrapolation (always mixed in practice) accompanies any and all cases, as does a seminal fragment of meaning that may come from anywhere and enter at any point. The same holds good when things other than music are at stake. Interpretations are relative; interpretation is not.

Meaning and Appearance Just what that involves will soon come under discussion, but meanwhile I should add that care does not work alone. The element of delay is also necessary. This delay is essential in both a general and a musical hermeneutics, but, as with so much else, it is more conspicuous in the latter. Consider a visual example first; a musical one will follow—after a delay.

Hermeneutics   387 There is a painting by Robert Morris modelled on Mantegna’s famous depiction of the dead Christ (c.1480), but the figure in Morris’s painting (1989) is the Depression-era American gangster Dutch Schultz (d. 1935).2 If the image looks familiar, that is, if one recognizes the allusion to Mantegna, it takes a moment to recognize the irony involved and to pose questions about it. To anyone unfamiliar with the Mantegna, the image shows nothing but a corpse with a notable erection, which poses a question in itself. Either way, there is an interval, whether an instant, a moment, or an hour, between the initial observation and the turn to a cultural archive for the means to create a description under which to see the image. Music commonly acts as or serves for such a description when it accompanies texts, images, or narratives. When that happens the music furnishes the very kind of meaning it is supposed to lack, albeit meaning in reduced form. But if we attend to music apart from such applications, something quite different happens, or may happen. The identical music may be involved. Music listened to for its potential rather than for its applied meanings typically amplifies hermeneutic delay as if it, the music, were its own entr’acte. The music embodies the delay until a change in how things sound, not a difference in the notes but a difference in their apprehension, reorients the listener. In his discussions of perception, Wittgenstein calls this outcome a change of aspect, in the sense of both a feature gaining in prominence and a face changing in expression (Wittgenstein 1958, 193–229). When we see or hear an item as something, what we perceive changes in character without changing in contour.3 Music extends this process in part because music necessarily takes time to make itself known, and must do so without the deceptive articulateness made available by language, even when language is involved. Changes of aspect often come built in, bringing big hermeneutic changes along with them. For example (as promised), consider the now all-too-famous first movement of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, his tone poem for large orchestra “freely” based on Nietzsche’s book of the same name. The first edition of Strauss’s score gives the movement no title, but the score is headed by a quotation from Nietzsche’s first chapter, in which Zarathustra addresses the rising sun. The music bears a family resemblance to various musical sunrises, so it is easy enough to take sunrise as a point of orientation, but it is unclear whether the music is evoking the sunrise itself, Zarathustra’s address, or Nietzsche’s proliferation of metaphors. It is next to impossible to hear this as “just music,” but just what one might hear it as remains dubious despite the solar associations. But the ending arrives with an imposing change of aspect. Throughout the movement, an organ has sustained a low pedal tone. At the close, this background drone erupts into a massive C major chord, nearly three bars of fortissimo: the indeterminate sound has turned ecclesiastical. To what end or with how much irony this change occurs remains uncertain, but the question has been posed decisively and the change of aspect envelops everything that has led up to it. This change may be apprehended long after the music is heard—another version of hermeneutic delay. Regardless of whether or not a change of aspect occurs in the immediacy of hearing, its hermeneutic effect is retroactive and incomplete. Meaning is never

388   Lawrence Kramer “all there,” whether in music or anything else, which is only a problem if we are under the illusion that it can or should be. Husserl (2014, 255–281) deals with a process similar to aspect-change in his phenomenological schema of noesis (roughly an act of perception as guided by an attitude or purpose) and noema (the object as it appears under those circumstances). But the difference between the philosophers is telling. Wittgenstein understands that one is not necessarily in control; aspect-change can be surprising or disorienting, terrifying or mesmerizing. Works of art often depend on the potential for such unruly transformation, as Morris’s painting and Strauss’s prologue do. The artwork has no fixed noema, or, when it does, it is no longer art but something else. Artworks are theatres of aspect-change, which in their case is indistinguishable from change of being. With art, with what we denominate as art, what seems is what is. This being, moreover, always potentially includes reflections by the artwork on its own seeming. Any hermeneutic must incorporate these conditions among its own conditions of possibility. The question with music, as with any art, is not whether it acts (whether we act) this way, but how. Recognizing that much immediately raises a series of questions, three of which seem especially pertinent here. The first is general: faced with changes in appearance that carry ontological weight, just what is hermeneutics supposed to do? The others are specifically musical. How do we deal with the commonly observed fact that music, considered apart from lyrics, libretti, programmes, or other pointers, is incapable of saying definitely what it means? And how do we deal with musical technique after demoting it epistemologically? Surely we can’t just ignore it. What role should we give it? The next section will take up these questions in sequence.

Locating Meaning Since its modern inauguration by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1819 (Scheleiermacher 1978), hermeneutics has sought primarily to uncover hidden depths, truths, or messages in the texts, images, and acts that concern it. A recent characterization by Peter Sloterdijk in his 2004 book Schäume: Sphären (quoted in Connor 2014, 185) is clear and simple: interpretation makes explicit what is implicit.4 This aim led thinkers sceptical about the very idea of such hidden meanings, Barthes and Foucault, for example, to reject hermeneutics outright. But what they were really rejecting was a programme, not a practice—a closed (restricted, unifying, exegetical) hermeneutics that never fit very well with the acts of interpretation it was supposed to regulate.5 Real interpretation refuses to be regulated, as one famously contrary thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, never tired of pointing out. The outlines of a more open hermeneutics begin with Nietzsche and can often be found at work under other names or even no names at all. Derrida, for example, would no doubt have rejected the label, but his changing accounts of reading progressively formulate as direct a précis of open hermeneutics as one could ask for.

Hermeneutics   389 The early Derrida advocates a reading practice that is content neither to “double” what the text says nor to refer it to an external source of meaning. To “open” rather than “protect” a reading one must read so as to “produce” the “signifying structure” that links what the writer can and cannot command of the “patterns of language that he uses” and is used by (Derrida 1976, 157–160). The later Derrida drops the language of structure and treats reading as an encounter with the singularity of the work or event: I would say that the “best” reading would consist in giving oneself up to the most idiomatic aspects of the work while also taking account of the historical context, of what is shared (in the sense of both participation and division, of continuity and the cut of separation). . . . Singularity “shared” in this way . . . comes both to confirm, repeat and respect the signature of the other, of the “original” work, and to lead it off elsewhere, so running the risk of betraying it, having to betray it in a certain way so as to respect it, through the invention of a signature just as singular. (Derrida 1992, 68–69; italics in the original)

Closed hermeneutics has by and large sought to protect understanding from such open hermeneutics, as if that were a good idea. I would like to return the favour. Critics of musical hermeneutics have generally targeted closed hermeneutics as if it were hermeneutics in general. To the extent that their criticisms refer to the closed version, they are perfectly right, whether they are speaking against the exercise of power and denial of otherness (Tomlinson 1993; cf. Kramer 1993), a failure to appreciate the effects of performance (Abbate 2004), a confusion of criticism with history (Taruskin 2005), or a denial of the subject’s plurality and saturation by sensory presences (Nancy 2007). But their critiques sail right past open hermeneutics, which their writings generally fail to recognize even when it is hiding in plain sight and which they regularly assimilate to the model of closed hermeneutics. In part the reason why is a static conception of meaning as a set of ideas or propositions rather than as a complex and plural activity. Open hermeneutics—Hermeneutics 2.0—corresponds to a latter-day cognitive mode that does not separate meaning from action, and does not separate either from language. As we will see, language in this frame of reference remains central, but in terms that depart from the primacy of statement and incline instead towards Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation— the word is chosen deliberately—of language as oath. An old argument against musical meaning rests on the idea that listeners are generally unable to tell what “programme music” represents without the help of a note or title. And it’s true; they can’t. But why should they? Would we recognize Dutch Schultz in Morris’s painting without the help of a title? Granted, a listener deprived of a title might well be forgiven for hearing the ride of Wagner’s Valkyries as the thrusting of a locomotive. But why hide the title? (And by the way, isn’t there some element of steam power in Wagner’s horseflesh?) Why play guessing games? More exactly, why play guessing games in theory when no one plays them in practice? The usual conclusion from the need for titles and programmes to cue meaning is that any non-musical content is superfluous, external, essentially irrelevant or, more exactly, irrelevant to the essence of the music. One way to counter this argument is to point out

390   Lawrence Kramer that one-to-one references in music no more determine meaning in any important sense than barebones references do in language. Walt Whitman’s poem “To a Locomotive in Winter” is unmistakably about a train, even without its title, but to know that is to know next to nothing. The title is almost misleading, since the locomotive undergoes rapid changes of aspect from machine to steed to woman. (The Valkyries are not far behind.) This is not a choo-choo. For present purposes, though, it is best to ignore this dimension of the issue, which has no bearing on musical meaning and interpretation. Why is that? The reason is fundamental. Not knowing what to hear in the absence of a title or programme, that is, in the absence of prior knowledge, is just the point. It is not the condition of music; it is the condition of perception. What matters is what happens after one perceives something under a description, which is the only way one can perceive anything as something. Take the famous figure of the duck-rabbit, best known for its role in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. When one says of this figure that it can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit but not both at once, the unspoken assumption is that the person who sees the figure knows what a duck and a rabbit are. Lacking that knowledge, the figure will make no sense regardless of the conformation it registers on the senses. Moreover, the prior knowledge required must cross a certain threshold of richness before it can be fully effective. We might recognize the wavering string music at the beginning of Mendelssohn’s “Fair Melusine” Overture as imitating the movement of water—the conventions for that are well established, partly by this very music—but unless we know the story to which the water belongs, we still know almost nothing. As with Whitman’s poem, the referent is not an answer, but a question. Meaning, or its preliminary moment, crystallizes when knowledge informs perception. The item we perceive undergoes a change of sense, a change of aspect. As already noted, it is characteristic of the arts to delay this event, and it is especially characteristic of music, which is in some sense the very art of that delay. The temporality of music is that of the time before meaning en route to becoming meaningful time. The principle that musical meaning does not derive from musical technique does not imply that technique is irrelevant or has no role to play in musical understanding. The question is not one of whether to consult technique, but of when, and of what role to assign to it. Admittedly, it is impossible to describe music closely without some technical vocabulary. Even simple things like octaves and triads and cadences qualify, and there is no formal criterion to separate “good” technical discourse that helps reveal something about the music from “bad” technical discourse that reveals something only about itself. But this, surprisingly perhaps, is not a problem. True, there is no formal criterion to govern the choice of language and the objects of inquiry, but there is a criterion of content. By this I do not mean that one can specify a series of legitimate or appropriate topics, nor even that one can identify a series of typical genres on which we can rely. Certain topics and genres do, of course, have a historical place and influence, but knowing these is of only limited help because the treatment of them is so varied and often unruly. The content criterion, rather, concerns the kind of statement that can tell us something about music. Statements of this kind, if they are well made, will be revealing regardless of the specific technical features they invoke.

Hermeneutics   391 So what kind is that? No music ever comes before us as mere isolated sound—not, at least, unless we discipline ourselves to hear isolated sound and nothing else, and perhaps not even then. Music comes saturated, indeed supersaturated, with cultural, social, and affective resonances (that last term to be taken literally) that have historically proved as elusive as they are forceful because of music’s celebrated ability to convey them while bypassing language. Music always embodies, is a primary embodiment of, the activity of care as Heidegger conceived it: the playing-out of our attachments (to what we care for, take care of, care about) through time. For Heidegger, care was synonymous with Dasein, human being in the world (Heidegger 1962, 225–273). For Ricoeur, care is above all the means by which clock time becomes human time, so that we can speak of time for something or the time of something that matters to us. Ricoeur links this humanizing process to narrative, but it is even closer to what happens in music, the very medium of which is continuously humanized time (Ricoeur 1980, 169–190). The temporal structure of care is in principle independent of culture and history, but the content of care, to speak loosely, is dependent on both. In other words, the humanizing uses of time obey no chronology. Their only precondition is a disparity between time as measured and time as lived, and they can therefore literally happen at any time. Yet it matters a great deal just when they do happen, and why. It matters what occasions they respond to or produce. It matters what idioms we use to address them. Care speaks in idioms, and most people are fluent in many of them and expert in negotiating their changes, for they change constantly. Language describing musical technique becomes revealing, and most true to what music does, when it occurs in one of the idioms of care. To illustrate, I will submit a simple example of analysis to severe critique. I can assure you that the author involved will not mind, because the author was me. In a 1992 article on the instrumental introduction to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, I examined Heinrich Schenker’s analysis of this movement (Kramer [1992] 2006). The article’s topic was the relationship of analysis to critical discourse, interpretation, and musical hermeneutics. Schenker regarded his analysis as the basis for interpreting the introduction as what Haydn named it, “The Representation of Chaos.” My account reinterpreted several of Schenker’s analytic observations—yet without questioning them. One of the most prominent of these involved a violent outburst, two-thirds through, which wrenches the movement to a climax on an abortive cadence. This climax is pure frustration. It also happens to coincide with the premature conclusion of the Urlinie (primal line)—a long-range descending pattern that Schenker regarded as essential to tonal music (at least to music of “genius”). I suggested that this foreshortening renders the Urlinie inoperative. The noisy outburst, all in octaves, forms the signature of chaos, the large X at the very core of chaos that blocks the emergence of cosmos. Cosmos can appear only after the unachieved cadence finally arrives at the end of the movement after a long delay. The analytic part of this interpretation still sounds good, so what’s the problem with it? The problem is that there is no need for the Urlinie: none at all. It is perfectly obvious that the mid-movement outburst is a premature conclusion; the violence of the gesture,

392   Lawrence Kramer the orchestration, the harsh octave replacing the sought-for triad—all these conspicuous qualities virtually shout it out: THIS IS CHAOS. Endings are not endings here; directions do not exist; if you think you know where you are, you’re wrong. What is added by the Schenkerian apparatus? Something, we might say: an extra grinding of the gears. If music cannot complete its universal, fundamental process, the composing out of the Urlinie—let’s forget for a moment that the idea is both prescriptive and ­ethnocentric—then chaos appears as the negation of cosmos, the negation of the ­arithmetical, Pythagorean perfection represented by the triad. That is, to be sure, ­something; but it is not much. We have an unachieved triad regardless of the Urlinie. Anyone can hear that; it’s almost impossible not to hear it. But the triad (or rather its lack) is not the basis of the interpretation. We need everything else, too—the violence, the orchestration, the octaves—and we need these features to coalesce not only with each other but also with a far-reaching network of ideas and images about the creation of the world and the wonder and terror that goes with it. The basis of the interpretation is this: The music collapses; the collapse is brutal. The interpretation, which is not wrong, emerges from the wreckage. So Schenker may add a little, but only a little; mostly he adds the ­grinding—the rest we can hear anyway. What I failed to recognize when I wrote the article is the implication of that proportion. Technical features never add more than a little—or make that “rarely” if you must. Specifying formal properties can advance or retard an interpretation but not determine one. This holds as true for the minimal technical features mentioned in my description of what is obvious as it does for Schenker’s more rarefied entities. Musical details may suggest an interpretation but not validate one. At least they cannot do so on their own. Music is a form of communicative or expressive action before it is anything else. What music presents to perception, what it presents for interpretation and understanding, depends on how a contingent, culturally embedded subject treats the music from a position of existential concern. Interpretation arises from the collaboration between concern and what its presence makes musically apparent (always something; never everything). Husserl’s schema affords a more general description of this collaboration than Wittgenstein’s investigations of aspect-change. The object of musical understanding— some combination of perception and interpretation—is music insofar, and only insofar, as it is the noema called forth by a noesis grounded in care. To say so properly, however, we have to add that the noesis is altogether historical. Its noema, which cannot be fixed, is transient and conditional. And its agent, the agent concerned with music, is the very opposite of the transcendental subject favoured by phenomenology—and often by musical aesthetics. This criterion of care applies equally to language about music and to the music described, whether potentially or actually, by such language. The music presents itself at the call of care. It cannot present itself otherwise, but, as I have stressed more than once, no such presentation can be complete. The music will also withhold some part of itself. Different acts of care will call forth the same music differently. Hermeneutics does not operate in the mere actuality of the aspect but in the potentiality of aspect-change.

Hermeneutics   393 The chief instrument for addressing that potentiality is language. Interpretation adheres in use as well as in discourse, but discourse is its inescapable foundation. So it is not quite enough to suggest that musical hermeneutics should absorb technical details in a language of care. To fill out the proposal we need to consider care further precisely as an expression of language. Of course, music and language are often opposed to each other; everyone knows the clichés on the subject. But neither music nor language can stay apart from the other for very long. To get to music we must go through music, but we must also go just as much through language. There is no alternative. In The Sacrament of Language, Giorgio Agamben makes the provocative statement that naming is “the event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath, in which . . . [the speaker] pledges to fulfil his word, swears on its truthfulness, on the correspondence between words and things that is realized in it” (Agamben 2011, 46).There is a lot to think about in this statement, but what I want to dwell on here is the idea that the name as oath does not reflect a pre-existing correspondence between words and things but, on the contrary, produces that correspondence. The relationship of words and things is not metaphysical, not even conceptual; it is ethical. If this is right, then recognizing it can help explain the peculiar magic of names and naming. This magic never seems to fade, despite its dependence on the postulate of a correspondence between words and things that has long since lost its credibility. The magic of names comes not from the names themselves but from my pledging on them, my consenting to them, my staking my word, and therefore my staking myself on them. But as this list of quasi-synonyms suggests, the relationship involved cannot be limited to the ethical. Naming is an act of recognition that endows what is recognized with a certain character it would not otherwise have. Before the relationship exemplified by naming is ethical it is poetic, in the originary sense of the Greek poiesis: bringing something into being where before there was nothing (Stewart 2002, 1–17; Agamben 1999, 59–67). To utter the name is to stand behind the making of something, to give assurance of its having been well made. The magic of names is the force of a promise. More particularly, it is the force of a promise with an open and indefinite future, a promise that can never be kept once and for all. These reflections on names have a direct bearing on musical hermeneutics because hermeneutics follows the same logic and makes the same promise. Interpretation too entails a kind of oath in which the ethical and the cognitive overlap. It too is a poetic activity in the sense that it brings something into being where before there was, not nothing, but not enough. The means of its poiesis is the exercise of care, which endows what it cares about with a certain character it would not otherwise have. If we think of interpreting music in this way it becomes necessary to reconsider virtually every aspect of what interpreting music involves. The criterion of care is both generous and severe: generous because it leaves the doors of opportunity wide open; severe because it discards most of the familiar ways of accounting for music and musical meaning.

394   Lawrence Kramer

Paraphrasing with Care The question of how language reveals the meanings that music bears (carries, supports, conveys, even suffers) is a special case of the more general question of how matters of concern and their symbolic working through are transmitted from one medium of pres­ en­ta­tion to another (Latour 2004, 225–248). Care tends to urge such transmission as media become available for it; as recent history strikingly shows, the urgency rises as the media proliferate. Over time, the migration of content across media has taken a variety of explicit forms—ekphrasis, illustration, the tone poem, film and television adaptation, remakes, novelization, fan fiction, the hypertext edition—but it is everywhere implicit. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s pithy words, “All media are mixed media” (Mitchell 1994, 5). The model of this process, and probably its condition of possibility, is the verbal act of paraphrase: the restatement of an utterance in other words. Language assumes primacy here because the human world is saturated by it and cannot be otherwise. But paraphrase assumes primacy in relation to language because it is not simply a function of language but a necessary condition for it. Language is continuously paraphrasing itself. In other words, no sentence or statement or text ever stands alone. Utterances can always be put in other words; utterances are always being put in other words. That, you will have noticed, is exactly what I have just done—and done twice. The simple fact that paraphrase is everywhere has been insufficiently remarked on. Its consequences are far-reaching. Without the possibility of paraphrase, no utterance or expression would be intelligible in the first place. The possibility of paraphrase is the possibility of meaning.6

How Does This Principle Affect Musical Hermeneutics? The principle applies no less between expressive media than it does within the medium of language. Presentation implies the capacity for paraphrase; what cannot be paraphrased in a second or third medium cannot be presented in a first. Eventually, the circle of media always returns to language, but the role of language in the relay of paraphrases is not simple. For one thing, verbal paraphrase does not, at least ideally, stop the relay, but instead propels it onward. For another, language can be as effective in yielding to paraphrase as it is in performing paraphrase. And music is the chief case in point. Music can paraphrase language just as much as language can paraphrase music. This happens all the time. It happens as a matter of genre in song, independent of the familiar devices of emotive expression and tone painting, and independent of whether the listener can understand the words being sung. Song is just musical paraphrase at its most basic. But song is only an example. Any juxtaposition of music and language can set the process of paraphrase in motion. This relationship can be ignored, and often has been, but it is always there.

Hermeneutics   395

Example 18.1  Debussy, “Le sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir,” beginning.

Consider, for example, Debussy’s piano prelude, “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.” The example is revealing in part because the score, as often with Debussy’s Preludes, is full of verbal descriptions of the music, and in part because the title gives us the text on which the music is commenting, the first line of Baudelaire’s poem “Harmonie du soir.” In brief, the text celebrates an ecstatic moment of memory, but in language tinged by pain and violence, notably the image of sunset as congealing blood. What the music says about this text is that its ecstasy is dissolving, has always been dissolving; the ecstasy is a receding illusion. We can hear the music make this “statement” as the opening melody (Example 18.1) comes to swirl through a cycle of repetitions that gradually wipes it away. The text’s measure of illusoriness, however, is just what the music leaves out. Nothing in the music suggests the text’s grotesque clots of blood and their liturgical reversal in a closing line that identifies the memory with taking Communion. The music, or so the music tells us, is a better illusion precisely because it is candid about its own illusoriness. In other words—always other words—the music dissolves its own presence into the order of memory. The process is both spontaneous and relentless. The first half of the melody returns (twice) only to disappear; the second half is more tenacious but before long it begins to crumble into a series of ever more fragmentary forms. By the end, it is the merest trace of itself, if that (Example 18.2). Thus much is simple enough description, but one might go further and say that the memory as paraphrased by this music becomes a force, gentle but irresistible, which acts less like Baudelaire’s ecstatic Communion than like the “dizzy languor” that, in the poem, the Communion overcomes. The next step would be to hear or play the music with this language in mind. Of course, the interchange continues in my comments about the music, which must be seen as no different, and no less authoritative, than Debussy’s—no less, not because I am prescient, but because he no less than I needs a language in which to speak. Thus his score tells the performer to make one passage “tranquil and floating,” another “like the distant sound of horns,” and the whole work “harmonious and supple.” The role of language in either direction, as interpreter or interpreted, is to open and to expand the space of discourse. There is no special idiom reserved for the purpose; the most musically specific of idioms can do a bad job and the least specific can do a good one. Or vice

396   Lawrence Kramer

Example 18.2  Debussy, “Le sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir,” concluding dissolution of melody.

versa. The choice of language is not a question of theory, but of circumstance: how do we speak here, today, of this, or how do we grasp, here, today, this as speaking to us? Paraphrase across media is not an issue of representation but one of inquiry. The relationship between music and language is the same no matter which is nominally acting on the other.

Technological Interlude How, then, can musical hermeneutics plausibly go about its work? When the interpreter offers a paraphrase as pledge, what makes assent to it reasonable? I need to delay again before answering. At this point it is necessary to change the subject rather unceremoniously. I have been talking about interpretation as if it were a kind of mental faculty, which in some sense it is. But it is also a historical practice, and in view of the enormous changes in the storage and processing of information created by digital technology, it is necessary to ask whether that practice itself needs to be reinterpreted to accommodate those changes. The topic is too large to address fully here, but its challenges can at least

Hermeneutics   397 be sampled. Two recent developments can exemplify these: the rise of cognitive nonconsciousness and the development of data mining. The term cognitive non-consciousness comes from N. Katherine Hayles (2014), who suggests that advances in neuroscience and digital technology have broadened the category of cognition beyond the activity of thinking performed by conscious human selves. Humans, some animals, and intelligent machines share a capacity for complex acts of adaptation, performance, and problem-solving which do not require consciousness and in many cases would be impossible for consciousness. This exclusion of consciousness also excludes the unconscious; the medium of action is not the other of consciousness but its mere absence. Cognitive non-consciousness regularly performs acts of interpretation that have nothing to do with meaning, which belongs exclusively to thinking. In humans, cognitive non-consciousness operates primarily through neural and somatic maps of events or circumstances; one example Hayles gives is that of a pianist who, in order to recognize his or her own playing on a recording, must first interpret the sounds by non-consciously simulating the neural activity that would go along with playing the music. Hayles concludes that acknowledging the ubiquity of interpretation beyond the system of consciousness and the unconscious requires an “epistemic break,” one “crucial move” of which would be to “reconceptualize interpretation so that it applies to information flows as well as to questions about the relations of human selves to the world” (Hayles 2014, 218). One of the principal forms of this application is literary (and, we might suppose, musical) data mining, otherwise known as “automatic text processing” and “algorithmic criticism,” a procedure that, whatever it is called, can be carried out only by computer. Before turning to this application, however, it is important to note that Hayles develops her concept of cognitive non-consciousness in terms that depend on a conception of thinking, meaning, and interpretation which confines all three within questionable limits. Hayles by and large limits meaning to the resolution of ambiguity, which we might concessively expand to include clarification of all sorts. But interpretation just as often, or more often, enlarges ambiguity and creates difficulty. Meaning in any case is not merely the outcome of a decision or the assignment of a category. It may incorporate such things, but, as already noted, meaning is not a package. Meaning is a continuing activity involving the invention of discourse and the citation and reuse of the materials taken up for interpretation. This activity, moreover, does not require a “self ” in the traditional sense of a private monad, even an illusory one. The performer of an interpretation is a subject, a historically-grounded and culturally-conditioned potentiality of relationship and understanding, both an agent who mobilizes concepts, tropes, and expressive acts and a position through which they circulate. Interpretation itself acts as an immanent critique of the reduced versions of it fostered by closed hermeneutics. Data mining uncovers patterns that people working at less than digital speed could not identify (at least in a reasonable period of time) and it therefore opens up areas of understanding that exceed the grasp of any interpretation conducted at the pace of thinking. But the availability of high-speed scanning does not make the speed of thought

398   Lawrence Kramer obsolete; we will have uses for walking even though we can fly. Aside from the obvious point that the results of algorithmic interpretation require interpretation themselves, as do its presuppositions, frequency is not necessarily a sign of importance. The reverse may often be true. And the most important terms may not only be marked by rarity or be hidden by surrogates but may also post-date the sample of data, however large. Meaning is no more linear than it is unambiguous. It is important to add that these considerations in no way form a brief against what we currently call digital humanities. The investigation of cognitive non-consciousness and the increasingly sophisticated use of algorithmic criticism will surely expand the possibilities of interpretation and may produce new forms of it. But these approaches are not inherently antagonistic to the care-based hermeneutics I have tried to describe here. The fortunes of interpretative thinking cannot be predicted with any confidence, but neither its flourishing nor its decline is preordained.

Heuristic Finale Interpretation will, then, both keep going and keep changing, so it still makes sense to return to the question I asked earlier: how can musical hermeneutics plausibly go about its work? There are no fixed answers to that question. There is no protocol or prescription for a general hermeneutics, and there never has been despite many efforts. But it is nonetheless possible to interpret music with a bit of inventiveness and the help of certain heuristics that should prove useful if what I have said so far holds good. Here are some of them. First, and to summarize: Meaning in music does not and cannot involve specifying a level of form or structure that justifies or generates a description. The description comes first. What the music means is what it becomes under a description. What music becomes under a description may show itself equally in verbal interpretation and in musical performance. The difference in medium is a difference in means, not a difference of possibility. Meaning in any medium is available in other media; it is intrinsically available for what has come to be called remediation. Meaning can be transcribed. This never happens without some change, but the same is true within any medium. Meaning always only approximates itself—at best. It follows that the general possibility of transcription from one medium to another is the precondition of meaning itself. What this implies for music in particular is the impossibility of sustaining any distinction that separates music or some part of music from meaning. Meaning or the lack of it will not serve to distinguish music from language, music from image, the score or the work from performance, form from feeling. If there is a beyond of meaning, and that is a bigger if than we often suppose, it cannot be located in a particular medium, but only evolved from within meaning itself. An interpretation is a discourse, an utterance, a speech act becoming an event. The meaning of an interpretation is indistinguishable from its language—and so, therefore,

Hermeneutics   399 is the meaning of the object or event being interpreted. But the interpretation does not mark the closure of a discourse. On the contrary: it is what makes discourse possible. An interpretation is not a hypothesis but an activity. Interpretation is inspired intrusion. It undoes both the complacency of enigmas and the illusions of clarity. With music these actions occur with a candour so disconcerting from an empiricist standpoint that musical interpretation is, despite repeated rebuttals, still regularly dismissed as arbitrary, as a special and inferior case, at best a poetic effusion, whereas it is in fact the model of the general case, and, because it never occurs in a cultural or historical vacuum, is not arbitrary at all even where it is paranoid or freakish. The work of interpretation is not easy. It requires learning, experience, and verbal dexterity. It has nothing to do with making things up or saying whatever one pleases. On the contrary, interpretation demands a willing immersion in the otherness that runs through whatever is being interpreted and that always exceeds the understanding it elicits. The hermeneutic cannot be derived from the semiotic. The notion that it can or should be is responsible for nearly all the confusions and misunderstandings that confound the concept of meaning and push the claims of empiricism beyond their credible domain into the sphere of over-regulation if not downright repressiveness. Musical signs are real but few and of limited usefulness. Music follows no semiotic code. In music as elsewhere, semiotics is a highly localized subdivision of hermeneutics. Meaning is independent of signs. Formal-technical detail in music can be used to support diverse and conflicting interpretations, just as textual detail in literature can. The implication would seem unavoidable had it not been avoided so long: such detail cannot be the basis of musical understanding and interpretation. Its support is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. What basis is there, then? Only a floating one, and hence not a basis at all: the interpretation becomes plausible when and only when one has a good reason for making it apart from its formal-technical embodiment. No formula can be given for what counts as a good reason. Each case has to be made on its own. Music is not a language, but it shares with language the capacity to say anything. Music has no limit on its semantic reach. Another way to say this is that music too belongs to the symbolic order (or, to be strictly Lacanian about it, that music belongs to the symbolic order as much as it does to the imaginary and the Real).7 Although it is no longer appropriate to talk about extra-musical meaning—any meaning that music has is a musical meaning—the capacity of music to produce meaning still leaves open the question of what kind of meaning music may produce. The answer is: any kind. Any meaning can become a musical meaning. Any musical event can participate in that meaning—or not. Descriptions of technique, up to and including musical analysis, become most helpful when they serve as a means of describing that participation. They become less helpful insofar as they become ends in themselves and thus disengage from the vocabulary of care. The aim of examining musical technique is not to identify order and structure, which, where they exist, are primarily means of curbing or framing a musical action that neither order nor structure can keep under control. The same caution applies to the

400   Lawrence Kramer analysis of formal patterns in terms of norms and deviations or convention and innovation. The idealization of form is a defence against meaning. Technical description is most helpful and least myopic when it provides or supports a vocabulary that can account for particular musical actions with precision when precision is needed. All humanistic knowledge is subject to the paradox of necessary speculation. Music is just one example among others, but it is a particularly vivid example, and its vividness has led, too often and for too long, to a knowledge of music that is constrained at best and spurious at worst. The paradox I speak of is that one must go beyond formal and historical description to produce genuine, full, knowledge of music; one must, in a word, speculate. But to speculate is to risk credibility, to push the boundaries of the plausible. Gain in knowledge requires loss in certainty. The more important the truths we approximate, the more we must make them elusive. Therefore—and this is a strong therefore—in contrast to the procedures that are still standard in most of the scholarly world, any understanding of music and its history that wants to avoid merely repeating what is already known must begin with informed speculation, with a certain meditated wildness, which may or may not accord with conventional accounts of musical style, genre, form, structure, occasion, or performance. All appeals for a solid floor on which to base interpretation are in vain. Practice always outstrips such bids for control. To understand the things we make or do you must walk on shifting sands.

Notes 1. See also Kramer 2016, 36–39, 168–172. 2. For discussion see Mitchell 1994, 273–275. 3. On change of aspect and musical meaning, see Kramer 2012, 10–13 and passim. 4. Sloterdijk regards this “explicitation” (explizieren) as an index of modernity; Connor links it to the general performativity that has recently come to subsume interpretation. On interpretation and performativity, see, inter alia, Kramer 2010. 5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, closes hermeneutics thus: “When we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken—i.e., the text is not intelligible—do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied. . . . Not only does the reader assume an immanent unity of meaning, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning that proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said” (Gadamer 1996, 294). 6. This possibility is the obverse of the possibility of signification, which stems from what Derrida calls the iterability of the sign: the sign, as such, must be intelligibly reusable in different contexts. See Derrida 1987, 307–330. Paraphrase is non-iterable. Although a paraphrase can be quoted or mentioned, it cannot be repeated as paraphrase but only paraphrased further. Paraphrase in this sense is remote from the reductive synopsis stigmatized as “the heresy of paraphrase” by Cleanth Brooks and the literary New Criticism; see Brooks 1947, 192–214. 7. These three “orders” or “registers” are a constant in Lacan’s writings but are fluid and changeable in meaning, and vary in prominence over time. By and large, the Imaginary is

Hermeneutics   401 the sphere of imagery, fantasy, and identification; the Symbolic or symbolic order the sphere of language and law; and the Real the usually transgressive remainder that cannot be symbolized. Lacan himself never provides a systematic exposition; for further explication, see Evans 1996, 84–85, 162–164, 203–204.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring): 505–536. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man Without Content. Translated by Georgia Albert. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath. Translated by Adam Kotsco. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brooks, Cleanth. 1947. The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Connor, Steven. 2014. “Spelling Things Out.” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (Spring): 183–197. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1987. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 307–330. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “This Strange Institution Called Literature.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 33–74. New York: Routledge. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1996. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2014. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (Spring): 199–221. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Kramer, Lawrence. [1992] 2006. “Haydn’s Chaos, Schenker’s Order; or, Musical Meaning and Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?” In Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays, 237–262. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Kramer, Lawrence. 1993. “Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson.” Current Musicology 53: 25–35. Kramer, Lawrence. 2010. Interpreting Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 2012. Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 2016. The Thought of Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter): 225–248. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

402   Lawrence Kramer Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn): 169–190. Ricoeur, Paul. 2012. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1978. “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures.” Translated by Jan Wojcik and Roland Haas. New Literary History 10, no. 1 (Autumn): 1–16. Stewart, Susan. 2002. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taruskin, Richard. 2005. “Review: Speed Bumps.” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 2 (Fall): 185–207. Tomlinson, Gary. 1993. “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer.” Current Musicology 53:18–24. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

chapter 19

Deconstruction Naomi Waltham-Smith

How, Rose Subotnik (1996) once famously asked, could music be deconstructed? The question implies that putting music and deconstruction together might be complicated or even controversial. Fifteen years later, in a gloss on Subotnik’s question, Lawrence Kramer wondered what the conjunction of music and deconstruction arouses more: curiosity, scandal, or derision (Kramer 2011, 128–129). Another decade on and the question of music’s relation to deconstruction remains far from settled. For one thing, deconstruction isn’t quite as obsolete as Kramer imagines. Deconstruction, so he contends, has become a niche pursuit whose influence is nonetheless all-pervasive. Everyone who doesn’t do deconstruction is at the same time doing it by another name. Deconstruction is sidelined by the new concepts and fields that it makes possible. But this is precisely what deconstruction is. It takes place under its own erasure. Deconstruction is all about showing that what seems to be outside (in this case deconstruction itself) is actually the presupposed and overlooked condition of possibility. More than that, what is at stake above all in deconstruction is philosophy’s relation to its outside—to what is not philosophy, which includes literature, art, and of course, music. Deconstruction is the very spacing between “itself ” and the other. Deconstruction means thinking the possibility of being other-wise. So, deconstruction isn’t over. It may have gone underground, but that only demands that we deconstruct this very presupposition of deconstruction itself. That is to say, today we are confronted with the challenge of thinking deconstruction otherwise. Music has long been philosophy’s way of being otherwise. Music is often philosophy’s outside, but as this essay will argue, it is also the condition to which philosophy in many ways aspires. So, there is nothing outrageous or ridiculous about putting music and deconstruction together. So long as music was philosophy’s other or its limit, music and deconstruction were always going to make good bedfellows. Deconstruction, even if Derrida sometimes appears in his earlier writings to define it more narrowly as a rejection of metaphysical logocentrism, is better characterized more broadly as the thought of the outside, of margins, of limits—and of their dislocation and dissolution. Music and listening, as we shall see, are frequently the guises through which philosophy thinks

404   Naomi Waltham-Smith these things. The history of philosophy in the West sets the stage for this star-crossed union. When lovers kiss, their lips don’t just touch the other’s. They feel their own lips touching one another as well. Between self and other alike there is contact and parting. In touching music as its other, philosophy touches itself at its limit, at its opening onto the outside. As other essays in this collection show, European thought in the nineteenth century, starting with early German Romanticism, came to entrust music with a unique access to this auto-affection. Listening to music, the subject of Hegelian dialectics feels itself being affected. Through hearing its own voice, the subject of Husserlian phenomenology is present to itself in an undivided present. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that music might also take centre stage in attempts to go beyond the horizon of metaphysics and self-identical presence. No longer a lubricant of auto-affection, music becomes this beyond and this impossibility of self-presence. If, in touching music, philosophy touches itself at its threshold, it touches itself at the point of no longer or not yet touching. Music, as philosophy’s outside, is the point at which metaphysics succumbs to deconstruction. The outside of philosophy is what troubles metaphysics: on what is metaphysics founded and how can it conceptualize that which grounds it if it lies beyond it? One strategy—the one pursued by the Hegelian dialectic— is for philosophy to appropriate whatever lies outside it, to try to make it its own, conceptualize it on its own terms. And yet music’s otherness—its resistance to being incorporated completely into philosophy—threatens philosophy’s sovereignty, its capacity to constitute itself without the intervention of something other. This is precisely why Adorno proposes a negative dialectics in which music becomes the non-identical that resists incorporation. Sonic irreducibility is the glow of metaphysics at the moment of its fall. Derrida, for his part, provides a retort to Husserl. In the moment of hearingoneself-speak, there is a hiatus, however minimal, separating producer and consumer of sound. Difference thus inserts itself into listening. Music and deconstruction become partners. It is, then, no coincidence that Subotnik came to deconstruction via (negative) dialectics. Music comes to deconstruction via dialectics. Dialectics, we might say, bears music’s difference, while deconstruction carries it to term. Music in turn, I will suggest by way of conclusion in this essay, can bring deconstruction to term. But that is to get ahead of ourselves. First, we must address the Hegelian heritage that—via Adorno in particular—has shaped musicology’s engagement with deconstruction. Musicology has tended to highlight the common enemy that negative dialectics and deconstruction share: Hegelian metaphysics (see, for example, Subotnik 1996, 54; Chua 1995, 9). Adorno thus becomes a Derrida avant la lettre. But this tends to overlook how deconstruction differs from dialectics, however negative. If music studies should listen to deconstruction today, it is because it offers a different mode of relationality. To begin with, this task of listening to deconstruction demands rethinking the “and” that comes between music and deconstruction, at once joining them and separating them. What follows, then, is the deconstruction of this “and.” I trace a series of deferrals and referrals before returning to the “and” between music and deconstruction from a new perspective. This involves first displacing the “and” so that it may return to itself as

Deconstruction   405 something a little different. The “and” can never express a simple coming together. There is always a certain asymmetry: one having power over or subordinate to the other, one outside or inside the other. This means that the “and” becomes an “of.” This “of ” is no more self-identical than the “and” but may be read in multiple senses. Because it differs from itself, the “of ” in turn morphs into a “with,” a “beside.” Starting with “the deconstruction of music,” the genitive initiates an interplay of subject and object. Music and deconstruction switch places. This genitive may be understood in two senses: objective and subjective. First, music is the object of deconstruction, the concept of music that deconstruction advances. In the second case, music is the agent of deconstruction, the deconstruction that happens in music, that music precipitates— music’s concept of deconstruction, if you like. But even this second, subjective genitive, in which music differs from itself, splinters into multiple possible meanings alongside one another. Side by side, music and deconstruction: each is transformed by the possibility of relating to the other. Neither coincides anymore with itself. Finally, this back and forth blurs into an indiscernible vibration. Deconstruction becomes musical resonance. The music of deconstruction means that deconstruction musics, it participates in musicking, it sounds. In what follows, I chart these various displacements and referrals, weaving through the possible encounters between music and deconstruction. Ultimately, the union is all of these things and never only one of them. This does not mean that we have music as deconstruction or deconstruction as music. Neither coincides with itself any more than with one another. There is no “the” music any more than there is “the” deconstruction. Rather, they both differ from themselves, dislocated from within. So there is simply music as not deconstruction, deconstruction as not music—both at once. Deconstruction is the indetermination of music, its refusal to be appropriated to any category or concept. But at the same time music is the indetermination of deconstruction, promising its release from the grasp of metaphysics.

The Deconstruction of Music Not deconstruction and music, but the deconstruction of music. Let us assume that this is an objective genitive, as the most intuitive reading would suggest. The problem is that there is no deconstructing music. There is no music that is the object of deconstruction. Derrida himself never seemed particularly interested in music. Neither have Jean Luc-Nancy, who is much more preoccupied with aurality, nor even Peter Szendy, who is also a musicologist by training, deconstructed pieces of music. Subotnik recounts how Derrida during a brief encounter in 1986 in New York assumed that she was deconstructing musicological texts, not a Chopin prelude (Subotnik  1996, 39). Recalling this recollection, Kramer suggests that the heyday of deconstruction was also an obsession with the text. Music can, of course, be treated as if it were a text—and often has been. But even setting aside this issue, there is no more a deconstruction of texts than there is a deconstruction of music. It is not a matter of finding an appropriate

406   Naomi Waltham-Smith object for ­deconstruction. Deconstruction does not have an object. It cannot be applied. It is not something that can be done to something else. Deconstruction is what happens. It takes place. Some might say that it takes place in a text or in music, but even that isn’t rigorous enough. Deconstruction, by its very nature, takes place neither within nor without. That is why there is no deconstruction of music. Deconstruction deconstructs the possibility of there being any wholly external perspective from which to deconstruct an object. There is, in other words, a deconstruction of representation. A good example of this is Jean-Luc Nancy’s resistance to a theological account of the world’s creation in The Creation of the World or Globalization (Nancy 2007b). There can be no transcendence, he argues, no other world. There is simply this world. And there is no external ­vantage point from which it can be grasped in its totality. If the world were simply in front of me, it would not be my world. The world, then, if I am to know it at all, cannot be absolutely other. Rather, I am always already part of it. “As soon as a world appears to me as a world, I already share something of it: I share a part of its inner resonances” (42). We might say the same about our relation to music. The word “resonance” is key and we shall return to it in due course. This sharing and resonance allow me to “recognize a short passage from Bach or from Varese—but also a fragment from Proust, a drawing from Matisse, or a Chinese landscape” (42). There is, then, no more a metamusical position from which to deconstruct music than there is one from which it may be totalized. If there is no outside, at the same time there is no inside. Deconstruction does not happen within the text. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Derrida’s practice, perpetuated by its anglophone reception in the 1970s for ideological reasons. Exemplary is the deliberate mistranslation of an (in)famous phrase from Of Grammatology: “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Derrida  1967, 227). Eager to discredit Derrida, opponents perpetuated a slogan: “there is nothing outside of texts.” Critics ventriloquized Derrida: there is nothing beyond language, they made him say, no context outside the text (see, among others, Said 1978; Searle 1993, 159–160). The irony seems to have been lost on them. They could only launch this specious claim by decontextualizing Derrida’s statement. A broader view of not only the text in question but also Derrida’s intellectual-cultural contexts reveals an almost diametrically opposed reading of this phrase. As Derrida later explained, there is no “outside-text” actually boils down to saying “there is nothing outside context” (Derrida 1988, 136). Rather than suspend all reference, deconstruction shows that a text is nothing other than the movement of referrals and deferrals to its outside. “There is no outside-text” means that there is no end to the play of différance. That is to say, a text—which is composed precisely of all its material, economic, historical, geographical, ethnic, etc. references—is an infinite openness to the other. Equally, this context is itself without limit. Deconstruction is the practice of showing, from within the horizon of the text, that there is no absolute interiority and no absolute exteriority. There is simply a relating, a sharing, a resonance with the other: a con-text.

Deconstruction   407 Deconstruction, then, is neither a bastion of old-fashioned formalism nor an instrument of what was once called the New Musicology—a body of thought focusing on hermeneutics, criticism, and cultural context, precipitated in the 1980s by a reaction against the positivism that characterized historical musicology. And yet Subotnik situated her intervention as a defence of close reading at the frontier of this brave new world. Both dialectics and deconstruction, as she saw it, were challenges to the exclusionary logic of abstract reason, a battering ram at the walls that guarded the music itself. But that did not mean that analytical work should not be retained, albeit perhaps under erasure. Unsurprisingly, deconstruction came on the musicological stage to shake up debates about analysis and hermeneutics. If deconstruction teaches anything it is that music is no more reducible to its contingent circumstances of production and consumption than it is to its formal logic. Deconstruction short-circuits any decision between autonomy and contingency. In fact, it dismantles any opposition or dialectic. Martin Scherzinger, in a provocative defence of autonomy, argues that the historicist reduction is just as dangerous as the formalist one (Scherzinger 2004, 253). Collapsing music into its socio-historical milieu crushes its political potency. Deconstruction’s potential, as I see it, lies in its refusal of determination. It won’t let music be pinned down. Szendy speaks of “the violence one inflicts on music, when one stops it in the slippage where it defers itself and differs from itself, to rivet it onto the stigmatizing punctuation of a meaning” (Szendy 2012, 204). If it is impossible to move outside music, it is only because music cannot be nailed down. Just as there can be no deconstruction of music, there can be no sense, no meaning, of music, understood as an objective genitive. Nancy says something similar when he speaks of “le sens du monde [the sense of the world].” There is no making sense of the world if this consists in a meaning situated outside of the world. Rather, “the sense of the world” should be read as a subjective genitive: the world makes sense in its play of (self-) reference. There is no fixed place at which this meaning takes place. There is no fully accomplished meaning. Instead, sense is produced in the movement between everything that shares in a world, in the process of sharing itself. We might say that deconstruction takes place at the point of encounter where music and deconstruction touch. But as deconstruction shows, they make contact in not quite touching. The sense of music happens in the gaps and interstices between itself and its others. The deconstruction of music is what takes place between music and deconstruction.

The Deconstruction of Music or the Music of Deconstruction There is no deconstruction of music, no deconstructing music as its object. But might one also speak of “the music of deconstruction,” understood as a subjective genitive? Are these not the same thing, one might object? Music is still the object. And yet I insist

408   Naomi Waltham-Smith in hearing a slight difference in this inversion. Even if there is no deconstructing pieces of music, there is nonetheless still a concept of music that is produced by deconstruction. Deconstruction makes music. The philosophizing that goes under the banner of deconstruction creates a certain idea of music. There is a music that arises out of deconstruction, that is proper to deconstruction, that is deconstruction’s own. This music of deconstruction is a way of thinking the other. Deconstruction produces music as something other than philosophy. It makes music (as) philosophy’s outside. Derrida devotes the introductory essay to Margins of Philosophy, first published in French in 1972, to this theme of philosophy’s outside. Philosophy has insisted on thinking its other. More than that, it has sought to appropriate its own limit for itself. It constitutes itself in its relation to the non-philosophical. This is, of course, the logic of deconstruction par excellence. Particularly striking, though, is the nature of philosophy’s relation to its outside. Metaphysics “has always intended to hear itself speak (s’entendre parler), in the same language, of itself and of something else” (Derrida 1982, xii; emphasis in the original). Philosophy hears its other. The relation to the outside is a matter of aurality. More specifically philosophy hears its other as it hears itself. It makes the other audible (only) by putting it into its own voice. Against this metaphysical relation to the outside, deconstruction constructs the audible as the inassimilable other that philosophy tries again and again to ingest. The problem is that hearing is not a matter of pure interiority. The reference to Derrida’s earlier deconstruction of Husserl in this passage is unmistakable (see Derrida 2011). Voice and Phenomenon, one of three texts dating from 1967, articulates for the first time a cardinal theme of deconstruction: there is an irreducible hetero-affection in every autoaffection. Derrida shows that hearing-oneself-speak is not the scene of metaphysical self-presence that Husserl imagines. Husserl contends that I hear myself immediately in the moment that I speak. In this moment I am present to myself without any recourse to exteriority. This is the fantasy that distinguishes hearing from sight or touch. Husserl’s own theory of temporalization and retention, however, contradicts this assertion. If the living present folds memory into perception, as Husserl contends, then there can be no pure auto-affection. Rather, there is always a tiny hiatus that divides myself into speaker and hearer, then and now. One only hears oneself as an other voice. Philosophy, then, can only hear itself as other. That is to say, when philosophy lends itself an ear, it hears itself as music. Although philosophy’s ear may be attuned to the sonorous in general (Glas, for instance, speaks of bells), elsewhere (in the passage quoted below, for example) Derrida is expressly thinking of music. But going back to Derrida’s later reflections on philosophical listening in Margins of Philosophy written five years after the deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology, he wonders: can philosophy really ever hear its other as other? Or does its tendency to appropriate drown out the outside? This later essay’s title, “Tympan,” has multiple resonances: tympaniser, meaning to criticize and ridicule but also more literally to hammer, as well as the auricular tympanum struck by sound’s vibration. Derrida imagines philosophy affecting itself, striking the membrane of its own eardrum. If the other were to strike with sufficient force it might rupture the circularity of auto-affection. The question is whether philosophy

Deconstruction   409 would then be deaf. If philosophy can only hear its other, appropriated to its own voice, then the non-philosophical other remains inaudible. But Derrida unearths another sense of tympan, a reference to the double-hammered printing press. This doubling allows him to imagine a philosophical hearing that would be open to the other without perforating its eardrum. This, then, is the music of deconstruction, the music that deconstruction produces: a music neither reducible to nor absolutely other than philosophy. If philosophy is always an attempt to think the outside, then music is its condition of possibility. The music of deconstruction lets philosophy hear the other. But Derrida is not the first thinker to conceptualize philosophy as hearing. In this he is following in the footsteps of Heidegger and it is Nancy who has in fact more explicitly taken up the mantle of this legacy. Nancy finds himself treading carefully—sometimes not carefully enough for Derrida. Heidegger yoked the ear to the theme of community. The echoes of National Socialism then present an enormous difficulty but also an urgent need to exonerate the ear from violence. And music’s sonic materiality had already in Adorno become the antidote to and refuge from conceptual violence. For deconstruction, then, the ear has a pharmacological quality: it is poison and cure, capture and sweet release. Derrida has good reason, therefore, to remain wary of philosophy’s temptation to appropriate its other. It always threatens to stifle the music it strains to hear. Only a deconstructive listening lets music sound. That is ultimately why Derrida does not write about music’s voices but prefers just to listen. Once asked in an interview if he was tempted to write on the multiplicity of voices in music, he replied: I wonder if philosophy . . . has not meant the repression of music or song. Philosophy cannot, as such, let the song resonate in some way . . . I do not write about these voices . . . I try to let them speak . . . The music of voices, if there is any, I do not sign it . . . first of all I listen to it. Interviewer: So, let’s listen. JD: Let’s listen. (Derrida and Weber 1995, 394–395)

When Derrida refrains from “signing” music, he means that he holds back from appropriating it, making it his own, authoring it. Deconstruction, unlike metaphysics, is able to listen to music. It has produced as its object something that always already eludes its grasp, that compels it to strain its ear. The music of deconstruction is the deconstruction of philosophy. It is what drags philosophy outside of itself, perforating the self-identical interiority of metaphysics. It is not simply that music is shaped by its context. Nor is music simply the outside, the absolutely unattainable other of philosophy. Rather, music is the opening at the heart of philosophy. It is the “with” that always accompanies philosophy, that stops it from being completely consumed by itself. Music is, as it were, philosophy’s ear, its openness and receptivity to the outside. The deconstruction of music and the music of deconstruction are mutually constitutive. One is not without the other. The music of deconstruction is music and deconstruction with one another.

410   Naomi Waltham-Smith

The Music of Deconstruction or the Music of Deconstruction This all raises the question: how exactly does the music of deconstruction elude the imprisoning grasp of philosophy? The trick—or so it seems to Nancy—is not to suspend reference but to transform it. Deconstruction must free reference from the chains of signification. The consequences of the “signifying imposition”—of the reduction to a meaning—for music’s political potential are not to be underestimated. Precisely— perhaps even only—because music allows itself to be nailed to a meaning can it become implicated in dubious causes and programmes. Nancy sets the stage for this critique with a discussion of Nazism’s appropriations of art: What truly betrays music and diverts or perverts the movement of its modern ­history is the extent to which it is indexed to a mode of signification and not to a mode of sensibility. Or the extent to which a signification overlays and captures a sensibility.  (Nancy 2007a, 57)

Sense squeezes out sensation. Music thus understood leaves no room to do anything but persuasively communicate this sense. Form is reduced to the adequate expression of this content. In this way “feeling” is identified with the signifiers and signified of various concepts and reality. This, argues Nancy, is what allows art to be identified with ideas like “people” and “destiny” (Nancy 2007a, 58). The sense of music must therefore take its leave and distance from meaning. Like resonant echoes, it must space itself out away from the prison of signifying reference. This metaphysical imposition is what suspends the play of multiple referrals. Deconstruction makes music in another sense. It makes the sense of music otherwise. Deconstruction lets music resonate because it makes music resonance itself. That is, the music of deconstruction, produced by deconstruction, is nothing other than resonant referral. The music of deconstruction thereby deactivates the dialectic of signification and sensation, and also of text and context. Music does not refer to a signified outside itself. It refers only to itself. But as the experience of hearing reminds us, there is always a minimal hetero-affection in every auto-affection. Music thus refers only to itself—but to itself as other than itself. The music of deconstruction refers otherwise than signification. This is the nature of resonance: it turns back on itself without becoming self-identical. Not only music is resonant. Philosophy, which is the practice of hearing its outside, has the same structure of referral. Philosophy cannot fully appropriate music to its own voice. Unable to make music coincide with itself, philosophy makes the other proper and thus hears itself as other. It returns to itself without coinciding with itself. Deconstruction, then, is not simply the silent, still exercise of the ear. Deconstruction is itself vibration. Like music and listening, deconstruction has the structure of resonance.

Deconstruction   411 That is why Nancy can perform a seeming sleight of hand: music, he claims, listens to itself (Nancy 2007a, 61–67). Music, like philosophy, affects itself with its own resonant referral. In this resonant condition, argues Nancy, there is no distinction between inside and outside, self and other. There is no division between, simply the between. Resonance fills the space in which each is at once apart from the other and with the other, a part of the other. Resonance is what shares and what is shared out. For Nancy, sense as resonance, shared out between signification and sensation, is what makes both possible. This means that there is more than one sense audible when I say “the music of deconstruction.” This isn’t a matter of dialectical flipping, of subject and objects switching places. Understood as a subjective genitive—the music deconstruction produces—this expression differs even from itself. Deconstruction does not just form a concept of music (the idea of music as philosophy’s outside). Rather, deconstruction makes music otherwise, in another sense. Deconstruction itself resonates, becomes musical. As such it listens to music but it also musics. It approaches and approximates music without appropriating itself. Deconstruction aspires to the musical condition when it enjoys the texture of the text. It comes closest to music when its rhythms, rhymes, and wordplays privilege sound over sense, sensation over signification. What does it mean to separate sound and sense? The temptations, fervours, and rages of Nazism will not leave us, Nancy suggests, until we have restored the distance between them. Nancy flirts with reappropriating the Romantic interpretation of music as ineffable. But the musical deconstruction I am imagining is not a beyond-signification (outresignificance) (Nancy  2007a, 58). Following Giorgio Agamben’s critical analysis of deconstruction that aims to expose its hidden transcendentalism, this non-signifying sense is very much within signification. Nancy actually adopts this reading when—with echoes of Agamben—he describes sense as signification’s condition of possibility. Sense is the very potential for signifying that goes forgotten in every actual act of signifying. It is outside signification only to the extent that it is an excluded inside. Following the structure of resonance, sense is at once the exteriority of reference folded inside and the disavowed core of signification ejected outside. Separating sound from signifying sense lets us hear this deconstructed sense—this condition of possibility—that is otherwise swallowed up in meaning. Agamben suggests that poetry is one way of keeping sound and sense apart. With its rhyme schemes and enjambments poetry disconnects the sonic continuity from the sequential flow of meaning. The poem ends, and becomes prose, when sound and sense finally coincide (Agamben 1999, 109–115). The writings of deconstruction, with their love of homonymic and homophonic effects, frequently exploit the rich possibilities for disjoining sound and sense in the French language. These wordplays are not mere ornaments but are used to unfold the argument and to forge connections between philosophical concepts. This often leads to explanatory paraphernalia when translating Derrida and Nancy into English. Deconstruction most closely approximates the musical when it cannot be readily carried over, when the possibility of relating one to the other is at stake. Music is not ineffable, but there is a music of deconstruction as it approaches the untranslatable.

412   Naomi Waltham-Smith Note that it only “approaches” untranslatability. Translation is a field of tension between “nothing is translatable” and “everything is translatable” (Apter  2006, 8). Translation, Derrida (2001, 183) proposes, is both impossible and necessary. It cannot and yet must carry on. Music would cease to exist for philosophy if it were absolutely untranslatable. But it would also disappear if it were completely assimilable into philosophy’s tongue. Like translation, the relation between music and philosophy cannot, then, be a question of adequation—of making one equal to the other. For deconstruction there is unavoidably a bit never-before and a bit always-already in every relation. Music’s untranslatability—its never-before, outside quality—is both an obstacle and an invitation to translation. Translation, as Emily Apter (2006, 6) points out, affects not only the other but also the mother tongue: it denaturalizes propriety, rendering selfknowledge foreign to itself. When philosophy grapples with music, it does not simply make music philosophical. In relation to its other, philosophy becomes something other than what it is. Derrida’s writings are characterized not just by polysemy but also by plurilingualism. Deconstruction is always stretching itself out beyond its mother tongue. There emerges therefore a potential for philosophy to extend itself in the direction of the musical. Everything is translatable but only insofar as translation never reaches its end. Everything is always in “a perpetual state of in-translation” (7). Philosophy is always approaching music, but its arrival is completely unpredictable. Deconstruction is the music to come.

The Deconstruction of Music and the Music of Deconstruction We return, then, in conclusion, to the deconstruction of music, now understood as a subjective genitive. Music, this suggests, becomes the agent of deconstruction. But surely music can no more deconstruct than deconstruction can? Deconstruction cannot fall incident to a subject. And yet the music that arises out of deconstruction in turn makes another kind of deconstruction. The music of deconstruction is an excluded outside that is at once folded inside as philosophy’s condition of possibility. But translation, as we have seen, is not a one-way process. This music transforms its source language as it tries to appropriate it. This music of deconstruction produces a fully musical deconstruction. This deconstruction of music, the deconstruction that music produces, refuses to decide between inside and outside, between never-before and always-already. From Agamben’s standpoint, Derridean deconstruction remains a repetition of metaphysics so long as it continues to apportion and assign even tentative or shifting boundaries between identity and difference. If there is always so much music and so much philosophy, one will necessarily transcend the other. In other words, deconstruction is never complete. There is no hors-texte means that language is metaphor all the way down. There is an infinite decision and separation of self from other, of coincidence

Deconstruction   413 from non-coincidence. Rather than decide infinitely between music and philosophy, Agamben’s gesture is to turn the focus to the possibility of their relating. This is the very potential for translation that Benjamin calls “pure language” in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” (Benjamin 1996, 253–263). This is the pure possibility of referral that Nancy calls sense. The “and” between music and philosophy is not a matter of deciding between them. If it is a matter of what comes between them, it is also a matter of what they share between them. This is the resonance between music and philosophy. This resonance, let us recall, is both music and listening. That is to say that the resonance between music and deconstruction is both musical and philosophical insofar as philosophy is a practice of listening. There is no deciding between them. With this deconstruction of music, thought otherwise, the opposition of the “either . . . or . . .” thus ceases. Instead, it simply says “both . . . and . . .”: music and deconstruction, the music of deconstruction and the deconstruction of music, subjective and objective genitive, plenary genitive. Deconstruction, on this reading, is the contact between music and philosophy, a tactful encounter because it does not touch too much. This coming-together is possible only because neither music or philosophy is selfidentical. Both are always in translation, always already opening onto the other. They enter into a zone of indistinction as a pure possibility of relating to the other. Philosophy as deconstruction does not appropriate music to itself. Neither does music transcend philosophy. Music is neither a part of philosophy nor apart from philosophy. Rather, each helps us to understand the other. They exemplify one another. They are, in Agamben’s (2009) parlance, paradigms that show themselves alongside one another. To speak of music and deconstruction is not to imagine one besides the other, apart from or as an additional supplement to the other. Neither is self-identical because the other is its condition of possibility. There is therefore an intimacy between them. Each approximates the other. They come close to one another. To think of music and deconstruction is to imagine music beside deconstruction.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. “What is a Paradigm?” In The Signature of All Things, On Method, translated by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell, 9–32. New York: Zone Books. Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “The Task of the Translator.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 253–263. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Chua, Daniel K. L. 1995. The “Galitzin” Quartets of Beethoven: Opp. 127, 132, 130. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jaques. 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Tympan.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, ix–xxix. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

414   Naomi Waltham-Smith Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Afterword.” In Limited Inc, translated by Samuel Weber, 111–154. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter): 174–200. Derrida, Jacques. 2011. “The Voice That Keeps Silence.” In Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, translated by Leonard Lawlor, 60–74. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Weber. 1995. “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise.” In Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber, 372–395. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 2011. Interpreting Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007a. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007b. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press. Said, Edward W. 1978. “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions.” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (Summer): 673–714. Scherzinger, Martin. 2004. “The Return of the Aesthetic.” In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 252–277. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Searle, John. 1993. The Social Construction of Reality. London: The Free Press. Subotnik, Rose. 1996. Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Szendy, Peter. 2012. “Music and Torture: The Stigmata of Sound and Sense.” Translated by Allison Schifani and Zeke Sikelianos. In Speaking About Torture, edited by Julie A. Carlson and Elisabeth Weber, 189–204. New York: Fordham University Press.

chapter 20

Posth um a n ism Gary Tomlinson

The discourse of posthumanism is made up of a group of approaches to cultural theory and philosophy that attempt to supersede perceived limitations of the humanisms of the twentieth century. In the essay that follows, I will outline these approaches as they have taken shape over the last thirty years or so. I will suggest that their move beyond humanism points towards something implausible or even impossible: a thought that appears at a horizon beyond the human but is nevertheless our thought. Such a thought, posited as a goal of posthumanist projects, will only be approached asymptotically, converged on but never touched. Music offers us a means to track this convergence—music conceived widely enough to assert its own special position, which defines an aspect of human exceptionalism at the same time as it links human and nonhuman experience.1

Posthumanist Lineages Like the “postmodernism” that anticipated it by several decades, “posthumanism” is a label that insists on qualification and apology. In what sense is “post-” meant, since it is not intended to signal merely a temporal succession beyond Enlightenment humanism and its twentieth-century outgrowths? Alternative terms have been suggested. Richard Grusin (2015) offers “nonhuman,” a choice that can evade teleologies raised by post-. But its nominative form, nonhumanism, signals a cancellation of humanism or an antihumanism, which is not Grusin’s intent; so a more specific denomination is required to name the recent gathering of momentum among theories of materiality, objects, technics, and so forth: the “nonhuman turn.” Others address anti-humanism head-on, embracing a term that has its own longer history connected to anti-Enlightenment and atheist thought. For Rosi Braidotti (2013, 23), however, this move remains bound to Michel Foucault’s “death of Man” in The Order of Things (a move that, half a century later, can seem a weak gesture in that otherwise extraordinary book); the effort to dismantle the post-Enlightenment European subject now appears to be parochial and

416   Gary Tomlinson ­ artial, indicating only one of several varieties of posthumanism. I have suggested p “parahumanism,” an alternative that avoids questions of temporality in favour of an extension beside and around the human (Tomlinson 2013, 2016); its indefiniteness is its weakness as well as its strength. Donna Haraway (2016) has dispensed with “posthumanism” altogether, favouring a profusion of poetic alternatives, among which terms denoting our kinship with “companion species” loom large. Despite these and other possibilities, “posthumanism” has lodged itself in our thought. Its prefix exercises an allure of supersession even as we fend off its temporal implications; and, in every case, humanism is central to the story. The variety of alternative terms reflects not only dissatisfaction with “post-ness” but also the many sources from which posthumanism has arisen. Primary sources include animal studies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and feminist new materialisms. Lateral affiliations with more recent approaches— tributary movements feeding into posthumanism—include Karen Barad’s agential realism, Quentin Meillasoux’s speculative realism, Graham Harman’s and Tim Morton’s object-oriented ontology, and affect theory, in the venturesome guises of writers such as Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Growing out of these sources, three main lineages can be discerned; I adopt Braidotti’s taxonomy to describe them (Braidotti 2013, 37–50): •• A focus on the technological extension and mediation of human bodies and capacities. This strain of thought is rooted in science and technology studies, actor-network theory, Foucault’s biopolitics, and the feminist technologism of Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985). •• The reframing of humans’ relations with other living things. This starts especially from ethical philosophy and joins to that discipline concerns about animal rights, environmental degradation, anthropogenic climate change, and mass extinction. •• Braidotti’s own “critical posthumanism.” This is related to the second lineage in its attempt to reach from the human out to nonhuman life forms and assert a new “bio-egalitarianism.” Unlike that lineage, however, it starts from models of the human subject drawn from postcolonialism and feminism, and it converges on a mobile, nomadic subjectivity and the becoming-animal of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Each of these strains—technology-oriented “transhumanism,” biology-oriented “transspeciesism,” and the bio-egalitarian critique of the monadic Enlightenment subject— works a narrowing of the potential range of posthumanist horizons. The first has focused on recent technologies—and technologies-to-come, since its futurist tendency is strong. Its limitation is its inattention to the broader dimensions, implications, and deep history of technology. One consequence of this is that it ignores the wide dispersion of technology or tool-making among nonhuman animals in the world today, which might otherwise link it to the second, trans-species strain.

PostHumanism   417 This second strain, for its part, rarely views in deep-historical perspective its theme of our relation to nonhuman life. Its short temporal reach encourages its tendency, for Braidotti a “reactive” one, to rely on Enlightenment individualism and human exceptionalism as its touchstones. And this tendency in turn hampers its aspiration to move beyond, as Cary Wolfe puts it, the mere recognition “that we share our world with nonhuman others” to a deeper sense that we are “constituted as human subjects within and atop a nonhuman otherness” (Wolfe 2003, 193). It is this constitution, Wolfe argues, that trans-species posthumanism must rescue from conventional, anthropocentric humanism (for a related position, see Morton 2017). The invitation to an evolutionary perspective is evident here, though it has not been much embraced by trans-speciesists. Critical posthumanism, finally, Braidotti’s own strain of thougsht, seems likewise hard-pressed to shake off the humanist legacy. This is partly because its critique of Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism continues a central theme of late twentiethcentury humanist theory. More importantly, it is because its strategy is mainly an extension out from the human to the nonhuman, rather than a reversal of this trajectory—a turnabout that might sit at the heart of refurbished posthumanist concerns, as I will suggest later. Whatever differentiates the three lineages of transhumanist, trans-speciesist, and critical posthumanism, they are united in contesting notions of a unitary, bounded, and stable human subject. This embrace of what Braidotti calls “a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity,” formed in its opening out to other subjects and to its environment (Braidotti 2013, 49), is not opposed to recent humanist thought but, on the contrary, extends one of its foremost agendas. It is another line that ties posthumanism to late twentieth-century humanist theory. But posthumanism works to delineate this relational subject from different starting points. Its open subject is not, like that of late humanist theory, glimpsed along avenues such as psychoanalytic theory, anthropological constructivism, Bakhtinian dialogism, or Marxist materialism. Instead it is mediated technologically or assembled in alignment with nonhuman lives and experience. Some rough-and-ready examples will indicate the distinctive avenues posthumanists have followed towards the open subject: •• N.  Katherine Hayles (1999) breaks down the bodily boundaries of subjectivity through the mediation of information technology, cybernetic schemata, and human-machinic cyborgs, in the same gesture resisting the anti-materialist orientation of much information theory. •• Haraway pursues what she calls “tentacular thinking” in order to open human identities out to other life forms in a new age she terms the Chthulucene (cf. Greek khthon [earth], and English chthonic). “The chthonic ones,” she writes, “. . . are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm . . . and human beings are not in a separate compost pile” (Haraway 2016, 55). •• Wolfe (2010) proposes Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis, as adapted by Niklas Luhmann in his systems theory, as a means of modelling individuals as complex systems conjoined to their environments.

418   Gary Tomlinson •• Most dramatically, Barad (2003, 2007) seeks to open bodies, subjects, and even discourses towards formative dynamics characteristic of matter itself. This “agential realism,” joining elements of assemblage theory and actor-network theory, rejects the distinction between things and representations of them in favour of the internal, boundary-making, structure-generating “intra-actions” of matter. Such emphases on the relational human subject continue to tether posthumanism to humanist theory, and the connection appears also in other features of posthumanism. The technological, transhumanist strain of posthumanism builds on the humanist tradition of analysis and critique of technology spanning the twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger to Bernard Stiegler. (In recent musicological research this connection has encouraged the tracking of the genealogy of transhuman sound worlds back to the nineteenth century; see, for example, Abbate  2016 and Trippett 2018.) And the trans-species strain extends its ethics to nonhuman animals in a manner familiar from writers such as Peter Singer, Mary Midgley, Temple Grandin, and Martha Nussbaum. Each strain shows this unresolved dilemma: a posthumanist’s desire is to conceive a place outside, beyond, or alongside the human, from which it can be imagined differently, in new affiliations and kinships; but even as it gestures out to approach others, living or technological, this stance remains anchored in a well-developed humanism. The problem, even in Braidotti’s nomadic rejection of individualism, is that the human has not been decentred, and this raises the question: do cultural theorists or philosophers—or any of us—have access to rhetorical forms, objective perspectives, or yet-undiscovered mentalities that can truly relocate us in this place outside? If it cannot reach such a place to begin its work, posthumanism runs the risk of recirculating an old humanist metaphysics based on Enlightenment assumptions and a view of the “human” as “Man”—male, white, heteronormative, and forged among Western ideologies and colonial power. At least since Frantz Fanon, of course, humanist theory has named the danger this persistent formation posed of positioning black, brown, female, or queer subjectivities as non- or not-quite-human; and some have been quick to alert us to the same danger lingering in nascent posthumanisms. From the vantage of critical race theory, for example, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson argues that, since Western metaphysics has still not cast off its tendency to oppose blackness in general to “the human,” blackness is always already lodged at the heart of the difference posthumanism attempts to approach; it “conditions and constitutes the very nonhuman disruption and/or displacement” the posthumanist seeks (Jackson 2015, 216). Jackson’s critique can be extended to the female or to queerness. In each case, a posthumanism aiming to reach out to the nonhuman is blocked by a metaphysics asserting false divisions within the human. Another version of this critique focuses on the transhumanist strain of posthumanism, sensing in its technological extensions an Enlightenment liberal subject that cannot take account of distinct black modes of technologized subjectivization (Weheliye 2002). It asks: if technology is a fundamental force in subjectivization, as posthumanists assert, must we not discern distinct forms of this subjectivization, in this instance those forged by five centuries of slavery? The legitimacy of any posthumanist project depends on facing challenges such as these. The posthumanist’s aim must be to destabilize the humanist enclosure, shaping

PostHumanism   419 posthumanist theory as something like a novel type or engine of critique, not another object for it. A categorical rupture of this sort may well be beyond the reach of posthumanist (or any) theory, but it is at least the posthumanist’s asymptote, pointing to an aspirational horizon.

The (Musical) Human as Alien and Emergent To approach this horizon requires a theory not predicated on specifically human propensity and achievement, and this is no simple challenge. An instance of what such a theory is not can be seen in Luhmann’s systems theory. A second-generation systems theory, descended from the first, cybernetic generation of Norbert Weiner, Gregory Bateson, and others, Luhmann’s work has been recommended by Wolfe (2010) as an approach to posthumanism. But since it dedicates itself to issues of psyche and society defined within the metaphysics of the human, it falls short of delivering a trans-species perspective. Luhmann’s communication systems are networks within human societies (see Luhmann 2013), not instantiations of a broadly dispersed and varied animal sociality, and he views language along Chomskyan lines as a human exception, rather than an emergent swerve in non- and prehuman capacities. Despite Wolfe’s effort to reconcile Luhmann’s view of writing with that of Jacques Derrida, it remains concerned with a set of local human techniques of recent invention (where Derrida’s arche-writing by contrast opens the way to a much broader understanding of writing as différance). Finally, Luhmann’s information is not the embracing relationality that characterizes the conception in the wake of Claude Shannon, for whom information can act independently of content and meaning (Shannon and Weaver 1949), but is instead a narrowly human information, defined by its content and closely connected to meaning. The task facing posthumanism is to reconceive keywords such as communication, language, writing, information, meaning, technology, culture, and sign in ways that do not start by delimiting them within humanist logics. In a strategy decisively different from that of assimilating the nonhuman to the human, we will have to alienate such terms from the human. The failure to do this is marked in accounts pointing towards posthumanist horizons of another keyword: music. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus offers a signal instance (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 299–350; see also Tomlinson 2016). Here music is opposed to the territorial animal refrain (ritournelle) and its exemplar, birdsong. Birdsong is a static block of sonorous content, music the operation that can cut across it, “deterritorialize” it, and open it to transformation. This transformative potency marks music’s processual energy (opposed, again, to the static refrain), which renders music “inseparable” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 299) from the becoming-animal that is Deleuze and Guattari’s most important move onto posthumanist terrain. Thus the outlines of their theory; but exactly what is their music? It is framed, as Martin Scherzinger (2008) has shown, in admiration of Boulezian views that

420   Gary Tomlinson emphasize autonomy and formalism and embody the regressive politics of high modernism. Worse, this reverence for sophisticated French hyperformalism is joined to a naïve conception of musical representation (as when Mahler is said to evoke “the deep, eternal breathing of the earth,” [Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 339], or when the “musician bird goes from sadness to joy” or “greets the rising sun” [318]). Such a humanized amalgam intersects uneasily at best with the animal refrains of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethology, making it difficult to discern any coherent relation between their human and nonhuman examples—that is, between the musicalization of the refrain by Schumann, Debussy, or Varèse and by an African shrike. But just such a coherent relation is required for us to attempt the posthumanist balancing act: gauging the differences between human and animal musics at the same time as we glimpse, from a broader-than–human vantage, the underlying processes shared by them in becoming-animal. This humanizing confusion of music with the calls, chirps, whistles, and other communicative means of animals has been repeated by posthumanists in the wake of A Thousand Plateaus. Braidotti, despite warning us of the anthropocentric tendencies of much trans-speciesism (Braidotti 2011, 81–97), relies on commonplaces about human musical effects to drive her consideration of insect “music” (98–110). And affect theorists dabbling in music offer an unsophisticated conception of human musical expression to model a realm of intensities and emotions that they then enlarge to include animals, plants, microbes, and even inorganic objects (see Tomlinson 2016; Leys 2011). The different effort we need is captured in Grusin’s succinct formulation “to lose the traditional way of the human” (Grusin 2015, xx–xxi). A summary of this effort for the case of music in relation to animal communication might go like this: Birds, whales, and insects do not produce music, but something other (or rather, somethings other) that are related to what we call “music” on the basis of trans-species capacities that remain to us obscure. Cognate communicative capacities burgeon for countless kinds of animals into complexities of behaviour that shape their lifeways forcefully and unpredictably; these remind us of what remains unaccounted for within the term “instinct.” This burgeoning of behaviours and the inadequacy of instinct as a term for many animal capacities are what Massumi aims to capture in his notion, adapted from the foundational ethologist Niko Tinbergen, of the “supernormal animal” (Massumi 2015). Allowing animal “song” to help us lose our way with human music would mean experiencing from a nonhuman vantage one aspect of our own supernormality, which would mark a step towards an alienated understanding of what it means to be human. In the instance of complex birdsongs, it would entail grasping that the immense combinatorial intricacies of these calls—costly in terms of dedicated neural networks, intergenerational pedagogy, practice, and sheer energy expenditure—are not correlated, as we automatically expect them to be, with syntactic complexity or nuanced differentiation in the messages carried. From this position we might move towards other views than we currently assume concerning the sources of complexity in human music, placing it within a new trans-species perspective. These are certainly not simple tasks, but a first step is easily taken. All we have to do is avoid the familiarizing habit of speaking of nonhuman activities as “music.”

PostHumanism   421 The example of music points towards a more general de-domestication of our own capacities as these originate in the human–nonhuman commons. The rigorous approach to this commons will require posthumanists to incorporate scientific knowledge more deeply than most have tended to do, making it an essential part of their project. But since most scientists themselves do not start from positions where the needed alienation must begin, a posthumanist use of science will often involve a loosening or expansion of the knowledge it offers. Wolfe points the way when he gauges the potential of cognitive science to aid a post-humanist account of human–nonhuman relations (Wolfe 2010, 31–47). He rightly complains about the Cartesian premises of many cognitivists, evident especially in their representational view of the human mind and their linkage of human uniqueness to this view. To lessen the distance between posthumanist concerns and this cognitivism we need to blur the sharp divide between the human and the nonhuman animal. This in turn involves rethinking not only human but animal minds through a set of conceptions that are not conspicuous in many cognitivists’ mainstream research agendas, including network and distributed systems theory, radical emergence, and feedback or circular causation. Such approaches might establish a revised grounding, shared by humans and many nonhumans, for products of cognition as diverse as signals, signs, languages, ideas, and discourses—even if some of these are not dispersed far beyond humans. Superseding humanism in collaboration with science, then, calls for revision of scientific approaches as well as humanist theory—another general challenge for posthumanists. This challenge has been met thus far more in the technological, transhumanist strain (see for example Hayles 2017) than in the trans-speciesist and critical strains; for these, Luhmann’s appropriation of the scientific idea of autopoiesis, reviewed by Wolfe (2010), provides one more cautionary tale. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoiesis names the processes by which innumerable kinds of systems, especially living ones, create internal order, decrease entropy, and maintain themselves far from equilibrium, in environments that in contrast are disordered and tend to equilibration and increasing entropy (Maturana and Varela 1980). This autopoiesis is a thermodynamic model generalizable to all life. Luhmann’s adoption of this theory, instead, is mainly conceived within his sociology and is therefore of local, human significance. The opportunity autopoiesis affords to reach beyond humanism is missed.

Virtuality, Abstract Machines, and Life Generalizing autopoiesis for a posthumanist project brings to light virtualities of a particular kind, and tracking these will help us to locate music within posthumanism as a technique for losing the way of the human. This is the musical tool I alluded to at the beginning, but describing the leverage it might offer requires a sizable detour. Music itself will return after this detour. The virtual has played a large role in posthumanist thought but a confusing one, since in different posthumanisms it means two different things, one a usage inherited from

422   Gary Tomlinson computer science and high-tech culture, the other an extension of late humanist theory. The first refers to the electronic making of alternative realities, “as if ” worlds, and our mediated experience of them. Such virtuality is seen to extend, oppose, or even transcend quotidian materiality and experience. This kind of virtuality is prominent in transhumanist posthumanism, at one with its futurism. It stands front and centre in Hayles’s (1999) work, where her effort is to reconcile computational and mediated virtuality with embodied experience—to define, as she puts it, “the materiality of informatics.” The second kind of virtuality is fundamental to all strains of posthumanism. This ­virtuality is immanent to matter, not opposed to it, and (at least in this respect) antitranscendental. It aims to capture the operation within materials of emergent processes, an operation Deleuze and Guattari (1987) signalled in their borrowing of the engineering concept “abstract machine” (machine abstraite). For them, abstract machine named the virtuality or the “plane of immanence” of assemblages (agencements), de- and reterritorialized (i.e., deformed and reformed) along the transversals (i.e., the flows of matter and energy) that cut across and through them. Abstract machines are processes at work in material/ energetic assemblages. They are immanently machinic in their existence only in the operations that arise in these assemblages, and abstract in the generalizable outlines of the processes they involve, dispersed through different—even dramatically divergent— assemblages. Discerning abstract machines teaches us two principles: that the world can be radically reduced to simple processes struck up by the interactions of matter and energy; and that this reduction turns out to be non-reductive, since such processes, layered and linked one with another, can yield all the awesome complexity we encounter and embody. Abstract machines are fundamental to understanding the evolution of life, starting from two machines. The first is autopoiesis itself, which provides a general description of the thermodynamics of all living organisms and today forms a part of most theories of the origin of earthly life (see, for example, the autocatalytic systems of Kauffman 1993, 287–341). The second is Darwin’s abstract machine of natural selection: inheritance + variation + environmental constraint → selection—that is, inheritance of traits with some incidence of variation in them gives rise, in environments of limited resources, to differential advantage of differing versions of traits, hence survival of organisms with some versions more than organisms with others. Interlinked with these machines is a third one, niche construction, an aspect of the autopoietic virtuality of all living systems that emerges from their interactions with their environments, including other living things in them. The fundamental machinic pathway of niche construction is a feedback circuit: organisms living their lives alter their local environments in large or small ways, making niches of them; and these altered environments bring altered selective pressures to bear on the kinds of organisms that have altered them. Traits are differentially advantageous or harmful in relation to environmental niches shaped by the organisms that bear the traits (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman  2003; Laland et al.  2015; Tomlinson  2018). While autopoiesis refers to the relations of a system with its environment whereby it maintains itself in a state far from equilibrium, niche construction concerns the reciprocity whereby living, autopoietic systems reshape their environments. It highlights the altered selection that organism-induced environmental change brings about. The

PostHumanism   423 three abstract machines, autopoiesis, natural selection, and niche construction, are bound up in all life forms and processes; in the next section I will add a fourth, bound with these three in a far smaller range of life forms.

Culture, Technology, and Semiotic Virtuality Autopoiesis, selection, and niche construction are all virtual in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: systemic processes arising immanently in the interactions of matter and energy. The kinships and differences among life forms arose especially from the operation of the latter two of these virtualities, and we can discern in them a matrix of processes circumscribing a trans-species, animal “supernormality” of the kind defined above, one that embraces communicative activities of all sorts and, among them, human language and music. For this reason the posthumanist project needs both to theorize the working of virtualities and to model the swerve in them that came about late in hominin evolution. This modelling will involve the family of keywords named above that posthumanists must try to alienate from the human. Culture and technology, two of those keywords, cannot demarcate human difference in any simple way, since both form part of the supernormal activity of some nonhuman animals today and, historically, both undoubtedly antedated the hominin line. Culture can be minimally defined as animals’ transmission to succeeding generations of behaviours learned during their lifetimes, and technology as an encounter of animals with material affordances in which they craft prostheses aiding their behaviours. Neither definition, however, draws a precise boundary around its term; instead each points to a fuzzy region within the supernormal complexities of animal lifeways. The nest-building of a New Caledonian crow seems non-technological, even instinctive, while, when it breaks off and sharpens a twig to impale grubs, it has evidently crossed the threshold to technology. But where in relation to this threshold do we place the action of a male Australian bowerbird that gathers and carefully sorts coloured objects to attract a female to the nest it has built? Birdsongs in many instances, meanwhile, move clearly into the cultural zone, as do humpback whale songs and sperm whale click codes, since they all are not merely genetically determined but also learned from conspecifics, transmitted across generations, and even subjected to individual manipulation that creates some differentiated meaning. Today human culture and technology are distinct from those of all other animals in the extent of their complexity, their cumulative archiving, hierarchic structure, and other features; but they have been so only in recent evolutionary times. The “human” is marked by the emergence, from the immanent operation of niche construction, selection, and other processes, of novel differences in capacities and behaviours that had already existed (see Tomlinson 2018)—and have continued to exist in nonhumans as well as humans. How did these immanent processes bring about so large a difference between human and nonhuman culture and technology? A path towards answering this question starts with the sign—another keyword mentioned before—and its dissemination.

424   Gary Tomlinson What kind of semiotics will aid the posthumanist project? Saussure’s semiotics, the customary recourse of humanists and a starting point for both structuralism and poststructuralism, is inadequate for it, just as Luhmann’s systems theory is, and because of a shared feature. Saussure’s emphasis on language circumscribes his semiotics within a specifically human supernormality. A productive starting point for posthumanist semiotics is instead the theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce recognized the extra-human reach of the sign—ever more clearly as his career went on—as do neo-Peirceans today such as Terrence Deacon (2012) and Paul Kockelman (2017). Deleuze and Guattari, in this too harbingers of posthumanism, appreciated Peirce as “the true inventor of semiotics” and saw that their conception of becoming-animal would need to incorporate Peircean views (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 254–260; see Tomlinson 2016). Deleuze specified the semiotic nature of many animal-behavioural assemblages, in which are found “whole regimes of signs” (Deleuze  2007, 177). At a minimum, animals become semioticians whenever they step beyond narrowly programmed patterns of behaviour (for these, instincts remains a good word) and display their supernormality. For such semiosis to come about, the ability to attend to—to focus on certain environmental stimuli while ignoring others—is paramount. In its focusing, delimiting nature, this capacity enables certain animals to create the signifying link of sign-vehicle to object, through an interactive connecting of things in the world that Peirce called interpretant (Tomlinson  2018). Attention arises only in central nervous systems that have attained a certain level of complexity, and researchers have worked to model the neural components involved in it and their evolution (Knudsen 2007; Haladjian and Montemayor 2015). It is evidently widespread among animals of many kinds, and we can be confident at least that it is evolutionarily ancient and has evolved separately in diverse lineages. Determining where in the animal kingdom the outer limits of attention, interpretant-making, and semiosis lie is difficult, but not crucial to the human-alienating posthumanist project. What is crucial is our displacing or extension of ourselves into a broader human–nonhuman commons that comes with the realization that sign making reaches far beyond the human. Within this broad semiotic arena, Peircean icons, signs related qualitatively to their objects, form foundations for the behaviours of countless animals; indexes, signs related to their objects by proximity or contiguity, contextual connection, causal relation, and in general a deictic, pointing operation, are foundational for a smaller (but still large) group. Humans share these sign types with many species—species that also share with us the neural ability to focus attention, on which signs are founded. Since these are shared aspects of animal supernormality, they can provide a semiotic avenue along which to seek the alienation needed for a trans-species posthumanism. Peircean semiotics can even help to alienate the most distinctively human of sign types, the symbol. This is because, as Peirce saw and Deacon has emphasized, sign types stand in hierarchic relations, in which indexes are reliant for their signifying operation on icons, and symbols are reliant on both (Deacon 1997, 2012). So symbols, whatever their features unique to humans in the world today, are grounded in signifying processes that reach far beyond the human. Moreover, Peircean analysis reveals semiotic behaviours that

PostHumanism   425 inhabit a fuzzy border zone between index and symbol, where indexes begin to sort themselves into the groupings and systems characteristic of symbols (see below and Tomlinson 2018). We can call this a hyper-indexical zone. Among humans, a foremost instance of it is music, as we will see in the next section. So a Peircean semiotics helps to define this fundamental aspect of human supernormality even as it reveals the extension of its foundations beyond the human. Signification and its interpretant, arising from the capacities for attention and encountering one thing as a sign-vehicle for another, mark the advent of aboutness in the world, and hence of content, meaning, and representation (in its basic sense of presenting one thing through another), all of which many animals in addition to humans experience. This aboutness of signs, in its determining influence on animal behaviours, takes its place as an element in the niche construction and selective dynamics of all animals capable of entering into the interpretant relation; it is, again, the currency of their supernormal behaviours. Content, meaning, representation, and aboutness are not markers of human exceptionalism, but the semiotic foundation of the human– nonhuman commons. In evolutionary history, semiosis was the last to emerge of the four fundamental abstract machines associated with life forms; these four are arrayed in conjuncture with one another. Autopoiesis gave rise, under the conditions of inheritance, variation, and limited resources, to selection; selection structured the historicity of autopoiesis not as a culling of organisms in static environments, but as the niche constructive feedback by which both are always changing one another and therefore provisional; niche construction was founded on the environmental impacts that are concomitants of autopoietic systems; and semiosis emerged as a set of possibilities affecting niche construction and selection once these had shaped, in many animal species, attentive neural systems. It is because of the wide dispersion of semiosis in the animal world that the posthumanist project of alienating the human calls for neo-Peircean analysis of semiotic virtualities extending across species. But semiosis is important to posthumanism for another reason also. Because culture always involves aboutness in what is transmitted from generation to generation, it is always, at base, semiotic; and because technology always involves a prosthetic extension of bodily capacities, it is always not merely semiotic but specifically indexical, creating a pointing or indicating relation towards its object (or the task it facilitates: scissors are indexical of cutting). Human exceptionalism is often sought in each of these areas, but they are instead rooted in a widespread, trans-species semiosis.

The Place of Music The standing-out of a percept to an attending animal—the percept that makes a sign in conjunction with the attention that instigates an interpretant—is a discrete movement of differential cognizing that emerges from the animal–environment relations of niche construction, then feeds back into them, reshaping them. The proliferation of signs in

426   Gary Tomlinson the perception of many animals follows as a consequence of the sheer multiplicity of the environmental stimuli perceivable through such attentive, discretizing cognition. Together, discreteness and proliferation render signs elements in larger arrays or sets, and, in the supernormal behaviours of some animals, this opened the path to arrangements within sign sets of order, systematicity, and hierarchy. Systematicity is linked to semiosis in many animal lineages. In the world today, examples include the combinatorial arrangement of motives by many types of songbirds and the click codes for pod and individual identification of sperm whales, as well as simpler cases such as the warning calls of vervet monkeys. All these are instances of systematized indexes, and indexical systems of a similar nature were also crucial in the niche construction of late hominin biocultural evolution. Archaeological evidence indicates that by at least 400,000 years ago this systematization burgeoned, bringing an increased complexity in the relations among indexes and inaugurating a hyper-indexical stage in hominin cultures, long before modern language or symbolic cognition took shape (Tomlinson  2018). The difference between human and nonhuman semiosis that emerged during this period was not fundamentally a matter of sign types or of the proliferation of the symbol, which is of more recent appearance, but rather of this growing complexity, within the indexical realm, of sign systems. The initial hyper-indexical stage created cultures of proto-language or proto-discourse (Bowie 2008), of proto-music (Tomlinson 2015), and of nascent ritual, understood in a broad sense as the performance of more or less fixed and repeated collections of signs pointing to things beyond immediate, sensible perception (Tambiah 1979; Bell 1992). In all these behaviours, even those that today are most dependent on symbolic semiosis, hyper-indexical semiosis has not been superseded but remains an ingredient and a founding condition. It is marked in language pragmatics (Silverstein 1993, 2003), in nonand para-linguistic communication of various sorts (what Robbins Burling [2007] has termed “gesture-calls”), in ritual of all kinds, and in music. It is because of its present-day afterlife in modern human behaviours that hyper-indexicality among Palaeolithic hominins is significant for the posthumanist project. Music arguably presents the acme of hyper-indexical complexity in all modern human cultures, rivalled in this only by certain complex rituals and certain kinds of linguistic discourse (as opposed to language syntax and semantics themselves, both symbolic rather than indexical). The force of this binding of music, ritual, and discourse to indexical semiosis does not isolate them from symbolic semiosis. It goes without saying that they are always entangled, among modern humans, in symbolic webs, since their performative circumstances are never entirely disengaged from human language, the symbolic system characteristic of our species and our sociality. It is because of this entanglement that musical gestures can take on both iconic and symbolic meanings of some complexity. Nevertheless, music’s fundamental structuring operates without need of symbols or icons, ordering its gestures in indexical arrays in which one indicates or points to another. Even in relatively simple music this deictic organization outstrips in complexity and precision that of gesture-calls (shrugs, smiles, frowns, exclamations, and the like) or language pragmatics. As for ritual hyper-indexicality, the distinction

PostHumanism   427 among modern humans between it and musical hyper-indexicality lies in part in the immanent role symbolism plays in ritual (Tambiah 1979), a role not similarly required for music. Musical semiosis, like all semiosis, starts from an attentive animal that perceives a connection of one thing (as sign-vehicle) to another (its object). In the case of music the sign-vehicles are musical events that usually take as their objects other musical events around them, on local or more far-reaching levels. The networked interactions of events pointing to one another in this way reveal music’s hyperindexical organization at work, and from it arises the internal aboutness peculiar to musical events. The exact nature of the pointing—the constraints as to what kinds of events can point to what kinds of other events—is shaped not only by fundamental cognitive capacities but also by individual, ontogenetic, intra-musical learning and by social systems within which particular musics arise and proliferate (Turino 2008). These are always symbolic in fundamental ways—again, no aspects of human culture today escape the gravitational pull of our ubiquitous symbolism—but that does not discount the foundational hyper-indexicality of music. In the deep-historical view of hominin biocultural evolution, the emergence of musical hyper-indexical ordering marked a distinctive new kind of animal supernormality, in which a novel end of semiosis appeared. There is good reason to think that this novel semiosis antedated the formation of the symbolic semiosis that eventually came to surround and shape it (Tomlinson 2018). Musical hyper-indexicality, even in ostensibly simple instances, unfolds at several or many hierarchical levels of gesture. The most basic of these levels touch directly on evolved cognitive capacities that develop in normal ontogeny and socialization, like similar (but distinct) capacities for language. These include the abilities to entrain to temporally regular series of events (beat-based processing, as music cognitivists call it), to process simultaneously discrete pitch and more general intonational shapes, and to perceive fine distinctions along a graded spectrum of timbral differences. At more developed levels, the systematicity delimits the various formalisms that music theorists have aimed to model and understand, in approaches such as Leonard Meyer’s expectational theory (Meyer  1956) and Eugene Narmour’s related implication-realization model (Narmour 1990, 1992), Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s generative theory of musical syntax (Lerdhal and Jackendoff 1983), theories of musical schemata rooted in the auditory scene analysis of Albert Bregman (1990; cf. Leman 1995 and Gjerdingen 2007), and numerous analyses of the social negotiation of formal types, organizational processes, and genres (for a posthumanist-oriented example, see Watkins 2018). All these formalisms are primarily indexical in nature, and the larger-scale phenomena among them can be understood as hierarchic extrapolations of the hyper-indexical systems manifested at smaller scales. This hyper-indexical complexity points to a foundation that links our music to the complex indexical functions of many other animals’ communication systems. Why, then, did I take a stand above (in the discussion of the human as alien and emergent) against the assimilation of human music to these putative “musics” of non-human animals, and even against the labelling of those behaviours as music? There are three

428   Gary Tomlinson reasons. The first is a matter of degree. The systematicity and hierarchic elaboration of human music far outstrip those of even the clearest hyper-indexical behaviors of nonhuman animals in the world today. This distance yawns even in the case of complex, combinatorial birdsong, which shows fewer levels of hierarchic organization than music. The distance was traversed across late hominin evolution, and here a wide gap separates hominins (humans and their nearest extinct relatives) from the broader hominid clade, which includes today’s non-human great apes. Apes show little evidence of hyper-indexical systems, despite the developed indexicality of their sociality. This indicates not only an independent, convergent evolution towards hyper-indexicality among the non-hominid animals showing it today (for example, songbirds and some whales), but also a large distance between non-systematic indexicality and human hyper-indexicality. Second, even among those nonhuman animals whose behaviours we are tempted to call “music,” evidence mounts that the cognitive bases for the production and perception of their calls differ from those underlying human music. Human discrete-pitch perception, for example, involves a processing of stimuli in which overtones are related to their fundamental in simple-integer ratios; this ability is robust and emerges automatically in normal ontogeny. It leads humans towards arrays of pitches, basic to our musical cultures, whose component pitches tend to be similarly related in simple-integer ratios (whatever their complex elaboration in practice), and it undergirds our likewise automatic capacity for relative pitch—the capacity that enables us to recognize a transposed melody as the same melody. Songbirds, on the other hand, seem to recognize their calls through neither relative nor absolute pitch, but instead through a processing of the full spectral envelope of sounds that is not dependent on harmonics ordered in simple integer relations (Bregman, Patel, and Gentner 2016; Honing 2019); and they seem, in those species that have been tested, not to recognize octave equivalence (Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004, 218). The striking implication of this is that the phenomenon of pitch may have no role in the communicative efficacy of birdsong, notwithstanding thousands of years of humans’ fantasies to the contrary. Meanwhile, temporal entrainment to regular sonic stimuli or beat-based processing also seems not to extend very far beyond humans (Fitch 2011; Honing 2019), despite occasional counter-examples in individual animals living in close proximity to humans (Patel et al. 2009). Basic temporal hierarchizations of human musics, which once again involve simple-integer relations, in this case between durational events, and which in many forms result in meter, are not features of the behaviours of animals that do not entrain to external stimuli in precise ways. Animal entrainment of more general types is hugely dispersed, of course, and entrainment even more broadly understood can be seen to extend far beyond life itself, as in the locus classicus of Huygens’s pendulum clocks, which gradually fell into synchrony through an effect today known as “injection pulling” or “injection locking” (Clayton, Sager, and Will 2005). But in the precise form basic to musical perceptions, entrainment seems to be close to uniquely human. The third reason to resist seeing various supernormal animal behaviours as music is because to do so assimilates the nonhuman to us rather than alienating our usual

PostHumanism   429 presumptions about human capacities. If basic cognitive capacities founding human music are not present in other animals loosely considered “musical,” then they are up to different things in their hyper-indexical lifeways than we are in ours. Understanding this difference could be a powerful impetus pushing the trans-species project of posthumanism along an alienating path. Moreover, since technology is at base indexical, the different modes of hyper-indexicality we might discover in alienating ourselves towards those other behaviours could afford new understandings of our own technological mediations, thus relating the technology-oriented transhumanist strain of posthumanism to the trans-species strain. Simply put, when we make the comforting leap to assimilate other animals’ behaviours to our music, we forfeit the leverage they offer to alienate ourselves into a broader animal world of many hyper-indexicalities. The role of music as a tool in the posthumanist project is, at last, like a Möbius strip, with two sides that are one. It is linked to other animal behaviours and also distinguished from them exactly in its indexicality. Only by understanding the exclusively human aspects of this feature can we begin to appreciate from within the exclusively nonhuman aspects of animal behaviours we have too quickly assimilated to it.

Posthumanism and Prehumanism I have tried to outline here a posthumanist theorizing of human presence in the world built from an understanding of the shifting virtualities that pointed the direction of late hominin evolution. This approach poses an alternative to other posthumanist strategies that variously extend a humanist ethics to our relations with nonhuman life, mount critiques of human exceptionalism, or detail the ongoing technological mediation of our bodies and minds. How will it help us? Its impact will be a diagnostic or analytic one that opens new possibilities for our understanding of our place and our future. Diagnostic, first, in that it describes how our relations with other life forms depend on the historical crossing of a new and different threshold in the ongoing operation of ancient abstract machines: autopoiesis, selection, niche construction, and semiosis. Together these virtualities, emergent in the course of the history of life on earth, determined the place of each kind of organism in the precarious, vulnerable relations it has with other life forms and with its environment in general. They shaped the historical contingency of all life forms from within. But their immanent operation also generated contingency of a different sort: the potential of the processes to transform themselves. One such transformation occurred in the ancient advent of semiosis and its aboutness among attentive, interpretant-building organisms. Another occurred in the course of late hominin biocultural evolution, when the burgeoning of semiotic systems redirected the more basic virtualities from which both semiosis and culture had sprung. This diagnosis begins to uncover the underlying structure of the deep-historical conjuncture that formed our specific supernormality. The swerve towards semiotic and

430   Gary Tomlinson cultural systematicity is the broadest historical contingency through which human modernity was formed (a modernity measured across the last one or two hundred millennia) in our characteristic relations both with other life forms and with each other. It shines a light on the coalescing of the assemblage, now global, in which Homo sapiens assumed a role unprecedented in earthly life. Understanding the changes in these virtual dynamics will not resolve the intrahuman injustices that came to be the necessary keynote of twentieth-century humanism and must remain a keynote of its twenty-first-century continuations. In this important regard, posthumanist theory is not a replacement for or displacement of humanist theory, but instead a complementary project. But it is one that might finally refashion its counterpart, for it helps us to understand that resolving the injustice bred from intrahuman differences of power, resource, and opportunity can no longer proceed in­de­ pend­ent of a broader address of the vulnerabilities of all life forms in the face of human depredation and environmental destruction. This lesson has been taught repeatedly in the burgeoning literature by humanists analysing the Anthropocene and its implications, which has begun to form another, distinct strain of posthumanism (examples include Chakrabarty 2009, 2014, and 2015; Broome 2012; Ghosh 2016; and Baucom and Omelsky 2017). The lesson is compelling not only—or even primarily—for the obvious reason that nonhuman life forms are central among the very resources unequally distributed among humans. On a deeper level, it compels also because even those life forms not directly sustaining human life are now a part of the planet-wide niche humans have constructed in the wake of the reshaped virtualities I have described. The opportunities to thrive of humans and of coral reefs are now interlinked opportunities. Joining the posthumanist, Anthropocenic view to the deep-historical one, we see more clearly the fact that countless life forms that were, even in recent history, not a significant part of the human niche have now been encompassed in it. Human niche construction has reached them in much the same way it has redirected climatic dynamics that once stood outside it (Tomlinson 2017). The pursuit of posthumanism through prehumanism that I am recommending might offer something more. In diagnosing the deep-historical emergence of systemic constructs we might finally join the separate questions of justice among humans and just action of humans toward other life forms. Richard Rorty’s conception of “justice as a larger loyalty” is pertinent here. He envisaged a “more inclusive moral community” (Rorty 1997, 144) as an extension of our loyalties beyond family, immediate circle, or clan to ever-larger human groups. While he saw this extension primarily as a product of human communicative consensus, he allowed that our “moral obligation” might reach beyond our species, forming an “idea of loyalty to all those who, like yourself, can suffer pain” (141). In this he moved along the familiar, ethics-extending path we have seen to be followed by many trans-speciesists—a path that, I have suggested, does not sufficiently alienate the human. At the same time, however, Rorty made another important move. Unlike his interlocutors John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, he did not ground his enlargement of loyalties in a post-Enlightenment reason seen as universal, but instead recognized the historical

PostHumanism   431 contingency of this reason—its “strong contextualism,” to invoke Habermas’s name for the anti-universalism he disparaged and Rorty celebrated. We must now try to imagine this contingency on a deep-historical scale. Human rationality, conceived as a feature distinguishing us in some manner from other animals, is a local construct. It emerged recently from a swerve of epochal virtualities, and it is finally nothing more than a marker of human supernormality amid countless other such markers in other life forms. We need to understand rationality as congruent with these other supernormalities. More than this, we might challenge ourselves to think of all these as specific rationalities in their own right, structured always in the face of environmental affordance and constraint. Were we to do so, we could begin to merge Grusin’s losing the way of the human with Rorty’s enlargement of loyalties. The resulting enlargement would not be merely a gradualist move, reaching incrementally to our nearest nonhuman relations and slowly extending that reach to include less proximate ones—the move that might be suggested by a sheer genetic account of our emergence and proximity to other species, or by Rorty’s or many other writers’ humanist notions of a larger-than-human community of suffering. Instead the move would be a radical enlargement of the human–nonhuman commons to include, first, the whole, vast community of sign-making animals, from which we differ only through the turn in virtualities that brought about our specific supernormality, and, second, the far larger realm we have swept up into our own recent niche construction, shaped by this turn. In revealing how the hominin swerve that sponsored our emergence has restructured the interrelations of all life forms, my account might abet the effort to reach a different vision of our humanity, one with the power to liken chimpanzees to coral reefs—and both to us. It might help us transform the trans-speciesist agenda from one that gestures out from the human to one that sees the human anew, as part of an inclusive whole, localized in deep-historical time and virtual process. Posthumanism so far has proposed permeable boundaries for the human subject, the human body/mind, or humanity itself, and it has described several openings of these out toward broader realms involving other living things, technology, or the place of human construct and discourse in larger material fluxes. Its guiding metaphor has been one of extension out from the human. The asymptotic project I have pointed towards would construct a reversal of this order, in which the human would be approached by humans from a non-human place. If this reversal will always remain beyond our reach, imagining it as a limit might at least help us to supplant posthumanists’ usual extension with a coextension, in which we locate ourselves on overlapping terrains—and finally, in global perspective, on the same terrain—with other living things. We are all, as Haraway put it, in the same compost pile. But understanding this is not enough, if its effect is to diminish the contingent difference we have brought to the pile. The deep-historical approach advocated here complements the posthuman with the prehuman in order to capture this evolutionarily recent, fateful change even as we locate ourselves in the pile. Such a dual project, featuring the virtual mechanisms of our long, biocultural history, is the opportunity afforded by posthumanism and by music within it.

432   Gary Tomlinson

Note 1. I am indebted to several colleagues who read preliminary versions of this essay, including Carolyn Abbate, Rosi Braidotti, Francesco Casetti, Juliet Fleming, and Tomás McAuley.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2016. “Sound Object Lessons.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (Fall): 793–829. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (Spring): 801–831. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baucom, Ian, and Matthew Omelsky, eds. 2017. “Climate Change and the Production of Knowledge.” Special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no 1 (January): 1–168. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, Jill. 2008. “Proto-discourse and the Emergence of Compositionality.” Interaction Studies 9, no. 1 (January): 18–33. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Bregman, Albert  S. 1990. Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bregman, Micah  R., Aniruddh  D.  Patel, and Timothy  Q.  Gentner. 2016. “Songbirds Use Spectral Shape, Not Pitch, for Sound Pattern Recognition.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (6): 1666–1671. Broome, John. 2012. Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World. New York: Norton. Burling, Robbins. 2007. The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter): 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2014. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (Autumn): 1–23. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2015. “The Human Condition of the Anthropocene.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale University, March 2015. Accessed at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/ lecture-library.php. Clayton, Martin, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will. 2005. “In Time with the Music: The Concept of Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology.” European Seminar in Ethnomusicology 11 (1): 3–75. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton. Deacon, Terrence. 2012. “Beyond the Symbolic Species.” In The Symbolic Species Evolved, edited by Theresa Schilhab, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon, 9–38. Berlin: Springer. Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. “Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, 175–180. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

PostHumanism   433 Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2011. “The Biology and Evolution of Rhythm: Unravelling a Paradox.” In Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, edited by Patrick Rubeschat, Martin Rohmeier, John A. Hawkins, and Ian Cross, 73–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gjerdingen, Robert O. 2007. Music in the Galant Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grusin, Richard, ed. 2015. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haladjian, Harry Haroutioun, and Carlos Montemayor. 2015. “On the Evolution of Conscious Attention.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 22, no. 3 (June): 595–613. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80:65–107. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Honing, Henkjan. 2019. The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical. Translated by Sherry Macdonald. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2015. “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human’.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (June): 215–218. Kauffman, Stuart. 1993. The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press. Knudsen, Eric  I. 2007. “Fundamental Components of Attention.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 30: 57–78. Kockelman, Paul. 2017. “Semiotic Agency.” In Distributed Agency, edited by N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman, 25–38. New York: Oxford University Press. Laland, Kevin  N., Tobias Uller, Marcus  W.  Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd  B.  Müller, Armin Moczek, et al. 2015. “The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Its Structure, Assumptions and Predictions.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.1019. Leman, Marc. 1995. Music and Schema Theory: Cognitive Foundations of Systematic Musicology. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring): 434–472. Luhmann, Niklas. 2013. Introduction to Systems Theory. Translated by Peter Gilge. Cambridge: Polity. Marler, Peter, and Hans Slabbekoorn. 2004. Nature’s Music: The Science of Birdsong. San Diego, CA: Elsevier. Massumi, Brian. 2015. “The Supernormal Animal.” In The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, 1–17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maturana, Humbert  R., and Francisco  J.  Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel. Meyer, Leonard. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Morton, Timothy. 2017. Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People. London: Verso. Narmour, Eugene. 1990. The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

434   Gary Tomlinson Narmour, Eugene. 1992. The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The ImplicationRealization Model. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2003. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Patel, Aniruddh D., John R. Iverson, Micah R. Bregman, and Irena Schulz. 2009. “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal.” Current Biology 19 (10): 827–830. Rorty, Richard. 1997. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” Ethical Perspectives 4, no. 3 (October): 139–151. Scherzinger, Martin. 2008. “Musical Modernism in the Thought of Mille Plateaux, and Its Twofold Politics.” Perspectives of New Music 46, no. 2 (Summer): 130–158. Silverstein, Michael. 1993. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, edited by John A. Lucy, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23, no. 3–4 (July–October): 193–229. Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tambiah, Stanley  J. 1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual.” Proceedings of the British Academy 65:113–169. Tomlinson, Gary. 2013. “Parahuman Wagnerism.” Opera Quarterly 29, no. 3–4 (Summer– Autumn): 186–211. Tomlinson, Gary. 2015. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. New York: Zone. Tomlinson, Gary. 2016. “Sound, Affect, and Musicking before the Human.” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (February): 143–72. Tomlinson, Gary. 2017. “Two Deep-Historical Models of Climate Crisis,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (January): 19–31. Tomlinson, Gary. 2018. Culture and the Course of Human Evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Trippett, David. 2018. “Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation.” Musical Quarterly 100, no. 2 (Summer): 199–261. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Watkins, Holly. 2018. Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. 2002. “ ‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer): 21–47. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pa rt I V

M USIC A L T R A DI T IONS A N D PR AC T IC E S

CHAPTER 21

I mprov isation Bruce Ellis Benson

Introduction At first glance, “improvisation” would seem to be easily definable. After all, the second edition of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary provides as its first definition “the action of improvising or composing extemporare” and defines “improvise” as “to compose (verse, music, etc.) on the spur of a moment; to utter or perform extemporare.”1 It seems safe to say that many people (artists included) would see such a definition as obvious. But where does this idea come from? As it turns out, this particular definition is highly dependent upon the notions “composition” and “performance” that have, in turn, come to us highly inflected by the notion of genius that arises in philosophical modernity and has significant implications for how musicians relate both to one another and to the audience. In what follows, I first consider how these ideas became influential in our thinking about music (and, for that matter, about art and artists in general). I then turn to how much of our current thinking about improvisation still reflects that origin, as well as how more recent theories have helped move us towards a more accurate understanding of the phenomenon of improvisation. Finally, I spend the rest of the essay discussing how improvisation is best seen as a practical activity that finds its ground in daily human life. As such, it is based on what Aristotle terms phronesis, the practical ­wisdom that not only helps us get around in the world but also is the basis for ­music-making. That, I will argue, makes improvisation a fundamentally ethical phenomenon.

438   Bruce Ellis Benson

On the Way to Kant’s Notion of the Artistic Genius The fact that something—in this case a theory regarding genius, the nature of composition, and the concept of performance—seems intuitively correct does not make it true. Instead, this seeming rightness is much more due to a quirk of history. To begin to make this clear requires that we consider the performance practice of Baroque music.2 David Fuller points out that “a large part of the music of the whole era was sketched rather than fully realized, and the performer had something of the responsibility of a child with a colouring book, to turn these sketches into rounded art-works. . . . The closest modern parallel to the gap between Baroque notation and the sounding product is to be found in jazz.” He goes on to say that the performances varied “from one group to the next, one day to the next, one neighbourhood to the next” (Fuller 1989, 117–118). He titles his chapter on Baroque performance “The Composer as Performer” because performers were so much a part of the compositional process that there simply was no a clear-cut distinction between the two roles. In this essay, we could likewise speak of the performer as improviser, for performance would not have been possible without improvisation. As to the notion of artistic genius and how it develops, the French theorist Charles Batteux claimed in 1746 that it was about imitating nature, so the genius was the one who is a superior imitator. On this view, the artist is essentially a craftsperson. In 1770, however, William Duff gives us a rather different conception of the artistic genius: “A man of genius is really a kind of different being from the rest of the species. . . . Hence partly it happens that his manners appear ridiculous to some and disagreeable to others” (Duff 1770, 339). Only twenty years later, Kant gives us a conception much more in line with Duff than Batteux. He tells us that “the genius is a favorite of nature, the likes of which one has to regard as only a rare phenomenon” (Kant 2000, §49). What is a genius for Kant? It is “a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given . . . consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic.” That he is talking about something quite different from Batteux becomes crystal clear when he writes: “everyone agrees that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation” (§§ 46–47). And the portrait of the artist that he provides is such that “the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him” (§ 46). So artistic creation is as mysterious to the artist as it is to anyone else, for it has nothing to do with imitation or mimesis. Kant nowhere tells the reader where he gets this idea, but it is not difficult to see that the artistic genius is quite similar to the God found in the Christian tradition, one who creates ex nihilo.3 Thus, it is not surprising that Jerrold Levinson would claim that “the whole tradition of art is creative in the strict sense, that it is a godlike activity in which the artist brings into being what did not exist beforehand—much as a demiurge forms a world out of inchoate matter” (Levinson 1990, 66). I think Levinson is quite right to say that this has, ever since Kant, been the standard view regarding the artist in the Western tradition, though I think his

Improvisation   439 comments about a demiurge forming out of inchoate matter better fit with the imitating artist. Responding to Levinson, Peter Kivy (1993, 45) points out that precisely the “wish to puff up the composer and his works . . . has led to most of the extravagant theories of music in the past, and the present as well.”4 And this is not merely some theoretical view that finds no incarnation in actual artistic practice: various artists have chosen to identify themselves as somehow divine. For instance, Bizet says that “Beethoven is not human, he is a god” (quoted in Salmen 1983, 269) and Matisse said of himself “but I am God” (quoted in Hobhouse 1988, 102; italics in the original). Given this view of artistic creation, it is not surprising that artists came to be viewed as having different ethical responsibilities than other people. We will return to this point later, but one way of working out such a claim is that composers gradually gained status and performers of their music were often seen as subservient to them.

Rethinking the Status of the Improviser Rather than being an unnecessary detour in intellectual history, an awareness of the history of artistic genius is absolutely central to understanding not merely the artist in general, but also the composer in particular—and, by implication, the improviser. For this view of composition as the result of genius is clearly reflected in the standard view of improvisation, in which improvising appears to come from nowhere. One might think that, after more than two centuries, such a conception would have properly met its demise. Yet, while it has been wounded,5 it is still alive and well in the popular mind, even if it has been largely abandoned or significantly scaled down by philosophers and musicologists. The tenacity of the notion should come as no surprise: wanting our composers and improvisers to be semi-divine is so gloriously romantic that it’s hard to give up. There is a famous letter by “Mozart” (actually written by Friedrich Rochlitz, who was strongly influenced by Kant, and ascribed to Mozart) and another that is a plagiarized version of the one by Rochlitz (though it may be inappropriate to describe a letter as plagiarized when it is based on a fake) attributed to Beethoven describing their creative processes. The Mozart version goes like this: “Concerning my way of composing . . . When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer . . . it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them.” Similarly, “Beethoven” writes: “You will ask me whence I take my ideas? That I cannot say with any degree of certainty: they come to me uninvited, directly or indirectly. I could almost grasp them in my hands” (Solomon 1988, 128–129). The problem is that these accounts don’t fit very well with reality. The more one knows about the composition process (in both of these composers’ cases), the less mysterious it becomes. Composition always takes place within a social context and, usually, within the confines of a genre (even if part of the composition process may involve stretching and even breaking genre constraints). New compositions are always commentaries on previous compositions (of the same composer and others) and genres. They never arise out of nothing.

440   Bruce Ellis Benson Our English word “improvisation” comes from the Latin term improvisus, which can be literally translated as “unforeseen.” Yet what is really at issue here is just how much improvised music is actually unforeseen versus the extent to which one knows in advance—and everything in between. Paul Berliner’s (1994) massive study of jazz opens with a quotation from Calvin Hill: “I used to think, How could jazz musicians pick notes out of thin air? I had no idea of the knowledge it took. It was like magic to me at the time.” Hill’s idea of the improviser sounds remarkably like Kant’s idea of the composer or poet. Notes are picked out of the air. And, if one knows little about jazz (or, for that matter, other types of improvisatory practices), that is likely what would seem to be happening. Even philosophers who have written with great nuance on jazz end up downplaying the extent of spontaneity, saying things like “most jazz solos were, for various reasons, not fully spontaneous” (Hamilton 1990, 334), or “jazz performances are frequently not completely spontaneous” (Young and Matheson 2000, 129). Both of these citations, though, suggest that at least some jazz solos or performances are completely spontaneous. Such comments raise a crucial question: what exactly would utter spontaneity be like? Is it possible to imagine something literally coming from nowhere? Although the orthodox Christian view is that God creates ex nihilo (out of nothing), even the creation story in Genesis depicts God creating out of a “formless void” (tohu va vohu) (Gen. 1:2). That implies taking something that already exists and shaping it in some way. Whatever that shaping might be, God would seem to have the upper hand over mere mortals, however genius-like they might be. Of course, Hill prefaces his statement by saying “I used to think,” implying that his development as a bassist caused him to see things another way. Similarly, if one consults the 1969 edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, one gets a definition of improvisation that claims it occurs “without the aid of manuscript, sketches or memory.” Yet, already in the 1986 edition (and continued in the 2003 edition), that claim is superseded by the following: “improvised music is not produced without some kind of preconception or point of departure. There is always a model that determines the scope within which a musician acts.” The entry then goes on to state that, in jazz, this model could be that of harmonies or a melody or motifs. Other forms of improvisation, such as those found in African, Asian, and Native American cultures, likewise have their own bases, even though these differ from culture to culture (and even within a specific culture). For instance, the radif of improvisers of Iranian instrumental music consists of hundreds of elements (Nettl 1992). Given this realization— that improvisation is always based on something—it becomes easy to see why the following statement is incorrect: “interpretation, a prime feature of conventional musical performance, may be safely said to be absent from an improvisation: it makes no sense to characterize an improvisation as an interpretation or to praise it as a good interpretation of a previously existing work since no such work exists” (Alperson 1984, 26). Quite the contrary: interpretation is part of all music. That claim is true of Western art music, Indian raga, blues, jazz, rock, and folk music of all cultures. And there is not just one form of interpretation that is present at a given moment. Improvisers can be interpreting a tune, a harmonic progression, and a style. Perhaps even more important is the fact that they are interpreting an entire tradition composed of previous interpretations and interpreters.

Improvisation   441 Yet there is another feature of this quotation that needs to be considered, the use of the phrase “conventional musical performance.” On the one hand, it is not surprising that the author uses this phrase, since theorists writing on music generally have privileged “Western art music” (or, more commonly, “classical music”) and assumed that it is in effect the standard for all other forms of music. With this standard in mind, it would appear (at least to some) that other forms of music are inferior. One need only remember that radio stations broadcasting classical music in the US back in the 1960s frequently described themselves as “good music” stations, as opposed (one guesses) to all the others. Among aestheticians and musicologists, this bias probably still remains to some extent, but it has definitely been challenged. Perhaps the best evidence of such a challenge is that philosophical journals devoted to aesthetics and musicological journals now routinely accept articles on jazz, rock, and even rap music.6 On the other hand, this privileging has likewise resulted in the assumption that composed music is superior to improvised music. Perhaps no one states this more powerfully than Igor Stravinsky when he describes the composition of a piece of music as being “the fruit of study, reasoning, and calculation that imply exactly the converse of improvisation” (Stravinsky 1947, 138; italics added). So the status of the composer is generally considered to be higher than the status of the improviser. We have seen, however, that this hierarchy simply didn’t exist at one point. Lydia Goehr (1992, 189) points out that “when Mozart and Clementi engaged in an extemporization competition in 1781, few present, if any at all, thought that extemporization was a strict alternative to the pre-composition of music, and few degraded it for being of lesser value.”7 One way of rethinking this hierarchy is to note that musical performance of all types requires improvisation. Carol S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton argue “that all musical performance, no matter how meticulously interpreted and no matter how specific the inscribed score, requires improvisation” (Gould and Keaton 2000, 143). They make that argument first by appealing to the centrality of improvisation in Western music, citing Bach, Mozart, nineteenth-century virtuosi, and Stockhausen. Then they question the idea that spontaneity is what defines improvisation, claiming that it is instead “a relation between the score and the performance event.” One problem with this formulation is that it assumes that scores are the basis for performance. Not only might one play a piece of music that is not scored, but also the basis for improvisation may be a score—or not. Mainstream jazz musicians often use so-called fakebooks or charts that provide the melody (what they would term the “head”) for pieces (the best known of which are called “standards”) that are often thirty-two bars in length or twelve-bar blues progressions. In free jazz, some groups play without using any pieces at all. Of course, this in no way means that they are utterly free musically. As Clément Canonne and Jean-Julien Aucouturier point out, in collective free improvisation there may not be a referent (such as a particular tune), but there will still be aspects of convergence such as time and strategy. They demonstrate that such improvisation is possible on the basis of what they call a “higher-level knowledge, which is not piece-specific but rather task-specific: an implicit mental model of what it is to improvise freely” (Canonne and Aucouturier 2016, 544). Their conclusions fit well with what George Lewis argues. He claims that the improvisers

442   Bruce Ellis Benson themselves see their improvisation as possible on the basis of “discipline, defined as technical knowledge of music theory and of one’s instrument as well as through attention to the background, history, and culture of one’s music” (Lewis 2004, 153). Yet here we run into a problem of terminology. While Gould and Keaton use the term “improvisation” to cover quite a wide variety of things a performer would do with a score, Young and Matheson insist that “even if the player spontaneously adds rubato or varies the tempo, she or he is not improvising. She or he is not improvising since she or he is simply varying the expressive properties of the work” (Young and Matheson 2000, 127). The question, though, is exactly what such “expressive properties” are as opposed to what they term the “structural properties.” Elsewhere, I have developed a taxonomy of improvisation that shows just how varied it can be in terms not only of degree but also of type (Benson 2003, 26–30). But we need to consider the compositional process in order to determine what the structural properties of a piece of music might be. If we examine the composition process, it becomes clear that composers have intentions but that those intentions are limited in scope and that they are further limited by what can be notated. Roman Ingarden makes the point that “even the most brilliant composer cannot know his work in the whole fullness of its qualification before its performance. He imagines his work only more or less ‘unclearly’ ” (Ingarden 1989, 113). Yet there is a further complication for Ingarden: he says that musical works are always “riddled with places of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) that can be eliminated only in the individual performances” (90). (This view, known in English as “underdetermination,” is common among theorists of music today, but Ingarden was writing back in 1928.) In that sense, then, performers are always improvisers. They are not merely varying expressive properties. Moreover, one can turn this around the other way: even performers who want to perform the work “just as the composer intended” (a claim that seems clear enough on the surface but is highly problematic) not only can never be sure they are doing that, but also are always, by necessity, improvising. Ingarden would agree with the composer Vaughan Williams, who claims that “a musical composition when invented is only half finished, and until actual sound is produced that composition does not exist” (Vaughan Williams 1987, 123; italics in the original). Perhaps we might quibble over the exact amount that exists once the composer is finished. And surely there are great differences in scores from different eras in terms of what and how much is notated, as well as just how strictly one is expected to follow that notation. But the basic point ends up being the same; the question is more one of degree. Such is also the conclusion of Bruno Nettl in an influential early paper on improvisation east and west. As he puts it, “the conclusion which recurs again and again in our thoughts is that perhaps we must abandon the idea of improvisation as a process separate from composition and adopt the view that all performers improvise to some extent.” He goes on to say that the difference “is only in degree” (Nettl  1974, 19). Of course, despite the fact that improvisation has often been characterized as something like composition done “in the moment,” there are differences between the two. Lee B. Brown (2000, 114) parses out these differences in terms of (1) the situation of the composer, who can change her mind and erase things along the way, and the improviser, who cannot

Improvisation   443 erase what has already been played; (2) the “forced choice” of the improviser, who cannot wait around to decide what to play next; and (3) the performer of scored works who has a script to follow. I think these points are correct, though we have seen that exactly how strictly a performer is expected to follow the score depends on the era. Further, there are performers who have differing ideas of what kind of fidelity to the work is appropriate. Jorge Bolet justified his changes to pieces by Chopin by saying that Chopin usually played one of his pieces for a month or so and then moved on, whereas Bolet played them for years and thus had a better idea of how they should go. Unless one simply assumes that “the composer knows best,” it is hard to dismiss such an interpretational practice as “wrong.”

Rethinking Improvisation So far, we have considered improvisation on the basis of how it finds its place in the trio of musical composition–performance–improvisation. Yet what if we were instead to start with the place of improvisation in human existence in general? I believe that we would come up with a somewhat different idea of what improvisation is at heart. Alperson actually would seem to move in this direction, since he mentions that there are “an indefinitely large number of human activities that involve improvisation,” including such things as learning a language and developing various life skills (Alperson 2010, 273). He goes on to say that spontaneity or “free play” is to be found in many activities. Elsewhere, he speaks of improvisation as “even the core of artistic creative activity” (Alperson 1998, 478), a view that (probably not intentionally) echoes that of Ferruccio Busoni, who says that “notation is to improvisation as the portrait to the living model” (Busoni 1962, 84). It would be instructive to follow up on Alperson’s lead. What does it mean to improvise as a human being? We might start with the following definition from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary: “to make or fabricate out of what is conveniently on hand.” We have seen that improvisation is very much dependent upon conventions, expectations, styles, and often scores (to name just a few of the things that are “on hand”). Yet how exactly does one do this? Aristotle’s idea of phronesis gives us an excellent basis for thinking about how this takes place. Phronesis is the ability to (1) know what is important, (2) know how to bring it about, and (3) actually do so. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1984) speaks of “what is fitting . . . in relation to the agent, and to the circumstances and object” (1122a 25–26). It is through phronesis that we are able to acquire moral virtue, and this is the primary concern of Aristotle in that text. Phronesis, however, is integral to all human activity, not merely to being morally virtuous. As it turns out, phronesis is also more basic than sophia (wisdom) or theoria (contemplation), since they both depend upon phronesis. Although Martin Heidegger never uses this term in Being and Time, he has a number of German terms (Umsicht [circumspection], Verstehen [understanding], Entschlossenheit [resoluteness], and Gewissen [conscience]) that capture the idea of phronesis. For Heidegger, we first encounter the

444   Bruce Ellis Benson world in the very practical way of “living in it” and only then do we theorise about the world (Heidegger 1962, ¶ 13). Phronesis thus guides us in all of our practical action, since it is about practice (whereas theoria is about theory). In effect, we could say that phronesis is a sort of improvisation, or perhaps better said, the most basic form of improvisation, since it is central to human acting. How so? Phronesis is the ability to take a given situation, including the actors involved, the various circumstances, and even oneself, and decide on the right thing to do. While Aristotle thinks that, in a given situation, there is always one right thing to do—what he calls the “golden mean”—one need not conclude that all or even most situations are like this. So, if we go back to musical improvisation, depending on whom one is playing with, what has been played before, and the set of expectations set up by the group as well as the genre, there is likely more than one “right” way to contribute. Yet there are also definitely ways to go wrong. Thus, when Sam Rivers (who plays free jazz) says “there’s nothing I can do wrong, nothing,” we have to take this with a significant grain of salt (NPR 1998). Likely, Rivers is talking here of making a musical mistake. But, if he is playing with other musicians, there are various ethical mistakes that one could make, such as playing over someone else or not respecting what others in the group are doing. Note how closely mistakes of an ethical and musical nature are intertwined. To be sure, playing over someone is probably going to lead to bad music-making. But it is even more serious as an ethical violation. At stake here are not simply rules of etiquette (though they are certainly present, as in all human activity). Thus, Howard Becker rightly admits that, even though he uses the term, “etiquette might not even be the right word to describe the kind of attentiveness, care, and willingness to give ground and take direction from each other involved” in the improvising process (Becker 2000, 173). To be attentive to the other is precisely what ethics is about. Emmanuel Levinas makes the important point that our responsibility is first and foremost to other people, not to abstract rules or ethical generalities. He (rightly) insists that moral responsibility stems from the other simply being there. Thus, he says that “to approach the Other is to put into question my freedom, my spontaneity” (Levinas 1979, 303). Levinas here is criticizing the elevation of autonomy by Kant. In formulating the categorical imperative, Kant emphasizes that one needs to be truly autonomous in making moral decisions, rather than looking to someone else’s judgement. In contrast, Levinas points out that my autonomy often comes at the expense of someone else. To counter Kant’s privileging of autonomy, Levinas instead privileges “heteronomy,” by which he (and Kant) mean that my actions take into account the existence of other people.8 Another reason, then, why improvisation is not purely spontaneous is that (at least in playing with and for others), my freedom is checked by their existence. In improvisation, I am responsible to those whose music I play, those with whom I am improvising, and those who are in the audience. It is entirely appropriate, then, that Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen’s 2012 book Music and Ethics opens with a chapter on listening. Music-making, in its most basic sense, is a social activity that requires being tuned in to other people (including other music-makers and the audience). As such, it is an example of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a “practice,” which “involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of

Improvisation   445 goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards” (MacIntyre 1984, 190). But it is also to enter into a kind of ethical contract with others, one that involves responsibility. Jeff Warren provides a helpful (and amusing) anecdote of an improvisation that starts to go so right musically that the players actually have to pull back dynamically when they remember that their gig is that of playing background music for a corporate gathering (Warren 2014, 106). As Aristotle reminds us, getting all of these responsibilities right is difficult. As another way to understand phronesis in action, we can turn to another genre of human activity, namely speech or language. As it turns out, Keith Sawyer’s work on improvisation arises out of his observation “that everyday communication is improvised” (Sawyer 2000, 149). In order to communicate (as opposed to merely babbling), there are many conventions that one must follow, ones dictated by such abstract things as grammar and syntax but also ones dictated by context. If one doesn’t understand the context in which one is attempting to communicate, there is a good chance that miscommunication will occur. One can certainly make mistakes in grammar and still be understood, but only to a point. To speak well, or for that matter even to speak poorly, requires linguistic phronesis. Conversation is always about making choices as to where to go next. True, conversations have their own kinds of constraints and expectations, but even those are somewhat improvised along the way. The idea that improvisation can be construed as a conversation or dialogue is not uncommon. For improvising with others requires that learn to listen attentively and seriously to what is being played or sung. The claim that conversation functions as a “model” is a way of saying that what takes place in improvisation is analogous to conversation (or, to use a better term, “dialogue”). Analogies, by their very definition, are limited. That is, we say that we can understand one thing in terms of another, all the while knowing that the two things remain different. What is at stake, then, is the degree of similarity, and thus the aptness of the analogy. Assuming that such a way of speaking makes sense, we can ask exactly how dialogue works and see how this relates to musical improvisation. For a genuine dialogue to take place, it requires what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the “logical structure of openness.” What does it mean for a dialogue to be open? On the one hand, a dialogue or conversation has the result of bringing something into the open. It gives us fresh insight. In musical improvisation, we generally want to hear something “new.”9 An improvisation that is simply a rehash of the same tired licks may technically count as an improvisation, but it is not a good one. On the other hand, dialogues need to have a certain “state of indeterminacy” (Gadamer 1989, 362–363). We don’t know exactly what will happen in advance. Gadamer puts this as follows: “We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine the conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation” (383). While Gadamer doesn’t use the term “spontaneity,” clearly that is what he is talking about here. Obviously, conversations can be more or less open, in the same way that improvisations can be more or less spontaneous. A way of getting at this spontaneity is to query the degree to which improvisation is like a question that leads to an answer or whether it is like a

446   Bruce Ellis Benson s­ tatement that closes down the discussion. Good questions open up the dialogue. Thus, improvisers need to have “something to say,” but that “something” needs to be provocative and lead the discussion on rather than close it down. As should be evident, these guidelines for a good dialogue have a strong ethical dimension to them. To be sure, in order for a group improvisation even to function, it will at the very least need an attentiveness to others in the group. I can hardly provide an appropriate contribution if I don’t listen carefully to what others are playing and work hard to “fit in.” Part of this is going to involve what role I’m playing in the band, say, as bassist or lead soloist. That doesn’t mean that the bassist doesn’t get her own solos, but it does mean that one has to respect a certain order, usually assumed in advance though also open to development in the course of actual improvisation. The goal is to be responsive and someone who is truly a team player. That means, for instance, that even the lead soloist needs to be mindful of how many choruses would be appropriate to take on a given tune. One might also, as does Gadamer, speak of “tact” or “taste” in the sense of knowing what is appropriate to say and do. A “tasteful” improvisation is one that fits in a given situation. By its very nature, “taste” is not something that can be spelled out exactly, since it is the development of a kind of sense that enables one to act. Earlier, we noted that the notion of artistic genius changed the status of artists and that this often had ethical implications. Composers have not always shown much respect for either performers or audience. Aaron Copland (1957, 258) wrote that performers “exist to serve the composer” and Arnold Schoenberg (1958, 52) lamented the fact that concert halls generally need an audience for the music to “sound right” and this “annoyed” him. But, even in classical music, there are signs that this is changing. A prime example of that change can be found in the work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik, who writes that the changing landscape of classical music requires that “composers who start out from the contemporary tradition will almost certainly have to renounce the ideal of complete structural autonomy in favor of values associated with community, including communication” (Subotnik 1991, 291). Moreover, in classical music, there is the rebirth of improvisation, with performers now improvising their own cadenzas and improvisation becoming part of the curriculum of many conservatories. Performers are beginning to claim more of their side of the dialogue. Kathleen Marie Higgins suggests “the jazz solo as an example of a musical model for ethics with respect to the interaction of individual and group” (Higgins 1991, 7). To be sure, jazz improvisation provides a very different way of conceiving the musical and thus ethical relationship. However, Dave Brubeck is clearly being hyperbolic when he claims that “jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact” (quoted in Berendt 1992, 161–162). Indeed, as Garry Hagberg reminds us, even jazz improvisation can “employ modes of social organization from the tyrannical to the anarchical” (Hagberg  2002, 190). Simply to assume that improvisation—jazz or otherwise—is essentially democratic would be naïve. Still, there are improvisational practices in many cultures that allow for varying degrees of freedom and spontaneity.10

Improvisation   447 At the very core of improvisation is respect. Jazz improvisation differs markedly from the emphasis on autonomy that is central to the modern conception of the composer. John P. Murphy subtitles his 1990 article on jazz improvisation “The Joy of Influence,” which is a direct reference to Harold Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom writes of “the strong poet’s anxiety of influence,” which he describes as the “horror of finding himself to be only a copy or a replica” (Bloom 1973, 80). In contrast, the jazz improviser celebrates the influence on her improvisations by previous improvisers. Henry Louis Gates Jr. speaks of a kind of “signifyin(g)” which is designed as a parody; but he likewise speaks of another sort that is “an act of homage” (Gates Jr. 1988, 46). Jazz improvisers often (perhaps usually) see themselves as engaged in various sorts of homage that signal their admiration for those who have gone before, their fellow jazz musicians, or even those with whom they are currently playing. Finally, improvising with other musicians requires the difficult work of finding the balance between following and leading, honouring tradition and expanding upon it, and having a sense of both one’s own autonomy and that of others.

Notes 1. Philip Alperson (1998, 478) gives virtually the same definition of the term “improvise,” namely “to do or produce something on the spur of the moment.” 2. What I will say here about Baroque music may well be even more true of medieval music, though we have considerably less information about performance practice of medieval music. 3. There are debates as to how far the notion of creatio ex nihilo goes back in the Christian tradition. But, at some point, it became the dominant (even if not the only) view. 4. While I clearly side with Levinson that musical works are created and not discovered, Kivy’s point here seems quite correct. For an attempt to work out how the notion of genius helped Beethoven gain an audience, see DeNora 1995. 5. For example, Benson  2003 questions the phenomenological accuracy of the genius account (i.e., does it really work like this?) and shows that the boundary between composition and improvisation is not nearly as strong as it is usually taken to be. 6. That philosophical journals accept articles on jazz should be clear from the sources I’ve already listed, and those to come. As to rock music, see the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism’s publication of Baugh  1993. That was later followed (with various articles in between) by Kania  2006. Turning to the Journal of the American Musicological Society ­simply as one example, I note that a search on JSTOR produces 372 articles on jazz. Perhaps these references do not constitute sufficient proof that all philosophers and musicologists now take jazz seriously, but they are good evidence that many do. 7. Goehr has shown (among other things) that the idea of the musical “work” is a recent invention that has significantly influenced our conception of “improvisation.” 8. Levinas (1993, 92) puts this as follows: “Autonomy or heteronomy? The choice of Western philosophy has most often been on the side of freedom.” 9. It is a sad state of affairs that audiences who attend classical music concerts often want the performance to sound just like they’ve heard it on their CD at home. It is an even sadder state of affairs that “audiences often take offense at [improvisational] variations”

448   Bruce Ellis Benson (Becker 2000, 174) with the assumption that either the player does not know what she is doing or else is simply playing around with the listener. 10. A further point worth mentioning here is that there is a danger of valorizing improvisation over composition to the extent that one considers the former to be superior not only in a musical but also in a social sense. I find this to be the case with Borgo 2006.

Works Cited Alperson, Philip. 1984. “On Musical Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 1 (Autumn): 17–29. Alperson, Philip. 1998. “Improvisation—An Overview.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly, 2:478–479. New York: Oxford University Press. Alperson, Philip. 2010. “A Topography of Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer): 273–280. Aristotle. 1984. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Revised by J. O. Urmson. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Batteux, Charles. 1746. Les Beaux Arts réduits à une même principe. Paris: Durand. Baugh, Bruce. 1993. “Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 1 (Winter): 23–29. Becker, Howard S. 2000. “The Etiquette of Improvisation.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (3): 171–176. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berendt, Joachim E. 1992. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Rev. ed. Revised by Günther Huesmann. Translated by H. and B.  Bredigkeit with Dan Morgenstern and Time Nevill. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill. Berliner, Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press. Borgo, David. 2006. Sync or Swarm: Musical Improvisation in a Complex Age. New York: Continuum. Brown, Lee B. 2000. “ ‘Feeling My Way’: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes—A Plea for Imperfection.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 113–123. Busoni, Ferruccio. 1962. “Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music.” In Three Classics in the Aesthetics of Music, 73–102. New York: Dover. Canonne, Clément, and Jean-Julien Aucouturier. 2016. “Play Together, Think Alike: Shared Mental Models in Expert Music Improvisers.” Psychology of Music 44, no. 3 (April): 544–558. Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Copland, Aaron. 1957. What to Listen for in Music. New York: McGraw-Hill. DeNora, Tia. 1995. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Duff, William. 1770. Critical Observations on the Writings of the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry. London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hont. Fuller, David. 1989. “The Performer as Composer.” In Performance Practice: Music After 1600, edited by Howard Mayer Brown and Stanley Sadie, 117–146. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Improvisation   449 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in Philosophy of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Gould, Carol S., and Kenneth Keaton. 2000. “The Essential Role of Improvisation in Musical Performance.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 143–148. Hagberg, Garry. 2002. “On Representing Jazz: An Art Form in Need of Understanding.” Philosophy and Literature 26, no. 1 (April): 188–198. Hamilton, Andy. 1990. “The Aesthetics of Imperfection.” Philosophy 65, no. 253 (July): 323–340. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. 1991. The Music of Our Lives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Hobhouse, Janet. 1988. The Bride Stripped Bare: The Artist and the Female Nude in the Twentieth Century. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Ingarden, Roman. 1989. The Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work—The Picture—The Architectural Work—The Film. Translated by Raymond Meyer with John  T.  Goldthwait. Athens: Ohio University Press. Kania, Andrew. 2006. “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 4 (Autumn): 401–414. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1993. “Platonism in Music: A Kind of Defense.” In The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music, 35–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1979. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingus. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1993. “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite.” In Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 88–119. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. “What a Musical Work Is.” In Music, Art, & Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, 63–88. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lewis, George  E. 2004. “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” In The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 131–162. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Originally published in Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91–122. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue. 2nd ed. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Murphy, John  P. 1990. “Jazz Improvisation: The Joy of Influence.” The Black Perspective in Music 18 (1–2): 7–19. Nettl, Bruno. 1974. “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach.” Musical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January): 1–9. Nettl, Bruno. 1992. The Radif of Persian Music: Studies of Structure and Cultural Context. Rev. ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

450   Bruce Ellis Benson NPR (National Public Radio). 1998. “Modern Jazz Pioneer Sam Rivers Profiled.” National Public Radio. Weekend Edition. 28 March 1998. Salmen, Walter. 1983. “Social Obligations of the Emancipated Musician in the 19th Century.” In The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, translated by Herbert Kaufman and Barbara Reisner, 1–30. New York: Pendragon. Sawyer, R. Keith. 2000. “Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 149–161. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1958. Ausgewählte Briefe. Edited by Erwin Stein. Mainz: B.  Schott’s Soehne. Solomon, Maynard. 1988. “Beethoven’s Creative Process: A Two-Part Invention.” In Beethoven Essays, 126–138. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of Music. Translated by Arthur Knoedel and Ingolf Dahl. New York: Vintage. Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1991. Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vaughan Williams, Ralph. 1987. “The Letter and the Spirit.” In National Music and Other Essays, 121–128. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, Jeff  R. 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, James O., and Carl Matheson. 2000. “The Metaphysics of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 125–133.

chapter 22

Composition Joseph Dubiel

Most of the music that philosophers discuss is composed music. Yet the activity of composing is little explored in the philosophical literature. This is understandable, as the activity is disunified in practically every way (a diversity that is the main subject of Roger Scruton’s  2011 essay on Composition in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music). This diversity extends to the degree of importance attributed to composition at all in v­ arious musical practices: witness Kendall Walton ([1988] 2015), who makes the question of composition’s centrality—as opposed to performance’s—the point of entry to many further questions, while centring his essay on relatively traditional cases. Even if all music is invented somehow, it need not be invented in any activity separate from its performance or recording. (Stephen Davies’s  2001 book Musical Works and Performances is organized by an awareness of such differences, although its focus remains on the works, variously defined, rather than on their composition.) The ­circumstances of its invention need not be of much interest to those concerned with the music; the very identity of the composer may not. And of course the composer need not be an individual, and could never be an isolated one. This diffuseness is in no way alleviated by a broadening of concern from composition to a less prejudicial “creativity.” Such a broadening (stimulated by a decision to approach music-making primarily through the creativity of performance) has led to valuable musicological studies, of which Nicholas Cook’s 2018 book Music as Creative Practice is notable for its inclusion of a variety of case studies, including studies of composition. This essay situates itself somewhat to the rear of this trend, concerning itself with composition in the “classical” concert-music tradition—by an identified individual, producing a conventionally complete and specifically notated score, and intended for public performance in relatively formal conditions—in order to make its way to a detailed exploration of some issues in one such work, the finale of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet (Crawford 1931/1941), about whose composition we happen to know an unusual amount, mostly from the composer herself. It will work towards this analysis by following one prominent line of argument that can be traced in the philosophical and

452   Joseph Dubiel critical literature, one that particularly concerns the modernist phase of the concert tradition, and complex questions of the relationship between composition and appreciation—and, more directly, composer and listener—that are raised by this newer music. (Not very new, in the event; but even the passage of nearly a century does not always remove a work from the category of the “contemporary.”) These issues are raised by the common discursive practice of treating the activity of composing, and sometimes the composer herself, as metonyms for the finished work.1 Composition often is invoked as a way to intensify the recommendation that a listener closely follow the unfolding of a work: this following may be described as a listener’s matching his mental activity to that of the composer. Here is a representative instance, from Theodor Adorno (who certainly knew better): The ear that does not want to be left behind [in works of Schoenberg’s, including tonal ones such as the First String Quartet] must voluntarily perform the entire work of composition again, independently.  (Adorno 2002, 632)

The entire work of composition? The sketching, revising, discarding, and replacing? Certainly not. Adorno means the process of thought that is staged within a completed work, imagined as though it were a continuous flow of invention and development. Adorno wants to emphasize how much in the music he admires is invented ad hoc, how little accepted from a tradition that “listened for the listener” (Adorno 2002, 630); he dramatizes this with an element of personification. The image of composing entailed in a remark like Adorno’s is a considerable idealization of the process. This is typical. When a more circumstantial account of the process is offered, in the context of a generally similar expectation of attunement by the listener, the imagined attunement still filters out much of the circumstance. Such an account is offered by Roger Sessions in his short book The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener. The title’s reference to one experience already indicates the thesis that “the experience of music is essentially indivisible” across the three subject positions, through the intersubjective sharing of the “musical impulse”—which belongs to the originating composer and is “reproduced” by performer and listener (Sessions 1950, 20). The “Composer” chapter includes a story of Sessions’s work on his Piano Sonata No. 1 (Sessions 1931), meant to “throw some light on some of the ways in which a composer’s . . . creative musical mind . . . works” (Sessions 1950, 53). His initial idea was “a complex chord” that “rang through [his] ear almost obsessively.” When he subsequently composed the opening phrase of the body of the piece, he recognized in it a simplification of this chord; meanwhile he also composed, “without much reflection,” an introduction to precede this phrase, which was in a key only distantly related to the phrase’s key. The original chord returned to his mind a few days later, and he then recognized how it might be construed—that is, heard—as a simultaneous reference to the two keys, whose relationship gradually became a basis for the first two movements of the Sonata (52–53).

Composition   453 The “Listener,” according to the chapter so named, should aspire to “inwardly reproduce” the music “in . . . imagination” (Sessions 1950, 97). This certainly includes sensing harmonic and tonal relationships like those demonstrated by Sessions. But should the listener also want to relive Sessions’s initial unawareness of them, or his obsession with the single sound in which he discovered them to be condensed?2 These are not strictly impossible suggestions, especially as engagement with a piece of music is not limited to the passages of time when one is actually listening to it or playing it; the recognition of a relationship like those found by Sessions may well be an event, a moment when the same sounds come to sound different. Yet it is hard to imagine that this is the sort of experience that must be shared to maintain the relevant continuity of “impulse.” By the vividness of his story, Sessions exposes, perhaps more than he means to, the difference between the experiences of composer and listener, and so, again, the removal from actuality of the “experience,” supposedly the composer’s, that the listener is to share.3 Composers’ self-reporting preoccupies Stanley Cavell (a one-time student of Sessions) in two articles about newer kinds of composing characterized by the use of explicit rules (Cavell 1969a, 1969b). Cavell feels a tension between such rules and his strongly-held aesthetic presupposition that composed music should “sound improvised.” He wishes to sense, in listening, that the music was created in a way that must have involved “ingenuity and resourcefulness,” and “the capacity to take and seize chances” (1969b, 199). Music whose production he cannot imagine in this way, he is willing to charge with “fraudulence.” But what exactly is the fraud? Where is there any intention to deceive—much less to do harm by deceiving? Most music that gives Cavell his desired impression is not in fact improvised, as he knows full well. So the problem with the music that troubles him cannot be the fact of its being composed by a procedure not involving the kind of adventure he prefers to imagine. The problem must after all be something about how the finished music sounds, whatever the compositional technique that may have conduced to its unsatisfactory traits. Like Sessions and Adorno, Cavell is inclined to project an impression he gets from the music onto the composer. The difference is that their personifications tend to leave the composer looking good (perhaps artificially so). But Cavell, when untraditional music resists being imagined in terms of “impulse and intention” followed through to “resolution” (Cavell  1969b, 199), decides to personify this in a way discreditable to the composer. When a composer actually says something that sounds bad along these lines, so much the worse. The single composer quoted by Cavell, Ernst Krenek, articulates an implausibly fatalistic stance towards his acceptance of what his mechanism produces: “The unexpected happens by necessity” (Krenek  1960, 229; quoted in Cavell  1969b, 195). But Krenek’s article is not about automatism: as he states quite straightforwardly, it is about the relationship between his procedures and aspects of his music “left uncontrolled” by them. No more necessity need be seen here than Krenek’s having arranged to produce some material whose particulars he did not very well foresee—which is to say, no necessity.

454   Joseph Dubiel Any compositional artifice leaves room for choice—further choice in reaction to the composer’s hearing of its product, over and above the decision to construct the artifice and to consider accepting what it does. If the initial result seems musically unpromising, this may be just what will provoke the composer to respond with the invention of something that might not have occurred to her otherwise. (An argument to this effect is made, with reference to specific examples, in Dubiel 1990, 1991, 1992, particularly 1992.) If composing is supposed to involve the taking and seizing of chances, then here they may still be. This does not mean that the music will project a comparable sense of difficulty and response to a listener—a separate matter. Of all things in Cavell’s wide-ranging and inquisitive articles, the moralistic moment has been picked out for an attempted naturalistic justification by Diana Raffman (2003), who appeals to a psychological account of musical perception. Now the offence is not against the listener’s romantic conception of artistic adventure; it is not against any conception of the listener’s at all, but against a theoretically posited subset of the listener’s sub-personal cognitive processing capacities. Displeasure with a class of compositions (no particular piece: none is discussed or even named, except in quotations) is projected onto compositional procedure and described (again) as ill intent. One would then expect a demonstration of how a certain way of composing is bound to produce such incorrect music. But it is hard to see how this could ever be shown: once again, any process of composing leaves room for the composer to evaluate and revise the product of any conceit she has employed. The difficulty of maintaining a steady focus on method over outcome is interestingly demonstrated in the 1988 article by the composer and music theorist Fred Lerdahl that grounds Raffman’s analysis.4 Lerdahl criticizes Le Marteau sans mâitre by Pierre Boulez (1955/1957) for the “impenetrability of its serial organization.” This organization has indeed been difficult to reconstruct, by audition or study of the score, but why should this be so important? Lerdahl allows that Le Marteau is “a remarkable work,” but his supposition (surely unexceptionable) is that Boulez achieved this “more or less intuitively, using both his ‘ear’ and various unacknowledged constraints”—and this, seen as evidence of a “gap . . . between compositional system and cognized result,” is to be considered “disturbing” (Lerdahl 1988, 231–232). Why disturbing? Why not felicitous? Does “ear” not contribute to the merits of any piece, over and above what planning may have done? Can anything worse have happened than that Boulez came to his “remarkable” results by inefficient means? These questions are not raised in any distinctive way by serial music. Sessions, working in a tonal context, did not know what his chord was going to be when he first imagined it. He may not have been sure that it could be made tonally intelligible at all. Was this disturbing? On the contrary: it is easy to share his pleasant surprise at the chord’s becoming interpretable through his development of a context for it. Suppose that he had somehow constructed this chord. Would this make his story disturbing? Suppose that he had constructed it by some means that made no reference to its eventual tonal meaning. Suppose he had rolled dice to get it. The beginning of the story would be different; and indeed the relationship of process to outcome would be different. But there would be nothing that need disturb us.

Composition   455 What Lerdahl, and then Raffman, urge is that in relevant respects there is only one way for a listener to interpret Sessions’s chord—or to interpret whatever Boulez was working with: a way dictated by fixed psychological rules (a “listening grammar,” in Lerdahl’s words). The difference between the cases of Sessions and Boulez could then be understood in one of two ways—which may be related but which cannot be treated as the same. One is that Sessions’s donnée is less difficult for the internal rules to interpret than Boulez’s construction. The other is that Sessions’s method of arriving at his material follows the rules more than does Boulez’s—or, since Sessions seems not to have employed much method at this level, that Sessions did not do anything that was as actively independent of the rules as what Boulez did.5 It is important to emphasize the difference between these two propositions, even in cases where there may be truth in both. We might care, out of a sense of general solicitude, that composers not waste their time (more than they have to); our intellectual standards might lead us to prefer that they not devote themselves to idle conceits. But these are matters of broad human concern, not of grammar. Meanwhile, we may be interested, even happy, to engage with sonic configurations that challenge our habits of perception, perhaps to encourage other perceptions, perhaps to sustain certain kinds of hesitancy or disorientation, accepting that it may not be easy. The effort to yoke these possibilities together under a single prescriptive scientistic conception can only confuse us.6 What may still be valued in these texts, despite disappointing arguments, is an apparent underlying impulse to give the listener some authority over the composer. Unfortunately this listener is no more than a bundle of sub-personal processing routines, when what ought to be wanted is a person: an interpreting agent who can entertain various conceptions of music, which affect not only how it is thought about, but to some degree how it is heard. The only way to admit the relevant range of interpretative possibility into the discussion is to study actual compositions, in actual contexts. Simplified descriptions of compositional techniques will not do.7 Accordingly, most of the rest of this essay is devoted to a case study in interpreting a passage of music with reference to the process of composition that may have produced it. The hope is to do this with a minimum of mind-reading. A little bit of actual reading is possible, of a statement by the composer (backed by other texts). Inference about the process is facilitated by the schematic clarity of some of its earliest stages: it is clear what the first steps must have produced, and what musical possibilities the composer would have had to consider as a result. And of course the finished score is there for us to read—and we should understand that scores, not verbal documents, are the primary texts in which composers express their thinking. As with verbal texts, scores can be understood to our best reading of them, in light of our knowledge of the matters they present. The fourth movement of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet works out a striking, even stark, textural idea.8 Two voices play in counterpoint throughout, with a complex imparity maintained between them. One begins with very short utterances, played very loud, the other with long ones, very soft. During the first half of the movement these traits of

456   Joseph Dubiel length and loudness are gradually exchanged between the voices, and they are exchanged again during the second half so that the original arrangement is restored at the end. Crawford outlines the procedure in an analytical note that she sent to Edgard Varèse to inform his teaching of the piece in a seminar for composers. She characterizes the two voices’ pervasive complementarity in a distinctive way: There is . . . a sort of dissonance within each voice between volume in dynamics and number of tones, and also a sort of dissonance between the two voices, in volume and number.  (Crawford 1938; quoted in Tick 1997, 360)

Here the concept of dissonance is extended beyond its usual application to pitch and interval. Such an extension was an explicit preoccupation of Crawford and of Charles Seeger, with whom Crawford studied composition shortly before writing her quartet. In fact, Crawford tells us that aspects of the quartet originated in assignments set for her by Seeger (although she does not say exactly which aspects). His unpublished “Manual of Dissonant Counterpoint” (Seeger  1994), drafted during the period of their work together—with so much participation from Crawford that he wanted to identify her as its co-author (a designation she declined)—is organized about ideas for such expansion, as is a short article that he did publish, “On Dissonant Counterpoint” (Seeger 1930), explicitly advocating the development of dissonant rhythm, melody, and form. (Rao 1997 is informative about the collaboration and the content.) The meaning of “dissonance” is not consistent even within Seeger’s writing, let alone Seeger and Crawford’s collaborative writing, and perhaps still less between this writing and Crawford’s music. The most radical conception is the one stated and enacted by Crawford, one of dissonance as differentiation without a norm, an uncentred contrast— as distinguished most obviously from dissonance in strict counterpoint, understood in each instance as against and with reference to a particular consonance. Seeger’s writing admits this radical conception, but also backslides to a merely oppositional one, in which the composer is advised simply to do the opposite of what traditional counterpoint would require (so that, in a sense, the music continues to be governed by the structures of tonality, only negatively). Crawford’s radical conception is expressed in the unequal way that she chooses to score the two voices, as well as in the scheme of volume and number. One voice is played by the first violin, alone; the other, by the other three instruments, doubling in octaves, and muted. Imagine some alternatives: two balanced duets (either the violins and the other two, or two, each including one violin and one other); or an arrangement changing over the course of the movement (either to bring balance to the initially imbalanced configuration or, in a different spirit, to reflect the other schemes of exchange). The effect of Crawford’s peculiar choice is hard to describe: the group is a larger presence than the individual, yet also a strangely shadowy one. Even when the group plays at a higher notated dynamic level than the solo, it would be hard to say that it really sounds louder: louder than it was, of course, while the solo is quieter than it was, but the acoustic impact of the two parts is persistently incommensurable.9

Composition   457 This is a remarkable idea, and a remarkable effect, especially for a finale. The quartet ends, not with any sense of coming-together, but with the emphatic and sharply articulated opposite. The two parts’ exchanges do not alter their essential separateness. Perhaps there is no longer a need to say this, but: there would be no point worrying about whether the movement’s plan arises from a “correct” perceptual-cognitive theory of dissonance. For one thing, Crawford is not operating in the dark: she obviously knows that she is stretching the concept. For another, the merit of the compositional idea does not depend on whether the extension is groundedly theoretical or speculatively metaphorical; and neither does the eventual success of the composition. Perhaps Crawford is discovering something about non-normative listening; perhaps she is inspired by a fanciful figurative extension of an image from one domain of music to another; perhaps something in between. The idea stands or falls pragmatically. This is not, then, the dismissive attitude holding that the composer may think whatever she wants as long as it helps her get some notes on paper. Interpreters of the piece do have reasons to be interested in how it could have been made. Information about concepts behind its facture may suggest ways to listen to features that could otherwise seem merely odd. Imagining a backdrop of alternative possibilities—which may not be supplied ready-made by tradition—may make it easier to grasp characteristics of what is actually done; not to mention that what is actually done, and thus what could count as the compositional act, may depend for its specification on reference to “concepts behind its facture.” As for music-theoretical discovery: what better way is there to learn something about the possibility of an extended concept of dissonance than to commit to it, at least provisionally, and listen carefully to what comes of it? Studied further, this case offers more examples of the rich potential of apparently unimpressive ideas. The means by which Crawford initially realizes the two voices’ increase and decrease are startlingly simplistic: the counting of notes. The solo violin begins with a figure of one note, then, after a rest, plays two notes, then three, and so on up to twenty-one. The ensemble begins with twenty, and plays one fewer each time it enters, down to one. Mere number of notes is a superficial measure of musical content, at best. It isn’t even a measure of duration, at least unless certain other conditions are met—which, in this case, they happen to be (at least for a while). Both parts begin playing in equal note values. But another problem follows from this: while the solo violin’s increment is bound to be obvious at once (especially as the solo gets a head start, advancing from one note to two before the others enter), the ensemble’s decrement almost certainly will not be. Nineteen fast notes in a row will sound about the same as twenty, and eighteen about the same as those. If the aim is an effect of complementation to the solo’s growth, then isn’t this scheme already running afoul of perception? No and no. First, there is no reason to accept that complementation, so simply described, is the aim. The fact that the scheme is formulated in those terms does not create any requirement for the scheme to produce that effect. (Neither does anything that Crawford says: interpretation of music is not obliged to assimilate the meaning of scores to the meaning of texts—and ought, if anything, to make the reverse its default.) Second,

458   Joseph Dubiel and more important, the viability of the scheme depends on what the composer does about the “problem”—or does with it. The perceptual peculiarities of the scheme may condition her next move, but they do not determine it. If she does want an impression of balanced, complementary increment and decrement, and she does nothing more to bring it about, then she has a problem. The problem would be the mismatch between the scheme and her wish, or her too-vague anticipation of how the scheme would work, or perception of how it is working; a scheme can’t succeed or fail in itself. Here are some easily imagined options—none of which, it should be made clear, are what Crawford does. The figures might be shaped rhythmically so that it will be unmistakable that one figure stops in its progress sooner than had the one before it. This possibility is already excluded by Crawford’s undifferentiated stream of quavers. Even at that, it would still be possible to give the figures a clear metrical orientation, allowing it to be clear that they are breaking off at earlier and earlier points in the measure. Again, Crawford does not do this, and she even makes potential metre more obscure by asking for irregular bowing patterns. (There also would be possibilities in the realm of pitch, of which more in a moment.) In short, Crawford doesn’t solve the “problem” at all. Instead she recognizes it as a resource—open to becoming yet another aspect of the basic idea of the movement, the two voices’ constantly shifting imparity. If one voice seems to move immediately and forthrightly to rectify the outlandish brevity of its first utterances, while the other seems mysteriously imperturbable, consistent yet slightly obscure in its consistency, might this not be interesting? And if a sense of the ensemble dwindling should enter listeners’ minds, not as a perception, but as a suspicion, a surmise perhaps first suggested by the ensemble’s contrast to the soloist, and later on recognized as having been prescient? (Since when is the experience of music, even specifically auditory experience, limited to perception?) Might all this even work better than an opposition instantly understood at the outset? At the level of rudimentary musico-dramatic horse-sense, recognizing it too soon might leave a listener with too little to do afterwards—no more than wait out the completion of a course already foreseen. Even if this is better (and there’s a good case for it), the point of most relevance to the argument is simply that it’s complicated, that it’s more intricate and peculiar and characteristic than what might have occurred to anyone from a standing start. Its genesis may have involved development away from the plan, by a composer noticing, in her mind’s ear, what the effect of the plan would have been and responding to that. The “gap between compositional system and cognized result” is where the music grows. The point of the process is to arrive at something more particular, less generic, than the necessarily approximate content of the sketch. Of course we do not know exactly what Seeger was hearing and thinking. In certain senses of “exactly,” she may not have, either. But in this case speculation is easier than it might be, because the plan is so simple and its immediate consequences so readily predictable. To carry the inquiry further, we need to learn something about Crawford’s handling of pitch. Here we shall address only the ensemble, because its pitch construction can be

Composition   459 related to the questions of the counting scheme’s “perceptibility” that we have been discussing, and because this construction in itself is an instance of serial technique, which was a primary stimulus for much of the writing we have considered.10 The soloist may be described, briefly, as treating material similar to the ensemble’s in freer, less patterned ways (as Straus and Hisama document).11 It may already be possible to imagine meanings for this difference in the context of the general difference between the parts. At the most basic level, Crawford’s construction is independent of the ensemble’s pattern of decrement. The ensemble’s pitches are derived from a ten-tone series, repeated again and again, with patterned modifications, to yield the 210 tones required by her scheme for the first half of the piece. Each successive figure simply draws the number of tones it needs from this long list, without any regard to the list’s original formation as a concatenation of ten-tone units. Thus the figures pick up and drop the series at different points in it; even if Crawford had done nothing but reiterate the series without change, its repetitions would have been elusive. Its repetitions as a totality, that is: at the same time, there will be ample opportunity to hear repetitions of almost any segment of it that one happens to notice. Because the earliest figures match or approach the length of two complete statements, there can even be considerable repetition within a figure. To be precise, we should understand the series of tones as providing the possibility of repetition, subject to local compositional decisions about register and articulation that can make it more or less apparent. Again, any resulting vagueness will have a place in the general impression. Crawford’s modification of the series intensifies this particular elusiveness. She treats the series, not as a beginning-to-end “row,” but as a cycle that can be entered at any point and then followed all the way around. (Music theorists call this rotation.) She moves the point of entry steadily along the series, starting the second statement with the second tone, the third with the third, and so on. When the series has been taken through all ten of its possible rotations (the first 100 tones), it is then transposed and the transposition is rotated in the same way. After this, one more statement of the original form brings the number of tones to the total needed. 12 Knowing this much about how the string of tones was built, we can ask, with higher expectations than a moment ago: when the scheme of decrement is applied to a string of tones so formulated, what can be expected to happen? Just as relevant to our concerns, what can be expected to be expected? The outcome is completely determined by the procedure, but what of it can the composer reasonably be expected to have foreseen? Even with full knowledge of the mechanism, imagining the results is a challenge. The ensemble’s first utterance, of twenty tones, includes two series statements: the original form, then the first rotation. So we will hear the ten tones in order, then the second through tenth again, and then the first one. Of what will the nineteen-tone figure consist? The third through tenth, first and second, fourth through tenth, and first and second. The eighteen-tone figure starts with the third, then includes the fifth through tenth, first through fourth, sixth through tenth, and first. Clear enough? What ought to be clear is how it will not be easy to keep track of where we are, even though—and to some degree because—there is a great deal of repetition. We could

460   Joseph Dubiel say that repetition is deployed here in such a way as to create this kind of disorientation. A systematically unrepetitive succession would not tease us with so much notquite-graspable pattern. In a psychologist’s test of “perception,” the output of this technique would very predictably give us some trouble. But why would we not consider this a demonstration of the technique’s effectiveness—for its particular expressive purpose? Hisama nicely captures the purpose, as contributed to by all the factors we have studied, by describing the ensemble members as “muttering among themselves” (Hisama 2001, 49). This in contrast to the “assertive” (39) soloist: Hisama’s interpretation of the piece as an allegory of gender relations centres on the contrapuntal voices’ “very different styles of communication” (47). This is the kind of thing that can be sensed by a person, not parsed by an internal “grammar.” A complaint about the “perceptual opacity” of Crawford’s serial technique, or for that matter the simplicity of the counting scheme, would miss the point, not necessarily by misdiagnosing the difficulty, but by stopping before considering the role of the difficulty as one of many inputs to a musical experience. We can identify further consequences of the interaction of Crawford’s serial scheme with the ensemble’s countdown. While these are “predictable” in the sense of emerging from the mechanism, we cannot know the degree to which Crawford foresaw them, let alone designed the mechanism to produce them. What we can do is explain the significance they might have in the movement as it develops, and recognize ways to interpret Crawford’s further compositional decisions as responses to them. In this case, certain incidents arising in the course of the two parts’ exchanges have the effect of articulating this long direct process into phases. Or perhaps it is better to say that they make themselves available to Crawford, to be shaped to that effect. Here then is an account of a number of things that were bound to happen, once the schemes were set into motion, with some of her compositional responses to them. The first few figures include a great deal of potential repetition, among them and each within itself. Because of the rotation, each ends shortly after a juncture at which the end of the series loops around to a bit of its beginning. Thus the series’s last tone followed by its first are among the last few notes of all these figures, variously embedded in slightly longer segments that incompletely quote one another. This inexact similarity helps the figures’ endings to seem particularly arbitrary, neither corresponding nor progressing. And in this sense the pitch organization does something to enhance the contrast between the ensemble’s scarcely detectable decrease and the solo’s evident growth. By the sixteen-note figure, this near-matching of the figures’ ends falls away. It is pleasant to think that this may be about the time when listeners would start to sense that the ensemble figures are getting shorter. But be that as it may, this is also the time when Crawford introduces other conspicuous changes. This is when the two parts’ figures begin to overlap, after a relationship of antiphonal exchange. And this is when the changes in loudness begin—now, not at the very beginning. We can easily imagine Crawford’s sense of musical detail calling for some inflection of the two voices’

Composition   461 long simple exchange—something that will keep it a little ahead of the listener, whose participation ought not be allowed to fade from anticipation to waiting. The details that contribute to the inflection at this moment have different origins in the process: some following automatically from the mechanisms, some produced through additional, ad hoc, decisions, some produced by departures from the plan (at least as first outlined). A bigger inflection is coming. In a little while, resemblances emerge again between the ends of consecutive ensemble figures. Those of ten and nine notes end with the same tone.13 In fact there is a shared succession of five tones leading up to these; but it is the very last tones that stand out—because for the first time in the movement the ensemble sustains them, making a pronounced change in their sonic quality as well as in rhythm. For its part, the solo now begins a few figures with long notes, after always moving quickly and more or less consistently (in ways that warded off any division of its lengthening figures into smaller parts). The passage when all this happens is also the one in which the notated dynamic levels of the two parts finally cross, the solo declining to mezzo piano and the ensemble rising to mezzo forte.14 Most of the features marking this moment fade away quickly. The ensemble’s sustained final notes cease to match, and begin to get shorter, until they are once more not sustained at all. (By this time the ensemble has very few notes per utterance, and gives up slurring them in favour of something more like the violin’s initial accentuation of everything.) The solo violin gives up its long first notes. By the end of the exchange (the middle of the movement), the texture is about as it would have been if it had proceeded directly according to the plan in Crawford’s sketch. But coming after subtle changes of texture along the way, this simplification comes with the character of an active gathering-together, not just the end of a long straight line. Crawford, in her note to Varèse, is very emphatic in presenting a simplified version of the plan, indicating not only in words but also in a diagram that the crescendo and decrescendo begin at the beginning of the movement. Of course this might be simply to make the analysis more readily assimilable. But imaginably Crawford did not understand herself as having departed from the plan in any significant way, simply by making adjustments in the course of its realization. In a way, the plan still accurately enough represents what will seem to have happened in the long run.15 This is a “gap” between procedure and result, the other way around from what we have discussed. If, in other cases, our point was to allow that the use of a procedure does not have to aim simply at the effect of the procedure having been used, we can now allow that the effect of a procedure can be brought about by means other than simply and directly following the procedure. In fact, given certain conditions having to do with listeners’ recognition, anticipation, and recollection of processes unfolding in time—perceptual and cognitive conditions, we might wish to call them—departure in detail from a process may be a better way to produce the musical impression of that process. Through this long account of Crawford’s shaping of the two parts’ imparity, it is not possible to say where we are between a discourse of problem-solving and one of the

462   Joseph Dubiel composer finding out what she is doing as she is doing it. The music’s progressive removal from a rudimentary initial idea amounts to a removal from cliché—or, less tendentiously, from a generic idea of two-part counterpoint, even from a more idiosyncratic, but still generic, one of two-part dissonant counterpoint—towards something literally unheard-of. By the time the piece exists, we cannot say what in its genesis has been overcome, what coped with, what embraced, exploited, or capitalized on. We cannot say what is construction, what trouvaille. From a long detailed story about a particular piece, can we generalize at all? Not very far, or powerfully (and certainly not prescriptively). And this, at least, is an important general point. Composing is a personal activity and not a unified one, even within a stable tradition, obviously less so outside one. It need not be carried out by an individual, it need not be completed prior to or outside the presentation of the music in performance. Not every stage in it need produce a musically acceptable result (obviously—this is why the process has stages), and not every move a composer makes need be towards her eventual result. Nor need every move be towards a goal, because she may not know very well what that is (in so far as there even is one). Finding out what she might be able to do is something that will happen to her all the time as she works. Over and above this, the process of composition is not easy to find out about. We cannot count on the composer to have a clear view of it while it is happening, much less a clear recollection of it afterwards—and still less the peculiar, and to her not necessarily relevant, skills required to put useful information about it into words. To those of us likely to regard verbal texts as more scrutable and preoccupying documents than scores, recordings, and performances, this should be a caution. All this being said, there still is no reason for us to give up thinking about composition. We do deal with a good deal of music in which it is appropriate, even mandated, to imagine a composer acting towards us, or creating a scenario in which we imagine this of the performers, or both. (The possibilities are many: consider how Crawford’s quartet finale might invite imaginative personification of the ensemble members to different degrees.) It can be stimulating, for our interpretative perception, to understand that composition can be undertaken in many different ways, and we should be curious about what some of them might be. In particular, we should be curious in exactly the cases when there is reason to believe that the process of composition may not have resembled the flow of continuous thought that is the favoured object of romantic imagining. If the process is not necessarily to be closely identified with any characteristics of the finished work, or envisioned as a model for our mental activities as a listener, or imagined as a site of struggle and triumph for a composer-heroine, our awareness of it may yet heighten our awareness of features that the work does have. We might derive from our informed image of the compositional process an understanding of a background of possibilities against which the particulars of the work can then be understood as chosen. Or, if we wish not to commit ourselves so much to personification at this stage, against which the particulars can be understood as particular—as this and not that. This, at any rate, may be one way for us as listeners to justify minding the composer’s business.

Composition   463

Notes 1. The experience of having one’s name used for this reason, and its paradoxical effect of reifying the work, is vividly described by Linda Dusman (1994, 142). 2. The chord occurs only once in the finished piece, at the climactic moment of the first movement. 3. Edward T. Cone’s influential book The Composer’s Voice formulates, as an interpretative device, a compositional “persona” to which the composition’s thoughts might be ascribed, not identifiable with the actual composer (Cone 1974). 4. Lerdahl’s article eventually drifts away from his announced concern with the relation of construction to effect, so that its closing list of “constraints” refer exclusively to characteristics that completed works should or should not exhibit, regardless of how they are made. 5. After this point the two writers move somewhat differently: Raffman finds a lack of “integrity” (another moralizing word) in the possible independence of stages of the compositional process from the automatic aspects of listening; Lerdahl has a stronger sense of the two processes as rivals of one another, speaking of a “compositional grammar” that should not depart too far from the “listening grammar.” A detailed critique of these complex articles would be too much for this context. 6. Bauer 2004 makes a different critical argument about some of the same material, noting that Lerdahl (in another article) identifies conformity to his grammar with good mental function and shares this attitude with other antimodernists not specifically associating themselves with science. 7. In the psychological studies cited by Raffman, the most interesting finding—the one that ought to be most interesting—is that listeners “perform” better when presented with excerpts from actual compositions than with abstract successions devised by the experimenters. It is not difficult to imagine that compositional techniques will perform better in actual compositions. 8. The composer’s name was Ruth Crawford when she composed the piece, Ruth Crawford Seeger by the time she published it. This essay follows Straus 1995; Rao 1997; and Hisama 2001 in calling her Crawford, particularly to differentiate her from Charles Seeger when both are in view. The musical analysis is indebted in many matters to Straus and Hisama. 9. This conception is best realized in the recording by the Composers Quartet (1973), the first and still the best, unfortunately out of print; also remarkable is the fine balance within the ensemble, so that their line cannot be identified with any one of its registral locations. It is interesting to hear what becomes of the two parts’ composed incommensurability under different interpretative choices by performers and engineers. In the recording by members of the Schönberg Ensemble (1997), the trio picks up a good deal of reverberation as it gets louder, almost giving a sense of spatial relocation, and in this way does come to overshadow the solo in the middle of the movement. The strongest impression of change specifically in the realm of loudness is given by the Fine Arts Quartet (1980); in the recording by the Pacifica Quartet (2006), the soloist always seems louder. For a use of incommensurability of loudness as an example of the shaping of perception by musical context, see Randall 1965, and for more general discussion Randall 1967. 10. This is particularly true of Cavell (1969a, 1969b) and Raffman (2003). Lerdahl (1988) also begins here, although his article extends its disapproval beyond the (at least arguably) serial Boulez, Schoenberg, Babbitt, Nono, and Stockhausen to include Carter, Xenakis, Ligeti, Reich, some non-serial Schoenberg, “Balinese gamelan,” and rock. Serial, or more specifically

464   Joseph Dubiel twelve-tone, composition is rarely far from Adorno’s mind, and his quoted remark (Adorno 2002) implicitly argues the continuity of Schoenberg’s earlier practices with it. 11. Left to one side of this discussion is the “dissonance” of the pitch material in one of Crawford and Seeger’s less extended senses, namely that of interval successions tending to undermine any tonal implications that they may momentarily suggest. 12. One complication is suppressed in the following discussion. Crawford departs from her rotational scheme, omitting one tone but then resuming the process consistently until the end, where she must supply one additional tone outside the scheme. Whether this is a mistake, a nuance, or something else is concealed by her reference to it, in the letter to Varèse, as “the loose thread in the persian rug” (Crawford 1938; quoted in Tick 1997, 359). Curiously, her identification of the omission is incorrect. 13. Did you realize that this was bound to happen? The ten-note figure is the same length as the series (though it is not coextensive with even a rotated statement of it); whatever tone ends it will then, rotated back one place in the order, reappear as the last tone of the following figure, which is one note shorter. 14. It is not also, as might have been anticipated, the moment when the numbers cross: the violin’s figures that include the long notes have twelve and thirteen notes. But the two parts’ utterances overlap almost completely by now, and the general impression is of them playing almost constantly, approximately the same amount. 15. Perle (1960, 59), in the first substantive discussion of the piece, makes the same simplification as Crawford.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor  W. 2002. “Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg.” In Essays on Music, selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, with new translations by Susan H. Gillespie, 627–643. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bauer, Amy. 2004. “ ‘Tone-Color, Movement, Changing Harmonic Planes’: Cognition, Constraints, and Conceptual Blends.” In The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, edited by Arved Ashby, 121–152. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Boulez, Pierre. 1955/1957. Le Marteau sans mâitre. London: Universal Edition. Cavell, Stanley. 1969a. “A Matter of Meaning It.” In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, 213–237. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cavell, Stanley. 1969b. “Music Discomposed.” In Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, 180–212. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Composers Quartet. 1973. Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet; George Perle: String Quartet No. 5; Milton Babbitt: String Quartet No. 2. New York: Nonesuch Records. H-71280. Cone, Edward T. 1974. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2018. Music as Creative Practice. Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Crawford (Seeger), Ruth. 1931/1941. String Quartet. King of Prussia, PA: Merion Music (Theodore Presser). Crawford (Seeger), Ruth. 1938. Letter to Edgard Varèse. In Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music, 357–360. New York: Oxford University Press 1997.

Composition   465 Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances. New York: Oxford University Press. Dubiel, Joseph. 1990. “Three Essays on Milton Babbitt [Part One]: ‘Thick Array/Of Depth Immeasurable’.” Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer): 216–261. Dubiel, Joseph. 1991. “Three Essays on Milton Babbitt (Part Two): ‘For Making this Occasion Necessary’.” Perspectives of New Music 29, no. 1 (Winter): 90–122. Dubiel, Joseph. 1992. “Three Essays on Milton Babbitt (Part Three): The Animation of Lists.” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter): 82–131. Dusman, Linda. 1994. “Music as Performance and the Reception of the New.” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 2 (Summer): 130–146. Fine Arts Quartet. 1980. John Downey: String Quartet No. 2; Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 4; Ruth Crawford-Seeger: String Quartet. Peterborough NH: Gasparo Records CD-1020. Hisama, Ellie. 2001. Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krenek, Ernst. 1960. “Extents and Limits of Serial Technique.” The Musical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April): 210–232. Reprinted in Problems of Modern Music: The Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, edited by Paul Henry Lang, 72–94. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962. Lerdahl, Fred. 1988. “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.” In Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, edited by John A. Sloboda, 231–259. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pacifica Quartet. 2006. Declarations: Music Between the Wars: Quartets by Paul Hindemith, Leos Janáček and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Chicago: Çedille Records. CDR 90000 092. Perle, George. 1960. “Atonality and the Twelve-Tone System in the United States.” The Score 27:51–61. Raffman, Diana. 2003. “Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27 (1): 69–87. Randall, J. K. 1965. “A Report from Princeton.” Perspectives of New Music 3, no. 2 (Spring): 84–92. Randall, J. K. 1967. “Three Lectures to Scientists.” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 2 (Spring): 124–140. Rao, Nancy Yunwha. 1997. “Partnership in Modern Music: Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, 1929–1931.” American Music 15, no. 3 (Autumn): 352–380. Schönberg Ensemble. 1997. Ruth Crawford Seeger: Portrait by Oliver Knussen et al. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon. 449 925–2. Scruton, Roger. 2011. “Composition.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 517–524. Abingdon: Routledge. Seeger, Charles. 1930. “On Dissonant Counterpoint.” Modern Music 7 (4): 25–31. Seeger, Charles. 1994. “Manual of Dissonant Counterpoint.” Part II of “Tradition and Experiment in New Music.” In Studies in Musicology, Vol. 2, 1929–1979, edited by Ann M. Pescatello, 163–228. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sessions, Roger. 1931. Sonata for Piano [No. 1]. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne. Sessions, Roger. 1950. The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Straus, Joseph N. 1995. The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tick, Judith. 1997. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Walton, Kendall L. [1988] 2015. “The Presentation and Portrayal of Sound Patterns.” In In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence, 230–251. New York: Oxford University Press.

chapter 23

Per for m a nce Paul Thom

Introduction Philosophical reflection on musical performance has flourished in the last twenty or so years. Of English-language books on the subject, the most recent is David Davies’s Philosophy of the Performing Arts (D. Davies 2011). The earliest in this period is my own For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Thom 1993). These two works place the performance of music within a general context of the performing arts. By contrast, Stephen Davies’s Works and Performances of Music: A Philosophical Exploration (S.  Davies  2001) and Stan Godlovitch’s Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study (Godlovitch 1998) deal exclusively with musical performance and the works performed. During the same period as philosophers were writing within a framework centred on the notion of the work, scholars of music outside of philosophy departments were breaking free of that notion. Carolyn Abbate, for example, advocates a shift of focus from work to performance, arguing that it is primarily musical performances, not musical works, that music-lovers love (Abbate 2004, 505). More generally, there has been a “performative turn” in musicology and related disciplines, a call for a focus on Music As Performance (Cook and Pettengill 2013). In this essay I draw on both philosophical and musicological approaches. I will make use of recent writings on conceptual issues regarding performance, improvisation, the place of musical performance among the arts, and the particular case where performance is performance of a musical work. I will also refer to studies and critical reviews of particular musical performances. The essay may be regarded as one possible answer to Carolyn Abbate’s (2004, 505) question: What would it mean to write about performed music? The musical work will not be the focus of my thoughts; but neither will it be totally absent. I will sketch a conception of musical performance as a temporally articulated activity involving the execution and presentation of musical material, an activity whose

468   Paul Thom exercise involves work (but not necessarily the performance of a work), and that possesses artistic potential as well as the potential for mere showmanship. I begin with some general observations, distinguishing two aspects of any performance. Then I turn to what seems to be the purest case of musical performance, musical improvisation. I go on to consider the claims that musicians have to the status of “Artists.” Finally, I consider the special features possessed by performances of a musical work.

Performance Of the multiple senses of “perform” given by the Oxford English Dictionary Online (2005), two are relevant to this essay. According to the first of these (2b), to perform means to “carry out, execute, or accomplish” an action or task. In this sense, I might inform you that I have duties to perform, or that my car performs well at low speeds. According to the second (4b), to perform means “to present (a play, opera, ballet, etc.) on stage or to an audience” or “to play or sing (a piece of music) for an audience.” In this sense, I might tell you that a band will be performing live in Hyde Park, or that a particular play has already been performed in Britain. The first sense refers to an activity, all of whose stages have been gone through; the second refers to an activity that is directed to an audience. David Davies recognizes both the “through” and the “to” senses of “perform,” dubbing the first “the merely evaluative sense,” and the second “the full sense” (D. Davies 2011, 5). The first sense is “merely evaluative” because it gauges behaviour against what is meant to be carried out. Davies takes the behaviour of inanimate things like cars to be paradigmatic of performance in the merely evaluative sense (5). Notice, however, that the behaviour of animate beings, including humans, also exemplifies this sense. Not only my car, but also my garage mechanic can be said to be performing their respective tasks well or badly. So too the musicians I pay to entertain me may perform their tasks well or badly. In Davies’s full sense, “to perform is to act in certain ways for the attention of those who are or may be observing one’s actions” (D. Davies 2011, 6). Here, I take Davies to indicate that performance in the full sense involves both executive and presentational performance. The performer in this sense “intends for her actions to be appreciated and evaluated, and thus is consciously guided in what she does by the expected eye or ear of an intended qualified audience” (6). Notice that performance in this sense possesses the characteristic that Franz Brentano (1973, 68) called “intentionality”: a performance is directed to an audience. A performance in the minimal sense of mere music-making need not have such intentionality. Corresponding to the two senses of the word “perform,” there are two senses of the word “performance”: a full sense and a merely evaluative sense. The audience to whom a performance in the full sense is directed is its intentional object. This object is defined by the performers’ idea of who they are playing for—an audience that is acculturated or

Performance   469 unacculturated in a particular genre of music-making, an audience having particular kinds of expectations, and so on. There may be a mismatch between the intentional object and the actual audience: those present may not know anything about the sort of music being performed, or may be after entertainment when the performers intend to provide high art. The performers may believe there is an audience when the hall is actually empty. Previously, I have suggested that in that case the performance is not really “for an audience” and so is not really a performance (Thom 1993, 192); but it would be better to say that there is a performance, albeit a defective one. A parallel case would be a dinner that is served for guests who do not arrive: the dinner is served, but in vain.

Musical Performance Stephen Davies observes that, in discussions of musical performance, most philosophers of music assume [a] paradigm [of] real time playing before an audience . . . Yet, in practice, most of the music heard by most people comes to them via the TV, the radio, the record player, or other electronic playback devices. The paradigm is such, that is, because of its historical importance. It does not represent the kind of performance most often encountered now.  (S. Davies 2001, 295)

Despite this assertion, I follow most philosophers of music in assuming this paradigm of “real time playing before an audience.” In particular, I take the replaying of recorded music to be “performance” only in a secondary sense, even if it has become the most common form in which we listen to music. A musical performance can be defined as a performance where the material performed is music—whether or not that material exists in the form of a musical work. Such a performance may be merely executive or both executive and presentational— modes that correspond to the two senses of “performance” addressed previously. Let us first consider musical performances purely as execution, independently of any address they may make to an audience. There are various kinds of situation in which music is executed without being performed for an audience: for example, it may be a practice session, an instrument may be being tested, and so on. On the picture I am presenting here, these types of music-making are not performances proper, since they are not intended for an audience. In what follows, I will therefore set aside such instances, and consider instead the executive dimensions of some specific types of musical performance proper, starting with the case of improvisation. An improviser does not set out with a detailed plan of what is going to be played or sung. There may, of course, be a general outline of what is to be done, an outline that fits in with the musician’s personal style or with an established practice. Something of this kind is evident in the traditional art of preluding at the keyboard as recommended by the composer and improviser Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Valerie Woodring Goertzen

470   Paul Thom gives the following summary of Hummel’s description of the art as practised by J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, and Mozart: one would begin with soft broken chords or slow arpeggios outlining the tonic harmony. . . . Following a gradual acceleration, and incorporation of more distantly related harmonies and more unusual figuration, the principal theme of the piece would emerge and be developed in ways other than those employed by the composer. The prelude would then dissolve gradually into less specific figuration, dying away on a fermata, the dominant of the piece.  (Goertzen 1996, 325)

Hummel clearly has in mind the sort of preluding that is designed to lead into a predetermined musical work—indeed, Goertzen sums up the nature of preluding by suggesting that “in this way, the composition was prepared . . . through the foreshadowing of its primary character” (Goertzen 1996, 326). This general outline leaves the musical details (the specific opening chords, the specific “more distant harmonies,” “unusual figuration,” and so on) up to the free choice of the improviser. A general outline similarly pre-structures many jazz improvisations. In all cases, the execution of the improvisation involves choices on the part of the im­pro­ viser. Nonetheless, the choices that the improviser makes do not have the fixed character of a detailed plan but often arise spontaneously. Francis Sparshott captures the fluctuating character of improvisation in general when he writes: we . . . allow for [the performer’s] forgetting what he was doing, trying to do two things at once, changing his mind about where he is going, starting more hares than he can chase at once, picking up where he thought he had left off but resuming what was not quite there in the first place . . .  (Sparshott 1982, 255)

This may sound like chaos, but the improviser’s activity is an orderly one: it is guided by a series of choices. Moreover, it may be that what the improviser actually does corresponds fairly closely to these choices. In that case, the execution would track the series of choices: from the listener’s perspective, it would be predictable when the choices were predictable, unexpected when the choices were unexpected. In Figure 23.1, we see an example of how choices and executions unfold over the course of a performance. The figure’s horizontal axis divides a performance into phases (AB, BC, CD, DE), while the vertical axis allows us to represent the relations between the choices the performer makes and their execution in each phase. At the start of each phase the performer chooses a path terminating in a “target” at the end of the phase. The chosen paths are represented by the dotted lines, and the targets are represented by circles (labelled t1 to t4). Diamonds represent the execution at the start and finish of each phase (e1 to e4). In this example, the path from the start of the performance to its end is a meandering one: no step is predictable from what has gone before—except perhaps the step from t3 to t4. Nevertheless, the execution follows the path of the choices almost exactly.

Performance   471 Improvisation: choices and execution t2 e2 t3

t4

e3

e4

D

E

t1 e1

A

B

C

Figure 23.1  Improvisation where the execution matches all choices.

Yet, this is not a typical pattern for an improvisation, as Lee B. Brown (2000) notes in writing about the way the performer’s choices operate in a jazz improvisation. Brown takes as his starting point Ted Gioia’s (1988, 60) comment that jazz depends on a “retrospective” model of performance rather than the prospective model that operates when a musical work is performed. The difference between a retrospective and a prospective model of performance can be explained as follows. In a prospective model, the performers are guided by a detailed plan covering the performance as a whole—a plan whereby what is to be executed at any future stage of the performance is already determined. This model fits the performance of a musical work. By contrast, in the middle of a jazz im­prov­i­sa­tion what remains to be executed is not determined except to the extent that the improviser has already determined on some general structure for the improvisation. Brown argues that the improviser (1) cannot undo what he or she has done, (2) is forced to make choices based on what has so far been done, and (3) has no script guiding those choices (Brown 2000, 114). In other words, the choices made by an improviser in the course of the performance are decided in midstream and they take into account the execution of the improvisation up to that point. These mid-stream choices may take the form of continuing a musical idea, or introducing a contrasting idea, or—and this is central to Brown’s analysis—they may be responses to slips or other misexecutions that form part of the execution up to that point. Brown cites the example of Louis Armstrong’s Okeh recording of “West End Blues,” saying: “Armstrong leads off with a thrilling nervy trumpet flourish. But one can tell that from the starting line he is going too quickly into those first notes” (Brown 2000, 122). Here, the improviser’s execution of his starting choice gets him into trouble. But he can’t stop altogether, nor can he erase what has been done. He must choose how to go on. In the case of Armstrong: “he slows down the overall tempo just a little . . . in such a way as

472   Paul Thom to place the new notes in a definite rhythmic relationship to the previous tempo, so that he preserves an underlying pulse through the change” (122). Figure 23.2 gives a diagrammatic representation of an improvisation in which the execution generally fails to match the choices previously made, and new choices depend on actions previously executed. In the figure, this dependence is shown by the fact that the execution of one phase becomes the start of the next phase’s chosen path (as e1 is the start of the path towards t2). Because it involves a choice about what will be played or sung, an improvisation involves intentionality at each choice-point. In other words, the intentional object of the improviser’s executive choices comprises actions that lie unactualized in the future (maybe the immediate future); they do not yet exist, and when they do eventuate they may come out otherwise than initially conceived. (This is distinct from the intentionality involved in a performance by virtue of its presentational aspect.) Louis Armstrong’s execution of his opening gambit was not quite the way he had wanted to do it. Pianists following Hummel’s guide to preluding may find that what emerges under their fingers has unplanned features. We will see later that the performance of a musical work also involves a structure of choice and execution, but a different one from the structure shown in Figure 23.2. Let us pass now to the presentation of musical material in performance. This requires something in addition to the execution of that material. For example, in presenting the material to an audience, performers project at least some of its qualities into a performance space. In order to facilitate this projection, dynamics, phrasing, tempo, and articulation may need to be adapted or amplified so as to be suitable for the size and acoustics of the performance space, the expectations of the audience, and the nature of the occasion. This occasion may be an audition where the performer’s abilities are being assessed by judges in their capacity as future employers. Or it may be a music examination where Improvisation: targets and execution t3 e2 t1

t4, e4 e3 t2

e1

A

B

C

D

E

Figure 23.2  Improvisation where a deviation from a previous choice becomes a determinant of a subsequent choice.

Performance   473 the performer’s abilities are being assessed by examiners authorized to issue certificates of achievement. Or it may be a concert or recital given for listeners who are there to be entertained or to appreciate the music-making. (For more on the skills that define musical performance, see McPherson 1996.) Likewise, musical performance is naturally accompanied by bodily movements and gestures. The orchestral conductor specializes in such things while not actually performing any music, but most instrumental musicians and singers engage to varying degrees in movements and gestures accompanying their music-making, more or less unconsciously. Empirical studies show that some of these movements help in communicating the music’s expressive or representational qualities to the audience (see Tsay 2013). Due to their powers of communicating the music to the audience, these movements and gestures may themselves be consciously adapted or stylized to suit the occasion or the type of audience. Thus, the presentation of music, as much as its execution, is guided by the performers’ choices. This is not to say that the presentation is always premeditated; sometimes performers rehearsing a piece will hit on just the right manner of presentation by chance. Nor is it to deny that there can be misjudgements in presentation, such as when what was intended to create a misterioso effect turns out to be inaudible. The performer’s choices may take the form of increasing the volume, slowing the tempo, introducing musical allusions to be picked up by knowledgeable musicians in the audience, or amplifying or clarifying the gestures that accompanying their playing. Sometimes the presentation of an improvisation goes exactly as the performer wants it to (as in Figure 23.1); and sometimes it deviates from the performer’s choices. Moreover, it can happen (as in Figure 23.2) that when the presentation turns out to depart from what was intended, the performers will find it preferable stay with the unintended effect because it better communicates aspects of the music that they want to highlight.

Musical Performance as Art Beyond execution and presentation, can a musical performance be a work of art? David Davies thinks so. He defends this claim by reference to the general concept of a work of art, understanding “work of art” in the sense in which the term is commonly applied to the works of great novelists, painters, sculptors, and composers; he also includes some musical performances, including some improvisations, as works of art. Davies thinks that what makes something a work of art is the kind of attention it calls for: artworks call for a distinctive kind of regard, and . . . they do so in virtue of the ways in which they articulate their contents. To determine the artistic contents of an artwork requires close attention to the details of its artistic vehicle which often exemplifies properties ascribable to the work. Artworks tend to articulate their contents

474   Paul Thom by means of many different properties of their vehicles, and to do so in a “hierarchical” manner, where higher level content is articulated through lower level content.  (D. Davies 2011, 142)

He emphasizes that the appreciation of something as a work of art is not merely an aesthetic matter—not merely a matter of its striking and powerful visual or sonic effects— but depends on bringing those aesthetic qualities into relation with the work’s content or meaning (see D. Davies 2011, 10). As an example of a performative improvisation that he considers a work of art he mentions Keith Jarrett’s improvisation at his 1975 concert in Cologne, West Germany (later released by ECM as The Köln Concert). Among the improvisation’s striking aesthetic qualities he mentions the “timbral richness” of Jarrett’s playing. And he sees this richness as expressing or exemplifying higher-level qualities that he interprets in terms of the work’s thematic “point”: The performance, as artistic vehicle, articulates its content through the timbral richness of the sequence of sounds produced. The expressive qualities of the latter, and the ways in which they draw upon the different musical traditions to which Jarrett refers in his playing, also serve to communicate higher order ­content.  (D. Davies 2011, 142)

Philip Alperson characterizes the “higher order content” of musical improvisation in terms of the audience’s access to the process of musical creation: “It is as if the im­pro­ viser's audience gains privileged access to the composer's mind at the moment of musical creation” (Alperson 1984, 24). Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim goes further: she sees the audience at Jarrett’s improvisation as not only observing the process of musical creation, but also sharing in the creative experience: the listener becomes involved in the search for a theme’s development, shares in the elation when Mr. Jarrett finds a beautiful new tune, experiences the joy of hearing him play with it. When he pauses on a chord, unsure of where to go next, it seems as if much more than the immediate future of this music hangs in the balance. When he shifts to a new key, it feels as if a door has been pushed open, inviting the listener to explore new rooms and hallways.  (da Fonseca-Wollheim 2008)

Not only improvisations but also performances of a musical work may be works of art— or, that performance may execute and present a musical work, and that work may be a work of art by David Davies’s criteria. But, one might object, the presentation of a work of art is not thereby itself a work of art. The projectionist in a cinema presents the movie to the audience, but that does not make the projectionist an artist. Nor is the curator of an exhibition, qua curator, necessarily an artist. Surely, in order for performers to count as artists, they need to be doing something which is artistic in its own right; but transmitting a work of art to the public is not in itself artistic. Let us examine this line of reasoning.

Performance   475 It is true that the performance of a musical work may itself appeal to the senses through its manifest aesthetic qualities in the way a work of art does: the performance may be, as Abbate puts it, “a huge phenomenal explosion” (Abbate 2004, 533). In cases like these, all that the performers have to do in order to achieve such an effect is to execute the performed work accurately—for example, because the work’s orchestration guarantees that any performance will have such powerful qualities. But in other cases, the aesthetic qualities of a performance are due to the performers and are not simply borrowed from the work performed. Think of the suaveness of the singer’s voice, the graceful shaping of a phrase. These qualities are part of the (performative) interpretation of the work. Is it not in virtue of qualities belonging to a performance in its own right, rather than qualities already present in the work performed, that we are entitled to think of the performance as a work of art? Maybe so. But on David Davies’s account, not even performances possessing aesthetic qualities in their own right would qualify as works of art in the broad sense if those aesthetic qualities were not structured in relation to higher thematic properties. And, it might be argued, when such a thematic structuring is evident in the performance of a work, it will be because it derives from the thematic structuring of the work performed; it will not belong to the performance in its own right. I think two points should be made in answer to this line of argument. The first is that there are generic qualities of all musical performances which can be regarded as the artistic point of musical performances, including performances of a pre-existing work. The point is made by Abbate: Because instrumental virtuosity or operatic singing, like magic itself, can appear to be the accomplishment of the impossible, performers at that level appear superhuman . . . Yet musical performance challenges notions of autonomy by staging the performer’s servitude, even automatism, and upends assumptions about human subjectivity by invoking mechanism: human bodies wired to notational prescriptions.  (Abbate 2004, 508)

The second point is that the analogy of work-performance with curatorship or ­film-projection is a misleading one. Performers differ from curators and projectionists in that they embody the material they are presenting. When Maria Callas sings the title role in Norma, it is not only Bellini’s music that expresses the character’s conflicting emotions; Callas’s incarnation of the role of Norma also does so, and with its own unique artistry. Its qualities are not just those already present in Bellini’s tragic heroine. Thus, critic Alan Blyth writes of her 1952 Covent Garden recording of the opera: The scene, “Dormono entrambi!”, where Norma contemplates murdering her children is quite searing, the inner compulsion of “Teneri figli,” quite heart-rending. At the other end of the vocal spectrum she can utter the single word “Giura!” with such conviction as to cow anyone in sight. Then in the final scene her performance takes on a sense of transfiguration, her voice gaining a visionary quality as Norma prepares for death to atone for her sin.  (Blyth 2003)

476   Paul Thom In addition, many live performances of musical works convey a sense of participating in an act of creation, in a way similar to that we mentioned earlier in connection with Keith Jarrett’s improvisation. I recently attended a Martha Argerich performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto which conveyed her intense concentration on the shaping of every phrase so vividly that it seemed as if one were in the presence of spontaneous artistic creation. Critic Edward Greenfield conveys eloquently the qualities of an earlier Argerich performance of the same concerto (recorded with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Nikolaus Harnoncourt): In her live recording Martha Argerich gives a vividly compelling, characteristically volatile reading of the Schumann Concerto, at once poetic and full of fancy, not to say powerful and often wildly individual. The performance, recorded live in July 1992, culminates in an account of the finale so daring one wants to cheer at the end. (Greenfield 1995)

Volatility, poetry, fancy, power, wild individuality, and daring—these are qualities that lift a performance from the level of the purely aesthetic to the level of art, where the higher qualities of a human life find musical expression. David Davies’s account of works of art provides a useful basis on which a musical performance can be judged to be a work of art. By that measure, many musical performances do not strive for artistic status: consider the sounding of the Reveille in its normal purely functional occurrence. On the other hand, many musical performances do strive to be works of art and succeed in that aim. This is true both of improvisations and of work-performances. In certain cases of both types, the performance in its own right exhibits a hierarchical artistic structure in which thematic elements are ultimately based on immediately perceptible aesthetic qualities. In other cases, this type of structure in the performance is derived from an analogous structure in the performed work, via the performers’ ability to embody the relevant qualities.

Impediments to Art Before leaving the topic of musical performance as art, let us briefly note that there are some ways of performing music that are antithetical to the nature of art. At the beginning I mentioned two senses of the word “perform” in the Oxford English Dictionary: essentially, to carry out or to execute an action or a task; and to present something (usually a form of entertainment) to an audience. Under the heading “performance,” however, the Oxford English Dictionary also recognizes another relevant sense, whereby a performance is “a display of anger or exaggerated behaviour; a fuss, a scene.” The dictionary shows this sense as closely linked to the sense of “performing a play, piece of music, ceremony.” David Davies recognizes this sense when he refers to a

Performance   477 child’s tantrum as “quite a performance” (D. Davies 2011, 5). Falling under this sense is the idea of performance as showmanship. This sense is useful in considering those musical performances where the gestures that were part of conveying the music to the audience are taken to an excessive point, or where the performers seek to make themselves the audience’s principal object of attention. Aristotle was aware of this phenomenon when he criticized actors by saying “Assuming that [the spectators] will not react unless [each actor] adds something himself, they use a lot of movement, like inferior oboe-players who whirl about if they have to represent a discus” (Aristotle  1987, 1461b30). Characteristically, Aristotle tries to understand this sort of performance as rational. The extravagant performers have a reason for behaving as they do: they judge that if they do not do so—if they remain with the normal parameters of performance—the spectators will not react. Nonetheless, he regards such performances as “inferior.” The practices Aristotle describes are still current. Here is critic Tim Ashley’s account of a 2015 London performance by the pianist Lang Lang: The best of it was perversely exciting, but lurching tempo changes threatened to pull the first movement out of shape, and dynamics were extreme to the point of exaggeration in the adagio. There were plenty of characteristic grand gestures and ecstatic glances towards the audience in moments of rapt contemplation. Playing a passage for the right hand alone, at one point, he placed his left hand over his heart and gazed heavenwards.  (Ashley 2015)

If, following Aristotle’s example, we try to make rational sense of such antics, we might suppose that the pianist thought that the audience was not up to following the music without the help of such exaggerated gestures. At the same time, it is clear that the critic believed that at least some members of the audience—himself included—were perfectly capable of following the music without such assistance. From that point of view, we could say that the pianist’s style of projecting the music was based on an erroneous belief. There is another way of making sense of performances like this. The performance happens to have been the performance of a musical work, but it need not have been. The performer was not so much making it easier for the audience to grasp the performance’s content, as substituting something else for that content. This substitute object of attention was the performer himself. This is the way the critic Michael Church (2015) saw Lang Lang’s performance: “There never was any problem with his technique, and there isn’t now, but the implicit message of his playing in the first movement was ‘look at me’.” Understood in this way, a performance like this is antithetical to the aim of raising performance to the level of a work of art. The audience is not invited to go beyond what is immediately perceptible in search of higher order thematic qualities; on the contrary, it is meant to be dazzled by what immediately strikes the senses.

478   Paul Thom

Performance of a Musical Work So far, we have looked at musical performance as execution, as presentation, and as art, focusing mainly on the improvisation of music. We now turn to the performance of musical works. In his influential book Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration, Stephen Davies outlines three conditions which must be met if a musical work is to be performed: (1) there must be (a suitable degree of) matching between the performance and the work; (2) the performers must intend to follow (most of) the instructions specifying the work in question (though they need know neither what work that is nor who composed it); (3) there must be a robust causal chain from the performance to the work's creation, so that the matching achieved is systematically responsive to the composer's work-determinative decisions.  (S. Davies 2001, 182)

Davies then explains what he means by a suitable degree of matching. He recognizes that ideally the performance of a given musical work accurately matches everything the work determinatively prescribes, but that common usage accepts cases falling short of this ideal “provided that the higher semantic structures remain sufficiently intact that they can be recognized by listeners . . . possessed of the kind of background knowledge that places them to identify works of the relevant kind” (S. Davies 2001, 152, 161). These higher structures include work-identifying features such as “themes and their development . . . along with their expressive or referential qualities” (158). By a robust causal chain Davies means “an unbroken chain of connections that leads from the sounds made to the performer's actions and intentions, from those to the notation in front of her, and from that via accurate copying processes to the score written by the composer” such that if the antecedents in the chain had been different, there would have been a different outcome (S. Davies 2001, 166–167, 172). A performance of a given work not only includes the work’s identifying features and issues from the performers’ intentions, but also includes the work’s identifying features because of the performers’ intentions. Moreover, the performance of a musical work is causally linked, according to Davies, not only with the performers’ intentions but also with the composer’s activity in creating the work. Performances of a musical work, while making that work recognizable, may still be less than ideal because they include wrong notes or memory lapses. But all performances of a musical work, on Stephen Davies’s account, at least make the work recognizable and at best execute all its determinative directions to perfection. This account makes no reference to audience-directedness; it is therefore an account of the execution of a musical work. Davies’s account differs on many points from the one developed by Stan Godlovitch— an account which Davies characterizes as normative, rather than aiming to state a necessary and sufficient condition for performance. As Davies writes:

Performance   479 Godlovitch’s criteria are as follows: only one work is performed at a time; its proper sequence is respected, as is the indicated rate of delivery; the performance is continuous, without unjustified breaks; performers comply with their appropriate roles (and do not, for example, swap parts midway through). Also, the audience is in a position to receive the entire performance in its detail.  (S. Davies 2001, 186–187)

The account imputed by Davies to Godlovitch requires that the performance be ­audience-directed but also imposes other conditions regarding the sequence of ­movements, the rate of delivery, the continuity of the performance, and the roles of the individual performers—conditions which are absent from my account. So my interest here is wider than Godlovitch’s. At the same time, my interest is narrower than Stephen Davies’s: I am interested in performances of musical works in the full sense, involving both execution and audience-directedness. Two questions remain. First, what is the difference at the level of performance between the execution of a musical work and that of a jazz improvisation? Second, what is involved in the performance of a musical work in the full sense, encompassing both execution and presentation? Here is one approach to the first question. A musical work specifies a highly-detailed performance plan in a form that is available to prospective performers; and a performance of the work follows the performance plan, more or less. But a jazz improvisation has no performance plan of comparable detail—at least, not one to which it faithfully adheres throughout its course. In the case of musical works, the performers’ intention to execute the work’s identifying features is, so to speak, reaffirmed in the course of the performance after any deviations from it. The execution of a performance plan can be represented schematically as in Figure 23.3. The execution does not always match the targets, but even when there is a mismatch between execution and target the performer always tries to revert to the performance plan. If the target of a given phase is missed (as in phases AB and CD), the execution of the next phase returns to the fixed path. The path followed by the execution is continuous up until point D, when it jumps abruptly to a different point before setting off towards its final target t4. In this example there is continuity in the performance plan, but not in the execution (see point D). We can imagine that the performer suddenly realizes how the performance plan continues at point D and abruptly attempts to execute t3 but slightly overshoots the mark. A performer’s persistent return to the performance plan may also have a moral dimension, as evident in Carolyn Abbate’s account of an incident in the Canadian tenor Ben Heppner’s performance of the role of Walther in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Ben Heppner lost his voice spectacularly. This became evident when he cracked on the high Gs and As while singing the first strophe in the first verse in the preliminary version of the Prize Song, and at that point I made a quick calculation that he

480   Paul Thom Performance of a work: choices and execution

e3 t1

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B

Figure 23.3  Execution of a plan. A fixed path is set at the outset, implying targets at each phase.

had five more strophes in two full verses in the preliminary version, and nine strophes in three verses in the final version in the last scene, in short lots more high Gs and As not even counting the act 3 quintet. This was when my eyes closed in despair. But I told myself to open my eyes and pay attention because what we were witnessing was extraordinary raw courage and sangfroid. Heppner would go on singing knowing what lay ahead.  (Abbate 2004, 535)

Now to the question of the presentation of the performance of a musical work. This involves anything that is done by way of projecting the work, or its execution, or anything else about the performance, to the intended audience. As previously mentioned, features potentially included in the presentation include high-level features of the work, details of the execution, and the performers’ personal attributes or mannerisms. The presentation may be influenced by the anticipated character of the audience—whether it is a musicology conference, the general public, or an audience of hearing-impaired persons. Possible motivations for drawing attention to some features rather than others include a desire to reveal what the work contains, a desire to reveal what is singular to this particular performance, a desire to please, or simply a desire to show off. Godlovitch remarks that improvisation and “score-guided playing” do not stand in radically different relations to the music made (Godlovitch  1998, 83). The account I have sketched above agrees with this observation. Nonetheless, performances of a musical work and jazz improvisations are two different subspecies of a single species of performance, namely performance comprising a temporal succession of choices and their implementations, where subsequent choices are made in the light of the way earlier choices have been implemented. The difference between the two subspecies is that in a jazz improvisation, the unsuccessful implementation of an earlier choice leads to new choices that are determined by that unsuccessful outcome, whereas in a

Performance   481 work-­performance, the unsuccessful implementation of an earlier choice leads to a reaffirmation of the general direction of previous choices. I do not regard either of these subspecies as having priority over the other. Stephen Davies, however, suggests the contrary. “Conveying musical pieces to listeners,” he says, “may be foundational—not because all music making is dedicated to it, but because a concern with music as such very frequently supposes an awareness that playings are of works” (S. Davies 2001, 188). To me it seems that the existence of musical works is not required as a foundation for the experience of either performers or listeners. Some of the interest that music making holds for practitioners and listeners alike is independent of whether a work is being performed. Both practitioners and listeners may have an interest in what Davies calls “music making simpliciter” (11); that is, with improvisatory performance or with the purely performative aspect of performing a work.

Closing Reflections Philosophical thinking tends to be abstract. In the philosophy of music, this tendency can be countered by a consideration of real-life examples of musical performances. In the end any philosophical theory has to account for such examples, just as any theory at all is ultimately answerable to facts about particular phenomena of the relevant kinds. The writings of music critics, empirical scientists, and historians are useful sources of such examples; and so, the philosophy of music can benefit from engaging with these writings. Abstract philosophical theorizing about music can also be enriched by engaging with theorizing from other disciplines, especially musicology; the world of music is not owned by any one academic discipline. Moreover, philosophical thinking also has a tendency to idealize its subject matter. This tendency can be countered by a consideration of the ways in which musical performances can go wrong, just as a full understanding of any practice requires an understanding of how it can go wrong. So, I think that the philosophy of musical performance does well to include an engagement with other disciplines that take music as their subject—including theoretical and historical musicology, music criticism, and scientific studies—as well as a consideration of the good and bad aspects of the practice of music-making.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring): 505–536. Alperson, Philip. 1984. “On Musical Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 1 (Autumn): 17–29. Aristotle. 1987. Poetics. Translated by Richard Janko. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

482   Paul Thom Ashley, Tim. 2015. “Fromidable Dexterity in a Bizarrely Uneven Concert.” The Guardian. November 27, 2015. Accessed November 21, 2018. www.theguardian.com/music/2015/ nov/27/philharmonia-salonen-review-lang-lang-grieg-royal-festival-hall-london. Blyth, Alan. 2003. “Bellini Norma.” Gramophone. December 2003. Accessed November 21, 2018. www.gramophone.co.uk/review/bellini-norma-12. Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Linda L. McAlister. Translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda McAlister. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brown, Lee B. 2000. “ ‘Feeling My Way’: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes—A Plea for Imperfection.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 113–123. Church, Michael. 2015. “Lang Comes Across as an Over-assertive Party Guest.” The Independent. December 2, 2015. Accessed November 21, 2018. www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/langphilharmoniasalonen-royal-festival-hall-reviewlang-lang-comes-across-as-an-over-assertive-party-a6757616.html. Cook, Nicholas, and Richard Pettengill, eds. 2013. Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Davies, David. 2011. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna. 2008. “A Jazz Night to Remember.” Wall Street Journal. October 11, 2008. Accessed November 21, 2018. www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367103134923957. Gioia, Ted. 1988. The Imperfect Art—Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Godlovitch, Stan. 1998. Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study. London: Routledge. Goertzen, Valerie Woodring. 1996. “By Way of Introduction: Preluding by 18th- and Early 19th-Century Pianists.” Journal of Musicology 14, no. 3 (Summer): 299–337. Greenfield, Edward. 1995. “Schumann Piano and Violin Concertos.” Gramophone. January 1995. Accessed November 21, 2018. www.gramophone.co.uk/review/schumann-pianoviolin-concertos. McPherson, Gary  E. 1996. “Five Aspects of Musical Performance and Their Correlates.” In “The 15th International Society for Music Education: ISME Research Seminar,” edited by Clifford K. Madsen, special issue, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 127 (Winter): 115–121. Sparshott, Francis. 1982. The Theory of the Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thom, Paul. 1993. For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Tsay, Chia-Jung. 2013. “Sight Over Sound in the Judgment of Music Performance.” PNAS 110 (36): 14580–14585.

chapter 24

Listen i ng Marcel Cobussen

Listening as a Multisensorial Experience 7:15 a.m. While I am peeling fruit and preparing sandwiches for my two kids, my oldest one—just turned eleven—turns on her favourite radio station. Within a second, the familiar sounds of a weekday morning—the boiling of the water, the singing and yelling of my youngest daughter in the bathroom, a contractor sinking piles, cars leaving our relatively quiet neighbourhood, etc.—are drowned out by the sounds of synthesizers, drums, and the slightly hoarse and childish voice of Ellie Goulding singing “Burn.” It’s one of my kid’s favourites, so she increases the volume and sings along as she turns the living room into a dance floor. “Burn” is followed by “Marrakesh Express” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash: obviously less popular with a girl on the verge of adulthood, the volume is quickly lowered. During breakfast the radio stays on; some songs pass by unnoticed, others can count on a (temporary) consenting humming or rhythmical tapping on the table. When breakfast is over and the kids have left for school, I turn the radio off, letting “silence” enter the house again. What does it mean to listen? What does it mean to listen to music?1 These are immense questions. How can one approach them? Without intending to postpone or circumvent the topic at hand, let’s start with an ostensible detour: instead of immediately addressing the ear, I will pay attention to the eye and the body. One of the first popular music theatre productions in The Netherlands had the title Music (Also) to Watch. In an essay I wrote in 1996 for a Dutch weekly magazine I heavily criticized both the title and the production as a typical example of a culture dominated by the visual where even the core of our cultural aural practice—music listening—was not protected against what I then called “the terror of the eye.” I also noticed this visual dominance in the extreme popularity of music videos, in which the attention of the consumer was most of the time more focused on the images than on the music (Cobussen 1996).

484   Marcel Cobussen Some twenty years later, the time has come to modify this well-intentioned effort to protect our auditory culture against (even more) subordination. Although I am still interested in the way human beings relate aurally to their environment and what such an aural orientation implies ontologically and epistemologically, I have come to think of music as involving more than just our ears: experiencing music is, can, or should be multisensorial. Two examples of this should suffice. First, I sometimes attend performances of experimental improvised music that are sonically not very interesting. However, this doesn’t imply a wasted evening: the ways the musicians interact among themselves, with the audience, the venue, their instruments, technology, a musical and cultural context, etc.—in other words, the tactile, visual, emotional, social, and intellectual components of the performance—can be extremely rewarding. Sometimes I listen with my eyes more than with my ears. At other times, the body becomes the primary site of listening. For example, Olivia Lucas (2014) describes the sensation of “becom[ing] aware of my body as an impressive aural-tactile organ” as the drone doom metal band Sunn O))) weave a timbral tapestry of bass (60–300 Hz) and sub-bass (20–60 Hz) frequencies that vibrate through her. Although she notes that “in the sub-bass range, the hearing of the average adult is weak,” given that Sunn O))) plays at a volume of about 120 dB(A) (“quite near the threshold of pain”), the sound “manifests as a knocking on my sternum, and . . . buzzes in my sinus cavity.” One can touch and be touched by the sounds; the body becomes a total aural-tactile organ. Or, as Salomé Voegelin describes her engagement with noise music: “I cannot even hear myself but am immersed in a sonic subjectivity, more felt than heard” (Voegelin 2010, 67; my emphasis).2 In other words, one can touch and be touched by sound. In these instances, the listener is attacked, stunned, and physically pinned down by the music rather than being allowed to adopt an attitude of contemplative attention. Thus, listening includes being aware of one’s own body “as sensitive skin, as vibrating sympathetic vessel” (LaBelle 2006, 180).3 So, often, listening to music becomes a multisensorial event involving our eyes and bodies in addition to our ears. In the late 1970s, psychologist Lawrence Marks contended in The Unity of the Senses (1978) that the entire sensorium interconnects and works in tandem to inform our spatio-temporal perceptions.4 Adapting this general idea to music leads to the question of whether a simple audio CD can do justice to musical perception, as any strictly sonic engagement is by definition void of visual and tactile aspects. However, my argument takes a different course, intervening in a (still) prominent discussion within the domains of musicology and music psychology about the opposition of distracted and attentive listening, wherein the former often alludes to the interference of visual, physical, emotional, or psychological influences and the latter refers to concentrated aural attention. The main questions that will haunt us here are whether it is still valid to make a clear distinction between these two ways of listening and whether it is possible to subsume specific listening attitudes under one or the other category: are dancing to the radio or listening over headphones while commuting distracted or attentive forms of listening? Can someone be immersed in music while ostensibly distracted at the same time? Is background music—if such a thing exists at all—a

Listening   485 priori activating less concentrated ways of listening? Conversely, are we always engaging in attentive listening while attending live concerts? In reflecting on these questions, I present various regimes of listening, covering diverse ways of engaging with music, events wherein music addresses us, and moments in which it intervenes in our daily lives, thereby being led by the idea that over the past decades thinking about listening has also meant embracing an awareness of the material, political, and social contexts of listening as well as the auditory environments in which our listening is embedded. In combining this holistic approach to listening with the proposal that listening is a multisensorial activity unrestricted by the capacities of the ear, the alleged opposition between distracted and attentive listening will be deconstructed, sometimes implicitly but always unequivocally.5 However, this deconstruction is not a conscious act of an individual or collective subject. As Jacques Derrida states: “Decontruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject” (Derrida 1988, 4). In other words, the alleged opposition deconstructs itself.

From Attentive to Distracted Listening 8:30 a.m. I leave the house to catch the train to the university, a forty-minute trip. Before leaving, I grab my earbuds from my desk. I can commute without music—sometimes I prefer the silence of the compartment, the sounds of the train, or even the murmur of my fellow passengers, sometimes I cannot concentrate on my reading with music on—but at times I just need to distract myself from the environment, to lock myself up in my own “sound bubble,” either because I’m tired or because I don’t want to be disturbed by the sounds and noises around me. When I do play music in these conditions, it is usually (alternative) pop or (progressive) rock rather than my favourite genres of contemporary classical, improvised, or experimental electronic music. Perhaps they require too much attention, too much concentration when commuting inevitably implies that one pays attention to the environment every now and then, if only for the regular announcements (usually about delays). In fact, one is almost constantly interacting with one’s environment: for example, turning the volume down and back up again or taking out at least one earbud when the ticket collector passes by. What does it mean to listen to music? What does it mean to listen to music in the second decade of the twenty-first century? First, the music most frequently listened to is pop music, although its ever-increasing diversification makes it harder to define genre boundaries.6 Second, we hear music mostly through electronic devices, be they sophisticated hi-fi systems or mobile phones with (or without!) cheap earbuds.7 This implies that listeners have some control of their sonic environment: they can, for example, determine the volume, order, and listening location for music. Third, sociological reports and psychological research tell us that most concentrated listening today doesn’t take place in concert halls, where people become annoyed by the noises or even

486   Marcel Cobussen the mere presence of others, but rather during car journeys, especially (of course) when the driver is the sole occupant (Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi 2001; Bull 2000; Blackburn, cited in Hindley 2007; Bijsterveld et al. 2014). Fourth, listening to music is not (anymore) what (traditional) discourses surrounding music have taken for granted for so long, namely attentive or concentrated listening. Especially so-called structural listening, which requires an almost exclusive focus on the intrinsic components and logic of music, is rooted in specific cultural predilections. In Ways of Listening Eric Clarke comes to more or less the same conclusion when he writes that in the concert music of the West listening has become autonomous—attending to the qualities and properties of sounds in themselves and their purely sonorous relations with one another—and in large part divorced from overt action such as dancing, worship, coordinated working, persuasion, emotional catharsis, marching, foot-tapping, etc. (Clarke  2005, 38). Moreover, as Marta Garcia Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi make clear in their introduction to Ubiquitous Musics, “the whole enterprise of musicology can be considered a justification of the value of those canonized musical works and of the attentional frame that has been built around them” (Garcia Quiñones, Kassabian, and Boschi 2013, 3; my emphasis). These authors, along with many others, reject the claim that this particular listening regime is the only or most legitimate way to really experience music. Doing something while listening to music—note that this phrasing implies that the act of listening is not considered doing something, an assumption which might be contested—is no longer or not always regarded as a betrayal as it may disclose unexpected, rich, and multisensorial experiences. As such, it deserves much more attention in scholarly discourses around music. Today the imperative “you have to listen” seems to have been replaced by “the right that was given to me to lend an ear” (Szendy  2008, 1). In “Functions of Music in Everyday Life,” a report of a modest experiment on listening attitudes, John A. Sloboda, Susan A. O’Neill, and Antonia Ivaldi found that at any randomly sampled moment between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. there was a roughly 50 per-cent likelihood that the participants would have heard music in the preceding two hours, but only a 2 per-cent chance that music was the main focus of their attention. Rather than having the attentive and respectful listening attitude of the stereotypical true music-lover, participants were performing some activity with music as accompaniment, with personal maintenance (washing, eating, cooking, getting dressed, shopping), travel (car, public transport, biking), and leisure activities (games, sports, socializing, eating out) being the most common of these (Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi 2001; Clarke 2005, 144). Sloboda and his colleagues come to the conclusion that people listen to music most often in a rather instrumental manner, that is, as a means to mood enhancement or mood change, as a stimulus for exercise, as a social facilitator, or as sound to fill otherwise awkward silences. However, the observation that people are not listening consciously or attentively does not mean that music does not shape reality and experiences of that reality (Voegelin 2010, 11). Music is used to increase arousal, present-mindedness, and concentration (or conversely, distraction), and thus influences the way one perceives the environment; it

Listening   487 s­ ignificantly determines the atmosphere of a place. This furthermore implies that the more someone can exercise control over the music being heard the better its instrumental function works. People want to be—and indeed have become, partly as a result of technological developments—their own disc jockeys.8 It is here that an interesting paradox, tension, or reversal that deconstructs the alleged opposition between distracted and attentive listening seems to emerge.9 A critical questioning of this opposition can be found in Lawrence Kramer’s argument challenging submissive listening—a term more or less interchangeable with attentive listening—as an institutional norm: Is my not listening that way really a deviation? Am I failing to experience the music when I vary my attention level or simply let it fluctuate, when I interrupt a sound recording to replay a movement or a passage, when I find myself enthralled by a fragment of a piece that I hear on my car radio without losing concentration on the road, or when I intermittently accompany my listening by singing under my breath or silently verbalizing commentary on what I hear? . . . These questions all point to a mode of musical experience .  .  . that cannot be regulated by unitary ideals or norms.  (Kramer 1995, 65)

Kramer’s experience highlights the fact that undermining and relinquishing of the dominance of concentrated or attentive listening in musical discourse by replacing it with attention to more distracted or instrumental regimes of listening does not lead to the ostensibly logical consequence that music becomes less important or less prominent. On the contrary, not only are we more and more exposed to music, not only is music regulating and accompanying our daily activities, not only does music affect our state of mind, but there also seems to be an increasing awareness of the music we want to hear in different situations and at different times. Add to this the growing number of situations in which we can have some sort of control over the music we listen to—Spotify or iTunes offering us almost any music we like to hear, iPods and mobile phones making music available at any time and almost any place—and the observation might be made that so-called distracted listening is in fact not very distracted: although we might not listen attentively in every situation, we are quick to change musical settings when they don’t fit with our current desires, mood, preferences, condition, state, activities, etc. Listening has become an act of mastery, imposing a self-selected order on a seemingly chaotic world. The most important question relating to this desire to control our sonic environment has become “to shuffle or not to shuffle?” This brings me to the proposition that in various regimes of listening to music we are both distracted and attentive at the same time, consciously as well as un- or subconsciously experiencing it. This supposition also challenges the boundary between listening and hearing: whereas hearing is usually thought of in physiological terms, always occurring (albeit mostly subconsciously), listening is regarded as a psychological phenomenon, an interpretative action in order to understand and potentially make meaning out of the sound waves (see Barthes  1991, 245). Jean-Luc Nancy echoes Barthes,

488   Marcel Cobussen saying “if ‘to hear’ is to understand the sense . . . to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning” (Nancy 2007, 6). However, as Anahid Kassabian argues in Ubiquitous Listening, “all listening is importantly physiological, and . . . many kinds of listening take place over a wide range of degrees or kinds of consciousness and attention” (Kassabian 2013, xxi–xxii). Many listening regimes seem to occur in a space between distraction and attention, between consciousness and subconsciousness, between the physiological and meaningful, or shifting from one to the other and back again, as my commuting example also demonstrates.

Music Co-constitutes the Listening Subject 10:00 a.m. My first class today: “What is Music?” As it is already the ninth meeting, the students know the beginning: “Batman” by John Zorn’s band Naked City. Today the tune sonically marks the transition from pre-class conversations to a thorough discussion of Edward Cone’s ideas about music and silence, alternating with concentrated listenings to music by Chopin, Schoenberg, and Cage. The ending of the class is delineated too: Frank Zappa’s “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” from the album of the same name. I realize that my use of Zorn’s and Zappa’s music can be compared to how Cone thinks about silence: just as, according to Cone, music is framed by silences at the beginning and at the end, my class is framed by two musics without it being overtly clear whether they are already part of the session or not (yet). At first, the students are overwhelmed, perhaps even shocked by Zorn’s eclectic and dynamic music and Zappa’s noise, which lasts almost two minutes. They are trying to make sense of it, trying to relate to it, and we discuss the selection of this music in relation to the class’s topic: “Is this music?” and “How does framing work?” What does it mean to listen (to music)? Where are we when we listen to music? Whether distracted or attentive, listening establishes a relationship between subject and object: there is no place where the listener is not simultaneous with the heard. The subject is in the sound, surrounded by it—they share a space (Voegelin 2010; Sloterdijk 1995). On the one hand, a subject produces the sounding object from its particular position of listening (Voegelin 2010, 14); on the other hand, by invading the subject’s body, sound constitutes the body and gives access to a notion of self; the subject thus emerges as subject from the resonant, listening body (Gritten 2014, 212; cf. Nancy 2007, 12). This relationship is why Nancy (2007, 10) can state that the sonorous has to do with participation, sharing, and contagion, while Voegelin maintains that listening is not a receptive mode but a method of exploration, “full of playful illusions, purposeful errors and contingent idiosyncrasies” (Voegelin 2010, 54). When we listen to music we are not (only) in a concert hall, a train, sitting on a sofa, or in a shopping mall: situated by the music, we enter a sonic world of possibilities, we are (within) sound.

Listening   489 However, how a subject constitutes the sounding object and vice versa also depends upon a context within which both participate and operate. To be precise, specific listening attitudes cannot be connected to distinct musical styles; musical styles or genres cannot a priori determine how one is supposed to listen to them. According to Garcia Quiñones, Kassabian, and Boschi (2013, 6–7), “works of classical music [can be] played as background music”.10 In the example given above, Zorn’s music might first be perceived in a distracted way— students are still entering the room and unpacking their books and computers—while gradually receiving more attention as they realize that the music is already part of the class. The music transforms them from young people into students, while in another setting the same music might constitute them as fans of alternative rock, as politically leftish, or as being interested in the New York Downtown Scene. In other words, music and listener do not have prearranged, fixed positions in a relationship; rather, they are contingent, negotiated, contested, and subject to political, social, economic, and aesthetic power.

From Distracted to Attentive Listening 12:30 p.m. My second class is called “Introduction to Auditory Culture.” Here, music is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of our sonic environment. Although we also discuss several texts about how humans relate to their milieus through hearing and listening, today’s class is mainly an exercise in “ear cleaning,” as R. Murray Schafer has formulated it. It is time for a soundwalk through the city, and the students are asked to describe some of the sounds they hear in acoustic, psychoacoustic, semantic, and aesthetic terms. We experience Cage’s famous statement at the beginning of his 1937 essay “The Future of Music: Credo”: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain” (Cage [1937] 1961 3) Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway was often annoyed with the soundscape of big cities; she was convinced that it was bad for her concentration, contemplation, and creativity. Woolf ’s main character expresses the concerns of many intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century about the increasing noise level in industrialized cities. Schopenhauer’s complaint about whip-cracking paralysing the brain and murdering thought is famous (Schopenhauer 2007, 77). Another German philosopher, Theodor Lessing, maintained that street noises narrowed and dimmed the intellectual functions (cited in Bijsterveld 2003, 166–167). For these and many other philosophers, listening almost exclusively meant listening to the voice of the inner self, not distracted by any other (real) sounds, often including musical ones.11 In general, making noise was considered uncivilized, primitive behaviour which needed to be controlled and suppressed. In that sense, Schopenhauer and Lessing’s intellectual attacks on noise pollution ran parallel with the gradual silencing of concert audiences over the course of the nineteenth century. Attentive listening, reinforced by darkening the concert space, among

490   Marcel Cobussen other tactics, became the norm, soon followed by a privileging of so-called structural listening that required a deep understanding of musical developments and the overall compositional organization. In the opening chapter of Theodor Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music, “Types of Musical Conduct,” this structural listening—silent, stationary, uninterrupted, ears glued to the musical structure and eyes closed—even becomes the only listening type demonstrating true respect to the music itself (Adorno [1962] 1988, 5; see also Clarke 2005, 136). According to Adorno, structural listening as a close focus on music’s formal components is most common among people with a proper musical training. He even states that only professional musicians can really achieve this listening state. I have already pointed out above how uncharacteristic this is of most people’s listening habits. Even Adorno has to admit that “quantitatively the type is probably scarcely worth noting” (Adorno [1962] 1988, 5), although the “good listener” and the “culture consumer”—types two and three in his hierarchically-ordered list of eight listener types—could also be said to listen to music’s formal developments, albeit alternating with more atomistic attention and concentration on performance techniques. Without downplaying this highly attentive form of listening, the question remains if this has ever been the dominant type of listening behavior through which people have engaged with music. In other words, can musicology and music theory legitimately present this kind of listening as (almost) the only proper way of dealing with music? In Everyday Music Listening, music psychologist Ruth Herbert writes: At any time, regardless of the context in which music is heard, I can find myself veering between “everyday” and “proper” modes of listening: whether at a live classical concert, at home, listening to music in a lecture or on the move, I might find myself “wallowing” in the sound, be exposed to unbidden imagery, narratives, associations and memories, notice myself analyzing aspects of the music, experiencing my surroundings slightly differently—or even forgetting the very presence of music. Notably, my awareness can fluctuate between these ways of listening to music in a single hearing.  (Herbert 2011, 1)

What Herbert makes clear is that attention is inevitably multi-distributed, which makes the binary opposition between special and everyday musical interactions irrelevant. In other words, just as associations, memories, and the awareness of elements of the external surroundings might be conceived as essential elements of sense-making during live concerts, so too a listener can be unexpectedly drawn into (musical) sounds that until then had been subject to distracted attention (Herbert 2011, 57; Clarke 2005, 136).12 In both cases there are fluctuations in attentional focus, shifting from intense perception to reduced awareness. Furthermore, listeners not only switch between perceiving musical and extra-musical sounds, they also blend together aural, visual, tactile, and other elements “to construct multisensory listening episodes” (Herbert  2011, 57). Combining several sensorial impressions in and through this multisensorial listening regime may lead to enriched experiences that an exclusive focus on the music’s internal developments might never be able to provide.

Listening   491

The Listening Body 5:00 p.m. Back in my hometown, I decide to go for a workout at the nearby gym. After the university and the train, I enter another sonic world. as Middle-of-the-Road (MOR) uptempo electronic dance beats blend with the dull sounds of falling dumbbells, the highpitched clicking of workout machines, and the groaning and panting of the serious fitness seekers. In an adjacent room, two voices of instructors periodically drown out Ariana Grande’s dance tune “Break Free,” encouraging the participants in a group cardio class to extend their physical and psychic boundaries. Although there is an occasional humming, tapping, or nodding along with the music, it mostly goes unnoticed; only “inappropriate” silences and slow tempo tunes are registered (and commented upon) by the exercisers, even though more than half of them are wearing their own audio devices, seemingly dissatisfied with the music choice of the gym’s management. Distracted and/or attentive listening—it seems as if listening to music is a purely mental activity. However, from the opening sentences of this chapter I have tried to emphasize the role the body plays in the perception, interpretation, and appreciation of music. The body is, perhaps above all, touched by musical sounds—literally, since the sound waves touch the eardrum and make it move. In other words, there is a physical force that traverses our act of listening, thwarting any uncluttered opposition between distracted and attentive listening. Music philosopher Vincent Meelberg (2009) calls this force a “sonic stroke,” an acoustic phenomenon that has an impact on the listener’s body or that induces affect before or without signification. Hence, a sonic stroke influences and determines the (physical) relation between music and listener; it creates an affect, understood here as the ability of one entity to impact another from a distance. In other words, we—that is, our bodies—are able to register and react to sounds before or outside of a cognitive appropriation that aims to recognize, categorize, frame, or analyse them. “What is it to be infected by sound? How are bodies affected by rhythms, frequencies, and intensities before their intensity is transduced by regimes of signification and captured in the interiority of human emotions and cognition?” Steve Goodman poses these fundamental questions in his book Sonic Warfare (Goodman  2010, 132). Goodman finds examples of sonic interventions into man’s affective sensorium in infra- or ultrasounds, Muzak or ambient music, and sonic branding. Meelberg’s sonic strokes should therefore not be understood solely as noisy or conspicuous interruptions; perhaps they are more frequently, but less conspicuously, found in today’s omnipresent musical wallpaper. Goodman’s examples suggest that the grey zone between consciousness and unconsciousness is the place where many of our musical experiences begin.13 If that is the case, it is necessary to rethink the idea of musical wallpaper associated with Muzak, background music, Tafelmusik, or ambient music. As Goodman notices, these musics can quite easily shift from background to foreground and back again, thereby undermining this distinction. However, and this is an important addition, this is not primarily a feature of these genres but rather points to a shift in regimes of listening (Goodman 2010, 143).

492   Marcel Cobussen Here I would like to draw a connection between Goodman’s reflections and Brandon LaBelle’s work on Muzak in shopping malls in Acoustic Territories (2010). Usually music in these locations is analysed in terms of how it immerses customers in a sonic environment that influences consumer behaviour; the music should not be actively registered, but functions as a pleasurable background, acoustically filling up a space that might otherwise consist mainly of (unwanted) noises. This surround sound culture both disciplines and controls consumers’ bodies and minds—regulating their flow and spending—for the most part on a sub- or preconscious level. As Barry Truax writes in Acoustic Communication, Muzak “imposes its character on an environment because of its ability to dominate, both acoustically and psychologically” (Truax 2001, 134–135). The auditory dominance of this music seems to force the consumer-listener into an attitude of distracted listening: although determining the (sonic) atmosphere and influencing the customers’ behaviour, it is not meant to be attentively listened to. LaBelle, however, argues against this rather totalizing idea: “The [sonic] script of the mall is also prone to slippages” (LaBelle 2010, 180). The relational frame in which listening to Muzak situates us, a frame usually defined by distraction and consumerism, is always already supplemented and displaced by other experiences, from ignoring the music altogether to listening consciously and attentively, sometimes even resulting in singing along. Advertising jingles, sound logos, and ringtones might unconsciously enter our bodies as sonic strokes but they can easily attract our attention and start dominating our sensorial perception: “the ear veers and slips, focuses and drifts” (184), pushing the listener-visitor into different levels of attention. “[T]he undoing of the strict distinction of figure and ground, back to fore, aims for a distracted subjectivity that might productively find new points of contact and alternative narrative within scripted space” (198). My point here is twofold. First, terms such as sonic wallpaper and distracted listening are misleading, as the presence and perception of music in contexts where attention is divided between various activities or stimuli is not necessarily superficial. Although at times barely perceived, music has the capacity to mediate, focus, colour, and integrate aspects of experience. Second, people may experience the same intense involvement with music in a shopping mall as they do while listening to music in a concert hall (Herbert 2011, 19). So-called background music is capable of entraining processes of mind and body on subconscious levels; moreover, the mere framing of music as background does not necessarily mean that it is passively perceived.

Immersion and Aesthetic Listening 8:30 p.m. I’m attending a concert of one of my PhD students, the Chilean composer and guitarist Miguelángel Clerc Parada. When I enter the concert hall, the musicians—a small chamber ensemble consisting of some twelve people—are already playing. It sounds like a strange mix between tuning their instruments, improvising, and polymetrical contemporary music, but which of these is most likely is indeterminable as the conductor is already in

Listening   493 front of the musicians, yet standing motionless. They play on the verge of audibility so that the musical sounds blend with the voices of the still-conversing audience and the scraping of chairs. Gradually the playing volume increases, and the audience becomes aware that the piece has already started; they settle into stillness and focus on what is happening on stage. What does it mean to listen to music?14 The question can be posed again and again, each time leading to new reflections, considerations, explorations, theories, and texts. Listening, listening to music, knows many manifestations, inflections, (dis)organizations—in short, many regimes. Often, however, listening to music is regarded as an act of becoming immersed, a condition wherein the listener is totally enveloped, absorbed, and enmeshed in a musical world in which the boundaries between self and environment dissolve. This world of musical sounds is in a sense a “virtual” world, a special event that is clearly demarcated and separated from all other (“non-musical”) sounds (Dyson 2009, 1–15). In contrast, the piece described above lacks certain elements that alert listeners to the fact that they are hearing music, for example a discrete beginning and a clear separation between musical and non-musical sounds. Listeners may become confused: to what are they listening? To what should they listen? Which sounds belong to the piece and which don’t? Should they be silent and attentive, or are they still allowed to focus their attention elsewhere, on the conversation they were having, on finding a seat, on the atmosphere of the hall? In other words, what means does this performance invoke in order to evoke a specific listening strategy? Perhaps Clerc Parada is playing with different listening regimes by requiring an ongoing gestalt switch from background to foreground sounds, from musical to non-musical sounds, from conversations to music, and from multisensorial experience to so-called pure listening. Perhaps this piece grants the listener opportunity to develop nomadic abilities of attention, as it permits and encourages giving attention to several simultaneous occurrences. Perhaps it encourages a type of listening that Joanna Demers calls “aesthetic rather than musical,” a kind of listening that includes “the experience of appreciating the characteristics of nonmusical sound as aesthetic objects” (Demers 2010, 151–152). Attending this performance, listeners can at one moment be aware of the people, clothing, furniture, coughing, shuffling, air conditioning, and lighting of a performance venue, while at another instant be completely engaged with the musical events. Attention will always fluctuate, not only shifting from one external stimulus to another, but also from external to internal focus as stimuli appeal to emotions, imagination, associations, and memories. Through this work Clerc Parada tries to rethink conventional ideas about listeners being immersed. Whereas immersion is usually understood as a state of being enveloped and transformed by a virtual environment or simulated space Clerc Parada assumes a non-dialectical relation between the virtual (music) and the real (the sonic environment). Immersion becomes a state of continuous transition in which different experiential layers interact simultaneously; it should be apperceived as experiencing multiple realities at the same time, rather than operating separately from reality. Unlike Demers, Clerc Parada does not want to disconnect aesthetic experiences from a perception of

494   Marcel Cobussen reality. Instead, in and through his artistic work he argues that Demers’s “aesthetic listening” (ostensibly quite close to Pierre Schaeffer’s [1966, 270–272] notion of “reduced listening,” that is, listening with the intention of focusing on the qualities of the sounds themselves) and Adorno’s “structural listening,” should be replaced by the listener’s attention towards multiple sonic fields, achieving a multi-directed sensory experience (Clerc Parada 2014, 166). “What place does a musical work assign to its listener? How does it require us to ­listen?” Peter Szendy asks. From the position of the listener the questions become: “[W]hat can I make of the music? What can I do with it? What can I do to it?” (Szendy 2008, 7–8). In this particular case, Clerc Parada’s musical world does not consist solely of the music’s own formal processes, but is far more heterogeneous and heteronomous; the music should not (necessarily) be perceived as autonomous. During the performance, attentive listening is alternated with, inhibited or transected by other forms of interaction between perceiver, music, and environment, moving between a blending of sensory impacts, attention to the (extra-musical) sonic environment (whether or not in combination with the music), and an inwardly focused experience where music triggers imaginative involvement (Herbert 2011, 187). If this essay contains the germs of a new theory of listening, of listening to music, of listening to sounds musically, such a theory must be a complex one that incorporates many actors, factors, and vectors, some of them often marginalized, ignored, or excluded. Listening involves the whole body: the visual, tactile, and even olfactory systems contribute in very specific ways to auditory experiences. Listening also involves the mind: it triggers our intellect as well as our emotions, imagination, and memories. Listening is influenced by the environment: material as well as immaterial contexts determine not only what we hear but also how we hear it. Various regimes of listening determine and are determined by social, political, ethical, economic, historical, and aesthetical issues in rather singular ways. And of course music “itself ” affects our listening attitude. It is this complexity which should form the basis of further analyses of listening practices.

(No) Conclusion 12:15 a.m. It is quiet (not silent of course). Everyone is asleep. I am in my study, rereading this text, listening to its voice, hearing its multivocality. Although the text has a kind of linear structure, it doesn’t lead the reader in one direction, it doesn’t arrive at clear and explicit conclusions. While writing, while reading, while listening, more and more voices can be perceived, more and more voices enter the stage, more and more voices support or contradict my own voice as well as those of many others. In the end, the question “What does it mean to listen to music?” cannot be answered due to its grammatical singularity. Not only can we distinguish between many regimes of listening alternating with each other, these analytically separable regimes might also be operating simultaneously. Distracted and attentive listening, passive and active listening—they are not (always) clear opposites, poles

Listening   495 on a line; often they are closely interwoven, the one on top of the other, the one in the other, the one with the other . . . They are continuous rather than categorical, constantly in transition rather than operating as stable counterparts. Simultaneously it needs to be stressed that music produces the listening, and listening produces the music, thereby suggesting that the field of perception can be regarded as a performative arena (LaBelle 2006, 101). Rain is ticking on my window, wind gusting, accompanying the dry clicks of my keystrokes. I listen to the complex polyrhythms of these sounds, to the many nuances of the wind’s white noise, and to some extremely high pitches—are they the external sounds of this room or a ringing in my ears? Can I reflect on my own listening while listening? Posing this question already seems to distract me immediately from my connection to the environmental sounds. Voices in my head, physiologically inaudible perhaps, do interfere with “real” listening. . . I am tired and turn off my computer. It is time to go to sleep. Am I listening while sleeping? And if so, how? Attentively? Distracted? Aesthetically? Subconsciously? Immersed? . . .

Notes 1. During the last decades, listening (to music) has become an important topic in sound ­studies, musicology, music philosophy, and music psychology; to present an exhaustive literature list here is simply not feasible. It is my intention in this text to bring insights from  these four fields together, first, to argue that our contact with musical and non-­ musical sounds is most often multisensorial, and second, to stand up for regimes of listening that often have been treated with some scorn. In order to do so, this text is framed by philosophical reflections on listening—for example by Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter ­Szendy—on the one hand, and psychological research—represented by John Sloboda and Ruth Herbert—on the other. 2. Of course, people frequenting dance events know that music is not only perceived through the ears but is a total bodily experience: the erotics of music consumption. Moving to music is perhaps the most natural way to relate to its rhythms, its meter, and its sounds. 3. I am not the first to draw attention to the bodily dimension of listening. In the first pages of Richard Leppert’s The Sight of Sound from 1993, one reads that “the body, simultaneously site, sight, and possessing sight, is an object of tactile sensation and an aural phenomenon. The body sounds; it is audible; it hears. Sound constitutes the atmosphere supporting life on and in the terrain of the body . . . Whatever else music is ‘about,’ it is inevitably about the body; music’s aural and visual presence constitutes both a relation to and a representation of the body” (Leppert 1993, xix–xx). 4. More than a decade before Marks, Pierre Schaeffer acknowledged the multimodality of our normal experiences of sound in his Traité des objets musicaux (1966), arguing that we often confuse an auditory sensation with visual perception further processed by contextual information. 5. Here I deviate from my previously exclusive attention to attentive listening, which I presented as a possible ethical relation one could have towards music (see Cobussen and Nielsen 2012, 29–33). 6. I mention the dominance of pop music here because listening to pop music is often assumed to imply multisensorial listening, while attentive listening is often associated with “classical” or “serious” music.

496   Marcel Cobussen 7. The ideal of attentive listening comes from a century in which “serious,” composed music could only be heard in concert halls. Discourses on music listening often still proceed from the premiss that what is listened to is live music. 8. This control reaches beyond the mere choice of music to which to listen. One can lower or raise the volume at will, take away bass or treble, add effects, jump from track to track or from fragment to fragment, mix two or more tunes, etc. As Peter Szendy remarks, “we listeners have become arrangers” (Szendy 2008, 71). 9. Although Derrida firmly argues against the reduction of deconstruction to a method or a set of rules that can be adapted to any text, theory, subject, or event, I detect a certain repeatable strategy: first, a (hierarchical and often implicit) opposition is traced (here: attentive versus distracted listening, with the first being the dominant term); second, the opposition is reversed (here: the attention to distracted listening at the expense of attentive listening); third, the opposition is dismantled (here: attentive listening is understood to always already include moments of distracted listening and vice versa). 10. It should be noted that even if musical genres cannot prescribe how they will be listened to, they can encourage certain ways of listening and discourage others. For example, one reason I do not listen to contemporary classical music while commuting, when I am dependent on earbuds, is that the music often changes in dynamic level. During quiet passages or silences, the compositions are, unintentionally and involuntarily, permeated by too much noise from the environment. 11. In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “Formerly, philosophers feared the senses . . . [They] saw the senses as trying to lure them aways from their world, from the cold kingdom of ‘ideas’, to a dangerous Southern isle where they feared their philosophers’ virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. ‘Wax in the ear’ was virtually a condition of philosophizing; a true philosopher didn’t listen to life insofar as life is music; he denied the music of life” (Nietzsche 2001, 237). Perhaps the most famous example of this sentiment can be found in the beginning of Plato’s Symposium when the flute player is sent away before the dialogue begins, as music could only negatively impact the voice of logos. In “Derrida’s Ohr,” the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han takes up Nietzsche’s idea by claiming that, paradoxically, philosophers often assume deafness in order to hear more. And this is not solved by Derrida’s attack on logocentrism. Although Derrida certainly blames the philosopher’s voice in constituting a subjective introspection, and although deconstruction “hears” and reveals other voices in texts, these are not phenomenal voices: they do not sound; they are not embodied; they have no real volume (Han 1997). 12. This phenomenon regularly occurs in my Auditory Culture class when students start paying attention to their sonic environment, sometimes perceiving it as if it were music. 13. There might be a similarity between Meelberg’s sonic strokes, Goodman’s affects, and what musicologist Erik Wallrup (2015) calls “attunemental listening.” Music first of all invades listeners in a primordial way, that is, the attunement comes over them, and they find themselves wrapped up in this sonic ambience before reflection, recollection, and analysis. 14. According to Cochrane (2009), one should distinguish between listening to music as part of a group and listening to music on one’s own. Whereas the latter implies far greater control over exactly what is listened to and how it is listened to, joint attention makes listeners aware of their mutual participation in a listening experience. Although the intrinsic emotional states might be different, group listening implies sharing an experience.

Listening   497

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor  W. [1962] 1988. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Translated by Ernst B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press. Barthes, Roland. 1991. “Listening.” In The Responsibility of Forms, translated by Richard Howard, 245–260. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bijsterveld, Karin, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs, and Gijs Mom. 2014. Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bijsterveld, Karin. 2003. “The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age: Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns, 1900–1940.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 165–189. Oxford: Berg. Bull, Michael. 2000. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Cage, John. [1937] 1961. “The Future of Music: Credo.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, 3–6. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Clarke, Eric. 2005. Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clerc Parada, Miguelángel. 2014. “(De)Composing Immersion.” PhD diss., Leiden University. Cobussen, Marcel. 1996. “De terreur van het oog.” De Groene Amsterdammer, January 10. http://www.groene.nl/artikel/de-terreur-van-het-oog. Cobussen, Marcel and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Cochrane, Thomas. 2009. “Joint Attention to Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (January): 59–73. Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” In Derrida and Différance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, 1–8. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Dyson, Frances. 2009. Sounding New Media. Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Garcia Quiñones, Marta, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi, eds. 2013. Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gritten, Anthony. 2014. “The Subject (of) Listening.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 45(3): 203–19. Han, Byung-Chul. 1997. “Derrida’s Ohr.” Musik & Ästhetik 1, no.4 (October): 5–21. Herbert, Ruth. 2011. Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Hindley, Emma, dir., 2007. The Secret Life of the Motorway, Part II. DVD. Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 1995. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum. LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New York: Continuum.

498   Marcel Cobussen Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lucas, Olivia. 2014. “Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results.” Journal of Sonic Studies 7. http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/84314/87805. Marks, Lawrence. 1978. The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations Among the Modalities. New York: Academic Press. Meelberg, Vincent. 2009. “Sonic Strokes and Musical Gestures: The Difference between Musical Affect and Musical Emotion.” In Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009), edited by Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg, and Päivi-Sisko Eerola, 324–327. Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1882. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2007. Studies in Pessimism. Translated by T.  Bailey Saunders. New York: Cosimo. First published 1891. Sloboda, John A., Susan A. O’Neill, and Antonia Ivaldi. 2001. “Functions of Music in Everyday Life: An Exploratory Study Using the Experience Sampling Method.” Musicae Scientiae 5, no. 1 (Spring): 9–32. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1995. Im selben Boot: Versuch über die Hyperpolitik. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag. Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Truax, Barry. 2001. Acoustic Communication. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. First published 1994. Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Continuum. Wallrup, Erik. 2015. Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

chapter 25

Voca l M usic Freya Jarman

Percy Scholes opens the entry on “Song” in his classic Oxford Companion to Music with the bold declaration that “No songless people has ever been discovered” (Scholes 1970, 966). Similarly, of “Singing” he states, “The art of singing has been cultivated in some sort of way amongst all peoples that have attained any considerable degree of ordered life” (953). Later, in the entry on “Voice,” he describes the voice as “a musical instrument, like any other, but with the additional power of framing the sounds called words and allying these with its tones” (1086). Such summative declamations speak to two of the basic features of most of the scholarship on—and, indeed, much popular discourse about—vocal music. First, the voice is posited as inevitable: the claim is that everyone has one, everyone can use one, and singing is the natural extension of a basic human propensity to communicate vocally. Second, the voice is not simply an instrument; it is not simply “of itself.” Rather, it mediates language, “framing the sounds called words,” and it thereby differentiates the human voice and human song from that of any other animal. Of all the concerns of musicology, then, vocal music is one of the richest and most multifaceted, even as it arguably sits as something of a neglected cousin to the canons of historical and analytical work on instrumental, particularly symphonic, repertoires. Yet we have already stumbled on a crack in the basic terminology of the question at hand, namely the relationship between the voice itself and the category of vocal music. In what follows, I contend that without proper consideration of the particularities of the former, any attempt at understanding the latter is ultimately limited, differing from scholarship on instrumental music only insofar as it may be enriched by due consideration of the text. Building on this, I argue that singing as a social, communal activity—it is, after all, peoples who are found never to be songless, rather than individual people—is in keen need of further theorization, and that such theorization both requires and facilitates rethinking the nature of subjectivity and its relationship to voice. Ultimately, this chapter looks to recent developments in the theorization of subjectivity to open up new questions about the nature of vocal music in a communal context. But I begin with a more in-depth evaluation, from this twin perspective, of philosophically oriented work

500   Freya Jarman on vocal music. To what extent, I ask, does such scholarship on vocal music attend to the voice? And to what extent does it attend to the communal? Scholarship on vocal music can be very broadly divided into that which takes the voice as such as a central concern, prioritizing the “vocal,” and that which does not, prioritizing the “music.” The latter category can be further divided according to the type of “musical” concern, whether it is music-analytical, cultural-historical, a combination thereof, or something else entirely. Donna Di Grazia’s (2013) weighty collection Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is representative of this tendency to focus on the “music” over the “vocal”: after opening with a few contextual chapters on “Cultural Influences,” the table of contents is dominated by names of composers and titles of what the book calls “masterworks,” leading to chapters that tend to offer overviews and guides rather than prioritizing philosophical theorization. Moreover, much similarly “music”-focused work is dedicated to solo genres, such as the lied or the operatic aria, although there is an emergent body of philosophically informed scholarship on vocal music that does approach choral music (see, for example, Berger 2007 and Varwig 2012, both in relation to J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion). The central theme of such work, however, still tends towards the music-analytical, albeit in relation to modernity, temporality, and similar conceptual themes, rather than attending to the peculiarly vocal nature of such music, with due consideration for the voice qua voice. Likewise, there is a large amount of work on the chorus in nineteenth-century opera, but it tends either towards performance ­history (Betzwieser 2000; Di Grazia 1998), compositional practice (Minor 2005), or a socio-political framework (Gossett 1990; Parakilas 1992; Stamatov 2002) as a central concern, rather than engaging with the philosophical ramifications of communal singing. Neither is it the case that work on the voice itself deals much better with the communal than does work focusing on “vocal music” as a general musical category. Speaking broadly once more, work on the voice can be subdivided according to whether it deploys primarily empirical or theoretical methodologies. With regards to the first of these categories, there is a large body of medical or scientifically informed work on the voice, epitomized by the activities of the Journal of Voice (“the world’s premiere journal for voice medicine and research”) but occasionally found on the pages of musicology journals (see, for example, Constantinos 2008 and 2013). Relatedly, there is a good deal of work on the subject of vocal pedagogy, largely fuelled by recent developments in laryngoscopic technology that enable a clearer sense of the larynx’s biomechanics in action, and generally drawing on scientific literature. The Journal of Singing and the Journal of Research in Singing and Applied Vocal Pedagogy are two such fora, while Karen Sell’s The Disciplines of Vocal Pedagogy (2005) represents an explicit general attempt to consolidate an enormous range of pedagogical theory and technique. Recent decades have seen a growing institutionalization of popular music-making (certainly in the United Kingdom),1 and formal vocal training for popular musicians is thus in ever greater demand. A book like Sell’s is therefore, in a sense, an early attempt to align historical and modern methods with the full range of contemporary Western vocal practice. Work on the more technical elements of vocal production is complemented by that on performance practices and cultures. The bulk of such work, which spans the breadth of

Vocal Music   501 history and genre, pertains to particular voice types in the history of Western art music. Cowgill and Poriss’s (2012) edited collection on the prima donna is as much about the cultural status of the soprano voice as it is about individual divas’ lives and work. John Potter’s Tenor (2009), meanwhile, is billed precisely as a History of a Voice. Similar work abounds in relation to the castrato voice, one of the most unattainable objects of study. The peculiarity of writing about a voice one has never heard results in such work tending to focus on biography, performance practice, and cultural history over vocal timbre (André 2006; Davies 2005; Feldman 2008; Rosselli 1992; Somerset-Ward 2004). Roland Barthes’s S/Z ([1970] 1975), however, stands as an important exception in its philosophical originality on the subject, while Martha Feldman’s reflections on the “natures and kinds” of castrati undertakes a close analysis of the vocal particularities at stake, with special reference to Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), the “last castrato,” and also the only one whose voice can be found on recordings (Feldman 2015, 81–131). Work on more contemporary practice is exemplified by the likes of Joshua Duchan, who writes on collegiate a cappella music (Duchan 2007, 2012a, 2012b). Martin Ashley also stakes a significant claim in the field, with his ethnographically rich studies of singing boys and boys’ singing (Ashley 2006, 2009, 2010). Situating the voice pragmatically in its auditory contexts is another distinct element of work on performed voices. Allison McCracken’s consideration of masculinity and microphones in crooning (McCracken  1999,  2015) and Kay Dickinson’s (2001) work on the role of autotune in the construction of camp, for example, both locate technologically mediated voices in their distinctive auditory contexts. The voice may be “a musical instrument, like any other,” as Scholes asserts, but its (near) universality makes it unusually everyday; whether it is in singing to infants or in singing with preschoolers, singing in the car or singing as religious worship, singing at football matches or in karaoke bars, the voice may well be the instrument most commonly heard in a live context, being quite likely the most-heard music made by non-professionals. Nonetheless, the consumption of music in general is accepted as very commonly taking place through the recorded medium, and the work of McCracken and Dickinson, ­alongside Serge Lacasse’s (2000, 2001) work on vocal staging and my own Queer Voices (Jarman 2011), addresses this in particular relation to vocal music and vocality. Moreover, as a result of the ubiquity of the recording, listening (including listening to the voice) is increasingly a secondary activity (Kassabian  2013; Kassabian, García Quiñones, and Boschi 2013), and the field has yet to address fully the implications of the uncanny shadow looming over the ubiquitous nature of the recorded voice. The key touchstone for theoretical work on the voice is Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Grain of the Voice” (1977). The title has become a pervasive term in the field, particularly in popular music studies, although it is rarely fully interrogated. Barthes’s essay is as much a thinking-out-loud as it is a theoretical model for general consumption, and that the scholarship adopts the concept without (for the most part) critically unpacking it is therefore at least as much the fault of Barthes as it is of those scholars who deploy it. Jonathan Dunsby (2009) offers the most robust response to date to this issue by revisiting in detail the two voices under Barthes’s original scrutiny in an attempt to clarify his development of the concept. Barthes’s great success, however, was

502   Freya Jarman to raise up clearly for consideration the voice qua voice, as opposed to a “frame” for “the sounds called words,” to return to my opening quotations from Scholes. Indeed, it is precisely the tensions between the object “voice” and language that underpin the concept of grain. Building on this insight, there is a significant body of work that interrogates the very nature of the voice. Such work is characterized by a number of recurring themes to which key philosophical concepts have a great deal of relevance. To summarize these themes, the peculiarity of the voice (and the reason it really is not “like any other” instrument, despite Scholes’s assurance) is that it radically disrupts a number of borderlines: (1) It is at once of the body and of language: The voice both serves and exceeds the semiotics and syntax of the spoken word; it articulates semiotic meaning and, in its bodily nature (pace Barthes), offers both another dimension to that meaning and another meaning altogether. The voice gives language meaning, in its inflections, its speed, its accent, its bodiliness, but it is also an object apart from language. It therefore speaks as much of the body as it does of syntax; the voice can operate without the spoken word, but the reverse cannot so easily be said to be true.2 (2) It is at once of the body and disembodied: Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck (2000) takes ventriloquism as the exemplar of this paradox. Concerned with exactly the uncanniness of the dis- and re-embodied voice, he identifies the voice as being “always in and of ” the body that produces it, and yet “by definition irreducible to or incompatible with that body” (Connor 2000, 208). Mladen Dolar similarly writes of the voice as being “plus-de-corps: .  .  . the surplus of the body, a bodily excess,” and as “the end of the corporeal” (Dolar 2006, 71). Linking this to the borderline between body and language, he argues more specifically that the voice “appears as the link which ties the signifier to the body” (59; emphasis added). (3) It is distinctly material and significantly immaterial: In the literal sense, there is a sound that we call the voice, which emerges from human bodies by way of a system of biomechanics. This is the voice in its materiality. At the same time, there exist both the figurative sense of “voice” as agency and the abstract, theoretical concept of the voice. This theoretical sense has been particularly prominent in psychoanalytic (especially Lacanian and post-Lacanian) thinking. Whilst psychoanalytically informed scholarship on the voice has seen some significant developments in thinking about the voice in relation to subjectivity, it (necessarily) omits consideration of individual subjects as embodied, empirical beings. I would hesitate to suggest that a purely ethnographic approach to the phenomenon of vocal music would satisfactorily fill in the gaps, not least for all the reasons that psychoanalysis continues to hold sway. (A methodological decision to prioritize conscious understanding rather than exploring pre-, sub-, or un-­conscious levels of motivation inevitably places certain limits on the models one can develop, even if it also opens up other possibilities.) Nonetheless, the universalizing impulse in much psychoanalysis fails to account adequately for the lived experiences of different subjects in their cultural contexts. Likewise, the psychoanalytic subject is relational only as far as the Other in the abstract sense, and such models do not fully

Vocal Music   503 account for either the social or cultural elements of subjectivity, in which the voice plays an important role, or for group vocality.

Philosophically informed writing on the voice is thus caught between a trio of related limitations that spill over into much of the writing about vocal music. First and foremost, it is primarily concerned with solo voices. Relatedly, any models of subjectivity that are deployed are fundamentally structured, whether explicitly or implicitly, around the individuation of autonomous subjects in relation to the psychoanalytic Other, formed in relation to other autonomous subjects, rather than considering the subject to be formed in culture as such. Even when work on vocal music considers group singing, it tends to presume either a group of autonomous subjects without relation to each other, or a homogenous group without individual subjectivities at all. And finally, work on the voice in its philosophical sense, and especially in its psychoanalytic sense, is often (though by no means always) wanting in political awareness, its focus on the voice as a theoretical concept (rather than as agency, as cultural force, or as a specific material voice) leaving it distant from ideological interrogation. Perhaps the best example of a model that attends successfully to the political, material, and cultural dimensions of voice is that offered by Deborah Bradley (2009), who traces the fine line between “community” and “fascism” in group-singing contexts, with some implicit consideration of what it means in those contexts to sing. Bradley constructs a model of “multicultural human subjectivity,” which takes as its starting point Michel Foucault’s contention that the subject is the product of discourse. Bradley asks, “If, as Foucault has argued, subjects are formed through discourse, what effect do multiple, conflicting discourses, or discourses that argue against unitary subjects (the various postmodern discourses), have on the way individuals view themselves?” (Bradley 2009, 59). Such a starting point allows Bradley to pursue a notion of subjectivity that resists unitary identities and to account instead for “cosmopolitanization” (58). With this model, she unpicks two examples of communal singing from apparently contrasting ideological perspectives, and interrogates their political roles in the discursive construction of subjectivity. Bradley’s model of subjectivity brings a fundamentally relational approach to bear on vocal music, something that extends beyond the primarily autonomous subjectivities that underpin, for instance, psychoanalytically informed work on the voice. In this sense, her contribution is an important one. But her analysis of the political work of the National Anthem Project (NAP) is undertaken from a position that is implicitly founded on a model of autonomous subjectivity, in which she reads collective singing as a vehicle for the ideological entrainment of individuals; it is this entrainment that Bradley identifies as the locus of a fascistic potential in collective singing.3 Bradley’s work stands out in its insistence on collectivity through singing, as well as in its deployment of a relationally formed model of subjectivity that is largely lacking in the scholarship at large. In this chapter, though, I want to take these ideas even further by considering vocal music in terms of networked subjectivities and reading distributed subjectivity in a historical context.

504   Freya Jarman

Congregational Singing in Nineteenth-Century England To explore some of the issues that I am suggesting are most pertinent to the future of philosophically informed thinking about vocal music, I want to take a single song for a walk (to misquote Paul Klee). That song is the Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City.” The words for this carol, written by Cecil Frances Alexander (1818­–95) for an 1848 collection entitled Hymns for Little Children, are a product of an emergent movement in the United Kingdom of mass national education in which children were to be enculturated in the prevailing ideologies of a God-fearing, increasingly muscular, and certainly ascetic Christianity.4 The melody, “Irby,” was written for the words in 1849 by Henry John Gauntlett (1805–76), and situates the carol firmly in the dual contexts of the rise of congregational singing and the carol revival of the nineteenth century by using the classic strategies of a limited pitch range, easy intervals, and a simple rhythm. Meanwhile, the most famous arrangement of the carol, by Dr Arthur Henry Mann (1850–1929), was written in 1919 for performance at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, which as a service itself is in large part a product of late Victorian and Edwardian religious and nationalist politics; the inaugural festival took place in 1918, and Mann’s arrangement has opened the service every year since its premiere the following year.5 This particular arrangement carefully manages a sequence of different participatory engagements with different musical worlds: it opens with a solo boy’s treble voice, followed by an unaccompanied choral verse, and later introduces the full congregation and organ, before the final verse focuses again on the treble voice (this time with all the trebles in the choir taking part) by way of an additional descant line. That the service has been broadcast annually almost without interruption live on BBC radio since 1928 lends the song an additional weight of tradition, intensifying with each annual repetition, as summed up by the late King’s College Director of Music Stephen Cleobury: “When three o’clock comes on Christmas Eve, people hear the voice singing Once in Royal David’s City, and they feel Christmas is beginning” (quoted in Webb 2001). This one song, then, can be taken as a hub connecting a wealth of issues around nostalgia, invented traditions, and national histories; congregational singing and its relationship with the solo boy treble voice; and music as moral and national corrective. The unevenness of the soundscape of churches in mid-nineteenth-century England was in many ways the product of those religious tensions that led to and were left over from the Reformation. So, while the Lutheran strand of Reformation musical politics generated hymns with a congregational function, the Calvinist strand emphasized the importance of “clear scriptural precedent,” which had the effect of prioritizing metrical psalmody and restricting the level of poetic licence adopted by later hymn-writers (Marshall and Todd 1982, 12). However, it was most notably Wesleyan Methodism that formed the foundation for congregational singing as it emerged within Anglicanism.6 The work of the Wesley family, most especially brothers Charles (1707–88) and John

Vocal Music   505 (1703–91), can be identified as a major development in the history of church music. The thousands of hymns penned by Charles during the eighteenth century and set to music for congregational worship have been described as “the main reason for the [Methodist] movement’s success” (Clapp-Itnyre 2002, 19). The “vigorously participatory style of the music” was “accessible to and powerful among the largely working-class constituency of early Primitive Methodism” (Wolffe 1997, 82, 63). In explaining Charles Wesley’s writing style, Madeleine Forell Marshall and Janet Todd note that there is distinctly more emphasis on feeling and sentiment than had previously been true of English hymns.7 Isaac Watts’s (1674–1768) hymns had already represented a “revolutionary departure from English tradition” in offering hymns specifically designed for congregational singing, marking the start of a continuous tradition of English hymn-writing. But whereas Watts’s writing focuses on the individual singer and their spiritual progress, positioning them as devout spectators of the life and work of Christ, Wesley’s writing encouraged singers towards “participatory identification” and “histrionic sympathy” (Marshall and Todd 1982, 65, 67) instead. Watts’s congregations were joined together by observing common devotional experiences; Wesley’s were cultivated to “enthusiastic response” and “emotional intensity” (73), passionate feelings that form the basis of the religious response itself. Consequently, Wesleyan hymns became “not merely a routine part of worship but a means of stirring up spiritual fervour, and even of drawing in converts” (Wolffe 1997, 62–63). Indeed, this was in many ways a distinguishing feature of Methodism, operating first at the fringes of and later more firmly outside the Church of England. There were significant religio-political tensions played out between psalmody and hymn-singing that simmered and sometimes boiled over for some decades of the nineteenth century, specifically because of the tensions between the (dominant) Anglican tradition and the practices of Dissenting denominations like Methodism. In 1820, a Church of England congregation in Sheffield even brought a legal case against their minister for asking them to sing hymns at Sunday services. The final judgement concluded that the minister was legally at fault, but that common practice was such that he should not be punished for his crime. Following the judgement, the Archbishop of York publicly approved the use of hymns in Sunday services, and so the case represents a watershed moment in the history of hymnody in the Church of England (Wolffe 1997, 63). The publication in 1861 of Hymns Ancient and Modern is another such landmark. Drawing together new translations of medieval, Latin, and Greek originals as well as more contemporary hymns by Watts and Wesley, “Hymns A. & M.,” as it became called, was immediately popular, and quickly came to sit alongside the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Authorized Version of the Bible as one of the characteristic books—the “splendid trilogy” (Bindoff 1950, 155)—of the Church of England. By 1901, hymns were thus “a staple part of services in almost all denominations” (Wolffe  1997, 63), despite having started the nineteenth century very much on the Nonconformist fringes. And by the latter part of the twentieth century, the hymn could be said to verge on the ubiquitous in Christian worship, in ways that could not have been foreseen two hundred years before. Jim Obelkevich’s summary is apt: “If there has been a ‘common religion’ in England in the last hundred years it has been based not on the doctrine but on the common hymn” (Obelkevich 1987, 554).

506   Freya Jarman Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain at large saw the rise of a missionary culture both internationally and at home. One feature of this culture was the ubiquity of Sunday schools, which Hugh McLeod asserts “were attended by the great majority of working-class children in the later Victorian and Edwardian years” (McLeod 1999, 52). Such pervasiveness was no small part of a more thoroughgoing construction at this time, particularly in English culture, of “the child,” a construction in which the child was enculturated into a particular mode of Christianity (see Clapp-Itnyre 2016). Victorian culture helped shape modern Western notions of childhood through radical social shifts, including the massification of elementary education and legal restrictions on child labour.8 As a result of the symbiotic relationship between those institutions claiming to protect (and thereby define) children and those constituting Anglican church life, there proliferated a new genre of book, namely the children’s hymn-book. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre claims it not only “came into its own” during the period, but is even “exclusively a genre of the nineteenth century,” dwindling significantly in the early years of the twentieth century (2016, 19). In this context, Hymns for Little Children, from which “Once in Royal” comes, is altogether a typical collection. Lines such as “Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he” sit comfortably in the longer tradition of didacticism established by Watts and Wesley, in which the young singer is led to scrutinize his own rectitude and admonish himself for his transgressions. Phrases like “little, weak and helpless,” or “dear and gentle,” are meanwhile emblematic of both a mid-century turn towards the innocent, “Romantic” child of Blake and Wordsworth, as opposed to the child as tainted by original sin, and of an emerging tendency to polarize “little” children and grown adults (Clapp-Itnyre 2016, 55–88). Apart from a shift in the general soundscape of English churches and the cultural notion of childhood, the other significant frame around “Once in Royal” is that of Christmas (as a set of) traditions, and the nineteenth-century carol revival as a musical subset thereof. It is something of a commonplace to say that the Victorians are in many ways responsible for Christmas as we know it, and such a statement extends to carol singing as much as any other element. The 1840s was the high decade of Victorian Christmassing, seeing the publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843 and the first commercially produced Christmas card in the same year. The dissemination of the latter was in turn supported by reforms and new developments in the postal service, such as the Penny Black adhesive stamp in 1840 and the growth of the steam railway network. 1844 brought with it an advert in The Times for a new book, The Christmas Tree: A Present from Germany (Darton and Clark 1844), quoting the Weekly Chronicle’s description of how Queen Victoria herself had “set the fashion, by introducing [the Christmas tree] on Christmas Eve in her own regal palace” (The Times 1844, 8). ­ erchants in Manchester had sold trees since the 1830s, Victoria’s Although German m endorsement lent the ritual an additional gravity, especially as it was made public knowledge by a burgeoning newspaper industry, which was in turn supported by a reduction in taxation and a rise in adult literacy. The soundtrack of Christmas was also intensively developed during this period. Heather Wiebe describes a nineteenth-century revival of interest in the carol forming at

Vocal Music   507 the “intersections of the different medievalisms of the Anglo-Catholics and the PreRaphaelites, the folksong revival, the Victorian revival of Christmas festivities . . . and the social practice of mass singing” (Wiebe 2012, 47). H. R. Bramley and John Stainer’s collection Christmas Carols New and Old, first published in 1871, remains the beacon today of what was then a growing body of carol collections: Some Ancient Christmas Carols (Davies Gilbert, 1822), Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (Sandys, 1833), A Good Christmas Box (1847), and Twelve Carols for Christmas-Tide (Sedding, 1860) all stand as precursors, and in some cases direct informants, to Bramley and Stainer. Nonetheless, this later collection is largely responsible for the “common idea of the carol as a hymn-like Christmas song for participatory singing” and its widespread popularity (Wiebe 2012, 47). “Once in Royal” was composed nearly thirty years before Bramley and Stainer’s landmark collection, but the collection itself is symptomatic of a trend towards congregational Christmas music that had been brewing for some decades and from which “Once in Royal” had emerged. In the context of the mid-nineteenth-century, this “medievalizing project” (Wiebe 2012, 47) is not simply a faithful revival of the old and ancient, but a set of traditions inflected for the modern age and with highly variable levels of connection to something genuinely old. Such is what Eric Hobsbawm famously terms the “invention of tradition”; it is not so much that a tradition is invented from nowhere, but that certain practices are established as “responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations” and that, although there is ideally some implied continuity with a “suitable historic past,” the continuity as such is “largely factitious” (Hobsbawm 1983a, 2). Hobsbawm (1983b, 263) is further keen to emphasize that “conscious invention succeeded mainly in proportion to its success in broadcasting on a wavelength to which the public was ready to tune in.” And so, by the time that the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols emerged as one invented tradition in 1880, the broader cultural groundwork was already laid for the serv­ice to take hold. Although the service is most famously linked to King’s College, Cambridge, from which venue the BBC has broadcast the Festival annually for nearly one hundred years, it was first fully constructed in the south-west of England by Edward White Benson (1829–96), the first Bishop of Truro and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Perhaps surprisingly, given the festival’s resolutely Anglican home today, David Miller notes that the “hymn sandwich” format of the festival, in which nine lessons are read from the Authorized King James Version of the Bible by members of the College and the City of Cambridge, and interspersed with carols (sung by the choir) and hymns (sung by choir and congregation), is “a quintessentially Methodist liturgical form” (Miller 2012, 180).9 Thus, via the festival, a musical practice that had been contained to the Nonconformist fringes represented by Methodism fully established itself in Anglicanism, at the very heart of the English religio-political establishment. Eric Milner-White (1884–1963), erstwhile Dean of King’s College, instituted the festival service in 1918—his first year at Cambridge. He went on to make his own innovations to Benson’s structure the following year, most notably focusing the musical efforts on hymns and carols and removing the choruses from Handel’s Messiah and J. S. Bach’s Magnificat, which had proved respectively “wholly out of place” and “unsatisfactory as a climax”

508   Freya Jarman (Routley 1958, 249). “Once in Royal” had featured as the processional hymn from the first year, the congregation being exhorted to join in the last two verses, but in 1918 this was sung only after an Invitatory Carol, “Up good Christen folk” (248). The key decision for 1919’s service was to start directly with “Once in Royal” in its new arrangement by the College organist, Dr Arthur Henry Mann, and without fail the service has opened every year since with the solo voice of one of the boy choristers in this arrangement. In 1958, Erik Routley wrote that Mann’s harmonization “remains peculiar to King’s” and a “closely guarded secret.” He goes on to say that the arrangement turns “the homely children’s hymn into a processional of immense spaciousness” (Routley 1958, 231), a description that has significant implications for the overarching concern in this chapter with subjectivity. The BBC took the decision to broadcast the service live from King’s College Chapel in 1928 and, save for the “missing” broadcast of 1930,10 has transmitted it annually. In the wake of the General Strike of 1926, during which time the company had been allowed to broadcast news bulletins due to the effect of the strike on newspaper production, by 1927 the BBC had transitioned from a private company to a public service corporation. Such a move was the beginning of the BBC’s place increasingly at the heart of the interconnectedness of listening subjects. Susan Douglas situates the role of radio historically in the wake of the newspaper and its place in forming the “imagined communities” of which Benedict Anderson (1983) writes. For Douglas, “Reading the newspaper may have been a crucial first step in cultivating this sense of national communion. But radio broadcasting did this on entirely new geographic, temporal, and cognitive levels” (Douglas 1999, 23–24). In this sense, radio is an invention that “has played a central role . . . in constructing us as a new entity: the mass-mediated human” (5). As for the BBC’s engagement with the relative novelty of the “new” tradition of the festival, opening announcement scripts reveal the extent to which they were willing to underwrite the fiction of its age. In 1939, the trauma of the first months of war offered an apposite moment to assure listeners of the festival’s authenticity by claiming that “The Festival has been held since the Chapel was built nearly 500 years ago, and the atmosphere of ­tradition is preserved by ranks of lighted candles glowing in the scarlet cassocks of the choristers” (BBC internal memorandum,  1939; emphasis added). Moreover, the announcements provided excellent opportunities for the BBC to emphasize in turn the tradition of the broadcast itself, assuring listeners in the early 1940s that “many [of them] will be familiar with the Festival” (BBC internal memorandum, December 1942).

Congregational Singing and Distributed Subjectivity One way of tying together these various contextual strands would be to say that “Once in Royal” connects Victorian Church politics, Edwardian post-war nationalism, constructions of childhood and tradition and, gradually, of the role of mass media therein. The

Vocal Music   509 questions of interest for the present chapter might thereby pertain particularly to the relationship between the Church and churchgoers, especially as regards the social, political, and spiritual status of individuals, and indeed of whole congregations. Even more than this, one particular question is whether congregational singing ought to be read as an Althusserian tool of the Church as an ideological state apparatus, one in which music is used to mould compliant individual subjects and where radio emerges as an accomplice. I want to suggest, however, an alternative reading, or perhaps an additional layer of meaning, namely that the song might be understood in terms of a more relational mode of subjectivity. Specifically, I contend that it opens up the historical scope of the operation of what Anahid Kassabian (2013) calls “distributed subjectivity,” a term derived from “distributed computing.” Differing from parallel computing, where multiple computers access a shared memory, distributed computing brings together multiple computers with autonomous memory and processing power in a network. One of the closest models to Kassabian’s is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, which produces structures that are profoundly networked, never traceable to a single source, haphazard, decentred, and permanently in motion, always “becoming.” The rhizome finds its antonym in “arborescence,” in which meaning and subjectivity both are figured as coherent, autonomous trunks stemming from a single source of roots and branching out directly and logically towards the expression of branches (Deleuze and Guattari 1980).11 Yet Kassabian’s model goes beyond Deleuze and Guattari by offering a way of accounting for the “individual-subject-function,” namely the continued relevance of the experience of individual subjectivity despite the impossibility of such autonomy. Distributed-ness suggests the concurrence of both locally autonomous and continually networked subjects, formations of collective-but-individual, individualbut-not-fully-autonomous subjectivity. And so Kassabian’s model accounts both for the mythical nature of the “Enlightenment subject” and for the weight of its legacy, its “force in absentia” (Kassabian  2013, xxiv). To conceive of “Once in Royal” in terms of this model yields a rather richer account of the song and the singing thereof. One particularly pertinent feature of Kassabian’s model is the importance of music to the channels of distribution. In this sense we are looking at Douglas’s “mass-mediated human.” Kassabian (2013, xiv) writes: •• Distributed subjectivity is constructed in and through our responses to acts of culture—speech, music, television, etc.—in ways very similar to how we once theorized individual subjects were formed, but through different processes. •• Music has a very privileged place in this formation; it is ubiquitous musics that bond and bind the field of distribution together. They are, in a sense, the channels of distribution. They put in place the experience of the network avant la lettre, as it were, creating the experience of distribution from the materials of broadcasting, that is, from the cables of Muzak and the airwaves of radio. Her term “ubiquitous musics” refers to the phenomenon that incorporates all kinds of music not chosen by the listener, which helps construct the space in which it is heard,

510   Freya Jarman and which is typically secondary to some other activity (for more, see Kassabian 2013). “Once in Royal,” at least in its rendition at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, does not readily fit this description. It is designed for attentive consumption as part of a religious service, and even for active participation by members of the congregation present in the chapel; ultimately, the broadcast is designed to bring even the radio listener into the congregation, so that secondary listening is not the typical mode of consumption for this song. Nonetheless, I propose that it stands as an example of earlier historical modes of the distribution of subjectivity, and that it continues to play its role in contemporary subjectivity-distribution. There are two other components of Kassabian’s model that are relevant here: the relationship between distributed subjectivity and identity; and the role of affect. On the surface of things, stable categories of identity are not easily compatible with a model in which subjects are always “becoming.” But such incompatibility only arises if one proceeds with the presumption that identity resides within individual, autonomous subjects. Once subjectivity itself is conceived of as decentred and networked, Kassabian further proposes that identity is “a position left behind by the work of affect,” where the “work of affect” is to fuel the very networks of distribution. That is to say, whilst identity may appear static, it is better understood as mobile and fluid, reliant on the residues of previous affective experience, and brought into focus by all the conditions of the present moment, which, themselves being equally mobile and fluid, produce different experiences of identity at different moments. By “affect,” Kassabian means a “circuit of bodily responses to stimuli that take place before conscious apprehension,” which “pass into thoughts and feelings.” These responses “leave behind a residue [that] accretes in our bodies,” and that is perceived as emotion when it is later re-mobilized (Kassabian 2013, xiii). To illustrate the relationship between affect and identity, she takes (like Bradley) the example of a group of people singing their national anthem: “Each singing is an affective event, creating a wave of feeling that flows across a group of any size . . . Affect like that leaves behind residue that appears to produce a static identity. But the very fact that it needs to be done over and over suggests that something rather different is happening” (xxviii). The same might easily be said of congregational worship: although the musical content might differ on any given Sunday, and although the membership of the congregation may be in flux, the event is nonetheless marked by the affective flow among and across the congregation. Such a flow, when read in the context of King’s College at least, momentarily reaffirms an identity position that might centre on the denominational, but is also implicitly national(istic), ethnic, and class-located, among other factors. The weekly ritual of worship arguably makes hymns at least as rich as national anthems for the mobilization of such flow and the reaffirmation of identity fuelled by it. So, from the perspective of modern iterations of “Once in Royal,” the affective flow is informed also by the weight of the history of the Festival of Nine Lessons as a tradition. The song has thus become the site of an interdependent pair of affective fields; whatever flow it facilitated at the time of its composition becomes caught up in the flow that it facilitates now, so each annual reiteration of the tradition carries with it the force of affective flow located in the history of congregational worship.

Vocal Music   511 In no small measure, nostalgia is part of the nesting process here. Svetlana Boym postulates two basic forms of nostalgia, formulated on the etymological duality of the word. The first, restorative nostalgia, emphasizes the element of nostos—homecoming, return to origins. Such nostalgia is, she writes, “at the core of . . . religious and national revivals”; it “think[s] of itself . . . as truth or tradition” (Boym 2001, xviii). In this description, one can easily perceive the kind of nostalgia that underpins the Hobsbawmian invention of traditions. It is in a sense an arborescent form of nostalgia, one that emphasizes the roots, the source, and the linearity of cultural history. Conversely, reflective nostalgia focuses on the -algia, not actually seeking the return to “home” or origins as such, but rather thriving on the longing for that return; here, homecoming is delayed in order to prolong the desire. This type of nostalgia has no single plot, Boym asserts, no direction, but instead “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging” (xviii). This may be an even more rhizomatic structure, one that expands perpetually and haphazardly, always dancing and proliferating in order to avoid the conclusion of desire. In “Once in Royal,” both senses of nostalgia are loudly in play. The opening solo and the ensuing choral setting encapsulate the invented tradition of the festival itself, and bring with them the authentic and imagined histories of the University of Cambridge and the Church of England, as well as the place of such institutions’ images in English national identity; in this sense, the voices call for the return to a historical national greatness (albeit a fictionalized one). The vocal inclusion of the congregation serves to amplify the call—whether singing or listening (and imagining singing), whether present in the chapel or tuning in to the radio broadcast, the congregational verses are themselves symptoms of the home being returned to, and they mobilize the restorative nostalgic affective flow in which Englishness and Anglicanism can be reconstituted as elements of participants’ and listeners’ identities. At the same time, the solo treble voice of the first verse carries with it not only the weight of restorative nostalgia found in the tradition of the festival, but a reflective nostalgia for childhood innocence and purity. Nick Nash, former Program Director at Minnesota Public Radio, was largely responsible for bringing radio broadcasts of the festival to the United States in 1979. In his recounting of the story behind his achievement, Nash emphasizes that the Eureka moment came when his father phoned him one Christmas Eve: “My father picked up the phone and I could tell he was crying. [ . . . ] He said he was listening to a recording of the Christmas Eve service from King’s College in Cambridge, England. And when I asked why he was crying, he paused and said, ‘It was the innocence in the boy’s [sic] voices.’ I knew in an instant we needed to bring that program here” (quoted in Eike 2013). Some four decades previously, Dean Milner-White had identified the importance to the arrangement, and indeed to the entire service, of the boy treble, when the BBC were forced to take only half an hour of the service due to wartime restrictions on bandwidth. An exchange in December 1939 between the Dean and the BBC’s Outside Broadcasting Executive, Graeme Williams, saw the ­former insist on taking the first half-hour, rather than the last as suggested by Williams, citing the opening solo as a basis for his in­sist­ence. Milner-White described the solo in one letter as “the most interesting and original section of the service” (Milner-White, December 2, 1939), and in another as the part of the service “which the outside world

512   Freya Jarman loves most to hear” (Milner-White, December 7, 1939). It is of course pertinent that the voice in question is that of a boy, since the threat of loss always casts its shadow in particular over the male treble voice, in wary anticipation of the pubertal “break”; experience always threatens to give way to maturation, and vocal change with it. The festival as a ritual therefore requires a constant flow of new boys—a boy can sing the solo one year, but the voice that earned him the accolade may well be gone by the following year. The solo moment, then, is simultaneously all about the individual boy who sings, and yet nothing to do with this boy as an individual. The aural focus is on that voice, certainly, until the choir join in the second verse, but by the time the congregation meet the choir in later verses, his voice is subsumed by the masses. This boy, remarkably, does not even know he will be the soloist until moments before the broadcast: several possibilities are identified during the afternoon rehearsal, but the final decision is taken between then and the broadcast, and the soloist is identified just seconds before the broadcast begins. “This” boy, then, stands in for all boys; his anonymity—mythologized as part of the rituals of both performance and broadcast—foreshadows that of the congregation’s. Even at the moment when, in the final verse, a descant line represents the eventual return of the distinctive treble voice (now the entire treble section), the “immense spaciousness” of the arrangement is what ultimately triumphs, mobilizing as it does an intensely affective response whose effect is one of reinforcing the network of subjectivity.

Conclusion In Cecil Alexander’s writing of the words, “Once in Royal” represented and propagated a host of prevailing nineteenth-century ideologies of the child. Combined with Henry Gauntlett’s melody, the carol exemplified all the entrainment of the faithful facilitated by congregational singing. In 1919, with Arthur Mann’s arrangement for Eric MilnerWhite’s new festival, the hymn framed the child in what were by then the well­established offshoots of Alexander’s original context. The festival itself was a restoratively nostalgic construction whose invented tradition promised all the stability offered by authenticity. By further institutionalizing the Festival, the BBC’s annual broadcast adds weight to that promise, ossifying the tradition until the fact of its invention is all but erased, and allows the promise as wide a reach as the airwaves will allow. Yet, from the moment of its initial musical circulation in 1849, the hymn also represents an early example of music’s role in the distribution of subjectivity, one that relies not on the technology of recording (which is so central for Kassabian), but on the rituals and politics of congregational singing. One hundred and seventy years later, and the better part of a century after the BBC’s first festival broadcast, the extent of that distribution is all the more evident. “Once in Royal” is a very particular example with its own specific history. But it nevertheless transcends much of its specificity to raise important questions pertaining to a good deal of vocal music—questions around the ideological work of the voice,

Vocal Music   513 e­ specially in its communal context, and beyond that, questions of the very nature of ­subjectivity. These are questions, I propose, that could yet be pushed further in the field, since I am arguing that collectiveness of voice is not yet properly understood in philosophical terms. It is too simple to read collective singing as the entraining of individual, autonomous subjects; although it is perfectly possible for group singing to act in such fascistic terms as Bradley suggests, bringing individuals into an “appropriate” relationship with the hegemony, such a model overlooks the inherent relationality of subjectivity that Kassabian and others argue for. To contemplate congregational singing in particular, as the soundtrack of a nation where religion and the state are complexly intertwined, is to contemplate the relationship between individuals and ideological apparatuses; it is also to consider the very nature of subjectivity as formed on a relational, distributed basis and the place of music therein. Moreover, the case of “Once in Royal” raises important issues about the study of music from a transhistorical perspective. Framing a case study with its historical context is methodologically important and widely understood as such. But the mobility of any given piece over time is also significantly meaningful, and we have yet to appreciate fully how the leftovers from an original context can be located as the traces of history in contemporary reiterations of a piece. In this sense, we should, I propose, read musical texts as ­continually branching out not just within their own time, but equally across times; as such, they contribute to the distribution of subjectivity on a long-term historical axis as well as a moment-by-moment contemporary one. The strength of this historical axis is drawn from tradition (as an invention), history (as imagined), and nostalgia, and it is mobilized by the institutions and ideological apparatuses that facilitate music’s life—in the present case, the Church of England, the BBC, and the University of Cambridge. At least as much as the ostensibly more obvious “Christmas message,” it is the simultaneously historical and contemporary distribution of subjectivity that is animated and reanimated by “Once in Royal David’s City,” every year, without fail, on Christmas Eve at 3 p.m. And, I argue, this multilayered (re)animation is built in to a significant body of vocal music that now warrants closer examination with a keen eye on more complex models of subjectivity than have been previously deployed.

Notes 1. In recent years, several providers (notably London College of Music and RockSchool) have started offering graded instrumental and music theory qualifications for British popular musicians, supplementing a long history of such provision for classical instrumentalists. Likewise, conservatoire-style institutions catering to popular musicians have proliferated since the foundation of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 1996. For a broader context, see Cloonan 2005 on the development of UK higher education provision in popular music studies. 2. An obvious exemplar of the latter point—spoken word without voice—is the computerized voice, but this may be more an uncanny simulacrum of the voice as such than a place beyond voice entirely.

514   Freya Jarman 3. The topic of singing the national anthem has recently become especially contentious in the United States; National Football League (NFL) players have been protesting the structural oppression of people of colour by kneeling during the anthem at matches since 2016, while President Trump’s response in July 2017 was to declare that such protest should be met with the firing of the players (CBS News 2017). Since that declaration, the controversy has only intensified: the President himself appeared to have forgotten the words in January 2018 (CNN  2018), and mock-conducted the tune at his own Super Bowl Party (before looking eager to sit down) in February 2020 (WTAJ TV  2020), but later tweeted that kneeling in protest during the anthem was “a sign of great disrespect” (July 21, 2020). 4. See Larsen 2012 for an overview of the dominance of biblical thinking in Victorian culture. See Hall 2010a on muscular Christianity, a term that originated in 1857 (Hall 2010b, 7). 5. The festival had originally been developed by Archbishop Edward White Benson at Truro Cathedral in 1880, but 1918 was the year of the first festival at King’s College. 6. “Anglicanism” refers to an overarching tradition within Christiantiy that comprises the Church of England and various other Churches with similar tenets, practices, or structures. Methodism, itself a collection of denominations, emerged as a revival movement within the Church of England, led primarily by John Wesley, but was established as a separate Church after his death. The finer points of certain denominations notwithstanding, Methodism is largely distinguished from the earlier Calvinist Protestantism by its assurance that salvation is available for all (contra the Calvinist position that only a select group, predetermined by God, would enjoy salvation). This principle underpins the strongly Evangelical flavour of many Methodist practices, from missionary work at home and overseas to the foundation of charitable organizations; the Salvation Army, though ultimately distinct from Methodism as such, stands today as a particularly visible remnant of Welseyan philosophy. 7. See also the extensive scholarship on feeling, sentiment, and sentimentality in Victorian culture more broadly. For example: Ablow  2006; Bell  2000; Bown  2011; Fletcher  2009; Kaplan 1987; Solicari 2007; and Wheeler 2016. 8. Key examples include: the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1878; the Mines and Collieries Act (1842); the Intoxicating Liquors (Sale to Children) Act (1866); the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 (Forster’s Education Act) and 1880; and the Factory and Workshop Act (1901). Note also the work of the National Education League from the 1860s, the growth of Dr Barnado’s Homes from 1868, and the establishment of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1884. 9. The Nine Lessons are the same each year, and together tell the Nativity story. The hymns and carols vary each year, except the Processional (“Once In Royal David’s City”) and the Recessional (“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”—with words, pertinently, by Charles Wesley). 10. See Nash 2014 for as thorough a context as can be found on this “gap.” 11. See also Mansfield (2000, 136–47) for an excellent explanation of rhizomatics versus aborescence.

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chapter 26

El ectron ic M usic Joanna Demers

“Brando,” the first track of Scott Walker’s and Sunn 0)))’s collaborative album Soused (2014), is as representative of electronic music as any work today could be. Which is to say that “Brando” is obscure and ambivalent, professing allegiances to several different styles while never firmly identifying with one in particular. How to classify it, then? There is the abrupt, breath-taking beginning in which an organ and Walker, higher in his seventy-one-year-old baritone than fans are used to hearing him, proffer an image. “Ah, the wide Missouri!”, Walker cries, and we are swept along with the majestic scene even as a grungy electric guitar responds with its own sort of affirmation. A few more statements like this, setting the scene for Marlon Brando’s life history, and the track then descends into the paranoia typical of both Sunn 0))) drones and Walker’s recent work. Vocals are infrequent, lyrics are oblique, referring to Brando’s apparent penchant for roles in which he was physically beaten. A reprise of the opening occurs later in the song, but it comes too late, and far too much darkness has been exposed in the meantime, for the panoramic music to offer any solace. This track could be described as drone music, as experimental rock, as musical theatre, as horrorcore, or as some other style. Or, we could simply call it electronic music, for the very good reason that its sounds are unthinkable without electronic instruments and processing tools. Obviously, there are the instruments of drone here, Sunn 0)))’s electric guitars and synthesizers, rendering sustained, loud, noisy sounds that would be unattainable through acoustic means. But there is also Walker’s voice, recorded with a close microphone in a relatively voluminous acoustic to sound utterly alone and bare. Electronics made it possible for Walker’s voice to become one of the most highly regarded of his generation. And electronics make it possible for us to hear the control and sensitivity and imperfections of Walker’s voice. Thus, Walker’s voice in “Brando” could be heard as a product of electronic music, or even as an electronic instrument, for he would certainly not sound as strong or as naked without the intervention of the studio. This opening description is not intended to define anything about electronic music, but to argue that we must dispense with facile categories when we think about electronic

520   Joanna Demers music. For just as “Brando” is an unwieldy track, so too is the label of electronic music, which today has greater fetch and yet far less meaning than it has ever had. In this essay, I contend that, until recently, the primary philosophical question posed by electronic music has been one of ontology. Indeed, musicians and listeners derive theories about electronic music and its ontology, rendering electronic music an especially self-reflexive art form. In the first section, I show that philosophical and aesthetic treatments have attempted to identify that which distinguishes electronic from non-electronic music. In the second section, I argue that the philosophy of electronic music needs to be updated to reflect new realities in electronic music as well as music at large. The distinctions between electronic music and non-electronic music have been blurred, if not effaced altogether. In this new soundscape, the updated ontological questions will have to do with (1) listening, (2) history, and (3) genre. Whereas prior research privileged sound material (whether timbre, texture, or tone) as the distinguishing trait of electronic music, contemporary electronic works offer ample opportunities for listeners to reflect on their own listening process. And whereas genre and style used to be peripheral frames of electronic musical discourse, they have now become a privileged object of artistic manipulation.

First-Generation Electronic Music and Its Distinctions Music studies at large have debated the relative necessity of specifying music’s ontology (Born 2005; Kania 2008; Ridley 2003). But electronic music’s most important philosophical questions have taken for granted that it possesses an exceptional ontology, one that distinguishes it from all other forms of music. What is the definition of “electronic music”? What are its boundaries, its hinterlands, its distant cousins? What is its essence? How is it different from non-electronic music? Within the different communities of electronic music, the secondary literatures have focused on diverse musical parameters, all of which are framed as distinct from acoustic music. Thus, academic composers like Trevor Wishart (1986), Simon Emmerson (2007), and Denis Smalley (1996) have written on the capacity of electronic music to signify despite lacking attributes of acoustic music (i.e., melody, harmony, regular rhythmic patterns) that have customarily been received as bearers of signification. Avant-garde and minimalist composers as well as musique concrète innovator Pierre Schaeffer have contended that electronic music does (or at least should) possess the capacity to evade signification—again, as opposed to acoustic music, for which meanings have long been ascribed to particular materials, instruments, and compositional procedures (Schaeffer 1967; Cascone 2000). Because technological change frequently follows an uneven and commercially determined path (Sterne 2003), if we set out on an Aristotelian project of defining categories of electronic music as we might define categories of plants or animals or thoughts, we

Electronic Music   521 quickly find ourselves grasping for illusory marks of distinction to separate electronic from non-electronic music. Improvements to the production, capture, and reproduction of sound have made it so that, to paraphrase Paul Théberge, any sound one can imagine is not only possible but eminently realisable (Théberge 1997). To cite just one example: there are any number of sound libraries available for purchase, many of which are playable on the Pro Tools suite of software for composing and editing audio. Each library contains multiple collections of sounds united thematically; hence, the company Orchestral Tools sells its Berlin Series, which contains samples of selected symphonic musicians organized into libraries such as Berlin Strings, Berlin Brass, and Berlin Woodwinds (Orchestral Tools, n.d.). One could just as easily purchase libraries of socalled non-Western instruments such as the didgeridoo, the koto, or the thumb piano, or else of non-musical field recordings of wind, gunshots, waterfalls, or explosions. Gone are the days when the “flute” sample of a keyboard sounded laughably dissimilar to its namesake. Unless, of course, a sound that is laughably dissimilar to a flute is what is desired. With only a basic conversancy with Pro Tools, a musician can edit these sounds to vary pitch, timbre, attack, or quality of the entrance of a sound, and duration. Rhythmic patterns are also easily constructed and sequenced. Such tools have contributed to a new status quo, one at odds with standards of musicianship from only fifty years ago, whereby conventional trappings, such as the ability to read notation, are no longer requisite for an aesthetically or commercially successful career. Meanwhile, the last barrier separating obviously electronic from obviously acoustic or non-electronic sounds has been breached. Now that any timbre we can imagine is possible, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between a mere imitation of a sound and an exact copy of that sound. Intellectual property disputes, already abundant in music, can be expected only to increase as a result (Sturm 2006). The ramifications of this technological transition are appreciable if we remember that, from the origins of electronic music in the 1930s until the 2000s, it was generally easy to hear the difference between electronic and acoustic music. This difference was predicated primarily on the distinctive timbre of electronic music, but also on the stylistic traits of music produced with electronic instruments. A few exceptions notwithstanding, one could expect to hear electronic instruments perform science fiction film soundtracks, pop, institutional electroacoustic music,1 and electronic dance music (EDM), but not symphonic, country, non-Western, or folk music. Whereas today, electronic music runs the gamut of musical discourse. We have electronic music that sounds electronic: that is, dissimilar to acoustic music. To pick one example, Marsen Jules’s The Endless Change of Color (2012) is a forty-seven-minute continuous drone of pitches that vibrate at different rates. Specific tones rise intermittently to prominence, and then fall back into the sea of sound. This is a work that would be unthinkable using only acoustic instruments, because it relies on sounds that are faithfully repeated. No reminders of corporeal musicianship, such as breathing or pausing or tempo fluctuation, mar Jules’s smooth sonic palette. On the other hand, we have electronic music (meaning music produced by means of electronic instruments

522   Joanna Demers and ­software) that is indistinguishable from acoustic music. To choose another example of drone, Kyle Bobby Dunn’s A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn (2009) employs orchestral instruments, piano, and electric guitar. Dunn’s overall aesthetic of smooth, attenuated decays and barely audible attacks, combined with a harmonic sensibility recalling that of Aaron Copland, make it easy to focus on the non-electronic aspects of this album. The possibilities intimated in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s landmark 1958–60 work Kontakte are now realities. In Kontakte, Stockhausen confronted the dual nature of vibrations, as discrete units and as continuous waves. This collision occurs dramatically at the halfway mark, when an electronic, high-pitched sound suddenly plummets down so far that the human ear ceases to hear pitch of any sort. Instead, we hear short pulses of distinct clicks, the building blocks of pitch. Kontakte addresses another antinomy, the spheres of acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. Today’s technology makes into ontological fact what Kontakte only intimated. It is now an aesthetic decision, not an externally imposed limitation, for electronic music to sound like electronic music. Another consequence of emerging sound production and treatment technologies is that musical genres that until recently were considered squarely non-electronic are now displaying signs of electronic influence. Popular music now references institutional electroacoustic music, as in Radiohead’s sampling of Paul Lansky’s Mild und leise (1976) in their track “Idioteque” (2000), or The Alps’ pastiche of 1960s-era musique concrète in “Marzipan” (2010). Ensembles and institutions historically specializing in Western art music now play “electronic” repertoire on acoustic instruments. Consider that “The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses” is a current tour of a symphonic orchestra that performs music from the video-game franchise (The Legend of Zelda, n.d.). Or that David Bowie’s experimental and synthesizer-laden 1977 album Low served as the inspiration for Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 1 (“Low”), a purely acoustic work that was first recorded by the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1993. One can find classical arrangements of Metallica (Apocalyptica’s Plays Metallica by Four Cellos from 1997, or the Angry String Orchestra’s String Quartet Tribute to Metallica from 2004) and Radiohead (pi­an­ ist Christopher O’Riley’s True Love Waits from 2003, or Vitamin Quartet’s Strung Out to OK Computer: The String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead of 2001). The entire genre of spectralism is premissed on the analysis of the constituent frequencies that create the timbre of a note; such analysis is utterly dependent on electronics. Thus, Gérard Grisey’s Partiels (1975), an orchestral work that reproduces and mutates the timbre of a double bass purely by means of other acoustic instruments, does what a synthesizer does, but imperfectly and with far less precision (Rose 1996). Even the act of producing a recording has obscured whatever claims could be made for the ontological singularity of electronic music. With the various types of splicing, amplification, pitch correction, sampling, and processing, hitherto acoustic music has gone electronic. Phil Niblock’s “Harm” (2006), for instance, is a drone consisting of a single cello note that is subject to microtonal manipulation. The act of recording, of capturing sound with strategically placed microphones, belies Niblock’s claim that “Harm” is a purely acoustic work, for “Harm” would be unthinkable without electricity. Our history has come full circle;

Electronic Music   523 whereas once electronic music was conceived to imitate acoustic music, it is now more often that acoustic music that is modelled on electronic music. Electronic works of earlier decades set the stage for our current state of categorical confusion, by emphasizing the synapses separating electronic from acoustic music. Before technologies made possible perfect copies of acoustic instruments and human voices, several works dealt with simulacra that were unsettlingly dissimilar to their models. Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6) breaks down its source material of a boy soprano’s voice into vowels, noises, and plosives, and groups these three types of sound with electronically-produced materials like sine tones, white noise, and clicks. Milton Babbitt’s Philomel (1964) makes its taped soprano voice undergo rapid acceleration. It is no coincidence that the stories that serve as the inspiration for these two works both speak of violence inflicted on the innocent. Gesang draws from the Book of Daniel account of three Jewish boys whom Nebuchadnezzar has thrown into an oven and who emerge miraculously unburnt, singing praise to God. Philomel is a rape victim whose attacker cuts out her tongue to prevent her from revealing his identity. In both instances, the human voice is heard both in more or less its unadulterated form as well as while enduring the trials of electronic manipulation. The voice bears scars of its torment, and can never revert to its earlier unsullied state. Even the quaint theremin renditions of romantic music performed by Clara Rockmore pit the past, emblematized by Tchaikovsky’s Valse sentimentale, against the alienating manipulations of futuristic technology. There is a categorical quality to this earlier generation of electronic music, in particular its enlistment of acoustic music. This view mirrors what Kane (2013) observes among writers on sound art as “musicophobia,” a fear of, or discontentment with, anything that smacks of old-fashioned musical discourse. Kane points out that, for many, the definition of sound art is negative; its identity has hinged on what it is not. While technologies of electronic music were initially deployed to imitate non-electronic instruments, irreconcilable timbral and sonic differences did much to underscore electronic music’s difference from acoustic music, and in so doing, contributed towards a monolithic view of electronic music as uniformly distinct and futuristic.

The Futures of Electronic Music: Listening, History, and Genre If electronic music is absorbed in revising the philosophy of its existence, it does so by way of three areas: listening, history, and genre. The act of listening has generated lively discussion, whether directed towards listening in general (to music or even sound of any kind), or to electronic music in particular (Demers 2010; LaBelle 2006; Nancy 2007; Szendy 2008; Voegelin 2010). Aesthetics and phenomenology are the two disciplines that inform this literature. There are books that confront electronic music’s engagement

524   Joanna Demers with or avoidance of meaning (Demers 2010), or that, in approaching the status of sound art as alternative to music, append expectations entirely distinct from those elicited by music (Voegelin 2010). Voegelin and I both note that recent electronic music and sound art engage the spaces within which they are heard; that they are not conceived necessarily to be at the centre of the listener’s attention; that they are as much if not more concerned with conceptual underpinnings as they are structure or technical detail. Sounds under this new approach to listening can continue to undergo interpretation as they do under musical paradigms. Or, the listener can develop an asceticism by which she disregards anything that might identify a sound or its provenance or that might anchor it within some larger discourse. Sounds for and as themselves: a quest that motivates writers as diverse as Pierre Schaeffer (1966), John Cage (1961), and Pauline Oliveros (2005). Of course, that this quest could even be conceivable was thanks to electronic means of recording and producing sounds. Yet, listening discourses generally sidestep the issue of how sounds are created, focusing instead on how we receive them. An important response to this sound-centric inquiry has come from Weheliye (2005), Reed (2013), and Reynolds (2012) who demonstrate how listening practices are always grounded in racial, gender, national, or sexual identities. One of the contributions of Brian Eno’s career has been to channel listening discourse (which, lest we forget, stems from the impulse to explain what is distinct about electronic music) back into creative practice. That is, Eno engendered a new genre of music through reflective listening. An admirer of Erik Satie and Cage, Eno by the mid-1970s was a rock celebrity thanks to Roxy Music, and a highly regarded record producer. Struck by a taxi while crossing the street, he lay bedridden in a hospital for several weeks. A friend brought him a recording of Celtic harp music, and Eno noticed how his attention wandered between the harp and ambient sounds like that of the rain outside. This experience proved formative; Eno later said that he resolved to make music that would effect this same seamless retreat into the background. An art-school graduate with ecumenical tastes, Eno was aware of Satie’s formulation several decades prior of musique d’ameublement, a furniture or background music conceived precisely not to occupy the centre of attention. This was a fundamentally anti-German idea, a repudiation of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Schopenhauer’s proclamations of the singularity of music. Eno’s ambient music became a Satie-like quip, and also a Cage-like example of Zen renunciation of desire, music as broadly inclusive and nothing in particular. What eventually congealed as the style we consider today to be ambient music is usually music created by synthesizers that produce cloud-like collections of static sound. Melodies, if present at all, take the back seat to sustained harmonies, echo and reverb, and drones. Ambient music is thus predicated on the listener’s intermittent attention. Even as it has grown more difficult to distinguish electronic from acoustic music, it has also become easy, perhaps too easy, to parse electronic music according to its supposedly distinct histories. Thom Holmes’s survey (2012), the seminal history for the field, applies the standard musicological strategy of coagulating isolated data (composers and pieces, laboratories, cities, and nationalities) into discernable styles. At stake is the concept of tutelage, the transmission of knowledge and manner that, say, explains

Electronic Music   525 what Denis Smalley or Michel Chion or Karlheinz Stockhausen learned during their studies with Pierre Schaeffer. Outside academia, Mark Prendergast’s The Ambient Century (2001) accomplishes similar work in locating groupings of popular music, jazz, and twentieth-century art music that share in the ambient sensibilities of Mahler, Ives, Miles Davis, or Eno. Music history, in other words, professes to demonstrate what electronic music is by cordoning it off into territories. This is not to say that music historians have it wrong. There are good reasons why grouping people, places, and institutions in the spotlight can help us refine our definition of electronic music. And music historians are indispensable here, for electronic music is an intensely historical genre. Indeed, there is a substantial tradition of electronic music works that deal explicitly with music history. Early concrete works, for instance, aimed to document ephemeral sonic phenomena for posterity. Halim elDabh’s Wire Recorder Piece (1944) predated Schaeffer’s earliest musique concrète works by four years. Like Schaeffer, el-Dabh enjoyed access to electronics thanks to his affiliation with a radio station (in his case, the Middle East Radio Station in Cairo). He used wire recorders to create a poetic documentary of a muezzin, heavy with reverb and looped into a continuous piece. Meanwhile, Schaeffer’s early works, especially Étude aux chemins de fer (1948), set the stage for his later theorization of the objet sonore (sound object) and reduced listening by introducing previously unimaginable sounds as looped bell chimes or collages of machinery and trains.2 This ideology notwithstanding, both el-Dabh’s Wire Recorder Piece and Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer are historical documents. They are recordings, after all, and do not exist in alternative ontological manifestations such as scores or textual descriptions; they cannot be heard “live,” in other words, but rather always through the mediation of the equipment that reproduces them. These pieces underscore the datedness of early recording equipment, the fact that nothing ages silently in electronic music. We hear these pieces as history, not as absolute works standing apart from history. The techniques known broadly as “sampling” further link electronic music to music history by inviting comparisons between the past and present. Vladimir Ussachevsky’s Wireless Fantasy (1960) consists of short-wave wireless signals tapped in Morse code to which is added a recording of the Prelude to Act 1 of Wagner’s Parsifal. This is one of the earliest examples of what we might call the sampling of a pre-existing music recording in a new work. Christian Marclay samples with a different aim in mind. He chose vinyl discs as the basis for his pieces, but he subjects these discs to abuse by placing them on the gallery floor for spectators to trample underfoot. The subsequent product is as much a found object as it is a reflection on the disposability and fragility of art commodities. For human civilization produces a surfeit of art and culture as well as physical objects. Whereas the sampling in Christian Marclay treats borrowed material as raw material with seeming indifference to its content, hip-hop sampling celebrates music. At times, DJs exhibit the identities of beloved musicians they sample, luminaries like James Brown or Kraftwerk or George Clinton. In other instances, DJs advertise the quality and obscurity of the material, how “deep” they must dig to find it. History is always essential, not incidental, in hip-hop sampling.

526   Joanna Demers Even instruments and phonographic media are historicized in electronic music. Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album Switched-On Bach concerns itself with history, but for reasons distinct from those in hip-hop. Carlos performed eminently recognizable, canonical works, but on the then-novel medium of the Moog synthesizer. The familiarity of the source material means that Bach serves as a transparent filter, underscoring the strangeness of the instrument. A Moog would paradoxically have sounded less foreign if playing material that sounded futuristic or strange. The synthesizer musician Benge discretely models his 2008 album 20 Systems on the Carlos Switched-On series. Here, twenty ambient tracks are performed on twenty synthesizers manufactured between 1968 and 1987. The tracks are arranged chronologically such that the album begins with the 1968 Moog Modular 3C and ends with the 1987 Kawai K5M. In the intervening tracks, the listener tours sounds generated by models of the ARP, Oberheim, Roland, Fairlight, and Yamaha. Likewise, William Basinski’s beloved 2001 work The Disintegration Loops foregrounds the materiality of electronic music. The piece originally existed as tapes of synthesizer riffs that Basinski made in the early 1980s. Rediscovering the tapes in 2001, Basinski attempted to copy them onto digital format, but each playback scraped more magnetized dust from the tape, literally disintegrating the piece in real time. Basinski recognized the potential, and recorded loops of the tapes whose sound gradually disappeared with each successive reiteration. * * * So far, we’ve established that electronic music possesses a self-reflexive ontology. Electronic music, in other words, reflects on itself—its characteristics and distinctions—in both word and deed. The technological affordances in electronic music have meant that any sound is possible. And this infinite possibility has, in turn, meant that the category of electronic music is a moving target that can refer to different phenomena. Sometimes, electronic music is a genre, if by electronic music we mean institutional electroacoustic music. The conventions of this genre could include atonal harmonies, abrupt cuts between different sorts of pre-recorded material, frequency oscillators, acousmatic replay whereby the work is “performed” as a recording, collisions between improvised and precomposed material, etc. At other times, electronic music simply refers to how the music is produced. This second sense means that, today, practically any genre of music could be called electronic music, from institutional electroacoustic music and electronica and sound art to classical and folk. These latter two types, while clearly deriving from pre-electronic forms, bear the mark of electronics. A new recording of a standard symphonic work like, say, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 is recorded such that fine details are mixed to be audible amid the legion forces onstage. And this feat of mixing and recording creates the illusion that the listener has the best seat in the house, one that makes the acoustically improbable into something attainable. But the claim that “electronic music” need not refer to any genre or genres in particular is only the antecedent to a much stronger claim. Genre itself in music today bears the stamp of electronic music in that genre has become instrumentalized in the same manner as pre-set timbres or rhythmic patterns on a synthesizer. That is, genre has

Electronic Music   527 become a variable, something to use colouristically, to add or change during the course of a musical work. This differs from the way that genre has typically been conceived: as the foundation of the work, a stylistic bedrock that itself remained stable even when its subsidiary elements such as melody, harmony, or rhythm varied (Brackett  2015; Fabbri 2012). That this manipulation is even possible is due to the technical advances of electronic music: recording, replaying, sampling, collage, timbral imitation, and synthesis. In sum, genre used to be defined through its particulars. Now, genre is used as a particular within a work. I want to begin with an early example of genre’s instrumentalization, from the title track off the Walker Brothers’ 1978 album Nite Flights. This is a strange song, a concatenation of several tendencies in the air in the late 1970s. Most obviously, there is the discolight vibe, the redolent orchestral instrumentation paired with a Philly-like four-on-the-floor percussion groove. Somewhat in cahoots with the disco vibe are the seemingly surreal lyrics that seem only in the vaguest possible terms to be referring to dreams; David Bowie’s songwriting seems here to be a pertinent point of comparison, or one could turn to Mallarmé or the Symbolists. The synthesized arpeggiation, the columnlike chords, the restraint of the tonal harmonic language: all these tendencies point towards Brian Eno’s first ambient works. And then, there is the unspoken genre that exists only through its absence, that of vocalist Scott Walker, who was one of the most recognizable voices of the late 1960s.3 For anyone who knew what Walker’s voice sounded like during the 1960s, “Nite Flights” was a bittersweet gift, a windfall for those who feared that he might have retired permanently, but also a reminder of the passing of time. Walker’s voice, though still as smooth and richly baritone as before, has aged, and he strains in its upper register. Yet Walker chooses to sing in that awkward range, just as he chooses an obscure lyric idiom and an idiosyncratic style that other, more cautious artists would be expected to avoid. “Nite Flights” is thus unclassifiable, if by classification we mean to safely corral a work into a genre that will explain (away) what we hear. Nothing is predictable in this song, which invokes at least four different genres (disco, ambient, middle-ofthe-road pop, and avant-garde) simultaneously without committing to any of them. The contemporary electronica artist M.  Geddes Gengras is a case study in genre instrumentalization. He has released material described as dub or psychedelic reggae, and is also known for his work on analogue synthesizers. Most references to his career in local LA music criticism refer to him simply as an experimental musician. His 2014 album Ishi tends in multiple directions. It is a solo-synthesizer concept album whose opening track, “Ishi,” meanders slowly from one open fifth harmony to the next, with occasional rippling or pulsating tones. One could hear Terry Riley here, or soundtrack composer Vangelis. Or J. S. Bach or even Frescobaldi, for Gengras plays his vintage keyboards with a sense of touch and fantasy that seem steeped in the Baroque. “Ishi” seems a retro-minded piece, but its imagined past could be the 1960s, or 1970s, or the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Wolfgang Voigt is the artist behind the German electronica acts Gas and Mike Ink. His reputation is based on his peculiar brand of ambient techno whereby motorikprecise techno beats are buried amid dense synthesizer pads. Voigt has been described

528   Joanna Demers as a self-appointed heir to the German symphonic tradition (Nye  2013), but he approaches that tradition of stately brass harmonies and meandering string lines by means of electronic dance music. So, Voigt might more precisely be regarded as the heir to the Germanic electronic music tradition, one that began with Stockhausen and Kraftwerk, and that today re-examines German classical music in the light of a disco ball. But Voigt’s more abstract works, like his Rückverzauberung 10/Nationalpark (2015), leave behind any intimation of the dance floor. The production still flags this as electronic music, for the brass and string sounds we hear are purposefully artificial, too smooth and lacking in inflection to have been produced by human musicians. But the harmonic language is murky and conflicted, not entirely atonal but certainly not tonal either. Voigt here seems less in touch with Bruckner or with Wagner’s preludes than he does with Schoenberg’s “Farben” from Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. The rhythmic language is equally ambivalent, never presenting a regular or recurrent beat. Yet, the very premiss of Nationalpark is possible only by means of electronic music, for the techniques Voigt employs here stem directly from ambient music’s deliberate wallowing in static harmonies. The path to Nationalpark is clear enough if one follows the trajectory in Voigt’s four-album Gas compilation Nah und Fern, which spans ambient techno works he released between 1996 and 2000. The first three albums are more or less rooted in techno, but the fourth, Pop, has nearly entirely dispensed with any dance beat. There is only a short distance between Pop’s oblique reference to techno, and Nationalpark’s utter rejection of techno. This sums up what Nationalpark is not, but does not adequately describe what it is. There are a few labels that could stick. This is certainly ambient music because of its nebulous harmonies. This is also modern classical, but this again is a negative definition contingent on Nationalpark’s lack of dance beat or of any regular beat in particular. We know that Nationalpark is not jazz, pop, dance, country, or folk. But beyond this, the piece nods slightly at other genres without staking a clear claim in any of them. Acid Mothers Temple (AMT) is a Japanese psychedelic rock group. Its album titles refer to progressive and acid rock staples of the 1960s and 1970s, from Are We Experienced? to Dark Side of the Black Moon to Son of a Bitches Brew. AMT are a prolific group, with over seventy studio albums and over thirty live albums. Much of this output is in the idiom of hippie-era American and British rock, containing expansive guitar solos, stereophonic panning, and folk-rock touches. So much of the compositional style of AMT points toward Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. It is this fidelity in stylistic pastiche that makes its few “cover” albums of works outside of the classic rock fold especially jarring. I am referring to albums like In C (2002), AMT’s rendition of Terry Riley’s famous minimalist work, or its 2000 album La Novia, a freak-out exploration of a medieval Occitan song. The title track begins with Tsuyama Atsushi intoning the irresistibly beautiful old song by means of throat-singing. He is eventually joined by band members who sing harmony in their falsetto, a bizarre way to pay homage to any work, let alone one already so temporally distant. The electric guitar, bass, and percussion eventually enter, and the track then seems to proceed more or less in a straightforward fashion, turning “La Novia” into a rock ballad similar to Iron Butterfly’s

Electronic Music   529 “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (1968). It is obvious that Acid Mothers Temple relishes unlikely stylistic collisions of this sort, and however far they might roam for source material, the group usually resituates the borrowing in the idiom of psychedelic rock. But Benzaiten (2015), its take on the 1973 progressive jazz album by Osamu Kitajima, is even more adventurous, in that it mixes free jazz and hippie rock with traditional Japanese music, tribal music, and even contemporary avant-garde music.4 The second track, “December Stops / Etekoraku / Etekobushi,” contains no vocals or rock percussion. Instead, koto and electric guitar combine with flute (perhaps a shakuhachi) and string instrument (perhaps a cello), as well as a synthesizer. The movement culminates with a blinding sho (mouth organ) chord. This is not typical Acid Mothers Temple playing at the garage band’s game of adopting material, no matter how far-flung, into the home dialect. This is, rather, Acid Mothers Temple forcing themselves, not the material, into unknown and uncomfortable stylistic territory. These examples are intended to demonstrate the instability of genre in recent music of all types, a situation that I perceive as having intensified within the past fifteen years. Much of the destabilization of genre has to do with retromania, which at times has taken the form of a stylistic free-for-all in which past and present happily coexist (Reynolds 2011). A relevant example of this type of retromania is Girl Talk (the stage name of Gregg Gillis), whose method is to sample hooks of very popular tracks of hiphop, rock, and electronica into seamless mixes. However, Girl Talk’s collage is not achieving the same destabilization that I perceive in these examples, because Girl Talk is copying original tracks. Sampled originals cannot be twisted or misshapen as much as newly created material can be, especially material that betrays the traces of several contradictory styles.

Conclusion In closing, we might well ask how electronic music makes such instrumentalization of genre possible. For surely there is nothing innate about electronic music that it solicits stylistic miscegenation more than acoustic music. But in fact, there is. If electronic music’s own stylistic profile was never settled, even in its earliest days, it has excelled in donning and discarding styles. The plasticity of style, the fact that style can be invoked vaguely without ever being committed to, is a quality that has spread far beyond strictly electronic music to become a defining characteristic of contemporary music at large. Another symptom of the plasticity of genre is apparent in so-called post-genres, my catch-all term for music that seems at once to be anchored in a genre while also critiquing it. Post-rock, for instance, consists of stripped-down garage bands, perhaps a guitar, drum set, and bass, often with no vocals. Post-rock acts like Mogwai, Explosions In the Sky, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor present extended tracks that develop thematic material over periods that are long by the standards of four- or five-minute rock songs. And this material seems blissfully divested of both American rhythm and blues, with its

530   Joanna Demers cleaving to blues harmonies, and the dictates of American and European popular dance forms like house, disco, or techno. The dissolution of style is the dissolution of all that was stable and essential in music. Electronic music is music that can sound like anything; now, all music is equally untethered.

Notes 1. Institutional electroacoustic music refers to electronic music produced in academic or research institutions (for example, IRCAM in Paris, Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and the Arts) that features electronics, often paired with acoustic instruments. 2. According to Schaeffer, the sound object is sound-isolated from its means of production or notation as well as the state of mind of the listener. Reduced listening is Schaeffer’s term for listening that ignores the source and origins of sound. For more information, see Demers (2010) and Kane (2007). 3. Walker was an American beatnik who moved to London to become more popular than the Beatles (briefly), and an idol of middle-of-the-road pop. He briefly broke out on his own with four solo albums that featured his own compositions, but their commercial failure prompted him to release mediocre cover albums during the early 1970s. 4. The album is dedicated to Osamu Kitajima as well as twentieth-century avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu.

Works Cited Born, Georgina. 2005. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2, no. 1 (March): 7–36. Brackett, David. 2015. “Popular Music Genres: Aesthetics, Commerce and Identity.” In The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, 189–206. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publishing. Cage, John. 1961. “Experimental Music.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, 7–12. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cascone, Kim. 2000. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (Winter): 12–18. Demers, Joanna. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Emmerson, Simon. 2007. Living Electronic Music. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Fabbri, Franco. 2012. “How Genres Are Born, Change, Die: Conventions, Communities and Diachronic Processes.” In Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, edited by Stan Hawkins, 179–192. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Holmes, Thom. 2012. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. 4th ed. New York: Routledge. Kane, Brian. 2007. “L’Objet sonore maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction.” Organised Sound 12, no. 1 (April): 15–24. Kane, Brian. 2013. “Musicophobia, or Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory.” Nonsite. org. Issue #8 Accessed 21 July 2020. http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-8-the-music-issue.

Electronic Music   531 Kania, Andrew. 2008. “Piece for the End of Time: In Defence of Musical Ontology.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48 no. 1 (January): 65–79. LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Bloomsbury. The Legend of Zelda. n.d. “The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses” Accessed 5 September 2015. http://zelda-symphony.com/. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nye, Sean. 2013. “Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25, no. 2 (June): 154–184. Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Lincoln, NE: Deep Listening Publications. Orchestral Tools. n.d. “Berlin Series.” Accessed 7 June 2016. http://www.orchestraltools.com/ berlin_series/index.html. Prendergast, Mark. 2001. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance—The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. New York: Bloomsbury. Reed, S. Alexander. 2013. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, Simon. 2012. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. New York: Soft Skull Press. Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Ridley, Aaron. 2003. “Against Musical Ontology.” Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 4 (April): 203–220. Rose, François. 1996. “Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music.” Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2 (Summer): 6–39. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1967. La Musique concrète. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Smalley, Denis. 1996. “The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era.” Contemporary Music Review 13 (2): 77–107. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “Bourdieu, Technique and Technology.” Cultural Studies 17 (3–4): 367–389. Sturm, Bob L. 2006. “Concatenative Sound Synthesis and Intellectual Property: An Analysis of the Legal Issues Surrounding the Synthesis of Novel Sounds from Copyright-protected Work.” Journal of New Music Research 35, no. 1 (March): 23–33. Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. New York: Fordham University Press. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Voegelin, Salomé. 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Bloomsbury. Weheliye, Alexander. 2005. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wishart, Trevor. 1986. “Sound Symbols and Landscapes.” In The Language of Electroacoustic Music, edited by Simon Emmerson, 41–60. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan.

chapter 27

Popu l a r M usic Theodore Gracyk

Most of the music performed, broadcast, heard, recorded, purchased, and pirated in the past hundred years is popular music. It is the musical lingua franca of modern life. A torrent of theorizing about popular music is generated by musicologists, psychologists, sociologists, and theorists in many other disciplines. This attention is a welcome change from past practice, when so-called art music was assumed to be intrinsically ­better and so worthier of study. Yet, until recently, the philosophy of music remained myopically focused on Western art music. So, which is the greater curiosity here? That the philosophical literature on popular music is so meagre? Or the presumption that popular music is a specialized topic within aesthetics and the philosophy of music, rather than the main event?

The Core Proposal The marginalization of popular music can be explained, but not justified, by noting that modern aesthetics arose as a theory of fine art. Although there is no univocal meaning of the phrase “popular music,” I propose that the primary referent of popular music is a socially created category that can only be understood in contrast to music as fine art (Jones and Rahn 1977, 85–86; Novitz 1992, 29–33; Hamm 1995, 3–6). The essential opposition of two broad categories of music has been explicitly recognized since the late eight­ eenth century, when J. G. Herder distinguished the culture and music of the people (des Volkes) from that of the learned, elite class (des Gelehrten) (Burke 2009, 30–35). There is much to criticize in Herder’s nationalistic romanticization of traditional, unrefined popular song (Volkslieder or folk music) and in his view that it is superior both to cosmopolitan high art and to the entertainment music of the urban “rabble in the streets” (Herder 1990, 239). Nonetheless, he perceptively locates the distinction as one involving

534   Theodore Gracyk competing musical cultures, aligned with two levels of education. (For a discussion of the many precedencies in distinguishing two cultures see Gelbart 2007, 80–110.) As such, popular music is a cultural category rather than a natural kind; it is like Japanese cinema and Gothic architecture rather than quartz and water. We should, however, resist the hasty conclusion that “the distinction between high and popular culture has no basis in the properties of texts and practices” (Storey 2003, 106). Cultural categories do not persist if they are arbitrary collections of objects or practices: objective features of films and buildings establish that a film is Japanese (rather than French) and that a building is Gothic (rather than Gothic revival). In this respect (but in almost no other), my analysis agrees with Julian Johnson, who argues that there are systematic differences between “high” and “low” music or, in his preferred description, “art” and “entertainment,” respectively. The two kinds of music “do different things not just because they are used or valued in different ways but because they are made in different ways and exhibit different properties and characteristics” (Johnson  2002, 114). As Charles Hamm observes, popular song is the most common type of popular music, and one of its defining characteristics is that it is “[d]esigned to be performed and listened to by persons of limited musical training and ability” (Hamm  1995, 98). Although there is a middle ground of difficult cases that might belong to either category, there are real musical differences that put Hank Williams’s songs into the category of popular music and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata into the contrasting category of art music. My initial goal is in this essay is retrospective and descriptive, identifying the major characteristics that have been used to demarcate a body of music as popular. My conceptual analysis involves three major proposals. First, “Quantitative and Descriptive Popularity” makes the case that popular and art music were initially distinguished several centuries ago, when popular music became a term of contrast, designating some music as popular by virtue of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic accessibility that contrasts with a competing tradition of art music. Second, the section on “Popularity as a Dispositional Property” unpacks the accessibility criterion, which says that popular music is simple enough to be understood and appreciated by contemporary listeners through mere repeated exposure to music of the same style. The competing art tradition resists equivalent comprehension and appreciation by most listeners because they lack formal and theoretical education about the music and its history. Third, the next two sections explore how this contrastive relationship was yoked to the assumption—­ however ill-founded it now appears—that the primary function for music qua art is to deliver aesthetic pleasure as a reward of focused, attentive listening. In contrast, popular music is not primarily so intended, and instead is intended to be functional and, frequently, multifunctional. I conclude by evaluating the current status of philosophy of music in relation to popular music. My identification of accessibility as the core contrastive relationship diverges from similar proposals, each of which focuses on other contrastive relationships. However, they complicate the relationship in problematic ways. According to the first, popular music is by its nature “commercially oriented” (Burnett 1996; see also Frith 1998). As a definition, this excludes many traditional musics while failing to distinguish popular

Popular Music   535 music from art music, since much music in the latter category (for example, many of Beethoven’s chamber works) is also commercially oriented. A second view, associated with the philosopher Noël Carroll (1998), is that the category of popular music has been supplanted by the category of mass art, which is technologically produced and distributed so that identical instances are available simultaneously to masses of people. When mass technology and low cost are combined with ease of cognitive engagement, and where music is of a kind that is “descended from traditional art-forms” (Carroll 1998, 197), it is mass art. While I am indebted to his analysis of accessibility, Carroll’s account goes wrong in two ways. It neglects the degree to which non-mass popular music remains relevant, as in live performances in local music scenes (Fisher 2004, 58) and in the robust tradition of musical theatre, ranging from high-school productions of Grease to Broadway’s The Lion King. Furthermore, the musical features of most popular music do not descend from traditional art-forms, the music of Hank Williams again serving as a case in point. A third prominent view says that the important difference between popular culture and art is their alignment with distinct classes in the modern social hierarchy, with an attendant social function of reinforcing class divisions (Denisoff 1975, 39; Bourdieu 1984; Novitz 1992, 36). While this analysis may dovetail with and supplement my two-cultures account, its accuracy is doubtful. Recent studies point to a messier reality in the alignment of taste and social position. Many people respond with full appreciation to both popular and art music, especially those with higher socio-economic status, which aligns with broad musical tastes (Peterson and Kern 1996; Alderson et al. 2007; Rimmer 2012). Similarly, the general lack of advanced music education for children of lower socio-economic status aligns with a corresponding failure to develop an appreciation for any kind of art music. These patterns are not unexpected if accessibility is the key distinction between the two music cultures.

Quantitative and Descriptive Popularity Explicit reference to popular music dates back about three centuries in Western societies, but no earlier. It coincides with—and to some extent emerges from—debates about music’s place in the fine arts. (Significant work on the most relevant history is found in Bailey 1998; Russell 1997; and Scott 2008.) At the outset, the English phrase “popular music” is used in the ordinary sense of noun and qualifying adjective, indicating music that is “widely favoured or well liked by many people” (Storey 2012, 5). For example, in 1779, particular Protestant hymns are identified as “the most popular music in England” (Knox 1779, 296). The important step was recognition that this quantitative notion of popularity should be distinguished from a non-quantitative notion, so that popular music is not simply music that is popular. Popular music thus became a category in its own right, “a category with descriptive content” (Fisher 2011, 410). For example, in 1809

536   Theodore Gracyk an anonymous English author divides music “into three classes; the popular music, the church-music, and the scientific music of the theatre or opera” (Anonymous 1809, 343). Here, popular music aligns very closely with Herder’s account of folk music—the presumably ancient, formerly widespread, and relatively unchanging oral music tradition of a people. Since it was recognized that such music was in steep decline, this use of “popular” no longer aligned with quantitative popularity. Even as the two notions of popularity diverged, they remained entangled. As “popular” became a descriptor of music made by or performed for common people, many composers became ambivalent about quantitative popularity. Boasting about his opera The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart appears to equate success with popularity: “Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but ‘Figaro’. No opera is drawing like ‘Figaro’ ” (Anderson 1966, 903). Surprisingly, Arnold Schoenberg’s letters acknowledge his “longing” to be the Tchaikovsky of modernism, expressing the wish “that people should know my tunes and whistle them” (Schoenberg 1987, 243). Only a decade earlier, Schoenberg had said that increased programming of his music led him to question its value (Schoenberg 1975, 51). He worried that artistic progress is contrary to popular reception. This concern receives an extended apology in Milton Babbitt’s infamous essay, “Who Cares If You Listen?” (Babbitt 1958; see also McClary 1989, 58–59). Because most people cannot understand genuinely new art, Babbitt argues, concessions made for the sake of quantitative popularity will interfere with free experimentation and artistic integrity. Mozart’s letters foreshadow this doctrine. When his father advises him to note the size of the “unmusical public” and to please them with music in “the so-called popular style, which tickles even long ears” (i.e., donkeys), Mozart responds that he will not make concessions to the “popular,” unmusical taste (Anderson 1966, 685, 690). He refuses to write “stuff which is so inane that a fiacre [coachman] could sing it” (833). So Mozart’s view points toward Babbit’s dismissal of “the whistling repertory of the man in the street,” which is “alien” to serious music (Babbitt 1958, 127). Mozart and Babbitt are certainly correct that, on the whole, musical complexity reduces popularity (see Percino et al.  2014). Yet the converse does not hold. Simple music is not always quantitatively popular. There is an oversupply of popular music, and different styles have distinct social affiliations, and most people familiarize themselves with, and enjoy, only a few favoured styles (see Bryson 1996). There is so much of it, in so many distinct styles, that most of it fails to find a large audience. Ironically, some classical music sells wildly. Enrico Caruso’s 1907 recording of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Vesti la giubba,” for example, was the first million-selling record. In 1992–3, David Zinman’s recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 outsold new recordings by the rock bands Gutterball and The Gits. Nonetheless, relative unknowns such as Gutterball and The Gits created popular music, whereas Caruso’s opera recordings and Górecki’s symphony are art music that happened to become popular. Mozart was not especially philosophical and his scorn for the popular style does not invoke any developed theory of art or popular music. Had he been inclined to read it, he would have seen the outline of such at theory in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790. Beginning at §43, Kant offers a model of fine art that might legitimize

Popular Music   537 the inferiority of simple, popular music. The next generation of composers (and listeners) recognizes and articulates a competition between musical entertainment and art. Witness the rhetoric used by Beethoven’s supporters to coax the reclusive composer to permit a Viennese premiere of the Ninth Symphony. On the one hand, a public letter signed by thirty patrons and supporters praises Beethoven’s music as accessible and pleasurable: “do not withhold any longer from the popular enjoyment . . . the latest masterworks of your hand.” No rival composer is mentioned by name, but they urge Beethoven to bring his new music to the “multitudes” in order to counteract the “shallowness” of Rossini’s operas, which are “abusing the name and insignia of art.” Although their petition affirms that art music can be quantitatively popular, their disparagement of Italian comic opera hinges on a contrast between insubstantial entertainment music and “higher,” more spiritual forms (Albrecht 1996, 5). The petition encapsulates the modern opposition between popular music and art music by postulating a categorical distinction between lower and higher forms of music. Any pursuit of popularity is tempered by the duty to develop music as art, an attitude that is passed down to Schoenberg and Babbitt two centuries later. According to this influential but misguided line of thought, art cannot be made accessible and, thus, popular. A standard objection is raised against this unfortunate elitism. I have already mentioned Caruso and Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, which illustrate that quantitative popularity is an accidental historical property of any sufficiently accessible music. Although their popularity has waned, some of Beethoven’s music is perennially popular. Hence, the categories of art and popular entertainment are not mutually exclusive and art music can be popular music. However, this argument is weak. Quantitative popularity does not demonstrate understanding. It is telling that only the more tuneful fragments of Beethoven entered the realm of the popular, most notably “Für Elise” and the Ninth Symphony’s “Ode to Joy.” Taken as a whole, the Ninth cannot be popular music, for it is quintessentially music for concert performance, demanding sustained attention and analytical listening. (I expand on the implications of this point in the section “But Is It Art?”) Popular taste responds to the juicy melodic bits, without understanding their integration into the artwork. As Theodor Adorno says in reference to Beethoven’s Fifth (another example of a Beethoven symphony of which one movement, this time the first, is disproportionately well known), art music cannot be popular unless it is wrenched out of its proper musical context: “What is heard is not Beethoven’s Fifth, but merely musical information from and about Beethoven’s Fifth” (Adorno 2002b, 262). Although radio brought classical music to the masses, the increased popularity of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony does not translate into an understanding of the artwork; removing the music from the concert hall actually impedes understanding (Adorno 2002b). For three centuries, art composers have composed music that demands sustained attention, as well as a level of understanding that presupposes acquisition of relevant music-theoretic concepts (Johnson 2002, 73). That is, the salience (and perhaps even the presence) of more complex musical relationships can only be appreciated by listeners who can conceptualize it in terms of appropriate music-theoretical terminology. Thus,

538   Theodore Gracyk “mere exposure and attentive listening” (Huovinen 2008, 327) are insufficient to understand and appreciate the significance of essential compositional features. Comprehension and apperception of the harmonic and structural details of Western classical music cannot be obtained by merely hearing the music on a regular basis. Therefore, a society that provides little or no music education—or limited incentives to pursue it for oneself—will have a correspondingly limited audience for its serious music (Mortensen 1997, 178). By default, popular music is any music that is accessible to members of the society through mere exposure to enough stylistically similar music. Setting language and other cultural barriers aside, the musical elements of popular music are relatively accessible—that is, readily comprehensible—to anyone who has simply heard a lot of music of the same style. I stress that the contrastive relationship centres on musical understanding, not pleas­ ure or any measure of value. We should resist John Blacking’s proposal that popular music is “[t]he music that most people value most” (Blacking 1987, 21). As is typical, Blacking’s formula collapses the popular into the quantitatively popular. Furthermore, such formulae are not readily amenable to a dispositional analysis. Taken literally, Blacking is denying that a “lost” Beatles song counts as popular music simply by virtue of not having been heard, and therefore not valued. But if one imagines an unknown Beatles song, and further allows that the unreleased song is as accessible as “Hey Jude” and “Yesterday,” then it certainly is popular music. For these reasons, it is an error to use pleasure and valuing as elements of a definition of popular music, especially when coupled with a quantitative measure. Having outlined my proposal about relative accessibility, I will now provide four qualifications of this contrastive relationship. First, popular music often differs from art music in terms of its primary function and value: art music is normally intended to offer a purely musical experience and to be appreciated as an object of exclusive attention. Popular music is not created to function in this way. (See “But Is It Art?” and “Doctrines of Functionality” in this essay, and Gracyk 2007, 134–152.) However, this contrast between the two musical traditions is waning, not least of all because a great deal of popular music is meant to be appreciated along these lines (Gracyk  1996, 207–226). Second, there is legitimate resistance to the idea that a basic understanding of the masterpieces of Western classical music requires anything more than the repeated exposure that is sufficient for understanding popular music. For example, Jerrold Levinson (1997) argues that no special training is needed to achieve the basic musical understanding required to follow the progress of a Beethoven symphony comprehendingly. Although this sets the bar very low for “understanding” this music, it is an important proposal. If Levinson is right, the consequence for the topic at hand is that the distinction I am tracing is a distinction without a difference. To a great extent, the alleged divide between popular music and other music will be a social fiction that reflects entrenched elitist assumptions about “better” music. I offer a qualified endorsement of this possibility later in this essay, where I recognize that some questionable assumptions about functionality are used to justify the distinction.

Popular Music   539 My third qualification is that comparative accessibility does not imply that all aspects of popular music are equally accessible to everyone upon initial or minimal exposure. Style differences and cultural provenance carve popular music into distinctive subcategories. Obviously, many pertinent facts about cultural origins cannot be extracted from mere exposure to the music. Most popular consumption is informed by extra-musical sources, ranging from disc jockey commentary to liner notes to internet sites to lengthy magazine interviews and profiles. As a result, more knowledgeable fans perceive aesthetic and communicative differences that casual listeners overlook, and the richer meanings of many pieces of popular music are inaccessible to casual listeners (Gracyk 2013, 19–20). For example, rockabilly first arose at Sun Studios in Memphis in the mid-1950s. Rockabilly revivalists aimed to sound indistinguishable, but the 1970s music of Dave Edmunds and of the Stray Cats is essentially nostalgic and reactionary. The revivalists are positioned in contrast to the excesses of 1970s rock music, rather than against the backdrop of polite 1950s hit parade tunes. There are also innumerable hybrid and borderline cases—witness the hybrid of punk rock and rockabilly developed by the Cramps, which is often classified as psychobilly. Although these fine-tuned distinctions depend on extra-musical knowledge, it is noteworthy that music-theoretical terminology is almost completely absent from the relevant knowledge base. Fourth, the two-cultures analysis of popular music allows a genre, style, or broad category of music to cross the divide between popular and art music—and of folk music, too, for traditionalists who endorse the view that it comprises a third, distinct category (Howes 1962). Jazz is an example of a musical genre that spread internationally as popular music. In the overlap of early jazz and blues, it also embraced folk music. Yet jazz then developed an avant-garde tradition (see the bebop revolution and then Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz) that qualifies as art music rather than folk or popular music. Once again, I emphasize that this is not a value judgement: Free Jazz is not better than Louis Armstrong’s recording of “What a Wonderful World” simply because the latter is so accessible. Recognition that a single genre can include both art music and popular music diffuses another objection that may be directed against my analysis, which is that we can easily produce many examples of highly accessible music by major composers. The music of Mozart or Beethoven is not categorically art music because those composers wrote it. As with the difference between Beethoven’s Große Fuge, Op. 133 and his arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne,” or the difference between George Gershwin’s Concerto in F and “They All Laughed,” both kinds of music can flow from the same pen. Many musicians have dual careers as both so-called serious musicians and popular musicians: Brian Eno, Yoko Ono (with and without John Lennon), and Philip Glass (Goodwin 1991). Starting from the historical emergence of the Western concept of popular music, I have extracted a non-quantitative concept that lacks application unless there is a contrasting body of more difficult music. This contrast is based on the criterion that popular music is understandable to a contemporary audience in the absence of systematic or formal music training. In Ralf von Appen’s formulation, “the recipients are no ‘enlightened listeners’ who know exactly how their favourite songs produce their effects. The musicians mainly strive for immediate understanding and do not presume knowledge

540   Theodore Gracyk in art history” (von Appen 2007, 17). Or, to adopt Susan Feagin’s (1996, 23–41) proposal that art appreciation requires a skilled interaction, popular music is a contrasting body of music whose reception and use involves minimal levels of very basic skill.

Popularity as a Dispositional Property The distinction between non-quantitative and quantitative uses of popular music captures a distinction between what is accessible and what is actually accessed. What is accessible is not necessarily accessed, which is why the contrastive relationship of relative accessibility does not align neatly with quantitative popularity. There is no contradiction in recognizing that music that is popular in the non-quantitative sense—musically and aesthetically accessible through mere listening—may be misunderstood, ignored, or disliked by most people. As such, the comparative, non-quantitative use of “popular” directs us to a dispositional property, for accessibility of understanding is a dispositional property in the same sense that fragility is. Such properties are objective latencies that become actualized when an object encounters certain circumstances. A glass vase is fragile if it will break when it meets a hard object at even low velocity. Fragility is a disposition to break given certain circumstances. Yet not every fragile vase gets broken. At the same time, the amount of force needed to break a fragile object is comparatively minimal; an automobile will buckle when it crashes in a high-speed accident, but we do not classify automobiles as fragile objects. Similarly, comparatively little cognitive preparation and effort is required of listeners in order for popular music to be readily understandable and therefore accessible. (Again, we should grant that there are cases that resist easy classification: some of the most harmonically sophisticated progressive rock will be a case in point.) A dispositional analysis defuses the misplaced objection that, because not everyone understands all popular music, the popular cannot be defined in terms of accessibility. In the same way that being intact does not count against a vase’s fragility, widespread miscomprehension and indifference do not count against classification as popular. Modern commerce and technologies encourage the proliferation of popular music styles and subcultures, and it has been many decades since it made sense to think that there is any music that most people enjoy. Musical style affects accessibility, for prior exposure to stylistically related music is required to establish listener expectations. This informal education is relatively passive. As a result, almost anyone born in 1918 would find Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” (1932) to be far more accessible (and emotionally engaging) than Lorde’s “Royals” (2013). Precisely the opposite is likely to hold for someone born in 1998. Neither song is more accessible in absolute terms. Yet each is stylistically tied to its time and to large swathes of other music familiar to listeners who were in adolescence when it was new, and so the listening habitus and “ears” of each generation make different music comparatively accessible to each. Language barriers are also highly relevant. Japanese pop metal is popular music, but, sung in Japanese, it is all but

Popular Music   541 unknown beyond Japan. The worldwide popularity of the Beatles would be unimaginable if the songs were not in English. Furthermore, many listeners resist exposure to musical genres that are not associated with their own social group(s) (Bryson 1996). Economic and technological factors also contribute to relative accessibility and inaccessibility. Prior to the rise of mass distribution, regionally distinctive musical styles generally remained unknown beyond a geographically limited area. After 1920, radio exponentially expanded access to a wider range of new music. The rise of inexpensive mass distribution allowed regional phenomena to become national or international hits. Legend has it that late-evening radio broadcasts of Glenn Miller made his orchestra more popular in California than on the Atlantic seaboard because the time difference provided exposure in California at a time when more people were listening. The Carter Family broadcast Appalachian music throughout the United States from a powerful transmitter in Mexico. Recordings also gave individuals access to an ever-broader range of music. Even so, building up a record library was an expensive process. Record producer Steve Albini observes that the digital age was an important leap forward: “In the blink of an eye music went from being rare, expensive and only available through physical media in controlled outlets to being ubiquitous and free worldwide” (Albini 2014). Yet the resulting sonic and economic access does not obliterate every difference. A free online recording of Schoenberg’s piano music may seem popular when the visitor counter reveals 60,000 listenings, but that is insignificant compared to the number of YouTube views for Lorde’s “Royals,” which approaches one billion views. Both are free, but the aesthetic virtues of Schoenberg are not readily accessible.

But Is It Art? It is time to confront the most important objection to an analysis of popular music that emphasizes a contrastive relationship with art music. By default, isn’t music a branch of the arts? Including all or most popular music? But if popular music is a subcategory of art, then my descriptive, contrastive relationship appears to be conceptually confused. In this section, I defuse this objection by distinguishing between two senses of “art.” As I have stressed from the outset, the contrastive relationship involves a contrast with fine art. In Western societies, the contrastive relationship between art music and popular music arose within a broader debate about differences between art, craft, and popular culture. In this section, I explain how the contrastive relationship maps on to the basic elements of that debate. From seventeenth-century debates about the nature of comedy (Mallinson 1999) to more recent theorists (Collingwood  1938; Adorno  2002a; Howes  1962), a consensus emerged: the popular arts are not art, because they fail to satisfy value criteria that make art special within the field of cultural production. Because this view has attained the status of a quasi-tautology, any unqualified assignment of art status to popular music is liable to be met with derision, for it will be misunderstood as the claim that even the most

542   Theodore Gracyk banal of pop songs should be subjected to precisely the same evaluative criteria that apply to modern fine art. Treated as an evaluative stance rather than as a descriptive criterion that differentiates between two kinds of music, the accessibility criterion would then suggest that popular music is inferior because it is simpler. Saying that popular music is art reduces it to a second-class category of art. It would be difficult to overestimate the frequency with which such thinking has been used to disenfranchise popular music from the artworld. Two arguments were repeatedly offered to show that popular music is not aesthetically rewarding in the way that art music is (Stolnitz 1986, 29–30; see also Wolterstorff 2015, 255–256). The first argument emphasizes that popular music is entertainment. The limited amusement that it occasions should not be confused with the aesthetic or expressive functions of art (Stolnitz 1986, 30; Collingwood 1938, 11, 78–104). According to the second argument, popular music is debased by commercialization, which requires simplification and formulaic repetition that preclude the level of originality and formal invention that is the desiderata of art (Carroll 1998, 49–70; Collingwood 1938, 44–45; Adorno 2002a). Both arguments deploy a simplification of Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (the first part of his aforementioned Critique of the Power of Judgment) and stress its failure to contribute to the progress of culture (Kant 2000, §51, 197; see also Carroll 1998, 89–90, and Gracyk  2007, 134–152). A Kantian framework is explicit (but revised) in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of contrastive cultural positioning. The error of both arguments is that each assumes that fine art, and only fine art, has significant aesthetic value. This assumption is false, however. Like many other cultural products and practices, popular music has significant aesthetic value even if it is not fine art (Gracyk 2007). Nonetheless, aesthetic value remains so closely associated with fine art that theorists in many fields remain reluctant to recognize that there are two major uses of the term “art.” At this juncture, I largely defer to Stephen Davies’s response (2000) to arguments that there is no non-Western art, arguments which often parallel those that say popular music is not art. According to many anthropologists and art theorists, art is absent from non-Western societies unless they assimilate relevant concepts from Western culture. There is no art before and until those concepts guide creative activity and reception. The plausibility of this argument turns, however, on the precise criteria for art that are being used to deny that non-Western cultures have art. Davies’s gloss on the relevant criteria suggests that “in the West . . . it is widely claimed that art lacks ‘utility,’ being made for contemplation distanced from social concerns; that artists should be indifferent to worldly matters in pursuing their muse; that artworks have intrinsic value and should be preserved and respected (Davies 2000, 201; see also Wolterstorff 2015, 25–33). If that is the default meaning of “art,” as more or less synonymous with Western fine art, then it is true that many non-Western cultures lacked art music until they assimilated Western values. Furthermore, until then they had no contrastive distinction between art music and popular music. Davies’s characterization of fine art is subject to the objection that it is a caricature. It is simply too easy to name bona fide artworks that serve as counter-examples to these criteria. Furthermore, some will object that these criteria wrongly reclassify some

Popular Music   543 Western art music as popular music (for example, G. F. Handel’s Water Music, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Richard Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin). However, Davies rightly cautions that these responses are a red herring. These criteria serve a regulatory purpose in the Western art world, by regulating the appreciative stances adopted towards different artefacts. The specialized Western domain of “fine” or “high” art is the art world that emphasizes the importance of intrinsically valuable, functionless art. This is “one kind within a wider genus . . . that is properly called art . . . though [it] might not be institutionalized and ideologically freighted to the extent the extent that [fine art] is” (Davies 2000, 202). The spheres of popular and folk cultures produce art, but governed by a competing regulative ideal. The broader category (often described as art with a small a rather than Art with a capital A) tracks a human universal, describing art and music found in every known society. This universal category of art consists of culturally significant practices involving non-accidental, non-incidental “achievements that are aesthetic in character,” where the aesthetic character is also “essential to its function” (207). Interpreted in light of Davies’s analysis, a contrastive analysis of popular music does not deny that popular music is art. Instead, it recognizes it to be “art with a small a” rather than “Art with a capital A” (Davies 2000, 202). But no music counts as popular music unless its originating society has both kinds of art, establishing the conditions for the contrastive relationship between vernacular and elite music. So, my account is not the simple assertion that popular music is a society’s accessible music, for that falsely implies that popular music is the default category and that every culture has always had popular music. Instead, my account says that popular music gains its status through contrast. It is music that is understood by, and its aesthetic character apparent to, untutored audiences, in a society that also produces art music that is not so readily accessible. As such, we find that some (but not all) non-Western societies independently developed their own distinction between art music and popular music. But in the absence of Western notions of fine art, what would be their “art” or “high” music? Although popular music is only recently a universal cultural phenomenon, the two-cultures analysis provides guidance about locating popular music in pre-Westernized traditional cultures (Powers  1965; Baily 1981, 106). We will look for a society in which some music has little or no function except to be listened to for its musical value, and whose full aesthetic and expressive character will be inaccessible to untutored listeners. The relevant stratification seems to have been met by some traditions in India and throughout East Asia, and these cultures may properly be described as having both popular music and fine art music prior to Western colonization and the arrival of Western musical culture. We would also expect such cultures to have developed a sophisticated aesthetics of music. These conditions were certainly met in Ming dynasty China and in the seventeenth-century court music of the Mughal empire (present-day India) (Schofield 2010, 490). Art music, or music with the status of fine art, arose in tandem with theories of fine art and connoisseurship, and it is a hallmark of that tradition that artistic value must be either entirely, or to very high degree, independent of practical function. Granted, we must be very careful in our attempts to identify such music and its accompanying theoretical support. We have not located it in a

544   Theodore Gracyk non-Western culture when a colonized society “subscrib[es] to the hegemonic values of the colonial powers” as a means of demonstrating that their own music and culture are appropriately civilized (485). For a detailed example, see Richard Widdess’s (2015) discussion of Hindustani “classical” music.

Doctrines of Functionality In light of this argument, both popular music and art music possess aesthetic value, but the contrastive relationship aligns with distinctive regulative ideals in which the two realms of music assign different priorities to the aesthetic. Nicholas Wolterstorff (2015, 85) articulates the underlying doctrine as the view that fine art—“art for disinterested attention”—is not valuable in the same way as “art in general,” which is most of the world’s art, and which includes popular music. Popular music possesses valuable aesthetic properties, but not as an isolated focal point for aesthetic appreciation. Its aesthetic properties are selected to support the functions that the music is designed to promote. So, in popular music, aesthetic value is reduced to one among several instrumental values. To illustrate this phenomenon, Wolterstorff directs us to think about work songs, which are “serviceable music” (255), which aligns them with music for dancing and other coordinated group activities. Here we see that the functional value of the music is more important than its aesthetic value. In this way, the accessibility criterion is supplemented by a functionality criterion. In contrast, art music is designed to be the exclusive focal point of disinterested aesthetic judgement (11–19; cf. Johnson 2002, 51–57). Art music is valuable for its own sake, without concern for its instrumental value (Levinson 1996a, 6; Higgins 2011, xix). In the modern tradition, complex instrumental music served as the paradigm case of such music. In a view of absolute music popularized by Eduard Hanslick (1986, 22) and more recently defended by Peter Kivy (2011, 101–118), the preludes and fugues of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier are to be valued for their own sake, without concern for their meaning or for any political or social import. As in Davies’s summary of the cultural norms for fine art, the regulative ideal for art music is often described as a doctrine about its intrinsic value, opposing it to the instrumental value of popular music. However, this description is misleading. Attentive listening to Mozart’s Divertimento for String Trio is supposed to offer a rewarding experience, and the music is valuable for providing this experience. However, that is certainly a species of instrumental value: the music is valuable because it functions in a particular way. So, it is unilluminating to oppose the alleged intrinsic value of art music with the functional value of other music. Instead, we should attend to their “different modes of reception or use” (Shusterman 2000, 314n4; see also Wolterstorff 2015, 83–106) and ask which music is designed primarily for disinterested attention, and which for multifunctional appropriation. Popular music and art music align with distinct categories of intended use, where “use” includes expectations about normal settings for its performance and rules for its reception. In keeping with the long tradition that background

Popular Music   545 music is not designed for aesthetic focus and so is not fine art (see Kant 2000, §44, 184–185), a restaurant’s use of Mozart’s Divertimento as background music could be said to render it popular music on that occasion, but it would remain art music. Conversely, John Williams’s film score for Star Wars is sometimes performed in symphony halls, but it was designed to support a film that falls squarely into the category of the popular. What, then, of art music created for a practical function (for example, the entertainment function of Mozart’s comic operas)? The standard answer is that art music’s superior aesthetic achievement will sustain interest and reward our listening when there is no purpose other than listening. Another common claim is that art music is autonomous, conveying the idea that the music’s primary value is “separate[d] from all worldly or historical contingency” (Goehr 2007, 161). We are to attend to it in splendid isolation, independent of “all possible social functions and values” (McClary 1989, 60). In the many cases where music has been designed to serve a very specific social function (for example, Haydn Masses or the Mozart and Brahms Requiems), the doctrine of autonomy says that the musical value of art music is highlighted rather than diminished when those functions are negated, as when a requiem is presented simply as a concert piece. In contrast, no one thinks that hospital-room “muzak” is autonomous in this way. An additional claim is often made for autonomous musical value: a Beethoven string quartet stands the test of time and so is just as valuable today as when it was written. Eschewing aesthetic autonomy, popular music is not meant to last. Most of it dates quickly—it is now difficult for anyone under the age of fifty to appreciate Helen Shapiro’s “Walking Back to Happiness” (1961) for anything but its unintended campiness. It is doubtful, however, whether any music is autonomous in the sense of escaping all historical contingencies, or being of value apart from all such contingencies, and therefore autonomy does not serve as a marker of the contrast between art music and popular music. With the possible exception of music that is simple enough to soothe a newborn (Unyk et al.  1992), the aesthetic properties of music emerge only for those who can apprehend similarities to, and differences from, stylistically related music. Unless one is attuned to a range of piano music, one cannot hear Beethoven’s piano writing as lyrical. Pianos are tuned percussion instruments, and Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata is only lyrical relative to the sustaining capacities of the piano (Walton 1970, 349–250). Similarly, songs by the Beatles are harmonically complex, but only relative to their appropriate comparison class: songs created by rock and roll musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet this music is highly accessible compared to the art music of this period. Both kinds of music are only understood against a background of related music. It remains the case, however, that the background knowledge required to understand the music of the Beatles can be acquired with relative ease by subsequent audiences. Ironically, there is a legitimate sense in which their music is relatively more autonomous than a Beethoven piano sonata. Despite these reservations, the broad contrast about two ideals for intended use explains how a bifurcation of musical culture can arise within a popular music genre, so that a single genre-label will refer to both popular music and art music. This bifurcation

546   Theodore Gracyk will be signalled and reinforced by pursuit of greater musical complexity, reducing cognitive accessibility. For example, a recent college-level textbook about jazz assures us that because bebop was “complex, dense, and difficult to grasp,” it marks the point at which jazz becomes “self-conscious art music” (Giddins and DeVeaux 2009, 296). Until then, jazz had been overwhelmingly created as dance music. (Early use of the term jazz referred to the attendant dancing, not the music.) Bop was decidedly non-danceable. Relocated from dance halls to small nightclubs and the concert stage, jazz turned its back on “popular music” (296; see also DeVeaux 2015). Aspiring to transform modern jazz into “art-music,” the boppers and their successors produced “a recital music”— “not . . . played for dancing, but for listening” (Hobsbawm 1993, 97–98; see also Brown, Goldblatt, and Gracyk 2018, 9–50). In short, jazz developed art credentials by reducing accessibility and by making the aesthetic rewards of attentive listening its primary function. Virtually all jazz prior to bebop was dance music, yet all of it served another important purpose of popular music: clear, accessible emotional expression. Most popular music (including most early jazz) has been song. Today, thanks to recorded music, most individuals, most of the time, select their own music. Generally, their choices are based on the music’s emotional effect. Ethnographic studies of contemporary life demonstrate that one of the primary functions (if not the primary use) of popular music is playing it for emotional self-regulation: it generates and enhances emotional states, energy levels, and the pace of activity (DeNora 2000, 46–74). Because music has a powerful capacity to trigger strongly emotional memories of a time period or specific situation, it is often used a marker of personal identity and as a tool for evoking memories (Sloboda 2005, 324). Although less easily measured, there is often a profound ethical function for music in varying social contexts (Higgins 2011). Rather than posit a unifying function for popular music, I have emphasized comparative accessibility. Accessibility facilitates, but is not identical with, the multifunctionality of popular music. Generally, a popular piece or recording has no particular use, and its accessibility facilitates multiple everyday uses. A song written for a film soundtrack will be relicensed to sell products in a commercial, and then the backing track will be used for karaoke. On my view, a particular work of popular music is more like a roll of duct tape, which can be creatively adapted, than a mobile phone application or “app,” which does only one thing. Now more than ever, avant-garde and art music functions like the mobile app in being intentionally restricted to one use: demarcating the elite who can rise to musical challenges (see McClary 1989). In contrast, popular music is freely used for multiple purposes across an array of social and individualized functions. Consequently, its aesthetic value will be different under different uses (De Clercq 2005). Accordingly, we should be cautious of accounts of popular music that downplay its multifunctionality. For example, consider Bourdieu’s sociological analysis, which also employs a contrastive relationship to demarcate popular culture from fine art. Bourdieu’s work has been criticized from a number of perspectives, but for present purposes the relevant point is his axiomatic commitment to the idea that popular music is

Popular Music   547 committed to “the affirmation of continuity between art and life,” most often through “a sense of revelry” (Bourdieu 1984, 32, 34). In short, he is right to emphasize the everyday functionality of the “low” side of the contrast, but he isolates one function of popular culture as the essential one. He also tends to align the popular with the tastes of the working class, and consequently his explanation of the functionality of music for the middle class is sketchy, by comparison, so that it seems to consist of any sort of expressive function (11). An alignment of popular culture and the working class is also central to the highly influential work of Stuart Hall. Again, popular music is defined by its central function. It is any music, at any time, that serves as “one of the sites where [the] struggle for or against a culture of the powerful is engaged” (Hall 1981, 239). Within this framework, the same music can be popular at some times but not others, and it may serve to advance different resistive projects of different groups or alliances. On balance, Hall’s emphasis on one function, the resistive function, fails to capture the use of popular that characterizes popular music. He is, instead, calling attention to a neglected aspect of popular culture, the study of which has led other scholars to recognize that, as a site of cultural struggle, popular culture is no less likely to be racist, misogynist, and counter-hegemonic than elite culture (see the summary by Kelley 1992). In American popular music, the minstrel tradition and its aftermath offer a complicated case in point (Lhamon 1998). Granted, some popular music is designed for very particular situations and functions. Most folk and traditional music is associated with group activity in specific work or social environments (see Ling 1997). During a series of recent hospital visits, I noticed that the patients’ recovery rooms had instrumental music at a low volume. I recognized none of it. It appeared to be music composed for the very purpose of providing an ambient soundscape. The music consisted of simple melodies, predictable rhythms, and slow to medium tempos. The instrumentation was sparse: a wash of strings supported a melody on piano, acoustic guitar, or flute. There were never drums and there was no dissonance. The music was there solely to create a soothing environment, not to be the object of focused attention. Functional music of this kind is often referred to as Muzak, using the name of the corporation that pioneered its use to influence the work tempo of office workers (see Lanza 2004). And nothing seems further from art music than “muzak” or elevator music. Increasingly, however, original recordings of pop hits are repurposed as the background music of public spaces, with styles chosen to reflect the “public” associated with different spaces. (Ironically, but not surprisingly, Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, a landmark of ambient music, has apparently played in only one airport.) In creating atmosphere while demarcating social distinctions, most background music is utilitarian and multifunctional. Ironically, classical music is intentionally adopted as background music by some shops and restaurants in order to discourage patronage by younger and less affluent and “cultured” customers. Richard Shusterman agrees that popular music is not meant to be autonomous art. Nonetheless, he argues that some popular music achieves an aesthetic and artistic “legitimacy” that elevates it to fine art (Shusterman 2000, 202). Deploying well-chosen examples, including an extended analysis of a rap track and associated music video by the

548   Theodore Gracyk group Stetsasonic, Shusterman argues that “better works” in popular genres satisfy all usual value criteria for fine art (215; see also Levinson 1996b, 235–238). On the surface, he is attacking the contrastive relationship I’ve advocated. But I propose that he merely redraws the border: observation that some hip-hop musicians flaunt their “proud artistic self-consciousness” (Shusterman 2000, 230) signals a bifurcation of the genre into simpler and more complex styles, where the popular genre serves as a source of musical materials that are reworked into fine art. In general, we should be wary of these attempts to erase the contrastive relationship by assigning the status of fine art to a limited number of cases within popular music. These arguments reinforce a contrastive relationship between fine art and most popular music, where the latter is normally of limited or low value. This approach tends to “denature” the popular by over-emphasizing commonalities with paradigm cases of fine art, in light of which “appreciation is partial and incomplete” (Lopes  2014, 122–123). Reframed as art, the popular will generally look second-rate. For example, from Adorno’s perspective it is obvious that Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues” is musically infantile, repetitive, and regressive. This critique, however, requires a perspective in which 1920s jazz is a modernist rival to the Second Viennese School, which requires closing one’s ears to the way in which Armstrong succeeds, as a remarkable and highly expressive blast of joy from the American underclass.

Looking Forward Despite sustained attention to the topic, there is little consensus about the scope and nature of popular music. Yet, I have argued, the distinction is not arbitrary. I will now suggest that philosophy of music is, thankfully, realigning itself in relation to the topic. Consider the stance taken towards popular music in three books written as introductions to philosophy of music—books by Peter Kivy (2002), Aaron Ridley (2004), and Jeanette Bicknell (2015). Kivy says that philosophy of music ought to be mainly concerned with “music without words”: instrumental music. Nonetheless, he recognizes that a general introduction to philosophy of music ought to say something about songs and singing, for that is what “people ordinarily listen to now” (Kivy 2002, 160). He then examines a philosophical problem in opera, offering it as representative “of almost all music with text” (165). Claudio Monteverdi and Mozart are offered to illustrate the philosophy of song, as if Mozart had never distinguished opera from the inane songs popular with the working class. Aaron Ridley challenges Kivy’s privileging of instrumental music. He observes that “there is [no] non-question-begging sense in which vocal music is to be thought of as less musical for not being purely instrumental” (Ridley 2004, 79). I applaud Ridley for challenging an entrenched dogma of the philosophy of music. Yet his next move is to support the use of examples of art song, not popular song. Ridley’s philosophy of song is rooted in “classical” music: Franz Schubert, Frederick Delius, and Anton Webern. He

Popular Music   549 defends this approach on the grounds of precedence and “partly because . . . there is no reason not to” (15). However, my contrastive analysis gives us a very good reason not to, for we should expect to encounter different philosophical problems when discussing instances of simpler and more complex music. Philosophy of music is likely to be an impoverished and myopic enterprise if it neglects popular music. In particular, we are likely to ignore the rich array of ethical issues related to the production and reception of music in everyday life (Higgins 2011). In addition, a continued focus on “classical” music implicitly reinforces the triviality of popular music. When Ridley finally mentions one composer of popular song by name, he does so in order to supply an example of “great songs” with “lousy music”—that is, lousy when the composition is judged by the standards of instrumental music (Ridley 2004, 82). In contrast to these two philosophies of song, Bicknell’s monograph on songs and singing adopts the methodological assumption that a general theory of song cannot be generated from any one genre of music (Bicknell 2015, ix). In a book of nine chapters, each focusing on a different song as a test case, she selects eight examples from popular music and one example from art music. There are a few places (4, 76) where Bicknell explains why it matters that she is discussing an example drawn from popular music, but she otherwise proceeds on the premiss that popular music possesses equivalent aesthetic and artistic legitimacy. We find a more explicit statement of this agenda in the introduction to a collection of essays on songs and singing that she co-edited: “the most interesting aesthetic questions about songs apply to non-art songs (hereafter ‘vernacular’ songs)” (Bicknell and Fisher 2013; originally a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). In that volume of twelve essays, ten are focused on popular music, two on art music. I believe that we are at a juncture where more philosophers of art agree with Bicknell than Kivy and Ridley. Collectively, philosophers of music are adopting a methodological programme that took hold in musicology a generation ago: there is less to be learned in thinking about the “serious” music (and writings) of Milton Babbitt than about a hit song by a popular group such as Earth, Wind, and Fire (McClary 1989, 77–81). However, philosophers have arrived at this stage without engaging in much of the transitional battling over priorities and prestige that arose in musicology. But what accounts for this development, if genuine? I do not credit anything so grand as a cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism. A simpler explanation is that there has been increasing recognition by philosophers of art that fine art, their traditional area of concern, is a system of classification that arose in tandem with modern philosophy in the so-called “modern system of the arts” (Kivy 1997; Shiner 2003; Wolterstorff 2015). Philosophers are increasingly aware of their own intellectual history, and see that the distinction between fine art and other kinds of art, including many products of popular culture, derives from a series of social contingencies that privileged some art as fine art—and not, it seems, according to a coherent grouping (Kivy 1997). Furthermore, the false equation of art with fine art has limited the range of questions that have been studied, and it has often impeded, rather than facilitated, progress on most issues when they are taken to the level of distinct art forms. Thus, there are pragmatic reasons to philosophize about popular music:

550   Theodore Gracyk new kinds of examples tend to yield new insights. In sum, philosophy of music has suffered from its emphasis on art music at the expense of popular music. Methodologically, a philosophy of music that excludes popular music is simply not a philosophy of music. Philosophers of music who continue to presume that so-called serious music is their default subject matter owe a non-question-begging justification for their approach. But that point seems past, given the general willingness to move forward with a more inclusive model of philosophy of music.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor  W. 2002a. “On Popular Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 437–469. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2002b. “The Radio Symphony.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 251–270. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Albini, Steve. 2014. “The Internet has Solved Music’s Problem.” The Guardian, November 16. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-facethe-music-in-full. Albrecht, Theodore, ed. 1996. Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, Volume 3, 1824–1828. Translated by Theodore Albrecht. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Alderson, Arthur, Azamat Junisbai, and Isaac Heacok. 2007. “Social Status and Cultural Consumption in the United States.” Poetics 35, nos. 2–3 (April–June): 191–212. Anderson, Emily, ed. 1966. The Letters of Mozart and His Family, Vol. 2. 2nd ed. Revised by Alec Hyatt King and Monica Carolan. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Anonymous. 1809. “Progress of the Russian Empire, During the Reigns of the Emperors Paul and Alexander, in Arts, Manners, and Political Economy.” Monthly Magazine (London) 27 (4), no. 184 (May 1), 341–346. Babbitt, Milton. 1958. “Who Cares If You Listen?” High Fidelity (February): 38–40, 126–127. Baily, John. 1981. “Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Popular Music: The Case of Afghanistan.” Popular Music 1 (January): 105–122. Bailey, Peter. 1998. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bicknell, Jeanette. 2015. A Philosophy of Song and Singing: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Bicknell, Jeanette, and John Andrew Fisher, eds. 2013. Song, Songs, and Singing. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Blacking, John. 1987. “A Commonsense View of All Music”: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Ethnomusicology and Music Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Lee, David Goldblatt, and Theodore Gracyk. 2018. Jazz and the Philosophy of Art. New York: Routledge. Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “Anything But Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes.” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (October): 884–899. Burke, Peter. 2009. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Popular Music   551 Burnett, Robert. 1996. The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry. London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collingwood, R. G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2000. “Non-Western Art and Art's Definition.” In Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll, 199–216. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. De Clercq, Rafael. 2005. “The Aesthetic Peculiarity of Multifunctional Artefacts.” British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 4 (October): 412–425. Denisoff, R.  Serge. 1975. Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeVeaux, Scott. 2015. “North American Jazz.” In The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, edited by Michael Church, 198–215. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Feagin, Susan L. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fisher, John Andrew. 2004. “On Carroll’s Enfranchisement of Mass Art as Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 1 (Winter): 57–61. Fisher, John Andrew. 2011. “Popular Music.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 405–415. London: Routledge. Frith, Simon. 1998. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gelbart, Matthew. 2007. The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddins, Gary, and Scott DeVeaux. 2009. Jazz. New York: W. W. Norton. Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, Andrew. 1991. “Popular Music and Postmodern Theory.” Cultural Studies 5 (2): 174–190. Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gracyk, Theodore. 2007. Listening to Popular Music: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gracyk, Theodore. 2013. On Music. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 227–239. London: Routledge. Hamm, Charles. 1995. Putting Popular Music in Its Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. 1986. On the Musically Beautiful. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1990. Volkslieder: Nebst untermischten anderen Stücken, Zweiter Teil. In Werke in zehn Bänden, Vol. 3. Volkslieder, Übertragung, Dichtungen, edited by Ulrich Gaier, 229–430. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. 2011. The Music of Our Lives. new ed. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1993. The Jazz Scene. New York: Pantheon. Howes, Frank. 1962. “A Critique of Folk, Popular, and ‘Art’ Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 2, no. 3 (July): 239–248.

552   Theodore Gracyk Huovinen, Erkki. 2008. “Levels and Kinds of Listeners’ Musical Understanding.” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July): 315–337. Johnson, Julian. 2002. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Gaynor, and Jay Rahn. 1977. “Definitions of Popular Music: Recycled.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 11, no. 4 (October): 79–92. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelley, Robin D. G. 1992. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk’.” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December): 1400–1408. Kivy, Peter. 1997. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2011. Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knox, Vicesimus. 1779. “On the Amusement of Music.” In Essays Moral and Literary 2:292–301. London: C. Dilly. Lhamon, W.  T., Jr. 1998. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lanza, Joseph. 2004. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996a. “What is Aesthetic Pleasure?” In The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 3–10. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996b. “Messages in Art.” In The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 224–241. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ling, Jan. 1997. A History of European Folk Music. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Lopes, Dominic McIver. 2014. Beyond Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Mallinson, G.  J. 1999. “Defining Comedy in the Seventeenth Century: Moral Sense and Theatrical Sensibility.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3. The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 259–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClary, Susan. 1989. “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition.” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring): 57–81. Mortensen, Preben. 1997. Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art. Albany: State University of New York Press. Novitz, David. 1992. The Boundaries of Art. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Percino, Gamaliel, Peter Klimek, and Stefan Thurner. 2014. “Instrumentational Complexity of Music Genres and Why Simplicity Sells.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 12 (December 31). Peterson, Richard  A. and Roger  M.  Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61 no. 5 (October): 900–907. Powers, Harold  S. 1965. “Indian Music and the English Language: A Review Essay.” Ethnomusicology 9, no. 1 (January): 1–12. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Rimmer, Mark. 2012. “Beyond Omnivores and Univores: The Promise of a Concept of Musical Habitus.” Cultural Sociology 6, no. 3 (September): 299–318.

Popular Music   553 Russell, Dave. 1997. Popular Music in England, 1840–1914. 2nd ed. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein. Translated by Leo Black. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1987. Letters. Edited by Erwin Stein, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schofield, Katherine Butler. 2010. “Reviving the Golden Age Again: ‘Classicization,’ Hindustani Music, and the Mughals.” Ethnomusicology 54, no. 3 (Fall): 484–517. Scott, Derek  B. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiner, Larry. 2003. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shusterman, Richard. 2000. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sloboda, John. 2005. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1986. “The Actualities of Non-aesthetic Experience.” In Possibility of the Aesthetic Experience, edited by Michael  H.  Mitias, 27–45. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Storey, John. 2003. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Storey, John. 2012. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 6th ed. London: Routledge. Unyk, Anna  M., Sandra  E.  Trehub, Laurel  J.  Trainor, and E.  Glenn Schellenberg. 1992. “Lullabies and Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Psychology of Music 20, no. 1 (April): 15–28. von Appen, Ralf. 2007. “On the Aesthetics of Popular Music.” Music Therapy Today 8, no. 1 (April): 5–25. Walton, Kendall L. 1970. “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review 79, no. 3 (July): 334–367. Widdess, Richard. 2015. “North India.” In The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, edited by Michael Church, 139–159. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2015. Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art. New York: Oxford University Press.

chapter 28

Bl acksou n d Matthew D. Morrison

Both music studies (here encompassing historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music analysis) and philosophy in the anglophone world are shaped by their European antecedents. Race and racism are customarily treated as subtopics of special interest within these musical and philosophical discourses, rather than as objects of analysis that are central to interrogating how, why, and when these areas of study themselves emerged, as well as how these fields subsequently helped to shape the making of Western epistemologies. Charles Mills, philosopher and author of The Racial Contract (1997), notes that an epistemic principle of “white normativity” emerged in the wake of Europe’s global domination, a domination that began during the colonial conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, continued with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the ongoing centring of Europeans and European Americans as the “constitutive norm” (Mills 2007, 25).1 This structuring of white normativity within Western societies helped to construct black people and other non-whites as peripheral subjects; subjects who are often unrecognized, ignored, and underrepresented in the designation of knowledge systems, even as their labour, bodies, and personhood laid the foundation for these systems from the outset. Furthermore, this “epistemic exclusion,” to use philosopher Kristie Dotson’s phrase, creates what theorist Ashon T. Crawley calls “categorical distinctions” that seek to divide persons into “pure” categories while providing the grounds “for racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, classism, and the like” (Crawley 2017, 5). These categorical distinctions combine with the work of epistemic exclusion to underwrite epistemologies grounded in racist ideologies that contribute to their normalization, while appearing as race neutral within white-dominated and supremacist structures.2 In an effort to challenge this epistemic exclusion, this chapter extends a question posed by Charles Mills (2016, 713): “how would an interest in race and racism orient one’s approach to the history of philosophy?” I build upon Mills’s original inquiry by asking: how might a centring of race and racism reorient one’s approach to historicizing and analysing the relationship between musical and philosophical discursive practices?

556   Matthew D. Morrison Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive survey or critique of works in music and philosophy dealing with race, I investigate the relationship between philosophy, music, and race through a theory I have developed called “Blacksound” (introduced in Morrison 2014; for its contextualization see also Morrison 2017, 2019). Blacksound is the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance as the origin of popular music, entertainment, and culture in the United States. As a hermeneutic tool, Blacksound is designed to historicize and redress how we conceive the formation of race and property laws throughout the nineteenth century via aesthetics. In particular, this tool analyses the construction, consumption, and erasure of black people and blackness out of blackface minstrelsy—the first original form of popular entertainment in North America. Blacksound is an open concept that challenges fixed notions of intellectual property by pointing to the role that the performance of race and the making of racism in popular music plays in property and copyright laws that have developed throughout the nineteenth century (see Goehr 1994, 91). In this chapter, I analyse how blackface, through Blacksound, laid the foundation for the economy of popular music and unpack how it continues to form the aesthetic and material basis of identity and cultural formations in the United States. By drawing on authors such as Saidiya Hartmann (1999) and Christina Sharpe (2016), whose methods help to amplify how the aesthetics of music has been framed by racialization in its connections to property relations developed in early America, I situate the musical phenomenon of Blacksound as a key point for investigating the emergence of Western society and culture in the wake of colonialism and chattel slavery. I conclude with an analysis that shows how the once-ubiquitous blackface aesthetics were gradually suppressed within popular entertainment yet persisted through Blacksound. In doing so, I show how this process incorporated race and racism into the formation of the entertainment industry in the United States through the ways in which intellectual property was defined and within the negotiation of modern copyright laws. To be sure, an analysis of race and its impact is not separate from any other aspect of identity and the systems of inequity that frame society when attending to the experiences of the most marginalized communities. This observation is theorized through the analytic of “intersectionality” developed by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). Through a particular concern with black American women’s experience in the United States, Crenshaw develops the concept of intersectionality not only to note the presence of multiple marginalized identities in one individual, but also to consider the structural oppression at play when one takes seriously the relationships between gender, race, class, sexuality, and other categories in considering an individual’s lived experience. As music philosopher Robin James notes, drawing on Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality: The categories do not pre-exist their intersection, for their intersection is what constitutes them as such. Accordingly, “race,” “gender,” “class,” and “sexuality,” are themselves conjectural categories, because even though they do not exist as distinct phenomena, it is sometimes, for the purpose of analysis, useful to name them individually.  (James 2010, 14)

Blacksound   557 Although an intersectional approach is central to my conceptualization of Blacksound, I will foreground and name race in particular, as it relates to gender, class, sexuality, and other identity constructions.

Constructing Blacksound in the Critical Study of Race and Popular Music As the sonic embodiment of blackface, Blacksound is central to the origin of popular music in the nation; it is critical to understanding how whiteness, blackness, and “authentic” notions of race have been constructed, performed, and politicized in society. Blacksound is a race-based epistemology that centres the analysis of race and identity within the history of American popular entertainment (see Almeida  2015; G. E. Lewis 2011). Blacksound is a historical concept that traces the origins of popular performance in the United States, and it acts as a hermeneutic to trace the sonic and embodied legacies of performance that are present within, yet often excluded from, how property functions under copyright law. Through historical, material, and hermeneutic analysis, I reconstruct how the making of popular music, (intellectual) property relations, and the racialization of identity (i.e., whiteness, blackness, and “authentic” notions of race in general) are tethered to the establishment of the commercial entertainment industry out of blackface through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The concept signifies both a historical phenomenon and an analytical tool for addressing the phenomenon’s continuing importance. As a historical phenomenon, Blacksound unfolds as a dialectical process that traces the material and ephemeral aesthetics of American popular music from its origins in blackface in the early nineteenth century (as mostly ethnic white men performed imagined and witnessed aspects of black performativity), through and after the Civil War (as black performativity began more directly to impact blackface), into Reconstruction and redemption, and finally, as the aesthetic basis of the music and entertainment industry that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. As an analytic, Blacksound considers the systematic and property conditions under which popular music is produced— including the political, cultural, and legal parameters that shape how the aesthetic and performance practices of African Americans have been exploited and embedded into the discourses of popular music and sound by white actors, as well as how the conception of intellectual property has been shaped by these aesthetics since the dawn of blackface minstrelsy during chattel slavery. Blacksound is a critical literacy tool designed to read rigorously discursive and non-discursive texts and the power relations embedded within them.3 In the case of the present chapter, the discursive and non-discursive texts under consideration include sheet music, performance accounts, publishing houses, and copyright law.

558   Matthew D. Morrison Blacksound, as a historically based ontology of popular performance, specifically traces the ephemeral and material performances produced by and/or attributed to African-descended peoples from the slave era into the present within the United States. Central to its legacy is the historical and essentialist effort to delimit black performativity, black personhood, and the ability for black people to “be,” through circulating counterfeit and imagined performances of blackness in and out of blackface, while simultaneously constructing recognizable sounds of popular performance via black(face) aesthetics that are made accessible through commercial entertainment and absorbed into the public domain. Blacksound also accounts for the legacy of violence embedded in the commercialization of popular music out of blackface performance, as black people have experienced, and continue to experience, systematic racism, while white (and other non-black) people freely express themselves through the consumption and performance of commodified black aesthetics without carrying what Saidiya Hartman (1999, 23) has identified as the burden of being black under white supremacist structures. Blacksound does not, however, purport to stand in for the myriad of complex and idiosyncratic sounds produced by the diversity of black peoples. The aesthetic and property conditions of Blacksound have shifted over the course of the past two hundred years. Its aesthetic basis developed during the antebellum era out of English and Irish folk sounds utilized for the counterfeit and exaggerated mimicking, in blackface, of black performativity. At the same time, Blacksound continued to be shaped by black bodies, rhythms, and sounds that were often decoupled from their rightful black authorship. Moreover, because performance was not deemed copyrightable in the foundational property laws that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early black aesthetics—often transmitted through orality or corporeality— were left out of the realm of protection both in copyright and contract law (for more on the history of performance in copyright law, see D. Miller 2018). The commodification of blackface performance and slavery in the late nineteenth century led directly to the foundation of the nation’s modern popular music industry out of the delimiting conditions of blackface performance and slavery. Through ventriloquizing real and imagined black aesthetics in the popular sphere, whites were able to promote, propagandize, and politicize notions of white supremacy through popular performance and thereby capitalize on the commercialization of Blacksound, black people, and their rights to intellectual (performance) property through sheet music, performance, and eventually, recording technologies. Black performance practices, or what I call the “intellectual performance property” of black people, became freely absorbed into popular entertainment by mostly white performers through Blacksound and out of blackface. This process helped to define and liberate imagined visions of whiteness and the polarization of its racialized construction against black aesthetics and actual African Americans, while the latter group largely had no property claims over their personhood or personal creations throughout most of the nineteenth century. Using the hermeneutic of Blacksound, I reinterpret generally accepted notions of intellectual property in the context of US copyright formation. In so doing, I make critical inquiries and interventions into previous understandings of the

Blacksound   559 aesthetic legacy of blackface vis-à-vis notions of intellectual performance property, as well as the making of ontologies of property and identity out of the aesthetics of these racialized performances. It is also important to note that the aesthetics of blackface and Blacksound travelled beyond the United States to the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and throughout the world during the nineteenth century. As the first popular entertainment export of the United States, blackface set the precedent for the global impact that American popular music would continue to have throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries.4

Situating Blacksound Copyright, Intellectual Property, and the Work-Concept Lydia Goehr’s formative 1994 book in the philosophy of music, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, introduces important ideas about the constructed nature of Western (classical) music and its analysis, ideas that are useful in unpacking how Blacksound functions as a philosophical concept. In particular, Goehr’s distinction between “regulative” and “open” concepts in philosophical discourse points to the political intention and methods behind a theory of Blacksound. In The Imaginary Museum, Goehr defines a regulative concept as one that is “delimiting” and often treated as “natural” and given, rather than taking into account how it is made and how it functions as a construction (Goehr 1994, 91). She outlines the nineteenth-century employment of the “work-concept” as a regulative concept that laid the foundation for theories, topics, methods, and inquiries that continue to shape music discourses today. In addition, musical works so conceived make up the pantheon of the “imaginary museum of musical works” that have set the standards and rules for music, its performance, and its analysis within the aesthetic practices that became accepted as Western “art” or classical music (4). Musical “works” and the work-concept are posited as “objectified expressions of composers that prior to compositional activity did not exist” (2). Importantly, Goehr argues that the employment of the musical work as a regulative concept has origins in nineteenth­century German Romanticism—even if the general idea might have existed prior to that moment—and was subsequently firmly entrenched in Western musical practices and discourses (115). As a concept, Blacksound maps the myriad aesthetics of popular performance that have developed along an aesthetic continuum to delineate, as Goehr puts it, “the genealogy of the concept or the history of its meaning as it has functioned within the relevant practice as a way to understand both the concept and the associated practice” (93).5 Within the context of this chapter, the work-concept finds legal expression in the development of copyright law. In the nineteenth century, copyright laws (insofar as they pertained to music at all) developed in relation to the formal “legible” aspects of music (for example, sheet music), not to its performance. In the United States, performance

560   Matthew D. Morrison was largely unprotected until the 1897 revision of copyright law; even subsequent revisions did not recognize sounds and movements as property to be protected. Until 1976, the primary copyrightable mediums remained sheet music and (eventually) physical recordings. This bias was itself based on a concept of property likewise dominated by the material object. The centrality of the work-concept in relation to property law laid the groundwork for melody (as opposed to rhythm, harmony, improvisation, or performance) to become the primary signal of “property” in determining what was copyrightable (see D.  Miller  2018, 176; Monson  2019, 60).6 Tracing the material history of Blacksound as an embodied phenomenon allows for alternative ways to consider how property relations functioned in performance contrary to normalized interpretations of its regulation in copyright law. To understand how the aesthetics of Blacksound resonate politically in both the legacy and study of popular music, I situate the concept within Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of “terror and enjoyment” (Hartman  1999, 23). As she notes: “this economy of enjoyment is interrogated through a consideration of the dynamics of possession and close scrutiny of the object of property and its uses” (26). Through performative acts of “terror and enjoyment” in blackface, intellectual property—or, as the World Intellectual Property Organization (n.d.) puts it, “inventions of the mind”—developed as a regulative concept under the conditions of chattel slavery and persisted through blackface as the popular music industry and the discourses of philosophy and music studies were under construction. By developing Blacksound as an open concept I re-evaluate how race has functioned in praxis and theory, both in the ontological making of intellectual property and in the long history of privileging Western classical music and its white Euro-American approaches to formal analysis as the basis of music studies in the anglophone world. Hartman also provides further insight into the ways in which entertainment, property, and possession of black bodies, people, and blackness are tethered when she writes: At the outset, it is clear that to take delight in, to use, and to possess are inextricably linked and, moreover, that enjoyment entails everything from the use of one’s possession to the value of whiteness, which can be considered an incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance of chattel slavery . . . . Hence what is striking here are the myriad and nefarious uses of slavery property and the ways in which slaves become the property of all whites, given their status in society.  (Hartman 1999, 23–24)

Under the system of chattel slavery, intellectual property as regulative concept denied black people rights to their own bodies and ideas, leaving them vulnerable to constant theft by those who could claim ownership over their person and anything they produced. This included their cultural productions, or intellectual performance property, many of which developed within oral traditions. With the development of copyright law through the nineteenth century, even as the “author” (most often white, male, and of a

Blacksound   561 written text) became the main subject of how intellectual property was imagined and influenced, so sheet music became the primary copyrightable material of music production. Far from marginalizing black traditions, this development confirmed the centrality to American music of black people’s intellectual performance property, as the blackface minstrel tunes that appropriated them were some of the earliest and most popular commercial sheet music in the nation. Importantly, intellectual property and copyright law were not the only nineteenthcentury fields to be bound up with racism. It was also during this era that French writer Arthur Gobineau’s influential text, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855) was composed, while Western science based on racist epistemologies developed in the mid-to-late nineteenth century along with social Darwinism, eugenics, polygenetics, craniometrics, and other pseudo-scientific approaches. These shaped beliefs on the “nature” of race and racist ideologies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 Even the regulative “work” concept that Goehr describes— one that almost always privileges white males for their “genius” (by nature) as composers of musical works—was developed in relation to, not apart from, ideologies of race and racism that took hold during the three centuries of slavery that helped to construct Western empires and their cultural productions. Specifically, Musikwissenschaft emerged as a field of study in the late nineteenth century—with Bohemian-Austrian scholar and early modern musicologist Guido Adler as one of its founders—as a systematic study of music and “style criticism” that drew upon the racist and sexist assumptions at the heart of evolutionary distinctions that grounded scientific models of biological determinism. This approach to “music science” helped shaped the systematization of music studies into historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology that remains at the core of contemporary Anglo-American music discourses and methods (for more on this history see Mugglestone and Adler 1981; Mundy 2014; and Morrison 2019). Until the latter part of the twentieth century, studies of European-American classical music continued to dominate the discourses of music study, and popular music in the United States was not given equal consideration in these fields, although it continued to shape society and culture. (For more on the exclusionary history of music disciplines, specifically the American Musicological Society, see Levitz 2018.) Blacksound as an analytic unpacks the ways in which popular performance and the formal study of music together functioned as a form of race science (i.e., helped to define epistemologies of racialized personhood on and off the stage since the nineteenth century). This mirrors the position of blackface performance, which shaped popular culture, even as it remained under-theorized in the emerging systematic study of music throughout the twentieth century. As blackface minstrelsy devolved into coon songs, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and eventually, the recording, TV, film, and radio industries at the turn of the twentieth century, it also helped to establish the conditions that defined intellectual property outside of performance—especially performance that was based upon real or imagined black performance aesthetics.

562   Matthew D. Morrison

Blacksound as a Technology of the Self Blacksound unearths this manipulation of black performance aesthetics in popular music, supported by the history and application of property laws, in an attempt to redress how social contract theory in Western society assumes an equal footing among all participants who “view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are de­pend­ent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live” (Friend, n.d.). It builds upon Mills’s proposition that the social contract should be understood as a strategy for effecting domination, as he draws in turn upon Carol Pateman’s (1988) concept of the “sexual contract.” Pateman’s concept highlights how the social contract inherently “gives ‘all to one side’ and is based on inequality; its function is to maintain and foster the inequality by legitimizing political regulation by the liberal state” (Pateman and Mills 2007, 82–83). In her book The Sexual Contract, Pateman notes that the “subject of all the contracts with which I am concerned is a very special kind of property, the property that individuals are held to own in their persons” (Pateman 1988, 5). Through connecting the social contract to the legal contracts of property laws, Blacksound points to how personhood, performance, and the history of popular music are interrelated in understanding how race and racism inform legal and aesthetic definitions of property—specifically, the intellectual performance property of black people that becomes commercialized through sheet music, recording, and other modes of mass consumption in systems based on racial inequity. The blackface mask and its related Blacksound performance aesthetic helped create the conditions for what Martiniquan theorist and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon referred to as a “racial epidermal schema,” by which the white gaze, or in this case white embodiment of a black “other” in blackface, imbues “black skin” (and black people) with racialized (and racist) attitudes and meanings that might be taken as fact through the remnants of colonial domination by the white (or non-white) observer and/or the black person being othered (Fanon 2008, 112). At the same time, “whiteness” is constructed in relation not to “being,” but to performing the black “other.” Blacksound takes seriously the dialectics of performance aesthetics that developed out of blackface and led to the development of these racialized scripts—ones that impacted the making of race and the enforcement of racism. Blackness and whiteness are co-constructed in blackface, as individuals begin to associate and disassociate themselves and others with these performances, based on their ability either to take on or to take off blackface and/or blackness in their everyday lives. In interrogating this process, I develop Blacksound as a concept that considers the ways in which music functions as what James calls—in conversation with Michel Foucault’s (1988) late work and that of Tia DeNora (1999)—a “technology of the self.” She writes: Music, because it intersects with ideologies and experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality, is a technology of the self—that is, it educates our desires, physiologi-

Blacksound   563 cal and psychical. Consequently, music’s strong ability to produce affect (either pleas­ure or disgust) arises from its coincidence with the various systems of privilege within which our identities are articulated and experienced; in other words, music works with race, class, gender, and sexuality to produce and reinforce boundaries of the self (i.e., identity), as well as the sociopolitical hierarchies through which the self emerges.  (James 2010, 25)

If music is understood as a technology of the self and as instrumental in self making, Blacksound is developed along a continuum to trace the history of the sounds and movements created in blackface and how they helped white ethnic (mostly Irish) working-class men and their families—many of whom had immigrated to the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century—make themselves “white” in relation to the construction of blackness in performance technologies. My use of Blacksound as an analytical tool that traces how music functions in the making of identity builds upon Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection and places a similar emphasis on “the joining of race, subjection, and spectacle” in an effort to “denaturalize race and underline its givenness—that is, the strategies through which it is made to appear as if it has always existed, thereby denying the coerced and cultivated production of race” (Hartman  1999, 57). To denaturalize race through its uncovering of the legacy of blackface performance, Blacksound draws upon the process that Sylvia Wynter defines as “deciphering,” a proc­ess that “seeks to identify not what texts and their signifying practices can be interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do,” and which also “seeks to evaluate the ‘illocutionary force’ and procedures with which [those texts and practices] do what they do” (Wynter 1992, 266). Blacksound does not simply trace the aesthetics of black performance at the base of American popular music that signify black “authenticity,” but instead traces how these sounds are (re) produced, by and for whom, and the process through which these sounds are embodied as personhood and embedded into legal and economic structures that determine their property value. In deciphering the relationship between performance and identity making, Blacksound as a historical concept considers the historiography of popular performances that are ephemeral—pre-recorded, based on sheet music and iconography, and often accounted for in periodicals and blackface manuals—although their aesthetic traces persist through recorded music and contemporary performance. Blacksound does not take music and its performance a priori without consideration of how it is produced along a continuum of cultural, geographic, political, and temporal shifts in the making of popular entertainment. The concept of Blacksound is coterminous with that of blackface performance and highlights the legacies, sounds, and movements of African American bodies—both real and imagined—on which blackface performance and commercial entertainment was constructed. The concept suggests the scripting, commodification, and embodiment of these sonic performances by both white and other non-black people, as well as the inscription of their stereotypical resonances onto blackness, while functioning as a

564   Matthew D. Morrison v­ ehicle for self-making and the construction of race and racism. These popular, everyday, and spectacular racialized sounds and performances are central to how ideals of citizenship as tethered to whiteness developed throughout the long nineteenth century and continue to resonate into the present. Because Blacksound develops within the contexts of chattel slavery and blackface minstrelsy, I analyse its sound and embodied performance practices in order to develop an aesthetic mode of rethinking the political economy of popular music and entertainment in the United States.

Blacksound and Intellectual (Performance) Property Beginning with the decontextualization of the ritual drum that was used to force captives into coffles across Africa to barracoons on its west coast, to the movements that enslaved peoples trapped in the bowels of sullied and thronged slave ships were forced to “dance” on its deck for “maintenance” and the (sexual) exploitation by mostly-white captains and crew members through the middle passage, the cultural aesthetics and embodied knowledge of Africans and their descendants have been primary sources of economic and cultural capital in the West—just as their bodies have been primary sources of property.8 Blackface minstrelsy was the first form of commercial entertainment to develop in the United States, and its entire aesthetic and performance medium is founded upon what was generally accepted under law: that the “slave” was an “object of property as well as a subject of sentiment” (Best 2004, 3). Stephen M. Best has lucidly described how the slave as property developed into aesthetic property relations as a shift “from antebellum ideas of property as tangible parcels with clear boundaries (an idea modelled on landed property) to notions of property as abstract, intangible, or, as it was often put, a mere ‘bundle of rights’ ” (11). As blackface developed almost thirty years after the invention of the cotton gin—a technology patented in 1794 that led to the great expansion of chattel slavery in the United States—the entanglement between property and person deepened for African Americans under the white gaze. And because blackface was developed as popular entertainment during slavery (mostly by white actors in the north who had limited interaction with enslaved people), the ability for white audiences and performers to embody, commodify, and enact blackness as a source of enjoyment is often separated from the real-life terror that black people experienced in everyday life. Vincent Woodard’s discussion of the “taste” and “appetite” both literal (as cannibalism) and metaphorical that white Americans developed for the African American during slavery resonates with this study: “Whites often satiated this taste [for the African] and appetite through acts of violence, sexual exploitation, imagined ingestion of the black, or through staged rituals designed to incrementally harvest black spirit and soul” (Woodard 2014, 18). Blacksound points to how blackface performance developed as a

Blacksound   565 ritual act that enabled both the embodied consumption and (violent) commodification of blackness under the guise of popular entertainment. The majority of black Americans—who were enslaved during the proliferation of blackface and on whom both aesthetic and structural developments in popular entertainment were being constructed—had limited structural power over how their bodies, personhood, or performance aesthetics were used or derided for commercial and political gain throughout most of the nineteenth century. Their ability to claim any rights to developing or owning intellectual (performance) property under the law was practically non-existent. Moreover, Alexander G. Weheliye points out that the history of habeas corpus in the US Constitution signals how legal recognition of personhood is “the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexuality” (Weheliye 2014, 77). This dual history is crucial to unpacking the relationship between the aesthetic development of popular music and the property relations of copyright law and personhood at the core of Blacksound’s analytical project.

The legacy of Blackface: Historicizing Blacksound The aesthetic and performative traits often stereotyped in Blacksound’s realization are fuelled by the scripts created in the early nineteenth century by mostly working-class Irish and English American blackface performers. Before blackface emerged as the most ubiquitous form of popular music in the 1830s, stereotyped characters, such as the “Yankee,” the “Savage,” the “Backwoodsman,” and other ethnic-based characters (“yellow face” and other caricatures of Chinese and Asian Americans drawn from blackface tropes developed in the 1840s and 1850s in San Francisco) were often performed alongside “Jim Crow” in variety performances, or interspersed between acts of “proper” theatre, such as Shakespeare. However, it was the “Jim Crow” and other associated counterfeit representations of blackness in the early American popular theatre that began to dominate the stage in the 1840s and became the primary conduits through which American popular entertainment was made throughout most of the century. “Jim Crow,” a stereotyped performance of the enslaved southern black American developed by northern whites in blackface, is central to how early popular music helped to shape an epistemology of racialized existence through performance aesthetics. What is particularly significant about “Jump Jim Crow” (the full name of the published song that the character is drawn from) is that its sound draws heavily on musical tropes associated with British folk music—such as the hornpipe—while the realization of “Jim Crow” in performance included the black-faced mask, caricatured movements, and other exaggerated aesthetics drawn on stereotyping an imagined black “other” to make it a distinctly American genre.9 From its origins, blackface and the aestheticization of Blacksound developed dialectically. It began with Irish Americans in blackface performing folk tunes from their homeland through exaggerated and stereotyped performances of blackness in movement and in dialect. These stereotyped performances in blackface that developed into a

566   Matthew D. Morrison new popular aesthetic are then directly reinterpreted and influenced by black performers on and off the minstrel stage. Subsequently, these performances are rescripted into the formalization of blackface minstrelsy by mostly white actors, as white minstrels then began to draw more regularly from observed performances of black aesthetics throughout the nation. Later in the nineteenth century, black performers took up many of the established tropes of minstrelsy and reinterpolated them in their own performances in and out of blackface, and so forth. This dialectical formation of Blacksound as a phenomenon was created out of the unequal and oppressive conditions of enslavement and contributed to what Brenna Bhandar names as “culturally inscribed notions of white European superiority, and philosophical concepts of the proper person who possessed the capacity to appropriate (both on the level of interiority and in the external world) [that] worked in conjunction to produce laws of property and racial ­subjects” (Bhandar 2018, 6). Given that audio recorded performances of blackface do not exist before the last decade of the nineteenth century with the invention of the phonograph, any analysis of Blacksound from the pre-recording era must draw on written accounts, sheet music, and other texts through which to comparatively read and consider how the aesthetics of blackface performance helped shaped the discourse of race in the nineteenth century. The most consistent references to blackness through the performance and published sheet music emerged from the earliest popularized blackface characters—“Jim Crow,” “Zip Coon,” and “Lucy Long.” The embodied performance tropes of these stereotyped characters often included angular/broken posture (contributing to views of primitivism and animalism among enslaved peoples), grounded and salacious movement (often connected to sexualizing enslaved bodies), caricatured black American dialect (representing the enslaved as ignorant and uneducated), and “abnormal” rhythms (deviations from “standard” rhythmic practices attributed to the “classical” style of Europeandescended Americans). These scripts were effectively embedded into the popular imagination through early popular musical aesthetics and performance, as both slavery and minstrelsy precluded the ability for black performers to fully define or articulate their own scripts of performative existence outside of blackface. These performances occurred in a systematic supremacist system driven by the white imagination and the ability of white people to claim citizenship and property, both material and intellectual, by virtue of their whiteness.10 This imaginary embodiment of blackness in blackface and the mimicking of black sounds, movements, and performance aesthetics by white performers and audiences led to the objectification of black people at levels that extend beyond mere (mis)representation in popular culture. Blackface caricatures were often viewed as factual representations of black people by their white producers and consumers—especially in the north where whites had limited contact with black Americans—as they helped to structure what “normal” and “proper” performance looked like in the making of their own whiteness within racist political systems. These misrepresentations helped to frame how blackness was ontologically perceived and constructed under the racist regimes that limited black Americans’ ability to define themselves under the law

Blacksound   567 and in popular culture. As performance theorist E.  Patrick Johnson notes, “White Americans also construct blackness”: Of course, the power relations maintained by white hegemony have different material effects for blacks than for whites. When white Americans essentialize blackness, for example, they often do so in ways that maintain “whiteness” as a master trope of purity, supremacy, and entitlement, as a ubiquitous, fixed, unifying signifier that seems invisible. Alternately, the tropes of blackness that whites circulated in the past—Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, Jim Crow, Sambo, Zip Coon, pickaninny, and Stepin Fetchit, and now enlarged to include welfare queen, prostitute, rapist, drug addict, prison inmate, etc.—have historically insured physical violence, poverty, institutional racism, and second-class citizenry for blacks.  (Johnson 2003, 4)

During all of these performances, blacks in America (again, largely held in captivity through chattel slavery in the southern states) were denied access to most theatres of popular entertainment, as well as control over aesthetic properties that were either imagined and placed upon them or drawn directly from their cultural creations and performances—or what I have referred to throughout this chapter as “intellectual performance property.” These were the aesthetic foundations out of which the materiality of Blacksound and its performance practices shaped early American popular entertainment, while simultaneously constructing notions of racial authenticity and ontology through performance from the nineteenth century through the contemporary era. Although there were some free blacks throughout the nation, black people, according to the Constitution, were not deemed citizens and therefore had little or no rights over their own bodies, no relationship to intellectual property rights, nor how they came to be represented on the popular stage. There were exceptions, such as the African Grove Theater built in 1821 in New York City by the free West Indian American William Alexander Brown. This theatre faced constant harassment, as did many segregated black establishments in the north, and was eventually closed by the city a few years after its opening (for more on the African Grove Theater, see Dewberry 1982). Furthermore, even black actors such as Ira Aldridge and James Hewlett, who were known for their performances of “proper” theatre, including Shakespeare, in theatres like the African Grove were parodied by white actors who stereotyped their performances of formal theatre in comic and burlesque shows. The famous (white) English comic actor Charles Mathews is noted for saying “we will be rich in black fun” in a letter to his wife after visiting the United States and observing these very actors in 1822–3 (for more on Mathews and “literary blackface,” see R. M. Lewis 2016). As black people were rarely able to represent themselves on stage or in society for one another or for non-black/mostly-white audiences, the condition of blackness for black people remained precarious within US culture. This precarity developed not because of any lack of humanity or innate humanness, but because black people were constructed as non-human and “chattel” through slavery and the systematic structures of racism from the nation’s foundation that denied them inalienable constitutional rights and liberties granted by default to white men and their families.

568   Matthew D. Morrison Blackface materialized within the larger system of white supremacist ideologies that were performed through the masking and aesthetics of blackface and helped to delimit—through the manipulation of performance properties belonging to black Americans—the fundamental condition of blackness under the white gaze and throughout society. Although African Americans existed as living beings, their condition of being, both in performance and in real life, was rooted in anti-blackness, a philosophical orientation defined by Calvin Warren as “an accretion of practices, knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated” (Warren 2018, 9). Antiblackness, whether intended or unintended, was at the root of early blackface performance. Blackface performers were “producers” of an aesthetic and material discourse grounded in racist ideologies that developed from the enslavement of black Americans and created systems that imposed “nothing” onto blackness as a labouring human body, as they simultaneously mapped superiority onto a constructed whiteness through performance (Varró 1996, 58). During the antebellum era leading up to the Civil War, the conditionality of black being and black existence were shaped by the rise of Jacksonian “common man” democracy and ideologies championed by the nation’s seventh President, Andrew Jackson and the “populist” democratic party made mostly of working and lower-class white males and their families striving to be a part of a system of “whiteness” in order to be afforded its privileges. (For more on Jacksonian “common man” ideologies and their relationship to blackface in the nineteenth century, see Saxton 1975.) Importantly, many of the early blackface producers and performers were directly affiliated with the Democratic Party in the mid-nineteenth century, and many contemporary political themes of the time were burlesqued on the minstrel stage. Gabrilla Varró astutely suggests that a “coded” discourse on white supremacy and dominance developed during the era of enslavement through the performance and commercialization of blackface minstrelsy. Blacksound as a hermeneutic can interpret the performance codes that “gave birth to concealed discourses on race and dominance” within blackface and its legacy (Varró 1996, 61). The rhythmic, harmonic, performative, melodic, linguistic, and corporeal aesthetics of black performance that are commodified into various facets of American popular entertainment through blackface might be amplified, as they are coded within performances and copyright laws that erase or refuse to acknowledge their property value.

Marketing Blacksound in Making Popular Entertainment The International Copyright Act of 1891 and subsequent revisions were integral to the establishment of the commercial music industry and the commodification of Blacksound. In its original form, it extended limited protection to foreign copyright

Blacksound   569 holders in the United States and was especially designed so that UK and US copyright holders could negotiate terms of fair use (see Sanjek 1988, 392–393). Prior to the adoption of the Act, music publishing was decentralized and generally led by independent houses in urban areas throughout the United States, mostly based on the sale of European classical music to the upper crust of society (357). This model was particularly lucrative for the few who could afford to publish, because independent dealers could simply reproduce sheet music from European composers without having to pay for the original work. Thus, Blacksound was often aurally experienced by consumers as translated by (mostly non-black) black-faced performers from scores by composers that were made available by a limited number of publishers scattered throughout the country. As Russell Sanjek notes in American Popular Music and Its Business (1988), this savvy music-printing model precluded the wide publication (and dissemination) of vernacular, US-based music for more general audiences for most of the nineteenth century. This model did not change until the 1891 legislation passed. After this date, the emerging middle class and the new copyright laws instigated the widening market of popular music production. The wholesale value of popular sheet music tripled between 1890 and 1909, from $1.7 to $5.5 million, as the price for sheet music rose from 25 to 60 cents a copy during this era of international copyright protection. Importantly, this is also the era in which more black performers in red-light entertainment districts of growing urban areas (for example, New Orleans’s Storyville or the Tenderloin district of New York City) began to spread their local performance styles in various halls of entertainment, as white copyists and musicians drew on their aesthetic practices in composing and publishing new popular songs. In contrast to the domination of the music publishing business by European art music, the sheet music of popular minstrel tunes that had been in wide circulation earlier in the nineteenth century was geared primarily towards minstrel performers and, through more “gentile,” i.e., less overtly racist, forms, such as parlour songs, increasingly towards middle-class audiences. However, composers of popular music in the nineteenth century often did not hold the copyright to their works; instead the copyright was owned by the publishers and printing houses that distributed the sheet music for sale. Until later in the century when popular sheet music became more profitable, composers were typically responsible for paying for the production and distribution of their work to publishers. Nineteenth-century composers of popular music, including Stephen Foster (known as the father of American popular song and the most prolific and popular blackface composer of the mid-nineteenth century), hoped to make money off of royalties from sheet music sales, which typically increased after a song became popular. As popular as Foster’s sheet music became through performance by troupes like E. P. Christy’s Minstrels (his “Old Folks at Home” sold an unprecedented 130,000 copies in 1854 at a time when selling 5,000 copies was considered a success), he was paid a flat and often low fee (in comparison to profits made by the publisher) by companies, such as Firth & Pond, who purchased and subsequently owned the rights to his compositions (Sanjek 1988, 78). Although by 1831 an individual could copyright sheet music, it was the

570   Matthew D. Morrison developing publishers who maintained a monopoly on the rights to a composer’s works until the late nineteenth century with the growth of the commercial music industry and the establishment of unions that represented composers and performers. Even still, the aesthetic basis of Foster’s and other composers’ popular blackface tunes was drawn from the dialectic construction of Blacksound in performance by minstrel troupes who were themselves drawing upon real and imagined black performance aesthetics. These were not seen as intellectual property, but were structured into the publishing of sheet music as “evidence” of copyrightable material. Even after performance rights were granted in the 1897 copyright revision, the structural racism at the base of society and the emerging music industry negated the aesthetics of black performativity as property in its commodification and limited the access black artists had in attaining copyrights for their works. Publishing houses of Tin Pan Alley—the basis of the modern music industry that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century—became the copyists, composers, and performers for the emerging radio, film, and television industries, as well as the first lobbyists and members of the earliest established music unions (such as ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and Performers). These sonic, performative, and legislative developments in American popular entertainment reflected the sonic transition from blackface into Blacksound. M. Witmark & Sons was one of the primary publishing houses that served as an architect of the turn-of-the-century commercial music industry. Between the end of the nineteenth century and their annexation by the Warner Brothers Hollywood entertainment conglomerate in the 1920s the firm went from heavily marketing blackface and “coon songs” to creating American popular “standard” songs.11 These standards derived from blackface, vaudeville, coon songs, and emerging black vernacular performance styles—ragtime, blues, and jazz—that were simplified into sheet music and attendant performances for Tin Pan Alley and film audiences. For music and film executives, these targeted audiences were generally working-, middle-, and upper-class whites, who through cultural, political, and economic alignment, continued to hold a civically elevated status through the construction of whiteness, granting them more access to capital as consumers. What allowed the vernacular or localized sounds and dances of black Americans to become a popular sensation in and beyond the 1890s were not just the sounds themselves, but their packaging and marketing into Blacksound for commercial consumption through sheet music, recordings, and later film and television. The commercialization of Blacksound aesthetics for a growing popular audience occurred under the cover of Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory policies against African Americans and people of colour whose intellectual performance property rights went largely unrecognized. Music executives, publishers, and mechanical reproduction companies (which included piano rolls in its earliest mechanical production)—many of which were connected in some way to Tin Pan Alley—were involved in proceedings surrounding the making of the 1909 Act—the first major revision to federal copyright law since the 1790 Act. This 1909 legislation granted protection to published works (though not recordings thereof) that had been copyrighted by authors and enabled the mechanical reproduction

Blacksound   571 of popular songs without authorial permission if a compulsory licence was obtained. If the work was not copyrighted, it fell into the public domain. Of course, the “author” might not be the actual performer or song originator (let alone the performances on which the composed work was based), but the person who had access to publishing through sheet music, or the company who had access to publishing mechanical reproductions through cylinders, piano rolls, and records. While protection was granted to published sheet music against its unauthorized mechanical reproduction, the 1909 Act gave even more property value to the writing and reading of music, rather than its performance, as machines were determined by the courts to “read” the music (of wax cylinders, records, or piano rolls) in order to produce sound. This interpretation only accentuated the divestment of sound or performance as intellectual property and continued to emphasize—in the making and litigation of music as property—that only what was determined to be legible, from sheet music to the grooves of a record, was protectable (see also Gitelman 1997). About a decade after the 1909 Copyright Act was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, “race records” and “hillbilly” records emerged as the first commercial genres of recorded music targeted specifically to racialized audiences—African Americans and southern/rural whites in particular. This practice helped set the precedent for how the recorded music industry would establish its larger conventions for marketing and recording popular music through Blacksound and out of blackface throughout the century. (For more on the racialization of early race and hillbilly records, see Pecknold 2013; K. H. Miller 2010; and Fox 2009.) Music industry executives (mostly male and white) began to market popular records specifically to racialized audiences and genres after black music executive Perry Bradford convinced Okeh Records to allow African American vaudeville star, Mamie Smith, to fill in during a recording session for Sophie Tucker—a popular Russian-Jewish American “coon shouter,” a term used to refer to white women, often Jewish American, who initially wore blackface and sang popular songs and later developed into some of the first women commercial pop singers at the turn of the century. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920), the first hit race record, went on to sell 10,000 copies in its first week and 75,000 within a month to a mostly black audience. This serendipitous recording event shifted how the legacy of Blacksound, drawing on the racialized legacy of blackface aesthetics and actual black sounds (that is, sounds produced by black people), was marketed in a commercial music industry that relied increasingly on radio and recording technologies throughout the twentieth century. As sheet music sales began to be matched and eventually superseded by mechanical sales of popular music, popular music sales charts were largely calculated upon the publisher, record company, and/or technology on which a piece of music was produced or played—the phonograph, jukebox, radio, and other forms of technology. The “Hit Parade” charts first published by Billboard in 1936—lists of hit, i.e., top-selling songs— were compiled using these methods. With the wider distribution and affordability of the phonograph and later vinyl records, however, the exponentially growing music industry of the mid-twentieth century began to base its marketing and tallying methods on

572   Matthew D. Morrison record sales divided into distinct genres, as evidenced by Billboard’s transition by the late 1940s into dividing record sales/play into pop, classical, race, and (after “hillbilly” was dropped) folk records. From the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, black performers in the United States had limited access to the developing publishing rights, presses, and executive positions in the recording industry under Jim Crow and discriminatory practices across the nation. Largely white music industrialists seized the opportunity to capitalize on the legacy of Blacksound and black sounds by transcribing them onto sheet music or into recordings for popular consumption, thereby providing a popular American aesthetic for white consumers and anyone else who could purchase Blacksound in its commercial form to embody, create, and perform their own self within the privilege of whiteness, without considering the aesthetic history of race and racism in their consumption of popular music. Importantly, the legacy of blackface into Blacksound laid the foundation for and continues to shape the modern popular music industry, how racialized sounds are developed into genres that signal and construct ideas of racial “authenticity” that are targeted to specific audiences, as well as how “pop” music as a genre is often constructed as deracialized in its marketing to a wider audience, yet remains grounded heavily in the exploitation of black sounds that are the basis of all genres of popular music in the United States.

Conclusion: Analysing Blacksound Blacksound, as the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance, allows for a transhistorical analysis of the relationship between popular music, racial identity making, systematic racism, and the making and interpretation of copyright laws in relation to notions of intellectual property. While the aesthetics of Blacksound shift from the origins of American popular music in blackface through the marketing of contemporary genres of popular music, the concept allows for an analysis of the aesthetic traits and ideological values attached to the production, circulation, and commercialization of popular music. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was targeted to black audiences and marketed as “race music,” but the sounds themselves developed out of a carefully crafted mélange of operetta, balladry, blackface, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley pop, and local vernacular black sounds developed in early black jazz and blues traditions. These black aesthetic innovations fell outside of copyright protection and were not valued as intellectual property, yet helped to shape the vaudeville aesthetic out of which Mamie Smith emerged as a star. Similarly, Sophie Tucker’s “coon shouting” integrated Yiddish cultural tropes in her blackface performances, as she also drew heavily on early black women blues singers in developing her own individual aesthetic that helped to shape a particular style of popular singing among early white women popular singers. In the end, however, both performers were part of a larger developing system of music industrial practices led by mostly white men that sought to capitalize upon racialized performance

Blacksound   573 aesthetics and audience reception, or what Daphne Brooks (2010) refers to as “sonic blue(s)face,” specifically by drawing on the Blacksound and racialized marketing tactics that had developed out of the long history of blackface minstrelsy. Blacksound is a concept that allows for an analysis of popular music and entertainment that centres on the relationship between the making of (racial) identity, aesthetics, performance and property from its inception through the present. The concept functions as an analytic and historical phenomenon in an effort to expand approaches in the philosophy of music that place (racialized) people and their aesthetic productions at the heart of how we analyse the commercial and legal aspects of popular music making that originated under chattel slavery. As popular music continues to be one of the primary cultural exports of the United States, this transhistorical concept redresses how value has been attached to musical commodities beyond their commercial exchange. Blacksound takes seriously how racial identity is constructed and embodied through popular performance, how structural racism impacts how we have come to value the performance aesthetics of racialized people, and how the modern industry continues to be based upon these often unequal systems that continue to shape how we consume popular music in and beyond the United States. Blacksound also enables a material reconstruction of the often-ephemeral sounds and movements of black intellectual performance property that continue to cut and resist its regulation—as suggested by Fred Moten (2003) in response to Karl Marx’s assertion of the commodity’s inability to speak on its own terms—even as they are coopted within systems and industries that seek to silence them as commodities through the interpretation of intellectual property as a concept under copyright law. Intellectual property as a regulative concept is unpacked through the open concept of Blacksound, which itself exists along a continuum of popular performance. Blacksound centres the racialized subject (i.e., human) who produces performance aesthetics (sounds or movements), and thereby has a right to claim ownership beyond the capitalistic systems that have taken these aesthetics up as property in the history of popular sheet music, recordings, and performance. It challenges accepted notions that these intellectual performance properties should not be protected under copyright law, as it also points to how they have been valued as consumable, historically and at present, in the performance, commercialization, and consumption of popular music. My exploration of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of Blacksound in this chapter is intended to provide a method that might provoke further studies that deconstruct the relationship between sound, performance, and intellectual property in the making of popular music and culture, as well as explore how the concept functions as a technology of the self in the construction of individual and collective racialized identities.

Notes 1. For more foundational texts on the making of epistemic systems based on racial ignorance and exclusion, see Mills 1997, 1998; Collins 1990; hooks 1989; Ladson-Billings 2000; and James 2010.

574   Matthew D. Morrison 2. Dotson defines “epistemic exclusion” as “a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinder one’s contribution to knowledge production” (Dotson 2014, 115–116). Drawing on the monumental work of Collins (1990), Dotson asks us to consider the nature of the “suppression of black feminist thought” within the discursive practices of the Anglo-American academy. 3. Critical literacy is a tool developed by social critical theorists, particularly in the study of pedagogy, in an effort to provide readers with the tools to actively read and deconstruct texts to unpack how systems of power and injustice structure human interactions. For more, see Freire 2000 and Shor 1999. 4. Blackface performance was especially popular in England in the mid-nineteenth century and remained a part of British popular culture well into the twentieth century. For more on this topic, see Pickering 2008. 5. Goehr (1994, 91) outlines the following parameters for an open concept: “(i) not corresponding to fixed or static essences; (ii) not admitting of ‘absolutely precise’ definitions of the sort traditionally given in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; (iii) intensionally [sic] incomplete or ‘essentially contestable’—because the possibility of an unforeseen situation arising which would lead us to modify our definition can never be eliminated; (iv) distinct from, though related to, vague concepts. According to [Friedrich] Waismann a concept is vague if there are cases in which there is no definite answer whether the term applies. (‘Pink,’ ‘tall,’ ‘bald,’ ‘middle-aged’ are examples.) Open texture provides for both the logical and empirical ‘possibility of vagueness’.” 6. Brenna Bhandar (2018, 28) notes, “the massive differences between the nineteenth century, the era dominated by the growth of industrial capitalism, and contemporary modes of neoliberal capitalism require close attention to the ways in which modes of appropriation, rationales for ownership, and the legal form(s) of property have adapted themselves to the imperatives of colonial domination.” 7. The nineteenth century was also the height of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States, as the enslaved population between 1790 and 1860 increased between 25 and 33 per cent per year, totalling 4.4 million by the end of this period (Bailey 1994). 8. For a detailed discussion on the ways that Africans, and African women and girls in particular, were commodified through song and dance during the middle passage and leading up to the proliferation of blackface, see Thompson 2014. 9. See Rourke  1931 for a discussion of the Yankee, the Backwoodsman, and the Blackface Minstrel (“Jim Crow”) as archetypes of early American humour. Additionally, Lawrence Hutton (1890, 120) provides accounts of how the famous early American stage actor Edwin Forrest would perform acts of the Dandy, Coffee (a Jim-Crow-esque character), and Sancho Panza (from Don Quixote) in his acts, in addition to his frequent roles in Shakespearean and other “serious” dramas. For more on “Jump Jim Crow” and its early amalgamated performance, see Wittke 1930 and Morrison 2014. 10. For a detailed discussion of African-American performers who performed in blackface popular theatre, as well as creating theatrical works that simultaneously existed within and combated these tropes, see Brooks 2006. For information on classical and non-blackface African American performers who travelled with minstrel and blackface troupes throughout the United States and abroad at the turn of the century, see Abbott and Seroff 2007. 11. Coon songs were individual popular songs published in sheet music and encouraged the increase in sheet music sales in the 1890s; these songs drew directly on tropes of blackface

Blacksound   575 minstrelsy and included stereotyped elements of black performance styles, while also drawing heavily on the “ragtime” style that had been cultivated by black Americans in the late nineteenth century. For more on coon songs, see Abbot and Seroff 2007.

Works Cited Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. 2007. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Almeida, Shana. 2015. “Race-based Epistemologies: The Role of Race and Dominance in Knowledge Production.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women and Gender Studies 13 (Summer): 79–105. Bailey, Ronald. 1994. “The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States,” Agricultural History 68, no. 2 (Spring): 35–50. Best, Stephen M. 2004. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brooks, Daphne A. 2006. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brooks, Daphne A. 2010. “ ‘The Voice Which is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (March): 36–70. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Unwin Hyman. Crawley, Ashon T. 2017. Blackpentecostal Breath. New York: Fordham University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July): 1241–1299. DeNora, Tia. 1999. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics 27, no. 1 (October): 31–56. Dewberry, Jonathan. 1982. “The African Grove Theater and Company.” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 4 (Winter): 128–131. Dotson, Kristie. 2014. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.” Social Epistemology 28 (2): 115–138. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of The Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fox, Pamela. 2009. Natural Acts: Gender and Rusticity in Country Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Mya Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary ed. London: Bloomsbury. Friend, Celest. n.d. “Social Contract Theory.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161–0002. www.iep.utm.edu/ (accessed 10 February 2019). Gitelman, Lisa. 1997. “Reading Music, Reading Records, Reading Race: Musical Copyright and the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909.” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (Summer): 265–290.

576   Matthew D. Morrison Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 1999. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Hooks, bell. 1989. Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. London: Sheba Feminist. Hutton, Lawrence. 1890. Curiosities of the American Stage. New York: Harper & Bros. James, Robin. 2010. The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. 2000. “Racialized Discourses and Ethnic Epistemologies.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 257–277. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing. Levitz, Tamara. 2018. “The Musicological Elite.” Current Musicology 102 (Spring): 9–80. Lewis, George  E. 2011. “Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise.” Colloquy: Studying  U.S.  Music in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 3 (Fall): 691–695. Lewis, Robert Michael. 2016. “Speaking Black, 1824: Charles Mathews’s Trip to America Revisited.” Nineteenth Century Theater and Film 43, no. 1 (May): 43–66. Miller, Derek. 2018. Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1790–1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. 2010. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1998. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mills, Charles W. 2016. “Critical Philosophy of Race.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, edited by Hermann Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne, 709–732. New York: Oxford University Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2019. “Personal Take: On Serving as an Expert Witness in the ‘Blurred Lines’ Case.” In The Cambridge Companion to Music and Digital Culture, edited by Nicholas Cook, Monique M. Ingalls, and David Trippett, 58–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morrison, Matthew  D. 2014. “Sound in the Construction of Race: From Blackface to Blacksound.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Morrison, Matthew  D. 2017. “The Sound(s) of Subjection: Constructing American Popular Music and Racial Subjection through Blacksound.” Women and Performance 27 (1): 13–24. Morrison, Matthew D. 2019. “Towards an Inclusive Musicology: Race and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (Winter): 781–823. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mugglestone, Erica, and Guido Adler. 1981. “Guido Adler’s ‘The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology’ (1885): An English Translation with an Historico-Analytical Commentary.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 13 (1981): 1–21.

Blacksound   577 Mundy, Rachel. 2014. “Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (Fall): 735–768. Pateman, Carol. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pateman, Carol, and Charles W. Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pecknold, Diane. 2013. Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pickering, Michael. 2008. Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Rourke, Constance. 1931. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida. Sanjek, Russell. 1988. American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years. Vol. 2, From 1790–1909. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saxton, Alexander. 1975. “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology.” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March): 3–28. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shor, Ira M. 1999. “What Is Critical Literacy.” Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism, and Practice 4, no. 1 (Fall): 2–32. Thompson, Katrina Dyonne. 2014. Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Varró, Gabrilla. 1996. “Blackface Minstrelsy: An Alternative Discourse on Dominance.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 2 (1): 57–71. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wittke, Carl. 1930. Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Woodard, Vincent. 2014. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York University Press. World Intellectual Property Organization. n.d. “What is Intellectual Property.” WIPO Publication No. 450(E). www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/intproperty/450/wipo_pub_450. pdf. Wynter, Sylvia. 1992. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” In Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye  E.  Cham, 237–279. Trenton, NJ: African World Press.

chapter 29

Ja zz Garry L. Hagberg

Jazz is in a sense a world unto itself: it has over the decades of its development become what is often called “musician’s music,” and it often places demands on the listener and the listener’s skill that many musical traditions do not. And because so much of the art of jazz involves improvisation, it is a tradition in which the practices internal to it to an unusually large extent are the tradition; that is, it is not a musical idiom such as Western classical music, in which much of what is of musical interest has been fully notated, and so the tradition lies in a sense beneath, or precedes, the practices (Alperson 1984, 2010; Davies 2001). As we will see, jazz is an art that challenges a number of dichotomies, such as the separate categories of notation and performance, that are essential to many other musical traditions. The first four sections of this chapter (on rhythm, harmony, melody, and improvisational pathfinding) will uncover aspects of the elements of this art that it is necessary to have in focus in order to make genuine conceptual progress in understanding it; seeing these features clearly is a precondition for grasping what is of vital philosophical interest within this music. This is not a small claim, precisely because it has proven too easy for writers in this area to assume that the terms rhythm, harmony, and melody carry readily accessible and transparent meaning from other idioms, genres, and traditions of music with which we might be more familiar and which might be more culturally acknowledged or philosophically discussed. As the following sections will implicitly argue, this is not true, and the presumption that it is can blind us to the distinctive meanings of these musical terms as they function within this context of evolving or living practices, without which we cannot see the conceptually indispensable particularities for the generalities. Or to put the matter linguistically, the connotations awakened by the general terms do not fit this art form, so we end up seeing this art form only through distorting superimposition (Brown 2002; Gracyk 2002; Hagberg 2002). Indeed, such superimpositions can lead us to think that the essential differences can be captured by drawing generic contrasts between, for example, score and improvisation without attending with sufficient care to the nuances of how these terms work within these musical practices. It is time—a time now well into jazz’s second century and a time

580   Garry L. Hagberg when more conceptual attention is being drawn to its remarkable aesthetic achievements—to correct that (Giddins 1998). Then in the fifth section (itself divided into five subsections), we consider five distinct philosophical aspects of jazz that call for further reflection; most of these have only recently started to be discussed by a few contributors, and taken together they chart a new way forward. So first, what are the practices that define this art, that make this art what it is, and that give field-specific meaning to the words rhythm, harmony, and melody? And what does pathfinding mean in this context and why does it name something vital to this musical world?

Rhythmic Character Jazz from its earliest development has depended upon swing rhythm, a type of musical time, or temporal definition, that in and of itself has proven famously resistant to notation. Swing time is not represented by a series of eighth-notes (although it is often written that way, with “swing” written above); nor is it written as a series of dotted-eighths-and-sixteenths (Hagberg  2010). The former, played, as it is called, “straight,” will yield a series of equally placed notes of equal duration (although the accents may vary according to context, i.e., strong beats may get more strength in the articulation); by definition, straight excludes swing. Think of a metronome clicking quarter notes, and then imagine equally spaced eighth notes within that temporal frame. Next, think of that same metronome, but now divide each quarter note by four (and so into sixteenths), but grouping the first three into a single longer note followed by a single sixteenth short note. This is the dotted-eighth and sixteenth grouping, and while it more closely approximates swing time, it misses as much as it captures (and is on occasion performed fleetingly as a parodic bit of humour by jazz musicians). Swing is, indeed, something one has to learn within an evolved world of practices, and there is no notation that accurately captures it. So from the start, one is playing “off the page” (Doffman 2013). In this respect it is instructive that in some early efforts in symphonic jazz, where a jazz ensemble is playing with an orchestra, orchestral players found it impossible to match the swing time of the jazz players, yielding irreconcilable rhythmic conceptions, even where detailed instructions were provided in footnotes to the score explaining how to perform the rhythms (Dankworth and Seiber 1959; in this case the orchestral parts were notated differently than the jazz band’s parts, showing that the composers expected trouble and tried, if unsuccessfully, to forestall it). There is of course much more than this fundamental point about swing that concerns the practices that together make the tradition of jazz under the category of rhythm. One can deliberately play ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat. Each of these patterns of rhythmic placement has a distinctive character, and they each will give to a given piece an unmistakable (as jazz players call it) “feel.” Playing ahead of the beat gives a sense of propulsion, of rhythmic vitality, of alertness, of a kind of eagerness. Think again

Jazz   581 of the metronome, but place your eighth notes against the ticking quarter notes at the earliest possible moment—the very front, cutting edge of the defined time. That, in short, is rhythmic alacrity. Next, think of those eighth notes as being aligned precisely with the metronome; that is on the beat, and the sense is one of stability, solidity, predictability, and being “locked in” to the forward movement in a settled way. And then think of the metronome at four to the bar (four beats per measure), but with your notes falling at the last possible microsecond before being definitively late. (“Late” is easy to sound out by clapping very shortly after the metronome sounds, where you can hear the gap between.) Playing behind the beat leaves no gap, because note placement is just before that gap emerges and becomes audible. It sounds laconic, it sounds casual, and it sounds as if no one is in a rush. All of these temporal placements, of course, appear in many forms of music. But in jazz, part of one’s mastery of the idiom lies in one’s ability to move back and forth across this rhythmic continuum in a way that serves the interests of the moment and gives the present musical gesture a more sharply defined meaning or a deeper musical significance (Hagberg 2020). This is another respect in which one is free of the dictates of a score or of a conductor interpreting that score. One is, in this respect, one’s own conductor (Brown 1996, 2000). (As we will see below, one is also, in improvising, one’s own composer). As in classical music, if one is playing jazz music with a section (brass—trumpets, trombones; reeds—alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones; rhythm—piano, guitar, bass, and drums), that section may well rehearse and perform the piece in a way that is determinative of the rhythmic placement for the section; the soloist is still free, however, to move expressively before, on, or behind the beat above that stable rhythmic foundation (Schuller 1968). Although these choices can be conscious and deliberate, for accomplished players such expressive variations in rhythmic placement can occur as instinctively as rhythmic variations in expressive speaking or as naturally as following the rules of grammar without inwardly consulting them.

Harmonic Language Harmony in jazz is what one might call a world within a world. Harmony of course appears in, or is implied by melodic movement in, countless musical traditions. But there are distinctive aspects to it as an evolved practice in jazz (Berliner 1994). First, as is widely known, there are often recurring chord progressions that underlie a jazz composition (the “changes” of the “tune”). The simplest of these are traditional twelve-bar blues changes, a form that jazz incorporated from the blues and then harmonically enriched. Its foundation is: four measures of the I chord, two measures of the IV chord, two meas­ ures of the I chord, one measure of the V chord, one measure of the IV chord, one meas­ ure of the I chord, and the last measure of the V chord (it can in fact even be further simplified). The blues harmonic language often, and in fact usually, plays each of the I, IV, and V chords as dominant sevenths; the jazz harmonic language uses that as foundational, but significantly expands the range of harmonic coloration. This is done in a

582   Garry L. Hagberg way that is itself very often improvisatory: pianists and guitarists use extensions to the harmonies (as in blues, sevenths, but also in jazz, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths) and alterations (flatted fifths, raised fifths, flatted ninths, sharped ninths, sharped elevenths, flatted thirteenths, and all combinations thereof). However harmonically complicated this kind of creative realization of the basic harmonies can be, it is really only the start of the matter. Jazz harmony has cultivated to a very high degree multiple uses of the ii–V–I progression, and these are often inserted before any given “target” chord. For example, in the second measure of the first four measures of the I chord in the blues form, players will often insert a ii–V, which then resolves back to the standard I chord. And then they might insert another ii–V in the last of the first four measures to establish a secondary ii–V relation to the IV chord (thus generating a kind of half-resolution to the IV—but only half because the progression still “wants” to go back to the tonic). Beyond these ii–V insertions, players will often insert a diminished chord built on a sharped-fourth root a half-step above the IV in place of the standard IV chord in the sixth measure: as a stack of minor-third intervals, the diminished chord functions as a dominant chord with alterations. So the basic blues progression, with all these harmonic colorations, is still there, but in a particularly interesting form that captures an essential point about the defining performance-practices of jazz (Hamilton 2007; Levinson 2015c; Rosenthal 1992). In classical music, the relation between the performed sound and the content of the music is often, if not always, one-to-one; to put it one way, one could say that the intentional content (barring mistakes, missed notes, bad attacks, etc.) of the players is equivalent to what is being sounded, what is being played. Jazz is interestingly different. This is true in rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic senses, but in the harmonic sense that concerns us at present, all of the additions or reharmonizations of the twelve-bar blues changes, all of the extensions, and all of the alterations, are played in an improvisatory way over what is not actually played—the basic twelve-bar chord progression first described above—but what is heard in the mind’s ear of each of the players (Levinson 2015a). The basic progression becomes the unspoken understructure shared by all the players—they always know precisely where they are in relation to it. And not only that: they know what kind of colorations they are adding over to it, so that it becomes something with both real and imagined layers; such performances are thus much like musical palimpsests (Hagberg 2017b). That is, the harmonic colouring layered over the foundation becomes a way of making the chord changes one’s own; it is an individualistic interpretation even at the level of sounding out the harmony of the piece being played, so jazz not only invites, but in this sense mandates, the emergence of an individual voice. In discussing harmony and reharmonization, jazz players often use the phrase “What I hear here is…” where this refers to the harmonic coloration or sophistication that comes to that individual player in the mind’s ear, and is then realized outwardly on the piano, guitar, etc. (One measure of mastery in this art form is the ability to “hear” in this sense creatively, non-obviously, and insightfully, and then be able to realize that imagined sound instantly or without needing time to work out the location of the sound on the instrument.) The creative space that opens between what is written and

Jazz   583 what is played is thus much larger in jazz than in most classical music (Hodeir 1956). I should note that it is dangerously easy to characterize jazz as one set of determinate practices on one pole and classical music as a contrasting set on the other. Any such stark characterization is ultimately misleading: there have been cases in which attention to notational detail has rivalled that of classical composition, and of course much of Duke Ellington’s music falls midway on this continuum. Also, there have been cases where the music is entirely pre-composed but played in a way that intentionally sounds improvised (Russell 1957). Coming from the other side it has been shown that many classical composers of the past were taught first and foremost how to improvise and that they employed improvisation throughout their musical lives e.g. Mozart, Chopin, and many others (Baragwanath 2011), so the static and polarized images of jazz improvisers as historically unprecedented creative artists and classical performers as skilled but uncreative score-interpreters are too conceptually neat to capture the complexities of the multiform practices on each side. (Much contemporary European music occupies the middle ground here as well.) I mentioned reharmonization; this unto itself is a dimension of the historically evolved practices of this art form that make jazz what it is. In a longer but still very common underlying structure, the thirty-two-measure AABA (eight bars each) song form, one encounters much more variety throughout the vast songbook of jazz compositions (and Broadway show tunes such as “My Favorite Things” that have been employed as understructures for jazz interpretations of those tunes) than found in the (still impressively varied) adaptations of the blues form. In this material one frequently finds extensive use of the ii–V–I progressions mentioned above and they are very often used in the secondary way (i.e., resolving to a chord other than the tonic I). This generates an unimaginably large number of reharmonization possibilities, and these multiple possibilities (routes, pathways through the chord changes) are amplified once again by seeing that, as the fundamental direction of the ii–V–I progression is from dominant to tonic, one can instead just insert a series of dominant chords (for example, the V of the V of the V before progressing to the I, called secondary dominant sequences) to add both more tension, and, with the addition of extensions and alterations to these sequences of secondary dominant chords, more harmonic colour in a palimpsest-like fashion. Thus the contrast with much classical music becomes sharper once again: the harmonization of a classical piece is written, and one plays it as written, if with a number of possibilities for creative interpretation. In jazz, the question of interpretation, and thus of individual voice, is present from the first touch of the instrument, where one faces an almost stultifying complex array of choices. (I will return below to the question of how these choices are made.) There is here enormous freedom, and correspondingly enormous responsibility (Hagberg 2008). A bit more should now be said about voicings as this relates to harmonic freedom. I have spoken of chords as though they are set, uniform, block-like structures that are invariant across contexts of their appearances. That would be an egregious oversimplification. To take the example of a simple A minor seventh chord: the constituent pitches of A, C, E, and G can be ordered in root position (with A on the bottom or serving as the

584   Garry L. Hagberg root of the chord), or first (C on the bottom) or second (E on the bottom) or third (G on the bottom) inversions. Extending beyond that, the octave in which the various notes of the chord can appear can change dramatically, and thus the intervallic distance between the notes can accordingly vary radically. (It is not difficult on the guitar to voice this chord in seventeen different ways, and that is before the real complexities begin.) So here too is another dimension of the forced choice that jazz requires: the exact voicings will very rarely be indicated, so their realization is itself creative (Doffman 2011). Lastly under this heading, I might mention that the very term chord progression can imply, or import into our thinking on this topic, the conception of functional harmonic analysis from much classical music; whereas in jazz, some chord progressions are not functional in that sense, and thus might be referred to as chord successions.

Melodic Invention The melodic dimension of the set of practices that constitute jazz is perhaps the most complex of all, in that this topic reaches into both the interpretation of a written melody (often heard at the beginning and ending of the performance of a piece) and the creation of new melodic lines in improvised solos. Both of these elements of melodic work in jazz also confer freedom and, in doing so, here again impose an equal measure of responsibility. There is very likely not a single case in the history of jazz in which a melody by a soloist was played as written. (This is not the case in ensemble melody, but keep in mind the rhythmic issue of swing time above, which is also unwritten-because-unwritable.) One can do so as a deliberate sounding-out of the notes indicated on paper, but this will sound wooden, unnatural, oddly inflexible—and importantly, uncomprehending. The reason for this is the very essence of jazz; there is a sense in which, in jazz, interpretation is everywhere, and, as with rhythm and harmony, it is impossible to play a line that is not within that performance an interpretation of that line (Hamilton 1990, 2000). This fact is of course not unique to jazz, but it is true of jazz to a perhaps unprecedented degree. Matters of articulation, note-attack, rhythmic placement and temporal definition, timbre, and volume-contour appear everywhere throughout the larger world of music, but in the case of jazz the extent of the freedom in the performance of a melody is extreme (Gioia 1988). There is, in jazz, the practice of playing the melody where this involves a great range of movement above the written melody, so the interpretative range is as open as is the creative space between written chords and played chords described above. Melodic playing can, and almost always does, involve the addition of pitches not written as the melodic analogue to adding extensions and alterations not written in chords. But here, those additions hold within themselves harmonic significance, so that a player, in articulating a melody, can imply a great deal about harmony in the act of playing the melody (one can add sevenths, ninths, thirteenths, altered fifths, ninths, and so forth).

Jazz   585 This means that the melodist can augment the harmonic content, and in doing so can signal to the harmonist preferred voicings or harmonizations that then become foundational to that performance. All of this can, and does, happen in the blink of an eye or a fleeting eighth-note. Similarly, a melodist can signal to the rhythm section a desire to shift the beat placement from the back to the front of the beat, and so forth. Or the melodist can deliberately play (and this is no small matter in explaining the audible power of this music) against the background that is harmonically or rhythmically different from the played melodic line, so rather than being a matter of signalling to play with the harmonic implications or rhythmic definition of the melodist, it is a matter of layering one interpretative attitude or approach over another. And while a performance of a melody can include elaborations and embellishments to a melody as basically structured, less widely understood is that it can in jazz also include a subtractive approach to a melody, so that the player in a sense conducts an analysis of the melody, reducing it to what that player regards as its minimal essence (the pianist Keith Jarrett, among many others, can do precisely this with profundity). This often introduces in listeners (and certainly in all of the players) the sense described above of “hearing” in the mind’s ear content that is not presently being sounded—they “hear” the full melody as implied by, or in a sense more fully “behind,” the melodic reduction that they actually hear; it is much like intimation in language. In truth, the improvisational parts of the melodic practices that define jazz are more complex still. One learns, from studying, analysing, and learning to play and interpret jazz melodies, how a musical thinker can find multiple and inventive ways through the harmonic surroundings or settings that constitute the support for, and define the possibilities of, the melodic path to be created. Those ways through, those melodic routes, can be charted with simple materials: one can play over a blues progression for an entire improvised solo with a six-note blues scale, and one can limit that even to an octave or an octave and one-half. Masters of the art form, on the other hand, bring into service all of the elements thus far described, and they can do so with harmonic insight, with rhythmic cleverness, with melodic originality, and with musical nuance that can be both powerful and subtle. (Of course, they can also work inventively within self-imposed limits on possible melodic routes, as in modal jazz; this corresponds roughly to the minimalist aesthetic in modern painting.) And as a melodic improviser, one can respond to the needs, stimulations, and provocations of the moment, just as one can design the shape of an improvised solo over the long form, over a number of “choruses” or repetitions of the underlying harmonic structure (Carvalho 2010). Lastly under this heading, I should note that in referring above to a jazz melody “as written,” I am not referring to one uniform or fixed kind of musical element. Indeed, this topic itself opens out into an interesting range of practices. Jazz compositions and their melodies have been written in many different ways with varying degrees of specificity: some are written in exacting detail (for example Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, or Gil Evans), others are sketches (Miles Davis, Bill Evans), or notated after the fact by persons other than the composer (Thelonious Monk), and those melodies have been circulated and used with a similar degree of variation throughout widely differing performance

586   Garry L. Hagberg contexts. In short, it is not the case that there invariably exists a definitive score against which performances can be compared. Instead, and in a way fitting to this entire art form, there is an ever-growing common-practice pool of notations, interpretations, recordings, and performances in which such melodies have their life.

Pathfinding Improvisation To grasp the nature of the creative work of the jazz improviser one has to first grasp the notion of harmonic terrain where one must find a (literal) path through a complex and challenging landscape. This demands that one sees possibilities, what maximizes the value of what has come before and the effort already expended, and recognizes the best way forward given both where one is at this moment and—importantly—how one got there. So the vision of the pathfinder in the actual musical landscape has to be bifocal in that one looks forward, yet always keeps an eye on where one has been and what it means for how one should go forward from where one is presently. The jazz improviser has to be in this sense even trifocal: first, one has to keep track of where one has been, how they got through what they did, and what that past means for the present and the future; second, one has also to look to the longer-form future in terms of where one is headed and what will answer, as a musically-logical consequent, the “questions” or problems stated by the preceding conditions, by the antecedents; and third, one has to be fully cognizant of the motion of the moment in the underlying harmony, aware of and responsive to the improvisational elements concerning voicing, reharmonization, rhythmic definition, and so forth, and simultaneously aware of one’s exact place in the longer-form progressions (in thirty-two-bar AABA form or whatever the formal case may be). Within this trifocal awareness, one can choose to play in long legato lines, in short staccato fragments, in sequenced figures, in fragmented but interrelated phrases, in scalar passages, in wide interval leaps, or in a thousand other melodic gestures or combinations of gestures (Coltrane 1963). Jazz improvisers are free, and in that freedom they have to be both extraordinarily disciplined and finely skilled (Coleman  1959,  1961). (The pianist Bill Evans is particularly exemplary in these respects.) These three primary elements—rhythm, harmony, and melody—serve to categorize the clusters of practices that define jazz. And as I said above, the evolution of those practices just is the tradition; it is not an art form that has separated composer-as-creator, conductor-as-interpreter, and performer-as-realizer. Rather, often—and in the case of improvisation always—these roles are merged or intertwined. As with the twelve-bar form, one can trace this aspect of jazz to its beginning in the blues; initially, almost all of the major blues players were composers and performers of their own works. And importantly, they were in a sense interpreters of their own works too, with multiple recordings of their songs showing significant differences across differing musical contexts and periods of this art form’s development. One sees this throughout the evolving tradition: Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Duke

Jazz   587 Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter, and many, many others (Shorter 2002). These clusters of practices evolved continuously, indeed relentlessly, in the hands of these performer-composer-interpreters. On the microscopic scale, they find inventive melodic ways through harmonic terrain within a rhythmic structure while on the macroscopic scale they find new stylistic directions for the music as they grow out of the traditions and point towards the future. As the art form unfolds over the span of its history it is often as if the implications of things “said” before are being subtlety discerned and then given voice or explicitly articulated in a new stylistic phase (Benson 2003; Kraut 2007; Monson 1996). Much of what takes place in this music thus stands as a direct parallel to what has been illuminatingly investigated as the culturally extended verbal practice of Signifyin(g) (Gates 1988). Creative pathfinding thus functions on two levels, with stylistic originators working as much or more on the macro as on the micro level (with the successive phases of Miles Davis’s development providing a powerful case in point).

Philosophical Aspects of Improvisation As stated above, it is time to affirm that the music created within the ever-expanding scope of these practices is of considerable philosophical interest (Day  2010; Hagberg 2000; Levinson 2015d). This interest ranges over several areas, including but certainly not restricted to (1) the ethics of performance, (2) the definition of art (including the idea of jazz as a representational art and as an existentialist art), (3) philosophy of language and analogies to speech, (4) philosophy of mind and issues of collective intention and group attention), and (5) relationships to American Pragmatism. In this section these foci of interest will be touched on in turn. But first, it should be noted that much work in the aesthetics of jazz to date has, with the exception of a few recent writers, concerned the ontology of this music: what kind of thing is a jazz work (and indeed is there such a thing as a jazz work?), and how do we situate, through a consideration of similarity and difference, our understanding of the works of this art form in relation to other idioms of music that have and are understood in terms of established works. (In classical music the question of work-ontology does arise in a way internal to the art because of the circumstance of multiple instances of, for example, Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony as performances of a full prescriptive score.) Further advancing the argument above concerning the particular conceptions of rhythm, melody, and harmony that are distinctive to and internal to the definition and conceptual understanding of this music, the following discussion argues not only for a much-expanded investigation of the philosophical aspects of jazz (in part by moving into areas of philosophy not yet associated with aesthetics), but also suggests that we refocus conceptual attention on issues and aspects that are alive within the practices of this music. Players within jazz ensembles are sensitive to the obligations they have to each other and to the integrity and history of the music; they see this music as

588   Garry L. Hagberg r­ epresentational of life in distinctive ways—but not with narrow concerns of definitionas-common-properties; they are centrally concerned with saying something within the music (and so are constantly using a deep and shared analogy to language); they are pursuing what they can create together at this time and in this moment beyond what they might have planned, or been capable of, individually; and they play, if not speak, a special pragmatic language. The question of ontology, although examined and theorized with great insight and ingenuity in other musical idioms, is oddly remote from jazz’s rich artistic life; it is a question that does not live within the practices of performers (Dodd 2014; Iseminger 2010; Young and Matheson 2000). And as argued above, this is a form of art that is defined by its practices (thus to understand how this music is made is to understand what this music is). So here following are the kinds of issues the aesthetics of jazz might now pursue.

The Ethics of Performance Of course all musicians who perform in an ensemble have obligations to each other, but in the case of ensemble jazz improvisation these can take on a new depth, urgency, and complexity. Part of this added complexity can be attributed to the fact that in jazz, the conventional distinction between the process and the product is blurred: much of the process of creating the music heard is itself presented on the stage—it is not only a matter of performing pre-specified music together (although it is of course in part that), it is also a matter of collectively creating, by intricately responding to each other, the very music performed. Thus one obligation is that of listening at a very high level of skill and responsive attentiveness (Clarke 2005, 2011). Concerning skill, one has an obligation to come to the ensemble with acutely trained ears: this is not merely a matter of listening for precise attacks or a section’s shaped crescendos and decrescendos, and so forth, but in addition to these it involves an ability to immediately recognize rhythmic patterns, chord types, and melodic lines, shapes, contours, motifs, and fragments (Faulkner and Becker 2009). One has to hear and instantly identify antecedent–consequent melodic phrase-making (where one improvises an accompaniment consistent with the logic of that phrase), register changes (where one improvises chord voicings that both complement and stay out of the way of the soloist’s register), and the long-form development of an improvised solo (where one carefully, if spontaneously, builds the dynamic alterations with the soloist, builds and releases harmonic tension with the soloist, and plays within the rhythmic patterns played or implied by the soloist). And one can have an obligation to not play too much, to not dominate the conversation but to listen and provide space respectfully. There is much more that takes place under this heading: for example, just as in moral life we need to be aware of and take account of the circumstances of an action (where, often, we cannot truly understand the action in question without those circumstances), so in jazz a player interacting within an ensemble will understand a musical gesture only to the extent that the gesture is understood within a broader set of rhythmic, harmonic,

Jazz   589 and melodic circumstances and the musical-logical sense that is unfolding as the soloist and ensemble proceed through the process of collective creativity. Just as in life, there can be many variations in the depth of understanding; musical intimacy in this sense is a mimetic reflection of moral intimacy (Day 2000; Hagberg 2006; Levinson 2015b). But there is also a need to acknowledge the autonomy and volitional independence of others in the ensemble: a soloist or an accompanist can be overbearing, too directive of others, disregarding of the contributions of others, and in a musical sense self-important. On the other hand, a player can be exquisitely sensitive, responsive to the ideas of others, and deeply acknowledging of others in a way that presents a musical self as a soloist among equals. The best players in the tradition do precisely this (with the duo recordings of the pianist Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall among the many high points of this kind of achievement). There is yet another form of acknowledgement in the respect that can be shown for complexity. In the case of the twelve-bar blues form described above, it is possible to stay within the simple five-note or pentatonic scale, improvising within those melodically and harmonically restrictive limits (when learning, most improvisers make their first statements within this elementary melodic vocabulary). But as discussed above, the set of practices that define this art form have evolved significantly beyond that simple beginning point, and to not develop one’s abilities beyond those narrow constraints constitutes a kind of ethical shortcoming: the contributions of others, in the form of complex and evolved practices, are not being properly acknowledged. To put it another way, one can play over chord changes simply, but one cannot play through them simply, and to play through them is to inhabit them and to comprehend their complexity from the inside. Again, this is ethically mimetic but not only that: jazz improvisation is an enactment of ethical interaction and responsibility, not just an artistic representation of it. Still another special form of ethical obligation presents itself in jazz-improvisational contexts. Just as in moral life, where one can have what might be termed a duty of memory, players need to follow both the soloist in particular and the development of the entire piece more broadly, so that even while being wholly in the present (and jazz is central among the arts that demand fully-present immediacy), they are both looking ahead (playing with anticipation and an awareness of the long form) and behind (keeping in mind where that particular solo, and that particular performance, came from and what precise ground it has covered). This too is not a simple matter and places stringent demands on the jazz player; it takes a deeply engrained set of advanced skills and not merely the recognition that one should do this (thus generating here again a secondary obligation to develop those very skills). Reminiscent of Aristotle on the art of tragedy, the work of the advanced ensemble cannot be reduced to a mere succession of episodes but must instead maintain a vigilant awareness of longer-form cohesion, development, and indeed unfolding musical teleology. And lastly under the heading of the ethical dimension, one is required to develop, and continually refresh, what one might call a habit of resourcefulness, the ability to contribute in inventive, creative, novel, and musically insightful ways (the working quartet of Wayne Shorter constitutes a high-water mark in this regard).

590   Garry L. Hagberg

Jazz as a Representational Art In recent years, jazz music has provided rich material for reconsidering the question of the definitions of art and of the musical work. If a traditional conception of a finished work implies a rigid distinction between process and product, then jazz already unsettles this presumption. (There may be those who would argue that it is the presumption that unsettles the art form, but that would be an egregious case of the tail wagging the dog.) So the degree of specificity of musical content as described above is (or is often) lower when evaluating an advanced jazz performance than a classical string quartet. One can place works of music on a continuum, with the classical quartet at one pole, the jazz standard in the middle, and free jazz (where there is no preordained structure, such as the blues form or the AABA song form) at the other pole. (It is of interest that the two polar extremes of this continuum have met in some contemporary European music and avant-garde experimentation.) This is plausible, in that it throws the differing amounts of creative space between the work and its performance into high relief: in the quartet, one plays the notes as written (with all the other forms of creativity internal to that kind of performance), in the jazz standard, one creatively realizes the rhythms, chords, and melodies according to the practices described above, and in free jazz one improvises from scratch, with no specific sonic progenitor in mind. In looking at the contrasts between the classical quartet and the moment-to-moment freedom of interpretation in jazz, one can argue, as Andrew Kania (2011) does, (presuming that the very concept of a work implies or requires a notated sound-structure that can be variously realized, or presuming that works are types and performances are tokens of those types) that there are no works in jazz. But this naturally depends on the conception of a work (indeed the meaning here of “work”) that is in play within the linguistic context of this debate, much like the meaning-determining particularities of rhythm, harmony, and melody discussed above. In this art the question of the definition of the musical work connects intimately to the question of what a jazz recording is: one cannot identify a recording as an exemplary performance, that is, one that defines the work or that gives the ideal performance in jazz in the same way as in the classical quartet. A recording in jazz is thus to a great extent a historical document; it captures what happened on a given occasion and preserves that particular musical presentation for posterity. Of course, a classical recording (and particularly a live recording) does the same, but with an important difference: the classical performance, if considered a high-water mark, can serve as a model for that very quartet or orchestra again, and replication would be an achievement. In jazz, replication would be cause for serious doubt: the creative and interactive elements of the art form would be thereby eliminated and thus, even an exactingly duplicated performance would not constitute a jazz performance. (It is true that many jazz artists learned their craft partly by replicating recordings of their idols and mentors during formative years, but that is study and preparation for creative performance, not performance itself.) Jazz has also been considered as a representational art, and although this may seem implausible at a glance, a closer look reveals some striking aspects of the art form that make this view of jazz considerably more compelling. There are the ethically mimetic

Jazz   591 features as discussed above, and this by itself establishes a correspondence-relation between jazz and life; there are also spontaneous acts performed within jazz improvisation that are instances onstage of volitional action within circumscribed contexts of possibility that illustrate in microcosm nothing less than the nature of human freedom (Fischlin and Heble 2004; Monson 2007). We see the variables in play within a determinate setting of human interactions, we see ways through that circumstantial web (as in playing through the changes above), and we resolve in a moment the contribution we will make to that rapidly evolving interactive context. For this reason the political dimension of free jazz has been especially emphasized. It was Plato who said that art holds a mirror up to the world, but if the world, as Heraclitus claimed, is flux, then jazz would move into central position as the representational art. There is yet more to be said: the jazz player is forced to move, and to keep moving swiftly, immediately, and in a way that makes and preserves sense while inventing the future out of the past. That is to say, the jazz player can be seen, and more plausibly so the more one considers it, in existentialist terms. According to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the existentialist lives within a world of choice and must move through it: in Sartre’s terms the individual is condemned to freedom. And the freedom to which one is condemned is, properly understood, radical freedom: the individual can choose (second order) to choose (first order) in a manner consistent with what has come before, but is not ethically, metaphysically, or in any other way constrained to do so. One can turn or swerve at any moment. This is very like jazz: one can move suddenly to a different register, or develop a melody on two planes simultaneously, or play against the established rhythm (e.g. three over four), or play so much into extensions and alterations that the improvised melodic line declares independence from the underlying harmony (while still making its own sense), or one can interpose oneself with a sudden display of volitional autonomy. And lastly under the heading of jazz as a representational art, and to return to Plato, in the Republic he identified the various musical modes, defined by differing locations of whole- and half-steps within the scale, that both correspond to and inculcate correspondingly varying states of the soul. Jazz—and perhaps particularly, indeed, modal jazz, as initiated by Miles Davis and as practised by many in this music to the present day—uses all of the modes available within the octave, and one could plausibly claim that they represent corresponding states of the soul. In any event, the world of jazz performance has occasioned significant reconsiderations of the presuppositions and problems of the definition of a musical work.

Improvisation and Analogies to Language Jazz is also an art form that invites a number of philosophically fruitful connections and comparisons to language (as mentioned above, connections or analogies that jazz players constantly use). One major connection was implicitly suggested above: the logic of thematic development common to both. In improvising a solo, experienced soloists do

592   Garry L. Hagberg not just play notes that fit the underlying harmony. Rather, they shape melodic lines over and through the harmonies and within the rhythms as discussed above; in finding routes through these musical terrains, soloists often establish relations, whether antecedent–consequent, question–answer (where they play their own answer to the “question” they have just stated), or theme-and-variation (where the thematic or gestural melodic germ is worked though or “seen” in varying ways). This can be done on the scale of the long mellifluous line (Stan Getz), on the scale of the short staccato fragment or motif (John Coltrane), or anything in between (Wynton Marsalis). In all these cases, the analogy to language—to what it is to make sense in language—is apparent: sense is not produced note-by-note, but in a larger frame of reference (just as in natural language sense is not generated atomistically or by the single unitary word taken unto itself). With these melodic versions of sense-making in view, one then sees another parallel with language in that one does not have to deliver a full sentence or paragraph to make a point or to create meaning. Rather, as in language within an established discursive context, one can reply to a previous musical remark or statement with the musical analogue of a word or two, commenting, replying, critiquing, developing, extending, approving, denying, joking, reasserting, and countless other meaningful responses that we rightly and naturally describe with terms drawn from spoken language. Speaking of the established discursive context suggests a further connection to language. In verbal interaction we are quite subtle at detecting ill-fittingness, irrelevance, or a remark made out of context. It was Wittgenstein who named such contexts languagegames, indicating a determinate framework within which possibilities for further discussion are opened while others are closed. And in language, it was what he called the field of a word that proved decisive in determining its meaning. The parallel claim in music is equally plausible (and in jazz improvisation powerfully applicable). The underlying song (for example the AABA form) realized in one particular way on one particular occasion in terms of rhythmic definition, time-feel, tempo, and pulse; in terms of the context-specific harmonic voicings of the given chords of the piece; and in terms of the  particular enunciation and interpretative articulation of the melody together ­create the delimited context of the musical language-game. It is that shifting and evolving collective musical entity that will in turn create the sonic space for relevance, irrelevance, depth, superficiality, insight, blindness, and many other pairs of positive and negative musical qualities. There are also interesting relationships between the nature and understanding of intention in speech and intention in jazz performance. It has proven easy for thinkers about language to describe linguistic intention as preverbal mental content that is only contingently attached, after the fact of its inward and metaphysically private articulation, to outward signs, such that the mental content is pictured dualistically as being carried or conveyed by its associated physical sign. But this has been subjected to profound scrutiny (in Wittgenstein’s “private language” argument and by others working in that tradition), so that the relation we see ourselves standing in to our words, to our language, is very different (Cavell 1976 explores this matter at length). This conception is a non-dualistic one where language is itself the vehicle of thought and where we think,

Jazz   593 speak, enact, perform actions, and create social institutions within, or one might say from within, language (Hagberg 2005). Although it is impossible to briefly express this alternative vision of language so as to do justice to this major development in the philosophy of language, it can be said that close examinations of the phenomenology of jazz improvisation and the nature and character of improvisational practices deeply challenge the traditional dualistic picture. This is one of a number of places where this art form can make a significant contribution to philosophy. The final connection between jazz improvisation and the nature of language is suggested by the guitarist Pat Metheny, who has insightfully called attention to the central importance of telling a story in and through the longer form of a solo (Cooke 2017). If this particular quality can be difficult to define, one knows it when one hears it, and I think the analogy with language can help us further articulate this sense-generating musical phenomenon. A well-structured story, as Aristotle famously wrote, will have a beginning, middle, and an end, and this is not at all the simple and obvious observation it might initially seem. A beginning sets in motion topics, themes, a protagonist exemplifying a character, other characters, and so forth: like a language-game, this will itself broadly define the limits of relevance and the thematic possibilities open for development. The middle then explores interconnected themes within the bounds of relevance and moves inside of, or realizes, potentials and possibilities as established in the beginning. And then the ending will weave those elements together into a coherent whole, creating a sense of completion, of organic interconnectedness, and of resolution. All of this emerges in the higher reaches of jazz, and by thinking through the elements and attributes of a story we can gain insight into the creative-structuring work of the accomplished jazz soloist.

Jazz, Collective Intention, and Group Attention The issue of intentional content offers links to the philosophy of mind, but a number of further issues present themselves under this heading. Given the extended range of freedom in jazz performance in the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic dimensions discussed previously, there is creative room not only for the individual within the ensemble to move in various ways, but also for the ensemble itself to form and reform, to take on and then in a collective sense morph away from, varying shapes and contours as the performance proceeds in its unique fashion. This too has proven easier to hear in music than to articulate in language. However, there has been extensive work in recent years in the philosophy of mind on the problem of collective intention, and this work can help describe the process, not of solo, but of ensemble improvisation (Bacharach and Tollefsen  2010; Bratman  1997,  2009; Hagberg  2017a; Searle  1990; Tollefsen  2004; Velleman 1997). It has been observed that a common starting point for thinking about collectives is to think of individuals as hermetically bounded, and then to picture the collective as a composite of such individuals. What is of special interest for present purposes is that this starting point limits what is considered as intentional content to a sum

594   Garry L. Hagberg total of all the individual contents of each of the players as members of the ensemble. And so the total group-intentional content would be precisely the same sum as that of the individuals added together. The discussion of collective intention, however, asks if there is not a kind of intentional content that is truly and in the first instance not individuated, not reducible to the sum total of such individual contents. In this way, what is often called (for want of a better term) the magic of creative ensembles working together and in a rarefied sense coalescing into a single organism has room preserved for its consideration from the outset, rather than being systematically excluded by the methodological individualist starting point. Such collective intentional content requires its own extensive description, but for the present it can be said that the highly developed skills and practices within jazz concerning the closest listening, the ability to instantly and without reflection identify chord types, voicings, complex and layered rhythmic patterns, melodic logic and the created sense of unfolding phrase construction, and the rapidly interactive mutual commentary and exchange— like an animated conversation, all serve the end of allowing for the emergence of shared intentional content at the collective level that is not reducible to the sum total of individual players. Another element of collective improvisation now comes to the fore: namely, group attention, which has also been discussed at length in some recent work in the philosophy of mind and can help explain the nature of the ensemble that has a capacity to morph in the manner suggested above (Eilan et al. 2005; Hagberg 2016; Mole 2017). Given the layered complexity of much modern jazz, it will be clear to any skilled listener that not everything can be attended to at once by any one player. Yet one hears, in the cohesion and the “tightness” of an accomplished group, that there is a clear and unambiguous sense in which nothing is being ignored, nothing is being missed, nothing is being relegated to the realm of disregarded background texture. One hears this in the ensemble, but when one focuses on any one player—the drummer, the guitarist, the saxophonist, the pianist, the bassist, and so forth—it is clear that they are selectively attending to a focal point or points within the larger frame of what they are taking in and being responsive to. Recent work on group attention provides an explanation for this: specific features of the whole are highlighted or “spotlighted” by individuals within a shared understanding of a distribution of labour, such that the evolving musical dialogue will remain inclusive while still allowing (for example) two of the five players to interact against a shared and acknowledged collective background with a heightened dialogical intimacy. The ensemble morphs as the patterns, subsets, focal points, and foreground/background shifts of attention occur. Linked to these discussions—all relevant to our understanding of ensemble performance in jazz—is the topic of group or collective agency: this, too, has quickly become an intricate matter in the philosophy of mind, but one can see, if in a provisional way, that if a collectivity is being thought of in terms of being or becoming a subject, then it will be describable in terms usually reserved for a subject, that is, an individual. The strongest proponents of this view suggest that collectivities, when unified in a distinctive way that creates an entity not reducible without loss to its individual constituents, can meet standards of rational

Jazz   595 choice and behaviour, hold beliefs and be judged for them, hold irreducible intentional content, and can themselves make sense or fail to do so. It is perhaps easy to go too far in this debate, but again it is clear that if we need a language to describe the highest forms of group creativity in jazz this could serve as one source of both conceptual and terminological enlightenment.

Jazz and American Pragmatic Philosophy Finally, there are direct and illuminating connections between jazz and what is arguably  the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy: Pragmatism (Colapietro 2003, 2013; Hagberg 2013; Levine 1998). Taking our first element from the description of jazz practices, rhythm, it was John Dewey (1958) who underlined a fundamental connection between (1) the dynamic relations between the person, the “live organism,” and the environment in which that organism lives, and (2) our embodied response to, and sense of depth and fundamental importance in, the sonic patterns that constitute rhythm. For Dewey, the living of life is itself the ongoing process of falling in and out of step with what he calls the march of surrounding things, the vicissitudes of our survivalinterested negotiations with our environment. Thus, rhythm is the representation of that fundamental part of life that concerns our attention to, interaction with, negotiation of, and, in successful cases, coming to grips with the multiform demands of that environment. Dewey regards this relation between our experience of the rhythm of life and the desire to create a mimetic representation of that experience as the root of the aesthetic in all societies, and he takes what he sees as biological and anthropological facts of human existence as the generator of musical rhythm. (This can be made all the more interestingly complex by conjoining this to the “plural subject” and ensemble-as-entity ideas mentioned previously.) Rhythmic balance, or a kind of harmonized equilibrium, is for Dewey the result of working through (as in playing within and finding a way through the chord changes) periods of tension and resolution, challenge and calm. And he emphasizes that the various changes we encounter in life have a way of interlocking in order to, as he says, sustain one another and create larger-form patterns of interaction between the live organism and the ever-changing environment (Dewey sees the seasons and the patterned changes of human behaviour they require as large-scale rhythms). All of this is richly present in the parallel world of group jazz improvisation. Dewey sees pattern-formation, collective mergers into mutually perceived continuity, episodes of destabilization followed by restabilization, the experiences of anticipation, de-individuation, dynamic crescendos and decrescendos, and satisfied expectation and the achievement of resolution as essential to the experience of life, and all of these are everywhere in jazz. The organism is—and inseparably so for Dewey—in the environment, and that environment has a discernible structure that is foundationally rhythmic. Our interest in rhythm is thus, for Dewey, our interest in the experience of life itself; rhythm is profoundly and universally captivating because it reenacts what it is to live, with improvisational constant forward movement, in our environment.

596   Garry L. Hagberg

Conclusion As an evolved and evolving set of increasingly complex, sophisticated, and demanding practices, jazz is a music that will not fit neatly or without remainder into any single category of musical analysis or of philosophical thought (Gottlieb 1996; O’Meally 1998). Indeed jazz, taken in toto as an art form with broad reach, demands distributed attention, multiple intertwining and mutually illuminating points of view, an awareness of the underlying musical-ethical issues, an understanding of the tools for the creation of musical sense, a consciousness of what jazz both represents and enacts, and—what each performance of this form of music has at its core—disciplined interpretative freedom.

Works Cited Alperson, Philip. 1984. “Improvisation in Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 43, no. 1 (Fall): 17–29. Alperson, Philip. 2010. “A Topography of Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer): 273–280. Bacharach, Sondra, and Deborah Tollefsen. 2010. “ ‘We’ Did It: From Mere Contributors to Coauthors.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 1 (Winter): 23–32. Baragwanath, Nicholas. 2011. The Italian Traditions and Puccini: Compositional Theory and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Opera. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berliner, Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bratman, Michael, 1997. “I Intend that We J.” In Contemporary Action Theory, Vol. 2, Social Action, edited by Ghita Holstrom-Hintikka and Raimo Tuomela, 49–63. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Bratman, Michael E. 2009. “Shared Agency.” In Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, edited by Chris Mantzavinos, 41–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Lee. 1996. “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continuity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 4 (Autumn): 353–369. Brown, Lee. 2000. “ ‘Feeling My Way’: Jazz Improvisation and Its Vicissitudes.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 113–123. Brown, Lee. 2002. “Jazz: America’s Classical Music?” Philosophy and Literature 26, no. 1 (April): 157–172. Carvalho, John M. 2010. “Repetition and Self-Realization in Jazz Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 4 (Summer): 285–290. Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1969. Clarke, Eric. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, Eric. 2011. “Music Perception and Music Consciousness.” In Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by David Clarke and Eric Clarke, 193–213. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jazz   597 Colapietro, Vincent. 2003. “Bebop as Historical Actuality, Urban Aesthetic, and Critical Utterance.” Philosophy & Geography 6, no. 2 (August): 153–165. Colapietro, Vincent. 2013. “Time as Experience, Experience as Temporality: Pragmatic and Perfectionist Reflections on Extemporaneous Creativity.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.594. Coleman, Ornette. 1959. The Shape of Jazz to Come. Recorded 22 May 1959, Radio Recorders, Los Angeles. New York: Atlantic Records. Coleman, Ornette. 1961. Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. Recorded 21 December 1960, A&R Studios, New York: Atlantic Records. Coltrane, John. 1963. Impressions. Recorded 3 November 1961, 18 September 1962, and 29 April 1963. New York: Impulse! Cooke, Mervyn. 2017. Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975–1984. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Dankworth, John, and Matyas Seiber. 1959. Improvisations for Jazz band and Orchestra. Mainz: Schott. Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Day, William. 2000. “Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 99–111. Day, William. 2010. “The Ends of Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer): 291–296. Dewey, John. 1958. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn. First published 1934. Dodd, Julian. 2014. “Upholding Standards: A Realist Ontology of Standard Form Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 3 (Summer): 277–290. Doffman, Mark. 2011. “Jammin’ an Ending: Creativity, Knowledge, and Conduct Amongst Jazz Musicians.” Twentieth Century Music 8, no. 2 (September): 203–225. Doffman, Mark. 2013. “Groove: Temporality, Awareness, and the Feeling of Entrainment in Jazz Performance.” In Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, edited by Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, 62–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eilan, Naomi, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes Roessler, eds. 2005. Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Faulkner, Robert R., and Howard S., Becker. 2009. Do You Know . . .?: The Jazz Repertoire in Action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fischlin, Daniel, and Ajay Heble, eds. 2004. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giddins, Gary. 1998. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gioia, Ted. 1988. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Gottlieb, Robert, ed. 1996. Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. New York: Pantheon Books. Gracyk, Theodore. 2002. “Jazz After Jazz.” Philosophy and Literature 26, no. 1 (April): 173–187. Hagberg, Garry L., ed. 2000. “Improvisation in the Arts.” Special issue, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring). Hagberg, Garry L. 2002. “On Representing Jazz: An Art Form in Need of Understanding.” Philosophy and Literature, 26, no. 1 (April): 188–198.

598   Garry L. Hagberg Hagberg, Garry L. 2005. “Meaning Beside Itself.” In David Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, with a critical commentary by Garry L. Hagberg, 1–32. London: Routledge. Hagberg, Garry L. 2006. “Jazz Improvisation: A Mimetic Art?” Revue internationale de philosophie 238:469–485. Hagberg, Garry  L. 2008. “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections.” In Art and Ethical Criticism, edited by Garry L. Hagberg, 259–285. Oxford: Blackwell. Hagberg, Garry L. 2010. “On Rhythm.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism “Symposium: Musical Improvisation” 68, no. 3 (Summer): 281–284. Hagberg, Garry L. 2013. “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics: The Contours of Experience.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, edited by Alan Malachowski, 272–299. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hagberg, Garry L. 2016. “Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, edited by George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 481–499. New York: Oxford University Press. Hagberg, Garry  L. 2017a. “The Ensemble as Plural Subject: Jazz Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Agency.” In Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and improvisation in Contemporary Music, edited by Eric Clarke and Mark Doffman, 300–313. New York: Oxford University Press. Hagberg, Garry L. 2017b. “Jazz Improvisation and Peak Performance: Playing in the Zone.” In Culture, Identity, and Intense Performance: Being in the Zone, edited by Tim Jordan Brigid McClure, and Kath Woodward, 143–159. New York: Routledge. Hagberg, Garry  L. 2020. “The Life of Rhythm: Dewey, Relational Perception, and the ‘Cumulative Effect’.” In The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, edited by Andy Hamilton and Max Paddison, 101–109. New York: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 1990. “The Aesthetics of Imperfection.” Philosophy 65, no. 253 (July): 323–340. Hamilton, Andy. 2000. “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Imperfection.” British Journal of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (January): 168–185. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hodeir, André. 1956. Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence. Translated by David Noakes. London: Secker & Warburg. Iseminger, Gary. 2010. “Sonicism and Jazz Improvisation.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 3 (Summer): 297–299. Kania, Andrew. 2011. “All Play and No Work: The Ontology of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 4 (Fall): 391–403. Kraut, Robert. 2007. Artworld Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, Lawrence  W. 1998. “Jazz and American Culture.” In The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, 431–447. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015a. “Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis.” In Musical Concerns, 99–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015b. “Popular Song as Moral Microcosm: Life Lessons from Jazz Standards.” In Musical Concerns, 115–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015c. “The Expressive Specificity of Jazz.” In Musical Concerns, 131–143. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jazz   599 Levinson, Jerrold. 2015d. “Instrumentation and Improvisation.” In Musical Concerns, 144–154. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mole, Christopher. 2017. “Attention.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/attention. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Meally, Robert G, ed. 1998. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosenthal, David  H. 1992. Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965. New York: Oxford University Press. Russell, George. 1957. All About Rosie. Recorded in Waltham, MA. Newton Centre, MA: Margun Music. Schuller, Gunther. 1968. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, John R. 1990. “Collective Intentions and Actions.” In Intentions and Communication, edited by Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack, 401–416. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, The MIT Press. Shorter, Wayne. 2002. Footprints Live! Universal City, CA: Verve Music Group. 314 589 679-2. Tollefsen, Deborah. 2004. “Collective Epistemic Agency.” Southwest Philosophy Review 20, no. 1 (January): 55–66. Velleman, J.  David. 1997. “How to Share an Intention.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 1 (March): 29–50. Young, James O., and Carl Matheson. 2000. “The Metaphysics of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (Spring): 125–133.

chapter 30

Oper a Michael Fend

Opera and philosophy might, at first glance, appear to be odd partners. Opera is a form of drama with orchestral accompaniment in which singing (often also speaking) actors emotively convey their thoughts and feelings with the aim of gripping spectators. Philosophy, by contrast, is an epistemologically controlled debate on the basis of concepts deployed by participants paying little attention to individuals. Although composers and philosophers share a sense of wonder at the world, opera offers theatrical presence for a visually and acoustically alert audience, while philosophy focuses on the contemplative study of non-narrative texts.1 Such a dichotomy, though, neglects the fact that opera is in the first place a form of aesthetic entertainment, directed at our perception and imagination. In this sense, aesthetics is the philosophical field closest to opera. Aesthetics, however, and music aesthetics in particular, has all too often been concerned only with providing a systematic theory of beauty, and has failed to address the untrammelled range of feelings that art actually provokes. Such a dichotomy also neglects to take account of the way in which, from its beginning, opera has brought the ethical shortcomings of human beings into the open. But opera’s stylized representation of human expression and action, combined with the genre’s tendency towards supernatural events, has resulted in ethical discussion of opera’s inhabitants being transferred to the history of reception and the sociology of gender and sexuality. Ethical discourses in philosophy, by contrast, rarely pay attention to opera. In this chapter, I do not seek to devalue the connections between opera and philosophy that are uncovered through a focus on ethics or aesthetics. I do wish to suggest, however, that a promising line of inquiry opens up through the concept of subjectivity if it spans authors, protagonists, and audience members.2 The philosophical debate about subjectivity can be situated between Michel Foucault at one end, for whom man constructs himself in an “endless and multiplied series of different subjectivities” (Foucault 1994, 75; quoted in Kammler et al. 2008, 294), and Dieter Henrich at the other end, for whom subjectivity is “an elementary knowledge of our self as a principle” in all life, thought, and action (Henrich 1999, 53, translation mine; see also

602   Michael Fend Henrich  2016, 23–34). In the present context, a discussion of “subjectivity” would involve the audience beyond the time of the performance. “Subjectivity” in the view of Josef Früchtl means a superior form of existence that is capable of referring to itself “contemplatively” or “reflexively.” In the self-reflective relationship, the self as the subject refers back to itself as the object in an act of cognition. As the subject and object rolled into one, it becomes the foundation of all knowing and acting perceived as relationships to objects. It accordingly becomes the foundation of science, morality, law, religion, art, politics, and all other rational, as well as social dimensions.  (Früchtl 2009, 89)3

It was not by chance that opera as a form of entertainment was (re)discovered at the beginning of the modern age around 1600, an age that can be defined as a quest towards subjective self-determination. This quest was captured succinctly by Kant, writing in 1784, when he defined “enlightenment” as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity” (Kant 1912, 53; 1996, 58). Among the arts, opera has privileged the representation of subjects, insofar as monological and dialogical singing with orchestral accompaniment offers protagonists time for both action and reflection. Admittedly, many protagonists appear to be singing so as to avoid reasoning with themselves, and not every arietta singer has the chance to reveal their interiority. But the medium of opera can also foster protagonists’ self-consciousness, so unveiling an aspect of the self that is central to subjectivity. Since Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607) operatic plots have usually centred on an individual struggling for self-determination against superior powers, represented by gods, monarchs, ideologically repressive communities, or alter egos. A focus on the topic of subjectivity thus leads naturally to an examination of the individual protagonists whom we inevitably encounter in opera. Such protagonists are usually natural or supernatural beings, but they can also be affects (as in Lully’s Armide [1686]), elements (the wind in Verdi’s Rigoletto [1851]), or domestic objects (as in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges [1925]). Most of all, however, they are humans: human individuals on the operatic stage who show their individuality through singing. As they take a stand for or against something, they become subjects. And so I open this chapter, in the first of four sections, by tracing the history of operatic heroes and heroines before and after their apogee in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1786), placing this history in dialogue with some key moments in changing philosophical attitudes to opera. A focus on the topic of subjectivity also leads, however, to an emphasis on the spectators of the opera, who have suspended their disbelief in order to engage fully in the world of the operatic protagonists. Audience reactions to opera range from reflections on meaning to sensual presentism, but usually involve a hefty dose of emotion. The aesthetic experience is both individual and collective. As such, it may liberate the spectators from broader emotional and social constraints, or it may overwhelm them into accepting a message at variance with their rational selves. I continue this chapter, in my second section, with a discussion of opera and emotion. Rather than attempt to provide

Opera   603 a full history, however, I examine a single, emblematic case study: an indirect eighteenthcentury dialogue between Rousseau and Diderot. Recall the aforementioned definition of subjectivity from Joseph Früchtl: “a superior form of existence that is capable of referring to itself ‘contemplatively’ or ‘reflexively.’ ” Such a definition invites consideration of the relationship between subjectivity and being—a topic at the foundation of modern metaphysics. I follow with a third section that, choosing again to concentrate on a single case study, re-evaluates the concept of musical metaphysics in Schopenhauer. This section goes on to consider Schopenhauer’s role in shaping Wagner’s concept of opera, with a particular focus on the ways in which questions of emotional engagement continue to inform the Wagnerian conception. This section also considers Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner. Taken together, the attention to Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche allows me to provide a real-world, concrete example of the impact that changes in philosophy have had on the history of opera, and one that highlights the continuing influence of Rousseau well into the nineteenth century. The relationship between opera and philosophy, however, is not merely historical. Rather, this history has led to a range of interactions in contemporary discourse. I thus close this chapter with a fourth and final section considering some contemporary philosophical writings on opera. I highlight here the categories that have emerged throughout the historical discussion: operatic protagonists, emotion, and metaphysics. Not wishing to suggest that philosophy should be the exclusive preserve of philosophers, I close this final section with a consideration of two of the most prominent musicological approaches to the topic of opera and philosophy.

The Rise and Fall of Operatic Heroes and Heroines In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century serious opera the hero and heroine usually survive. After 1800 they tend to die. Of course, counter-examples will immediately spring to mind and in comic opera of all periods the protagonists tend to resolve their conflicts. Still, the difference is striking. It is a difference that underscores the distance between opera culture and the political and social worlds in which individuals and collectives have attempted to achieve self-determination and self-realization. Yet it is also a difference that can be explained by noting that operatic personas are determined by the ideologies of their authors and by institutional interests. As such, the survival of the operatic hero in pre-1800 operas is less due to their own effort than to intervention of the gods. When this scheme lost its plausibility for many opera composers and librettists around the turn of the nineteenth century, protagonists could no longer be saved. At its foundation in 1670s France, the tragédie en musique carved out a third repertoire in between comédies, which exposed character faults to ridicule, and spoken

604   Michael Fend t­ ragédies, in which historical or mythological protagonists demonstrated admirable bravery before suffering the fatal consequences of their actions. The tragédie en musique sought to stun audiences through the spectacular inclusion of gods and magicians who would save the protagonists from misfortune, although they were often left in a state of melancholy. Allegorical protagonists framed the plots with sycophantic messages directed at the absolutist king, Louis XIV, implying that he too could grant mercy to a powerless individual. Whereas performances of tragédies en musique were restricted to the court of Versailles and the theatre in Paris, Italian opera became widely accessible in multiple cities. Here, librettists, impresarios, and composers shaped plots to suit the strengths of particular singers. Venetian opera appears to have been the first place for women singers to pursue the risky path towards professional independence. Starring in the role of Ottavia in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) among many others, Anna Renzi (1620–after 1661) was perhaps the first Venetian prima donna. Her vocal and acting qualities were praised in descriptions and poems, while her contractual salary exceeded that of the most famous opera composer in the city, Francesco Cavalli.4 Dramma per musica first showed men as the playthings of the gods, mixing natural and supernatural worlds; but the reforms instigated by the librettists Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio in the early eighteenth century sought to give greater verisimilitude to the genre and to strengthen its pedagogical value. Misreading the concept of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics, Metastasio created usually happy endings for gruesome ancient tales (Metastasio [1782]  1968, 573–581; see also Feldman  2011, 278–280). Metastasio had framed his ethical goals around mostly historical rulers who overcome not only their emotional desire to preserve their dignity, but also the political and social status quo. It sometimes seems as if he was devising plots to make space for a series of affects. But Metastasio’s self-controlled rulers remained as unpopular in France as the Italian castrati who enthralled Londoners. From the early eighteenth century, the political conformists of tragédie en musique and opera seria had to compete for audiences with the irreverent opera buffa and the parodistic opéra comique. Despite the impediments of a shoe-string budget and punitive red-tape, the makeshift theatres of the opéra comique attracted a new class of spectators keen to see fellow individuals, usually a pair or two of lovers, gradually lose their provincial speech and demand life according to their own preferences against the will of parents or other local authorities. Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress) (1733) varies this model as a female servant outwits her oafish master by tricking him into marrying her. In the early eighteenth century a comedy was the only public space where a woman could overpower her male master, but in this instance their mutual infatuation gave the plot a sentimental tone. Since repulsing an undesirable partner and winning a desirable one was a burning concern of self-determination in eighteenth-century societies, plots like La serva padrona quickly became popular with the growing constituency of female audiences. These operas intensified their moralistic tone when thematizing misdemeanour at court (as in Goldoni and Ciampi’s Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno of 1748). Through the early eighteenth century, Neapolitan composers Leo, Vinci,

Opera   605 Pergolesi, Piccinni, and others developed a dramatically fluent and joyful musical language that could persuade any audience member that they were on the winning side. When their repertoire reached France in the early 1750s it caused the notorious Querelle des Bouffons, with people divided into those who supported the tragédie en musique or those in the opera buffa camp, at the same time aligning themselves with the king (tragédie en musique) or with the parliament (opera buffa), and advocating for the suppression (tragédie en musique) or the support (opera buffa) of the fledgling Encyclopédie. Opera here served as a space for writers to make their own voice heard, just as the more general public could observe “musical, political and religious analogies operating throughout the texts of the quarrels” (Cook 2001). Moving into the 1760s, Calzabigi, Gluck, Traetta, and other librettists and composers abandoned Metastasio’s gentle historical rulers and returned to mythological plots, within which the operatic hero and heroine sang with insubordinate voices. Gluck’s later operas created a storm in Paris. These operas showed kings and other members of royal households revolting against ordeals created by fate or gods and administered by priests. The dramaturgy of Gluck’s later operas sought to install “nature” as a commanding idea above other authorities, although contemporary librettists and composers still resolved conflicts with the help of supernatural powers. Gluck appropriated the ancient concept of the imitation of nature (mimesis) to justify a musical rhetoric that many spectators either enthusiastically enjoyed or found too realistic (Gluck [1773] 1995; Arnaud 1984; Marmontel 1984). However forceful their singing, protagonists in tragédies en musique resemble spectators more than agents in the solution of conflicts. Further, both tragédies en musique and comic operas tended to construct sentimental solutions that bordered on the miraculous. Both genres highlight a widespread craving for fairy tales in preRevolutionary Europe. A leftover from medieval real life, “seigneurial rights” (the rights of feudal lords) were tackled in Beaumarchais’s La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), which Mozart and Da Ponte set as Le nozze di Figaro (1786). Rarely in the history of opera have the positions taken by operatic protagonists shadowed contemporary politics more closely, as these rights—a metonymy of the seigneurial system—were officially abolished three years later during the French Revolution. The people in Beaumarchais’s comedy congratulate the Count for abandoning his seigneurial rights, only for him to rescind his promise when he believes his attempts to seduce Susanna may be thwarted. Both play and opera exposed the misuse of power by the nobility. Le nozze di Figaro’s structure made it harder for the audience to avoid feeling either accused along with the Count or sympathetic to his victim. Mozart never repeated this level of realism. But Beaumarchais had written Figaro as the middle part of a trilogy, preceded by premarital worries and enthusiasm in Le Barbier de Séville (1773, set by Paisiello in 1782 and Rossini in 1816), and followed by La Mère coupable (1792, set by Darius Milhaud in 1966), in which the Count’s and Countess’s extra-marital affairs lead to the family’s near financial and emotional ruin, prevented only by Figaro and Susanna’s interference. The trilogy offered an indictment of the upper class in the ancien régime as incompetent, corrupt, and self-destructive. Beaumarchais sketched an even sharper critique of the monarchy in his Tarare (set by Salieri in 1787).

606   Michael Fend Here, a king snatches the wife of his bravest soldier for his harem and sends the soldier on an impossible military campaign, only for the king to commit suicide after the soldier comes back in triumph, inheriting the throne at the end. Beaumarchais reinforced the philosophical substructure of his plot through an allegorical framework in the manner of Philippe Quinault. In an arrangement borrowed from traditional divine pronouncements before a kneeling crowd, allegories of Nature and Fire declaim words that are written with flames in the clouds and are accompanied by thunder and trumpets: “Man! Your greatness on earth does not stem from your status, but derives entirely from your character” (Beaumarchais 1988, 589). Although the plot was ostensibly set in the Orient, its reference to contemporary France was understood. Beaumarchais’s vision of the people choosing their next king was overtaken by history when France became a republic in 1792. Two hundred years of operatic entertainment, which over the last forty years had criticized ever more strongly the power structure of the ancien régime, had reached the point where internal strife and revolutionary wars changed French interest in opera. Each of Mozart’s later operas offered its own form of “poetic truth” for its protagonists. A father, mysteriously rising from the dead, punishes the dissolute Don Giovanni (1787) for dishonouring his daughter. The Don’s narcissism is musically revealed by his lack of a self-reflective aria while virtually all the other protagonists’ arias are about him. In Mozart and Da Ponte’s Così fan tutte (1790), two couples have to acknowledge the fickleness of their emotional bonds, as the materialist philosopher character Don Alfonso predicts. The fairy-tale wedding of Tamino and Pamina in Die Zauberflöte (1791) triumphs over the Queen of the Night’s cry for revenge and Pamina’s incarceration by Freemasons claiming to follow Enlightenment ideals. The central characters were determined by other forces. Against these literary inventions, the plot of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814) was based on an imaginative “fait historique,” previously set by Pierre Gaveaux (1798), Ferdinando Paer (1804), and Simon Mayr (1805), from the time of the French Revolution. Here, a courageous woman dresses up as man and threatens her husband’s political enemy with a pistol when he attempts to murder him. The improbable arrival of a minister at the moment of the couple’s highest danger furthered the opera’s success, because a rogue individual, who had taken the law into his own hand, was forced to hand authority back to the state before the prisoner’s wife enacted revolt. The contemplative quartet (Act 1, scene 3), the prisoners’ chorus (Act 1, scene 10), and the hymnic ensemble finale (Act 2, scene 16) offered the protagonists the opportunity to reflect on life beyond the plot. The development of man’s self-determination and self-realization in French politics had reached a point where the story of an innocent man of unremarkable background rescued from a tyrannical other had become topical. “Rescue operas” by Grétry, Berton, LeSueur, Méhul, Dalayrac, and Cherubini further served that interest. The notability of Fidelio rested also on the gender reversal of the mythological norm of a man (such as St George, Perseus, or Orpheus) rescuing a woman. While arbitrary imprisonments were a daily occurrence in Revolutionary France, none of the known escapes and rescues were on the scale of Fidelio, indicating the audience’s

Opera   607 unquenchable hunger for the miraculous. In the Europe of restored monarchies after the Vienna Congress of 1815 some opera composers sought refuge in the fantastic world of early modern superstition (Weber’s Der Freischütz [1821]) or the timelessness of sentimental comedies (Rossini’s La Cenerentola [1817], La gazza ladra [1817]). But their theatricality could not conceal for long the social and political downsides which industrialization and commerce inflicted on opera audiences. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72) promoted unbounded enthusiasm for music as a saviour from the materialism into which he saw Europe declining. Mazzini, one of the founders, along with Giuseppe Garibaldi and Pietro Cavour, of modern Italy, identified music with opera, advocating a “social art” that would result in a more powerful presence of the chorus as representative of communities. The focus of composers on individuals and their woes, thought Mazzini, had resulted in the predominance of melodic writing that, in the case of Rossini in particular, represented “ ‘voices’ and nothing more” rather than “a purpose or idea” (Mazzini 2004, 47, 52–53). Curiously, in a “note” added as late as 1867, Mazzini exclusively praised not an Italian composer but Meyerbeer for having “moralised the musical drama by making it the echo of our world and its eternal problem,” celebrating him as “the prophet of the Music to come, of that Music whose high and holy mission will place it but one step below Religion itself ” (Mazzini  2004, 65). Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836) thematized the fundamentalist potential of religion and the catastrophic consequences of such fundamentalism for society. Mazzini’s crude conceptualization of the history and future of opera may have impeded Mazzini’s contemporary and later reception. But Rossini’s dramatization of the Swiss liberation from Austrian imperial suppression in Guillaume Tell (1829) should have found his favour, as it resembled Mazzini’s own dreams for Italian independence. He may also have been unaware of Rossini’s deeply ironic Il viaggio a Reims (1825), in which a group of nobles and artists, en route to the coronation of the reactionary Charles X in Reims, decide that they would prefer their own entertainment in a hotel to being mere bystanders at the coronation. There is nevertheless a noticeable echo of Mazzini’s philosophical ethics in Verdi, insofar as many of Verdi’s plots focus on a chivalric sense of honour in vengeful societies. The revival of medieval forms of conduct represented a counter-current against the social requirements of industrialized and modernized societies, although this countercurrent remained largely underdeveloped in nineteenth-century Italy. Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1836) unsparingly described the monotony of contemporary life in 1820s Italy, a country without a centre, a national literature, or a national theatre, writing that “the walk through town, the theatre, and the church provided the main occasions for social life.” The lack of society meant that its people could not cultivate an “idea of honour” (Leopardi 1998, 56–57). Against this cultural deficiency, Verdi’s protagonists care about their personal honour more than their lives, usually with fatal consequences to their families and communities. Their sense of self is bound up with their “honour.” Revenge for family, social or religious dishonour was at the heart of Verdi’s Oberto (1839), Nabucco (1842), Ernani (1844), Macbeth (1847/1865), Stiffelio (1850), and others. Verdi’s constant battles with censors prove that his protagonists fought for a kind of freedom or justice

608   Michael Fend that the authorities did not grant. The hunchback and court jester of the eponymous Rigoletto tries to restore family honour after his daughter, Gilda, has been seduced by a philandering duke. But, defying her father, she makes herself the victim of his vengeful scheme so that the duke can escape. Whereas Rigoletto shows the futility of an individual’s revolt against court society, Verdi’s most up-to-date opera, La traviata (1853), dramatized the irreconcilability of the life of leisured lovers and society’s financial and moral strictures. Both are enabled by the ideological, social, and economic conditions of the July Monarchy in Paris, but they also lead to the protagonists’ financial insecurity, mutual deception, and emotional cruelty. The libretto represented provincial ardent youngsters eventually broken by the money, glitter, and emotional upheaval of the capital city. Verdi’s La traviata is a fantasy of loss, which is counterbalanced by the survival of a cruel, false-hearted masculine world while its women are kept in subjection and, by assenting, contribute to their own erasure.

Rousseau and Diderot on the Expression of Emotion Rousseau Opera was a crucial public genre for individuals to give vent to their grievances and delights from the moment that composers shifted the polyphonic ensemble structure of sixteenth-century emotive madrigals to aria forms where individuals could melodize their interiority to an orchestral accompaniment. This ambition had its analogy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letter writing, for which Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) became the paradigmatic example. The detail of self-disclosure in this work, which Rousseau propagated through his protagonists, was closely linked to his contemporaneous theory of the origin of language, as set forward in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (written in 1761, but published only posthumously in 1781). Here, Rousseau claimed that man had invented speech primarily to express emotional rather than physical needs, let alone thoughts, and that these expressions had taken the form of chanting to enhance their urgency. Speech melody was the crucial vehicle in chanting, far more important than the invention of harmony, whose age-old application to cosmic structures was of no interest to Rousseau. He conceived of “melody” primarily in its everyday use, not in the context of opera, although the link could be made by his readers: Melody, by imitating the inflections of the voice, expresses complaints, cries of sadness or joy, threats, and moans; all the vocal signs of the passions are within its scope. It imitates the accents of languages, and the turns of phrases appropriate in each idiom to certain movements of the soul; it not only imitates, it speaks, and its language, inarticulate but lively, ardent, passionate, has a hundred times more energy than speech itself.  (Rousseau 1998, 322)

Opera   609 How could this form of communication be realized in opera? Battle-hardened from the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–4), when, after criticizing French opera and language, his effigy had been burnt outside the Académie royale de musique, Rousseau’s sketch of the history and system of the genre centred on the concepts of interest and illusion. Italian operas became more interesting after gods, demons, and allegories, which had “dazzled” the senses of earlier audiences, were “chased from the stage” so that conflicts between humans could “touch the hearts” of spectators (Rousseau  1995, 951–954). Rousseau saw the old libretti of Zeno and Metastasio, alongside scores by Vinci, Leo, and Pergolesi, as distinguished by an affective mechanism that never granted spectators the space to be themselves. The audience’s loss of distance and critical judgement was facilitated by intensified expression and the delimitation of secular subject matter. Opera’s goal should be to represent the forceful moments of expression: “The energy of every feeling, the violence of every passion are thus the principal object of lyric drama, and the illusion that produces charm is always destroyed as soon as the author and the actor leave the spectator to himself for an instant” (Rousseau 1995, 954; 1998, 453). To further stimulate a spectator’s interest and to enhance the sense of illusion, Rousseau suggested that a singer should be “wary of imitating theatrical declamation . . . but rather seek to imitate the voice of nature speaking without affectation and without artfulness” (Rousseau 1995, 819; 1998, 400). Such a singer needs a plot and a musical language that will communicate with the audience. Looking at this process systematically, Rousseau developed a mimetic model of audience perception. Opera’s interest and illusion represent attitudes of consciousness, manifested in time. Music also makes itself evident through movement in time. A composition can provoke emotion if its course enables the audience to form an analogy with the development of their own feelings. Rather than restricting composers to the traditional imitations of water or thunder, an opera plot might require the composer to represent a protagonist dreaming or in a state of silence or being captive in a subterranean prison, all situations for which the stage and orchestra could provide a semantic context: “The musician’s art consists in substituting for the imperceptible image of the object that of the movements its presence arouses in the mind of the spectator; it does not represent the thing directly, but awakens in our soul the same feeling experienced in seeing it” (Rousseau 1995, 959; 1998, 456; see also 1995, 421, 861). Gaps or even omissions of text might then not be detrimental to a singer’s expression, as the seeing, hearing, and feeling of the spectators could supplement what the singer had left unsaid. In such a situation the orchestra could function as a dramatic agent in its own right, exploiting the theatrical ambience to communicate insights that were potentially beyond the singer’s consciousness. In short, the discussion of the entire conceptual field of opera enabled Rousseau to advocate for protagonists who expressed their emotions so as to realize their true selves. Rousseau’s key concepts of “melody” and recitatif could hardly have been modelled on his experience of contemporary opera singers in France or Italy. Instead, his proposals for reform of earlier Lullian and Rameauian models of tragédie lyrique, which he had equated with a restrained emotion, had their counterpart in his autobiographical writings, such as

610   Michael Fend the Confessions (1782–1789). Here, he pursued an unprecedented level of “transparency,” that is, a wish to present himself without social, political, or religious restrictions, in the hope of being accepted as sincere by his readers. Rousseau’s resulting “theory of emotives” would find its application in Gluck’s “reform operas,” much to the philosopher’s late contentment (Reddy 2001, 161).

Diderot Denis Diderot’s aesthetics of theatre production echoed Rousseau’s position in its renunciation of beautiful singing. Diderot took his models instead from real life because of their stronger effect on audiences: What is it that moves us at the sight of a man roused by some intense passion? Is it his speeches? Sometimes. But what always upsets are screams, inarticulate words, worn-out voices, some monosyllables which slip out at intervals, something like a murmur in the throat, between the teeth.  (Diderot 1965, 101–102)

These performative details befitted a singer rather than an actor. In this, Diderot did not overlook the professional aspect of performance. In their rehearsals actors and singers should learn to imitate a person gripped by passion. They train their voice, gestures, posture, glances, and body movements throughout their time on stage. The most persuasive actor or singer creates their role by projecting emotions in a controlled manner, playing a villain today and a hero tomorrow. These techniques led Diderot to claim that a great actor is also a “marvellous marionette,” impersonating any character but themselves (Diderot 1965, 348). The actor’s and singer’s technical control over the fictive reality of their affect is the precondition for the audience’s emotional arousal. At any given moment they have to be both inside and outside their role, bringing their own individuality to it and voluntarily substituting it with the individuality of the stage character. Such a perfect actor appears to have been Jean-François Rameau (1716–77) with whom Diderot engaged in a fictional dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, which took place in a Parisian café. The nephew of the great Jean-Philippe Rameau appears to have taken to heart Shakespeare’s phrase that “all the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7). Craving financial and social advantage, the nephew boasts that he can impersonate the tone, gestures, and mimicry of any character in his real life rather than on stage. Motivated by revenge against an uncaring society, the nephew’s roguish ways of thinking contradicted Diderot’s own morally driven plays with such ferocity that Diderot sent the manuscript of the dialogue to Empress Catherine in St Petersburg rather than see it published during his lifetime. The nephew’s tirade against older French opera has a similar trajectory to Rousseau’s historiography of the genre. At the Académie royale in Paris, the canonical operas by Lully, Campra, Rameau, and others had invariably led audiences to “yawning boredom.” By contrast, audiences were absorbed by down-to-earth Italian opera buffa, such as Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, which they had encountered during

Opera   611 the Querelle des Bouffons and at Parisian market fairs (Diderot 2014, 66). The nephew explains that the melodic declamation in Italian comic and serious opera expresses the emotional accents of the text, facilitated by agility and flexibility of a language rich in vowels. Tragédie en musique, by contrast, is beholden not only to “insipid mythology” and “sickly little madrigals [i.e., airs],” but also to a “stiff, deaf, hefty, heavy, pedantic, and monotonous language” (67). The nephew postulated for opera a realism that would make it indistinguishable from life. Further, he identified “true expression” with Philidor’s opera Le Maréchal ferrant (1761) as if a historical change from old to new opera had created an ideal quality. At the same time, the notion of “true expression” formed part of an equation: “The more forceful and true the declamation, . . . the truer the song will be, and the more beautiful” (Diderot 2014, 65; translation adapted). In transferring an ideal notion of what is true and beautiful to historic examples, the evaluation of compositional techniques acquired a historical dynamic. The correlation between true and beautiful expressive singing required continuous adaptation to the demands of the experience of actual listeners. Given his eccentricity, the nephew’s own demands were extreme: It’s for the animal cry of passion to dictate the line we should take. . . . The phrasing needs to be tight; the meaning cut off, left hanging; the composer needs to be able to freely arrange the whole and each of the parts, to leave out or repeat it, to add what he feels is missing, to twist it and turn it inside out like a polyp, without destroying it. . . . The animal or human cry gives the language its accent.  (Diderot 2014, 71)

Diderot entrusted Rameau’s nephew not only to give voice to these views but also to impersonate dozens of Italian and French opera protagonists, even imitating the orchestra as if in an “opéra imaginaire” (Diderot 1977, xliv–lvi; Didier 1985, 365). Diderot’s scenario also included the nephew’s audience: All the pawn-pushers had left their chessboards and gathered round him. The café windows were crammed with passers-by who had stopped to see what the noise was. The laughter was loud enough to bring the ceiling down. He was completely oblivious; he carried on in the grip of a fit of mental alienation, of enthusiasm.  (Diderot 2014, 69)

Even outside the theatre and without a plot, the energy and theatricality of a singing actor alone could provoke an audience’s utter absorption. For that became opera’s and theatre’s goal: the deeper a protagonist is vocally involved in themselves or the more strongly they express their feelings, the more audiences are involved as well. Diderot’s example of absorption was focused on the sphere of opera, but the French Revolution intertwined instead Rousseau’s model of musical absorption with a political sociability that by 1793 ended in terror and, by 1815, with an entire continent ruined and traumatized by Napoleon’s wars. Still, in the second decade of the nineteenth century E. T. A. Hoffmann wanted an opera in which word, action, and music would appear as an “indivisible whole [which] should create a total impression on the listener”

612   Michael Fend (Hoffmann 1989, 152). Carl Maria von Weber, likewise, sought an “effect of totality” in opera where the “collaborating arts blend together and . . . somehow form a new world” (Weber [1817] 1965, 63). They strove for the kind of audience’s emotional participation that inspired Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Wagner Between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche Schopenhauer A year after the publication of the text of Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1853, Richard Wagner read Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (first ed. 1818) no fewer than four times (Reinhardt 1992, 287). In this work, Schopenhauer (1788–1860) had argued that our thinking and acting are governed by both rational and, even more so, irrational forces. He believed that a “will” is active in all inclinations, from the gravitational attraction between rocks, to the growing of plants, to the intentions behind all animal and human life. As this “will” permeates the entire world, it also activates music. Schopenhauer felt legitimized to develop a “metaphysics of music” because he saw music and nature as “two different expressions of the same thing.” He held instrumental music especially above the other arts as “the expression of the world” and as a “universal language to the highest degree” (Schopenhauer 1988, 2:309; 2010, 289). He also claimed that “the composer reveals the innermost essence of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language that his reason does not understand” (Schopenhauer 1988, 2:307; 2010, 288). In music the “will” of the sounds derives, according to Schopenhauer, from the arithmetical organization of the harmonic system. The analogy between simple number proportions, lengths of strings, and consonant intervals, confirmed by the frequencies of string vibrations, allowed him to sketch a music theory that included his views on harmonic and melodic construction. Schopenhauer’s return to a numerical theory of music, borrowed from the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition and more recently from Rameau, was extraordinarily antiquated for a nineteenth-century writer. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music thus deprived him of much of the usual aesthetic vocabulary used by that time to investigate music. As a consequence, his views on compositional techniques remained impoverished, as reflected in his rejection of Haydn and Beethoven, favouring only Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and exclaiming, in agreement with Hegel, Give me Rossini’s music, which speaks without saying a word!—In the compositions of today there is more emphasis on the harmony than the melody; I however take the opposite view and regard melody as the core of music, to which harmony relates as does sauce to a roast.  (Schopenhauer 1988, 6:459; 2015, 388–389)

Opera   613 The cabaletta “Di tanti palpiti” from Rossini’s Tancredi (1813) was Schopenhauer’s alltime favourite, because the protagonist’s melody, performed by a contralto, accorded with his concept of the “will,” encapsulated as “the ornamented and overpowering melody, the elevation of the ‘purely’ musical over dramatic function” (Braunschweig 2013, 290). By contrast, he rejected grand opera, which he deemed to be “not a product of the pure artistic sense, but rather of the somewhat barbaric concept of heightening aesthetic pleasure by piling on different means, simultaneity of completely different impressions and intensification of effect through an increase in the operative masses and forces” (Schopenhauer 1988, 6:459–660; 2015, 389). Schopenhauer was important for Wagner in three ways. First, as Carl Dahlhaus has noted, Wagner appropriated Schopenhauer’s “tone and claim” in talking about music in a way that “would have appeared arrogant to his contemporaries” (Dahlhaus 1988, 476). More specifically, the analogy between the will as a natural force and musical progressions endowed music with a greater significance than that of mere entertainment. It confirmed what was, according to Nietzsche (1968, 633), one of Wagner’s favourite phrases: “music means more, infinitely more.” Second, Wagner had already dramatized love as an irrational and blind force in his Der fliegende Holländer (1843) and Lohengrin (1850). In this, he had anticipated Schopenhauer’s conception of the will as a force both rational and irrational. Third, in later writing Schopenhauer also developed a “metaphysics of sex” that would surely have stirred the future composer of Tristan und Isolde. Here, Schopenhauer suggests that [the] longing and this pain of love cannot draw their material from the needs of an ephemeral individual. On the contrary, they are the sighs of the spirit of the species, which sees here, to be won or lost, an irreplaceable means to its ends, and therefore groans deeply.  (Schopenhauer 1988, 3:632; 1966, 2:551)

In his unpublished writings, hence unavailable to Wagner, Schopenhauer sharpened the emphasis on the fulfilment of yearning: If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world . . . achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.  (Schopenhauer 1970, 3:240; quoted in Magee 2000, 170)

Wagner Rousseau and Diderot had invoked primeval societies as abstract models of passionate speech, which they hoped would be employed by future opera composers. Wagner took equally important inspiration from an idealized concept of Greek tragedy which served him as a model for a synthesis of the arts, performed in public and free from commercial involvement. His artwork of the future was meant to create a new social bond among its participants.

614   Michael Fend Revisiting Rousseau’s idea of a “festival” in early societies, which had been eagerly embraced in France after 1789, Wagner conceived his own future festival as a “total work of art”—a Gesamtkunstwerk—to be performed in a specially constructed building. He trusted opera to engender social healing. In Oper und Drama (1850/1851), he sketched a vision for a spoken drama that would no longer be perceived by an audience as in any way artificial or arbitrary. Such a drama had to be emotionally truthful, but this in turn required an “emotionalization of the intellect” (Wagner 1913, 4:78; translation mine). If the emotions became man’s central agency, Wagner assumed, greater certainty of knowledge would be achieved and any doubt harboured by the audience’s intellect would be curtailed. Insisting on the privilege of “emotional understanding,” Wagner admitted supernatural protagonists and miraculous events in his theatre, provided that they resembled the natural world sufficiently, so that a “spontaneous emotion accepts it [the supernatural] without resistance” (4:82; translation mine). The emotional processes in the audience were therefore of equal, if not greater, concern to him than those in the drama. The medium that intensified the motivation of the protagonists to act in their specific ways was, of course, music. Wagner compared the synthesis of verbal and musical language in the creation of opera with an overpowering sexual act. Removed from happy endings, compromises, or misfortunes of contemporary or historic plots set by some fellow composers, Wagner’s music dramas put a Romantic counter-world of medieval myths and fairy tales on stage with protagonists ruled by affects to the extent that some can hardly count as characters. In these pre-rational structures, protagonists act in a trance-like fashion. Ostensibly created to cut through the epic diversity of ordinary life, these staged miracles were intended to enable protagonists to reveal their natural selves. The programme for a Gesamtkunstwerk that would serve as a national myth formed two pillars of Wagner’s project. Given the ambiguity of musical semantics, Wagner might have remained more cautious about the music-centredness of his Gesamtkunstwerk, had it not been for his readings of Schopenhauer. Unlike other medieval legends that enshrined the value of feudal and matrimonial loyalty, Tristan und Isolde (1865) insisted on the superior value of the protagonists’ private, erotic bondage, despite their irreconcilable social statuses. Wagner captured the emotional trajectory of the Prelude in an explanatory commentary that reads like an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sex: Fired by its draught, their love leaps suddenly to vivid flame, and each avows to each that they belong to none save one another. Henceforth no end to the yearning, longing, bliss and misery of love: world, power, fame, splendour, honour, knighthood, loyalty, and friendship, all scattered like baseless dream; one thing alone left living: desire, desire, unquenchable, longing forever rebearing itself,—a fevered craving; one sole redemption—death.  (Wagner 2008, 93–94; 1995, 387)

To mirror the anxious process of the protagonists’ passion, Wagner freely employed chromatic chord alterations and mediant relationships similar to those found in Liszt.

Opera   615 But nobody had yet used such syntactic possibilities to create on a similar scale the swelling and subsiding of sound power that unfolds out of one motive into a seemingly “endless melody” (Wagner 1913, 7:130). The compositional process of the Prelude is made irregular by the persistent alterations of its 6/8 metre, whose conventional accents on the first and, to a lesser extent, the fourth beat of the bar are here clouded by fermatas, syncopations, suspensions, and polyrhythms to produce a jerking progression. It is as if the musical diction instrumentalizes an irregular heartbeat, following some psychophysical insight that needs no programme to reveal the erotic genre. (For more on the effects of Wagner’s music on a physical and physiological level see Dreyfus 2010 and Trippett 2013, 356–369.) The “kinetic energy” (Kurth 1920, 45; see also Wagner 1985, 187) inherent in Wagner’s sequential segments was the musical anticipation of Tristan’s and Isolde’s drama. But such a focus neglects the couple’s conflict with King Marke, without which there would have been no tragedy, and largely skims over their time of erotic fulfilment, as if the action springs from the end of Act 1 to the wounded Tristan’s long waiting for Isolde in Act 3. (For an analysis of Marke’s “noble anger and bafflement,” see Whittall  2015). Wagner’s emphasis on “desire” reflects the problem that the essence of the opera, erotic fulfilment, is unrepresentable on the opera stage. Gottfried von Strassburg, author of the early thirteenth-century courtly romance Tristan, had solved the problem of how to represent such erotic fulfilment through the evocation of a locus amoenus with an ornate bed allegorized as an altar, which gave the erotic sphere an almost transcendent beauty (Strassburg 1980–6, 2:16679–17274). In Wagner’s second act, bliss is prolonged by Tristan and Isolde talking about day and night, and life and death, which turns into a deathpact. The music is both the medium of fulfilment for what is left in silence and a relentless expression of desire that defers ultimate fulfilment until death, as is foreseen in Act 3. Tristan and Isolde’s resistance in the name of absolute love was a calculated refusal of nineteenth-century morality. For Roger Scruton, however, the plot paradigmatically enacts the human ability that “in desire and my submission to it . . . I am most conscious of my personal existence as a free self with rights, demands, and a purely human destiny.” The way Tristan and Isolde realize their mutual sacrifice presents the “origin of those feelings that are summarized . . . in concepts of the sacred and the consecrated” because they are not “merely empirical transactions” (Scruton 2004, 151). One cannot talk about self-determination and self-realization in Wagner’s operas without considering the composer’s own activities in realizing the performance of his work. During the period of his concert performances in Paris in 1860, which included the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, Wagner wrote letters to the opera houses in Vienna and Hannover, offering the premiere of the entire opera against immediate payment of 5,000 francs (“Letter to Albert Niemann” [1860], in Wagner 2008, 90). Seeing Wagner as the marketing agent for his own work may enable the reader to measure the emotional distance he had come since writing a well-known letter to Liszt in 1854, in which he had imagined composing Tristan as a substitute for a life unfulfilled and covering himself in a black flag to die (“Letter to Franz Liszt” [1854], in Wagner 2008, 20).

616   Michael Fend

Nietzsche In his Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to complement philosophically what he saw as Wagner’s artistic programme of creating social homogeneity through opera, envisaging particularly intense emotional processes among the audience in opera performances. Strikingly similar in tone and ambition to Rousseau, Nietzsche started with a relentless critique of opera and general culture in his own country, which he perceived as degenerate. It would become his bugbear for some time that theatre audiences would take performances either as artificial entertainment or, following a tradition since Aristotle’s Poetics, as lessons in morality. But the shortcomings of the theatre, he insisted, were only symbolic of shortcomings in general education, law, and morality: Let us think of a culture that has no fixed and sacred primordial site but is doomed to exhaust all possibilities and to nourish itself wretchedly on all other cultures— there we have the present age. . . . The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb. (Nietzsche 1980, 1:145–146; 1968, 135–136)

In a period of growing global connectivity, Nietzsche argued for an educational system tied to an absolute tradition presented in ancient Greek art and theatre. To harness indigenous powers he made a number of attempts at evoking an image of the performances of Greek mythical plays, which would act out a Dionysian “feast of reconciliation between nature and man” (Nietzsche 1980, 1:559). In ever more enthusiastic phrases he gives us impressions of the orgiastic state reached by the individual at those festivals (1980, 1:141; 1968, 131). Nietzsche’s experience of a performance of Tristan and Isolde stands behind his glorification of a state of intoxication, which the philologist of ancient languages in him identifies with the ancient orgiastic cult of Dionysius. Nietzsche imagines audiences of Wagner’s operas behaving in similar fashion to participants in that cult. When Nietzsche was writing Die Geburt der Tragödie, the score of The Ring was still unfinished. Nevertheless, with the political potential inherent in Siegfried’s heroic deeds before his inner eye, he wrote: “Let no one believe that the German spirit has lost its mythical home for ever, if it can still understand so clearly the voices of the birds which tell of its homeland” (Nietzsche 1980, 1:154; 1968, 142). Nietzsche interpreted The Ring as a call to heroic political action. Like Wagner, he recalibrated the chorus of Greek tragedy, which displayed for Nietzsche a Dionysian enthusiasm of much greater power. For the performance of Wagner’s Ring, Nietzsche imagined the opera audience in the role of that chorus. He describes it as “a dramatic phenomenon in its own right” that in watching Wagner’s opera “the audience would feel itself transported and now to act as if it had taken on another body and another character” (1980, 1:61; translation mine).

Opera   617 For the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 Nietzsche published a piece of adulatory propaganda, in which he translated his exalted imagery of an ancient, all-transforming cult ritual to the political present of a newly unified Germany. His political-artistic manifesto implored the audience to take the festival as an opportunity for the rebirth of Germany, or, in Nietzsche’s phrasing, “to found a state on music” (Nietzsche 1980, 1:458; 1995, 284). Scholarly attempts at schematizing this text, however, alongside those scrutinizing its unpublished variants, reveal Nietzsche’s growing reservations. The “Bayreuthevent” made him “worried” because he detected in Wagner “reactionary elements,” such as “medieval-Christianity, princely patronage, a Buddhistic streak, and [an inclination to the] miraculous” (1980, 7:760; 8:190, 236; translations mine). He noticed the internal contradiction between Wagner’s attempting a “renewal of the arts starting in the theatre,” and the audience’s potential liberation from social constrictions resulting merely in the “tyranny” of Wagner (7:763–764; translations mine). The social and working conditions in contemporary society appeared at odds with the demands Wagner placed on the arts and his audiences. Nietzsche blamed Wagner also for submitting to an “imperial Germanness” (Nietzsche 1980, 6:289; 1968, 704) and, scathingly doubting even his musical gifts, described him as “an incomparable histrionic, the greatest mime, the most surprising genius of the theatre that the Germans ever produced” (1980, 6:30; 1968, 628). Having succumbed originally to Wagner’s musical rhetoric, Nietzsche began as early as 1874 to detect a distance between Wagner’s intentions and their effects; Nietzsche now saw only a charade in Wagner’s work, culminating in the “operetta” of Parsifal. Although he continued to acknowledge that in Wagner’s operas “modernity spoke its most intimate language, concealing neither its good nor its bad sides,” he now infinitely preferred Bizet’s Carmen which showed love to be “the most egoistic feeling” (1980, 6:6, 12, 16; translations mine).

Wagner after Nietzsche Wagner appears to fascinate aesthetically not only the nearly 23,000 members of 139 Wagner Societies around the globe but also musicologists and philosophers to the extent that they still often engage in cultural issues as conceived in Wagner’s own terms. In some recent literature, for example, Wagner’s operas are still credited with addressing “fundamental questions in modernity” (Bowie 2007, 241), posing “the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence” (Deathridge 2008, 100), and being “an ontological statement about the last things, about the meaning of life” (Žižek and Dolar 2002, 115). Gary Tomlinson (2013, 195) invites audiences of Wagner operas to “describe our participation as a process in which we make the music at every moment, fully as much as the singers and players of the orchestra”—a level of intensity reminiscent of Baudelaire’s ([1860] 1976) admiration of Wagner. Meanwhile, Alain Badiou sees Parsifal as provoking the “question as to whether modern ceremony [without transcendence] is possible,” but identifies elements of its realization no further than in the Wagnérisme of Mallarmé (Badiou 2010, 147). Roger Scruton (2016) has employed the composer as a transmission

618   Michael Fend belt in order to establish himself as a cultural critic in the spirit of the 1920s. In contemporary discussions of Wagner still lurks a veneration of the Romantic, genial personality and of his charismatic exercise of power, but the musical immediacy of Wagner’s operas should not obfuscate their nineteenth-century ideologies.

Opera and Philosophy in Contemporary Scholarship Bringing the past into the present in this way, I shall focus on writing related to opera by analytic philosophers, before concluding by considering two musicologists’ ideas on opera and metaphysics.

Music and emotion If they have discussed music at all, anglophone analytical philosophers of the past eighty years have concentrated mostly on instrumental music, puzzled by its intense emotional power. How, they have wondered, can music express emotions, such as sadness and happiness, if “only sentient creatures can express emotions” and “musical works”—understood as configurations of wordless sounds—“are not sentient” (Davies 2003, 173)? This question, however, is misguided, for four reasons. First, it disregards the at least partly vocal conception of a very large part of music even where its genre designations may have indicated the opposite. Second, a sentient composer and performer were indispensable agents of any musical effect until the invention of electronic music in the 1950s. Although music is a non-representational art in contrast, say, to painting or sculpture, it does not reach us as pure matter. Rather, a pig skin beaten by a stick or a larynx expelling air are only the “material cause,” to use an Aristotelian turn of phrase, of a musical experience (see Aristotle 1961, 28). Third, the puzzlement of this question too often overlooks the emotional effects of other, equally non-sentient art forms such as painting on canvas. Finally, recent philosophical concepts of “autonomous” and “pure” instrumental music are undoubtedly descended from the nineteenth-century idea of “absolute music,” yet historical consciousness of this genealogy is rarely displayed (see Budd 1985, 175; Dahlhaus 1989; Taruskin 2006; Trivedi 2017, 2; Young 2014, 74). That said, philosophical approaches to music and the emotions can nonetheless offer insight into the role of emotion in opera. Such approaches offer a range of theories as to how music arouses emotion in its listeners, theories that might easily be extended to the case of opera. The language used to describe music’s effects, for example, can be “metaphorical” (Scruton 1997, esp. chs. 2, 6, and 8) and music’s expressiveness can be “contagious” or “infectious” on the listener’s emotions (Davies 2011). These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Philosophers have also offered insight into the varied relationships

Opera   619 between composers and listeners. Even if composers might appear to act out their emotions through their compositions, philosophers have noted that this is not always the case, and composers require imagination and technique in equal measure in order to communicate with the public. In Stephen Davies’s words, composers are “like the person who expresses his or her feelings, not by showing them directly, but by making a mask that wears an appropriate expression” (Davies 2003, 178). Again, such insights extend readily to opera. Philosophers of music, furthermore, have been concerned not only with the ways in which music might arouse emotion, but also with the more general puzzle of music’s expressiveness. Especially promising for opera in this regard are those theories that relate to music’s fictional nature. Davies (2003, 179) introduces such theories as follows: “In the case of works generating fictional worlds, such as novels or films, we engage imaginatively with characters inhabiting those worlds. Maybe music’s expressiveness connects to fictional or make-believe experiences of emotion.” Here, there is a natural fit between the experiences of novels or films with which Davies contrasts musical listening, and the fully musical-fictional world of opera.

Opera and narrative Of recent philosophers, in the analytic vein at least, perhaps no one has written more about opera than Peter Kivy. Viewing opera as “the drama not of actions and ideas, but the drama of emotions” (Kivy 2012, 107), he insists on a “problem” presented by opera because of a “disanalogy . . . between the repetitiousness of music as opposed to the ongoing, directional character of fictional narrative” (Kivy 2002, 165). (For an extended critique of Kivy’s position, see Young 2013, and for related discussion, see Levinson 1996.) Yet Kivy does not explain why musical repetition should be in conflict with the experience of aesthetic unity, or why it should hinder emotional insight. On equally narrow formalist grounds, he has maintained that a dramatic text must lose its “psychological depth and complexity” when adapted to music, without analysing the complexity offered by other media (Kivy  1988, 271). A worry about the loss of “content” in the encounter with opera is also at the heart of Kivy’s contention that “nowhere are we more perceptually aware of medium, and less of content, than in opera and music drama” (Kivy 2007, 59). Here, however, Kivy does not consider the possibility that the singing embodiment of a role could make a scene’s content transparent. Contra Kivy, I would suggest that, in comparison with straightforward spoken theatre, the operatic medium enhances, rather than detracts from, the communication of narrative. More precisely, the singers, who enact a dramatic text with the help of gestures, the sensuality of their voices, and the theatrical machinery, can provide composer, performers, and audiences with a road map to intuit and perhaps to comprehend the driving forces that lie behind the actions of the protagonists. In Michel Poizat’s definition, opera is the “apparatus” that enables “the radical autonomization of the voice, its veritable transformation into a detached object that lays claim to listener’s entire receptivity” (Poizat 1992, 33).

620   Michael Fend The musical setting enhances the suspension of dramatic time, which simultaneously intensifies the audience’s emotional time by creating expectations. This unique potential to manipulate dramatic time rhetorically, to create a space in which texts are recited and actions unfold, exacerbates opera’s artificiality but also allows protagonists to reveal their thoughts and feelings with unprecedented expressiveness. As Bernard Williams (2006, 10) has put it, “while time passes in the theatre, a sequence is unfolded by the orchestra and singers which does not represent a sequence at all, or at least not a sequence of events, but some other dimension of the action, often a state of mind, a mood or a motivation.” While audiences of spoken dramas have to hang on every word or risk losing the plot, and while actors can vary the speed of their delivery to keep the public on tenterhooks, libretti use fewer words and allow for repetition in the musical setting to facilitate comprehension and intensify affective communication. The totality of theatrical illusion intensifies opera’s emotional effect while narrowing the viewer’s space for independent thought although viewers can, of course, reconsider the ethics and actions of the protagonists afterwards.

Opera and ontology Another topic that has frequently concerned analytic philosophers of music has been musical ontology, the study of, in Andrew Kania’s (2017) words, “the kinds of musical things there are and the relations that hold between them.” At first sight, this discussion is not of much help in opera because it has likewise been focused on instrumental music. Further, the “metaphysical picture” on offer is sometimes “unsatisfyingly austere” (Dodd 2007, 106). Nelson Goodman’s (1976, 186) thesis that the “complete compliance with the score is the only requirement for a genuine instance of a work,” for example, has led his critics to emphasize the indeterminate features of any musical performance. Such indeterminacies are only multiplied in the performance of opera. There are, however, ontological issues related to the status of live performances versus recordings, issues that have attracted the attention of analytic philosophers and that have a ready application to opera, since audiences go to the opera not least because of the thrill of live performance. Kania’s (2006, 2011) discussion of the uncertainty of what we hear in jazz or rock music, for example, relates also to opera: today’s studio recordings enable multiple takes, splicing, and other forms of technical enhancement to show performers in their best light, but such virtual performances create a legacy that performers may find hard to sustain in subsequent live performances. These recordings, as well as the contributing performers, enjoy separate copyrights and thus reveal the new complexity of a musical work’s “instances.”

Better to forget about operatic metaphysics Gary Tomlinson has made the most ambitious attempt yet to link audiences’ “hearing of the operatic voice”—he defines the “operatic voices” as “[a] medium putting its listeners in touch with invisible, supersensory realms”—with the development of “subjectivity”

Opera   621 in the last four hundred years (Tomlinson 1999, ix). Put the other way round, he extensively discusses prominent philosophical conceptions of the “human subject” and relates them to the development of opera. Tomlinson’s history is, in Mary-Ann Smart’s words, “a tale of decline” (Smart 1999, 104). At the centre of his story stands a Kantian or post-Kantian subjectivity that shows its validity in opera as an unabated fascination for the unknowable, both in- and outside of itself. This subjectivity is illustrated most vividly by reference to scenes of madness in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Verdi’s Macbeth (1847/1865), which serve to illustrate the fascination of composers and audiences with the theatrical representation of the borders of reason. Referring to Adorno’s discussion of Wagner, Tomlinson (1999, 127–142) argues that twentieth-century audiences have never accepted the decline of metaphysics in opera precisely because of the late-capitalist commodification of culture. Tomlinson’s focus on “metaphysical song” and the “noumenal operatic voice,” however, leads him to omit completely the role of comic opera in the formation of “subjectivity.” Further, as we saw in the sections on “The Rise and Fall of Operatic Heroes and Heroines” and “Rousseau and Diderot on the Expression of Emotions,” the legitimacy and strengthening of subjectivity was achieved against supersensible powers that often camouflaged forms of spiritual, economic, and political exploitation (see also Blumenberg 1983). Nor does Tomlinson mention influential critiques of metaphysics either in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, or in the early nineteenth century with Hegel and with the rise of materialism and positivism around 1850. While Tomlinson (1999, 156) nostalgically traces his rising doubt as to “whether the [operatic] voice can sustain metaphysics anymore at all” from Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600) to Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954), Carolyn Abbate takes the “metaphysical flight” in some operas as the genre’s transhistorical property. She focuses on these “magical moments” (Abbate 2001, vii) to show their inherent connection with the physical labour of singers, musicians, and stage machinists involved in opera production. Influenced by Vladimir Jankélévitch’s exploration between the 1930s and 1960s of the “inexpressible” or “unrepresentable” in Chopin, Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, Abbate applies Jankélévitch’s terminology to the automatic and funereal quality of the march in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791) that accompanies the flute-playing Tamino’s and Pamina’s fearless walk through fire and water in the second act finale (Mozart, n.d. [1953], 341–342). This is a moment where “music transcends narrative, or image, or philosophy, yet remains wholly tied to the material means of its production” (Abbate 2001, 103). Abbate finds similar moments in Act 5 of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), when Mélisande’s voice “approaches . . . the unrealizable sound of a song that can never exist, sung by a creature no one can identify or see with human eyes” (179). So too does she find such moments in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, where the fearful Princess’s address to the tempestuous child is accompanied by an arpeggio that sounds unreal because it is played by bass clarinet and bassoon rather than the expected harp (234–239). Generalizing her examples, which also include Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845/1867) and Parsifal (1882), Abbate sees “an unfolded musical work, with all its integration and structuring of absence,” as “the trace of an ‘infinite longing’

622   Michael Fend that is constitutive of [modern] subjectivity” (Abbate  2001, 243; partly quoting Žižek 1997, 205). If opera’s links with philosophy have become uncertain since the twentieth century, its relevance for metaphysical ideas ought to be even more tenuous by now, given an increased attention to the very physicality of its performance. In Tomlinson’s and Abbate’s insistence on opera’s metaphysical dimension their affinity with a German Romantic conception of music is plain. Abbate’s affinity is not cancelled out by her references to the Franco-centred musical writings of Jankélévitch, whose own intellectual journey began with the study of Schelling, Novalis, and the music of Schumann (see, for example, Jankélévitch  1933). During this study, Jankélévitch noticed “innumerable nuances of negation” and a “pathos of shadow,” which he also called “the being of notbeing or the positive of the negative” (Jankélévitch 1957, 20–21). The limits of perceptibility became a lifelong interest for Jankélévitch, especially as exemplified in the music of Chopin, Fauré, Debussy, and Satie, although he did not grant metaphysical status to any musical message (see Jankélévitch 1949, 132; 1988, 2–5). Indeed, Jankélévitch wrote that music “is only metaphysical by virtue of a metaphor and, in some sense, spiritually. Music, this voice from another order, does not come from another world, and even less from the otherworldly” (Jankélévitch 2003, 151). I want to close this chapter by suggesting that some philosophically minded studies might want to follow Jankélévitch by listening to operatic music that explores the limits of perceptibility, given the critical appetite for investigating nuances in recent operas and in new explorations of earlier repertoires. The crucial question rests on the outcome of those studies. Will such studies confirm Hegel’s philosophical critique of music in general that it merely “captures the abstract listening to one-self ” (Hegel 1970, 152), or will it offer a “world-disclosive dimension” (Bowie 2003, 159)? This dimension is foreclosed if musicologists endow some canonic operas with metaphysical thoughts, as they function intellectually to enshrine these works with absolute values. It should instead be accepted not only that since the middle of the nineteenth century “we have no alternative to post-metaphysical thinking” (Habermas 1988, 36), but also that “every critique of metaphysics is metaphysics itself ” (Früchtl 2007, 3). In this makeshift world audiences’ attitudes towards musical experience are at stake beyond clapping or booing and it is up to them to choose whether to embrace a nostalgic solipsism or rather to transform opera’s communicative potential into culturally sustainable labour.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Roger Parker, Michel Noiray, David Charlton, Natasha Loges, Emanuele Senici, and Felicity Riddy for critical comments and bibliographic references, and the peer-reviewers and the editors for their stimulating critique. 2. This is not to suggest that ethics, aesthetics, and subjectivity have been kept completely separate in previous scholarship. For a compelling example that brings together all three of these through an examination of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, see Nielsen, “Voice,” in Cobussen and Nielsen 2012, 117–153.

Opera   623 3. The philosophical discussion of operatic protagonists as “subjects” is well established, and will be engaged further later in this chapter. “Subject” as a person goes back in English to the fourteenth century, while the earliest print appearance of the term “subjectivity” is in 1803. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2012), s.v. “subject,” “subjectivity.” 4. Contract between Anna Renzi and Geronimo Lappoli of 17 December 1643, Archivio di Stato Venezia, Archivio Notarile, atti b658, fos. 163v–164v, exhibited at OPERA: Passion, Power and Politics. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2017–18; see also Strozzi 1644; Rosand 1991, 229–236; Glixon and Glixon 2006, 326–336.

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2001. In Search of Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Aristotle. 1961. Physics. Translated by Richard Hope. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Arnaud, François. 1984. “Le Souper des enthousiastes.” In Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, edited by François Lesure, 1:62–92. Geneva: Minkoff Reprint. Badiou, Alain. 2010. Five Lessons on Wagner. Translated by Susan Spitzer. London: Verso. Baudelaire, Charles. [1860] 1976. “Letter to Wagner.” 17 February 1860. In Œuvres complètes, edited by Claude Pichois, 2:1452–1453. Paris: Gallimard. Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de. 1988. Tarare. In Œuvres, edited by Pierre Larthomas, 493–596. Paris: Gallimard. Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braunschweig, Yael. 2013. “Schopenhauer and Rossinian Universality: On the Italianate in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Music.” In The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism, edited by Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton, 283–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Budd, Malcolm. 1985. Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. London: Routledge. Cook, Elisabeth. 2001. “Querelle des Bouffons.” Grove Music Online. https://doi-org.ezp.lib. cam.ac.uk/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.50010. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1988. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The Idea of Absolute Music. Translated by Roger Lustig. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2003. “Philosophical Perspectives on Music’s Expressiveness.” In Themes in the Philosophy of Music, 169–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2011. “Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion.” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 133–148. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deathridge, John. 2008. Wagner Beyond Good and Evil. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Diderot, Denis. 1965. Œuvres esthétiques, edited by Paul Vernière. Paris: Garnier. Diderot, Denis. 1977. Le Neveu de Rameau. Edited by Jean Fabre. Geneva: Droz. Diderot, Denis. 2014. Rameau’s Nephew. Edited by Marian Hobson. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.

624   Michael Fend Didier, Béatrice. 1985. La Musique des Lumières. Paris: PUF. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dreyfus, Laurence. 2010. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feldman, Martha. 2011. Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myth in Eighteenth-Century Italy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994. “Entretien avec Duccio Trombadori.” In Dits et écrits: 1954–88, edited by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, 4:41–95. Paris: Gallimard. Früchtl, Josef. 2007. “Ästhetik und Metaphysik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten.” In Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, edited by Josef Früchtl and Maria MoogGrünewald, 3–16. Sonderheft 8. Hamburg: Meiner. Früchtl, Josef. 2009. The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity and Film. Translated by Sarah Kirby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Glixon, Beth L., and Jonathan E. Glixon. 2006. Inventing the Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gluck, C. W. [1773] 1995. “Letter to the Editor of the Mercure de France.” In Patricia Howard, Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents, 106–107. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Habermas, Jürgen. 1988. Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. 1970. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. Vol. 15 of Theorie Werkausgabe, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Henrich, Dieter. 1999. Bewusstes Leben: Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Metaphysik. Stuttgart: Reclam. Henrich, Dieter. 2016. Denken und Selbstsein: Vorlesungen über Subjektivität. Berlin: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1989. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, translated by Martyn Clarke, edited by David Charlton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1933. L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. Paris: Alcan. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1949. Debussy et le mystère. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1957. Le Nocturne: Fauré, Chopin et la nuit, Satie et le matin. Paris: Albin Michel. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1988. Gabriel Fauré et l’inexprimable. 2nd ed. Paris: Presses pocket. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kammler, Clemens, Rolf Parr, Ulrich Johannes Schneider, and Elke Reinhardt-Becker, eds. 2008. Foucault-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Kania, Andrew. 2006. “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 4 (Fall): 401–414. Kania, Andrew. 2011. “All Play and No Work: An Ontology of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69, no. 4 (Fall): 391–403. Kania, Andrew. 2017. “The Philosophy of Music: Musical Ontology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 ed.), edited by Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2017/entries/music/

Opera   625 Kant, Immanuel. 1912. Abhandlungen nach 1781, edited by Heinrich Maier, Max FrischeisenKöhler, and Paul Menzer. Vol. 8 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (subsequently German, then Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences. Berlin: Georg Reimer (subsequently Walter de Gruyter). Kant, Immanuel. 1996. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784).” In What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 58–64. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kivy, Peter. 1988. Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and Text. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kivy, Peter. 2007. “Speech, Song, and the Transparency of Medium: On Operatic Metaphysics.” In Music, Language and Cognition: And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music, 51–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2012. “Operatic Authenticity.” In Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music, 89–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kurth, Ernst. 1920. Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan.” Bern: Paul Haupt. Leopardi, Giacomo. 1998. Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani. Edited by Mario Andrea Rigoni. Milan: Biblioteca universale Rizzoli. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. “Song and Music Drama.” In The Pleasures of Aesthetics, 42–59. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Magee, Bryan. 2000. Wagner and Philosophy. London: Penguin. Marmontel, Jean François. 1984. “Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France.” In Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes, edited by François Lesure, 1:153–190. Geneva: Minkoff Reprint. Mazzini, Giuseppe. 2004. Giuseppe Mazzini’s Philosophy of Music (1836): Envisioning a Social Opera. Translated by Emily Ashurst Venturi (1867). Edited and annotated by Franco Sciannameo. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press. Metastasio, Pietro. [1782] 1968. “Da L’estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotile e considerazioni su la medesima.” In Opere, edited by Mario Fubini, 553–584, Vol. 41 of La Letteratura italiana: Storia e testi. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. n.d. [1953]. Die Zauberflöte. Edited by Hermann Abert. London: Ernst Eulenberg. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Massimo Montinari. 15 vols. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1995. Unfashionable Observations. Translated by Richard T. Gray. Vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Nietzsche, edited by Ernst Behler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Poizat, Michel. 1992. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinhardt, Harmut. 1992. “Wagner und Schopenhauer.” In Wagner Handbook, edited by Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, translated and edited by John Deathridge, 287–296. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

626   Michael Fend Rosand, Ellen. 1991. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1995. Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre. Vol. 5 of Œuvres complètes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings related to Music, translated and edited by John T. Scott. Vol. 7 of Collected Writings, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1966. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1970. Der handschriftliche Nachlass. Edited by Arthur Hübscher. 5 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Kramer. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1988. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Arthur Hübscher. 7 vols. Mannheim. F. A. Brockhaus. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation: Volume 1. Edited and translated by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, edited by Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2015. Parerga and Paralipomena: Volume 2. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, edited by Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scruton, Roger. 2004. Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2016. The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung.” London: Allen Lane. Smart, Mary Ann. 1999. “Review: Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera by Gary Tomlinson.” Nineteenth-Century Music 23, no. 1 (Summer): 103–109. Strassburg, Gottfried von. 1980–6. Tristan. Edited by Rüdiger Krohn. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Strozzi, Giulio. 1644. Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana. Venice. Taruskin, Richard. 2006. “Is There a Baby in the Bathwater?” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 63 (3–4): 163–185, 309–327. Tomlinson, Gary. 1999. Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tomlinson, Gary. 2013. “Parahuman Wagnerism.” Opera Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (Summer– Autumn): 186–202. Trippett, David. 2013. Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trivedi, Saam. 2017. Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study. Albany: SUNY Press. Wagner, Richard. 1913. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in zehn Bänden. Edited by Wolfgang Golther. Berlin: Deutsches Verlaghaus Bong. Wagner, Richard. 1985. Prelude and Transfiguration from “Tristan and Isolde.” Edited by Robert Bailey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Wagner, Richard. 1995. “Prelude to Tristan und Isolde.” In Vol. 8 of Collected Prose Works, translated by William Ashton Ellis, 386–387. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Opera   627 Wagner, Richard. 2008. “Erläuterung zum ‘Vorspiel’.” Dokumente und Texte zu “Tristan und Isolde.” Sämtliche Werke, edited by Gabriele  E.  Meyer and Egon Voss, 27:93–94. Mainz: Schott. Weber, Carl Maria von. [1817] 1965. “On the Opera Undine.” In Source Readings in Music History: The Romantic Era, selected and annotated by Oliver Strunk, 62–67. New York: Norton. Whittall, Arnold. 2015. “Tristan, Isolde, Marke: Romance and Responsibility.” The Wagner Style: Close Readings and Critical Perspectives, 165–181. London: Plumbago Books. Williams, Bernard. 2006. On Opera. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Young, James O. 2013. “Kivy and the ‘Problem of Opera.” ’ In “Opera and Philosophy,” edited by Tomás McAuley and Nanette Nielsen, special issue, The Opera Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (Summer–Autumn): 282–301. Young, James O. 2014. Critique of Pure Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. 2002. Opera’s Second Death. London: Routledge.

pa rt V

K E Y C ONC E P T S

chapter 31

A bsolu te M usic Sarah Collins

The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to “do nothing”—thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.  (Žižek 2004, 72)

Introduction “Absolute music” names an idea, an aesthetic concept, a regulative construct, a repertoire, and an aspiration. The term engages a series of propositions about music’s relationship to things that might be considered—for certain ontological (and sometimes political) reasons—to be external to it, or not a part of its essential nature. These extramusical things have included ideas or concepts, words, drama, narrative, purpose, function, emotion, society, politics, and history. The series of propositions about music’s relationship with these things tend to be both philosophical and normative, moving from claims that, for example, music is a self-referential system that is incapable of communicating specific ideas, making representations or expressing emotions, towards claims that music ought or ought not to communicate, represent, or express in this way.1 Radiating out from these propositions are others regarding the practice of analysing and evaluating music, understanding its historical development, and mapping its social function, all of which take on a particular shape if music is viewed as a self-­referential system, beholden to no purpose but its own and accountable only to aesthetic ­judgement—that is, judgement based only on what “something with an independent claim on reality offers in experience” (John 2012, 193). In this broader context, the “is” and the “ought” of the initial claims tend to become blurred, resulting in practices that not only analyse their object, but also rationalize and legitimate the object described. Thus a claim about music having an essential nature that is purely musical, and its attendant normative assertions, comes to limit the scope of what counts as music and what is studied as such, which in turn demarcates the boundaries of a discipline.

632   Sarah Collins The idea underpinning absolute music still holds some degree of currency today in the sense that the philosophical questions about the limits of musical expression remain a live issue (especially from the perspective of analytical philosophy), and related categories such as the “sublime” and “late style” remain recurrent topics of interest. Still, there is a sense in which no one today would use the term “absolute music” seriously to try to denote a certain “objective” property of a work without a specific methodological reason to do so (see, for example, Hoeckner 2002). The term is far too laden with ideological implications to be of any analytical use, and in any case it is hopelessly ambiguous: indeed, it is uncertain whether even Eduard Hanslick—the figure perhaps most popularly associated with the idea historically— ever held the view that music expresses nothing but itself, or that purely instrumental music was unequivocally superior to other types of music, rather than simply calling for music aesthetics to focus on the music rather than the sentiment it evokes (Bonds 2014, 1997; Pederson 2009; Grimes, Donovan, and Marx 2013; Landerer and Zangwill 2017, 2016). “Absolute music” also engages a range of broader claims about aesthetic autonomy or the possibility of aesthetic forms of experience more generally, and these questions certainly continue to be hotly debated in contemporary disciplinary discourse. These matters also tend to invite a certain blurring between epistemological claims about aesthetic experience and judgement on the one hand, and claims pertaining to the ontological status of art, on the other. Put more simply, ideas about aesthetics often slide into ideas about what should count as art. These types of claim both preceded and succeeded the serious use of the term absolute music in music criticism, and they have been far more politically-oriented, contested, and durable than the narrower subcategory that the term encompasses. These divergent discourses on the aesthetic might be imagined as concentric circles that radiate out from the term absolute music, though sometimes in opposition to it. In pursing this image in what follows my aim is not simply to present a survey of progressively more remote meanings, approaches, and responses, but rather to argue that what might more broadly be called the “fear of aesthetics” (Rose 2017) is largely the result of conceptual slippage, misalignment, and non-equivalence, resulting in a catalogue of historical ironies in the genealogy of this set of ideas. The final formulation calls for renewed attention to what aesthetic autonomy has been—and can be—productively positioned against. Linking a relatively localized historical debate about music’s capacity to express ideas to other more far-reaching claims regarding the nature of aesthetic experience and the epistemological role of aesthetic judgement is not without its challenges. After all, other than the general sense that there is some element in music that is irreducible to the nonmusical, there is no simple alignment between, for example, calls to replace a so-called subjective style of criticism with more objective or putatively scientific forms; arguments about the “essence” of music or its capacity for representation; claims that aesthetic judgements are independent from cognitive judgements; claims that art is irreducible to its context; a move from formalism to hermeneutics to theory, or indeed a rejection of hermeneutics tout court in favour of immanent knowledge, all of which will

Absolute Music   633 come into play in what follows. Indeed some of these claims with respect to aesthetic autonomy have resulted in wildly conflicting approaches to music and musical experience—a legacy perhaps of the tension within the notion of aesthetic judgement itself, of a subjective feeling of pleasure not dependent on concepts on the one hand, and the communicability of that feeling to others (giving it an impersonal aspect which is nonetheless indeterminate), on the other (Shepherdson 2017). Yet this approach is supported by the fact that discussions about absolute music shaped the foundational assumptions of music studies as they became institutionalized towards the end of the nineteenth century (Karnes 2008), and to some extent continue to condition the way many people approach Western art music today—a point that is more often mentioned in passing than coherently investigated. With this in mind, examining the idea of absolute music can be about more than simply reflecting upon the assumptions of disciplinary history that resulted in the canonical ubiquity of AustroGerman instrumental works from the nineteenth century (the period and region in which the aesthetics that supported the idea of absolute music reached its peak). It can also extend beyond philosophical questions about musical expression. To wit, it can be understood as implicating the purpose and practice of music history and criticism as such, and the ethical repercussions of these activities on practices of listening and experiencing music. In this way absolute music raises the ongoing problem of how to remain mindful of the limitations of aesthetics while also confronting the fact that its persistent critique and the resultant inability to see music beyond its politics leads, by some accounts, to an “intellectual dead end” (Levitz 2017). The idea of absolute music is both a promise and a threat. For a scholar such as Carl Dahlhaus, writing in West Germany during the Cold War, it promised a form of expression that existed beyond its social function, and which could thereby escape cooption into an aestheticized authoritarian politics (Hepokoski  1991). And for the English polymath Edmund Gurney (described by some as the “English Hanslick,” but primarily influenced in fact by utilitarian and evolutionary discourses), the sensuous apprehension of an autonomously musical beauty was a radically egalitarian proposition that undercut political hierarchies and conventions (Collins 2019b). Yet the idea of absolute music has also been contentious in that it refers to the possibility of an object whose features are irreducible to conditioning contexts and perceptions, and which therefore holds forth a pretence of truth, lending it a structural similarity to religious and political dogma. Accordingly, in examining the idea of absolute music at a time when the practices of critical theory have been substantially re-evaluated, our question then becomes not “can music express or represent ideas, experiences or emotions, and is it desirable for it to do so?” but rather “can music offer a realm of experience that lies somehow separate from instrumental knowledge and prevailing structures of power and organization, enabling something new to come into being which is not simply a replacement system or dogma?” This latter question speaks to the political potential of the aesthetic in the sense alluded to in the epigraph—it asks, “can music offer a type of autonomy (or ‘nothing’-ness) that can open up a ‘space for a different kind of activity’?”

634   Sarah Collins

Contestations and Concentric Circles The term absolute music does not refer to a singular idea, and it has no singular history, but rather, as already mentioned, encompasses a collection of different sets of ideas that spin out from the term itself in progressively expanding concentric circles, which in turn overlap and deviate in accordance with the term’s misuse and misappropriation. In the smallest circle—so, in its narrowest sense—the term absolute Musik gained prominence within a particular Austro-German critical discourse on music in the midnineteenth century whose history is well documented (Pederson 2009; Bonds 2014). Neither this discourse nor the musical works to which it applied were by any means straightforward (Newcomb 1984; Karl and Robinson 2015), yet the apparently oppositional positions of two polemicists—Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick—and their respective followers came to represent contrasting claims about the extent to which music’s capacity for infinite expression should be considered a disadvantage to be corrected, or an advantage to be protected. And this despite Wagner (who coined the term, though in the pejorative sense) only having used the term for a limited time (late 1840s–1850s) and quite haphazardly, and Hanslick not having used the term specifically (even in his seminal text Vom Musikalisch-Schönen of 1854) and certainly not in the way that it came to be understood by others as attributed to him from the 1880s onwards, from which time it became a “slogan” (Pederson 2009, 254–255). Another complication in this narrowest context is the ambiguity created by Hanslick’s modifications to the final paragraph of his treatise in its second and third editions (1858 and 1865 respectively). While in the first edition Hanslick referred to the fact that “it is not merely and absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that music affects the listener, but rather at the same time as a sounding image of the great motions of the universe,” he was driven to delete this statement and related comments in subsequent editions. The conventional explanation for these changes has been that Hanslick was responding to the criticisms of his friend and colleague Robert Zimmermann regarding the extent to which the final paragraph undermined the treatise’s central claim about the sui generis nature of musical beauty. More recently, Bonds has suggested that the final paragraph in the first edition indicates Hanslick’s intellectual investment in Naturphilosophie (which would see him linking musical beauty to the proportions and laws of nature), and that other sections of the treatise may point to an undercurrent of transcendentalist thinking or a residue of Hanslick’s earlier Hegelianism, though Landerer and Zangwill dispute these readings in favour of more pragmatic considerations (Bonds 2014; Landerer and Zangwill 2017). These debates were tied very firmly to a localized historical milieu, engaging particular political tensions (Wagner’s first use of the term appeared only two years before the 1848 Revolutions that forced him into exile, and Hanslick’s aesthetics was equally shaped by the post-revolutionary milieu—in his case the democratically-minded liberalism of the Viennese middle class with which he identified); professional investments (the

Absolute Music   635 career fortunes of a range of critics and composers were at play, as were the associated interests of music institutions in Weimar and Leipzig respectively); and intellectual contexts (both Hanslick and Wagner were alive to the legacy of German Idealism and its potential to effect a consolidation of a distinctive idea of “Germanness” as part of a broader cultural and political programme). The use of the term in the context of these debates also drew explicitly from a broader aesthetic concept that had achieved widespread influence in intellectual circles towards the end of the eighteenth century; namely, the notion that music could embody a form of knowledge that was not accessible to philosophy, the sciences, or indeed other forms of reason, cognition, or perception. This possibility, in turn, rested on a shift in our conception of language—from being an apparatus for naming ideas and objects that were already in existence, to being a constitutive element in our knowledge and the world we perceive, opening the way for early Romantic writers to conceive of music as being able to convey what language cannot (Bowie 2001, 29–33). By the late eighteenth century (even as early as the 1760s, by one account [Morrow 1997]), the notion that music was at the service of rhetoric—enhancing the persuasive power of words through affective representation, and bound within liturgical structures and social rituals thereby—was gradually challenged by the notion that music could grant access to a realm of knowledge beyond the grasp of language and reason via imaginative, indeterminate, reflective, or aesthetic means. This shift in turn facilitated the emergence of what might be called the “institution of art”—namely the notion that art inhabited its own world with its own system of values, capital, and interaction. Within this schema, music could potentially occupy a position separate from the here of social utility, and the now of history as an unfolding process, towards a transhistorical and apolitical realm. Early German Romantic writers capitalized on this shift in a way that was very much historical and political, by positioning German instrumental music as the most disinterested and therefore the most aesthetically valuable art—a position that served to counteract the cultural dominance of French and Italian vocal music, as well as helping to consolidate an emerging notion of Germanness aimed at reducing the Napoleonic threat (Applegate and Potter 2002). At the moment when ideas about language and knowledge began to take account of the epistemic role for the experience of the incomprehensible, music was said to gain its “autonomy,” or become “emancipated,” from representation and social utility. In other words, the idea of absolute music is intimately bound up with the emergence of modern aesthetics as a subject. There is both a historical and conceptual alignment, then, between the idea of absolute music on the one hand, and aesthetics on the other. This will become important when we move to consider recent re-evaluations of aesthetics. Beyond this schematic outline, there are a number of discontinuities and ironies in the history of absolute music that serve to remind us of the conflicting investments involved in its deployment. One of the most well-known is that while Wagner coined the term absolute music in the pejorative to describe the weakness of purely instrumental music and to rationalize his own theory of music drama, the term was subsequently taken up by his opponents and turned against him via the claim that music was closest to

636   Sarah Collins its essence when it was not in the service of drama or other conceptual or narrative modes. Another irony is that while Immanuel Kant’s notion in the Critique of the Power of Judgment ([1790/1793] 2013) of “aesthetic ideas” as mediating between concepts and sensibility while remaining independent of both was crucial for paving the way to the exalted status of instrumental music (that is, music with the least recourse to concepts), music occupied an almost humorously marginal role in Kant’s thinking. For Kant, the difficulty in determining whether musical impressions proceed from reflection or whether they are merely the effect of sensation (with the suspicion that it was the latter) meant that music was likely not even amenable to aesthetic judgement like the other fine arts, but instead was merely “agreeable.” Musical sound could even be simply annoying or deprive one of liberty, according to Kant, because it imposes its presence beyond the individual listener in a way that poetry and formative arts do not, forcing sensations of pleasure or displeasure upon others against their will, like a man with a perfumed handkerchief (§53). Even the telling of jokes had the edge over music because laughter at least performed a healthy physical function (§§ 51–54), and this despite music without words being described as an instance of “free beauty” earlier in his treatise (§16). There are two further ironies in the history of this concept that are less often remarked. First, towards the end of the nineteenth century music came to be viewed within some literary circles as the only art whose form and content could be potentially indistinguishable. Music became an emblem of a purely self-referential art that literary ­figures and progressive poets sought to emulate, including those associated with Aestheticism (such as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Aubrey Beardsley) and French Symbolism (such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé), yet these writers drew many of their ideas about music from the writings of Wagner (less so from his music, which was of course the antithesis of self-referentiality), linking one of the most striking valorizations of aesthetic autonomy in literary circles to the very figure who sought to denigrate absolute music (Lees  2007; Sutton  2002). And second, Johann Gottfried Herder’s late eighteenth-century anthropological work was highly influential in contributing to the shift towards a constitutive conception of language (as opposed to language describing pre-existent forms), which, as already mentioned, laid the foundation for music’s emancipation from representation, yet this insight was based on Herder’s idea that language formed and was rooted within local contexts—a notion that also contributed to the development of historicism and an attention to the particular, in preference to a discredited Enlightenment universalism. In contemporary disciplinary terms then, Herder might be said to have led the way into what was to later become a more contextual understanding of music, while at once also having been instrumental in allowing it the autonomy from representation that led to music being viewed as transcending its context—namely being in some way universal (for more on Herder and universalism, see Sikka 2011). Each of these historical quirks and ironies was shaped, once again, by certain localized conditions and professional investments that are worth bearing in mind, such as the personal relationship between Kant and Herder and the politics of post-Kantian formations across Europe more generally. Indeed some argue that the “popularization” of

Absolute Music   637 aesthetic autonomy in late nineteenth-century artistic circles was based not on a Romantic rejection of Enlightenment principles, but rather on a “productive misappropriation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment” (Schweizer 2013). There was a similarly patchy adoption of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer by certain protagonists in this debate (see, for example, Braunschweig 2013). In addition, claims for music’s autonomy supported burgeoning constructions of Germanness as a synthesizing or mediating temperament that attained a higher ideal by drawing together and transcending the local (and thus context-bound) styles of others, such as in Wagner’s essay of 1878, “What is German?” Recognizing these local elements in the irregular development of the idea of absolute music as an aesthetic concept helps bring some perspective on the selflegitimizing nature of historical narratives that subscribed to the superiority of absolute music, and highlights the fact that if the history of the term was charted only by paying attention, for example, to criticism in English or French, the view from within those intellectual communities would chart a quite different course (Verzosa 2017). The writings of Kant, Herder, Wagner, and early German Romantics who, for different reasons and with different degrees of legitimacy, have been seen to have valorized instrumental music and the “absolute” (though not necessarily absolute music)—such as Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Friedrich von Schlegel, and E. T. A. Hoffmann— enjoyed quite different receptions in Britain and Ireland, where there had already been a tradition of serious interest in aesthetic autonomy since at least the early eighteenth century, preceding Kant, such as in the influential work of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) (see Grote 2017). Indeed many of the early German Romantics were themselves influenced by British empiricism, and the full significance of a continuing local tradition of thought about the purely musical nature of musical expression—extending from John Locke through Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Edmund Gurney, and others—is yet to be comprehensively explored. We have so far moved from absolute music as a term used inconsistently in a set of debates in the mid- to late nineteenth century, outwards to an aesthetic concept that emerged in the late eighteenth century and involved a shift in ideas about language and knowledge. Extending the conceptual bounds of absolute music even further outwards, it might be said to be a regulative construct that encompasses debates about the essence and effect of music (Bonds 2014). This broader remit sees the history of the idea stretch back to Pythagoras and forward beyond the late nineteenth century, through Stravinsky, Busoni, and Varese’s ideas about the self-referential nature of music, through Boulez and the claims of post-war serialism about the emancipatory potential of autonomy, and also to ongoing discussions within analytic philosophy about the capacity of music to express ideas, or to be “profound,” or to bind content to form, such as in the work of Roger Scruton (1997), Peter Kivy (1990), and Nick Zangwill (2015). The understanding of absolute music as a far-reaching regulative concept has raised some degree of contention, because it divorces the concept from a particular repertoire— namely the music to which it purportedly applied, such as music without text (in Wagner’s formulation) or without narrative or thematic programme or social purpose (in its later

638   Sarah Collins sense from the 1880s). Viewing absolute music in this way might be said to reduce it to a mere “idea without an object” (Chua 2015)—a silent, musicless, cold concept that arbitrarily attaches to some works. It also has the tendency to divorce the concept from real social and historical events that conditioned its development, in that following the ongoing debates about music’s capacity for expression tends to ignore the types of localized historical and institutional conditions mentioned above that have shaped the expression of these ideas historically. In its ahistoricity this method could seem to be complicit in the ideology of absolute music itself. Daniel Chua has argued that this strategy is designed to serve Hanslick’s reputation specifically, and that downplaying the effect of historical conditions makes Hanslick seem more progressive, and even prophetic (Chua 2015). To speak of absolute music as an ideal type or a philosophical aspiration may seem to neglect the extent to which all music is shaped by the experience of the human agents who create and partake of it—it does not issue forth of its own accord. We might extrapolate from this that the idea of absolute music is itself nothing more than a “meta-programme” (Dammann 2017) or an “extra-musical idea” (Chua 1999, 6)—a conceptual apparatus that music has been made to serve. A related argument is that the medium of music has an inherently close relationship with words and bodily movement, and that our tendency to attribute meaning, narrative, emotion, or even dramatic gesture to instrumental music indicates that the musical and the non-musical are by their nature indistinguishable (Ginsborg 2017). One response to these issues with the regulative construct approach might be to consider absolute music a repertoire or a practice, or to suggest that changes in the aesthetics of music were accompanied or even driven by changes in compositional practices themselves (Bowie 2001). Others explicitly reject this idea, countering that the “new aesthetics of instrumental music reflected fundamental transformations in contemporary philosophy and general aesthetics that were unrelated to the music of the time,” and that important contributors to this change such as Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis, and Jean Paul hardly ever referred to specific works in their writings (Bonds 1997, 389; see also 2014). Debates about aesthetic autonomy extend beyond music discourse of course, receiving particular attention amongst theorists and practitioners of fine art (see Elkins 2013 for a summary) and within literary studies, especially with respect to Victorian and modernist literary forms (see, for example, Anderson 2001; Goldstone 2013; and Rose 2017). Taking absolute music as a regulative concept can therefore also incorporate recent manoeuvres on behalf of the aesthetic more generally, including work in the area of presence, ineffability, affect, and the “drastic,” drawing from theorists such as Vladimir Jankélévitch, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Brian Massumi, and also discussions about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political, including in the work of Jacques Rancière. In this expanded view, absolute music might be said to name a proposition, or an aspiration, engaging broader matters of autonomy. This expanded view also serves to illuminate the narrower concept of absolute music, because there are structural ­similarities—not only conceptually but also rhetorically, and in terms of cultural function—between the ­different planes of discourse.

Absolute Music   639

Mystification, Demystification, Remystification A persistent paradox that has emerged from discussions about aesthetic autonomy is that the commitment to the aesthetic has often been allied to the notion that art can be transformative in some way, either personally or collectively, or collectively via the personal. Just as the aesthetic concept underpinning absolute music has been described in terms of the emancipation of music (from words, representation, or social utility) in the late eighteenth century, and much later in the Cold War context the possibility of musical autonomy had similarly emancipatory implications, the notion of aesthetic autonomy more generally has sometimes been viewed as providing a type of refuge—from the market or the industrial system, and the type of consciousness that attends it; or from authoritarian rule. This was certainly the case for Friedrich Schiller, whose Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) was a direct response to processes of dehumanization that he saw playing out after the French Revolution. In a different way, though also in response to modern rationalization that was seen to have a dehumanizing effect, Theodor W. Adorno in the twentieth century viewed the aesthetic as productively subversive—as a challenge to the existing order. For others, the aesthetic presented a type of alternative spirituality, as it were, in the wake of the breaking down of a theologicallyordered society. These anti-capitalist and spiritual implications can be seen in the valorization of autonomy by various forms of aestheticism (including the idea of “l’art pour l’art”), some of which sought the replacement of religious dogma and moral codes with the non-moralizing morality of the aesthetic—a “religion of art.” This tendency can be seen even in the more recent scholarly revival of the aesthetic within the humanities, as we will soon explore in the section entitled “Faith and Scepticism.” The quasi-spiritual and socially-transformative tendency of the commitment to the aesthetic is problematic, of course, to the extent that it renders the aesthetic purposeful, and therefore not autonomous, leading to the idea that autonomy constitutes a specific position with respect to social reality. The political and artistic implications of this were debated by cultural theorists and composers in the decades after the Second World War, such as in the widely-discussed debate involving Jean-Paul Sartre, René Leibowitz, Luigi Nono, Adorno, and Umberto Eco (for two clear summaries see Carroll  2002 and Borio 2014). This paradoxical element in claims about aesthetic autonomy is not always readily apparent, leading to accusations that the promise of the aesthetic is tantamount to mystification. The charge of mystification has been a persistent part of criticism of the aesthetic. Even as Wagner was coining the term absolute music in the late 1840s and 1850s, he was drawing from a tradition of scepticism towards claims about the purity of the absolute in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel’s thought, a tradition that included in particular Feuerbach and Schopenhauer’s attempted reclamation of sensuous bodily experience against the abstraction of Idealism (Pederson 2009). In a different way, in the late twentieth century,

640   Sarah Collins Pierre Bourdieu argued in La Distinction (1979) that the proposition of aesthetic autonomy was a specifically bourgeois strategy of mystification bound up with a desire to seek mastery over history, and to fashion the world in one’s own universal image. In a related line of thought, John Berger argued in Ways of Seeing (1972) that the institutions of art rely on this mystification to legitimize their own authority. The aesthetic, on these terms, is based upon an elaborate and self-serving lie, or at least one whose anarchic potential had come to an end—an idea that was further consolidated in Hal Foster’s foundational collection The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983). At the same time, the aesthetic became inextricably linked with the ideological via the conflation “aesthetic ideology,” and through the influential work of Terry Eagleton (Criticism and Ideology, 1976) and Paul de Man (The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1984). This type of critique was famously brought to bear directly on the question of absolute music by Susan McClary (1993) in an essay entitled “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute Music’: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony,” but it can also be seen in ethnographic studies of particular musical institutions published around the same time,  such as Georgina Born’s Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-garde (1995), which draws on Bourdieu’s position. The influence of the critique of the aesthetic as a form of bourgeois ideology has now become fairly pervasive in the sense that most disciplinary discussions today proceed on the basis of what might be loosely described as an anti-aesthetic premiss— namely a position sceptical towards aesthetic value taken on its own terms. Even while it is true that there is no clear division between the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic in that both are interpenetrating, the idea that a musical work has aesthetic qualities that exist beyond those perceived in it, or attributed to it, would be largely antithetical to the generation of musicologists who graduated in the last two decades, all trained in matters of identity and social history. Accordingly, context is no longer an optional extra, evincing a deep scepticism with the claims associated with absolute music. It is important to note that there is nothing inherently adverse about contextual considerations, and indeed despite the routine caricature of music scholars before the 1980s as being either hidebound to formalist procedures, uncritically enamoured with the idea of beautiful and the good in the aesthetic, or blind to the historical factors that condition the experience of composers, performers, and listeners, it is in fact difficult to find any earlier writers seriously interested in music who were not also mindful to some degree of a range of non-musical factors in its shaping, or who do not acknowledge that conventions and tastes shift over time. What has changed, perhaps, is not so much a commitment to context, but rather a view of how the human subject is formed, turning towards a decentred view of the subject as something that is conditioned by factors that are not integral to it. This change has had a range of implications, not the least of which is a disavowal of a coherent concept of human nature on the one hand, and of strong versions of cultural identity on the other, through critiques of essentialism. The self has thereby been dissolved into a conglomerate of external shaping forces, its identity in constant flux—there is nothing integral, nothing latent, nothing a priori to the subject, and there is therefore no objective position from which judgements (either ethical or

Absolute Music   641 aesthetic) can be made. With respect to this debate, the idea of context as a mitigation of the ahistorical proposition of absolute music, then, becomes a watchword for a more far-reaching shift in conceptions of selfhood—the creation of the self who has very little agency over its own subject position. Absolute music names an insistence on the a ­priori, which leaves it open to the charge of being socially irresponsible or simply illusory. In the current disciplinary climate the idea of the aesthetic seems totalizing, homogenizing, oppressive, elitist, blinded to social realities, and perhaps even irrelevant or non-existent. This is a legacy of disciplinary developments since the 1980s under the umbrella of New Musicology, but it also reflects the materialist impulse of cultural studies more generally, and in a different sense the imperatives of critical theory. There have been a number of criticisms aimed at the increasing dominance of context in musicology when it is cast as being in the service of ideology critique. For our purposes it suffices to note that some have considered this dominance to have been achieved at the expense of the aesthetic aspects of music—of the music “itself,” as it were. On this view, music, along with other cultural artefacts, became a mere shadow of more putatively real or worldly things like economics or politics, making the musicologist’s task to unmask the concealed conditioning factors underpinning music’s shiny aesthetic ­surface—namely, to demystify or disenchant it—or indeed simply to attempt to interpret it via the use of language. One thread of criticism along these lines points out that the pretence of unmasking that ideology critique undertakes is itself a form of mystification (one premissed in the ideology of neo-liberalism), and that the moral relativism that it has produced has the effect of legitimizing spurious perspectives and silencing critique under the doctrinaire banner of tolerance and pluralism (Currie 2009; Clarke 2007). It seeks to remind us too that the activities of critique, contextualization, and historicization do not allow us to escape the clutches of form—there is no outside, purely unmediated, non-aesthetic realm from which to view in safety the machinations of the aesthetic (Scherzinger 2004). This type of critique has also issued from studies of literature and contemporary art, such as in the work of Bruno Latour, who claimed in a famous article entitled “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” that many are drawn to anti-aesthetic practices because there is an essential feeling of being correct and clever in the task of unmasking (Latour 2004). George Levine and others voiced similar concerns in the early 1990s that the simple reduction of literature to political positioning in ideology critique amounted to a denouncement of the literary, and of aesthetic experience itself, and that this kind of activity was predicated on the critic needing to feel “smarter and more honest than the writers [whose work they study], who either didn’t know what they were doing, or, worse, thought they could get away with their devious moves” (Levine 1994, 3). More recently Rita Felski, in an article pointedly entitled “Context Stinks,” argued that context, which is seen as a “quintessential virtue” in Cultural Studies, is often “wielded in a punitive fashion to deprive the artwork of agency” (Felski 2011, 582). These doubts form a part of a broader project in recent years to reduce the stigma of the aesthetic among the academic Left; to recover the link between the senses and the aesthetic; and to understand the political potential of the aesthetic. Their authors

642   Sarah Collins variously seek a renewed closeness to the object and perhaps also a recovery of passion and enthusiasm as tools of inquiry. They sometimes caricature the activity of critique as cold and detached, overly cerebral or theoretical, or overly abstract. James Elkins has described these critical responses to anti-aesthetic discourse in terms of various types of refusal—“refusal to read, refusal to theorize, refusal to understand, to consider, to see”— positions which match critique’s own refusal to take into account embodied knowledge, practices, and performance: “this is not to say either side stands in need of correction: it is to say that the gesture of refusal is central, in many ways, to this subject, which is unevenly encountered by all sides” (Elkins 2013, 15–16). Along these lines, there has also been a call to consider scepticism itself as a form of belief—namely a belief that the human subject is constituted by class-consciousness; that structures of knowledge are inherently ideological and shaped by power relations; or that music is merely a reflection of its context. This type of argument has the tendency to sound very much like the creationist’s objection that the theory of evolution is simply another theory among many, appealing to the problematically equalizing tendencies of pluralism. Even so, both those who would point to the totalizing tendencies of the aesthetic and those who would point to the reductionism of the critique of the aesthetic have accused the other of pursuing a form of faith. They have also accused each other of pursuing often unacknowledged political and moral agendas, undercutting both the aesthetic’s and critique’s respective claims to privileged detachment. Felski describes “suspicious reading” as “not just an intellectual exercise, but a distinctive disposition or sensibility that is infused with a mélange of affective and attitudinal components,” and that therefore “experimenting with other modes of reading and reasoning will require us not only to think differently but also, perhaps, to feel differently” (Felski 2011, 575). Both aesthetic and anti-aesthetic arguments can thus be conceived as positions along a spectrum of ideas related to the question of how to determine ethical conduct.

Faith and Scepticism [Beauty’s] whole magic resides in its mystery, and in dissolving the essential amalgam of its elements we find we have dissolved its very being. (Schiller [1795] 1993, 88)

The aesthetic has often been cast as a type of faith, either pejoratively or affirmatively—it both promises and threatens to elide distanced self-reflection by locating a site for knowledge in ecstatic experiences, enthusiasm, passion, and revelation. This is perhaps not surprising given the historical association of the aesthetic with the sublime, and the tendency can be seen directly in the history of the use of the term absolute music itself. For example, as Sanna Pederson has pointed out, August Halm used the term absolute music in the context of his theologically-inflected writings on music, where he

Absolute Music   643 distinguished between a preacher and a priest—the former “who is directed mainly towards people” and the latter, who is “focused on God,” with Bruckner’s music achieving the latter, directed towards the “absolute spirit” (Pederson 2009, 258–259). Dahlhaus noted an initial theologizing aspect of absolute music in its early formation in the writings of German Romantics, such as Tieck on instrumental music in general, whose terms were then appropriated by E. T. A. Hoffmann and applied to Beethoven’s instrumental music in particular. Dahlhaus emphasized that this theological characterization was not latent to the idea of aesthetic contemplation as such, but rather that it can be traced to the “art religion” of Wackenroder, which was in turn drawn from Schleiermacher—“Ah, thus I close my eyes to all worldly strife—and withdraw quietly into the land of music, as into the land of faith” (Wackenroder, quoted in Dahlhaus 1989, 90). Dahlhaus demonstrated that far from being an ambiguous gesture towards the transcendent effects of art, this manoeuvre was historically interlinked with a change in the relationship of the aesthetic to religious consciousness. He argued that while there had been a notion of religious presence in the plastic arts in antiquity (such as in a statue of a Greek god, which had an immanent rather than simply symbolic meaning, as recognized by Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Spirit [1805]), the Christian era saw a turn towards associating the infinite with “inwardness” and “feeling,” emphasizing the mind’s ability to reach beyond the merely material. For E. T. A. Hoffmann this process was emblemized by instrumental music’s own turn inwards, away from text, mimesis, and the affections. By contrast, Hegel’s imbrication of spirit with “word” saw him elevate lyric poetry above instrumental music. According to Hegel, instrumental music’s inwardness drew it too far away from content that would have enabled it to speak to the soul of humanity, leaving it as an abstracted and therefore merely atmospheric art. On Hegel’s view then, music was all expression, with no spiritual content. As Dahlhaus shows though, even if this aspect leaves music being either of no significance or of the ultimate significance, both Hegel and Hoffmann, and later Hanslick, agreed that music is most itself as “pure” form (Dahlhaus 1989, 88–102). From the perspective of art history, Elkins also notes that Christian aesthetics has played a prominent role in the revival of the aesthetic more generally. There has been an undoubtedly theological tendency to this discourse, with beauty seen as a form of experience that opens the viewer up to faith, such as in the work of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Elkins points out that there is a historical component to this tendency dating back to the preoccupations of medieval scholars: “What is the prime analogue, the principal model, of beauty? Is it divine or mundane, or (equivalently) theological or philosophical, Platonic or Aristotelian?” (Elkins 2013, 6). In the context of these questions, Aristotle is held to speak for beauty in terms of “harmony of parts,” originating a type of formalism in his discussion of tragedy. The refusal to read on the part of some recent approaches to the aesthetic has been viewed as a potentially oppressive call for critical silence—one that amounts to a reinvented Romantic sacralization of music, of the kind that fed the elevation of absolute music in the nineteenth century, newly combined with anti-rational Bergsonian ideas

644   Sarah Collins about vitalism, flow, becoming, and duration (Hepokoski 2012). Hepokoski, for example, in a colloquy on the work of Jankélévitch, cast the recent disciplinary interest in ineffability as a misnomer, and a “rearguard, regressive posture” at that (230). The implication of charging recent approaches to the aesthetic as forms of sacralization is that it is an essentially anti-intellectual discourse in the sense of being hostile to scepticism or critique, and preaching a kind of faith. The history of this charge is complicated by the fact that hermeneutics arose from philology, which itself had its basis in theological study and interpretations of the Bible. Ideas related to aesthetic autonomy were also intimately entwined with institutional and theological contests engaged by various forms of Protestantism (contests which, needless to say, played out differently in Germany, Britain, and France, shaping the different national manifestation of ideas about autonomy), and even the secular universalism of Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgement and sensus communis came under suspicion in the twentieth century for being premised on the idea of a non-human authority. In the early twentieth century, calls for a return to immediate experience against distanced reflection were often inflected with an anti-liberal, politically-reactionary stance which resulted either in a conservative hostility towards the avant-garde, or a reformulation of modernism in terms of “modern classicism” (i.e., the spirit of modernity conveyed through the expressive economy and immediacy of a classical aesthetic). In early twentieth-century Britain for example, modern classicisms often gave expression to a contemporaneous scepticism, in the broader intellectual field, towards predetermined notions of “liberty” and “equality”—terms that were seen as unacceptably abstract as bases for political reform. As a counterforce to these Continental-derived abstractions, and shaped by a historical ambivalence towards French political and intellectual practices, prevailing notions of “Englishness” tended to prize qualities of intuition, selfdetermination, and an anti-theoretical commitment to “doing” and the concrete, rather than “reflecting” and the abstract. This scepticism shaped an avowedly anti-Continental form of cultural modernism in Britain, sometimes issuing from the political Right (such as in the case of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), or from anti-liberal, socialist alternatives based on the social structures associated with medieval Catholicism (such as those proposed by Hilaire Belloc) (see Collins 2019a). Even in the late eighteenth century, Herder’s Counter-Enlightenment call for an understanding of language rooted in cultural context used similarly anti-intellectual rhetoric targeted at, in his case, the enlightened liberalism of the German middle class, whom he saw as hopelessly detached from their cultural roots. In a critical gesture aligned with Hepokoski’s concerns over the silencing of critical discourse by a faith in the aesthetic, James Currie has noted how Jankélévitch’s emphasis on restraint and modesty (which he associates with shamefulness), in both the philosophical approach to music as well as the aesthetic tendencies of his favourite works, have their rhetorical origins in France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, in anti-German nationalist discourse, or alternatively in the neoclassical aesthetics of twentieth-century Fascism. Jankélévitch’s moralizing preference for modesty, rationalized philosophically with respect to the ineffable and consecrated by his invocation of

Absolute Music   645 theological analogies, strikes Currie as being highly political without announcing itself as such (Currie 2012). Others however point to the fact that a commitment to the aesthetic does not imply a silencing of critique, scepticism, and doubt while promising disclosure, akin to theological dogma. Michael Gallope has argued that Jankélévitch’s broader writings do in fact acknowledge the capacity of language and philosophy to partially unveil the ineffable. For Jankélévitch, “philosophy is in the double business of the ‘Je-ne-sais-quoi’ (a modesty concerning its ability to present the unnamable) and a ‘Presque-rien’ (the infinitesimal approach to the inconsistent reality of becoming)” (Gallope 2012, 237). According to Gallope, this sense of modesty becomes an ethical agenda for Jankélévitch, a call to be faithful to the unspeakability of the ineffable by “joining metaphysical principles with empirical particulars” (238). This ethics applies as much to music as it does to the ethics of forgiveness, in Jankélévitch’s thinking, so that the aspiration towards the absolute in knowledge via music is an analogue to the impossible aspiration towards so-called “absolute selfness.” Gallope rejects the theological account of the act of faith required to approach music and forgiveness with the requisite modesty for ethical action to take place. The approach to the ineffable, in this sense, is predicated in the certain failure of our aspiration to result in any kind of nearness or understanding. The task of an ethical philosophy, or an ethical way of approaching music, then, is to proceed on the basis that our pursuit of comprehension will inevitably fail (an acknowledgement that Gallope refers to as “fidelity”), while also acknowledging that the aspiration and its consequent action can attain some form of resistance. The possibility of resistance is predicated on the dialectic nature of the medium of music itself (i.e., bound and mediated by formal properties, yet offering a unique sensory immediacy), which allows us to think through philosophical problems in a way that no other medium allows. Gallope encourages us to “ethically navigate one’s way toward a vernacular horizon of the insensible, the excluded, and the peripheral” in a way that acknowledges the open-endedness and paradoxical nature of the task yet resists falling into silence and refusal (Gallope 2017, 13).

Strategies As we have seen already, there are both weak and strong versions of what might be called a redescription of aesthetic autonomy today. The weaker end of the spectrum (not intended pejoratively) includes claims that it is possible to defend the institutional autonomy of art—as one might defend the autonomy of academic scholarship from state or corporate intervention—without subscribing to an aestheticist autonomy that is ahistorical. As Jusdanis has claimed: “it is possible to posit the notion of aesthetic value without advocating aestheticism, to support the social institution of art without severing it from society, to believe in the worth of literature without defending social privilege” (Jusdanis  2005, 28). While Jusdanis laments the anti-aesthetic rhetoric of contemporary literary criticism, he affirms the critiques of aesthetics that take issue with

646   Sarah Collins its claim to transcend history, as in the “radical aestheticism” of writers such as Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. Instead of arguing for the potential of such claims, or presenting a modified version of them as Gallope and others have done, Jusdanis instead prefers to hold to the more limited assertion that the social importance of the aesthetic comes from its claim of independence per se. In a slightly different vein, Karol Berger has argued for a recognition of the “relative autonomy” of music as a condition of the possibility of writing its history (Berger 2014). Gallope’s emphasis on attitudinal “modesty” presents a slightly stronger version of the redescription of autonomy, in that even though it acknowledges the impossibility of autonomy, it attributes critical benefit to its aspiration. Other versions of the stronger description tend to draw variously from Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and also sometimes Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan. These include David Clarke’s advocacy for a “strong relativism”—which approaches the neo-liberal critique of the possibility of objectivity (namely, of autonomy) by arguing for an engagement with Otherness not through passive tolerance but by pursuing active negative critique on equal terms (Clarke 2007); James Currie’s view of the political as conditioned by the aesthetic and vice versa, allowing them to be interrogated in both separate and interpenetrating fields (Currie 2009); and J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s advocacy of “presencing” over “presence” to argue for the agency of the aesthetic—as an activity of Being-in-the-world—in revolutionary politics (Harper-Scott 2012). Recent re-evaluations of Hanslick have also participated in the redescription of aesthetic autonomy, rejecting interpretations of Hanslick that cast him as a text-based formalist who viewed the musical work as a closed form, and highlighting instead his attention to temporal unfolding, effect, and listener experience. In a formulation that seems more Kantian than hereto acknowledged, the essence of music, in Hanslick’s view, can only be grasped through free and purposeless contemplation of the “tonally moving forms.” In other words, he was less concerned with ontology than with the way things appear to us, through our imaginative and cognitive faculties, leaving open the possibility of aesthetic judgement (Levitz 2017). Perhaps the strongest positions on the aesthetic in music in recent years are those that have been concerned with the notions of “ineffability” (drawing from Jankélévitch), “affect” (drawing from Brian Massumi, and Deleuze and Guattari), and “presence” (drawing from Hans Gumbrecht, such as in Abbate  2004 and  2017). Another more recent development in the midway of the spectrum are studies that claim an emancipatory, transformative, or democratic function for music, such as studies of an “aesthetics” of exile; jazz improvisation and democracy; and musical “citizenship.” These types of study tend to ascribe some type of affirmative agency to the aesthetic aspect of music— its irreducible element of musicness—viewing music not merely as a reflection (of exilic experience, of democratic fellow-feeling or of citizenship), but as a structuring force of these experiences and formations. These developments may seem discomforting to some for the reasons described above, namely that affirming the political in the aesthetic or following the methodological logic of aesthetic autonomy without engaging in ideology critique seems to risk

Absolute Music   647 becoming blind to its imbrication in vested interests, and complicit with the aspect of faith required of the aesthetic—its denial of the possibility of explication, transparency, and perhaps also accountability. Yet, just as it is possible to sustain the anthropological category of human nature at the same time as acknowledging that human capacities, intuitions, and relations change over time, while the aesthetic has indeed been historically linked with oppressive political regimes, reactionary agendas, and suspect causes, it is not of necessity tied to these types of political position, and neither need it be simply a vehicle for lending a universal character to the tastes and values of a dominant group.

Conclusion While it is impossible to view the aesthetic as “pure” or “absolute,” it is important to pursue a better understanding of exactly how and why the aspiration towards autonomy has seemed so necessary—and so powerfully subversive—at certain times in history, and thereby to comprehend the value of a practice whose historical investments are not by necessity intrinsic to it. Claims for music’s autonomy have been used both to resist autocratic or authoritarian rule and to shape revolutionary visions (as much in the late eight­ eenth century as during the Cold War and today), as well as offering a way of subverting processes of state-sponsored or market-driven rationalization. These purposive applications of the notion of autonomy seem to run counter to its own mandate, but what they reveal is a collection of practices aimed at envisaging a situation that does not yet exist, and one that is quite literally unthinkable within current social and knowledge structures. On these terms, the question of absolute music and the way we grapple with its intellectual legacy today ultimately calls us to return to epistemology and ethics—it calls us to return, in other words, to Kant. Kant never considered the aesthetic to be a form of truth or higher reality, with aesthetic contemplation requiring a retreat from worldly concerns into subjective experience and a withdrawal from communication and social commitment. Indeed, quite the opposite—one of Kant’s most crucial insights was that the world is mind-dependent, with language being an empty sign that tries to figure an unknowable reality. It was therefore far from a source of mystification, and indeed as Joel Galand noted in 1995 in direct response to the caricature of aesthetics by postmodern musicology, the aesthetic might be seen instead as a “lucid prefiguration of themes with which poststructuralist thought at its most rigorous is deeply concerned” (Galand 1995, 85). Kant’s distinction between “determinant” and “reflective” judgement gives an indication of his innovation in this respect. For Kant, determinant judgement refers to knowledge of objects gained from viewing them through the lens of already formulated concepts, and reflective judgement refers to knowledge gained by viewing an object and abstracting generalizable concepts from it. Reflective judgement is described as aesthetic and autonomous in the sense of being a practice of viewing the object free from

648   Sarah Collins any idea or purpose or for elucidating its link with other meanings, though the possibility of reflective judgement was predicated both on something inherent in the object itself and on the viewer’s or listener’s capacity to approach it in this way (Siebers 1998). As such, while determinant judgement was inherently bound within pre-existing concepts (and therefore inherently prejudiced), reflective judgement indicated the possibility of something beyond conceptualization—an idea that linked the practice of aesthetic contemplation to a broader civic project designed to mediate between the individual or particular and the collective. Like Kant, Schiller was also concerned with how internal divisions (both within an individual and within a social body) could be mediated through the aesthetic. The purpose of approaching otherness in this way, for the more politically-minded Schiller, was not to reconcile it, flatten it, or co-opt it into a totalizing whole, but rather to ensure that humans were enabled to become fully themselves rather than merely ceding to their functional status as mere fragments of a social whole, or mechanistic nodes within a system of production or association. Schiller’s concern was to discover a route to moral reform that did not risk merely replacing a new system for the old. From Schiller onwards, the powerful draw of aesthetic autonomy has been this promise of actual newness—an impossible freedom that it is our task to strive towards despite its impossibility. What we learn from the wayward history of debating aesthetic autonomy is that while we should certainly be wary of politics masking itself behind a supposedly neutral aesthetics, the aesthetic also offers the capacity to shape experience in a way that is fundamentally different from other structuring forces.

Note 1. I would like to thank the editors, the anonymous reader, Alexander Wilfing, and Michael Gallope for their insightful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this chapter.

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650   Sarah Collins Goldstone, Andrew. 2013. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. New York: Oxford University Press. Grote, Simon. 2017. The Emergence of Modern Aesthetic Theory: Religion and Morality in Enlightenment Germany and Scotland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimes, Nicole, Siobhan Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx, eds. 2013. Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism and Expression. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Harper-Scott, J. P. E. 2012. The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hepokoski, James. 1991. “The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-musicological Sources.” 19thCentury Music 14, no. 3 (Spring): 221–246. Hepokoski, James. 2012. “Ineffable Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence.” In “Colloquy: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music,” edited by Michael Gallope and Brian Kane. Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring): 223–230. Hoeckner, Berthold. 2002. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. John, Eileen. 2012. “Beauty, Interest, and Autonomy.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 2 (Spring): 193–202. Jusdanis, Gregory. 2005. “Two Cheers for Aesthetic Autonomy.” Cultural Critique 61 (Autumn): 22–54. Kant, Immanuel. [1790/1793] 2013. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer, translated by Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karl, Gregory, and Jenefer Robinson. 2015. “Yet Again, ‘Between Absolute and Programme Music’.” British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 1 (January): 19–37. Karnes, Kevin. 2008. Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1990. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Landerer, Christoph, and Nick Zangwill. 2016. “Contemplating Musical Essence.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141, no. 2 (November): 483–494. Landerer, Christoph, and Nick Zangwill. 2017. “Hanslick’s Deleted Ending.” British Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 1 (January): 85–95. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter): 225–248. Lees, Heath. 2007. Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Levine, George. 1994. “Reclaiming the Aesthetic.” In Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by George Levine, 1–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Levitz, Tamara. 2017. “Absolute Music as Ontology or Experience.” British Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 1 (January): 81–84. McClary, Susan. 1993. “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony.” In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth  A.  Solie, 326–344. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Morrow, Mary Sue. 1997. German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newcomb, Anthony. 1984. “Once More between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann’s Second Symphony.” 19th-Century Music 7, no. 3 (April): 233–250.

Absolute Music   651 Pederson, Sanna. 2009. “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 240–262. Rose, Sam. 2017. “The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory.” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring): 223–244. Scherzinger, Martin. 2004. “The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its Place in Political Critique.” In Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 252–277. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schiller, Friedrich. [1795] 1993. Essays. Edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York: Continuum. Schweizer, Harold. 2013. “Literary Autonomy: the Growth of a Modern Concept.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 6, The Nineteenth Century, edited by M. A. R. Habib, 231–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shepherdson, Charles. 2017. “Aesthetic ‘Sense’ in Kant and Nancy.” New Literary History 48, no. 2 (Spring): 197–221. Siebers, Tobin. 1998. “Kant and the Politics of Beauty.” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 1 (April): 31–48. Sikka, Sonia. 2011. Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutton, Emma. 2002. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verzosa, Noel. 2017. “Realism, Idealism and the French Reception of Hanslick.” NineteenthCentury Music Review 14, no. 1 (April): 51–64. Zangwill, Nick. 2015. Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of Description. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. London: Verso.

chapter 32

Consciousn ess David Clarke

The View from the Multidisciplinary Playground What is consciousness? As St Augustine put it regarding time (with which both ­consciousness and music have a profound affinity), “[p]rovided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (Augustine 1991, 230). Whoever’s asking—philosopher, musician, artist, scientist, theologian—the quintessence of consciousness seems to be its mysteriousness, or, more prosaically, its resistance to intellectual inquiry. Not least perplexing is the relationship it demonstrates between the mental and the physical. How is it that certain configurations of matter (rocks, or spoons, for example) do not seem to know the world, while others—most notably human beings—do? And how is it that humans are able further to reflect on this ­knowing—to know that they know the world? For materialist epistemologies, how can these things be explained without falling back onto some version of Cartesian dualism, premissed on a fundamental split between (material) body and (immaterial) mind (Descartes 2008)—that is, without reintroducing a mind–body split? And how can we tackle a related issue, the canonical “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers 1996): the fact that consciousness appears to be an irreducibly subjective, first-person experience, and that what seems essential to it—the phenomenology of Self—is inaccessible as such to any exterior third party (Nagel 1974)? These enigmas are not the only striking features of consciousness: so also is the sheer range of disciplinary perspectives mobilizing around it. These characteristics may not be unrelated. Take a look at the scope of papers in the Journal of Consciousness Studies or presented in conferences convened by such bodies as the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and you see a picture indicative of a wider contemporary proliferation and fragmentation of academic disciplines. This image is mirrored in the contribution of music

654   David Clarke studies—for example, in international conferences on music and consciousness convened in 2006 and 2015 (in the UK cities of Sheffield and Oxford respectively), and in the volumes developed from these events, respectively Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives; and Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities.1 Much research conducted in the name of consciousness studies could proceed undisturbed under other names. Neuroscientists could get on with brain science, philosophers could continue worrying about questions of ontology and the real or illusory nature of the subject–object divide, religious studies scholars could contemplate the relationship between spirit and matter, music theorists could still separately consider music perception and cognition, music semiotics, aesthetics—all without reference to consciousness and without bothering anyone else. Yet this single word consciousness has the effect of a master signifier drawing all the interested parties together into a metaphorical multidisciplinary playground. As there is no study of consciousness outside of disciplinary formations, disciplinarity has to be understood as another aspect of the investigative problem. Since every discipline speaks its own metalanguage, hopes for an agreed definition of consciousness or even an agreed set of terms of reference (a kind of consciousnessstudies Esperanto) would be misguided (Clarke and Clarke  2011, xxiii–xxiv;  2014, 84–86). The playground, attached to the academy but less than fully regulated by it, has something in common with Bakhtin’s description of the novel and its polyphonic array of voices: it is “a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents” (Bakhtin 1981, 276). Or as philosopher Daniel Dennett more bluntly suggests, “[i]t’s just a war of metaphors” (Dennett 1991, 455); hence the textual strategies of investigators cannot be excluded from the inquiry. Yet this need not mean that consciousness does not have a real-world referent. One contrary spin on the claim in Derrida (1976, 158) that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside-ofthe-text)2 may be to posit consciousness as really existing outside of every text that (nonetheless) tries to capture it. Consciousness may be the ultimate reality, without which nothing can be known. The elusiveness of consciousness may be in part the blinding effect of disciplinary signifying systems: each discipline in opening up its own avenues of thought risks closing down others. All of which is to say that scholars of music and consciousness must make their way within this dialogically contested space. On the one hand, their arguments are rightly informed by what music and its own disciplinary formations distinctively offer the study of consciousness. For example, one key theme of this chapter—scepticism towards a certain hegemonizing scientism within the field (emphatically not the same thing as denying the crucial contribution of scientific thought)—is rooted in a musician’s intuitive grasp that music affords a different space from which to consider consciousness. On the other hand, music scholars might proceed with more than one understanding of interdisciplinary affinities available to them in this quest. Music can be valuably extended to a notion of “music-among-other-arts,” and music studies similarly to “music-studies-among-other-disciplines.”3 First, consider music’s affinities with other

Consciousness   655 arts. Like them, it may offer a vehicle to altered states of consciousness and alternative forms of selfhood to those found in everyday empirical experience; and along with other, specifically temporal art forms, it has the propensity to shape and reveal the flow of our phenomenal subjectivity. Accordingly, it is legitimate in this context to locate discussions of music within arguments about the arts and humanities in general. By contrast “music-studies-among-other-disciplines” recognizes music studies not as a unified field, but as a congeries of subdisciplines. Computational, cognitive, generative-linguistic, evolutionary, ethnographic, and historicizing approaches to the study of music and consciousness might all find stronger alliances with their wider disciplinary counterparts than within music studies itself. Hence the conflicted space of the multidisciplinary playground may make itself felt on music scholars’ own doorstep. Regardless, an important upshot of these forms of disciplinary expansion—one rehearsed throughout this chapter—is the need for music scholars not only to argue for the significance of their own discipline for consciousness studies, but also to assert their right as interdisciplinarians to speak beyond the confines of music. Further, given the subject matter of this book, how does music (as an art form and as a set of disciplinary understandings) contribute to the philosophical study of consciousness? The question is apposite because, I would argue, consciousness is ultimately a philosophical problem. For the present purposes, three particular branches of philosophy are relevant. First, the enigmas and intractabilities of consciousness compel engagement with epistemology—questions of “the nature, sources and limits of knowledge” (Klein 2005). A key claim of this chapter is that the realm of the aesthetic, and hence music within it, provides a valuable experiential standpoint from which to approach consciousness—among other things as an alternative epistemological order from which to critically appraise the possibilities and limitations of scientific empiricism. A second salient philosophical domain is phenomenology: not only first-person approaches to consciousness, but the wider question of how the Self is constructed and represented, among other things, in and through music. Thirdly, this in turn relates to fundamental questions of ontology, of Being itself—something with which both music and consciousness are intimately affiliated. These three aspects of philosophical inquiry—epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology—are embedded across the course of this chapter in counterpoint with an overall structure cast as a series of episodes. These are to some extent paratactic—consistent with the notion that there is no agreed definition of, or epistemological framework for, consciousness (hence readers are at liberty to read them in other than the printed order). Yet while there is intentionally no syllogistic movement to a final or central argument, in their non-linear juxtaposition these meditations—often thematized as “views”—bear on each other and (I hope) generate a larger, complex discursive whole that represents a more authentic kind of engagement with the current panoply of intellectual positions and of music’s potential contribution to it. “The View from the Upper Circle” and “The View from Science” could together be read as an (I hope productive) agon between certain musical and certain scientific perspectives on consciousness—among other things mobilizing understandings of music as a foil to computational models of the mind

656   David Clarke promulgated by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. The question “Where Is Consciousness?” foregrounds debates around different lines of disagreement, primarily over whether mind is something that extends beyond the neural processes of the brain, or whether consciousness might not be a field that extends out into (and intends in from) the world—notions pioneered by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, among others. Given the embodied, encultured, “enworlded” nature of music, musical investigators might be more inclined to offer arguments in favour of consciousness in this more extended sense, and in “The View from Ontology” I argue for a version of Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world as perhaps the essential conceptual ground and point of convergence for music and consciousness. Yet, as Heidegger and others have stressed, Being— and hence, I would say, also consciousness—eludes capture in conventionally disciplined language. Hence, in contemplating consciousness, academic researchers are perhaps “Gathering Around the Void” (the topic of the last section) of something (or no-thing) that challenges traditional Western metaphysical assumptions. But if consciousness is unknowable as such in conventional linguistic and discursive terms, music might well offer an alternative way to map it.

The View from the Upper Circle The opera house is one place where consciousness is musically instantiated and enacted—and richly so. For example, several times in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) we not only hear a musicalization of his characters’ inner, phenomenological world, but also follow them in the act of musical creation. Act 3, scene 2 is the crucial moment where protagonist Walther van Stolzing finally gets his heart and mind around what it takes to compose a mastersong. The stakes are high: if Walther is to succeed in winning his beloved Eva as his bride (let us suspend judgement here on the feudal gender politics), he must that day prove himself worthy of winning the Mastersingers’ midsummer singing competition by composing a new song conformant with the strenuous poetic rules of the Mastersingers’ art. Guided by Hans Sachs, Walther channels his invention into a prototype of the song that will admit him into the Mastersingers’ social sphere. The unconscious plays its part in the process. Walther tells of a waking dream of beauty that he struggles to articulate and fears to lose. Sachs encourages him: by poeticizing his dream he will recover it. Walther moves out of his everyday consciousness and redirects his intentionality inwards (to use intentionality here in its phenomenological sense, meaning that which a subject is conscious of). The moment of his reorientation is both represented and experienced through two sustained, blended, differently orchestrated C major chords that suspend the dramatic momentum and, so to speak, take us into his inner world. (In practice, it is we the audience that perform this inward orientation, and then project it back out onto Walther.) Then he begins his rapturous aria

Consciousness   657 “Morgenlich leuchtend in rosigem Schein”—a love song to Eva, suffused with natural imagery. This diegetic act of improvising a song relays an enhanced state of consciousness that rides on more normative conditions. Cognition and emotion are inseparable, Jay Schulkin (2013, 100) asserts, invoking Darwin himself. So it is appropriate that Walther’s efforts to raise the cognitive ante (coterminous with his rising desire) are conveyed through the genre of the operatic aria, whose conventions are utterly bound up with heightened emotion. We can also conjecture that Walther’s extemporization, which involves both language and melody, would draw on regular cognitive resources of speech production. However, Dennett (1991, 231–252) argues that linguistic utterances are not generated by some centrally intending conceptualizer in the brain, but arise out of a “pandemonium” of parallel possibilities (a notion consistent with his “multiple drafts” model of consciousness)4 channelled by complementary constraining mechanisms. In Walther’s case those constraints are the highly rule-bound poetics of the mastersong. His struggle with the Mastersingers is precisely over his refusal to allow his personal, emotionally charged internal pandemonium (fuelled by romantic love) to be totally assimilated to their overwrought syntactic demands. What he eventually achieves is his own palatable balance. As we listen to his final, honed musical utterance we attune to something radically more ordered than the equivalent pandemonium in our own heads, and hence ourselves achieve a more centred subjectivity (which is perhaps a key attraction of aesthetic products). That Walther is a fiction and that this is but a theatrical representation of the real composing process need not invalidate the argument. Wagner, for whom Walther and Sachs act as proxy, is likely also to have had to wrest his final product out of some level of creative pandemonium, and Walther’s aria might remain the result of multiple drafts—literally or metaphorically—at the historical moment of composition. In its artefactuality, this dramatization of the creative process brings with it additional dynamics of consciousness and constructions of subjectivity.5 For one thing, the characters as represented to us are in fact the work of live singers whose conscious (and unconscious) attention is directed not only to their artistic intent (for example, the portrayal of their respective characters) but also to the continuous regulative monitoring of their own performance, alongside an awareness of the entire performing environment: their fellow stage actors, the conductor, the sounds from the orchestra pit, and (perhaps more subliminally) the audience presence. All these subjectivities are in turn audible in the structured formation of sound: Wagner the historical person is no longer an actual presence, and the same goes for the performers when we listen to the work through an audio recording; yet their combined subjectivity is present as a trace in the sonic flow. No less active in the process is the consciousness of listeners—considered both in their private interiority and their awareness of being part of a shared cultural experience. This account foregrounds how these different actors together instantiate a field of consciousness through music. Field is an appropriate term because the consciousness enacted in the theatre involves multiple subjects in the act of creating, recreating, perceiving, responding, being embodied, simply being—across the entire physical space of

658   David Clarke the auditorium, within the imaginary spaces being represented on stage, and along the arc of history. Beyond the opera house there are plenty of other contexts in which we can know music as a locus and focus of consciousness (and of discourse about it). These include: the embodied, enactive consciousness among improvising musicians; music as generative of altered states of consciousness, perhaps aided by drugs in a vernacular context, or within shamanistic rituals; awareness of the temporal processes in performing a Chopin prelude; music as a part of everyday listening—for example the attentional shifts between inner and outer spaces made possible by iPods and other personal listening devices; therapeutic interventions through music; music in relation to trance or meditative states; the encouragement to rethink our relationship to sound and silence in the music and aesthetics of John Cage; music as a way of marking an event—as engendering consciousness of social and political change; and so on.6 However synoptically, this sketch points not only to the diversity of ways in which consciousness is pertinent to music, but also to how music instantiates consciousness in, or as, a rich, complex, and culturally mediated field; and this stands in stark contrast to the reductionism of various scientific approaches.

The View from Science Steven Pinker’s infamous characterization of music as “auditory cheesecake” (Pinker  1999, 534) puts limits on the medium’s significance for any scientific understanding of the mind and consciousness. We love cheesecake, Pinker says, not because we have evolved to do so, but because it trades on neural circuits originally evolved to give pleasure from more wholesome and naturally available foods (525). The arts, along with pornography, represent similar kinds of non-adaptive phenomena that capitalize on adaptive pleasure responses: “Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” (528). Pinker would seem a sub-optimal scientific emissary to arts researchers and practitioners. His views about music appear questionable even on purely evolutionary grounds (Cross 2012; Donald 1991; Mithen 2005; Tolbert 2001a, 2001b; Tomlinson 2015; see also Carroll 1998). Yet it would be fairer to construe his account, along with those of other specialists (some discussed here) who have cared to write for a general public, as usefully illustrating both the possibilities and limits of the scientific attitude in understanding consciousness, and as a point of comparison for arts-based approaches. On the positive side, Pinker’s examination of music includes a relatively lengthy exegesis of the generative theory of musical structure in Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983)—unsurprisingly, given his own predilection for the syntactic, and the common influence of Chomsky’s generative grammar. Pinker affirms that “the mind owes its power to its

Consciousness   659 syntactic, compositional, combinatorial abilities . . . . These logical and lawlike connections provide the meanings of sentences in everyday speech and, through analogies and metaphors, lend their structures to the esoteric contents of science and mathematics, where they are assembled into bigger and bigger theoretical edifices” (Pinker 1999, 563). Such a computational model of the mind—with its associated metaphors (“circuits,” “programming,” “software,” “modules”)—is shared with various empirical psychologists and neuroscientists. It crucially underpins Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness, under which conscious content arises, almost contingently, out of the interaction of parallel brain processes that coevally and unconsciously work on many different events or different parameters of the same event (Dennett  1991, 111–138). Although Dennett doesn’t discuss music in this regard, he could well have done.7 Consider the challenge of learning the subtleties of a song being transmitted orally. The sequence of pitches (which may involve fleeting decorations), their duration, and their correspondence with the underlying text all have to be apprehended, synthesized, and reproduced. The difficulties sometimes experienced in grasping all these features at once (as when a learner reproduces the note order correctly but with errors in the text underlay, or gets the right rhythmic sequence while reordering some of the pitches)8 could be explained by the fact that these different streams of information are processed separately, at different speeds. One of Dennett’s striking conclusions from such phenomena is that there may be no subjective centre of consciousness in which the processed data arrive at one time in a synthesized form. Through his multiple drafts approach, Dennett seeks to put to bed once and for all the Cartesian notion of a “theatre of consciousness” in which information is displayed to a virtual inner observer or homunculus (Dennett 1991, 101–138). Residues of this notion persist, Dennett argues, even in supposedly materialist scientific accounts—for example, those that argue for some unified (or unifying) centre of consciousness in the brain (126–134). The multiple drafts model dispenses with such a centre and any corresponding notion of a neurally manifest Self to which the brain’s computational workings deliver. Once the idea of the Self as an empirical reality is disposed of, there is no need to worry about it in any transcendental or phenomenological sense either. For Dennett, first-person experience does not have to be explained by a theory of consciousness. We can observe people having it (or reporting accounts of it), but this becomes a kind of anthropological matter, which he agnostically couches under the concept of heterophenomenology—phenomenology regarded from a (sceptical) third-person viewpoint. According to Dennett’s eliminativist position, such notions and all that goes with them—notably the ineffable experience of sensations (or qualia)—are extraneous and, to all intents and purposes, illusory.9 By contrast, psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey sees phenomenal experience and its associated concept of Self as crucial components of a theory of consciousness. In his book Seeing Red, he presciently suggests that “[m]aybe there are in fact nonverbal ways of getting at the nature of phenomenal experience” (Humphrey 2006, 114), and he numbers painting and music among them. While, in the end, his discussion privileges painting (because of the visual tenor of his book), it would not take a huge

660   David Clarke leap of the imagination to see how music might similarly illuminate his arguments. This is not least because his starting point is the temporality of artworks, notably the way paintings by Monet and by Bridget Riley embody an extended present, which inflates the moment of now into what is other than itself: into a “thick moment of consciousness” correlated with a notion of “thick time” (113, 125).10 In this reiterative overwriting of the present, an artwork offers the experience of “being like itself in time . . . . In a strange way, the painting [by Riley], like the moment, is about itself” (116). Similarly, a quintessentially temporal art such as music can be seen to “overwrite” itself and deepen consciousness in the present moment, whether this be, for example, through the unfolding of a melody which continually reworks its initial content through subsequent variations of motive and phrase; through longer-term developmental processes across an entire movement or work; or through the cumulative iterations of material in a minimalist piece (closer in spirit to Riley’s work).11 Humphrey spots a connection between these qualities of temporal depth and the brain’s capacity to generate internal feedback loops—an evolutionary legacy whereby sensations that would originally have generated actual physical responses (“wriggles at the body surface”) have since become “biologically redundant,” “closed off from the outside world,” and thus ultimately “signals about themselves” (Humphrey 2006, 121–122). Such “re-entrant” circuits (Pollen 1999, 2003; cit. Humphrey 2006, 145n13) might support the phenomenology of viewing a painting by Riley (or identifying with the temporal flow of music); and, crucially, such experiences of “existing in thick time” (Humphrey 2006, 125) are what generates a commensurably rich sense of Self. Humphrey notes the view of Thomas Clark (1995, 254) that such an experience of Self may be responsible for an inflation of an individual’s “metaphysical self worth,” (Humphrey  2006, 126), and hence for an—illusory—belief in a mind–body duality. Unlike Clark, however, Humphrey does not see such an alleged illusion as maladaptive. On the contrary, this gives individuals a stronger sense of self-worth, leads to enhanced lives, and is thus a positive biological adaptation (128–129). It is unclear whether Humphrey’s final position represents a truth claim about human ontology or whether it is a narrative tactic that enables him to reconcile his own very human values with what from his standpoint would be a disciplinary requirement for any theory of consciousness to be ultimately grounded in evolutionary terms. This could be the spectre of a Darwinism (a “universal Darwinism” in Richard Dawkins’s [1983] term)12 that in seeking to apply cultural phenomena to its own explanatory ends risks undervaluing culture and theories of culture as sources of explanatory power in their own right. Humphrey’s openness to the value of the aesthetic, and his patent desire not to quash his own humanism, generates a tension also discernible in other scientific accounts of consciousness, whose symptoms are sometimes illuminating non-scientific textual supplements and sometimes a tendency towards bathos. These symptoms tend to transpire as the writers in question reach the conclusion of their texts and perhaps relax their guard. Textual supplements include the touching quotation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” at the very end of Humphrey’s Seeing Red, as well as Dennett’s socio-anthropic sensitivities around dead bodies in the closing chapter of

Consciousness   661 Consciousness Explained (1991, 452–453). But perhaps one of the most candid, and bathetic, (non-)perorations would be the close of Humphrey’s article “Getting the Measure of Consciousness” (2008). Here, after alluding to the need for a programme of research that might even go into territory more usually associated with the self-help and New Age sections of libraries, Humphrey confesses to being “shocked” by the naïvety of his own conclusion, that “consciousness—on various levels—makes life more worth living”: We like being phenomenally conscious. We like the world in which we are phenomenally conscious. . . . and the enhanced sense of our own metaphysical importance has in the course of evolutionary history turned our lives around. (Humphrey 2008, 269)

But why evolutionary history? (For one thing, we don’t yet know whether being phenomenally conscious will ultimately turn out to have been evolutionarily advantageous.) Is consciousness not also conditioned within our cultural history, and is this not better explained in terms beyond neo-Darwinian ones that determine a priori the significance and consequences of consciousness only in their own evolutionary terms of reference?13 That such textual supplements remain supplements points to a reluctance fully to grasp the radical challenge of consciousness to epistemic boundaries, and fully to embrace the significance of the aesthetic, which, far from being “a pure pleasure technology,” represents its own sphere of truth.

Where Is Consciousness? The locus of consciousness may represent a more tractable (and fruitful) line of inquiry than the stymieing problem of its definition. Neuroscientific hardliners can ostensibly dispense with the where of consciousness pretty quickly: consciousness obtains nowhere but in the brain. Such an internalist view is argued from a scientific perspective by Gray (2004) and from a philosophical perspective by Fodor (2009). For internalists, consciousness essentially happens inside the skull, where brain activity includes the building of informational representations of external reality—presumably some form of replica of the world, privately experienced.14 Assumptions of internal mental representation have certainly been important to researchers in music cognition, and to associated theories of the musical mind (see, for example, Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983; Palmer and Krumhansl 1990; Shepard 1982). But since, as practitioners, musicians also have a particular stake in embodiment, many theorists of music and consciousness find affinities in theories of embodied consciousness and cognition. Even brain-centred theories of consciousness would argue for the brain as part of the body: Dennett (1991) refutes the brain-in-the-vat idea; while Antonio Damasio’s (1999) multi-levelled account of consciousness sees extended consciousness (another take on Edelman’s

662   David Clarke [2005] higher-order consciousness) emerging from a primary core consciousness that in turn rests on a proto-self founded on a continuous background monitoring by the brain of the body’s homoeostatic systems. But music also has investments beyond the computational and biological. Bennett Hogg, analysing consciousness in musical improvisation, draws on the notion of enactive cognition expounded by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993). Such a notion “fundamentally problematizes the validity of binaristic thinking, in particular the notions that body and mind are separable, and that an embodied consciousness is separable from the environment in which it exists”; moreover, it questions “the idea that consciousness is fundamentally concerned with mental representations” (Hogg 2011, 86). Hogg relates this position to Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical techniques (associated with his “Poor Theatre”) under which actors are encouraged to suspend mental judgement and think instinctively through their bodies; and he also links this conceit to Stockhausen’s principles of “intuitive music” as practised in works such as Aus der sieben Tagen (1968). Hogg cautions against a reading of such embodied practices that would end up in reinforcing the Cartesian mind–body dualism by simply inverting the terms. Instead, he makes a deconstructionist move that seeks to collapse not only the different agencies normally attributed to mind and body, but also the distinction between performer and instrument. He describes his realization that as an improvising violinist “[t]he inner states that I imagine being externalized onto the violin are not in themselves originary and instinctive, but have found their way inside, as it were, through the enactive nature of my own embodied consciousness and the inescapably culturally mediated condition of every object I interact with” (Hogg 2011, 87). In other words, the violin becomes as much an agent of consciousness as the improviser himself. Congruent with these ideas are Eric Clarke’s applications of James Gibson’s theory of ecological perception to musical cognition and listening (E.  Clarke  2005,  2012; Gibson 1979). On this view, perception and our relationship to the world are as much specified by structured information in the environment and the affordances of objects and spaces within it, as they are by the biological apparatus of our organism. Similar positions are found across the epistemic spectrum.15 Within the cognitive sciences, Andy Clark is one of the strongest advocates of an active externalism, which sees cognition—and with this the self—as continuous with processes in the environment and as socially extended (A. Clark 2008, 223, 231, 232; see also Clark and Chalmers 1998).16 Clark’s theory of extended mind goes beyond the claim “that human cognizing leans heavily on various forms of external scaffolding and support”; rather, the mind itself extends “beyond the bounds of skin and skull” (A. Clark 2008, 76), and may enlist nonbiological media in extensions of cognitive loops (81). “Such body- and world-involving cycles are best understood . . . as quite literally extending the machinery of mind out into the world,” Clark tells us, “[s]uch cycles supersize the mind” (xxvi). Hogg’s violin would be an example of such a non-biological extension out into (or in from) the field of culture. And indeed the field of history as well: as Ansuman Biswas (2011, 101) points out, “[b]y engaging with a given instrument I accept the proclivities and decisions of all those generations who have contributed to its design. The shapes and balances of their

Consciousness   663 bodies are figured into its size and materials. I echo those bodies and enter a larger social body when I pick up or sit at this trace of them.” The key role of culture in consciousness poses a challenge to internalist positions, just as it does to neo-Darwinists. One solution for such parties has been the metaphor of memes—a term coined by Dawkins to refer to culturally transmitted units such as “tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” that are able to replicate themselves by “propagating” from brain to brain (Dawkins 2006, 192). Dennett sees language (and arguably any cultural signifying system) as a meme-complex, out of which human beings spin a sense of Self (Dennett 1991, 199–210, 415–416). Indeed “human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes” (210; see also Blackmore 1999, 2003b). The paradox here is that while memes are accredited with agency, capable of “infesting” brains (Dennett  1991, 209), the human Self seems to have no comparable autonomy: in the end, it may be that “what you are is a program that runs on your brain’s computer” (430). No doubt this is intended as a salutary provocation out of some misleading intuitions; at the same time, such conclusions may arise from mistaking a metaphorical relationship between memes and genes (both are kinds of replicator) as an ontological reality. A more productive analysis of the location of consciousness in culture (and vice versa), using a different metaphor, comes from sociologist Roger Bartra in his book, Anthropology of the Brain (2014). From philosopher Colin McGinn he borrows the notion of the ­exocerebrum—meaning an evolutionary adaptation in which culture and its signifying ­systems act as a prosthesis to the brain: an external substitution system or a network of extrasomatic mechanisms that enable it to take on tasks that would otherwise be impossible (Bartra 2014, 6–7). While McGinn uses the exocerebrum as a conceit to illustrate the interiority of the brain as a problem, Bartra adapts it in order to support a theory of extended mind reminiscent of that of Clark and others; he suggests a reciprocal—symbiotic, rather than parasitic—relationship between culture and brain. Quoting phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, Bartra seeks to subvert habitual notions of consciousness premissed on a distinction between inside and outside: “consciousness is not a closed place, about which I might wonder how something enters it from outside, because it is, now and always, outside of itself ” (Changeux and Ricoeur 1998, 137, 141; as cited in Bartra 2014, 20). Significantly, Bartra’s study includes a chapter discussing music. Adapting ideas from Schopenhauer (without the metaphysics), and also drawing on Malcolm Budd (1985), Bartra argues that music is “a symbolic representation of internal emotional states whose neuronal structure lacks strictly representational components” (Bartra 2014, 87). Music represents a bridge between inner and outer: “besides representing internal states of self-consciousness, [it] is itself an external state of consciousness” (84). Moreover, The fact that symbols [a facet of external culture] are added to functions of [inner] feeling is what makes consciousness a process that cannot be explained simply through the observation of endocerebral mechanisms. The causal and explicative character of self-consciousness and the feelings on which it is based is explained by the fact that somatic functions join together with symbols.  (Bartra 2014, 93)

664   David Clarke These are just a few samples of accounts illustrating a gathering momentum behind theories of extended consciousness and cognition, to which perspectives from music (such as Krueger  2014) also contribute. Their suggestion that consciousness obtains across a space that is bigger than the interior of the skull has significant, potentially highly counter-intuitive, implications for epistemologies of consciousness. In the case of a performance of Wagner’s Meistersinger, to use an example rehearsed in this chapter, what might it mean to posit that consciousness fills the entire space of the opera house? As ever, we need to mind our language. Consciousness arises from, or inheres in, or is a consequence of the connections of many elements: the bodies and intentions of the performers and the audience (considered as individuals and as a collective), the composer, the abstract structures of the music, the “grain” of the singers’ voices, the playing of orchestral instruments (implicated in their physical construction and playing techniques, all derived from historical and culturally transmitted practices). These and much else, in addition to the squishy matter in the heads of all the human organisms present, are all determinants of consciousness. Putting it this way seems relatively uncontentious. Internalists and extended-mind proponents might even compromise on the related assertion that the brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for explaining consciousness.17 But a potential sticking point is whether the brain should be regarded as the seat of consciousness, or whether this should be seen as another, possibly deceptive metaphor. For while it is hard (for Westerners at least) to imagine consciousness without a brain, it is equally hard to imagine it without a body as an essential vehicle through which we have agency in and thus know the world, without a world to know, without the culture that makes it in any way intelligible, and without other individuals, aggregating into society, that make culture and understanding of the world possible—all are equally essential to consciousness. Ah yes, a “brainbound” proponent might say (to use Clark’s [2008] nomenclature), those elements are also necessary, but in the end it’s only in the brain that consciousness actually takes place. And internalists, who are supposedly also nondualists, in following this line will presumably want to argue that a brainbound consciousness exists only in, or as the action of, matter. So, then, which matter is responsible for consciousness (even if only as epiphenomenon)?18 Is consciousness present in any single neuron? In particular neuronal configurations at particular times (and others at other times)? In particular brain regions? Spread across the whole brain? And even if we could agree on a location or determinable mechanism (the famous “neural correlates of consciousness” debate— see, for example, Chalmers 1996; Crick and Koch 1990, 1995; Greenfield 2000, 163–193), would we be claiming that this particular configuration and activation of matter is consciousness (a curious way of putting it, but consistent with the logic of nondualism)? Or does it enable consciousness? If the latter, then how is this particular subset of matter any more or less relevant to my conscious state in the opera house than anything else that contributes to it: this oboe key, this crotchet in the printed copy the player is playing from, this seat in the upper circle I’m sitting in?19 Consciousness seems to be everywhere and nowhere. It is perhaps not surprising that following through the logic of arguments about consciousness can lead to seemingly

Consciousness   665 bizarre conclusions (see for example Galen Strawson’s [2006] arguments on why physicalism entails panpsychism)—but then maybe these are the only ones worth having. Where does an extended theory of consciousness stop in its enumeration of the elements in which it inheres? Bethany Lowe (2011) writes of a story within Buddhism in which a king asks his courtiers for an explanation of the intoxicating sound of the lute (vīṇ ā). The moral of the story is that this cannot be found in any single element of the instrument or of the conditions of playing it: “any piece of music or music-making event arises from a staggering concatenation of people, circumstances, traditions, recording and/or notation and/or oral transmission practices, instrument functioning, discourses, and so on, each of which even on its own is impressively complex” (118). The principle being rehearsed here is that of dependent origination (pratītya-samutpāda)—the idea that everything (including music, self, and consciousness) has no existence outside of its infinite connections with everything else. And this relates intimately to the concept of emptiness (śūnyatā)—the idea that any posited thing is devoid of autonomous existence (117). On this view, there is no single place where consciousness exists; and maybe it is not even a thing. As this is a book on Western music and philosophy (perhaps a regrettable limitation), these are arguments for another time and place. Nonetheless, they open up a much more salutary (and interesting) route than equally radical conclusions of Western brainbound scientism that construe consciousness as an illusion along the line of a conjurer’s trick (Dennett 2005, 57–75)—a somewhat nihilistic judgement on what it is that makes us fundamentally human. Equally significantly, this contrast suggests that the ultimate epistemological ground on which consciousness studies has to be conducted may not be one of explanation. Perhaps instead, consciousness is a matter of the meanings it discloses to us: a question of hermeneutics, requiring a more speculative form of philosophizing that would act as a critical corrective to certain forms of scientism.

The View from Ontology Here is one attempt at an epigrammatic definition of consciousness: Consciousness is the knowing of Being. This can be glossed in several ways. First, conscious beings are conscious to the extent they are aware of their world and hence of their being in it. (We may speculate that this may be on a continuum from the raw sentience of simple organisms to the higher-order consciousness characteristic of humans.)20 Hence, a further gloss on the epigram would be: consciousness is the act of beings (human beings included) coming to know their Being. However, putting it this way—as “beings”—posits a plurality of individuals (preconstituted as such), and implies that in their individuality they subsequently acquire consciousness. Yet, this sense of individual being arguably only emerges coterminously with consciousness. Thus, another gloss on the epigram might instead characterize Being (and knowing) as a unity: consciousness is Being’s knowing of itself. This implies Being as a universal state that inheres in and becomes conscious through

666   David Clarke individual existents. This tendency towards unity, or towards resisting a separation between knowing ego and known Being, could be pursued to its conclusion in a further gloss: in consciousness, knowing and Being become one. This is a notion that resonates with certain views of consciousness in Buddhist and Indian philosophy (for example, Advaita Vedānta), in addition to which A. H. Almaas (2016, 20) cites Plotinus: “in the Intellectual Principle itself, there is complete identity of Knower and known, and this not by way of domiciliation . . . but . . . by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing” (Plotinus 1991, 241). There is also a deliberate Heideggerian tone to my epigram, which I want to develop here. For if we accept phenomenology as essential to consciousness studies (because first-person experience is ineliminable from the debate), and if we accept consciousness as inhering in more than our brains (as also extending through our bodies and into the socially and culturally mediated world), then we need an understanding of Self and world more capacious than Husserl’s transcendental ego, and a different style of philosophizing.21 Although Heidegger abandons the term consciousness as he distances himself from Husserl, there are key aspects of his resulting ontology that can be suggestively reimplanted into thinking about consciousness, which can be sketched out here. Where much in consciousness studies is concerned with notions of the Self or subjectivity, Heidegger’s ontology uses the term Dasein (literally there-being, but usually left untranslated) to characterize the way humans experience being. As he puts it in Being and Time, Dasein is “distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger  1962, 32). It would not be too much of a travesty to replace “Being” with “consciousness”: as Dasein, our consciousness is an issue for us, whereas for rabbits or flatworms this seems not to be the case. This suggests that Dasein has affinities with empirical ideas of higher-order, or extended consciousness (Edelman 2005; Damasio 1999). The challenge that the knowing of Being poses to Dasein means that for Heidegger ontology (and we might also say consciousness studies) becomes a hermeneutic project: “ontology . . . remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this as its fundamental task” (1962, 31; italics in the original; see also Moran 2000, 234–237). One of Heidegger’s principal hermeneutic avenues is to argue that, for Dasein, Being means Being-in-the-world; and the world takes its distinctive form (its “worldhood”) through our (social, cultural, embodied) dealings with it, which are thoroughly implicated in entities such as tools or equipment (Zeug). There may be more than a superficial affinity between Being-in-the-world and theories of extended mind or theories such as Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, which foreground the mutualism of organism and environment (Gibson 1979). What Heidegger (1962, 98) terms the “readiness to hand” (Zuhandenheit) of a hammer would be represented by Gibson as its affordances. Its properties determine the way a craftsman deploys it as much as the craftsman himself does; this utterly mutual, embodied relationship in action epitomizes the way the craftsman knows the world (and the same would go, say, for a guitarist and his or her guitar). In addition to these cross-disciplinary resonances, we find a conceit in Heidegger’s Being and Time that has altogether more arresting implications for understanding

Consciousness   667 consciousness, and goes beyond the remit of empirical inquiry. This is his distinction between the ontic and the ontological—a distinction which is also relevant to the issue of disciplinarity in consciousness studies. For Heidegger, the ontic amounts to the study of entities: the things that disciplines conceive, or indeed construct, as their objects of inquiry. By contrast, the ontological is that territory which opens up when disciplines reach a limit point in their conceptualization of entities and need to look beyond their regulating horizon. Individual sciences or disciplines “examine entities as entities of such and such a type,” whereas ontologies “are prior to the ontical sciences and . . . provide their foundations” (Heidegger 1962, 31; see also Mulhall 1996, 4–5). Here is one provocative inference from this distinction: could it be that the failure within consciousness studies to come up with conclusive answers about the nature of consciousness (or even an agreed definition) has do with the fact that consciousness is being mistaken for an entity?22 In other words, is consciousness being treated as an ontic problem rather than also an ontological one? What if consciousness were not a thing (as Buddhists might also, if differently, argue)—that is, not a thing that could be known theoretically or conceptually? What if consciousness were instead that which makes the knowledge of things possible? Taking our cue from Heidegger, who did not disparage concern (Besorgen) for the ordinary everydayness of Being-in-the-world even as he sought pathways to a deeper unconcealing of Being, such a conjecture does not give cause for abandoning theoretical or conceptual inquiry into consciousness (hence the above allusions to cognate empirical terminologies). But it does point to a further level of Being—and commensurably different ways of knowing—to which we need to be open in order to get beyond conceptual (ontic) determinations of consciousness. Heidegger considers, for example, how the breakdown (Versagen) of tools or equipment can paradoxically disclose their normally concealed implication in our Being-in-the-world. His example in Being and Time is the craftsman’s hammer, but we might also consider how a broken violin string disrupts (and so reveals the nature of) our normal, intimately embodied connection with the instrument, the culturally transmitted knowledge of normative finger patterns, and so on. As John Richardson points out, this idea is taken further in the later Heidegger’s writings on art. For example, poetry effects “a breakdown in our relation to language” and in doing so “lights up our relation to both language and world” (Richardson 2012, 301). In Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, this moment of lighting up the world is achieved when words and music coalesce in song, as Walther (in Act 3, scene 2) finally levels with the poetic conventions of a mastersong while also pulling out something from his deeper relation to Being: he makes something authentic that goes beyond (ontic?) ­convention—a wresting of world from earth, as Heidegger might have put it, using his famous conceit from The Origin of the Work of Art (1993). Heidegger, for whom language was of paramount importance to philosophy, seemed generally oblivious to music’s potential for disclosing the ontological.23 It is Schopenhauer’s notion of the Will that is more usually linked to Wagner’s pursuit of the transcendent (though it would seem perverse to deny any resemblance whatsoever between Schopenhauer’s dualism of Will and representation, and Heidegger’s rendering

668   David Clarke of the ontological and ontic, or earth and world). The sublime endings of Tristan und Isolde (1859) and Götterdämmerung (1874)—examples of what Gabrielsson (2011) terms “strong experiences with music”—illustrate Schopenhauer’s view of music as a vehicle for transcending the Will. Yet Heidegger’s ontology also allows for the role of more everyday, vernacular experiences of music, regardless of how this possibility may have surprised him. I’m sitting in a café drafting this chapter, and suddenly the canned background music does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do, pulling me out of my ruminations and back out into the world. I’ve been caught unawares—which is sometimes how music has its way with us—by Etta James’s classic rendition of Mack Gordon and Harry Wallen’s 1941 song, “At last,” from her eponymous 1961 album. “At last,” she sings, “my love has come along”—and, oh my God, I’m on the edge of tears, a lump in my throat. My neurons and a cocktail of chemical neurotransmitters are no doubt busily at work during all of this; and, no less physically, the experience also arises from nowhere else than in the information encoded several times over in the recording of the song. The listening Self which I have become here—the state of consciousness I’m in—could to some extent be accounted for by a thoughtful semiotic analysis (as Naomi Cumming demonstrates in her monograph, The Sonic Self [2000]). Yet there is something more. Through many levels of mediation, James’s performance from long ago has broken through, and something in me has broken down. Neither the sentimental string backing nor the melody and harmony—all elements one could describe and define formalistically (ontically)— are responsible for moving me to some other place (which is actually right here and now). It is of course James’s voice, and her soul singing style. The attenuated blue note on “love” (approached by a glissando, quitted by a short run), the way she delivers the opening words, “At last” (spanning a perfect fourth), makes vowel sounds pregnant with her voice (adding some more when the text gives out, “oh, yeah, yeah”): these features which fill only the opening few seconds leave their mark on the entire song, telling of a chronic yearning and emptiness not cancelled by the subsequent expression of emotional fulfilment. It’s the way these two sets of feelings are held together that makes the performance so powerful (compare this with the altogether more contented, less tortuous feelings in the rendition by Ella Fitzgerald with Joe Pass on guitar). All too plainly this is a song about romantic love, yet James makes us conscious of something deeper (to which love indeed points): of what it is to come home into Being.24

Gathering Around the Void Simplifying to the extreme, I would claim, after Heidegger, that the fundamental concern of consciousness studies (acknowledged or otherwise) is the meaning of Being. Anxieties around materialism, scientific and evolutionary reductionism, the status of the Self and its inner experience, our ontological relationship with the world, the legitimacy of what we value as human: all these consciously or unconsciously underlie the

Consciousness   669 drive to understand consciousness. Consciousness studies circles around a void previously occupied in the West by religious belief—a space that since the rationalizing, objectifying impetus of the Enlightenment has been vacated (even putatively liquidated) by empirical science and instrumentalizing forms of reason. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning. . . . Substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and existence: to define these concepts in a way appropriate to the times was a concern of philosophy after Bacon—but science managed without such categories” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979, 5). Yet consciousness, which is known through our embodied, subjectively experienced Being-in-the-world, cannot be studied without reference to these fields of enquiry. One way or another the void continues to exert its influence; its real presence registers across the most disparate approaches to the subject, often as a theoretical moment of negation, or sometimes as just plain repression (some look into the void, while others look the other way). Dennett is able to explain consciousness (and on his own terms consummately so) by limiting the philosophical dimensions of his inquiry to what is tractable to empirical analysis, and declaring the rest unnecessary (Dennett  1991, 454–455). Blackmore declares consciousness an illusion—a conclusion probably informed by her Zen as well as her scientific practice (Blackmore  2003a, 411–414, and passim;  2011). McGinn (1999, 31–76, 205–231, and passim), sympathetic to scientific attitudes, posits that we may never be able to understand consciousness because, as a result of our evolutionary history, we simply do not have the cognitive apparatus to do so—a view with which Pinker (1999, 561–566) concurs. But one could surmise that the brains we have are entirely fit for purpose, it’s just that we should try running a different epistemology on them. For Buddhists, the black hole that McGinn is staring into may be the underlying emptiness of reality; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993, 217–235) argue that there is scope within Buddhism for finding models for consciousness (and for living) that can embrace groundlessness, or philosophical anti-foundationalism, without descending into nihilism. For Heidegger, the disclosing of the truth of Being may be possible only through a subversive re-envisioning of the relationship between language, concepts, and thinking—a tactic far removed from empirical methods.25 Music, which represents a nonverbal, non-conceptual knowing of Being, can also sometimes light up the void. Experienced temporally and socially, music forms and reveals our Being before our very ears. It both articulates our inner phenomenology and represents its trace, potentially making our innermost subjective life public (a kind of deep heterophenomenology, to adapt Dennett’s term). My critique of scientism in the preceding is not to dismiss the significance of scientific approaches to consciousness, but to underline the fact that their epistemologies, on the one hand demonstrably powerful, yet also abstracting, objectifying, and reductive, tend to leave a remainder (a void) that, paradoxically, may be what is most essential to consciousness (the knowing of Being). In music’s case, there is no doubt that certain rigorously developed epistemologies—think, for example, of Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s generative theory, acknowledged by computationalists such as Pinker—have indeed

670   David Clarke instructively modelled syntactic principles that underpin the cognition of many forms of tonal music. Yet it is in the field (or void) behind or beyond those formalisms—in the felt, visceral event of a musical performance, in the lived moment of apprehension—that selves come to know themselves, that a world is unconcealed, that consciousness is disclosed. This may be in rarefied moments of transcendence, for example, the peak experiences of the opera house. But it may be no less in the vernacular everyday, as when a singer like Etta James cuts through into your soul. What we hear in such moments is not just a personal, autobiographical self, but also a self constructed as an R & B singer, hence occupying a place in a socio-cultural world; and also (from that place) a subject voicing her—and my—Being. Here consciousness extends from the recorded trace of an individual into a coinhabited world; and charting all its dimensions implies a truly multidisciplinary endeavour. Arguably the future development of the study of consciousness requires no less than a holistic approach in which terms such as brain, mind, self, subject, world, and Being (as well as the relationships between them) might all feature. On the one hand, it would be perverse to deny the potential significance of research from neuroscience; on the other, that significance can only be judged and made effective through an interpretative framework that lies beyond the ontic concerns of such individual disciplines. All of this points to the continuing importance of epistemology, phenomenology, ontology, and philosophy more widely to the debate. Further, as I have sought to argue in this chapter, music has a vital role in these developments. For, as Bowie (2007, 46) puts it, “it is when the limits of philosophy become apparent that other means of revealing meaning in the world, like music, may become most significant.” If we believe that music represents something more than a sideshow to fundamental ontological questions, that it offers a window into our Being-in-the-world and hence overlaps with concerns of philosophy more usually broached through language, then it is clear that music has a critical place in that most fundamental of philosophical issues, the nature and meaning of consciousness.

Notes 1. These volumes (Clarke and Clarke  2011, and Herbert, Clarke, and Clarke  2019) present thirty-seven chapters in total, which, while thematizable (as implied by the books’ subtitles), nonetheless reveal a highly heterogeneous picture. 2. I have slightly modified the alternative English translation given in Derrida 1976, 158. 3. And indeed this licence might extend to granting a certain semantic ambiguity between the object of study and the study of (or discourse around) the object, since the way we understand the former is unavoidably mediated by the latter. Hence in this account “music” might signify the sonic phenomenon (and/or its cultural practice) as well as its academic study—that is, “music studies.” 4. On Dennett’s view, “distributed content-discriminations yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain . . . at any point in time there are multiple ‘drafts’ of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain” (Dennett 1991, 113). Hence, an utterance such as a sentence (or in this

Consciousness   671 case a song) arises out of a “pandemonium” (231–242) of multiple possibilities being perpetually edited or rewritten. This model (which Dennett adapts from Oliver Selfridge [1959]) is discussed further below. For an application to music cognition, see Jackendoff 1991. 5. The argument here resonates partly with notions of “voice” in studies such as Cone 1974 and Abbate 1991. 6. These themes are treated in Clarke and Clarke 2011, in chapters by Bennett Hogg, Jörg Fachner, Benny Shanon, Eugene Montague, Ruth Herbert, Tia DeNora, Ansuman Biswas, Bethany Lowe, and Richard Elliott. 7. See also Eric Clarke’s discussion of multiple drafts in E. Clarke 2011, 206–208. 8. Anecdotally, I refer here to my own experience of learning a bandiś (composition) in Indian classical vocal music. In the khyāl style, melodies often bear a supple relationship to the underlying rhythmic structure, their discreet ornamentation not always obviously related to the text underlay. Other song traditions afford comparable cognitive challenges. 9. Dennett’s eliminativist position is discussed in Feser 2005, 117–121. 10. In effect Humphrey is talking about a phenomenal or subjective present. He quotes his own earlier writing: “The ‘physical present’, strictly speaking, is a mathematical abstraction of infinitely short duration, and nothing happens in it. By contrast the ‘subjective present’ is arguably the carrier and container of our conscious life” (Humphrey 2006, 113, citing Humphrey 1992, 170). 11. This view resonates with a Husserlian account of internal time consciousness, which I discuss further in D. Clarke 2011. 12. Broadly speaking, “universal Darwinism” has come to mean the application of ideas in Darwinism to other disciplinary spheres, including economics (discussed sceptically by Witt 2003) and culture. Dawkins first used the term in a biological context (1983), then retroactively applied it to his theory of “memes” in later editions of The Selfish Gene (see, for example, Dawkins 2006, 322). Plotkin’s 1994 book represents another canonical application, to psychology. Blackmore (1999, 2003a, 2003b) is also an exponent of universal Darwinism and “memetics.” 13. I explore this point in my 2014 review of Schulkin 2013 (see D. Clarke 2014). For critiques of “ultra-Darwinism,” see Fodor 2007 and Gould 1997. See also Donald (2001, 1–4, and passim) on “neo-Darwinian Hardliners.” 14. See Ricoeur’s critique of this idea from a phenomenological standpoint in Changeux and Ricoeur 2000, 162. 15. For a helpful digest of the epistemic territory see Chemero 2011, 17–44. Chemero’s own account in Radical Embodied Cognitive Science is built on Gibson’s ecological theory. 16. In general, externalist positions argue that states of mind or consciousness cannot be understood without reference to a world or environment beyond the subject. For Clark and Chalmers, active externalism is “based on the active role of the environment [in the immediate here and now] in driving cognitive processes” (Clark and Chalmers 2008, 7). 17. As Roger Penrose and Eric Clarke seemed to do in a dialogue in the closing session of the Second International Conference on Music and Consciousness, Oxford University, 2015. 18. Epiphenomenalism maintains that “events in the brain and body produce events in the mind, but that those mental events in turn have no causal influence on what happens in the brain and body. They are mere ‘epiphenomena,’ ineffectual by-products of the operation of the physical processes of the brain” (Feser 2005, 43).

672   David Clarke 19. A related argument is made in A. Clark 2008, 86–88. 20. More radically, proponents of panpsychism would argue that mind (sentience, consciousness) inheres across the entirety of the natural world, going all the way down even into allegedly inanimate matter, albeit at a remote or proto-level (see Seager and AllenHermanson 2015). Strawson (2006) argues that such a view, however counter-intuitive, is the ultimate corollary of a physicalist (or materialist) view of the universe. 21. “Transcendental ego” refers to an inner “I” that Husserl believed was the condition of possibility of experience, the foundation of consciousness, which constitutes the world through its intentional acts: it is “something essentially necessary; and, as something absolutely identical throughout every possible change in mental processes, it cannot in any sense be a really inherent part or moment of the mental processes themselves” (Husserl 1982, 132). 22. Richardson (2012, 289) similarly points to Heidegger’s argument about metaphysics’ tendency to treat Being as an entity. 23. This lacuna is discussed by Bowie (2007, 261–308). For some recent musicological applications of Heideggerian thought see Harper-Scott 2012; Nielsen 2013; and O’Rourke 2014. 24. As Jerrold Levinson has pointed out to me, this (non-fictional) episode coincidentally resonates with a similar scene (and similarly phenomenologically inflected) at the end of Sartre’s Nausea (Sartre 2000, 246–253). 25. For an indication of how, see Richardson 2012, 277–323, esp. 311–321.

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674   David Clarke Dawkins, Richard. 2006. The Selfish Gene. 30th anniversary ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin. Dennett, Daniel C. 2005. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Descartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donald, Merlin. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donald, Merlin. 2001. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton. Edelman, Gerald  M. 2005. Wider than the Sky: A Revolutionary View of Consciousness. London: Penguin. Feser, Edward. 2005. Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Oneworld. Fodor, Jerry. 2007. “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings.” London Review of Books 29 (20): 19–22. Fodor, Jerry. 2009. “Where Is My Mind?” London Review of Books 31 (3): 13–15. Gabrielss0n, Alf. 2011. Strong Experiences with Music: Music is More than just Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gould, Stephen J. 1997. “Darwinian Fundamentalism.” New York Review of Books 44 (10): 34–37. Gray, Jeffrey. 2004. Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenfield, Susan. 2000. The Private Life of the Brain: Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Harper-Scott, J. P. E. 2012. The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. The Origin of the Work of Art. In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 139–212. London: Routledge. Herbert, Ruth, David Clarke, and Eric Clarke, eds. 2019. Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hogg, Bennett. 2011. “Enactive Consciousness, Intertextuality, and Musical Free Improvisation: Deconstructing Mythologies and Finding Connections.” In Clarke and Clarke 2011, 79–93. Humphrey, Nicholas. 1992. A History of the Mind. London: Chatto and Windus. Humphrey, Nicholas. 2006. Seeing Red. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Humphrey, Nicholas. 2008. “Getting the Measure of Consciousness.” Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement 173: 264–269. Husserl, Edmund. 1982. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jackendoff, Ray. 1991. “Musical Parsing and Musical Affect.” Music Perception 9, no. 2 (Winter): 199–230. Klein, Peter D. 2005. “Epistemology.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Tim Crane. Accessed February 25, 2020. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/overview/ epistemology/v-2.

Consciousness   675 Krueger, Joel. 2014. “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind.” Frontiers in Psychology: Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 4 (article 1003): 1–13. Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lowe, Bethany. 2011. “ ‘In the heard, only the heard . . .’: Music, Consciousness, and Buddhism.” In Clarke and Clarke 2011, 111–135. McGinn, Colin. 1999. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Mithen, Steven. 2005. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London and New York: Routledge. Mulhall, Stephen. 1996. Heidegger and “Being and Time.” London: Routledge. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October): 435–450. Nielsen, Nanette. 2013. “Ernst Krenek’s ‘Problem of Freedom’ in Jonny spielt auf.” TwentiethCentury Music 10, no. 1 (March): 25–57. O’Rourke, Michelle. 2014. The Ontology of Generative Music Listening. PhD diss., University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Accessed February 25, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2764. Palmer, Caroline, and Carol  L.  Krumhansl. 1990. “Mental Representations for Musical Meter.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 16 (4): 728–741. Pinker, Steven. 1999. How the Mind Works. London: Penguin. Plotinus. 1991. The Enneads. London: Penguin. Plotkin, Henry  C. 1994. Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollen, Daniel A. 1999. “On the Neural Correlates of Visual Perception.” Cerebral Cortex 9, no. 1 (January): 4–19. Pollen, Daniel  A. 2003. “Explicit Neural Representations, Recursive Neural Networks and Conscious Visual Perception.” Cerebral Cortex 13, no. 8 (August): 807–814. Richardson, John. 2012. Heidegger. London: Routledge. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2000. Nausea. London: Penguin. Schulkin, Jay. 2013. Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Seager, William, and Sean Allen-Hermanson. 2015. “Panpsychism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed February 25, 2020. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/panpsychism/. Selfridge, Oliver. 1959. “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning.” Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes. London: HM Stationery Office. Unpublished. Shepard, Roger N. 1982. “Structural Representations of Musical Pitch.” In The Psychology of Music, edited by Diana Deutsch, 344–390. New York: Academic Press. Strawson, Galen. 2006. “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10–11): 3–31. Tolbert, Elizabeth. 2001a. “The Enigma of Music, the Voice of Reason: ‘Music’, ‘Language’, and Becoming Human.” New Literary History 32, no. 3 (Summer): 451–465. Tolbert, Elizabeth. 2001b. “Music and Meaning: An Evolutionary Story.” Psychology of Music 29, no. 1 (April): 84–94.

676   David Clarke Tomlinson, Gary. 2015. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Varela, Francisco J., Eleanor Thompson, and Evan Rosch. 1993. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Witt, Ulrich. 2003. The Evolving Economy: Essays on the Evolutionary Approach to Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

chapter 33

Evolu tion Stephen Davies

When and why did music-making first originate? We do not know. Music can be made without the use of artefacts that would persist in the archaeological record. And it can be made with items that do persist, such as resonant stalagmites (Montelle 2004), that are not usually recognizable for their musical adoption (but see Dams 1985 on when this recognition is possible). For these reasons, music could have been practised for millennia in prehistory without this being evident now. As a result, the discussion of music’s origins and evolutionary significance must be speculative. This speculation need not be entirely idle, however, when considered against the backdrop of a number of relevant issues. The issue of music’s origins and functions is not directly philosophical, I allow. But applied philosophy is concerned with the critical evaluation of arguments and of the bearing of complex bodies of evidence, especially where the theories involved tend to outstrip the available empirical support. So the writings on this topic, which come from a wide spread of disciplines, are fair game for philosophical discussion. The first task is to consider evidence for the view that musicality has ancient, biological roots. Is music-making pan-cultural? Do all and only humans make music? Despite their manifest differences, are there any features common to the musics of the world? Considering possible connections between our music behaviours and our evolved human nature involves delving into the conditions under which musicality originated and first developed. It also involves trying to distinguish modes of auditory processing and vocalization that are primarily musical from those that are primarily linguistic (assuming this can be done in a manner that is not ethnocentrically question-begging, as is doubted in Wachsmann 1971 and Robertson-DeCarbo 1976). And it also requires separating both of these from the auditory processing with which we generally make sense of our noisy world. There are two overall strategies that can be adopted in trying to argue that music originally served as an evolutionary adaptation by improving the reproductive success of those who were biologically inclined towards making it over those who were not, with the eventual outcome that there was selection for musicality and music-making.

678   Stephen Davies The first approach is to look at the development of the physiological conditions that were necessary for musicality and that probably marked the emergence of musical behaviours. Of special importance here would be the existence of inherited neural circuits dedicated to musical functions and the timing of their appearance. But, as we will see, there is not agreement about whether these exist or about whether their non­existence shows that music is not an adaptation. One complicating factor is the brain’s inherent plasticity. Musical practice or exposure can change it considerably, so it is not always easy to distinguish inherited from acquired structures. A second major complication concerns the fact that both language and music share many parts of the brain and we are not certain which came first. The second approach considers the evolutionarily valuable functions music might have served at the time when first it appeared. For instance, did it create a mutual bond between mothers and their helpless, highly dependent babies? Or was the musician more sexually desirable than his non-musical lookalike? (I write “his” deliberately; according to the common version of this second theory, music is a form of male courtship display.) Or did music cement the group and confirm its common values? Or was some combination of effects involved? One problem with this second approach is that music is so multifunctional, sometimes in conflicting ways—it can be used both to include others and to exclude them, for example—that it is difficult to identify what was initially beneficial to the fecundity of its possessors.

Some Central Questions Is Music Apparent in Every Known Culture and Do Many Members of the Culture Engage With It? If music is not only pan-cultural but also practised universally, and if the world’s many musics share crucial features and parameters, this would suggest, at the very least, that it is an ancient practice and that, most likely, it was subject to selection by evolutionary forces. This is not to deny cultural influence and wide differences between musics, or the effects of self-reflection and historical change on music of any given place, but is to look past these to seek some underlying core. No culture has been discovered without music (D.  Brown  1991; Nettl  2000). The music of a culture is usually distinctive to some degree and there is no evidence that music was spread originally through cultural contact from a primary source. Moreover, though one culture might favour rhythmic complexity where another features rich harmony, the music of all cultures is highly developed and is often accompanied by musictheoretic terms and notions. Music everywhere is valued. Skilled performers and composers are esteemed. (Even in cultures in which new songs are dreamed and come as gifts of the gods, those who dream the better songs are recognized for doing so.) Not

Evolution   679 only is music pan-cultural, engagement with it is virtually universal (Blacking 1973). Whether made in groups, pairs, or singly, in hunter-forager cultures everyone participates. They sing melodically, beat out rhythms, or dance in time. Even in the modern West, where amateurs are distinguished from professionals and listening is more common than performing, most people sing along with their favourite tunes where this is socially acceptable, join in with the national anthem, and so on.

Despite Their Many, Manifest Differences, Do the Musics of the World’s Cultures Share Any Universal Features That Are Not a Consequence of the Domination of Any One Culture or of Cultural Transmission? A number of structural principles are regularly put forward as more or less universal. Octaves are treated as equivalent (that is, as the same note, but higher or lower); scales are organized with between five and seven notes, a centring tone, some uneven intervals, and usually a perfect fifth or fourth; simultaneously sounded notes with low, simple ratios are perceived as more stable and less tense than ones with high, complex ratios. Moreover, all listeners seek pattern and continuity according to standard gestalt principles that track repetition, sequence, and closure. (Representative references are Nettl  2000; Justus and Hutsler  2005; McDermott and Hauser  2005; Higgins  2006; Stevens and Byron 2009; Stevens 2012; Brown and Jordania 2013. For an apparent exception to the preference for simple harmonic ratios, see McDermott et al. 2016.) Some aspects of temporal processing in music appear to be universal (Drake and Bertrand 2003) as do proportional tempo-keeping (Epstein 1988), perhaps mirroring the pace of physiological processes. The claim about universality might be questioned. The intervals of the Javanese slendro scale are all approximately equal (though the differences are not negligible (Perlman and Krumhansl 1996)). And modernist Western classical music might use all twelve notes of the equal-tempered scale, avoid treating any as a centring tone, shun metric regularity, repetition, and closure, and eschew harmonies with simple ratios (such as fifths and fourths). What is probably true is that at least one of the musical kinds in any culture conforms to the stereotype. The Javanese pelog scale has unequal intervals and most popular Western music is based on the major scale, a regular metre, and easily followed patterns. One musical type with a claim to universality is the lullaby. Typically, lullabies have descending melodic contours and soothing, smooth, expressive qualities (Fernald 1992; Unyk et al. 1992; Trehub, Unyk, and Trainor 1993a, 1993b). The expressive effect of lullabies is quite likely a result of their elaboration of the prosodic features of infant-directed speech—a highly expressive and inflected mode of vocalization adopted by parents in all cultures when they interact vocally with newborns. In that case, the universal effects are not specific to the fact that lullabies are music, but depend rather on musical aspects

680   Stephen Davies of a vocal form. Infant-directed speech would not normally be regarded as music. It is musical, however, to the extent that it highlights pitch differences and rhythmic repetition, even if it does not possess the full range of features (tonality, regular tempo, metre, rhythm, balanced phrasing) that are characteristic of music’s most familiar and basic forms. But as is discussed below, it is a possible precursor both of music and of language. Cross-cultural agreement on the expression of some basic emotions in music has been presented as indicating a universal basis for such recognitions (Fritz et al. 2009). (For a more sober assessment of the cross-cultural evidence, see Thompson and Balkwill 2010, and for criticism of a number of published studies, see Davies 2011.) It seems unlikely that the expressive character of all foreign music is universally accessible, however, since some such music can be very difficult for foreigners to follow and anticipate successfully. But the relevant universal might be this: to those at home with its given type, music is experienced as expressive of emotion and among such listeners there is high agreement at a general level about what is expressed. Staying with the cross-cultural, even if we cannot always recognize the expressive tone of foreign music or appreciate its intricacies, it is perhaps noteworthy that foreign music almost always is recognizable as music (just as foreign languages are almost always recognizable as languages). And through exposure, we can bootstrap our way into foreign music (Huron 2006, 47–55; Higgins 2012, 78–105) and, over time, grasp its conventions and principles. Just as a listener can move with ease from one musical style to another—from blues to jazz to medieval church music to nineteenth-century Romantic classical music—so she might grasp Chinese opera, Japanese kabuki, and African thumb-piano music.

How Do Infants Respond to Music? If babies displayed an innate understanding of music, that would surely suggest that it is a hard-wired capacity. The evidence for this is equivocal or negative, however. Babies respond differently to “good” and “bad” melodies, to “concords” and “discords” and it is sometimes said that their reactions have an emotionally valenced character (according to the frontal hemisphere in which the response is processed, the one being associated with positive evaluations or experiences and the other with negative ones) (Trehub, Thorpe, and Trainor 1990; Trainor and Trehub 1994; Trehub 2003a). It is not at all straightforward to identify these reactions to musical stimuli as evidence of innate musical predispositions, however. Even newborns might not be musical innocents; they hear music when in the womb. And the experiments tend to be performed on babies of six to nine months, who have already been exposed to music. Besides, the studies show that babies pay more (positive) attention to some musical sounds than to others, but this does not show that these reactions are to music as such, as opposed to relying on processing directed to the general environ-

Evolution   681 ment or anticipating the comprehension of language. (Reservations along these lines are expressed in Justus and Hutsler  2005; McDermott and Hauser  2005; and Patel 2008, 377–386. These authors similarly object to studies that infer from individuals whose musicality is affected by neural deficits to what is innate and musicspecific in undamaged people.) Nevertheless, babies as young as eighteen months make up melodies structured more in terms of contour than pitch (Ball  2010) and pitch-structured, metrically regular vocalizing is in place before a child is five years of age (Trehub 2003a, 2003b). Compared to their acquisition of reading and writing, music behaviours emerge spontaneously in young children.

How Do Non-Human Animals Respond to Music? Plainly many non-human animals can hear music, but it is not clear how they cognize it (Wallaschek 1891). For instance, cotton-top tamarins do not show a preference for consonance over dissonance (McDermott and Hauser 2005). The experience of notes at the octave being the same is crucial to how humans hear music. Apparently octave equivalence is experienced also by a number of non-human animals. When trained to respond (for example, by salivating in anticipation of food) to a note of a given pitch, a number of animals respond more (that is, salivate more) to the octave than to any other “wrong” note (Lerdahl and Jackendoff  1983). Rhesus monkeys identify six- to seven-note musical passages as the same when they are transposed to the octave or double octave, but not when transposed to the fifth or twelfth (Wright et al. 2000), but it is not clear how to interpret this result. (Or what is the influence of their living in labs with piped music or TVs, see McDermott and Hauser 2005.) A number of bird species have absolute pitch (Weiseman et al. 2006), as do a (small) minority of humans. The relevant behaviours and discriminations fall far short of the human reaction to and following of music. (For instance, we recognize melodies transformed and transposed in many ways, and absolute pitch is not necessary for this capacity.) And dogs and monkeys do not act in musical ways outside the experimental situation. Rather than providing evidence of animal musicality, these data are better interpreted as implying that many of the pitch recognitions and experiences crucial to humanity’s musical experience first evolved in other, older species as part of general auditory processing. One distinctive aspect of the human response to music is entrainment—matching movement to the pulse of the music (and perhaps also matching mood to its expressive character). No other species are known to entrain in this way in the wild. However, individual parrots have been known to “dance” in time with music (Fitch 2009; Patel et al. 2009). When a Californian sea lion was trained to bob in time with music (Cook et al. 2013), this unusual phenomenon was widely reported in popular news media.

682   Stephen Davies

Do any Non-Human Animals Make Music? There can be no denying that some creatures—most notably, birds—make attractive musical sounds. Those who would claim songbirds as musicians (for example, Hartshorne 1973) rightly point out that species’ songs are inherited only in outline and learning is involved in perfecting them, with the result that song dialects are common (Whaling 2000). But I would expect more for music: a freedom of invention or rendition that results in generativity or creative development. Change in birdsong is not of this kind, but looks instead to be random and accidental (Davies  2012; but see Merker  2012; for more general arguments and reference to other animals, see Mâche  2000; Marler  2000). By contrast with birdsong, something like generativity occurs in humpback whale song, with the “song” changing significantly each season (Payne 2000; Merker 2012). We can leave the issue undecided, because it is plain that our species is the most emphatically musical and that songbirds and whales are not the ancestors from whom we inherited our musicianship. About six million years ago we shared an ancestor in common with the great apes; one branch led from it to them and another to us. Singing evolved on several different occasions in the primate lineage (Geissmann 2000) but it is not apparent in the line from our common ancestor to the apes, whose vocalizations give vent to feelings but lack musical control or complexity. Accordingly, we should anticipate that musicality arose either with us or with an earlier species on our (the hominin) evolutionary branch.

Music and Evolution: African Origins The point of the questions so far asked was to establish if all and only humans make music and if there is evidence of a music-specific, biologically inherited component to our doing so. The data are inconclusive, but they are sufficiently suggestive to encourage us to dig more deeply. The ethologist Ellen Dissanayake (1988) suggests that, if a pattern of behaviour is universal, ancient, and intrinsically pleasurable, this provides strong evidence that the behaviour was selected by evolutionary forces in the past. Indeed, she thinks these three qualities are the hallmarks of evolutionary adaptations. (This last claim might go too far—see Davies 2012, 186–187—though evolutionary explanations will be appropriate to many behaviours with these features.) Music apparently meets these conditions. As has been argued already, music is pancultural and universal, as well as being highly valued because, among other things, it is a source of pleasure (Brattico, Brattico, and Jacobsen  2009). Musical behaviours are rewarding to the extent of often being self-motivating. Is music-making also ancient? The earliest surviving musical instruments crafted for their musical function are about

Evolution   683 40,000 years old (Conard, Malina, and Münzel 2009). But these are sophisticated artefacts and the improvisational use of what came to hand as beaters and rattles is likely much older and older still, surely, is the use of the voice as a musical instrument (Gamble 2012; Morley 2013). In addition, we might reason as follows: given that sophisticated but different forms of music are found in every culture and people, though the groups concerned have often been isolated for a very long time; and given also that our species originated in Africa and later spread to other parts of the globe; then sophisticated forms of music must have existed earlier in Africa. Given its ubiquity and complexity, music left Africa with Homo sapiens emigrants, rather than being invented subsequently in every isolated community. (A similar argument has been applied to the history of syntactically complex languages [Gibson 2007; Collins 2013].) So, when did members of our species leave Africa? After an earlier visit by Homo sapiens to the Middle East and perhaps further, the current consensus puts the global spread of our species as initiated from Africa about 60,000 years ago (Wells 2002; Finlayson 2009). By the earlier reasoning, sophisticated forms of music must have predated that. This conclusion is disputed by Gary Tomlinson (2015), who dates discrete-pitch, metred music to 40,000–20,000 years ago, which was a period when widely dispersed, small groups of Homo sapiens occupied much of Europe and Asia, as well as Africa. He suggests that this form of music was invented independently in many places and cultures. I find the previous argument more persuasive than this alternative, however. And we shall shortly get to further, indirect evidence of music’s antiquity. The approach we turn to next considers the physiological (and social) underpinnings of musical production and appreciation.

Physiological Preconditions for Musical Vocal Behaviours At What Stage of Human Evolution Were the Physiological, Cognitive, and Social Resources Necessary for Music Production and Appreciation (That is, Musicality) in Place? Extended musical vocalization in hominins requires fine breath and tongue control, a descended larynx, and the capacities to control pitch, to generate beat-structured rhythmic patterns, and to recognize and remember occurrences of these. Relevant physiological evidence takes several forms: fine tongue control requires an enlarged hypoglossal canal and breath control demands extensive thoracic nerve structures. Hearing should be sensitive to the pitch-bands that are most prominent in speech and the environment. The relevant cognitive resources can be suggested by the external shape of the brain as

684   Stephen Davies reflected by the inner cranium and by brain size more generally. The social circumstances conducive to the production of music would be ones in which members of groups interacted and communicated extensively and in which coordination and cooperation were vital. Entraining with the beat of the music and with the movements of others also would be crucial to marry music with dance. The required physiological capacities and social conditions for music-making may have been in existence some 500,000 years ago (Mithen  2005; Gamble  2012; Morley 2013). Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 190,000 years old. We descended from a previous species, Homo heidelbergensis, which also gave rise to the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Europe about 300,000 years ago. Our species overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe from about 40,000–30,000 years ago, when they became extinct. So, if we extrapolate from the capacities to the behaviours, it may be that the first musicians were an ancestral form of humans. (For reservations about just this kind of extrapolation, see Dubreuil  2011.) Homo heidelbergensis had large brains, was highly social, and traded goods over hundreds of kilometres (Stringer 2011). Intellectually and physically, they had what it takes to make and enjoy listening to music. Meanwhile, when we met our cousins, the Neanderthals, it is possible that they sang. (There is no evidence of Neanderthal musical instruments, however, while our species was making them at the time.) It might be objected, as does Tomlinson (2015), that these ancestral species did not have the cognitive sophistication to produce what we would recognize as music. He reasons that music requires combinatorial and hierarchical modes of cognition, and considers as evidence for when these arose the much later emergence of multi-part tools and the like. In fact, though, there is evidence of composite (multi-part) tools as long as 285,000 years ago (McBrearty 2007). And in hunter-forager rituals, children standardly join the group’s singing and dancing long before they master abstract modes of thinking. Moreover, the human capacity for combinatorial and hierarchical modes of cognition, rather than being foundationally abstract and symbolic, may be better interpreted as a consequence of the emergence of a much older capacity for motor rehearsal (see Stout and Chaminade 2012). So Tomlinson’s criteria for music-making might be inappropriate. Debates about the dating in our species of the emergence of “symbolic thinking” (aka psychological or behavioural modernity) are too complex to consider here, but it is often associated in the literature with religion and art, including music, the adoption of insignia and decorations, burial with grave goods, and so forth. There is no unambiguous archaeological evidence of such behaviours in Homo heidelbergensis. And while it is now widely agreed that Neanderthals were unfairly disparaged in the past, only a comparatively few signs of such behaviours became apparent in them, and then mainly after their contact with us (Finlayson 2009). In response to this concern, Iain Morley (2013) makes the reasonable case that musicmaking of a quite developed kind can be more about emotional expression and group coordination and entrainment than about abstract thinking. Individuals with mental deficits can be highly musical. And as just noted, even young children can be drawn to participate fully in the group’s dancing and singing. Music-making is a practical skill that

Evolution   685 calls for “know how” but need not require “knowing that,” the capacity verbally to cognize and articulate what is done (Davies 2004). What matters, then, is not whether Homo heidelbergensis was a great thinker but whether she was inclined to vocalize her feelings in a musical fashion, perhaps while interacting with her baby or while cooperating with her fellows. If her group celebrated their successes and mourned their losses, these ancients could have found applications for the musical potentials that they possessed. So we have a time frame for music’s origins: some time after about 500,000 years ago and before about 60,000 years ago. This is consistent with more general work on the development of communication (see Levinson and Holler 2014).

Are There Any Music-Specific Neural Circuits? Is There a Unique Combination of Neural Circuits Dedicated to Making and Processing Music? If some neural circuits were exclusive to music-making or appreciation, this would provide strong evidence that such behaviours are the product of evolutionary selection. Unfortunately, there is no agreement on the matter (see Rebuschat et al. 2012). Some think there are such circuits. (For example, S. Brown 2000a; Huron 2003; Peretz and Coltheart  2003; Feist  2007). Others do not. (For example, Justus and Hutsler  2005; Patel  2008; Ball  2010). The evidence is inconclusive (McDermott and Hauser  2005). Morley (2013) suggests that what might be distinctive to music is the combination of different neural regions that it activates. One difficulty lies in distinguishing acquired neural circuits from innate ones (McDermott and Hauser 2005); the brain is very plastic. Another problem is that music might piggyback on neural structures evolved originally for processing the wider soundscape. A third is the huge overlap in brain regions used both by language and by music (Justus and Hutsler 2005; Patel 2008; Koelsch 2012; Rebuschat et al. 2012, pt. 4; Arbib 2013, pt. 4). Moreover, both music and language are neurally processed in similar ways (Patel 2008; Fenk-Oczlon and Fenk 2009; Koelsch 2012). What look like modules for processing rhythmic strings, for example, might have evolved to service language, not music. And because we are not sure whether or not music preceded language or if they shared a common ancestor, as is discussed further below, we cannot be sure which had first claim, as it were, on the brain.

What in Music Draws On Processes Evolved for Parsing the Regular Soundscape? As we have already seen, recognition of octave equivalence is present to some degree in the auditory experience of some other animals, so that particular aspect of Homo auditory perception could easily predate musical behaviours. And we seek regularity and

686   Stephen Davies pattern in the environment at large, so our detection of metric regularity and rhythmic pattern and of tonal regularity and melodic organization are probably grounded in more general auditory capacities (Wallaschek 1891; Janata and Grafton 2003). Our tendency to segment the soundscape into streams (Bregman 1990) also finds obvious application in following music. An interest in the timbral qualities of sounds must have been present in precursor species, because timbre provides crucial evidence of how a sound is produced and what makes it. More generally, the tendency to hear sounds in connection with sound-makers must be ancient. We hear in and through sounds the actions—beating, sawing, chopping, filing—that go into their making. The pitch of a sound also provides evidence of the size of the creature or thing that made it, as does its amplitude, at least sometimes. As well, imitative learning is a deeply rooted Homo disposition (Sterelny 2012), so vocal imitation of other people and of natural sounds most likely came prior to music as such.

What in Music Draws On Processes Evolved for Speech, Including its Prosodic Features? This is a trick question, of course. It should be reversed if music came before language. But we should say this much: both provide semantic and expressive content, but to very different degrees. Music without accompanying words can be suggestive of mood, motion, and of distinctive sound-makers, and, as a result of conditioning or its prior association with significant occasions, it can bring other things or events to mind. But in general, music is poor as a medium for communicating information when compared to language, except with respect to its expressiveness. Meanwhile, the power of language to impart meaning is in part gestural and prosodic (Corballis 2003; Davies 2014). Musical features with the same qualities as prosodic aspects of expressive speech express the emotions conveyed in such speech (Juslin and Laukka 2003; but on differences between speech and musical prosody, see Sunderberg 2012).

Which Came First, Music or Language, Or Did Both Share a Common Predecessor (Known as Proto-Language or Musilanguage)? The short answer is that we are not sure. It was suggested previously that the earliest musical behaviours might date to 500,000 years ago. But almost all the physiological capacities essential to musicality are also essential for language and speech. Moreover, the Homo sapiens variant of the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be essential in the mastery of speech (Enard et al. 2002), was shared with Neanderthals (Krause et al. 2007; Green et al. 2010), which implies that it was also possessed by our common ancestor,

Evolution   687 Homo heidelbergensis. Broca’s area, a part of the brain that deals importantly with language (along with the right hand and music), was well developed in both Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis. So some form of language could also date to 500,000 years ago (Wells 2010; Collins 2013). Some theorists regard music as a by-product of the evolution of language. (For example, Spencer [1857]  1966; Pinker  1999; Barrow  2005; De Smedt and De Cruz  2010.) Others see it as originating out of pre-linguistic vocalizing and hence, as prior to language. (For instance, Darwin  1880, pt. 3, ch. 19, 572; S.  Brown  2000a,; Merker  2005; Mithen 2005; Fenk-Oczlon and Fenk 2009; Gamble 2012.) A more specific version of this last theory identifies infant-directed speech as the precursor to music. (See Dissana yake 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2006, 2008; Trehub 2003a, 2003b; Koelsch and Siebel 2005; Panksepp 2009.) As alternatives, Parncutt (2009) identifies sounds experienced by the foetus in utero as the source of music and Wermke and Mende (2009) suggest that babies’ crying is the source of music. The view according to which infant-directed speech was a precursor to music could be a special instance of the more general thesis according to which both music and language shared a common, ancestral form of vocalization, known either as “proto-language” or “musilanguage.” According to the general thesis, proto-/musilanguage was not confined to interactions with infants but was employed as part of a more general form of communication between all members of the group. Of course, our hominin predecessors vocalized, as do much older species. They issued alarm and contact calls; perhaps they defended their territory or attracted mates by vocalizing; they cooed and clucked at their babies; they vented their rage, despair, and grief vocally. It has been suggested that what distinguished the vocalizations of hominins from ancestors we share with the apes was their adoption of synchronous chorusing (Merker  2000; S.  Brown  2007). The development of language would have been gradual but inexorable, given the selective advantage of detailed, accurate communication between members of the group. Ostension and gesture linked sounds to individuals, things, or events; holophrasistic utterances (that could not be broken, tensed, or declined) took on significance; these might then be conjoined; increasingly complex syntactic structures came into use. (For discussion, see S. Brown 2000a, 2003; Corballis 2003; Fitch 2010; Collins 2013.) Whether it came earlier or not, a similar path of development presumably could be traced for music. Expressive slides and glides, fragmentary melodic phrases, beats and rhythms were combined, repeated, and developed until something recognizable as music emerged (S. Brown 2000a). This all would have been gradual. But at some stage our predecessors had both music and language. According to the proto-/musilanguage view, on which we will focus here, both music and language could be traced to more or less the same earlier modes of vocalizing (Molino 2000; Davies 2014). Tomlinson (2015) agrees that some form of proto-discourse came first, but he also emphasizes the distinctness of music and language and regards their subsequent development as parallel but independent.

688   Stephen Davies Two leading exponents of the proto-/musilanguage view are Steven Brown (2000a) and Steven Mithen (2005, 2007). They differ to some extent in their account of the precursor to music and language. Whereas Brown thinks musilanguage conjoined basic lexical units according to primitive grammatical rules, Mithen thinks that the protolanguage was primarily holophrasistic. His term for the proto-language is “Hmmmmm,” because it was Holistic, manipulative (in calling for shared attention and response), multimodal (that is, including mime and gesture), musical, and mimetic (that is, imitating natural sounds) (Mithen 2005, 172). But these contrasting perspectives need not be fundamentally opposed. The proto-language could have changed over time, starting as primarily gestural and holophrasistic and later becoming more segmented, or it could have been mixed from the beginning in terms of the structures it employed. Brown holds that the proto-language emerged some time in the last five million years. And Mithen holds that musicality goes back to the early hominins. While Brown does not commit himself to a date for the emergence of full-blooded language from the proto-language, Mithen holds that this happened only with our species, Homo sapiens. He thinks (Mithen 2005, 2007) Neanderthals communicated in the proto-language. But as indicated above, recent work has discussed the possibility that Homo heidelbergensis, our common ancestor with Neanderthals, was chatty, in which case the Neanderthals encountered by our Cro-Magnon predecessors in Europe were likely speakers too.

Functions Music Might Have Served for Our Ancestors The “physiological” approach to the prehistory of music does not produce a decisive result, largely due to our uncertainty about the historical relation between music and language, and about the neural and other physiological structures that subserve them. But I think there are reasons for betting that music came before language. A person does not need to be able to speak in order to make music and, and given its importance in communicating emotion, in coordinating dance and work, and in bonding both with infants and with fellow group members, powerful selective pressures would have supported its adoption and development. Music-making does not depend on the highly sophisticated cognitive attributes and skills that are required for precise, clear linguistic communication. Admittedly, the hunting and trade practices of hominins like Homo heidelbergensis must have required effective means of information exchange, but proto-language may have been up to that task (Marwick 2003; Tomlinson 2015). So, on balance, I am inclined to side with those who see language as a special case of music (Morley 2013), which is a view for which

Evolution   689 there is some neurological evidence (Koelsch and Siebel 2005; Brandt, Gebrian, and Slevc 2012), rather than with those who see syntactically rich forms of language as coming first. Note that “tonal” languages, such as Mandarin, in which semantic meaning depends on relative pitch location as well as sound, presume a developed sense of subtle pitch discrimination. The first of the strategies for connecting music to our evolutionary history is not entirely successful, then. What about the second? This seeks functions that music might have served, where these functions improved the biological fitness of those who made and appreciated music. Biological fitness is measured in terms of a person’s (potential) success in passing their genes to future generations. So, this approach considers musical effects that might have produced such an outcome. If they are located, it is plausible to argue that musical behaviours are evolutionary adaptations. The conclusion that music is an evolutionary adaptation alleges a close, positive connection between music and survival. The first step is to outline the functions music might have served for its earliest makers. In fact, there are many. Music can be used to soothe infants and to bond with them. (See references for infantdirected speech as the precursor to music.) An extension of this view suggests that music primes the baby for its future mental life and for speech (Cosmides and Tooby 1989; Trehub 2003a, 2003b; Merker 2006). Various positive effects on children and/or older individuals have been suggested for music. It might play a role in cross-domain cognitive development (Cross 2009, 2012, but for a sceptical response, see Davies 2012). Or in evoking affectively charged memories (Schubert 2009), or, more generally, in forging a sense of self-identity in adolescence (Patel 2010). As a result, it contributes to effecting the social differentiation of individuals (Ralevski 2000; Grewe et al. 2009). A common theme emphasizes the role of music in male competition (Boyd 2005) and sexual display (Darwin  1880; S.  Brown  2000b; Miller  2000a,  2000b; Dutton  2009; Dunbar 2012). More often, it is the way that music benefits the group that is stressed. One suggestion is that it was used originally to establish and defend the group’s territory (S. Brown 2000a; Hagen and Hammerstein 2009). Other proposed benefits remain apparent today. It is used to incite effort (Aristides Quintilianus  1983; S.  Brown 2000b; Huron 2003; Boyd 2005) and to ensure group bonding, identity, synchrony, coordination, entrainment, and emotional catharsis (Dissanayake  1988,  1995; S.  Brown  2000a,  2000b; Merker  2000; Cross  2009,  2012; Dunbar  2003,  2012; Koelsch and Siebel 2005; Mithen 2005; Gamble 2012; Morley 2013). The underlying mechanism here might involve its suppressing testosterone and stimulating endorphins (Fukui and Yamashita  1998; Fukui  2001; Dunbar  2012). It has been suggested that music serves as a form of vocal grooming at a distance (Dunbar 2003, 2012) and that it can contribute to conflict resolution (Fukui  2001; Huron  2003; Bown and Wiggins 2009).

690   Stephen Davies

Music’s Evolutionary Status Did Music Enhance the Fitness (Reproductive Potential) of Those Who First Engaged in it? That is, Was it Adaptive in the Evolutionary Sense? If so, How? What Were its EvolutionRelevant Functions? What are we to make of this rich array of proposals? The first point to note is that music certainly is multifunctional and perhaps always was so. When the music of present-day hunter-foragers is examined, there is no one function that dominates in all (Morley 2013). Of course, the music that defines one’s distinctively personal identity cannot be identical to that which defines groups and subgroups to which one belongs. And the music that goes with competitive male display is unlikely to be the same as that which unites the group and reduces conflict. But some music might perform the one function and other music the other. The issue, though, is not about the range of uses to which music can be put but about its alleged evolutionary function. That music is useful in signalling when a home run has been struck in baseball plainly does not entail that music is an evolved adaptation to this end. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, the proposals listed above each do claim to identify music’s primary adaptive function: musical behaviours were selected because they improved the relative reproductive success of those who had them by benefiting their reproduction in the specified way; that is, by attracting more sexual partners, resolving conflict, defending group territory, or whatever other function is highlighted. Such behaviours are now universal, it is suggested, because, over time, the relevant traits spread genetically through the wider population. (High levels of musical talent are only weakly heritable—Pratt 1977, Howe, Davidson, and Sloboda 1998—but appropriate lowlevel musical skills now are universal and emerge with normal development— Davies 2012, but for doubt, see Patel 2008.) Taken as claims about music’s primary adaptive function, these various proposals are in direct conflict. For instance, in evolutionary terms, music’s purpose cannot be to unite the group if its primary evolutionary function is as a competitive form of male display (Boyd 2005; Pinker 2007; Dutton 2009). It is not easy to judge among the many alternative proposals and I will not attempt to do so in detail here. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that the original, primary function of music was as a competitive male courtship display targeting potential female sexual partners. The sexes are equally musical, most music occurs outside of courtship situations, and the musical ties between a mother and her baby seem more prominent than those between mutually attracted adults. Undoubtedly, music can be enlisted as a prop for seduction, but it is hard to believe that we can describe its evolutionary origins along these lines. (For further critical discussion of the idea that music is a product of

Evolution   691 sexual selection, see Dissanayake  1999,  2000a; Cross and Morley  2009; Ball  2010; Davies 2012.) One issue to consider is how the claims about group benefits might be reconciled with the classical evolutionary model, according to which it is the individual (or, more precisely, their genes) that is the target of evolutionary selection. A first possibility is that benefits to the group are not evenly distributed among its members, so that some individuals benefit comparatively more than others. Under this scenario, overall group benefits are compatible with selection among individuals. A few authors explicitly subscribe to some such view (for example, Dissanayake 1988, 1995; Dunbar 2012; Morley 2013). The alternative would be to accept multilevel selection theory and claim that groups, not only individuals, can be subject to evolutionary selection (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Wilson 2007; Bowles and Gintis 2011). In this case, transmission of the desirable characteristics could be exclusively cultural and not genetic beyond what is necessary for ordinary sound processing. The idea then would be that music-rich groups outcompeted music-impoverished groups because of the group strengths garnered from music, with the relevant musical behaviours passed on within the group via teaching and imitation. The status of multilevel selection within the philosophy of biology has been questioned (Okasha 2006; Hampton 2010) and there is doubt about its applicability in this kind of case (Pinker 2007). If it is to be invoked, it then is necessary to demonstrate that the relevant intergroup pressures were more significant or powerful than selective forces operating via intra-group competition between each group’s individual members. Typically, those who claim that music’s group benefits were adaptive and who seem to commit to group-level selection do not address this issue. We might agree with Dissanayake (1988) that the fact that music is universal, ancient, and intrinsically rewarding suggests a probability that it was evolutionarily adaptive for our forerunners, even if we cannot be sure which of its potential uses was fitnessenhancing in the past and led to its later proliferation. But before endorsing this view, there are alternatives to be considered.

Or Rather, Was Music a Happy By-Product of Auditory Capacities and Biological Interests With No FitnessEnhancing Features of its Own? Darwin himself noted that music is apparently not adaptive in its own right: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed” (Darwin 1880, pt. 3, ch. 19, 569–70). I have already cited a number of people who regard music as a by-product of language, including Darwin’s contemporary, Herbert Spencer ([1857] 1966). Another evolutionist of that period, Alfred Russel Wallace (1889), held that music and dancing are by-products of our brainpower and excessive vitality. (For a modern version of the view,

692   Stephen Davies see Feist 2007.) Other suggestions are that music is an offshoot of ancient socio-affective systems (Panksepp 2009) or that it builds on the capacity, known as “theory of mind,” to understand others as intentional agents with beliefs, desires, and emotions (Livingstone and Thompson 2009). In a passage that was to become notorious, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker compared music in its effects to recreational drugs. “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties” (Pinker 1999, 534), these being language (when the music has lyrics), auditory scene analysis, emotional calls, habitat selection (as expressed in musical tone picturing of the sea, weather, etc.), motor control (when music leads to dancing), and “something else that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts” (538). In other words, senses and capacities evolved for non-musical purposes are stimulated by music in a fashion that we find pleasurable, though not to any evolutionary purpose. (For discussion of Pinker’s choice of the cheesecake metaphor, see Davies  2012, 139–142.) The by-product thesis might be able to account for music’s ubiquity. And it is true that we highly value many things that are not evolutionarily adaptive. Still, I wonder whether this theory can explain the passion with which music is pursued and the very high value placed on it. And most versions of the theory do not, as they should, clearly identify the adaptation from which music derives and the route of its derivation. If the musical whole is more than the sum of its derived parts, as Pinker allows, that is a reason for thinking it is not merely an accidental side-effect of non-musical adaptations.

Or is it So Distantly Related to Only Very General Characteristics (Such as Intelligence, Curiosity, Emotionality, Sociality, and Identity) That it is Better Regarded as a Cultural Technology Than as Either an Adaptation or a By-Product? Aniruddh D. Patel (2008, 2010) has described music as a transformative technology that is not directly a product of evolution. It is transformative in terms of its many valuable effects, but it comes to us as part of our cultural, not biological, endowment. In this it can be compared to the control of fire, which is an ancient, universal, and highly valuable capacity that is taught rather than being genetically inherited. Or, the comparison could be made with writing and reading, which draw on evolved capacities for manual control and shape recognition but apply them to a quite specific, highly valuable end in a fashion that must be taught. How strong are these analogies, though? The spontaneous emergence of musical behaviours in the course of normal development might not be so robust as linguistic behaviours, but they are surely much more so than is the case for fire-making and reading and writing, which suggests they involve an important genetic component. And whereas fire and literacy are highly valued, this is because they are means to effects that

Evolution   693 we value highly: heat, light, cooked food, dry clothes; the reliable transmission of information over distance and time, the creation of entertaining fictions. Exposure to music may produce desirable effects, but most of the time we engage with it primarily for its own sake and we treat it as intrinsically valuable. And it is not as if we think just any music, so long as there is a sufficient quantity of it, is always as good or potent as any other music. These are all reasons for interrogating the analogy on which Patel’s argument relies. (For more detailed discussion, see Davies 2012, 149–157.)

Supposing Music Was Originally Adaptive, Does it Retain that Evolutionary Function Still? Has Music Taken on Some New Evolutionary Function? It is not clear how to answer this question if we do not know what music’s original adapt­ ive function was. But we do know that evolution builds adaptations on earlier, different adaptations rather than starting afresh. Feathers that helped regulate temperature, with some modifications, later facilitated flight. So, the possibility that music’s evolutionary function has altered is a real one. If the original adaptive function was territory maintenance, then it is no longer primary now. But given the energy and dedication we put into music, either the original function is retained, or some new one has taken over, or some new one sits alongside the original one. I doubt that music originated in sexual display or that this is now its primary function, but it could be a subsidiary yet adaptive function that (popular) music is put to by some of its makers.

Has Music Transcended its Biological Origins as a Result of Becoming Universal? Music may have given those committed to it higher fitness and hence an evolutionary advantage over their amusical contemporaries. Music could still confer some such advantage (even when it becomes universal), if it is practised to different degrees by different individuals and if those who are comparatively less musical do not make up for this in other ways (such as by being painters, say). But it is possible that musicality is shared equally enough that it does not provide a selective advantage now though it did so in the past. (As an example, think of bipedalism.) In that sense it could transcend its original biological function(s). There is another way music could easily cut its ties with biology. There should be no denying the importance of culture and tradition in musical behaviours, even if they have biological drivers and components. As a culture’s music develops (and progressively repudiates its musical ancestors), the avant-garde might take it to a point where it would be no longer capable of carrying out biological agendas it served previously. Its composers

694   Stephen Davies might abandon tonality and serialize every parameter, or create a twenty-note piece with a tempo that has it last 500 years, or specify it as for performance in the soundless vacuum of space, or include only pitches that are beyond the range of the indicated instruments. Many cultures have esoteric, sophisticated modes of art that are accessible only to connoisseurs and cognoscenti because of the degree to which they have been refined and become conceptual and self-referential. When music becomes like that, it dispenses with any ties to evolution its ancestral forms possessed. There is no reason to think that that result is to be condemned. But notice this: however specialized some modes of art become, they rarely replace more quotidian, accessible forms. Lullabies remain the same and popular music tends to be conservative and conventional where it aspires to a mass audience, even when twelve-tone operas or isorhythmic motets get added to the tradition.

Are the Key Notions Employed Here—Adaptation, By-Product, Non-Biological Technology—the Ones Best Suited to Understanding the Place of Music in Human Evolution? Tomlinson argues against the usefulness of arguing that music has any particular adapt­ ive function on the grounds that music’s emergence was piecemeal, incremental, and various, and involved the coalescence of many different capacities. He criticizes adaptationist hypotheses for seeking a “unilateral explanation for a manifold phenomenon” (Tomlinson 2015, 33). There are more general reasons why we should question the explanatory power of these evolutionary categories to our species’ development, as I now outline. While some creatures, such as beavers, construct aspects of the environment in which they prefer to live, we humans are unique in the extent to which we do this (OdlingSmee, Laland, and Feldman 2003). The earliest members of our species buffered themselves against raw nature. They wore clothes, made tools, created weapons, occupied heated shelters, cooked their food, used natural medicines and supernatural rituals to protect against injury and illness, and so on. Some ten thousand years ago, when most of us progressively abandoned the hunter-forager existence in favour of towns, agriculture, and the domestication of animals, we took yet more control over the construction of our environment. Nowadays, the trend is even more marked. Many of us eat meat and vegetables without ever killing an animal or pulling up a plant. We live in a humanly created environment that is the product of culture and technology. Our biological nature places constraints on the form that culture takes—unassisted flying is not an Olympic sport. But equally, culture modifies our biology—the dentition and guts (and perhaps even brain size, see Wrangham 2009) of our ancestors changed as a consequence of their move to cooked foods. As a result, there are feedback loops in both directions between human culture and human biology, so these cannot be regarded as isolated, mutually exclusive domains in which we exist (Richerson and Boyd 2005).

Evolution   695 Originally, individual fitness was proposed as the measure of an organism’s adaptedness to its environment. That was later changed to potential fecundity, because creatures will take on physical handicaps for the sake of reproductive success. But once we include the other sex as an aspect of the environment, the two accounts come back into line. However, as just observed, both the physical and the socio-cultural environment are in our species largely self-created. This makes the standard biological notion of adaptedness difficult to apply. There is no easy way to distinguish adaptations from by-products and technologies, and little explanatory value in doing so. Rather than debating which of these categories applies to music, it might be more meaningful to track the way we construct and populate the musical niche (Fitch 2006; Killin 2013; Menary 2014).

Concluding Remarks What is the upshot of this analysis? We are the only species capable of creating and presenting music that melds melody, tonality, and rhythmic articulation set against a regular pulse and metre, to name some central elements characteristic of music as such. Extinct hominin species may have preceded us, however. Music-making may be as old as 500,000 years and most likely is more than 60,000 years. Not only is it pan-cultural, a modest but respectable level of musical competence is near-universal (Davies 2012). We value music highly and often intrinsically, though it is also a means to incidental benefits. Together, these facts suggest that it may have been evolutionarily adaptive for our predecessors and is universal now because they out-reproduced their tone-deaf conspecifics. Whether music was adaptive is not settled by the neurological evidence, especially given our uncertainty about the timing of its emergence relative to that of language and given the possibility that other, proto-musical forms of communication might have foreshadowed both music and language. And while many adaptive benefits of the adoption of music have been claimed, there is conflict between them and a lack of consensus about which are the more plausible. Other possibilities—that music is a by-product that is not adaptive in itself, or that it is better regarded as a cultural technology far removed from our biological endowment—have also been presented. Adjudicating between these various options might become easier when we learn more about prehistory or the brain. But on the other hand, framing the debate in terms of these familiar categories might be unhelpful, even distorting, given the extent of mutual influence and feedbacks between genetics and culture in the development of our species. And even if we could clear these hurdles, it would remain to work out if music has taken on new evolutionary functions and what these might be, or, alternatively, if it has become so culturally arcane that it has transcended and made irrelevant its biological roots in our evolutionary past.

696   Stephen Davies

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chapter 34

Ex pr ession Mark Evan Bonds

Few concepts in the philosophy of Western music are as central or as contested as that of expression. The term has been used over the past three hundred years in a wide range of senses, often in ways that are flatly contradictory. This is due in part to the broadly divergent applications of the term in general, quite aside from music. We use “expression” on some occasions to indicate a considered projection of one’s deepest, innermost thoughts or feelings; yet at other times we use the same term to denote an off-the-shelf idiom accessible to all. Expression encompasses wilful acts of transmission (as when we “speak our mind”) as well as involuntary manifestations (as when we cry out in pain from a sudden blow). In the broadest sense, expression can be understood as an outward manifestation of some inward state of mind, hence “ex-press,” a pressing outward. The term is used regardless of whether that inward state of mind is spontaneous and sincere or calculated and self-induced. The focus of the present essay is on issues of musical expression as they relate to music independent of words, that is, music that is purely instrumental or vocalized. The multitudinous ways in which music can enhance the expressivity of a verbal text lie far beyond the scope of the account given here of the ways in which music in and of itself can be regarded as expressive. Musical expression can be approached from a variety of perspectives, including those of the composer, the listener, the performer, and the work itself. The considerable differences among various theories of musical expression, both past and present, derive from the points of emphasis that necessarily follow from each of these broader orientations. Given such a wide range of approaches, and in the absence of any general consensus, it is both possible and desirable to think of expression not as a single concept but as an umbrella term that has been used to describe a number of related but decidedly distinct phenomena. Precisely because it lacks words or visible images, music has always been regarded as limited in its ability to convey specific ideas or objects, certainly in comparison to the verbal and representational arts. Onomatopoeic gestures in music that strive to imitate thunder, croaking frogs, or the like have never been regarded as capturing the true nature of the art. By the same token, the essentially abstract, intangible nature of music

706   Mark Evan Bonds has encouraged a widespread recognition of its ability to express or arouse emotions and mental states in ways unavailable to the verbal and visual arts. (It is deeply significant that abstract painting should be so closely associated with the aesthetic movement known as “Expressionism.”) It is this expressive power that led Felix Mendelssohn to make the provocative observation in his letter to Marc-André Souchay of 15 October 1842 that “the thoughts that are expressed to me by the music I love are not too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite” (quoted in Botstein 1991, 31). By this line of thought, it is verbal language that comes up short. But whose “thoughts” or “voice” or “emotions” do we hear in music that has no words? The composer’s? The performer’s? Our own as listeners? Or a disembodied manifestation of the music itself? And what kinds of mental states or emotions? Western responses to these questions have varied widely since the eighteenth century, and philosophers today remain sharply divided on defining what musical expression is and describing how it works. The full range of these viewpoints can perhaps best be appreciated by tracing their development over time. The history of the concept of musical expression, while not entirely neglected in contemporary accounts, provides a useful alternative framework for coming to terms with the widely divergent theories of present-day philosophy.

Enlightenment Theories “Expression” and its cognates (including the German Ausdruck) do not figure prominently in writings on music prior to the eighteenth century, save in discussions of setting a text to be sung. Commentators since the time of Plato had recognized the power of music to elevate and intensify the import of words, and it was in this sense that they most often used the term. Yet it is equally clear that philosophers since the time of Pythagoras recognized the power of music on its own, without the aid of any sung text. Ancient authorities, including both Plato and Aristotle, lay great emphasis on the ability of particular modes of music (Dorian, Phrygian, etc.) to arouse particular responses in listeners, for example, and multiple Greek myths attest to the power of music without words: Orpheus accomplished his miracles not through the texts he sang but through the music to which he sang those texts, and what made the Sirens irresistible was the sound of their voices, not the import of their words. The concept of what we might now think of as purely musical expression, however, was extremely rare before the Enlightenment. (For a fuller examination of the historical development of these ideas prior to the more recent theories discussed at the end of this chapter, see Bonds 2020.) St Augustine had pointed to the vocalise-like song of labourers returning from the vineyard as an example of music’s ability to allow individuals to express jubilation in a way that both bypassed and transcended the capacity of verbal language, but such accounts from earlier times are the exception, not the rule (McKinnon  1987, 156–157; on this and other similar accounts from earlier times, see Bonds 2014, 41–48).

Expression   707 It was not until the early eighteenth century that philosophers, critics, and composers began to speculate systematically on the nature and mechanics of musical expression. This development coincided more or less with the growing acceptance of the idea of music as a language in its own right, with its own rules of grammar (melody, harmony) and rhetoric (form, performance). A work of music, in turn, was perceived as a wordless oration, with the composer and performer(s) working in tandem—or in the case of improvisation, the performer alone—to move an audience. Enlightenment philosophers, critics, and composers for the most part thought of expression as the objective representation of an emotion or series of emotions crafted in such a way (either with or without a sung text) as to evoke a calculated response in listeners. The equation of expression with self-expression— that is, the belief that a composition might reflect its creator’s own personal emotions or innermost self—was an assumption that did not begin to take hold until the 1830s, driven by a convergence of philosophical, cultural, economic, and technological changes (see the section on Romantic Theories). Philosophers, critics, and composers of the Enlightenment, by contrast, viewed expression within the broader conception of music as an essentially rhetorical art, one whose purpose was to move an audience. Expression was central to this process of moving listeners. Johann Mattheson, in his Der vollkommene Kapellmeister (1739), dismissed as trivial any work of music that did not in some way move the passions. Charles Avison, in his Essay on Musical Expression (1752), the first treatise in any language to put musical expression at the centre of its inquiry, identified expression as a “force,” the product of the union between melody and harmony that elevates a work above the level of the merely agreeable. And in his influential Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), Johann Georg Sulzer called expression “the soul of music. Without it, music is no more than a pleasant mechanism (ein angenehmes Spielwerk). But with it, music becomes the most emphatic speech (nachdrücklichsten Rede) that works irresistibly upon the heart” (Sulzer 1771–4, 1:109).1 Within this rhetorical framework, the personal emotions or psychological state of the composer are secondary or irrelevant. Even in his lengthy chapter “On Musical Expression so far as it Relates to the Composer,” Avison has nothing to say about what we would think of today as self-expression. He focuses, instead, on the technical means by which a composer can arouse various emotional states. In this sense, “expression” is more closely akin to what we today would think of as “representation.” Indeed, the two terms were virtually synonymous in the eighteenth century: as the playwright Louis de Cahusac noted in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, “one does not imitate anything without expressing; or rather, expression is the same as imitation” (Cahusac 1751–65, 6:315). As in verbal rhetoric, delivery was understood as an essential part of moving an audience through music. (When asked to identify the three most important elements of rhetoric, Demosthenes is said to have answered: “Delivery, delivery, delivery” [quoted in Quintillian, Institutio oratoria, 11.2.6].) Performers were thus encouraged to grasp the composer’s intentions and project those perceived intentions as faithfully as possible. For Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, one of Sulzer’s musical collaborators for the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, the performer is responsible for “the complete representation of the character and expression of the work.”

708   Mark Evan Bonds The whole as well as every individual part must be performed with precisely the tone (Ton), spirit (Geist), affect (Affekt), and in the same shadow and light in which the composer conceived the work and set it . . . Every good musical composition has its own character, its own spirit (Geist) and expression that spreads itself throughout all parts of the whole; the singer or player must transmit these so exactly through his performance that he plays as if from the soul of the composer. (Sulzer 1771–4, 2:1252)

The “soul of the composer,” in this context, is an imagined entity that existed in the moment of the work’s creation, which is to say, an entity imagined or willed by the composer. It is not, in other words, a soul that permeates all the composer’s works or even the different movements of a single work. That the “composer’s intentions” have often been interpreted quite differently by various performers over time is less significant than the deference that Schulz and others of his time (and beyond) have given to the composer in establishing the desired form of expression to be projected. (On the role of the performer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critical thought, see Hunter 2005; on the vexed role of the “composer’s intentions,” see Kivy  1995; Davies  2001; and Butt 2002.) Eighteenth-century commentators as a whole encouraged composers and performers alike to study the human temperaments, for as Mattheson put it, “no one will be able to arouse a passion in others (eine Leidenschafft in andrer Leute Gemüthern zu erregen) if he himself is not acquainted with precisely the same passion, as if he had experienced himself, or is experiencing it at the very moment.” The key words here are “as if.” A composer need not “wail or weep” while writing a work suitable for mourning, but he must “accommodate, as it were, the appropriate affect in his psyche and heart (Gemüth)” (Mattheson 1739, 108). Charles Batteux similarly encouraged painters and musicians “to forget their state (oublier leur état), to move out of themselves and to put themselves into the milieu of those things they wish to represent” (Batteux 1746, 34). And Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach conveyed the same kind of message in relation to keyboard performance when he declared (paraphrasing Horace) that in order to move others, one must oneself be moved. As in the case of composers, the performer must be able to “transport himself into all affects by which he seeks to move his listeners” (C. P. E. Bach 1753–62, 1:85). Sulzer, writing in collaboration with another of his musical consultants, the composer and theorist Johann Philipp Kirnberger, likewise encouraged the composer to cultivate “through diligence and repetition” the ability to put himself into a variety of emotional states as demanded by the exigencies of the moment, much like the epic poet, who must be able to imagine himself into the minds of all his tale’s various characters. The best way to achieve this, Sulzer suggested, would be for the composer to “imagine some sequence of events, some circumstance, some condition” that would put him in the proper state of mind. Once he has “fired up” his imaginative forces, the composer can then proceed to his work, taking care not to introduce “any musical figures or phrases that lie outside the character of the work” he is writing (Sulzer 1771–4, 1:110).

Expression   709 Joseph Haydn similarly described his compositional method as a two-stage process: I sat down [at the keyboard] and began to fantasize, according to whether my state of mind was sad or happy, serious or playful. Once I had seized upon an idea, my entire effort went towards elaborating and sustaining (auszuführen und zu soutenieren) it according to the rules of art. I tried to help myself in this way. And this is what is lacking among so many of our young composers; they string together one little bit after another, and they break off before they have begun, but nothing remains in the heart (es bleibt auch nichts im Herzen sitzen) when one has heard it. (Griesinger 1810, 114)

In this instance, the composer’s mood provides a starting point, but whether it is spontaneous or self-induced is far less important than the hard work of discovering and then “elaborating and sustaining” a musical idea “according to the rules of art.” The finished composition is primarily a product of technique, and without this artifice, the listener will remain unmoved. Expression will fall short. Enlightenment thinkers thus felt no shame in the artificiality of art. To the contrary: they considered mimesis—often translated as “imitation” but better understood as “representation”—as that which unified what were beginning to be thought of as the fine arts. When Batteux (1746, 15) called music “the artificial portrait of the human passions (le portrait artificiel des passions humaines),” he meant it as an artificiality to be embraced. This essentially objective concept of musical expression prevailed throughout Ludwig van Beethoven’s lifetime (1770–1827): scarcely a single critic spoke of the composer’s works as a reflection of his inner self. Even E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his celebrated review of the Fifth Symphony, emphasized the composer’s Besonnenheit, which is to say, his capacity for reflection, circumspection, and rational deliberation, his ability to distance himself from his work and consider it from a dispassionate perspective, in short: his objectivity. Hoffmann was quite explicit on this point. Beethoven, he observed, “separates his ‘I’ (sein Ich) from the inner realm of tones and rules over that realm as an unfettered master (unumschränkter Herr)” (Hoffmann  1810, 633–634). At a time when subjectivity was the central issue of German philosophy (in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, among others), this evocation of the philosophical flashpoint of the Ich and Nicht-Ich takes on special significance. Long regarded as the first great monument of Romantic music criticism, Hoffmann’s essay in fact treats expression very much in terms of Enlightenment objectivity. The emphasis throughout is on Beethoven’s music, not Beethoven the individual; Hoffmann himself in all likelihood had little if any knowledge about the person who had created the Fifth Symphony. What is striking about virtually every account of expression before c.1830 is the irrelevance of the composer’s personal self and innermost feelings. Sincerity—in Lionel Trilling’s (1972, 2) classic formulation, “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling”—played virtually no role in musical aesthetics prior to the nineteenth

710   Mark Evan Bonds century. Mattheson, Batteux, Sulzer, and others conceded that a composer might on occasion give vent to a genuine, present, and deeply felt emotion, but they scarcely considered this a sine qua non for producing a musical work. The only exception to this—and it is a very revealing exception—appears in accounts of the keyboard fantasia from the second half of the eighteenth century. More than any other genre, an improvised or seemingly improvised solo was considered capable of accommodating and reflecting the mood of its composer-performer. Such influential music historians as Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (1955) and Carl Dahlhaus (1982) have used this one genre to push back the origins of musical selfexpression to the so-called Sturm und Drang era of the late 1760s and early 1770s. But theorists and critics of the time made a strict distinction between the fantasia and all other musical genres. Let us recall here Haydn’s starting point for his own compositions: “I sat down [at the keyboard] and began to fantasize, according to whether my disposition was sad or happy, serious or playful”. The purpose of that stage of the process, as we have seen, was to provide Haydn with a workable thematic idea. From that point on, improvisation ceased and his compositional efforts went into “elaborating and sustaining” that theme. In other words, although Haydn began to compose by fantasizing at the keyboard, the resulting work was most definitely not a fantasia (unless explicitly labelled as such), because that genre, as contemporary writers defined it, had no central theme, no musical idea elaborated and sustained over the course of the whole. Instead, the fantasia followed—or at least gave the appearance of following—the whim, the fantasy of the composer-performer. The idea of mapping qualities associated specifically and exclusively with this one highly unusual genre onto all compositions in all genres—sonatas, string quartets, symphonies, and the like—simply does not withstand scrutiny. In the end, even Dahlhaus was forced to concede that “musical expression is not to be immediately related to a composer as a real person. Even the extreme ‘expressionists’ of the eight­eenth century, Daniel Schubart and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, when they ‘expressed themselves through music,’ were showing not their empirical person in private life, but their ‘intelligible I,’ the analogue of a poet’s ‘lyrical I’ ” (Dahlhaus 1982, 22).

Romantic Theories Whereas Enlightenment theories of expression had consistently centred on the arousal of listeners’ (or readers’) emotions within a rhetorical framework, Romantic theories conceived of expression primarily in terms of compositional (or authorial) self-expression. This shift was due in part to the precipitous decline of the status of rhetoric, in part to a broader change in attitudes towards all the arts in which the paradigm of selfexpression—that is, the manifestation of thoughts and emotions from deep within the soul of the artist—supplanted the prevailing paradigm of mimesis, which is to say, representation.

Expression   711 In comparison to literature, the ideal of self-expression was relatively slow to develop in music. Poets were already beginning to articulate an aesthetics of intense subjectivity as early as 1800, particularly in the realm of lyric poetry, which they often compared to music. Lyric poetry was the quintessential first-person genre, grounded in an emotional state rather than in characters or plot. In the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth famously defined “all good poetry” as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind” (Wordsworth 1800, xiv). The source of all expression, by this view, is both spontaneous and sincere—it occurs to the poet unbidden and is genuine. The Enlightenment notion of consciously working oneself into a desired state of mind before setting pen to paper is no longer acceptable. The experience now must be direct, personal—in a word: authentic. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, too, viewed art as a form of self-expression, maintaining that from early on in his life he had routinely transformed personal experiences— both pleasant and unpleasant—into “an image, a poem (ein Bild, ein Gedichte).” In this manner, he was able to come to terms internally with his own subjectivity. He deemed his writings “fragments of a great confession (Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession)” (Goethe 1960, 336) and late in his life encouraged young poets to ask themselves of each new poem “if it contains an experience, and if this experience has worked to your benefit” (Goethe 1981, 361). For “poetic substance (poetischer Gehalt) is the substance of one’s own life . . .The artist, posture as he might, will always bring forth only his own individuality” (360). These developments in literature were driven by a variety of philosophical and cultural forces: new conceptions of the self as a source of knowledge, a consequent and growing acceptance of subjectivity as a positive value, changing notions of genius, and the rising prestige of the emotions over and against (or above and beyond) reason. Immanuel Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution in thought about the relationship between subject and object had compelled his contemporaries to rethink their most basic assumptions about human perception and understanding. His Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) would prove particularly important in laying the epistemological foundations for a new attitude towards art not merely as a source of pleasure but also as a source of knowledge (on this point see Bonds 2006, 5–62). Once again, Goethe had played a key role in the new understanding of selfhood as something that could be cultivated and developed: his ideal of Bildung, articulated most famously in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), gave the subjectivity of individuality new-found prestige. “Genius,” long perceived as a quality or as an attendant spirit, now became synonymous with the individual in possession of that quality or spirit. In the post-Enlightenment world, emotions were no longer something to be contained, repressed, monitored. All of these tendencies helped foster the movement we now think of as Romanticism. As the historian Peter Gay pointed out, the nineteenth century’s “pilgrimage to the interior,” its “preoccupation with the self ” was not without precedent. But the generation

712   Mark Evan Bonds that came of age in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the first to pursue it “to the point of neurosis” and make a sense of self-consciousness “available, almost inescapable, to a wide public” (Gay 1995, 3, 5, 6). It did so most forcefully through the arts, which by that point were coming to be seen more and more as an expression of the innermost, primordial self. These premisses proved particularly combustible when directed towards instrumental music, which operated outside the strictures of verbal thought, freed from the limitations of representation, logic, and plausibility and thus widely construed as deeper, more “primitive” and therefore as a more interior, more “authentic” mode of expression. Not surprisingly, then, it was instrumental music that provoked a conceptual realignment of the relationship between a composer’s life and works. The unusual nature of Beethoven’s late string quartets had compelled a small handful of critics, starting around 1825, to attempt to explain them at least in part by recourse to the circumstances of the composer’s life, and specifically his growing deafness. But it was the publication of the so-called “Heiligenstadt Testament” in October 1827, some seven months after Beethoven’s death, that seemed to legitimize in a single stroke critical interpretations of all his music based on his life as a whole. In this confessional document, written in 1802 but hidden away for decades in a secret compartment of his writing desk, the composer relates his struggle against deafness and the resulting sense of personal estrangement from society. “Had things got only a little worse,” he declared, he would have committed suicide. “It was only art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world before having produced everything that I felt called upon to bring forth (alles hervorgebracht, wozu ich mich aufgelegt fühlte)” (Rochlitz 1827, 707). This remarkable document, with its almost stream-of-consciousness prose style, changed the way in which listeners heard Beethoven’s music. Only a year after the composer’s death, it emboldened critics like Joseph Fröhlich (1828, 236) to suggest that the Ninth Symphony might be thought of as “Beethoven’s autobiography, written in music (die musikalisch-geschriebene Autobiographie Beethoven’s).” The composer’s deafness soon became the centrepiece of the enduring trope of struggle and triumph—or at a later stage of his life, struggle and resignation—that listeners perceived in so many of his most celebrated works. From the 1830s onwards, listeners were no longer hearing an emotion in Beethoven’s music but rather his emotion. The “Awakening of Happy Feelings on Arrival in the Countryside” in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony (“Pastoral”) was not simply an expression of joy in general, but of Beethoven’s joy. The “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit” in the A minor String Quartet, Op. 132, was no longer the depiction of a song of thanksgiving by a convalescent, but of Beethoven’s own recovery after a documented illness that had occurred around the time of the work’s composition. As a model of creativity, Hoffmann’s Besonnenheit gave way to Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” It is the rare critic in the decades after Beethoven’s death who did not somehow attempt to relate the composer’s music to his personality, the events of his life, or both. The composer’s life became, in effect, a portal to the work, the work itself a portal to higher truths. “With Beethoven’s symphonies,” as the journalist and literary critic Julian Schmidt observed in 1853, “we

Expression   713 have the feeling that we are dealing with something very different from the usual alternations of joy and sorrow in which wordless music ordinarily moves. We intuit the mysterious abyss of a spiritual world (den geheimnißvollen Abgrund einer geistigen Welt), and we torment ourselves in an effort to understand it . . .We want to know what drove the tone-poet to bottomless despair (grenzenlosen Verzweiflung) and to unalloyed joy (ausgelassensten Jubel); we want to gain an understanding from the mysteriously beautiful features (geheimnißvoll schönen Zügen) of this mysterious sphinx” (Schmidt 1853, 2:410). (Many similar accounts are available in Eggebrecht 1994.) This perception of a direct connection between Beethoven’s life and works provided a model for the next generation of composers, who cultivated the idea of writing autobiographical music with new-found enthusiasm. Hector Berlioz’s thinly-veiled symphonie à clef, his Symphonie fantastique (1830), encouraged the notion of a vital connection between a composer’s output and innermost self through an elaborate accompanying prose programme inspired by his passionate love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson; critics seized upon the deeply personal nature of this symphony almost at once, and they heard the work as a revelation of Berlioz’s soul. Robert Schumann, in turn, incorporated easily decoded ciphers of important persons and events in his life into his Carnaval (1835), and critics were once again quick to interpret this as an essentially autobiographical work. Frédéric Chopin’s Mazurkas and Polonaises of the 1830s and 1840s were similarly understood as expressions of their composer’s deep-felt patriotism for his native Poland. Later in the century, Bedřich Smetana openly inscribed the onset of his deafness in musical terms in his String Quartet No. 1 (“From My Life,” 1876), and critics lost no time in linking the gloomy finale of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony (1893) to the composer’s alleged suicide shortly after he had conducted the work’s premiere. This equation of expression and self-expression was applied retrospectively to the music of earlier composers as well and proved especially attractive as a means of explaining stylistically anomalous works within a given composer’s output. More than one commentator heard Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sombre Violin Sonata in E minor, K. 304, for example, as the composer’s response to his mother’s recent death. Others explained the anguished opening theme of the D minor String Quartet, K. 421, as the resonance of Constanze’s cries of pain during the birth of the couple’s first child in June 1783 (more recent scholars who have endorsed these interpretations include Flothuis 1990 and Hildesheimer 1977, respectively). And at least one critic of the early twentieth century heard Haydn’s turbulent minor-mode symphonies of the early 1770s as evidence for the composer’s own unhappy love affair with an otherwise unknown woman: only a personal crisis similar to Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved,” so the reasoning went, could have precipitated a sudden outpouring of such pathos-laden works (see Bonds 1998). The fact that not a shred of evidence supported the existence of such a woman did not prevent a hypothesization of her ­existence: the music was a sufficient indicator of major events in the composer’s life. By the end of the nineteenth century, biography had become the primary tool of musical hermeneutics.

714   Mark Evan Bonds There were voices in the minority, to be sure. The most notable was that of the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who in his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) decried the idea of music as an art of subjective expression and advocated in its place an aesthetics of beauty based entirely on form. Hanslick did not deny that music could arouse an emotional response in listeners but he contested the idea that the music could itself express such emotions. He ascribed emotional responses to music to cultural associations established through convention: thus while a slow, soft work in the minor mode in subdued tones might well evoke feelings of sadness, sadness is not in the music itself. Not a single composer, however—not even Johannes Brahms, a personal friend—came to Hanslick’s defence. The public was far more inclined to accept the testimony of composers like Franz Liszt, who in an 1855 essay praised the theorist and critic Adolph Bernhard Marx for having recognized that “the artist does not deal with form for the sake of form, but rather to find in it the voice that can project the impressions of his innermost essence (die Eindrücke seines inneren Wesens)” (Liszt 1882, 197). For Liszt and others who endorsed Richard Wagner’s vision of the “Music of the Future,” “form” had become a code word for convention, “expression” a code word for the projection of the intrinsically unique compositional self (on Hanslick and Liszt, see Bonds  2014, 103–126). The aesthetics of personal self-revelation proved a winning formula for composers and listeners alike: it reinforced the individuality and elite status of composers even while providing listeners with a ready means of access to otherwise challenging music. Court patronage had declined markedly by 1830, and most composers were compelled to fend for themselves in the marketplace of public tastes and fashions. They quickly learned that their public personae carried tangible financial consequences: Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, and Wagner belonged to the first generation of composers who selfconsciously fashioned their own distinctive public images; tellingly, these four were also among the first major composers to write significant quantities of non-technical music criticism aimed at a broad public (on Wagner’s self-fashioning, see Vazsonyi  2012). Audiences, in turn, were grateful for a point of entry to an increasingly heterogeneous and at times baffling repertory. If the bizarre harmonies and timbres of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique could be understood as reflections of his personal life, this made the work that much more comprehensible. If Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage could be heard against not merely the programmatic titles of its individual movements but also its composer’s actual and documented experience of those places, then these demanding works took on a new depth of meaning. Simplistic as such connections might seem today, they were novel at the time and exerted a powerful effect on the music-consuming public. Sincerity played a key role in this new practice. Listeners who heard music as an autobiographical utterance assumed that the feelings expressed in that music would be genuine and heartfelt. This devotion to sincerity is equally evident in contemporaneous discourse about literature: Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and Leo Tolstoy, among many others, placed enormous value on a direct correlation between the artist’s emotions and work. “Professing sincerity,” moreover, as the literary historian Susan Rosenbaum (2007, 5) has observed, was also not only a “moral practice

Expression   715 but . . . also good business. By performing their ‘private’ lives and feelings in public, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced their professional careers.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not simply the published score alone that was for sale—the “music itself,” so to speak—but also the soul of the composer, a wordless confession from the innermost recesses of the genius-artist, more emotionally direct than anything that could be conveyed through the strictures of conventional language (see Magill Jr. 2012 on the historical concept of sincerity in general). Whereas Haydn—often compared in his lifetime to the novelist Laurence Sterne— could routinely call attention to the artificial nature of his art (the ending of the “Joke” Quartet, Op. 33 No. 2 is the most famous of many examples), his nineteenth-century counterparts went to great lengths to preserve the illusion of seriousness and sincerity in their works. Not until the late 1880s would another composer, Erik Satie, call attention to the constructed nature of his own music so directly, and even then, Satie would remain an outlier for another forty years. It is scarcely surprising, then, that the ideal of self-expression as the sincere projection of the inner self reached its height at the turn of the twentieth century, at the very moment when Freud’s theory of the Unconscious and art’s relation to it was rapidly gaining acceptance. This was also the time when listeners were struggling to understand the aesthetic motivation behind a harmonic idiom rapidly approaching the realm of atonality. “Art,” as Schoenberg declared in a letter to the painter Vasily Kandinsky dated 24 January 1911, “belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics (nichtangeborenen Eigenschaften), but that which is inborn (angeborenen), instinctive (triebhaften)” (Schoenberg and Kandinsky 1980, 21; emphasis in the original). Later that same year, Schoenberg summed up his feelings in the dictum “Art comes not from ‘can’ but rather from ‘must’ (Kunst kommt nicht vom Können, sondern vom Müssen)” (Schoenberg 1976, 165).

Since 1920 The aesthetic of musical self-expression began to collapse almost as quickly as it had begun. The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) of the 1920s rejected subjectivity as the paradigmatic perspective on art and ushered in a return to an earlier conception of expression as a dispassionate construct: the detached circumspection of Hoffmann’s Besonnenheit could now resume its central role in perceptions of the creative process. The leading musical proponent of this new—or rather, very old—aesthetic was Igor Stravinsky, who in a series of pronouncements distanced himself from the very idea of expression. He declared his Octet (1923), for example, to be “not an ‘emotive’ work” but rather a “musical object . . . based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves” (quoted in White  1979, 574; on the complicated bibliographic history of this essay, see Stenzl 2012). Stravinsky, like Hanslick, did not deny the expressive powers of

716   Mark Evan Bonds music, but he saw these as by-products of the conscious manipulation of musical materials. In his autobiography, he noted: Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional at­trib­ ute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention—in short, an aspect which unconsciously or by force of habit, we have often come to confuse with its essential being.  (Stravinsky 1936, 83–84)

Expressive objectivity would become an aesthetic cornerstone of the high modernism that dominated the decades after the Second World War. In The Composer’s Voice, for example, the composer and theorist Edward T. Cone argued that a musical work’s creator is present in it only in the guise of a persona: “Every composition is an utterance depending on an act of impersonation” (Cone 1974, 5). This notion of an assumed and protean compositional identity is strikingly consistent with Enlightenment attitudes towards the nature of musical expression. Far from representing a norm, then, the conflation of expression and self-expression constitutes a relatively brief (if highly influential) episode in the broader history of music. The turn towards objectivity that re-emerged in the neoclassicism of the 1920s was not merely a reaction against Romantic subjectivity, as it is so often portrayed, but rather a reassertion of a much older concept of musical expression as artifice. Ortega y Gassett’s “dehumanization of art” and Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theatre” are but two of many aesthetic theories from this time that reflect this dispassionate understanding of the purpose and nature of art. The ideal of the musical work as a manifestation of its composer’s innermost self has nevertheless proven remarkably resilient. Composers themselves have adopted differing viewpoints on the relationship of their life and works. Some, like Milton Babbitt or Pierre Boulez, have insisted on the priority of formal structures and have minimized or denied autobiographical elements in their output. Others, like Schoenberg and Alban Berg, have continued to embed life experiences into their compositions (for example, Schoenberg in his String Trio, Op. 45; Berg in his Lyrische Suite), even while at times keeping the biographical origins of certain musical features a secret from the general public. Still others, like John Cage and Dmitri Shostakovich, have openly acknowledged the autobiographical nature of their music, but the precise nature of these connections is not always clear and the authority of these and other composers in fashioning the reception of their own works remains a point of serious contention in musical scholarship. By various means, then, contemporary composers of art music have managed to negotiate a place for themselves somewhere in this mixed tradition of uneasy co­ex­ist­ ence. Neo-Romanticism and postmodernism, both of which emerged during the third quarter of the twentieth century, accept the premise of self-expression without making it foundational to their aesthetics. The notion of life-as-works and works-as-life flour-

Expression   717 ishes with particular vigour in the realm of popular music, where it is applied to performers even more vigorously than to songwriters, whose identities often remain obscure (if not altogether unknown) in the public mind. In recent decades, critics and philosophers have built theories of expression based on one or more aspects of these earlier discourses. The survey that follows here outlines these theories according to their principal points of orientation. Some have focused on capturing the notion or concept of musical expression (for example, Levinson, Matravers, Ridley, Budd), while others (for example, Meyer, Kivy, Davies) have emphasized the causes and mechanisms of it. These approaches and objectives are by no means mutually exclusive: they often overlap or complement one another, and individual writers can be readily associated with more than a single type of theory or purpose.

Self-Expression Theories These refine the principles that dominated the nineteenth century’s leading paradigm of expression. In the twentieth century its chief proponents in the arts in general were Benedetto Croce (1902), R. G. Collingwood (1938), and Richard Wollheim (1968), all of whom believed to varying degrees and with different points of emphasis that the character of any artwork can be related in some way, however indirectly, back to the artist. The nineteenth century’s ideal of artistic self-expression has been supported to a considerable degree by developments in psychology, particularly the work of Freud and Jung. This is very much in keeping with the tenets of Schoenbergian self-expression, by which artistic creation becomes a means of psychic therapy through self-knowledge. More specifically in music, Theodor Adorno (an associate of Schoenberg) advocated the centrality of self-expression. If the “subject”—the composer—is “no longer permitted to state anything about itself,” then that subject “must be content with the hollow echo of objective musical language, which is no longer its own” (Adorno  1973, 181–182). For Adorno, “pathos”—emotions, feelings, passions—could come only from within and constituted an essential element of any music that wishes to claim a status beyond that of a mere commodity. More recently, Aaron Ridley (1995, 2004) has insisted that expression be viewed as an essential rather than merely incidental feature of any artwork, and that attempts to minimize the emotional aspects of a given work are misguided and misleading in that they run counter to our actual experience of listening.

Persona Theories These were adumbrated by Enlightenment critics who recommended that composers in effect imagine themselves into a state of mind appropriate to the expressive properties of the work to be composed. Such theories have been promoted by Edward T. Cone (1974), who advocates a persona theory from the perspective of the composer, and by Jerrold Levinson (1996,  2006) and Jenefer Robinson (2005), whose theories address the

718   Mark Evan Bonds concerns of listeners. Levinson maintains that the imagined presence of a persona in the mind of the listener is essential for hearing music as expressive at all: there must be an “agent,” as it were, who generates the music or its gestures for expression to be perceived in the act of listening. Ridley (2007), on the other hand, considers the concept of the persona useful on some occasions but not on others.

Arousal or Evocation Theories These theories locate expression within the listener’s response and thus look back on Enlightenment conceptions of music as a rhetorical art. Peter Mew (1985), Derek Matravers (2010), and Charles  O.  Nussbaum (2007), among others, have developed arguments based on this premiss, with Nussbaum drawing extensively on recent developments in psychology and the cognitive sciences to support his position.

Contour or Resemblance Theories These hold that music’s expressiveness arises from the similarities between sounding music and various emotional states. Thus, while one cannot say that a “sighing” instrumental motif in and of itself expresses longing or sorrow, a listener—and particularly a cultivated listener—is likely to hear that figure as being expressive of sorrow because of its similarity to the physical act of sighing, manifested by a general downward contour of the breath and of the body in general. These theories are at least partially indebted to Hanslick’s thesis (1854) that music’s true and exclusive content consists of tönend bewegte Formen (tonally animated forms). They also draw to at least some extent on Suzanne Langer’s earlier theory (Langer 1942) of analogous motion, which stresses our responses to the ebb and flow of music without ascribing direct correlation to specific emotions. Nelson Goodman (1968) developed a related argument, that a work of art can metaphorically exemplify an emotion. The most noted advocates of this theory specifically in the realm of music include Peter Kivy, who has explored our inclination to “animate” the musical sounds we hear (most notably in Kivy  1989), Stephen Davies (1994), and Malcolm Budd (1995).

Intransitive Theories Intransitive theories are based on the premiss that music can express only itself. These theories, too, are indebted in part to the aesthetics of Hanslick (1854), who argued that musical beauty—a term he used to encompass what most others called (and still call) expression—can be defined only in musical terms and is different from all other varieties of beauty or expression. Leonard Meyer (1956) posited that our emotional responses to music are primarily a product of expectations established at various levels (through

Expression   719 melody, harmony, voice-leading, timbre, etc.), and that we are moved by the realization of those expectations in ways that do not adhere to standard conventions. Roger Scruton (1997, 159) argues that listeners constantly “oscillate” between the transitive and intransitive sense of expression in music. Along similar lines, Anthony Newcomb (1984) has observed that formal and expressive interpretations are in fact complementary, and that we need not accept one concept at the expense of the other.

Conclusion In the end, no single theory of expression has proven wholly adequate or satisfactory from either an intellectual or an experiential perspective, and the variety of perspectives in play from the Enlightenment down to the present reflects the variety of ways in which we as individuals can hear music, including the same work at the hands of different performers, or for that matter, even the same performer at different times. This has led some to question the very concept of expression; Scruton, for one, has suggested that it might be beneficial to avoid it altogether (Scruton 1997, 153). But this seems neither beneficial nor even possible: we will inevitably continue in our efforts to isolate and articulate that quality which raises music above the level of a “pleasant mechanism,” to use Sulzer’s phrase. And in the process, we would do well to acknowledge that the “soul of music” (Sulzer again) is no less elusive than the human soul itself.

Note 1. All translations are my own.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Seabury Press. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. 1753–62. Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. 2 vols. Berlin: C. F. Henning and G. L. Winter. Batteux, Charles. 1746. Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe. Paris: Durand. Bonds, Mark Evan. 1998. “Haydn’s ‘Cours complet de la composition’ and the ‘Sturm und Drang’.” In Haydn Studies, edited by Dean Sutcliffe, 152–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2006. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2020. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

720   Mark Evan Bonds Botstein, Leon. 1991. “The Aesthetics of Assimilation and Affirmation: Reconstructing the Career of Felix Mendelssohn.” In Mendelssohn and His World, edited by R.  Larry Todd, 5–42. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Budd, Malcolm. 1995. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London: Allen Lane. Butt, John. 2002. Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cahusac, Louis de. 1751–65. “Expression (Opéra).” In the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited by Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. 17 vols. Paris: Briasson. Collingwood, R. G. 1938. Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cone, Edward T. 1974. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Croce, Benedetto. 1902. L’estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Milan: Sandron. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1982. Esthetics of Music. Translated by William  P.  Austin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published as Musikästhetik (Cologne: H.  Gerig, 1967). Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press. Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich. 1955. “Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalischen Sturm und Drang.” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 29: 323–349. Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich. 1994. Zur Geschichte der Beethoven-Rezeption. 2nd ed. Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag. Flothuis, Marius. 1990. “K. 304.” In The Compleat Mozart, edited by Neal Zaslaw and William Cowdery, 290. New York: W. W. Norton. Fröhlich, Joseph. 1828. Untitled review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Cäcilia 8:231–256. Gay, Peter. 1995. The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud. New York: W. W. Norton. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1960. Autobiographische Schriften. Vols. 9–10, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit. Stuttgart: Cotta. First published 1811. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1981. Gespräche mit Eckermann. In Schriften zur Kunst, Schriften zur Literatur, Maximen und Reflexionen, edited by Erich Trunz and Hans Joachim Schrimpf. Vol. 12 of Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, edited by Erich Trunz. Munich: C. H. Beck. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Griesinger, Georg August. 1810. Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Hanslick, Eduard. 1854. Von Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant as On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1986. Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. 1977. Mozart. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1810. Untitled review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12 (July 4).

Expression   721 Hunter, Mary. 2005. “ ‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58, no. 2 (Summer): 357–398. Kivy, Peter. 1989. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Langer, Suzanne. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. The Pleasure of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression.” In Contemplating Art, 91–108. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liszt, Franz. 1882. Streifzüge: Kritische, polemische und zeithistorische Essays. Edited by L. Ramann. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel. Magill, Jr., R. Jay. 2012. Sincerity. New York: W. W. Norton. Matravers, Derek. 2010. “Recent Philosophical Work on the Connection between Music and the Emotions.” Music Analysis 29, nos. 1–3 (March–October): 8–18. Mattheson, Johann. 1739. Der vollkommene Capellmeister. Hamburg: Herold. Translated by Ernest  C.  Harriss as Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister: A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981). McKinnon, James. 1987. Music in Early Christian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mew, Peter. 1985. “The Expression of Emotion in Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 25, no. 1 (Winter): 33–42. Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Newcomb, Anthony. 1984. “Sound and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 4 (June): 614–683. Nussbaum, Charles  O. 2007. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology and Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Ridley, Aaron. 1995. Music, Value and the Passions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. Philosophy of Music: Themes and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ridley, Aaron. 2007. “Persona Sometimes grata: On the Appreciation of Expressive Music.” In Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work, edited by Kathleen Stock, 130–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rochlitz, Friedrich. 1827. “Den Freunden Beethovens.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 19 (October 17, 1827): 701–710. Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenbaum, Susan  B. 2007. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Schmidt, Julian. 1853. Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Leipzig: Herbig. Schoenberg, Arnold. 1976. Stil und Gedanke: Aufsätze zur Musik. Edited by Ivan Vojtech. Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer.

722   Mark Evan Bonds Schoenberg, Arnold, and Vasily Kandinsky. 1980. Briefe, Bilder und Dokumente einer außergewöhnlichen Begegnung. Edited by Jelena Hahl-Koch. Vienna: Residenz Verlag. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Stenzl, Jürg. 2012. “Igor Strawinskys Manifest von 1924.” In Auf der Suche nach Geschichte(n) der musikalischen Interpretation, 71–91. Würzburg: Köngishausen & Neumann. Stravinsky, Igor. 1936. An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster. Originally published as Chroniques de ma vie. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1935. Sulzer, Johann Georg. 1771–4. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. 2 vols. Leipzig: M. G. Weidemanns Erben und Reich. Trilling, Lionel. 1972. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vazsonyi, Nicholas. 2012. Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Eric Walter. 1979. Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1968. Art and its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: Harper & Row. Wordsworth, William. 1800. Lyrical Ballads. 2 vols. London: Longman and Rees.

chapter 35

Gen der J. P. E. Harper-Scott

Musicological Examinations of Gender The study of gender is a theoretical and political act whose aim is to judge to what extent qualities of masculinity and femininity in human individuals are grounded in what is given by nature or what is made by culture. There are two principal responses to this question. On one side are conservatives who argue that a word which began its linguistic existence as a useful means of treating important distinctions in the qualities of parts of speech remains useful as a means of labelling the generally observable differences of behaviour and character between men and women. Linguistic and social conservatism seeks to preserve and ossify these linguistic and social distinctions, to declare them permanent and naturally given. While this does little harm to language, which does not cry when you beat it, the effect of the isomorphism in the hands of conservatives, witting or not, is to do material violence to actual living women and men. Stressing the nature side of the dialectic so extremely as to diminish the culture side to a point of negligibility is an act of political and social coercion which has palpable material effects on human beings of either sex. For feminists such as Judith Butler, in marked contrast, the assumption is that the opposite of the “natural” conservative view is correct.1 To such writers, gender is performative, which is to say, much more significantly influenced by cultural than by biological factors. Behind the observation of gender difference therefore lurks a theory of gender difference, determining the nature of the observation—and that theory is either feminist or non-feminist. Although gender theory is heavily politicized, fundamentally it simply makes the move common to most recent philosophy of science which stresses, in the words of Norwood Russell Hanson, that “seeing is a ‘theory laden’ undertaking. Observation of x is shaped by prior knowledge of x” (Hanson 1958, 19). The study of music and gender entered musicology under the influence of midcentury feminism and was subsequently transformed by the linguistic turn in the humanities, of which a new, postmodern form of feminism has been part, and which is generally

724   J. P. E. Harper-Scott declared to be a more sophisticated interpretative framework.2 This more recent emphasis has highlighted the importance of multiple gender identities rather than a binary view of gender as a masculine–feminine opposition. The increased focus on queer identities in particular has allowed men to occupy some of the space of subjugation that an earlier generation had given over primarily to women. But the proliferation of queer identities, an increasing stress on the intersectionality of gender, race, and other identities, the emphasis on new distinctions between trans and cis (i.e., between people who describe themselves as transgender, transsexual, trans, and so on; and those who do not: the terms trans and cis are at present used mainly by initiates of the discourse), and an increasingly vitriolic policing of the entire discourse of gender on blogs and social media, has created a situation in which feminists of an older generation, such as Germaine Greer, have been pariahed as transphobic.3 There is consequently great variety in approaches to the question of gender in music, but despite the variety, a clear pattern emerges which can be characterized as a strongly demarcated choice of emphasis between material or linguistic contexts. Musicological studies influenced by mid-twentieth-century feminism have a strong materialist focus on the lives, work, economic situation, professional struggles, social situation, critical reception, and so on, of women musicians. The accent of the investigation is therefore generally biographical, and a growing number of women composers and performers of art or popular music who had been neglected by traditional scholarship have now been treated to the same serious attention as their male counterparts. While the mode of argument is often biographical, the central claim is a philosophical one, namely that the canons of Western classical and popular music and their historical narratives are ideologically constructed, and that anything in music which can be characterized as feminine is systematically denigrated, again for ideological reasons, to the point where the material reality of musical women can almost disappear from consciousness. The breadth of research into these suppressed women’s histories is an indication of the scale of the earlier ideological silencing. It is not my intention to offer an annotated bibliography, which would be invidious in a field that has become so rich and extensive. Instead I shall quickly point to a number of indicative contributions to the discipline to sketch the general compass of musicological inquiry, then turn, in the next section, to philosophical responses both to musicological and more general writing on gender, before examining in more detail, in the third section, just one particular piece of music whose gendering has been important to the discipline in recent years, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. By offering an alternative feminist reading of the work, and the composer, at the centre of the debate, it is my aim to open a new perspective—challenging but, I hope, productive—on the issues at hand. Since the 1980s there have been published new standard reference works, such as the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (Sadie and Samuel 1994), and anthologies of women composers (Schleifer and Glickman 1996–2006). Such studies and collections have done much to raise general awareness of the hitherto unremarked contribution of women composers to music history. Scholarship which retains a sense of broad over-

Gender   725 view while allowing for slightly more expansive treatment of especially noteworthy creative artists includes studies by Citron (1993), Higgins (1991), Hoffmann (1991), Reich (1985), and Rieger (1981), concerning a broad array of composers and musicians stretching back to the Middle Ages. Composers and performers of art music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular are well represented by book-length studies.4 Popular-music histories, too, are marked by strange silences concerning women, and significant recent studies include Sherrie Tucker’s (2000) history of all-women jazz and dance bands in the 1940s, or Gayle F. Wald’s (2007) biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.5 As part of this lifting of the ideological veil, attention has also been drawn to the institutional obstacles, in education and the music business, which have been placed in the way of women’s success in musical activities—the ideological apparatuses, to modify Louis Althusser’s term for the material forces that impel ideological interpellation, which hold patriarchy in place.6 Although in many cases there is considerable overlap between materialist and linguistic concerns, a large number of scholars since the 1990s have turned to the language of music—its technical manipulation of melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation—in an effort to locate the ideological workings of patriarchy within the music itself. Influential early work on the gendering of musical composition and reception in terms of a gendered mind–body split was written by Suzanne G. Cusick (1994a) and Richard Leppert (1993), while Susan McClary (1991) was responsible for the most provocative early gendered reading of tonality from Monteverdi to the twentieth century. Discourse analysis was also brought into contact with queer theory at the same time (Brett, Thomas, and Wood  1994). Among authors who have accepted the basic premiss of music’s ideological interpellation by patriarchy, and seek to apply it to analysis of specific repertoires, methodology has continued to be varied. Some authors have drawn explicitly or implicitly on the resources of music theory and analysis, while others have written more impressionistically about the music and given relatively more attention to any text it might set.7 In much scholarship such as this in which discourse is a major focus, a basic assumption is that a dominant ideology is colouring the production, reproduction, and reception of a musical canon. Although its focus is different, a crucial model for this ideological critique of a canon is Edward Said’s (1978) work on the ideology of Orientalism.8 As Said argues about the entire Western tradition since the ancient Greeks, so many feminist critics of the musical canon argue that a single ideology has shaped the development of culture. For Said’s trope of Orientalism such scholars substitute patriarchy as the dominant term.9 The claim is double-edged: not only has pa­tri­ archy controlled the production and dissemination of the music of the Western canon but it is embedded in the musical language of that tradition, and therefore shapes listener responses to musically ordered sound—and since music, like other arts, plays a role in forming subjective identity, such music is complicit in the patriarchal ideological work of modernity. The problem with this reading is that it relies on an uneasy conjunction of Erich Auerbach’s (1953) narrative of a unified and seamless Western canon stretching from ancient Greece to modernism and, on the other hand, Michel Foucault’s

726   J. P. E. Harper-Scott emphasis on discourse, which he precisely meant to apply to the specific historical conditions of modernity.10 Consequently, this perspective tends to flatten out history and to overlook or deny the possibility of ideology changing in response to historical circumstances. It is ironic that a theoretical tradition which in other situations strives so hard to stress the dynamic cultural side of the nature–culture dialectic should, in this fundamental postmodern commitment, forcefully insist on an unchanging ideological nature in the West. I return to the implications of this inconsistency in postmodern thought below.11

Conservative and Radical Philosophical Views on Gender Studies This congeries of ideas—a continuous Western tradition, a dominant ideology stretching across it, and the need to examine its role in the construction of human subjects— exercises a strong hold over more recent feminist musicology, which has concentrated on gender as a form of knowledge. In specifically musical terms, the turn to analysing discourse has encouraged a very welcome focus on the role of the technical language of music in creating and policing gendered difference in music. But although feminist criticism has rightly played a prominent part in recent musicology, its arguments have not been taken up with much interest by philosophers writing on music. One of the most thoughtful of the philosophers who dismiss musicological studies that develop a critical perspective on gender in music was Roger Scruton (who, to his great credit, was well read in musicology). Scruton’s view on the matter might be guessed from the curious fact that he seemed to prefer not to use the word gender at all: in his Aesthetics of Music, for instance, it appears only twice, on both occasions in quotations from other scholars (Scruton 1997, 429, 431). A politically conservative writer and the author of a tract on The Meaning of Conservatism (Scruton 2002), he objects specifically to the “Marxian theory of ideology” that he says provides the ground for gendered readings of music. Gender theory appears to him to add little to the discourse of music criticism, and one of its major musicological representatives is his chosen scapegoat.12 If we look at the results of ideological criticism, we find nothing very new. Susan McClary, for example, who explores the “process of gender construction” in the music of Monteverdi, is just as concerned as a traditional critic would be, to show us how we should hear the music. She justifies her judgement by arguing that Monteverdi’s melodic line embodies conceptions of the masculine and feminine. And this is true. Has it not always been a part of hearing the human voice correctly, that we should understand the vision of sexuality that is projected by the musical line? It is a further question, whether the music is also endorsing the vision; and a further question still whether the endorsement is contentious. . . . Or take another of Susan McClary’s examples—the presentation of the heroine’s sexuality in Bizet’s

Gender   727 Carmen. It is undeniable that the music projects a particular conception of Carmen, using compelling folk-rhythms and chromatic melodies (as in the famous “Habanera”), in order to emphasize her threatening quality. And the threat is real, working its way into the soul of José and slowly undermining it. (It is not as though nobody had noticed this before.) But what follows? When it comes to describing the meaning of Bizet’s work, McClary does exactly what any other critic would do: she shows how the drama is conveyed through the music, and how the simple tonality of José’s love is undermined by the vacillating cadences which are Carmen’s musical gift to him.  (Scruton 1997, 431–432)

Scruton slips easily from “gender construction” to “sexuality,” as if they were the same thing, and attempts to collapse a dialectical tension into monological tranquillity. But his reading misses every important point of the argument. By gender construction, McClary means the way that an individual human subject consciously or unconsciously adopts behaviours of a more or less stereotypically masculine or feminine quality in response to general and specific cultural pressure: for instance, a man may resist tears in a moment of pain (responding to the childhood admonishment that “big boys don’t cry”), or a woman may choose to act on an emotional rather than a rational basis (because her culture tells her she is governed by “feminine intuition”). Sexuality, by contrast, is the specifically sexual set of behaviours which, at least since Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis of 1886 and Freud’s work on human sexuality, has come to be considered a fixed and biologically given (as opposed to a socially constructed) quality of all human beings, irrespective of the time or place of their birth. McClary wishes to stress the dialectical relation between what is universally natural to all humans, including the fact that they are social animals, and the particular cultural circumstances which determine the formation of their particular identities.13 In short, McClary’s work on Carmen concerns both (1) the gender construction of the main character and (2) her sexuality— and, as a musicologist, she is also (3) interested in enhancing her audience’s understanding of the technical processes of the music and its intellectual and emotional effects on its listeners. Scruton is interested in the second and third points, but, for whatever reason, is not interested in the first. While Scruton’s criticism comes from the Right, feminist gender theory also has detractors among philosophers on the Left. Especially energetic in his criticism is Slavoj Žižek, who argues that there is a strange meeting between conservatives like Scruton and liberals like Butler. Žižek’s move is to focus on “the ‘surplus-enjoyment’, which sustains the two positions” (Žižek 2008, 56).14 The surplus is created by the transformation of pain into pleasure—the conservative through wry or rueful comment on the intransigence of fate, the liberal by “snatching a little piece of jouissance away from the Master” (57). In other words, the conservative who has no problem with the existing order of things, and uses its mere existence as an argument in its favour, will tend to mock any Leftist critique of prevailing practices or conditions as utopian, and appeal to simple or brute reality (in the same way that a conservative will appeal to plain English rather than the jargon of theory)—but will soften the criticism by some disarming, sensitive remark.

728   J. P. E. Harper-Scott Hence Scruton’s rhetorical question, cited above: “Has it not always been a part of hearing the human voice correctly, that we should understand the vision of sexuality that is projected by the musical line?” This question distracts from the real claim by McClary that motivated it, namely that there is a manufactured, ideologically laden imbalance between the presentation of masculine and feminine representations in music, and that this manufactured imbalance works to the considerable disbenefit of women. The pain of the situation is half acknowledged by the conservative, but with a shrug: what can one do, other than to be gallant about it, since this is simply the natural way that the world goes? The liberal, by contrast, foregrounds the faults or deliberate deceptions of the existing cultural forms, but in a self-undermining way. The pain of the injustice is converted alchemically into pleasure. A long inventory of revealing discursive constructions is read off in the manner of an ideological charge sheet against the artwork under consideration, and the reader’s anger or discomfort is transmogrified by the reassurance that someone else sees this, and is angered or discomfited by it too. The result of such critical discourse analysis is that the material conditions are unaffected, and the people who pay closest attention to the injustices of the current situation are distracted by the intellectual diversion of an ineffectual policing of language, while those who exercise real material power are left alone and unchallenged, unimpeded by their critique. Hence, both conservative and liberal ultimately support the prevailing cultural form. This effect occurs irrespective of the critic’s intentions, as a consequence of the structure of the arguments. On this view, while the feminist arguments of McClary, Clément, Solie, et al., have the effect of demonstrating how music articulates and sometimes critiques a patriarchal bias, they do not seriously threaten to undermine the prevailing ideology. Instead, they increase the reader’s appreciation of the artwork, by providing surplus jouissance, and so make it easier for liberal listeners to enjoy the music without guilt, and therefore without actually effecting a real change in the situation.15 This failure has not escaped other feminist musicologists in their reception of McClary. Paula Higgins, in her review of McClary’s magnum opus, Feminine Endings, even goes so far as to say that “one of the book’s troubling aspects is its insidious tendency to reinscribe patriarchy everywhere” (Higgins 1993, 176). At root, I argue that the problem is that the mission of ideological critique, vital to gender theory, has foundered on the rock of Foucauldianism. The solution cannot emerge from within the Saidian–Foucauldian nexus, because the retention of that model ties gender theory to what Fredric Jameson (1991) famously called “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” Postmodern liberal musicology, which insists that there is a hegemony of the canon, opens up a range of new musical possibilities for scholarship to focus on in both art and popular traditions, in film, and in non-Western music (which in typically postmodern fashion is often rendered as the plural musics). The effect is to reconfigure the scholarly space so that it has no centre, no canon of knowledge (however shifting and consensually determined that canon might be from generation to generation), but only an endlessly multiplying array of musical choices (and, in gender theory, ever more numerous gender identities beyond the male–female binary), each of equal “value” in a free marketplace of aesthetic ideas that are kept in perpetual motion. Far from performing an ideological critique of the late-capitalist cultural economy, liberal

Gender   729 musicology simply attunes scholarship to the ideology of the prevailing political economy. Unless a theory of gender and music can reach an accommodation with a canon that resists this capitalist spiral, scholarship will continue its drift towards the pseudoprogressive politics of some vocal corners of social media. There, the correct use of symbolic constructions has somehow become a more important focus of politics and policing than the transformation of external reality, and this turn away from external forms of oppression to internal forms of response to it serves, as Higgins already observed at the time of first publication of Feminine Endings, to hold patriarchy comfortably in place.16 The reasons for this are, I suggest, dismayingly obvious, because such policing suits capitalism very well. The proliferating identities of gender, race, and sexuality, which are so carefully mapped by a radically pluralist postmodern discourse, can all be commodified, as Alain Badiou, among others, has been at pains to point out. Each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. . . . What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge—taking the form of communities demanding recognition and socalled cultural singularities—of women, homosexuals, the disabled . . . And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles . . . Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. (Badiou 2003, 10; referencing Deleuze and Guattari 2004)

Foucauldian discourse analysis locks out history, economics, and class—the topics forbidden by capitalist ideology. If there is to be a renewal of gender studies in music, one which stresses the universalizing claims of equal treatment, it can only come through a radical reassertion of the material, of the historical, of the true, at the expense of the immaterial, ahistorical, truth-denying capitalist anxieties of liberalism.

Beethoven, Revolution, and Gendered Readings The direct or indirect criticisms of philosophers such as Scruton and Žižek can, I suggest, be rebuffed by returning to the anti-feminist’s bogey, Susan McClary, from a theoretical perspective that, albeit feminist, is at odds with her own. It is useful to re-examine

730   J. P. E. Harper-Scott probably the most controversial utterance of the feminist new musicology, a highly quotable phrase by McClary, which was occasioned by the point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She writes: The carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release. (McClary 1987, unpaged)

This remark led to the understandable suspicion that feminist musicology judges the musical system of tonality to be so thoroughly implicated in the violent ideology of patriarchy that every perfect cadence is a musical encoding of rape. In defence of her position, Robert Fink has suggested that it has two valuable contributions to make. The first is a purely music-analytical point: her emphasis on the failure to attain release tallies with Fink’s reading of what he calls the structural failure of this moment, the failed cadential motion. McClary is simply concretizing an analytical abstraction from her own subject position. Second is an aesthetic insight, namely that this represents a response to music which he says is “an audible trace of . . . Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern sublime” (Fink 2004, 111), an exemplary expression of violence and pain—which makes rape an even more intelligible choice of image. Fink writes that “the form of Beethoven’s Ninth is itself not salvageable, shattered at its critical structural turning point by the irruption of the unpresentable into the active presentation” (130). The cadential failure and its violent musical presentation are for Fink the essence of the sublime. Theodor Adorno, one of McClary’s declared influences, albeit one whom she subordinates to Foucault, had a rather different reading of this moment, and it is one which has a surprising bearing on the theory of gender and music.17 In his unfinished, stillfragmentary book on Beethoven, Adorno claims that “the gigantic complex of the first movement of the Ninth is really only there for the sake of a few bars at the start of the recapitulation, to show that immensity could not exist without the whole movement” (Adorno 1998, 115). And in explaining what this immensity might mean, he offers the following: The opening of the recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth was composed over and over again, on account of its transcendence. But it also represents the utter immanence of transcendence, which defeated Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. While expression is entirely foreign to it,18 the passage is a strict working-out of the original bars of the theme in the exposition—indeed, the transcendent itself is the full working-out of the origin. Music is reduced to its pure becoming: this causes it to pause. And even the new element in this passage was everywhere present already. (Adorno 1998, 113)

It is normal to offer masculine-gendered interpretations of Adorno’s thinking, so I shall begin from that perspective. Adorno does not invoke here the familiar trope of Beethoven’s revolutionary middle-period style. This style has direct links to post-Revolutionary

Gender   731 French composers, which have been extensively demonstrated. Its claims to musically encode either a specifically or generally revolutionary sentiment might therefore be seriously entertained.19 Irrespective of the specific historical resonance, it seems that this moment has a revolutionary quality. It exhibits the traits of artistic, political, or scientific revolutions described in the recent philosophy of Alain Badiou (2005,  2009). On this account, whose utility to a new materialist theory of gender in music I shall spell out in the concluding section, a revolution is, formally, a faithful response to a truthful Event. An Event, in Badiou’s philosophy, is an infinite excess to any particular historical presentation, for instance the claim that the poor of the earth can become free. Such a truth exceeds, but at the same time motivates, its presentation in Spartacus’s army, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc. It exceeds the situation because what it signifies is more general and universal than the historical particulars; and it motivates the situation because historical actors drive historical developments along lines illuminated by the general and universal truth. Spartacus and Lenin acted in a particular way in their own times as a means of instantiating, in their present moment, a truth of universal validity.20 This moment of recapitulation in Beethoven’s symphony functions precisely like one of these moments, which Badiou calls “truth procedures.” On Adorno’s interpretation, the point of recapitulation is a repeated return to an origin, a truth which remains inexhaustible and universal, but which requires a new historical moment to achieve a new form of presence. The recapitulation in the Ninth Symphony becomes in this sense the resurrection of the idea presented at the beginning of the symphony as, so to speak, the original revolutionary moment, the birth of the new revolutionary world. For scholars like McClary who hear this music under the influence of Foucault’s theory of power, however, the revolutionary rhetoric of the heroic style, recrudescent in Beethoven’s late period, is heard as Germanic, masculine, and extremely violent. This particular moment in the set of Beethoven’s works becomes, on this account, a kind of limit point for patriarchal tonality. This focus on the violence of Beethoven’s style, and of tonality more generally, has had a potent effect on musicology, but like much else in scholarship, it has a precise historical context in the motion of Western ideology. The emergence of the belief that revolution and violence are linked can be seen most clearly in the historiography of the historical moment in which Beethoven was writing—the French Revolution—which also took a turn in the 1980s towards a narrative that insisted on a violence inherent in revolution (rather than being a response to right-wing re­sist­ ance), and the claim that all revolution ended in failure. Both assertions were attempts to discredit the emancipatory claims of the Left, and it is little surprise that they were conductive to the regimes of Thatcher and Reagan, which wished to preserve their neoliberal status quo.21 Whatever their intended politics, it is no surprise that McClary and Fink, in acknowledging the revolutionary distinctiveness of Beethoven’s heroic style, insist on violence as its central characteristic. They are simply perpetuating a potent contemporary myth of revolution. As a revolutionary composer, Beethoven, and the tonality whose goal orientation he made his own, are on this Rightist view necessarily a force of repression, and in creating a violent sublimity which somehow cannot achieve final presentation of the

732   J. P. E. Harper-Scott idea it is striving towards, McClary and Fink construe Beethoven as a composer whose music denies the very possibility of revolutionary change. On this gendered understanding of the language of Beethoven’s tonality, there is no emancipation. Its apparent truth claims—most notably that men can become brothers—are false. There is a certain attractiveness to McClary’s and Fink’s response, because it strikes superficially appealing feminist notes. Not only do they read misogynistic violence into the language of the music, but they impute, often directly, a heightened machismo to interpretations of critics like Adorno. And yet their own interpretative focus on violence, as well as being a historically contingent one might, paradoxically, also seem to be quite a masculinist interpretation. Let us return to Adorno’s interpretation of the Ninth Symphony, quoted above. From the masculine perspective that is normally attributed to him, Adorno could indeed be perceived to be referencing a musical sublime that is awesome and violent, even sexually so. But if one ventures a feminine reading, something radically different emerges. Adorno’s fragment focuses on transcendence, not on pain or pleasure. He does not speak of the moment of recapitulation being overwhelming. He speaks of immanence, of something dwelling inside, and of transcendence, of something that rises or goes beyond. When he speaks of this moment drawing the rest of the movement into itself, of going back to the origin, might we not instead speak of the movement being drawn back into the womb, as if the transcendent mother returns in thought to reflect on the birth of a new life, and through a miraculous second gestation and rebirth sets that life on a course of constant renewal, of inexhaustible growth and development, of perpetual, living revolution? Yes, violence can be awesome and painful, but so can childbirth.22

Conclusion It is to be hoped that future studies of music and gender will retain the field’s many indispensable recent insights into the gendered language of music, but insulate themselves against the error, dramatically spotlit by Žižek, of simply taking psychological jouissance from the shared knowledge of the injustices of patriarchy. In order to move surely in a direction enabling it to actively oppose the ills it diagnoses, gendered theory of music needs to turn away from Foucault, Said, and the identity politics which generates figures for capitalist investment, and towards a renewed materialist dialectic which is sensitive to shifting historical configurations, to real humans embodied in time, responding to Badiouvian truth Events. Although Badiou accepts the basic insight of postmodern gender theory, namely that it is false to insist on a simple male–female binary of sex (and masculine­­–feminine binary of gender), he does have two objections to the way the consequences of this insight have played out in postmodern theory. First, he claims that this deconstruction of the gender binary hands sexuality over to capitalism, for reasons elaborated above. Second, he argues that this deconstruction can only hold firm in a world without love.

Gender   733 This is a startling but also a liberating claim. For Badiou, “the difference of the sexes serves as the support which makes it possible for a subjective formalism [i.e., a comingtogether of a couple] to amorously take hold of a body that an encounter has brought forth into the world—in a manner that is entirely independent of the empirical sex of those who commit themselves to it” (Badiou 2009, 420). That is, an encounter of love, which brings something radically new into the world which had not previously existed, but which structures itself around a general and universal truth (that is to say, it is an Event), creates from the individuals an ontological Two. It is necessary that there be two separate sexed positions (what Badiou calls “the sexes” in the quotation above) but irrelevant whether those sexed position are man, woman, transsexual, etc. The formation of the Two commits individuals to a particular truth, to a strong declaration of their position in respect of one another. Because it entails a commitment to a truth, the sexual difference which constitutes the Two is therefore “always a break with the atony [the lack of a true tonic centre: his image is a musical one] of fashionable sexualities” (420). The “fashionable sexualities” of postmodernism are supported by the denial of any possible truth in the realm of sex or sexuality. But every Two is a witness to the universality of the Event of truth. Whoever the individuals might be, and whatever their sex, sexuality, or gender identity, they create a new world in their present by establishing a subjective connection with an acknowledged truth. For example, they might recognize that there is a generalizable quality in the love of Dido and Aeneas which—irrespective of the identity of any two individuals in the present—can be newly realized, now, in the Event that is newly re-presented in the love of a new Two. The (particular) identity exists in relation to a (universal) truth; the particularity of identity does not entail an absence of a truth. Therefore, on this new perspective, the fine gradations of gender that contemporary postmodern theorists insist on, and which identity politics cannot help but offer as items for sale, are accepted as a background, but ultimately identity—which is disparate—will be pulled together into a universalizable response to a singular, infinite truth. Good theory should always emerge from an encounter between relatively abstract thinking such as Badiou’s or Butler’s and the specific concerns of an individual discipline.23 In musicology, one of the central means by which scholars realize the postmodern desire to produce “atony,” the abandonment of a truth at the core of disciplinary knowledge, is by critiquing and even rejecting the canon. In studies of gender in music, this abandonment is often pivotal in the ideological critique of the symbolic representation of patriarchal knowledge/power (to invoke Foucault once more). But if an emancipatory truth is to be possible within the study of gender in music, a transformation of current musicological understanding of it is necessary. In conclusion I offer just one example of how this transformation might occur, and it is not by accident that I continue to concentrate on what contemporary liberal musicology considers the most controversially German, canonic, and “masculine” composer of all: on the contrary, I insist that it is only by a radical return to the canon that a progressive future for musicology can be carved out from the proliferating identitarian logic of capitalist postmodernity. It need not be complex. To approach a dialectical unfolding is sometimes simply a matter of turning the by now familiar, inward-looking, Foucauldian attention to the

734   J. P. E. Harper-Scott discursive practices of music—here the familiar topic of the violence of tonality—outwards onto the world. That is, rather than stopping with the observation that Beethoven’s music is violent, and running away from it and the canon into peripheral art music, the countless styles of popular music, or ethnomusicology, we should renew our fascination with the canon, and ask the question, among others, whether the violence of canonic Western masterworks is responding to some other form of violence outside, in the world. Elsewhere I have argued that tonality’s strong insistence on governing the relationship between consonance and dissonance amounts to a form of structural violence in which an ideological inside and outside, normal and deviant, are projected onto the level of the structure (Harper-Scott 2012). If Beethoven’s musical surface is violent, there is no reason to suppose that the violence originates in him, or in the canon. Rather, it could be present because Beethoven is demonstrating the arbitrariness of this rigidly hierarchical system of musical organization, perhaps not with the intention of smashing it, but of showing up its limits so that we can imagine a different world beyond it. The world that he ultimately points to is, as Adorno (1998) and Spitzer (2006) have argued, that of the modernism already implicit in classicism. And indeed, with the eradication of the consonance–dissonance binary by the canonic composers of the Second Viennese School, this work of emancipation achieved a revolutionary new synthesis, one which began a modernist response that has stretched through generational waves to our present. In contradistinction to the ideological complaisance of non-art forms (which are the only truly hegemonic music of modernity, ubiquitous and culturally dominant), this art tradition has retained, not without hypocrisies and failures, a resilient defiance of prevailing cultural norms. The decisive test of its offensiveness to current ideology is the zealousness with which it is scorned for its elitism and irrelevance by free-market politicians and their inadvertent votaries in the liberal academy. True, the classic anglophone interpretation of Beethoven’s heroic style emerged in the mid-twentieth century not from writers who evinced any particularly strong revolutionary feeling, but on the contrary from those who were happy to consider revolution in music as something entirely divorced from ordinary history, something to do simply with aesthetic products. They considered art to exist in (relatively or entirely) autonomous relation to other spheres of human experience. It was only a more radically politicized later generation, including figures such as McClary, which fought the classic interpretation, rightly, on political grounds. Correctly identifying that aesthetic autonomy is an exaggeration, and that art is embroiled in general history and its shifting ideologies, the revisionists sought to attack the untheorized earlier school of Beethoven interpretation. But their presentation of revolution as inevitably violent denies the possibility of emancipation and, in so doing, works towards capitalist ends. Their voices, considered by many to be radically opposed to conventional ways of thinking, are now a harmless inherent transgression which cannot undermine the structure they despise. Ultimately, the reason why the hyper-violent recent feminist interpretation is ultimately a distortion of the value of Beethoven is that emancipation works for women as well as for men. In denying this music any possible connection to revolutionary processes of change, such thinking effectively kills the feminist cause. By declaring that power must be relin-

Gender   735 quished, such writers refuse the invitation to change the world to equalize the treatment of women and men, and leave the subjugated half of humanity with no option but to learn to love the oppressive conditions of the status quo. In a direct way, the damning of revolutionary or modernist impulses as masculinist is a politically blatant defence of the power structures of the existing order, and an attack on all progressive movements. It seems to me that a more positive future feminist musicology will respond to canonic figures such as Beethoven in the faithful and surprisingly gentle manner that is revealed in Adorno’s fragment. Under today’s neo-liberal postmodernism, this is a Beethoven, and a tonality, and a canon, and a culturally critical musicology, in need of emergency rehabilitation.

Notes 1. The classic texts of this postmodern gender theory are Butler 1990 and 1993. 2. The so-called linguistic turn in the humanities describes the commitment of scholars writing in the wake of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to the idea that language constitutes reality. Adherents to this view hold that, far from being a neutral means of describing the material essence of the real world, language itself has the most powerful effect in defining, sustaining, and in short creating reality itself. Language ought, therefore, to be subjected to the most intense and unflinching critical attention. 3. For a general introduction to the new policing of feminist discourse, see “The TERFs [Trans Excluding Radical Feminists],” http://theterfs.com/. An example of intersectional musicology is Lott 1993. 4. See Hisama 2001; Hyde 1998; Myers 1993; Reich 1985; Tick 1993; and Tillard 1996. 5. For a more critical view of gender in popular music, see Leach 2001. 6. Though this is also a feature of some already cited studies, see in particular Rieger 1981; Reich 1985, 1990; and Hoffmann 1991. On the material force of ideology, see Althusser 1971. 7. A representative but by no means exhaustive list of such studies would have to include Clément  1988; Cusick  1994b; Draughon  2003; Irving  2011; Knapp  2003; Leach  2006; McClary 1992; Solie 1992; and Tick 1997. James Hepokoski’s (1994) gendered reading of sonata form, which offers an alternative to McClary’s, is interestingly refracted in his later Sonata Theory, in which the “feminine” second theme is elevated to the most important role in the sonata design—in contrast to the normal hegemonic freighting of the masculine– feminine binary: see Hepokoski and Darcy 2006. For an excellent overview of gender and music from the ethnomusicological tradition, whose attention to music is quite differently orientated, as well as for a reflective biography of the feminist movement in that field, see Koskoff 2014. In the field of popular music, Whiteley 2000 and Whiteley and Rycenga 2006 are highly regarded. 8. For a critical history of its application to the study of music, see Bellman 2011. 9. For the same reason, but as appropriate to their different preoccupations, scholars of Russian, Scandinavian, or non-Western music substitute Germanocentrism, Eurocentrism, or some other term they find to be ideologically suspect. 10. Said cites Foucault (1972, 1977) as his major influence. 11. For a gently worded but explosive critique of Said 1978, see Aijaz 1992, 159–220. 12. It must be said that Marx is generally only a subconscious influence for the scholars whom Scruton targets. On the whole, studies of music and gender vary too greatly in their attitude towards capitalism to be labelled Marxist.

736   J. P. E. Harper-Scott 13. Scruton’s impatience with the cultural critic’s opposition of culture and nature—“as though culture were not natural to us” (Scruton 1997, 430)—again misses the very obvious point that nobody is denying that both culture and nature are essential to the nature of human beings: the demand is simply that their dialectical relation be properly grasped. 14. Here Žižek borrows Jacques Lacan’s categories of the knave and fool, but conservative and liberal are decent approximations for present purposes. See Lacan 1992, 182–183. 15. See also Clément 1988 and Solie 1993. 16. In today’s universities, the turn towards internal symbolic experience and away from external material reality has reached the point where university administrators are introducing a regulatory framework to police thought in the classroom. Lecturers are asked to provide trigger warnings before their lectures (to alert students to potentially unsettling topics of discussion) and campus authorities issue faculty with guidance notes on avoiding microaggressions (for example, where the question “where are you from?” is heard as “you are a foreign alien, unnatural and unwelcome”). See Lukianoff and Haidt 2015. This is a high point, though perhaps not yet the apogee, of Foucauldianism. 17. The introduction to McClary 1991 traces her theoretical lineage. 18. By “expression” Adorno means the expression of something concrete and external. 19. Solomon (1977, 138) summarizes the results of studies by around a dozen authorities who have established direct links between the symphonies, overtures, and violin and piano sonatas to post-Revolutionary composers such as Berton, Catel, Gossec, Cherubini, Grétry, Kreutzer, and Méhul. 20. Abstractly, an Event is a non-well-ordered mathematical set, a set which contains itself as one of its terms. A simple example is the set of my mind, which is defined as “the set of objects of which I can form a conception.” This set includes squirrels, tea, self-denial . . . and my mind. The human mind, defined in these terms, is thus an infinite excess to any particular subject, and yet also finitely present within it. 21. The principal architect of this interpretation was François Furet (1981). Simon Schama (1989) has been an extremely successful popularizer, with a showman’s eye for gory detail. 22. For recent feminist readings of Adorno, see Heberle 2006, and especially Lee 2006, which argues contra McClary for Adorno’s sensitivity to the body, and the feminine body in particular, in Minima Moralia and other books. 23. Butler 2009 makes the same point. I am grateful to Ian Pace for drawing my attention to this.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1998. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music; Fragments and Texts. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity. Aijaz, Ahmad. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, 127–186. London: New Left Books. Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.

Gender   737 Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. Bellman, Jonathan D. 2011. “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology.” Musical Quarterly 94, no. 3 (Fall): 417–438. Brett, Philip, Gary Thomas, and Elizabeth Wood, eds. 1994. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2009. “If the Commodity Could Speak…” TDR: The Drama Review 53, no. 1 (Spring): 22–23. Citron, Marcia  J. 1993. Gender and the Musical Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clément, Catherine. 1988. Opera, Or, the Undoing of Women. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cusick, Suzanne G. 1994a. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem.” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter): 8–27. Cusick, Suzanne G. 1994b. “Gender and the Cultural Work of a Classical Music Performance.” Repercussions 3, no. 1 (Spring): 77–110. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum. First published 1972. Draughon, Francesca. 2003. “Dance of Decadence: Class, Gender, and Modernity in the Scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.” Journal of Musicology 20, no. 3 (Summer): 388–413. Fink, Robert. 2004. “Beethoven Antihero: Sex, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Failure, Or Listening to the Ninth Symphony as Postmodern Sublime.” In Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing, edited by Andrew Dell’Antonio, 109–153. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. Furet, François. 1981. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, Norwood Russell. 1958. Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper-Scott, J. P. E. 2012. The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton. Music in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heberle, Renée J., ed. 2006. Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno: Re-Reading the Canon. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Hepokoski, James. 1994. “Masculine–Feminine.” Musical Times 135, no. 1818 (August): 494–499. Hepokoski, James A., and Warren Darcy. 2006. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higgins, Paula. 1991. “Parisian Nobles, a Scottish Princess, and the Woman’s Voice in Late Medieval Song.” Early Music History 10: 145–200. Higgins, Paula. 1993. “Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics.” 19th-Century Music 17, no. 2 (Autumn): 174–192.

738   J. P. E. Harper-Scott Hisama, Ellie M. 2001. Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, Freia. 1991. Instrument und Körper: Die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. Hyde, Derek. 1998. New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music. 3rd ed. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Irving, Howard. 2011. “Gender and Germanness in the British Reception of the Viennese Classics.” Musical Times 152, no. 1914 (Spring): 87–94. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Knapp, Raymond. 2003. “Reading Gender in Late Beethoven: An die Freude and An die ferne Geliebte.” Acta Musicologica 75 (1): 45–63. Koskoff, Ellen. 2014. A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton. First published 1986. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2001. “Vicars of ‘Wannabe’: Authenticity and the Spice Girls.” Popular Music 20, no. 2 (May): 134–167. Leach, Elizabeth Eva. 2006. “Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenthcentury Music Theory and the Directed Progression.” Music Theory Spectrum 28, no. 1 (March): 1–21. Lee, Lisa Yun. 2006. “The Bared-Breasts Incident.” In Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, edited by Renée J. Heberle, 113–140. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press. Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. 2015. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic (September), 42–52. McClary, Susan. 1987. “Getting Down off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis ii.” Minnesota Composer’s Forum Newsletter: unpaged. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, Susan. 1992. Georges Bizet: “Carmen.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myers, Margaret. 1993. Blowing Her Own Trumpet: European Ladies’ Orchestras and Other Women Musicians 1870–1950 in Sweden. Gothenburg, Sweden: University of Gothenburg Press. Reich, Nancy B. 1985. Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reich, Nancy B. 1990. “The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel.” In Mendelssohn and His World, edited by Larry Todd, 86–99. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rieger, Eva. 1981. Frau, Musik und Männerherrschaft: zum Ausschluss der Frau aus der deutschen Musikpädagogik, Musikwissenschaft und Musikausübung. Ullstein Materialien. Frankfurt: Ullstein. Sadie, Julie Anne, and Rhian Samuel, eds. 1994. The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. London: Macmillan. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Gender   739 Schama, Simon. 1989. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Knopf. Schleifer, Martha Furman, and Sylvia Glickman. 1996–2006. Women Composers: Music Through the Ages. 8 vols. Detroit, MI: G. K. Hall. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2002. The Meaning of Conservatism. 3rd ed. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Solie, Ruth A. 1992. “Whose Life? the Gendered Self in Schumann’s Frauenliebe Songs.” In Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, edited by Steven Paul Scher, 219–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solie, Ruth  A. 1993. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Solomon, Maynard. 1977. Beethoven. New York: Schirmer Books. Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tick, Judith. 1993. “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology.” In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music, edited by Ruth A. Solie, 83–106. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Tick, Judith. 1997. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Tillard, Françoise. 1996. Fanny Mendelssohn. Translated by Camille Naish. Portland, OR: Amadeus. Tucker, Sherrie. 2000. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wald, Gayle. 2007. Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity. New York: Routledge. Whiteley, Sheila, and Jennifer Rycenga, eds. 2006. Queering the Popular Pitch. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. First published 1997.

chapter 36

The I n effa bl e (a n d Beyon d) Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope

In mathematics there are “ineffables,” which are un-formulable propositions, and in set theory there is even an “ineffable cardinal,” a phrase that can easily unmoor the imagination (off we sail, to ornithology, or church hierarchies, or reddish hues).1 But as understood within the humanities, “ineffable” has primarily to do with words. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means “too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words”—alternatively, it means barred from being said out loud, “not to be uttered.” Linger for a moment over the first meaning, since this is the one that has been significant in music philosophy. (The second is often associated with Abrahamic strictures against naming God.) Though the ineffable has been associated with music in a multitude of cultures, surprisingly few philosophers have devoted sustained attention to this association. Small wonder, then, that among writers who deal with music and philosophy, the ineffable has become so powerfully entwined and associated with a single philosopher who positioned music’s ineffability as one of his central preoccupations: Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85). For Jankélévitch, music’s ineffability may be axiomatic, but it offers no prohibitions. Though he resolutely holds to the proposition that music is not language-like, Jankélévitch’s conception of music’s ineffability is in fact playful, complex, and full of openings. He contends that music has “broad shoulders” and, in the process, casts the ineffable into a productive concept that enables multiple interpretative forays (Jankélévitch  2003, 11). As he puts it, when speaking about the human experience of music, “one delves without end into such transparent depths and into this heartening plenitude of meanings” (72). Jankélévitch’s interpretations may deal with the naturalistic, mechanical, or non-emotional qualities of musical topoi. They may ask why this or that musical passage attracts hyper-symbolic readings. Or they may address broader questions: music’s unique way of modelling the inconsistent flow of time, or how it might bring to life the creativity inherent in repetition, or show the range of vicissitudes within rhapsodic movements, or exemplify the way a given instant can appear paradoxically

742   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope timeless, or even how becoming distracted can set our feet on unexpected paths. All this polyphonic interpretative traffic is supported, eliciting a speculative mode of attention we would call an “unwoven dialectic” (see Gallope 2017, 165–203; McBrayer 2017). Across this multiplicity, there emerges a single, unifying motif to Jankélévitch’s approach to music’s ineffability: he asks his readers to address the sensuous in­con­sist­ ency of musical experience point-blank. The sonic medium is his locus of fidelity. And by inconsistency we mean this: even as music incessantly imitates, attracts, and weaves itself into meanings, its sonic materiality remains irreducible to a matrix of phonemes and signs or to metaphors of “speaking.” Instead, it appears fluid and non-discrete to our lived experience. To be sure, Jankélévitch writes evocatively on various repertories in ways that reflect his Gallic stylistic commitments to impressionism, to the inexpressive, and to the neoclassical. But what is unique in his writings on music is the tenacity with which he draws attention to the “drastic,” which is more than giving heed to performance and lived experience (see Abbate 2004). The drastic refers to music’s many existential charges: the inconsistent contours of a courageous performance, the dramatic workings of a resourceful improvisation, and the polyphony of ways musical labour is mediated by various kinds of material and technological objects. All this is drawn into his overarching affirmation of the loose and non-linguistic character of music’s unique significance. The precepts summarized above were given voice above all in La Musique et l’ineffable (1961), and among anglophone music scholars, the 2003 English translation set in motion a wave of responses and debates on the topic that has, since then, continued to unfold and evolve. Some reactions were predictable: puzzlement about rhapsodies to silence and reticence in a philosopher who wrote hundreds of thousands of words about music, and attendant calls to refuse the temptation embodied by this paradox (Scruton 2010). (Far better not to dive in at all than to do so in a way that risks leaving oneself at all vulnerable to irony.) There was a suspicion of anything suggesting metaphysics, and uneasiness about the way virtues like grace, charm, and forgiveness make repeated appearances within his work. For James Hepokoski, attempts to make that discomfort go away by gathering adjectives—such as “once-faded” or “well-worn” or “antiintellectual” insofar as they might be associated with a “potential for intimidation” and “suppression”—were ready to hand, in something of an echo of Karl Popper’s midcentury suspicion of all things mystical (Hepokoski 2012, 224, 226; see also Popper 2013). The ineffable is even “dangerous,” as Judith Lochhead (2008) has written. The vocabulary used here can seem perplexing in its anxious disparagements, since the threats referenced are absent from Jankélévitch’s actual work. What he proposed was not some retrograde or conservative pact with the irrational. Rather, he contends that it is not illicit to contemplate the proposition that silence, modesty, restraint, or respect for what remains stubbornly unknowable could be a legitimate choice. Or that mystery is a fruitful aporia. That not-forbidden-ness is one of the many instances in which Jankélévitch enacts—here in the form of an invitation or an allowance, an openness— his philosophical fidelity to music’s unique properties as a medium, namely, as noted above, its material inconsistency.

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   743 Another recurring theme in responses to Jankélévitch’s work has been the charge that music’s ineffability amounts to a conservative call to bypass sociology, politics, or cultural history. Following the rise of absolute music in European and Anglo-American aesthetics since the early part of the nineteenth century, scholars have occasionally associated music’s ineffability with some brand of formalism (Pythagorean, Hanslickinfluenced, or otherwise) in order to claim that both are ideologically blind to the particularities of social meaning. This gambit—which has been employed by Lawrence Kramer (2012, 2016) and Susan McClary (2015) among others—has been used to recommend hermeneutics, a method that promises to unearth semiotic registers in music, and that strives to pedigree certain listening experiences in the name of forgotten and implicit cultural nuances. Yet, as with the critics of all things mystical, the rote association of ineffability with a silencing formalism has derived from a misreading of Jankélévitch’s thought that caricatures the underlying philosophical questions at issue. Music’s ineffability undeniably carries metaphysical valences, but for Jankélévitch it is also materially grounded and saturated with cultural specificity. He considers music’s Orphic powers—in their very irrationality—to be a social fact that invites a concrete, loquacious, and wide-ranging engagement with music’s nocturnal capacity to perplex, stun, and mystify. And though he does wax eloquent about the ways in which hermeneutics can become a police action that sets franchised limits upon the experience of music, Jankélévitch’s conception of the ineffable is diametrically opposed to any kind of formalism devoid of meaning. At no point is pious silence the aim of his philosophy. Rather, as mentioned earlier, Jankélévitch devotes sustained attention to numinous and evasive ways musical experiences release and support a “plenitude of meanings” (Jankélévitch 2003, 72). All that said, Jankélévitch is not a saviour or a prophet. His thinking has undeniable limitations, and the present authors find plenty of room for disagreement with aspects of his work. His chosen repertoire is decidedly narrow, demonstrating little to no engagement with popular music, with musicians of colour, with traditions from nonEuropean locales, or with music transmitted orally or through non-Western or vernacular forms of musical literacy. Indeed, for a man who rapturously embraces multiple musical worlds and waxes poetic over music’s multiple possibilities—and who had at least some exposure to jazz—Jankélévitch discerns ethical virtues most often in French, Spanish, or Slavic modernism, or in the works of Franz Liszt, and elsewhere only as exceptions (see Currie 2012). There could be other difficulties with Jankélévitch’s quaint chivalry towards women (since chivalry can become condescension), or with his rhetorical deployments of the feminine (for a critique of Jankélévitch’s metaphors of the feminine, see James 2018.) There could be difficulties with his idea that ancient Greece was an Eden of continence and virtue, when its violence and frequent political chaos are no secret—violence and chaos that have not escaped being made into legend over time as well, as the yang to continence’s yin. One need only contemplate The Iliad, or, for a more recent instance, the film 300 (directed by Zack Snyder, 2006). Perhaps most significantly, his writings are more ethical than political; they do not engage deeply

744   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope with the pressing concerns of injustice and inequality, or with European politics and society during his lifetime—problems and issues that tend to be more structural than experiential or phenomenological. In the years since Music and the Ineffable was translated, Jankélévitch’s work on music has seen its share of inspired applications by anglophone musicologists and music theorists. Writings on favoured composers (Fauré, Debussy, Ravel) have been taken up as a heuristic device, to see whether one’s analysis might gain in vividness in being inflected by his poetic way of putting things, or his suggestions concerning exactly which qualities in musical works deserve interpretive attention (Rings 2008; Rumph 2015; Janz 2015; Puri 2007, 2017). In another vein, at least one analysis inflected by Jankélévitch’s writings has focused on acoustic phenomena rather than musical works. In an article for Organised Sound, Kristina Wolfe (2014) writes of sonification—the ostensibly objective and often scientific translation of non-acoustic data into audible forms—and reasons from Jankélévitch’s speculations about ineffability to zero in on sonification’s pacts with incommensurability and its potential as apophatic experience. While we recognize the virtues of these applications, our goal here is slightly different: we seek to open up some philosophical themes in Jankélévitch’s musical writings beyond the usual repertoires, case studies, and their analyses. Our first aim will be to explore the productive nature of music’s ineffability as Jankélévitch understands it, with particular emphasis on his writings on improvisation. In these writings, Jankélévitch offers a meditation on the way a musician’s performing body is woven into its many technological mediations and affordances. We then reposition Jankélévitch’s work in relation to the writings of a philosopher, who, for some, will appear an unusual figure in this context, namely Theodor Adorno. We hope to show that Jankélévitch’s efforts to rethink the long tradition of music’s ineffability have the power to engender their own twenty-first-century variations, in particular variations that might help establish more inclusive futures for musical aesthetics.

Ineffability and Improvisation If ironies within Jankélévitch’s writings have been noted and catalogued, there has arisen, simultaneously, an acknowledgement that his philosophical singularity is opening up new lines of inquiry in the worlds of moral and ethical philosophy, in philosophies of life, and in musicology and music theory. But what constitutes that singularity? In a review of Music and the Ineffable, Julian Johnson (2004, 643) began with a droll remark: “You may feel that you don’t have time for the ineffable. Perpetually rushed between preparing tomorrow’s lecture, this afternoon’s faculty meeting, the writing of references and reports, and reading a hundred committee papers, what time have you for music, let alone the ineffable?” Johnson went on to propose why time should be made, what (in other words) the paradoxical qualities of the ineffable could have to do with your practical life as a musician, scholar, or teacher. That’s hardly a familiar gesture,

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   745 since philosophical questions about music’s ineffability would seem to exist on a plane so exalted—cosmology, ontology, metaphysics—and so intricately woven with history, so focused on long-vanished or elite musical cultures, as to preclude the production of any evident or ordinary collateral benefit once all the effort has been made. But Jankélévitch’s approach to the ineffable is grounded in the ordinary and accessible materiality of the here-and-now. In fact, one of Jankélévitch’s most underserved ideas about music aims to make philosophical insights about music germane to the domain of everyday life. And, among musical phenomena, he suggests that improvisation, in its very nature, could give insight into the act of making moral and ethical choices. Nowhere is this resemblance stated outright; rather, his belief has to be gleaned from his writings on musical improvisation, on Liszt in particular (see Jankélévitch 1998). It has to be gleaned by asking how virtues in the domain of musical improvisation—how Jankélévitch describes or characterizes them—come to resemble the virtues and ethical practices set out in his moral philosophy. Improvisation is something Jankélévitch intuitively aligns with making one’s way as an ethical being who is perpetually confronted with dilemmas and changed circumstances, and ought to be able to act virtuously in a drastic situation, in a win-or-lose moment that appears in time. It is this virtue that he associates with the qualitative inconsistency of time denoted by the ancient Greek term kaïros (see Périgord  1974, Norton 2016). Amidst the drama of a charged social predicament, no commandment, no a priori moral dictum, score, or rulebook will suffice, precisely because they are all prescriptive. Calculated and fixed responses provide false comfort in the face of what needs to be done, or what cannot be undone. Thus, in everyday life, occasions will arise when following the score will result in an immoral choice. Jankélévitch’s thinking about improvisation and moral choice was in part formed by a specific historical moment: the German occupation of France during the Second World War, when despicable laws were enacted by the government, then obeyed by citizens who chose the desolate ethics of compliance. What is difficult, of course, is knowing when a law is unjust, and determining, in a critical moment, how one should choose a path undictated by it. To be sure, a malevolent or ill-tempered extemporizer—particularly one in a position of power—can commit great wrongs, so the improvisation of a moral choice per se is no guarantee for a just outcome. But this is the point. The risk of doing the wrong thing inheres in the existential charge of one’s moral reasoning. As a result, it is not virtuous merely to improvise. It is virtuous to do the just thing in the face of uncertainty, and to do it well. In music, a virtuoso improvisation taps into the actions and rhythms of such a decision. It threads its way between the a prioris of the self, the inconsistent fabric of time, the physical medium at hand, and memories of past configurations and sounds, with heroic verve. Doing so in turn reflects a wide array of other models for ethical or genuinely responsive behaviours—liveliness, playfulness, being oblique with one’s own intentions, recalling deep historical traditions, and practising complex fidelities towards the always-vanishing experience of the now (see Gallope 2016). In the realm of jazz improvisation, many have discerned similar parallels with ethical virtues

746   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope insofar as improvisation unfolds with the contrapuntal dynamics of collaboration (as  a metaphor for political or social virtue) and collective attention (see Benson 2003, Hagberg  2008,  2016).2 For Arnold Davidson (2016), himself a reader of Jankélévitch, jazz performance (in solo flights by Sonny Rollins) can even represent individual moral perfectionism in action. And outside jazz studies, Dana Gooley’s Fantasies of Improvisation (2018) has spun together Jankélévitch’s earliest writings about improvisation with the economies and networks of nineteenth-century Romantic virtuosity. We may feel we don’t have time to work out the philosophical questions underpinning music’s alliances with these vicissitudes of human action. But the lesson, in our view, is significant for music scholars and philosophers alike. For Jankélévitch maintained that such an ethics can be discovered not just in works or styles, or in the materia musica of high-art composition, all of which can remain unembodied, contemplated, and even reified as they are turned around in the mind. In his view, ethics comes to life most vividly somewhere else. For instance, in an action, in the real-time making of something that works, even in the slight, but irreducible panic of improvisation. For even when scaled down to the register of everyday life, a minuscule panic invites a valiant response; under such conditions, performer and listener alike can be taken away by an astonishing solo, unsupported by guardrails of compliance. Such a phenomenon is not totally inexpressible, nor does it ever entail some form of silent metaphysical fusion or apolitical emptiness of cultural meaning. On the contrary, improvisations are filled with cultural life and social desire. They are saturated with both, even though as a phenomenon they resist linguistic expression, and resist being sculpted into easy analogies tout court.3 It is not, in other words, that drastic performances evade understanding altogether, or that scholars in a wide array of disciplines from sociolinguistics to performance studies have not effectively written about them in the past. It is that the existential charge of realtime phenomena constitutes something that, as a scholar or writer, one is perpetually inclined to forget, to subsume beneath a prefabricated model for understanding, such that one loses track of that irreducible inconsistency that produces astonishment each time something works, barely works, or even fails. We should not evade the force of that astonishment, or lose track. Jankélévitch asks us to be puzzled at the inconsistencies allied to musical production, and to be taken aback by the blank verve of action. His meditations draw on one’s ability to attune oneself to the ephemerality of everyday life, whose exemplar is the real time of a musical performance, whether that performance is what we do when we play Ravel’s Menuet antique (1895) with a sense of absent-mindedness, or what we do when we are flooded with adrenaline in the face of a large audience, and our soloing hands get involuntarily rigid. No naïve vitalism ensues. The drastic is not an instance of emancipation and boundless freedom, nor is it an affirmation of the powers of a performing body against all else. For Jankélévitch, the ineffable comes to life as a charged drama—a concrete, material, and secular drama—that gives rise to dialectical paradoxes. If we are philosophically attuned to the drama, it can open our mind to a complex weave of interaction with the surrounding world.

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   747

The Part Played by Technicity This is because technicity structures the passing of time. In his book on Liszt, Jankélévitch essentially argues that improvisation is an obstacle course: technical mediation complicates the verve of action at every turn, a stance that puts him at a critical remove from simple Bergsonian affirmations of “freedom” and “immediacy.” Jankélévitch in other words took the material turn decades before it became respectable and routine in academia. He had an enduring affection for musical things and objects, for the feel of instruments when you play them, for physically manifest sound—he found virtues there. And not just because they were sensuous artefacts, or because, as objects, they embody a distinct epistemology from the historical past. Rather, he contended that material objects were perpetually infused with, and structured by, potential forms. Inert devices, sculptures of matter, set out parameters for action. And in turn, such objects sculpt our actions. In contemporary terms, as fields such as music cognition or music-and-neuroscience would define them, these material objects and experienced phenomena are “musical affordances” (Menin and Schiavio  2012). For others, they are infused with the life of “distributed cognition” (Clark and Chalmers 1998; De Souza 2017). In Jankélévitch’s words: In the first place, improvisation is negatively guided, which is to say limited, channeled, defined by the technical possibilities and impossibilities of the instrument at the surface of which it takes shape: all is not realizable, and the possible has neither the same sense nor the same limits for the saxophone, the flute, the keyboard of the piano, or for the human voice; there is the tessitura and the range, the intervals, the fingers, and more generally the instrumental writing, the imperatives and prohibitions of craft (métier) being, on the one hand, a function of the vibrating material, and on the other, the capacities of the hand, the larynx or the breath. (Jankélévitch 1998, 123–124)4

Given the power of the formatted object, the musician’s body is likewise foundationally technical, inhabited, distorted, and even damaged by complex and historically significant patterns. This vital body, always-already structured by materials and patterns, was a key theme of Jankélévitch’s first philosophical book, his 1930 monograph on Bergson. The technicity of the vital body was never really developed by Bergson himself, though, in Jankélévitch’s hands, it became a rich dialectical insight that proved to be something of an innovative motif. In Jankélévitch’s discussion of a much broader Bergsonian ontology of life, he called it the “dialectical complication” of the “organ-obstacle”: Such is the ironical contradiction of the organ-obstacle . . . The body in general is thus an impediment as much as it is an instrument . . . Its very resistance and inertia are paradoxically a stimulant for vitality . . . the animal sees despite its eyes rather than by means of them. There is no idea more profound and more fertile in Bergson’s

748   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope philosophy. Bodies, we may add, far from being the cause or even the simple translation of the spiritual, on the contrary represent everything the soul has had to vanquish to live alongside a matter that seems to do violence to it and in which it believes itself to be boxed in. . . . All the same, the Pythagorean’s soma sema [body prison] lacked the dialectical complication and the paradox of the organ-obstacle: for the prisoner needs his prison. He is the little that he is only in this prison and thanks to it! The heaviness of the flesh is the very condition of his personal existence. (Jankélévitch 2015, 138–139)

As it is with life’s structuration by physical organs, or musical production’s inflection by instruments, so is it with the spectres of idioms and traditions that are inherited, unwittingly or not, in the time of an improvisation. In a gesture that even resonates with the writings of Martin Heidegger, or a Derridian conception of “constitutive technicity,” Jankélévitch calls attention to shadows of the musical past that stand ready to hand, built upon a multitude of historical inheritances (Gallope 2011). The threshold of creativity is populated by techniques—“habits and reminiscences”: But it is at the level of the vibrating material itself that the seeker of impromptus finds these harmonic and melodic constellations. The fingers, caressing the ivory keys, already hold the nascent rhapsody at the tips of their nerve endings: the errant hand brushes the keyboard, and here the melismas lift themselves in their multitude, dictated at the same time by the muscular innervation and the aural preference, by kinesthetic habits and reminiscences, by sensory-motor tendencies and associative tropisms, by the physiology of fingers and the suggestions of memories; the inspired hand, docile to the gravitation of cadences and the modulations as much as the appeal of sensory terminals, reinvents all of music without itself noticing it. (Jankélévitch 1998, 124–125)5

All of this underlines the fundamental necessity of mediation. For Jankélévitch, music’s ineffability resides and comes to life within these physical mediations, within the flight of the here-and-now. Ineffability flows from an existentially charged materiality; the music is never purely in flux, since it comes to life through the dialectical weave of actions structured by technics. This charged and intertwined life in turn gives rise to puzzlement, and such perplexities attract language that resists the reliable circuitry of linguistic reference. For this reason, writing—the language used—does matter. Music’s inconsistency, as summoned by language, comes to life in conceptual registers that supported Jankélévitch’s sustained meditations, in a multitude of unusual metaphors, sentences, punctuation, and imagery. In chapter 3 of Music and the Ineffable, the disquisition on paradoxical expressive directions in piano pieces by Fauré, Ravel, and Debussy (muted fortes, sonorous pianissimos) leads to the lyricism of a double entendre: “the means to realize these paradoxes physically do not exist. Imponderable touch, a left hand that sings, a weightless one, iron fingers gloved in velvet . . . archangel hands would be needed to convey this ambivalence” (Jankélévitch  2003, 116). The concreteness and physicality of such an image field,

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   749 intentionally, is the counterweight to a proposition that a physical manifestation of these expressive directions is impossible. Because, as Jankélévitch points out a few pages later, you have to call repeatedly on the metaphors (all the while questioning them, testing them) to be “subtly deflected,” asymptotically, towards truths about music that will not be reached. Music’s inconsistency colludes with labels while preserving them. All these contradictions slow one’s thinking, and slowed thinking is good, since it acknowledges—and allows consciousness of—the heaviness of the body, the weight of the instrument, the inherited idiom (whether musical or intellectual), which helps us escape conclusions, slogans, keywords, shorthand, complacency, vainglory, inertia, and conformity. We are moved by the aporias of the drastic, since they are not easy affirmations inducing silence. The drastic invites deliberation.

The Long History of the Ineffable It has been right to wonder about “music and the ineffable,” for the specific reason that deriving immense energy from the question of “the ineffable,” allowing music’s ungraspable-ness to make for high-flown speculation, is hardly unique to Jankélévitch. As an insight about music, “the ineffable”—in the sense of music’s mysterium, its resistance to explication, its paradoxical capacity to seem to have import, or voice chthonic truthsaying without allowing understanding—has been a central post and pillar in German intellectual history. From an even longer historical view, European discourses on the ineffable are multiform. They reach back most notably to Plotinus and Augustine. In modern Europe, the notion was diffused enough to accommodate the well-known appeals of the Romantics, the Hanslick-inspired formalists, the Aestheticism of Walter Pater, and many within the orbit of twentieth-century aesthetics, from T.  S.  Eliot to Clement Greenberg, Susanne Langer, and Roland Barthes. Philosophers have tended to associate music’s ineffability not only with questions within the philosophy of art, but also with deeper metaphysical questions linked to that which lies beyond language or social actuality. In the history of European philosophy, Schopenhauer proposed the outline for a musical unconscious with his proposal of music narrating “the story of the will as it is illuminated by thoughtfulness” (Schopenhauer 2010, 287). His best-known follower, Friedrich Nietzsche, defended an aesthetics in which physiological intoxication becomes the carrier of numinous Dionysian forces.6 During the twentieth century, a modern Marxist tradition in Europe exemplified by Bloch and Adorno rescued remnants of theology and metaphysics in order to build out unconscious threads of music’s unspeakable capacities into a grand, often baroque, politics of utopian fracture. The hope—and it was grand— was that just as music resisted the positive referentiality of language, it might too resist, with a brilliant and sublime obliqueness, the larger social ills of alienation and injustice.

750   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope How might we position Jankélévitch in this history? Jankélévitch, who wrote a master’s thesis on Schelling, who knew Schopenhauer’s texts well, and whose father translated Hegel and Freud into French, should by no means be taken as the inexorable Other of the Germanic tradition (Gallope and Kane 2012, 240). He was also hardly unusual among twentieth-century music philosophers in hypostasizing certain musics, or composers, or styles precisely because they are deemed ethical where others are not. These philosophers commonly asked: what ethical essence is at issue, and exactly how might it attain significance in musical form, in this or that piece, in some technical or formal aspect of music, in a given instance? Jankélévitch went to great lengths to pin down and defend the noble compositional paths of Liszt, Debussy, and Ravel, among many others. Indeed, many twentieth-century intellectuals, faced with a flooded marketplace of newly recorded musical styles, focused philosophical energies on developing discerning criteria for an ethical practice of modernism. Is such an ethical specification of philosophical principles not the essence of Adorno’s love for Schoenberg? Consider a further parallel that crosses national boundaries: though it is not often mentioned, Adorno, like Jankélévitch, recognized music’s ineffability. Yet Adorno’s conception of music’s ineffability is one that is saturated with semantic latency and ultimately circumvented by the ways and means of interpretation. In “On the Contemporary Relationship Between Philosophy and Music” (1953), Adorno wrote famously that “music provides the prototype of untranslatability” (Adorno  2002b, 142). Evoking Benjaminian negative theologies, Adorno claimed music was exceptional among the arts due to its numinous modes of appearing. Adorno writes: “The name appears in music only as pure sound (reiner Laut), divorced from its bearer, and hence the opposite of every act of meaning (Bedeutung), every intention toward sense (Sinn)” (140). For Adorno, the key paradox is the way music promises meaning while ultimately withholding it, as a hieroglyph—and the hieroglyph metaphor suggests that what is withheld will, eventually, be disclosed. The promise of meaning comes in the form of historical materials, which have become language-like over time, particularly through the emergence of tonal conventions. As a result, “the succession of sounds is related to logic: there is a right and a wrong” (Adorno 2002a, 113). In its highest forms, Adorno extends music’s “logic” into a defence of music’s Erkenntnischarakter, a language-like structure that must be properly recognized by listeners. Famously, in most of Adorno’s writing on music, this led him to narrow criteria for what an ethically resistant or fractured modernist practice might be. All the same, for Adorno, no score—and this was his problem with total serialism— could be contemplated only in terms of abstractions on the pages (Adorno 1998, 269–322). It still needed responsive, human performers and listeners. It was in dealing with music in the flesh that Adorno had to acknowledge music’s ineffable opacity, since, when materially realized, music’s significance appeared surreally “at once distinct and concealed” (Adorno  2002a, 114). In “Music, Language, and Composition,” (1956) he writes that music “reaches the absolute immediately, but in the same instant it darkens, as when a strong light blinds the eye, which can no longer see things that are quite visible” (2002a, 116). And in Aesthetic Theory (1970), “if one seeks to get a closer look at a

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   751 rainbow, it disappears. Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident” (Adorno  1997, 122). It was Adorno’s quirk that, while continually making reference to an immediacy that forecloses stable interpretation, to fascinating enigmas and fertile aporias, his commitment to a relatively provincial formalism led him to shy away from music’s ineffability as a sustained locus of mediation. There is a certain tragic anxiety in the very next sentence of Aesthetic Theory, “it [the paradox] cannot be solved, only its form can be deciphered, and precisely this is requisite for the philosophy of art” (122). And with this thought, Adorno turned to the exacting forms of his immanent critiques, and refrained from any sustained, Jankélévitch-like fidelity to music’s inconsistency. Such differences invite a comparison of metaphorical fields between the two philosophers. While Jankélévitch is set apart from the German tradition by his Bergsonian a prioris, making him uninterested in questions about musical works (or techniques or phenomena) as giving fractured, mediated expression to history, he is also set apart, from Adorno in particular, by the values or virtues he assigned to ineffability per se. Jankélévitch did not proceed from a blanket axiom about historical and material alienation, nor did he consider historically developed forms to be essential to comprehending music’s specificity. For him, music’s inconsistency was an object that could positively sustain our philosophical attention. Adorno, for his part, would have considered Jankélévitch’s existentialist themes of positive fidelity and authentic moral action to be hopelessly bourgeois and deluded—false appeals to the intimacy of one’s own particular experience.7 At moments when Adorno contemplates the language-like character of music in general, he acknowledges that music has a unique kind of gestural inconsistency, and thus might be an analogue to a language beyond all known names. Again, to allude to a ­language—albeit a magical, unknowable one—is to cling to rhetoric that implies the ex­ist­ence of a dictionary, somehow, somewhere. And Adorno’s stringent formalism comes at a cost. In his more conservative writings, when Adorno relies on music’s “broad shoulders” to bear the weight of a special truth-saying, he sets up a strong dialectic that involves legerdemain. It goes like this. Adorno’s edifice—feeling quietly certain that music speaks a cryptic, elusive truth—is of course founded on music’s ineffability and ambiguity. But an a priori measure of certainty is desired—airtightness, steadiness in the formal domain. This is the belief that musical works, mediations they may be, do give access to historical and cultural truths, albeit in forms that are cryptic and puzzling and refracted and fiendishly difficult to access. Once feeling quietly certain about that is locked down, ineffability can be tolerated because it’s actually required for the legerdemain. At his most narrow and dogmatic, Adorno seems to other music’s ineffability as a fearful thing: in his prose, the words that characterize music’s non-signifying quality start slewing towards voids, empty eyes, the alien. Thus, Adorno’s variant on music’s ineffability produces an incommensurability. It functions within language as a sort of transcendental signified, a seductive but disavowed “real” inconsistency—something akin to a cobra’s paralysing stare—that becomes foundational to the exacting form of music’s fractured resistance.

752   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope Every sharpened point of contrast invites qualifications. There were always more open-ended Adornos lurking in different Adorno texts, different periods, different moods: Benjaminian Adornos, Blochian Adornos, and yes, even Jankélévitch-like Adornos. There are versions of Adorno where the historicity of forms has a looser and more ambiguous grip on experience. Even as his conclusion remained ultimately pessimistic, one of these Adornos acknowledged the imaginative potentiality of an ontological rupture in “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (1934). The grooves that result when a needle inscribes sound in a physical medium are inconsistent, shaky, and erratic. Via a rhetorical slide, these quavering peaks and valleys and sideswipes are said to reveal something about music per se, which is “decisively its true character as writing (Schriftcharakter)” (Adorno 2002c, 280). The language Adorno uses—music-as-writing is said to “transform the most recent sound of old feelings into an archaic text of knowledge to come”—reverts to a now-familiar trick, giving music the metaphorical garb of a decipherable phenomenon (writing, text), while nonetheless alluding to the inaccessibility of the knowledge it embodies (“to come”) (280).8 Yet there remains that underlying doubt, triggered by the physical inconsistency and irregularity, the puzzling character of the grooves made by the needle. And doubt—which is good—here devolves specifically upon the ontological rupture. Elsewhere Adorno seems genuinely unsure what music’s forms are. The Adorno of Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) affirms something that the Adorno who wrote A Philosophy of New Music (1948) would never acknowledge: that vernacular musical materials, with somewhat ordinary harmonies, could nonetheless indicate obscure powers of resistance. Adorno’s metaphors and rhetoric in the Mahler book reflect this perplexity over music’s inconsistent forms. The prose jumps sensory registers from notated details, to literary images and characters, to quasi-cinematic and even olfactory hallucinations, as if entering a state of altered parataxis. As if all supposedly exact languages were suddenly up for grabs. While not above his own forms of conservative guardianship, Jankélévitch foregrounds this critical perplexity in the face of the ineffable as the locus of his philosophy. In his view, negative hieroglyphs are disquieting where inconsistent and non-communicative ­arabesques are not, since for him ineffability is not vehicular, it’s not needed to verify the exacting negativity of a given fracture. Along these lines, Jankélévitch undid grandiose notions that musical works or institutions legibly enact an abstract form of political resistance. He undid any “casual assumptions about the symptomatic relationship between [music and] human and social life” (Currie 2012, 247), and he rebutted the historical analogy in which music becomes language-like. In his writings, individual works become set pieces for speculative rhapsodies. For Jankélévitch, it is not that music has no politics. Not at all. Nothing prevents music from shouldering the power of a slogan, triggering an association, or loosening our sense of what is socially possible. Jankélévitch merely emphasizes caution against idealized investments in music’s political powers. The key is that the medium—an in­con­sist­ ent flux—cannot deliver precise social results, just in the same way that it cannot deliver precise semiotic meanings. That music’s messages are transient and contingent was a

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   753 truth known to Italian opera composers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since they would (not infrequently) reuse music originally written for one number in another number, in a different opera, which was not just sung by a different character in a different plot, but had different words, whose emotional valences could be at an opposite pole. Affective day and night, yet the same music accommodated both. It is something hardcore punk bands have known for decades. If a loud band in the basement wants to get political, they use the acoustic downtime in between songs to stage didactics with their audiences, thus establishing solidarity. Otherwise, in the flux of impact, the music risks erasure of their social cause. Or consider hip-hop, a late modern genre that opens vast acoustic spaces for verbal language, which pours out in cascades. Groundbreaking work in the genre—from Nicki Minaj to Kendrick Lamar—relies nonetheless on rappers not as transparent communicators of messages, but as icons for complex, unspoken fantasies. A drum machine’s hypnosis, the delicate weave of at­mos­ pheric samples: these pulses are the gravity that gathers and concentrates music’s in­con­ sist­ency. Beats—devoid of exact referents—carry hip-hop’s numinous cathexes. Jankélévitch’s thinking in effect asks us to press play on the stereo, then to be honest. There’s a lot there—a lot of life in the sensuous inconsistency of the medium—that is probably not behaving. In Jankélévitch’s view, any exacting hermeneutic claim has a way of forgetting the befuddling power of that flux. Forgetting that is not good. Thus, to be silent is not to be muzzled, worshipful, or conservative. It is not to offload social and historical agency to a numinous transcendent force. Quite the opposite. It is to be modest, open, and attentive to the efficacy and inconsistency of the medium. Jankélévitch’s variations on ethics simply ask for courage and reflection in the face of inconsistent unknowing.

The Ineffable—Beyond Western Art Music Might we read Jankélévitch as asking us to loosen our fixation upon canonical forms of modernist resistance? This is not to say that fantasies of modernist historicism (to borrow Seth Brodsky’s recent term) are simply false, ideological, or without efficacy (Brodsky 2017). It is that Jankélévitch’s moderation and scepticism are also a caution against the heated and often privileged desire for scholars to prescribe one virtuous fracture against another. For Jankélévitch reminds us that we might not know, and what’s more, we might not connect—or could even somewhat ironically be embarrassed that we do connect. Or we could remain unsure ourselves, habitually misrecognizing aspects of our own desire. This would not be a refusal of form, or language, or discipline, nor is it an unreflexive dive into de-territorializing affects. It would be an honest response to the specificity of the musical medium. Being responsive to the medium, in our view, enables one to be ethically open towards a fracture that one does not know, or may never know.

754   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope It was Jankélévitch’s relish, his affirmation of resounding music whatever its physical source that nourished an ideal: more inclusive, hospitable, and flexible approaches that could evolve from pondering music’s ineffability. One starting point is Jankélévitch’s stance towards the physical media that music inhabits. In Music and the Ineffable, he asks: “But exactly where in the end, is music? Is it in the piano, or on the level of the vibrating string? Does it slumber within the score? Or maybe it sleeps in the grooves of the record? Is it to be found on the tip of the conductor’s baton?” (Jankélévitch 2003, 91). Here, the LP record and the physically vibrating string can comfortably cohabitate within the same sentence, with no abyss being opened out between them. In his musings about all of the resounding that forms of music might take, Jankélévitch suggested an ontology of music without strong borders, and hence felt no need for an essay on the reifying dangers of “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger  1977) or on “The Curves of the Needle” (Adorno 1990). Jankélévitch’s question—exactly where in the end is music?—suggests ontological porousness. It hints at ways music’s ephemeral specificity could take shape in a multitude of material and technological circumstances, according to protocols and idioms that might remain only partly intelligible and even perplexing to their listeners. Jankélévitch’s question indexes a virtuous modesty tied to a keen ear. In this context, it would appear that recording technologies—the devices and systems of techniques of all sorts, from Edison to the LP, to drum machines, modern audio compression, streaming audio, and highly malleable software for the performance of electronic music like Ableton Live—in our view, multiply the stakes of Jankélévitch’s conception of music’s ineffability. Insofar as Jankélévitch affirms that music’s only real materiality (the inconsistency of sound) is foundational to its non-linguistic significance, then to write, edit, sculpt, manipulate, and reproduce this inconsistency is to let the object drift freely from normative coordinates once reified by the narrow literacy of the work-concept. Meanwhile, as many scholars of the new organology have contended, technological media through which music becomes material express odd and peculiar forms of agency all their own, rarely paying much heed to the dogma of gatekeepers (formalists, purists, Luddites, audiophiles, or gear fetishists). In the present era of sophisticated technological reproduction, the sites through which music’s ontology takes flight just keep coming.9 New historical and technological conditions do not do away with music’s object-hood: performances, albums, songs, works, sessions, solos, remixes, and the like continue to individuate an increasingly complex world of sound. As a result, life within that world of sound, and within the world of those who contemplate sound and music, is irrevocably pluralized. More broadly, an inclusive material future for the ineffable could go hand in hand with an inclusive conceptual one, in a way that extends far beyond Jankélévitch’s writings. Far outside the annals of Western Art Music, music’s ineffability has of course been an object of speculation and perplexity in ways that carry rich and polyphonic social weight. Complex and centuries-long traditions of Sufi mysticism have developed elaborately conceived approaches to the idea that music is incommensurable with language. (For an introductory text, see Ernst 1997.) In Hinduism, the Sanskrit concept of Nada

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   755 Brahman finds an ancient origin in the Upanishads where the vocalization of a single mystical syllable—“Om”—captures the transcendent character of spiritual ascent or a pure fulfilment of desire (Beck 1993). In the lineages of Taoism in Chinese thought, the music of a shamanistic “Great Man” was seen as a vehicle for inexpressible forms of intoxication (Kohn  1992). From a modern perspective, geographically distant from Asia, at the turn of the twentieth century W. E. B. Du Bois wrote powerfully of the way “Sorrow Songs” sung by African American slaves and their descendants carried “a message [that] is naturally veiled and half articulate,” that embodied “a strange world of an unknown tongue” (Du Bois 1989, 210). Frederick Douglass, decades earlier, had written about the “ineffable” sadness he felt in hearing such songs (Douglass 1849, 8–15). And within the transnational flows of immigration in the Americas, Jairo Moreno (2004) has explored the ways Latin Jazz enacted a uniquely sonic counterpoint of cultural syncopation that was not articulated in any individual Latin American locale, but instead came about only in the fusions and fissures of musical collaboration. Moreover, many practitioners themselves think and work in such philosophical terms. In the world of post-war modernism, George Lewis’s history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians details the essential importance of mysticism among pioneering Afro-modernists like Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Sun Ra (Lewis 2008). In an adjacent milieu, Alice Coltrane, in her adoption of postbop, Indian music, and Hinduism, used music’s ineffability as the backbone for formal experimentation amidst the misogynistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s jazz press (see Berkman 2010). More recently, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth conceded that her stage persona was “mysterious,” “opaque,” “enigmatic,” and even “cold.” She then writes revealingly: “Maybe for a performer that’s what a stage becomes; a space you can fill up with what can’t be expressed or gotten anywhere else” (K. Gordon 2015, 12). And in a space outside language, since 2008, Kanye West has made a habit of mysteriously long and empty outros, blank refrains devoid of lyrics, and meandering auto-tuned vocals that have been manipulated to the point of being nearly anonymous.10 Such practices are neither irrational nor flighty; they exemplify, in sensory form, a vernacular philosophical thinking about ineffability. They also echo facets of a contention once made by a forgotten giant in aesthetics, Susanne Langer. The artist, she claims, “is not saying anything, not even about the nature of feeling; [s]he is showing” (Langer 1953, 392). Note that this aphorism resonates strongly with Jankélévitch’s disquisition on the difference between doing and saying (Jankélévitch 2003, 77–88). Langer elaborates upon this proposal in the opening pages of Feeling and Form (1953), enjoining her readers to attend to the poetic, expressive, and intuitive components of art-making. As she put it: “the most vital issues in the philosophy of art stem from the studio” (Langer 1953, 14). Her notion of showing rather than saying pushes against the culturally sanctioned reduction of philosophy to speaking, and to semiotic exactitude. It raises an ethical question, whether there are other ways to participate in intellectual interchange that have been overlooked or delegitimized, a question relevant to everyday life, to our teaching and our interactions with students. The possibility that processes of showing have a discernable and instructive

756   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope wisdom to them paves the way to what we think of as a vernacular philosophy: “what artisans, composers, engineers, or technicians are doing . . . represent[ing] an engagement with problems that are also causing perplexities upstairs in conventional philosophy” (Abbate 2016, 797). By what method might one retrieve such vernacular engagements, where wisdom on music’s ineffability is being articulated beyond great works of the European past? Simply romanticizing unfamiliar traditions is, of course, not the answer. Jankélévitch’s philosophy after all encourages one to take a critical distance from scholarly fantasies that a particular compositional métier, or musical tradition, can reliably perform specific political work. Or that music can manage, for example, when rendered into a symbol, fracture, or an exemplar, to wake us tout court to the continued scarring left by colonialism. Or slay the dragons of neoliberalism. Not because the systematic hierarchies and abuses of colonialism and capitalism are simply here to stay—they undeniably encapsulate the formidable endurance of social exploitation and inequality—but because the scholarly act of treasuring one’s own (or one’s favourite) fracture as the authorized re­sist­ ance to injustice can easily collapse into idealized echo chambers—a defensive narcissism, or a fetishized romanticism. Thinking about the ineffable along these lines does lend itself to an overarching virtue that is both ethical and political, one that is easier to affirm in theory than it is to set into motion as a practice: pluralism and the unconditional principle of inclusion it presupposes. Far afield from Western Art Music traditions, it asks us to accord a wider multiplicity of forms both legitimacy and social weight, and to do so while remaining alert to their specific medium (musical sound), its many mediations, and what that medium is doing. It also asks us to take on board a practical and detailed sense of the weight of what is known and unknown, heard and unheard in these forms. To be self-aware about our immersion in them, or distance from them. To take note of what remains opaque, problematic, awkward, and still hierarchical across cultural lines. To do this, to pay attention to what remains ineffable, is not to blind us to the elaborate web of social context. It is to caution us to acknowledge that in no specific form or genre, from this or that place or time, will music per se conform to a scholar’s ideals for social change. Music’s in­con­sist­ ency—its medium-specific resistance to being made into a dragon-slayer of injustices— does not stop at national, international, genre-specific, or cultural borders. We (the present authors) are ourselves advocates of speculative, interpretative reflections on the medium. But we want to express philosophical caution about the scholarly fantasy of salvation-by-analogy, so that we might instead ponder the ineffable as consonant with a sober attentiveness to all music, up to and including vernacular sources of sound at the outer limits of audibility. This sober attentiveness would make room for reticence, diffidence, and another order of thought within and against prefabricated critiques that seem to digest and present music’s social and political meaning too con­ven­ iently. While attending to sound, and noting that its medium is inconsistent, music’s ineffability still supports the outward step to politics, ethics, history, and society. At the same time, it may also serve to remind us how important it is to plainly grasp and attend to an injustice for what it is.

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   757 The politics of what counts as listening, what counts as music, what counts as legitimate forms of thinking and reflecting, does however, directly inhabit what we do. In this regard, we share a conviction that philosophical insights are paralleled, qualified, and enriched by practitioners and non-philosophers who work in a multitude of cultural milieus. Threading one’s way through the critical perplexity embodied by Jankélévitch’s thinking on the ineffable could, as we have argued, open on to a historically responsive and openly practical conception of philosophy, in which forms of wisdom also come from musicians, engineers, problem-solvers: non-philosophers. Taking technicity seriously invites this. Many think and work far from the centres of power among intellectual authorities, but with equal speculative rigour about the affordances of the medium, even if they don’t express it in terms that register professionally as philosophy. There is much to be learned by amplifying and clarifying the stakes of this vernacular philosophical thinking. By attending to the speculative thought of nonphilosophers, philosophy might move beyond its own provincial spheres of the usual masterworks. It might build bridges with all those who now wrestle with the complex and global currents of music’s life.

Notes 1. A multidisciplinary assessment is given in Jonas  2016. Jonas undertakes a systematic ­examination of how one might think of the ineffable as a way of knowing exemplified by a foundational experience of what she calls “self-acquaintance.” Many thanks to João Pedro Cachopo, Martha Feldman, Laurie Lee, Tomas McAuley, Amy Skjerseth, an anonymous reviewer, and the participants of Martha Feldman’s graduate seminar “Techne, Body, Memory” at the University of Chicago for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. On improvisation and ethics more generally see Cobussen and Nielsen 2012, Warren 2014. 3. Jankélévitch’s metaphorical fields, as well as his assignments of import to improvisation, have been shadowed by Lydia Goehr, who writes about improvisation impromptu as a “concept of wit and fit, of doing exactly the right thing or wrong thing in the moment” (Goehr 2016, 459). The critical terms are right and wrong. 4. Jankélévitch’s original reads as follows: “En premier lieu l’improvisation est négativement guidé, c’est-à-dire limitée, canalisée, définie par les possibilités et impossibilités techniques de l’instrument à la surface duquel elle prend corps: tout n’est pas réalisable, et le possible n’a ni le même sens ni les mêmes limites au saxophone, à la flute, sur le clavier du piano ou pour la voix humaine; il y a la tessiture et la portée, les intervalles, les doigtés et plus généralement l’écriture instrumentale, les impératifs et interdits du métier étant fonction de la matière vibrante d’une part, des capacités de la main, du larynx ou du souffle d’autre part.” 5. Jankélévitch’s original reads as follows: “Mais c’est au niveau de la matière vibrante ­elle-même que le chercheur d’impromptus retrouve ces constellations harmoniques et mélodiques. Les doigts, caressant l’ivoire des touches, tiennent déjà la rhapsodie naissante au bout de leurs filets nerveux: la main errante effleure le clavier, et voici que les mélismes se lèvent en foule, dictés à la fois par l’innervation musculaire et la préférence auriculaire, part les habitudes kinesthésiques et les réminiscences, par les tendances sensorimotrices et

758   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope le tropisme associative, par la physiologie des doigtés et la suggestion des souvenirs; la main inspire, docile à la gravitation des cadences et des modulations autant qu’à l’appel de ses terminaisons sensorielles, réinvente toute la musique sans même s’en apercevoir.” 6. Nietzsche (2000, 42), riffing on Schopenhauer, writes of music’s ineffability in The Birth of Tragedy: “The world symbolism of music utterly exceeds the grasp of language, because it refers symbolically to the original contradiction and pain at the heart of the original Unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which exists over and above all phenomena. In comparison with this, all phenomena are merely allegories: so language, as organ and symbol of phenomena, can never reveal the innermost depths of music, and as soon as it engages in the imitation of music, can only ever skim the surface, while even the most eloquent lyric poetry is powerless to bring the deepest meaning of music as much as one step closer to us.” 7. Adorno’s critique of the immediacy of existentialism is a recurring question raised by P. Gordon 2016. 8. For a powerful animation of the more open-ended potentialities in Adorno’s meditation on the phonograph, see Moten 2004. 9. See Jacques Rancière’s famous slogan, the “distribution of the sensible,” which has sought to recover the ontological inventiveness of nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic production. See especially Rancière 2013. Also, Denning 2015 narrates the phonograph’s role in vernacular musical traditions worldwide. 10. An early example of Kanye West’s vast empty outros occurs in the second half of “Say You Will,” 808s & Hearbreak (Rock-a-Fella, 2008); another exemplar (with auto-tune) is “Blood on the Leaves” (Def Jam Recordings, 2013).

Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring): 505–536. Abbate, Carolyn. 2016. “Sound Object Lessons.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 3 (Fall): 791–827. Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. “Curves of the Needle.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. October 55 (Winter): 48–55. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor  W. 1998. Vers une musique informelle. In Quasi Una Fantasia, 269–322, translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor W. 2002a. “Music, Language, and Composition.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan Gillespie, 113–126. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2002b. “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan Gillespie, 135–161. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2002c. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Thomas  Y.  Levin, 277–282. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Beck, Guy  L. 1993. “Vedic Sound.” In Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound, 23–49. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   759 Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkman, Franya J. 2010. Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Brodsky, Seth. 2017. From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, no. 1 (January): 7–19. Cobussen, Marcel, and Nanette Nielsen. 2012. Music and Ethics. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Currie, James. 2012. “Where Jankélévitch Cannot Speak.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring): 247–251. Davidson, Arnold. 2016. “Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 523–538. New York: Oxford University Press. De Souza, Jonathan. 2017. Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press. Denning, Michael. 2015. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. London: Verso. Douglass, Frederick. 1849. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office. First published 1845. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1989. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Classics. First published 1903. Ernst, Carl  W. 1997. “Sufi Music and Dance.” In The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 179–198. Boston: Shambhala. Gallope, Michael. 2011. “Technicity, Consciousness, and Musical Objects.” In Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by David Clarke and Eric F. Clarke, 47–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallope, Michael. 2016. “Is Improvisation Present?” The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, eds. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 142–59. New York: Oxford University Press. Gallope, Michael. 2017. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gallope, Michael, and Brian Kane. 2012. “Colloquy: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring): 215–256. Goehr, Lydia. 2016. “Improvising Impromptu, Or, What to Do with a Broken String.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 458–480. New York: Oxford University Press. Gooley, Dana. 2018. Fantasies of Improvisation. New York: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Kim. 2015. Girl in a Band. New York: Harper Collins. Gordon, Peter. 2016. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hagberg, Garry L. 2008. “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections.” In Art and Ethical Criticism, edited by Garry L. Hagberg, 259–285. Oxford: Blackwell. Hagberg, Garry L. 2016. “Ensemble Improvisation, Collective Intention, and Group Attention.” The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 481–499. New York: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3–31. New York: Harper Perennial.

760   Carolyn Abbate and Michael Gallope Hepokoski, James. 2012. “Ineffable Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring): 223–230. James, Robin. 2018. “The Gender Politics of Music and the Ineffable: On the Feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5 (2): 99–118. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1998. Liszt: Rhapsodie et Improvisation. Edited by Françoise Schwab. Paris: Flammarion. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2003. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 2015. Bergson. Translated by Nils  F.  Schott. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. First published 1930. Janz, Tobias. 2015. “Claude Debussy: Douze études pour piano.” Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 72, no. 1 (2015): 55–75. Johnson, Julian. 2004. “Review: Music and the Ineffable.” Music and Letters 85, no. 4 (November): 643–647. Jonas, Silvia. 2016. Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohn, Livia. 1992. “Ecstatic Exploration of the Otherworld.” In Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition, 96–116. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 2012. “Oracular Musicology; Or, Faking the Ineffable.” Archiv Für Musikwissenschaft 69, no. 2 (2012): 101–109. Kramer, Lawrence. 2016. The Thought of Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Langer, Susanne. 1953. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Lewis, George E. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself; The A.A.C.M. and American Experimental Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lochhead, Judith. 2008. “The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics.” Women & Music 12: 63–74. McBrayer, Benjamin. 2017. “Mapping Mystery: Brelet, Jankélévitch, and Phenomenologies of Music in Post-World War II France.” PhD Diss., University of Pittsburgh. McClary, Susan. 2015. “Writing about Music—and the Music of Writing.” In The Future of Scholarly Writing, edited by Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, 205–214. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Menin, Damiano, and Andrea Schiavio. 2012. “Rethinking Musical Affordances.” Avant 3 (2): 202–215. Moreno, Jairo. 2004. “Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (Winter): 81–99. Moten, Fred. 2004. “The Phonographic Mise-en-scène.” Opera Quarterly 16, no. 3 (November): 269–281. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norton, Glyn P. 2016. “Improvisation, Time, and Opportunity in the Rhetorical Tradition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Vol. 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 262–288. New York: Oxford University Press. Périgord, Monique. 1974. “Vladimir Jankélévitch, ou Improvisation et ‘Kaïros’.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 79, no. 2 (April–June): 223–252.

The Ineffable (and Beyond)   761 Popper, Karl. 2013. “Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt Against Reason.” In The Open Society and Its Enemies, 430–461. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Puri, Michael J. 2007. “Dandy, Interrupted: Sublimation, Repression, and Self-Portraiture in Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1909–1912).” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60, no. 2 (Summer): 317–372. Puri, Michael  J. 2017. “Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales and Its Models.” Music Theory Online 23, no. 3. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.17.23.3/mto.17.23.3.puri.html Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso. Rings, Steven. 2008. “Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy's Des pas sur la neige.” 19th-Century Music 32, no. 2 (Fall): 178–208. Rumph, Stephen. 2015. “Fauré and the Effable: Theatricality, Semiosis, and Reflection in the mélodies.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 3 (Fall): 497–558. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1. Translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2010. “Effing the Ineffable.” Big Questions Online, November 4, 2010. Accessed December 29, 2017. Reprint available: www.catholiceducation.org/en/religion-and-philosophy /apologetics/effing-the-ineffable.html Warren, Jeff. 2014. Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolfe, Kristina. 2014. “Sonification and the Mysticism of Negation.” Organised Sound 19, no. 3 (December): 304–309.

chapter 37

M ea n i ng a n d Au tonom y Max Paddison

Central to this chapter is a critique of the concept of “meaning” in Western art music and its entwinement with the idea of “autonomy.” Also addressed is the problem that “meaning” presents for hermeneutic interpretation in the special case of autonomous instrumental music. Starting from an account of the historical relationship between autonomy and the problem of musical meaning, the chapter revisits Kant’s philosophical critique of instrumental music’s non-conceptuality as a means of defining the limitations of the traditionally opposed “coherence” and “correspondence” theories. Given the general looseness of the term “meaning” in English, the concept is analysed in the context of the philosophy of language, and a case is made for the priority of meaning as “sense” over meaning as “reference” in understanding music as a mediated “complex of meaning.” The problem of interpretation is addressed from the perspective of hermeneutics in view of each work’s idiosyncratic rationality and its temporality, as well as its non-conceptuality. It is proposed that hermeneutic interpretation requires a form of engaged mimetic experience to complement it in the process of making sense of the ambiguity and polyvalence of autonomous music.

Autonomy, Non-Conceptuality, and the Problem of Meaning While it is tempting to see an analogy between the historical emergence of autonomous instrumental music and the eighteenth century’s obsession with automata (the construction of artefacts that can perform complicated actions apparently independent of any human control),1 the concept of autonomy has in truth a more complex relationship to the problem of meaning than the mere production of intricate toys for the

764   Max Paddison entertainment of wealthy patrons. I see the concept of autonomy as having three distinct aspects: (1) the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy as freedom of the individual in a political and moral as well as aesthetic sense; (2) art’s (and in particular music’s) loss of (or “emancipation from”) direct social function in the late eighteenth century; and (3) the post-Enlightenment ideology of art as a self-sufficient and independent sphere of activity (for example, the aesthetics of “absolute music” and of “formalism”). There are clearly tensions between these three ways of understanding autonomy, exacerbated by the non-conceptuality of instrumental music which, in the absence of any obvious social function or purpose, can appear as a form of pleasant but meaningless entertainment. I shall address the contradictions of autonomy through a short excursion into social history at this point, combined with a critical commentary, before considering Kant’s important critique of music’s non-conceptuality, which is one of the fundamental issues that lies at the heart of the problem of meaning.

Autonomy, Non-Conceptuality, and Loss of Meaning—a Brief History of a Relationship We can say that the emergence of the idea of autonomy in the late eighteenth century as part of the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment coincides historically with the decline of aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage of the arts that followed the French Revolution and, in due course, the dramatic social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The “age of revolutions” in Europe and America in the period from the 1770s to the 1870s also saw the rise to economic security and political in­de­ pend­ence of the enterprising middle classes—the bourgeoisie that now found itself with the time and means to enjoy a sensuous art form like music detached, or so it seemed, from any utilitarian function. The instrumental musical work now appears as the freefloating and emancipated object of aesthetic contemplation, its non-conceptuality thrown into relief and given greater significance as a result of music’s loss of direct social function.2 Instrumental music is now accepted as one of the “fine arts,”3 while the social origins of its autonomy are no longer directly evident in the music itself or in the concepts and aesthetic ideas that serve to validate it.4 But was music’s emancipation from social function in reality merely a shift from one set of social functions to another? Peter Bürger has argued that autonomous art now acquired a new purpose: “the portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding” (Bürger 1974, 65; 1984, 48)—in effect, the self-representation of the rising middle classes, with their ideals of individualism, self-reflection, and aspirations to economic independence and political power. This case has credibility, because the gradual liberation of music from utility combined with the corresponding emergence of a work concept (see Goehr 1992) was also supported by a new aesthetics of autonomy—a position that coincided historically with the ethical and moral case for the freedom and political autonomy of the individual that had been made by Enlightenment philosophers, in particular by Kant in his

Meaning and Autonomy   765 moral and political philosophy. To this extent we might assume that music’s “meaning” now became part of such aspirations. Frank Hentschel writes: “The assumption that music might be independent, free from any purpose outside itself, emancipated from church and court, led obviously to the idea that it might define and lay down its own [internal] laws” (Hentschel 2006, 307; my translation). I argue that the autonomy of music needs to be understood as part of the larger process of the social emancipation of the bourgeoisie and its ideology of individualism—a process accompanied in both cases by the apparent disappearance from consciousness of the social developments that gave rise to autonomy in the first place. The free-floating and emancipated function of the autonomous musical work now appears as an independent object of aesthetic experience and interpretation. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic definition of autonomy in relation to poetry is pertinent to the case of autonomous music. Ricoeur writes: “By ‘autonomy’ I understand the in­de­pend­ ence of the text with respect to the intention of the author, the situation of the work and [of] the original reader” (Ricoeur 1981, 165). The social fact of music’s autonomy understood in this way suggests that its autonomy is now irrevocable. This has implications for autonomous music’s interpretation by the listener. If the musical work becomes an autonomous “musical text,” free of the intentions of the composer as author, and independent of its original social context and of the demands of its original public, it then becomes the object of interpretation viewed as an end in itself. It is then open to sensuous experience, where the attempt can be made to understand and decipher the music’s structure and its immanent artistic rationality with no apparent need to refer to anything beyond the music itself. At the same time the music’s relation to its absent social other is left hanging, and the question of meaning becomes self-referential. Furthermore, given the decline in patronage after the French Revolution, composers and musicians had to become entrepreneurs operating professionally in the marketplace, and the flip side of the autonomous musical work, seemingly meaningful as an end in itself, also becomes the work as commodity, marketed and consumed as entertainment. Theodor Adorno pinpoints the irony of this change of function when he writes that “before the French Revolution artists were retainers: today they are entertainers” (Adorno 1984, 359; 1970, 376). Commodities are marketed and sold on the basis that they are not only desirable but also unique and magical, and this constitutes a sort of claim to autonomy on the part of the commodity, even though bogus because the commodity is not unique, but the product of a process of mass production and mass marketing. Nevertheless, the commodity character of the autonomous musical work is now fundamental to the music’s social function. There is no doubt that before its “emancipation” art music had specific social functions that gave it “meaning,” and that since the late eighteenth century it has accrued new functions by association, in spite of the music’s apparent autonomy. Bürger has suggested that aesthetic concepts have served, in effect, the function of obscuring the social determinacy of the music’s autonomy. A good example of this is the concept of “absolute music” which represents an attempt from the nineteenth century to absolutize ontologically the historical idea of autonomy in music. What concepts like “absolute music” have

766   Max Paddison done is to ascribe metaphysical values to music, values that claim to go beyond concepts to aspire to the inexpressible.5 In this respect the term “absolute music” also points to an aspect of autonomy that is inherently contradictory across the arts. Bürger formulates this contradiction succinctly when he writes of autonomy itself as “a category whose characteristic it is that it describes something real (the detachment of art as a special sphere of human activity from the nexus of the praxis of life) but simultaneously expresses this real phenomenon in concepts that block recognition of the social determinacy of the process” (Bürger 1974, 49–50; 1984, 36). Finally, can the problem of meaning simply be attributed to the lack of conceptuality in autonomous music, or is it a general problem across all the arts? Clearly, each of the arts has a different trajectory and a different history. However, when confronted by the question of meaning in relation to any art form, including literature, poetry, dance, theatre, film, and the visual arts, we are always faced with a high degree of ambiguity that forces us to acknowledge that even the conceptuality of literature does not lead to transparency of meaning. Nevertheless, it must also be conceded that autonomous music, as instrumental music without words, is fundamentally non-conceptual and non-representational to a degree difficult to achieve in the literary or visual arts, “abstract art” and Symbolism notwithstanding. The boundless ambiguity of autonomous music presents the problem of “meaning” in its most extreme and intractable form. It was this feature of instrumental music—its lack of concepts—that particularly concerned Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

Kant’s Critique of Instrumental Music’s Non-Conceptuality Kant argued that purely instrumental music cannot communicate ideas through concepts “because it merely plays with sensations” (Kant 2000, 206). For Kant, this was a serious limitation for which music’s ability to stir the emotions by means of associations was little compensation. In §53 of Critique of the Power of Judgment he wrote: For, although of course it [music] speaks through mere sensations (Empfindungen) without concepts, and hence does not, like poetry, leave behind something for reflection, yet it moves the mind in more manifold and, though only temporarily, in deeper ways; but it is, to be sure, more enjoyment than culture (the play of thought that is aroused by it in passing is merely the effect of an as it were mechanical association); and it has, judged by reason, less value than any other of the beautiful [i.e., fine] arts.  (Kant 2000, 205)

This judgement, and the limited options it offers, has haunted attempts to address the problems of meaning and interpretation in autonomous instrumental music since Kant’s time, and I shall use it as my point of reference here. In Kant’s view it is poetry that stands at the apex of the fine arts precisely because it is able to deal with concepts as well

Meaning and Autonomy   767 as sensations through its form (that is to say, through its autonomous form it organizes not only patterns of sound but also of concepts as ideas), “thus poetry elevates itself aesthetically to the level of ideas” (Kant 2000, 204). Music, in contrast, only plays with sensations through its forms, and cannot rise to ideas (at least, not in conceptual terms). Furthermore, in comparing music and the visual arts, Kant states that “the two sorts of arts take completely different paths: the former from sensations to indeterminate ideas, the latter, however, from determinate ideas to sensations. The latter are of lasting impression, the former only of a transitory one” (206–207). Kant presents us with what he sees as the inescapable problem of autonomous art music: on the one hand, such music is merely a play of sensations as tones organized through its autonomous form, and means nothing but the agreeable and transitory pleas­ure it affords us as entertainment; on the other hand, however, it arouses the imagination to a free play of feelings and indeterminate ideas which are nevertheless arbitrary and mechanical, and leave no lasting and distinct impression that we can later contemplate. Underlying Kant’s problem with music’s lack of conceptuality, therefore, is another problem: the fact that music is transitory because it unfolds in time—an issue to which I shall return later when discussing the problem of interpretation in relation to musical experience. For the moment I want to stay with the more immediate implications of Kant’s judgement on music.

Critique of the Coherence and Correspondence Theories of Musical Meaning The two options implied in Kant are formulated by Alexander Becker and Mathias Vogel in the following terms: Were music to have meaning (Bedeutung) beyond the level of sensations (Empfindungen), then we would have only two options available to us: either we shift to the level of [the music’s] technical production, or we concentrate on those contents that are called up through music as associations. The latter [option] would be to reconcile itself with the fact that in itself it is meaningless [sinnlos] and therefore not worth any particular attention. (Becker and Vogel 2007, 7–8; my translation)

If we press these options further we can see that the first leads towards the idea of music’s inner coherence or consistency, and the case for a uniquely musical logic and rationality, perhaps with priority given to technical music analysis as a way of understanding this logic. Underlying this position is the aesthetics of formalism of the kind put forward by Hanslick and Kivy. The question to be addressed here is: what is the nature of music’s rationality, and how is it to be understood? The second option leads towards a focus on the associations and feelings assumed to be aroused by the music, and their correspondence in some way to the world beyond the work, whether through free associations, or the

768   Max Paddison kind of formalized associations that are linked historically to the “doctrine of affects” (die Affektenlehre) that dominated thinking about music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.6 Underlying this position is the aesthetics of expression (and to an extent in the case of the doctrine of affects, the imitation aesthetic). This raises a number of questions, in particular concerning the semantics of musical expression and also the emphasis often placed on the “norms” of musical expression. These opposing positions represent attempts to resolve the problem of autonomous instrumental music’s non-conceptuality and ambiguity, and ultimately its “meaning.” At one extreme is the conviction that music means something in itself, as a “language of tones” that has inner consistency, or coherence, a logical syntax to which we have yet to find the semantic key. At the other extreme is the conviction that music means something outside itself, perhaps through the expression of particular feelings, or through associations, as a “language of the emotions” that has a correspondence to referents beyond its immediate sphere, a sign system for which we have yet to decipher the syntax. These two options continue to dominate the various arguments for “meaning” in autonomous music. In both there are problems. Correspondence theories can only make at best a weak case for referential meaning and must concede that music cannot deal at all with propositional meaning. Coherence theories, on the other hand, cannot escape the criticism that arguments for some kind of inner musical logic as constituting musical meaning “in itself ” are tautological and could be reformulated as “sense in music is musical sense.” A third possibility is also implied by Kant: that autonomous music is simply meaningless, which is the direction taken by Peter Kivy, who writes that “the pleasure imparted by absolute music is empty indeed of semantic and propositional content, but hardly empty of substance or consequence” (Kivy 2012, 188). He concludes: “Wherein that substance or consequence lies is a mystery yet to be solved. And I will leave it here as I found it. A mystery wrapped in an enigma.” This option must also be taken into account, not because it is satisfactory, but because it asks how we react to art music’s fundamental ambiguity and refusal of meaning as reference or signification— and why we find it difficult to tolerate ambiguity and demand that music should “mean” or “correspond to” something in the first place. Indeed, could its “meaning” be, perversely, its refusal of meaning, at least as propositional or semantic meaning? This suggests there could be a fundamental problem with what we understand by “meaning” in the arts, and it takes us to a consideration of what we mean by the term “meaning.”

Meaning, Sense, and Reference As normally applied to art, and in particular to autonomous instrumental music, the concept of meaning is confusing, and needs clarification. Peter Kivy (2012) is adamant that “meaning” can only mean semantic or propositional meaning, and if music cannot satisfy the conditions for these, then it must be meaningless.7 But meaning as propositional meaning constitutes only part of the concept, and it is inadequate in the

Meaning and Autonomy   769 case of music. One proposal for addressing this problem is that offered by Leonard B. Meyer. He argues that the distinctive mode of the arts (that is, of artistic practice) is presentational. While theories of art and art criticism may be propositional, in that they seek to conceptualize and explain relationships perceived and understood through the experience of works of art, a work of art itself is, in Meyer’s view, “a concrete exemplification of relationships” (Meyer 2000, 6), rather than a theory about those relationships. This is an important distinction for two reasons: first, because it recognizes the need to make a distinction within the concept of meaning itself; and second, because it emphasizes the concreteness of the presentational mode of the artwork as a material exemplification of relationships that is structural, rather than a conceptualization of those relationships through description and analysis. But Meyer’s insight leads him to reinvent a distinction that already existed: that between Sinn and Bedeutung. The confusion around the concept of meaning arises because the same word in English can refer to what are, in fact, two different concepts. This is evident in the way we use “sense” compared to “meaning.” Gottlob Frege (1892) clarifies this conceptual distinction in German in his famous paper “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (“On Sense and Reference”). While both these terms—Sinn and Bedeutung—are commonly translated by the English word “meaning,” there are significant differences between them: Sinn is most accurately translated as “sense,” while Bedeutung is usually translated for philosophical purposes as “reference,” or “significance.” I do not propose to adopt Frege’s philosophy of language theory in toto here, however, because the distinction between the two concepts is well enough understood in everyday German in a way that is sufficient for my argument, and I suggest that it also offers a valuable means for prising open the English word “meaning” to enable us to distinguish between different usages that are otherwise not made clear. I now want to look more closely at these two types of meaning, for which I shall use the standard terms “sense” and “reference” in what follows, because there are further distinctions to be made within each of them that are helpful in the discussion of what we might reasonably understand by meaning in relation to autonomous music. These distinctions can also serve to clarify the relationship between “correspondence” and “coherence” theories.

Meaning as “Sense” Musical meaning as Sinn (sense) concerns the assumption that music can “make sense” in its own terms, as a coherence, without any specific or direct correspondence with an external referent being immediately identifiable or, indeed, relevant. It could be understood as “making sense” of the relations between part and whole within the context of the “musical work itself,” regarded as an autonomous entity, perhaps with a comprehensible and widely accepted syntax, but one which has no immediate semantic connection with anything external to it. It corresponds in most of its aspects to Meyer’s conception of art as “presentational.” I see four aspects to this.

770   Max Paddison 1. Sense as “making sense”: Developing the claims of A. W. Moore (2011), Andrew Bowie has argued that artistic practices can also be understood as a form of “sense-making.” He writes, “it is worth considering whether the making of sense may in fact not always best be achieved by objectifying what we do in the form of propositional claims. Sense-making may instead inhere in performances which reveal aspects of the world that are hidden by dominant practices and assumptions, including the assumptions of some philosophy as presently practised” (Bowie 2015, 51). 2. Sense as musical logic: The clearest argument for this is presented by Eduard Hanslick in his On the Musically Beautiful (1854). Hanslick writes that “Music has sense (Sinn) and logic (Logik)—but musical sense and logic. It is a kind of language we speak and understand yet cannot translate” (Hanslick 1986, 30). It is possible that Kivy did not realize that Hanslick was employing Sinn rather than Bedeutung as meaning in his seminal defence of formalism. Indeed, it is true to say that when “meaning” is referred to in relation to art in German it is practically always the term Sinn that is used. 3. Sense as rationality: The term Sinn is also used by Max Weber in his sociological theory of meaning, action, and interpretation in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society, 1922), and in relation to rationality and rationalization in music in Die rationalen und sozialen Grundlagen der Musik (1921, published in an English translation as The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, 1958). Weber argues that there is a socio-historical process of increasing rationalization that has permeated and transformed all aspects of society and culture in the West, including music. This rationalization is, for Weber, apparent in the development of tuning systems, scale systems, and tonal systems, and also in the construction of musical instruments, in the development of musical structures, and in the contexts within which music is heard. 4. Sense as social and structural mediation: Weber’s concept of rationalization was taken up by Adorno as an important aspect of his Hegelian concept of mediation (Vermittlung) through subjectivity. This also draws our attention to what he sees as the dialectical relation between “sense” and “reference” as a Sinnzusammenhang. I shall extend the concept of mediation further here. For Adorno, the material of music, like its technical means, is always socially and historically mediated, and is replete with pre-established associations (see Paddison 2007). This does not directly constitute the “meaning” of the individual musical work, however, but is subjectively mediated a second time as the work’s structure. It is the work-asstructure that constitutes what Adorno calls its “complex of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhang), and which is essentially a non-conceptual articulation and or­gan­i­za­tion of its material elements. Adorno writes: “Directly or indirectly everything that appears in the work contributes to such meaning (Sinn), though not all that appears is necessarily of equal importance” (Adorno 1997, 152; 1970, 228). Understood in this way, the “complex of meaning” is polyvalent, multilayered, and inherently ambiguous.

Meaning and Autonomy   771 At the same time, however, the socially mediated character of musical material also belongs to the referential dimension of the autonomous musical work.

Meaning as “Reference” The second type of musical meaning, Bedeutung (“reference”), concerns the assumption that “meaning” means referential and significative meaning understood in the context of a correspondence theory, where some aspect of the music is interpreted as corresponding or referring to something outside its immediate sphere. I see four aspects to this. 1. Reference as propositional meaning: This suggests that music can put forward logical propositions and make truth statements. This is a claim that is difficult to support in relation to music, however, and it is, as we have seen, the problem faced by philosophers like Kivy (2012) who insist that meaning can only be understood as propositional. Maintaining this position leads Kivy to argue that autonomous music cannot do this, and must therefore be meaningless. 2. Reference as expression of emotions: In the context of an expression theory: this involves the claim that music conveys emotions either through some form of direct communication between composer and listener, or through “imagining as” (see, for example, Davies 1994), or through correlations between particular musical gestures and particular emotions as, for example, arousal theories (see Robinson 1994). The claim that there exists a precise language of music and emotions is difficult to sustain, however, although some psychological theories have been productive through a combination of empirical research and music analysis (for example, Spitzer 2010). 3. Reference as expressive norms, genres, styles, and topics: In the context of a semiotic theory this requires the identification of a semantic set of musical signs that can be interpreted in the context of musical discourse. Leonard Ratner’s “topic” theory (Ratner 1980) is perhaps the most relevant case in music, particularly as extended and developed by Robert Hatten on Beethoven (Hatten 1994). 4. Reference through metaphor: This has been developed in particular by Paul Ricoeur in hermeneutics (Ricoeur 1981), Roger Scruton in aesthetics (Scruton 1997), and Michael Spitzer in musicology and music analysis (Spitzer 2004). Metaphor theories are different to other theories of meaning as “reference,” to which category they only partly belong. They divide into those that focus on metaphor as intrinsic to the way we experience and interpret music, and those that also focus on metaphor as intrinsic to the artwork itself, at the poiesic (i.e., “making”) level of composition. I shall briefly expand on these aspects of meaning as metaphor. Metaphor is the transposition of a word or concept from one sphere to which it belongs to a different sphere to which it does not normally belong. In the discussion of

772   Max Paddison music even the most basic musical terms refer to notions—such as the spatial metaphors of “movement,” “progression,” “high,” and “low”—that strictly speaking lie outside music’s sphere. More importantly, however, metaphor is fundamental to the experience of music because we transfer our concepts from the outside world to furnish our understanding of the hermetic world of autonomous music, and in this way, it can be argued, we intuitively interpret music with reference to the real world and so provide it with meaning. To this extent, metaphor theories relate to correspondence (reference) theories. Scruton goes so far as to argue that we cannot describe the experience of music without metaphor, because metaphor “defines the intentional object of the experience of music” (Scruton 1997, 92). He claims that to hear music as music is to experience it imaginatively through metaphor: “The indispensable metaphor occurs when the way the world seems depends upon an imaginative involvement with it . . . And this is the case when we listen to music” (92). However, Scruton does not address the role of metaphor at the poiesic level of the “making” of musical works, and Spitzer has argued that this “absence of poetic theory is the great failing of much contemporary writing on musical metaphor” (Spitzer 2004, 82). It is just such a poiesic theory of metaphor that is proposed by Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, where he argues in relation to poetics that the transposition that characterizes metaphor can also apply to the extended work (for example, a poem) as metaphor (see Ricoeur 1981, 167). Ricoeur derives his theory from Aristotle’s Poetics, and exploits the implied connection to be found there between the concepts of metaphor, mimesis, and poiesis. It is here that he sees the referential level of the artwork, because mimesis involves the imitation of human actions, of life, of reality. But here also lies the paradox of mimesis. Ricoeur writes that “mimesis does not mean the duplication of reality; mimesis is not a copy: mimesis is poiesis, that is, construction, creation. . . . Could we not say that mimesis is the Greek term for . . . the disclosure of a world?” (179–180). Metaphor, operating via mimesis and poiesis, both discloses a world and refers to the world; it also “makes human actions appear higher than they are in reality” (181). In taking the work as a totality that implies both meaning as “reference” and meaning as “sense,” Ricoeur puts forward a theory of metaphor that sees meaning (sense) as “emergent” (Ricoeur 1981, 180; see also Cook 2001, 192–193).

Music as a Mediated Complex of Meaning I have argued that the distinction between sense and reference is central to understanding the concept of “meaning” in the context of autonomous music and what Kant saw as music’s inability to rise to ideas. I have employed this conceptual distinction to argue that the relationship between the dimensions of “sense” and “reference” needs to be viewed dialectically through a concept of mediation which also—unlike Adorno’s concept of Vermittlung—incorporates a theory of metaphor. I have drawn on Adorno’s term “complex of meaning” to designate the field of tension between sense and reference, where the socially-mediated referentiality of musical material and its historically-

Meaning and Autonomy   773 expressive gestures and norms is subjectively and structurally mediated a second time as the work-as-structure.8 One of the forms mediation takes in autonomous music is through the sociallyderived norms of compositional practice and the ways in which these are structurally articulated as material through the work’s particular “form.” It is tempting to see “norms” as absolutes, especially once they have been systematized through classification. This is reinforced by the weight of accumulated norms and conventions of musical practice in both composition and performance. But while it is true that norms play an important role in art and our relation to it, an exclusive emphasis on norms neglects the extent to which art is also characterized by innovation, experimentation, and the transgression of norms. Beethoven is defined not by his exemplification of the norms of the contemporary compositional practice of his peers, but rather by the ways in which he went beyond them. Norms are the representatives of what is general and generic in artworks, what makes them familiar. To this extent we could say they can do our listening for us, and even obviate the need for active interpretative listening on our part. What is distinctive about art, however, is also what makes each work different from other works. As Meyer has pointed out, the sciences, philosophy, and the humanities move from the particular to the general law. Artworks, however, move in the opposite direction—they move from the general and the generic towards the particular (Meyer 2000, 3–51). While works of art manifest norm-based processes (for example, through their relationship to genres and topics), they are not totally defined by them, because they are also characterized by an opposing feature: each work of art not only defines itself in relation to previous works of art, but it also defines itself against them, or through a critique of earlier art practices. I suggest that this too is part of the immanent rationality of art, and is an important aspect of the process of mediation. It is the interplay between norms, which to an extent constitute the referential dimension of music and are in a process of constant historical change, and critique, which can take place at the structural level and constitutes the dimension of “making sense” of this interplay that involves us actively through our capacity for interpretative experience. It is to the sphere of interpretation that I now turn.

Interpretation Interpretation is a performative act not only for the musical performer but also for the musical listener. The problem of interpretation is that we can never be sure of the accuracy or validity of our interpretation. As we have seen, this is so especially in view of the inherent ambiguity of autonomous music because of its non-conceptuality and also, as Kant saw it, because of what he called its “transitoriness”—in effect, its temporality. To be faced with the non-conceptuality of autonomous music is to be challenged intellectually and rationally, to the extent that we attempt to use our powers of reason to solve the puzzle of something that appears meaningful and language-like, but which we cannot

774   Max Paddison fully grasp or understand because we cannot identify to what it refers with any certainty. To be faced with the temporality and transitoriness of music is to become drawn into a process that is an experience of being carried along and even lost in a sense of the immediacy of the experience. The first, the non-conceptuality of autonomous music, is dominated by various modes of rationality in our attempts to interpret it; the second, the temporality and transitoriness of autonomous music, is dominated by what I would call “mimetic” or “empathetic” modes of “lived experience” and “sense-making.” I shall look outside art music towards hermeneutics and the social sciences to find an ideal type for aesthetic rationality and “interpretative experience,” and for a model for artistic ra­tion­ al­ity in poetics, before discussing the “mimetic” experience of music as an unfolding through time. But first I want to make some initial observations on the problem of interpretation from the perspective of hermeneutics. Writing of poetry, Ricoeur likens interpretation of the “text” to the musical performance of the score in the absence of the composer: “the autonomy of the text, deprived of this essential support, hands writing over to the sole interpretation of the reader” (Ricoeur 1981, 174). Interpretation can be understood as a creative act of construction by the reader/performer/listener analogous to the original act of construction by the author/composer. According to Ricoeur, interpretation concerns the work “at the level of its articulation of [meaning as] sense” comparable to “understanding a metaphorical statement” (174–175). But Ricoeur’s primary concern is with the work as “text”—in fact, as written text—although he also acknowledges the desirability of extending the hermeneutic method of interpretation to the social sciences (see 37–38). Because artworks are also social facts, and constitute forms of rational social action, however indirect and oblique, I want to broaden the discussion by returning to Max Weber’s speculative sociological theory of interpretation in relation to rational social action. I now wish to argue that autonomous music presents a specifically aesthetic and affective rationality that, while differing sharply from means–ends rationality, must also be regarded as a form of meaningful human action.

Interpretation and Human Action For Max Weber, rationality concerns the basis on which we might attempt consciously to interpret the outcomes of human action and behaviour. In the case of artworks, however, such outcomes of social action may function at a spontaneous level that is only partly conscious, and which may to an extent operate at a level of sublimation that is hardly conscious at all. Weber identifies four “ideal types”9 of rational social action: (1) means–ends or instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität); (2) value-rationality (Wertrationalität); (3) affectively-determined action (affektuell orientiertes Handeln); and (4) traditional behaviour (traditionales Verhalten). While means–ends rationality is a conscious form of social action, as is value-rationality, Weber says that affectively-determined action lies “on, or often beyond, the boundary

Meaning and Autonomy   775 marking out the area of consciously ‘meaningful’ behaviour: it may simply be a spontaneous response to an unusual stimulus” (Weber  1978, 28;  1922, 1). Traditional behaviour functions as a boundary concept10 that serves in this case to mark out the limits of rational behaviour that is aware of itself, and tradition, which is not itself a conscious form of social action but rather a body of settled habits dictating our responses to stimuli. I suggest that, in the case of music, “artistic” or “aesthetic” rationality could be understood as a combination of Weber’s two types: “value-rationality” and “affective rationality.” Weber writes that “the aim of all interpretation . . . is . . . to achieve certainty (Evidenz)” (Weber 1978, 8, translation modified; 1922, 2), but such certainty is never final, and interpretation is always provisional and hypothetical. He points out that, while rational interpretation (his first type, that using “means–ends” rationality) can lead to certainty via evidence in those areas susceptible to rational analysis and explanation, there are other areas that are not susceptible to such a form of interpretation. Accordingly he proposes a second type of interpretation that takes “the form of empathetically re-living11 the experience in question (involving the emotions and artistic sensibility)” (Weber  1978, 8, translation modified; 1922, 2). This would apply to artistic activity which, if interpreted according to the measure of “means–ends” rationality, would be seen as “irrational.” In view of this, we can say that the autonomous musical work manifests a form of ra­tion­al­ ity that is only partly susceptible to what Weber calls “rational analysis” in the sense of “means–end rationality,” but that is susceptible to a form of interpretation that can, in his words, “empathetically re-live the experience” of the work. As discussed above, this could be seen as a mixed type between “value-rationality” and “affectively-determined action,” and therefore as being in part consciously rational and in part instinctive. I suggest that this “mixed type” of interpretation is what Adorno later had in mind when he used the terms “[interpretative] experience” (Erfahrung) and “mimetic understanding” (mimetisches Verstehen)—that is to say, experiencing the work “mimetically,” moment to moment as it unfolds through time, while also relating each moment to the totality of the work (see Paddison 1993, 214). This position is not necessarily at odds with that of Jerrold Levinson in his book Music in the Moment (1997), although I admit that at first sight it might appear to be. Following Gurney, Levinson argues for the total involvement of the listener in each moment of the music as it passes, without attempting at the same time to grasp the totality of the piece or relate each moment to what has already happened and to what is to come. I accept this as an ideal, but with some qualifications. As listeners (and particularly as performers) we can become familiar with a piece of music, so that we remember and anticipate without necessarily losing the intensity of the moment. Moreover, knowing a piece intimately as a totality is a necessity for a performer, who must be able to remember and anticipate while remaining always in the moment. What is significant, however, is that we never have exactly the same experience of the same piece twice, and because music unfolds through time our experience of the work as a totality is always partial—that is, through the part, in the moment we are in.

776   Max Paddison

Rationality and the Practice of Art I shall return to the temporal character of the interpretative experience of music shortly, but first I want to consider the “rationality” of the activity of art itself as a practice. I do this to challenge the view that rationality in music refers only to the particular forms of musical logic that typify Austro-German music of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, employing procedures like developing variation and motivicthematic integration. By “artistic rationality” I mean something more basic: the use of materials to make something, the purpose of which does not lie outside itself, even though its materials come with pre-existing associations. To illustrate what I mean I shall draw on an example from poetics. In his late essay “The Idea of Art” (1935) the poet Paul Valéry writes: In the life of every individual we can thus circumscribe a peculiar realm constituted by the sum of his “useless sensations” and “arbitrary acts.” Art originated in the attempt to endow these sensations with a kind of utility and these acts with a kind of necessity.  (Valéry 1972, 26–27; 1935, italics in the original)

The French title of the essay from which this definition of art is drawn—“Notion générale de l’art”—makes it clear that Valéry intends it to be applicable to art in general, and not just Symbolist poetry. It is also a formalist definition, and furthermore it is one formulated from the poiesic perspective of the artist as the maker of artworks. It is not primarily concerned with imitating other works of art, or fitting into an existing system or scheme, nor is it directly concerned with causing us to experience this or that emotion, or with attaching this or that referential meaning to it. Moreover, it is not concerned primarily with symbols, in spite of a misconceived popular view about the Symbolists as a movement. It is concerned instead with sensations, as sounds, colours, and textures, which in themselves may have no obvious use in everyday terms, are not necessarily already organized, for example, by scale systems or tonality, but which are given a function and direction within the context or a piece, a poem, a painting—a “work.” In themselves these elements, as sensations and acts, are arbitrary, and, as found, there is no necessary connection between them until such necessity is constructed and contrived for them within the context the artist makes for them. I would say that it is a form of “sense-making” in relation to material. This suggests the rationality of art and the kind of ends to which the artist works. This is not to say, however, that the “useless sensations” and, in themselves, “arbitrary acts” do not already carry strong associations in the world from which they are drawn, because, of course, they do, and this also belonged to the rationality of the Symbolists’ attraction to formalism and to their admiration for what they considered to be “absolute” music. But as I have argued, to identify the “meaning” of a work of art directly with the referential meanings associated with the socially and culturally mediated material on which the work has drawn is misleading, because the material is mediated a second time through the work as structure. For example, the brief sixth piece from

Meaning and Autonomy   777 Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19,12 consists of only nine bars made up of very slow sustained bell-like chords with a few tiny fragments of recitative-like melody. If you know something of the circumstances in which the piece was composed, then you might interpret it as “meaning” or “referring to” the funeral of Gustav Mahler— in fact, Schoenberg wrote the piece shortly after returning from Mahler’s funeral in May 1911. While it might be true to say that “funeral bells” dimly resonate within the piece as an indirect association with the musical material (in this case, piano chords largely built from piled-up intervals of the 4th), to go on to claim a direct and unmediated correspondence between the enclosed world of this piece and a particular event in the outside world (Mahler’s funeral) in order to insist that the one “means” the other is to reduce a work to the circumstances of its composition. Artworks, I suggest, while “intentional objects,” are more than their creators’ intentions, and retain an exceptional degree of ambiguity and polyvalence. Interpretation cannot be reduced to mere stock-taking. What struck the Symbolists about autonomous music was not that it dealt in symbols, but rather that it had to do with what they regarded—somewhat idealistically from their poetic and literary perspective—as “pure form.” We have seen that for the Symbolists, “form” was what “made sense” of otherwise “arbitrary material” and gave it “utility and necessity,” as Valéry put it. But what the term “form” refers to in this context is not pre-established handed-down forms (these are part of the available materials) but rather the structure of the particular individual work as the unique configuration of all its elements. The work as a coherence is constructed from diverse materials that already carry associations, as semantic references to their previous use, whether in the real world or in other works of art. While the arbitrariness lies in the choice of initial materials, the necessity and causality comes from the oblique aesthetic rationality that shapes the way in which the material is articulated as structure. It is this process of articulation that transforms pre-existing materials into something else. What enters this process is not the same as its outcome, so that what was meaningful as “reference” now becomes meaningful as “sense.” It is this sublimated—or repressed—reference to the “real” world through its structural mediation as form that lends the work a critical distance from the real world. It is also this distance that gives the work as structure its critical relation to its materials, and which constitutes its rationality. This critical relationship is only possible as a result of the music’s historical emancipation from direct social function and its acquisition of autonomy—however relative, contradictory, and contingent that autonomy might be. At the same time, this autonomy is also a sign of the work’s reification. All works of art are subject to reification, because through their form they crystallize as “works” to become things in the world. In the case of Western art music this is particularly so through the reification of the work as written score that calls for interpretation as performance in advance of its experience and interpretation by the listener. This is perhaps the most significant and provocative feature of the autonomy of the work, and is what presents the most difficult challenge to interpretation, both for the performer and for the listener. Fundamental to this challenge to interpretative experience is the possibility of a mimetic understanding of a work as a temporally-unfolding structure that

778   Max Paddison might be described as a form of non-conceptual rationality. I now want to return to this aspect of the autonomous musical work and the problem of its meaning—the fact that we are dealing with a time-based as well as non-conceptual and non-representational art—before coming to my final conclusions.

Temporality, Non-Conceptuality, and Making Musical Sense In contrast to literature or the visual arts, the most distinctive characteristics of the experience of autonomous music are its temporality and transitoriness, combined with its non-conceptual and non-representational sensuality. We recall that Kant considered music’s transitoriness (which is an aspect of its temporality) to be a property that prevents us being able to grasp it fully as a structure that we can hold in our mind and contemplate later when the music is no longer playing. For Kant, this meant that music was a purely sensory experience, perhaps diverting and entertaining from moment to moment, but ultimately superficial because it lacked a conceptual dimension. But Kant was deaf to what I have called the “non-conceptual rationality” of music as we experience it unfolding through time as a process of the articulation of its elements. It is clear that music’s temporality is fundamental to it as a time-based art form—it is its “environment,” the world it discloses. Music shapes our experience of time as we listen to it, and it enables us to have a particular kind of sensuous experience that is both non-conceptual and coherent. With Valéry’s definition of the work of art in mind, we could say that autonomous music is a sensuous and non-conceptual form of understanding through the articulation in time not only of relationships between sounds and durations, but also between the work’s structure and the associations aroused in us by its musical materials. But this would be to oversimplify. The sense of meaningful continuity through time as the dominant characteristic of music and which distinguishes it from the other arts, is not, I suggest, really a property of the music as such. It is something we bring to music through our imaginative experience of it, which is an important aspect of our interpretation of the musical work as listeners and performers. To this extent I would agree with Scruton’s suggestion that it is the aesthetic experience that is definitive for music to be heard as music. However, the musical composition as a “work,” unlike improvisation, is normally not composed in the same time sequence that it appears to have in its performance. The composer tries things out, makes changes, and reorders the position of sections during the composition of the piece, a process that is as much spatial as temporal, especially given the centrality of the score to this tradition. As listeners we lend the performance of the work the illusion of continuity and duration through the focus of our attention (a version of what the performer does in the process of performing the piece). As Henri Bergson saw it, we as listeners imbue the work with our own sense of a self persisting through time (see Bergson 2007, 6–7), and hence provide it with our own narrative continuity. Perhaps the real meaning of autonomous music is always time—not the music’s time, but our sense of time passing in relation to

Meaning and Autonomy   779 a musical work, the experience of being in the midst of the music as a process of “becoming.” Having identified temporality as a fundamental feature of the experience of music, however, I must emphasize that it has not been my primary intention to suggest what autonomous music “means” as such. My interest instead has been to consider the conditions under which autonomous music arose and the reasons why its meaning became problematic in the first place—that is to say, the contradictoriness of its autonomy. It has also been to consider the implications of the music’s autonomy and the problem of its non-conceptuality and its temporality for its interpretation.

Conclusions I began by arguing that musical meaning as a problem has been intertwined with the concept of autonomy ever since the period of the Enlightenment. The “problem” of musical meaning, which was located by Kant in the non-conceptuality of instrumental music, arose in the first instance from the music’s claim to independence as one of the fine arts. One could say that, in becoming free from external control (for instance, from direct social function in the service of church or princely court, and from the influence of the “doctrine of affects”), instrumental music then became regarded as subject to the control of its own inner musical rationality.13 This left us with two questions. The first concerned the extent and limits of music’s autonomy, and to this we have answered that, while definitive, in that such music is now inescapably ambiguous as a result of its autonomy, this autonomy is contradictory, and also fundamentally social in its origins. The second question concerned how we might understand a purely musical rationality and inner-musical logic that is non-conceptual and non-representational as falling under a philosophical concept of meaning. I have argued that this second question demands a critical re-examination of the concept of “meaning” itself—a term which, as traditionally used in English, has limitations because it confuses two different kinds of meaning. In order to be able to differentiate between contrasting and sometimes contradictory aspects of “meaning” I have made a case for drawing on the Fregean distinction between “sense” and “reference,” and I see this as significant for three reasons. First, it is because hitherto this distinction has been almost entirely ignored within English-language debates on musical meaning, as Borio (2009) has also pointed out—a neglect that has led to confusion. Second, what the distinction makes clear is not so much what music might “mean” in itself, but how music generates a range of often contradictory meanings within a context that includes not only the world of social reality but also the structural mediation of that reality within the autonomous musical work. This is an interaction which can involve a critical confrontation with handed-down norms of musical behaviour within the work itself. I have argued accordingly that the traditional opposition between “coherence” and “correspondence” theories can be subsumed by a dialectical theory of mediation, as the

780   Max Paddison tension between “sense” and “reference.” And third, I suggest that it shows why the question of musical meaning is complex rather than simple, because, in addition to the above considerations, it is our own interpretative experience that enables us to understand music as music—that is, as a temporal unfolding. You could say that “meaning” in music is experienced “in the moment” primarily as a process of “sense-making” (see also Bowie 2015), rather than as the identification of signifieds after the event. I have suggested that the open-minded and competent listener’s interpretative experience, like that of the performer, is engaged and empathetic in character. I would now go further and propose that it is also performative in the manner in which it may retrace the work’s structure as experience and, in the process, relive the music’s unfolding through time as an imagined continuity. I would identify these dimensions of the experience of the work as the mimetic aspect of interpretation. On the other hand, when we attempt to conceptualize the non-conceptuality of the music with reference to our experience of the outside world, we inevitably resort to metaphor as a means to create a link between these spheres. I have also made the case that residues of music’s social origins and functions may remain as part of its materials, although they become largely concealed within the structure of the work, and these too inform our understanding of the music. Addressing these dimensions of the work and our experience of it is what I would identify as the hermeneutic aspect of interpretation. But ambiguity persists, so that “meaning” in autonomous music is never direct, and I suggest that this serves as a permanent sign of the repressed social origins of the music’s autonomy. I have argued, however, that the autonomous musical work, if understood as “doubly mediated”—that is, socially mediated through its materials (the dimension of “reference”) and structurally and subjectively mediated through its particular form (the dimension of “sense”)—can best be regarded dialectically as a mediated complex of meaning. It is this complex that presents itself to interpretative experience. Seen in this way, interpretation is always provisional, and musical meaning—as the dynamic interaction of sense and reference experienced as a process through time—can be understood as polyvalent and open.

Notes 1. The most famous example is Jacques de Vaucanson’s automaton The Flute Player of 1737. 2 . Hitherto music’s meaning had been associated primarily with its function or purpose. 3. Peter Kivy (2002, 49–66) discusses instrumental music’s difficult relationship to the system of the fine arts in the lead-up to his discussion of formalism. 4. Elements of this account of the social origins of musical autonomy are taken from sources that include Adorno  1973; Bürger  1974,  1979,  1984; Ricoeur  1981; Goehr  1992; and Paddison 1993, 1996, 2001. 5. See Pederson 2009; Chua 1999; and Hoeckner 2002 for critiques of the concept of “absolute music.” 6. Tomás McAuley points out that, by instrumental music without words, Kant was still ­referring to music conceived in accordance with the Affektenlehre. McAuley makes the claim that the decline of the Affektenlehre in the late eighteenth century was encapsulated

Meaning and Autonomy   781 in Kant’s concerns about the limitations of instrumental music in his Kritik der Urteilskraft. McAuley also suggests that the main reason for Kant’s low estimation of instrumental music among the fine arts was its perceived intention, in seeking to move the “affects” of listeners, to undermine their autonomy (see McAuley, forthcoming). 7. Kivy recommends that we consult the Oxford English Dictionary in order to confirm his narrow conception of “meaning.” When we do this (I consulted The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., because it happened to be at hand), we discover that the OED does not, in fact, support his claim, because it includes both “signification” and “sense” under its definitions (s.v. “meaning,” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972]). We must assume from his selective reading of the OED definitions that Kivy chose to ignore this important distinction. 8. Adorno was always rather vague about precisely what he understood by “mediation” (Vermittlung). For my understanding of the concept, I refer the reader to “The Problem of Mediation” (Paddison 1993, 109–148) and to Paddison 2010. There is also interest in the concept in the sociology and anthropology of music—see especially Born 2005. In the context of the present essay, however, I use the term in a more limited sense to locate the interaction of sense and reference both within the work, between the work and its social other, in the relationship between performer and work as score, and between listener and the performance. 9. Max Weber emphasizes that his use of the term “ideal type” is not intended to correspond directly to how things are in the real world, but is rather a device to clarify our thinking about the world. In reality all forms of social action tend to be mixed types. I discuss Weber’s four “ideal types” of rational social action at greater length in relation to the concept of mediation in Paddison 1993, 135–147. 10. The term “boundary concept” derives from Kant’s concept Grenzbegriff (sometimes also translated as “limiting concept” or “border concept”) in the Critique of Pure Reason, pt 2, bk 2, ch. 3, in his discussion of the noumenon. It is used epistemologically as a negative concept against which to measure the limits of our knowledge. Max Weber also uses a version of the concept as Grenzfall (boundary case, limiting case). 11. Weber writes “einfühlend-nacherlebenden.” 12. I am grateful to Robert Hatten for raising this as an example of musical meaning at a conference on “Music and Expression” at Durham in September 2009. My interpretation, however, differs from his. 13. To build on Tomás McAuley’s suggestion that the doctrine of affects was incompatible with Kantian ethics, this could be seen as a trajectory from heteronomy towards autonomy that parallels Kant’s moral philosophy and his ideal of the autonomy of moral judgements (see McAuley, forthcoming; cf. Paddison 2017).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1970. Ästhetische Theorie. Vol. 7 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Adorno, Theodor  W. 1973. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962). Vol. 14 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 169–433. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Adorno, Theodor  W. 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Christian Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

782   Max Paddison Adorno, Theodor  W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press. Becker, Alexander, and Matthias Vogel, eds. 2007. “Einleitung.” In Musikalischer Sinn: Beiträge zu einer Philosophie der Musik, 7–24. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bergson, Henri. 2007. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Edited by John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Borio, Gianmario. 2009. “The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century.” Topoi 28, no. 2 (September): 109–117. Born, Georgina. 2005. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2, no.1 (March): 7–36. Bowie, Andrew. 2015. “The Philosophy of Performance and the Performance of Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy Journal 1, no. 1 (April): 52–58. Bürger, Peter. 1974. Theorie der Avant-Garde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bürger, Peter. 1979. Vermittlung—Rezeption—Funktion. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chua, Daniel  K.  L. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 2001. “Theorizing Musical Meaning.” Music Theory Spectrum 23, no. 2 (October): 170–195. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Frege, Gottlob. 1892. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1): 25–50. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. 1986. On the Musically Beautiful. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Hatten, Robert. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hentschel, Frank. 2006. Bürgerliche Ideologie und Musik. Politik der Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland 1776–1871. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Hoeckner, Berthold. 2002. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kivy, Peter. 2012. Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McAuley, Tomás. Forthcoming. “Immanuel Kant and the Downfall of the Affektenlehre.” In Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World, edited by Stephen Decatur Smith, Judith Lochhead, and Eduardo Mendieta. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Leonard B. 2000. The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Moore, A.W. 2011. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meaning and Autonomy   783 Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paddison, Max. 1996. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. London: Kahn & Averill. Paddison, Max. 2001. “Music as Ideal: The Aesthetics of Autonomy.” In The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, edited by Jim Samson, 318–342. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paddison, Max. 2007. “Die vermittelete Unmittelbarkeit der Musik: Zum Vermittlungsbegriff in der Adornoschen Musikästhetik.” In Musikalischer Sinn: Beiträge zu einer Philosophie der Musik, edited by Alexander Becker and Matthias Vogel, 175–236. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Paddison, Max. 2010. “Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation.” In Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, 259–276. London: Routledge. Paddison, Max. 2017. “Art and the Concept of Autonomy in Adorno’s Kant Critique.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory, edited by Michael J. Thompson, 291–308. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pederson, Sanna. 2009. “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically.” Music & Letters 90, no. 2 (May): 240–262. Ratner, Leonard. 1980. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited and translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Jenefer. 1994. “The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no.1 (Winter): 13–22. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spitzer, Michael. 2004. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Spitzer, Michael. 2010. “Mapping the Human Heart: a Holistic Analysis of Fear in Schubert.” Music Analysis 29, nos. 1–3 (March–October): 149–213. Valéry, Paul. 1935. “Notion générale de l’art.” Nouvelle Revue française, no. 266 (November): 683–693. Valéry, Paul. 1972. “The Idea of Art.” Translated by Ralph Manheim. In Aesthetics, edited by Harold Osborne, 26–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, Max. 1921. Die rationalen und sozialen Grundlagen der Musik. Munich: Drei Masken Verlag. Weber, Max. 1922. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: JCB Mohr. Weber, Max. 1958. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. Translated and edited by Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Weber, Max. 1978. “The Nature of Social Action.” In Selections in Translation, translated by Eric Matthews and edited by W. G. Runciman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 38

M ea n i ng a n d Scepticism Paul Boghossian

Introduction I here revisit the classic question: (Expression) Does absolute music—music unaccompanied by text or programme— express or represent anything extra-musical?1

By “absolute music” I mean purely instrumental music in the Western tradition, prominent examples of which include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G major, J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, or the string quartets of Béla Bartók. These pieces not only lack texts; they also lack programmes, or expressively suggestive titles, such as La Mer. By “extra-musical” I mean such things as human emotions, for instance, anger, or gestures expressive thereof; physical objects like a mountain, or a building. These things, in not being music, are “extra-musical.”2 All kinds of extra-musical things have been said to be expressed or represented by music: the sea, the wind, a sunken cathedral; but also, sadness, yearning, joy; gratitude, puzzlement; immensity, heroic action, fate, the sacred. I shall concentrate mostly on human emotions and human gestures in my examples. And, therefore, on expression rather than representation. I will call those who answer “yes” to my question “Expressivists” and those who answer “no,” “Sceptics.” Notice also that my question is: Does absolute music express something extra-musical? And not: Must it do so? Nick Zangwill (2004, 29), a contemporary Sceptic concerning music’s expressive capacity, says: “it is not essential to music to possess emotion, arouse emotion, express

786   Paul Boghossian emotion, or represent emotion. Music, in itself, has nothing to do with emotion.” We can agree with Zangwill that it is not essential to anything we properly regard as absolute music that it expresses something extra-musical. Bach’s Art of Fugue is an abstract work that, for the most part, neither expresses nor represents anything in the sense intended here (on which more below). The question is whether some absolute music does express emotion or other mental states. Of course, Zangwill intends to deny this claim as well, and not just the essentialist claim. Someone may have the following thought: All music is situated in a particular historical context: it was composed at a specific point in time, under particular social conditions, and it will reflect aspects of those conditions of its production whether it likes it or not. In that sense, could not all music be said to express something? I agree that all music is historically and culturally situated. However, reflecting the conditions of music’s production is not expression in the sense that is in question here. The question is whether music expresses things in the way in which humans express their inner states when they talk, behave, or wear a particular expression on their face.

Eduard Hanslick One of the most important and influential originators of scepticism about extra-musical meaning was the great nineteenth-century music critic, Eduard Hanslick. In his wonderfully clearly written On the Beautiful in Music (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), first published in 1854 and still in print today after numerous editions, Hanslick argued that when someone performs a passage of music, they produce tones that stand in audible relations to one another, but those tones do not express or represent anything. Extramusical states of mind, such as emotions, are no part of their content. (Hence the title of his second chapter: “The Representation of Feeling is not the Content of Music.”) The object of musical perception is, as he put it, “tönend bewegte Formen” (sonorous forms in motion3) and those do not present us with such extra-musical meanings as emotions or thoughts. If they are put together in the right way, they will result in an object of beauty, but they can aspire to no more than that. Hanslick’s answer, then, to the question with which we started this essay was a resounding “No!” When Hanslick discussed this question of extra-musical meaning, he was writing in a particular historical setting in which it had become a commonplace, at least in certain prominent circles, to make quite extravagant claims about music’s ability to express not only complex emotions, but also complex philosophical thoughts; and not just to express them, but also to demonstrate their truth. In the hands of great masters like Beethoven, Wagner, and Liszt, it was said, music could aspire not merely to producing beautiful sounds, but to expressing truths of a sort that may not be available in any merely discursive idiom. Certain deep truths about the world were thought to be ineffable and the only way to access them was through music and the other arts.

Meaning and Scepticism   787 Arthur Schopenhauer, who was a powerful influence on Wagner and many other musicians, thought that only music could give you access to the Ding an sich, reality as it is in itself: Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, . . . This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.  (Schopenhauer 1969, 257)

In his essay on Beethoven, which was partly meant as a rebuttal to Hanslick’s book, Wagner (1896) denigrated mere beauty as an aesthetic goal and argued that the highest aspiration for music was to acquaint us with the “musically sublime.”4 In the words of Günter Zöller, for Wagner the musically sublime “originates with the nightmarish realization of the nullity of all individual existence and [moves] from there to the articulation of the sinister vision of the world so disclosed by musical means” (Zöller 2013, 651). This artistic/intellectual movement, which has come to be called (see Gardner 2007) “philosophical aestheticism,” continues to the present day, its greatest contemporary exponent being the late Roger Scruton. Speaking of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Scruton says this: “The Ring cycle was to symbolize and reveal the deep spiritual truths that were once the property of religion but which art alone, [Wagner] believed, can now communicate” (Scruton 2016, 55). Scruton makes it clear that he thinks that Wagner not only aimed at philosophical aestheticism, but that he succeeded. Writing of Act 1, scene 1 of Die Walküre, he says of Siegmund and Sieglinde: Drawing on a new theme, that of the Volsungs’ sorrow . . . the music weaves a web of love and distress around them; the audience, observing this, is entirely on their side. So necessary and right has Wagner made this love that the subsequent revelation that they are brother and sister will matter not a jot. If there is such a thing as an aesthetic refutation of a moral belief, this is it.  (Scruton 2016, 76; my italics)

But this type of philosophical aestheticism is way overblown. Act 1, scene 1 of Die Walküre may indeed provoke a laudable sympathy in us and lead us to a moral insight that we did not previously have. But it is absurd to think that it could have established it on its own, without any ratification from reason. As Plato, Tolstoy, and Mann have pointed out, whether what the music is leading us to think is a valid insight, rather than a misleading moral perception, is something that must be settled by our capacity for moral thought, not by art itself. Music can stir us to falsehood just as easily as it can stir us to truth, as the Ring cycle itself shows, when Wagner makes the music thrill us to the hatred that Siegfried feels for Mime. At the end of the day, then, whether music is pointing us towards truth or falsehood is to be settled by reason, not by art. Against the backdrop of these sorts of extravagant claims about music’s power not merely to express, but even to prove, deep philosophical truths, Hanslick’s book represented a sobering backlash. As Richard Taruskin points out: “It is difficult today

788   Paul Boghossian to appreciate the polemical force of [Hanslick’s] title; but at the time, for a German critic to insist on beauty looked to many like virtual treason” (Taruskin 2005, 441). In  a way, Taruskin understates the radicalness of Hanslick’s thesis. For Hanslick didn’t just insist on beauty as a legitimate aesthetic goal for music to have among ­others; he insisted that it was the sole legitimate aesthetic goal that music could have. And that was a truly radical idea. It is one thing to refuse to denigrate beauty as an aesthetic goal in the production of musical art; it’s quite another to elevate it to the sole legitimate aim of musical art. How could we account for the value we attach to much Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, or Schoenberg if beauty were our sole conception of the aesthetic value of music? Forget demonstrating deep philosophical truths, says Hanslick. Music can’t even express them, let alone demonstrate them. Indeed, it can’t even express, represent, or be about anything other than itself. Maybe partly because he was reacting against such an extreme position, Hanslick’s scepticism became, and remains, hugely influential, especially among musicologists and composers (on Hanslick’s influence, see Bonds 2014). I suspect it played a role in the rise of the kind of academic, mathematically-driven composition characteristic of, say, the work of Milton Babbitt, who famously wrote an article entitled—though the title was supplied by the editors of the magazine in which it appeared—“Who Cares if You Listen?” (Babbitt 1958). We can see evidence of Hanslick’s influence in the remarks that Leonard Bernstein makes at the very beginning of his Young People’s Concert series: Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that's all there is to it. . . . It’s a funny thing about this meaning business—in music, anyway. When you say “What does it mean?,” what you’re really saying is “What is it trying to tell me?,” or “What ideas does it make me have?” Just like words; when you hear words, you get ideas from them. If I say to you “Ow, I burned my finger!,” then immediately you get an idea from what I said or some ideas. You get the idea that I burned my finger, that it hurts, that I might not be able to play the piano any more, or that I have a loud ugly voice when I scream, lots of different ideas like that. That’s words. But if I play notes, some notes on the piano, like this . . . the notes don’t tell you any ideas; these notes aren’t about burning your finger, or sputniks, or lampshades, or rockets, or anything. Well, what ARE they about? They’re about music. For instance, take this piece by Chopin [Nocturne in F sharp Major, Op. 15 No. 2]. Beautiful, isn't it? But what's it about? Nothing. Or take this Beethoven Sonata [No. 21 in C major, Op. 53 “Waldstein”]. Or take some piece of boogie-woogie. It's not about anything either. None of them are about anything, but they’re all enjoyable to listen to. Why should they be enjoyable to listen to? I don’t know; it’s a part of human nature to like to listen to music.  (Bernstein 1958)

And here is Igor Stravinsky in his autobiography:5 I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon

Meaning and Scepticism   789 of nature, etc. . . . Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.  (Stravinsky 1998, 53)

Among philosophers of music, especially of the analytic variety (of whom there aren’t many), Hanslick’s scepticism has tended to be less popular, with several prominent philosophers of music attempting to refute Hanslickian scepticism by presenting positive theories of musical expressiveness (see Davies  1994; Budd  1995; Scruton  1997; Robinson 2005; Levinson 2006), although even among philosophers, there are several notable proponents of Hanslick’s point of view, including Kivy (2001) and Zangwill (2004). A hundred and fifty years after Hanslick first opened up the question, the debate still rages. But why does it matter? Why should we care whether music can or cannot express extra-musical meanings in the way in which a face, action, or utterance might? Why should we care whether it is Hanslick or Wagner6 that’s right about music’s expressive capacity?

Meaning, Emotion, and Value Even those of us who are not in the market for overblown claims of philosophical aestheticism can give three types of reason for the importance of the question. I will list them briefly and then discuss them at greater length. 1. (Phenomenology) Hearing music as expressing emotions seems to be a hugely important part of the ordinary phenomenology of listening. If the Sceptics are right, this phenomenology would be totally illusory. 2. (Arousal) We don’t just perceive music as expressing emotions; we are moved to emotion by the content of a piece of music. Music arouses emotion in us. 3. (Value) We regard music’s aesthetic value as bound up with its ability to express things.

Let me elaborate on each of these reasons. First, Phenomenology. Competent listeners report that they hear music as expressing various extra-musical meanings, most especially emotions. For example, most say that they hear the Tristan Prelude as expressing yearning. Scruton says that he hears the opening bars of the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto as expressing a “tranquil gratitude” (Scruton  1997, 141). Many hear the second movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony as sombre and anguished. The opening bars of the slow movement of Mozart’s Thirty-Ninth Symphony are said to express a serene state of mind. And so on. (Some prefer to talk of hearing the yearning or the sombreness in the music. I won’t worry about the difference between these locutions for present purposes.)

790   Paul Boghossian It’s important for my purposes that we not confuse the thesis of Phenomenology with Expressivism. Hanslick himself was very careful with the distinction. He did not deny that people often hear music as expressing emotion. That’s a thesis about musical perception. What he denied is that the music was expressing the emotion. That’s a thesis about music’s expressive capacity. Many writers have written as though Hanslick is refuted once we observe that we do hear things as expressed in music. But that’s to misconceive his point. Another relevant aspect of the phenomenology of listening to music is that we hear some music as fitting some situations better than others. This can assume many different forms depending on whether the context is that of opera, song, or film. Music can seem to amplify the message of the words being spoken or sung. Music seems to be able to comment on a scene, as a Greek chorus does; it can produce a particular mood or signal danger. And so on. But whichever one of these things it is doing, it’s not easy to see how music could do it without having an expressive capacity of its own that it brings to bear. So, it is clear that the phenomenology of music perception often involves hearing it as expressing meanings. However, unless music does express these things which we say we hear in it, these perceptions of ours would have to be deemed illusory—our perception of music would involve a systematic error. And I suppose it would be nice if this were not so. Second, Arousal. Many listeners claim that we are moved to emotion by the content of music, and that our being so moved is appropriate. This, too, is not something Hanslick denied, although he is sometimes read as having done so. It’s worth pausing a second on this word “moved.” It has at least two importantly different meanings. In the first, it denotes a specific distinctive emotion that is not identical to the garden variety emotions, such as being sad, angry, or resentful. Rather, one is just moved. It is a very interesting question, one that has only recently been receiving some attention, what this distinctive emotion of being moved is, and when and why it occurs. If I were to venture a hypothesis now, it would be that we are often moved by some experience of the sublime, in something like Kant’s sense. We are moved when we experience something whose possibility our mind can’t quite fully comprehend, but which is vividly being presented to us in a direct experience. Experiences in which we are moved in this distinctive sense are often experiences of a positive nature—the impossible poignancy of the string playing in a particular performance of the Good Friday music in Parsifal, for example. But they needn’t be. We can be moved by experiences that are disturbing, even terrifying: the unspeakable ferocity of a hurricane viewed from the safety of a dwelling, the incomprehensible vastness of the universe as seen by the early astronauts staring out of their portholes in space, the massive coordinated intensity of certain political rallies. I think it is undeniable that we are often moved in the distinctive sense by our experience of music. This may, but need not, have anything to do with music’s ability to express, since it may, but need not, have anything to do with music’s content. The phenomenon that is somewhat more puzzling, but which many listeners report as well, is that they are moved to specific garden variety emotions by the content of a piece of music. One feels sombre after a powerful performance of the slow movement of

Meaning and Scepticism   791 the “Eroica”, or exhilarated by a Rossini overture brought off with subtlety and panache. The emphasis on the fact that we are moved by the content is important in that it is meant to exclude two alternative possible scenarios: one where we are moved by the circumstances in which the music is played, for example, at a memorial for the victims of a tragedy; and one where we are moved by an emotional association that we might have between a piece of music and a memory, what has been labelled the “that’s our song” phenomenon. If we agree that we are often appropriately moved to real emotions by the content of a piece of music, it would seem as if that can only be if the music is telling us things. If the perceptual object of musical experience were purely formal, and does not present us with such extra-musical meanings as emotions or thoughts, we might get a causal explanation of how particular tones, in particular combinations, tend to arouse particular emotions in us, in much the way in which we might get a causal explanation of how drinking wine can cause us to get intoxicated. But what we would not get is any explanation of why it would be appropriate for us to be moved by the content of a piece of music. If we are to vindicate the range of emotional responses that we have to absolute music we need to be able to see absolute music as telling us things, in much the way in which we see characters in opera or drama as telling us things. In short, we need to be able to assimilate the problem of absolute music to the problem of “feeling for fictions.” That is not to deny that there is a genuine problem of explaining the appropriateness of our feeling for fictions. But everyone is agreed that there must be a solution to that problem. As Peter Kivy says: The question I am raising is how we are emotionally aroused by what the nineteenth century called absolute music . . . It is important to remember this because when the resources of language are added to the musical work, the terms of the argument are radically changed. I have no quarrel, for example, with someone who says that when he attends a performance of La Traviata, he experiences real and intense sorrow over the death of Violetta, . . . This is not to say that there is no philosophical problem in just how real emotions of sorrow and love can be aroused by the fates of fictional characters . . . But the presence of language, with all its potential for conveying concepts, and the presence of fully delineated characters such as Violetta and Alfredo . . . provide materials for arousal of the garden-variety emotions far exceeding anything that can reasonably be postulated in absolute music. And that is why absolute music poses a problem far beyond that of opera, oratorio, song and programme music to those who wish to claim that it arouses the garden-variety emotions, . . .  (Kivy 2001, 101–102)

It makes sense to be moved by opera, Kivy tells us, because characters in opera can tell us sad things. The problem for absolute music, he says, is that, lacking language, title, or text, it can’t tell us anything; a fortiori, it can’t tell us anything sad, happy, or whatever. Hence, it cannot make sense to be moved by absolute music. Most people are inclined to flip this reasoning around: since it so obviously does make sense to respond to music with emotion, there must be a sense in which music is capable of telling us things, the question being how.

792   Paul Boghossian Third, Value. Let us grant, for the moment, that Hanslick was right about musical content, that all that music really presents us with is sonorous forms in motion and does not present us with such extra-musical meanings as emotions or thoughts. Once you’ve accepted this sort of formalist account of musical content, a certain formalist conception of musical value seems to follow. For what kinds of valuable experience can you get from purely formal properties? Hanslick thought that the most you could get is beauty. Admittedly, beauty is no small thing; and music has produced us with examples of beauty that are both extraordinary and extraordinarily varied. However, Hanslick clearly underestimated the extent to which music could aspire to a large number of other aesthetic values, beyond beauty, that are consistent with his formalist conception of musical content. It is consistent with formalism, for example, that one might see value in exploring new sonorities, as in the music of Pierre Boulez and Helmut Lachenmann; or in experimenting with rhythm, as in the music of Steve Reich; or with scale or texture, as in the music of Anton Webern; or with complexity, rhythm, texture, and sonority, as in the music of György Ligeti. And so forth. But even if we expand in this way the range of aesthetic values that a purely formal conception of musical content could aspire to, one might still sympathize with Wagner’s claim that music can not only aspire to more, but has actually delivered more. For can we really explain the value we place on the late quartets of Beethoven, or on the symphonies of Mahler, solely in terms of qualities such as these? Perhaps some proponents of philosophical aestheticism went too far in the extravagant claims they made about what music could aspire to teach us. But a mere commitment to Expressivism is a much more moderate view, and does seem to underlie these three important aspects— Phenomenology, Arousal, and Value—of our relation to music. Should we say, then, that Hanslick overreacted to Wagnerian extravagance, leaving us with a conception of musical content that is too impoverished to make sense of how it appears to us, how it affects us, and of why we value it? Or is Hanslick’s view ultimately correct? And, if it is, what should we do with the way we normally conceive of musical experience?

Can We Refute Hanslickian Scepticism? Given all the reasons that we intuitively seem to have for believing in at least a modest version of Expressivism, what drives some theorists to deny it? One major source for scepticism derives simply from the theoretical difficulty in explaining, in a satisfying way, how music could be expressive. There are several issues here. To begin with, humans can express emotions because they have emotions to express. But music is not an agent. So, what does it mean to say that music expresses emotions? It won’t do to say that the music is expressing the emotions of either the composer (presumably when he wrote it) or the performer (presumably at the time of performance) because there need be no correlation at all between what the music expresses and what either of those individuals were feeling, at those times or any others.

Meaning and Scepticism   793 There are two interesting responses to this worry. The first is that certain pieces of music can be heard to contain a persona (sometimes more than one, as we shall see), a bare subject, and the emotion that is heard is the emotion of this imagined persona.7 The second response is that we should think of expression in music not in the transitive sense—where expression is expression of something—but in the intransitive sense in which a face can sometimes wear an expression, even if the expression that it wears is not reflective of its underlying emotion. Think of the way in which a St Bernard can look sad, even though it is not sad. It wears a sad expression, but this does not express an underlying mental state. Whichever one of these lines we take—and one may be appropriate in one context and the other in another—there is a deep theoretical puzzle about how mere sounds or tones could express anything, whether in the transitive or intransitive senses. Well (one might say), spoken language is also just sounds, in some sense. How does it manage to express so much, and why couldn’t music do it in the same way? But there are two crucial disanalogies between language and music. First, language has a vocabulary— words with stable and repeatable significance. Second, it has a compositional structure—a set of rules that determine the meaning of a complex phrase or sentence on the basis of the meaning of its parts and of how they are put together. It is because language has these structural features that speakers competent in a language are able to understand a potential infinity of sentences of that language on a finite basis. If I were to say to you “Beethoven inscribed his symphonies on watermelon rinds” you would know what I meant, even though it is unlikely that you had ever come across that sentence before, because you know what the parts mean and what putting them together in this way results in. Although some theorists—for example, Deryck Cooke (1989) in The Language of Music—have attempted to argue that music is analogous to language in these respects, that effort is widely seen as a failure. For music does not have a vocabulary or a compositional semantics. Furthermore, the relation between word and meaning in language is conventional. Exactly how that relation gets set up is a complex business studied by philosophers of language, linguists, and others. But the relation between musical elements and what they mean is, for the most part, not founded on convention. There are, of course, some such conventional associations—a short and lively sounding of trumpets (a fanfare) to announce something important. A march-like rhythm with, well, a march or a procession. And so on. But these are the rare cases. In general, to the extent to which music is able to express things, it has to be through some sort of natural relation to that which it expresses. What sort of natural relation could this be? There have been many attempts to answer this question of which probably the most promising and influential has been the Resemblance theory, a view that has been very ably developed by Malcolm Budd (1995) and Stephen Davies (1994), among others. We may state it roughly like this: A passage P is expressive, in context, of emotion E just in case P sounds the way a person would sound who was expressing E vocally; or sounds the way a person would look who was expressing E gesturally, etc.

794   Paul Boghossian This kind of account leans, of course, on the idea that persons have characteristic ways of expressing their inner states. For example, there are typical—and typically natural—ways that sad people look, typical ways that they sound, and so forth. Thus, the reason the persona imagined in the music is said to be expressing something sad is that the music sounds the way a person would sound, (or the way a person would look), if that person were expressing real sadness. I used to think that some version of the Resemblance theory could be made to work. I am now convinced, though, that it collapses into another view, what Jerrold Levinson (2006) has called the Ready-Hearability view. Let’s go back to one of our examples of the attribution of expression, say, Scruton’s view that the opening bars of the Beethoven G major Concerto express a tranquil gratitude. Does this resemble the typical way in which someone expresses a tranquil gratitude? How does someone do that? She might softly say “thank you” while slightly lowering her head. In what way do these opening bars resemble that? We might imagine the gratitude expressed gesturally rather than aurally, hands clasped in prayer mode, head bowed slightly. But then we’d have to make sense of the cross-modal comparisons that are called for: how does a sound resemble a look? In any case, how do the opening bars of the Beethoven G major sound the way a pair of hands in prayer mode look? Finally, even if we do think that there is some sense in which there is a resemblance between the passage and a tranquil gratitude, won’t we have to concede that the passage equally resembles many other states of mind, or even non-mental states, that have nothing to do with gratitude? It’s a commonplace of philosophy, one Nelson Goodman was particularly fond of, that everything resembles everything else to some degree. But as Levinson (2006) has persuasively argued, the degree of resemblance required for passage P to express emotion E cannot be specified in terms of some fixable degree of resemblance between the two. It can only be specified as whatever resemblance is sufficient to induce appropriate listeners to hear the music as expressing E. This has led Levinson to say that the best we can do by way of providing a theory of expression is something along the following lines: (Expression as Ready-Hearability) P is expressive of E iff P, in context, is readily heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in question, as an expression of E.

I think that something along these lines probably is the best we can do by way of a theory of musical expressiveness, though it leaves many other issues about how musical expressiveness works unaddressed. Issues such as what is it for a listener to be experienced in the genre, or what is it for such a listener to readily hear P as expressing E. But let’s ignore these for now. The problem for the Expressivist is that, in whatever way we resolve those questions, we will run smack into a very simple observation of Hanslick’s that makes it difficult to see how we could attribute some objective, determinate set of expressive properties to a passage of music. The observation is that, even as we might all agree that a particular passage of music is in a particular emotional neighbourhood, there is simply too much subjective variability in what competent listeners, experienced in the genre, will hear the music to express. Here is how Hanslick put it:

Meaning and Scepticism   795 One person will say “love.” Possibly. Another thinks “yearning.” Perhaps. A third feels “piety.” Nobody can refute any of them. And so it goes. Can we call it the representation of a specific feeling when nobody knows what feeling was actually represented? Concerning the beauty of the pieces of music, probably everyone will agree. Yet concerning the content of music, everyone differs. To represent, however, is to produce a clear and distinct content, to put before our eyes. How, then, can we designate something as what an art represents, when the very dubious and ambiguous elements of that art themselves are perpetually subject to debate?  (Hanslick 1986, 14)

There is a tendency in the contemporary aesthetics literature to hold that there is something fundamentally wrong with being preoccupied with the question of which expressive attributions are true of a given passage of music. Scruton’s argument to that effect goes something like this:





1. When I hear music, I am not hearing mere sound. Even when sound is understood not merely as a physical phenomenon—vibrations in the air—but as a “secondary object,” a mental object that exists only when it is heard, it is not the intentional object of musical perception. (“Intentional” here does not mean something having to do with someone’s intention: it means the thing that is the object of one’s perception, that which is being perceived.) 2. The intentional object of musical perception is rather tone, where tone is characterized by such variables as pitch, rhythm, harmony, and melody. 3. As applied to sound, however, these concepts are metaphorical. Therefore, to describe music “we must have recourse to metaphor, not because music resides in an analogy with other things, but because the metaphor describes exactly what we hear, when we hear sounds as music.” (Scruton 1997, 96) 4. The use of any metaphor cannot ultimately be explained.

According to Scruton, then, even the purely formal musical properties that Hanslick puts forward as the only thing that is real in musical perception cannot be thought of as literally true of anything. Hanslick emphasizes motion, for example—sonorous forms in motion. However, says Scruton, there is nothing, either out there or in one’s own mind, that moves in the way that a melody does. A melody is heard as moving up or down, or as passed from one instrument to another, but these perceptions themselves are all illusory. The concept of a melody is itself not true of anything real. Sound sequences are heard as melodies, but there is nothing either in the outside world, or the inner world, that is a melody. According to Scruton, then, even at the most basic level of the description of musical experience allowed by Hanslick, we need to have recourse to metaphor. Metaphor is what we hear when we hear music. So, there is no point in making invidious comparisons between expressive attributions and the attribution of purely formal properties: they are both at best metaphorical. We may as well employ whatever metaphors shed light on what we are hearing. And so, of course, music is expressive. It has expressive properties in exactly the same way in which it has formal properties, namely, metaphorically.

796   Paul Boghossian This is an interesting argument. But even if it were sound, which I don’t believe it is, it would not entail that there would no longer be a distinction between those descriptions of a passage of music that are undoubtedly “correct” and those that aren’t. Just because every description, including the most formalist ones, we might give of a passage of music, is literally false in some philosophical sense, doesn’t mean that some of them are not more fitting than others. Even if we are in the realm of metaphor, some metaphors are more apt than others. Relatedly, there might be a great deal less subjective variability in judgements about the aptness of certain metaphors (the formal ones) than there is in the application of others. That Hanslick is clearly right about the great subjective variability of expressive characterizations of a given piece, as compared to its formal characterization, is shown by the fact that professional musicians may be in nearly total agreement on the latter while giving expressively highly divergent interpretations of it. Yet professional musicians are competent listeners, experienced in the genre, if anyone is. Compare music to language in this regard. In language, too, we need to decide what belongs to the meaning of a sentence or word, and what is simply auxiliary information about it. And the way we think about that issue is not very far from where we have ended up with the Ready-Hearability view. In the philosophy of language, too, the notion of the meaning of a phrase is essentially tied to what a person competent with the language of which the phrase is a part would be expected to understand on hearing that thing. For example, to use a dated philosophical chestnut: What belongs to the meaning of the English word “bachelor”? Well, anyone who understands the meaning of that word must know that bachelors are male unmarried persons of a marriageable age. If you fail to know any of those three things, you fail to understand the meaning of “bachelor.” However, do you need in addition to know what the median income of bachelors is in order to understand the meaning of the word? No. Do you need to know that bachelors tend to have a certain sort of lifestyle? No. Do you need to know that there are more bachelors now in their forties than there used to be? No. Useful as it may be to know these further facts, they are not, strictly speaking, part of grasping the concept of a bachelor.8 (For further discussion see Quine 1951; Boghossian 1996.) They are auxiliary information. So, the way the attribution of meaning works in language is that the meaning of something is that minimum which you have to grasp if you are to be credited with understanding it. Now, as it turns out, for most words in a natural language, we have fairly firm intuitions about what is and is not needed for someone to understand that word. So, we can say determinately enough what is part of the meaning of the word and what is merely auxiliary information about it. Hanslick’s acute point was that we don’t have similarly firm intuitions about what you have to take a passage of music to express, if you are to be said to understand it. That’s the point of the famous passage I quoted above. Why there should be such a big difference in interpretative determinacy between natural language and music is a deep question that there is not space to go into here. Some of the reasons, having to do with language having units of meaning (words), and a compositional semantics, I have already alluded to above. Connectedly, language is used for

Meaning and Scepticism   797 the communication of information, so there has to be pretty widespread agreement about the conventions that establish its meanings, if it is to fulfil that function. Needless to say, music is not used for that purpose. But whatever the source of the difference, what is undoubtedly true is that we do have much firmer intuitions about the meanings of natural language sentences than we have about the meanings of passages of music, even when what is at question are very abstract and unspecific expressive attributions.

The Beethoven G Major Concerto and the Orpheus Legend Let me illustrate the points I’ve been making with one of the pieces of the ClassicalRomantic repertory that most vividly calls for expressive interpretation, the Andante con moto movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major. Almost since its inception this movement has been thought by some not only to be suffused with expression, but indeed to contain a detailed musical narrative of Orpheus’s confrontation with the Furies as dramatized in C. W. Gluck’s 1762 opera, Orfeo ed Euridice (see, for example, Jander  1985 and Cone  1985; for a comprehensive account of the movement, see Jander 2009). When Orpheus seeks to enter the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Euridice, he is confronted by the Furies (the strings of the orchestra) who deny him entry with strident expressions of “No, No, No!” Orpheus (the piano) responds by trying to charm them with beautiful playing on his lyre, which here becomes a soothing, seductive passage suffused, inevitably, with his melancholy. Orchestra is not assuaged. It returns with yet another loud and strident refusal. Piano counters with yet another soothing, charming response. Through repeated such exchanges, along with a passage in which Piano’s own emotions flare up (somewhat inexplicably on this reading), Piano succeeds in mollifying Orchestra. They end in hushed agreement and Orpheus is let through. Consider a performance of this piece that, I believe, comes closest to rendering in musical terms the outlines of this narrative and expressive description: a February 2010 concert played by Mitsuko Uchida, accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle.9 The first thing to say about this is that even if we were to discover, contrary to the available evidence, that Beethoven really had intended his movement to represent this detailed Orpheus story in his music, it would still be incorrect to say that the specifics of the Orpheus legend are expressed in the music. It might enhance, or possibly even detract from, one’s experience of the piece to know that detailed story. But the detailed story can’t be said to be part of the content of the music. Why is that, you might ask? Surely, if Beethoven had intended the music to represent Orpheus’s encounter with the Furies, why wouldn’t that be part of the content of the music? It can’t be part of the content of the music because no competent listener, experienced in the genre, could be expected to know that it was about Orpheus and the Furies

798   Paul Boghossian just by understanding the music. The musical materials do not contain names, nor the ability to refer to a particular narrative as background, nor to any other aspects of the specifics of the Orpheus legend. If we apply the Ready-Hearability constraint, as I think we should, what could we say remains from the fulsome description I gave above? In a sense, virtually every aspect of that description becomes controversial. In Uchida’s hands, the impression that there is an interplay here between two distinct personas, one represented by unison strings, and the other by the piano, is very vivid. But that there are personas involved expressing themselves is nowhere as vivid in other fine performances of this movement, for example in the one by Walter Gieseking, accompanied by Karl Böhm’s Saxon State Orchestra in 1939.10 Although it might be said that all concertos feature some sort of interplay between the solo instrument and the orchestra, it is not in any way automatic for each of those forces to assume a definite reidentifiable personality at each point in the movement, as they do in Uchida’s performance. The suggestion that there are distinct reidentifiable personas here has a formal basis. As Joseph Kerman (1992) points out in his famous essay on this concerto, in the Classical-Romantic concerto repertory, most of the encounters between solo instrument and the orchestra deploy the same musical material, not utterly different material as here, emphasizing the difference between them. Even so, the reading is not forced. Kerman also argues that these two personas are clearly engaged in some sort of dialogue. When Piano enters, it is responding to Orchestra: it is not just doing something of its own, unaware of the presence of Orchestra or of what it has just said. This phenomenology, of one musical persona responding to what another has just said, is a very important aspect of much classical music; but its presence is not guaranteed simply because one instrument plays after another. In Beethoven’s Cello and Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, for example, the two instruments are initially portrayed as not having much awareness of one another, their utterances heard as quasi-independent musings; gradually, the interplay between them develops into something more of a dialogue. Even if we thought that two personas, and some sort of dialogue between them, are non-negotiable elements of any proper understanding of this movement, the other elements would certainly count as controversial by the standards of ready hearability. For one thing, Bohm’s orchestra is just not that strident or angry; it’s actually somewhat lyrical and laid-back. One thinks of a bunch of sailors lazily singing a ditty in unison. It doesn’t need mollifying or soothing. Of course, if you listen to any performance of this movement with the Orpheus legend in mind, it will be easy to project its elements on to the performance, even when they are not there, just as you can suddenly recognize the note of cigar box in a wine when someone so describes it to you. But projection it will be. We should thus distinguish between two kinds of indeterminacy. The first is that it can be indeterminate which determinate emotion is being expressed. The other is that it can be determinate which emotion is being expressed, but that that emotion is itself indeterminate. I believe that both kinds of indeterminacy are at work in music.

Meaning and Scepticism   799

Where Have We Ended Up? Who, then, is right in this endless debate? I want to say: Neither and Both. If we think of the ability to express meaning in a way that is even minimally disciplined, I’m afraid we have to agree with Hanslick that there are very few determinately correct ascriptions of determinate meaning to passages of music. The music may constrain us to a particular emotional neighbourhood—we can’t hear the opening bars of the Beethoven G major as a raucous carnival—but it doesn’t present us with the determinate expression of a determinate emotion—tranquil gratitude—to which we can imagine no admissible alternatives. To the extent to which there is meaning expressed in music it is often in this way doubly indeterminate. And to the extent to which that is true, Expressivism is unable to ground the three theses it was called upon to support: Phenomenology, Arousal, and Value. On the other hand, the Formalists are wrong in thinking that we can relate to music in a way that is purely formal, merely appreciating in it the types of aesthetic value—beauty, sonority, rhythm, and the others we listed above—that can be grounded in purely formal properties. We cannot explain the value we attach to many pieces of music without alluding to the emotions and other meanings that we hear them as expressing, however illusory we may sometimes feel those perceptions are. This ineluctable meaning-seeking on our part may be especially strong in our experience of music, but it is probably grounded in some much more general feature of the human mind. As Roger Caldwell (2016) points out, “when Lewis Carroll tells us that ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’ (“Jabberwocky,” 1871), we cannot help but think that toves are some kind of (probably unpleasant) animal and that “gyre” and “gimble” describe their movements.” Our minds assign meaning, even where we know that none exists. How, then, are we to navigate between the Scylla of draconian Formalism and the Charybdis of an unconstrained Expressivism? The answer is that we have already done so in the case of poetry, especially modernist poetry. When we read the first stanza of T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?

800   Paul Boghossian we are not, of course, at a complete loss as to what thoughts and emotions are being expressed. We know we are in the neighbourhood of despair and of loss. But we would scoff at the idea that there is a uniquely correct interpretation of what is being said. The poem invites us to assign it a meaning, and as we do so, one such meaning may seem to us, at any given moment, to make most sense of the work, to unlock its most powerful message, to do fullest justice to its rhythm and rhyme. However, it would be folly to think that no other interpretation could be correct or that any paraphrase of its meaning could substitute for the poem itself. Just so in the case of music, the formal properties may place us in a certain expressive neighbourhood, but in and of themselves they are largely incapable of determinately expressing determinate thoughts or emotions. Rather, we project determinate meanings onto them, in part because we are ineluctably predisposed to do so. But what then happens to the three theses—Phenomenology, Arousal, and Value— on which I said a positive answer to the issue about Expression depended? In response, I am suggesting that we should endorse the following theses instead: 1. (Phenomenology*) Hearing music as expressing emotions is a hugely important part of the ordinary phenomenology of listening, although it is, to a significant extent, illusory. 2. (Arousal*) When we respond to music with real or quasi-real emotion, we are responding in part to imagined content; but this is no more inappropriate than it would be to respond emotionally to the imagined tragedy of Hamlet. 3. (Value*) We should regard music’s value as bound up not with its ability to express meaning, but with its undeniable ability to elicit meaning from us, allowing us to imaginatively acquaint ourselves with situations and feelings in a firstpersonal mode that we are unlikely to be able to access in any other way.

Shifting our conception to this way of thinking about music will not, I believe, detract from the importance we attach to it; and it may also have the salutary effect of liberating us from the oppressive thought that, in order to properly understand a piece of music, we must strive to unlock the one true expressive meaning that it contains.

Notes 1. For useful feedback I am grateful to the audience at the Conference on “Music and Essence” that was held in Vilnius, Lithuania in August 2016 and especially to its organizers, Ruta Staneviciute, Rima Povilioniene, and Nick Zangwill; to the Workshop on “Music and Meaning” that was held in Venice in October 2019, and especially to Ophelia Deroy, Christopher Peacocke, Barry Smith, and Andrew Huddlestone; and to Kirill Gerstein and participants in a session of his webinar series “Kirill Gerstein Invties,” on May 13, 2020. For helpful comments on an earlier version I am also grateful to Tomás McAuley, Kit Fine, Jerrold Levinson, and an anonymous referee for Oxford University Press. Special thanks to William Fitzgerald for hugely enjoyable and illuminating conversations on music and the arts over many years.

Meaning and Scepticism   801 2. Richard Taruskin, at the conference in Vilnius at which an early version of this essay was presented, was much exercised by my use of the phrase “extra-musical meaning.” He protested that we don’t talk about “extra-painterly meaning”, even when we are talking about paintings that depict things, so how could it be appropriate to talk about “extra-musical meaning”? However, in the case of painting, the phrase analogous to “extra-musical” would be not “extra-painterly,” which refers to something beyond the creator of the work, but rather “extra-paintly,” which refers to something beyond the medium of the work. And, of course, we do think that figurative paintings have extra-paintly meanings, since they depict things like houses, rivers, or fruit, that are not paint. (Thanks to Thomas Adès for this incisive observation.) 3. Often translated as “tonally moving forms,” though see Bonds 2014, 147–148 for more on this notoriously difficult phrase. 4. Wagner’s essay on Beethoven was written after Hanslick’s book, but the views about music he is giving voice to in it were very much around before Hanslick. For an illuminating account of discourse about music in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Taruskin 2005, 411–442. 5. These are, of course, official pronouncements, declarations of one’s official “philosophy of music.” It’s quite another question whether these musicians behaved in ways that conformed to their official views. If you look at a tape of Bernstein’s rehearsals of the Mahler Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, you might be surprised that he made the remarks I quoted above. 6. The animus between these two was ferocious and it is widely assumed that the character of Sixtus Beckmesser, the pedantic and conservative defender of musical tradition, whose original name in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was to be Veit Hanslich, is a parody of Hanslick. 7. The concept of a musical persona was, as far as I know, first introduced by Cone (1974) to capture the difference between the lyrical self of a song and the composer. The notion is extended in Levinson (2006) to purely instrumental music. 8. Is the Pope a bachelor? Well, he is male and unmarried; but some people balk at calling the Pope a bachelor. This is probably a matter of connotation rather than meaning; but it could be cited as an example of the way in which the boundary between meaning and connotation can be blurry. 9. A video of the performance in question (from a concert given on February 20, 2010) can be accessed on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall (https://www. digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/295#). If this is inaccessible, the Youtube video (of a different performance) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3Pq0Q86Bbw may be used as a substitute. 10. The recording can be accessed on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oAfCW2-3NxA.

Works Cited Babbitt, Milton. 1958. “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity 38 (February): 38–40, 126–127. Bernstein, Leonard. 1958. “What Does Music Mean?” CBS Television. Videocassette. Boghossian, Paul. 1996. “Analyticity Reconsidered.” Noûs, 30, no. 3 (September): 360–391. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press.

802   Paul Boghossian Budd, Malcolm. 1995. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music. London, UK: Penguin. Caldwell, Roger. 2016. “The Philosophy of Poetry.” Philosophy Now 114. https://philosophynow. org/issues/114/The_Philosophy_of_Poetry. Cone, Edward T. 1974. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cone, Edward  T. 1985. “Beethoven’s Orpheus—Or Jander’s?” 19th-Century Music 8, no. 3 (Spring): 283–286. Cooke, Deryck. 1989. The Language of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eliot, T. S. 1930. Ash Wednesday. London: Faber & Faber. Gardner, Sebastian. 2007. “Philosophical Aestheticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, edited by Michael Rosen and Brian Leiter, 75–121. New York: Oxford University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. 1986. On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. First published 1854. Jander, Owen. 1985. “Beethoven’s ‘Orpheus in Hades’: The ‘Andante con moto’ of the Fourth Piano Concerto.” 19th-Century Music 8, no. 3 (Spring): 195–212. Jander, Owen. 2009. Beethoven’s “Orpheus” Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in Its Cultural Context. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Kerman, Joseph. 1992. “Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto.” Representations 39 (Summer): 80–101. Kivy, Peter. 2001. New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression.” In Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics, 91–108. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Quine, W. V. 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophical Review 60, no. 1 (January): 20–43. Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2016. The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. London: Penguin. Stravinsky, Igor. 1998. An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. First published 1936. Taruskin, Richard. 2005. Music in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 3 of The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wagner, Richard. 1896. Beethoven (1870). In Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 5, Actors and Singers, translated by William Ashton Ellis, 57–126. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted New York: Broude Brothers, 1966. Zangwill, Nick. 2004. “Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right About Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 1 (January): 29–43. Zöller, Günter. 2013. “The Musically Sublime.” In Das Leben der Vernunft: Beiträge zur Philosophie Kants, edited by Dieter Hüning, Stefan Klingner, and Carsten Olk, 635–660. Berlin: De Gruyter.

chapter 39

M ercy Martha C. Nussbaum

Introduction: Mercy in Music Mercy in music? What an odd, even a bizarre, idea. It’s not a huge stretch to find emotions such as fear, anger, shame, and hope in symphonic music.1 Schopenhauer (1969, §52) was audacious but not unconvincing when he asserted that music contains structures that embody the kinetic structure of many of the major human emotions. But mercy is highly conceptual, involving the idea of a mitigation of merited punishment. Fear and hope have a far more basic cognitive content, which we can without great difficulty imagine being embodied in non-verbal structures. Each involves the idea of good or bad and the idea of an agent or person whose good or bad is at issue. And it is not difficult to see how musical structures (sometimes a single phrase, more often a more complex and extended development, such as an overture or a movement of a symphony) might embody the point of view of such an agent searching for good, for example, but encountering looming opposition.2 Even if such ascriptions must in the end be contextual to some degree (one cannot confidently interpret the expressive content of music from an unfamiliar tradition), one can still make secure ascriptions, within a musical tradition, without needing a text through which to pin the emotion down. Eduard Hanslick (1986) was, if profound, ultimately unsuccessful when he tried to argue that all ascriptions of emotional expression to musical passages were mere metaphors for purely musical structures. (Like many subsequent philosophers, Hanslick gave pride of place to the verbal over other expressive media, and was unable to imagine that complex emotions could be embodied in a non-verbal form.) When we get beyond relatively simple emotions such as fear and hope, however, matters become more difficult.3 Grief involves the thought of a major and irrevocable loss. Can such a thought be found in music without some type of textual determination? (Could we confidently say that Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder expresses grief—as opposed, for example, to objectless sadness—without the text?) Anger involves the painful

804   Martha C. Nussbaum thought of wrongful damage and a hopeful desire for retribution, and all of this involves complex causal thinking (see Nussbaum 2016a). Could we say that the duet “Sì, vendetta, tremenda vendetta” (“Yes, vengeance, terrible vengeance”) from Verdi’s Rigoletto expresses anger—without the text? (My daughter, a very astute musical listener from early years, but, at age two lacking awareness of that opera’s plot, thought that it was a very joyful piece of music, and she kept requesting it on happy occasions.) Compassion involves the idea that someone else is suffering without desert or in a way that goes beyond desert. Again, can we pin down those ideas in symphonic music without a text? As for mercy, often understood to be a judge or quasi-judge’s waiving of (some part of) a merited punishment in the light of a sympathetic understanding of circumstantial pressures: how on earth can that get into a stretch of textless music? We need the idea of a judge, the idea of mitigation, and the idea of some type of sympathetic understanding, and it seems very unlikely that we can find those three thoughts in a stretch of music if no text is in the neighbourhood. I accept the merit of the sceptical question, but I don’t cave in completely. I immediately concede that for mercy to be correctly ascribed to a passage of music there must be a text somewhere in the neighbourhood—whether under the music itself or in some adjacent stretch of the work or, perhaps, in some other work quoted or clearly referred to in the work in question. Mercy need not be expressed by a dramatic persona in a song or opera, although it often is; it may be ascribed to a stretch of symphonic music as an at­trib­ute of the point of view of the music.4 But in that latter case we require some type of textual guidance somewhere in order to pin it down. Nonetheless, even when a text is present, the expression of mercy may be more specific and determinate in the music than in the text: a text that, taken on its own, might express grief or resignation or bitterness or some other emotion may be seen by close scrutiny of the musical setting to express mercy, as I shall try to show with examples below. Great composers have a way of going beyond their librettists in emotional insight, and certainly this is the case with Mozart—even when his librettist is Da Ponte, but most especially when it is the journeyman Mazzolà (of La clemenza di Tito).5 To locate mercy in a work, one needs close familiarity not only with the musical tradition within which the work is produced but also with the composer’s whole style and oeuvre, insofar as that is possible. For this reason, and also because I feel that a small number of fully developed cases will be more convincing than a catalogue of hastily developed snippets, I take my musical examples from a narrow range of works, largely from eighteenth- and nineteenth- (and in one case early twentieth-) century opera, and above all the operas of Mozart, though in two cases I include Requiem Masses that are unusually operatic in nature; one of these, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, though of much later date (1962) completes my examination of one strand in the mercy tradition. In this essay I shall first distinguish two conceptions of mercy: a hierarchical, or “topdown” conception, in which mercy is granted from on high and predicated on a permanent asymmetry between judge and wrongdoer; and an “egalitarian” conception, in which mercy is granted in light of common human frailties and circumstantial pres-

Mercy   805 sures. I shall then show how both are present in music, giving a range of examples from operatic and choral works in which a textual component establishes the situation as potentially one where merciful judgement might be offered—and then, or so I shall argue, the music itself, over and above the text, establishes the fact and the type of mercy in question. What do I mean by talking of the expression of mercy in and by a work? This question cannot be avoided here, yet the answer must be brief.6 The expression of mercy may also be a depiction or representation, as when a character (a persona in an opera, or a characterized stretch of a non-verbal text) itself displays mercy. But it is also possible to ascribe to the text as a whole a point of view. Just as literary critics distinguish the views of a character or characters from the views and sentiments of the “implied author,” i.e., the sense of life that animates the text taken as a whole, just so the music critic may distinguish a local point of view, that of a character or characters, from the sense of life animating the musical text as a whole. Some characters are clearly meant to be seen critically or unfavourably or comically, whether in an opera or in a programmatic piece of music that contains “characters” (the tone poems of Richard Strauss contain many, for example). At times, by contrast, we may be able to argue that a particular character, at some moments and in some ways, expresses the point of view of the music as a whole. But we may also arrive at the “implied composer” by some independent route. Expression is not the same thing as causation: music can be seen to express fear without causing fear in the listener. However, the issues are not entirely separate. The attentive reader of a poem or novel (the implied reader, we might say) inhabits the point of view of the implied author, and is likely, rather like a good actor, to take on the range of sentiments that constitute that viewpoint. So too with the implied listener, the attentive and undistracted and knowledgeable and fully responsive follower of a musical work. Such a listener will be likely to take on the sentiments of the work, at least at times. Of course such a reader may, at the same time, utterly reject the point of view of some character or sub-stretch within the work: that is why the distinction between character and implied author is so important. But there is always complexity here too: for if the music is deep and compelling enough, drawing the listener in, then the most detersist­ ance to its sentiments may crumble—hence philosopher Bernard mined re­ Williams’s agonized ruminations about Siegfried’s Funeral Music, which with good grounds he finds both emotionally compelling and politically ominous (see Williams 2006, cf. Nussbaum 2015). In what follows, then, I focus on the “point of view of the music,” which may also be, and in Mozart frequently is, that of some character or characters within the work, at least at some times. And my question will be: given the presence, somewhere in the neighbourhood, of a text that makes such questions intelligible, what musical structures express mercy, and how? First, however, we need a philosophical examination of mercy, for it turns out that it is a contested notion with two very different Western traditions: the Graeco-Roman and the Christian-monarchical.

806   Martha C. Nussbaum

Mercy in the Western Philosophical Tradition What is mercy (Latin clementia, Italian clemenza) in the Graeco-Roman tradition?7 The canonical works are the On Anger (De Ira) and On Mercy (De Clementia) by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 bce–69 ce).8 The De Ira was written early in Seneca’s career; it is addressed to all human beings, including himself. The De Clementia is addressed to the new emperor Nero and is part of a programme of ethical education for that young man by a trusted adviser who functioned for five years as the regent of the empire—but Nero’s future job is not important: Seneca gives him the same advice he gives all human beings in the De Ira. Seneca defines mercy as “An inclination of the mind towards leniency in exacting punishment” (De Clementia 2.3.1). Mercy, then, is an attribute of the good judge. It is not the same thing as compassion (Latin misericordia, Italian pietà), although, as we’ll see, Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito traces a close and fascinating connection between the two concepts. Mercy is a mental inclination but not necessarily an emotion; compassion is an emotional reaction to the plight of another person. Mercy recognizes that the person is at fault: it belongs, so to speak, at the penalty phase of a trial, after conviction. Compassion, by contrast, need have nothing at all to do with fault: indeed, as typically understood, it recognizes a large role for uncontrolled events in getting people into the bad situation that inspires the painful emotion. And it typically ascribes to these uncontrolled events considerable importance for human flourishing—a reason why Stoic philosophy disapproves of the emotion.9 Sometimes the people for whom we have compassion are guiltless, for example people harmed by a natural catastrophe, or victims of a crime. Sometimes they did something bad, but with mitigating circumstances: they didn’t know what they were doing, or they were overwhelmed by a situation that put tremendous pressure upon them. In such cases the two concepts, compassion and mercy, draw close, but there is one further link necessary to connect them: the sympathetic imagination. Let us, however, step back. For we cannot move forward until we recognize that the Senecan tradition, which is egalitarian, seeing the basis of mercy in universal human frailty, must be contrasted with a different and highly influential view that I shall call the top-down view. It is not present in Graeco-Roman texts, but it is prominent in some Christian texts, particularly when interpreted in cultures in which monarchs claimed divine rights.10 Consider Portia’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

Mercy   807 ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; .  .  .  .  . But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice. (4.1.181–6, 190–4)

Mercy, here, is the free gift of an all-powerful ruler to those way down below. The monarch’s mercy is modelled on the mercy of an omnipotent and fault-free God, and its starting point is a huge gulf: between God and mortals, perfection and guilt, the (godlike, unerring) king and mere erring mortals. The monarch can bestow mercy not because of a recognition of common humanity, but because of a secure knowledge of permanent difference and hierarchy. Nor does top-down mercy require any effort of sympathy or imagination: for all are alike low, base, and sinful, so imagining the heart of another will show us no particular reasons for mitigation and would thus be a waste of time. It is notorious that Portia makes absolutely no effort to imagine what a Jew in Venice might feel, what experiences of stigma and hatred might have led to Shylock’s obdurate insistence on his bond. We might hastily suppose that for modern Western composers in monarchical cultures, the operative conception of mercy must be the top-down one. We cannot assume this, however, because Christian texts contain both conceptions and because, in any case, the Graeco-Roman concept of mercy did not die. The subject of a long philosophical tradition that includes not only Graeco-Roman authors but also many moderns influenced by them (including Shakespeare himself, in Measure for Measure11), it is fully alive in the eighteenth century and later. Indeed, I think we’ll soon see that it is this conception, and not the top-down conception, that figures in Mozart’s operas (perhaps expressing his Enlightenment recuperation of classical humanism). Graeco-Roman mercy begins from a simple insight: there are many obstacles to acting well. Thus, when people do bad things, it is sometimes fully their own fault, but often we want to say that they have been tripped up by the circumstances and pressures of human life. Close inspection of particular circumstances often leads to a downward deviation in assessing punishment—not because of God’s grace but because of sympathetic understanding and human fellow-feeling. Seneca says that an astute person is not surprised at the omnipresence of aggression and wrongdoing, “since he has examined thoroughly the circumstances of human life” (De Ira 2.10). Circumstances, then, and not innate evil propensities, are at the origins of vice. And when a sensitive person looks at these circumstances clearly, he finds that they make it extremely difficult not to go wrong. The world into which human beings are born is a rough place, one that confronts us with obstacles of many types: scarce

808   Martha C. Nussbaum resources, competition, the aggression of others, the pressure of the passions. Being so vulnerable and needy, we are likely to go wrong in some way, being too grasping, or too angry, or too jealous, or too acquiescent to someone we love. Given the omnipresence of these errors, Seneca argues, “it is a fault to punish a fault in full” (De Clementia 2.7). If we look at the lives of others with unsympathetic hardness or self-complacency, we become hard, rigid, closed to others. His proposal: “Give a pardon to the human species” (De Ira 2.10). Moreover, Seneca announces that he examines himself in a similar spirit. Seeing his own faults helps him understand others; and learning not to be punitive to himself helps him learn how to be gentle to others. Senecan mercy is not top-down, but egalitarian. It says that we are all in it together, we understand human life because we are in its midst and burdened by its difficulties. Nobody is secure, and the judge no more than the offender. Mercy is built on sympathetic imagining (of both self and other). When you look into the heart of the offender, you don’t find pure evil, you find a human being. Human beings are often a terrible mess, but this tradition holds that none is fully and entirely bad: they are crossed up by life in some way. So you take note of the wrongdoing, you don’t deny it, but you punish it less than you would have done if you had not seen into the human heart. That’s how compassion is linked to mercy: through the imagination of the heart. Seeing a bad state of affairs, we might not know whether to have compassion for the offender or whether to wish him a horrible death. But seeing into the heart, we see a mixture of fortune and intention that makes us decide—often at least—that compassion is warranted by the nature of the person’s predicament. Such insight makes mercy in sentencing preferable to a rigid and merciless justice. It’s worth mentioning that this classical tradition is alive and well in the US tradition of criminal law. At the penalty phase of a criminal trial, after guilt has been established, many jurisdictions in the United States give the defendant, by law, the opportunity to present a detailed life story in order to plead for mercy from the judge or jury. One state removed that opportunity from defendants in a range of cases, and the US Supreme Court held that they had violated the basic constitutional norm of “fundamental respect for humanity.” A process that accords no significance to relevant facets of the character and record of the individual offender or the circumstances of the particular offense excludes from consideration . . . the possibility of compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind. It treats all persons convicted of a designated offense not as uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of the penalty. . . (Woodson v North Carolina 428 US 280, 304 (1976))12

Things don’t always work this way in practice, for life histories soon become formulaic, and the likelihood that the narrative has been manipulated by a clever lawyer makes people sceptical. Still, seeing into the heart is honoured as a norm of judicial conduct.13

Mercy   809

Top-Down Mercy: The Requiem Mass Top-down mercy is omnipresent in Western music, particularly religious music. An entire study of settings of the Requiem Mass could be written in this vein. Of course, typically and for the most part, the point of view of the music is the human viewpoint, that of the person awaiting the Last Judgement and pondering the fate of the departed. This viewpoint, like the text of the Dies Irae, is filled with a terrible anxiety, with emotions of guilt, longing, and occasionally hope. But at times the point of view of the divine judge (whether God the Father, Christ, or the Virgin Mary) is present in the music, and music itself gives expression to the beauty of the grace that leads to mercy, and the beauty of the merciful treatment of error itself, that might possibly befall sinful mortals. Giuseppe Verdi’s setting of the Agnus Dei in his Requiem (1874) is just one example of this perspectival shift. Coming after the agony of the Dies Irae, the complexity of the Offertory with its contrapuntal “quam olim Abrahae,” and the blare of the Sanctus with its triumphant “Hosanna” giving praise to God, the Agnus Dei marks an abrupt shift. As David Rosen (1995, 53–55) observes in an insightful analysis of this movement, Verdi has treated this text in an unusual way: rather than making it part of the Libera Me, with its anguished plea for mercy, as do Mozart and Cherubini, he sets it off as a separate movement, creating an interlude of serenity. The text still officially inhabits the lowly human perspective: it asks God to grant peace and rest to the departed. But consider the music. As Rosen aptly notes, “The dynamic range of this lightly scored movement ranges from ppp to p, and its structure is a theme and variations, one of the most placid of all musical forms, well suited to impart a sense of calm and timelessness” (53). Out of a silence, two voices, soprano and mezzo, enter very quietly, singing a cappella, in octaves, a very simple melodic line, with a boundless serenity and tranquillity. They are then joined by the chorus, also pianissimo, also a cappella, as the sense of grace gains momentum and firmness. When the orchestra enters, gradually, and always very softly, the sense that mercy has been granted solidifies. The entire movement is the most pronounced contrast, dynamically, rhythmically, expressively, with the storm of the Dies Irae, the clangour of agonized fear and the torment of guilt, and with the even more agonized Libera Me to follow, with its desperate plea. Mercy is expressed by embodying musically the perspective of grace, assured, confident, descending on a world in pain. It is almost transhuman: it can sound less like speech than like a pure instrumental melody (Rosen 1995, 54). One could discuss many other examples in this way—and not only in the Mass. Opera has its own perspectives of grace. Consider the angelic upsurge of redemption at the end of Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859), where it is not the words but the music that informs us that Marguerite has been redeemed. Consider the angels who descend to watch over the sleeping children in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893), whose shimmering music informs us that the errors of children and parents will be pardoned. But

810   Martha C. Nussbaum let us examine just one case: the arrival of the Virgin Mary’s mercy at the end of Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica, premiered in 1918), the middle opera of his Il trittico (The Triptych). A young woman gives birth to an illegitimate child, gives him up, and, punished by her noble family, enters a convent, where she lives happily. Seven years later her aunt, a Princess, comes to visit her (in order to get her signature on documents renouncing her property), and when Angelica expresses a desire to benefit her child, the Princess tells her that the child died two years ago. Desolate, she sings a famous aria “Senza mamma bimbo tu sei morto” (“Little one, you died without your mother”), imagining the child’s lonely death and imagining that she will again be reunited with him in heaven. Caught up by her ecstatic vision of the son in paradise, calling to her, she drinks poison and dies, thinking she will join him in heaven. At that point, when it is too late and the poison is taking its course, she (musically as well as physically) writhes in agony, realizing she is damned for all eternity. Then, however, a chorus of nuns offstage sings of the Virgin Mary’s power and grace. A trumpet sounds. And, as Angelica cries out, “Please save me,” the chorus swells up ever more confidently and forcefully, until its measured confidence simply eclipses her agony—and as she dies the presence of the Virgin Mary is apparently assured. Directors typically find visual ways of underlining the message of mercy—a heavenly light, an appearance by the Virgin Mary, even the beatified child running to embrace its mother—but the music itself makes the resolution clear.14 Heavenly mercy is, of course, visible only from the human perspective, so what we are experiencing in such works is heavenly mercy as hoped-for, imagined, by humans. But the presence of such a hope for grace takes a distinctive, and often distinctively beautiful, musical shape, as flawed yet hopeful human beings imagine the beauty of a divine perfection that extends mercy out of pure gratuitous goodness, and not in response to any need. We can understand these moments of heavenly mercy more fully by pausing to contemplate a musical world from which that hope of heavenly redemption has been snatched away, while its legacy yet persists: Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. The work had its premiere in 1962, at the rededication of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral after its destruction during the bombing of the Second World War. Britten’s choice to combine the traditional text of the Requiem Mass with poems of Wilfred Owen expressing the pointlessness of the First World War has long occasioned controversy (see Cooke 1996 for a summary). Both Britten and his partner the tenor Peter Pears were pacifists and had won conscientious objector status during the Second World War. One source of controversy was the choice of a pacifist perspective for the rededication, after so many non-conscientious-objectors had risked and in many cases lost their lives in the fight against Fascism. Nor could one argue that Britten intended only a more general statement about war: the specific context of the Second World War was part of his plan for the performance, and he deliberately cast singers representing three of the major nations involved (Pears from Britain, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau from Germany, and soprano Galina Vishnevskaya from Russia). This schema was so important to him that he insisted on Vishnevskaya for national reasons despite the possibility that Soviet

Mercy   811 authorities would prove unwilling to allow her to travel—and in the event English soprano Heather Harper sang the work at its opening, though Vishnevskaya sang it later and made the first recording. So Britten’s statement about war’s futility was clearly intended by him as a specific statement about the Second World War, which many ra­tional people dedicated to a politics of non-anger and (in general) non-violence might see as a just war if ever there were one. In the debate about the nature of pacifism and of non-violence that raged throughout the war and the post-war period, Britten and Pears clearly espoused Gandhi’s extreme position that violence and war were never acceptable under any circumstances.15 A thoughtful person could agree with Britten’s lifelong commitment to ending the spirit of anger and retribution, without opposing national selfdefence in the Second World War. A more subtle problem was the evident fact that Wilfred Owen was not a pacifist: in letters he made it clear that he thought there could be legitimate wars, but that the First World War (in which he died) was itself pointless and illegitimate. So Britten, by linking Owen’s poetry with a Gandhian pacifist stance towards the Second World War, represented his own ideas but not those of Owen (see Cooke 1996, 1–19). These worries seem weighty to me. They do not imply that Britten thought soldiers mere fools or dupes; clearly he had the greatest sympathy with common soldiers, whom he did not blame for war’s violence. Nor do they imply that Britten, like Gandhi, sought a radical break with the religious spirit of Britain’s past and present.16 Britten always insisted that he had some type of (apparently non-theistic) Christian religious view and viewed Christ as a perfect moral exemplar. And the commission that resulted in the War Requiem was clearly a project that melded a desire for a new future with an embrace of a certain sort of British continuity.17 Still, there is rupture as well as continuity, since he and Pears espoused a pacifism that set them at odds with much of the national and, even more clearly, the international community. Despite such controversies, which seem destined to continue in this case as in the parallel case of Gandhi, there is no doubt that Britten has created a work that brilliantly expresses the pointlessness and savagery that is characteristic of very many wars, the important human interests in love and compassion that war disrupts, and the need to reconnect in spite of this disruption. The work occasions deep emotional reflection about the genesis of war in the human spirit. Such reflection was a lifelong obsession with Britten, who investigated the spirit of anger and violence in many contexts and from many different points of view.18 The musical world of the War Requiem is one in which war’s chaos and savagery dominate, and yet human beings still retain the longing for some type of salvation or grace. The text of the Requiem Mass (typically sung by the two choirs, an adult choir and an ethereal-sounding boy choir) provides the work with its formal frame and makes an orthodox and monumental statement, while the poetry of Wilfred Owen, sung by the tenor and baritone soloists, supplies a sceptical and tragic human intervention, intimate rather than monumental, accompanied by a chamber orchestra. These interventions “continually interrupt—better, disrupt—the majestic flow and momentum of the Requiem” (Mitchell 1999, 207). As we arrive at the Agnus Dei, where, traditionally,

812   Martha C. Nussbaum Christ’s mercy frequently appears, the usual structure inverts itself, as Donald Mitchell (208) has shrewdly observed: the Owen poem, “A Cavalry Near the Ancre,” sung by the tenor, takes the foreground, and the boy choir recedes into a vague murmuring background. In music of stark simplicity and haunting beauty (see Cooke 1996, 71–73), we learn of no mercy from on high, but, instead, of the death of a human Christ (emblem of the young men of Europe), crucified by the war machine: One ever hangs where shelled roads part. In this war he too lost a limb. But his disciples hide apart, And now the soldiers bear with him.

The voice of Peter Pears, with its sui generis combination of purity, physical beauty, and humanity, expresses the persona of the human Christ, almost naked against a very sparse orchestration and the distant Latin chant of the boy choir. As Mervyn Cooke remarks, the use of F♯ suspensions on top of C major chords, at the words “hangs,” “disciples,” and, later, “love” creates a powerful and poignant impression of a human purity.19 This young human Christ (like the similarly pure and yet eroticized figure of Billy Budd) is laying down his life for the sins of the world. In place of any mercy, however, we find a savage indictment of the social institutions that put Christ to death, including organized religion itself, as co-opted by makers of war. Near Golgotha strolls many a priest, And in their faces there is pride That they were flesh-marked by the Beast By whom the gentle Christ’s denied.

Mitchell perceptively notes the musical accents marked on “flesh-marked,” and the use of the side drum, the only percussion in the entire movement, to underline the “ensuing indictment”: “The scribes on all the people shove / And bawl allegiance to the state.” “The side drum,” Mitchell continues, “undoubtedly, serves as a reminder of the weapons to which an oppressive state will have recourse” (Mitchell 1999, 208–209). So there is no mercy to be hoped for from on high, and the music, suited to the texts (which of course the composer chose and arranged), fittingly expresses, with a stark sadness, the emptiness of a world into which people hoped God would intervene. Mitchell (1999, 208) emphasizes the movement’s “unequivocal insistence on the baneful tritone (C–F♯), the Requiem’s unappeasable and all-pervasive leading motif.” Instead of being redeemed, human violence runs riot. (Owen’s version of the “quam olim Abrahae” text, inserted at that point in the Mass, has Abraham killing Isaac—“and half the seed of Europe one by one.”) At the end of the movement, Britten changes the text of the Latin Mass in the tenor line: instead of a final “dona eis requiem” (“give them rest”), which the chorus sings, the tenor sings “dona nobis pacem” (“give us peace”). The score shows that this change was

Mercy   813 inserted in Pears’s handwriting, a bold expression of Pears’s lifelong pacifist stance.20 We are left with the beauty of Christ and of his sacrifice—and with the possibility of a purely human peace. Britten never altogether gave up the idea that a kind of redemption could be achieved through the suffering of Christ, a hope that shapes the epilogue of Billy Budd. Nor, as Heather Wiebe (2012) makes clear, did he ever wholly reject the possibility that some elements in traditional English values might guide the search for peace. In the tragic text of the Agnus Dei, however, only the beauty of a very human Christ survives, with no hint of a transcendental hope. Since I have concurred wholeheartedly with Donald Mitchell’s persuasive interpretation of this movement, I must record a note of dissent. At the end of his analysis, Mitchell (1999, 209) speaks of “the (righteous) anger that erupts in the ‘Agnus Dei’.”  I believe that this ascription of a spirit of anger to the movement’s viewpoint to be profoundly wrong, both philosophically (in terms of Britten’s beliefs and commitments, which he typically follows through with unerring musical judgement) and musically. The pacifist tradition of which Britten was a leading exponent totally eschewed the spirit of anger, even though some of its members were willing to countenance the resort to violence in self-defence. Nor is the utter rejection of anger alien to Britten’s repeated wrestlings with this theme, as Mitchell himself shows. From the early The World of the Spirit (1938) to the later Voices for Today (1965) and Owen Wingrave (1970), there is repeated and obsessive emphasis on the gentleness of the spirit of peace, on the need to replace the angry spirit with a spirit of love. Among the many examples of this commitment gathered by Mitchell himself, I can mention only two. Voices for Today includes as leading texts one from the Gospels, “Love your enemies; do good to those that hate you,” and one from Ashoka, “The Beloved of the Gods wishes that all people should be unharmed, self-controlled, calm in mind, and gentle” (Mitchell 1999, 191). And at a climactic moment in Owen Wingrave, Owen describes the haunted room at Paramore, crying out: “The anger of the world is locked up there, the horrible power that makes men fight” (206). Britten does not distinguish between righteous and non-righteous anger; he says, get rid of that doomed emotion, and act in a spirit of gentleness and love. Nor does the music of the Agnus Dei speak otherwise. The anger in the movement is entirely in the persona of the warmongers. Christ’s music is serene, gentle, and loving. One would hardly expect otherwise, in a setting of “But they who love the greater love lay down their lives, they do not hate.” And the setting of that line is indeed loving and serene. Mitchell’s comment shows us how difficult it is, in modern societies hooked on anger, that there can be resistance to war and injustice, and indeed an emphatic protest against war and injustice, conducted in a spirit not of anger but of love and peace. It is in the humanity of Christ and in the humanity of all that mercy, and love, are to be located, not in a fantasy of divine intervention. The possibility of a human mercy is further explored at the end of “Strange Meeting,” set as part of the Libera Me. The poem depicts the post-mortem reconciliation of two soldiers who meet after both are dead, one British and one German. The setting is some mythic realm beyond death—but Britten pointedly omits lines of the Owen poem giving

814   Martha C. Nussbaum the meeting place as Hell (see Cooke 1996, 29, 74–75). Religious cosmology is replaced by a world of human imagination and emotion. The poem is sung almost a cappella at first, with only brief interventions from the oboe and flute. And although the German solder is “lifting distressful hands as if to bless,” when he speaks, he does not endorse conventional religious ideas. Instead, he talks of hopelessness (to a single oboe’s accompaniment) and of unrealized hope (against a harp). But then, when he begins to speak of his desire to offer a purely human consolation (“I would go up and wash them from sweet wells”),21 the violins enter, and eventually the rest of the strings. The climactic declaration, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend . . . Let us sleep now” is delivered a cappella—but then the choir takes up the last line, “Let us sleep now,” and the choral voices curve around the soloists as the refrain swells outward. The boy choir still sings the religious text, speaking of angels leading the dead person into Paradise, but those voices are shadowy and remote, and it is the two humans who have immediacy. They do not even acknowledge conventional religious ideas; they simply speak to one another. This is mercy between humans, in a world where conventional ideas of divine grace have failed—indeed, been corrupted and expropriated by nationalistic politics. Human compassion and the ability of humans to overcome hatred take the place of conventional top-down religion and become the full earthly embodiment of the murdered Christ (after all, Pears is singing both roles). And so, it becomes in the end a Senecan and egalitarian kind of mercy, but with a powerful undercurrent of despair, unknown to Seneca (unknown equally to Mozart) that comes from the awareness of the absence of a hope of heaven. As Cooke (1996, 76) remarks: “This unique conjoining of all the performing groups (spanning some forty-seven staves of full score, mostly subdued in dynamics) singing the same music, serves as a fitting representation of the reconciliation with which the Owen setting ends.” As Wiebe (2012, 191–225) emphasizes, the work performs both rupture and a certain continuity, since the humanity of Christ is, of course, part of traditional religion. But the advice to humans is not to wait for external interventions: instead, we must arrange to have mercy on, and to love, one another. In a purely human world, however, there are no neat endings, and Britten disrupts the final reconciliation by the reintroduction of the tritone C–F♯ on the tubular bells, which twice discordantly checks the voices in their attempt to repeat, “Let us sleep now”/“In paradisum.” As if dejected, the chorus takes up the tritone for the final “Requiescant in pace,” as a resolution into the alien key of F major ends the work on a profoundly unsettling and ambiguous note (see Cooke 1996, 76–77): does the resolution express a possibility of hope, or a further stage of dejection? Perhaps each listener must decide. Mercy is for humans to construct, and whether we will take up that challenge is unclear. In a musical world not gripped by the hope of divine grace,22 Senecan mercy has a different, and more amiable, sound. If we confine ourselves to the worlds of the Mozart operas, we are not confining ourselves at all, so many rich opportunities do the operas offer for the exploration of this emotion.

Mercy   815

Senecan Mercy in Mozart: The Countess Says “Yes” It would be no exaggeration to claim that Mozart’s operas, early and late, are obsessed with the topic of mercy.23 Mozart of course had some flexibility in his choice of themes, and even though I shall argue that most expressions of mercy in his operas are musical more than textual, it is a fact that he repeatedly opted for libretti in which mercy is an important part of the plot. The early Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio, premiere 1782) culminates in the decision by Pasha Selim, who has imprisoned Constanze and Blonde, not to punish either the women or their lovers Belmonte and Pedrillo for their daring escape from the harem—even after discovering that Belmonte is the son of his most hated enemy. It is the buffoon Osmin, the eunuch who guards the harem, who gleefully anticipates a strict justice that culminates in a bloody retribution. Thus mercy is represented as noble, revenge as base. At the other end, the late Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, premiere 1791) revolves around the replacement of the morality of honor and revenge, exemplified by the Queen of the Night, by the solemn and merciful world of Sarastro, leader of a humanist Masonic order similar to those in which Mozart took a keen interest. Instructing the postulant Tamino, Sarastro speaks of “these sacred halls, where retribution is unknown.” There is a lot to say, along these lines, about Idomeneo, about Così fan tutte, and even (though it would take some arguing) about Don Giovanni (see Nussbaum 2014). For the most part, I would wish to argue, the mercy that interests Mozart is the human-egalitarian rather than the divine-hierarchical sort. Let me, however, focus on two works only. At the end of The Marriage of Figaro (premiere 1786), the Count, caught in deception, kneels before the Countess and sings, in a voice newly softened by confusion, a phrase of a type, lyrical and legato, hushed, almost gentle, that we have never heard from this man before: “Excuse me, Countess, excuse me, excuse me.” There is then a long pause. The length of this pause is interpreted variously by different conductors, but both Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan hold it for a full four seconds, a very long time. (In the score, the pause is designated by a quarternote rest with a fermata.) Here, I suggest, is where the idea of the judge deliberating enters the music. The Countess then sings softly out of the silence: “I am nicer, and I say yes” (“più docile io sono, e dico di sì”). The musical phrase arcs gently upward, and then bends down as if, almost, to touch the kneeling husband. And now, in hushed and solemn tones, the entire assembled company repeats the Countess’s phrase, this time to the words, “Ah, all of us will be happy in that way” (“tutti contenti saremo così”). The choral version of the phrase is reminiscent of the solemn simplicity of a chorale (which, in this Catholic musical universe, denotes a sudden absence of hierarchy). So we have, musically, the idea of the judge (the pause), the idea of mitigation (the gentle arcing phrase), and the related idea of human understanding (the phrase again, but combined with the interpretation of a fine singer).

816   Martha C. Nussbaum In my recent book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, I have argued that The Marriage of Figaro depicts a struggle between this masculine honour-culture— exemplified not only by the Count but by Figaro as well—and a very different culture of reciprocity, imagination, and love that finds its home, in that opera, only in the women’s world (Nussbaum 2013, 27–53). The culmination of that contrast is this moment of Senecan mercy, mercy based on human love and imagination, not on the hope of divine grace. In other words, Mozart sees that the problems of politics are personal not simply political, or rather, to use an old slogan, that the personal is political. We won’t get cultures of equal respect unless we learn reciprocity first in our intimate relations. The end of the opera is a cautious first step towards a radical reinvention of those relations. The idea of Senecan reciprocity and the related idea of mercy are in the music, more clearly than in the text. As with so much else in the opera, one could imagine many different musical settings of what Da Ponte wrote, each of which would have a different emotional meaning. The Countess might say yes with fear, with bitter cynicism, with a resentment that would belie her words. But she is “nicer,” more understanding of the vagaries of the human heart, and so she says “yes” in that gentle way.

Seeing the Heart: Tito, Sesto, and Vitellia La clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Titus, premiere 1791) was the last opera Mozart composed, written after most of Die Zauberflöte had been completed.24 Commissioned for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, it needed to deal with good leadership, but the topic of Titus’s mercy seems to have been chosen by the impresario, Dominico Guardasoni. There was an existing libretto by Metastasio, which had already been set by Caldara, Gluck, and Myslivicek. He approached Salieri first, but Salieri turned him down. Mozart accepted. The libretto in its final form was edited by the poet Caterino Mazzolà. So Mozart chose, in effect, the subject. Drawn to the theme of mercy despite the absence of a brilliant libretto, he consistently transcends the libretto. Mercy is the overall subject of the work and figures in it musically in fascinating ways (for a more detailed study, see Nussbaum 2016b). We don’t have to study the opera very long in order to find that the sort of mercy that interests Mozart and his librettist Mazzolà is the Senecan, and not the top-down, kind. Tito does not portray his mercy as given out of a secure knowledge of a suprahuman status. Indeed, his monologues are filled with struggle. Like Seneca in his nightly selfexamination (De Ira 3.38), Tito is constantly examining his own heart, and criticizing himself for all sorts of inappropriate passions. He depicts his mercy not as a mandate handed down from on high to humble erring mere mortals, but, rather, as a longstanding personal commitment. (Here Mozart follows the Roman sources, who portray Titus as a very unusual sort of ruler.)

Mercy   817 The real drama, however, concerns the other two leading characters: Sesto, who betrays his friend Tito under pressure of Vitellia’s intemperate jealousy, and Vitellia, who undergoes a remarkable and wonderful transformation, present more in the music than in the words. They are both, ultimately, the objects of Tito’s mercy, not the givers, but their own psychological evolution is the main interest of the work, as they learn how to plead for mercy, and how to understand both self and other. Sesto is, we might say, the Cherubino of Figaro grown up and thrown into the middle of a tough world. That tender mezzo voice has now entered a world of political intrigue and competition—and yet he is still singing in the same loving tones. What will become of him there? What will become of tenderness and the wish for reciprocity, when greeted with the harsh reality of a violent and aggressive honour culture? At first, utter confusion. The diseased values in this case take the shape of a captivating woman, and he falls for her.25 Vitellia, at first, is as utterly incapable of love as the Count in Figaro: all she wants is imperial status, and a man who can get it for her. Slighted by Tito, she seethes with a jealousy that has nothing to do with love. Worse still, she thinks of the young man who desperately loves her as a mere tool of her aim to establish her own superiority. Sesto keeps trying to tell her that Tito is generous and kind and should not be harmed. But she has no interest in anything but her own status, and she goads him until he breaks. In the emotionally complex and eloquent aria “Parto, parto,” the gentle young man, an utterly unsuitable assassin, tells her that he will go and try to kill Tito only for her sake and for the sake of having a peaceful loving relationship with her in the future. “I’ll go, I’ll go,” he says with a moving combination of reluctance and determination, “But, my dearest, make peace with me again”—and Mozart makes this simple statement, “meco ritorna in pace,” haunting, arcing upward in hope, and then gliding gently downward. His music, far more than his words, show that Sesto is simply not going to fare well in the world of anger and revenge. And the beautiful basset-horn obbligato in the aria, written by Mozart for his friend Anton Stadler (Rice 2009, 229), makes Sesto’s connection to a world of love and generous emotional expression extremely plain.26 Of course Sesto’s assassination attempt is an utter disaster. A fire does break out, and for a while Sesto believes that Tito has died—but actually he hasn’t been hurt at all. And now Sesto has to live with the fact that he has betrayed his friend, his values, and himself. As he stands before his fortunately still-living friend, he sees in him an utter rigidity that spells death. Rigidity is the attitude of mind Seneca criticizes, because it involves a refusal of imagination, both to self and to another. In his utterly characteristic and utterly Senecan way of pleading for mercy, Sesto succeeds in reminding Tito of what reciprocity and love are all about—and also of the frailty in all human beings that both threatens love and makes it so beautiful when it rises above hate. The moral centre of the opera, I contend, is thus Sesto’s aria, “Deh, per questo istante solo” (“Ah, for just this one moment”). Sesto admits that he is a traitor and deserves to be regarded with horror. Still, he says, if you remember our love, and look into this heart, you would not be so severe. Rigour and disgust kill the heart. Sympathetic understanding makes it come to life. Once again, the message is in the text up to a point, but the music deepens it: once again the long legato arcing phrases—and then, when we arrive

818   Martha C. Nussbaum at “Pur sareste men severo se vedessi questo cor” (“You would be less harsh if you could see this heart”), the delicate act of imagination, its pauses and hesitations, is depicted in the music, with its little pauses between small phrases. These little pauses for breath, or perhaps we might say suspensions of thought in mid-air, suggest that the breath of thought and humanity is being infused into Tito’s harsh rigorism. Once again, a pause (or pauses) suggests the stance of the judge, and from this stance, Sesto has become himself again. He reminds Tito of what love can look like—and sound like. If you would look into my heart you would see that I am a confused, messed-up person who did a terrible thing under great pressure. And you would see in me the same person you used to love. Tito accepts the (musical more than verbal) invitation to mercy. The expressive centre, here, is in the rationale for mercy, not the eventual decision: see into the heart, and your course will be clear. But we have not finished with Mozart’s surprises. Vitellia’s emotional trajectory is underdetermined in the libretto. According to the libretto, she comes to a full appreciation of Sesto’s unconditional and generous love, and she decides to give up her hopes of power and glory to save him, by confessing to Tito that she has masterminded the conspiracy. Servilia has usefully reminded her that compassion has to be active: it’s not enough to worry about Sesto without doing anything. So Vitellia decides to come forward and accuse herself. In the recitative “Ecco il punto” (“Now’s the time”) and the aria “Non più di fiori” (“No more garlands”), she announces her decision. However, think in how many ways that sad text could be set. She is saying that she will not have the fancy wedding of which she has dreamed, and will not become the empress, but will risk death to save Sesto. It would be most natural to set that text in a rather mournful or disappointed or at least conflicted way. After all, she is giving up everything that has defined her life hitherto. No more the glory and glamour of rule. Up to this point she has seen love only as ornament for her glory or an occasion for control. She might continue to struggle, hating the loss of power and glory that right action brings with it. Mozart, however, doesn’t see her that way. Vitellia sings the “no more wedding” text in soaring legato lines, in the gentle key of F major, as if she has suddenly been relieved of a huge burden—as if it were actually a most wonderful, gracious, and gentle state of affairs not to have to care about power and status any longer, but to care only about love. She has a moment of uncertainty and fear—“Unhappy, what will become of me?” (Indeed, several such moments, since the aria is a very long one.) But then she understands the essence of things, so to speak: if someone could only see into her grief, there could actually be compassion, and ultimately mercy (“Chi vedesse il mio dolore, pur avria di me pietà”). And suddenly we realize that Vitellia is singing Sesto’s music: the descending chromatic phrases of this section remind us rather forcefully of the ending of “Deh per questo istante solo,” and are utterly unlike any music Vitellia has sung previously.27 Empathetic imagination has shown her the way to the heart—of Sesto and his genuine and unconditional love. And now, when the first theme (“Non più di fiori”) returns, it swells up to a high F as in the most happy triumph, because this strong and passionate woman has indeed

Mercy   819 triumphed—now, and not before—triumphed over her own jealousy and anger, into a future of reciprocity. As with Sesto, the focus is on empathetic imagining as the ­necessary—and, for a good person, the sufficient—prelude to mercy, not so much on the decision itself. But we might even boldly say that here, in a Senecan way, Vitellia gives mercy to herself: she examines her heart and, instead of hating herself, reacts with generous love. Clearly Mozart goes beyond the libretto here, expressing what we might call Mozartian ideas—of the triumph of empathy, love, and mercy over narrow egoism and status-focused anger.28

Conclusion The topic of mercy in music, which initially seemed so unpromising, now seems indefinitely rich, a research programme that could lead to analyses of countless further works. (One especially fruitful example would be the exchange between Wotan and Brünnhilde in Act 3 of Die Walküre, where the music clearly takes the lead, and seems to me to show that the mercy offered is the egalitarian, rather than the top-down, sort.) Any such further analysis must bear in mind the all-important distinction between top-down mercy and Senecan or egalitarian mercy, and should be keenly aware of a range of different religious and secular beliefs with regard to the possibility of mercy as a hope or even a norm, in this life so full of errors and flaws. In our world we urgently need to move beyond the doomed strategies of anger and revenge and to reach an intelligent and sensitive accommodation with people who may make us feel uncomfortable, or even wronged. But to attain such an accommodation we need sympathetic understanding of one another and the gentle disposition of mind and heart that such understanding should yield. We need, then, mercy. And when talking seems to lead only to more animosity, perhaps it is music that will take our hearts in hand and lead the way to a world of peace.

Notes 1. For one convincing example, see Levinson 2011, 336–375. And on shame, see Levinson 2015, 88–98. 2. See Levinson 2011 for a detailed reading of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, arguing that as a whole it embodies the idea of hope. I study Mahler’s Second Symphony in Nussbaum 2001, 614–644, showing how emotions of fear, hope, and compassion are embodied in stretches or even an entire movement. Mahler often produced “programmes” of his symphonies introducing the idea that everything is happening to some type of aspiring agent who encounters many obstacles: see Nussbaum 2001, 249–294. 3. From now on I am relying on the view of emotions as having a cognitive content of some sort that I have developed in Nussbaum 2001. 4. For that locution, and a comparison to the literary notion of the “implied author,” see Nussbaum 2001.

820   Martha C. Nussbaum 5. On Mozart and his dissatisfaction with his librettists, alongside his frequent emphasis on the primacy of music in conveying emotional meaning, see Rice 2009; one excellent example of the way in which musical meaning both complements and transcends text is the discussion of the Figaro sextet in Berger 2007, 199–211. 6. I discuss it at length in Nussbaum 2001, 238–248, and 249–294. 7. Portions of the material in this section are drawn from Nussbaum 2016b. 8. I have discussed Seneca’s ideas about mercy earlier in Nussbaum 1993; 1999, 134–183. But I have in significant ways altered my view: I did not recognize there the two traditions I describe here, but focused only on the Graeco-Roman one. 9. See Nussbaum 1994, 359–401. For more extensive discussions of compassion’s structure, see Nussbaum 2001, 297–454; 2013, 137–60, 257–313, 378–398. 10. Christian texts often express, as well, the more egalitarian conception, focusing on Christ’s full humanity. So the distinction is less historical than conceptual. 11. Thus, Isabella asks Angelo to have mercy on her brother by asking him to scrutinize his own heart and see whether he does not find similar desires there. There is no suggestion that as ruler he is infallible or above others; indeed, just the opposite. He is assumed to be human and similar. 12. See Nussbaum 1993 for discussion of other pertinent cases. 13. There is a very interesting debate about whether, if we extend sympathy in this way to the defendant, we are bound by consistency to extend it to victims, admitting “victim impact” statements at the penalty phase. I argue against this notion in Nussbaum 2016a, 169–210. Briefly: all the legally pertinent evidence about what the defendant did to the victim has already been presented at trial; the victim impact statement is usually an occasion for friends and family of the victim to whip up vindictive sentiment by talking about indirect impact on them. There are two problems with this: first, it treats victims unequally, privileging those who have friends and family. Second, empirical evidence shows that it distracts the jury, giving them people to bond with who are likely to be more like them than the defendant is, in class and race. 14. For the reception of the work, see Wilson 2007, 178–184. The religiously heterodox interpretation of mercy did not occasion any comment, and indeed the middle opera of the trilogy was largely ignored by critics, who lavished most of their attention on the third, Gianni Schicchi, in which they saw an endearing statement of Italian identity. Modern opera companies have followed suit: Suor Angelica is rarely staged, but the famous aria (sung at the world premiere by Geraldine Farrar) has remained in the soprano recital repertory, and was given a memorable interpretation by Maria Callas. 15. See the declaration signed by Britten and Pears in 1949 and reproduced in Mitchell 1999, 214, which states, inter alia, “Not only is modern war completely irrational and suicidal, it is also completely immoral.” On the varieties of pacifism in the international movement against violence in this period, see Nussbaum 2016a, 211–246. Gandhi espoused total nonviolence and opposed armed resistance to Hitler. Martin Luther King, Jr. agreed with Gandhi in espousing a politics of non-anger and non-retribution, but held that violence in self-defence was acceptable, and opposed total pacifism on those grounds. Nelson Mandela followed Gandhi in insisting on an end to the politics of anger and retribution, but held that violence might be used in a temporary and limited way as a strategic instrument. 16. Although Gandhi invented a version of Hinduism that was consistent with his values, it clearly did mark a radical break, as his assassin, Nathuram Godse, correctly stated (though,

Mercy   821 of course, utterly wrongly invoking this break as a justification for homicide). See Nussbaum 2016a, 211–246. 17. On Britten’s religious beliefs, see Cooke 1996. On the complex interweaving of continuity and rupture in the Coventry Cathedral project and in the War Requiem, see the perceptive analysis in Wiebe 2012, 191–225. 18. Mitchell is a most valuable inquiry into the multiplicity of these contexts, and, as he says: “one ideological description simply will not suffice” (1999, 206). 19. Cooke says “flawed purity,” but the emphasis is on Christ’s full humanity, not on any fault. 20. Pears was a more public and recognized pacifist than Britten, and he consequently got his conscientious objector (CO) status with little ado; Britten’s record was less clear, and he had to have an extended hearing. Sir Andrew Davis, one of the greatest living conductors of Britten’s work, has conjectured, in a conversation with me when he visited my opera class at the University of Chicago in April 2016, that there might be a more mundane explanation for Pears’s alteration: the vowel “ah” is easier to sing in that high register than the vowel “eh.” I am not convinced, since Pears’s remarkable ability to articulate text seems to have no such limits. 21. Cooke notes that the baritone solo uses perfect fourths in contrast with the many augmented fourths in earlier movements, signifying, he argues, resignation to his fate (Cooke 1996, 76). 22. Britten always maintained that he was a Christian, and he offered detailed biblical exegesis at his CO hearing to argue that Christ’s position was pacifist. 23. A different and somewhat idiosyncratic attempt to trace the theme of mercy in Mozart’s operas is Nagel 1991; Nagel’s treatment of the theme is flawed, I believe, in its failure to distinguish the two mercy traditions: he thinks mercy is always top-down. 24. Portions of the material in this section are drawn from Nussbaum 2016b. 25. It’s worth noting that Cherubino already has an excellent model for male–female relations in his tender, adoring love for the Countess, not to mention his rather different sexual relationship with Barbarina. Sesto has lived, it seems, in an all-male culture that has not prepared him well for male–female relationships—so he makes a bad mistake. 26. The clarinet was generally understood to be an erotic instrument, and its use was therefore controversial. Mozart generally uses the instrument to express love and susceptibility— hence its prominence in Così fan tutte. 27. I realized this because I learned both arias; having performed Vitellia’s, I was then working on Sesto’s (ultimately too low for my voice), and discovered the same vocal difficulties of singing the delicate chromatic lines. 28. On anger and how to triumph over it, see (in what I’d call a very Mozartean spirit) Nussbaum 2016a.

Works Cited Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cooke, Mervyn. 1996. Britten: War Requiem. Cambridge Music Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanslick, Eduard. 1986. On the Musically Beautiful. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. First published 1854.

822   Martha C. Nussbaum Levinson, Jerrold. 2011. “Hope in the Hebrides.” In Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, 336–375. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015. “Shame in General and Shame in Music.” In Musical Concerns: Essays in the Philosophy of Music, 88–98. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Donald. 1999. “Violent Climates.” In The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Britten, edited by Mervyn Cooke, 188–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, Ivan. 1991. Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas. Translated by Marion Faber and Ivan Nagel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published in German in 1985. Nussbaum, Martha  C. 1993. “Equity and Mercy.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no. 2 (Spring): 83–125. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1994. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1999. Sex and Social Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2013. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2014. “Rape, Revenge, Love: The Don Giovanni Puzzle.” Programme note for Lyric Opera of Chicago. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2015. “Moral (and Musical) Hazard.” New Rambler Review, March 4, 2015. www.newramblerreview.com. Nussbaum, Martha  C. 2016a. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2016b. “ ‘If You Could See This Heart’: Mozart’s Mercy.” In Hope, Joy, and Affection in the Classical World, edited by Ruth  R.  Caston and Robert  A.  Kaster, 226–240. New York: Oxford University Press. Rice, John A. 2009. Mozart on the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, David. 1995. Verdi: Requiem. Cambridge Music Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. Vol. 1. Translated by E. J. F. Payne. New York: Dover. First published 1818. Wiebe, Heather. 2012. Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 2006. “Wagner and the Transcendence of Politics.” In On Opera, 70–89. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wilson, Alexandra. 2007. The Puccini Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 40

Natu r e Stephen Decatur Smith

Early in the Philosophy of Nature that constitutes the third part of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel describes what he calls nature’s Ohnmacht—its weakness or powerlessness, its exposure to contingency, its resistance to the concept or to consciousness. He develops this thought briefly in a verbal addition: The infinite wealth and diversity of forms and the entirely irrational contingency that are mixed into the exterior order of natural figures have been celebrated as the freedom of nature, and also as the divinity of nature itself, or at least as the divinity in nature. [But] it is a sensory way of thinking [i.e., a thought that is not fully conceptual, and thus not fully philosophical] that takes contingency, capriciousness, and disorder for freedom and rationality. This powerlessness (Ohnmacht) of nature sets limits on philosophy, and the most unseemly of these is to expect from the concept that it should grasp this contingency—or, as it is said, to construe or deduce it. (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 34–35; translation mine)

Some thinkers, Hegel tells us, have seen in nature an overflowing opulence, a spring of novelty and production, which they take as evidence that nature embodies or expresses the freedom of the divine. But Hegel suggests here that he would swap out this godly engine of production, and replace it with a void of raw contingency. If nature can give rise to “an infinite wealth and diversity of forms,” for Hegel this wealth is grounded in a deeper poverty. His nature teems with difference and change, but not because its heart is procreative or generative, and not because it is strong, consistent, indestructible; instead, he thinks, nature transforms because its heart fails, because it is weak, in­con­sist­ent, fragile, and unconscious. Novelty and change would thus arise in nature when what is already there, in its exposure to transience and contingency, comes apart or comes

824   Stephen Decatur Smith undone. And for Hegel, this “sets limits” on the powers of philosophy as it seeks to find within nature the conceptual universality that is its own medium. This essay will take the notion of a weak nature that Hegel adumbrates here, as well as the distinction between a strong and a weak nature that his formulation can suggest, as starting points for a critical discussion of the place of nature in analyses of sound and music. In doing so, it will follow several strains of recent philosophical work. One precursor for the inquiry developed here can be found in the work of Adrian Johnston, who leverages the “concept-theme” of weak nature in order to generate both an original historical interpretation of Hegel’s thought, and a precedent for his own contemporary philosophical position, which he calls “transcendental materialism” (Johnston  2014). Nature’s “chaotic contingency,” Johnston argues, works in Hegel’s system as the “necessary but not sufficient material/ontological condition of possibility for Geist”—that is, for spirit as subjectivity, mind, and culture (Johnston  2012, 141). Beginning with this picture of culture and consciousness as grounded in a material nature shot through with contingency and inconsistency, Johnston develops a theory of subjectivity that maintains a robust critical dialogue with a wide array of contemporary discourses, especially philosophy of science and psychoanalysis.1 Another root for this essay’s treatment of weak nature can be found in Derridean deconstruction. Leonard Lawlor, for example, follows Jacques Derrida’s late writing on animals in order to construe life as a “weak force” (Lawlor 2007). If Aristotle provided the basis for thinking life as “pure actuality or presence,” Lawlor shows how Derrida’s deconstruction conceptualizes life as internally spaced from itself, scored from within by a proliferating multiplicity of fissures and faults (8). For Lawlor, reconceptualizing life in this way addresses many of the most crucial questions facing contemporary philosophical thought, ranging from the ethics of factory farming to the status of sovereignty in the contemporary nation state. “There is . . . no greater problem for thought today,” he writes, “than the problem of how to conceive life in terms of powerlessness” (5). In what follows, I will treat this powerless life as a piece of weak nature.2 My own line of argument will stage a dialogue between, on the one hand, critical engagements with contemporary theory and philosophy, and on the other, the reinterpretation of historical precedents, especially Hegel’s. I will examine three contemporary texts: Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, Charles O. Nussbaum’s The Musical Representation, and Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music. The selection of these works is designed to span several of the ways in which conceptions of nature appear in contemporary theoretical or philosophical writing on music. Together, they include an analytic philosopher (Nussbaum), a musicologist (Tomlinson), and a critic informed by Continental philosophy (Morton), while engaging more broadly with sound studies and acoustic ecology (Morton), as well as cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology (Nussbaum and Tomlinson).3 The essay’s final section will return to Hegel, in whose Philosophy of Nature and Aesthetics it will find historical precedent for a thought of music and sound that is grounded in nature’s weakness.

Nature   825

Sound and Music Without Nature Timothy Morton’s 2007 Ecology Without Nature argues that we must develop ways of interrogating themes traditionally gathered under the rubric of nature, while avoiding certain constraints that inherited conceptions of nature tend to place on our thought. Nature as wholeness, organism, or totality; nature as norm, law, or consistency; nature as a deep plenitude, with which we should learn to experience a sense of oneness or belonging; nature as the correlate of Man, who is certain of what he is, and of where he finds his home—these are the pictures and conceptions of nature that Morton would have us think without.4 Morton analyses a sweeping range of cultural production, including literature, philosophy, historical writing, and even advertising. Amid this diversity of objects, music and sound recur persistently. One way to sketch Morton’s critical approach in Ecology Without Nature would be to say that he is concerned with the ways in which a kind of Romanticism that stretches from the early nineteenth century to the present day repeatedly figures modernity via experiences of torn-ness, scission, separation, and displacement; for the subject of this Romantic modernity, nature can stand both as what is lost in these experiences and as what might heal them, either through a direct communion with nature, or through one of its substitutes, especially in art or the aesthetic writ large. Throughout his text, Morton is attendant to what he takes to be the especially powerful ways that music and sound can be folded into these fantasies of reconciliation and plenitude. This attention to music and sound in Ecology Without Nature sometimes takes the form of a direct engagement with ambient music, sound art, and some forms of acoustic ecology and historical sound studies. When David Toop writes that sound “places us in the real universe,” Morton hears an eminent example of an “ambient poetics,” which constructs experiences of repleteness and situatedness that would redress the displacement and rending of post-Romantic modernity, thus standing in as a substitute for nature even at sites where nature is not explicitly thematized (Morton 2007, 66). Similarly, in “sonic history” (his word for historical sound studies), Morton hears “the symptom of a radical loss of place” (95). Here, he argues provocatively that a longing for emplacement and concreteness can be woven through efforts to reconstruct historical soundscapes, thus addressing a need for wholeness, connection, or a certain thickness of world, which Romanticism sought in nature and its substitute in art, and which post-Romantic moderns continue to construct and consume in myriad forms. This same line of criticism motivates Morton’s persistent suspicions of deep and acoustic ecologies alike. It bears noting, though, that Morton’s principle target in these lines of critique is not so much ambient music, historical sound studies, or acoustic ecology themselves (that is, on the level of the sounds they produce or the lines of inquiry they pursue), but rather the regimes of value in terms of which such work can be affirmed—these, he suggests, can remain haunted and conditioned by figures of a lost or broken nature, and the fantasy of its restitution.

826   Stephen Decatur Smith More broadly, Morton mobilizes vocabularies drawn from analyses of sound and music in order to describe the drive for emplacement, concretion, and repleteness, and thus for what he takes to be displaced figures of nature, across all the domains he studies, whether these are explicitly sonic or not. The “ambient poetics” he hears in Toop recur across his accounts of post-Romantic cultural production in general. As he analyses these poetics, he resolves them into an array of specific strategies, which he describes repeatedly in terms of sonic metaphors—thus, the cultural production of post-Romantic modernity, on his analysis, returns again and again to techniques that he calls the “timbral,” the “Aeolian,” and the production of “tone” (Morton  2007, 39–47). In this sense, music and sound are not only conceived as sites where modernity stages a reconciliation that would stand in for its figure of suppressed, displaced, or broken nature; sound and music are also mobilized as metaphors for this reconciliation, even where they are not literally at stake themselves. And yet, if Morton is concerned with showing how cultural production of the last two hundred years has repeatedly sought to manufacture the plenitude of nature it believes it has lost, he is just as interested in seeking out self-deconstructing currents within this same field, where nature’s harmony and wholeness can be figured as coming undone. For example, in Frankenstein’s creature, he sees a model for conceiving nature, not as a reservoir of wholeness and plenitude, but as an obscene patchwork of the technical and the dead, mediated and damaged all the way down by the social, historical, and all-toohuman world from which it emerges (Morton 2007, 194–195). And in an ambiguous and ambivalent analysis of Alvin Lucier’s sound art piece “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Morton inches towards a hearing that would construct Lucier’s work as something like a sonic correlate of Frankenstein’s creature: a surrealistic assemblage of techne and physis, which undercuts any picture of nature as a positive, self-identical plenitude (47–49). With an ear to Hegel, Johnston, and Lawlor, might this bifurcation in Morton’s thought be read as a sifting-out of strong and weak natures, with the strong natures of reconciliation and plenitude falling on one side, and the weak and incomplete natures of Frankenstein’s creature and Lucier’s “Room” on the other? If so, then I would suggest that Ecology Without Nature can offer both a useful heuristic and a note of caution for contemporary music studies and philosophy of music. When such discourses thematize nature, we might ask, is their nature strong, or weak? Do they place their accent on nature’s repleteness and emplacement, its wholeness, plentitude, or law-like consistency, with the danger of seeking out a displaced substitute for a stability that modernity seems to deny? Or do they hear a nature that is transient, contingent, incomplete, and inconsistent? Dalia Nassar (2014) has grouped Ecology Without Nature with a number of critics who write, as it were, after the end of nature. Such work argues that nature as a concept cannot provide effective orientation for contemporary critical thought, either because modern industry and climate change have so altered the Earth that there is no “nature” left upon it (for example, McKibben 1989), or because historical concepts of nature were never sufficient to begin with, sometimes simply wrong, sometimes complicit in exploitation and suffering (Morton’s own position). Nassar herself, though, can be grouped

Nature   827 with another collection of writers (for example, Stone  2005; Krell 1998; Nassar  2013 and 2014; Malabou 2005), for whom the modernity that opens with the early nineteenth century continues to afford conceptions of nature that have by no means been already exhausted, and that can still be mobilized in ways that address contemporary problems, questions, and needs. Reading Morton in this context can suggest lines of inquiry that might work to put out of action the strong natures he would have us suspend, but that nonetheless maintain contact with the often rich and strange pictures of nature that proliferate across nineteenth-century Romanticism and Idealism, and that continue to echo through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, to some extent Morton already pursues this strategy himself, as he locates the early historical and theoretical roots of what he calls a “dark ecology” in the same Romanticism that spawns the natures he would discard (Morton  2007, 143, 181–205). But what if Frankenstein’s creature and Lucier’s “Room” could be read, themselves, as pictures of a nature that is inconsistent, non-total, shot through with supplementation and mediation, even permeated by rhythms of artifice that cannot be limited to human activity? What if they modelled, that is to say, a nature that is weak? The difference can seem small, perhaps merely a matter of naming (ecology without nature versus weak nature); but its consequences can be great, especially for research that works, not simply to discard historical materials that thematize nature, but instead—perhaps like Frankenstein with his creature—to reanimate them in a contemporary world.

The Musical Representation as Strong Nature If Morton’s work can thus begin to mark distinctions between strong and weak nature, Charles Nussbaum’s can show some of the pitfalls of a nature that is too strong. Nussbaum’s The Musical Representation develops a “naturalistic” philosophy of music, in which “naturalism” refers to the thesis that some findings from the natural sciences “may be relevant to, and may legitimately be used in the resolution of, traditional philosophical problems” (Nussbaum 2007, 5). Nussbuam thus marshals work drawn from neuroscience, cognitive science, anatomy, and evolutionary biology, which he places in dialogue with work in aesthetics and the philosophies of mind, language, and music. Such a project, of course, does not commit Nussbaum to any unifying account of nature writ large, nor does he ever thematize conceptions of nature that would go beyond his more local arguments; nonetheless, I will argue that despite the apparent metaphysical modesty of Nussbaum’s naturalism, his project is conditioned and limited by a strong picture of nature. Nussbaum’s central theme, as his title suggests, is an account of musical representation, which he conceives in terms of three interlocking moments. First, there is what he

828   Stephen Decatur Smith calls the “heard musical surface,” a representation produced by a listener as she experiences sounding musical information in the two dimensions of pitch and time. Second, there are “hierarchical plan representations,” or representations of musical structure, which a listener must extract from the information in the heard musical surface; Nussbaum believes these are best modelled by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s (1983) generative theory of musical representation. Third, there are “musical mental models,” which the listener “constructs” on the basis of the hierarchical structural representations that she extracts from the musical surface. Building upon what he construes as homologies between Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s tree structures and “motor control hierarchies and task-level action plans” that are entailed in bodily movement, Nussbaum argues that these “musical mental models” act as a sort of script for movement through virtual space, which the listener then undertakes “offline” (Nussbaum 2007, 41–42). This is not to say that the listener necessarily moves her body in ways that are dictated by music, but rather that she simulates or imagines movement on the basis of her representation of the musical structure. Nussbaum argues that the musical surface thus provides affordances for virtual movement, and that a musical performance enjoins the listener to carry out this movement in imagination: certain musical events afford, but also prescribe, certain kinds of virtual movement. Crucially, Nussbaum is clear that this philosophy of musical representation is meant to apply only to a very limited body of music, namely “Western tonal art music since 1650,” though he suggests that its results might be generalized beyond this repertoire and its attendant cultural and historical fields. A first hint that Nussbaum’s account remains haunted by a picture of strong nature can be discerned in his speculations about the historical evolutionary roots of musical spatiality. Strikingly, he attempts to develop an account of the origins of musical space by drawing on literature in evolutionary biology that traces the modern organ of Corti in the human inner ear back to the lateral line, a sensory system that runs the length of a fish’s body. Nussbuam writes: The cochlea is coiled, snail-like; but were it to be uncoiled, the hair cells in the organ of Corti tuned to higher frequencies would be located closer in toward the brainstem, while those tuned to lower frequencies would be located farther out. Although the hair cells in the lateral line are not frequency-tuned in the same way, the remote tip of the cochlea corresponds structurally to the far end of the lateral line near the tail of the fish. . . . Assuming, as is reasonable, some preservation of ancient function between the somatotopical mapping in the acousticolateral nuclei of fishes and the tonotopical mapping in cochlear nucleus of humans, we might well expect a head-totoe spatial orientation naturally built into musical pitch, with higher pitches heard “up” near the head and lower ones “down” toward the toe. The reason for this is obvious: the human body, unlike the fish body, is normally oriented vertically with the head up relative to the terrestrial gravitational field.  (Nussbaum 2007, 53–54)

In spite of Nussbaum’s efforts to limit the range of his inquiry to modern Western classical music alone, this turn to evolutionary history brings with it a powerfully universalizing gesture. The experience of musical space, he suggests, is grounded in

Nature   829 anatomy and evolutionary history that would be shared by all modern humans with the relevant anatomical structures in place—and this, in turn, would suggest that in some anatomical or deep evolutionary sense, the experience of musical space would be effectively universal, regardless of culture or historical epoch. A wealth of evidence, however, suggests this is not the case. Modern European languages do indeed tend to describe pitches as high and low. But modern Farsi speakers describe them as thick and thin; Javanese gamelan practitioners describe them as small and large; the Suyá of Brazil describe them as young or old (Cassanto  2017, 50–51; Zbikowski 1998). As Lawrence Zbikowksi writes, differences such as these suggest that “the understanding of music is profoundly metaphorical: not only is the high and low of musical pitch metaphorical, but it is only one of a number of ways to characterize pitch relations” (Zbikowski 1998, 3.5). Nussbaum’s evolutionary speculations might be taken to cast some light on the ways that sound is experienced spatially, but in forgetting the gap between sound and music, he misses a massive field of human difference. What picture of the relations between musical experience and human anatomy does Nussbaum’s account here suggest? He begins this moment of his inquiry with a conception of music derived solely from one tradition, the aforementioned “Western tonal art music since 1650,” and he seeks one set of anatomical structures that would ground this conception in a normative human body. As he thus produces a linkage between a kind of monoculturalism and a kind of mono-naturalism (the practices of one culture, grounded in one seemingly universal anatomical structure), his limited picture of culture vastly limits his interrogation of nature as well.5 And what picture of nature, in turn, would this manner of linkage suggest? As Nussbaum naturalizes Western art music by rooting it in human anatomy and evolutionary history, he also calls upon a nature that would be consistent and singular (insofar as it would be effectively the same for most modern human bodies), and that would be powerfully determinative of culture (insofar as the natural structure of the inner ear would determine the cultural experience of musical hierarchy as space). In this, I suggest, his picture of nature is not only too narrow; it is also too strong—too consistent, singular, and determinative of culture. But would a picture of musicking (for more on this term, see the section entitled “A Million Years of Weak Nature”) that takes account of a wider field of human difference bring with it also a different picture of nature? What conceptions of nature might result from an effort to search out linkages between human musicking and its support in human materiality, if such efforts are not limited by a highly circumscribed field of human difference? Such inquiry, I suggest, would need to be concerned with strata of human embodiment that are radically open to contingent inscription, such that they can respond on the level of their material structure to the vast differences that traverse historical epochs and cultural spaces. It would need to conceive strata of nature on the level of the human body as underdetermined in themselves, such that they can respond to and be shaped by all the difference and contingency of human life. Such natures, I suggest, would be utterly weak. They could not be fully singular, universal, or structured by necessity, since they would need to be open to the multiplicity, difference, and contingency of human culture and history. They could not consistently

830   Stephen Decatur Smith determine culture, since they would need to be open to being themselves determined by culture. In different ways, Adrian Johnston (2014), Catherine Malabou (2008), and Sylvia Wynter (2001), amongst others, have begun to analyse neuronal inscription as a site where the full range of human difference—and, in Wynter’s analysis, the full range of power differentials in historical human relations—can be etched into, and thus reproduced by, the materiality of the human body. If our neuronal assemblages are natural, in the sense that they are grounded in an evolved material dimension of the human body, then they remain nonetheless radically open to being materially shaped by the cultural and historical determinacy in which they mature and live, not least on the level of language acquisition and use. Human neuronal life is thus a piece of nature that is radically weak, in the sense that it is underdetermined by nature. Or, as Johnston writes (summarizing work by Daniel Dennett and Joseph LeDoux), on the level of neuroplasticity “human beings are designed by nature to have re-designable natures” (Johnston 2014, 131). This weak nature of neuroplasticity, rather than what works in Nussbaum’s text as the strong nature of aural anatomy, might provide a site for thinking the production of musical spatiality as one way among others to structure the experience of musical hierarchy. A certain absence of contingency and multiplicity characterizes the interior of Nussbaum’s theory as well. The three interlocking levels in his account of musical representation also entail three moments of inscription or reinscription: one appears when the listener produces an initial representation of the “heard musical surface” based on available sonic information; a second when she extracts “hierarchical plan representations” from the “heard musical surface”; a third when, based upon these plan representations, she constructs a “mental model,” which serves as a script for virtual physical movement. Presiding over this entire process, and thus over the sites of transfer at each of these junctures, Nussbaum locates the figure of the “competent listener” (Nussbaum 2007, 2, 87, 111, 222, 250). He offers no substantial analysis of this figure, but throughout his account, the competence of the competent listener seems to ensure that the right musical surface is represented based upon available sounds, the right hierarchical plan is extracted from the musical surface, the right model or models are constructed based upon the hierarchical plan. Competence, that is to say, guarantees inscription or reinscription at each of the crucial junctures in Nussbaum’s theory. But in the consistency that this competence guarantees, difference and contingency seem to disappear. Even within the field of production to which Nussbaum insists his analysis exclusively applies (again, “Western tonal art music from 1650 to the present”), numerous forms of analysis, criticism, arrangement, and performance all depend upon, and attest to, the possibility of generating multiple and sometimes dramatically differing ways of listening to or hearing a single musical composition or event. Philosophers like Peter Szendy (2008) and Theodor Adorno (2002) have even suggested that the production of new music within this tradition is dependent on generating new ways of hearing music that already exists. If we could not change our hearings of old music, they suggest, we could never produce new music. The historical world is, in this sense, full of rehear-

Nature   831 ings, counter-hearings, hearings otherwise, even (perhaps especially) productive ­mishearings—and if it were not for these, the tradition that Nussbaum theorizes would be dull at best, simply non-existent at worst. One way to account for this multiplicity in real-world historical listenings would be to ask again after the role of contingency in Nussbaum’s thought. Whether competent or incompetent, do not listeners and their listenings simply vary from one instance to another, based upon nothing other than raw contingency? Do we not hear works differently from one day to another, for no other reason than that our attention waxes and wanes during different moments in different hearings, or even because contingent extraneous noises (a cough in the audience, a chair squeaking on stage, traffic outside, a subway beneath the hall) intervene at different times in different performances? Would not contingent differences in and among human bodies also serve to differentiate and multiply possibilities of listening even in terms of Nussbaum’s theory? Might not differences in hearing, whether based upon ability or disability, change the contours of the “heard musical surface”? And might not differences among bodies—including abilities and disabilities—suggest dramatically different possibilities for navigating the “virtual physical landscapes” that are constructed based upon various listenings? Just as Hegel pictures the infinite wealth of forms that arise amid the raw contingency of a weak nature, we might here imagine a limitless wealth of listenings that emerge from nothing more than this same contingent void. It is, finally, in this sense that the strength or weakness of nature can be at stake in Nussbaum’s surprisingly unitary, consistent, one might say lossless picture of listening. It would run powerfully against the grain of his naturalism to presume that, on his account, the space of musical listening is somehow entirely non-natural, an idealist or simply magical realm, where the constraints of nature would not apply; on the contrary, his frequent recourse to findings drawn from the natural sciences as he models the components of his theory suggests that he regards its objects as pieces of nature. But if this is the case, the nature of Nussbaum’s listening and hearing, the nature in which his musical representation finds its place, is surprisingly devoid of contingency or accident: at the site of the competent listener, this nature repeats its inscriptions without mutation or emergence. And in this, as I have suggested above, the strength of his nature correlates with a foreclosure of difference, both across cultures (as a singular, universal, and determinative picture of nature appears linked with a singular culture of musical listening), and within a culture (as a nature of lossless inscription leads to the unending repetition of unchanged listenings).

A Million Years of Weak Nature If Nussbaum can illustrate some of the pitfalls of a nature that is too strong, Gary Tomlinson’s recent work can model the strengths of a weak nature. His A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Modern Humanity (2015) argues that human musicking (his

832   Stephen Decatur Smith term, following Christopher Small, for the full range of human musical practices, including all music making and all responses to music) cannot be traced to a single evolutionary adaptation, which would respond to a single environmental pressure. Instead, Tomlinson insists that human musicking is assembled from a multiplicity of capacities, each with its own evolutionary history. Musicking thus has multiple roots, which reach back to different epochs. Beginning with a picture of evolutionary history as non-linear, discontinuous, and shot through with contingency and emergence, Tomlinson’s project thus seems to presuppose a nature that is weak indeed. He does not search out ways in which a consistent, stable, and universal nature might determine cultural practices or experiences. Nor does he conceive life, music, or sound as the necessary emanation of a “vibrancy” or vital impulse that inhabits all matter; indeed, in another publication linked to this same project, he explicitly opposes such “animism” (Tomlinson 2016). Instead, as he construes the earliest forms of hominin culture as evolutionary niches that condition subsequent evolution, not least on the level of neuronal anatomy, Tomlinson pictures nature and culture in an open dialectic of mutual shaping, made possible because neither is fully complete or strong in itself. In what follows, I will focus on a juncture where Tomlinson himself stages an intersection between his project and Derrida’s deconstruction. Here, I argue, Tomlinson’s weak nature might become weaker still. Tomlinson’s historical account begins with early hominin methods for making tools out of chipped flint. Drawing on a wealth of anthropological and palaeontological research, he argues that these tool-making practices remained relatively stable for hundreds of thousands of years. Crucially, though, the beings who employed and transmitted these practices had not yet developed spoken language, nor did they possess cognitive resources that would allow them to imagine what a finished tool would look like before it was made. The ability to form such a mental template, Tomlinson insists, only emerged much later in evolutionary history. Thus, without language, and without mental representations of completed tools, early hominins learned to reproduce the complex and difficult sequences of actions entailed in this industry merely by watching and imitating one another. As Tomlinson describes it, the process played itself out, again and again, as a kind of dialogue between rhythms of mimesis and material affordances of the environment, long before the full emergence of the modern human mind. The mimesis and entrainment it entailed, he argues, can be understood as early moments in the long history of the capacities that would later be bundled together, many thousands of years later, in modern musicking (Tomlinson 2015, 51–88). Tomlinson works to theorize this “Paleolithic poesis” by searching for a philosophy of technology that might account for the production of “a sophisticated tool without pla­ nning, foresight, or mental image of the product-to-come” (Tomlinson  2015, 86). In Heidegger, he finds what he takes to be a conception of techne that is too strongly de­pend­ent on the future-oriented realization of mental templates (as though tools are merely means for realizing an imagined or foreseen end), and in Bernard Stiegler, he sees a kind of historical short-circuit, according to which the emergence of the first hominin tools suddenly brought with it future-oriented cognition that differed in no

Nature   833 decisive way from that of a modern human (as though the emergence of the first tool brought with it a fully-fledged ability to envision possible futures). Derrida’s early work, though, strikes Tomlinson as far more promising. Tomlinson is concerned in particular with Derrida’s reading of the archaeologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan, whom Derrida follows in treating the production of the earliest stone tools as a form of exteriorized memory. Insofar as these tools were left behind after the acts through which they were produced, Derrida and Leroi-Gourhan argue, they might be understood as a kind of memorial to those acts, and even as a kind of inscription, a lasting mark in the stone that has been chipped into a tool. Crucially, for Derrida, the production of this memorial trace would join in a vast “history of life,” which extends from “ ‘genetic inscription’ and the ‘short programmatic chains’ regulating the behaviour of the amoeba or the annelid up the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens” (Derrida 1997, 84; quotation marks in the original). If Derrida can provide a way to conceive the production and reproduction of stone tools without recourse to language or the representation of a future-oriented mental template, this is because he finds a structure of inscription and reinscription at the root of all life, from the amoeba and the annelid all the way to the human. There can be no life, Derrida argues, without a minimal capacity for retention or putting in reserve, whether what is retained is energy from an environment, or the simplest behavioural coding, or the most rudimentary genetic inscription. In this sense, Derrida will say, “the living being has the structure of a text” (Vitale 2014, 108–109). Indeed, far from depending on modern human language and foresight, this text structure of life would be the precondition of the modern human mind: if the human animal could not retain, inscribe, or put in reserve on the level of its bodily life, it could never develop its more ramified capacities of language and imagination. It bears noting already that, if the life of the early tool-using hominin is conceived as a piece of nature, Derrida too exhibits this nature as weak. For Derrida, the retention or putting in reserve that is inseparable from all life, and that can be located too on the more elaborate level of the first stone tools, means also that the living being follows what he calls the logic of the supplement. A supplement, in this sense, augments or enhances, but it does so at a site of incompletion or absence, which it thus comes to mark. The stone tool surely supplements the life of the early hominin, but Derrida thinks that this logic is both older and deeper than the first external technologies; he sees it, indeed, reaching all the way to the retentions, reserves, and inscriptions that are internal to the living thing. The retention of energy from an environment, the inheritance of genetic inscriptions and behavioural codes—all of these support the life of the living being, rend­er­ing it functional or viable; but all of these also come from outside, either from an environment or an ancestor. And in this sense, they mark the living being’s insufficiency to sustain itself entirely on its own. Derrida treats this supplementarity as a kind of an internal fissuring, even what he calls a movement of “arche-violence,” or an ineliminable discord at the very roots of life. The inscriptions and retentions upon which the living thing depends, he thinks, mean that it can never be wholly present or identical unto itself, nor can it even be entirely or fully alive, since it must bear within it traces of what is other, absent, past,

834   Stephen Decatur Smith non-living, or no longer living. Death thus does not merely wait at the end of the living thing’s life; it permeates this life from the start. It is for this reason that Lawlor writes of life as a “weak force”—if life is a force in its activity, production, or affirmation, it is nonetheless weak, not only in its mortality, but also in its supplementarity, its exposure to and dependence upon its outsides, even when it finds these outsides within itself. Life is weak, that is, in its inability “to hold the others out” (Lawlor 2007, 109). All of this, thus far, is consonant with Tomlinson’s account. The rudimentary tool use he analyses, reproduced by means of mimesis and entrainment, would not simply restitute or make up for a certain weakness in a natural being; instead, it would be possible because of this very weakness—because, that is, the living thing is constitutively open to supplementation, all the way down to its innermost structure, and long before the advent of external techniques and technologies. The flint tool, itself a kind of inscription in stone, would thus echo, extend, and externalize a structure of inscription that life must already bear within itself. But for Derrida, the text structure of life entails both a putting in reserve, and an opening on to what is to come, a trace that is also the possibility of an iteration or repetition. On his interpretation, genetic inscription is at once the record of a form of life, and a programme for future life, whether this be the continuing life of a living being, or the lives of its offspring. Similarly, instinctive behaviour and programmatic chains are at once traces of past life, and scripts for the possibility of living on. For this reason, Derrida writes of “the trace as the unity of a double movement of protention and retention,” a putting in reserve that conditions what is to come (Derrida 1997, 84). And what, then, of Tomlinson’s early toolmaker, the being who crafts its flint instruments “without planning, foresight, or mental image of the product-tocome”? Can this living thing anticipate? Following Leroi-Gourhan, and in consonance with Derrida, Tomlinson grants that the earliest flint tools may be regarded as a form of exteriorized memory, a hard trace of the activity through which they were formed. But how can a strict line be drawn between this tool’s status as an exteriorized memory on the one hand, and its possible status as exteriorized anticipation on the other? Even assuming, with Tomlinson, that the earliest tool-makers could not represent to themselves a completed object or a robust mental template for future action, each tool that they made, along with the sequence of actions of which it stood as a trace, could itself condition future life, including the production of new tools. Indeed, Tomlinson’s own account presumes this minimal anticipation. This is especially clear in the scene of observation he imagines, in which one hominin learns to produce chipped flint tools merely by watching and imitating another. As a chain of movements in one being becomes a mimetic model for the movements of another, it passes from inscription to script, from record to programme. What is embodied memory for one being becomes a condition for another’s future action. In this sense, by Tomlinson’s own lights, the earliest stone tools, and the sequences of actions entailed in making them, are already externalized memory and anticipation, at once “a double movement of protention and retention.” This is not to argue, as Tomlinson believes Stiegler does, that the first tool use brought with it fully-fledged, indeed fully modern, capacities for representing possible futures.

Nature   835 What is at stake here, instead, is something much weaker, a minimal protention, which would provide the basis not only for the early hominin’s animal life, but also for the much more elaborate forms of anticipation that emerged only in later epochs of evolutionary history. Tomlinson never explicitly denies that the earliest hominins lacked the ancient and minimal forms of protention, programming, and anticipation that Derrida sees as inextricable from the “text structure of life.” But as he works to conceive a hominin consciousness without “planning, foresight, or mental image of the product-tocome,” the minimal protention that would work beneath and before these later capacities can seem to fall away, as though the hominins he describes were encased in a changeless present, inured from the temporal differentials necessarily woven into the rhythms of their own lives. If there is a risk here that a weak nature could grow too strong, it might be located in the density of this presence, the semblance of a here-and-now that is not fissured by scripting and inscription, not spaced from itself by the supplement of a dead past and an opening onto the possibility of iteration. Such a presence, Derrida might say, would not be “out of joint,” and in this, it could be conceived as overly strong (Derrida 1994). It is here, perhaps, that Tomlinson’s weak nature might grow weaker still, specifically by rooting its notion of ancient poiesis in the “text structure of life” and its “double movement of protention and retention,” all prior to the emergence of more robust capacities for the mental projection of a future. This, I suggest, would be thoroughly consonant with Tomlinson’s project overall, for it is one of the most beautiful and exciting interventions of A Million Years of Music that it shows how musicking emerges from the supplementarity and weakness of life. If, as Tomlinson argues, musicking entails capacities for mimesis and entrainment that reach back to the earliest forms of techno-sociality, this means musicking is rooted in life’s ineluctable dependence upon pieces of alterity that reach even into its innermost constitution, spacing life from itself and exposing it to death. It is only a weak life, Tomlinson might be read to say, that could ever make music at all. In this essay’s final section, I will find a kind of historical precursor for this argument in Hegel, whose Philosophy of Nature suggests that only a weak matter might sound.

Hegel: Nature and Music’s Weak Force Though written in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and thus at the opening of the period in which Morton sees “nature” coming to signify a replete thing that modernity believes it has begun to lose, Hegel’s discussions of sound and music are informed throughout by what Johnston has called the “concept-theme” of weak nature. The most sustained treatment of sound in Hegel’s work appears in his Philosophy of Nature, where he writes that sound (Klang) arises through vibration (Erzittern), described as “the momentary negation of [a body’s] parts and, equally, the negation of this negation of them” (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 171; Miller 2004, 137; translation modified). When a body is made to vibrate, its previous state of still and silent persistence is negated, and so too are

836   Stephen Decatur Smith the spatial positions of its multiple parts, first as these are initially set in motion, and then again and again as they continue to traverse their oscillating paths, with each new position continuously negating the one that preceded it. The result of this multiplicity of negations is the emergence of sound as what Hegel calls “the ideality of the material” (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 171; Miller 2004, 137; translation modified). The specificity of what Hegel means by “ideal” here is crucial. He does not figure sound as ideal in a Platonic sense, as though sound might crack open the sky, revealing a realm of eternal ideas that would be independent of, or prior to, the transient sounding body. Nor is sound ideal here in a subjective or Kantian sense—the sounding body is not “idealized” merely insofar as it is heard by a listener. Instead, if sound is ideal for Hegel, this is because it is a dynamic web of negativity and relation, which cannot be reduced to any one part of a sounding body, at one point in space, at any one moment in time. Matter itself, Hegel thinks, is the result of a mutually limiting play of forces; it is internally dynamic and differentiated, and in this sense, it already bears within it a negative self-relation, which prefigures the ideality of sound. When matter is passive, inactive, and silent, this tension remains dormant and interior; but as a body begins to sound, its ideality is activated and exteriorized. Hegel’s thought links this ideality with a constitutive weakness of matter. Early in his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel determines nature in general as exteriority (Ausserlichkeit)— not merely the exteriority of material nature compared with the immaterial interiority of subjective spirit, but also nature’s self-exteriority, the negative multiplicity of its forms, bodies, domains, spaces, and times, all of which he conceives as external to one another in various ways. Even nature’s weak transience and contingency can be grasped as exterior compared with what Hegel characterizes as the necessity and eternity of the concept. And much as Lawlor sees life as weak insofar it bears the supplement at the heart of its innermost constitution, Hegel’s thought entails a certain weakness of matter, insofar as he sees matter’s innermost density pervaded by the exteriority that characterizes all nature. Indeed, on Hegel’s account, sound can show how this exteriority within matter can give rise to ideality: if a material body were not composed of a multiplicity of mutually external parts, if these parts could not traverse mutually exterior spaces, then the body could never instantiate the dynamic self-relation that weaves the ideality of sound across spaces and times. An absolutely dense, absolutely strong matter—utterly singular, utterly present unto and identical with itself—could never harbour or express this negative internal multiplicity. It is in this sense (to repurpose Johnston’s words) that the “cracks and fissures” within matter open an “elbow room” for the emergence of ideality, in this case the ideality of sound (Johnston 2014, 154). Or, as Hegel writes, sound is “the plaint of the ideal in the midst of violence,” an ideality that emerges within, and that depends upon, the conflict and contingency of a weak nature (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 174; Miller 2004, 139). After he determines sound as the ideality of matter, Hegel goes on to call it a “soul that is posited as one with the material body” (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 173; translation mine). This is not a mere passing metaphor. Hegel follows Aristotle in locating soul (Seele) wherever there is life, whether this be on the level of the plant, the animal, or the human.6

Nature   837 The living being is an ensouled being. And if it makes sense for Hegel to describe the ideality of sound as a kind of soul, this is in no small part because, in his thought, sound and soul follow the same structure. Within a living body, Hegel writes, “[t]here are millions of points in which the soul is everywhere present; and yet it is not at any one point, simply because the exteriority of space has no truth for it”—the soul, that is to say, is present by being absent, not concentrated entirely at any one point of a living body, but instead woven as the dynamic relations among these points (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 431; Miller 2004, 352). This soul is not an inert substance; instead, like sound, it is a self-relating web of negativity and difference. The “exteriority of space has no truth for it” simply because it traverses this exteriority, criss-crossing mutually exterior spaces for as long as the individual life can hold itself together. But this means also that the vital soul, like the soul of sound, takes nature’s exteriority as its precondition: if the body were not composed of its “millions of points,” if it did not traverse the “exteriority of space,” then the synthetic soul could never be woven across these points and this exteriority. Just as sound emerges as a weave of spaces and times, haunting the body in and from which it appears, the living soul is an ideal tapestry, possible only because of nature’s self-exteriority and weakness. Sound appears near the midpoint of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, almost exactly halfway between the derivation of matter from the differentiation of space and time and the later construction of organic life from the tense and negative internal differentiation of matter. It is perhaps with an ear to this medial position that Hegel refers to sound’s specifically mechanical soul-like-ness (mechanische Seelenhaftigkeit) (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 171). This formulation can have an oxymoronic ring in Hegel’s system, where life (that which is beseelt, animated, or ensouled) embodies a self-moving and organic structure, as opposed to the mere mechanical movement of matter in its lowest, non-living forms. There is, in this sense, something monstrous about sound’s mechanical soul. If sound seems to have, or even be, a life, it nonetheless does not live in the same way that an organism does; instead, it presents a kind of not-yet-living life, an undead ideality. The discussion of music in Hegel’s Aesthetics depends in crucial ways upon the account of sound developed in his Philosophy of Nature. Here again, Hegel describes the emergence of sound as an ideality woven from the shuddering of matter; and again, this ideality takes on the character of a soul. When the ear turns to music, Hegel says, it encounters the “first ideal soul-like-ness” of sound (Hegel [1841] 1970c, 134; Knox 1975, 890, translation modified). It is from sound, moreover, that music draws its force. “The peculiar power (Gewalt) of music,” Hegel says, “is an elemental strength (Macht), that is, it lies in the element of sound (Ton) in which art moves here” (Hegel [1841] 1970c, 155; Knox 1975, 906; translation modified). This power of music, rooted in the soul-like ideality of sound, also has its site of impact and address in the soul of the listener. Music’s tones, Hegel says, “echo only in the depths of the soul (Seele)” (Hegel [1841] 1970c, 136; Knox 1975, 892; translation modified). For Hegel, that is to say, music literally hits us where we live, as it sets the listener’s vital soul in motion. Hegel’s philosophy of music is often characterized in terms of interiority. Music, he says famously, “claims as its own . . . the depths of a person’s inner life as such” (Hegel [1841]

838   Stephen Decatur Smith 1970c, 135; Knox 1975, 891). But if the account of sound in his Philosophy of Nature and the discussion of music in his Aesthetics are held together, this inner life begins to reach beyond the space of a listener’s subjectivity. Sound, Hegel insists, already idealizes, exteriorizes, and sets free the “inner form” of a sounding body (Hegel [1830] 1970a, 171; Miller 2004, 136). And in this, music can lay claim, not only to the interiority of the listener, but also to a certain interiority of matter. As the sounding materials of music address and move the listener’s inner life, music weaves together the not-yet-fully-living ideality of sound with the organic ideality of the listener’s vital soul. What Hegel calls the power of music does not move only in the listener’s head; it can also catalyse a kind of environmental event, a transduction of souls. There is a chiasm of insides and outsides here: matter, in the world outside the listener’s subjective life, gives up its ideal insides, while the innermost life of the listener is moved by, indeed networked with, the movements of exterior matter. This web of souls, moreover, is not the expression of a strong living force, exteriorized first in sound and then in music. Hegel does not become a naïve vitalist at this juncture. Instead, he hears the power (Macht) of music rooted in the powerlessness (Ohnmacht) of nature, its weakness, negativity, transience, and contingency, which afford the preconditions of the undead soul of sound and the organic soul of the listener alike. Might this power of music in Hegel, like life in Derrida and Lawlor, be grasped as a weak force? Hegel may thus root music’s singular power in its natural materials—but this does not mean he reduces music to sound, and thus to nature. Quite the contrary, he claims over and over that, despite the force it derives from its natural material, music is profoundly distant from nature, indeed more so than any other art. “[W]e must recommend the painter and the sculptor to study natural forms,” he says; but music is different; it “does not possess a natural sphere outside its existing forms, with which it is compelled to comply” (Hegel [1841] 1970c, 143–144; Knox 1975, 898; translation modified). For Hegel, all art combines materials drawn from nature (stone, the ingredients of paint, sound as shaped by instruments or the voice, the form and movements of the human body) with content and import drawn from the realm of spirit (Geist as subjectivity, mind, or historical culture). But music lacks any clear representational model in nature, and as such, spirit in music is more ideal, and less determined by nature, than in any other art. The result is an ambivalence at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of music. As sound puts on stage the emergence of a kind of not-yet-living life within matter, and as this sounding soul, shaped in music, moves the living soul of the listener, Hegel’s music can appear profoundly close to a nature of matter and life. But since music sounds its spir­it­ ual content and import without representational models drawn from nature, Hegel also hears music as the art most distant from nature’s constraints. Music is a deeply natural art; music is the least natural art. And if music can thus be natural and unnatural at once, it is precisely because its nature is weak. Across Hegel’s system, weak nature is the precondition of spirit not only insofar as spirit is rooted in life and matter, but also insofar as nature must be weak enough to open a space for the free self-determination of a spirit that has nature as its ground. Spirit, which has “freedom as its essence,” is rooted in nature. But an utterly strong nature—tyrannical in its determination and capriciousness alike—could afford spirit

Nature   839 no freedom (Hegel [1830] 1970b, 34, translation mine). For spirit to be free, for it to realize its essence as freedom, nature must be weak. One might thus say that, for Hegel, nature must be a wax soft enough to take on the seals and inscriptions of spirit—and this dynamic, too, is put on stage in music. Sound, matter, and life may be the natural preconditions of music, but on their own, they are not strong enough to determine music fully. This more thoroughgoing inscription must come from spirit, even if spirit shares nature’s weakness at its base, even if spirit has feet of clay. All music, in this sense, becomes a kind of phonography, the etching of a spiritual script into the weakness of nature, a form of writing made possible because nature, by its nature, is weak enough to denature as it is overwritten and overridden by the spirit it supports. Or, to paraphrase Auden: in Hegel’s philosophy of music, weak nature by nature in unnature ends. * * *

This essay has proposed lines of inquiry that extend well beyond what can be accomplished within its brief space. I suggest, though, that the problems it has taken up—a sifting of historical figures and notions of nature with an eye to contemporary needs; the possibility of thinking music’s relations with nature qua embodiment and evolutionary history without occluding human difference; the question of how to understand music’s relationships with life and matter, without recourse to an oversimplified vitalism or nostalgia for lost plenitude—will be crucial as music studies continue to thematize nature in coming years. If, as Lawlor writes, contemporary philosophy must take up the problem of how to “conceive life in terms of powerlessness,” music studies may be presented with the problem of how to think music in the midst of nature’s weakness.

Notes 1. Johnston has developed this project across a number of texts. In addition to Johnston 2014 and 2012, see Johnston 2008, 2013, 2019; and Johnston and Malabou 2013. As a contribution to philosophy of science, his work engages richly with that of Nancy Cartwright (1999). 2. In addition to the texts by Derrida and Lawlor discussed here, Caputo  2006 and Hägglund 2011 articulate versions of deconstruction relevant for this perspective. See also Vitale 2014. 3. The goal of this text, then, will not be to offer an exhaustive study of recent literature that thematizes nature in philosophy or music studies. Some examples can be found in Allen 2011, 2013; Allen and Dawe 2016; Gautier 2016; and Pedelty 2012. For an excellent critical survey of recent work in eco-musicology, as well as a robust line of original analysis, see Ingram 2010. 4. I note that, in turning to Ecology Without Nature, I am examining only one moment in Morton’s voluminous production, and one that emerged before he began to organize his critical work by way of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. This decision on my part is deliberate, in part because engaging with Morton’s somewhat later work would entail an exposition of Harman’s project, which would go well beyond the scope of this essay, and in part because I find this later work substantially less productive for the project

840   Stephen Decatur Smith developed here. Thus, when I refer to Morton’s work here, I refer only to Ecology Without Nature. 5. On mono-naturalism vs. multi-naturalism, see Viveiros de Castro 2015, and Gautier 2016. 6. Hegel discusses the soul most extensively in the Anthropology that begins his Philosophy of Spirit, part  3 of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. See Greene  1972 and Inwood 2007.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 2002. “On the Problem of Music Analysis.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 162–180. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Allen, Aaron S. 2013. “Ecomusicology.” Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Allen, Aaron  S., and Kevin Dawe, eds. 2016. Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Nature, Culture. London: Routledge. Allen, Aaron S., ed. 2011. “Colloquy: Ecomusicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (Summer): 391–424. Caputo, John. 2006. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. A Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassanto, Daniel. 2017. “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors.” In Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse, edited by Beate Hempe, 46–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Gautier, Ana María Ochoa. 2016. “Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology.” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (February): 107–141. Greene, Murray. 1972. Hegel on the Soul: A Speculative Anthropology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hägglund, Martin. 2011. “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassouix.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 114–129. Melbourne: re.press. Hegel, G. W. F. [1830] 1970a. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse: 1830: Zweiter Teil: Die Naturphilosophie: Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen. Frankfurt: Surkhamp. Hegel, G. W. F. [1830] 1970b. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse: 1830: Dritter Teil: Die Philosophie des Geistes: Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen. Frankfurt: Surkhamp. Hegel, G. W. F. [1841] 1970c. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. Frankfurt: Surkhamp. Ingram, David. 2010. Jukebox in the Garden. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Inwood, Michael. 2007. A Commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2012. “The Voiding of Weak Nature: The Transcendental Kernels of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring): 103–157. Johnston, Adrian. 2013. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. Vol. 1, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Nature   841 Johnston, Adrian. 2014. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2019. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. Vol. 2, A Weak Nature Alone. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Adrian, and Catherine Malabou. 2013. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press. Knox, T. M., trans. 1975. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2007. This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge. Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press. McKibben, Bill. 1989. The End of Nature. New York: Random House. Miller, A. V., trans. 2004. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nassar, Dalia. 2013. The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nassar, Dalia. 2014. “Romantic Empiricism after the ‘End of Nature.’ ” In The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, edited by Dalia Nassar, 296–314. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Charles  O. 2007. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pedelty, Mark. 2012. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Stone, Alison. 2005. Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Tomlinson, Gary. 2015. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. New York: Zone Books. Tomlinson, Gary. 2016. “Sign, Affect, and Musicking before the Human.” Boundary 2 43, no. 1 (February): 143–172. Vitale, Francesco. 2014. “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction.” Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 1 (July): 95–114. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2001. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’ ” In National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, edited by Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, 30–66. New York: Routledge. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 1998. “Metaphor and Music Theory: Reflections from Cognitive Science.” Music Theory Online 4, no. 1.

chapter 41

M a k i ng Sense Andrew Bowie

Philosophy of Music Concern with the “philosophy of x,” be it language, science, maths, history, tends to suggest that there is a delimited subject area which a specific kind of philosophy can explore and illuminate.1 In the following, I want to question this assumption, in a way which is intended to pose questions for some current conceptions of the tasks of philosophy. The philosophy of music in the analytical tradition tended until recently to work on the kind of agenda, which, for example, seeks to establish the ontological status of a musical “work.” Is the work the score, all performances which correspond to the score, any performance that roughly follows the score, and so on?2 Other questions include whether music “means” anything, how the term expression is appropriately employed with respect to music, and whether music “arouses” emotions, or whether it just has “emotional properties.”3 Peter Kivy says of Beethoven’s Eroica, for example, that “it has no content to reveal, no message to decode,” and that in teaching the work “few instructors, trained in the modern analytical and musicological traditions as they are, will be tempted to attribute any meaning to it,” it being, “in a sense . . . pure contentless abstract form” (Kivy 1993, 29, 30; see also Davies 1994, and for a different view Levinson 2006). Many of the questions that concern the analytical philosophy of music demand yes– no answers, even though such answers often conceal more than they reveal. The answers tend to come down either on the subject or the object side of the question: the emotions, for example, are aroused in the person hearing the music (the subject) or they are properties of the music itself (the object).4 Yet in this example of musical emotions, the key point is that subject and object are inextricably connected. The connection affects the very status of what is understood to be subjective or objective, and this also can change as the nature of the practice of music changes historically. A musical device like the use of the diminished seventh chord can, as Theodor Adorno suggests, move from being a radically individual expressive innovation in Ludwig van Beethoven, to being a cliché in

844   Andrew Bowie the harmonic repertoire of salon music in the later nineteenth century, thus moving from “subjective” towards “objective.” The analytical philosophy of music, then, treats the object music in much the same way as it treats other objects, because the assumption is that philosophical problems should be solved by the clarification and specification of concepts, or conceptual analysis. In this sense it is philosophy of music in the “objective genitive.” Like most of the analytical philosophy of art, this branch of analytical philosophy is often ignored by other analytical philosophers, because it is seen as having no serious consequences for the epistemological, semantic, and metaphysical questions which are foundational for the discipline. Indeed, the philosophy of music tends simply to employ resources from the philosophy that ignores it by adopting positions from analytical epistemology, semantics, ontology, and metaphysics to philosophize about music. It does not, as such, make an independent contribution to philosophy, and often lags behind the most influential developments in the philosophy upon which it depends. This kind of philosophy of music is also largely ignored by practising musicians, because its questions are seen as having little effect on actual music-making. There is an exception here with respect to historical performance practice and the performers’ interpretation of a composer’s intentions, which do relate to aspects of the philosophy of music that focus on the ontology of the musical work and the question of expression. But the notional philosophical demonstration that music arouses emotions would hardly be enough to make Richard Goode play Beethoven very differently, or make the average listener listen to Richard Wagner in a radically new way. The effects of theoretical arguments on practices like musical performance and reception are highly complex and mediated, as the history of musical reception and performance make clear (see Dahlhaus 1988). It would be wrong, however, to question the legitimacy of all analytical philosophy of music on these grounds. Philosophical inquiry has an autonomous element which means that it should pursue its inquiries for as long as there are people who think the inquiry is worthwhile, even if the aims or effects of the inquiry may not be clear. The most telling objection here, and one which leads to the questions that I want to ask, is that the analytical philosophy of music pays no serious attention to the idea that Beethoven’s or Wagner’s music had a major effect on how emotion, expression, and a lot else are understood and experienced in the modern world. There is a mismatch between the actual life of music in modernity and the main agenda of the philosophy of music, though there are signs that this is changing (see, for example, Ridley 2004 and some of the essays in this volume; for a critique of my earlier criticisms of the philosophy of music, see McAuley 2015). The sources of that mismatch lie in the influence of objectifying ways of thinking, which are essential to the success of the modern sciences, but whose transfer to the social and cultural domain can hide much of what matters in that domain. How we respond to this mismatch is vital in establishing appropriate ways of connecting philosophy and music. So should one concentrate on more illuminating approaches to music in other philosophical traditions? Adorno, who until recently was hardly mentioned in the analytical philosophy of music, offers philosophical alternatives which demonstrably influenced

Making Sense   845 the development of modern music. The approach I want to suggest, however, is rather more radical. Instead of giving priority to philosophy, I want to show how music itself can illuminate neglected issues in various areas of modern philosophy. This means that the philosophy of music can also be understood in the “subjective genitive,” or the idea that philosophy can emerge from music, rather than music always being an object to be explained by philosophy. The obvious objection to this is that philosophy is essentially discursive and conceptual, and music is essentially non-conceptual. What is at issue therefore involves fundamental assumptions about the very nature of philosophy. A famous example from the history of analytical philosophy can show that the reversal I am proposing may not be as absurd as it might first appear. This reversal does not entail the abandonment of the tasks that dominate most of the philosophy of music, but it does question whether such philosophy has adequately reflected on its aims and scope, and whether it could ever provide the kind of answers to its questions that it seems to demand.

Wittgenstein: Music and “Logical Form” In much of the secondary literature on Ludwig Wittgenstein in the analytical tradition the fact that music plays a central role in his thought (and his life) is rarely mentioned. The remarks on music in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and elsewhere sometimes register, but these remarks are not often seen as germane to his philosophy as a whole (the most outstanding exception to this is de Castro  2007). Meanwhile the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) would seem from most discussions to have nothing to do with music at all. The fact that this is simply false is an indication of a philosophical occlusion of music that is symptomatic of what I want to explore. The Tractatus played a central role in moving early analytical philosophy in Vienna in an anti-metaphysical direction. It did so by asserting that the only statements with truth value were either logically necessary or contingent empirical assertions based on observation in the natural sciences: everything else was “nonsense” (Unsinn).5 This would seem to be an example of the worst kind of scientism until it becomes clear that the assertions of the Tractatus themselves must be “nonsense” because they are neither purely logical nor empirical. The paradoxicality of this situation has recently led to a debate over what this means for the development of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, where any form of language which has effects in a culture can be said to have some kind of meaning (see Crary and Read 2000). If the propositions in the Tractatus that are supposed to establish the conditions which determine sense and nonsense (and therefore seem to have “transcendental” status) are themselves nonsense, what does that mean for Wittgenstein’s relationship to metaphysics? It is surprising that music is not mentioned in this recent debate, because music actually appears at a decisive point of the Tractatus, and in the notes written while Wittgenstein was preparing the manuscript in 1915 it is clear that music played a crucial role in the development of his ideas.

846   Andrew Bowie The “transcendental” aspect of the Tractatus results from its assumption that the world is intelligible and that language is a condition of possibility of this intelligibility. The problem is to explain how it is such a condition: “The proposition (Satz) can represent the whole of reality, but it cannot represent what it has to have in common with reality in order to represent it—logical form” (Wittgenstein  1984, 33). The example Wittgenstein uses is not fortuitous: “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the musical notation, the sound waves all stand in that representing internal relationship to each other which exists between language and world. They all share a logical construction” (27). The crux here is the notion of “logical form,” which sign and world have to share for the world to be intelligible. The Tractatus itself makes no more of the music example, but the 1915 notes contain the following: “But is ‘language’ the ‘only’ language? Why should there not be a means of expression with which I can talk ‘about’ language, so that it can appear in combination with something else? Let’s assume music would be such a means of expression” (144). Wittgenstein’s reflection derives from his questionable conviction that the proposition is a picture/image (Bild) of reality, which gives rise to the demand for an explanation of what they have in common. At the same time, the idea that music can talk about language should not be dismissed. The fact that music makes a kind of sense which is not expressible in verbal language, and yet evidently relates closely to it, suggests that we inhabit forms of intelligibility which may mutually influence each other in ways that escape our conscious attention. These forms can do so in ways that may also resist philosophical articulation because they have to be experienced through engaging with the world, rather than being verbally explained; otherwise, there would be no reason to introduce music in the context in question. The later Wittgenstein contends, for example, that the “simplest explanation” of a musical phrase “is sometimes a gesture; another might be a dance step, or words which describe a dance” (Wittgenstein 1980, 69; on the role of music in Wittgenstein’s later thought more generally, see de Castro 2007 and Bowie 2007, 261–308). The fact that Wittgenstein, in a remarkable example of the philosophy of music in the subjective genitive, regarded music as a possible answer to the riddle of logical form is striking, then, not least because this fact almost never appears in mainstream interpretations of his thought.

Music and Language Many philosophers are not interested in music in relation to their philosophical work, either because they are just not that interested in music at all, or because they don’t see any connection between music and the issues they deal with. The fact that a lot of analytical philosophy in particular has become more and more preoccupied with formulating arguments about technical questions in increasingly specialized domains has also made the idea that music might be important for key questions in philosophy seem hard to defend. This fact points to reasons why there is a neglect of the philosophy of music in the subjective genitive in this tradition. In modernity there are fundamental divisions in

Making Sense   847 philosophy concerning how language should be conceived. Philosophers who adopt what Charles Taylor (1985, 2016) has termed the “designative” approach (derived from Locke, which dominates parts of the analytical tradition), are unlikely to see music as in any way philosophically central. In contrast, the “expressive” tradition founded by Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder leads naturally to a heightened concern with music. The former approach sees the primary function of language in representational terms, and asks how language can represent states of affairs, facts, and so on. In order to do this, it brackets much of what constitutes the substance of actual language use (rhythm, tone, emphasis, speed of utterance, and other gestural aspects of language). This kind of exclusion is legitimated by the seeming impossibility of semantics without linguistic idealizations that both transcend particular contexts and are independent of the specific tone, rhythm, and so on of linguistic utterances. In this perspective the idea that music is essential to philosophical investigation of language makes little sense. The problem is that such an approach tends to assume that what language is has already been established, yet Donald Davidson famously maintains that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” (Davidson 1986, 446). Any account of the nature of language qua object of analysis is always faced with a version of the problem suggested by Wittgenstein, namely that such an account would require language to be investigated from a location outside language. If one does not stipulate that constative utterances are the basic model for language and try to explain how propositions represent reality, a number of novel questions arise. The move beyond such an approach in analytically oriented philosophy is prepared by speech-act theory, which sees utterances as social actions rather than just as ways of representing the world or as conveyors of information. However, it is only with thinkers like Davidson and Stanley Cavell, in the wake of the later Wittgenstein, that limitations of representational approaches to language become a significant issue, and that music can be seen to play a role in core philosophical questions. If we do not presuppose a model which results in music being an object to be characterized in theoretical propositions, the very idea of what language is changes, as Herder and Hamann already made clear in their criticisms of rationalist conceptions of language. Martha Nussbaum has indicated how this connects to music: “Musical works are somehow able—and, after all, this ‘somehow’ is no more and no less mysterious than the comparable symbolic ability of language—to embody the idea of our urgent need for and attachment to things outside ourselves that we do not control, in a tremendous variety of forms” (Nussbaum 2001, 272). If language is not seen as predominantly a means of representation, then it can be seen instead to share with music the task of articulating and expressing a multiplicity of ways in which humankind exists in and relates to the world, only one of which is the attempted true representation of states of affairs. In this perspective the borders between what is understood as music and what is understood as language become fluid, the perceived nature of each affecting how the other is conceived. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s surmisal that the intelligibility of language cannot be

848   Andrew Bowie understood without aspects of what pertains to music means one cannot consider music just as an object of language, because it is itself, in the broader “expressive” sense, linguistic.

Epistemology and Rhythm The assumption that music connects us with the world—even if one seeks to escape the world through music, one is generally looking to a better world, rather than selfannihilation—makes it possible to show how central philosophical problems are affected by music. (The connection, as the work of Adorno and musical avant-gardes make clear, can be a critical one, rather than one which reconciles us to the world as it is.) A vital factor here is rhythm. John Dewey maintains in Art as Experience that “What is not so generally perceived is that every uniformity and regularity of change in nature is a rhythm. The terms ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rhythm’ are synonymous” (Dewey 1980, 149). The scope of what this idea implies is easy to underestimate. Consider the following. Modern philosophy is frequently concerned with how the relationship between subject and object is conceived, thus with the epistemological problems that begin in particular with René Descartes’s attempts to banish sceptical doubt. What is striking here is that the success of the natural sciences in predicting and controlling natural events that gets under way in Descartes’s era is not matched by the success of epistemological attempts to account for or ground that success. The basic problem is how to explain the fact that the indeterminate multiplicity of the empirical world can be subsumed under a finite number of forms of identity to enable the formulation of natural laws. A vital aspect of this problem is language, which uses a limited number of signs to articulate an unlimited number of phenomena. The emergence of modern versions of the epistemological problems that become central to philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century is, not coincidentally, often connected to the question of the origin of language that becomes a major philosophical concern when theological ideas about the connection between language and world come into question at much the same time. The attempt to provide a foundation which obviates the possibility that language is merely arbitrarily connected to the world—this is what lies behind the concern with its origins—echoes what happens in epistemology. Music repeatedly occurs in the debates over the origin of language because it is seen, by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and others, as embodying the transition between the pre-semantic and the semantic, the natural and the cultural, and so as providing a connection between two realms whose supposed separation is the source of many issues in modern philosophy (see Thomas 1995). Even in this period, though, the relevance of music for epistemological questions is not extensively thematized, and the subsequent history of epistemology rarely considers the issue of music. So why insist on this connection now, and how can sense be made of it? The early German Romantics, the serious reception of whose philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon, start to elucidate how music is connected to knowledge and

Making Sense   849 philosophical reflection on knowledge. Friedrich Schlegel (1988, 5:41) offers a classic example of the philosophy of music in the subjective genitive when he suggests: “One has tried for so long to apply mathematics to music and painting; now do it the other way round!” But how is this to take place? Mathematics is crucial to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, as a “synthetic a priori” form which is a condition of possibility of natural laws. In the Critique of Pure Reason the key epistemological issue is the separation of stable forms in the understanding, such as mathematics, from the ever-changing and unstable intuitions which are the subject’s access to the objective world. In order to mediate between these two separate sources of cognition, Kant introduces the idea of “schemata,” which are the sources of preconceptual intelligibility that make coherent experience possible. A schema is a shiftable frame that enables things to be identified which are not strictly identical at all: for bonsais and giant redwoods both to be trees something has to bring them together despite the massive difference in their perceptual manifestations. It is with respect to the schemata for time that the connection to music becomes fully apparent. In order for time to be ordered there must be a stable framework to enable identities between moments which otherwise just consist in endless difference: schemata are, then, “nothing but ‘determinations of time’ a priori according to rules” (Kant 1968a, B 184, A 145). This suggests an obvious connection to rhythm: without the schemata of “persistence,” “succession,” “simultaneity,” and so on, the experience of rhythm would be impossible. Most importantly, given the way rhythm seems, as Dewey suggests, to be anchored in aspects of nature—think of its role in animal existence or for pre-linguistic children—one can ask whether Kant’s schemata are not derived from rhythmic phenomena that are always already in play in human and other life. In this sense, rather than being a condition of possibility of rhythm, schemata themselves may depend on rhythm. Kant himself does not give an account of how schemata arise, because such questions belong for him in the realm of psychology, but a priori temporal rules seem to demand some kind of inherent regularities that already differentiate time. Such regularities involve what Kant characterizes in terms of the “transcendental unity of apperception,” the continuity of a subject between different moments. The question is, though, how this relationship between the identity of the subject and the differences between moments of rhythmic phenomena plays a role in the constitution of a meaningful world. Genetic questions like this do become a central concern for Kant’s successors, so it is not surprising when Schelling attributes considerable significance to rhythm. Rhythm is the “introduction (Einbildung) of unity into multiplicity,” the “transformation of a succession which is in itself meaningless into a significant one” (Schelling 1856–61, I/5:492, 493; on this see McAuley 2013). Rendering what is different identical is fundamental to cognition, as Kant and German Idealist and Romantic thinkers underline in new ways— hence the centrality of the transcendental unity to the questions they ask. The further aspect here is the growing realization of how processes of identification are connected both to language and to music. The very origins of language and of knowledge evidently have something to do with the transformation of meaninglessness into meaning by the creation of identities and relations between different phenomena. There are familiar

850   Andrew Bowie naturalistic explanations for the origin of such processes, based on the obvious fact that they can increase the chances of self-preservation. Interestingly, though, Kant himself adds a further dimension to what is in play here when he suggests that knowledge is also founded in pleasure. Although we now derive no pleasure from how forms of unity are manifest in nature, such that we can form concepts of them and make conceptual judgements, “in its time there must have been some [pleasure], and only because the most common experience would not be possible without it did it gradually mix with simple cognition and was no longer particularly noticed any more” (Kant  1968b, BXL, A XXXVIII). So how is identification connected to pleasure? Here the importance of rhythm, which can be the source of somatic and affective pleasure, becomes very clear. What is at issue is rhythm in the widest sense, understood as the connection of elements which leads to the production of meaning. This is why one can talk of rhythm in a prose style or in a painting. Novalis suggests what is meant in the following: “Seasons (Jahreszeiten), times of the day (Tageszeiten), lives, destinies are all, strangely enough, thoroughly rhythmical—metrical—follow a beat (tactmäßig).  .  .  . Everything we do with a certain skill—we do rhythmically without noticing it—Rhythm is found everywhere—insinuates itself everywhere” (Novalis 1978, 401). Schlegel talks of the early development of thought in humankind in terms of the “drive to hold fast a feeling (Empfindung) for oneself and to repeat it.” This drive already makes possible the beginning of the “poetic capacity of humankind”: “for only by sensuous limitation and sensuous distribution of the material of communication, by rhythm, which in the case of the wild man therefore does not belong to excess but to need, can feeling  .  .  . be expanded into a lasting and more universal effectiveness.” He sums up the decisive point as follows: “rhythm in this childhood of the human race is the only means of fixing thoughts and disseminating them” (Schlegel 1988, 2:13). Music is the root “of human education in Hellas,” because it can make the “idea of an incomprehensible infinity,” which is “the beginning and end of all philosophy,” bearable by introducing differentiation and limitation into what is undifferentiated and unlimited (2:16, 10). The essential idea is that the baseline intelligibility which is a necessary condition of cognition has to do with rhythm, as a preconceptual form of sense that comes into play to control the anxiety generated by lack of any sense of order. For Schlegel, in a further case of the philosophy of music in the subjective genitive, rhythm is therefore the foundation of philosophy, which converts chaos into initial intelligibility. Once such forms of initial order are in place they can be reflected on, differentiated, and expanded, which is where the specifically aesthetic aspect of rhythm comes in. This conception also connects to the issue of language we touched on above: the fixing of thoughts is also a function of language, which Schelling identifies with schematism: “Even language [is] nothing but a continual schematization” (1856–61, I/5: 408). In this perspective the division between what can be said to have semantic content and what lacks it involves more than the verbal dimension of language. The root of the possibility of verbally articulated semantic content is a preconceptual organized sense which underlies the capacity to pick things out so that they become possible objects of verbal utterances. In this respect, music is connected to what Martin Heidegger means by “being.”

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Music as a “Manner/Melody of Human Existence” What we have seen so far echoes what Charles Taylor means when he asserts, in the wake of Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that “[w]e are able to form conceptual beliefs guided by our surroundings, because we live in a preconceptual engagement with these that involves understanding” (Taylor 2002, 114; Taylor 2016 develops this idea in relation to the present author’s ideas on music). Conceptual beliefs obviously play a role both in discussion of music and in musical practice, but the simple fact that music is not reducible to what can be said about it and is often mainly comprehensible through participation is too often ignored in philosophical reflection on music. This has the further consequence that the musical aspect of how concepts arise, discussed above, is ignored. The Heidegger pupil, musicologist, and theorist of “music for use” (Gebrauchsmusik), Heinrich Besseler, captured what interests me in his dictum that music is “a manner/melody (Weise) of human existence” (Besseler 1978, 45). The double sense of Weise suggests the idea of living “melodically” by participating in music as a world-disclosive and socially integrative activity which does not rely on the sort of verbal interchange that can produce social conflict. Besseler’s concern with “music for use” underlines the ways in which music can inform and illuminate many diverse aspects of social life. (Music can, of course, be the location and occasion of conflict, but this is predicated on its being of social and cultural value in the first place.) Besseler’s notion develops out of his assimilation of Heidegger’s questioning of philosophy that focuses on objectified “beings/entities” (Seiendes) without seeing that our engagement with things is not primarily objectifying. One inhabits ways of being in the world rather than primarily observing things from outside, in the same way as one can participate in musical practices which make no sense seen from the outside. The objectifying stance is thus always secondary to such forms of engagement. Music obviously does not offer discursive answers to philosophical problems. At the risk of somewhat unfair hyperbole, however, it might be said that, to judge by the evidence so far, philosophy does not really do this either. The proliferation of contradictory epistemological positions, for example, makes it impossible to claim that philosophy offers solutions to problems, of the kind which the natural sciences very often do. Epistemological disagreements should not be regarded as worthless, but the epistemological positions clearly do not possess the kind of value that a scientific theory which enables reliable predictions does. The question is what value such theories have if one does not assume that the contradictory positions will be resolved into agreement.6 In this respect the ambiguity inherent in engagement with music could be said to resemble what happens in philosophy if one suspends the idea that it could be the source of definitive arguments. In both domains, much of what happens undoubtedly involves rigour, without which what is produced becomes unintelligible or vacuous, but the rigour does not issue in a definitive result. Something of this can be the case in areas of the natural sciences, but the key difference there is the ability to propose testable hypotheses which can lead to technological and other applications.

852   Andrew Bowie These assertions are highly generalized and open to all sorts of objections, but it is hard to deny that the modern natural sciences have occupied much of the territory which traditionally belonged to metaphysics. Indeed, the later Heidegger (1988) claims that the modern sciences are themselves the culmination of metaphysics. In the present context, this suggests that the need for philosophy as a mode of reflecting on ways of making sense cannot be fully satisfied by means of explanatory theories. Modern relationships between subject and object are not exclusively an epistemological issue, and might sometimes be better characterized as involving a kind of homelessness. Novalis says that philosophy “is really homesickness—the drive to be at home everywhere”—and sees music as offering a possibility to be “at home” in an at least temporary manner (1978, 675). Much depends here on how one characterizes metaphysics: if it is seen in terms of a timeless general picture of the ways things are, thinkers such as Heidegger, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas suggest that the modern situation means that the search for this is no longer a viable option. So, given the need for something which is not catered for by explanatory theories, what might alternative conceptions of metaphysics look like? Conceptions of the goal of existence founder for those without theological convictions not least on what is revealed by physics concerning the heat death of the universe, in which anything resembling what we could call a world will come to a definitive end. Just knowing this gives us no resources for how to respond to that knowledge. For much of life such facticity can be repressed, but the evanescence that is an ineliminable feature of modernity evidently demands cultural responses. Herbert Schnädelbach talks in this context of “negative metaphysics,” or the “justified reminder that discourse does not have complete command of the true and the good: there is here something which cannot be methodologically anticipated, but has to show itself and be experienced. . . . the term ‘negative metaphysics’ points to something additional that is required if our cognition is to be true and our life to be good” (Schnädelbach 1987, 171–172). Schnädelbach sees Wittgenstein, Adorno, and Heidegger as examples of this. The first two see music as a means of making sense that cannot be articulated as discursive truth; despite his concern with time, in his main writings Heidegger does not attribute a significant role to music, though there is evidence that he did find it important. Heidegger’s silence in this respect is a further example of the tendency of many forms of philosophy to ignore music, with which we began. At the same time, from the 1930s onwards Heidegger’s moves away from philosophy towards “thinking” echo some of what we have been discussing. He concentrates on developing new ways of thinking about language which reject the objectification of language as an entity in a subject like linguistics and develop a kind of philosophy of language in the subjective genitive: “A speaking ‘about’ language makes it almost unavoidably into an object” (Heidegger 1959, 147). The aspects of language which resist such objectification are evidently those which are closely connected to music via their concern with the sense generated by the form of articulation, rather than with what it might refer to. Why Heidegger makes little or nothing of this connection matters less than the fact that what he does say is part of a wider, but often neglected development in philosophy in which music plays a decisive role.

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Music and the End of Philosophy We already encountered the core issue here in relation to Wittgenstein: a wholesale objectification of language demands an impossible perspective on it, one which lies outside language itself. The historical development of this issue in Europe can be roughly characterized as follows: the decline of views of the divine origin of language—which are predicated precisely on a position outside language—is accompanied both by a transformation in the significance of music, set in motion by philosophers such as Schelling, Schlegel, and others, and composers like Beethoven and Schubert, and culminating in Arthur Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the early (and parts of the later) Friedrich Nietzsche, and also by the successes of the objectifications of the natural sciences which are part of what give rise to Heidegger’s later non-objectifying approaches to language. Nietzsche’s characterization of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as the “opus metaphysicum of all art” represents a high point of the reversal of the priority of philosophy and music (Nietzsche  1997, 232). The lack of extensive attention to such phenomena in post­metaphysical thinking is striking. Bryan Magee rightly argues of Wagner’s influence on Nietzsche that “there is no other such example in the whole of our culture of a creative artist who is not himself a philosopher having a ‘philosophical’ influence of this magnitude on someone who was indeed a great philosopher” (Magee 2002, 81). The influence came from Wagner’s music itself, so how is the metaphysical influence of the music to be interpreted? Such musical metaphysics cannot be interpreted in terms of a theory which provides a philosophical explanation. That would be self-contradictory, because the theory would derive from precisely the kind of discursive philosophy that is put in question by the philosophy of music in the subjective genitive. Wittgenstein speaks of what has to be shown because it cannot be said, and he thereby follows a Romantic tradition that is slowly becoming a more substantial part of contemporary philosophical reflection. Friedrich Schleiermacher suggests how verbal communication may fail to articulate crucial aspects of our being: “If we once more consider how one so easily one-sidedly presupposes that the very direction of the individual towards communication is a verbal one (eine logische), and yet must admit that all musical representation only really has a minimum of verbal content, then a powerful refutation of this assertion lies in this fact, and it follows that there must be a massive intensity in this direction of the human mind to be able to represent itself purely in its mobility, apart from everything verbal (abgesehen von allem Logischen)” (Schleiermacher 1842, 399–400). He underlines this in very concrete fashion: “if we see musical instruments as extensions of the human voice and ask if poetry has done the same with language as music has done with notes, then the production of poetry in relation to its element [i.e., words] is infinitely small . . . the extension of music is an infinite one in comparison with the other arts” (392). The rapid technical and expressive development of music from Schleiermacher’s era to the present (a development which is astonishingly rapid in jazz from around 1920 to around 1960) suggests the importance of new ways of expressing the sense life gains through the

854   Andrew Bowie a­ rticulation of mobility. Emotions are precisely movements of feeling, and complex transitions from one emotion to another are a fundamental aspect of our being in the world. This development of expressive resources to respond to such transitions relates to rhythm’s aforementioned role in the creation of meaningfulness. However contested their exact nature may be, there are connections between the decline of religion and traditional metaphysics and the heightened importance of music in modern Western culture. The idea of the “end of philosophy” that emerges in the first half of the nineteenth century with Ludwig Feuerbach and others relates to a series of reorientations and reappraisals of the possibilities in modernity of coming to new, secular terms with human existence. Cavell reflects on this situation as follows: “it would follow that philosophy is only over on the assumption that philosophy is exhausted by metaphysics and that metaphysics is exhausted by the attempt to solve problems generated by the skeptical process [that, in the form of Descartes’ epistemological doubt, inaugurates modern philosophy]. But if metaphysics is to tell us how things are, then philosophical procedures otherwise motivated—let’s say by wonder—may count as metaphysics” (Cavell 2005, 211). This situation may also change the way we see language, which can become “a matter . . . of learning how to let objects become impressive to us, matter to us (something to sing about, or speak about)” (51). As such, music can embody a metaphysics concerned with new ways of making post-theological sense.

The Unanswered Question? Modernity is characterized by a dialectic where what brings untold advantages (in the form of new technological control of natural processes) also creates profound social and cultural problems. These problems undermine those advantages and increase the threat from what Schelling and Karl Marx call “second nature,” that is, human society which functions like the “first nature” that can destroy us. Philosophers like Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, and Cavell are part of a tradition that is concerned with how language itself can be distorted by being reduced to a means for achieving the instrumental goals which give rise to that dialectic. Their concerns very rarely become central to the investigation of language in analytical philosophy, as evidenced by the latter’s concentration on semantic issues and its frequent neglect of both the philosophical content of music and the significance of poetry. The lacking consensus characteristic of much of analytical philosophy, which involves deep divisions such as those between reductive physicalism and versions of normatively oriented idealism, can also be ­interpreted as a symptom of an issue that, in a different form, has played a major role in certain aspects of recent European philosophy and which is connected to the philosophy of music. The basic question concerns the implications of conflicts which seem irresolvable by argument. In some strands of European philosophy, this vital issue has been addressed via Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of a différend, or a conflict between so-called discourse regimes that cannot be overcome for lack of shared assumptions between such

Making Sense   855 regimes (for a criticism of these arguments see Bowie 2003, 183–220; cf. Frank 1988). A concern to take seriously ways of talking about the world that seem incommensurable with the prevalent Western ways is not least a result of the growing awareness of the ­history of repression of other cultures by the Western world. Attending to the possibility of incommensurability can be an important hedge against cultural imperialism, though it can also encourage the widening of differences when there may be the possibility of non-coercive reconciliation. It is clear, however, that arguments will not lead to an overcoming of the conflict in many political and cultural conflicts. Indeed, continued argument can make things worse by making each side more rigid in the defense of their position. In contemporary intercultural conflicts, Edward Said sees two unhappy alternatives in “homogenization” and “paranoia”—both of which need to be overcome if violence is to be avoided. He suggests that music might help avoid the former by virtue of its concern with “what can’t be resolved and what is irreconcilable. . . . I think it’s useful, at times, to think of the aesthetic as an indictment of the political and that it’s a stark contrast, forcefully made, to inhumanity, to injustice. And I think that’s what people respond to in Beethoven” (Barenboim and Said 2004, 168). Given that conflict is ineluctable, forms of philosophy which reply predominantly on argument (whose heatedness can be in inverse proportion to the importance of the issue) have few resources for finding ways of coming to terms with the intractable differences that form the substance of so much of life in contemporary society. One does not generally resolve conflicts, especially in close personal relationships, by winning the argument, so we deal in other forms of exchange which enable coexistence without agreement. In a discussion with Said, Daniel Barenboim gives the example of two cellists in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra from different sides of the Middle East conflict who are wholly opposed politically but come to a minimal mutual agreement in working out the best way to play a particular phrase in Beethoven: “I believe in cultural matters—with literature and, even better, with music, because it doesn’t have to do with explicit ideas—if we foster this kind of contact, it can only help people feel nearer to each other, and this is all” (Barenboim and Said 2004, 11). Barenboim does not offer some kind of magical resolution to intercultural conflict on the basis of music, but he does highlight a vital point which is almost wholly absent from many ways of doing philosophy. It might seem odd to cast suspicion on explicit ideas, given the undoubted value of clarity in many philosophical contexts. Assuming explicit ideas are equivalent to something like propositionally expressible claims, it is evident that these are the in­dis­pen­sa­ ble form in which many practices that sustain human life are manifested; at the same time, they tend to demand yes–no responses. Taylor contrasts the use of sentences which express explicit beliefs that can be used in the absence of the objects of the belief, and which demand a yes–no stance, with capacities like those employed in music, which can be used only by participation in a specific practice. In such practices, which are often highly complex and differentiated, it may be possible to circumvent the exclusionary identifications which are part of propositional language, and—as the cellists did— achieve a different kind of at least temporary understanding.

856   Andrew Bowie The point of this is not to argue against argumentation (which would be absurd), but to suggest a philosophical dimension to human interaction which cannot be regarded as just a prelude to propositional articulation of that dimension, and which can issue in new kinds of agreement that circumvent the pitfalls of the practice of argumentation. Such participatory forms of understanding have their own form of clarity and rigour—a jazz musician experiences something of this on any successful gig, when the differing things the members of the band improvise come together in new ways. Failure to take adequate account of such forms impoverishes philosophy’s ability to be open to the diverse modes of sense-making which sustain a culture. The sort of affective agreement which music can involve is not adequately catered for by much of what is said in philosophical discussion of emotions and their significance. Without the participation in actual music making as player or listener, the way music is embedded in the world and locates subjects in a world of affective meaning that is connected to other forms of relationship to the world is often obscured. Such a view will not issue in a new philosophy of music in the objective genitive, and a vital aspect of what it entails is detailed attention to the changing historical significance of music as a sense-generating practice that manifests alternatives to the main forms of metaphysics (see Bowie 2007). The philosophical image of music still tends to be of a profound secret that philosophy should seek to explain. Once again it has to be observed that this explanation, like the epistemological answer to scepticism, seems to be a long time coming. Given the continuing development of music in all kinds of forms, the idea of a definitive philosophical theory should anyway appear questionable, not least because it could close down the space for the new sense which musicians devote their lives to opening up. The objection “That’s not music” to radical musical innovations which then turn out to redefine musical possibilities makes clear why conceptual determination in this area has to be handled very carefully. The scope of the concept changes with the historical development of music: the history of jazz can be characterized by its ongoing transformation of “wrong notes” into right ones as its vocabulary expands and forms are found which can make sense of the previously senseless. Rather than waiting for an answer to the unanswered question it can make sense to interrogate the whole approach that gives rise to that question. Wittgenstein suggests that “we break radically with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: communicating thoughts” (Wittgenstein 1984, 376). The philosophical “mystery” of music only demands an answer if one assumes the language game of explanation of notional “objects” is the only philosophically relevant language game. People effortlessly integrate music into their lives, because the reception and production of music expresses, articulates, and influences their feelings, the tempo of their life, their relationships to landscape, to other people and themselves, and even to death. That one should ask why this should be the case is obvious, but the revival of interest in philosophy’s relationship to music, to which this volume is a testament, needs to look beyond the standard repertoire of philosophical approaches to such questions. The philosophy of music can sometimes consist in music itself being an indispensable resource for sustaining and creating sense where philosophical argument and explanation do not.

Making Sense   857

Notes 1. This essay was written with the support of a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation. The essay draws on ideas set out in much more detail in Bowie 2007, but tries to extrapolate beyond those ideas in certain respects. 2. Recent work that challenges these tendencies include Goehr 1994, which shows why exclusive focus on the idea of the work can be questionable and Ridley 2004, which questions the main agenda of analytical philosophy of music. 3. These issues form the focus of work by Peter Kivy (see Kivy 1993, 2002, for examples). 4. In the latter case the hybrid notion of response-dependent properties gives the game away by making it clear that the issue makes no sense in terms of separate subject and object. 5. All translations from the German are my own, though published versions in English, where available, are noted in Works Cited. 6. See Bowie 2013, where I explore Adorno’s and Dewey’s idea that contradictions between philosophical positions can be understood as expressions of historical tensions. See also Dewey 2012.

Works Cited Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward W. Said. 2004. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. Edited by Ara Guzelimian. London: Bloomsbury Press. Besseler, Heinrich. 1978. Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte. Leipzig: Reclam. Bowie, Andrew. 2003. Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 2013. Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity. Cavell, Stanley. 2005. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Crary, Alice, and Rupert Read, eds. 2000. The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1988. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber Verlag. Davidson, Donald. 1986. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Ernest Lepore, 433–446. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Castro, Paulo. 2007. “Wittgenstein’s Music: Logic, Meaning, and the Fate of Aesthetic Autonomy.” PhD diss., University of London. Dewey, John. 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Press. Dewey, John. 2012. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Frank, Manfred. 1988. Grenzen der Verständigung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske. Translated by Peter D. Hertz as On the Way to Language, New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. 1988. Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Kant, Immanuel. 1968a. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Vols. 3 and 4 of Werkausgabe. Edited by  Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated and edited by Paul

858   Andrew Bowie Guyer and Allen W. Wood as Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. 1968b. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Vol. 10 of Werkausgabe. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews as Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kivy, Peter. 1993. The Fine Art of Repetition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. Contemplating Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magee, Bryan. 2002. Wagner and Philosophy. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. McAuley, Tomás. 2013. “Rhythmic Accent and the Absolute: Sulzer, Schelling, and the Akzenttheorie.” Eighteenth-Century Music 10, no. 2 (September): 277–286. McAuley, Tomás. 2015. “Missing the Wrong Target: On Andrew Bowie’s Rejection of the Philosophy of Music.” Performance Philosophy 1 (2015): 59–64. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazale. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. 1978. Vol. 2 of Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk. Edited by Hans-Joachim Mähl. Munich: Hanser. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. The Philosophy of Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1856–61. Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Division (Abtheilung) I, Vols. 1–10; Division II, Vols. 1–4. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag. Vol. 5 of Division I. Translated and edited by Douglas W. Scott as The Philosophy of Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Schlegel, Friedrich von. 1988. Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Schriften und Fragmente. Edited by Ernst Behler. 6 vols. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1842. Vorlesungen zur Aesthetik. Berlin: Reimer. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1987. Vernunft und Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Taylor, Charles. 1985. “Language and Human Nature.” In Human Agency and Language, 215–247. Vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2002. “Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction.” In Reading McDowell: On “Mind and World,” edited by Nicholas H. Smith, 106–119. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, Downing  A. 1995. Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. Edited by Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Translated by Peter Winch. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Tractatus logico-philosophicus; Tagebücher 1914–1916; Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated by D.  F.  Pears and B. F. McGuinness as Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge, 1961.

chapter 42

Societ y Michael Gallope

The topic of music and society presents philosophy with a complex task. The relationship between the two is built upon murky, hidden, passionate, and often intense feelings, many of which are not clearly described in language by musicians and listeners, or expressed with the aim of public consumption. Yet the link is also very real. Having an intuitive, sometimes opinionated, argument about the effects different kinds of music can have on society is not uncommon. It seems palpable to many that, in our contemporary world, music provides a powerful impetus to social cohesion and is an important factor in the construction of one’s cultural identity. The realness of the topic—its vernacular accessibility—paralleled with a certain explanatory difficulty makes for an especially puzzling and fruitful topic for philosophy. It is curious then that, with a few exceptions, philosophers have not devoted much attention to it. One likely reason is the normative orientation of Western aesthetics towards the autonomy of the musical work as an object for aesthetic contemplation, analysis, interpretation, judgement, and the like. As Edward Lippman put it in his History of Western Musical Aesthetics, “at first glance, the sociology of music seems the very antithesis of aesthetics, for the horizon of aesthetic thought has traditionally been a limited one . . . The one thing conspicuously absent was social context, whether as social history or as sociology” (Lippman 1992, 470). Understanding the big questions linking music and society is, to be sure, still a pressing philosophical question; indeed, it engages some of the most challenging problems we associate with music. An axis of inquiry central to the so-called New Musicology of the 1980s and 1990s, the topic wrestles with music’s meaning and significance for groups of people, often in terms that are vivid to the senses (see Leppert and McClary 1987). For when one discusses music and society, one is not isolating abstractions, formalisms, ideal conditions, or arid ontological problems; one is talking about how music affects us in groups, often quite concretely. Adding to the complexity is the fact that, in an era of mass media, social bonds within these groups can be massive, entailing listeners in the hundreds of millions, which asks us to consider that the powers of music, in some larger structural sense, can take flight beyond the powers of our own will to control them.

860   Michael Gallope To begin, some brief etymology. The word “society” denotes social groups of people— inclusive ones, sometimes in a public situation, who associate with one another both within and across cultural differences. Usage of the English word dates to the sixteenth century, and denotes “the fact or condition of being connected; a connection.” The Oxford English Dictionary details a range of meanings that branch from here and refer to political alliances, business relationships, or groupings based in a common social activity: “The fact or condition of participating in some action, event, etc.; participation.” In French, société similarly meant “company” and is likewise derived from the Latin words socialis, meaning “of partners or allies; conjugal; sociable,” and socius, an adjective meaning “sharing, associated, allied.” At first blush then, it would seem that when one talks about music and society, one is headed away from philosophical abstractions towards questions better served by empirical and historical accounts of music: reception history, sociologies of music, and case studies that examine music’s relationship to politics, religion, identity, and the like. Yet when a philosopher takes up the topic of music and society, she does not defer her inquiries to questions that can be answered with empirical research. Often spurred by political or ethical motivations, philosophers who explore this topic have sought to explain, at a certain level of depth and generality, the complex significance and value of music for society. And these explanations are often proffered with a sense of urgent importance regarding music’s relationship to power. They may entail convictions about music’s ability to trigger political cohesion (as well as disintegration and antagonism), negotiate axes of equality and inequality, join forces with emancipation and resistance, and bolster or resist the numbing powers of ideology. Past attempts to tackle the topic of music and society from a philosophical perspective have tended to focus on individual thinkers (DeNora 2003; Drott 2015; Simon 2013). This chapter approaches the topic from a historical and comparative perspective by drawing together writings on music and society by an array of five significant philosophers in the West: Plato, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, W.  E.  B.  Du Bois, and Theodor Adorno. On the surface, these philosophers differ in their approaches. Plato and Aristotle write predominantly about music’s relationship to physical training, education, and emotion; Rousseau writes about the sonic foundations of a moral community; Du Bois writes about the testimonial and affective power of music in a society historically structured by slavery and racism; and Adorno writes about the intersection of music with mass culture. Yet amidst these differences, there are underlying continuities that allow us to examine their approaches to the question of music and society from a comparative point of view. With this in mind, I shall propose two concepts to serve as leitmotifs: imitations and codes. An imitative relationship between music and society is based in correlations between musical elements and social effects. It lends itself to practical and instrumental linkages between music and the education of youth, the development of a moral community, the dissemination of divine meanings, and the experiences of intoxication, relaxation, and emotional release. If a philosopher claims that music’s relationship to society is imitative, the reason is that it serves a social function. By contrast, if music has an encoded

Society   861 relationship to society, the music is first and foremost assumed to have a certain degree of autonomy. Within the boundaries of an abstracted or conventional form that is neither principally mimetic nor semantic, the music contains some kind of obscure significance for society. It does not trigger specific social effects so much as it attempts more obliquely to indicate something about society. These theories were most famously developed by twentieth-century thinkers in the orbit of the Frankfurt School tradition of Marxist critique, for whom elements of the base (the economy, or forces of production) are said to be “coded” into said abstractions of music that exist at the level of the superstructure (which entails culture, institutions, beliefs, and ideas—everything else). Adding to the complications of musical codes is the fact it is often not so clear how the coding is being done, or exactly what is being said in the code. Because of music’s abstract, gestural, and ineffable character as a medium, a code cannot simply mirror society in some kind of mimetic way. Music-as-code does not result in a “picture” of society. Rather, according to this line of thinking, the abstraction of music encrypts social meaning in complex and mysterious ways, inducing, on the part of philosophers, talk of strange messages, the elicitation of secrets, even disruptions of ordinary historical time. What’s more: musical codes can be taken to contain secrets specific to music that are impossible to encode in other media. That is, with codes, music indicates something about society that can go unstated in language. In this way, codes can address one’s desire to understand why a certain kind of music took fire and meant a lot to a whole group of people, particularly in cases when musicians and listeners do not venture explanatory testimony themselves. For much of the chapter, I do not take it as my task to evaluate or critique the writings of these thinkers; until the last section, my aim will be primarily exegetical. I hope this comparative approach allows their thinking to be understood in ways that are both novel and mutually illuminating. But in the closing paragraphs, I venture the argument that both of these terms—mimesis and coding—would require significant pushback and modification if they were to serve as conceptual lenses for the many ambiguous and ineffable linkages between music and society in today’s globalized worlds of popular music. While there is, undoubtedly, still a great deal to be learned from these philosophers, the sheer complexity of late modern linkages between music and society often seems to exceed the explanatory power of these two principles.

Plato Consider, first, the ancient Greeks on the topic of music and society, who largely conceived of the relationship between the two as imitative and functional. Plato writes about the divinely inspired nature of music in the Ion, but the most important discussion of its relation to society appears in the Republic and the Laws. It is instructive to remember that such a significant account of music by the Greeks appeared in works of political theory. We now customarily assume music to be centred in the domain of

862   Michael Gallope aesthetics, but in ancient Greece, music was not an autonomous art. The Greek term for music—mousikē—explicitly linked song to poetry and dance, and it was written about primarily in terms of its social effects (cf. Murray and Wilson 2004; West 1992). Plato put forward two theories that were deeply influential throughout centuries of Western musical thought: the melos doctrine and the ēthos doctrine. Melos is a compositional principle that states that music is made of three elements: text, harmony, and rhythm. The theory holds that the three should mesh with one another, and that the harmony and rhythm should follow the words. Ēthos is specifically about music’s relationship to society. It names the way in which various musical elements—harmoniai (or modes), instruments, melodies, and so on are heard and understood to be imitative of various emotional and social effects. The main discussion of ēthos occurs in Book 3 of the Republic, where Socrates, in dialogue with Glaucon, is trying to decide which modes and instruments need to be banished from the city for the purposes of training the guardians. Famously, Socrates only spares two kinds of music—an “enforced” or “violent” mode that imitates the courageous behaviour of a warrior under the threat of death, and a “voluntary” mode that imitates a peaceful comportment that is favourable to the exercise of intellectual freedom. Other modes are expunged from the city, either because they encourage intoxication and laziness (the Lydian and Iastian), or because they are associated with effusive lamentations for the dead (the Mixolydian and Synotonolydian). On a more general level of explanation, Socrates describes the imitative link between music and society in formal terms. In Book 4 of the Republic, he frames his cautionary prescription about music as a prescription against novelty with a direct link to political life: “People should beware of change to new forms (eidos) of music, for they are risking change in the whole. Styles of music are nowhere altered without change in the greatest laws of the city” (Plato 1984, 140). When one enters the nitty-gritty of Socrates’s reasoning, however, the exact links of imitation between musical elements and social behaviours become more difficult to pin down. The courageous mode in fact imitates not social behaviours themselves, but rather sounds—the vocal patterns of a courageous man: “leave the one that would appropriately imitate the discrete sounds (phthoggous) and variable cadences (prosōdias) of a man who is brave in deeds of war” (131; translation modified). Generally speaking, virtuous music is praised for the reliability of its social effects. Along with the Dorian and Phrygian modes, Socrates preserves several instruments because they have desirable effects. He preserves the lyre and the kithāra for practical use within the city, and the syrinx for its rural use by herdsmen. A similar logic holds for rhythm. Socrates enjoins: “we do not pursue intricately varied [rhythms] with every kind of movement, but discover the rhythms that are those of an orderly and courageous life” (Plato 1984, 133). By the same reasoning, compositional rules follow suit. According to the melos doctrine, virtuous rhythms should follow the melody, which in turn follows the logoi, presumably because the meaning of words is more reliable than the effect of music. If this rule were followed, the various metrical feet would adhere to the secure meaning of words. The underlying metaphysical logic holds in each case: the effects of the acceptable music are virtuous, predictable, and simple.

Society   863 If virtuous music is associated with unity, music associated with multiplicity is repeatedly cast as a threat. Socrates, for example, describes a ban on a class of instruments and a ban on a compositional style with many different modes: “we shall have no need of a multiplicity of strings (polychordia) or an assemblage of all harmonies (panharmoniou) in our songs and melodies” (Plato 1984, 132). Similarly, he bans specific instruments like the triogonoi, pektides, and the aulos (and their respective craftsmen) for their ability to sound many keys. In each case, Socrates’s reasoning-by-imitation uses mathematics (the contrasting principles of unity and multiplicity) to correlate various kinds of music with effects in social and political life. If the music is plural and unpredictable (thus embodying multiplicity), society will be as well (and thus dangerous). It is worth noting, however, that Socrates’s reasoning is not exclusively deductive and categorical on this topic. He also occasionally reasons empirically—from his own experience—by recalling music’s actual effects and referring to second-hand accounts of experts, namely Damon, a noted Greek music theorist. As an overlay to these mimetic categorizations, in Plato’s texts ēthos also entails a generic principle of moral education. Socrates describes this in the form of a question: “Isn’t training in mousikē of overriding importance, because rhythm and harmonia penetrate most deeply into the recesses of the soul and take a powerful hold on it, bringing gracefulness and making a man graceful if he is correctly trained, but the opposite if he is not?” (Plato 1984, 135). Still, there is a fair amount of ambiguity as to exactly how this works. The mimetic effect of this music on society is not something that can be discerned in a strong causal (or empirical) sense. When discussing the power of music for mere play or amusement (paidia), Socrates’s interlocutor Adeimantus adopts aqueous metaphors to describe its dangerously revolutionary potential: by gradual infiltration [music] softly overflows upon the ethē and pursuits of men. From there it disembarks enlarged, and enters men’s dealings with one another, and from these dealings it moves to attack laws and constitutions with the most wanton extravagance, Socrates, until in the end it overturns everything in both public and private life.1

Aristotle Aristotle’s theory of music and society is similarly imitative, though he is less deductive and more empirical in his approach. If Plato rendered strong judgements about what kinds of music were appropriate for society, Aristotle more open-mindedly declared that the social aim of music was to “occupy our leisure well” (Aristotle 1984, 171). In terms that prioritize multiplicity (rather than Plato’s unity), Aristotle is likewise more responsive to the wide variety of music’s uses and effects of music on people: “we say that music should be used to give benefits of several sorts, not just one” (180). Along these lines, Aristotle frames Plato’s ēthos doctrine as a generalized metaphysics of education, and claims that music is now holistically important for the education of

864   Michael Gallope youth. His position on ēthos is broadly consonant with his virtue ethics, in which moral cultivation takes place through the long-term education of human character, not through the formal command of a moral law, or by case-by-case consideration of an action’s individual consequences. Thus, for Aristotle, ēthos has a certain abstraction to it; one need not excessively fuss over the exact social effects of music. The generalized effect of music will, over a lifetime, fulfil the purposes of education by teaching one to lead a good life. Aristotle’s practical advice is consonant with this generalization: teach children to play an instrument up to a certain point so that they might be able to appreciate music. His main negative judgement is against the aulos—an instrument he associates with intoxication, virtuosity, and vulgarity (and one Plato too found to be particularly dangerous and multifaceted). He adds only that children should be kept from practising music excessively; being a competitive virtuoso musician can lead to a dangerous and vulgar way of life. Aristotle was a philosopher with a more forgiving relationship to art (he was, after all, the author of the Poetics—a foundational text of literary criticism). Thus, he can philosophize about music and society in a way that is unencumbered by Plato’s strong judgements of social and moral value. In his discussion of music, Aristotle makes a key distinction between paidia and diagōgē. Paidia, a term already used by Plato, is music as amusement or play—a functional unwinding after work. Aristotle defines it thusly: “Amusement (paidia) exists for the sake of relaxation (anapauseos), and relaxation must necessarily be pleasant, since it is a kind of treatment (iatreia) for the pain that labour brings” (Aristotle 1984, 174; translation modified). Crucially, this is a practice Aristotle refuses to denigrate. He accepts such non-intellectual use of music as part of what music is. Diagōgē, by contrast, is an elevated practice. Aristotle claims it is intellectual by nature, and has no particular function within the economy. It is a term Aristotle’s translators have struggled to render into English, adopting variously “intellectual pastime,” “entertainment,” “conduct,” and “way of life.” None of these captures the meaning perfectly, for what Aristotle aims at is something leisurely, cultivated, and available to the free class of citizens (not slaves), but without purpose, existing as an end in itself. The best definition may be akin to the modern concept of the liberal arts. As Aristotle describes it: “there is a kind of education which should be given to our sons not because it is practically useful or necessary, but because it is liberal and good” (Aristotle 1984, 172). His example of such diagōgē is Homeric poetry. This is an early version of what eventually will be called aesthetic autonomy, though, in this ancient context, it is striking that Aristotle’s description of autonomy is heavily sociological; and that his sociology is adamantly based in hierarchical divisions between free citizens and slaves, and between men and women. For the intellectual benefit of diagōgē would, ultimately, only be available to those for whom such freedom was appropriate and socially acceptable—a small class of free men. Finally, there is the famous theory of catharsis. In contrast to the lifelong work of ēthos on the soul, catharsis is music associated with a peak of dramatic intensity, enacting a relatively quick “purgation” or “purification” of emotion. Aristotle writes: “The most moral harmoniai should be used for education, while the most invigorating and inspirational

Society   865 ones should be used when we listen to other people performing” (Aristotle 1984, 180). As Aristotle describes it in the Poetics, an exemplary instance occurs in a narrative context— say, a tragedy—through a complex mixture of pity and fear in reaction to the events that befall a character on stage. In the Politics, Aristotle states that music would be integral to such an experience, but either missing or unfinished is any developed explanation linking music’s relationship to catharsis to the broader socio-ethical vision of the value of the arts as ēthos, paidia, and diagōgē. These three theories (with catharsis) form the key tripartition of Aristotle’s writings on music, each of which is dependent upon a generalized principle of imitation, deployed with the aim of a social good. If Plato used mimesis to impose judgements about the arts from above, Aristotle plays the part of an even-handed sociologist, categorizing the already-existing work of music in society. He applies the logic of imitation to general principles for how it might be used and developed to improve society, to purge one’s pent-up emotions, let one unwind and loosen up, and to allow certain individuals within society to seek a somewhat abstracted form of intellectual pleasure.

Rousseau Rousseau’s writings on music and society follow somewhat continuously from a discussion of Plato and Aristotle, for Greek philosophy was a significant influence on his musical writings. Rousseau, like the Greeks, had a deeply imitative theory of music. Yet instead of strong Platonic codes of prohibition or Aristotle’s loosely categorical assessments of music’s social effects, Rousseau proposed a complex historical and practically grounded link between musical imitation and the social world. In his famous polemic with Jean-Philippe Rameau, Rousseau argued that a modern theory of music should not depoliticize or de-emotionalize musical expression by way of a “materialist” science (which he associated with Rameau’s rational approach to harmony). Rather, it should bring these social powers to life by remaining true to the oral, melodic, and expressive origins of music. By comparison with the Greeks, Rousseau proposed that mimetic relationships between music and society worked at a higher degree of detail. I suspect this is partly due to historical reasons: Rousseau’s musical expertise far exceeded that of Plato’s and Aristotle’s. He worked as a music copyist for much of his career, and became a composer of some renown, writing seven operas, one of which—Le Devin du village (1752)— became something of a transnational hit. Thus, his theory of music went beyond the ēthos doctrine of the Greeks to discuss the ways in which music could simulate the perception of specific objects. As he put it: “the musician’s art consists in substituting for the imperceptible image of the object that of the movements that its presence excites in the art of the contemplator.” To modern ears, examples of the presence of these signifying “movements” are specific enough to be proto-cinematic: “Not only will it agitate the sea, fan the flames of a blaze, make streams run, rain fall, and torrents swell, but it will depict

866   Michael Gallope the horror of a frightful desert, darken the walls of an underground dungeon, calm a tempest, make the air tranquil and clear, and spread from the orchestra a renewed freshness over the groves.” Finally, Rousseau claims that music “will not represent these things directly, but will awaken the same feelings in the soul that are experienced in seeing them” (Rousseau 1998, 327). In accordance with the loose outlines of the ēthos doctrine, music is here transformed from a taxonomy of generic resemblances (say, between a single mode and a correlated social effect) into a modernized painterly mimesis (“as signs of our affections”). For Rousseau, whose thinking was influenced by the naturalism of Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza, this musical mimesis emerges during a long process of cultural evolution as the instinctive gestures and passionate cries gradually develop into to the more nuanced articulations of language: Along with the first voices were formed the first articulations or the first sounds, depending on the kind of passion that dictated the one or the other. Anger wrests menacing cries which the tongue and the palate articulate; but the voice of tenderness is gentler, it is the glottis that modifies it, and this voice becomes a sound. Only its accents are more or less frequent, its inflections more or less acute depending on the feeling that is joined to them. Thus cadence and sounds arise along with syllables, passion makes all the vocal organs speak, and adorns the voice with all their brilliance; thus verses, songs, and speech have a common origin. (Rousseau 1998, 317–318)

The voice cries out; the mouth transforms the passionate gestures of anger and tenderness into accented rhythms and sounds. In the course of such a development, an imitative relationship to archaic gestures undergirds the historical possibility of more sophisticated articulations, music included. Sung melodies imitate the cadences, rhythm, and accents of spoken language. And both music and language remain connected by “vocal signs of the passions,” which in turn contribute to the education and “movements” of one’s soul (Rousseau 1998, 322). Such originary articulations in sound were inseparable from the larger phenomenon of social order, which, in Rousseau’s view, was originally established not by written laws or by the powers of reason, but by aesthetic practices (see Rousseau  1964, 133). As Rousseau described it: “The first stories, the first languages, and the first laws were in verse; poetry was discovered before prose; this had to be so, since the passions spoke before reason. The same was so for music” (Rousseau 1998, 318). That is, if the Greeks thought of mimesis as harbouring more or less eternal social and moral properties, Rousseau, writing from the point of view of the eighteenth century, understands mimesis to provide a historically and culturally differentiated foundation for morality and politics. By way of example, he conjectured that the natural plenitude of the “South” created a situation in which needs arose from passions (embodied by what he imagined to be their first phrase, “Aimez-moi [love me]”). By contrast, the scarcity and harsh climate of the “North” led to the opposite effect: passions arose from more immediate needs (embodied by the primordial phrase “Aidez-moi [help me]”).

Society   867 The arts, in this context, functioned as a kind of socially contingent paidia. As Rousseau puts it in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse): “People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle and assembled men and women” (Rousseau 1964, 149). In these societies, passionate emotions come out of a desire for political and social togetherness that was more historically developed than the simple need to survive and reproduce, which, shorn of empathy and expressive culture, would have kept people dispersed geographically. With respect to the South, Rousseau writes of the socially magnetic power of art: Beneath aged oaks, conquerors of years, an ardent youth gradually forgot its ferocity, gradually they tamed one another; through endeavoring to make themselves understood, they learned to explain themselves. There the first festivals took place, feet leaped with joy, eager gesture no longer sufficed, the voice accompanied it with passionate accents; mingled together, pleasure and desire made themselves felt at the same time.  (Rousseau 1998, 314)

Applying these ideas to the modern world, however, is no simple task. Over historical time, this natural social order of passions is increasingly subject to the rule of reason. This puts Rousseau in an openly nostalgic position regarding the social powers of the arts. With respect to rhetoric, he writes: “In ancient times, when persuasion took the place of public force, eloquence was necessary . . . Among the ancients it was easy to make oneself heard by the people in the public square.” (Rousseau  1998, 331). Now, Rousseau laments, in 1754, modern politics is ruled by reason, money, and military power, and the like. In his typically proto-Romantic yearning for the delicate balance of premodern man and his natural instincts, Rousseau longs for a society built around the magnetism of the sermon. Music, too, would be structurally intrinsic to the order and impact of such laws.

Du Bois American philosopher and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois extends music’s association with passion and empathy still further, but moves beyond an imitative conception of music and society. His topic is the post-Reconstruction-era American South. In Du Bois’s writings, one can discern the threads of a new kind of explanatory proposal about the power of music. In The Souls of Black Folk, originally published in 1903, Du Bois describes American spirituals from the South as inducing a haunting experience that is not selfevident or functional in its social effects. In spirituals, he hears an obscure message from generations of silenced black slaves—all of whom worked in the same socio-economic class rendered incapable of intellectual reflection by Aristotle:

868   Michael Gallope before each thought in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.  (Du Bois 1989, 204)

A paradox to be sure. How does one apprentice oneself to a musical tradition that one does not recognize or even understand, but still feels like one’s own? It implies a link between music and society that goes beyond the traditional conception of imitation one finds in Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau; it is no longer a question of a functional relationship, or of music triggering a specific social effect. It is now a question of latent content, one that is specifically musical. A historical secret is encoded in the impact of the songs. What are these songs and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. (Du Bois 1989, 206–207)

To receive this message, one does not have to understand the positive mimesis of a specific musical sign (as one would for Rousseau); rather, the message arrives in a way that is imprecise with respect to specific musical features. Du Bois is after a mode of interpretative and explanatory attunement that eludes technical grasp because it is mediated by something that is at once socially-grounded and ineffable: a “veil” marking difference in the American racial imagination. Du Bois’s veil denotes a visible mark of black skin and a complex axis of social imagination structured by race. It challenges Euro-Western enlightenment values of self-knowledge and freedom, for it marks an opacity that is interposed between whites’ experiences of African Americans, African Americans’ experience of whites, and African Americans’ self-experience through the lens of whites (producing what Du Bois calls “double-consciousness”). It implies at once a secretive, non-mimetic form of knowledge, a marker of otherness, and a barrier to Westernized human universality. Beneath the veil, one’s self-knowledge is structured paradoxically by forms of material subjugation and exceptional insight. In music, the veil discloses itself obscurely, non-mimetically, with a strange duality of emotional impact: They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.  (Du Bois 1989, 207)

There is no one imitative effect of the African American spiritual; it is joyous and heartwrenching at once. Its impact is a strange cipher, an “unvoiced longing” filled with “misty

Society   869 wanderings and hidden ways.” As Du Bois says slightly later: “[A] strange blending of love and helplessness sings through the refrain” (Du Bois 1989, 211). There is no musical sign or harmonia for this experience; it will frustrate any Platonic attempt to draw mimetic correlations between musical form and social effects. Instead, it is an inscrutable trace of hope, a messianic theology, oriented towards the goal of racial justice: Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.  (Du Bois 1989, 213–214)

The condition for such a revelation was the sorrow songs’ synthesis of African musical traditions and elements of Protestant hymnody. For Du Bois, these hymns were canvases of sound, transfigured into a medium for dissent. He describes the music as consisting of minimal couplets in language in a religious context that was more or less conventional: “The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody” (Du Bois 1989, 210). Their significance came to life in the subversive transfiguration of a standardized social and theological function. When saturated with affective force, spirituals acquired a specific kind of black historicity that spoke dissent obliquely and strangely, in a coded protest against the ­barbaric economy of American civilization. And this historicity was not in the words; it was in the music, and emerged through a process that had its origins in African oral traditions: The songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development . . . The child sang [an African song] to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.  (Du Bois 1989, 207)

By comparison with the precise aims of words like denote, define, and indicate, Du Bois’s use of the English word “meaning” can be diffuse and connotative, suggestive and atmospheric, making it an apt term to describe the aqueous and non-mimetic significance of music. Du Bois asks his reader to listen to this African song, a song made of words whose definitions have been similarly lost amidst generations of displacement. This effect traffics in a metaphysical complexity that is built upon an ineffable abstraction, an “unknown tongue” whose historicity can be felt but not communicated in a positive sense. There is a play of presence and absence that echoes the opaque experience of blackness behind the veil, and remains askew of any conformity to the melos doctrine. This is music as a code, a code without a clear language.

870   Michael Gallope In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment. Once in a while we catch a strange world of an unknown tongue, as the “Mighty Myo,” which figures as a river of death; more often slight words or mere doggerel are joined to music of singular sweetness.  (Du Bois 1989, 210)

This passage ends, again, with a scrambling of the mimesis of the melos doctrine where sweet music is joined to the conventionality of “slight words or mere doggerel.” What is spoken to us, obscurely, in a “half articulate” veiled language, is an absent past. Slaves were violently expropriated, dehumanized into property, physically and psychologically tortured, and silenced as they were forced into labour in the name of economic development. From the perspective of Euro-Western historiography, Afro-diasporic social history was correspondingly often excluded from visibility and audibility. Alternatively, black historicity, for Du Bois, is significantly carried by the collective work of affective recollection. In his view, African American spirituals carry the weight of a social memory that does not survive as linguistic testimony; the sorrow songs carry a form of expression that in many ways remains opaque. Music then becomes a coded—but affectively charged—medium for sensing a historical violence, as well as the promise for justice, no matter how obscure.

Adorno and Attali Du Bois’s association of music and the promise of justice presaged an important theme in philosophical accounts of music in the twentieth century. While much serves to distinguish their respective visions of social justice, it is instructive to note that the Frankfurt School critic, Theodor Adorno, like Du Bois (both of whom were, incidentally, careful readers of Hegel and Marx), conceived of music’s significance for society in terms of an obscure, non-mimetic code. For Adorno, the mimesis Rousseau and the Greeks spoke of had become reified in late modernity—transformed into fixed and repeatable formulas and abstractions. This process was set in motion by “the culture industry,” a vast commercial operation roaring by mid-century that was fuelled by the powers of electricity, mechanical reproduction, and the profit motive. At one with a broader reification of modern life, for Adorno, we might say that Aristotle’s paidia and Rousseau’s “signs of the affections” were thus administratively infused into the nervous systems of society, and externalized simultaneously into the numbing threat of Fascist politics and the mass sedative of the entertainment business. In his essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno writes that a consumer’s experience of popular culture is entirely standardized, and that all choices are consequently false ones, dissociated into a mist of culinary particulars. Though he does still acknowledge that our actions to choose music are marginally free (“[consumers] desire a deception that is nonetheless

Society   871 transparent to them”), there is only the most ephemeral glimmer of choice (“a system almost without a gap”), before all freedom is ultimately closed down (Adorno 1975, 16). Preserving that moment of freedom, of course, is the culture industry’s greatest victory; it does not determine all choices, it merely standardizes the menu. For Adorno, the situation mid-century is no less bleak for intellectually minded music, which in the case of integral serialism had systematized its compositional methods to the point of leaving all traces of expression behind. At the hands of modern industry, the once separate spheres of Aristotle’s paidia and diagōgē were thrust together into the fire of modernity. For Adorno, popular art, modern-day paidia, “perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it” and modern-day intellectual art, or diagōgē “is destroyed in speculation about is efficacy” in the form of an elite and inaccessible avant-garde (Adorno 1975, 12). The only way forward was a narrow path of artistic resistance that managed to fracture the normative rules of musical creativity. Thinking comparatively, we might say that for Adorno, an ethical link between music and society requires a critical and negative diagōgē capable of revealing the ideological, deadening character of mass-standardization. It does this by adopting a narrow, high modernist and Euro-Western path for resistance that “is accompanied by the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form” (Adorno 2002, 127). Then it could reveal a latent and encoded secret about social life, a form of what he called Wahrheitsgehalt, or truth content. The Marxist backbone of Adorno’s thought posited that elements of the ­superstructure—culture, institutions, beliefs, and ideas—reflected elements of the economic base. As such, Adorno claimed that music was a coded cipher of society, one that reflected, with a degree of abstraction, the social world. As he memorably put it, music is “a mysterious sundial from whose face one imagines one can read the state of consciousness, without, oneself, any longer having power over it” (Adorno 2002a, 128–129). For Adorno, it was not enough to stage a protest that cast this encoded shadow of society in positive terms. A resistant music had to cast a shadow with a negative code in a way that would expose the ideological character of musical conventions, while maintaining the unified integrity of an autonomous work. Adorno’s resistant exemplars were European and largely drawn from the early atonality of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) because their music made the exhaustion of Western tonality explicit and inconsumable while still retaining expressive remnants of nineteenth-century Romanticism. The music showed that things could be otherwise by encoding—in the abstracted and conventional script of music—a sense of social discontent and alienation. Adorno’s utopian music, unlike that proposed by the Greeks and further developed by Rousseau, was no longer primarily mimetic. In a way that echoes Du Bois’s account of the conventional forms of Christian theology, much of the mimesis that remained was deeply encoded into the reified object of the work. In the late 1970s, Jacques Attali, a young French economist influenced in part by Adorno, schematized this dialectical view of music and society into a Marxist analysis of “the political economy of music.” In line with Adorno, Attali claimed that music was an abstracted code that could serve as an obscure mirror of society. He likewise echoed

872   Michael Gallope Adorno’s bleak diagnosis of the era of mass media through his famous concept of “repeating” (Attali 1985, 87–132). Attali was, however, no simple parrot of Adorno’s positions. One of his signature disagreements with Adorno would be the criteria for dissent. If Adorno had very little hope in the powers of jazz and popular music to resist the reified character of modern life, Attali saw in black free jazz of the 1960s and 1970s a re­sist­ ant musical practice he called “composing” that tapped quite directly into a practice of sonic dissent. (In the chapter entitled “composing,” Attali celebrates DIY economies, self-taught musical practices, collective composition, and the recuperation of pleasure and the body in playing instruments). For Attali, these methods harboured the potential to resist the powers of the profit-driven record industry, which tended towards stand­ ard­iz­ a­tion, both in musical form and in social effect.

Global Inconsistencies The modern encodings proposed by Du Bois, Adorno, and Attali may seem to be toying with a philosophical theory of music and society that is speculative, fanciful, and loose. Certainly, their theories are more abstract than the mimetic links between music and society posited by Rousseau and the Greeks. As I claimed at the outset of this chapter, however, none of these philosophers aim to offer an empirical or sociological account of music. Rather, they seek to explain the significance of music to society in terms of collective desires that can often operate without commentary or self-consciousness, and that cannot be reduced to the positively verifiable work of individual agents. This is most explicitly the case for Du Bois, who is writing about a cultural history that was often denigrated as noise, as black slaves were systematically dehumanized, their expressive forms ignored, othered, or silenced from the perspective of Euro-Western historical accounts. But it is also true of Adorno and Attali who are similarly seeking to explain the social, ethical, and political significance of music in a way that takes account of music’s affective and unconscious registers. In each case, musical affects can easily pass through society in ways that remain unspoken or un-thought. It is my hope that this difficulty of correlation—something I have elsewhere (Gallope 2017) referred to as the befuddling challenge of music’s ineffability—would be cause for further collaboration between social and historical research and philosophical argumentation. To draw on just one set of recent examples, arguments about coded forms of resistance in music have helped a whole generation of scholars in cultural studies to come to terms with the explosion of new developments in popular music during an era of urban decline in American cities of the 1970s and 1980s. Tricia Rose (1994), for example, has formulated an influential view of the way the black-invented forms of hip-hop were coded symptoms of post-industrial unemployment and a pervasive sense of social discontent in the South Bronx. Dick Hebdige ([1979] 2012) told a similar story about the stylistic complexity and non-normative semiosis of punk rock. For Robert Walser (1993), heavy metal reproduced and transfigured a complex set of discourses and

Society   873 i­deologies that circulated among white, working-class fans. Ever-evolving genres and subgenres of queer music making have only added to this sense that music is an apt, but indirect, vehicle for social resistance, one that invites searching explanations as to their exact mode of empowerment (cf. Peraino 2006; Muñoz 2009; Hubbs 2014). Notwithstanding vast historical distances, Plato and Aristotle’s writings on music may be surprisingly relevant to modern case studies. Aristotle’s contention that music was holistically linked to the education of youth was echoed and formalized in German Enlightenment discourse about Bildung, and lives on in claims about the intangible value of music education. Modern paidia, for its part, has acquired an astounding sense of poetic complexity far beyond what Aristotle could have imagined in his injunction that citizens “occupy leisure well.” In the concert sphere of Western culture, twenty-firstcentury diagōgē continues to be nourished by a material system that carves out spaces of potential opposition to the market-driven norms of the culture industry—philanthropy and patronage, academic institutions, independent music labels, museums and cultural centres, and festivals underwritten by corporations or governments—all of which ostensibly ensure a domain of creative freedom once associated with the liberal arts. The debate over the possibility and authenticity of non-normative resistance within and outside these organizations continues to thrive in questions about the cultural politics of new music and the Euro-Western canon (Fink 1998; Berger 2014). But in other ways, the multifarious terrain of global popular music confounds any easy comparative gestures. One of the central questions one confronts when seeking to interpret and explain popular music is the significance of how powerfully and overwhelmingly the planet has come to be dominated by Afro-diasporic musical forms. And indeed, the axis of race powerfully complicates any easy extensions of the principles of mimesis and coding. We can recall, for example, that the testimonial power of Du Bois’s sorrow songs in the nineteenth century were coded responses to dehumanization, suffering, and silencing. We might also ask: What was the fate of Du Bois’s veil once the culture industry was recording, imitating, stealing, and disseminating black musical forms at mid-century? In Du Bois’s wake, an influential tradition of twentieth-century black theorists and historians (Amiri Baraka, Paul Gilroy, and Fred Moten, among many others) have extended his logic of the veil to argue that Afro-diasporic musical traditions mirror deep and complex social histories that are inassimilable to the whiteness of Euro-Western metanarratives (cf. Jones 1999; Gilroy 1993; Moten 2003). Moten, in a fascinating twist, powerfully transfigures Adornian thinking, in his work on the meaning and significance of Afro-modernist diagōgē. In his writings on figures like Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton, Moten (2016) elaborates upon Adorno’s negative fracture of a musical code based in inherited musical techniques, while maintaining a basis in a specifically black conception of historicity. His work thus provides resources for a more inclusive practice of “coded” immanent critique, attuned to the historical specificity of the black avant-garde, while upending the Euro-Western whiteness of Adorno’s criteria for a coded form of social dissent in music. It is instructive to note that exactly the popular music that Adorno would react to with such withering fear and paranoia (syncopations as false musical problems, or

874   Michael Gallope improvisation as a form of false resistance to the culture industry, all built upon the profitability of black musical forms) may, in Moten’s work, be taken as material for coded fractures—as racialized forms of dissent with modes of historicity that were distinctly not Euro-Western. Moten, notably, is hardly alone in providing correctives to the European models of modernist historicity. In a similar tracing of the interwoven possibilities of musical collaboration and disagreement, inclusion and exclusion, idealization and nostalgia, Jairo Moreno, for example, has traced a distinctly modern “tense and dynamic syncopation” of Latin Jazz at mid-century through the collaborative practices of Mario Bauzá and Dizzy Gillespie (Moreno 2004). In my collaborative essay with Carolyn Abbate on the topic of the ineffable (Abbate and Gallope, “The Ineffable (and Beyond),” ch. 36, this volume), we critique Adorno’s tendency to become overly reliant on a resistant code that, in its most idealized and conservative form, becomes little more than a routine analogy that claims to stage dissent against reification. By contrast, in our view, attending to the porous and ineffable materiality of music can lead one to eschew easy links of imitation or coding, and facilitate a certain kind of philosophical sobriety about the actual social potentials of music. We further argue that such sobriety could have an important political upshot: loosening commitments to axiomatic links like imitation and coding might help better attune our ears to the philosophical significance of countless hybrids in a wide array of global vernaculars. Consider just a few examples in closing. The four-to-the-floor beats in a wide range of global hip-hop and house music, for example, carry a powerful mimetic sexual charge. But is their resistant potential erased by the commercial efficacy of mimesis as Adorno and Attali might claim? The profit motive is undeniably a powerful force in the production of modern music (although arguably less so in the age of streaming audio), but if one thinks of it as an exhaustive determinant, one risks becoming categorically suspicious (or dismissive) of large swaths of the world’s musical creativity. A simmering practice of footwork house music in the south side of Chicago is a case in point (see Glasspiegel 2014). It features consumable beats (which are openly mimetic, encouraging participants to dance competitively), but in ways that often build to a bracing sense of rhythmic complexity and asymmetry—paidia fractured into Afro-diasporic diagōgē. Footwork, while being mimetic, thus, could be taken as hypermodern, and embody a critical sense of its own predicament by containing abstracted forms of resistance—­ particularly for those who are silenced or sidelined in normative societies, as Du Bois has argued was the case for the slaves of the African diaspora. Regarding the social value of the increasingly global genre of punk rock, Lester Bangs put it so memorably: “The point is that rock n’ roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it’s true, anybody can do it” (DeRogatis 2008, 136). Yet what might superficially appear to be the most un-Adornian of resistances, a noisy populism shorn of diagōgē, might be read ironically as somewhat Adornian. Rife with negative energy, punk abstracts the conventions of rock music into a raucous form of protest that ranges widely across the political spectrum. There is queer punk, straightedge punk, anti-racist punk, socialist punk, Nazi punk. The sheer negativity of the genre asks listeners to consider the mimesis of the emotional effect as something that has lost

Society   875 its original appeal, and is subject to something of a noisy breakdown of convention and a release of latent negativity. In this way, the mimetic paidia of a vernacular genre may be understood to transform and encode meaning from within. But what the politics is remains quite indeterminate. Celebrity modernists of the twenty-first century have their own way of engaging these philosophical themes. Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, for example, write music for the Top 40, but seek to make arguments in their songs that are comparatively abstract and non-normative and contain both mimetic effects and encoded meanings that adopt and distort conventions. Lorde’s 2013 single “Royals” pairs an expertly crafted minimalist arrangement with lyrics that confront culture industry myths about fantasies of celebrity consumption. Lana Del Rey’s recordings create a unique and puzzling mixture of fragile authenticity and structured artifice that resists intellectual comprehension because it is delivered in the form of seductive paidia—beautifully lush string arrangements, languid trip-hop beats, and a hypnotizing vocal performance. Even in the more standardized annals of the hit parade, philosophical perplexities abound: there are innumerable inversions of the melos doctrine, scrambling of mimetic codes of ēthos, music that is as uplifting as it is transgressive, and simulations of catharsis in contexts that are within single songs (rather than within dramatic narratives, as they were for Aristotle). Adorno on occasion acknowledged the challenge of interpreting music’s social grammar, with statements such as: “What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed.” (Adorno 2002b, 114). Because of this perplexing ambiguity—that music seems at the same time formally transparent and opaque in its meaning—as soon as one starts discussing what music does (or means) to society, one usually wants to know how exactly the music does that work. And, as was the case for Plato and Aristotle, answers are rarely very easy to pin down. Perhaps we can take this as a sign that the criteria for resistance will forever remain productively unclear—resistant to convenient ­analogies—and that this openness and instability has political relevance. Not knowing what is at work is not a naïve affirmation of music’s universal language of global grooves; it is an indication of Moreno’s “tense and dynamic syncopation” that is internal to music’s relentlessly shifting and overlapping forms, infused as they are with affective intensity. The imprecise powers of music that Aristotle took to be essential to the education of the soul may be equally obscure in their powers to imitate and encode social life. Listening carefully to music’s ambiguous ontology might be step one in developing more inclusive approaches to the relationship between music and society. And in the twenty-first century, in which it is increasingly of interest to scholars to understand the social value of music in all its complexity, philosophy may serve as a conceptual nexus for an expanded interdisciplinary conversation.

Note 1. Plato, Republic, 424d–e. The translation of the opening sentence (“by gradual infiltration…”) is taken from that of Paul Shorey in Plato 1969. I have left ethē transliterated from the Greek as it refers back to the ēthos doctrine described earlier. The translation of “From there it disembarks enlarged…” is slightly modified from that of Andrew Barker in Plato 1984.

876   Michael Gallope

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 1975. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered.” Translated by Anson G. Rabinbach. New German Critique 6 (Autumn): 12–19. Adorno, Theodor. 2002a. “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan  H.  Gillespie, 127–134. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor. 2002b. “Music, Language, Composition.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan  H.  Gillespie, 113–126. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Aristotle. 1984. The Politics. In Greek Musical Writings, Vol. 1, The Musician and His Art, edited by Andrew Barker, 170–182. Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Attali, Jacques. 1985. “Repeating.” In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, translated by Brian Massumi, 87–132. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berger, Karol. 2014. “The Ends of Music History, or The Old Masters in the Supermarket of Cultures.” Journal of Musicology 31, no. 2 (Spring): 186–198. De Nora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeRogatis, Jim. 2008. Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic. New York: Random House. Drott, Eric. 2015. “Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 4 (Summer): 721–756. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1989. The Souls of Black Folk. London: Penguin Classics. Fink, Robert. 1998. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” American Music 16, no. 2 (Summer): 135–179. Gallope, Michael. 2017. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glasspiegel, William. 2014. “Footwork: 10 Essential Tracks.” Pitchfork.com, April 26, 2014. Accessed May 16, 2015. http://pitchfork.com/features/starter/9444-footwork/. Hebdige, Dick. [1979] 2012. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hubbs, Nadine. 2014. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jones, LeRoi (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka). 1999. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Harper Collins. Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary. 1987. “Introduction” to Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, xi–xix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippman, Edward. 1992. “The Sociology of Music.” In A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 470–510. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Moreno, Jairo. 2004. “Bauzá–Gillespie–Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 1 (Winter): 81–99. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: Towards an Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Society   877 Moten, Fred. 2016. “Jurisgenerative Grammar (for Alto).” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies vol. 1, edited by George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 128–42. New York: Oxford University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press. Murray, Penelope, and Peter Wilson, eds. 2004. Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousikē’ in the Classical Athenian City. New York: Oxford University Press. Peraino, Judith. 2006 Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Plato. 1984. Republic. In Greek Musical Writings, Vol. 1, The Musician and His Art, edited by Andrew Barker, 124–169. Cambridge Readings in the Literature of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1969. Republic. In Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6, edited by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. The First and Second Discourses. Edited with introduction and notes by Roger D. Masters. Translated by Judith R. Masters. New York: St Martin’s Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 7. Translated and edited by John T. Scott. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Simon, Julia. 2013. Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. West, M. L. 1992. Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 43

Space Andrew Kania

Space is such a general feature of the world and our experience of it that spatial concepts get applied in a wide range of ways to almost any subject one can think of, music being no exception. But music is often said to be a paradigmatically temporal art (Levinson and Alperson 1991), with the result that the application of spatial concepts to music is often taken to be merely figurative. In this essay, I investigate a variety of ways in which music might be thought to be essentially spatial in relatively literal ways. I begin by considering whether certain spaces or spatial features are essential to musical works or performances. I then consider spaces “within” music, paying special attention to the notion of “pitch space”—the space in which we experience musical tones as higher or lower than one another and melodic lines as moving.1 My main conclusion with respect to the first issue is that there is a distinction between (1) musical works and performances to which spaces are essential because they affect the sonic properties and thus aural experience of those works or performances (what I will call “acoustically spatial” music), and (2) musical works and performances to which spaces are essential for other reasons, most notably because audiences must be aware of spatial properties of the performance, for instance the spatial arrangement of the performers, independently of their sonic or aural effects (what I will call “conceptually spatial” music). This distinction is worth drawing to the extent that we think of music as primarily a sonic or aural art. There has recently been philosophical and musicological resistance to the notion of “pure” or “absolute” music (for example, Ridley 2004), usually motivated by the assumption that to classify some music as such is to privilege it over other musical forms. (See Bonds 2014 and Bonds et al. 2017 for discussion of the long and complicated history of the rise of this view within musical aesthetics.) Nonetheless, some such distinction between the medium of (pure) music and other artistic media seems essential for understanding forms of music such as song, programme music, ballet, film, and musical theatre—clearly artistic hybrids in some sense—even if it turns out that there are no actual examples of absolutely pure music. For instance, is it merely a contingent matter of linguistic history that we (typically) call songs “music” but not “poetry,” or that we don’t call films “music” even though in many films music plays almost constantly? It seems unlikely that we could answer such questions without

880   Andrew Kania adverting implicitly or explicitly to the notion of (pure) music as a component or aspect of these art forms. With respect to spatial features, I assume it is obvious that, for example, musical theatre is essentially spatial. You couldn’t have a (complete) performance of a theatrical work without some spatial arrangement of performers. The interesting question, then, is whether musical works that are not ordinarily thought of as theatrical can be essentially spatial in some respect. (For further discussion, see Karl and Robinson 2015, 26–29; Kania 2020, 12–24, et passim.) I should emphasize, in light of the resistance to the notion of pure music, that no evaluative conclusion about music (for example, formalism about musical value) follows from such a distinction; nor does the distinction by itself tell us anything about the nature of the medium of music, including whether any kind of spatiality is essential to it. So we can, for the most part, set to one side the question of the nature of the musical medium. My main conclusion with respect to the second issue (of spaces “within” music), however, is that if one particular theory of pitch space is correct, then imagined spatial experience may be central to at least Western music, including purely instrumental music.

Compositional Spaces One quite general and widely held view in philosophy of the arts (and musicology) is that the context of creation of an artwork is essential to its identity and hence often affects its aesthetic and artistic properties. (Classic philosophical sources include Currie 1989; Levinson 1980; Danto 1981; and D. Davies 2004; for dissent, see Dodd 2007.) The space in which a musical work is composed would seem to be part of that context, and hence essential to the work’s identity. But the kind of “space” relevant here is a social, historical, cultural, or political location, rather than a wholly objective physical or topological location. Hence “place” may be a more natural term for this concept. For instance, the physical or geographical locations of Shostakovich and the Soviet Union are presumably less relevant to the sense of exhausted resignation at the end of his String Quartet No. 8 than the composer’s social, historical, cultural, and political context. Much more could be said about this issue, but if our focus is on physical locations—spaces, as opposed to places—then those most plausibly linked essentially to musical works are not those at which, but rather those for which they are composed, that is, performance spaces.

Performance Spaces Works Composed for Particular Spaces Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed works of twentieth-century classical music, was written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral built to replace the fourteenth-century cathedral destroyed in the

Space   881 Second World War. Arguably a pacifist requiem, it interpolates Wilfred Owen’s poetry into the Catholic Requiem Mass. The location of the first performance undeniably contributed to its impact, as did its ritual function and the “casting” of the three solo ­singers—English tenor Peter Pears, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya—to represent the three major powers involved in the war. But note that, again, the importance of Coventry Cathedral here largely depends upon its cultural and historical identity rather than its physical or geographical location. Anyway, there have been many other performances of the War Requiem, as Britten clearly intended, in other venues, and by performers of various nationalities. Indeed, even at the premiere, the soprano part was sung by Heather Harper, a British vocalist, since at the last moment Vishnevskaya was denied permission to travel by the Soviet authorities (Cooke 1996). Some performances attempt to recapture something of the spirit of the premiere. For example, John Eliot Gardiner’s 1992 recording in St Marienkirche, Lübeck, is “dedicated to the victims of war in former Yugoslavia,” and featured an image of “Ruined bells in the Marienkirche” on the cover.2 But there are many performances in ordinary concert halls. Indeed, this is surely the most common setting in which the work is performed, and there seems to be no reason to think it detracts one whit from these performances’ being (fully authentic) performances of Britten’s work (Kivy 1995, 91–92). The venue of the premiere, like the nationalities of the male soloists, may have contributed expressive and other properties to that performance, but these are not essential to the work. The polychoral music of the Venetian School of composers (particularly Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) may be a similar kind of case, though I will consider an alternative interpretation of these works below. The San Marco basilica, where these composers were music masters, possesses several spatially separated choir lofts, which seems to have inspired experiments in passing musical material back and forth between groups of performers situated in the various lofts. But while, unlike the case of Coventry Cathedral, it seems to be physical rather than cultural features of the space that are relevant to understanding the genesis of significant features of this music, the Gabrielis’ works, like the War Requiem, are regularly performed all over the world. Though it is common to spatially separate the groups of performers, this is by no means necessary; one hears the separation in the music, even if the groups perform side by side or even intermingled. (For a dissenting view, see S. Davies 1987, 41.)

Works Composed for Kinds of Spaces If a particular performance space is rarely, if ever, essential to a (non-hybrid) musical work, most musical works are surely composed for particular kinds of performance spaces. Bach’s cantatas were composed for performance in churches (and, moreover, for performance in a liturgical setting). Mahler’s symphonies were written for performance in concert halls. Are such location-kinds essential to these works? There is a growing consensus that the artistic content of many musical works cannot be separated from the

882   Andrew Kania quite particular kinds of sounds mandated by their composers, usually via instrumentation in a score. (For overviews of this debate over authenticity, see Thom 2011 and Dodd and Irving, “Authenticity,” ch. 45, this volume.) And some argue, further, that the way in which these sounds are produced is similarly essential to a proper performance of such works (Levinson 1990;  2002). Either way, due to the complex nature of sounds (for example, Casati and Dokic 2014), and the reasonable expectations of composers that their works would be performed in certain kinds of venues, it’s not obvious that the sound in question is simply that of a particular kind or combination of instruments, rather than that of those instruments in an acoustic environment of a certain sort. If these arguments are correct, then to perform in a dry setting (such as a community hall) a choral work written for performance in a richly reverberant acoustic (such as a large church) is as inauthentic as performing a Brandenburg Concerto on modern instruments (S. Davies 2001, 214–216). Call such works acoustically spatial. These considerations would also apply to the works discussed in the previous subsection. But notice that they apply even more strongly to the music of the composers of the Venetian School if, as Lydia Goehr (2007) argues, their compositional practices predate the work concept. If the practice of such composers was one of producing not works for multiple performance but rather singular “performance-works” (D.  Davies  2011, 19), then it is even more plausible that the particular location of each such work would determine certain aesthetic properties of it, just as the physical context of a site-specific installation more plausibly affects its aesthetic properties than that of a traditional, “portable” sculpture does. Nor should we forget that historically-informed performance practice is a matter not just of playing the right kinds of instruments in the right kinds of spaces, but also of doing so in the right kind of style—and in many cases these styles have developed in response to, or symbiotically with, the kinds of performance environments commonly used. So, for instance, the vocal techniques of both classical opera and Polynesian ensemble-singing have developed in part to maximize projection—in the one case to enable singers to rise above a full orchestra in a certain kind of architectural venue, in the other to enable a full sound in an outdoor acoustic (Grylls 2012, 178).

Spaces Within Musical Performances While works originally written for performance in San Marco may be contentious cases, many works uncontroversially require a certain spatial disposition of performers or ensembles. In the score of his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for instance, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1921, 2) asks that the second string orchestra “should, if possible, be placed apart from the First Orchestra.” (For simplicity, I ignore the diffidence of Vaughan Williams’s wording here, and treat this arrangement of the performers as mandated by the score.) This spatial separation may be “acoustic” in the sense just glossed (i.e., intended to have a purely auditory effect), aiding the listener’s ability to distinguish

Space   883 v­ arious musical elements from one another. But very often such spatial separation of musical forces makes an additional contribution to some aspect of the work’s meaning. The War Requiem, for instance, requires spatial separation between its three major ensembles partly for thematic reasons: The tenor and baritone soloists together with the chamber orchestra represent the combatants, the chamber organ and boy choir represent a traditional religious approach to war and death, and the symphony orchestra with chorus and soprano soloist provide a kind of choric commentary utilizing the traditional Requiem Mass text. Call such works conceptually spatial. (If you think there is such a thing as pure music, then it is an interesting question whether it is, or can be, conceptually spatial.) One spatial technique notable for its frequency is the use of offstage instruments in concert-hall works. The immediate sonic effect is a kind of muting, but because the absence of a performer is so unusual, there is usually an additional higher-order effect, having to do with some kind of metaphorical absence or distance. For instance, in Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, the offstage string ensemble represents “The Silences of the  Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing” (Ives 1953, 2); the per­ formers’ absence, no less than their distant sound, represents the druids’ removal from the everyday world to some arcane spiritual realm. The offstage ensembles in various works by Mahler arguably represent realms in conflict with those represented by the primary, onstage ensembles (Franklin 2001, §§10–12), while the repetition of the opening Prologue by offstage horn as the Epilogue to Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings suggests a recollection at the edge of sleep. In all of these cases, part of the effect would be lost were the performers to produce the same sounds—with mutes, say—while remaining onstage. (A corollary is that when we hear recordings of such pieces, in order to enjoy the same effect we must imagine the spatial distribution of the performers, even if, in fact, the “offstage sound” is achieved by other means.) These examples are both acoustically and conceptually spatial. Presumably we are not required to imagine that Ives’s druids, or any of these other things represented by offstage instruments are literally spatially distant from anything else represented by the music, but there are many examples of such fictional space in music. One famous example is in the third movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which begins with a dialogue between oboe and offstage cor anglais. In this case we are presumably supposed to imagine two shepherds calling the cows home with their pipes while physically distant from one another. But the effect is not a simple one. For instance, the particular actual distance between the players does not determine the particular fictional distance between the shepherds. After all, the end of the movement is haunting because the oboe returns to the music of the duet but is answered this time only by silence, and we are not consoled by the fact that we’ve seen the cor anglais player creep back onstage in the middle of the movement. We are no more supposed to imagine that the shepherds are the same distance from one another as the musicians than we are supposed to imagine that the shepherds play keyed instruments, wear black gowns, or are separated by a wall. Simply mapping out the various kinds of fictional spaces generated by programme music would require an essay in itself—think just of the particular

884   Andrew Kania environment suggested by the birdcalls Beethoven selects for combination in the “Pastoral” Symphony (S.  Davies  2012, 75), the train pulling out of the station in Honegger’s Pacific 231, or the mini-genre of “caravan” pieces (those depicting something slowly approaching and receding), such as Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia and “Cattle” from Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It is notable that the examples just considered are clear instances of programme music. This is unsurprising to the extent that the spaces “in” these works are not literal but representational, whether what is represented is physical space, as with Berlioz’s shepherds, or a notional space, such as the “distance” between two ideas. Other examples, however, such as Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia, are not usually considered programme music. But are appearances misleading here? If an otherwise musical work required the performers to move about the stage in various ways while playing their instruments (but not, or not merely, for sonic effect), it would not be far-fetched to consider it, at least in part, a dance or theatrical work. Does it really make much difference that the musicians in the Fantasia are merely spatially separated, and don’t move about? For that matter, what about a passage in an orchestral work where a theme is passed down the strings and we hear and see it moving furiously across the stage, or where there is a dialogue between wind and strings or concerto soloist and orchestra? The answer to these questions seems to turn on whether the sources of the music—the performers and their instruments—must be experienced as spatially related in a certain way. If a theme is passed down the string sections of an orchestra, it typically makes no difference whether the sections are spatially arranged in descending order or whether, say, the second violins are placed opposite the firsts, with the violas and cellos in between them, as long as one hears that the theme is descending in musical space (to which I turn shortly). Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia is a tricky case. It doesn’t seem to be programme music, since it has no accompanying text or other representational components, but the fact that it takes a Renaissance English theme as its subject might suggest, particularly considering Vaughan Williams’s music-historical context and compositional practice, that the piece represents historical relationships, including relationships of memory (like some of the offstage effects discussed above). If the point of spatially separating the two string orchestras is that (for certain higher-order artistic reasons) we should hear the music each plays as spatially separated, just as (for different higher-order artistic reasons) we should hear the cor anglais as spatially distant from the oboe in the Symphonie fantastique, then the Fantasia is a kind of programme music—perhaps the placement of the orchestras represents, say, the distance between the musical worlds of Tallis and Vaughan Williams. It would follow that a performance that did not spatially separate these forces would be less than ideally authentic, a little like a concert performance of an opera. But if the point of the spatial separation is merely to clarify in the listener’s ear the various musical masses in play, the Fantasia is no more programme music thereby than is a piece for double choir just because the two choirs stand side by side rather than intermingled. (Note that even if the spatial separation of the performers is essential to hearing two musical masses as distinct, it doesn’t follow that our experience of the music represents the musical masses as spatially separated.)

Space   885 The discussion thus far can help us to think about virtual spaces created by electronic manipulation of the sounds of a performance on a recording (and in some modern concert halls). The addition of acoustic effects such as longer reverberation times to recordings of works of pure music for live performance is typically intended to give the illusion of the sounds’ being produced in the right kind of space for the work. By contrast, the use of stereo space in an opera recording, for instance, is typically intended to help the listener to imagine the spatial arrangement of performers onstage (and thus, often, characters in the opera’s fictional world). In both cases we arguably have a technological surrogate for aspects of the kind of live performance appropriate for the work in question. Some musical works, however, are created not for live performance, but as recordings for playback (S. Davies 2001, 1–44). Classical electronic works fit this description, but according to a growing consensus (following Gracyk 1996), so do most works of popular music from the 1960s onwards. Such works typically contain a virtual space in which the sounds appear to originate and resonate, especially if they are created for playback through more than one channel (e.g., stereo). In some cases, the ultimate effect is of an illusionistic or imaginative experience of a live performance—a live performance that never occurred—but in others the sonic possibilities are exploited in order to create non-naturalistic auditory experiences (Walton  2015), for instance of a voice circling one’s head while its timbre changes psychedelically. (For an extended discussion of these techniques in rock music, see Zak 2001.) If the distinction between acoustically and conceptually spatial music for which I have argued holds water, then we should be able to extend it to such works for playback. If appropriate experience of the music requires imagining certain spatial relations between the sources of the sounds or those sources and oneself independently of the (imagined) sonic effects of those (imagined) relations, then the work is conceptually spatial. But if the music requires no such imagining, then it has, at most, a kind of derivative (because imagined) acoustic spatiality. (Much of the discussion in this section skips over complex issues of musical representation. Helpful treatments include Kivy  1991; S.  Davies  1994, 1–166; Scruton  1997, 118–139; and Ridley 2004, 47–69.)

Pitch Space In the previous section, we moved from considering the spatial distribution of performance forces to spatial experiences of music, veridical and otherwise. One basic and particularly puzzling such experience is that of pitch space. Various phenomena are discussed under the general rubric of tonal or pitch space. One kind familiar to music theorists is that of harmonic space, but I focus in this section on the more basic phenomenon, already mentioned, of notes’ being higher or lower than another, the “pitch space” in which music is heard as moving. Our experience of this musical space seems quite robust, and to underpin our experience of many other important musical features. If one could not hear whether a melody rises or falls, one could be accused of not grasping

886   Andrew Kania its essential character (Scruton 1983, 80–81). The cheap thrill, found in some popular music, of an unprepared modulation up a step would be undercut if it were replaced with a step down. And all philosophical theories of music’s emotional expressivity appeal at some point to music’s dynamic character (Kania 2015, 157–158). By contrast, the language of “harmonic space” is generally accepted to be less literal than that applied to pitch space. To consider just two recent examples from leading theorists of harmonic space: Fred Lerdahl explains that “the starting point” for his book Tonal Pitch Space “was not the obvious spatial aspects of music, such as room acoustics or pitch height, but empirical evidence that listeners hear pitches, . . . chords, and regions as relatively close or distant from a given tonic” (Lerdahl 2001, v). A central claim of Dmitri Tymoczko’s Geometry of Music is that “geometry provides a powerful tool for modeling musical structure” (Tymoczko 2011, 19; my italics). When defending this claim (and throughout the book), Tymoczko is careful to put many central spatial terms (for example, “distance,” “maps,” “chord spaces”) in “scare quotes” to indicate that they are not used literally. (For useful introductions to harmonic space, see Scruton 2012 and Christensen 2002, “Mapping Tonal Spaces,” 306–476.) But is the more basic pitch space—the space in which a melody is passed “down” the orchestra, in which one note is higher or lower than another, in which a melody leaps or plunges—any more literal than the harmonic space in which keys are arrayed? Clearly this musical space is not ordinary physical space; if the cellos are on risers and the violins on the stage floor, we still hear the melody descending from the violins to the cellos. Some theorists have denied that space or spatial concepts are essential to our experience of music at all. Such “eliminativists” claim that our use of spatial terms to describe music is merely a metaphor that could in principle be eliminated in favour of a neutral, more objective description (for example Budd  1985; see also De Clercq  2007). Though he never assays such a description of pitch, in an early paper Malcolm Budd does so for rhythm (Budd 1985, 243), and in a later paper (Budd 2003) he draws an analogy between pitch and timbre. He points out that it is very difficult to give a characterization of the timbre of a particular instrument without resorting to metaphor (for example, the piercing tone of an oboe), and yet we do not think the metaphorical concepts (piercing, in this example) are in any way essential to our experience of such timbres. Similarly, he argues, “sounds have a character, pitch, that can be heard, recognized, discriminated, without this character being brought under spatial concepts” (251; original italics). But Budd glosses over an ambiguity concerning “pitch” here. For while we could say that all sounds have a pitch, meaning something like a frequency or our typical experience of that sonic feature, there is more than this to the musical feature known as pitch. For instance, “untuned” percussion instruments, such as bongo drums, emit sounds with pitches in the first sense, but the very fact that they are considered untuned shows that to have a pitch in the second sense requires something more. Exactly what more is difficult to say, but here are two relatively uncontroversial aspects of pitch, in the musical sense, that seem to be quite universal (Stevens and Byron 2009). First, in all musical cultures, sounds with frequencies related by a factor of two are heard as “of the same kind” in some sense (i.e., what Western music theorists call “octave equivalence,” or belonging

Space   887 to the same “pitch class”). Second, musical pitches are subject to “categorical perception.” That is, they are heard as falling within certain qualitative categories with relatively sharp borders that have no basis in the objective frequency spectrum. Imagine, for instance, two pairs of musical pitches, each separated by the same distance on the frequency spectrum. Because of where the pairs fall on that spectrum, together with the musical system in which they are perceived, one pair may be heard as two Ds—one slightly flat and the other slightly sharp—while the other pair may be heard as a very sharp E and a very flat F. To the extent that these features seem less amenable to the eliminativist strategy, because, say, it is difficult to characterize octave equivalence without appealing to one G’s being higher or lower in pitch space than another G, we will be motivated to pursue other theories of musical space. “Literalists” argue that we cannot eliminate spatial concepts from our descriptions of music, but that this presents no philosophical problem. Stephen Davies points to crosscultural evidence of the application of spatial concepts to music, which suggests a “conceptually deeply rooted” connection between the two domains (S.  Davies  2011, 26). Combining this claim with the relatively uncontroversial notion that terms may have primary and secondary senses, Davies argues that our application of spatial terms to music is an example of “polysemy”: The notes of a piccolo are literally (if in a secondary sense) higher than those of the double bass, and a theme may literally swoop down, just as one’s career may literally be on the rise or one’s grades falling (S. Davies 1994, 229–239; 2011, 25–30). For Davies, “music is an art of temporal process. A theme is constituted by movement in the way that the progress of the Dow Jones Index is” (1994, 235). This view is to be contrasted with eliminativism in that for the eliminativist the use of spatial terms is a dispensable, merely contingent metaphor. To be sure, these metaphors may be “dead,” but the eliminativist must allow that a different metaphor might just as easily have been taken up originally; for instance, we might have talked of what we call pitch “space” in terms of colours, with each pitch class named for a particular shade, and octaves distinguished in terms of their “hue.” In linguistic terms, this would be homonymy rather than polysemy. (As it happens, Budd has recently shifted towards literalism, citing Davies’s arguments (Budd 2003, 220).) Like eliminativism, literalism is certainly a coherent view. Its weakest point seems to be precisely that it accords secondary status to the use of spatial terms to describe the musical features in question, when some might aver that they experience notes as higher or lower, and melodies as moving, in the primary senses of those terms. It’s worth noting in this connection that the cross-cultural evidence Davies cites includes terms not commonly used in the West: Low notes are described (in translation, of course) as “big” or “strong,” high notes as “small” or “weak” (1994, 231–232). We do use such terms to describe music in English and other European languages, but not typically to describe relative pitch. It might be argued that to hear a melody that begins high up and plunges to the depths as, instead, beginning very small and inflating to a great size would be to misunderstand it (Scruton 1983, 80–81). But if the literalist is correct, these are simply alternative—but crucially still spatial—ways of describing the experience of a temporal process that is non-spatial (in the primary sense).

888   Andrew Kania If one finds compelling the criticisms of eliminativism and literalism raised above, one might feel the attraction of “metaphorical” theories of musical space and movement. Whatever a metaphor is, it seems to involve the non-literal application of a concept, so the hope would be to have one’s cake—the primary sense of the relevant spatial concepts—yet eat it too, in denying that these concepts apply straightforwardly. Of course, if the idea is just that we use spatial metaphors in describing music (in thought or publicly), then the view collapses into eliminativism. To be an alternative to the theories already discussed, the metaphor must be embedded somehow in either the music itself or our experience of it. Nelson Goodman has a theory of expressive properties of the former kind, which might be extended to spatial properties (Goodman 1976, 45–95): A musical passage is sad just in case it metaphorically exemplifies sadness. Unfortunately, the central concept of “metaphorical exemplification” is no less puzzling than the phenomenon it aims to explain (S. Davies 1994, 137–150). Roger Scruton and Christopher Peacocke have theories of the latter kind: Our perceptual experience of music is somehow metaphorical (Scruton 1983, 77–100; 1997, 1–96; 2004; Peacocke 2009, 257–275; 2010, 189–191). (Like Goodman’s, Peacocke’s theory explicitly addresses only expressive properties, but Peacocke does not rule out its application to spatial properties.) Scruton claims that when we hear a melody as moving or a chord as widely spaced, our perception involves an “unasserted thought” with a content such as “that melody is moving,” as opposed to the judgement “that car is moving” involved in a non-metaphorical perception. Peacocke’s theory is that such perception involves the subpersonal detection of a rule-governed isomorphism between the actual (for example, sonic) and metaphorical (for example, spatial) domains, with the result that concepts from the latter “are copied to some special kind of storage binding them with . . . mental representations [in the ­former] domain . . . in the subpersonal state underlying an experience” (Peacocke 2009, 267). That is, a part of our mind inaccessible to conscious thought “notices” a certain structural similarity between sounds and space, and thus uses spatial concepts to structure our aural experience. Although Peacocke’s theory of metaphorical perception is more detailed than Scruton’s, it is still crucially unclear how the concepts from the metaphorical domain enter into perceptual experience (Boghossian 2010, 71–76; Budd 2012). Stephen Davies pushes the problem back a step, arguing that Peacocke’s view mischaracterizes the phenomenology of the experiences he seeks to explain in the first place. Taking one of Peacocke’s central examples, Davies argues that it is not part of our perceptual experience of a picture of anthropomorphous pots that they are people (S. Davies 2011, 22–23). A final alternative to be considered claims the advantages of metaphorical theories (positing an experience involving both sonic concepts that literally apply to the object of experience and spatial concepts that do not), while avoiding their disadvantages (a bedrock appeal to metaphor or an unfamiliar kind of mental process). According to “imaginative” accounts of musical space and movement, we imagine of the sounds we hear (or our experience of them) that they are spatial or mobile (or of spatial or mobile things). Imagination has always played a role in Scruton’s theory as the capacity that underlies metaphorical perception, and in Scruton’s later work one might see imagination taking

Space   889 over from metaphor as the more important part of the theory. (By contrast, Peacocke explicitly distances his theory from Scruton’s on the grounds that our experience of expressive features of music, at least, is more directly perceptual than any imaginationbased theory could account for (2010, 190).) Rafael de Clercq has suggested that one charitable way of interpreting Scruton is as arguing that we simply perceive the sounds or tones of the music and then imagine of them that they possess spatial characteristics such as height or motion (de Clercq 2007, 158–163). This interpretation bears strong affinities with Kendall Walton’s (1990) theory of fiction. According to Walton, fictions are “props” in games of make-believe. That is, when we watch the opening of Citizen Kane, though we know we are seeing a photographic record of an actor on a set (the “prop”), we spontaneously imagine there is a man dying. Though the general shape of Walton’s theory is widely accepted by aestheticians, the details are disputed. For instance, Walton argues that our mode of imagining depends on the medium and content of the work. When we experience visual fictions, such as Citizen Kane, we imagine seeing Kane die, that is, we imagine of our visual experience of the moving images that it is a visual experience of a dying man. But if we read a novel including a similar story, we need not imagine seeing (or reading) anything; we need only imagine that a certain man is dying. However, depending on the narrative strategy of the novel, we may imagine being told a story in some unspecified way. Others have argued that we simply imagine the fictional events to occur, regardless of the medium (for example, Currie 1991). That is, in both the verbal and visual case, we imagine that a man is dying, and the medium only affects the content of the imagining (for example, in the visual case, we imagine that a man of such-and-such an appearance is dying, where the “such-and-such” stands in for the rich visual information presented in the film). Walton applies his theory to music in the course of discussing whether music is representational or abstract (Walton 1988; 1990, 333–341; 1994). His answer, in short, is that although we may, in experiencing a piece of pure music, appropriately imagine of some aspect of that experience that it is an emotional experience (for example, we imagine of our experience of a slow minor theme that it is an experience of sadness), the music does not represent anyone as undergoing that experience. In the course of defending this answer, Walton briefly touches on the topic of musical space and movement. He points out that our experience of musical space and motion is non-perspectival, that is, we may hear one note as higher than another, or a melody as rising, but we do not hear the notes as higher or lower than ourselves or rising towards or away from our location. Walton argues that this implies, at the very least, that we do not (typically) imagine hearing sounds when we experience music, since hearing, like seeing, is essentially perspectival (Walton 1988, 53–54). He stops short, however, of offering a positive explanation of the basic experience of musical space and motion. Nonetheless, we might apply Walton’s general theory to this phenomenon. (In addition to de Clercq’s interpretation of Scruton, such an application is suggested in Kania 2007, §4 and Trivedi 2011, 188, and developed in Kania 2015.) Taking Walton’s observations on board, we would have to say that when we hear sounds as music, we imagine of those sounds that they are spatially arrayed and, often, moving. Budd objects

890   Andrew Kania that, since the identity of a musical tone is given by its position in pitch space, we cannot hear musical tones as moving (Budd  2003, 216). (Scruton [1983, 84] also makes this point, which militates against ascribing this theory to him.) We might reply that even if a musical tone’s identity is tied up with its pitch, the identity of an ordinary sound is not tied up with its pitch (in the musical sense). Indeed, it might be that the imaginative experience of hearing sounds as spatial is part and parcel of hearing them as music. Of course, the identity of ordinary sounds might be tied to their frequency, or some phenomenal correlate of frequency, and Budd might argue that even with this clarification the objection resurfaces once we hear the sounds as musical tones. But a second reply to Budd points to the fact that our imaginative experiences need not be logically coherent. This is most obvious in the case of narrative fictions, where we often imagine things we believe or know to be impossible (just think of science fiction or ghost stories). Walton introduces the quasi-technical term “silly question” to refer to questions about the content of our imaginings that have no answer within the fiction and may, if pressed, disrupt our engagement with it (Walton 1990, 174–183). It may be, then, that in experiencing a soaring melody we imagine of the sounds we hear that they are, or include, something moving through space in a certain way, but without imagining anything about what this thing is or how the space it moves through is related to the space we, or the sounds, actually inhabit. Budd thinks that such a characterization raises questions about the coherence of the experience (or the theory of it), but perhaps such questions are, in Walton’s sense, silly. I suggested in the previous section that if appropriate experience of a work for playback requires imagining spatial relations between the sounds’ sources or those sources and oneself, then it is conceptually spatial. Does this imply that if an imaginative theory of musical space and movement is correct, then all music is conceptually spatial? One difference between the cases is that the imaginative theory of musical space and movement involves imagining spatial properties of the sounds themselves, rather than their sources. This might militate against counting musical space and movement as conceptual (in this sense), even if the imaginative theory of it is correct.

Music, Space, and Musical Space Though I have by no means offered an incontrovertible argument for an imaginationbased theory of pitch space and musical movement, it is worth noting that if such a theory is correct, spatial experience may be central to at least Western music. For pitch is surely central to such music, and the imagination theorist argues that to experience pitch is to have an imagined spatial experience. This may lend weight to those theories that attempt to draw a principled distinction between music and other arts of sound, where such an experience is not so central (see for example Hamilton 2007; Kania 2011). (For a careful discussion of other possible connections between spatial concepts and musical experience, see de Clercq 2007.) Regardless of one’s views on the nature of pitch

Space   891 space, the conclusions argued for earlier in this essay suggest that there is a further distinction to be drawn between acoustically spatial and conceptually spatial music. This distinction is useful for appreciating different ways in which music can be spatial, but if the notion of pure or absolute music is defensible, anyone interested in limning its boundaries must also address the question of whether both acoustic and conceptual spatiality fall within them.

Notes 1. Thanks to David Davies for organizing the panel at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, where I presented the earliest version of this material, and to the audience for helpful discussion. Thanks to John Dyck for sharing his work in ­progress on this topic, which I look forward to seeing in print, and to Raf de Clercq for alerting me to essential literature on the topic. 2. Britten, War Requiem, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, recorded live at the Marienkirche in Lübeck in August 1992, during the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Hamburg, Germany; released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1993 (compact disc 437801-2).

Works Cited Boghossian, Paul. 2010. “The Perception of Music: Comments on Peacocke.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 1 (January): 71–76. Bonds, Mark Evan. 2014. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonds, Mark Evan, Guy Dammann, Hannah Ginsborg, Tamara Levitz, Christopher Landerer, and Nick Zangwill. 2017. Symposium on Absolute Music. British Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 1 (January): 67–101. Budd, Malcolm. 1985. “Understanding Music.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 59, no. 1 (July): 233–248. Budd, Malcolm. 2003. “Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors.” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 3 (July): 209–223. Budd, Malcolm. 2012. “The Musical Expression of Emotion: Metaphorical-as Versus Imaginative-as Perception.” Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 2 (November): 131–147. Casati, Roberto, and Jérôme Dokic. 2014. “Sounds.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2014 edition. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://plato.stanford .edu/archives/fall2014/entries/sounds/. Christensen, Thomas, ed. 2002. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooke, Mervyn. 1996. Britten: “War Requiem.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1989. An Ontology of Art. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Currie, Gregory. 1991. “Visual Fictions.” Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163 (April): 129–143. Danto, Arthur. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

892   Andrew Kania Davies, David. 2011. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Stephen. 1987. “Authenticity in Musical Performance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 27, no. 1 (January): 39–50. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2011. “Music and Metaphor.” In Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music, 21–33. New York: Oxford University Press. Davies, Stephen. 2012. The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press. De Clercq, Rafael. 2007. “Melody and Metaphorical Movement.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 2 (April): 156–168. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press. Franklin, Peter. 2001. “Mahler, Gustav.”  In Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed  January 15, 2016. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove /music/40696. Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. First published 1992. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grylls, Karen. 2012. “Voices of the Pacific: The (Ch)oral Traditions of Oceania.” In The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music, edited by André de Quadros, 177–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. “Music and the Aural Arts.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 1 (January): 46–63. Ives, Charles E. 1953. The Unanswered Question. New York: Southern Music Publishing. Kania, Andrew. 2007. “Philosophy of Music.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2007 edition. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/music/. Kania, Andrew. 2011. “Definition.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 3–13. New York: Routledge. Kania, Andrew. 2015. “An Imaginative Theory of Musical Space and Movement.” British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 2 (April): 157–172. Kania, Andrew. 2020. Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. Karl, Gregory, and Jenefer Robinson. 2015. “Yet Again, ‘Between Absolute and Programme Music’.” British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 1 (January): 19–37. Kivy, Peter. 1991. Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lerdahl, Fred. 2001. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1980. “What a Musical Work Is.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 1 (January): 5–28. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. “Authentic Performance and Performance Means.” In Music, Art, & Metaphysics, 393–408. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Space   893 Levinson, Jerrold. 2002. “Sound, Gesture, Spatial Imagination and the Expression of Emotion in Music.” In “Emotion and Action,” edited by Élizabeth Pacherie, special issue, European Review of Philosophy 5: 137–150. Levinson, Jerrold, and Philip Alperson. 1991. “What Is a Temporal Art?” In “Philosophy and the Arts,” edited by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16: 439–450. Peacocke, Christopher. 2009. “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 3 (July): 257–275. Peacocke, Christopher. 2010. “Music and Experiencing Metaphorically-As: Further Delineation.” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 2 (April): 189–191. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1983. “Understanding Music.” In The Aesthetic Understanding, 77–100. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2004. “Musical Movement: A Reply to Budd.” British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 2 (April): 184–187. Scruton, Roger. 2012. “The Space of Music: Review Essay of Dmitri Tymoczko’s A Geometry of Music.” Reason Papers 34, no. 2 (October): 167–183. Stevens, Catharine, and Tim Byron. 2009. “Universals in Music Processing.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut, 14–23. New York: Oxford University Press. Thom, Paul. 2011. “Authentic Performance Practice.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 91–100. New York: Routledge. Trivedi, Saam. 2011. “Music and Imagination.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 113–122. New York: Routledge. Tymoczko, Dmitri. 2011. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Vaughan Williams, Ralph. 1921. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. New York: Boosey & Hawkes. Walton, Kendall L. 1988. “What is Abstract about the Art of Music?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, no. 3 (Spring): 351–364. Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 1994. “Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 1 (Winter): 47–61. Walton, Kendall L. 2015. “Two Kinds of Physicality in Electronic and Traditional Music.” In In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence, 36–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zak, Albin J. III. 2001. The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

chapter 44

Ti m e Christopher Hasty

Although music need not be considered more temporal than any other activity, its vividly felt dynamic continuity and its resistance to the production of fixed, univocal images and ideas can make music seem something especially temporal, fleeting, evanescent. Thus, in Gisèle Brelet’s now famous words, music can seem “the art of time par excellence” (Brelet 1949, 1:25). Certainly, sounding music can’t be arrested and held as a changeless image as it is sounding. But can seeing, reading, speaking, thinking, living be so arrested? (When do our seeing, reading, speaking, thinking bodies stop?) And yet, to the extent music can resist the thought of fixed images and turn our attention to the dynamic emergence of felt events, it can be a powerful, problematic site for thinking about temporal continuity and discontinuity. The question of music, like the question of time in general, can raise problems of becoming and passage, that is to say, problems concerning the complex emergence of events (becomings) and their continuous or fluent succession (passage). Of course, the thought of both music and time can be protected from this problematic. Music can be conceived abstractly as the invariant structure of a prior composition or an arrangement of objects, ordered from left to right on a timeline and measurable in terms of “length.” Similarly, time can be immobilized as an essentially changeless container for the succession of things that occur and change “in” time. And indeed, “time” as a technical term inherited from physical science is generally understood as immobilized, deprived of an “arrow” that would complicate things by introducing an essential unpredictability and novelty and by raising problems of a dynamic continuity poorly modelled by a mathematical pseudo-continuity of an infinitely dense succession of durationless time-points. In music theory, time is often taken for granted as a more or less unproblematic aspect of music, a dimension or parameter labelled rhythm or, more narrowly, metre, tempo, or timing; or most abstractly, the variable t with all its possible values. Least thought, time in music can mean most simply “the beat” or the time signature, for example, “keeping time” or more specifically, keeping “three-four time.” And yet, in the last half-century composers and musicologists have sought to take questions of time seriously in ways that would engage broader, more philosophical ideas of time. Composers (for example,

896   Christopher Hasty Stockhausen, Rochberg, Childs, Kramer) have focused on questions of time as a way of creating and valorizing new styles of music. And musicologists, critical of the objectification or reification of music as essentially timeless artworks, have turned to questions of time as a way of valuing musical experience, the work music actually does. Many of these scholars (for example, Zuckerkandl, Clifton, Lochhead, Burrows) have been inspired by the work of Edmund Husserl for whom the temporality of human experience was a central concern. Interest in connections between music and philosophy has not, however, been onesided. Many philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists have turned to music as a phenomenon that might offer clues to thinking about time or passage in new ways, ways that would escape the reduction of time to number or, more generally, to static conceptions of time grounded in visual-spatial imagery. Drawing to varying degrees on phenomenology, Alfred Schutz, Susanne Langer, and Don Ihde are remarkable for their sustained engagements with music. But even without such sustained engagement, many other thinkers have used music as a prime example of time understood as a dynamic process of event formation as opposed to time as an essentially static order of positions. Indeed, Husserl appealed to melody as a principle illustration of his temporal schema of protention-retention. In an essay foundational for gestalt psychology, Christian von Ehrenfels (a student of Anton Bruckner) makes music his central example of temporal wholeness. Jakob von Uexküll’s efforts to frame a holistic and dynamic eco-biology led him to take music quite seriously as a guiding example. And in his deeply temporal philosophy, Henri Bergson takes music as a primary example in his argument for the irreducibility of duration. In his essay “The Perception of Change” Bergson writes: The indivisibility of change is precisely what constitutes true (vrai) duration. . . . real duration is what we have always called time, but time perceived as indivisible. That time implies succession I do not deny. But that succession is first presented to our consciousness, like a distinction of “before” and “after” set side by side, I cannot admit. When we listen to a melody we have the purest impression of succession we could possibly have—an impression as far removed as possible from that of simultaneity—and yet it is the very continuity of the melody and the impossibility of breaking it up which make that impression upon us. If we cut it up into distinct notes, into so many “befores” and “afters,” we are bringing spatial images into it and impregnating the succession with simultaneity.  (Bergson 2007, 124–125)

(In this passage Bergson also writes that real duration (durée réelle) in our experience of passage is “the clearest thing in the world.”) Bergson’s complaint is that succession has come to be thought of as instantaneous or “simultaneous,” as happening all at once and thus taking no time. On the other hand, the things that happen (for example, musical tones, figures, phrases, sections) cannot be instantaneous or durationless—to be “things” or events they have to last, if only for a while. Like Ehrenfels and Husserl, among others, Bergson takes musical melody as a familiar and striking example of a temporal wholeness that can seem paradoxical—a succession of apparently independent or separate elements (tones) that are in fact thoroughly intermeshed, interrelated, or internally

Time   897 related; we might say (without thinking much about tense) that a change of one would not leave the others untouched. This simple observation of musical experience can help give credence to a variety of relatively new thought-worlds—for example, to the thought of emergence, complexity, internal measurement; and to the revolutionary (and thus counter-intuitive) thought-worlds of relativity and quantum physics. Such worlds can seem at first utterly alien from what we find plain common sense; and so for the apologist, enlisting the senses in a new way can be a powerful aid in the attempt to shift worlds, to make a new sense of a world in which “sense” need not bifurcate “meaning” and “feeling.” It should be of interest that musical sense (and audition in general) is so often invoked to bear witness to new concepts that are radical in their break from an entrenched metaphysics of substance (presence, essence) and in their turn to process.

The Problem of Succession and Duration (Event) A remarkable example of a scientific-philosophical appeal to music (and one sympathetic to both Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead) is found in the conclusion of Milič Čapek’s The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics. Here Čapek turns to music (especially polyphonic music) as a provocative aural alternative to the visual or pictorial thinking about time characteristic of classical physics: In the temporal structure of the perception of melody, features can be discovered which appear irrational in any visual mechanical model of physical reality: the primacy of events, the absence of infinite divisibility, the compatibility of continuity and individuality, the fusion of becoming with its concrete content. Needless to say, such use of auditory models is purely propaedeutic; it only helps to free our mind from the exclusive sway of visual imagination, whose influence may be detected even in some apparently mathematical habits . . . The positive significance of the auditory experience is in the fact that from it a certain imageless dynamic pattern may be abstracted which will probably offer a key to the understanding of the type of “extensive becoming” that seems to constitute the nature of physical reality.  (Čapek 1961, 399; my italics)

Earlier, Čapek had suggested more specific ways in which tonal succession might lead to the thought of a dynamic, expressly temporal wholeness demanded by relativity and quantum physics as, for example, in the following: The quality of a new tone, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality. The individual tones are not externally related units of which the melody is additively built; but neither is their individuality absorbed or dissolved in the undifferentiated unity of the musical whole. The musical phrase is a

898   Christopher Hasty successive differentiated whole which remains a whole in spite of its successive character and which remains differentiated in spite of its dynamic wholeness. Like every dynamic whole it exhibits a synthesis of unity and multiplicity, of continuity and discontinuity; but it is not the unity of an undifferentiated simultaneous whole nor is it the plurality [multiplicity] of juxtaposed units; it is neither continuity in the mathematical sense of infinite divisibility nor is it the discontinuity of rigid atomic blocs. For this reason, paradoxical as it may sound, the traditional distinction between succession and duration must be given up.  (Čapek 1961, 371–372; my italics)

Čapek’s intent is in part rhetorical—to use the example of sound as a way of escaping habits of thought tied to visualization, thus turning to audition with the intent of leading to new thinking. But it is also systematic (perhaps also rhetorical)—to demonstrate a continuity reaching from the relative simplicity of the electromagnetic to what seems most complex: the cultural and, more specifically, the music-cultural. Musical experience is an example of dynamic time, not a metaphor. Thinking about music is valued as a way of thinking about Nature. And indeed why not, if the way (the only way) we’ll know about Nature is through human nature? And why not, if human is never without music? As an experiment, I would like to take Čapek’s project a bit further by using his apparent paradox of “succession and duration” (introduced by Čapek explicitly in connection with music) as a way into thinking about time as process, and then try out this thought in terms of a central “musical” category—measured durational quantity, “how much time,” “how long time.” “Musical” would be very broadly construed here to acknowledge that durational quantity (how long) can be focal or especially meaningful in many activities not properly called “music”: among others, dance, poetry, and many sports. But first, why should the folding together of succession and duration seem paradoxical? Bergson calls attention to the problem by exposing a deep rift between “duration” and “extension” where “extension” becomes abstract, empty, mathematical space and duration is understood as real time. Thinking of an actual sustained musical tone and looking for a kinetic-visual/tactile metaphor or analogy (pace Čapek), let’s imagine duration felt as a sort of growing fullness or thickness that we sense in, or rather as the emerging sonic event. Such thickness or viscosity can be felt in the particular “length” or ex-tension of a sound or a complex of sounds; also in the exciting interval, let’s say, between “this may pinch a bit” and pinch!; in the fleeting glance of a lover from cool to warm; the meeting that just won’t end; or the remembrance right now of “won’t end” in the ear or silent mouth as something you can (momentarily) hold on to. Events “take” time and thus “have” duration—have duration by taking time; after all, it takes time to become and to be an event. But what about the succession of events? Does succession have or take time? If it took time, wouldn’t it be like event? If it were, how would we then distinguish the taking of time for event from the taking time of succession? In the list of “events” I just offered, was there an instance of succession without duration? Of the two terms, “succession” imagined as instantaneous is the more abstract, detached from concrete duration, detached from the complexity of what we experience

Time   899 and know. Indeed, to be without “duration” would be a strange sort of being, like nothing we’ve ever actually encountered. I will argue that we only ever actually encounter “duration” as a process of event formation (for example, this read and half-spoken sentence as an event). I will return to the question of duration when we turn towards the example of a sensible sonic event. But for now I would like to substitute for “duration” the term “event.”1 “Event” is a more general, abstract word, on the level of “succession,” and (as a result of its generality) a starting place for thinking of the more concrete, of things like “duration” and “music.” To stay a bit longer with the paradox of succession and (en-during) event and to bring us back to the question of Time, let’s say that Time is nothing other than the passage of events, one after another. But before going any further, I would pause briefly to acknowledge the “polyphonic” complexity of events happening in and outside one another at different scales—both (“quantitative”) timescales and (“qualitative”) scales of intensity or value (for example, more or less focus/interest/importance). At this stage, such complexity need not necessarily be cause for alarm. Keeping things simple per se is fine if the simplification can later lead us to discover complexities that can testify to the power of such an exacting “polyphony.” Abstraction (itself a process) is productive when it feeds on and is fed by complexity. But now, returning to our initial definition and its abstractions, let’s ask what is involved in events, one after another? And let’s save the passage of for later. The first-named “events” is plural. For time-as-succession you have to have (or be given) more than one event. You need one-after-an-other-one, and so, at the very least, two. To have more than one (in succession) you have to first have one, and, indeed, ones (at least two)—different ones (two as a different ones). But let’s now add a specifically temporalizing provision: let’s say that to be an event means to last or endure, for a while. And yet, in that “while,” while it lasts, where is succession? Succession is supposed to be a many, a one after an other. But what of the time of the event (its duration) when there is only one?2 If we stop short of assuming an infinite regress of events (or “times”) in smaller and smaller “containers” (like nested Russian dolls) we need not detain ourselves in thoughts of infinite divisibility. And we can thereby avoid the highly restricting and essentially atemporal image of time as a line composed of an infinite number of timeless, durationless events.3 Indeed, such a reduction of “time” would precisely deny the lasting or enduring provision we’re trying out, the provision of a “while” I suggested for a definition of event. (Think of “while” as a verb, which it was for a long time; we can still say/hear “while away.”) To help think of “event” as enduring or lasting, listen in “event” to the verb e-venire— to come forth, to come out. Think of event(ing) as a body or creature emerging, or more abstractly or generally, as an embodiment or a creation. But what about “succession”? If we think of succession as taking no time, succession must appear as an instantaneous, durationless cut—in which case, event and succession would be fundamentally different kinds (perhaps as different as life and death if we think of generational succession, sometimes called “passage”).4

900   Christopher Hasty

Concrete and Pure Succession I began this story (a “let’s-say” story, not a “just-so” story) introducing “passage” in place of “succession” in a definition of Time. I did this in order to avoid the tendency of thinking that succession is instantaneous or durationless. If event is not instantaneous and we want to think of event and succession together (rather than apart as a dichotomy) then succession can’t be instantaneous or timeless. And if we want to think of event and succession together we would have to think of events (plural) as essentially together. But how can we do this if to be an event or a thing is to be a “one” separate from other events or things (other ones)? Whitehead, whose work involved subverting many traditional dichotomies, offers a way of understanding succession and event as inseparable while also understanding how we can, in thought, come to separate the one from the other. In the following passage Whitehead calls on human experience—musical experience included—for an understanding of time as the passage of things or events. Whitehead’s aim here is to show us an all-too-human path of abstraction or elimination: from “acts of experience,” to the things or types of thing objectified in many acts of experience, and thence to a new level of abstraction in which time is eliminated in the pure “succession” of the many of number (where much music theory has preferred to dwell). Time is known to us as the succession of our acts of experience, and thence derivatively as the succession of events objectively perceived in those acts. But this succession is not pure succession: it is the derivation of state from state, with the later state exhibiting conformity to the antecedent. . . . Time in the concrete is the conformation of state to state, the later to the earlier; and the pure succession is an abstraction from the irreversible relationship of settled past to derivative present. . . . The integers succeed each other in one way, and events succeed each other in another way; and, when we abstract from these ways of succession, we find that pure succession is an abstraction of the second order, a generic abstraction omitting the temporal character of time and the numerical relation of integers.  (Whitehead 1985, 35; my italics)5

Partly in response to Hume, Whitehead offers an alternative to the separation of succession and event with his notion of “time in the concrete” in which succession involves the entrance of prior events into the becoming of a present event (“the conformation of state to state, the later to the earlier”). Moreover, Whitehead offers an explanation for the tendency to see events (“acts of experience”) as separate, externally related objects. Here he identifies two orders of abstraction that lead to the thought (or image) of what can be called “linear time,” an idea based in images of geometric line and number line, creatures of “pure succession.” “Pure succession” is purified of (abstracted from) the complexity and messiness, and the power and freedom, of concrete “acts of experience.” For Whitehead, the first order of abstraction on the way to the idea of “pure succession” is a focus on an object of sensing or thinking as something separable from preceding objects, as “an event objectively perceived” in “acts” of experience; for instance, let’s say, something we’ve held on to or paused long enough for it to become some thing (and perhaps be given a name)— an “in itself ” that we might return to again and again. Such objects include all the things

Time   901 we see, hear, talk, and write about and react to. The second order of abstraction further reduces the temporal relation of succession to something like juxtaposition or addition, the juxtaposition of essentially separate, autonomous parts (particles), and thence to the assimilation of time to number, a logical misstep that confounds temporal succession and numerical succession by imagining that succession means the same thing in the two realms. The first order creates things by opposition—this is the world of our living with and dealing with objects, or things opposed (set against one another). The second order emerges in a purely intellectual world purified of the complications of togetherness. This is a world in which relations—here “temporal” relations—can be imagined as relations of separate things that succeed one another in time, for example in an image-time made of discrete locations and fixed ordering. Such is “pure succession.”6 Let’s say that “concrete succession” (i.e., succession understood as “time in the concrete”), much like Bergson’s durée réelle, does not lose sight of its temporal objects—the individual things (like the tones of a melody) that come to pass, that come and pass— but nonetheless, and at the same time, acknowledges their (temporal) continuity or “wholeness.” The continuity of succession might be understood as the connection or coherence of successive items. And yet, to the extent “connection” and “coherence” suggest next-to-next (juxtaposed, one-after-another, external) relation, the word “concrete” is more apt, especially in view of Whitehead’s choice of “concrescence,” a mainly biological term understood as a process of “growing together” (con-crescere). The dynamic growing together of successive events is described as “the conformation of the later to the earlier.” Such conformation occurs in the (present) becoming of an event, as it takes into account relevant past events for its self-formation. Without the past (the “wholeness” of the past) there would be nothing for a present event to form itself out of. Moreover, the becoming, emerging event is also in the process of creating conditions for the emergence of future events that will take it into account in one way or another. As Čapek puts it, following this line of thought and using a musical example: “The quality of a new tone . . . is tinged by the whole antecedent context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality” (Čapek 1961, 371). In the human microcosm of a melody, Čapek hears and sees an example of the general creation of novelty accomplished by a present event (or rather a complex of present events and so, a “polyphony”) that now forms itself out of the world it inherits and must more or less conform to; and when it is past, will be a fact to be dealt with by its successors. For some perspective, contrast this (positively) problematic plenitude of problem-solving with those astringent simplifications that require the imagination of a pure succession in which “present,” “past,” and “future” are reduced to timeless relations on a time or number line.

Tenses All this temporal rather than linear-spatial vocabulary (for example, growing together, emerging, take into account, etc.) leads to a clearer idea of succession-and-becoming. If succession is now interpreted as implication and involvement of one-in-another, and

902   Christopher Hasty thus temporalized, then the tenses present, past, and future are also involved, implicated, folded into one another where one is not separate from an other. In this way, tense distinctions too will resist the thought of separation. Rather than conceive of succession purely as a relation between events (an order relation of before and after), let’s say that succession is involved in the production (creation) of events. Let’s say production (creation) is an activity and therefore situated in the present. The past is become, no longer a site of activity. The coming out (e-venire) of the event is always the emergence or appearance of a new event against an old event, that is to say, against a now-old event, an event made newly past, now past from the perspective of the new, now, present event. The old event is made past con-currently with the making of the new event. The first is not past “before” the second is present; nor is the future, as future, “after” the present. Speaking historically (that is, thinking about what no ­longer now is), we might say that there were successions in the past when past events were present and becoming, but that there is not succession in the past. Succession is present, now, becoming—there were successions and there will be successions. Present here will mean becoming, ongoing, changing, emerging, coming out. Present will also mean begun and not ended: if not begun, then future; and if ended, then past. These two characterizations of present are also the characterizations of event, and so in this scheme events are present—in the past are what were events.7

Duration Thus far, our “events” have seemed quite empty. To approach questions of musical experience we shall have to imagine something more substantial—a sonic event, or rather a complex or manifold of sonic events. I would like to take “duration” to be synonymous with “event” but as a term that focuses on the sensibility of becoming. (Compare “a duration of time” and “an event of time.”) To approach the sense of duration I intend, a comparison with succession will be helpful; and this exercise will help clarify the relation of becoming and succession. Succession as sequence (sequi) implies following and separation, one after an other, a second “one” as other. Duration here implies togetherness and a kind of bodiedness or substantiality, an active presence or fullness (eventfulness) of processes interacting or braiding together, making something new, now. From the Latin verb durare—“to become hard, or fast, or firm”—duration (like action, or abstraction) speaks of process, transforming a verb into an abstract noun. To favour process, let’s imagine “duration” to come from an imaginary verb “to durate,” to become hard or, as I will suggest, solid. Here I would pause briefly to make a distinction between “hardening” and “solidifying” as a distinction of “becoming past” and “becoming present.” Think of “hardening” as ossifying, dying and “solidifying” as growing, emerging (concretizing), eventing—coming out into the world palpable, sensible, graspable, and also, at the same time, something to be grasped, sensed, felt, taken or taken “in.” Thinking of event as present entails thinking of “duration” as present, a solidifying rather than a hardening.8 We could then make a distinction “duration”/“duration” and  say that the latter, “duration,” is past and hardened (dead) and that the former,

Time   903 “duration,” is present and thus in the process of becoming (living). This said, I will use the unmarked form “duration” only, and yet by this usually refer to the idea of the marked form, “duration.” I must ask the reader to seek the difference in the context. The point again is to try to turn from noun to verb, from substance to process. In this connection, note that substances—by definition separable, identical, and durable—have no particular duration and thus no duration. In contrast, eventing is duration. “Time in the concrete,” conceived as Whitehead suggests, includes everything that can enter into the creation of events, and so is nothing apart from duration and succession. What I have called “concrete succession” is succession in terms of Whitehead’s “time in the concrete;” to match the activity of duration, we could call it succession. “Pure succession,” on the other hand—succession conceived purely as order—is not an event or part of an event. It is an abstraction from event and duration—though certainly, an extraordinarily, amazingly useful abstraction, useful for all sorts of technologies. In “pure succession” duration is abstracted or eliminated from event (which thus becomes the durationless event of classical and relativity physics). But duration is the event—in its becoming, its coming to be, and its eventual participation in a big world where new things/events are being made all the time. So if duration is eliminated, what’s left? If duration is the concrete (durus) becoming of an event, its concretion, then what is left is past, become. “Pure succession” is, by way of abstraction, the elimination of real temporal distinctions—distinctions of present, past, and future (however the list might read). And yet, since pure succession is closer to the customary meaning of succession than is what I have called “concrete succession,” let’s for now acquiesce and call pure succession simply “succession” (an unmarked form in contrast to the marked form, “concrete succession”). Such (“pure”) succession is itself durationless—and so, categorically external to duration. Such succession is the ordering and othering of events (plural). Succession is a word for multiplicity—others, other unities, outside one another, externally related. Duration, however, can be a word for unity or the solidifying of the event into just this one. It would seem that there is a (pure) succession of durations, but not a duration of (pure) successions. But these linguistic-conceptual differences do not separate or drive apart succession as “concrete succession” and duration (or becoming); the two work together and are inseparable (neither would work without the other). As Čapek writes: “paradoxical as it may sound, the traditional distinction between succession and duration must be given up” (Čapek 1961, 372). Indeed, to hold the becomings of events apart from their “concrete succession” (or a succession of concretions) would be to break the continuity of time’s flow—in Whitehead’s words, “the becoming of continuity” (and not “the continuity of becomings”) that is the mark of process.

Durational Quantity or (Internal) Measure To ask how concrete succession might work, I propose turning to the example of music as a site of sensible becoming. Such a turn towards exemplification is highly problematic. An example of music is an abstraction from actual, sensible musical experience, a necessarily generalized what—some thing or product that has become. And so to turn

904   Christopher Hasty to a musical example we need first to ask what becomes. Later we can move on to the question of how, in what way. To ask how that “what” becomes is to ask about process, about the becoming of that thing in its process of becoming what will eventually be that thing as something done and past (but not done with if it can have a future in the creation of events beyond itself). What becomes is the event as an externalized, fully-formed thing or object, fixed-out in all its various and luxurious characters, or qualities, or dimensions—in the case of sound, all the nameable properties or qualities that can come into play: things we call timbre, pitch, contour, emotional character, etc. One of those qualities, one of those nameable aspects/dimensions/categories/domains of a “what” is durational quantity— how much duration, how much time. This “how much” is non-numerical in the world of process (or “time in the concrete”), a world not ruled by lines, or rather by lines abstracted in the arithmetics and geometries of “pure succession.” Viewed from the perspective of the abstract (numerical, unit-based, “linear”) world of “pure succession,” durational quantity, in the sense I am urging, seems to be rather a quality. Like other qualities of sound, duration is palpable, feelable. Duration felt as how long (in what way, long) can be very vivid, for example, in feelings of too long, too short, just about right, unhurried, urgent, dead on, mercifully short, luxuriously long. Durational quantity can have many expressions. You can feel some sort of durational quantity with any sonic event; and indeed, durational quantity can be felt in events without sound, in events visual, tactile, kinaesthetic—though perhaps not quite so vividly as in aural events which are in any case never entirely divorced from other sense modalities. The generality of duration recommends it for study. The “amount” or “quantity” of a sonic event’s duration, its “how long,” can be determined by the clock or by a notated unit-count regardless of whether the sonic event has any special quality of sound we might name: pitch, contour of pitches, harmonic or tonal qualities of pitches (that is, the relation of different pitches as tones); timbre, pattern, “metrical type” (for example, duple, triple), and on and on. But that durational quantity is abstractable does not mean that it is ever actually (in experience) separate, abstracted from countless other qualities. It needs to be stressed that “how long” (in what way long) is not separate from all the particularity of the thing—the sonic event—that is coming out. To effect a radical separation, we could substitute for the concept how long the concept what length. Notice the difference. “Length” here is a measurable quantity (a calculable amount of “time”), a quantity measured in units, a freezing of the adverbial how into the nominal, substantive what, and further, a freezing that leads to the question of how many or what number. “What length” purified or sublimated to “what number” is beautifully immune from the (infinite) complexities of qualitative difference—number is precisely designed to be indifferent to the difference of things that can have the same count. By contrast, this particular, momentary, concrete “how long” cannot be separated from everything that is felt in this particular, momentary, concrescent sonic event—the coming of a new creature. Durational quantity—how long, that is, in what way or ways long (a length or stretch or span of time, but not a numerical, quantized or unitized length or “amount of time”) can be very vividly felt in aural events. This feeling can be expressed in many ways, for

Time   905 example: too soon, just right, slowing, growing, becoming weaker, too slow or long to clearly feel, too fast to take in, how long I still have for this present event, how long I yet have to prepare to meet the new event, when to prepare to move, when to move . . . How many varieties of feeling might we name? Different scales of durational quantity are felt also as differences of quality, different ways of feeling quantity—think of the differences in feeling of events of a second, a tenth of a second, ten seconds in duration. All these differences point to the power of duration as a category, that is, duration as a process of event creation (a process of events coming out or emerging)—and a process that can, under certain conditions, be vividly felt as quantity. The sort of durational quantity I will now turn to can be felt most clearly or vividly in the immediate succession of sonic events under fairly narrow conditions: simple, focally sonic events of, say, a second or two of clock-measured duration.

Trying Out Duration Let Example 44.1 be the abstract representation of a succession of two sounds, each of which lasts about a tenth of a second and in which the “interval” from sound to sound is around one or two seconds. In this graphic representation the space between the two lines signifies a cessation of the two sounds but not the cessation of the event begun with sound. Thus, in this diagram events are initiated with sound. Let’s now try to imagine two acoustic events of relatively brief duration. Say, the sound of two handclaps, “separated,” as we might say, by silence—that is to say, separated as sounds but not as beginnings of events. And, in the spirit of music, rather than merely imagine acoustic events, let’s actually experiment by clapping our hands, making sound, always different. To focus on process or growth, let’s begin the experiment with just one clap, nothing else. The single clap’s sound lasts as long as we can hear it. If we attend carefully and are not distracted by other sounds we can continue hearing this clap, however faintly, after the acoustic clap-stimulus has ended, in a variety of memory Ulric Neisser (1967) has called “echoic,” a sort of after-image of the sound that we can prolong further through special attentiveness or rehearsal. Indeed, as it becomes more difficult to hold on to this initial sound we may find ourselves repeating or rehearsing it, “playing it back to ourselves” in order not to lose it. But eventually it is gone with our inability to keep it going. This experiment may require several attempts in order to come to feel the effects of rehearsal or “playback” in an effort to hold on to the sound.

Example 44.1  Linear-diagrammatic representation of the succession of two sounding events, and a notation for clapping.

906   Christopher Hasty Now let’s try clapping again (a second time), following a first clap with another clap a second or two later. Again, I would suggest that this experiment be tried several “times,” perhaps experimenting with different lengths and different sounds; in fact, such differences will necessarily be produced whether or not we can attend carefully enough to pick them up. With attention we might notice some particular difference in some qualitative dimension of difference, or domain—the second sound might be louder or softer, more or less resonant, different in timbre, longer or shorter. We might think of such difference in terms of comparison, but we don’t need to go back and forth between the two sounds—the difference could be just the particular quality of the second sound, something it has inherited from the first by taking measure of the first, and indeed by opening dimensions as ways of taking measure. But whatever qualitative dimensions we might have felt, a new quantitative (how long) dimension will have been opened. With the second clap, a first event lasting from the first to the second clap will now have been formed. The first event is now fully determined and in itself past, become and no longer becoming—that is to say, with the second clap and emergence of a second event there is nothing we can do to change what the first event became, we can’t now make it longer or shorter (or change its pitch, timbre, etc.). It can’t be brought back. Let’s ask then, what is the duration of the new event initiated with the second clap, how long does it last? If we pay attention we can notice a new difference. The silence after the second clap is thickened, or filled, or energized in a way that the silence after the first was not—it is enlivened with the feeling of an emerging and more or less definite duration (perhaps giving “echoic memory” something more or less definite to work with). This filled or filling silence following the second clap has a more or less definite duration even as it goes on. We might try to hold on to this feeling of becoming solid, concrete—try to hold on to this emerging event. But this event and the palpable feeling of holding will eventually dissipate, become less solid, less concrete, though it will be hard (in this simple experiment) to say precisely when the event ends. This duration (or duration, as proc­ess), this sensing or feeling of quantity is the measuring of the second event by its taking into account the first event. In Example 44.1 this relevance of the immediately past event is all the new presently emerging event has to go on; that is to say, our example shows no other relevance. In this simple, abstract representation, all the new event has to go on is the determined duration of its immediate predecessor, now past. This now, new duration or measuring might be a feeling of how much time is left until the new, now present duration runs out, or how much time remains before the possible emergence of a new third event, if for any reason we are interested in the coming of a future successor. Since an actual successor, a third sound event, can make the duration of the second event determinate (as the second made the first determinate, past) we might feel the measuring of the second event very precisely in feeling that the third clap comes, say, slightly early or late, or just right. If in this experiment we focus our attention in this way on the quantities of events (how long) or their quantitative “timings” (how long for this one to play itself out, how long before a successor might appear) then the qualitative differences of the two sounds (timbre, volume, etc.) might seem irrelevant to or separate from quantity. Could we not

Time   907 produce the same durations apart from the particular sounds of the two claps? It should be clear now from experimentation with Example 44.1 that we cannot; indeed, we cannot if duration is the actual becoming of events. Whatever specific difference or particularity of sound we pick up on cannot be separated from the complex feeling and precision of our timing. Relevance is nothing if not the possibility for connection (as irrelevance is absence of the possibility of connection). And yet, problematically, relevance is by the same token nothing if not variable—it depends entirely on the situation, relevant for what. This complex relevance is not negligible unless we choose for descriptive purposes to neglect it. In your experimenting with clapping there cannot in fact have been an isolation or separation of “pure duration” from everything that came into your experience. Your clapping had an actual, concrete feel: tactile, visual, auditory, whole-bodied, emotional, etc. How vividly you might feel in all such domains is variable. I imagine, optimistically, that with successive tries you might have become more sensitized to differences or particularities, that in repetition you might have enhanced your sensitivity to the focal issue of durational quantity by way of picking up and attending to a complex of factors that came into play on that occasion. Such attending as a way of picking up more sonic detail can lead to an intensified feeling of duration or, more generally, a heightened rhythmic engagement. But there cannot be an event/situation in which we pick up on nothing—if no new perspective on the world, then no new event. Certainly, we need to move into more complex experiments involving more than two clapped events and involving all sorts of musical domains. But I’d like to stay for a while with this primitive example as a sort of illustration of Whitehead’s concept of a (concrete) “succession of our acts of experience” understood as “the derivation of state from state, with the later state exhibiting conformity to the antecedent” (Whitehead 1985, 35). Let’s now redraw Example 44.1 with symbols that would represent the functioning of “derivation” or “conformity to the antecedent.” Moving from your performance of Example 44.1 to a symbolism of “such a” performance, that is to say, “any such” performance, let’s posit in Example 44.2 two complex functions labelled P and Pʹ as representations of two inextricable phases in “the succession of our acts of experience.” Here P is situated in the presently-becoming first event labelled A, an event growing in duration. To show this growth as a graphic length I draw a line labelled P (shown initiated with the vertical mark |) to symbolize the durational quantity of the presently becoming event A—from A’s initiation (marked |) to its end, the becoming of A’s successor B (likewise marked |). Let’s call the vertical mark | a “mark of becoming or presence.” Drawing the duration-length P as an arc is a slight sign of resistance to the simplifications of the straight line. The arc adds a dimensional difference (a sign of intensity or

Example 44.2  Basic diagram for “projection” as a union of duration and succession.

908   Christopher Hasty intensive difference)—up/down, higher/lower, more/less—unknown to the straight line. Let this graphic difference symbolize an essential changing of intensities (in all felt dimensions) that together constitute the concrete becoming of this event. The curved and solid line P symbolizes two aspects of the event: both (1) the emergence or ongoingness of an event A which, here by definition, is present and (2) the relevance or influence A can exercise for a (future) successor that will take A into account when A is past. The curved line symbolizes emergence-becoming-presence. The solid line with an arrow (the “arrow of time”) symbolizes a growing determinacy that can become relevant to a successor. The dotted line beneath Pʹ symbolizes a growing determinacy that is the particular relevance of that first, now past and determined event (P) for a second and present event (Pʹ) as the new event is in the process forming itself (a sort of self-determination).9 Pʹ is thus a sort of repetition of P with a powerful difference. A traditional name for the ability or power to enter into a new event is “potential.”10 This entering in or “conformation of state to state, the later to the earlier” is Whitehead’s definition of “time in the concrete.” P and Pʹ would, however inadequately, symbolize succession in “concrete (concretizing) time.” The symbols A and B understood as separate, autonomous objects here symbolize “pure time.” If there were a pure durational quantity separate from other quantities/qualities, then the new, unconditioned duration of B could be identical to the quantity of A; that is, A could equal B (A=B). But if there are differences in all kinds of quantity/quality that matter, and also differences in kinds of time or tense that matter (here simplified to present, past, and future) then A and B are misleading symbols. Is A, in its present coming into being, the same as past A (the same “A”) in its complex influence in the becoming of B? And what about present A’s potential contributions to a world that has yet to be—a future world in which an A past would actually (somehow) influence or come into the newly becoming B? If time/tense is real there can be no actual identity of A and B, and by extension no event identities as all—apart, that is, from the self-identity of an event for-and-in-itself, presently and preciously coming out, sovereignly emerging as an event, “its own” event: A it’s A, B it’s B. A tempting thought, but in reality neither an A nor a B apart from everything that is coming into the creation of each. A-present (that is to say A-becoming, emerging, eventing, durating) does not equal A-past (that is to say, A-persisting as a potential influence on its followers).11 In light of these distinctions, there can be no stable, tenseless, once-and-for-all events. Certainly, for representation, for “having again” as an opportunity to experiment with and explore, the labels A and B are essential tools. And yet, how much greater the opportunities for experimentation and exploration were we also to acknowledge the real complexities of the world where “having again” as identity makes no sense. To reconcile representation and complexity would involve finding ways to have both the precision of our categories and the understanding that our categories are always on the move and nothing apart from whatever experimentation/exploration we are willing to undertake (see Gendlin 1995). Seeing the radical simplification of our representations as limitation or impoverishment (and not as a salutary elimination of “irrelevant” factors or noise) is, in fact, also a seeing of what lies beyond the simplification and thus a sort of learning.

Time   909 To carry our simple experiment a step further, let’s add a third clap in Example 44.3a and 44.3b. In Example 44.3a the event C initiated with a third clap is shown to inherit or take its measure focally (though now not entirely) from its immediate predecessor, the second event B. This diagram shows relevance only for the immediately successive terms—A for B and B for C. It should be noted, however, that the projective symbols (P–Pʹ, Q–Qʹ introduce what we might call a genetic-transitive relation: the C that is formed under the influence of B cannot be apart from A if that A was influential in shaping B. This sort of transitivity distances the representation shown here from the realm of external, pure succession. Example 44.3b shows a different possibility for a third. Here the third clap as the initiation of a new event takes for its measure not the second (determined/past) event B but a yet larger event comprising the first two events together, AB. In this case, the third clap would sound the emergence of a second (secundus, following) event which, as a second or follower, could take its measure only from its predecessor—the event of the first two clap-initiated events together, as one. This new event is, at the same time, a new togetherness of the first two—now one. In this new and larger event, the special relevance of the prior first for the prior second is transferred or transformed. The second clap is now a later phase in a larger event that will have its own effect on a successor (initiated here with a third clap).12 In spite of its severe abstraction, Example 44.3, with its three claps, can point to a complexity of events at many (and possibly shifting) levels of duration. Multiplicity here is inseparable from complexity, the many folded into one another in a multitude of temporal, tensed ways. Even limited, as it has been here, to the category of durational quantity,

Example 44.3  A third clap: 3a, a new first, a beginning-again; 3b, a new second, continuing its predecessor and thus expanding duration.

910   Christopher Hasty this diagram could be developed (and revised) in response to experiments with actual musical rhythm that involve a variety of musical domains and various degrees of complexity.

Projective Complexity: The Beginning of Beethoven’s Op. 132 Although there is no space here to adequately experiment with examples of music (sounding or remembered, imagined), I would like to at least open the possibility of working with musical duration by considering the opening of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132.13 The fairly condensed analysis that follows will make use of conventional music-theoretical nomenclature and concepts augmented by a few primitive projective symbols to follow paths of event formation in the opening twentynine bars. These notations and explanations are meant to be patiently tested by the reader. Even if affirmed (and they need not be), they will raise many questions which will move beyond this limited account. Indeed, it is my hope that the theoretical underpinnings of this analysis could accommodate better readings and ask for more sensitive analytic categories. Example 44.4a is an annotated reduction to two staves of the first large event, a “slow introduction” (I), showing only the outer voices. The marks of beginning and continuation show a pattern of growth in duration through these four stages of event formation. Although in the Example 44.4a we can see at once the several marked bars, we can’t see the temporal process, which involves local reproductions of durational quantity by succeeding events. Each reproduction or inheritance arises from local conditions involving tones, contours, qualities of sound (register/timbre, volume), etc. In this way, quantity and quality are always mixed. If we take time (change, novelty) seriously, each bar is unique—the production of a new creature, and not merely the reproduction of a type. Here fifteen (8+4+2+1) unique measured durations/events are shown, all interwoven in hierarchical order understood as a process of growth. As they grow together, various levels are not separate. Thus, a player might focus on level I as a lens for feeling larger durations of varying orders. Moreover, in the course of I, focus might change in level or intensity. As a slow introduction, this massive (35–40 seconds long) and highly symmetrical phrase-event is unconventional, disseminating its motivic gestures into the following Allegro. In this way, it might be thought of rather as an extended motto or a model or “precept.” Example 44.4b shows the two forms of its motivic tetrachord, tonic and dominant. Each is a “turn” around a consonant fifth (A–E and E–B). Thus, each of the eight measures of level I begins with a dissonance (appoggiatura) resolving by half-step in its continuative phase. This complex device is instrumental in its generation of events at levels I–III. In its final stage (through acceleration, change of contour, and heightened dissonance), the event intensifies thereby motivating the energetic and disruptive Allegro. The motivic turns shown in Example 44.4c contrast with the space-creating, “broken”

Time   911 turns of the motto. Here the focus is on single pitches (scale-degree 2 and scale-degree 5) and on stepwise motion; melody becomes livelier, more continuous and singable. This new melodic development in I continues into the Allegro. (In Example 44.5 chromatic turns are marked with a double spiral.) I is not, however, immediately projective. The new music sustains the harmonic opening and the dissonant F in violin but finds no foothold in the durational quantity that I would offer a successor. The new event A1, shown in Example 44.5, begins with little if anything to go on; moreover, it is itself unstable giving rise to, at most, quarter-note measures (and in many performances not even that). A new beginning appears with the tonic resolution at the end of bar 10. But with bar 11 the properly rhythmic beginning (the “crusis,” the beat) of the Allegro emerges, suddenly transforming the end of bar 10 into anacrusis (| → /) and transforming the whole of bars 9–10 into a large-scale anacrusis. With the high cello in bar 11, a motive or figure is

Example 44.4a  Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132, first movement, bars 1–9 reduced to outer voices and annotated.

Example 44.4b  Tonic and dominant versions of motivic tetrachord.

Example 44.4c  Turn figures around a single pitch – diatonic and chromatic versions.

912   Christopher Hasty

Time   913

Example 44.5  Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132, first movement, bars 9–33 reduced and annotated.

i­ntroduced which promises a proper phrase and a proper beginning. In register and pitch this figure draws on the relevance of the climax of I, bars 5–7.14 The following repetition in the violin an octave lower in the next two bars (13–14) can form a continuation and a four-bar measure, and perhaps the promise of a thematic period or sentence. And yet, as things go on, bar 13 emerges as the true beginning of a four-bar phrase, pushing the beginning deep inside the Allegro. Marking this shift of function (bars 13–14 from continuation to beginning) the bass of bars 5–7 reappears: F–E, D#–E. (This beginning with 13 is confirmed with the beginning of the consequent A2 in bar 23.) Here the metrical relevance of I begins to assert itself, if indirectly: the pairing of bar-measures15 in A1 and A2 results in a slow four-beat (2+2) measure that can feel like a return to level I of I. The tempo is somewhat faster, but the scale is the same—the new whole note is equivalent to but faster than the old half note (the “same” but faster). And yet the melody of the new music (comparing bars 11–12 with 5–7) is moving much more quickly; and this comparative quickness (a projected, inherited quickness) contributes to the particular or precise tempo of this Allegro, to its particular “character” or feel. The emergence of a four-bar measure begun with bar 13 quickly fails to fit the stylistic convention that would promise an eight-bar antecedent phrase, a 13–20 event. Instead, this projective promise is contracted in the emergence of a small, closed four-bar “sentencelike” form: long–long–short–short–long, in bars 13–16. But even this reduction is denied when bar 16 breaks off from the rest to pair with bar 17 as beginning and continuation.

914   Christopher Hasty Certainly, bar 13 to the Adagio in bar 21 adds up to eight bars, but think what is lost in this simple count. Example 44.6 provides a schematic projective diagram of A1–A2 to help us keep track. The four-bar measure begun with bar 13 is abandoned without issue (here shown as “crossed out”) when a new two-bar measure emerges with bars 16 and 17. From here compression and motivic liquidation (dissolving the motive in a multiplication of its particles) begin to undermine even two-bar measures leading to a further and different sort of compression in an abbreviated I-like Adagio (notice the revival of the focal tonic ascent to ^3: A–B–C returned to the high register); this is followed by an abbreviated “running sixteenth-note” Allegro passage (now piano instead of forte), all leading to the consequent A2, a “consequent” that is the most stable, beginning-like moment thus far and that finally delivers a palpable four-bar projective potential. It is a most peculiar consequent that can thus appear as the clearest moment of beginning for the Allegro. The beginning-again with bar 23 (Example  44.5) inverts the counterpoint of bars 13–15 with the cello now in its proper register and beginning, like bar 11, on the offbeat.

Example 44.6  Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132, first movement: schematic projective diagram of bars 9–33 (Event A).

Time   915 Changes of register and detail produce an effect quite different from that of A1. There is now a continuous ascent up to B• in bar 28, and bar 27 can initiate the potential for a second four-bar measure. But suddenly the downward B• major arpeggiation breaks in, to again unsettle the notated metre. Compare this moment with the downbeat of 19 (an octave lower). This 1½-bar arpeggiation functions rather like the two-bar diminishedseventh arpeggiation that opened the Allegro, as a second blurring through a critical reduction of metrical range or “size.” Here the immediate clouding of a clear beat greater than a whole note leads to a new event with a markedly different projective behavior, a second event B working as a transition to a larger second, the “second theme.” The new function begins with and is marked as beginning (|) by a departure in tonal orientation. The predominant function of the “Neapolitan,” B• major (^2b) in A minor, is sustained; but it changes meaning, becoming a different sort of pre-dominant in F minor with the change of D to D• in bar 30: from D, ^4 in A minor, to D•, ^6 in F minor. This new development leads quickly to F major (B• resolving to A, ^4 to ^3) and then on to a new “second” or follower, opening a new “level” of duration: with bar 48 the beginning of the second, continuative Hauptperiod or “second theme” (in A minor → F major: A → ^3, C → ^5) where now for the first time we can experience a proper (though “extended” and overlapped) sixteen-bar parallel, antecedent-consequent, “first-and-second” period. This contrast of the first and second themes as mobile and stabile respectively is conventional (e.g., Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550), but mobility here is pushed to an extreme. Of course, this is only the beginning. The course of this monumental event (lasting or “durating” approximately ten minutes by the clock) proliferates, event upon event, remembering and forgetting, changing scale and focus, gradually or suddenly—rather like our living. Music offers a multidimensional play with time–event–duration, different from other human activities, but not unconnected. If music offers countless worlds for aesthetic adventure, can it not also offer countless laboratories for exploring questions of time, event, and duration?

Closing Thoughts Music is an art of durational quantity/quality par excellence (along with dance and poetry, at least). But if, as I have argued, durational quantity/quality in music is nothing apart from all the factors that can shape the event in its duration, then even an understanding of the durational-mensural demands an understanding of the complexity of all those factors that work to create a musical event. But what are those factors? How do they work? And how do they work together? Moreover, what counts as a musical event? When precisely does one begin and end? There are always so many things going on, overlapping, simultaneous, and interdependent at different scales and with different degrees of importance or focus. There is here no end of questions, and there are many ways to carry this thought further. An obvious next step would be to consider in more detail various

916   Christopher Hasty complex musical events with an ear turned and an eye tuned to process, that is to say, to the transformation of repetition into novelty as a present event (at whatever level and focus) takes shape from its past world of predecessors and in view of what it might offer events to come as it passes or comes to pass (becomes). Taking such a step into thinking or asking about music while truly staying in touch with the sensible would involve taking into account all sorts of musical qualities or domains, and so could lead to a new thinking of what these domains might be and how they might work together. The conventional theoretic-analytic categories I employed in the Beethoven analysis need not be the last word for this tradition of theorizing European “classical” music, and obviously much less so for musics that fall outside its narrow stylistic range and cultural-historical provenance. Thinking with and about music could be wide-ranging, encouraging experimental enterprises that might move happily back and forth between disciplines of music and philosophy. From time to time the disciplines of music and philosophy have yearned for such contact, and perhaps now is such a time. Both disciplines are nothing if not temporal, that is, nothing if not performed. Indeed, each has its characteristic discursive and notational performative ways. One thrives in thinking/feeling with and the other in thinking/feeling about. The two thrive together when with and about are not strangers.

Notes 1. Čapek’s substitution of “duration” for event is not, I think, a direct reference to Bergson’s durée réelle but rather a way of avoiding an understanding of “event” that Čapek considers misleading. In classical and relativity theory, “event” is durationless, a point in geometrical space-time. In particle physics and quantum theory, events are short-lived but not durationless, and it is to these innovations in physics that Čapek appeals for his advocacy of process. 2. As Čapek (1961, 371–372) indicates, the separation of duration and succession is closely connected to the dichotomies of unity–multiplicity and continuity–discontinuity. “For this reason,” Čapek writes—the same reason that a synthesis of unity and multiplicity, and a synthesis of continuity and discontinuity must be admitted now that we know more about Nature—“duration and succession must be seen not as a dichotomy, but as intimately connected in the inflowing of events that we might call Time itself.” Although there is not sufficient space here to pursue the connection, reflection on the togetherness of duration and succession could lead to ways of outgrowing the dichotomies of unity– multiplicity and continuity–discontinuity. Indeed, that must be Čapek’s point in turning to “auditory models” and “auditory experience” (see Čapek 1961, 399 and 361–381). 3. Taking time as a linear series of positions and recognizing change as a fundamental character of time, J. M. E. McTaggart (1908) finds position and change to be irreconcilable and is led to the conclusion that time is unreal. For “position” and “change” substitute “succession” and “duration” (or in place of “duration”: “actualization,” “becoming,” “event,” “occasion”). 4. It is important to remember that we could take other and less visual/geometrical metaphors. For a more kinaesthetic metaphor, we could let “event” evoke holding (holding up or holding on or onto) and let “succession” evoke passage or movement in general (not simply one to an other). In this way, the idea “event and succession” could be tested with the more bodily (but still quite abstract) categories of “holding and moving.” This metaphor

Time   917 group (also paradoxical) might lead to very different, and perhaps more process-friendly, conclusions. See Hasty 2014 for a preliminary development of this metaphor. 5. In this first sentence Whitehead sidesteps Augustine’s essentialist question: “What is Time?” to begin instead with a proposition (or invitation): “Time is known to us as the succession of our acts of experience.” Beginning not with a Time separate from an Us, Whitehead avoids the anxious epistemological questions: “how do we know,” “how could we trust that our knowledge be true of Time?” Thus, he suggests we begin straightaway by admitting that if we know anything of Time it is in/through our specifically human living which we can know only in/through/as our experience; indeed our experience, so owned, implies a sort of knowledge and trust. For Whitehead, the wager is that if human being is not separate from Being or Nature (or whatever Time might be spoken of) then we should by rights have access to what lies beyond the merely human. And even if the premiss is mistaken, what’s our alternative? This consistent acknowledging of the human and, moreover, a human not separate from a human body is an opening to thinking about and with music, about and with the arts in general, and about and with sensitivities of all kinds and degrees. 6. Note the connection of Whitehead’s triad—concrete followed by two different orders of abstraction (first objects, then relations)—to Charles Sanders Peirce’s “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness” and also the radical reversal of value. 7. To make the present the locus of succession and becoming (and indeed event) need not deny the intertwining of the tenses, nor need it privilege present over future and past. If the tenses are to be thought together then each must be in each. Focusing on “present” here is doubtless an oversimplification, as is any scheme—indeed, how many tenses might there be? Gilles Deleuze (1994) has proposed a fascinatingly complex scheme in which each of the three tenses is allowed to function as a dimension in each of the others in three syntheses, thus forming a ninefold (3 × 3) order. 8. As I suggested earlier, the solidifying of duration in this sense might be imagined analogically as thickening or, more specifically, becoming viscous. “Viscosity” has its charms as an evocative, liminal word, a word between liquid and solid and with the peculiar implication of stickiness (like the word “coherence”)—thus viscosity could be one way of picturing the felt flows of time, flows felt braiding together as complex and dynamic, twisting and turning flows of events. How Baroque we care to be is a matter of taste. 9. This new event will obviously be informed by much more that its immediate predecessor. The diagram of Example 44.2 is a radical simplification made to focus on immediate or undivided succession, that is to say, no third party to succession (unless perhaps the power of potential “P”). But a development of this elementary diagram might accommodate more complexity—for example, triple metre (see Hasty 2020b). 1 0. P can represent both a qualitative and quantitative potential. But how can the adventures of potential be represented? The diagram cannot, of course, represent process or temporal passage. The articulations “⌜” are emergent, not locations or points—they extend into their growing durations. The dotted-line “extensions” are also misleading, showing, as they do, an all-at-once. Continuation is a process, not a product. Notice especially that the vertical line (|) marking the initiation of an event represents a process, an initiating that belongs to the whole event and is inseparable from the event as a whole. Although the | is placed at the beginning of the graphically represented event, the | does not refer to the initiating sound itself, much less to an instant of beginning. Rather, | continues—as long as the event continues, until the event ends with the initiation of a following event or, if without a sharp articulation, in the gradual passing away of the event (as in a single clap without a second that would determine its end).

918   Christopher Hasty 11. In the images of autonomy, sovereignty or rule we can feel a sense of power located in, or at the self-sufficient event-thing. But it is difficult to know where this power comes from. If from within, how does it get there? If from without, from where, or what? If, however, instead of the self-sufficient event-thing we imagine a “permeable” event-process, these problems of power take on a different character involving causality (for example, Whitehead’s “causal efficacy”), growth, and learning. Such questions de-centre and complicate power, allowing it to run along countless changing and interwoven threads (or “lines”) of connection, countless courses. 12. In Example 44.3b no projection is shown from the second clap to the third. AB is now one event initiated with A (| \). If C is now a second event that takes AB into account then B’s relevance for C will pertain to C’s later phase, since B is the later phase of AB. The mark \ here symbolizes the articulated continuation of an event already begun (|), an articulation that does not (at this higher level) initiate a new event. 13. For more detailed analyses along similar lines, see Hasty 2019a (Haydn, Josquin des Prez), 2019b (Takemitsu, Feldman, Sciarrino), and 2020a (Keats, Endymion); see also Hasty (forthcoming) for a more leisurely and expansive analysis of the opening of Op. 132. 14. Notice in bars 11–12 the difference from bars 5–6: instead of rising to B, the melody falls to G# in a large, intensified A–G# appoggiatura. In contrast to the peace of I, A1 gets stuck in a rather anxious or restless behaviour, perhaps reminiscent of the opening of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 (by contrast, a large and metrically unsettled “Satz”). In this connection, notice especially a focus on continuation in bar 12 involving a variety of domains. Indeed, a focus on continuation permeates this music on all levels and contributes to its restlessness and to its drive. 15. A brief note on terminology: since a (notated) bar may or may not be a (durational) meas­ ure, I use the term “bar-measure” to refer to a measure that happens to be notated as a bar (delimited by bar lines).

Works Cited Bergson, Henri. 2007. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Repr. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Brelet, Gisèle. 1949. Le Temps musical: Essai d’une esthétique nouvelle de la musique. 2 vols. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Čapek, Milič. 1961. The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published 1968. Gendlin, Eugene T. 1995. “Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface between Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation.” Mind and Machines 5(4): 547–560. Hasty, Christopher. 2014. “Rhythmusexperimente—Halt und Bewegung.” In Rhythmus— Balance—Metrum: Formen raumtzeitlicher Organisation in den Künsten, edited by Christian Grüny and Matteo Nanni, 155–207. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hasty, Christopher. 2019a. “Thinking With and About Rhythm.” In Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm, edited by Richard Wolf, Steven Blum, and Christopher Hasty, 20–54. New York: Oxford University Press.

Time   919 Hasty, Christopher. 2019b. “New Music—New Rhythm.” In Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm, edited by Richard Wolf, Steven Blum, and Christopher Hasty, 337–380. New York: Oxford University Press. Hasty, Christopher. 2020a. “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm.” In Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, edited by Peter Cheyne, Andrew Hamilton, and Max Paddison, 233–254. New York: Oxford University Press. Hasty, Christopher. 2020b. Meter as Rhythm. New York: Oxford University Press. Hasty, Christopher. Forthcoming. “Rhythmus/Metrum.” In Handbuch Musikanalyse: Methode und Pluralität, edited by Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Jan Philipp Sprick, Christian Thorau, and Ariane Jeßulat. Kassel, Stuttgart: Bärenreiter-Metzler. McTaggart, J. M. E. 1908. “The Unreality of Time.” Mind 17, no. 68 (October): 457–473. Neisser, Ulric. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1985. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Repr. New York: Fordham University Press. First published 1927.

Pa rt V I

C OL L ISIONS A N D C OL L A BOR AT IONS

chapter 45

Au then ticit y Julian Dodd and John Irving

Work Authenticity as Score Compliance Authenticity At its most abstract, an art object’s being authentic consists in its truly being the kind of thing it purports to be (Thom 2011, 91). Perhaps the most familiar kind of authenticity is that which we refer to when, for example, we describe a painting as “an authentic Vermeer” or an etching as “an authentic print of Braque’s L’Aquarium.” Claims such as these concern the provenance of the object in question. The painting is an authentic Vermeer because Vermeer himself painted it; the etching is an authentic print of L’Aquarium because it was made by taking an impression from the very plate produced by Braque. Let us call this kind of authenticity etiological authenticity. An artefact is etiologically authentic just in case it genuinely has its purported origins, authorship, or provenance. Etiological authenticity is not the kind of authenticity that tends to be at stake in philosophers’ and musicologists’ discussions about the nature and desirability of authenticity in musical performance (D.  Davies  2011, 73). Nonetheless, two things are worth noting about etiological authenticity, if only to help us precisely characterize the different kind of authenticity that dominates discussion with regard to Western classical music. First, etiological authenticity does not admit of degree: an object is either etiologically authentic or not; it cannot have more or less of it. Second, whether an artwork is etiologically authentic is purely a question concerning its causal origin; it is not itself a normative property (that is, a property whose possession contributes to the artwork’s artistic value). This is reflected in the fact that a painting’s being an exact forgery does not of itself make it artistically inferior to the original (Goodman 1976, 109). What, then, is it for a musical performance to be authentic? It is for it to be true to something that it purports to be true to. This relation of being true to something, unlike the purely causal relation that characterizes etiological authenticity, is—or at least seems

924   Julian Dodd and John Irving to be—normative in nature. It is a kind of faithfulness. Crucially, however, we do not have just one kind of authenticity here. Different candidates for the thing to which a musical performance can be faithful, and alternative accounts of the relation of faithfulness, yield different species of authenticity. Here are some examples. If the thing to which a musical performance is supposed to be faithful is the performer’s character—her emotional states, beliefs, or values—then the authenticity involved is a kind of sincerity. Plausibly, such sincerity is a performance value in blues music, with certain critics believing authentic blues performance to require the expression of felt emotions that can only be experienced by those who have lived as a black person in the United States (Baraka 1963, 147–148). If, by contrast, it is held that a musical performance ought to be true, not to the performer’s character, but to her artistic personality, then the authenticity concerned is what Peter Kivy calls personal authenticity (1995, 108–142). A personally authentic performance is one that is true to the performer’s own aesthetic tastes and intuitions; and so, if these tastes and intuitions have aesthetic merit in themselves, a personally authentic performance will have artistic style and originality (123). Kivy claims that such personal authenticity is valued in all art forms, including Western classical music, and this view has achieved a good deal of consensus, although some have expressed reservations about whether it is right to call this value a kind of authenticity (S. Davies 2001, 241–242). Significant as these varieties of authenticity are, they are not where most of the philosophical and musicological action is, at least when it comes to Western classical music. Western classical music is predominantly a work-focused kind of music. Performances tend to be performances of musical works: repeatable entities specified by scores that are made manifest in performance. A performance of a work in this tradition is not evaluated as an autonomous musical event, but as a performance of the work performed (S. Davies 2001, 250; Levinson 1987, 377). As a result, such evaluation involves judging the extent to which a performance is true to—that is, faithfully instantiates—the performed work. This, in schematic form, is the kind of authenticity to which the remainder of this chapter is devoted. Let us call authenticity of this sort work authenticity. The thing to which a work-authentic performance is true—the thing to which it is faithful—is the work of which it is a performance. Of course, matters cannot be left here. The schema needs to be filled in by an account of what being true to a work consists in. Here is an attractive such account: work authenticity is score-compliance authenticity, namely, accurately rendering the performed work’s score into sound (S. Davies 1991, 21; 2001, 227). On this view, a work’s score encodes instructions, addressed from the composer to performers, for performing the work correctly. The more fully and precisely a performance follows the said instructions, the more work authentic it is (S. Davies 1987, 46; 1988, 223; 2001, 207, 227). On this view, ideal (that is, perfect) work authenticity is ideal (that is, perfect) score compliance. Many commentators believe that such score-compliance authenticity is a performance value within Western classical music: in other words, that a musical performance within this tradition is better for being more authentic, other things being equal (S. Davies 1987, 47). On this view, perfect

Authenticity   925 score compliance is a goal of work performance (S. Davies 2001, 241), albeit one that might conflict with, and as a result be traded off against, other performance values. Whether score-compliance authenticity is a genuine performance value and, if so, of what kind, are questions that we will come back to. For now, we can end this section by emphasizing two points of contrast between work authenticity—construed as score compliance—and etiological authenticity. First, score-compliance authenticity comes in degrees (S. Davies 2001, 207; Thom 2011, 93): one performance of a work can be more or less score-compliant than another. (As we shall note presently, if a purported performance of a work fails to achieve a minimal degree of score compliance, it thereby ceases to count as a performance of its target work at all.) Second, score-compliance authenticity— in appearing to be a way of being faithful to a work—would seem to be a normative, rather than a purely causal, property. While a painting’s being an original Rembrandt informs us merely as to the work’s causal origin, the fact that a performance of a work is fully compliant with the work’s score would encourage many to describe the said performance as properly formed, i.e., constructed as it ought to be (Wolterstorff 1980, 56–58), which is a description with clear normative content.

Score-Compliance Authenticity as Historical Authenticity From now on, for the sake of brevity, we shall use authenticity to name the work authenticity that is this paper’s prime focus. We have noted already a tendency to construe such authenticity as score-compliance authenticity: the accurate rendering of a work’s score into sound. But what does such score compliance consist in? As often in philosophy and musicology, things are not as simple as they might at first seem; and seeing why not will enable us to understand why people have tended to interpret score-compliance authenticity itself in a historicist manner. Here are two complications concerning what it is to obey the instructions for performance encoded by a work’s score. First, not everything recorded in a work’s score has the status of an instruction. Some of the things written down in scores might, with justification, be treated as mere recommendations, wishes, or advice on the part of the composer. Such notational elements, by contrast with genuine instructions on how to perform the work accurately, may be deviated from without sacrificing score compliance. For example, Stephen Davies has suggested that if a repeat served originally to help first-time audiences grasp the main thematic ideas of the work, and if ignoring it does not unbalance the movement or its relation to other movements, then performers need not observe it (S. Davies 2001, 213–214). Second, composers sometimes issue instructions on correct performance only implicitly, in the context of an assumed performance practice; so the instructions whose totality determine what it is to be ideally compliant with a work’s score go beyond what

926   Julian Dodd and John Irving is explicitly notated (S.  Davies  2001, 207). For instance, Baroque church sonatas are always in four movements with the following tempi: slow, fast, slow, fast. So, to follow Peter Kivy’s thought experiment (Kivy 2002, 241), if we were to find a score for a Baroque church sonata which contained no tempo instructions, we would likely regard its composer as, in effect, issuing instructions on tempi that have gone without saying. These two complications indicate that in order for performers to approach ideal score compliance in performance, they must interpret the score in light of a set of notational conventions and norms concerning performance practice. It is not enough to approach a score blind. But which such set of notational conventions and norms of performance practice is relevant? The dominant answer is this: the notational conventions and performance practices in place when the work in question was composed (S. Davies 1987, 43; 2001, 211–214, 222–224). The thought here is that, since the score encodes the composer’s instructions to performers, and since these instructions were issued in a specific music-historical context to musicians operating in that context, the conventions appropriate to the interpretation of the score “are those with which the composer would have taken musicians of the day to be familiar” (S. Davies 1987, 43). Once a performer interprets score-compliance authenticity in this kind of way, and then makes the decision to aim at the ideal of score compliance in her performance, her approach becomes recognizably that of the historical authenticity movement in musical performance that gathered pace from the 1960s: a methodology that seeks to obey the composer’s scored instructions using instruments characteristic of the time of composition, and by according with period notational and performance conventions (S. Davies 2001, 207; Young 1988, 228–229). However, the first thing we would like to say about this is that such a historicist spin on score-compliance authenticity has tended to be under-argued. Consider the following analogy. The offence of threatening behaviour, as specified by section 4 of the UK’s Criminal Justice Act (1967), is that of issuing “threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour towards another person,” with “the intent to cause, and thereby causing, harassment, alarm or distress.” But what are the standards by which we should judge whether a verbal or non-verbal action is “threatening,” “abusive,” or “insulting”? Presumably not those operative in society at the time at which the bill became law, but those in place at the time at which the alleged offence took place. Social mores evolve over time, and it would be wrong to assess defendants’ behaviour today according to anything other than contemporaneous standards. No doubt, the legislators of the Act in 1967 had a good idea of what, by their standards, would count as threatening, abusive, or insulting behaviour, but this does not alter the fact that subsequent cases are assessed not by these standards, but by those in place at the time of the alleged offence. So now consider this. Why should we treat score compliance in a historicist manner, rather than in an analogous way to that in which we decide, for the sake of the Criminal Justice Act, whether a certain action counts as threatening, insulting, or abusive? According to the latter kind of approach, the conventions appropriate to the faithful rendering of a musical score into sound are those extant at the time of performance, just as long as these conventions are part of an identifiable evolving tradition of music-making

Authenticity   927 linking the performance to the work’s composition. On this view, for example, it could be argued that our use of modern tuning conventions, modern instruments, and women’s voices for the upper parts in liturgical music are all twenty-first-century ways of faithfully realizing a Baroque score in sound (Young 2005, 393). The idea behind such a non-historicist take on score compliance is that the appropriate demand on reading period scores is not that performers should attempt to reconstruct period performance and notational conventions, but that “[p]erformance should be part of a tradition: a practice which is constantly amended in the light of new examples, which in turn owe their life to what has gone before” (Scruton 1997, 449). In light of this appeal to tradition, as opposed to historical reconstruction, we cannot just assume that the conventions relevant for faithfully instantiating a score are period ones. If, for instance, a Baroque score describes a sonata as for oboe, it does not follow that complying with this scored instruction requires a performer to use a Baroque, rather than a modern, oboe. Since the composer’s instruction is merely to play the piece on an oboe, and since what counts as an oboe is determined, not by the composer at a certain time, but by an evolving musical tradition, the fact that the composer would not have been familiar with modern versions of the instrument would seem to be of little or no consequence. As we have seen, an item of legislation can outlaw a kind of behaviour from a certain time even though what counts as such behaviour evolves after this time. When this happens, the standards by which we determine whether a subsequent action is of the outlawed kind are not those of the legislators themselves, but those in place when the action concerned was performed. Similarly, a composer’s instructions can be recorded in a score, and yet might subsequently come to be satisfied in ways that she could not have anticipated. Having just raised the question of whether it is obligatory to construe score-compliance authenticity as historical authenticity, we would just like to register our scepticism before moving on to other, evaluative matters. In outline, the remainder of this paper will be concerned with the desirability of score-compliance authenticity within Western classical music. Specifically, after arguing that score-compliance authenticity is, indeed, desirable within this musical practice, we go on to consider both the extent of its desirability and the manner in which it is desirable. In focusing exclusively on evaluative questions, we put to one side the epistemological and practical concerns raised by certain musicologists, most famously Richard Taruskin (1995). Although we do not underestimate such concerns, we believe the evaluative issues that interest us to be fundamental.

Score-Compliance Authenticity as a Performance Value According to the notion of a performance value introduced in the first section, score compliance is a performance value within Western classical music just in case a musical performance of a work is better for its being more score compliant, other things being

928   Julian Dodd and John Irving equal (S. Davies 1987, 47). For score compliance to be a performance value in this sense is for it to be a pro tanto good in work performance: something that, although perhaps not always good all things considered, is nonetheless a good-making feature in performances of works of music. Since central, paradigmatic cases of work performance see performers trying to perform works in as good a way as possible, the claim that scorecompliance authenticity is a pro tanto good in performance is equivalent to the thesis that performers have a pro tanto obligation to maximize score compliance when they perform musical works: an obligation that must be weighed against any other relevant pro tanto obligations in order to determine what the performer ought to do. This latter thesis gives some clear content to the claim that our practice has the maximization of score compliance as an ideal (Goehr 2007, 99). However, while it is clear what it is for score compliance authenticity to be a performance value within Western classical music, it is far less clear how to determine whether it is such a value. Davies, keen to press the idea that “a performance should seek to be ideally authentic” (S. Davies 2001, 241), seemingly tries to argue for this claim by pointing out that fidelity to the score is “an ontological requirement, not an interpretative option” (S. Davies 2001, 207, 241; 2013, 74). What he means by this is that a performance of a work can count as a performance of that work at all only if it is sufficiently scorecompliant to at least be recognizably of its topic work (2001, 207). This is true, but does not help us. We may agree that a necessary condition of performing a work is that the performance “succeeds to a reasonable degree” in complying with the instructions encoded in the work’s score (Levinson 1980, 86; see also S. Davies 2001, 166). But it does not follow from this that score compliance is a performance value in the sense just introduced. The reason for this is simple. Merely acknowledging that a performance must reach the threshold of what Davies calls “the minimal level of authenticity” in order to count as a performance of the work performed (S. Davies 2001, 241) does nothing to commit us to the claim that a performance is better for being more score-compliant (other things being equal), once this minimal threshold has been reached. It does not commit us, in other words, to the claim that maximizing score compliance is a genuine ideal in Western classical music. Some have tried to argue for the idea that score-compliance authenticity is a performance value on the grounds that we have a moral obligation to composers to play their works, if we play them at all, as they scored them (Sharpe  2004, 80–81). A simpleminded reply to this reasoning goes as follows: since we have no moral obligations to the dead, any attempt to argue along the aforementioned lines for score-compliance authenticity’s being a performance value only has application to the performance of living composers’ works. It is, though, wrong to think that we do not have moral obligations to the dead. A friend’s death does not annul my promise to look after her children in her absence (Sharpe 2004, 80). Nonetheless, although it is plausible to suppose that we have some moral duties towards dead composers, it is not so plausible to think that we have such a moral obligation to perform their works exactly as scored. For there is nothing about our practice of performing musical works that suggests that composers have a moral

Authenticity   929 right to see their works performed as they intended them. We do not regard a muzaked version of the final movement of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5 as morally injurious to Sibelius; the defect is aesthetic, not moral. Having said this, it would be no less of a mistake to develop this observation into the argument that score compliance is a performance value because a work “normally sounds better” when played in strict accordance to its score (Sharpe 2004, 82; see also Edidin 2008, 11). The idea behind such an argument would seem to be this: a perfectly score-compliant performance of a work is likely to be in itself a more aesthetically satisfying musical event—that is, have a greater “aesthetic payoff ” (Kivy 1995, 152)—than a performance that falls short of this standard. But this thought, it seems to us, is problematic for two reasons. First, the assumption that the composer always knows best how to perform her works is questionable (Kivy 1995, 162–71; 2002, 246). A performer might be right in thinking that a departure from the score might make for a more aesthetically satisfying performance of the work. (We shall return to this possibility presently.) Second, and as we shall now explain, this attempt to argue for score compliance’s being a performance value misconstrues the nature of the value we find in works and their performances. Once we think that performers should aim to maximize score compliance for the sake of producing performances with a greater aesthetic pay-off, we treat works themselves as bearing only instrumental aesthetic value. Aron Edidin endorses this conception explicitly. Works, he says, “are of aesthetic value on account of the role they play in the production of valuable performances”; “[t]here’s no independent end-value to the compositions themselves” (Edidin 2008, 5, 9). But this way of thinking gets things exactly the wrong way round. The work performed is not a mere vehicle for the production of aesthetically pleasing musical events, but something of final value which can only be properly appreciated and understood through performances of it (D. Davies 2011, 25). Since performances are the conduits by which we appreciate the works they are of, we value them as such conduits; and we hope, furthermore, to achieve a cumulative understanding of works by picking up on and reflecting upon differences in the ways in which they are performed. It might be doubted whether score-compliance authenticity is a performance value. Roger Scruton, for one, seems to be denying it when he says that “the [score compliant] authentic performance will not, in itself, provide a standard, or give access to the true musical identity of the work performed” (Scruton  1997, 446). Presumably, for score compliance not to provide a standard for performance is for there to be no pro tanto obligation on performers of a work to maximize accuracy when realizing the work’s score in sound. In Scruton’s view, performers are not bound by this obligation, but by an obligation to perform the pattern of pitches specified by the work’s score “as music, and therefore to make whatever additions and adjustments are required by a musical understanding” (441). We are sympathetic to the idea that work performance is governed by such a norm, and we will elaborate on this suggestion in the next section; but, for now, it suffices to say that merely pointing out that performers should deviate from the work’s score when their musical understanding calls for it is not in itself to deny that maximizing

930   Julian Dodd and John Irving score compliance is a performance value. For what we might have here is a familiar case of normative conflict between two pro tanto obligations, along with a recommendation of what to do in particular cases when such a normative conflict arises. In short, the reason why deviation from the score might sometimes be called for could be, not that score compliance is not a performance value at all, but that it is a performance value which, when it conflicts with the other performance value alluded to by Scruton, is overridden by it. What this illustrates is that the presence within our musical practice of an ideal of maximizing score compliance is not falsified by the observation that there are prominent recordings and performances “which are characterized by intentional deviance from the score” (Dyck 2014, 40). Perfect compliance might be a genuine ideal in musical practice that, nonetheless, is compromised in situations in which it cannot be satisfied without compromising other, more significant ideals. The performer who follows the call of what Scruton calls her “musical understanding” (1997, 441) in deviating from the score could be in a similar situation to that of someone who must resolve the tension between two of her ideals as to how to live her life. At this point, however, historical musicologists are apt to raise two kinds of concern about the suggestion that the maximization of score compliance might be a performance value. First, they might allege that philosophers who propose such a thesis are prone to overestimate the ease with which we can identify the instructions with which performers are supposed to comply. Consider, for example, J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2. The title page, as seen on the complete copy of Bach’s autograph compiled under his supervision by his son-in-law, Johann Christoph Altnikol, in 1744, describes the collection as “comprising preludes and fugues through all the tones and semitones.” But what this document does not tell us explicitly is whether a fully scorecompliant performance should play the twenty-four preludes and fugues in an ascending sequence starting with C major, or even whether completeness in performance is a requirement at all. Furthermore, this same collection of preludes and fugues lacks a definitive urtext, having instead a large number of textual sources that frequently conflict with each other. Where, in this sea of textual material, is the definitive set of instructions with which an ideally score-compliant performance must comply? Second, a historical musicologist will likely suspect that regarding the maximization of score compliance as a performance value rests on an oversimplified conception of the function of musical notation. Analytical philosophers of music typically regard scores as encodings of sets of instructions whose faithful execution generates the production of properly formed performances (S. Davies 2001, 100). However, historical musicologists (for example, Boorman 1999; Butt 2002; Levin 1992) have suggested that scores, particularly but not exclusively in early music, often had functions other than that of the simple prescription of performance. If such scores were not even intended by composers as issuings of instructions, how could maximizing score compliance be even a pro tanto obligation on performers? Keeping this question in mind, John Butt (2002, 106–122) has provided a helpfully nuanced characterization of different uses to which notation has been put by composers. Of particular interest are elements of scores—such as Corelli‘s ornaments in his

Authenticity   931 v­ iolin sonatas and Mozart’s solo piano lines—which were regarded by their composers as examples designed to give performers an idea of the sort of thing that the music calls for, not a template to follow exactly (Butt 2002, 110). Indeed, there is unassailable documentary evidence of Mozart’s tendency to regard certain scored elements as little more than prompts. When looking, for instance, at the autograph score of one passage in the finale of his C minor Piano Concerto, K. 491 (1786), we see that the virtuosic right-hand part was written in four different ways (on successively higher staves of the manuscript) and that while the first amendment might be considered a replacement of the original, the others offer further possibilities, with no suggestion of a final definitive reading. And to take another example, if we examine the opening bars of the C major Piano Sonata, K. 279 (1775–6) we find a texture that is virtually no different from an improvisation: figures that explore the space, testing out the environment (or perhaps the keyboard) in such a fashion that if the notation is representing anything here, it is a pianist’s fingers physically teasing musical patterns out of thin air. It is plausible to think that many more of Mozart’s solo keyboard works began life as improvisations, their conventional notated forms capturing formerly spontaneous acts. Indeed, we have it on Mozart’s own testimony that a later C major piano sonata, K. 309 (1777), evolved from just such a circumstance. What should we make of these two historically inflected worries? In our view, although the historical knowledge they demonstrate undoubtedly deepens our understanding of the ways in which scores mediate the relationship between composers and performers, it does nothing to problematize the hypothesis that maximizing score compliance is a value in performance. To be sure, the first kind of worry looks to be epistemological only. Whether, for example, someone striving for a fully compliant performance of material from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 should perform the entirety of its preludes and fugues, and in a particular order, depends upon whether the collection is itself a work (as opposed to being an aggregate of works), and, if it is, whether it is a sequential work (a work whose correct performance requires its parts to be performed in a specific order). Presumably, the discipline of historical musicology stands a good chance of helping us come to an evidence-based decision on this matter. Likewise, in situations in which no urtext exists, scholars will typically engage in a project of reconstructing such a text, bringing to bear their knowledge of the composer’s life and oeuvre, together with the music-historical context in which he was working. Of course, the evidence may fall short of pointing us definitively in one direction rather than another, but it does not follow from this that the very idea of compliance with a score has been discredited, just that we lack complete knowledge of what full compliance demands of us. The various uses of notation to which Butt draws our attention are more significant, perhaps. Nonetheless, it is noticeable that Butt himself describes such notational elements as offering “performance directives, but . . . rather by way of example than prescription” (Butt 2002, 109–110). This form of words is not absolutely clear, but the key point to be distilled from it would seem to be this: although performers are not expected to follow such model-like elements in scores to the letter, they are being instructed to

932   Julian Dodd and John Irving produce the music along the same lines as that represented by the model. Consequently, whenever a performer does this—thereby improvising in the manner of the model— they are perfectly compliant with that element of the score. In essence, examples such as these function in the same way as an improvised cadenza in a concerto. When a concerto leaves a space for a cadenza, any improvisation on the part of the soloist (at least, if it matches the work’s genre and style) is trivially compliant with the score. To improvise at this point is to do as the score says. With the kinds of cases Butt has in mind, there is a constraint on the style of improvisation: the performer must produce music in the manner of the model. In both kinds of case, however, the moral is the same: the score calls for improvised music-making, and so to provide such is to be compliant with it. In the sorts of examples Butt describes, the composer presents the notation as a prompt and instructs the performer to produce music like that. This is an atypical use of notation but it is still used to issue an instruction (Dyck 2014, 37). Davies’s fundamental conception of scores as prescriptive has not been challenged. Where does this leave the thesis that score-compliance authenticity is a performance value? So far, we have seen some unconvincing arguments for it and some equally unconvincing arguments against it. It is now time for us to lay our cards on the table. In our view, score-compliance authenticity is a performance value: performers do have a pro tanto obligation to maximize compliance with the score. As we shall see, however, there are occasions when this pro tanto obligation comes into conflict with, and is outweighed by, another pro tanto obligation for performers along the same lines as that appealed to by Scruton: namely, the obligation to evince understanding of the work. More of this later. For now, let us explain why we take score compliance to be a performance value. We start with a thought experiment. Imagine two performances, e1 and e2, of a work W, that are sonically identical and perfectly score-compliant, with one exception: e2 contains a little slip—a single wrong note—that is utterly insignificant in the context of the performance as a whole. Specifically, the occurrence of this wrong note in e2 does nothing to alter the performance’s higher-level aesthetic character (that is, its complex of technical, gestalt, affective, and expressive properties), so that, aesthetically speaking, e1 and e2 are equivalent. Here, then, we have two performances for which everything is equal except for e2’s containing a minor infraction of W’s score. Since e1 is equivalent to e2 in every respect except for being marginally more score-compliant, we find it compelling to regard e1 as the superior performance. It does everything that e2 does, and yet it does it while sticking more completely to the strictures of W’s score. This, we contend, makes e1 the greater artistic achievement. What this suggests to us is that Stephen Davies is right: our practice of work performance is such that a performance is better for being more score-compliant, other things being equal. Score-compliance authenticity is a performance value. The interesting questions, however, are what grounds this fact and, relatedly, what kind of performance value score-compliance authenticity is. To answer this question, we shall lean on the work of Christine Korsgaard (2008, 2009) by introducing the notion of a constitutive norm. A constitutive norm or standard for a thing or activity is one which in the

Authenticity   933 following sense arises from what it is to be the object or activity in question: it belongs to the nature of the object or activity that it both ought to meet, and in a sense is trying to meet, that norm (Korsgaard 2008, 7). Such constitutive norms arise out of the object or activity’s teleology: its purpose or function, in other words (Korsgaard 2009, 28–29). To use one of Korsgaard’s own examples, the function of a house is to serve as a habitable shelter; and from this we can derive what it is to be a good house, the relevant constitutive norm. A house is a better house for being better at sheltering us from the weather, and so the less good a house is at such sheltering, the worse a house it is. Indeed, as a house gets worse and worse at sheltering it crumbles and so ceases to be a house at all (28). This latter point is an important one. The insight it expresses is that an object or activity must accord with, or at the very least aspire to accord with, the constitutive norms relevant to a given kind in order be an object or activity of that kind at all (Korsgaard 2008, 8). And, with this idea in place, we can now approach an explanation of both why score-compliance authenticity is a performance value in Western classical music, and what kind of value it is. Considering a hypothetical recommendation to a performer that she should deliberately depart from the work’s score in some respect, even when she could obey the composer’s relevant instruction, Stephen Davies says this: This is an odd recommendation indeed. It is one thing to play wrong notes accidentally and quite another to play wrong notes deliberately for the sake of achieving an interesting interpretation. The . . . recommendation is strange because it sets the player’s intention at odds with the goal of work performance. Though the musician represents himself as playing the work—indeed, as offering an interesting interpretation of it—he intends to ignore some of the composer’s work-determinative prescriptions. It is as if this performer does not understand what work performance is. He is like the chess player who knows all the moves but does not understand that the aim of the game is to capture his opponent’s king. He misses the point of the enterprise and in that respect is not “playing the game.”  (S. Davies 2001, 248)

Davies goes on to describe score-compliance authenticity as “valued for its own sake” (253); but, in fact, his claim is more accurately formulated as the thesis that such authenticity is a constitutive norm of our practice of performing works of Western classical music: a norm definitive of the practice’s nature. This, he believes, is just how our practice is, since a purpose of that practice is to “present” the composer’s musical ideas: that is, to “deliver” or “transmit” the composer’s work to an audience (S. Davies 1987, 47; 1991, 25; 2001, 249, 251, 253; 2013, 74). Davies is right: since a point of work performance is to transmit the composer’s scored musical ideas to audiences, accuracy in such transmission is a constitutive norm within this practice. Hence we have an answer to our two questions: score-compliance authenticity is a performance value within Western classical music because its being so arises out of the teleology of the practice of work performance within this tradition; and this fact about why score-compliance authenticity is a performance value entails that such authenticity is a constitutive norm within the said practice.

934   Julian Dodd and John Irving This latter observation is significant. Given score compliance’s status as a constitutive norm within the practice of work performance within Western classical music, Davies is right to observe that this norm should not be compromised for the sake of mere interestingness in performance interpretation. As Guy Rohrbaugh explains, “[t]he mere fact that it would sound better to ignore the score generally carries little or no weight at all in the face of the score itself ” (Rohrbaugh 2020, 86). Where they conflict, constitutive performance values trump other performance values—such as interestingness, spontaneity, and imaginativeness—which, though they have considerable normative weight, would seem not to be in the same way built in to the purpose of the activity. This is the sense in which constitutive performance values and non-constitutive values “seem not to exist in this same space” (86). Having noted our agreement with aspects of Davies’s discussion, we nonetheless think that he has something fundamentally askew. Davies, we have seen, is bewildered by the idea of a performer’s playing “wrong notes deliberately” for the sake of some other performance value. This is because he presumes that the transmission of composers’ works is the goal, or the point, of such performances. Not a goal, but the goal. A corollary of this unitary conception of the purpose of work performance is that this practice has only one constitutive norm, score-compliance authenticity; and if this were the case, then it would, indeed, be baffling as to how someone well versed in the practice of performing works of music could come to decide to deviate from a scored instruction when perfectly able to abide by it. Constitutive norms, we have seen, have a peculiar deontological status: when a constitutive norm comes into conflict with a non-constitutive norm, the former invariably trumps the latter. But why should we believe that the only point in performing works of music is to deliver the composer’s musical ideas? Suppose that there was another point to our practice of work performance that grounded a second constitutive performance value to sit alongside score compliance authenticity. Suppose, further, that there could be situations in which score-compliance authenticity and this second constitutive norm imposed incompatible demands on performers. What should performers do then? This, we think, is more than a hypothetical question; it, in fact, characterizes the kind of practical reasoning that performers have to engage in on a daily basis. The striking thing about this is that the second constitutive performance value, thus far introduced only schematically, is a second kind of work authenticity: another way of being true to a work.

Another Kind of Authenticity Performers want to deliver composers’ works to audiences. This is one point of work performance, and this entails that score-compliance authenticity is a constitutive norm within this practice. But this is not all that performers want to do. They do not see themselves just as deliverers or transmitters of composers’ works; as Aaron Ridley has insightfully explained, they also think of themselves as sense makers of the works they perform,

Authenticity   935 as aiming to evince insight of these works in their performance of them (Ridley 2004, 17–104). This is another point or purpose to work performance, and it grounds another constitutive norm within this activity. Although Ridley himself does not regard it in this way, this second constitutive performance value is a kind of work authenticity that we may call interpretive authenticity (Dodd 2015, 486–496). Interpretive authenticity in performance is a matter of performing a work in a way that demonstrates understanding of the work: that is, playing the piece in a way that is revelatory of what is there to be understood in it, the piece’s content. Inasmuch as an interpretively authentic performance evinces understanding of the performed work, its detail will have been determined, not just by a grasp of the way in which the work unfolds musically, thematically, and expressively, but by an appreciation of the significance—one might say the point—of the work’s unfolding as it does. Such a performance, in placing an appreciation of the work’s detail within the context of an understanding of its point, will be guided by a refined sense of why the work is as it is and, hence, of what matters in the presentation of the work in performance (Dodd 2015, 489). Like score-compliance authenticity, interpretive authenticity admits of degree. A performance is interpretively authentic to the extent that it displays an understanding of the work that is profound or otherwise insightful (Dodd  2015, 488–489). Significantly, though, what counts as an insightful presentation of a work admits of audience relativity. Since the insight into the work evinced by a performance is paradigmatically intended for uptake by an audience, and since audiences differ with respect to their familiarity with the work performed, what it takes to display features of the work effectively will vary depending on the audience concerned. So, to lean on Jerrold Levinson’s example, performers of Schubert’s D minor String Quartet, D.  810, “Death and the Maiden,” might feel the need to substantially nuance their performance if confronted by an audience made up of jaded listeners, familiar with the score’s every measure. When playing the Andante variation movement to such an audience, the performers might find that conveying the emotional intensity of its death march-like theme is best served by taking the half-note–quarter-note–quarter-note rhythm with the maximum distension of the half note relative to the two quarter notes, “thus imparting to the figure more of a pulsing or surging quality” than would be appropriate for an audience of less familiar listeners (Levinson 1987, 380). A little more controversially, Andreas Staier’s recording of the last movement of Mozart’s A major Piano Sonata, K. 311, the rondo Alla Turca, sees him radically depart from the score, moving the melody to the bass and improvising new counter-melodies, arguably in order to convey fully the movement’s puckishness. A fully score-compliant performance would perhaps be too bland to convey the piece’s true nature—as a mischiefmaking, gleefully vulgar showpiece—to contemporary listeners familiar both with the piece itself and with world music, jazz, and other, more extreme examples of musical magpieism (Dodd 2015, 494). Some wonder whether interpretive authenticity is, properly speaking, a kind of authenticity at all (S. Davies 2013, 71). But this performance value’s status as a kind of authenticity should not be in question: being revelatory of what there is to be understood

936   Julian Dodd and John Irving in a work is according with the work’s content, which is a way of being faithful to the work itself. A much more interesting line of enquiry—though one which we can only sketch here—is to chart how interpretive authenticity differs from score-compliance authenticity, and then consider what performers should do when, as is possible, these two constitutive norms of work performance conflict with each other. One thing should be clear already: it is possible to achieve perfect score compliance in performance without displaying any great insight into the work performed. A dry, one might say “page-turning,” performance can achieve maximal score compliance, and yet lack the overall aesthetic vision that comes from delving beneath the score to grasp the work’s significance or point (DeBellis 2004, 749). Such a performance will be accurate, but will shed little light on what is really going on in the piece itself. Equally clearly, it seems, prioritizing interpretive authenticity in performance—that is, seeing one’s role as a performer as being primarily that of evincing depth, insight, and subtlety in one’s performance interpretation of the works one performs—can sometimes call for deviation from elements of the work’s score. We have seen one putative example of this already: Staier’s treatment of Mozart’s rondo Alla Turca. But others would seem to abound. Alfred Brendel advises pianists to ignore Beethoven’s scored metronome markings for the opening movement of the B flat Piano Sonata, Op. 106. If, he says, Beethoven’s prescribed tempo is attempted, the performance will travesty the piece, since some of the features crucial to Beethoven’s music—colour, clarity, and dynamic range—will be lost (Brendel 2007, 33; Dodd 2015, 493). Meanwhile, Mark Evan Bonds, in correspondence, has suggested that the fanfare-like motif in the recapitulation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is best performed on valved horns, rather than the notated bassoons. The former instruments, he convincingly argues, better serve the motif ’s evident function of signalling that something of musical significance—namely, the unfolding of a lyrical passage in the strings—is about to happen. Using valved horns, he suggests, displays a better understanding of what the motif is there for, even though Beethoven explicitly wrote it for the bassoons (no doubt, because the valveless horns of his time could not have hit the required notes comfortably) (Dodd 2015, 494). Finally, consider what Levinson has to say about Glenn Gould’s renditions of Bach’s Partitas: Glenn Gould’s Bach Partita renditions are not perhaps, in matter of instrumentation, and phrasing, strictly correct performances of those works, but they answer to appropriate and even historically grounded musical interests (e.g. clarity of counterpoint and voice-leading, inwardness of expression), and they do so without inordinately traducing the sound, performance means, and emotional domain envisaged by the composer. Many would agree with me that their musical virtues make them, as a matter of fact, outstandingly good performances of Bach’s Partitas, even though, paradoxically, they flirt with not being performances of them at all. (Levinson 1987, 384)

Let us suppose that Levinson is right about this. What could Gould’s motive have been in deviating so greatly from Bach’s instructions that his recordings of the Partitas

Authenticity   937 flirt with not being performances of them at all? Here is a compelling answer provided by Gould’s long-standing producer, Paul Myers. Gould’s purpose, according to Myers, was to give the listener a chance “to reconsider his attitude towards a particular work— to ‘rethink’ the entire piece, if necessary—and so achieve a deeper and more complete understanding of it.” For Myers, the fulfilment gained in listening to a Gould performance of a familiar work consists in hearing how “he pulls it apart and reconstructs it, [thereby] reveal[ing] new facets of the music which I, for one, may never have considered” (Payzant 1997, 50). What Myers describes here is a performing artist driven by a concern for interpretive authenticity. So driven, in fact, that when he takes the pursuit of this performance value to conflict with the performance value of maximizing score compliance, he trades the latter for the former. Davies is inclined to think that such trade-offs are illegitimate. According to him, score-compliance authenticity “cannot easily be traded off against other performance values”; “[score-compliance] authenticity is not negotiable in the way that other performance values may be” (S. Davies 2013, 74; 2001, 241). But inasmuch as Davies’s confidence in his position rests on the assumption, albeit tacit, that score compliance is the sole constitutive performance value in work performance, it is misplaced. We have seen already that performing works of Western classical music has another point besides simply delivering the composer’s work: specifically, that of evincing understanding of the work performed. Accordingly, this second point in work performance grounds a second constitutive norm: that of maximizing interpretive authenticity. These two constitutive norms—these two varieties of authenticity—inhabit the same normative space, and yet they can come into conflict. Since both norms are constitutive, when such normative conflict arises, we cannot just assume that score compliance systematically trumps interpretive authenticity. Indeed, it rather seems to us that the opposite is true. The sorts of decisions made by Brendel, Staier, and Gould are mainstream, not aberrant. While it is possible to take issue with the particular examples we have appealed to in outlining this possibility (S. Davies 2013, 72–74), the style of practical reasoning we have described is very familiar within our musical practice. Performers of works of Western classical music, like the directors of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, sometimes take themselves to deviate from the text in order to do justice to, or bring out, a deeper level of work meaning. No doubt, some decisions made on such a basis are bad ones. This, however, does not undermine the idea that there can be circumstances in which a performer’s legitimate aim of revealing a more profound understanding of a work counts as a decisive reason for departing from aspects of the work’s score. Sometimes performers make a performance of a work more interpretively authentic, and so better overall, by deviating from scored instructions.1

Note 1. This basic idea is developed, albeit with some significant departures from the story told here, in Dodd 2020.

938   Julian Dodd and John Irving

Works Cited Baraka, Amiri. 1963. Blues People. New York: Quill. Boorman, Stanley. 1999. “The Musical Text.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 403–423. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brendel, Alfred. 2007. Alfred Brendel on Music: His Selected Essays. London: Robson Books. Butt, John. 2002. Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, David. 2011. Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Davies, Stephen. 1987. “Authenticity in Musical Performance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 27, no. 1 (Winter): 39–50. Davies, Stephen. 1991. “The Ontology of Musical Works and the Authenticity of Their Performances.” Noûs 25, no. 1 (March): 21–41. Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, Stephen. 2013. “Performing Musical Works Authentically: A Response to Dodd.” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 1 (January): 71–75. DeBellis, Mark. 2004. “Review of Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music.” Mind 113, no. 452 (October): 747–750. Dodd, Julian. 2015. “Performing Works of Music Authentically.” European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (September): 485–508. Dodd, Julian. 2020. Being True to Works of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dyck, John. 2014. “Perfect Compliance in Musical History and Musical Ontology.” British Journal of Aesthetics 54, no. 1 (January): 31–47. Edidin, Aron. 2008. “Consequentialism about Historical Authenticity.” Performance Practice Review 13 (1): 1–3. Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Kivy, Peter. 1995. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2002. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, Christine. 2008. The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, Christine. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, Robert  D. 1992. “Improvised Embellishments in Mozart’s Keyboard Sonatas.” Early Music 20, no. 2 (May): 221–233. Levinson, Jerrold. 1980. “What a Musical Work Is.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 1 (January): 5–28. Reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 63–88. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Levinson, Jerrold. 1987. “Evaluating Musical Performance.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 21, no. 1 (Spring): 75–88. Reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 376–392. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Payzant, Geoffrey. 1997. Glenn Gould: Mind and Music. Toronto: Key Porter Books. Ridley, Aaron. 2004. The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Authenticity   939 Rohrbaugh, Guy. 2020. “Why Play the Notes? Indirect Aesthetic Normativity in Performance.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 78–91. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharpe, R. A. 2004. Philosophy of Music: An Introduction. Chesham, UK: Acumen. Taruskin, Richard. 1995. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thom, Paul. 2011. “Authentic Performance Practice.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Grayck and Andrew Kania, 91–100. London: Routledge. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Young, James O. 1988. “The Concept of Authentic Performance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 28, no. 3 (March): 228–238. Young, James  O. 2005. “Authenticity in Performance.” In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 501–512. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Chapter 46

Beau t y Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton

This chapter sets two examinations of musical beauty alongside each other. The first, written from a philosophical perspective, is by Nick Zangwill. The second, written from a musicological perspective, is by Stephen Hinton. The authors then engage in a dialogue arising from their contrasting examinations before closing with a jointly authored reflection on how their differing approaches to the topic of musical beauty might encapsulate broader trends and opportunities in music and philosophy.

A Philosophical View (Nick Zangwill) Music and Musical Beauty The notion of beauty is an everyday one, not the exclusive property of intellectuals. Nevertheless, there has been an intellectual tradition in the West of thinking about beauty, from Plato onwards. In that tradition, beauty is connected with pleasure. Plato, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, and many others agree on this, even though they have different things to say about the nature of the pleasure that we take in beauty. Other traditions, such as the many Chinese, Japanese, and Islamic traditions, also tend to foreground pleasure in beauty. There is reason to think that the notion of beauty is a common sense one, and that the experience of beauty is a cultural universal, like language (Dissanayake 1992). Let us accept a link between beauty and pleasure, even though it must be pleasure of a particular sort, since other things please apart from beauty. My question in what follows will be whether, and to what extent, music should be understood in terms of beauty. Few would deny that much music aspires to be beautiful. Many music-makers aim to make beautiful sounds that unfold in time, which can be appreciated with pleasure of the relevant kind by appropriately situated and acculturated listeners. But some theorists take this further and construct a general theory of

942   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton music based on beauty and pleasure. This is more controversial. Indeed, the consensus in both philosophy and musicology is to reject this. The main figure in the Western tradition who defends a beauty-centred view is Eduard Hanslick. In his seminal work Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), published in 1854, Hanslick argued that we should foreground beauty— musical beauty—when pursuing general issues about music, the experience of it, and its place in our life. Hanslick is far from being the only thinker to have pursued this, but his statement is canonical. In more recent times, Peter Kivy and I have pursued this line of thinking (see Kivy 1980, 1993, 2004; Zangwill 2015). But why hold such a view? What motivates it? There is, I would suggest, a general puzzle about music and our experience of it. Although we take music for granted, its prominence in our lives is, when we think about it, puzzling and strange. Why is this tickling of our ears so important to us? Why is it so difficult to conceive of a world with human beings who can hear sounds but who lack music? What would such a world be lacking? The beauty theory provides an answer in terms of a special susceptibility of human beings to pleasure in sound. This explanation is quite straightforward, even simple: music yields pleasure, and that is why we pursue it. The strength of this approach can be appreciated by comparison with some of its rivals. For example, some thinkers react to the puzzle of why there is music in our lives by seeking to understand music in terms of its relationship to other domains of human thought and activity, such as literature (Kramer 2010), politics (Adorno 1962), religion (Begbie 2000), brain science (Zeki 1999), or mathematics (Xenakis 1992). But music is just a terrible substitute for these other goals, and we would be irrational to pursue music for these reasons. Music can and is often combined with other goals, but those other goals are typically achieved by means of its musical beauty. Some thinkers, such as Jenefer Robinson (see especially Robinson 2005), have tried to make out a general connection between music and emotion, claiming that music expresses or arouses emotions. Supposing this to be true, we can ask: what would be the point of using music to express or to arouse emotions? There may be personal reasons for doing so, but it is difficult to see how these could in themselves explain the value that we often accord to creating and experiencing music. In contrast to such theories, appealing to the beauty of music explains the value that we accord music because appreciating beauty—and often creating beauty too—yields pleasure. That means that we can vindicate our interest in music, the investment we make in it. So, we can see how engaging in musical activity seems reasonable and worthwhile. Hanslick does not understand music in terms of its relationship to something else. Rather, music is understood in its own terms, by appealing to musical beauty. Thus the main function and value of music is to embody musical beauty in “tones and their artistic combination” (Hanslick 1986, 28). That people are pleased by musical beauty does not mean that they will agree in their judgements of beauty. They might or might not. They might think that others ought to agree, regardless of whether or not they do indeed agree (Kant 2000, §§ 6–7). But regardless

Beauty   943 of such agreements or disagreements, people around the world listen to music, they find much of it beautiful, and they take pleasure in that beauty. Music typically yields pleasure of a specific kind. It yields aesthetic pleasure—among other kinds of pleasure, no doubt. There are many different ways to understand aesthetic pleasure—indeed, the nature of such pleasure is one of the central questions of Western aesthetics. My view is that aesthetic pleasure is pleasure in beauty. I think that aesthetic pleasure in music arises from a confrontation with a value—namely, beauty—that is there in the music. But both Hume (1985) and Kant (2000) have sophisticated theories of aesthetic pleasure that deny that. Hume and Kant think that there is something distinctive about the type of pleasure that we experience. Such a view makes sense, and it gets by without a commitment to the existence of a property of beauty being there in the music. Many will see that as a good thing given the apparent strangeness of such a conception of beauty—a matter for metaphysical debate. But metaphysical losses need to be offset against phenomenological gains.

Beauty and Other Aesthetic Notions Two related questions arise. First, why beauty? Why is beauty the pre-eminent notion for understanding music? It might be argued that much music has other values, values that could also explain our interest in it. Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky wrote much beautiful music. And “Manhã de Carnaval” is a beautiful Brazilian samba. But there is other music, it seems, with other values (see Levinson 2015a). Second, and relatedly, how widely should we conceive of musical beauty? Let us distinguish between wide and narrow senses of beauty. In the wide sense, the notion of beauty coincides with the notion of aesthetic value. In the narrower sense, “beauty” denotes a particular kind of aesthetic value. Jerrold Levinson has a subtle and insightful characterization of the narrow sense as applied to music in his essay “Musical Beauty.” He writes that such beauty “seduces, charms, and gently conquers us”; it is “simply effortlessly disarming and enchanting” (59). A mark of musical beauty is “a feeling of melting on hearing such music, a sensation of being gratifyingly disarmed and overcome” (62). It gives us “a promise of peace and tranquillity rather than struggle and strife” (63). Among the structural features by which music produces this effect are “moderate tempo, even dynamic level, legato articulation, limited dissonance, major mode, symmetrical phrasing, and slow harmonic rhythm” (63). But these are not sufficient; we also need “some degree of novelty or unexpectedness in the music’s evolution” (63–64). Let us not pause to assess every detail of this proposal. Levinson emphasizes that much good music is not beautiful is this narrow sense. The availability of the narrow notion, however, does not undercut drawing on beauty, in the wide sense, for a general theory of music. Things may be beautiful in the wide sense without being beautiful in the narrow sense. It seems that beauty in the narrow sense is a “thick” or “substantive” aesthetic notion, like daintiness, dumpiness, and elegance (see Zangwill 2001). If something is beautiful in the narrow sense, then it is a way of being beautiful in the wide sense.

944   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton The notion of beauty that we need for a general understanding of music is the wide one. Being narrowly beautiful is a way of being widely beautiful. Hanslick was clearly using “beauty” in the wide sense, since he writes that musical beauty is constituted “by tones and their artistic combination” (Hanslick 1986, 28). This goes beyond Levinson’s narrow notion because many of the kinds of values in music that Levinson distinguishes from narrow beauty are also constituted in this way. It is because narrow beauty is a kind of wide beauty that we can appeal to wide beauty to understand music that exemplifies narrow beauty. Moreover, music has other values besides aesthetic values (see Levinson 2015b). But on my view, it is aesthetic value—wide beauty—that is a central goal of almost all music. What is this aesthetic value of music, this musical beauty in the wide sense, if it is distinct from beauty in the narrow sense and it is also distinct from other kinds of values? It is the value that we experience in the aesthetic experience of music. To further focus this: an aesthetic experience of music plausibly centrally involves following it, attending to unfolding audible patterns, constituted by rhythmically changing notes and chords (see Levinson 2009; 2015b on this idea). This following, I suggest, is constituted by a simultaneous twofold awareness of both the aesthetic properties of the music and the sonic elements that constitute them. (For the general idea of two-fold awareness see Wollheim 1980.) Aesthetic properties of music include what we describe in terms of “motion” and “emotion.” Moreover, while we attend to both aspects of the music as it unfolds in time, we are also sometimes aware of the larger-scale structure of what we are listening to. We can think, “Ah, there’s that theme again,” and this affects our listening, so that we hear the passage in question as a revisiting of an earlier theme. This means that we need to understand music, as a temporal art, as offering a threefold experience in which we are aware of: (1) the changing constituting sonic elements; (2) the changing aesthetic properties (including narrow- and wide-beauty, motional and emotional characteristics); and (3) these changing sonic elements and aesthetic properties in the light of their place in what we have heard thus far, or if we already know the piece in question, in the light of the whole piece. (There is a disagreement between Kivy [2004] and Levinson [1998] about the extent of so-called architectonic listening required for musical understanding, but they agree that at least some such listening is important.) Given such notions of aesthetic experience of music and musical beauty, we can see that it is not culturally parochial. Musical beauty, as Hanslick understands it, and the aesthetic value of music, as I understand it, is something instantiated by many kinds of music. It is not at all restricted to so-called Western classical music. It can be found, for example, in much Muslim religious music (for example, recitations of the Qur’an by the qari Sheikh Abdul al- Basit; see also Risser 2018), much Greek rebetiko (for example, in the music of Rosa Eskenazi, Vassillis Tsitsanis, or Stelios Kazantzidis from before or around 1960), much flamenco, Russian folk music, Brazilian samba, Japanese flute music, and many other examples. All cultures that I know of have a concept of beauty, and all apply it to much of their music. Of course, these cases of music are very different from one another, and the kind of beauty they have is also very different. But so what? There are many breeds of dog that are very different. Labradors are different from

Beauty   945 ­ oodles. Nevertheless, they are both dogs. Musical beauty can take many varied forms, p like different kinds of dogs. The beauty-centric view is supposed to be a general truth. So some might worry about counter-examples: what about John Cage and other avant-gardists, much of whose music seems not to be concerned with beauty. I do not think that this should worry us greatly, for we can still say that most music is concerned with musical beauty. Philosophers are usually concerned with the general, more than the particular, but that generality need not be absolute generality. We can be happy with a framework for understanding much music and much musical experience. We need not seek a completely general claim, for a quite expansive claim can satisfy the urge to understand music in general terms.

The Sublime and the Agreeable Can there not be great music that is discordant and ugly? What of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring? What of the anger of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? What of tortured flamenco? What of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”? Many say that music of this sort is sublime but not beautiful. Richard Taruskin, for instance, follows Richard Wagner’s idea that Beethoven, in his Ninth Symphony, was going somewhere new, beyond beauty, making room for something greater, namely the musical sublime (Taruskin 1995; Wagner 1995). Perhaps beauty is just one kind of value that music can have, and sublimity is another value. My view, by contrast, is that sublimity in music is a kind of beauty. We should reject the traditional opposition between beauty and sublimity. Instead, sublimity is a way of being beautiful. Thus, there is no contrast between beauty and the sublime, contrary to what Edmund Burke (1998) and others have maintained. In support of the Burkean view, Taruskin says that our “ear is offended” by some passages of the Ninth Symphony (Taruskin 1995, 248). But surely most listeners are pleased by those passages. The Ninth Symphony is a much-loved work. It fills concert halls. Similarly, the screaming guitar solos of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” are greatly enjoyed by many people. So why not call them both “beautiful”? The defender of the traditional conception of the sublime as opposed to beauty might agree but say that such pleasures are mixed with pain. (We might call this the sadomasochist theory.) But while there are lots of kinds of pleasure in music, few, I think, are mixed with pain in a way that fits the conception of the sublime that is supposed to exclude beauty. I do not say that no pleasures are like this. Sadomasochist pleasures exist. Scary fairground rides are also pleasurable. But it is very doubtful that much pleasure in music is like this. What exactly is the pain of someone who relishes a Hendrix guitar solo? Pleasure in the sublime in music is almost always an unmixed pleasure, not a sadomasochist pleasure. It is pleasure in a certain kind of beauty. Beauty, in the philosopher’s jargon, is “multiply realized” (see Putnam 1975). Some musical beauty is of the kind we find in much Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky, which is Levinson’s narrow sense of

946   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton “beauty.” But much musical beauty is not like that. It has a rougher edge. There are many different ways to be beautiful (on this point, see Socrates in Xenophon 1990, ch. 8). The conception of beauty employed by the defenders of the traditional idea of the sublime is, then, overly narrow and so too, by extension, is their conception of pleasure. Many different things are pleasurable in different ways. Compare flavours and the pleasures we take in them. Honey is pleasurable to taste; but so is cheese. Some music, we might say, is like honey, whereas other music is like cheese. Consider again the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which Susan McClary (1991, 128–129) would have us find to be full of patriarchal violence. I agree with McClary to an extent (see Zangwill 2014; cf. Hanslick 1986, 9). Violence is there in the music, in a sense. But it is musical ­violence— violence we can hear. It is also beautiful musical violence. This explains why listeners are not typically genuinely frightened by the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Even putting the case of music to one side, the Burkean view that the sublime is always partly painful is not plausible. Perhaps stormy seas or high mountains frighten us, and perhaps what we appreciate in those situations is sublimity, not beauty. But the stars at night and the delicacy of a spider’s web are also cases of sublimity, in virtue of their distance, size, or delicacy, even though there is nothing frightening about them. If music can be sublime, it is in that way. That kind of sublimity can be appreciated without pleas­ ure and pain being mixed. So there is nothing in the sublime in music to detract from the centrality of musical beauty. (For further debate about the musical sublime see Taruskin 2019 and Zangwill 2019.) Going in the other direction, we can ask: why beauty rather than what is merely agreeable? Many things are agreeable but not beautiful (Kant 2000, § 3). Kant’s example is Canary wine, which he thinks is agreeable to the palate, but not beautiful. Now, much music aspires to be beautiful. But perhaps quite a lot of music aims merely to be agreeable, like Canary wine. What, then, can we take to be symptomatic of the distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable such that we can think about its application to music? One way that Kant made the distinction was by reference to desire. He thought that pleasure in the agreeable generates desire, unlike pleasure in the beautiful. But whether or not this successfully marks the distinction is controversial (Zangwill 1995). Another, more convincing mark of the distinction, Kant claims, is between the kind of correctness—“universal validity”—claimed by judgements of beauty, by contrast with judgements of the agreeable, which Kant thinks merely claim “general” validity (Kant 2000, §§ 6–7). Things that are agreeable may please us; but we do not think of our pleasure as a correct response, and other responses as mistaken. By contrast, it is part of our experience and judgement of beauty that the opposite judgement and preference is taken to be mistaken or incorrect. Roger Scruton writes of architecture, for example, that in judgements of architectural beauty “inwardly we affirm our preference as valid” (Scruton 1979, 105). This is why Kant thinks that we may claim universal and not merely general validity for the judgements that follow. Is the pleasure we take in some music of the less normative kind? Surely, yes. Music pleases us in many different ways. But the interesting question is whether much music is

Beauty   947 not at all appreciated in the normative way as well. “Happy Birthday to You” is a pleasant tune, but is it beautiful or intended to be beautiful? One point is this. As I have already noted, there are different kinds of beauty—musical beauty is multiply realized. But beauty also comes in degrees. Plato’s view of beauty in the Symposium, and other places, is worth recalling (Plato 1997b). There is one beauty, but it manifests itself in a variety of ways, from the simple perceptible forms to more abstruse beauties that require training, and—if we believe Plato—that includes the beauty of the Forms, including the beauty of Beauty itself. The pleasure in simple music, such as “Happy Birthday to You,” might have a low degree of beauty rather than none at all. A second point appeals to the formal elements of music. These are appreciated both in paradigmatically beautiful music and also in simple pleasant music. But these elements, which we appreciate as part of appreciating both sorts of music, are surely ways in which the music has its beauty. How could these elements generate beauty in some cases and agreeableness in other cases? So “Happy Birthday to You” has a certain beauty in virtue of its formal elements. There is more to be said here, and perhaps there is room for argument over how much music there is that lacks the beauty function.

Formalism and Absolute Music Deploying the wide notion of musical beauty does not by itself commit one to the idea of what is called “absolute music” or to what might be called “formalism.” Nevertheless, plausible extra commitments of this sort are available once we appeal to musical beauty. Let us, without too much ceremony say that “absolute music” is, by definition, music with only aesthetic functions. The beauty of absolute music is beauty that is self-contained, in the sense of being determined only by “tones and their artistic combination” (Hanslick 1986, 28). I prefer this sound-bite from Hanslick’s book to the “tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1986, 29) passage so often cited, because in the latter (1) the idea of movement is a metaphor that needs interpretation and (2) it describes the content of music, whatever that is, whereas my preferred passage describes what constitutes beauty in music, which is a more fundamental idea. Absolute musical beauty does not depend on any non-musical functions that the music may serve. Absolute music is concerned only with musical beauty. We may call such beauty “absolute musical beauty.” (Bonds 2014 offers a controversial history of the idea of absolute music; see Landerer and Zangwill 2017 for a discussion of it.) A plausible musical formalism will not claim that all music is absolute. Certainly, Hanslick never makes such a claim. The very opposite is manifest, for example, in Hanslick’s devastating review of Wagner’s Parsifal (Hanslick 1950, 187–209), in which Hanslick considers first the text, then the music, and lastly the combination of the two. Nevertheless, it is true that musical formalism prioritizes absolute music and absolute

948   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton musical beauty. A common objection to such a position might be to ask: how can any kind of formalism be defended when so much music has non-musical functions as well as the “pure” musical function of embodying musical beauty and providing pleasure in musical beauty? Music can be made specifically for dancing, praying, shopping, and marching; and there is music for sport, for films, for propaganda, and so on. Why prioritize the “pure” cases? The answer involves clarifying the relation between aesthetic and non-aesthetic functions. “Form” is a word that roams the various arts (and beyond the arts) in an unruly way. It is used with different and incompatible meanings, both by those in favour of and by those against various formalisms. In literature, for example, form is often explained by contrast with “content.” This is not a useful notion if one wants to be a musical formalist, since form in music cannot be explained in terms of a contrast between musical form and content. In the case of music, a more promising way of articulating formalism would be to do so in terms of a certain function and the priority of that function—the function of having musical beauty in virtue of Hanslick’s “tones and their artistic combination.” There is non-absolute music, of course, in which non-aesthetic functions are important, perhaps even dominant. But a formalist will say that non-absolute music—such as music for marching or for praying—is possible only because of the absolute musical beauty of that music. Thus, absolute musical beauty has explanatory priority. Without absolute musical beauty there would be no other musical values. Operas, for example, may have all sorts of compelling narratives and interesting things to say. But those things had better be set to decent music if the opera is to work. As Hanslick argues, there are great operas that have great music and mediocre plots, but there are no great operas with great plots but mediocre music. Why is that? Hanslick’s answer is that it is due to the priority of musical beauty among all the things that an opera does. (See Hanslick 1986, 8–27.) Anti-formalists often emphasize the political roles of music, while the formalist rejoinder is that the political role of music depends partly on absolute musical beauty. Consider, for example, the political role of the South Korean popular music commonly known as K-pop. The South Korean government deliberately introduced K-pop not only for economic reasons, but also as part of a cultural war with North Korea. Perhaps the government was impressed by the role of Western pop music, which many people think was a significant factor in undermining Soviet communism. (The disc jockey Seva Novgorodsev is thought to have played a significant role; see Sheeran 2007, 94–95.) But in order to have such social and political roles, the music must be such that it can discharge these social and political roles. If Western pop music had been no good as ­absolute music it would not have been politically effective in undermining Soviet communism. Similarly, the Muslim call to prayer has religious and social functions. But it can perform these functions only because of its absolute musical beauty. Consider also national anthems or revolutionary songs. Such music has political meanings, which go beyond absolute musical beauty. But effectively conveying those meanings depends on its absolute musical beauty. If the music were worthless, in an absolute way, then the political purposes would fail. Absolute musical beauty is fundamental: other musical values depend on it. The worldly functions that recent musicology has tended to

Beauty   949 e­ mphasize are not just compatible with formalism, construed as an explanatory priority thesis, but are best explained by it. Given this framework, there is a question about the relationship between aesthetic and non-aesthetic values and functions in complex works. According to one idea, musical and non-musical purposes fit together—they combine, to make a kind of harmony between them. How the notion of “fit” should be understood is a difficult and deeply important issue. (This issue is present, for example, in Plato’s Republic, where Plato writes “And surely the mode and rhythm should suit the words” [Plato 1997a, 398d].) Understanding this fit is arguably the central question of contemporary musical aesthetics. One idea would be that, in much music, aesthetic and non-aesthetic values fit together in a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. But there are also cases where the musical and non-musical functions coexist without much interaction. In such cases, the two functions just sit side by side and do not yield a valuable whole that is not already there in the parts considered in themselves. In either case, we need absolute music is order to understand the many functions of music.

Describing Musical Beauty I end by raising a rather abstract issue. What, then, is this musical beauty, whether absolute or not? What is this value that most music pursues and that musical experience reveals? What, more specifically, can we say about it? The problem is to describe musical beauty, but it is difficult to describe either beauty itself, or the more specific aesthetic properties of music responsible for musical beauty. Perhaps music analysis can, in some cases, reveal the sonic, non-aesthetic facts upon which musical beauty depends. But musical beauty is not reducible to the sonic facts that underlie it. Musical beauty itself remains mysterious. It is for this reason that we reach for metaphors and similes in the description of music and our experience of it. There are limits to the description of music and musical experience; but that’s life. We have to accept it. The same is true of love and pain. Poets, with their metaphors and similes, may do better at describing love or pain than psychologists and philosophers. And given the limits of verbal description, there is a temptation to characterize music in ways that are disconnected from the beauty of sound, as happens when some succumb to the temptation to characterize music in terms of some alleged relationship with other domains. But this temptation should be resisted. We should be content with sonic musical beauty in its various realizations. To adapt Wittgenstein (2009, § 1), “explanations come to an end” in musical beauty. Other views fail to make the variety of musical activity intelligible. In many cases of music, explanations come to an end in multiple functions and values, but among those there must be musical beauty and there must be pleasure in musical beauty if it is to be intelligible that we value and pursue music-making and musical experience. There is much to be said for Hanslick’s view that explanations of our concern with music come to an end in musical beauty and

950   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton our pleasure in it. There may be further evolutionary questions remaining about why we have these musical pleasures, but answering such questions would not contribute to a rational explanation of musical activity. Evolutionary explanation can only supplement the appeal to musical beauty, which is what makes sense of musical activity for those who engage in it.

A Musicological View (Stephen Hinton) Beauty as a Historical Topic Although beauty has been an enduring theme in philosophy since Plato, it arguably had its heyday in aesthetic discourse in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In 1746, Charles Batteux, with Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe, proposed “a single principle” for the fine or “beautiful” arts (les beaux arts) and for theories of beauty and taste oriented towards the imitation of nature. In 1750, Alexander Baumgarten, with his Aesthetica, established aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in its own right that would deduce rules and principles of natural or artistic beauty from individual “taste.” And in 1790, Immanuel Kant, with his Critique of the Power of Judgment and its brilliantly nuanced “analytic of the beautiful,” produced what would remain a principal source and frequent point of reference for writers on the topic up to the present, not least because of his contested comments about music. According to Kant, when people judge something to be beautiful, whether it is a natural or an artistic phenomenon, they do so in the belief that other people ought to agree. Such judgements can be described as having “subjective universality” within a community of taste, a sensus communis. They are based, furthermore, on subjective pleasure that is at once disinterested, necessary, and without reference to a particular concept or function. Kant thus defined the judgement of beauty according to several complementary criteria: qualitatively (“without interest”), quantitatively (“without concept”), on the basis of immanent aesthetic function (“purposive purposelessness”), and with respect to modality (“necessary pleasure”). Systematically linking it to other key categories of his Enlightenment philosophy, he declared beauty to be “a symbol of the morally good.” “Taste,” he believed, makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm. (Kant 2000, §59, 228)

Following Kant’s lead, idealist writers such as Schiller and Schelling would continue to place beauty at the centre of their aesthetic theories: Schiller with the idea of an “aesthetic state” and a belief in an objective concept of the beautiful, “where content loses itself in

Beauty   951 form” (Reschke 2003, 410; translation mine); Schelling with his definition of beauty, in his Philosophy of Art (1802–3), as a particular reflection of Being in the ideal, and with the notion of a transcendental identity between the structure of the beautiful and that of the Absolute. For Schelling, “beauty is posited wherever the particular (real) is so commensurate with its concept that the latter, as infinite, enters into the finite and is intuited in concreto” (Schelling 1989, 29). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, beauty became increasingly pushed to the margins of aesthetic discourse. Renate Reschke has aptly characterized this process as a “fraying of philosophical aesthetics”: The nineteenth century gives birth to doubt about the unity of aesthetics, art and beauty, and ushers in the process of the fraying of philosophical aesthetics, which in European modernism by means of radical artistic practice makes the aesthetic lodestar of the beautiful suspect as something “cosmetic.” (Reschke 2003, 395; translation mine)

When philosophers write about beauty in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they appear to be making their own special plea for the continuing relevance of a neglected category. See, for example, a recent essay collection entitled The Recovery of Beauty (Saunders, Macnaughton, and Fuller 2015). In asking whether it is possible to “recover beauty,” the volume’s authors address a wide range of themes from the human need for beauty, its links to truth and understanding, to its deceptive dangers. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Die Aktualität des Schönen (1977) and Alexander Nehamas’s Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007). Both of these latter authors have a case to make on behalf of beauty, each of them quite different from the other. Where Gadamer finds “the actuality of the beautiful” in enduring works of art, Nehamas focuses on beauty, in an avowedly un-Kantian manner, as “part of the everyday world of purpose and desire, history and contingency, subjectivity and incompleteness” (Nehamas 2007, 35). Beauty has come a long way since playing its fundamental, yet narrowly circumscribed, role in eighteenth-century thought. As Nehamas’s book illustrates, the Kantian constellation of features that define the beautiful has not only shifted but also expanded significantly. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, to take a not wholly untypical example, recently invoked Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime in a book titled In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006). In an opening section called “Definitions,” Gumbrecht draws extensively on Kant to state: if the beautiful . . . concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it. . . . Kant associates the concept of the sublime with “nature in its chaos and in its wildest and most unruly disorder and devastation.” The sublime is that which threatens to overwhelm us.  (Gumbrecht 2006, 46–47)

While he does not dispute that we can be overwhelmed by sporting events, Gumbrecht does insist that “[m]ost of the moments that spectators long for fall under the definition of the beautiful rather than the sublime” (Gumbrecht 2006, 47).

952   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton Inherent in discussions of beauty—not just in discussions of musical beauty, but there perhaps more than anywhere—is a paradox that lies at the heart of aesthetic experience: we may judge the representation of unbeautiful things to be beautiful. This is because, as the musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht has argued, echoing philosophers from Schiller to Gadamer, the essence of artistic representation is inseparable from its ex­ist­ ence as play. Music, to quote Eggebrecht (1997, 56), “is ontologically play, a play with tones that is at once a play with time. Even where music becomes involved with the unbeautiful, the ugly, with murder and death, it is play. And playing is beautiful.” If music is a play with time, then it is also play that occurs (like theatre and sport) in time. We may judge a musical form to be beautiful and attempt, via analysis, to explain the beauty of a piece of music. Yet, according to Eggebrecht (1997, 57), “play is not a category of form but one of action: it exists only when play actually happens, that is, when it is played as play.” Thus he concludes: “The beautiful exists only when it appears, and, like all musical beauty, can be sensed and apprehended only aesthetically, that is in the act of sensual perception.” The aesthetic experience of music, how musical forms are apprehended as temporally unfolding in performance, makes verbal description exceedingly challenging. It is this essential, hard-to-capture quality of “transitoriness” that gave Hegel pause in his posthumously published lectures on aesthetics, and which had led Kant to question music’s cultural value as art as compared with other media. As co-author Nick Zangwill aptly put it, “[m]usical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties that for the most part cannot be described literally. They are there, but they are elusive” (Zangwill 2015, 194). Although Kant acknowledged that we might judge music’s form—its “mathematical form,” as he referred to it—to be beautiful, he notoriously characterized music as “more enjoyment than culture.” The reason for his drawing this distinction, he claimed, was music’s capacity to elicit feelings of pleasure; for him it was primarily a play of pleasurable (or, as the case may be, not so pleasurable) sensations. Music, according to his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant 2000, § 51), tends to produce “merely agreeable sensations” (bloß angenehme Empfindungen) as opposed to the perception of something that is beautiful in Kant’s specific understanding of the term as defined above. That is, music has a purely subjective appeal, since it plays with sensations not available to the universals of disinterested aesthetic judgement. Unlike the beautiful, the “merely pleasant” meets only sensuous, bodily needs. In §53, he writes concerning “the art of tone”: “For, although of course it speaks through mere sensations without concepts, and hence does not, like poetry, leave behind something for reflection, yet it moves the mind in more manifold and, though only temporarily, in deeper ways; but it is, to be sure, more enjoyment than culture” (Kant 2000, §53, 205). Hence he concludes: If . . . one estimates the value of the beautiful arts in terms of the culture that they provide for the mind and takes as one’s standard the enlargement of the faculties that must join together in the power of judgment for the sake of cognition, then to that extent music occupies the lowest place among the beautiful arts (just as it

Beauty   953 occupies perhaps the highest place among those that are estimated according to their agreeableness), because it merely plays with sensations.  (Kant 2000, §53, 206)

After Kant, beauty would at times be displaced or at least qualified as a central concern of aesthetics. His theories remained nonetheless as influential as they were contested: not just his ideas about the beautiful and the sublime but also his comments on the individual fine arts, including music. Because his thought left so many indelible traces in philosophical theories of art, even prominent aestheticians of music such as Eduard Hanslick and Theodor W. Adorno made both direct and oblique reference to the writings of their great German forebear. Yet they were hardly going to let his dim view of music’s cultural status and value go unchallenged. To that extent, they defined their positions in marked opposition to his.

The Historicity of Hanslick For the musicologist, then, the concept of beauty invites study in terms of the particular and differing connotations it has acquired over time as well as in terms of its importance relative to other aesthetic categories, such as the sublime, and in its relation to fundamental, not specifically aesthetic, concepts of philosophy such as truth and goodness. According to this view, beauty and sublimity not only appear in fluctuating tension with each other; they also resist being subsumed under a unifying general theory. This is not to deny the philosopher’s view of the importance of the concept of beauty in musical aesthetics, but rather to draw attention to how it has been variously understood and invoked, whether as quite distinct from the sublime, or as complementary to it, or even as overlapping with it. This latter view is the one adopted in the “The sublime and the agreeable” subsection by co-author Nick Zangwill, where he asserts, “sublimity in music is a kind of beauty . . . a way of being beautiful.” Or as Gustave Flaubert has it, via the character of Bouvard in his unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumously published in 1881), “the Beautiful is the beautiful, and the Sublime the very beautiful” (Flaubert 1896, 211). The musicologist and the philosopher certainly concur here on the importance of On the Musically Beautiful. Hanslick’s text, first published in 1854, fuelled aesthetic debates in the latter part of the nineteenth century and has continued to have an enduring impact up to the present. That impact can be measured in several different ways: by the fact that Hanslick’s tract was very widely read and discussed at the time of its publication, being issued in no fewer than ten editions during his lifetime, and by the fact that his name would become, both rightly and wrongly, a byword for musical conservatism. In part as a classicizing reaction against the Romantic aesthetics of the sublime, in part as a rejection of the idea of programme music, beauty as espoused by Hanslick became embroiled in musical politics, with the author himself taking sides in dialogue with other aestheticians and on behalf of what he called “pure music.” Whether or not one is inclined to dub him a formalist (a moniker that has been variously applied in his case), it

954   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton is hard to deny that his revisionist aesthetics paved the way for musicians such as Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg, whose approaches to music analysis became foundational for the anglophone discipline of “music theory” in the second half of the twentieth century. By “pure music” Hanslick meant the phenomenon captured by the final word of the subtitle of his tract in the original German, Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst. Tonkunst—literally, “tone-art”—does not have a precise equivalent in nonGerman-speaking cultures. In his English version of Hanslick’s text, published in 1986, Geoffrey Payzant translates the full title as On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. In the latest translation, published in 2018, Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer render the subtitle as A Contribution to the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. On the cover and title page, however, they simply omit it, thereby suppressing the Tonkunst issue. For Hanslick, music and Tonkunst were not synonymous. His aim was to formulate an aesthetics, not of music in general, but of the culturally and historically delimited phenomenon identified by the German word. Tonkunst, in other words, denotes art music in the strongest sense of the word, namely the instrumental compositions of Viennese classicism. Hanslick asserted that Only instrumental music is music purely and absolutely. Whether, for its value and effects, one prefers vocal or instrumental music (die Vokal- oder die Instrumentalmusik) . . . one will always have to grant that the concept “music” [Hanslick uses the word Tonkunst] does not apply strictly to a piece of music composed to a verbal text. (Hanslick 1986, 15)

(Given the “aesthetic prejudices” of On the Musically Beautiful, as Nietzsche might have called them, it is hardly surprising that its author would come to embrace the music of Brahms rather than that of Wagner.) Insofar as Hanslick focused his attention parochially on the music of the recent past, in particular classical art music of the Germanspeaking lands, his aesthetics has been characterized as “epigonal” (Eggebrecht 1997, 48) and as “merely the expression of an epoch—the classicistic one—no less than the old aesthetics of emotion proposed by Daniel Schubart or Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, against which Hanslick aims his argument” (Dahlhaus 1982, 54). What is, as Hanslick would say, the “specifically musical” of musical beauty? The musicologist is inclined to view the “specifically musical” as something that is historically and culturally specific, that eludes systemization, just as what is deemed musically beautiful is not only in the ear of the beholder or—to invoke Kant’s condition of the “shareability” of aesthetic judgement when it comes to beauty—the ears of a particular group of beholders. What is deemed musically beautiful may also either lose or gain its appeal depending on changes in musical taste. The task is to account for the fluctuations, rather than the consistencies, in how the concept of beauty applies to music. The focus on the historically specific of the specifically musical extends to Hanslick’s thought and how it evolves over the course of his career. Musicologists are interested in the ways in which his ideas changed as reflected in his music criticism and in various

Beauty   955 revisions to his text On the Musically Beautiful. For example, before becoming an advocate of “absolute music” in staunch opposition to programme music and music drama, he wrote admiringly about the works of Berlioz and Wagner. Moreover, after publishing On the Musically Beautiful he decided to make a number of revisions to his revisionist text; these included excising the opening paragraph from succeeding editions and, moreover, omitting a substantial passage, discussed below, that appears in extenso only in the conclusion to the first edition, not in subsequent ones. These kinds of changes invite explanation and interpretation. Lastly, a tension manifests itself between Hanslick’s positivist formalist views as documented in the 1854 treatise and the author’s later work as a cultural historian and hermeneutic critic, as discussed by Kevin Karnes in Music, Criticism and the Challenge of History (2008). Although it may be overstating the case to assert that Hanslick effectively abandoned the formalism of his treatise, he did focus his attention increasingly on “living history (lebendige Geschichte)” (Karnes 2008, 47) and on “the subjective impressions characteristic of journalistic criticism at the center of the historical narrative” (22). Hanslick himself drew attention to the ephemerality of beauty when he observed that there is “no art that exhausts so many forms and as quickly as does music.” Musical “purity” and “innovation” are, it seems, closely related. Modulations, cadential progressions, intervallic and harmonic progressions wear out in fifty, even thirty years such that the intellectually stimulating (geistvolle) composer can no longer employ them and will be constantly pressured to invent new, purely musical features. Without inaccuracy, we can say of a host of compositions that rank high above the norm of their time that they were once beautiful.  (Hanslick 1986, 35)

Hanslick’s famous treatise similarly invites us to consider the cultural specificity of his ideas about musical beauty. Factors to consider range from the philosophical discourses to which he was either directly or indirectly responding, on the one hand, to the language that he used, on the other. For all of the celebrated lucidity and elegance of his prose, his key ideas do not lend themselves readily to translation, as the above reference to the normative concept of Tonkunst illustrates. Two key phrases in Hanslick’s text in particular present translators with almost insuperable challenges, to do with Hanslick’s conception of the substance and appreciation of Tonkunst. One concerns the content of music; the other has to do with what constitutes musical composition. In perhaps the most frequently cited passage from On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick describes the content of Tonkunst as “tönend bewegte Formen,” which Payzant translates as “tonally moving forms” and Rothfarb and Landerer as “sonically moved forms.” The translation by Gustav Cohen, published in 1891, offered a free paraphrase, “sound and motion,” and omitted any reference to form entirely. Cohen also misleadingly rendered “content” (Inhalt) as “essence.” In his recent illuminating article on the genesis and evolution of Hanslick’s treatise, Mark Evan Bonds (2014) presents the reader with two possible translations in an attempt to convey the nuances of Hanslick’s famous and famously intractable phrase: “forms set in motion through sound” and “tonally animated forms.”

956   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton Hanslick’s meaning becomes clearer, of course, when the phrase is read in its full context. Doing so involves among other things navigating the framework of binary oppositions with which he presents his argument. Before defining the content of music positively as “tönend bewegte Formen,” he defines it negatively by rejecting “the erroneous assumption that the beauty of music has its being in the representation of feeling.” In negation of the Hegelian view that music constitutes the “sensuous appearance of an idea,” Hanslick maintains that form and content are one and the same, namely “musical ideas.” A “musical idea,” he explains, echoing Kant’s “purposelessness purposiveness,” “is already autonomous beauty, is an end unto itself and in no way primarily a means of or material for representing feelings and thoughts” (Hanslick 2018, 41). This is where the paragraph in translations following later editions of Hanslick’s text ends. The first edition, however, continued that same sentence for several lines more (indicated below in italics) in order to make the connection between art music’s “self-subsistent beauty” and beauty in art in general. A musical idea, Hanslick wrote in that edition, “is in no way a means of or material for representing feelings and thoughts, even though it can possess to a high degree that symbolic significance reflecting the great laws of the world that we find in all artistic beauty” (Hanslick [1854] 1976; translation mine). Symbolism, in this particular instance literally suppressed by the author himself, has a little-discussed role to play in Hanslick’s understanding of “pure music.” True, he devotes a considerable amount of space to debunking what he calls in the preface to the first edition “the putrid aesthetics of emotion” (verrottete Gefühlsästhetik) and to pointing instead to the musical elements—notably musical syntax or “rhythm in the large” (Rhythmus im Großen) as he calls it, and above all melody and form-defining themes— that are responsible for producing musical beauty. “However each person, according to his individuality, may speak of and designate the effect of a piece of music,” he states, “its content is nothing but just the heard tone forms [i.e., sonic formal relationships consisting of tones]. For music speaks not merely through tones, it speaks only tones.” Yet he does readily concede that, although music cannot express specific emotions, it can convey a dynamic quality associated with emotions: “music can ‘rustle,’ ‘surge,’ and ‘storm,’ but it cannot ‘rage’ and ‘love’ ” (Hanslick 2018, 109). Earlier in the tract he writes, “We can neither say of a chord in itself that it represents a particular feeling, nor yet less that it does so in the context of an artwork. Other than the analogy between motion and symbolism of tones, music does not possess another means for this ostensible purpose [i.e., representing emotions]” (20). The question remains, therefore, concerning the extent to which such analogies, which are plentiful in On the Musically Beautiful, play a role in the apprehension of music as beautiful. That Hanslick considered music as capable of having symbolic import is undeniable, even if we meet his requirement that we “comprehend it on its own terms.” Those terms have to do with his definition of musical composition as “ein Arbeiten des Geistes im geistfähigen Material.” Payzant translates this phrase as “Composing is a work of mind upon material compatible with mind” (Hanslick 1986, 31). Rothfarb and Landerer favour “intellect” over “mind”: “Composing is an operation of the intellect in material of intellectual capacity” (Hanslick 2018, 45). Cohen, again, is

Beauty   957 free to the point of misrepresentation: “The act of composing is a mental working on material capable of receiving the forms which the mind intends to give” (Hanslick 1891, 72.) What does Hanslick mean by Geist and its derivative geistfähig? It is clearly a central term in On the Musically Beautiful, and not just because of its frequent occurrence. “For without Geist,” Hanslick asserts, “we would not recognize beauty.” We saw above that he referred to the inspired composer as being literally “full of Geist” (geistvoll). Bonds again offers help in suggesting the following translation for a passage near the end of the final chapter of Hanslick’s text: For no intellectual-spiritual meaning can be derived from the vague feeling that might somehow serve as the basis of these other kinds of content, whereas such spiritual-intellectual meaning can be derived from the precise configuration of tones as a free creation of the spirit out of materials that lack concepts and yet are capable of being imbued with Geist.  (Bonds 2012, 4)

That Geist and its adjectival derivations do not lend themselves easily to translation into English (or any other language for that matter) is indicated here by its meaning being rendered variously as “intellectual-spiritual,” “spiritual-intellectual,” and “spirit.” At the end of the paragraph Bonds further responds to the challenge by simply reverting to the original, Geist. Geist has all of the suggested connotations, which cover the full spectrum of the Latin terms spiritus, anima, mens, and genius. It is a key term in Hegel, who uses it to describe the personal, legal, and moral dimensions of his philosophical system (the subjective, objective, and absolute Geist respectively). Hanslick expressly criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of music that defines music as “sounding inwardness,” yet it would surely be going too far down the formalist path to associate Geist merely with mind or intellect. Human spirit is involved, as both conveyed by the composer and received by the listener. Indeed, with recourse to an idealist metaphysics of the infinite and absolute as promulgated by Schelling and other romantics, Hanslick ended the first edition of On the Musically Beautiful with the following passage that he removed from subsequent editions: In the mind of the listener, furthermore, this intellectual-spiritual substance unites the beautiful in music with all other great and beautiful ideas. It is not merely and absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that music affects the listener, but rather at the same time as a sounding image of the great motions of the cosmos. Through profound and secret connections to nature, the meaning of tones elevates itself high above the tones themselves, allowing us to feel at the same time the infinite in the work of human talent. Just as the elements of music—sound, tone, rhythm, loudness, softness—are to be found throughout the entire universe, so does one find anew in music the entire universe.  (Bonds 2012, 4)

Why did Hanslick recoil from invoking metaphysics in his theory of musical beauty? Did the removed passage take away from the rest of the treatise? Or could it be said, conversely, to have added anything? For the musicologist, it raises a number of questions at

958   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton once. On one level, thanks to its ending, the first edition can be read as reflecting a transition between two competing conceptions of absolute music: “absolute music in the sense of the absolute as all-encompassing,” on the one hand, and “absolute in the sense of music as an art wholly separate from and unrelated to anything outside itself,” on the other (Bonds 2012, 23). The former, “holistic” conception, Bonds argues, “differs fundamentally from the hard-core formalism that would emerge in subsequent editions of his treatise.” One could also add that the excised paragraph, with its reference to how music “[allows] us to feel at the same time the infinite in the work of human talent,” appeals to notions of the sublime in music in contradistinction to its “self-subsistent beauty” discussed elsewhere in the treatise. On another level, the passage forces the question as to whether musical beauty is something that depends on the judgement of the listener or whether it is “intrinsic,” as Hanslick claims earlier in the treatise: “The beautiful is and remains beautiful, even if it arouses no feelings, indeed even if it is neither viewed nor contemplated.” Here, it would appear, he was interested more in the nature of the musical object itself than in the response of listeners, despite his insistence that “the content of a work of music (Tonwerk) can be grasped only musically, never objectively (gegenständlich), i.e., as that which is concretely sounding in a piece” and despite his historicizing remark about musical forms that were once considered beautiful ceasing to be so when they “wear out.” How can the beauty of musical material fade of its own accord, when it is neither perceived nor “contemplated”? Of course, it can’t. Judgements of taste are necessarily involved. The rigour of Hanslick’s basic argument is predicated on his making a strict distinction between aesthetics and psychology, on the one hand, and between work and reception history, on the other. However, the original ending of On the Musically Beautiful, in linking judgements of beauty in music to a broader conception of what constitutes the beautiful in art and nature, provokes a question regarding the circularity of equating the “musically beautiful” with the “purely musical.” If musical beauty manifests itself in music as form, and, as Hanslick also claimed, Geist is the condition of musical beauty, then form is objectified Geist. The “form,” “content,” and “music” of “sonically animated forms” become one and the same, forcing Hanslick to “continually talk in tautologies,” as Bernd Schirpenbach recognized in his searching analysis (Schirpenbach, 2006, 101–102).

Musical Beauty After Hanslick As an apologist for the classical repertory of instrumental music, Hanslick was also an organicist through and through. Drawing an analogy with nature, he claimed that a musical work “develops in an organically perceptible process like blossoms from a bud.” (Hanslick [1854] 1976, 101; translation mine). For him the “bud” or “microcosm,” as he calls it elsewhere, was the musical theme, which in a composition “develops” to form a beautiful tonal whole (or at least it does in the classical repertory that Hanslick had in mind when contemplating the musically-beautiful). The composer-theorist Heinrich Schenker, although he was initially critical of the concept of organicism, which he

Beauty   959 ­ ualified along Kantian lines as a “regulative” concept for apprehending music as uniq fied “as if it were nature,” would eventually develop his highly influential concept of the Ursatz (“fundamental structure”), the centrepiece of his “theory of organic coherence,” as he called his book Der freie Satz (Free Composition), published posthumously in 1937 (Schenker  1979). Based on the classical aesthetic principle of unity within diversity, Schenkerian analysis amounts to an attempt to represent the beauty of musical masterpieces in terms of the large-scale coherence of voice-leading and harmony. Schenker’s concept of Fernhören (literally, “tele-hearing”)—the ability, that is, to grasp the unity of musical works in their entirety—correlates to Hanslick’s “aesthetic” listening, which he opposed to emotional or “pathological” listening. Both Hanslick and Schenker saw the apprehension of beauty not as something universal, as Kant did, but as exclusive. As with Hanslick’s “tonally moving forms,” the issue of musical beauty as it relates to Schenkerian theory is an epistemological one of the kind that has fuelled aesthetic debates since Kant formulated his aesthetic postulates in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. What is the epistemological status of the Ursatz? It is a question that recurs frequently, and in various guises, in the literature on Schenker. As a theoretical construct does the Ursatz form the foundation of the theory, or is this role assumed by the “chord of nature” (der Klang in der Natur), as he stated it in several theoretical writings? Put another way: should music be conceived as the composing out of a triad or does the premiss begin rather with the fundamental contrapuntal structure, that is, with a harmonic progression and bass arpeggiation? Is the triad, then, the indispensable basis of the theory? Schenker would have answered emphatically in the affirmative; his pupil Felix Salzer, whose book Structural Hearing (1952) promoted the possibility of organic coherence in atonal music, would have said no. A related question is whether the Ursatz should be understood as an archetypical phenomenon (Goethe’s Urphänomen) or merely as a theoretical axiom. Milton Babbitt and his American contemporaries argued pragmatically for the latter. Similarly contested is whether the theory applies to “the totality of tonal practice in an encapsulated musical world,” to quote Robert P. Morgan (2002, 252), or only to masterpieces or Geniekunst, as Schenker himself insisted. Is the theory normative or descriptive? And what, moreover, is the connection between Schenker’s theory in the narrower sense and his broader aesthetic and political ideas? Where does musical autonomy end and the “extra-musical” begin? Answering these questions has consequences for understanding the organicism of Schenker’s writings, which in his mature theory comprised elements of genius worship and nationalism—elements that Carl Schachter considered separable from analytical practice “like the creative work of a great mathematician from his political affiliations” (Schachter  1988, 524n2). The question concerning the epistemology of the Ursatz and the role it plays in the apprehension of beauty in musical works is, in sum, relativizing: it brings together a configuration that which otherwise seems disparate or even incommensurable. For the musicologist, it would be more accurate to speak of competing epistemologies. No recent aesthetician has addressed questions of musical beauty more thoroughly and more critically, both against the background of the idealist legacy and in light of the

960   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton “fraying of philosophical aesthetics” in the twentieth century, than Adorno. Many of the key issues that have concerned recent scholarship can be found in the monumental, posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie (1996), including the aforementioned critique of beauty as “cosmetic” and hence as deceptively dangerous and ideologically suspect. “Artworks are conceivable, by no means merely as an abstract possibility,” Adorno contends there, “that fulfil the criteria of Kant’s judgement of taste and yet fall short. Others—and that includes modern art (neue Kunst) as a whole—conflict with those criteria, they are not universally pleasing, without being objectively disqualified” (Adorno 1996, 248). Continuing with particular reference to Kant, he maintains that the objectivity of Kant’s aesthetics and ethics, achieved as it is by “formalizing in general terms,” runs counter to the aesthetic phenomenon “as something constitutively discrete” (248). With recourse to the ephemeral example of beauty in nature (das Naturschöne), Adorno’s Critical Theory critiques the tendency of artistic beauty (das Kunstschöne) to perform an affirmative, reconciling function in an administered world. Affirming his modernist perspective, Adorno states that there is “nothing essential to a work of art that any work of art has to be in a purely conceptual sense” (Adorno 1996, 248). Kant’s formalization “forces the work of art into that merely subjective realm, ultimately into contingency, from which Kant wanted to wrest it and which art itself resists” (248). Nor can aesthetics be wholly objective, he argues, in implicit rejection of Hanslick’s proposition that musical beauty (or any other aesthetic quality for that matter) is objectively inherent in the artwork itself. Both subjective and objective aesthetics, “as polar opposites . . . are subject equally to dialectical critique: the former, because it is neither abstractly transcendental nor contingent based on the taste of individuals; the latter, because it fails to acknowledge that art is objectively mediated by the subject” (248). Where art is concerned, “the subject is neither the observer nor the creator nor absolute spirit. Rather, the subject is inextricably bound up with the matter, preformed by it, and itself mediated by the object” (248). The same applies to judgements of musical beauty.

A Dialogue Zangwill: Stephen, thank you for that fascinating exposition. Our approaches in many respects complement each other. I wonder, though, if it might be useful to draw attention to some differences between us. One obvious difference is the emphasis we place on writers of the past. Although I admire and am inspired by historical figures such as Plato and Hanslick, I present a case for musical beauty that is mostly self-contained, without looking over my shoulder too much to see what others have said. The past hardly speaks with a unified voice, and so if we want to know what to think, while we might take advice from previous writers, ultimately, we must make up our own minds. I do not deny that there is an interesting tale to be told about how we got here, which is part of understanding our own minds, and what we take to be our own intellectual

Beauty   961 problems (see Bernard Williams’s subtle essay “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” [Williams 2006]). Nevertheless, that will not tell us what to think, now, today, here. Hinton: Music historians should be honest with themselves by taking account of the fact that their historical interests are never entirely divorced from contemporary ones. In a sense this turns your point on its head: history can be our guide in demonstrating how the same works of art appeal in different ways depending on a variety of factors. One era’s mannerism can become another era’s classicism. As Hanslick conceded in On the Musically Beautiful, conceptions of musical beauty change, thus contradicting his own notion that beauty is inherent in works of art. Aesthetic value is nothing if not a complicated cultural, historical, and intersubjective matter. History therefore can have a role to play in helping us understand what is at stake where taste is concerned. Zangwill: It is a peculiarity of quite a lot of German intellectual history writing to identify a concept with what intellectuals have said about it. But one does not have to have read Gottlob Frege’s famous essay “On Concept and Object” (Frege 1951) to recognize that an object is one thing, a concept of that object is another thing, and what intellectuals of any age and tradition have said about the object or concept, is yet another thing. Intellectuals, as such, have no authority. There is beauty. There are people’s concepts of beauty. And there are what various intellectuals have said about beauty and concepts of beauty. That said, if I were telling the intellectual history, I would draw attention to the significant differences between the German and the Austrian intellectual traditions, which make a difference to how we read Hanslick. In particular, we need not agree with Mark Evan Bonds’s reading of the excised last passage from the first edition (see Bonds 2012, 2014). If we look carefully at the passage, it is not connecting musical beauty with motions of the universe and the infinite. Instead it is about the mind (Geist) of the listener who is confronted with musical beauty, the creative talent of its creator, and it is about the musical listener’s knowledge of the creative talent responsible for musical beauty. It is these that are connected with the universe and the infinite. For Hanslick, music is an artefact produced by human beings, who appreciate it as such. That is why musical beauty is not inherent but can change, and because of that it can be somewhat fancifully related to the cosmos or infinity. (The scholarly case for this is given in Landerer and Zangwill 2016; see Sousa 2017 for discussion.) More generally, it seems that German Idealist thought figures too strongly in many histories and philosophies of music and of musical beauty. I agree with Charles Rosen (2000) when he complains that Adorno privileges German thought in a systematic way. Why should the view from Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries predominate? If we are thinking about beauty and beauty in music, there is also a long Western tradition of thinking about beauty from Plato, through the Neoplatonist and medieval periods, to the Renaissance and British sentimentalism, up to the twenty-first century. (Bonds 2014 charts some of this history.) This is to say nothing of rich nonWestern traditions, such as the Japanese or Chinese traditions, that embody many interesting perspectives on beauty, from which there is much to be learned about our experience of beauty.

962   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton Hinton: Why the German discourse has predominated is itself a topic for the historian, albeit one too vast and complicated to do justice to here. For sure, musicology has been moving away from its former Germano-centric perspective, even if the canonic works of the German classical and romantic traditions continue to inform our sense of aesthetic value in music and even if Hanslick would doubtless balk at how liberally his ideas about beauty were being applied to music that would not conform to his strictly organicist criteria.

Closing Reflection: Philosophical and Musicological Points of View In approaching the topic of beauty, one of us (the philosopher) has pursued general and theoretical questions, but in a way that tries to take on board diverse particularities, while the other (the musicologist) has pursued historical particularities of reflection on music, while acknowledging general issues. Our discussion of Hanslick’s contributions to the topic illustrates contrasting approaches. Whereas the philosopher appropriates and defends those aspects of Hanslick’s argument in On the Musically Beautiful that he finds useful for understanding music and musical experience, the historical musicologist dwells on Hanslick’s shifting views as reflected in his revisions to that text. Even so, those perspectives are complementary rather than being mutually exclusive. The historical musicologist does not reject the notion that musical works can be judged in formalist terms. Rather, he holds that judgements of beauty, understood as an intersubjective matter, can also be about much more than such immanence. The theoretical philosopher, for his part, welcomes serious textual scholarship and the history of thought, so long as they do not throw a straitjacket over present and future thinking about the beauty of music. Our discussion of beauty might be seen as typical of the relationship between philosophy and musicology more generally. Philosophy is typically concerned with general questions. For example, a philosopher may ask, “What is time?” Or, “What is morality?” Or, “What are numbers?” When it comes to music, philosophers tend to ask: “What is  music?” or “What is musical experience?” or other such general questions. Musicologists, by contrast, tend to focus on the particular—on particular musical works or events, on composers or musicians, on cultures or genres. They are less interested in the general questions of philosophers, and may even suspect that such questions oversimplify or falsify diverse phenomena. Are the two disciplines, then, on a collision course? Someone might strive for peace by suggesting that different people might simply be interested in different things. Perhaps each discipline has different concerns and they can happily ignore each other. A contrasting view, and one to which we both incline, is that music and philosophy need each other, or rather, the academic disciplines need each other, and if that leads to

Beauty   963 some stress and anxiety and interdisciplinary friction, then so be it. Friction can become frisson. On the one hand, musicology needs philosophy because any interest in the particular must draw on the general aspects of particulars. In making, performing, composing, or writing about music, assumptions are made about the nature and value of music and about musical experience and activity. And these assumptions will be philosophical in part. There is no avoiding philosophy, and it is a general rule that those who dismiss philosophy are the most dogmatic philosophically. On the other hand, philosophy needs musicology: for flights of philosophical speculation, if they succeed in making sense, are ultimately about real social and psychological phenomena. So the philosophers cannot make it up; they cannot invent it. What they say must be true to the facts of music, to its history and its psychology. Interest in particulars is concerned with what is general and shared in particulars; an interest in general claims must be sensitive to the particulars they are supposed to describe. Ours is a world of both particularity and generality locked together in an inextricable embrace. Another apparent difference between musicology and philosophy, at least if we confine the latter to its English-speaking and Austrian philosophical traditions, is the extent of the emphasis placed on the history of thought. Philosophers in these traditions tend to come to an issue with some awareness of what the diverse voices of the past have said, but without deference to any of those voices. They are more likely to draw on and defer to contemporary psychology or other empirical disciples. By contrast, musicologists place more faith in the history of thought and believe it essential to embed any view of a phenomenon in the context of an intellectual tradition. For them, the subject matter cannot be cut off from what people have said about it. Understanding a phenomenon necessarily involves understanding people’s conceptions of that phenomenon, and those conceptions necessarily arise within particular historical and intellectual contexts, which need to be described and understood. (See Taruskin 2019 and Zangwill 2019 for further debate on this issue.) Again, it looks as if music and philosophy are working in opposite directions, or at least, that their concerns are very different, with little connection between them. A contrasting view, and again one to which we both incline, is that subject-matteroriented philosophy needs a historical understanding of why and how the problems they address present themselves now, as they do. And historians of ideas cannot pretend to be merely descriptive and sublimely impartial; they must understand what made the ideas compelling to those who held them in their historical situation. But that will involve evaluating ideas. Without that, the ideas will have no life and the historical account will not be convincing. We believe that there is much to be gained from having a conversation based on different approaches, differences that are part of living in a diverse intellectual community.

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966   Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton Wagner, Richard. 1995. Opera and Drama. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. First published as Oper und Drama in 1851. Williams, Bernard. 2006. “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline.” In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, edited by A. W. Moore, 180–199. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. First published 2000. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P.  M.  S.  Hacker and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollheim, Richard. 1980. “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation.” In Art and Its Objects, 137–511. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xenakis, Iannis. 1992: Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Xenophon. 1990. Conversations of Socrates. Translated by Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield. Edited by Robin Waterfield. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Zangwill, Nick. 1995. “Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (Spring): 167–176. Zangwill, Nick. 2001. “The Beautiful, and Dainty and the Dumpy.” In The Metaphysics of Beauty, 9–23. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zangwill, Nick. 2014. “Susan McClary and Musical Formalism: Friends Reunited.” Musical Times 155, no. 1929 (Winter): 63–69. Zangwill, Nick. 2015. Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of Description. New York: Routledge. Zangwill, Nick. 2019: “Music, Essence and Context.” In Of Essence and Context: Between Music and Philosophy, edited by Rima Povilioniene, Nick Zangwill, and Rūta Stanevičiūtė, 27–41. New York: Springer-Palgrave-Macmillan. Zeki, Semir. 1999. Inner Vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 47

Emotion Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers

This article is jointly written by someone from the discipline of philosophy and someone from the discipline of musicology. The study of expression done in each of those disciplines inevitably reflects disciplinary concerns. We do not have space here to give an overview of such differences, nor are we convinced about how deep such differences go. One need only reflect on the names common to both: Deryck Cook, Leonard Meyer, and Eduard Hanslick among them. However, as is apparent in what follows, musicology tends to be sensitive to the context in which music is created and experienced, to what listeners to music actually think and say. Philosophy tends to be less interested in such particularities (with, that is, particular social or historical contexts) and aims instead at generality—providing a constitutive account of expression. In what follows, such differences are not to the fore. What is aimed at is an account of expression—the background story of the link between music and the emotions. All of the accounts discussed below attempt to throw light on this notion by working with the properties of music and how the listener responds to those properties. Even if we would not go as far as the great musicologist Deryck Cooke, who claimed that “music functions as the language of the emotions” (Cooke 1959, 32), the emotions provide much food for thought for the musicologist and the philosopher of music. The phenomenon which Cooke noted is that listeners often experience music (and we are restricting ourselves to what is called “Western art music”) as bound up with the emotions. Resulting discussion has two foci: the role the emotions play in engaging with and understanding music, and the contribution of the emotions to the value of music. The former question has garnered most attention; the latter is comparatively neglected. Before embarking on a discussion of the role the emotions play in our understanding of music, it would be as well to say a little about the emotions themselves. There is no consensus within philosophy on the nature of emotions. Although much challenged in recent years, a range of accounts take emotions to be something more than mere feelings. Emotions might embody thoughts (that one is in danger), or an appraisal (there is danger about), or be rather like perceptions (seeing the world in certain valenced ways).

968   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers More recent accounts take their cue from the work of William James and take emotions to be feelings caused by changes in the body. What all have in common is that emotions are bound up with our engagement with the world—paradigmatically, what we feel (fear, for example) is bound up with an awareness of there being something a certain way (fearful) in our environment. The fact that emotions are reactions to our environment poses problems for exploring the link between music and the emotions. Music does not, or at least not in any standard sense, represent the world as being thus-and-so—for example, as being fearful. There are two caveats we should make to this. First, it could be that listeners regard music, as they regard a novel or poem, as a work of fiction. On some accounts of fiction, this would involve imagining of the music that it involved emotional states or agents (Walton 1994). Such an approach has something in common with that taken by Jerrold Levinson, considered in our section on “Experiencing Expressive Music.” Second, some music incorporates representations or reproductions of actual world sounds: the firing of cannon, the striking of anvils, the singing of birds, and so forth. Such sounds could enter into the cognitive aspect of an emotion, although how listeners experience such sounds is a matter of dispute. Typically, however, it is taken as a problem in the philosophy of music that music, unlike pictures and text, standardly does not represent the world as being thus-and-so. Thus, standardly, it is not obvious that there is anything about music that could provide the basis for an appropriate link to an emotional state. However, even if we agree that music does not standardly represent the world as being thus-and-so, it might nonetheless have links with emotions and the world. As we will see below, music might realize patterns realized elsewhere in the world, or in the mental states of listeners. Let us park these thoughts as we can come back to them once we have said something to specify what exactly are the problems to which emotions give rise in the philosophy of music. There are many ways in which we can connect music and the emotions. The most obvious is that music can arouse our emotions (Budd 2011). Even within the arousal of emotions, several relevant distinctions can be drawn. First, music can arouse emotions towards objects. Obvious examples are music that arouses emotions towards loved ones (the “our tune” phenomenon) and martial music that might arouse feelings of pa­tri­ot­ ism (national anthems). Second, music can arouse feelings that take the music itself as its object. Examples might be boredom (if it is boring music) or irritation (if it is irritating, badly played, or some such). Third, music can, simply, alter our mood. There is what is known as a “mirroring response” such that music that is ponderous and low can have a depressing effect, and music that is light and skipping can have an invigorating effect. Fourth, although not quite the arousal of either emotion or mood, music can directly induce in us “chills or frissons”; it can give us goose bumps or make the hair stand up on the back of our necks (Levinson 2006a). None of these instances of emotional arousal are particularly problematic. In the first case, music causes an emotion in us that has some non-musical cognitive state as a component: a loved one, or one’s country. This would be no more problematic than being caused to feel an emotion for one’s loved one by a kind deed or an emotion for one’s

Emotion   969 country by an athlete winning a gold medal (although there have been valiant, if doomed, attempts to found an account of expression on aroused emotion—see Matravers 1998). Second, there is no problem with music itself being the object of an emotion. We can be bored by music, irritated by music, love music, just as much as we can be bored by, irritated by, or love, anything else. Third, music can induce moods but then so can many other things: the grey weather, the unremitting concrete, the seemingly endless week. Finally, music can act directly on our nervous system, but so can heights, explosions, and many other things. Nobody takes these instances of the arousal of emotions as problematic, so we should not take them as problematic for music. Even if not problematic, resources from such links might still be employed so as to illuminate the connection between music and emotions, as can be seen in the discussion of Meyer in our section on “Expressive Experiences of Music.” Of more immediate interest are instances where it seems as if the music itself is truly described in terms drawn from the emotions. Such descriptions can take a variety of forms although there are three in particular that have been the focus of philosophical attention. The first is the apparent attribution of an emotion to music. That is, a predicate usually used to refer to an emotion is ascribed to the music: “the music is sad” (the classic statement of this is Bouwsma 1954). The second claims that music is expressing emotion or is being used to express an emotion: “the music is expressing sadness” (perhaps the classic statement of this is Kivy 1989). The third is the apparent attribution of a complex emotion to an extended piece of music: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony expresses resolution in the face of doubt (for this, see Levinson 1990). The philosophical issue is to say what these mean, a task which often takes the form of saying what needs to be the case in order for an utterance of these sorts to be true. The remainder of this essay will consider various attempts to throw light on these three ways of speaking. These will be considered under two broad headings. The first, a strong tradition in Anglo-American philosophy of music, attempts to give a perspicuous and accurate description of an experience of expressive music in a way that makes clear its connection to the emotions. The second, a strong tradition in the psychology of music, attempts an adverbial analysis. That is, this approach is a more explicit attempt to characterize a way of listening. We might say that the first attempts to characterize the experience of expressive music, and the second attempts to characterize the expressive experience of music.

Experiencing Expressive Music From the outset, one might think the first approach has picked a problem that must be easy to solve. If all an account needs to do is to give a perspicuous and accurate description of an experience familiar to many of us, then from whence does the disagreement spring? Should we not simply introspect and report? The answer is that we are not always aware of the nature of our experiences, and often struggle for the best way to describe

970   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers them. We are left, however, in judging the accounts, to judge whether the fine phenomenological descriptions provided by the accounts do correspond to our experiences. The two dominant such accounts in the philosophical literature are due, respectively, to Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson. Davies’s account begins with the notion of “emotion characteristics in appearances”: The character of a person’s appearance, bearing, face, or voice sometimes is described by using emotion terms. We might say “He is a sad-looking person” or “He cuts a sad figure.” In such cases we do not mean that the person feels sad; neither do we mean that he frequently feels sad, or that we make believe that he feels sad. The reference is not to any emotion, in fact, but to the look of him.  (Davies 1994, 222–223)

In short, for Davies, the expression of emotion is associated with a characteristic look. That look, however, can occur independently of some felt emotion being expressed. Thus, to take the example, the look associated with the human expression of sadness occurs when humans express sadness, but also in the faces of basset hounds, the shape of weeping willows, and so on. Davies uses emotion characteristics in appearance to characterize the experience of expressive music: “I believe that the expressiveness of music depends mainly on the resemblance we perceive between the dynamic character of the music and human movement, gait, bearing, or carriage” (Davies  1994, 229). Davies’s account, then, is an “experienced resemblance” account. What it is to hear music as, for example, sad is to experience the emotion characteristic of the appearance of sadness. That is, it is to experience the music as resembling the human expression of sadness. Note three important features of this account. First, the account is about the experience of expressive music, rather than the causes of that experience. That is, the account does not claim that there are certain real resemblances between some bits of music and expressive people, which cause the experience, and that our experience of the music as expressive is the experience of those resemblances. There would be a number of flaws with such an account, the most troubling of which is that those bits of music would not only resemble expressive people, but, to quote Peter Kivy, “the waves of the ocean, and, for all I know, the rise and fall of the stock market or the spirit of capitalism” (Kivy 1989, 62). Instead the music causes us to experience a resemblance between the music and an expressive person. We can throw more light upon the experience by talking of the respects in which we are experiencing the resemblance but those respects are aspects of the experience we are caused to have. Second, the emotion characteristic in appearance is independent not only of a felt emotion but can also be tokened without the need for some particular thought associated with that emotion, or object of that emotion. The sadness of a basset hound’s face does not require us to claim the dog feels sad, that any sad thought is being expressed, or that there is an object for the dog’s sadness. Similarly, the sadness of the music does not require us to claim the music feels sad, that any sad thought is being expressed, or that there is an object for the music’s sadness. Third, Davies’s talk of an expressive “look” is to some extent misleading. We experience a resemblance not

Emotion   971 between the music and the look of sadness but between music and human action; that is, movement that exhibits “order and purposiveness” (Davies 1994, 229). There are a number of places where such a worry could surface on Davies’s account of which we will mention three. The first questions whether what we hear in expressive music is always, as Davies claims, movement. The account rules out, from the outset, the possibility that listeners can hear expressive music as static representations of static qualities in the world: for example, musical representations of landscape, or of human or animal character. Second, even in those instances in which, arguably, movement is heard, it is not clear how perspicuous it is to characterize such experiences in terms of cross-modal resemblance: that is, experiencing the sound of the music as resembling the look of a person. Most familiar cases of experienced resemblance are intra-modal: experiencing the foghorn as resembling the whale (both sounds), or the milkshake as resembling the berry (both tastes). Finally, what is it, in the visual world, that Davies claims we experience the music as resembling? Davies, for good reason, is keen to say that the music is experienced as resembling expressive action rather than simply movement. Action, however, is intentional and purposive, and it is not clear that these are visual properties. Once we are thinking of the music in terms of its passage as being intentional and purposive, are we still simply experiencing a resemblance? At this point, the gap between Davies’s account and that of Levinson appears to narrow (see Levinson 2006b, 197). Levinson’s account exists in an earlier and later version of which we shall consider the latter (Levinson 1996, 2006b). The account begins with two truisms. The first is that hearing something as expression is a matter of hearing “inner states through outer signs.” The second is that “expressing requires an expresser.” Thus, when we hear music as expressive we hear it as an expresser expressing his or her inner states. In short, “music expresses an emotion only to the extent that we are disposed to hear it as the expression of emotion, albeit in a non-standard manner, by a person or personlike entity” (Levinson 2006b, 192–193). Clearly, when we listen to expressive music we are not disposed to hear it as the natural expression of emotion. Rather, we are in the realm of imaginative perceptions. Levinson puts this in two ways: we hear the music as an expression of emotion, or we imagine of the music that it is an expression of emotion (195). We will explore this account by considering three objections that have been made to it. We will not dwell on the first as it is a general problem for many attempts to secure correctness of judgement—including the correctness of colour judgement. On Levinson’s theory, what makes the judgement that a work expresses some particular emotion correct is that it is the judgement that would be made by some ideal listener. The danger of circularity is obvious: the correct judgement is that made by the ideal listener, and the ideal listener can be identified only in terms of the correctness of his or her judgement (Scruton 1997, 353). Levinson is alive to the danger, but argues that the notion of a “properly backgrounded listener and his or her hearing of a passage in its proper intrawork and extrawork context” can be spelled out in a non-circular manner, especially if some measure of bootstrapping is ­ earability-as-expression under such conditions— allowed. Thus, “where there is ready h

972   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers evidenced most clearly by convergence of experiencers among such listeners—then objectivity and normativity are present” (Levinson 2006b, 202). The second objection has, once again, been expressed by Roger Scruton: When we hear expression in music, Levinson suggests, this is like hearing another person express his feelings. But in what way like? . . . Our ability to imagine a subject expressing his feelings in just this way is predicated upon our ability to recognize the expressive content of the music. Only if we can independently recognize the emotional content of the music, therefore, can we embark on the thought-experiment required by Levinson’s definition.  (Scruton 1997, 352)

This objection is premised on a misunderstanding of Levinson’s position. Levinson does not think that we need to identify what emotion the music is expressing, and then imagine of the music that a persona is expressing that emotion: that would indeed undermine the account. Rather, the music disposes us to imagine of the music that it is the expression by a persona of a particular emotion. We are prompted into this imaginative act; we do not need to work out what emotion to imagine beforehand (Levinson 2006b, 202–203). Why it is that the music prompts us to imagine the persona expresses this particular emotion rather than some other is a question best answered by psychological investigation. Levinson claims, surely rightly, that the mechanisms will be complex and varied: it is likely to include feeling responses (including micro-responses), noting resemblances (whether consciously or sub-personally) between the music and human behaviour, and the music and the human experience of emotion (Levinson 1996, 112–116). The final objection concerns what we are being asked to imagine when we imagine of the music that it is the expression of emotion by a persona. The point was put by Malcolm Budd against a similar view put forward by R. K. Elliott (1967). (In the following quotation M is some piece of expressive music, and E is the emotion expressed.) Since M consists of sounds M must be imagined to issue from a person’s body in some way—if not from his mouth, by means of his voice, in some other manner of sound production. But sounds expressive of emotion issue from human beings only vocally. If, therefore, I am to make-believe that M is someone’s sui generis expression of E, I must imagine human beings to have some non-vocal means of making sounds come from their bodies and in which their emotions can be expressed, and I must make believe that M issues in this way from someone as an expression of his E. (Budd 1985, 134)

Levinson, however, does not claim that we imagine of the sound of the music that it is the sound of expression: “musical expressing is music heard as something like what humans do in manifesting emotions, but with different resources—ones analogous to human gesturing and vocalizing and expressive movement, in all its forms, including dancing but going beyond them” (Levinson 1996, 115). Music has rich resources, in suggesting facial expression, bodily attitude, gesture and movement, and so on (see

Emotion   973 Cumming 2001). Hence, Levinson can marshal these to hold that what we imagine is relatively unspecific. My account does not imply that listeners who register expressiveness in music possess a concrete conception of what literally expressing emotions through music instead of behaviour would amount to, or how such expressing would work. The account requires only that listeners are able to imagine music to be such a literal expression.  (Levinson 2006b, 203)

Expressive Experiences of Music Earlier we identified two broad approaches to music and emotion, of which Davies and Levinson have been instances of the former. Those who favour the second, adverbial, account will baulk at various assumptions in the foregoing. Instead of thinking the listener hears a resemblance (Davies) or hears the music as expression (Levinson), the adverbial account will argue that music enacts certain patterns, and that these patterns can be also be found in the world, as well as in listeners’ psychological processes. A touchstone for this approach is Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of musical form as an interplay of alternately subverted and fulfilled expectations. According to Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music, “Affect or emotion-felt is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus situation, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked” (Meyer 1956, 31). Whilst the concept of musical emotion as tension and release is not original, the ambition to capture it through a stringently psychological model of expectation launched musicology’s cognitive turn. Of the various psychologically-oriented music researchers who followed Meyer (see in particular Fred Lerdahl [2004]), David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation (2006) is the text which centred the theory of musical mind most intently on emotion, via a much more stringent model of expectation. Nevertheless, it is not clear if or how expectation (or “anticipation”) is indeed connected to emotion; nor that it is the only path to a cognitive theory of emotion. For instance, Charles Nussbaum’s The Musical Representation (2007) goes beyond Clarke to ground emotion in a Gibsonian ecological model of tonal forces. In the first case, it is doubtful that tension is an emotion at all rather than a foundational dimension (of music, of emotion) (although see Walton 1999). This is why Meyer originally confined the expectation/resolution cycle to undifferentiated “feeling tone” (or core affect), with emotion(s) proper emerging at higher levels. Stephen Davies argues that Meyer’s early view of emotion as ultimately extrinsic to musical process makes him a formalist in the tradition of Hanslick—an irony, given Hanslick’s image as an enemy of musical emotion: [Hanslick] thinks that thoughts of emotions prompted by music cannot be of aesthetic/artistic relevance, because the train of such thoughts must fall beyond the

974   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers control of the development of musical materials within the work. Meyer’s approach is vulnerable to this attack because it treats the music as a trigger that activates the listener’s feeling in an automatic fashion, leaving associations brought from outside the musical context to give that response its emotional individuality. (Davies 1994, 290–291)

We would be hard pressed to find musicologists today who can so confidently separate out from musical material what Davies terms “associations brought from outside,” including its cultural and historical meaning. Meyer demonstrated in his later, albeit never fully realized, theory of ethos that emotional character can be inscribed within the quality of musical parameters. In his exquisitely nuanced analysis of the Trio from Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, Meyer defined “ethos” as “those aspects of affective experience that remain relatively constant over time and that are the basis for the characterization of all or part of a composition” (Meyer 2000, 122). Taking his cue from Georges de Saint-Foix’s description of the Trio as a “moment of sunshine . . . calm, reposeful, pellucid, truly idyllic . . . charming . . . pure and calm . . . so Elysian a grace” (quoted in Meyer 2000, 122), Meyer correlates its ethos with technical features such the absence of extremes of tempo, register, or dynamics; regular metre; flowing rhythm; and commonplace triads and chord progressions. The argument as to whether expectation and “feeling tone” properly constitute emotion reflects a wider debate between writers like Davies and Levinson, who focus on the conscious experience of emotion, and others, particularly in music psychology, who dwell on mechanisms which may well create emotion, but which may not necessarily be available to conscious experience. The line between these positions is fuzzy; for instance, the thrust of musical education or appreciation is that listeners can become aware of ostensibly underlying or foundational mechanisms, thereby gaining more enjoyment (read: emotion) from the music. One reason for Meyer’s lasting interest is that his principles are sufficiently underdetermined (compared to more empirical modern protocols) to adapt themselves equally to both positions. The play of expectations is especially audible in the so-called comic Classical style of Haydn and Mozart, which is why Meyer was especially drawn to that repertoire. Meyer’s theory is also durable because it builds bridges between expression and arousal. It suggests how music expresses ethos in the very course of stimulating the mental processes which arouse emotion. Since such processing is a lot more dynamic than simply identifying the music’s character, Meyer’s work also calls into question Davies’s theory of perceived resemblance; that is, that we find music expressive because of “the resemblance we perceive between the dynamic character of the music and human movement” (Davies 1994, 229). That may well be the case for noting the resemblance between an object and its painting. But in music the listener doesn’t perceive the dynamic pattern so much as mentally enact it. Just as the affective quality of a human action may not be detachable from the action itself (how one moves or gestures or walks), the same may be true of how we hear emotion in music. To put the matter adverbially, rather than hearing sadness, we hear sadly.

Emotion   975 Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music (1959) interested philosophers in part because it taught them that affective character had music-technical correlatives. Meyer raised the game because Cooke’s ad hoc attributions of affective epithets are not theorized either analytically or psychologically. Published half a century after Cooke’s and Meyer’s texts, Juslin and Sloboda’s Handbook of Music and Emotion (2010) signalled a major change in music-and-emotion research, driven largely by the professionalization of music psychology, and by psychology’s overcoming its earlier behaviourist suspicion of emotion studies. Although ostensibly ignorant of Meyer’s theory of ethos, Juslin and Timmers’s (2010) model of how performers communicate emotion via “acoustic cues” represents a refinement of that theory, in that modern technology is better able than Meyer to capture details of intonation, timbre, and micro-timing. For instance, sadness is typically conveyed through slow mean tempo, legato articulation, dull timbre, large timing variations, slow tone attacks, flat micro-intonation, etc., and the other four basic categories for musical emotion that Juslin and Timmers identify (happiness, tenderness, fear, and anger) are characterized by other sets of acoustic cues. Juslin and Timmers’s talk of emotional categories signals a more pluralist perspective on musical emotion— emotions rather than Emotion. In its pluralism, current research recalls Charles Darwin’s 1872 survey of emotions in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, and indeed the venerable tradition of Affektenlehre and the passions (see Bartel 1997). This suggests that, after Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Smith, German Idealism’s turn away from affective pluralism was a historical aberration. Several objections can be raised against Juslin and Timmers’s approach. The first is that it offers a rather static picture both of music and of emotion, as Jenefer Robinson finds in the “Doggy” theory of expression she (rightly or wrongly) imputes to Stephen Davies (Robinson 2007, 307–310). Whichever side one takes in her dispute with Davies, our point regarding Juslin is not that the theory is wrong so much as that it is incomplete. Certainly, acoustic cues efficiently capture a static emotional category, akin to the “look” of a person (or a basset hound or a weeping willow). They are also reminiscent of the seventeenth-century art-theorist Charles Le Brun’s (2010) taxonomy of faces in the grip of various passions. This theory is incomplete, however, because it does not reckon with emotions in terms of human action. Juslin cites Keith Oatley’s functionalist definition of sadness as “failure of major plan or loss of active goal” (Juslin and Sloboda 2010, 77), yet he offers no account of how music’s acoustic parameters could be expressive of that. We are not sure whether, or to what degree, Juslin subscribes to the various theories he surveys, or—more importantly—how they might be integrated within a coherent theory. Related to that, a second objection is that Juslin’s distinction between expression and arousal seems somewhat rigid. He encapsulates music’s capacity to express, arouse, induce, or mirror emotion in six discrete brain “mechanisms”: (1) brain stem reflexes; (2) evaluative conditioning; (3) emotional contagion; (4) visual imagery; (5) episodic memory; and (6) musical expectancy (Juslin and Västfjäll  2008). The big bang in Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony causes us to flinch because our brain recruits all these mechanisms to different effect. At the most brutally perceptual level, a sudden bang induces a feeling of unpleasant shock (1). Through repeated listening, we become

976   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers c­ onditioned to emote to Haydn’s surprise in a particular way (2). (That said, a related paradox is why musical surprise is immune to experience, perhaps because an encapsulated brain module is congenitally deaf and blind to experience.) At the level of emotional contagion, we “catch” the fear expressed by Haydn’s bang by internally mimicking it (3). There is speculation that such empathetic processes rely on mirror neurons. Visual imagery (4) is the realm of metaphorical and symbolic associations; and episodic memory (5) refers to emotion induced in listeners because the music evokes a memory of a particular event in their life—the “Darling, they’re playing our tune” phenomenon. The role of musical expectancy (6) is familiar to us through the work of Meyer and his successors (such as David Huron). Do these six mechanisms exhaust the manifold aspects of musical emotion? And just how encapsulated are they? Musical expectancy is a case in point, since its reliance on stylistic convention is mediated through a universe of cultural and historical knowledge not obviously represented in any of Juslin’s mechanisms. The stylistic competence of “backgrounded listeners”—their understanding of Haydn’s Classical style and the ­eighteenth-century symphony—is not accounted for by conditioning, memory of life events, or metaphorical imagery. Conversely, Juslin and Västfjäll seem illegitimately to rule out analytical methods that do not lend themselves to psychological testing, such as Schenkerian voice leading and Schoenbergian musical logic. Their theory of discrete mechanisms also neglects the question of how listeners might come to partake of, or identify with, the emotions they recognize the music as expressing. This is often a matter of choice: as with reading a literary text, we can decide at will whether to adopt an “insider” perspective, identifying with the character of the novel, or an “outsider” perspective, observing the character’s emotional experience with critical detachment. We suggest that a similar degree of voluntary control is available to the listener in the face of, say, Beethoven’s heroic “narratives”; indeed, how one listens is also affected by one’s mood, which is a kind of emotion in itself, as well as by age and personality-type. For instance, our capacity or inclination to identify with the Napoleonic passion of the Eroica Symphony might fade with jaded life-experience. And yet it is difficult to find a platform for such critical freedom or self-awareness within Juslin and Västfjäll’s brain model, as is typical of modern theories of consciousness that shy away from the problematic “homunculus” assumed by the “Cartesian Theatre” (see Dennett 1993; Blackmore 2010). It is difficult to square a notion of subjectivity with that of brain mechanism, partly because the latter suggests that the musical subject is localized in a specific brain region. A fault-line thus opens up between the majority of the psychologically-orientated emotion researchers in Juslin and Sloboda’s volume, and philosophical approaches, akin to the gap between brain and mind. This gap is by no means insurmountable, as is witnessed by the highly psychologically-literate writings by philosophers such as Jenefer Robinson (2007), Naomi Cumming (2001), Charles Nussbaum (2007), and Kathleen Higgins (2012). Robinson’s process model of emotion sees an interaction between a “quick and dirty” non-cognitive appraisal (as when we instinctively flee a bear or a snake) and more leisurely, reflective judgements (as when we realize that what we thought was a snake was actually a stick). Nussbaum criticizes Robinson for assimilating

Emotion   977 emotional reaction to the startle reflex, but this is wide of the mark, since research shows that listeners are capable of evaluating a musical idiom in a split second. From this standpoint, we can think of musical form as reflecting upon the emotional ethos afforded by the music’s secondary parameters: we “catch” the emotion instantly, from the timbre, rhythm, tempo, and dynamics, and this appraisal is confirmed or disconfirmed by the unfolding formal process. As an outline of human action, music’s formal process converges with the persona theory of musical emotion detailed in the “Experiencing Expressive Music” section of this chapter. Though not directly addressing musical emotion, Naomi Cumming’s The Sonic Self (2001) helped to tease apart the vocal/oral, gestural, and teleological strands of the human-action model of emotion. One might not fully accept Cumming’s Peirceian taxonomy. But in associating vocality with timbre (icon), gesture with medium-level motive or phrasing (index), and long-range formal process with human will or action (symbol), Cumming helps unravel both the “quick and dirty” and more reflective sides of emotional appraisal. Charles Nussbaum’s The Musical Representation (2007) supplies the most complex and psychologically sophisticated account of the persona theory of musical emotion. Nussbaum thinks that “music is not about emotions, but about an emotionally charged virtual environment” (Nussbaum 2007, 251). Subscribing to Nico Frijda’s biological concept of emotion as “action tendency” in response to appraisals of environmental (Gibsonian) affordances, Nussbaum sees the musical work as a “virtual feature domain” (237), an acousmatic musical landscape of tonal forces and pathways we negotiate in listening. It is also an affective scenario that listeners act out in their heads: The arousal of emotion by music results from the presentation of affordances in virtual musical space, activating motor schemata off-line and motivating the construction by the listener of appropriate mental models of musical scenarios or feature domains. The nonconceptual nature of these representations . . . tends to dissolve epistemic and metaphysical barriers between subject and subject and between subject and object, a result that encourages simulation of virtual musical objects and further enhances emotional involvement with the musical scenario content. (Nussbaum 2007, 257)

There are too many assumptions in Nussbaum’s account to unpack in a short summary. On the one hand, his intensely self-orientated view of extended pieces of music as affective-tonal landscapes that we imaginatively walk through sounds intuitively correct for a lot of music. And it resonates with the Kantian tradition of active listening with imagination, including Theodor Adorno’s (2014) mimetic theory of “musical reproduction,” which holds that listeners mentally reproduce the music by identifying with its unfolding process. On the other hand, even if we overlook Nussbaum’s intricate quarrels with the full gamut of opposing philosophical views, there are several more basic caveats to his approach. First, tonal pathways comport better with theories of affect rather than with emotion proper; that is, treating affect as pre-conceptual vectors and gradations of

978   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers intensity (see the work of Brian Massumi [2002] among others). (Note also that untangling the cross-relations between “emotion” and “affect”—if these are indeed separate domains—is one of the outstanding jobs to be done in future research.) Unlike Juslin, Nussbaum doesn’t show how or why specific musical materials afford particular emotional categories. A second caveat is that the landscape or narrative scenario model works well with nineteenth-century music, but poorly with early or contemporary music, where large-scale musical form is much less conventionalized. Nussbaum’s book thus pivots on the historical coincidence that the modern concept of emotion and extended instrumental form both crystallized in the nineteenth century. Related to this is the problem that the musical self is also deeply historicized. This goes beyond Levinson’s talk of the “appropriately backgrounded listener,” as the issue is not so much of competence as constitution. It is doubtful that the medieval listener had as pronounced a sense of self as Beethoven’s listeners, just as the tonal pathways in a Dufay motet (such as they were in a modal universe) are obscure by modern criteria. Furthermore, historical records throw into question modern assumptions that art reflects everyday human emotions. The emotions represented in motets and altarpieces are divine, prefiguring an ideal state towards which brute human emotions ought to aspire. Nussbaum and Juslin’s self-orientated perspective on emotion reverses this far older outlook centred on the divine. Differently put, this historical flip is congruent with Europe’s trajectory towards realism in the arts. Hence another divide opens up between realistic or everyday emotions on the one hand, and aesthetic emotions on the other. The question, in short, is why we should expect musical emotion to mirror the categories of emotion in people’s day-to-day activities. Both sides have their adherents. The trajectory towards realism converges with the biologization of the humanities, one aspect of which is the perceived continuity, since Darwin, of human and animal adaptive behaviour and affective experience. Thus, Juslin finds basic emotional categories such as happiness, fear, and anger in music—­ categories one may well discover in dogs and cats. Such continuity has been challenged by a cluster of researchers based in Geneva, at the Swiss National Centre for Affective Sciences. The GEMS (Geneva Emotional Music Scale) model of Marcel Zentner and colleagues provides “a taxonomy of musically induced emotions” (Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer  2008). Surveys of audience responses to a wide array of musical genres (including classical, jazz, pop, and rock) found that listeners most commonly reported feeling “relaxed,” “happy,” “enchanted,” “nostalgic,” or “filled with wonder.” According to this study, the rarest emotion induced by music, at the bottom of a list of sixty or so emotion terms drawn up by the investigators, was “anger.” Music seldom if ever made listeners feel angry. The research is of course concerned only with arousal or induction, not with the expression or representation of emotion—and plenty of genres, such as heavy metal or hip-hop, arguably aim at the expression or representation of angry affective states. But there are two points here. The first is that lay listeners may be most involved with musical emotion in terms of how they feel; and that, by extension, identifying, categorizing, and labelling represented emotion is harder to achieve, and comes only with musical

Emotion   979 training. The second point is that emotional categories such as “wonder,” “transcendence,” “nostalgia,” and “peacefulness” may be more relevant to musical experience than the basic emotions of “happiness,” “anger,” “fear,” etc. Zentner and his team term the former “aesthetic” emotions, and the latter “utilitarian.” It is interesting that “wonder” is Descartes’s pre-eminent emotion of attention, and it was linked to musical spectacle throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods, albeit before the invention of philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, the archetypal case of wonder is gazing at a rainbow. It is also found in so-called eureka moments of working through a mathematical theorem, the two extremes of wonder coming together in the discipline of optics. In this regard, Rameau’s spectacular operas constitute a sonic optics of musical wonder, theorized by Rameau the acoustician when he is wearing his scientific hat. In other words, there is a reciprocal connection between Theorist Rameau and Composer Rameau. The theory treatises explicate the intellectual wonder afforded by the aesthetic wonder of the compositions. The problem of interrelating aesthetic and everyday-life categories of musical emotion has yet to be satisfactorily resolved in current research. One possibility is that it is a pseudo-problem, a figment of music psychology’s experimental protocols. The tickboxes of audience questionnaires typically demand very quick responses, whereas, as Robinson reminds us, it often takes a long time to grasp what emotion we are feeling. This element of time is as germane to musical emotion as to emotion in everyday life: we are generally unaware of what we are feeling at any given moment. It is pertinent that Alf Gabrielsson’s Strong Experiences with Music (2011) was conducted on the basis not of questionnaires but of in-depth interviews with a thousand subjects. The typical emotions reported are similar to Zentner, Grandjean, and Scherer’s aesthetic emotions: “absorbed,” “moved,” “in wonderment,” “struck,” “overwhelmed.” Importantly, they are frequently “strong” enough for their memory to last a lifetime. In search of common ground between the aesthetic and the everyday, Kathleen Higgins proposes that the essence of musical emotion is the enjoyment it affords of “ontological security.” If the worst thing to befall a person is “to be alone in the world,” then music helps “to construct and reinforce a sense of sharing the world with others” (Higgins 2012, 145, 158). The “comfort and joy” of Higgins’s “music between us” is thus a participatory model of emotion. This is to treat musical emotion not as the product of reflection on a musical object, but as the outcome of an activity, such as joint performance or even dancing. We should beware of paper tigers, however, since, according to the Kantian aesthetic tradition that Nussbaum takes forward, listening is itself a kind of inner performance. Nor is listening necessarily a solitary experience, as Higgins reminds us; music promotes feelings of group membership by its very nature as a symbol and vehicle of a “continuing community” (165). To extend Higgins’s argument contra the critics of what is sometimes disparaged as absolute music, listeners can gain “strong experiences” of music whilst driving or cooking, or undertaking many other kinds of everyday activities. Similarly, the ethnomusicologist Judith Becker (2004) has argued that “deep listening” affords strong emotions across many world cultures. It might even be the case that the philosophy of musical emotion is on the back foot with respect to anthropology and history, since the rising flood of new information about musical

980   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers emotion across the globe challenges our somewhat Western-centric (and nineteenth­century–centric) models of subjectivity.

Concluding Thoughts In ranging over such a diversity of contexts for musical emotion, we may wonder whether we are dealing with a single phenomenon at all. Is “emotion” just a word, affixed willy-nilly to disparate objects, as Paul Griffiths (1997) proposed in a provocative study? We would suggest that it doesn’t really matter. If “musical emotion” turns out to be a blanket term thrown over a rapidly proliferating range of phenomena, then we are perhaps all the richer for it. What of the future? The urge, within philosophy, to produce a single account that attempts to capture all of what we mean by expression in music seems, at least temporarily, to have gone into abeyance. One reason for this might be Malcolm Budd’s insistence over many years that the accounts we have are not incompatible, and that different accounts might be needed on different occasions of utterance. On some occasions the claim that a piece of music is expressive of a certain emotion might gesture at a similarity, on others it might be the claim that, to experience the work with understanding, the listener will have to indulge in a form of imaginative perception (Budd 2008, 77–81). If this is the case, each of the accounts discussed above might have a place at the table. An awareness of the work of the cognitive sciences, as shown in the latter part of this essay, shows no sign of abating. There is no consensus of view in either philosophy or musicology as to the extent to which such work will solve the problems at issue, although all should agree that whatever answers are provided should at least be compatible with the science. One consequence of the influence of the cognitive sciences has been a revaluation of some of the earlier theories—as we saw above, it has given impetus to Meyer’s theory, but also allowed some form of the arousal theory back into the frame. The focus on the mechanisms of expression have also strengthened the claim to pluralism (see Cochrane 2010). A further challenge—perhaps the greatest one—is to align research in musical emotion with the History of Emotions, itself a resurgent discipline in the other humanities (see Plamper 2015; Spitzer 2020). Musical work in this field is rather s­ poradic, and is ironically held back precisely by its dalliance with the cognitive sciences. In other words, further progress in musical emotion will happen only when it negotiates the ­profound contradictions in method and approach between psychology and history.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 2014. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft, and Two Schemata. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bartel, Dietrich. 1997. Musica poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Emotion   981 Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Blackmore, Susan. 2010. Consciousness: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Bouwsma, O. K. 1954. “The Expression Theory of Art.” In Aesthetics and Language, edited by William R. Elton, 73–99. Oxford: Blackwell. Budd, Malcolm. 1985. Music and the Emotions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Budd, Malcolm. 2008. “The Intersubjective Validity of Aesthetic Judgements.” In Aesthetic Essays, 62–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Budd, Malcolm. 2011. “Music’s Arousal of Emotions.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 233–242. London: Routledge. Cochrane, Tom. 2010. “Music, Emotions and the Influence of the Cognitive Sciences.” Philosophy Compass 5 (11): 978–988. Cooke, Deryck. 1959. The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cumming, Naomi. 2001. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Davies, Stephen. 1994. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 1993. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin. Elliott, R. K. 1967. “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art.” In Aesthetics, edited by Harold Osborne, 145–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabrielsson, Alf. 2011. Strong Experiences with Music: Music Is Much More than Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, Paul. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Higgins, Kathleen. 2012. The Music Between Us: Is Music a Universal Art? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Juslin, Patrik N., and Daniel Västfjäll. 2008. “Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underlying Mechanisms.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, no. 5 (October): 559–621. Juslin, Patrik  N., and John  A.  Sloboda. 2010. Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juslin, Patrik N., and Renee Timmers. 2010. “Expression and Communication of Emotion in Music Performance.” In Juslin and Sloboda 2010, 453–492. Kivy, Peter. 1989. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Le Brun, Charles. 2010. Caractères des passions, sur le desseins de C. Le Brun. Paris: Nabu Press. First published 1690. Lerdahl, Fred. 2004. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. “Hope in The Hebrides.” In Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, 336–375. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1996. “Musical Expressiveness.” In The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 90–125. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006a. “Musical Chills.” In Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics, 220–236. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2006b. “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, 192–204. Oxford: Blackwell.

982   Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Matravers, Derek. 1998. Art and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Leonard  B. 2000. “Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart’s G-Minor Symphony.” In The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays, 55–125. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nussbaum, Charles. 2007. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Plamper, Jan. 2015. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Jenefer. 2007. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spitzer, Michael. 2020. A History of Emotion in Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Walton, Kendal. 1994. “Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 1 (Winter): 47–62. Walton, Kendal. 1999. “Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension.” Philosophical Topics 26, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall): 407–440. Zentner, Marcel, Didier Grandjean, and Klaus Scherer. 2008. “Emotions Evoked by the Sound of Music: Characterization, Classification, and Measurement.” Emotion 8, no. 4 (August): 494–521.

chapter 48

Ench a n tm en t Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham

“The disenchantment of the world” is now a familiar expression. It made its first appearance in Max Weber’s lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” and with this phrase, Weber brilliantly and succinctly captured the sense of a world stripped of its mystery by the seemingly relentless triumph of the natural sciences. By extension, Weber’s expression also captures intellectual efforts to reverse this circumstance—the striving for a “re-enchantment of the world.” “The re-enchantment of the world” has provided the title for a steady stream of books that have set themselves to recover what science seems to have destroyed (see Moore 1996; Heilke and Woodiwiss 2001; Partridge 2004; Brown 2004; Levine 2006; Graham 2007; Harries 2008; Elkins and Morgan 2009). Some of these seek a revival of the religions that a disenchanted world has discarded; others look for new and different sources of enchantment—in the arts or the natural world. What is striking is that very few of these Herculean efforts invoke, or even mention, the world of music. This is surprising because, although the word enchantment has associations with magic, its etymological origins are to be found in singing. Might the metaphysics of music cast the task of re-enchantment in a different light? In what follows, we address this question from the perspectives of a philosopher and theologian (Gordon Graham) and a music theorist and historian (Scott Burnham). We have not attempted to distinguish sharply between our authorial perspectives—yet neither have we attempted to merge them into a single voice. The opening sections of the essay, which take a broadly philosophical approach towards general questions of musical enchantment, are written by Graham; the later sections, which use music analysis to address specific examples of musical enchantment, are by Burnham. Nevertheless, in the spirit of co-authorship, both perspectives echo throughout the entire essay.

Enchanting the World The idea of magic, except in the sense of conjuring tricks, is alien to the modern mind. Yet some faint resonance of magical allure still clings to the words enchant and enchanting. In common usage they signify a power that something or someone possesses not

984   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham only to capture, but to hold the attention of human beings to the extent of deflecting them from the activities in which they are already engaged. Enchanting, accordingly, is something more than “attracting” or even “enticing”; it is closer to “hypnotizing.” The etymological roots of enchant and enchanting reveal a special affinity between this power and music, especially singing: witness the magician, who most effectively “casts” by intoning the words of the spell. In modern speech, similar words—chant and chanting—retain this musical connection. Usually there is no mesmeric connotation, but some such aura is not far to seek. The enduringly interesting story of Odysseus returning home from the Trojan War expressly connects the two. The Siren voices that Odysseus is curious to hear sing with such compelling beauty that by listening to them he risks his own destruction on the rocky shore to which they beckon him. So, in order to hear them sing while nevertheless evading this risk, he commands his sailors to plug their own ears with beeswax, lash him to the mast, and ignore his every plea to be released. Thereby he ensures that he is prevented from following the powerful longings the music of the Sirens will awaken in him. The myth of the Sirens is grounded in this fact. There is indeed something about music that is properly called “enchanting.” A great many pieces of music have a remarkable power to make us return to them again and again. They not only attract our attention; they absorb it, and they do so indefinitely many times. Most importantly, familiarity, far from breeding contempt, seems to intensify this power. Music, we may say, does indeed have the power to enchant. But what exactly does this mean, and what is it about music that gives it this power? The story of Odysseus incorporates another feature of enchantment—relocation. The danger confronting Odysseus is that the beauty of the voices he hears will entice him to forsake his ship for the island Anthemusa, the land of the Sirens (according to some versions of the myth). In this particular story, any attempt to reach Anthemusa will mean destruction. In many other stories, however, there is no danger of this kind. On the contrary, the enchanted place is benign. Enchanted woods or valleys are generally wholly different to normal woods and valleys. They are not necessarily dangerous places, though they may be, and enchantment perhaps is more often thought of as a risk than a benefit. However, we can say more neutrally that to be enchanted is just to be drawn into a contrasting world, whether that world be good or bad. This contrasting world is not otherworldly; since it makes use of musical instruments, concert halls, recording studios and the like, it is clearly related to this one. Somehow, however, it is a world that has quite different charms to offer us once we enter it. The project of re-enchantment reflects our longing for a world with charms that distinguish it from the material world that science discloses to us, and music enchants precisely because it seems to present us with a world that is differently constituted from the world of matter in motion. Moreover, while enchanted woods and valleys are fantasy worlds, music is not fantasy; it is as real as scent and colour. This makes music a promising avenue for thinking about a different kind of world. Of course, it is plausible to claim that the expression “another world,” when applied to music, is mere analogy or even a slightly whimsical façon de parler. So to support the claim that it is more than this, we

Enchantment   985 have to identify some properly ontological difference between the material and the musical worlds. Moreover, this needs to be the sort of difference that would explain music’s power to enchant, which is to say, the ability a piece of music has to make us return to it again and again. What could such a difference be?

The Shape of Musical Time Though ontological seems a rather portentous term, in this context it can be explicated in terms of space and time. Music can be said to be an alternative world of experience because it has distinctively different spatial and temporal dimensions. Such a claim gains considerable support from the fact that the concepts of space and time are regularly employed in musicological analysis and the articulation of musical forms. According to Jeremy Begbie, for example, “one way in which music becomes meaningful for us is through the interplay between its temporal processes and the vast range of temporal processes which shape our lives in the world” (Begbie 2000, 13). This temporal “interplay” is also central to Karol Berger’s lengthy study Bach’s Circle, Mozart’s Arrow (2007). Taking his cue from Bach’s early cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God’s Time is the Very Best Time), Berger gives a detailed explanation of how Bach succeeded in bridging the gap between the endlessness of eternity and the irreversible time of ordinary life. He does this by making harmony central to his musical works, and thereby realizing “God’s time.” This realization is exemplified especially clearly in the St Matthew Passion. “What is characteristic of Bach’s Passion,” according to Berger, is “complex temporality embedding linear flow of time within the framework of eternity” (Berger 2007, 118). It is “man’s time suspended in God’s time that Bach replicates in the St Matthew Passion” (119). “The rules of harmony require time to be discovered,” he writes, “and their application in an actually existing piece of music requires time, too, but they possess the permanence that transcends any purely human construct. Thus the exploration of musical harmony is one way to contemplate what truly endures” (127). The music of Bach, on this account, creates for us a world in which to contemplate a reality that normally escapes us. It invites us, we might say, to enter a temporal world quite different to our daily experience of time. Its power to enchant, accordingly, is the power it has to draw us again and again into the distinctive world that it creates. Berger’s treatment of Mozart’s music is also analysed chiefly in temporal terms. Where Bach’s music is built around “two temporal possibilities, that of existing in God’s eternity or existing in human time,” Mozart’s Don Giovanni “shows that there is a third possibility—experience as “a series of Nows—not a story but a catalogue or a list” (Berger 2007, 253). Berger argues, however, that the denouement of the opera is in fact a rejection of this episodic conception, an acceptance that “submission to the authority of linear time . . . is prerequisite to making self-identity possible” (256). It is in these temporal terms that Berger articulates the profound difference he detects between the music of

986   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham Bach and the music of Mozart, a difference most evident in the contrast between Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Mozart’s Figaro. In Figaro, as in the Passion, human history culminates in an act of loving grace. But unlike the divine act of grace that reconciled humanity with God, this grace has a wholly human source, and its effects are finite, likely to last a finite length of time—perhaps no longer than a day. Human finitude and contingency are accepted, as is the imperfect human capacity to effect reconciliations, but only in time, not out of it.  (Berger 2007, 258–259)

Berger holds that the difference in musical temporality between Bach’s “cycle” and Mozart’s “arrow” reflects a profound historical shift that was significant far beyond the confines of music, a change, no less, in cosmic understanding. Bach’s music arises out of a premodern, God-focused world, whereas the music of Mozart reflects (and perhaps shapes) the human-centred world of modernity. By relocating music firmly in the irreversible time of the human world, Mozart’s arrow thereby eliminates any possibility of the kind of transcendence found in Bach. In a “postlude” to the main argument, Berger finds Beethoven’s music to hover somewhere between the two, by creating “interruptions” between “two distinct ontological worlds.” One of these worlds relies on the “sense of change and time passing,” while the “alternative world” is a world “of contemplation of the eternal and timeless” (Berger 2007, 329–330). Berger thus uses temporal language to capture differences between styles of composition. It is an intriguing and an ambitious thesis. For present purposes, however, it confronts this difficulty. Whatever the differences between them, the music of Mozart is just like the music of Bach and the music of Beethoven in this: we are drawn to it again and again. That is to say, Mozart’s power to enchant is no less great than Bach’s or Beethoven’s. Accordingly, even if Berger is right that the worlds these composers invite us to enter are importantly different, they are the same kind of world. This means that the temporal differences that Berger detects cannot be fundamental to music as music.

On the Threshold Perhaps it is music’s spatial dimension that unites them. In his 2013 book Mozart’s Grace, Scott Burnham, one of the co-authors of this essay, invites readers to “an enchanted appreciation” of what he calls “the Mozart effect” (Burnham 2013, 4). The title of the book connects it directly with Berger’s contention about divine and human grace, but Burnham suggests that even if we suppose that Mozart’s “act of loving grace” is indeed confined within “a finite length of time,” its power to enchant can be explained by setting the temporal concept of a “moment” within a framework of spatial concepts. This is most evident in the fact that the central and longest chapter is entitled “Thresholds,” a threshold being essentially a spatial concept as the line that marks the entry to a new or

Enchantment   987 different space, and hence separates it from all that lies outside. Burnham expands on the connection between temporal and spatial concepts thus: Mozart’s music stages suspended moments of revelatory beauty, moments whose second sight is made possible by the presence of a threshold that can never be crossed . . . With this threshold, consciousness becomes an inner space created in contradistinction to the outside world . . . Mozart’s beautiful moments make this space resonate as an interior realm, activating its divination of a now remote transcendence. . . . One is transfixed but never overmastered, fleetingly touched but never fully possessed.  (Burnham 2013, 114)

Burnham’s summation of the enduring appeal of Mozart’s music is replete with spatial concepts. To take another example, he writes: even on the postmodern frontier, where the once infinite depths of the modern self have been compressed and flattened into an infinitely crowded surface, where the magic theater stands empty, a Kinderspiel from the childhood of modernity—even in this landscape, it is hard to imagine a standpoint from which Mozart’s music would not register as beautiful.  (Burnham 2013, 116; italics added)

One important difference between Berger’s and Burnham’s analyses seems to be this. For Berger, Bach creates a temporal world that incorporates the linear time of ordinary life but also allows us to transcend it. It is this transcendental element that justifies us in thinking of Bach’s music as otherworldly. Mozart’s music, by contrast, reflects and embodies a movement from a premodern to a modern consciousness. It thus loses the transcendental element we find in Bach (which Beethoven perhaps strives to retain), and leaves us within the linear time by which the humanity of modernity is confined. If this analysis is correct, however, we are left to wonder where the indisputably enchanting power of Mozart’s music lies. In Mozart’s Grace, however, Burnham uncovers a spatial dimension in Mozart which explains the continuing enchantment that we experience even while conceding the loss of transcendence. The beauty of Mozart’s music, though rooted in the human rather than the divine, places us on a threshold. It is a threshold we cannot cross, yet being able just to stand on it generates within us an intimation of a hauntingly alternative world. In short, though the temporal dimension of Mozart’s music may, as Berger claims, be just the same as in a thoroughly humanized experience, its distinctive characteristics still make us aware of “an inner space,” a space that Mozart has created “in contradistinction to the outside world.” This interpretation is of special interest, of course, to those who seek to re-enchant a strictly humanistic world that makes no appeal to God or the supernatural. Both of these books explore lines of thought that uncover deep and significant differences between the music of Bach and the music of Mozart, and there is evidently nothing artificial or manufactured about their use of temporal and spatial terms to capture these differences. Still, a continuity between music and other contexts remains because temporal and spatial concepts can also be used to draw illuminating contrasts between

988   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham literary works as well as musical ones. It follows that we have yet to identify the ontological property that the music of Bach and the music of Mozart share. This property, in fact, is evident. Unlike novels, the music of both is constructed out of tonal elements combined with all the usual variables—pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmonies, and so on. Could it be these common elements, rather than differentiating styles, that ultimately explain music’s power to enchant?

Sounds of Enchantment We can call these common elements the sonic content. It is plausible to claim that composition structures this sonic content within distinctive temporal and spatial dimensions, while performance (literally) realizes them, that is, brings them into existence. Of course, in the case of improvisation, composition and performance are identical. This realization within distinctive dimensions, it can be argued, is what makes music an alternative sonic world, one with which we may become enchanted, a world tangentially related to the world of everyday sounds. (Some interesting and important questions concerning the character of electroacoustic music and computer composition are left aside here.) The natural world is full of sounds, and occasionally we refer to these in quasi-musical terms—birdsong, for example. These sounds may have evolutionary or other connections with the idle whistling or humming that human beings go in for, but they are not properly comparable to music as human beings have developed it. In music deliberately sung, played, or composed we find the realization of tones within sophisticated organizational structures. These structures have distinctive dimensions of space and time. For instance, tones stand in relation to each other as higher and lower. This relationship is constituted by intervals, and since in a fifth (say) two tones sound together, a fifth is not a temporal interval. The spatial character of these relationships is further revealed by the fact that they can be represented graphically in a score as measurably higher or lower. This does not mean, though, that they have geographical location. F♯ and A♭ are not any “where.” At the same time, their spatial character is not thereby merely analogical to geographical space. Higher and lower are natural and irreplaceable terms to use about musical notes, and thirds, fifths, and so on are real measures of distance apart. It is on the basis of these familiar facts that we can say music has a genuinely, but distinctive, spatial dimension. Comparable observations can be made about time. Sonic content comes in an order properly called temporal, because there are relations of before and after within it. Furthermore, this temporal order is usually of crucial importance to intelligible listening, and generates its own temporal terms—recapitulation and coda, for instance. It is important to note that (1) this temporal order is necessarily related to the temporality of everyday experience—we have to hear musical sequences in measurable time, between 10:00 and 10:15 a.m. say—and (2) the temporal order within the music itself is nevertheless

Enchantment   989 quite different. I have to hear a recapitulation after I have heard the sonic content it is recapitulating, and I have to hear a coda after I have heard the other parts of the composition. The coda does not happen, so to speak, at 10:14, any more than the recapitulation happens at 10:10. This is revealed (if revelation were necessary) by the fact that I can listen to it again and again—at 10:14, 10:29, 10:44, for instance. Within the temporal order of everyday experience I could hear the coda before the rest of the music, and might, by chance, only hear it that way. Or I might hear the recapitulation twice, though not as recapitulation. Once again, it seems clear, these familiar facts give us reason to say that music operates within its own distinctive temporal dimension. It is a very striking aspect of this ordering of sonic content within distinctive spatial and temporal dimensions that it can, and does, sustain an immensely rich descriptive vocabulary. This vocabulary includes (though it is not restricted to) aesthetic terms (beautiful, delicate, elegant), emotional terms (joyful, sombre, furious), visual terms (bright, colourful, dark), and action terms (busy, languid, forceful). This remarkable fact has often generated philosophical theories about music—that it has representational power, for example, or that it is the expression or communication of emotion. Though such theories are the staple of debates in philosophical aesthetics, it is only by setting them all aside that we can really come to appreciate just how extraordinary this range of descriptive terms is. Clearly, whatever theories we might be inclined to build upon this, some form of predicative extension is involved in the application of these terms to the organization of purely sonic materials. Music is not literally bright, or sad, or busy, but even if we want to say that applied to music these are metaphors, it remains the case that music is quite properly described in these ways. The implication of this fact for present purposes is that it greatly amplifies the sense in which music presents us with a different world, tangentially related to that of the everyday. It is this otherworldliness that gives music its power to enchant. What musicological analysis and commentary can show is that the hugely impressive range of descriptive language that music is able to sustain includes temporal and spatial terms—eternity, moment, threshold, surface, and so on. Applied to music, these terms, like all the others, reveal the tangential relationship in which the world of music stands to the world of everyday experience, in something like the way the land of the Sirens stands to Odysseus’s ship. However, it is the more obviously musical terms like interval, coda, cadenza, and recapitulation that show music to be, truly, a different kind of world.

Constructing Chopin’s World What does this tell us about the project of re-enchantment? At one level, nothing, at another everything we could want. It tells us nothing in the sense that it does not provide an opening or a means by which the world might be re-enchanted in some respect other than musically. What it demonstrates, however, is that our experience is not confined to the world that science discloses. There is indeed another enchanting world tangentially

990   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham related to the world of material objects and scientific laws, not a world yet to be brought about by a fresh infusion of spirit, but a world that has existed all along—music itself. This is further demonstrated not only by the use of terms that often denote the construction of an alternative time and space, but also by musical reference to gestures, emotions, narratives—the stuff of human thought and action. When talking about music we invoke fields of meaning that are so ambitious in their reach and range that we seem to be describing some sort of heightened reality (Eternity! Transcendence!). It is indeed hard to overreach when talking about certain pieces of music that have come to mean so much to us, individually and collectively. We talk about such music with the same elevation of language that we reserve for our highest exaltations, our deepest spiritual imaginings. Thinking about music in this way returns us to one version of an earlier question that was left to the side. Why should this other world enchant rather than repel? It could easily be unsettling and even profoundly alienating to find oneself relocated to another world, however temporary, or however virtual. Instead we are drawn to such a world, over and over again. Why do we wish to re-experience this other world so often and with such deep-seated pleasure? We can start in on this difficult question by invoking a single one of music’s worlds and attempting to grasp some of the sources of the pleasure we take in hearing it again and again, even when we know every last detail, when we know what is about to happen at any given point.

Chopin’s Prelude No. 7 in A Major How can this brief composition be said to constitute a world? To begin, we may take advantage of modern music notation, which allows us to visualize sonic features and thus operates as a kind of calculus, translating time into space. A quick perusal of the score of Chopin’s Prelude No. 7 in A major reveals a number of repeated patterns as well as a strategy of grouping. The primary rhythmic pattern repeats every two bars. Animating this two-bar group is a lilting melodic gesture whose upbeat quarter note followed by dotted rhythm makes for a slight acceleration into the quarter–quarter–halfnote pattern that forms the heart of the pattern. This lilting gesture is like that leading step one takes in certain dance figures, such as a mazurka. And indeed, the repeated patterns, the lilting melodic gesture, the accompaniment figures, the 3/4 meter—all these things suggest a mazurka, which provides us with a physical way to relate to the world of this prelude. The music partakes of the friendly familiarity of dancing, and to be in its world is to experience something like the kind of temporal pleasure afforded by some dance steps. This is the pleasure of moving through space in regular units of time, but always with a lilt that keeps such motion from becoming merely mechanical. Adding Chopin’s harmony to this rhythmic framework shows yet another way in which the time of this prelude is organized in two-bar segments: each two-bar segment features one fundamental harmony (until bar 12).

Enchantment   991 Table 48.1  Correlation of 2-bar pairs with fundamental harmonies in Chopin Prelude in A major, Op. 28 No. 7. Bars Harmonies

1–2 E7

3–4 A

5–6 E7

7–8 A

9–10 E7

11–12 A  F#7

13–14 b  E7

15–16 A

This is a relatively slow harmonic rhythm (i.e., rate of chord change), with the result that we move forward in relaxed and easily graspable two-bar groups within the world of this prelude. Beyond this two-bar grouping, there are more global groupings that can be heard to correspond to one another: the two-bar groups are organized into four-bar groups and eight-bar groups. Thus the world of this prelude is sustained by a temporal logic that is both additive and cumulative. 2+2=4; then 4+4=8 (and the first half of the piece); then 8+8=the entire piece. Every other bar is heard to complete one or more even-numbered group of bars: bar 2 completes bars 1–2; bar 4 completes bars 3–4 and bars 1–4; bar 8 completes bars 7–8, bars 5–8, and bars 1–8. Jumping ahead to the end, bar 16 can be heard to complete bars 15–16, 13–16, 9–16, and 1–16. All these simultaneous yet different grades of completion, of closure, lend a satisfying richness to the experience of moving through this prelude temporally. They can also make for a circular kind of motion; we keep returning to the same tonic harmony, until we finally end the entire process on that harmony. Chopin’s Prelude No. 7 thus offers a complete temporal experience with divisions and subdivisions of time and with a satisfying cumulative logic. And there’s more. The Prelude has a distinct climactic moment, made all the more striking by the overall stability of its rhythmic and harmonic framework. The stunning change of harmony in bar 12 comes after an abiding regularity of harmonic alternation between the two complementary chords of this tonal style: dominant seventh and tonic. And not only does Chopin use a different harmony, he uses a harmony that is chromatic, that introduces a brightly colourful accidental (A♯, which alters the tonic note itself, thus temporarily decentring the sense of key). In addition, this chord is introduced by the highest note yet in the piece, the high C♯ of bar 11, and is further staged by Chopin’s dynamic marking, a hairpin crescendo that in his music also invites the performer to stretch the beat ever so slightly. Finally, Chopin brings this colourful new harmony in a bar early; he speeds up the prevailing harmonic rhythm by introducing his new harmony after only one bar of tonic harmony. This enhances the effect of destabilizing things. The next two bars continue this new rate of harmonic change, impelling the music into the stronger closure of the final two bars (stronger because it now grounds the entire harmonic progression of I–V7/ii–ii–V7–I in A major, rather than a harmonic alternation). In sum: though the sonic world of Chopin’s Prelude is not exactly equivalent to anything in our everyday world, it shares the gestural life of a dance form, as well as the cumulative impact of, say, a short rhyming poem. For example, Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” fits perfectly into this prelude. Each of Frost’s lines can be read

992   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham within a 2-bar group of the Prelude. Moreover, the climactic line of the poem (“So Eden sank to grief ”) falls within the climactic two-bar group that contains the altered chord. Chopin’s Prelude thus guides us through a temporal experience with a distinctive shape, a process whose culmination can be heard as a shining moment (bar 12) followed by a wistful aftermath (listen for that inner-voice motion in bar 13), or perhaps as a revelation followed by a concomitant adjustment of reality.

Re-hearing Enchantment But why can we rehear this unassuming piece so often? In particular, why does that bright chord in bar 12 never fail in its effect? No groan of recognition is likely to accompany the hearing of this harmony, though we may have heard it dozens upon dozens of times, fingerprinted it, classified it, explained its harmonic function, its linear agendas, and so on. It will still deliver its frisson of pleasure. In fact, it does so precisely because we know that it’s there, and because we anticipate it and relish it. Thus the chord does not constitute “information” in any mundane sense, but acts as the consummation of our expectations. The Prelude stages this charged moment, a moment that can be experienced time and again. Of course, different performances of the Prelude will bring us different versions of this moment, such that we will not be hearing the exact same thing each time, but it’s a very common occurrence to favour a specific recording and listen to it repeatedly, with no diminishment of pleasure. In this case, one knows with absolute precision what is going to happen and when. Thus one aspect of musical enchantment is the experience of an alternative world whose events are reliably predictable. The experience becomes renewable in a strong sense, in that we renew our relationship with the same sonic world. In the language of enchantment, we seem to be put under the same spell again and again. Another frequent characteristic of musical enchantment is a sense of being transported instantly into the world of the piece. And when that world is connected to some remembered stage of one’s life, it’s not unusual to become immersed in the entire emotional ambience of the former time. (Few other stimuli have this power of immediate transport into the full emotional impact of a memory, though smell and taste come to mind). In such cases the enchanting alternative world merges with the emotion-laden memory of a past stage of one’s real-world experiences; this invites us to ponder the realm of our memories as yet another alternative world capable of engendering enchantment. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings offers a powerful example of this effect, for its very first sounds trigger an almost involuntary reaction in many listeners. A large part of this effect is due to the memories this music conjures. For many of us these days, the imagery inevitably associated with Barber’s Adagio comes from the tragic pageantry of September 11: many televised documentaries have relied on this music as a commensurate soundtrack for the grievous impact of that day. Barber’s Adagio has a long tradition

Enchantment   993 of such use; it was performed at the funerals of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Albert Einstein, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the meantime we have heard the music in various movies, most strikingly in Oliver Stone’s shattering war film, Platoon. In all these contexts—the funerals of beloved figures and heroic leaders, the depictions of war—Barber’s Adagio successfully invokes a collective and transhistorical emotion; it allows each separate occasion to become part of an age-old sadness, a sadness exalted by so much human history. With what musical means does the Adagio cast its spell? A quietly sustained opening tone gathers our attention, then richly poignant harmonies come in underneath it, two chords with a sound like the slow opening of a door into a place where Time falls away. Once we are through that doorway and into that place, the melody climbs slowly upward with many internal repetitions and a pervasive pattern of one step down and two steps up. This conveys the sense of a slow, laboured ascent. The long bass notes in the opening passage move even more slowly upward through their lower register, like sadly benevolent Titans. In fact, the form of the entire Adagio moves slowly upward, building in intensity to an unforgettable climax in the upper register. How best to describe the effect of that upper-register climax? It seems to freeze a collective scream of despair, to remind us of the shock of grief, the thing we never get used to, the sheer disbelief in the unacceptable. The silence following this climax only amplifies its impact. Yet if this climax is wrenching, it also possesses a clarifying nobility—for these harmonies are not screeching dissonances, a point brought home when they are immediately echoed in a lower, more human register, echoed in a more solemn voice. Harmonically, Barber’s upper-register culmination takes us to a place far from home, far from our daily lives—the clarifying chord in this climactic passage is F flat major! Even its name sounds exotic. The sound of that F flat major harmony awaits us at the heart of the ritual, like the heat of a purifying flame. It culminates a long, slow act of sharing a great, transhistorical grief, which is at the same time a great, transhistorical exaltation. Barber takes us onward and upward to the place of this searing sound, makes us resolve our dissonance there, just as his harmony resolves its dissonance, makes us hear this process in the highest reaches of our individual musical beings—and then returns us to the sphere of our immediate collectivity, from which we will soon re-enter our daily lives. During the course of Barber’s Adagio we move upward into our grief. This upward motion is exalting rather than depressing—and it is markedly different from the relentlessly descending tread of so many musical laments in the Western tradition. We are made to feel the nobility of loss; we are made to feel ennobled by loss.

Music’s Siren Song With words like these, one may as well be describing a religious experience. And this acknowledgement leads us towards a consideration of the spiritual effects of rehearing music, towards what is perhaps the most profound degree of musical enchantment.

994   Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham Perhaps, as Princeton psychologist and novelist Michael Graziano (2011) suggests is the case for himself, we honour music as a complex universe and invest music with its own deity, for whom we feel “some measure of awe and reverence.” This is to relate to music at least in part as a sublime Other. But we also relate to music in an intimate way, as something that reinforces our most cherished sense of ourselves, of our identity. Trust infuses the experience. Like love, or worship, our favourite music gives us something to believe in, something to trust. The evergreen renewability of the listening experience speaks to us of the stability of our selves, perhaps even supports the sense that we have an enduring soul. We may indeed feel, in the sense developed earlier in this essay, an enchanting relocation into another world, but this relocation also deepens and anchors our sense of self. We are paradoxically decentred and centred all at once. The feeling music arouses is at once overmastering and bolstering, as though emanating from without and within, from other and self. The mingling of inner and outer reality that we encounter in listening to music may well constitute the essence of enchantment, understood as a magical state of mind in which we both lose ourselves and find ourselves. The ways we recount the experience of listening to music indicate the special nature of our engagement (and may even, to some degree, constitute it). As discussed above, music can be described in terms both temporal and spatial, as well as in terms of human actions and emotions. The temporal and spatial terms, thoroughly ensconced in our system of musical notation and in so much of the technical language we use to describe music, are always and only metaphorical; and yet, they have attained an almost objective status as proper descriptors of music, and their use empowers the sense that music offers the experience of a self-sustaining alternative world that shares fundamental features (space, time) with our everyday world. Verbal descriptors of music that invoke human actions and emotions, on the other hand, are often deemed to be strictly subjective—but no less valid if applied convincingly. The oft-repeated assertion that music can never be described in words has rarely stopped anyone from attempting to do so. In fact, it could be said to motivate such attempts, as a kind of poetic challenge, namely, the verbal translation of a deeply meaningful non-verbal experience. Or, in the terms explored in this essay, we are drawn to recognize and describe music as a world unto itself that is both inviting and enchanting in its perceived ability to stand apart from our everyday world even while resonating with it. We relish the experience of temporary relocation into this obliquely related world, as a form of spiritual travel. And we relish talking about it, just as we relish talking about our other travels. The myth of the Sirens is one of the perennial stories we tell ourselves about music, because it plays to our sense of music as a powerful mode of enchantment. Though music is a thoroughly human activity, it can seem to be coming from elsewhere and— like little else in the human sphere—can seem impossible to resist. And if music continues to resemble a Siren song, we listeners resemble Odysseus, in that we remain tied to the mast of everyday reality: we can only sail past our singing Sirens, we cannot live on their island. With their hypnotic sounds they grant us the joy of enhanced awareness, the gratifying sense of worlds within and beyond.

Enchantment   995

Works Cited Begbie, Jeremy S. 2000. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brown, David. 2004. God and the Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnham, Scott. 2013. Mozart’s Grace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Elkins, James, and David Morgan, eds. 2009. Re-enchantment. New York: Routledge. Graham, Gordon. 2007. The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graziano, Michael. 2011. “Why Is Music a Religious Experience?” The Blog. Huffington Post. 15 June 2011. Accessed May 8, 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/whyis-mozart-a-religious_b_875352.html Harries, Richard. 2008. The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Heilke, Thomas W., and Ashley Woodiwiss, eds. 2001. The Re-enchantment of Political Science: Christian Scholars Engage with Their Discipline. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Levine, George. 2006. Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moore, Thomas. 1996. The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Partridge, Christopher. 2004. The Re-enchantment of the West. London: T & T Clark.

chapter 49

Ex pectations Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay

Almost every facet of the experience of musical listening—from pitch, to rhythm, to the experience of emotion—is shaped by the meeting and thwarting of expectations.1 But it is unclear what kind of mental states these expectations are, what their format is, and whether they are conscious or unconscious. Here, we distinguish between different modes of musical listening, arguing that expectations play different roles in each, and we point to the need for increased collaboration between music psychologists and philosophers in order to arrive at a more detailed characterization of conscious musical experience and the role of expectations therein than has previously been offered.

Expectation in Music: A Survey In Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer (1956) put expectation squarely on the agenda for psychologists of music.2 Though Meyer’s particular interest was in the role of expectations in the emotional experience of music, almost all aspects of musical experience—pitch, rhythm, melody, harmony, and the emotional experience of music, for instance—are now thought to be shaped by expectations, which arise both from general processes of perceptual organization and from learned stylistic patterns. Eugene Narmour’s influential Implication-Realization theory (Narmour 1990) proposes that melodic expectations are predicted on the basis of principles of melodic shape. For Narmour, the presence of a large interval gives rise to an expectation that it will be followed by a change in direction; a small interval elicits an expectation for another small interval in the same direction. A family of subsequent theories has attempted to streamline and to quantify Narmour’s original theory (see, for example, Cuddy and Lunney 1995; Krumhansl 1995; Schellenberg 1997; Margulis 2005). Other influential models include Steve Larson’s (1997–8, 2004) model of expectation by analogy with physical forces, as well as Fred Lerdahl’s (2001) theory of tonal attraction.

998   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay The experience of harmonic structure has also been discussed in terms of expectations. If two chords are heard as harmonically related, it is thought that hearing the first chord (or the prime) sets up an expectation of hearing the second (the target). Jamshed Bharucha and colleagues (Bharucha and Stoeckig 1986, 1987; Tekman and Bharucha 1992; see also Krumhansl 2000 for discussion) presented subjects with two successive chords, before asking them to judge whether or not the target (second) chord was in tune, measuring how long it took them to deliver this judgement. In this way, the experimenters thought, they could indirectly measure the extent to which the prime set up an expectation of the target chord. They observed that the reaction time on the tuning judgement was shorter when the prime and target chords were part of the same diatonic set of chords (the set of triads in a given key) than when they were not. Expectation is also believed to be central to rhythmic experience. Entrainment is the process by which a psychological rhythm can become synchronized with some regularly occurring event in the environment. We can tap our foot to a beat with ease; that we can do so is thought to show that we accurately predict or expect the timing of events in a regular pattern, and then coordinate our behaviour with that pattern. Various authors have suggested that entrainment is not just related to rhythmic experience, but that it also lies at the heart of auditory attention. Mari Reiss Jones and colleagues (Jones 1981; Large and Jones 1999; Barnes and Jones 2000) argue that attention to periodic events, such as musical rhythms, is underpinned by dynamic expectations: we do not pay attention equally at all moments. Rather, our attention is directed towards the most likely moments of stimulus onset. Attention waxes and wanes, in other words, in line with the expectations of onset that a pattern sets up. All this work on expectations in music stems in one way or another from Meyer’s seminal contribution, but David Huron’s work represents a more direct successor, insofar as he targets affective experience—the experience of emotion in response to music. In the widely cited Sweet Anticipation, Huron (2006) argues that expectations are the cornerstone of such experience. When melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic expectations are met, a positively valenced prediction response is elicited. As I follow a regular rhythm, for instance, I expect the downbeat to occur at a particular time (or at least within a certain window). A temporal prediction is thus formed. And when the downbeat does, in fact, occur at the time I predicted, I experience satisfaction. This, says Huron, is because it is biologically advantageous for me to make good predictions; and so I am rewarded for doing so, such that the heuristic I used to make that prediction will be used again in the future. However, it is not only when events are successfully predicted that I can experience satisfaction: I can also experience pleasure when my expectations are thwarted. After all, it is often when the music seems “surprising” to me, rather than predictable, that I experience satisfaction as I listen. Whether those expectations are thwarted or met, in other words, Huron thinks that expectations always lie at the heart of emotional responses to music. Most discussions of musical expectations focus on unconscious processing. Characterizations of the role of expectation in conscious experience are less common.

Expectations   999 We may hence ask: do any conscious expectations feature in musical experience? Or do we have conscious access only to their effects3—experiences of tension and relaxation,4 for example? There is ambiguity in the literature on this front, as we will now see.

Musical Expectations: Conscious or Unconscious? The likelihood that unconscious “expectations” exist, and that they affect experience, has long been acknowledged. Nevertheless, there has been ambiguity concerning the role of conscious expectations in musical experience at least since Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854): The most significant factor in the mental process which accompanies the comprehending of a musical work and makes it enjoyable . . . is the mental satisfaction which the listener finds in continuously following and anticipating the composer’s designs, here to be confirmed in his expectations, there to be agreeably led astray. It goes without saying that this mental streaming . . . occurs unconsciously and at the speed of lightning.  (Hanslick 1986, 64)

For Hanslick, musical experience owes its aesthetic appeal to automatic, unconscious expectations. These expectations are, however, evidently not entirely unconscious: the listener is sometimes able explicitly to “anticipate” the “composer’s intentions,” sometimes getting it right, and sometimes erring. Even if unconscious expectations that proceed automatically are undergirding musical experience, how should we understand the way an unconscious mental state (the expectation) influences a conscious mental state (the musical experience)? Does this involve the conscious representation of some of these normally unconscious expectations, or aspects thereof? Or is conscious musical experience confined to feelings of, say, tension and release, without the subject’s really experiencing any expectations at all? Meyer proposed that perceptual stimuli create unconscious expectations, which give rise to tendencies to respond in certain ways to those stimuli. These tendencies to respond, he says, can be conscious or unconscious (Meyer 1956, 24). Normally, when an expectation is met and a tendency runs its course, the process is unconscious. When the response tendencies are inhibited, however, they become conscious: Countless reaction patterns, of which the responding individual is unaware, are initiated and completed each hour. The more automatic behaviour becomes, the less conscious it is. The tendency to respond becomes conscious where inhibition of some sort is present, when the normal course of the reaction pattern is disturbed or its final completion is inhibited. Such conscious and self-conscious tendencies are often thought of and referred to as “expectations.”  (Meyer 1956, 24)

1000   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay So, for Meyer, it is the inhibition of a tendency to respond (which results from a thwarted expectation) that is crucial when it comes to conscious musical experience. However, one may ask here: is the thwarted expectation itself (that X will occur, say) represented in conscious experience? Or is it merely the experiential effect of such a thwarted expectation that is so represented? Sometimes Meyer implies that he means the latter; he says, for example, that musical passages can give rise to a feeling of tension or suspense, which is “essentially a product of ignorance as to the future course of events” (Meyer 1956, 27). It seems like no expectation at all is being experienced here. However, at other times, he implies that we do entertain at least some expectations as we listen, and that we are aware of them before they have either been confirmed or thwarted. He says, for example: Sometimes a very specific consequent is expected. . . . [The] consequent chord is expected to arrive at a particular time, i.e., on the first beat of the next measure. . . . At other times expectation is more general: that is, though our expectations may be definite, in the sense of being marked, they are non-specific, in that we are not sure precisely how they will be fulfilled.  (Meyer 1956, 25–26)

Even though the expectations may be more or less specific, that is, Meyer seems to be suggesting here that those expectations do, in fact, feature in the content of musical experience, and that it is not merely the upshot of unconscious processing that plays a role therein. Which interpretation should we prefer? This ambiguity survives in present-day discussions of musical expectations. For instance, Carol Krumhansl, whose research on musical expectations in harmonic and pitch perception is extensive, implies in places that we only have conscious access to feelings of tension and relaxation when we listen to music. These are to be thought of as the by-products of unconscious, implicit perceptual expectations, which are formed on the basis of exposure to regularities of sound patterns as well as particular stylistic conventions; the expectations themselves do not feature in conscious experience. In a 1997 review article, she seems to interpret Meyer as making this sort of argument, which she also endorses: Expectations produce waves over time of tension and release from tension. Expectations are derived from both general psychological principles (such as Gestalt principles of perceptual organization) and knowledge of the style (such as tonality, harmonic progressions, and musical form).  (Krumhansl 1997, 338; emphasis added)

Here, Krumhansl is implying that it is only the waxing and waning of tension that feature in the conscious experience of music. The substrate of expectations is not itself consciously accessible, or at least, does not normally protrude into consciousness. This argument is echoed by Brattico and Pearce, who describe the mainstream view of expectations in music psychology (as emanating from Meyer and foreshadowed in Hanslick) thus: Musical enjoyment is linked with patterns of tension and resolution resulting from the confirmation and violation of perceptual expectations of which we are usually

Expectations   1001 unconscious. These expectations might concern, for example, the pitch of the next note in a melody, the next chord in a pattern of harmonic movement, or the timing of the next note in a solo percussion performance.  (Brattico and Pearce 2013, 53)

These expectations are unconscious; they are implicitly acquired through statistical learning “in which listeners construct implicit probabilistic models of the next element in a musical sequence” (Brattico and Pearce  2013, 53). It sounds as though, like Krumhansl, these authors also endorse a view whereby it is only the by-products of implicit, unconscious expectations that feature in experience. Elsewhere, however, Krumhansl suggests that listener expectations—which can be explicit expectations and predictions about tonal hierarchies, for instance—can, and do, feature in ongoing musical experience. In her 1990 book, Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch, she asserts that a central line of thought informing her research is the following idea, which she attributes to Meyer: Of greater psychological import . . . is Meyer’s suggestion that through experience, listeners internalize the complex system of probability relationships, and, when listening to a particular piece of music, relate the sounded elements to this knowledge. This process gives rise to dynamically changing expectations about subsequent events, which may or may not be satisfied, or may be satisfied only partially, indirectly, or with some delay. In these expectations reside what to Meyer is the syntax, the meaning, and the aesthetic experience of music.  (Krumhansl 1990, 63)

Krumhansl here at least seems to be hinting that the expectations one may form and articulate about music really do feature in the ongoing conscious experience of music, that one actively relates them to what one hears as one listens to a piece. This idea—that we have conscious access to the expectations that drive our ­experience—underpins much of the methodology of the research into expectations. Models of expectation are tested according to whether they correlate with subjects’ expectation judgements. For instance, in a series of studies by James Carlsen and colleagues (Carlsen, Divenyi, and Taylor 1970; Carlsen 1981; Unyk and Carlsen 1987), listeners were presented with two successive tones, and asked to sing what they believed would be the continuation of the melody, had it been allowed to continue. A related method, known as the probe-tone method, has also been widely used (for example, in Krumhansl and Kessler 1982; Cuddy and Lunney 1995; Krumhansl 1995). Here, various musical contexts—like the two-tone contexts above—are followed by a probe tone. Listeners are asked to rate how well the probe tone matches their expectations as to what was likely to have followed from the previous two tones. This methodology seems to require that listeners have some access to their expectations. But if this is the case, then these experiments say nothing about our unconscious expectations unless we posit that unconscious experiences can somehow be consciously accessed—a blatant contradiction on at least some accounts of consciousness. David Huron provides a taxonomy of expectations, which is supposed to be helpful for resolving the ambiguity. He suggests that there are four different types of expectations:

1002   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay schematic, veridical, dynamic, and conscious expectations (Huron 2006). First of all, we have schematic and veridical expectations (this distinction is borrowed from work by Bharucha and colleagues, see Bharucha and Stoeckig 1986; Bharucha 1994). Schematic expectations are those that arise from statistical learning. They are general, in the sense that they concern, for example, the kinds of regularities that are usually apparent in music of a given style. Veridical expectations are specific to a given piece: it is thought that when I am familiar with a tune I have precise veridical expectations about what will happen next. I “know how it goes,” in other words. The third kind of expectations are dynamic expectations, which are formed as a piece goes along: in cases of improvisation, for example, a listener can come to expect a note that sounds “wrong” (perhaps because it conflicts with their schematic expectations about what is permissible in the current key) if the performer keeps repeating it with apparent intent. These three types of expectations— veridical, schematic, and dynamic—Huron tells us, are “preverbal or unconscious in origin” (Huron  2006, 235). The final class of expectations—what Huron calls conscious expectations—arise from explicit deliberation and reflection. For example, reading “Lento” in the programme notes at a concert might cause me to expect the music to be slow. Huron’s taxonomy is problematic in a number of respects. First, it is unclear whether it is intended to be exhaustive. Second, it is also unclear whether the categories may overlap (for instance, whether a dynamic expectation could also be either veridical or schematic). Third, and more importantly, there is no indication as to whether schematic, veridical, or dynamic expectations are meant to feature in conscious musical experience. Being “unconscious or preverbal in origin” does not necessarily mean that these expectations cannot be conscious. One can entertain many explicit thoughts, such as “I would like a ham sandwich,” that are no less conscious for having originated in the preverbal state of hunger—an unconscious registration of which physiological state could well have prompted my intention to make myself a snack. In short, when it comes to characterizing the conscious experience of music, Huron’s taxonomy does not seem very helpful. So how are we to proceed? Given that there seems to be a consensus that (a) there are unconscious expectations as well as conscious ones; (b) implicit perceptual expectations, or at least their effects, play some role or other in musical experience; and (c) explicit theoretical expectations (such as those arising from theoretical knowledge about music) and/or their effects could play a role in musical experience too, then we have at least four possible scenarios when it comes to characterizing conscious musical experience. Cases 1 and 2 below presume that all implicit perceptual expectations are unconscious during listening, whereas Cases 3 and 4 presume that at least some such expectations are conscious. Cases 1 and 3 presume that all explicit theoretical expectations are unconscious, whereas Cases 2 and 4 presume that at least some such expectations are conscious. Case 1: All implicit perceptual expectations are unconscious during an episode of music listening; it is only their effects (such as experienced tension and release) that feature in conscious experience. All explicit theoretical expectations (such as those

Expectations   1003 arising from general musical knowledge) are also unconscious; it is only their effects (such as experienced tension and release) that feature in conscious experience. Hence, conscious musical experience includes the effects of implicit and explicit expectations only; no expectations of any kind are consciously entertained. Case 2: All implicit perceptual expectations are unconscious during an episode of musical listening; it is only their effects that feature in conscious experience. At least some explicit theoretical expectations, however, are consciously experienced. Hence, conscious musical experience includes the effects of implicit perceptual expectations, the effects of unconscious theoretical expectations, and at least some of our conscious theoretical expectations themselves. Case 3: At least some implicit perceptual expectations become conscious during an episode of musical listening. All explicit theoretical expectations are unconscious. Hence, conscious musical experience includes the effects of implicit expectations, at least some of those implicit expectations themselves, and the effects of explicit theoretical expectations. Case 4: At least some implicit perceptual expectations are consciously experienced during an episode of musical listening. At least some explicit theoretical expectations are consciously experienced as well. Hence, conscious musical experience includes some implicit perceptual expectations, the effects of other implicit perceptual expectations, at least some explicit theoretical expectations, and the effects of other explicit theoretical expectations.

The above four cases assume that conscious musical experience is homogeneous: that there is only one kind of musical listening. In the section on “Four Modes of Musical Expression,” we will suggest that it is not. Before we do that, however, we need to address another group of questions about musical expectations. What kind of mental state is a musical expectation? What kind of content could it have, and how finely grained might this content be? And lastly, what reason do we have to suppose that any expectations could influence perceptual experience in the first place?

Musical Expectations: Structure and Content Discussions in music psychology and music theory are surprisingly vague about what expectations are. Turning to the philosophy of perception is not very helpful either: while references to the importance of expectation are rife in this area of philosophical investigation, there is no agreement about how we should think about expectations themselves. Poverty of stimulus arguments in perception science propose that expectations are a necessary ingredient of any kind of perception, since the sensory stimulation associated with any perceived object seriously underdetermines that object.5 The same retinal image, for example, could be the projection from a vast number of three-dimensional

1004   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay objects (Marr 1982). How, then, does the perceptual system arrive at the “correct” reconstruction of the perceived scene? A series of “expectations” about the perceived scene— or, assumptions about what is present, derived from past experiences—are thought to guarantee the delivery of a stable percept. There are more and less radical versions of this claim. According to the currently popular predictive coding approach, perception is by its very nature prediction: according to this view, it is inherent to the nature of our sensory systems that they predict what we will perceive in the next moment, on the basis of expectations arising from contextual clues as well as past experience (Clark 2013; Friston 2005). It is only those parts of the stimulus that fail to conform to our expectations that are processed by our perceptual systems. In this picture, all perception is expectation-driven. Even if we don’t endorse this radical claim, it seems clear that if we hold the sensory stimulation fixed and vary the expectations, our conscious perceptual experience will also vary, given the underdetermination of the stimulus. Note that this claim is more substantial than saying that our overall conscious experience will change if we hold the sensory stimulation fixed and vary the expectations. The claim we are interested in is that expectations can influence specifically perceptual phenomenology, not overall phenomenology.6 Influences on overall phenomenology are cheap: as long as the expectation is conscious (something presupposed in Cases 2, 3, and 4 above), expectations would automatically alter overall phenomenology. But what is at stake in understanding the role of expectations in musical listening is whether and how expectations influence perceptual phenomenology. Returning to the musical case, the very general picture that emerges from the philosophy of perception is as follows. We have expectations about music, based on contextual clues arising both from the music itself and from our past experience of listening to, reading about and talking about music. These expectations can be thought of as constituting some kind of non-perceptual background mental state. Let us call this state A. The influence of A on perceptual experience could be direct or indirect. If the influence is direct, then our expectations, considered to be non-perceptual mental states, directly influence our perceptual experiences. One advantage of this view is that it does not put significant constraints on what expectations really are: it is con­sist­ ent with considering expectations to be beliefs or dispositions, for example. Nevertheless, this framework presents something of an interface problem. Our musical expectations can have very rich content, with theoretical, historical, social, or cultural overtones. It is unclear how non-perceptual mental states with such rich content could manage to influence our perceptual experience (which, presumably, has a much less rich content) without any mediation. It seems that the direct influence approach will put serious constraints on the richness of the content of expectations, since there are constraints on the richness of the content of perceptual states they influence directly. One way out of this conundrum would be to beef up the content of the perceptual experience itself, by claiming that our perceptual experience of music has rich content. If perceptual experience has rich content, then this would make for a more straightforward interface between complex expectations and perceptual experience. Philosophical opinions diverge as to the range of properties that is perceptually experienced, however.

Expectations   1005 Some argue for the sparse view that only very low-level properties like shape or colour, or perhaps pitch and loudness in the auditory case, are perceptually experienced (Dretske 1995). If this is right, then the interface problem remains, and it becomes difficult to see how expectations can be part of perceptual experience. But some philosophers of perception argue that we perceptually experience higher-level properties, such as sortal properties, causal relations, action-properties, and so on (Siegel 2006, 2009; Bayne 2009; Nanay 2012a). In the musical case, then, one might argue that we perceptually experience rich musical features like tonal relations, metrical hierarchies, and perhaps even formal features (such as sonata form). If this is right, the influence of rich expectations is easier to defend—but arguments are still required to establish that the perceptual experience of music does, indeed, have such rich content. Moreover, even if we think about perceptual content in this richer way, it remains difficult to explain how expectations with highly sophisticated content could interact with perceptual experiences that have much less sophisticated content. The second option would be to say that the influence is indirect, by allowing for some kind of mediation between the non-perceptual mental states and the perceptual experience. This yields a two-step picture. First, we have A: the non-perceptual mental state that is comprised of our knowledge about music, which is in turn built, at least partly, from our previous exposure to music. A is a relatively static background state. Second, we have B: a mediating mental state, whose content is at least partly determined by A. B is a dynamic, fleeting mental state that parallels our perceptual experience without being identical with it. And thirdly, we have C: our perceptual experience of musical listening, which is influenced directly by B (and thus indirectly by A). Now, unless we appropriately specify what kind of state B is, the interface problem will remain; some account is owed as to how it is that B can “translate” between our background knowledge with rich content, and perceptual experience with sparse (or, at least, sparser) content. Given we can identify some candidate states for B, a preliminary question we need to ask is whether the crucial expectations are located in A, or B, or both. Recall that B is a fleeting mental state that changes as our perceptual experience changes, while A works in the background. B seems to be a better bet for those who want to understand how our expectations may alter in real time, and may thus influence our musical experience as it unfolds in a dynamic fashion. Since the content of B is itself determined by A, however, A still needs to be part of any such explanation. Now if we are happy to endorse this sort of indirect influence, we still need to figure out what kind of mental state B is. What kind of mental state can mediate between nonperceptual mental states and perceptual experiences? Here, we can help ourselves to the conceptual apparatus of the cognitive penetration debate, which is concerned with whether and how higher cognitive states influence our perceptual experiences. We will suggest that attention and mental imagery are apt candidates for mental state B, given ample evidence that both of these states frequently do mediate between higher-order mental states and perceptual experience, and also have the appropriate dynamic character that seems desirable in the musical case.7

1006   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay Cognitive penetration is, roughly speaking, the view that higher-order cognitive processes can, and do, influence lower-level perceptual processes. The view that perception is cognitively penetrable (to at least some extent) seems more and more plausible in the light of recent empirical findings (for example, Goldstone  1995; Hansen et al.  2006; Lupyan and Spivey 2008; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, and Swingley 2010; Lupyan and Ward 2013; Nanay 2013a, 2013b; Siegel 2011; Macpherson 2012; Teufel and Nanay 2017; but see also Firestone and Scholl 2014 for a critical analysis). Top-down processes influence perceptual processing as early as the primary sensory cortex (Gandhi, Heeger, and Boynton  1999) or the thalamus (O’Connor et al.  2002). Such top-down influences become more numerous and more diverse as the perceptual processing continues. In a classic experiment (Delk and Fillenbaum 1965), subjects were asked to match objects to colour samples. They tended to match a picture of an orange heart to colour samples closer to the red end of the spectrum than they did other, non-heart-shaped orange objects. This shows that the recognition of the object in question (the heart, in this case) influences the colour one experiences it as having (there are some serious methodological worries with the original experiment, but very similar results were found by Hansen et al. 2006). In a more recent experiment (Levin and Banaji 2006), two pictures of identical (mixed-race) faces were shown to subjects. The only difference between the stimuli was that under one picture, the subjects read the word “white,” while under the other they read “black.” When asked to match the colour of the face, subjects chose a significantly darker colour for the face labelled “black,”8 suggesting that higherlevel cognitive processes (such as the comprehension of written text, in this case) can influence one’s perceptual experience. Both of these experiments could be interpreted as demonstrating the influence of expectations on perceptual experiences: our expectation that hearts tend to be red, in the first case, and the expectation that people identified as “black” have darker skin in the second. Mounting evidence suggests that experience is not just determined in a bottom-up manner by the perceptual stimulus: it depends on language, attention, and one’s expectations, as well as one’s cultural context (see Hansen et al. 2006; Lupyan and Ward 2013; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, and Swingley 2010). However, the possibility of cognitive penetrability has been extensively debated in recent decades. Depending on how one defines the concept (see Siegel 2011; Macpherson 2012 for summaries), it may not be too far-fetched to retain some sense in which perceptual experiences are not cognitively penetrable. One could maintain (as Pylyshyn [1999] does, for instance) that top-down influences only come into play before and after “early vision,” which is itself impenetrable. For this reason, we will not assume in what follows that perception is cognitively penetrable in any particularly strong sense. The reason we rely on the cognitive penetrability literature is that it has a lot to say about which mental states may mediate between non-perceptual mental states and perceptual experiences. We are trying to understand what the mediating mental state B—the state that translates between rich musical expectations and the real-time perceptual experience of music—might look like. We will consider two candidates for the mediating mental state: mental imagery and attention.9 In each case, we will argue that (a) the evidence suggests that imagery and attention do, in fact, mediate between higher-order mental states and

Expectations   1007 perceptual experience; (b) this fact counts as evidence that the interface problem does not exist for those states; and hence (c) the states in question are good candidates for our mediating state B. Let us take attention first. Depending on how we deploy our attention, perceptual experiences involving the same sensory stimulation can differ radically. This phenomenon is demonstrated by inattentional blindness experiments (Mack and Rock  1998; Simmons and Chabris 1999). To take a famous (or infamous) example, if subjects viewing a short video clip of a ball game are asked to count the number of times a basketball is passed amongst a group of players, they will reliably fail to see the man in the gorilla costume strolling casually across the screen. If the subjects do not attend to the counting task, they immediately notice the gorilla figure (Simmons and Chabris 1999). Attention has, in this case, a very significant impact on our perceptual experience: depending on where we focus our visual attention, we can fail entirely to perceive some components in the scene. The proposal would then be that something like this is happening in the musical case. The non-perceptual background mental state A, partly constituted by expectations (whether explicit or implicit), is directing our attention (mental state B) to some musical features in the stimulus over others. It is this directing of our attention that is responsible for the change in our perceptual phenomenology. On this view, then, background expectations guide our attention, and it is attention that directly influences our perceptual experiences. Here is a toy example: suppose that one is listening to the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The experience of the first three notes (TaTaTa) makes us attend to the temporal point at which the fourth note (Taaaam) is expected. If the note that we end up hearing at the attended time diverges from the way we anticipated that it would be (if it is delayed, for example, or if its pitch, loudness, or timbre is different to the way we anticipated it would be), we notice this difference and experience it as salient because we were attending closely at that moment in time (see Kok, Jehee, and de Lange 2012 for empirical support for this claim). The other candidate is mental imagery (Macpherson 2012; Nanay 2016, 2018, forthcoming). If I ask you to visualize an apple, the colour of the visualized apple will be determined by your non-perceptual background mental states about the colour of apples, which are determined by your previous encounters with apples. The phenomenal character of your mental imagery is very much informed by your background knowledge and expectations about the object you are imagining. Moreover, there is evidence that mental imagery can influence ongoing perceptual experience in some cases (Nanay 2017, 2018, forthcoming). A key reference point here is the Perky experiment, where (under some interpretations of the experiment, at least) subjects’ perceptual experience was significantly influenced by their visual imagery (Perky 1910; Segal 1972). In general, there is plenty of empirical evidence that perceptual processing interacts with mental imagery at various levels (see Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006 for a thorough summary), and also that mental imagery and perception share a vast proportion of neural circuitry. Given that there appears to be a rich network of influences from mental imagery to perceptual experience, the proposal in this case would be that it is mental imagery (presumably auditory imagery)—formed in the light of our background

1008   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay expectations about music—that is influencing our perceptual experience. Take, again, the toy example of Beethoven’s Fifth. On this view, the listener forms a mental image of the fourth note (Taaaam) on the basis of the experience of the first three (TaTaTa) (there is a lot of empirical evidence that this is in fact what happens—see Yokosawa et al. 2013; Kraemer et al. 2005; Zatorre and Halpern 2005; Herholz, Halpern, and Zatorre 2012; Leaver et al. 2009). This mental imagery may or may not be conscious. And now, if the actual “Taaaam” diverges from the way our mental imagery represents it (again, if it is delayed, or altered in pitch or timbre for example), we notice this divergence and experience its salience in virtue of a noticed mismatch between the experience and the mental imagery that preceded it. The same effect is achieved—we notice that things have turned out differently to the way we anticipated they would turn out, and we experience this difference as salient—but on this view of the way in which expectations affect experience, the effect has come about through a process involving mental imagery, rather than one involving attention to a specific point in time. Two points need to be emphasized. The first is that we are assuming that both attention and mental imagery can be conscious or unconscious (see Viera and Nanay 2020 and Nanay 2021). In the section on “Musical Expectations: Conscious or Unconscious” we made a distinction between conscious and unconscious expectations, and claimed that both plausibly play a role in musical experience. This is consistent with a role for attention and imagery when it comes to musical expectations, given that both can be unconscious. Unconscious attention has been at the forefront of empirical research in perceptual psychology (Cohen et al. 2012; Kentridge, Heywood, and Weiskrantz 1999; Kentridge, Nijboer, and Heywood 2008). One impressive finding is the following: if an attention-grabbing image is presented below the awareness threshold in one part of the visual field, we are quicker to recognize new stimuli in that part of the visual field—a phenomenon thought to arise from the fact that our unconscious attention has been drawn there (Jiang et al. 2006). Perceptual psychologists also discuss mental imagery as a process that can be conscious or unconscious (Kosslyn, Behrmann, and Jeannerod 1995; see also Nanay 2010 and Phillips 2014 for a philosophical argument for unconscious mental imagery; and Nanay 2020 for an overview). The second important point is that these two ways of accounting for musical ­expectations—­by means of attention and auditory imagery—are by no means exclusive. In fact, if musical expectations involve the exercise of auditory imagery (as a lot of empirical findings suggest: see the aforementioned Yokosawa et al. 2013; Kraemer et al. 2005; Zatorre and Halpern 2005; Herholz, Halpern, and Zatorre 2012; Leaver et al. 2009), the question about what fixes the content of such auditory imagery remains. Attention may play a crucial role here (see Kok, Jehee, and de Lange 2012), as may the findings about how the musical expectations of expert musicians involve different exercises of mental imagery (see Brodsky et al. 2003; Lotze et al. 2003; see also Fazekas and Nanay 2017 on the relation between attention and mental imagery in general). We now have a pluralistic picture of how expectations can influence perceptual experiences. We may also endorse a pluralistic view regarding what expectations are. Expectations may be considered to be beliefs that influence our perceptual experiences via imagery or attention; this is consistent with the view that the relevant expectations

Expectations   1009 are located in A (the background state) rather than B (the mediating state). They may also be considered to be auditory images, or patterns of attention, by means of which our background knowledge manages to influence perceptual experiences. This view sits well with a picture whereby the relevant expectations are located in the dynamic mediating state B, rather than in the static background state A. These different ways of understanding what expectations are and how they influence perceptual experiences become especially important when we consider different ways in which we can engage with musical listening, and the different roles expectations play therein. This is the topic to which we now turn as we distinguish between four modes of musical engagement, considering the role of expectations in each.

Four Modes of Musical Engagement To begin to investigate whether and how expectations feature in conscious musical experience, rather than in unconscious processing, a preliminary taxonomy of conscious experiences of music is useful. First, we may distinguish between online and offline experiences of music. Roughly, online experiences of music happen when one is listening to music as it is playing. Offline experiences of music occur when there is no music playing, and one is either imagining or mentally replaying it, or perhaps just discussing it, or reading about it. Within each category, we may make the further distinction between engaged and disengaged experiences. Engaged experiences track the music closely, whether that music is being perceived or imagined. Disengaged experiences, on the other hand, involve a stepping-back from the musical texture (where that texture is either perceived or imagined) in order to evaluate it in some way, or formulate thoughts about it, or indeed to evaluate or form thoughts about the engaged experience that one has just had. This pair of distinctions yields a fourfold taxonomy of musical experience: online engaged, online disengaged, offline engaged, and offline disengaged. A few caveats before we continue. To begin with, we will focus only on online experiences in what follows, for two reasons: first, it is the perceptual experience of music that is our main concern; and second, the vast majority of experiments target the perceptual experience of sounding music rather than the experience of imagined music. Furthermore, this taxonomy is intended as a first pass: it is not necessarily exhaustive. And though we are presenting the categories as mutually exclusive—we will argue that one cannot simultaneously have, for example, an online engaged and an online disengaged experience of music—we are aware that some arguments could be made to the contrary; while we do think it most likely that online and offline engaged experiences cannot co-occur, our main purpose here is to argue for the need to hold the different modes apart conceptually. The online engaged experience of music is the kind of experience that most people have in mind when they refer to an episode of musical listening: it is the experience of

1010   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay actively tracking or following a piece of music as it unfolds, keeping up with it at every moment. This kind of active tracking, or following, is discussed at length in Levinson (1997).10 The online disengaged experience of music, on the other hand, occurs when one evaluates the music, predicts what will happen next, or formulates some other explicit thought about it. Suppose that we are listening to music together, and I say to you: “There’s a really good part coming up.” When I do so, I can still hear the music, but I am no longer actively tracking it; I am forming thoughts about the music rather than just immersing myself in it. It seems that one must exit the online engaged mode in order to enter the online disengaged mode. I don’t just happen to briefly stop tracking the music when I entertain a prediction or evaluation about it. It is a condition on my being able to engage with it in this way that I distance myself to some extent from the unfolding texture. Formulating higher-order thoughts about music, or making predictions about it, takes time and effort; as such, it requires some minimal distance from the musical texture. Expectations function differently in these two states. Take online engaged experience first. Again, the phenomenology suggests that when I am attentively tracking music in the online engaged mode, I am not consciously expecting anything. I am just following the music. I am not consciously entertaining any expectations whatsoever, be those explicit theoretical ones, or more implicit perceptual ones. If I were to go about making predictions, or entertaining expectations, I would be in danger of losing the thread of the music entirely (an argument that is, incidentally, already made by Zuckerkandl [1969] as an objection to Meyer’s positing of expectations as a feature of conscious musical listening). I must enter the online disengaged mode in order to be able to consciously entertain an expectation about the music I am hearing. Now of course, it is still possible to retrospectively attribute the experience of expectation to myself, once I have exited the online engaged mode. I can say something like, “That cadence was unusual; I was expecting something else.” But even if such a statement seems natural, it does not imply that I was really consciously expecting anything at all in the moment before the cadence resolved. The expectations that may become conscious during online disengaged experience can be more or less explicit, depending on the level of knowledge or expertise of the listener. If I know what sonata form is, for example, I may expect that the expository material that I am currently hearing will be followed by a development section. In online disengaged mode, I can consciously formulate this expectation, or communicate it to a fellow listener.11 However, even if I do not have any theoretical knowledge about music, I can still formulate and express some expectations about the music that I hear, where these expectations are derived from my acquaintance with the piece in question, or my acquaintance with music of a similar type. In the former case, I could say something like “A high melody will come in shortly,” which does not rely on my having any theoretical knowledge about music whatsoever. In the latter case, I may expect (for instance) that the verse of the song I am hearing for the first time will be followed by a chorus. I can also entertain negative expectations: even if I know nothing in particular about Baroque music, I can legitimately expect that the harpsichord piece I am enjoying will not

Expectations   1011 s­ uddenly be interrupted by a solo on electric guitar. There is thus a very wide range of explicit and implicit musical expectations that I can entertain and express, no matter what my level of musical knowledge or expertise is, once I enter the online disengaged mode of experiencing music. Recall the fourfold distinction we made in the section on “Musical Expectations: Conscious or Subconscious.” The online engaged mode is an instance of Case 1: we do not consciously entertain any expectations as we listen to music. We experience some of their effects, certainly—feelings of tension and release, or a general sense of anticipation or arousal—but we do not experience the expectations themselves. The online disengaged mode, on the other hand, is an instance of either Case 2, 3, or 4, depending on the types of expectations that a given listener is in a position to entertain, on the basis of her knowledge and expertise. A listener might consciously entertain both explicit theoretical expectations and implicit perceptual expectations (Case 4), or perhaps entertain some perceptual expectations without entertaining theoretical ones (Case 3). It seems less likely that, if one is in the online disengaged mode, one might be able to experience explicit expectations without experiencing implicit ones (Case 2), given that explicit expectations seem to rely on implicit, internalized patterns for their recognition. Depending on how one defines explicit and implicit expectations in the first instance, however, and on where one judges the division between the two to be in terms of ­richness of content, this might be possible too. Settling this issue does not bear on the argument here. Let us take stock. We have two modes of engagement with an unfolding musical texture: online engaged experience and online disengaged experience. While evidence suggests that expectations, both implicit and explicit, affect experiences in both modes, they are only consciously experienced as expectations in online disengaged experience. We now must address what kind of mental state could serve as the mediator that we require (between the expectations, whether those are conscious or unconscious, and the respective perceptual experiences). How does this fit with the proposal about the importance of auditory imagery and attention in musical expectations? At first blush, the literature seems to point to attention as the most obvious candidate state. Various authors (for example, Large and Jones 1999; London 2012) have suggested that rhythmic experience (and the experience of rhythmic stresses or “beats” in particular) constitutively involves attention. When we hear music, it is suggested, we attend to patterns of events in time, and our attention waxes and wanes with regularities in the music: our attention peaks at anticipated onsets of events (strong beats, for example), and slackens during periods where nothing of significance is expected to occur (in the period between beats, for instance). It is the dynamic waxing and waning of attention, goes the argument, that is responsible for our sense that certain moments in the music are accented, or stronger than other moments. This focus on attention in the psychology literature might lead us to select attention as the most likely candidate for our mediating state. It is not obvious, however, that attention and imagery are competing explanations, as we saw in the section on “Musical Expectations: Structure and Content.” Further, it

1012   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay could be argued that they cannot be easily dissociated, at least in the auditory case. While it seems apparent that one is in a position to tell, say, whether one is perceiving a rhythm or imagining one, auditory attention—or, at least, attention to periodic events—may nevertheless involve mental imagery as a fundamental component. When I listen to a rhythm, I am only in direct perceptual contact with one sonic event at a time, and yet the entire rhythmic pattern seems to be present to me. There is a sense in which my attention reaches outwards from the present moment: I have the impression of being in perceptual contact not only with what is present at time t, but also with what was just present at t–1, as well as what I am about to hear at t+1. Given that neither the event at t–1, nor the event at t+1, is actually present to me at time t, my strong sense that I am able to attend to the overall pattern—which encompasses all three events—could plausibly involve mental imagery.12 Hence, when one considers attention to rhythmic patterns, it seems difficult to distinguish between attention and mental imagery on either the phenomenal level or the functional level, because (1) the phenomenology of attention to periodic events seems to overlap with the phenomenology of an episode of mental imagery of events no longer occurring, and (2) the proper functioning of attention to periodic events seems to implicate some forms of mental imagery. This, again, points to a pluralistic conclusion: that both attention and mental imagery are implicated in musical expectations, given the apparent phenomenal and functional co-involvement of attention and mental imagery in the auditory case. Crucially, both can be, and normally are, unconscious. In the online engaged mode of musical listening, it is the mediation of expectations by normally unconscious imagery and attention that shapes our conscious musical experience.

Conclusion Philosophers and music psychologists rarely interact. Given the overwhelming dominance of discussions of vision in the philosophy of mind, philosophers have much to gain from consideration not only of other modalities such as hearing, but also musical listening. Musical experience is ubiquitous: most of us listen to music, hum tunes, and absent-mindedly tap rhythms every day. Multiple sensory modalities interact and combine when we attend concerts, or play music ourselves (see Nanay 2012c). Moreover, musical experiences involve the exercise of some perceptual capacities that are, it is thought, almost exclusively human.13 When it comes to clarifying the content of musical experience itself, however, music psychologists also have much to gain from increased interaction with philosophers. We hope, in this article, to have contributed to the clarifying of some conceptual issues, in the attempt to determine the implications of psychological explanations for our understanding of conscious musical experience.

Expectations   1013

Notes 1. This work was partially supported by the ERC Consolidator grant to Bence Nanay 726251 and the FWO grants G0C7416N. 2. His essays in Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Meyer 1967) as well as his Explaining Music (Meyer 1973), which deal with expectations in musical listening, have also been very influential. 3. For the purposes of this paper, we are assuming that the phenomena of tension and relaxation are indeed the effect of expectations. However, this may not be the case: much of the phenomenal character commonly attributed to the meeting and thwarting of expectations may in fact be due to other mental states not appropriately described as expectations. See Judge 2018 for an argument that musical surprise—thought to be a canonical expectationrelated experience—is caused not by prior expectations on the part of the listening subject, but rather prior assessments of the present. 4. Walton 1999 discusses such experiences. 5. “Poverty of stimulus” arguments also occur outside perception psychology. In linguistics, for instance, it is claimed by some that children must have an innate linguistic capacity, since natural language grammar would be unlearnable on the basis of the limited information to which children are exposed when they are learning to speak a language. We are not referring to this body of literature here, however. 6. See Siegel  2007 and Nanay  2012b on the distinction between perceptual and overall phenomenology. 7. Mental imagery can be distinguished from imagination: the former may or may not be necessary for the latter, but definitely not sufficient for it (see Nanay 2015). It is the role of mental imagery that we want to emphasize in this context, rather than that of imagination considered broadly. 8. There has been some controversy about the Levin and Banaji 2006 findings, especially about their first experiment (see, for example, Firestone and Scholl 2014; Lupyan 2015). However, the experiment we are discussing here is not their first but their second experiment, where the two faces presented are identical in all respects apart from the label ­displayed under them. 9. We follow the psychological and philosophical literature in taking attention to be a mental state, rather than an aspect of conscious experience (see also the remarks below about unconscious attention). 10. See also Levinson’s “Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music,” reprinted in Musical Concerns (Levinson 2015). 11. It should be acknowledged that the notions of “musical knowledge” and “expertise” that we are employing here are rather simplified. The concept of sonata form, for example, postdates its most famous exemplars (such as Beethoven’s instrumental works), and there remains disagreement amongst musicologists and theorists as to its exact nature (see, for example, Rosen 1980; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006). Nonetheless, we think it plausible that knowledge of the traditional sections of sonata form is likely to shape a contemporary listener’s experience of a piece of music “in” sonata form. 12. See Music in the Moment (Levinson 1997) for more on this phenomenon, as well as discussion of Husserl’s reflections on the grasp of melody as it relates to time-consciousness. 13. To take an example, evidence suggests that the human ability to perceive the “beat” in music is present from birth (Winkler et al. 2009). It has proven difficult to clearly identify other animals that can react to a musical beat as easily and accurately as we can. While some

1014   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay “vocal learning” species can, it has been suggested, entrain to a musical beat (for example, Patel et al. 2009; Schachner et al. 2009), electroencephalogram (EEG) evidence suggests that primates—or at least some species of primates, such as rhesus monkeys—cannot (Honing et al. 2012).

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1016   Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay Krumhansl, Carol L., and Edward J. Kessler. 1982. “Tracing the Dynamic Changes in Perceived Tonal Organization in a Spatial Representation of Musical Keys.” Psychological Review 89, no. 4 (August): 334–358. Large, Edward  W., and Mari Riess Jones. 1999. “The Dynamics of Attending: How People Track Time-Varying Events.” Psychological Review 106, no. 1 (January): 119–159. Larson, Steve. 1997–8. “Musical Forces and Melodic Patterns.” Theory and Practice 22–3:55–71. Larson, Steve. 2004. “Musical Forces and Melodic Expectations; Comparing Computer Models and Experimental Results.” Music Perception 21, No. 4 (Summer): 457–498. Leaver, Amber  M., Jennifer Van Lare, Brandon Zielinski, Andrea  R.  Halpern, and Josef P. Rauschecker. 2009. “Brain Activation During Anticipation of Sound Sequences.” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 8 (February): 2477–2485. Lerdahl, Fred. 2001. Tonal Pitch Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, Daniel  T., and Mahzarin  R.  Banaji. 2006. “Distortions in the Perceived Lightness of Faces: The Role of Race Categories.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 135 (4): 501–512. Levinson, Jerrold. 1997. Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015. Musical Concerns: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. London, Justin. 2012. Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Lotze, Martin, Gabriela Scheler, H.-R. M. Tan, Christoph Braun, and Neils Birbaumer. 2003. “The Musician’s Brain: Functional Imaging of Amateurs and Professionals During Performance and Imagery.” Neuroimage 20, no. 3 (November): 1817–1829. Lupyan, Gary. 2015. “Cognitive Penetrability of Perception in the Age of Prediction: Predictive Systems are Penetrable Systems.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6, no. 4 (December): 547–569. Lupyan, Gary, and Michael J. Spivey. 2008. “Perceptual Processing Is Facilitated by Ascribing Meaning to Novel Stimuli.” Current Biology 18, no. 10 (May): R410–R412. Lupyan, Gary, Sharon  L.  Thompson-Schill, and Daniel Swingley. 2010. “Conceptual Penetration of Visual Processing.” Psychological Science 21, no. 5 (May): 682–691. Lupyan, Gary, and Emily J. Ward, 2013. “Language Can Boost Otherwise Unseen Objects into Visual Awareness.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 35 (August): 14196–14201. Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. 1998. Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacPherson, Fiona. 2012. “Cognitive Penetration of Colour Experience.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84, no. 1 (January): 24–62. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. 2005. “A Model of Melodic Expectation.” Music Perception 22, no. 4 (Summer): 663–714. Marr, David. 1982. Vision. San Francisco, CA: Freeman. Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, Leonard  B. 1967. Music, the Arts and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in TwentiethCentury Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nanay, Bence. 2010. “Perception and Imagination: Amodal Perception as Mental Imagery.” Philosophical Studies 150:239–254. Nanay, Bence. 2012a. “Action-Oriented Perception.” European Journal of Philosophy 20, no. 3 (September): 430–446.

Expectations   1017 Nanay, Bence. 2012b. “Perceptual Phenomenology.” Philosophical Perspectives 26, no. 1 (December): 235–246. Nanay, Bence. 2012c. “The Multimodal Experience of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 4 (October): 353–363. Nanay, Bence. 2013a. Between Perception and Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nanay, Bence. 2013b. “Is Action-Guiding Vision Cognitively Impenetrable?” In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1055–1060. (CogSci 2013). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Nanay, Bence. 2015. “Perceptual Content and the Content of Mental Imagery.” Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1723–1736. Nanay, Bence. 2016. “Hallucination as Mental Imagery.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (7–8): 65–81. Nanay, Bence. 2017. “Sensory Substitution and Multimodal Mental Imagery.” Perception 46: 1014–1026. Nanay, Bence. 2018. “Multimodal Mental Imagery.” Cortex 105: 125–134. Nanay, Bence. 2020. “Unconscious Mental Imagery.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, in print. Nanay, Bence. Forthcoming. Seeing Things You Don’t See. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nanay, Bence. 2021. “Music and Multimodal Mental Imagery.” In Music and Imagery: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Applications, edited by Mats Kussner, Liila Taruffi, and Georgina Floridou. London: Routledge. Narmour, Eugene. 1990. The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. O’Connor, Daniel H., Miki M. Fukui, Mark A. Pinsk, and Sabine Kastner. 2002. “Attention Modulates Responses in the Human Lateral Geniculate Nucleus.” Nature Neuroscience 5, no. 11 (November): 1203–1209. Patel, Aniruddh D., John R. Iversen, Micah R. Bregman, and Irena Schulz. 2009. “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal.” Current Biology 19, no. 10 (May): 827–830. Perky, Charles West. 1910. “An Experimental Study of Imagination.” American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 3 (July): 422–452. Phillips, Ian. 2014. “Lack of Imagination: Individual Differences in Mental Imagery and the Significance of Consciousness.” In New Waves in Philosophy of Mind, edited by Jesper Kallestrup and Mark Sprevak, 278–300. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pylyshyn, Zenon. 1999. “Is Vision Continuous with Cognition? The Case for Cognitive Impenetrability of Visual Perception.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, no. 3 (July): 341–423. Rosen, Charles. 1980. Sonata Forms. New York: W. W. Norton. Schachner, Adena, Timothy  F.  Brady, Irene  M.  Pepperberg, and Marc  D.  Hauser. 2009. “Spontaneous Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species.” Current Biology 19, no. 10 (May): 831–836. Schellenberg, E.  Glenn. 1997. “Simplifying The Implication-Realization Model of Melodic Expectancy.” Music Perception 14, no. 3 (Spring): 295–318. Segal, S. J. 1972. “Assimilation of a Stimulus in the Construction of an Image: The Perky Effect Revisited.” In The Function and Nature of Imagery, edited by Peter W. Sheehan, 203–230. New York: Academic Press.

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chapter 50

Ga l a n t M usic Jean-Luc Nancy

Translator’s Introduction: Music’s Tact Naomi Waltham-Smith Translation is a delicate business. You can’t press too hard. It demands a certain respect and generosity towards the original text, but this cannot be an absolute deference, for that would amount to leaving the French untouched. On the contrary, rather like music as Nancy characterizes it here, translation is an “art of passage.” It necessarily traverses an unbridgeable idiom. It cannot be too literal but must bend to the target language. Still, it should not push too forcefully. Translation requires tact. It has to steer a text’s vagaries and caprices into a single, precise rendition without paralysing the movement and play of sense or stifling its adventurousness. One might even say that translation calls for a measure of gallantry and of galanterie in the sense that Nancy develops in this provocative little essay. It calls for a lightness of touch, a little flair and embellishment—even charm. Nancy argues that every art—and perhaps this might extend to the art of translation—mobilizes freedom but at the same time that music is unique in inventing “a freedom all of its own . . . a singular independence, an autonomous galanterie.” Unlike other arts, music is said to gain its liberty without freeing itself from the characters of its sensuous objects, such as birdsong or murmuring. In arguing for music’s distinctive status among the arts, Nancy echoes an argument he makes in Listening where he insists that, while “nothing” is said of sound that must “not also” be said of the other senses, sound is at the same time “nothing but” the resonance that makes all the senses

1020   Jean-Luc Nancy possible (Nancy 2007, 76–77n7). The exemplary status accorded to music and sound means that they serve as what deconstructionists would call a quasi-transcendental, a condition of possibility that is both inside and outside the field that it constitutes and is therefore, to the extent that it marks an untouchable or inaudible point within sense, a condition of impossibility. If Nancy has suggested that resonance occupies such a role for sensation, he seems here to suggest that music enjoys a similar privilege or priority among the arts. It is this privilege, though, that Derrida finds problematic in his book devoted to Nancy’s thought, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida 2005). The difficulty is that, as soon as one identifies one aspect that is incomparable in the model, the singular risks being confined to the status of a transcendental exception or unattainable goal instead of ruining the teleology of the transcendental position in general. Which is precisely what Nancy seeks to gain by reframing Derrida’s notion of différance as dispersal and self-differentiation now as resonance. Nancy offers a number of reasons for music’s incommensurable relation to freedom, which chiefly have to do with the ways in which music eludes the grasp of sensation. The metaphorics of touch is one of the most striking features of Nancy’s essay, one that resonates with preoccupations foregrounded in other texts such as Corpus (2008) and “Unum quid” (2016) and that also invites to be read alongside Derrida’s critical reflections on this theme. Derrida’s argument is subtle. In a first gesture, Nancy is credited with avoiding hypostatizing this condition of possibility by showing how all touch is always also the impossibility of touching, a certain untouchable-intangible—underscored in this essay by both the elusiveness and the tact ascribed to music’s galanterie. Nancy’s notion of music as that which to some extent refrains from touching even as it touches is what sets him apart from Romantic conceptions of music’s unsurpassable immediacy. Limiting its own force, galant music instead brushes against the truth. In a second gesture, though, Derrida suspects Nancy of ultimately preferring the infinite, as Geoffrey Bennington (2008) puts it, and thus of nullifying the finitude of tact or what I want to call, after Derrida, the autoimmunity of touch, which in order to safeguard itself necessarily limits itself. Autoimmunity takes on increasing significance in Derrida’s later thought alongside the notions of immunization and indemnification and is used to highlight how any self-protective gesture is inseparable from a degree of selfdestructive protection against this self-protection. If sense were to become absolute presence or absolute absence, it will have destroyed itself and so it necessarily holds back to preserve itself. Taken to one extreme or the other, an infinite touch without restraint would not so much touch as penetrate or merge with its object, while an absolute tact would abstain from all con-tact altogether: either fusion or cut-off. In the correspondence that Nancy exchanged over this essay with friend and philosopher Marie-Louise Mallet quoted here in the Afterword, he explains that he chose the provocative term galant to characterize music in general precisely so as to avoid elevating it, as the Romantics did, into an incomparable spirituality, access to profundity, or immediacy of expression. Drawing upon a phrase of Rousseau, he asks in what way ­ ressing. music can “go to the heart.” “Music,” he proposes, “touches without pushing or p

Galant Music   1021 It reaches the heart without punching you in the gut.” When Nancy speaks in this essay of an “unbridgeable gulf,” of an infinite distance traversed, or of music as what approaches the impossible, he appears to lean in the direction of thinking the music’s finite or tactful trace as a trace of the infinite—of the “unknown” or “supersensible.” This approach is associated with a virtuosity or bravura yet without turning into ostentation or brouhaha. At the same time, Nancy is also at pains to stress that music’s touch is always tempered. And this because musical sound is not grasped immediately in aural perception but rather passes through a relay of technical articulations—what he describes as a certain instrumentality or organicity. Listening, as David Wills (2015) brilliantly theorizes it, is itself a prosthesis, a series of technological mediations that extend all the way into the body. Technics and prosthetics are central themes in Nancy’s thought, and here music is seen as an irreducible mixture of freedom and technicity, of the calculable and the incalculable, and hence neither straightforwardly finite nor infinite. Whether this undecidability reflects that Derrida’s anxieties have made something of an impression on Nancy is something that remains to be seen. Whether it entirely succeeds or not, though, it is clear that, beneath the essay’s delicacy and charm, there is a tremendous effort to keep music poised between the incommensurable and the measurable, the ineffable and the sayable, freedom and self-restraint. Insofar as Nancy singles out music for its singularity, readers might therefore suspect him of adhering to a pervasive Romantic conception. And yet I would argue that Nancy’s reference to galanterie’s autonomy ought here to be understood in the context of both the complex relation to early German Romanticism that he and Philippe LacoueLabarthe elaborate in The Literary Absolute (1988) and also Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom (1993) which sets out an alternative notion of freedom, destabilizing the sovereign freedom of the Kantian subject and also resonating with the thematics of surprise and decision that Derrida associates with the unconditional. At stake in Nancy’s thinking of galanterie is not only music’s capacity to touch the real or truth but also the relation between music and philosophy. The tactful touch of which he speaks makes music at once more approachable and yet also resistant to subordination under the philosophical concept. Nancy’s essay might be read as a response to Derrida’s question in “Tympan” as to whether philosophy is necessarily rendered deaf when its eardrum is perforated by the other (Derrida 1990, xii). Galant freedom does not put music completely beyond philosophy’s reach. Following Derrida’s reading of Nancy’s habitual syntagma “there is no ‘the,’” to say that there is no “the” meaning of music does not mean that there is no meaning whatsoever—that music is ineffable madness. Rather, only because there is some meaning (some contact between music and the philosophical) is sense wandering, multiple, and always capable of transformation, of translation. The singularity of music (or a text) that we want to protect, as well as the ­violent grasp of its reduction, is only possible because of the iterability of conceptual thought. The encounter between music and philosophy—like that of translation—is neither a head-on collision nor an asymptotic approach that never arrives but more of a graze, delicate and almost galant.

1022   Jean-Luc Nancy

Galant Music Jean-Luc Nancy Translated by Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jerrold Levinson How to speak of music when it does not itself speak? Even when it makes words sing, it does not make them speak. The Roman Catholic Church was not mistaken in striving to keep musical settings within the bounds of textual intelligibility. But musicians, whatever desire they had to serve their religion, were not able to keep within these limits. The damage remained limited as long as the words of the Kyrie or the Dixit Dominus were known in advance. But when the text was not known in advance . . . And even when the words are known, for example for a Mass, an opera, or a lied, what is the import of this knowledge? Do we think of the meaning of the Agnus Dei, “Là ci darem la mano,” or “Seit ich ihn gesehen”? Yes, without doubt, we think about it: we know that it is a matter of pleading, seducing, or being lovestruck. These significations cannot be separated from the music. Their sense (sens) is caught up in it. Sense is caught up such that it is absorbed, integrated, infused to the point of being inseparable from the resonance and the rhythmic movement of the line (ligne cadencée) but also such that it scatters (disperse) and vanishes as sense—insofar as one would want to speak of meaning (signification). This is not to say that a vanishing or scattered sense is a pure and simple absence of meaning. On the contrary. It is this contrary which makes the music what it is (qui fait la musique), which makes music (qui fait musique), which musicks (qui musique). “The next day at dinner we talked about music; he talked about it well. I was transported with joy to learn that he accompanied on the harpsichord. After dinner some music was sent for. We spent the rest of the day playing the prince’s harpsichord, and so began that friendship” (Rousseau 2000, 340). This new friend was Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was both an ally and rival of Rousseau as much in gallantry as in a musician’s thinking. What is it, then, to musick? It is to let oneself be carried away by a gallantry, or otherwise put, by a lively ease, by a happy vivacity even in sombre or severe keys. Behind the word “gallant” there is effervescence (wallen), elan (walare), force or bravura (galio), as well as rejoicing (galer). Before assuming a more specialized sense in the context of amorous behaviour, gallantry evokes a graceful passion (emportement), an adept and obliging lightness, a delicate charm. It is more a manner of conducting oneself than one of seduction. Or better, more than a behaviour, it is an ambience, an atmosphere, a mood. The terms style galant or musique galante characterized a shared sensibility during the course of the eighteenth century for a pleasant musical style, forgoing learned counterpoint

Galant Music   1023 for melodic charm, ornamentation, and even instrumental virtuosity. This style was, however, only a transient crystallization, bordering sometimes on sterility in the artifice and embellishment with which it nonetheless creates one of music’s fundamental traits: freedom of movement. All types of art demand freedom and put it to work. In the visual and plastic arts, however, this freedom is gained in relation to the characters presented by the perceived objects with their hues, shades, and volumes. The same goes for dance with regard to the body and likewise for the gustatory arts in relation to flavours and aromas. Music, by contrast, does not free itself from the characters presented by sonic objects—birdsong, murmurs of the wind, inflections of speech. Music invents a freedom all of its own. It creates a singular independence, an autonomous galanterie. One could rightly say that the other arts also create their own regimes of freedom. Even so, one must recognize that with music a different relation opens up between the realm of sensation and the artistic regime. Musical sound is scarcely grasped by sensation: to a much greater extent, it comes about through a wholly other process. In truth, it is formed by a dedicated organ, an organon, an instrument conceived and constructed exclusively to that end. Into this conception and construction (which also holds for the production of the singing voice) come procedures of measurement, such as the spacing of openings in a tube or the lengths of vibrating strings, while mechanisms of tension, pressure, percussion, and open- or closedness must be arranged and designed from materials and forms to meet established expectations. These expectations are themselves determined according to differences in pitch, intensity, and timbre that are assessed according to principles of construction or composition of musical objects— principles that are in turn relative to cultural, aesthetic, and technical conditions. * * * Music possesses an organicity of its own to a degree that other artistic practices cannot match. This is what gives music its two faces, technical and calculated on the one side, free and galant on the other. Each of these sides is dependent on the other and it is precisely there that the possibility is at stake of a virtuosity also without exact equivalent in other disciplines. But virtuosity—that is, the functioning of an autonomous mastery for its own sake—is only one face of a coin whose other side presents musical truth: the complete in­de­pend­ence of a sense in a free state. Those one calls interpreters are virtuosos of this liberty. Those one calls composers are the sensors of this straying, floating, adventurous sense whose wandering (errance) they render in a product as precise as it is elusive. That would be the sense of musical galanterie: bringing into the world forms with their own values, subject to nothing but the laws of their autonomous combination, subject to neither use nor exchange: “actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance,” as Proust (2002, 351) writes.

1024   Jean-Luc Nancy Impenetrable to the intelligence but penetrating the body, the senses, the soul, or the spirit. Making its way everywhere because it is free of all material support, all worldly assignation, its only sources those from which it largely escapes only to lose and find itself ad infinitum. Such is the supreme galanterie of music: it does not purport to say, demonstrate, or even show anything whatsoever. When a musician—composer or instrumentalist— begins to want to show or demonstrate anything other than the elegance and the finesse of his art, he is on the way to leading his music astray or weighing it down. But the elegance and finesse of this art does not consist in the arrangement of easy and slender convolutions: it arises from a gallantry of the unknown, of the impossible even, or perhaps the insensible or supersensible which may be approached. This gallantry is also a valiance, a bravura, that risks itself in such an approach and does so without boast—one could say, indeed one must: without noise (bruit). Simply to approach—but in such an approach the impossible and the insensible touch us in their inclinations, their amplitudes, and their erasures. It is the passage of this touch which makes musical time. Music is quite other than an “art of time,” as is supposed, and much more an “art of passage.” The approach of the impossible and the insensible traverses and confirms at the same time an unbridgeable gulf. Music—art of distance observed yet traversed, and crossed yet respected. The art of traveling infinitely far, even to the limits of the world, while remaining as close as possible. Thus sentiment or passion, to the extent that they still fall within the order of recognizable significations, do not constitute the ultimate stakes of music. Music here proposes an even deeper galanterie, whereby the heart situates itself further and further away beyond all distance and all proximity. Rousseau was able to write: I will even dare say that the pleasure of the ear should sometimes prevail over the truthfulness of the expression; for Music can go to the heart (aller au cœur) only through the charm of the melody, and if it were only a question of rendering the accent of the passion, the art of declamation would alone suffice. (Rousseau 1998, 493)

In these lines, both the era and the idea of a style galant overcome and overstep themselves in the hyperbole of a charm truer, more veridical even, than truth that is expressed. * * * That is why, at the same time, the distance remains unbridgeable between that which makes itself heard—that which listens to itself (s’écoute) in every sense of the word, which is attentive in listening to itself so as to be understood for itself, and regardless of the feelings, images, or thoughts that can join forces or are even confused with it—and music, with its notation, its rules, its instruments, its measures, and its laws. The scraping of horsehair coated with rosin on a synthetic string encased in aluminium, or the combined tensions of stomach, throat, and palate muscles in the emission of a column

Galant Music   1025 of air, or the transmission by biosensors of contractions and relaxations to an audio software program, are incommensurable with the impalpable suppleness and grace of a ribbon of notes floating somewhere else apart from their notation. This distance, unbridgeable and yet unceasingly crossed—back and forth, one way or another, every which way—by those who perform and those who listen to performing, is at the end of the day what Rousseau best recounted in another text, in which various gallantries commingle, switch places, conflict, and move in step with one another: A music which, to my taste, is greatly superior to that of the opera-houses, and which has no equal in Italy or in the rest of the world, is that of the Scuole. The Scuole are charitable institutions founded to provide an education for young girls who have no fortune, and to whom the republic then gives them a dowry, so that they may either marry or go into the convent. Among the accomplishments these young girls cultivate, music holds first place. Every Sunday at the church of each of these four Scuole the evening service includes motets for full choir and orchestra, composed and directed by the greatest masters in Italy, and performed in galleries behind grilles entirely by girls of whom the oldest is not yet twenty years. I can conceive of nothing more voluptuous nor more touching than this music; the richness of the composition, the exquisite art of the singing, the beauty of the voices, the accuracy of the performance, everything about these delicious concerts combines to create an impression that may not be wholly appropriate in the setting, but against which I doubt if any man’s heart is proof. Carrio and I never missed these vespers at the Mendicante, and we were not alone in this. The church was always full of music-lovers; even the performers from the opera-house came to cultivate true musical taste by listening to these excellent models. But I was chagrined by those accursed grilles, which let through only the sound, while hiding from my sight the angelic beauty that must surely have produced it. I could talk of nothing else. One day when I was talking about it at M. Leblond’s, he said: “Since you are so eager to see these little girls, I can easily satisfy your curiosity. I’m one of the administrators of their house, and I’ll invite you to tea with them.” I did not leave him in peace until he had kept his promise. As I entered the drawing-room where the beauties I so yearned after were assembled, I felt a thrill of love such as I had never experienced before. M. Leblond presented to me one after the other these famous singers, whom I knew only by voice and by name. “This is Sophie” . . . She was hideous. “This is Cattina” . . . She was one-eyed. “This is Bettina” . . . She was disfigured by smallpox. There was hardly a single one that had not obvious defect. My tormentor laughed at my cruel surprise. Two or three of them, it is true, seemed to me tolerable, but they only sang in the chorus. I was devastated. During tea there was laughter and teasing, and they become animated. Ugliness does not exclude grace; and this I found them to have. I said to myself: “No one without a soul could sing like that: they must have souls.” In short, by the time I left I had come to see them so differently that I was almost in love with every one of the ugly little things. Afterwards I hardly dared return to hear vespers. When I did I was reassured. I continued to find their singing delicious, while their voices lent such charm to their faces that, so long as they were singing, I persisted, in spite of what my eyes told me, in finding them beautiful.  (Rousseau 2000, 305–306)

1026   Jean-Luc Nancy

Afterword [Nancy sent his essay to philosopher and friend Marie-Louise Mallet, who is the author of La Musique en respect (2002), and generously shared the ensuing correspondence with the translators. Mallet raises a number of smaller points with Nancy, including the question of the relation between music and the visible, which leads her to bemoan recent trends in opera staging. Above all, though, she takes issue with Nancy’s generalization of the term galant beyond its specific historical usage to music of all periods. This strikes her as particularly problematic for the notorious inaccessibility of a late Beethoven and for music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also equally difficult to extend to earlier ­repertoires—a move that Nancy concedes he knew would provoke resistance among “connoisseurs of music.” Mallet also assumes that Nancy is inspired by Rousseau in his choice of this word galant—something which he denies, pointing out that whilst it is a common term of that period, it is by no means peculiar to Rousseau. If this thought of musical galanterie is in any way indebted to Rousseau, it is instead to his description of the style galant “going to the heart (aller au cœur)” in the passage that Nancy quotes from Rousseau’s observations on Gluck’s Alceste. This, as Nancy explains in his response to Mallet, accounts for his insistence on the provocative use of the term galant to characterize music in general. Resisting in turn the resistance he anticipated, Nancy writes the following. —TR.] I understand perfectly why this word is unexpected, though, in relation to music. Why then indulge in what remains a provocation? Precisely in order to turn away from a gravity or emphasis that easily hovers around “serious” music. For this gravity and this emphasis have quickly slipped towards the solemn, the profound, and towards indicating the distant ineffable and sublime. Yet these latter words are not only well-worn (usé). They are also facile: they cloak themselves in an elevation or a spirituality which in their own way lose sight of something of the music. They go in the direction of what Rousseau calls “the expression of passion” and which indeed dominated the eighteenth century to which you refer. But in the end, with Wagner, there was an overflowing of this expressivity which no doubt responds to the heaviness of the time and its spirit. There is indeed some charm or galanterie in Wagner (I am thinking less of Lohengrin than of Tristan), but there is also much expressivity or expressionism. Nietzsche sensed this well and did not only use Bizet as a simple ironic contrast: he was seeking to be less suffocating. It seems to me profoundly true, though, to say that music never suffocates (except when it has a programme, or is military, heroic, or sentimental). Music touches without pushing or pressing. It reaches the heart without punching you in the gut. It stirs by making one feel how emotion moves, not how it weighs. Thus Nietzsche again, who says “we have art in order not to die of truth.” Not that art is a lie: rather, it is the delicacy of brushing against (effleurer) the truth without pretending to master it. Art is always the art of rendering sensible the delicate retreat

Galant Music   1027 (retrait) of truth in truth itself. This is how art is galant with Truth itself as with us. This is the fact of all art, but music has the privilege of a detachment, of an exceptional ease of movement with which the forms all pass, brush against, or if they do press, are quick (s’empressent) to shift their pressure, which does not cease to dissipate while bouncing back and replaying (rejouant), eluding (déjouant) one’s grasp, immobilization, signification . . . This slipping out of all grasp also forms an invitation to a simplicity not contradicted by elegance: on the contrary, the two summon one another. I  would say gladly: galant music, simple music, the very simplicity of which art alone is capable.

Works Cited Bennington, Geoffrey. 2008. “Handshake.” Derrida Today 1 (2): 167–184. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. “Tympan.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, ix–xxix. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mallet, Marie-Louise. 2002. La Musique en respect. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Translated by Bridget McDonald. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2016. “Unum quid.” In Ego Sum: Corpus, Anima, Fabula, translated by Marie-Eve Morin, 88–112. New York: Fordham University Press. Proust, Marcel. 2002. The Way By Swann’s. In Search of Lost Time. Translated by Lydia Davis, edited by Christopher Prendergast. London: Penguin. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1998. “Fragments of Observations on M. Le Chevalier Gluck’s Italian ‘Alceste.’ ” In Essay on the Origin of Languages and Other Writings Related to Music, edited and translated by John T. Scott. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2000. Confessions. Translated by Angela Scholar. Edited by Patrick Coleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wills, David. 2015. “Positive Feedback: Listening Behind Hearing.” In Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, edited by Sander van Maas, 70–88. New York: Fordham University Press.

chapter 51a

Perception Christopher Peacocke

The perception of music involves the perception of relational properties, properties that involve the relations of the notes played, or sounds made, to things, events, and structures that go far beyond the local properties of pitch, timbre, and volume. The perception of relational properties is a sine qua non for the perception of music. So much is entirely uncontroversial and widely accepted. I will be arguing for three overarching theses about these perceived relational properties: (1) The class of relational properties involved in the perception of music is far more extensive and more interesting than is acknowledged in extant treatments. (2) This wider class of properties is a major theoretical resource, of significance for theories of perception, for aesthetics, for music criticism, and for music history. (3) These relational properties play an almost exhaustive role in explaining the significance of musical perception, to an extent found in no other extant art form. I will be distinguishing four different kinds of relational properties that can be perceived in music, and in the case of the less familiar kinds, I will say something about their aesthetic significance. I will be drawing some conclusions about the perception of agency in music, some conclusions about what is distinctive about the expressive power of music, about the relations between music and poetry, and about what is distinctive of live performance. I conclude with an explanation of why the perception of relational properties is so important to music.1

1030   Christopher Peacocke

Relational Properties, First Kind: Syntactic Properties and Pitch Relations One familiar class of relational properties that we perceive in listening to music is better understood than some others, and that class is reasonably described as comprised of certain syntactic properties and their pitch relations, characterized in a particular way. You hear a note maybe as the tonic, or as the seventh, of a certain tonal centre. You hear a certain passage as having a syntax described by a tree structure, and so forth. These are all relational properties of the individual sound events that make up the music that is heard. In the case of Example 51.1, at the end of sequence (a), our perceptual system expects a particular note, namely, the C above middle C. For most of us, there is no such perceptual expectation of any particular note at the end of sequence (b). In case (a), the notes are heard as standing in certain relations to an implied tonic. They are heard as standing in certain relations, without the hearer necessarily being able to conceptualize those relations. This parallels the perception of grammatical relations in a sentence. For example, there are two different ways to hear the structurally ambiguous sentence “Visiting relatives can be boring,” the different ways involving hearing the first word as part of the grammatical subject (as specifying an activity) or as an adjective qualifying “relatives.” These two ways of hearing the sentence can exist for a perceiver who entirely lacks the conceptual apparatus to characterize the difference. The difference between the cases is one of non-conceptual perceptual content. Similarly, in hearing metre, we perceive it in relation to a larger temporal structure. Listeners can perceive the difference between the stronger and the weaker beats in the Beatles’s “When I’m 64” (Example 51.2), again without conceptualizing the difference as such. Our capacity to hear in relation to much more local rhythms is especially important in atonal music. Sometimes when we may not be able to perceive in relation to the tone row in a piece of serial music, we hear structure in relation to recent rhythms, and perceive pitch relations of the notes at corresponding points in the local rhythmic structure.

Example 51.1  Diatonic (a) and Octatonic (b) scales.

Perception   1031

Example 51.2  The Beatles, “When I’m 64,” opening bars. © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.

In Example 51.3, Anton Webern exploits our ability to hear one passage in relation to other passages heard just a moment earlier. More generally, we can perceive the identity of relatively local relations, as when we perceive one passage as having the same internal relative pitch relations as some preceding passage, or (in some cases) a more complex, interesting relation than mere sameness. Structure must be perceptually accessible in such ways if it is to be musically and aesthetically significant. Styles that ignore this are doomed. The perceived local relations need not be those of pitch and rhythm, they can also be those of various kinds of timbre, even without the composer using the familiar division of the octave. For example, such perceived timbral relations are important in modern works such as Georg Friedrich Haas’s In Vain. We can also experience music as related to something that is absent, as in a famous passage near the conclusion of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben (Example 51.4b).

Example 51.3  Webern, Variations Op. 27, I, bars 37-46.

1032   Christopher Peacocke

Example 51.4a Schumann, Frauenliebe und Leben, I, bars 8–15.

We experience Example 51.4b, in particular bars 35–36, in relation to some notes that are absent—the notes of the descending seventh and rising sixth of bar 12 of the vocal line (on “tiefste”) in Example 51.4a. This is perception of relational properties built up on the fly, dependent upon relations to an earlier passage (as we have seen in Webern), rather than relations to a more permanent background of, for instance, tonal structures. It is important throughout that these are features of perception itself, rather than features of thought or imagination (for more on this contrast see Peacocke 2009). It is also important not to characterize the perception of Example 51.4b merely as one in which the earlier vocal line is remembered. After all, the vocal line could be remembered without the notes of the later passage being perceived as standing in certain relation to the vocal line. The point can be made by considering a partially parallel phenomenon in visual perception. In perceiving the Kanizsa triangle (Figure 51.1), we perceive the segments cut out of the three circles as containing the vertices of a triangle, even though there is no perceived line forming the line of the triangle, other than the straight boundaries of the dark area.

Perception   1033

Example 51.4b Schumann, Frauenliebe und Leben, VIII, closing bars.

Now it would not be sufficient for the very distinctive perception of the Kanizsa triangle that the subject perceives the three dark areas, and remembers that in an earlier presentation there was a triangle there. That memory could exist (even as a memory image) without the subject currently perceiving the cut-out segments as enclosing a triangle. The perception of something in relation to something else is never just a matter of either memory or imagination.2

1034   Christopher Peacocke

Figure 51.1  Kanizsa Triangle. “Creative Commons Kanizsa’s Triangle” by Fibonacci – Own work is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1788215

Relational Properties, Second Kind: Musical Features Heard Metaphorically-As Here are two examples of hearing some features of a passage of music metaphorically-as something else. In these examples, as elsewhere, the metaphor is part of the content of the hearing, and they are cases of genuine hearing, not merely as-if hearing or metaphorical hearing. In bars 29–36 of Franz Schubert’s lied “An Schwager Kronos” (see Example 51.5), we hear the music metaphorically-as the action of a horse working hard to move up a steep incline. A passage played by the first violin in Benjamin Britten’s Third String Quartet (see Example 51.6) is heard as a person struggling to do something, eventually stopping, and possibly expiring at the end of the movement. In this example, we can hear the passage as involving struggle even though there is no written text, as there is for the Schubert song. In these examples of hearing one thing metaphorically-as something else, the metaphor is exploited by the human perceptual system. The metaphorical mapping it involves is not consciously thought about. It is a hard and demanding matter to make

Perception   1035

Example 51.5  Schubert, “An Schwager Kronos,” D. 369, bars 29–36.

explicit the character of the mapping from one domain to another in any metaphor. Even the point that metaphor involves a certain kind of mapping is a matter of modest intellectual reflection, of a sort that is not required simply to be in a mental state with a content involving metaphor. Nor is the mapping that underlies the metaphor consciously perceptually represented (otherwise we would find it much easier to say what the mapping is than we actually do). The music may be experienced metaphorically-as mental events of one kind or another, or metaphorically-as physical events or states of affairs, or even, as in the earlier Schumann example metaphorically-as the absence of a beloved husband. Experiencing one thing metaphorically-as something else is not a special case of experiencing it as really being something else. Experiencing one thing metaphoricallyas something else is not a case of representing the world around you as being a certain way. Although experiencing one thing metaphorically-as something else has a rich intentional content, that content is not representational in the strong sense that there is such a thing as taking it at face value, that in being in the state it seems that the world is a certain way. Of course it does not seem to the hearer of the Schubert song that the piano notes are footfalls of the horse up a steep incline. But it would also be wrong to say that it seems, in having the experience, that there is a certain mapping between piano notes

1036   Christopher Peacocke

Example 51.6  Britten, String Quartet No. 3, V, bars 27-41, first violin part. © 2006 by Faber Music Ltd.

and footfalls. There is indeed a mapping between domains whenever one thing is experienced metaphorically-as something else, but in such cases the mapping is exploited, rather than explicitly entering into the content of the perceptual state. Experiencing one thing metaphorically-as something else is a sui generis event-type, not to be assimilated as some special subcase of perceptually representing the world as meeting a certain condition (for more, see Peacocke 2009). These relational properties provide a fundamental source of meaning, or as I would prefer to say, significance in music. Some writers urge the importance of the first class of relational properties I distinguish, but downplay the second class, asserting that it cannot provide any kind of basis for musical significance, and cannot have norms of correctness as instances of the first class of relational properties do. Diana Raffman is one such writer. Raffman allows that there are norms for assessing the correctness of what she calls “musical feelings,” the experience of such matters as beat strength, metrical stress, of prolongation—that is, the experience of relational properties of the first kind. By contrast, of what Raffman calls “a listener’s emotional response to a work,” Raffman says that we can no more call these mistaken than we can say that of “a diner who prefers swordfish to salmon . . . Emotional responses to music are neither correct nor i­ ncorrect— typical or atypical, perhaps, but not right or wrong” (Raffman 1993, 58, 59). I think the contrast Raffman aims to make here, once it is separated from the issue of preferences, cannot be sustained. It is true, in the case of relational properties of the first kind, that we can specify objective abstract structures, of metre, of phrase structures and their prolongations, for example, and that the correctness or incorrectness of what Raffman calls a “musical feeling” can be assessed against those abstract structures.

Perception   1037 But which abstract structure is the correct one for characterizing the work musically is a complex function of human perceptual psychology. Any musical work, considered as a sequence of sound-types, can be analysed in arbitrarily many ways, and assigned arbitrarily many abstract structures that fit it. The same is true of any language, including natural languages, considered simply as a set of well-formed sentences. What makes one grammatical analysis of a sentence rather than another the correct analysis is a matter of which grammar is psychologically real for the users of the language. Incorrect ­parsings—and incorrect hearings—of sentences of the language can be assessed against the abstract structural descriptions of the correct grammar. But what makes that grammar correct is a matter of which grammar is psychologically real—at the level of competence, of course, rather than the level of performance, as Noam Chomsky has always emphasized. It is a psychological truth about us that we do not have perceptual expectations that the metre will change every fourth bar, a psychological truth that we hear a piece of music with 6/8 rather than 3/4 metre, just as it is a psychological truth that we do not find “1004” the right thing to say as the item that follows 1000 in a sequence starting 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 . . . In every one of these cases, there is an abstract structure that specifies the way we perceive or think of the structures. But it is a mistake to think of what makes a structure the correct one as something independent of psychological facts about perception or understanding. The point I am making here is not some denial of the possibility of individual rulefollowing. On the contrary, I think that an individual’s grasp of a concept, including the concept of addition, consists in the individual’s tacit knowledge of the fundamental reference rule for the concept.3 The fundamental reference rule for a concept specifies the relation in which a thinker must stand to something for it to be the reference of the concept for that thinker. For example, the fundamental reference rule for a perceptual demonstrative concept that phone (as given in the thinker’s visual experience of a phone) is this: what makes something the reference of that demonstrative is that it is the phone perceived in that visual experience. What makes something fall within the extension of the observational concept square is that it is of the same shape as things are represented as being in perceptions of things as square. What makes a particular function the reference of x+2 is that it is the function f on natural numbers that conforms to the two principles that f(0)=2 and for any natural number n, f(the successor of n) = the successor of the successor of f(n). To grasp any one of these concepts is to have tacit knowledge of its reference rule. The tacit knowledge contributes to the explanation of facts about the conditions under which the thinker makes judgements involving the concept in question. This tacit knowledge is the relevant psychological fact verifying the general point I am making about a dependence on psychological reality. It is the content of the tacit knowledge—the fundamental reference rule itself—that determines the abstract ­ ­structure against which assessments of correctness or incorrectness of judgements or impressions involving that concept are to be assessed. Once we recognize the psychological grounding of the relational properties of the first kind that are perceived in music, the alleged differences in respect of objectivity

1038   Christopher Peacocke between the first and second kind disappear. In both cases, we are concerned with an interesting special case of the intersubjective. That certain features of a piece of music are experienced metaphorically-as sombre, or exuberant, or hopeful, are equally founded in the psychology of perceivers. When a piece of music or an utterance in language is perceived as having a certain property of the first kind, whether it really has that structure is assessed against an abstract characterization that is psychologically real. The same applies to the perception of syntactic structure in language, and to semantic properties of language too. When a feature of a piece of music is heard metaphorically-as a second property from an utterly different domain, we can equally assess whether that musical feature is really mapped on to that second property by the isomorphism between domains that is present in any case of metaphor. The relevant isomorphism in perceiving metaphorically-as is the one that is psychologically real and drawn upon (though of course drawn upon unconsciously) by the musically competent. Of course metaphorical content is of a distinctive kind, different from the structural contents of experience when relational properties of the first kind are experienced. But what the correctness or incorrectness of a musical claim (or even an individual perceptual experience) rests upon in each case is ultimately founded in facts about the psychological reality of hearers, corresponding to a level of competence. Misconstrual of a note as coming on a strong, rather than a weak, beat, and misconstrual of a passage as jaunty, rather than as anxious, are both cases of construal that do not fit in with the way the piece is perceived by the competent. Just as an utterance can be heard in more than one way, but one way is best given the total context of utterance and its production, so a passage of music may be heard in more than one way—but one of the ways can be better, again given the total context of the piece of music in which the passage is embedded. The notion of competence is certainly looser and richer in the musical than the linguistic case. Differences between competence and performance in the linguistic case are characteristically identified as explained by memory errors, computational limitations, and the like, whereas the status of something as a mishearing of the metaphorical content of a passage must appeal to something richer. All that matters for the present point is that the classification of perceptions of relational properties of both the first and the second kind, in respect of what makes them correct, must equally appeal to the contingent psychological structures of listeners. Those contingent psychological structures also involve various abstract structures. That point holds equally for the perception of syntactic structure and for hearing metaphorically-as. The status of the emotion or other content that can be heard in a piece of music is sharply to be distinguished from preferences for various styles and pieces of music, and from emotional reaction to a piece of music, here distinguished from the emotion heard in the music. Two experienced listeners can fully hear and appreciate the emotional content of a piece of music, while one likes and prefers it to other music, and the other does not (see Levinson 1994). (For example, many experienced listeners differ in this way in their reactions to Anton Bruckner’s music.) This person-relativity of preference can be present even when we hold constant what is heard, metaphorically, in the music. And, to add the obvious point, there can be variation in individual preferences for some

Perception   1039 r­ elational properties of the first kind over others. This fact by itself cannot ground anything about the status of those properties. Second, the emotional response to a work—a description Raffman uses often (as evidenced in the quotes above)—is not the same as what is heard in the music. Emotional responses may vary widely with individual histories—the music may be entirely contingently associated with happy or with unhappy events in different people—consistent with the music’s possessing a constant metaphorical content that is not subject to such wide, individual variation. Of course, the intentional content given by what a piece of music is heard metaphorically-as need not involve emotion or subjectivity at all. That is precisely a distinctive feature of Claude Debussy’s music described (though not by Debussy) as impressionistic (see Peacocke 2014). There may still be highly subjective, variable preferences between hearers in respect of whether they like or admire that music, and also in respect of their emotional response to the music. Once we make these points about the first and second kinds of relational properties, it becomes implausible that syntax and pitch relations are the entire source of musical significance. Once we have a good account of the other, not purely syntactic, sources of music significance, there is no need to think that such significance is restricted to cases in which we find norms of the type associated with syntactic properties and their ilk.

Relational Properties, Third Kind: The Perception of Music as Action We perceive some events not as mere events, but as actions, as exercises of agency. This applies both to visual and to auditory perception. Even in very young infants, there is a perceptual distinction between mere physical motion, and those events that are actions. We as adults perceive a particular bodily movement as a reaching, or as play, or as dance, or as an emotional expression. Prima facie, this is a distinction in perception, not just in thought (see Carey 2009, 157–214). A linguistic utterance is commonly perceived as an action. A particular musical event is also perceived as an action, as an exercise of agency. The successive parts of a theme played by an instrument are heard as a continuation of the same action. We hear a piece of music as an action, possibly collective action, even when we do not perceive the performer in any other way. (Maybe this is a way of finding some truth in Schopenhauer’s view that music is a striving in which nothing observable strives [Schopenhauer 1969, 2:447–457; cf. Scruton 1997, 49].) To say that the music is perceived as action is not of course to say that this perception is correct. It may be the case that a sequence of sounds is randomly generated by a computer, and that we know this to be so. Yet still we hear the sounds as an action, while knowing that it is not. The phenomenology of music is a phenomenology of action. This initial point is to be distinguished from the point that sometimes we need to mention action in the specification of what the music is heard

1040   Christopher Peacocke metaphorically-as. We hear the musical events themselves as actions whether or not we hear action in the content of the music. Our everyday, pretheoretical description of passages of music is shot through with implications of agency. For example, we say that one passage responds to another as in the opening of the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, where the piano gives a gentle and calming response to the severe and solemn orchestral opening (see Example 51.7). In another example, almost everyone hears the entry of the second violin soloist in the slow movement of J. S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto as imitating the actions of the first soloist, who in turn supports the second as the movement continues (see Example 51.8).

Example 51.7  Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 4, II, opening bars.

Perception   1041

Example 51.8  J. S. Bach, Double Violin Concerto, II, opening bars.

Though no words are involved in the actual music at all, we hear the trumpet in Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question as querying something about the serenity and beauty of the opening string passage (see Example 51.9). Questions come in various kinds, from simple requests for information to something querying a whole worldview or attitude. We hear the trumpet part in Ives’s piece as a more confrontational, sceptical questioning. It is part of the content of the music that by the end of the piece, no answer has been given to this critical questioning. At one point in the music, we hear the flutes and a clarinet mocking the question (at the first place

1042   Christopher Peacocke

Example 51.9 Ives, The Unanswered Question, opening bars.

Perception   1043 marked “Allegro” in their parts). Of course, mocking is also an exercise of a quite specific kind of agency. In a phenomenon Roger Scruton notes, we sometimes “hear a single melody jump” from one instrument or set of instruments to another as in Johannes Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto (see Example 51.10). Scruton (1997, 19) says this is an instance of “virtual causality,” “as though indifferent to the world of physical causes.” I think rather that we hear this passage as cooperative action, the piano in each phrase concluding in each phrase what the strings have begun. Cooperative action is something that is firmly in the world of physical and real causes. The experience of agency also accounts for another piece of phenomenology to which Scruton is sensitive, namely rhythm, which he also describes in terms of “virtual causality,” “life conscious of itself as life,” and beats “bring[ing] each other into being.” Here is the full quotation: To hear rhythm is to hear a kind of animation. Rhythm involves the same virtual causality that we find in melody. Beats do not follow one another; they bring each other into being, respond to one another, and breathe with a common life. The organization of sounds I have described is not a possible organization of sounds, construed as material objects. But it is an organization of mental objects, and one that we know intimately from our own inner experience: the experience of life conscious of itself as life.  (Scruton 1997, 35)

There is real insight in these statements, but I suggest that the proper elucidation of the phenomenon motivating Scruton’s description should proceed in terms of the perception of agency. We perceive the later beats and notes as instantiating a certain pattern. We also perceive that pattern as intentionally produced under some description that specifies that pattern. This is what is involved in our perceiving individual components of the rhythm as breathing “with a common life.” In my view, the talk of virtual causality in Scruton should be replaced with talk of a perceived common intentional origin to the successive parts of the musical event, an intention whose fulfilment requires the structural relations and successions perceived in the actual music.4 We should also distinguish very sharply between the perception of the performance of a piece of music as an action, on the one hand, and, on the other, an experience as of an exercise of agency within the experienced intentional content of the music, as specified by what it is heard metaphorically-as. Sometime we hear agency, and exercises of agency, in this intentional content. We hear the music in the last movement of Britten’s Third String Quartet metaphorically-as someone struggling, with great difficulty, to do something. Many people hear the famous beklemmt passage in Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat Major, Op. 130 metaphorically-as someone expressing emotion. The agent represented in the intentional content of the music—who is of course not a real agent, but is rather an intentional object too, the “expressing subject or agent” if you will—is sharply to be distinguished from the real agent of the music. In some of Debussy’s impressionist piano music, for instance a prelude such as Le Vent dans la plaine, we hear the

1044   Christopher Peacocke

Example 51.10  Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 2, IV, bars 340–346.

Perception   1045 ­ erformance as an exercise of agency. But there is no agent or subject in the intentional p content of the music itself. The music is not heard metaphorically-as an exercise of agency or an agent’s expressing or experiencing something. The objective state of affairs heard in the music may itself have emotional significance, but, once again, that is different from hearing the emotion in the music (for more, see Peacocke 2014). We can sometimes hear in the music, of a single performer, in a single piece of music, a conflict or struggle between two agencies. This can occur even when there is no text or relevant descriptive title to the piece. We can, for example, hear the conflict in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fugue in D flat Major, Op. 87 no. 15, where two different agents or forces are heard here in the music itself. One of them, expressed by the major chords, wins. We cannot describe this by saying that the conflict is between one of the pianist’s hands and her other hand. It is not given in perception of the music which hands are used, and in fact both are used in each passage on each side of the conflict. Even for music performed by the human voice, we can draw the distinction between hearing the music as action, and the intentional content of the music that involves an expressing subject in that content. Music produced by the human voice is normally perceived as action. It does not follow that there is an agent in the intentional content of the music, in what the music is heard metaphorically-as. Again, this is two-way independence. A folk song is heard as action, but if the text is in the third person, there may be no expressing subject in what the music is heard metaphorically-as. The voices in Debussy’s Nocturnes are heard as voices, their music is heard as action; but, as in much of Debussy’s music, there is no expressing subject in the intentional content. In summary of this particular point: when there is an agent or subject in the intentional content of the music, that is something additional to the musical event being perceived as an action. The fact that music is perceived as action seems to me to be incompatible with Scruton’s thesis that all that matters in the perception of the music is given by what he calls an “acousmatic” conception, on which all that matters is the pure sound (pitch, timbre, volume), independently of what causes it. Scruton writes, “The one who hears these sounds experiences all that he needs, if he is to understand them as music. He does not have to identify their cause in order to hear them as they should be heard. They provide the complete object of his aural attention” (Scruton 1997, 3). Again: “The phenomenal distinctness of sounds makes it possible to imagine a situation in which a sound is separated entirely from its cause, and heard acousmatically, as a pure process. This is indeed what happens in the music room” (12–13; the music room is Scruton’s expository device for emphasizing acousmatic hearing). In perceiving an event as an action, our perceptual system is, in the nature of the case, representing the event as having a certain kind of cause.5 The fact that music is experienced as action gives an additional level at which the phenomenon of experiencing one thing metaphorically-as something else can occur. One can experience the action of producing the music metaphorically-as something else—knocking, sliding, climbing. There is no space here for further discussion, but this is clearly a further resource in providing an adequate phenomenology of musical experience.6

1046   Christopher Peacocke

Aesthetic Significance of the Perception of First Three Kinds of Relational Properties The aesthetic significance of the perception of relational properties in music is a vast topic. It ranges from the particular kinds of effects and possibilities for expression made available to the composer by the perception of relational properties in music, to issues about the relations between the perception of music and the appreciation of other art forms. I give three examples of points of these respective kinds. First, the ability to hear a passage of music as having various relational properties underlies cases in which the same motif or theme, used in a later situation in, say, an opera, transforms our understanding of the earlier situation—and possibly of the later one too. A perceived musical similarity can prompt a deeper understanding of the similarity of two situations represented in the opera. The perceived similarity does not state what the similarity of situation is, though the music may, by its own character, hint at it (or show it) in one or more ways. There are myriad examples of this throughout the Western operatic tradition, but a particularly striking case is in Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. In an earlier scene (Act 1, scene 2), Lulu is with her then-husband, the painter, and the music sung at that earlier time by the painter-husband is the same—and so to begin with are the very words—as in a later scene (Act 3, scene 2) when Lulu sings them, now as a prostitute to her client. Berg specifies that this client is to be acted by the same singer as earlier acted the part of the painter. In the earlier scene, Lulu had commented that the painter was “blind” to her. The implication is that he was as out of touch with her as a person as the client is to the prostitute as a person. One of the effects of the similarity being perceived, rather than stated, is that it activates, perceptually, all those mechanisms invoked in ordinary interpersonal, perceptual interaction in coming to understand another person in real time. This can operate below the level of conscious propositional reasoning that starts from premisses about similarity learned from an utterance. The perceived similarity has effects in consciousness that can be variously, and both, chilling and illuminating. It draws on the same kind of affect that can be present in our ordinary conversation with another person, or in observation of the interaction between two other persons. Second, the composer, as opposed to the novelist or poet, is faced with a very distinctive combination of freedom and constraint. The composer is not constrained in a musical enterprise by the concepts expressible in a given language, for meaning in music has its primary source in what the music is heard metaphorically-as. This is not something that involves linguistic or conventional meaning, and the composer is correspondingly unconstrained by any range of meanings associated with the elements of a linguistic or symbolic system. But the composer certainly is constrained by the brute psychological facts about what humans can, and cannot, hear the music metaphorically-as. On these issues I diverge from the suggestion formulated by Ian Cross, when he writes, “it can be suggested that language and music are at the opposite poles of a

Perception   1047 c­ ommunicative continuum, almost meeting in the middle somewhere near poetry” (Cross 2005, 35). Conventional linguistic meaning and experienced metaphorical content are two utterly different phenomena, differing in kind, and not merely in degree. No adjustment of degree of some parameter or other will gradually result in a transition from one to the other. What is special about the experience of poetry is not that it occupies a middle position on a spectrum. It is rather that, in its distinctive exploitation of both local and larger-scale syntactic structure, poetry relies upon the very same phenomenon of mentally representing one thing metaphorically-as something else that we find in the perception of music. We may, for example, experience the sudden failure of an apparently established syntactic pattern metaphorically-as something distinctive, something fixed by the sense of the words in the poem. I suggest that the notion of experiencing one thing—in this case, larger-scale syntactic structure—metaphorically-as something else is the notion we need to explicate the significance of some of the insights of the critic and poetic analyst Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Forrest-Thomson discusses part of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94: They that have power to hurt and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

Forrest-Thomson writes of the verse’s subjects, Definitely not nice people, we feel, but why? Because we cannot but be aware of the ambivalence built up around the verse which speaks of them; at least they as a subject for the poet are actively powerful enough to have produced this masterly equivocation of syntax and rhythm which gives with one hand while it takes away with the next; which cuts the reader’s feet from under him even while he thought he had found a secure foothold in the formal pattern.  (Forrest-Thomson 1978, 9)

The sudden change in pattern in the fourth line, for instance, is experienced by the listener or reader metaphorically-as a transition from actions and behaviour externally described, to the character of these self-controlled, self-contained people. As ForrestThomson writes, the words used in conventionally stressed places “will both work downwards to determine which formal patterns dominate, and move upwards to produce a thematic synthesis from the way in which they mesh with the level of meaning” (Forrest-Thomson 1978, 16). Here, the “formal patterns” are certain broadly syntactic patterns. I suggest that the “meshing with” relation Forrest-Thomson mentions should in a wide range of cases be understood as the relation of generating in the reader/hearer an experience of the syntactic pattern metaphorically-as something else, something determined by the level of the meaning of the words in the poem. A comparison of the operation of music and poetry would obviously need more extended discussion; but I suggest that it would need to recognize this common exploitation, in the relevant experience itself, of metaphorically representing one thing as something else, as a starting point.

1048   Christopher Peacocke Finally in a lecture originally given in 1945, T. S. Eliot described one of the functions of poetry by writing: “there is always the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility” (Eliot 1954, 18).7 The phenomenon of the unnamed emotion or mental state that is nevertheless heard in the content is par excellence a phenomenon in music. We can describe in words the emotion of Wotan when surrounding his daughter Brünnhilde with fire, so that only a hero will be able to reach her. It is the emotional combination of pride in his daughter, identification with her values and fierce independence, love, determination to protect, sadness at a farewell—that is a fair description, but it says nothing about what it is like to experience that complex emotional state. You can understand the complex description without knowing what it would be like to experience the state so described. But if you hear and appreciate Richard Wagner’s music in that scene from Die Walküre, you experience it metaphorically-as that complex emotion from the inside. That is not the same as having the complex emotion itself, but it both gives some acquaintance with what it is like to experience that complex emotion, and it certainly goes far beyond merely understanding the longish linguistic description of the complex emotion, and arguably beyond experiencing a theatrical representation of the scene with only words and no music. What the music is experienced metaphorically-as is the subjective complex emotion itself. To give another highly familiar example, the same applies to the complex emotion of grief, loss, and striving after reconciliation which is heard in both the violin solo and the voice in the aria “Erbarme Dich” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, a case so brilliantly analysed by Naomi Cumming (1997).8 Some mental states S have this property: it is in the nature of state S that to be in S involves knowing what it is like to be in some other state Sʹ. In such cases, we can say that state S subjectively engages state Sʹ. An obvious example is subjective imagination. To imagine seeing a square, to imagine hearing a clarinet, or to imagine walking upstairs, you must know what it is like to see a square, to hear a clarinet, or to walk upstairs. Experiencing some feature of music, or of anything else, metaphorically-as some subjective state from the standpoint of its subject similarly involves knowing what it is like to be in that state. When one state S subjectively engages another state Sʹ, one way to get a person to know what it is like to be in Sʹ is to bring it about that the person is in state S. That is one of the powers of music. There are no strange or mysterious causal powers being postulated in this description. Any case of experiencing something m ­ etaphorically-as some mental event or state, from the standpoint of the subject of that event or state, involves as a constitutive matter knowing what it is like to enjoy or to experience that state. It is an empirical question what can cause us to have such experiences, but such mechanisms certainly exist, since we are sometimes caused to be in such states. It is hard to overstate the importance of these phenomena, not only aesthetically, but also for other dimensions of musical works. Because it is an experience rather than a judgement, hearing something metaphorically-as the experience of some emotion, whether complex or simple, is not a state or event the subject has reasons for being in, or reasons for enjoying. Although underlain by complex computational processes, hearing

Perception   1049 something metaphorically-as something just happens to the conscious subject in a given context, and may cut through the subject’s beliefs or prejudices. We can hear Wozzeck’s sufferings in the music independently of our beliefs about the society of the time depicted in the opera, and that hearing can alter those beliefs. The perceptual, rather than the judgemental, character of experiencing the music metaphorically-as something else is important for its political, as well as for its aesthetic, power. Certain musical features of a song may be heard as the exuberance of suddenly genuinely belonging to a wider community. Under apartheid in South Africa, songs of struggle were banned from the radio stations of the nationalist South African government. Young blacks said that those songs “broke the sense of non-belonging” for them (see Mohare 2017). The freedom anthems of the civil rights movement in the United States had the same powerful effect. These points about political applications of course apply as much to the named emotions as well as the currently unnamed emotions. Art may express a value we cannot yet properly articulate explicitly in language.9 Great poetry, including some of T. S. Eliot’s, can achieve such effects too (and sometimes by means that overlap with syntactic features of music—a topic for another occasion). But there is a special feature of the musical case. As the scene of Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde illustrates, when we hear certain features of the music metaphorically-as the complex emotions of Wotan, the progress of syntactic features of the music in real time is experienced metaphorically-as the progress of his complex emotions, from the inside. There are of course many parallels here with the power of theatrical representation outside opera. T. S. Eliot wrote of what “we have experienced, but have no words for” (Eliot 1954, 18). Both music and poetry are capable of expressing emotions and mental states that we have not experienced, and may or may not have words for. What music is heard metaphorically-as, when it is heard metaphorically-as the experience of an emotion or other conscious state from the point of view of its subject, may or may not be something that is named in the language, or in any current language. There is no such linguistic restriction on what the music may be experienced metaphorically-as. There may be no single word in any language for the emotional identification with the whole of humanity that is expressed in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Relational Properties, Fourth Kind: The Relations of Live Performance All of the points I have been making so far in this chapter apply to the experience of a single individual listening to the recording of a performance. Now I turn to the significance of live performance, to the relations of performer to audience. This involves a very different kind of relational property. Live performance of a piece of music by one or more musicians to an audience of one or more listeners is a paradigm example of the phenomenon of joint attention. This point

1050   Christopher Peacocke has also been noted by Tom Cochrane (2009). The musical performance is the object of joint attention of both performers and audience. The attention has the distinctive overtness and publicity of cases of joint attention. If we formulate the case in terms of Jon Barwise’s self-involving situations, we can say that a situation E of live musical performance m of a work has these characteristics, where I use “:” for the relation between a situation and what holds in it: E: the performers attend to m E: the audience attends to m E: the performers are aware of E E: the audience is aware of E.

As often (and possibly always) in cases of joint attention, we can describe the case without self-involving situations. We can say that the awareness of the audience is a self­referential one: this awareness is one in which the performers are attending to this musical performance m, we are attending to m, and the performers are aware of this awareness

(see Barwise 1988; Peacocke 2005). Though joint attention is certainly possible for a group of the blind listening to a performance, for the sighted, vision plays an important part not only in facilitating and supporting joint attention, but even in appreciation and evaluation of the performance (Tsay 2013). Such joint attention certainly involves awareness of a relational property of the token musical event. That the event is an object of a certain kind of joint attention is a relational property of the event. It is, however, a relational property of a rather different kind from those we were discussing earlier. The earlier relational properties were, in their very natures, properties that only musical events could have: properties of standing in certain musical syntactical relations; properties of standing in certain metaphorical relations, in virtue of their musical syntactic properties, to various psychological states or other state of affairs, and so forth. But these relational properties of being the object of a certain kind of joint attention are shared by other public, wholly overt, events that are non-musical events. They are shared by utterances in language, by some other non­linguistic actions, and of course shared by performances of non-musical works in a ­theatre. All the same, the relational property of being the object of joint attention is something on which we need to draw in characterizing some distinctions in the perception of music, and in elucidating their aesthetic significance. There are several degrees to which an audience may be involved in a musical performance. At one extreme, there may be no audience distinct from the performer or performers at all. A group of monks in a medieval monastery may be singing a chant in a religious service, or singing the funeral chant “In Paradisum” at the burial of one of their brothers, in which case there is no perceived audience distinct from the performers; and it is also obvious to all involved that this is so. The music in such cases may have expressive properties (whose essentially non-religious character caused Augustine [1961,

Perception   1051 238–239] such concern). The music can also serve as unifying joint action; it can serve expressive functions for the performers and for the institutions in which they participate; and it can be of value to the performers themselves to take part in, and to enjoy, such exercises of joint action and the joint attention they involve. Much music, both in the East and West, is intended to be performed live for an audience who is present to the performers, and obviously so. This is the most common case, but there are also further degrees to which the audience may be involved. Sometimes some section of the music is meant to express a reaction to the events that have already been represented in music, as in the chorales in Bach’s St Matthew Passion. We cannot begin to account for the effect of the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion unless we mention the joint attention, and joint conscious emotional reaction, to the events represented in that work’s earlier sections. The same applies to the chorales at the end of Bach’s cantatas. Sometimes the audience or congregation is meant to join in the singing. The texts set here characteristically set something that express what we—first-person ­plural—are meant to be experiencing emotionally. Sometimes the musical work itself addresses the audience not in the first-person plural, but in the second-person plural. This is what happens when the Ringmaster at the start of Berg’s opera Lulu addresses the audience, says that humans are like a menagerie of animals, and points to the audience, who are meant to get the message: “I’m singing about you.” The audience has not begun to understand the opera if they do not appreciate this. When an audience distinct from the performers is involved in the joint attention generated by a musical performance, aesthetic possibilities open up for the music that are unavailable when there is no audience distinct from the performers. The music itself, for instance, may indicate that things are not as the expressing subject, the agent in the intentional content of the music, represents them to be. The third time we hear the father reassuring the child in his arms that there is no Erlking, that there is only mist among the trees, the music is in the minor mode and is more urgent than before, giving the lie to his words. In an operatic aria, a good composer can show in the music in one way or another that the character singing is self-deceived in his or her emotions. The orchestration may show that things are more serious that the text represents them as being. The presence of trumpets in the orchestra in Così fan tutte indicates that the whole drama may have more significance for human life than the apparently light, comedic text may indicate. The trumpets, in high register, are present not only in the military music “Bella vita militar!”: they are also present in the orchestral accompaniment for Fiordiligi’s aria “Come scoglio.” Such divergences between the emotion expressed in the words and what is heard in some of the music would not be possible in cases in which the performers, the expressing subject in the intentional content of the music, and the audience are all identical, and known to be, as in the case of the monks’ chant for themselves. The preceding observations concern the compositional possibilities when there is an audience. The interaction between performers and a live audience of whose ongoing reactions in real time the performer or performers are aware also makes a huge difference to the performance that is given, and, as a matter of mutual interaction and joint attention, to the value the audience attributes to the performance. The pianist Alfred Brendel writes, of performing in the recording studio, “the player sits as though

1052   Christopher Peacocke in a tomb,” and adds that even if the player in the studio “possesses the important gift of playing there with all the tension of the concert platform, and however vividly he might imagine the presence of the public, it is still imaginary. There is no direct exchange” (Brendel  1990, 202–203). None of this can be adequately characterized unless we mention that in a live performance that is responsive to audience reaction, we have a case of wholly overt joint attention. It is not a matter of the performers and the audience separately reacting to signals of which it is left open whether the other side is aware of them.

Concluding Reflections There are many issues to take further if what I have been saying is along the right lines. I mention two. First, the four kinds of relational property I have identified as important in the perception of music are not at all exhaustive. One very important further kind has as instances the relational properties we perceive in music when we hear it as the music of a dance. Such relational properties are sometimes present in the most surprising places; they further enhance the possibilities open to a composer; and it is obvious that we ought to try to understand the phenomenon better, at all levels—constitutive, musicological, psychological, and aesthetic. Nor is perceptual consciousness the only species of consciousness relevant to our appreciation of music, though it is certainly the most fundamental kind. A range of other conscious states may be crucial to understanding and fully appreciating a piece of music. These other states can include conscious knowledge of the cultural significance of a musical style or of particular musical features; knowledge of the social and political history of some theme or phrase; conscious memory of the role of the theme earlier in the musical work in question; and so forth. The conscious states involved in understanding and appreciating music are multilayered and interleaved with one another. These conscious states and their various roles are obviously equally worthy of investigation. It is, however, a plausible hypothesis that perceptual consciousness of music is fundamental. The other conscious states variously involved in understanding and appreciating music concern in one way or another the music as given in perceptual consciousness. Second, there is a why-question in this area that is crying out to be answered. Why is the perception of relational properties apparently so crucial in music? After all, we certainly perceive relational properties in every other art form. Part of the answer is that in music unaccompanied by any text, there is no independent level of conventional linguistic meaning on which to build. Even in an art form such as depictive painting, where there is also plausibly nothing analogous to linguistic convention on which to build, there are complex—and of course much-discussed—connections between a scene depicted and its depiction. Some theorists characterize the connection in terms of similarities of the perceptual experience of the scene and the perceptual experience of the depiction, some in terms of similarities of certain kinds of

Perception   1053 objective projection. Whatever the correct answer, it is clear that there is a relation in the case of depiction that has no entirely general analogue in the case in which a subject hears some feature of the music metaphorically-as something else. The composer needs to rely on the perception of relational properties to achieve aesthetic significance for reasons, and to an extent, that almost no other art form does. Even in the case of dance, where there are no prior linguistic conventions on which to draw, the choreographer is often representing human situations by means of the bodily actions of humans in those situations. The composer is at most gently tethered in his possibilities by the limited connection between the perception of a sound and the perception of the human voice. The tethering is so gentle that in a huge range of musical works, connections with perception of the human voice play no part at all. For the composer, I am inclined to say, the perception of relational properties is not merely a sine qua non for aesthetic significance. It is also, for fundamental reasons, very nearly the composer’s only such resource.

Notes 1. I have been helped by discussions of this material in 2014–15 with audiences at Columbia University, at Bence Nanay’s seminar in Antwerp University, at James Grant’s and Andrew Huddleston’s seminar at Oxford University, at a Columbia/NYU/London Institute of Philosophy Discussion Group, and at a colloquium at Bryn Mawr; more recently I have been helped by the comments of the editors of this volume, together with those of an anonymous referee. At the July 2015 meeting of the Royal Musical Association’s Music and Philosophy Study Group, my commentator was Nicholas Cook, and I am very pleased that his excellent observations have been included in this volume. I have left my substantive claims in place so that his piece is fully engaged with the present text. 2. I thus think that Charles Rosen underdescribes the perceptual impact of the second passage in Example 51.4 by mentioning only memory of the earlier vocal line in his discussion (Rosen 1996, 115). 3. See Peacocke 2008 for general discussion, and Peacocke 2012 for the application against neo-Wittgensteinian treatments of rule-following. 4. I would say the same about Francis Wolff ’s (2015) view, according to which we experience the earlier notes of a musical phrase as causing the later ones. 5. In my view, the perception of features of a musical event that are not purely acousmatic are also important in characterizing different kinds of musical style. See again Peacocke 2014. 6. This resource of the perception of music as action provides one sympathetic way of understanding John Sloboda when he writes, “Dynamic awareness of music involves reading the music as an embodiment of something else, and my proposal for that something else is, broadly, the physical world in motion, including that very special subclass of moving objects, the living organism” (Sloboda 2005, 170). 7. I agree with Craig Raine’s comment that “Eliot is interested in the emotion that is ‘­inexpressible’—not just here, but everywhere” (Raine 2006, 135). 8. “The codification of grief and striving, then, may help in identifying the components of what is heard, but the performance of these gestures in their context creates an emotion specific to the moment, individuated through nuances of movement that are not captured

1054   Christopher Peacocke in a category. In giving utterance to this state and eliciting the hearer’s recognition, it can actually provoke a moment of psychological ‘insight’, a recognition in the self of something that has not been named” (Cumming 1997, 23). 9. It is plausible that if you experience some feature of music metaphorically-as a particular emotion from the inside, you will be imagining that emotion from the inside. If this is ­correct, it does give a significant role for imagination in the appreciation of music. But it does not at all undermine the distinction between perceiving one thing metaphorically-as something else, and merely imagining one thing metaphorically-as something else. Rather, the distinct state of perceiving one thing metaphorically as something else has imagination as a component.

Works Cited Augustine. 1961. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Barwise, Jon. 1988. “Three Views of Common Knowledge.” In Proceedings of the Second Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, edited by Moshe Y. Vardi, 365–379. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Brendel, Alfred. 1990. Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts. London: Robson. Carey, Susan. 2009. The Origin of Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press. Cochrane, Tom. 2009. “Joint Attention to Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (January): 59–73. Cross, Ian. 2005. “Music and Meaning, Ambiguity and Evolution.” In Musical Communication, edited by Dorothy Miell, Raymond MacDonald, and David J. Hargreaves, 27–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cumming, Naomi. 1997. “The Subjectivities of ‘Erbarme Dich’.” Musical Analysis 16, no. 1 (March): 5–44. Eliot, T. S. 1954. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber. Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. 1978. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Levinson, Jerrold. 1994. “Being Realistic about Aesthetic Properties.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 3 (Summer): 351–354. Mohare, Thabiso. 2017. “The Sound of Soweto: Part Two.” Podcast. BBC World Service. May 24, 2017. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p053v5j3 Peacocke, Christopher. 2009. “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 3 (July): 257–275. Peacocke, Christopher. 2005. “Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge.” In Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, edited by Naomi Eilan, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes Roessler, 298–323. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 2008. Truly Understood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, Christopher. 2012. “Understanding and Rule-Following.” In Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes from Crispin Wright, edited by Annalisa Coliva, 49–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Perception   1055 Peacocke, Christopher. 2014. “Musical Style and the Philosophy of Mind.” In The Philosophy of Creativity, edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, 82–102. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raffman, Diana. 1993. Language, Music, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Raine, Craig. 2006. T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, Charles. 1996. The Romantic Generation. London: Harper-Collins. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sloboda, John. 2005. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsay, Chia-Jung. 2013. “Sight Over Sound in the Judgment of Music Performance.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (36): 14580–14585. Wolff, Francis. 2015. Pourquoi la musique? Paris: Fayard.

CHAPTER 51b

R esponse to Chr istopher Peacock e: Perception Nicholas Cook

Eduard Hanslick was the first person to hold a chair in the aesthetics of music, and the discipline he was responsible for institutionalizing was based from the start on exclusion. He didn’t say that music couldn’t depict events or express emotions, as is so often claimed: he said that such things lay outside the proper purview of aesthetics. And this exclusionary orientation has more or less remained in place ever since. For example, when Roger Scruton (2014, 151) writes that “In disco music . . . the focus is entirely on repeated rhythmical figures, often synthesized digitally and without any clear musical performance, in which musical arousal is brought to an instant narcissistic climax and thereafter repeated,” he is not simply saying he doesn’t like it: he is saying that the “quick fix” culture “in which the I–You intentionality is no longer the focus of attention” does not warrant serious aesthetic engagement. In other words, his claim represents an act of exclusion. Andrew Kania (2006), by contrast, embraces rock, but on terms that stress its ontological affinities with the classical tradition and classical aesthetics: the musical work is now defined by the track rather than the score, but otherwise it is basically business as usual. In bringing rock within the fold, Kania draws a boundary between it and what lies outside. Meanwhile changes in the production, dissemination, consumption, and curation of music have turned what I’ll call aesthetic music, however defined, into just one cultural practice among many. Musicologists have attempted to come to terms with the multifarious cultural practices that occupy the place that was once simply called “music,” and doing so has led them to new insights into the classical masterworks too. But they have done so in their usual, muddling way, and so, for a musicologist, it seems reasonable to look to philosophers of music for more principled approaches to understanding the unmanageable variety of musical practices in today’s world. The question this poses is how far it is possible to be both principled and inclusive.

1058   Nicholas Cook In this context it is a pleasure to welcome an ambitious attempt to encompass the diversity of music’s modes of existence and meaning without compromising on the rigorous and systematic philosophical thought you would expect from Christopher Peacocke. He offers an explanatory framework that encompasses the familiar while avoiding limiting assumptions of historical style. He finds room in his relational model for the structuralist approaches that held such sway in anglophone music theory and aesthetics, and sometimes in composition too, from the middle of the last century. Indeed he uses these approaches to introduce the basic idea of relationality: that things have meaning—or as he prefers to say significance (p. 1036)—not in themselves but in relation to other things. But he does not restrict such relationships to structure, instead setting out three other kinds of relational properties, involving what he calls metaphorical hearing-as, agency, and live performance. And what is more, he sees no reason to stop there: these four kinds of relational property, he says, “are not at all exhaustive” (p. 1052), and to make the point he thinks briefly about dance. I applaud this: it seems to me a basic principle of music that there is always one more way in which it can make sense, and one more way to make sense of it. So I’ll accept Peacocke’s implied invitation to think of other aspects of music that might be accommodated within his relational framework, reflecting a number of recent and not-so-recent developments across music studies.

Topics and Reference For one thing, there is an obvious parallel between Peacocke’s relational framework and semiotics, predicated as it is in the idea of signification grounded in difference. As much as relationality, this is a concept with an unlimited range of reference, and I think it’s unfortunate that, within music theory, the idea of semiotics was so comprehensively hijacked by approaches that essentially repackaged familiar structuralist insights in different terms: if we had thought less in terms of Jean Molino on textual interpretation and more in terms of Umberto Eco on blue jeans, we might have gained more and newer insights. More recently, however, the term has become increasingly associated with the use of conventionalized musical figures familiar from the sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, though actually this is a far more widespread phenomenon both within and beyond that classical tradition. I am talking about so-called topics, that is, the use in works of one genre of musical figures and performance styles associated with another, the consequence of which is a transfer of connotations. Heard in light of these conventions, a piano sonata can turn into a journey from the church to the opera house to the countryside, ending with the sound of Turkish janissary bands. Wye Jamison Allanbrook refers to music heard this way as a “miniature theatre of human gestures and actions” (Allanbrook 1983, 6). Of course this can all be seen as falling into Peacocke’s second kind of relational property, because it involves hearing particular piano sounds “as” choral or operatic singing,

Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception   1059 orchestras, or drums and cymbals: in other words, it is metaphorical. But I mention it because it allows me to make three points. First, it is a particularly clear example of how metaphorical hearing-as becomes conventionalized so that patterns of hearing become bearers of tradition. The iconic dimensions of the association between piano sounds and hunting horns are, after all, limited, and the rest is supplied in the symbolic domain, that is to say, through history. The second point follows on from this: I might want to nuance the distinction Peacocke draws between visual depiction and “the case in which a subject hears some feature of the music metaphorically-as something else” (p. 1053). Depictive paintings involve iconic representation, to be sure, but they are to a greater or lesser—and always irreducible—degree stylized or conventionalized. In other words, like the conventionalized musical representation through which Mozart depicts musical scenes, painting involves a combination of iconic and symbolic representation. There is of course an issue of the relative prominence of particular forms of reference in different art forms, but topics are representative of many kinds of musical signification that were lost from view as a consequence of the twentieth-century fixation with musical structure. The third point is that topics nicely illustrate the way in which history, performance, and listening work together. I won’t go into detail on how present-day fortepianists are developing musicologically based ideas of topics and rhetoric into performance practices that create not only old-but-new things to hear but also old-but-new ways of hearing them. Historical knowledge and experimentation with old or reconstructed instruments change perceptions. And one of the things I would want to query in Peacocke’s essay is the strength of the distinction he draws between knowing and hearing, or as he puts it, between thought or imagination on the one hand and perception on the other (p. 1032). On several occasions he invokes psychology as a sort of ground truth: he speaks of the “psychologically real,” “psychological truth,” “psychological facts,” and even “brute psychological facts” (pp. 1037, 1046). And of course I understand why: even now the wounds inflicted by post-war music theory, with its refusal to distinguish between explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, and perception, have barely healed. But psychology does not stand outside culture. In his writings on both architecture and music, where he invokes the closely related concept of aspect perception, Scruton (1979, 1997) demonstrates how intimately knowing and perceiving are entangled with one another. Schenkerian analysis, transcription of non-Western music, and the use of tempo and dynamic graphs of recordings can all change the way you hear. So can historical knowledge. One of the dimensions of musical experience, then, is its relationship to the past, and I’ll come back to this near the end of this commentary.

Performance and Agency I have already touched on music in performance, which is the fourth kind of relational property Peacocke mentions. His focus is specifically on live performance, whereas I’ll focus on something equally applicable to live and recorded performances. Musical style

1060   Nicholas Cook is often seen as Alois Riegl saw motifs in the visual art: namely, as a play of impersonal historical forces. In this way the idea of style, like many musicological and music-­theoretical ideas, tends to contradict that of agency (Peacocke’s third relational property of music). But both composers and performers make music in relation to how others have made it, and listeners hear it that way too: record reviews are dominated by this kind of relational listening. In this way music signifies through its relationship to stylistic expectations that are constantly in motion. Style, like structure, is something that musicians play with, and in doing so they express their agency. That of course is the idea that lies behind Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s (1988) concept of signifyin(g)—itself a play on the term that Peacocke prefers to meaning—and to say this highlights the breadth of reference that a relational approach can invoke. Though he specifically emphasized the broader applicability of the term, Gates focused on the practices of black writers signifyin(g) on the products of a hegemonic culture, and his approach has been applied widely in the analysis of black popular music from Hendrix to hip-hop. But it might equally well be applied to the way in which performers play with—or on, or against—the works of a WAM culture that is conditioned by the values of writing and so treats performers as of less musical significance than composers. (By WAM I mean “Western art music,” though of course it could also stand for “white and male.”) Style, then, is another fundamental dimension of music’s relationality. I would also like to push the ideas of performance and agency a little further. In musicology as elsewhere, the concept of agency has become increasingly important over the last generation or so, driven in particular by concerns over the representation of minority cultures and the extent to which ethnomusicological models and practices recognize their agency. More recently, similar concerns have developed in the musicology of performance. But I am also talking about agency in a sense that is closer to Peacocke’s third kind of relational property: the way in which music is experienced in terms of what he calls intentional agents, or what Fred Maus (1999, 186) calls instrumental agents, and how these relate to the performers on stage. In popular music it is usual to distinguish three levels of agency, those of real-life person, stage persona, and song protagonist, and these levels map easily onto classical music: we have Jane wondering whether the rehearsal will finish soon enough for her to get to the shops, her persona as a professional violinist, and the role of second violin that she is playing in the music—for example in a textural exchange between the violins (let’s suppose it is a quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven). There is a constant slippage between the dynamically changing social relationships enacted on stage and the symbolic interplay of intentional or instrumental agents, and this slippage is a significant source of pleasure for the participants (within whom I include the audience). I agree with Peacocke that “the agent represented in the intentional content of the music . . . is sharply to be distinguished from the real agent of the music” (p. 1043), because you can’t have slippage unless you have different things to slip between. I would just add that you cannot do justice to the experience of musical performance, whether classical or popular, without factoring in the slippage too.

Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception   1061

Performance and the Social There is also a larger point that emerges from this: it is here, in the relationship between the domains of enaction and symbolisation, that the social dimension of performance enters into the equation. This is a particularly important dimension of music’s relationality, and again one that was lost from view as a consequence of the obsession with structure. Scores—and you can go on thinking about a Beethoven quartet—afford real-time, social negotiation and decision-making: the violist and analyst Edward Klorman (2016) has developed what he calls an idea of “multiple agency” that positions the analyst within the social network of the ensemble, rather than observing the music from an external, “omniscient” perspective. He might just as well have called it relational agency. And this is just one aspect of the relational interactions afforded by Beethoven’s quartets. Another is illustrated by Christian Friedrich Michaelis, who in 1829 wrote of the “quartet clubs, whose primary, or exclusive exercise is the study of Beethoven’s quartets,” where “the latest and most difficult masterworks are gone through fifty or a hundred or more times” (quoted in Hunter 2012, 58). And three years earlier Hans Georg Nägeli (1980, 92–93) spoke of “two art-lovers asking each others’ opinion on a work of art,” and “at the same time befriending one another. . . . They move in the same direction, their views and feelings coincide, unite, and their association becomes a bond of the spirit, forged and tempered through the disclosures they have made.” Here music drives an intense, even intimate, relational transaction. In this way, whether it is at the level of moment-to-moment interaction or that of discourse and social institution, music has “as one of its central functions the construction of social context.” The phrase is Ingrid Monson’s (1996, 186) and relates to jazz, but it is a broader approach that has been making some headway in recent years under the banner of relational musicology—and it has an obvious affinity with Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2002) “relational aesthetics,” the essential insight of which is that the significance of certain kinds of contemporary art lies in the interpersonal encounters it prompts between those who participate in it. I would argue that this relational dimension is an important aspect of virtually all music in performance, and not only in the concert hall: it is particularly evident in what I like to call the relational practices of music, which range from music therapy—at one time a clinical practice, nowadays as much a practice of community health and well-being—to the invocation of music for purposes of social renewal and conflict transformation. Of course, Peacocke does touch on the social dimensions of performance under his fourth kind of relational property. The parallel he draws between music and the “interaction in coming to understand another person in real time” (p. 1046) resonates with the socialities that Michaelis and Nägeli described, as well as with Alfred Schutz’s famous description of making music together as “growing older together while the musical proc­ess lasts” (Schutz 1964, 175). And during his discussion of joint awareness in musical performance Chris imagines a group of monks in a medieval monastery singing

1062   Nicholas Cook together; he refers to this as “unifying joint action,” and speaks of its significance for the performers themselves (p. 1051). It is telling, however, that he quickly moves on to describe certain aesthetic effects that are available only when there are listeners as distinct from performers—in other words, the familiar situation of the concert in which listeners listen to works composed by composers and performed by performers.

We This isn’t the only way music can work, but it is how philosophers of music commonly think of it. It is not just a matter of the assumed separation of roles but—as with Klorman—of where the discourse is positioned within the social context of the music. Peacocke repeatedly invokes the first-person plural: “we hear structure in relation to recent rhythms,” “we hear certain features of the music metaphorically-as the complex emotions of Wotan” (pp. 1030, 1049), and so on. This isn’t of course a characteristic of this essay in particular—it is a familiar convention of music-philosophical writing, as also of certain kinds of analytical and critical writing about music. And its effect is to create a kind of complicity between writer and reader that positions both as members of the audience conjured up by the discourse. At the same time this inclusive category of “we” can only exist by virtue of an excluded other, or rather several excluded others, and I’ll mention four. One is performers. The traditional focus of music-philosophical, analytical, and critical writing on musical works—that is, on the creative significance of composers rather than performers— means that what I call “we”-discourse takes on a kind of upstairs-downstairs quality, with performers serving a society of reflective listeners rather than being members of it (apart, that is, from a select number of honorary members, such as Alfred Brendel—the class of performers on whom universities bestow honorary doctorates). The second category is composers, and I’ll make the point in relation to the claim in Peacocke’s essay that “Structure must be perceptually accessible . . . if it is to be musically and aesthetically significant. Styles and attempts that ignore this are doomed” (p. 1031). This makes perfectly good sense if we think in terms of the society of listeners. But it’s simply not true as applied to the processes of composition: from ars nova to serialism to biomusic, composers have constantly pushed structure beyond the perceptual box. The explanation is that when Peacocke says “aesthetically significant,” he is talking about how listeners perceive music, and not how composers make it. Aesthetics is for listeners. Then third, there is the historical other. It is nowadays common for philosophers of music to range quite freely across the historical repertory of the Western tradition, and one might accordingly expect them to see the music’s relationship to the past as key to its significance. But in writing about such music, the philosopher’s perspective is ­typically—one might perhaps say by definition—a presentist one. The emphasis is on how “we” experience music here and now, regardless of where and when it came from, and to this extent one might say that the entire orientation of the discourse is one of domestication: music of the past is admitted on present-day terms, as if Mozart or

Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception   1063 Beethoven were one of us. In saying this I am drawing a contrast with the defamiliarizing thrust of historical research: recognizing the otherness of the past is the precondition for creating paths of understanding between then and now, them and us. But does it matter for aesthetics if people in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s time heard their music differently from us? Do certain ways of hearing music fall within the purview of aesthetics but not others? Is it the job of aestheticians to decide which ways of hearing it are admissible and which are not, so controlling entry to the club? Is aesthetics the means by which we define, in other words set limits to, our music? And finally there is the fourth excluded other, which has to do with the music “we” listen to: the music played at concerts where listeners listen to works composed by composers and performed by performers. To say that is not just to associate “we” with a particular demographic: it is to exclude many forms of popular and most traditions of world music. And clearly you can’t draw universal conclusions from a minority culture like classical music. But is it okay if aesthetics is just about aesthetic music, just for WAM listeners, just for us? (This time I’ll leave you to decide what WAM stands for.)

Conclusion As a musicologist I really am not sure whether I am making a reasonable suggestion that the aesthetics of music might broaden and contextualize its outlook, or simply missing the point of what makes it different from the chaotically heterogeneous field of music studies, where (as I said at the beginning) we are used to muddling along. Is there a perspective from which you can be both principled and inclusive? I suggested that musicologists are inclined to look to philosophers to set familiar practices within a larger explanatory framework that should ideally make sense not only of the actual, the here-and-now, but also of the imaginable or even the possible—in short, to take a zoomed-out view of music as a cultural phenomenon in the way, for example, that ethical philosophers might seek to establish principles that hold across different cultures. Or is that perhaps an unreasonable or simply uninformed expectation, a kind of disciplinary misprision? Whatever the answers to these questions, I’m cheered that they are emerging from the attempt by a philosopher to rethink music aesthetics from first principles, setting out an approach that can be as open as you want it to be. It is true that once you start thinking of music’s significance in terms of its relational properties the problem becomes where to stop. But then, that is the sort of problem you want to have.

Works Cited Allanbrook, Wye Jamison. 1983. Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses de Reel.

1064   Nicholas Cook Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Mary. 2012. “ ‘The Most Interesting Genre of Music’: Performance, Sociability and Meaning in the Classical String Quartet, 1800–1830.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9, no. 1 (June): 53–74. Kania, Andrew. 2006. “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 4 (Autumn): 401–414. Klorman, Edward. 2016. Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maus, Fred. 1999. “Concepts of Musical Unity.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 171–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Nägeli, Hans Georg. 1980. Vorlesungen über Musik mit Berücksichtigung der Dilettanten. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Schutz, Alfred. 1964. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” In Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers II. Studies in Social Theory, edited by Arvid Brodersen, 159–178. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Scruton, Roger. 1979. The Aesthetics of Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 52a

Su bj ecti v ities Susan M c Clary

In the bad old days of positivist methodologies, musicologists maintained a sharp distinction between “objective,” factual knowledge and the sorts of responses to music usually lumped into the category of the “subjective.” Although the emphasis on verifiable information often yielded spectacular results, such as with Alfred Dürr and Georg Dadelsen’s revised chronology of Bach’s works, it also eliminated any discussion of music’s effects. Professionals learned to deal with a technical vocabulary that labelled particular elements (such as chords and formal structures). But they also learned to ridicule colleagues who stepped out of disciplinary bounds if and when they confessed to emotional reactions and thus lowered themselves to the level of plebeian listeners. A quasi-scientific imperative governed what could and could not be said. Today when scholars in the humanities speak of “subjectivity” they mean something quite different from this. To put it briefly, they study ways in which societies constituted or experienced the Self at various moments in history.1 I began with the old objective–subjective dichotomy, however, not only to defuse that understanding of the word in circles where it still lingers but also to indicate the enormous void that exists when we insist on restricting our discourse to nothing but facts. If no one responded powerfully to music, it never would have existed; we would not find it as an indispensable practice in every known human culture, and we would not pour our precious resources into making it available. In other words, the quest for cold, hard data can never tell us why we as a species compulsively musick in the first place.2 Not all reactions to music fit into the same category, of course. If I get sentimental when I hear a song that takes me back to a dance in junior high school, this probably holds little interest for anyone else. It may prove crucial to my own formation and subsequent interactions with music, but that’s as far as it goes, except perhaps in film scores in which this particular kind of sound cue sutures the viewer in to the private associations of a character. But if millions of people weep when they witness Aretha Franklin singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at President Obama’s inauguration, they do not do so because they don’t know how to label the chords or because each individual is caught up in his or

1066   Susan McClary her own personal universe. Instead, their intersubjective responses stem from past experiences with the patriotic song and with Franklin’s voice, alongside the overwhelming impact of the historical moment. The managers of the inaugural event designed their programme in such a way as to produce precisely this result. Similarly, entrepreneurs often programme Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in order to invite a sense of oneness (“alle Menschen werden Brüder”) on celebratory occasions such as those marking the fall of the Berlin Wall. The recurrent “Ode to Joy” theme of the final movement draws upon the device honed by Martin Luther to inculcate his followers into his new Church through a repertory of chorales. Though we may be unaware of their existence in a given moment, emotional associations sedimented into anthems, hymns, or songs can draw communities together into a single entity, temporarily united in body and soul. This phenomenon is not imaginary. Historian William McNeill (1995) has demonstrated that marching, dancing, or singing together enables social groups to behave as one; this characteristic has been corroborated more recently by neuroscientists (Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause 2001). In order to reward us for participating in such collective activities, the body secretes pleasurable chemicals into the brain that suppress the perception of individual boundaries in favour of a timeless, interpersonal, cooperative continuum. In short, practices associated with musicking prove fundamental to human evolution. As we learn more about the brain and its physiological relations to culture, we have fewer and fewer reasons to doubt the intersubjective dimensions of musical experience or to downplay their vital importance. (For more on the interplay between the brain and culture, see Bickerton 2014.) In the instances mentioned thus far, the particular details of the compositions in question may register much less than the fact of collective participation per se. To be sure, the swelling music leading into the phrase “Land where my fathers died / Land of the Pilgrims’ pride” stands out from the surrounding passages and may invoke a special frisson. But context and shared histories matter far more. I would guess even that most listeners at public events respond primarily with quasi-Lutheran impulses to appearances of the chorale in the Ninth Symphony while the rest of this highly complex and affectively ambivalent piece chatters away as so much noise; the chorale serves to glue us together, regardless of the materials that occur between verses. And that, of course, is no small feat. Many musicologists now focus their research on audience behaviours and preferences in order to learn more about this dimension of musicking—a crucial corrective to the composer-oriented scholarship that used to dominate. Along with the rise of this stream of research has come a not infrequent contempt for projects that deal with “the music itself.” A swerve towards the social in methodologies has encouraged a turning away from musical specificity, as if musical works were interchangeable or as if we had been forced into score study in music theory classes and have no need for it ever again after graduation. My own cluster of concerns has involved the relationships between particular ways of shaping music and notions of selfhood at various moments in Western history or in other parts of the world. This project in no way precludes those mentioned above, but it

Subjectivities   1067 does offer quite different approaches to the study of musical practices from those available principally through the verbal testimony and the kinds of analysis that admit no relationship between the autonomous work and anything else. I came to these questions not through reading in other disciplines (though that reading did yield support, modes of argumentation, and much more) but from within the music itself. I began coaching performers as an undergraduate and found that I wished to supply rationales for my suggestions rather than simply stating (as their teachers too often did) “do it this way.” Analysis helped—pointing out a prominent Neapolitan or odd modulation, for instance—but as I became familiar with myriad styles from before Bach, I wanted to understand why composers in different periods shaped their music as they did. My exposure in my undergraduate history survey to repertories in the 1600s posed the greatest challenge for me. Not content with the “no longer modal, not yet tonal” write-off these works usually received, I set about trying to grasp how ­seventeenth-century music worked. The fact that musicologists at the time divided possible projects into purely formal dissection on the one hand and archival research on the other meant that I had few models within the discipline to assist me. As I cast about for help, however, I began to assemble an unlikely set of tools. First, linguists at the time were producing very interesting work concerning the social development of languages, sometimes even at the syntactical level, and these projects seemed to me parallel to the sorts of issues I wanted to pursue in studying unfamiliar procedures and style change.3 Second, my acquaintance in 1975 with Rose Rosengard Subotnik introduced me to the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno and Michel Foucault. From Adorno I learned how to address ideological dimensions of musical procedures; from Foucault I received permission to consider the body, gender, sexuality, desire, and affect as having social histories. Later, when I became involved with feminist theory, I found out how not to think of myself as a universal subject but rather as one shaped fundamentally by cultural codes concerning gender, including those conveyed through music (for more on this difficult conversion, see McClary 1991). Most unlikely perhaps was the spectacle of the particular moment in which I was living: the late 1960s and early 1970s. Despite my best efforts to concentrate on Josquin for my qualifying examinations, the soundtrack of the sixties proved impossible to block out. Nor was this simply “music.” The sounds that had first burst into the broader public in the 1950s with the emergence of Rock had effected with stunning rapidity a transformation in my generation’s experience of nearly every aspect of our subjectivities. Our parents looked on in dismay as we danced with provocative gestures, experimented with drugs, flaunted our promiscuity, and rebelled against state policies related to the war in Vietnam. No other cultural media had nearly so profound an impact as music. Rock entrained our notions of temporality, our kinetic vocabularies, our structures of desire, our behaviours, our bodies, our selves. It was powerful, seductive, and potentially ­dangerous—especially for those who wished to maintain intergenerational decorum. It doesn’t take too much delving to locate other moments in music history in which a way of putting sounds together was regarded as dangerous. Plato famously excluded most music from his Republic because of its ability to shape subjectivities. Recall his

1068   Susan McClary concern with modes—by which he meant not the order of half- and whole-steps within a scale but entire cultural practices. Succumbing to the Lydian manner threatened to make you soft, luxury-seeking, and vulnerable to conquest. The music of the Dorians (i.e., the Spartans), on the other hand, produced disciplined warriors. The savage Dionysian rituals of the Phrygians had to be handled with extreme caution, even if Plato granted them a limited role. Like people of my parents’ age, Plato regarded style change itself as perilous. The overseers must be watchful against [the Republic’s] insensible corruption. They must throughout be watchful against innovations in music and gymnastics counter to the established order, and to the best of their power guard against them. . . . For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.  (Plato 1961, 424b–c)

Better just not to let any of it circulate within the utopian space that Plato envisioned. Note also his pairing of music with gymnastics, the cultivation of the body. Plato realized full well the crucial relationships between sound organization and physical deportment, thereby anticipating McNeill’s (1995) conclusion by some millennia. Shifting the ways in which individuals experience their bodies simultaneously alters their behaviours and notions of selfhood. This connection between music, the body, and the self helps explain some of the hysteria that breaks out at key moments in music history, such as John of Salisbury’s homophobic rant against polyphony or Giovanni Artusi’s critique of Claudio Monteverdi’s (lack of) dissonance control. In the former case, because John understood melody metaphorically as the intact human body, he heard interweaving lines as unspeakably perverse acts.4 This is not to suggest that the ars nova ushered in an unparalleled incidence of same-sex behaviour, but anyone who has sung in a small, intimate ensemble knows the deep erotic pleasure that comes from leaning one voice into a suspension with another. (For more on the secret pleasures of intimate music performance, see Brett 1997.) In the latter case, Artusi’s worst fears came all too true: in a world in which the individual has licence to break what Plato called established order, social harmony becomes a lost cause—as indeed it did in the violent upheavals (political, cultural, and theological) of the seventeenth century.5 Understanding changes in musical styles as shifts in culturally construed notions of subjectivity helps us grasp the most important aspects of those changes, and it also makes music—the music itself—a crucial element in the study of cultural history. Take the Italian madrigal as an example. The unfortunate and condescending term “madrigalism” has led many to reduce this rich and sophisticated genre to the level of what film theorists call mickey-mousing; analysts ill-equipped to deal with pre-tonal grammars content themselves with locating surface responses to words and think they have thereby exhausted the piece’s meanings. In other words, a bonehead hermeneutics has caused this repertory to appear naïve and even laughable. Luca Marenzio, one of the

Subjectivities   1069 subtlest composers of any time, gets represented in many anthologies by his gimmicky “Scaldava il sol,” largely because it seems to serve so neatly as evidence supporting a progress-oriented narrative of sixteenth-century artifice that had to give way to naturalistic seventeenth-century monody. Nevertheless, the Italian madrigal stands among the most complex of genres, paralleled in certain respects only by the Beethoven string quartets. As the product of a court culture that treasured daring individuality, its four- or five-voice polyphonic webs often simulate deeply divided interiorities: the simultaneous conflicted impulses of inside and outside, body and mind, love and hate, desire and dread, reason and feeling. Not coincidentally, its composers gravitated towards the poetry of Petrarch, Tasso, and Guarini; they set themselves the challenge of rising to the same levels of paradox and emotional intensity as those offered in words by leading literary figures. When the madrigalists began bringing increasingly chromatic moves into their pieces, they did so in part in order to raise the horizon of expectations, but also because the task of representing the “authentic” self in music seemed to require the violation of codes of musical decorum. The bar was set ever higher in the interest of getting at some kind of truth—not ours, to be sure, but no less urgent for its relevance to a particular time and place (McClary 2005). Crucial to the madrigal enterprise was the manipulation of modes, newly theorized by Glareanus and Zarlino, to accommodate the exigencies of polyphony. Each of the twelve modes offered a different matrix of potential tensions, each was predisposed towards certain strategies or structures of feeling. A composer would read a chosen text, locate its principal conflicts, and fit them with a congruent modal allegory that governed the ways those tensions manifested themselves in the music. When music drama supplanted the madrigal in the early 1600s, a vastly different ideal of the subject came into being. In place of the introspection and divided interiorities of the madrigal, monodic composition posited a single-voiced and extroverted character; moreover, the rhythms associated with speech and oratory required new ways of structuring temporality and, consequently, subjectivity. In many respects, the innovations of the seventeenth century resulted in a stripped-down, simpler musical language and a grammar that could not easily accommodate the ambiguities of the madrigal’s modal practice. Yet the sacrifice of the earlier complexity seemed well worth it for the thrills of teleological extension. The radical bending of time—its contraction and dilation— became the main game in town (see McClary 2012a, 2016). One of the principal debates over musical practices in the seventeenth century concerned the resistance of the French court to Italian innovations. This face-off, which led at times to the banning of transalpine repertories from Versailles, involved much more than xenophobia or political rivalry. If Italian compositions revelled in simulating wilful and virtuosic individuality with a penchant for overriding potential points of rest, the French sought to locate courtiers in the moment. Their favoured genre, dance, strengthened the all-important phenomenon of keeping together as a social unit, and it discouraged any tendencies to project forward in time (see McClary 2012a, 241–256; 1998). In other words, the example of wanton, rebellious, self-indulgent Italian sonatas or arias

1070   Susan McClary threatened much more than mere taste. The encyclopédiste d’Alembert parodied this fear in a passage clearly alluding to Plato: All liberties are interrelated and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music entails freedom to feel, freedom to feel means freedom to act, and freedom to act means the ruin of states. So let us keep French opera as it is if we wish to preserve the kingdom and let us put a brake on singing if we do not want to have liberty in speaking to follow soon afterwards.  (d’Alembert [1759] 1967, 520; my translation)

We often scoff at such debates today, secure in the belief that music is only music. But I would hold that French authorities were absolutely right to try to suppress contemporaneous Italian music, given their ideological priorities. For nothing less was at stake than two radically incompatible structures of subjectivity. This brings us to the brink of the Age of Diatonic Tonality, known in other domains as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. The repertories of the eighteenth century— those from Corelli through early Beethoven—may seem to us to manifest the very height of objectivity, an island of rationality tucked between the extravagances of the Italian seicento and the self-indulgences of the Romantics. We still teach music students to hear, analyse, and judge music through the grid of the tonal harmony that reigned in the 1700s as if it were a universal language. To understand tonality in this way, however, is both to elevate it above its cultural context and to underestimate its role in shaping a most particular version of subjectivity. Most of my previous examples have emphasized changes—indeed, the kinds of changes that provoked vociferous reactions. Because debates always signal the violation of Plato’s established order, the clash between two procedures or modes of being, it is relatively easy in such cases to grasp issues of meaning. The attendant polemics themselves usually address the underlying stakes explicitly. We have more trouble assigning meanings, however, to the conventions that comprise the established order. Once solidified, conventions quickly retreat to the status of formal shells, the containers within which deliberate content gets poured. But conventions, I have argued, qualify as the most important bearers of meaning; they are the basic assumptions concerning temporality and expressivity that we fail to notice because we take them for granted. If quarrels over proper deportment come to the verbal fore only when threats arise, the frameworks within which what counts as normal operates reinforce over and over again a mainstream sense of subjectivity. (For an extended exposition of this concept, see McClary 2000.) So what kind of being is the tonal Self? First, it relies heavily on a social contract, as demonstrated via self-contained formal plans such as the da capo aria, binary dance, concerto, or sonata. The implicit contract between these formal structures and the listener allows for a transparency of communication, and it reinforces the listener’s ability to predict the future on the basis of ongoing information. Gone for the most part are the breath-taking special effects of, say, Alessandro Stradella, whose ABB´ arias always reserve the surprises for the altered reprise of the second section. A vestige of this withholding of surprises persists in the improvised ornamentation of the return to A in the da capo aria, which otherwise presents multiple levels of containment.6

Subjectivities   1071 Second, our eighteenth-century denizen expects rational control of tonality at every level, whether from chord to chord or from modulation to modulation. A common background progression holds virtually all movements together regardless of genre or form: tonic to dominant (or relative major), to another couple of keys, then back to the tonic. With this road map firmly in place, the listeners can focus on details knowing that tonal resolution and formal closure are guaranteed in advance. This tendency towards emplotment will also give rise to the novel, as well as a sense of individual destiny and of protagonists who strategize and work to achieve ultimate goals. One reason we are loath to let go of eighteenth-century tonality is that we still like to think of ourselves in this fashion (see McClary 2000, 63–108; Chua 2006; for similar readings of literature, see Armstrong 1990, 2006). Nevertheless, this ideology had a relatively brief shelf life. Already in the second decade of the nineteenth century composers were acting out against its premisses. Beethoven began to refuse the low-hanging fruit of the dominant, preferring to experiment with the lowered submediant as the secondary key area—even if this required extensive planning with sketchbooks. In some respects, Schubert proved even more radical in his compositions that began blithely in the major mode but ended in an anguished minor (Clark 2011; Cone 1982; McClary 1997, 2012b; Schmalfeldt 2011). In contrast, Bach, Handel, or Haydn could be as prolific as they were because the background always took care of itself. In refusing that certainty, nineteenth-century composers insisted on making up their own tortured paths, often leaving listeners bewildered. The social contracts that made the conclusions of eighteenth-century pieces appear inevitable became anathema (McClary 2000, 109–138). Many historical events influenced this shift in subjectivity: among them, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Industrial Revolution, all of which challenged the much-loved notion that one could make one’s way through reason and determination. The steady-state world assumed by the Encyclopédie project shattered in the face of these upheavals; new kinds of selves began to proliferate—some retreating into the mysticism the secular philosophes thought they had left behind, some flaunting personal eccentricity. All of these options, however, necessarily depended on the market that artists claimed to loathe. In effect, the post-patronage world required that lovingly constructed subjectivities be bought and sold through advertisement and shameless self-promotion. (For more on the crisis around 1800, see Woodmansee 1994; Kittler 1992.) In response to this state of affairs, some artists deliberately shunned market forces— or at least postured at doing so. The race off the cliff of communication that resulted in twentieth-century modernist opacity occurred in part as a way of preserving authentic subjectivity, even at the expense of radical isolation. The self-inflicted wounds of this antisocial move manifested themselves in the aggressive dissonance and affective violence of Le Sacre du printemps or the works of the Second Viennese School, which spoke to the anguished world-view of many after the First World War (for example, Adorno 1981). The atrocities of the next war and the advent of the Nuclear Age inspired an even greater retreat into tortured interiority (McClary 2015; for a much longer view see J. Johnson 2015).

1072   Susan McClary Of course, not all listeners chose to identify with such constructions. Many preferred to stick with the continuation of Romantic subjectivities with the lush strains of Rachmaninov or Puccini (Franklin 2014). Others turned away from the innovations of the avant-garde and gravitated toward the African-inflected genres made available through sound recording, film, and other media. I wrote earlier in this essay about the ways a later generation would be shaped by adult-oriented R&B, renamed rock ’n’ roll when it jumped the tracks and started to appeal to white teenagers. But already in the 1920s—often called the Jazz Age—modes of dress, bodily deportment, behaviour, attitudes, and social mores changed profoundly under the influence of American popular music. The impact of blues and jazz on subjectivities was undeniably far greater than anything offered by the heroic modernists. It is for this reason that our histories of twentieth-century Western music must factor in the songs, dances, and rhythms of African Americans, for they have provided the principal soundtrack—internationally embraced—since 1900 (see McClary 2006; for a revised history of twentieth-century music along these lines, see Small 2011). As Jacques Attali (1985) argued, music is prophetic in the sense that it embodies what we will become—which is, again, why Plato warned against innovation in this area. If “the history of Western music” means anything, it should surely include the repertories that (like it or not) have shaped some of the most basic notions of selfhood experienced by people during that history. We musicologists do not always qualify as the protagonists of the stories we need to narrate. Most of our trajectories involve wishful thinking of one kind or another, whether the German canon’s omission of non-German repertories or the line-up of triumphal modernism that still characterizes most of our accounts of music since 1900. When we claim to be telling the history of “Western” music, we mean something far more constricted. But we could start to trace through our knowledge of music the complex development of subjectivities in Europe and North America (if this is what is meant by “Western”). Doing so would speak to the interests of historians in other fields, and it would also bolster the general sense of music’s ongoing importance in human life and cultural development. We might learn more about why musicking matters, why its practitioners and fans fight for and against innovations in procedures, and even why we gravitate as individuals towards one repertory as opposed to another. All we have to do is follow the flashpoints signalled by debates, which always indicate that at least some people have begun to shape themselves in response to the most recent Pied Piper.

Notes 1. For one example see Taylor 1989, wherein he traces the transformation from the norms by which individuals understood themselves in Christian terms to those underlying secular identities. 2. With the word “musick” I refer to the work of the late Christopher Small, who insisted that we treat “music” as a verb—as a social activity—rather than as a noun or object. See particularly Small 1997.

Subjectivities   1073 3. For a more recent example, see Bickerton 2009 for a fascinating study of the syntactical negotiations necessary for the creation of hybrid languages. 4. Music theorists have begun to understand metaphor as fundamental to the ways humans shape and comprehend music, often in ways that allow for John’s apparent cognitive leap. See particularly Zbikowski 2005, in which Zbikowski builds on the work of philosopher Mark Johnson (1987, 2007). 5. For a collection of interdisciplinary essays on subjectivities during this era, see McClary 2013. 6. The da capo aria and its native genre, opera seria, have long been castigated for their ­adherence to convention. See, however, Martha Feldman’s illuminating study of the ways these conventions worked as rituals to sustain the central ideologies of their target a­ udiences (Feldman 2009).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. 1981. “Arnold Schoenberg, 1874–1951.” In Prisms, translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber, 147–172. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Armstrong, Nancy. 1990. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Armstrong, Nancy. 2006. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press. Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bickerton, Derek. 2009. Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Find Clues to Our Common Humanity. New York: Hill & Wang. Bickerton, Derek. 2014. More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brett, Philip, 1997. “Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire.” 19th-Century Music 21, no 2 (Autumn): 149–176. Chua, Daniel  K.  L. 2006. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Suzannah. 2011. Analyzing Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cone, Edward T. 1982. “Schubert’s Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics.” 19th-Century Music 5, no. 3 (Spring): 233–241. d’Alembert, Jean le Rond. [1759] 1967. La Liberté de la musique. In Œuvres de d’Alembert. Vol. 1, 515–546. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. Feldman, Martha. 2009. Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Franklin, Peter. 2014. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music: Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Johnson, Julian. 2015. Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Mark. 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

1074   Susan McClary Kittler, Friedrich. 1992. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Translated by Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, Susan. 1997. “The Impromptu that Trod on a Loaf: How Music Tells Stories.” Narrative 5, no. 1 (January): 20–34. McClary, Susan. 1998. “Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music.” In From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France, edited by Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, 85–112. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McClary, Susan. 2000. Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McClary, Susan. 2005. Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McClary, Susan. 2006. “The World According to Taruskin.” Music and Letters 87, no. 3 (August): 408–415. McClary, Susan. 2012a. Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McClary, Susan. 2012b. “Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music.” In Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, edited by Stan Hawkins, 21–38. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. McClary, Susan, ed. 2013. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McClary, Susan. 2015. “The Lure of the Sublime: Revisiting Postwar Modernism.” In Transformations of Musical Modernism, edited by Erling  E.  Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson, 21–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClary, Susan. 2016. “Doing the Time Warp in Seventeenth-Century Music.” In Music in Time: Phenomenology, Perception, Performance, Essays in Honor of Christopher Hasty, edited by Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, 237–256. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McNeill, William  H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Newberg, Andrew, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause. 2001. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books. Plato. 1961. Republic. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairnes, translated by Paul Shorey. New York: Pantheon Books. Schmalfeldt, Janet. 2011. In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Small, Christopher. 1997. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Small, Christopher. 2011. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodmansee, Martha. 1994. The Author, Art, and the Market. New York: Columbia University Press. Zbikowski, Lawrence  M. 2005. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 52b

R esponse to Susa n M c Cl a ry: Su bj ecti v ities Jeanette Bicknell

To think about music and subjectivities is to risk being caught in a paradox. Music does not possess subjectivity; that is, it does not possess the capacity for agency, for conscious experience, or for holding a perspective. Only sentient beings possess subjectivity (although some would argue that computers are not far behind). Music, no matter how highly we esteem it, does not have these capacities. So to speak of music as possessing subjectivity can only be metaphorical, although the metaphor may be rich and illuminating. In this response to Susan McClary’s essay on “Subjectivities” I consider the philosophical question of how music might embody subjectivities. This response is meant to complement her more historical account of how music has embodied subjectivities. Music itself does not possess subjectivities; however composers, performers, and listeners, all do. These intersect in significant ways with the creation, production, and reception of music. Thinking about the subjectivity of the human beings involved in creating and responding to music takes us to the heart of some of the most important and profound questions about musical experience. How do the subjectivities of performers and listeners intersect with those of composers? How much of the significance and power held by music is specific to individual listeners, and how much is shared? How can the same music that deeply moves one person leave another indifferent? The topic of music and subjectivity invokes individual or even idiosyncratic responses to music. “Subjective” is contrasted with “objective” as personal opinion is contrasted with ideals of scientific rigour. “Objective” claims are understood to be free from individual bias or interpretation. Yet while responses to music (as to the other arts) may be assumed today to be highly personal and individualistic, it is worth remembering that music is a relative latecomer to these romantic designations. Indeed music has been a

1076   Jeanette Bicknell field of objective scientific inquiry since the sixth century bce when Pythagoras connected certain musical intervals with definite numerical ratios. Together with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, music was part of the medieval quadrivium—the “exact” portion of the seven liberal arts. It was not until the eighteenth century that music gradually dropped out of the mainstream of what was then considered science (Cohen 1984). Yet the topic of this essay is not “subjectivity” but “subjectivities.” This might be understood in at least two different ways. “Subjectivities” might refer to a plethora of different individual responses to music, each worthy of interest and none privileged above any other. Or “subjectivities” might refer to intersubjective and shared responses to music. Indeed, the historical perspective explored by McClary in her essay relies on the possibility of there being intersubjective responses to music. Absent these, it would make no sense to speak of relationships between particular ways of hearing music and notions of the selfhood at various moments in history. In what follows, I consider each of these possible understandings of “subjectivites” in turn. I start, in “Subjectivities as Personal Responses,” by considering musical subjectivities in the first sense—as personal and individual responses to music. Then, in “Shared Subjectivities,” I address shared and communal responses to music.

Subjectivities as Personal Responses Even listeners of around the same age and from similar cultural backgrounds may have very different responses to the same musical works and performances. By this I mean to say something deeper than they may have different tastes and preferences. They may literally hear different things in the music. How is this possible? Understanding musical experience requires thinking about a minimum of two elements: an experiencing subject and an appreciated object. Philosophical inquiry about the subject side of aesthetic appreciation has been typically expressed in questions about different types of listeners and their differing ways of using language to describe what they hear. (For example, Boretz 1970; Budd 1985; Guck 1997; Putnam 1989; Scruton 1997.) Inquiry about the nature of the musical object has taken the form of arguments over the possibility of music’s cognitive content. Some listeners claim to discern rich and complex extra-musical content in musical works. Philosophers have debated whether these listeners are simply mistaken about what they hear, or if music can in fact convey complex cognitive content. Let me take, for example, two such claims discussed by Peter Kivy in his book Philosophies of Arts, namely, that Hans Ebbebrecht heard the proposition, “I seek salvation” in J.  S.  Bach’s Art of the Fugue; and that David  P.  Schroeder claimed that Franz Joseph Haydn’s “London” symphonies contain a message about tolerance (Kivy 1997, 179–217). It is certainly possible to argue that listeners such as Eggebrecht and Schroeder are mistaken and that for conceptual reasons they simply cannot have heard what they claim. Those meanings (a desire for salvation and an approval of tolerance) are too

Response to Susan McClary: Subjectivities   1077 complex to be expressed by instrumental music without the addition of words. For one thing, if the content is really there, why isn’t it heard by all listeners? Yet the fact that Ebbebrecht and Schroeder—two musicologists, and therefore hardly naïve or uninformed listeners—have made these claims should make us hesitate to dismiss them outright. Given the epistemological difficulties in understanding and characterizing the experience of listening to music generally, on what basis can listeners who hear such “rich” content be dismissed? Is there a way to make sense of their experience, without at the same time alienating other listeners (such as Kivy) who claim to hear no more than “the music itself ”? To begin to make sense of this problem, we must turn from thinking about the conceptual limitations of instrumental music and instead consider a different question. What is it about music, and about the experience of listening to music, that listeners frequently experience as carrying semantic weight? In response to this question, I propose an account of the listening experience that stresses the similarities between following a musical performance and following or constructing a narrative. The fundamental feature shared by music and the various forms of artistic narrative (stage drama, epic poetry, short stories, novels, and dance narratives, among others) is that all are arts of time. As such, they present themselves as temporal gestalts, demanding continuous and continued attention. In this they are different from the visual arts: paintings and drawings exist in time, but they do not occupy time. Music and narratives, by contrast, fill up time; they impose an organization on time. According to some psychologists of language, the minimum requirement for narrative is at least two sequential clauses, temporally ordered, about a single past event (Gleason 1997, 407). As I see it, the most important characteristic of narrative is that it is a way of making sense of—and of giving a structure to—events over time. Telling stories or imposing narrative coherence on events is one of the main ways in which we make sense of our experience. By its very structural arrangement of events in a sequence (whatever the organizing principle of that sequence), a narrative can give recounted events a coherence that they lacked as lived events. Narrative as I understand it does not require antagonism, and its beginnings and endings may be largely arbitrary. This means that it may be applicable to a wide variety of music, including both music without clear beginnings or endings and music without obvious conflicts. Some music has a narrative structure, even a plot, apparent on its musical surface. Becoming involved with much music is a matter of discerning and following its narrative structure, perhaps revising expectations as the music continues. By “following” I mean paying attention and being alert to the clues in the music and to the expectations—tonal and rhythmic—that it generates. One can speak unproblematically of a “musical narrative” in some nineteenth-century symphonies and tone poems. Listeners hear this narrative, and may also become involved with it or swept up in it, wanting to know what will happen next. One mark of a bad story is that we can stop listening or reading at any point because we no longer care how things will turn out. Something similar can be said of music: one indication of an interesting work or performance can be that while we enjoy the music, we also want to know what will happen next. We want to hear where it is going.

1078   Jeanette Bicknell Of course, not all music has a structure as easily discernible as that of a nineteenthcentury symphony or tone poem; indeed, some music is composed specifically so as to be difficult to follow and to evade ready understanding. What then of music which lacks an obvious narrative or dramatic structure? I suggest that when there is no apparent or even concealed narrative on the surface of the music, we follow the music ­as if it were a narrative. When a narrative structure is not evident, we impose such a structure, or attempt to do so. We follow such music as a narrative despite the lack of clues as to how the various musical actions are to be ordered and ultimately resolved. We expect music to signal to us what is important and to indicate to which aspects we should pay most attention. We listen for such indications even when they are not forthcoming. We also listen for hints as to the music’s ending—will the ending be signalled harmonically, with dynamics, or otherwise? As in the case of listening to works with an unambiguous narrative structure, we may need to revise expectations as the music continues. In listening in this way, I suggest, we are imposing a narrative structure where one is concealed or absent. This model of understanding music by imposing a narrative structure takes us only part of the way to understanding why some listeners have the subjective experience that instrumental music holds cognitive content. To go the rest of the way, I need to say more about the nature of music. Here Nelson Goodman’s account of artistic symbols in Languages of Art (1976) is helpful. For Goodman, understanding a work of art requires entering into the world of the work (see also Goodman 1978). Musical performances are semantically and syntactically “dense.” That is, there is no one-to-one relationship between the elements of the music and of the world. Each musical work can be seen as having a different symbolic structure and as utilizing different semantic relationships. These relationships (representation, expression, and exemplification) are not universal or immutable. They must be freshly decoded and understood in each artwork we encounter (although knowledge of the artistic tradition and conventions, and especially style, will help us gain a better understanding of the work in question). For example, an ascending chromatic passage need not signify the same thing in works by different composers, nor even in works by the same composer, nor even in two passages of the same work. The dense nature of music makes it difficult for her to say exactly what the passage signifies, and unlikely that there is any one single definitive answer. We are now in a better position to understand why some listeners get the feeling that there is more to music than what they hear directly on the auditory surface. The human desire to know—which is a source of pleasure as well as the root of all scientific exploration, broadly construed—includes the desire to understand abstract patterns. This desire, plus the way music is experienced as unfolding through time, plus its high syntactic and semantic density, is one way of accounting for different subjective impressions in our responses to music. We don’t have to choose between claims that there is nothing beyond the “music itself ” and semantically rich claims about music. We can accept that people on both sides of this debate really do hear what they claim to hear. It would be easy enough to argue that the sense that some music calls for ascriptions of semantic content arises from a misplaced desire for comprehension, and that if such

Response to Susan McClary: Subjectivities   1079 listeners really understood the nature of music, they would not make these kinds of claims. Yet there is good reason to resist such a conclusion. First, the human tendency to uncover meaning is matched by a corresponding desire to communicate significance. The feeling that music is meaningful in the fully semantic sense and the desire to understand it as such is informed by a sense that the music is a human product. Music is composed, performed, and appreciated in specific social and cultural contexts, and becomes invested with significance in these contexts. Due to the syntactically and semantically dense nature of artworks, however, this meaning is rarely easy to interpret.

Shared Subjectivities So far I have been stressing differences in our responses to music (subjectivity). In this section I address a second sense of musical subjectivities—shared and communal responses to music. Let me take up McClary’s example, that of Aretha Franklin’s performance of “My Country ’Tis of Thee” at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009.1 McClary writes that the similar responses of many listeners (weeping) does not stem from knowledge or ignorance of musical structure (knowing how to label the chords). Nor is each response purely idiosyncratic (with each person “caught up in his or her own personal universe” [pp. 1065–1066]). Instead, the intersubjective or shared subjective response stems from the overwhelming impact of the historical moment (the inauguration of the first African American president) and audience members’ past experiences with patriotic songs and with Franklin’s voice. So while individual responses are personal and subjective, these responses are shared by many in the crowd because they share a sense of the historical moment and have had similar associations with the song and with the singer. Here McClary writes that “the particular details of the compositions in question may register much less than the fact of collective participation per se” and that “context and shared histories matter much more” (p. 1066). Here I diverge from McClary, particularly with the way she has set up the problem. She contrasts the “particular details” of the musical work (and presumably, the details of a particular performance) with the fact of “collective participation.” Yet it seems clear to me that musical performances are events and audiences are part of those events. Individual subjective experiences are generated in this social situation, which is the coordinating mechanism of the shared emotional response (weeping). All of the details, including details of musical nuance, of performers’ social identities, and of audience behaviour, are important contributions to this social event. All of these details contribute to creating the particular experience that is shared by the performers and the audience. In this example, I would argue that the “particular details” of the performance matter a lot, including the fact of that particular singer at that moment. Franklin is more than a beloved performer with a distinctive voice. She is the “Queen of Soul” and her

1080   Jeanette Bicknell a­ ppearance at the inauguration—mature, regal, and wearing a magnificent hat that could have been a crown—made her look every inch the part. Franklin’s voice and her public persona would have been known to virtually everyone in the audience. Even before her performance at the inauguration, she had a place in African American history in virtue of her association with the civil rights movement. Yet it is not merely that listeners share similar associations with Franklin’s voice, although that may well be true. Her repertoire is wide enough that her voice likely arouses a wide variety of associations among listeners, and her long and distinguished career may have worked against the possibility of audience members having a single dominant association with her and her work. Her 1967 recording of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” became a feminist and civil rights anthem. Another big hit from 1967, “Natural Woman,” likely carries with it very different associations. Listeners too young to have strong associations with these songs may best remember her 1980 performance of “Think” in the movie Blues Brothers. Still others will associate her with and be most moved by her gospel repertoire. The song Franklin sang, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” would likewise be well known to virtually everyone in the audience. The song begins with the words “My country.” I do not think we can underestimate the significance of an African American woman singing these words and claiming the country as her own at a major civic event. Each element of the performance—the text of the song and any associations arising from it, the number of verses sung, the interplay of the gospel choir with Franklin’s solo parts, performance choices such as melisma and rhythmic nuances, the musical accompaniment—­ contributed to the distinctive experience shared by the audience and the performers. In my analysis of this example I have separated out and discussed individual elements of Franklin’s performance for ease of discussion. I do not, however, believe that we can separate these elements to say that the fact of a shared experience, context, and shared history matter more than any of the musical elements or the specifics of the performance. The totality of the details makes up an event. If it were not that song, not that performer, not that occasion, the event would have a different emotional import. When interpretative readings of music are achieved in solitary contemplation, yet informed by the social nature of music, we have differing subjective responses to music. This is a part of the story of why some listeners hear “a yearning for the absolute” or “the importance of duty,” etc., in instrumental music. When responses arise in social situations of reception and performance, we have the possibility of shared subjectivities and of stepping beyond our individual, idiosyncratic responses. Perhaps music is most powerful in situations such as these, when it can mean similar things to many people.

Note 1. A video of the performance is available on YouTube: “Barack Obama Inauguration—Aretha Franklin—Sings ‘America’ My Country Tis Of Thee Jan 20, 2009,” YouTube, 03:21, January 20, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsNHhJTZAM0&t=1s.

Response to Susan McClary: Subjectivities   1081

Works Cited Boretz, Benjamin. 1970. “Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art from a Musical Point of View.” Journal of Philosophy 67 (August): 540–552. Budd, Malcolm. 1985. “Understanding Music.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 59 (1985): 233–248. Cohen, H. F. 1984. Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650. UWO Series in Philosophy of Science 23. Dordrecht: D.  Reidel Publishing Co. Gleason, Jean Berko. 1997. The Development of Language. 4th ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Guck, Marion A. 1997. “Two Types of Metaphoric Transference.” In Music and Meaning, edited by Jenefer Robinson, 201–212. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kivy, Peter. 1997. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, Daniel A. 1989. “Some Distinctions on the Role of Metaphor in Music.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 23, no. 2 (Summer): 103–106. Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Szabó, Arpád. 1978. The Beginnings of Greek Mathematics Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.

Index

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t ” and “f ”, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbate, Carolyn  479–80, 621–2 continental philosophy of music and  98 on embodiment  20 on metaphysics  167–8 on performance  467, 475 absolute music aesthetic autonomy and  632–3, 636–7, 639, 645–7 autonomy and  765–6 beauty and  947–9 context and  640–1 debates contesting  634–9 emotion and  791 extra-musical expression and  785–6 faith, scepticism and  642–5 history studies and  633 institution of art and  635–6 language and  635 meaning and autonomy and  768 modern view of  632 mystification and  639–42 origins of  197, 634–6 overview of  631–4, 647–8 programme music and  219–20 as regulative concept  637–8 strategies 645–7 symbolism and  776–7 Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Bonds) 167–8 absorbed not-being-there, in topography of musical absorption  309f, 311–12 absorption, musical absorbed not-being-there in  309f, 311–12 agency and  318–19

coping and  313–14 ex-static absorption in  309f, 311–12 frustrated playing in  309f, 310–11, 318 mind-wandering not-being-there in  309f, 310–11 reflection and  313–14 standard absorption in  309f, 310 understanding 309 abstract machines, posthumanism and  421–3 abstract objects, musical works as  331–2, 342n.9 academic journals  228 Académie de musique et de poésie  168 a cappella music, collegiate  500–1 accessibility, of popular music  538–41, 546 Acid Mothers Temple (AMT)  528–9 acoustically spatial music  879–82 Acoustic Communication (Truax)  492 acoustic music, electronic music compared to 521–2 acoustics cues in, emotion and  975–6 phenomenology and  232 Acoustic Territories (LaBelle)  492 action collective  1043, 1066 human, interpretation and  774–6 human, model of emotion  977 perception of music as  1039–46 phenomenology of  1039–40 social, rationality and  774–5, 781n.9 active externalism  662–3 activist ethnomusicology  288–9 Adagio for Strings (Barber)  992–3

1084   index adaptation, evolution and music and  690–5 Adler, Guido  11–12, 46, 561 Adorno, Theodor  22–3, 91–2, 404, 639, 668–9, 830–1, 1067 on beauty and aesthetics  959–60 on Beethoven  537, 730–2 Bloch compared to  94–5 on complex of meaning  772–3 on composition process  452 on culture industry  870–1 on diagōgē 871 on entrepreneurialism  765 historical musicology and  14–15 on Husserl  245–7 ineffability of music and  750–2 on jazz  28–9 on Kurth  39 on mediation  781n.8 on paidia 871 on self-expression  717 on sense as social and structural mediation 770–1 on society and music  870–5 on structural listening  489–90 advertising jingles  492 Aelian 125 Aesthetica (Baumgarten)  29, 950 aesthetic autonomy, absolute music and  632–3, 636–7, 639, 645–7. See also autonomy aesthetics. See also Black aesthetics aisthesis and  41n.15 Aristotle on  123–6 in art music  544 autonomous 249–50 beauty and  959–60 of blackface  556, 558–9, 565–6, 572–3 Blacksound and  558, 560 as critical force  20 epistemology of music and  268–70 faith and  642–5 French studies on  239–40 function and  272 historical musicology and  13–14, 19–20 listening and, immersion and  492–4 musical beauty and  943–5 in musicology, exclusion and  1057

Nietzsche on  749 in nineteenth-century music and philosophy 207 objectivity and  960 phenomenology compared to  233–4 philosophy of music and  338–40 pleasure and  943 in popular music  544 relational properties and  1046–9, 1061 sacralization and  643–4 score-compliance authenticity and  929 subjectivity and  960 textbooks and courses on  14 in twentieth-century music and philosophy 228–9 Aesthetics (Hegel)  837–8 Aesthetics of Music (Scruton)  726 affect action and  774–5 emotion and  973–5, 977–8 identity and  510 musical 71–2 rationality and  774–5 affective-rhetorical tradition  181–4, 198–9 affect theory  416 affordances, musical ontology and  164 Africa evolution and music origins in  682–3 oral traditions of  869 African Americans. See also Black aesthetics; blackface; Blacksound chattel slavery and  560–1, 564–5, 567, 870 oral traditions of  869 phenomenology and  229–31, 237–8 “Sorrow Songs” of  754–5, 867–70 subjectivity and music of  1072 African American Spirituals  867–70 Agamben, Giorgio  393, 411 Agawu, Kofi  54 agency of bodily habituality  317–18 control and  318–19 of music  316–17 perception of music as action and 1039–46 performance and  1059–61 in popular music  1060

index   1085 relational 1061 topography of musical absorption and 318–19 agential realism  416, 418 the agreeable, beauty and  945–7 aisthesis 41n.15 Die Aktualität des Schönen (Gadamer)  951 Albini, Steve  541 Aldridge, Ira  567 Alexander, Cecil Frances  504, 507–13 Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Sulzer) 707 allographic, musical works as  77–8 Almaas, A. H.  665–6 Alperson, Philip  443, 474 The Alps (band)  522–3 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Strauss)  387 alteration, Kurth on  37 Althusser, Louis  724–5 Altnikol, Johann Christoph  930 Alypius 118 The Ambient Century (Prendergast)  524–5 ambient music  491 nature and  825–6 ambiguity, ethnomusicology and  58–9 American Folklife Center  51 American Musicological Society (AMS)  50 American Popular Music and its Business (Sanjek) 569 American Society of Composers and Performers (ASCAP)  570 AMS (American Musicological Society)  50 AMT (Acid Mothers Temple)  528–9 Anacreon 120–1 analogies, beauty and  956–7 analysis  34–5, 391–2, 910–16. See also music theory continental philosophy of music and 99–101 analytic philosophy  2 historical musicology and  15–16 methodological features of  65–6 opera and  620–2 analytic philosophy of music artistic signifiers in  70–1 authenticity in performance and  69–70 cognitive studies and  82–3

contemporary history of  68–71 continental philosophy of music and  78–9, 90–1 defining features of  65–8 emotion and  843–4 epistemology, rhythm and  848–51 experimental philosophy and  83 irresolvable conflicts and  854–7 language and  846–8 modernity and  844–5 musical expression and  71–4 musical grammar and  82–3 musical works and performance in  74–8 musicology and  83–4 objectivity and  843–4 performance philosophy and  81 social behaviour and  80 twentieth-century divide of continental and 250–2 Wittgenstein on logical form and  845–6 Anatomie of Melancholy (Burton)  188 ancient Greece. See Greece, ancient Anderson, Benedict  228, 508 anger  803–4, 978 Anglicanism  504–5, 514n.6 animal behaviour musical response in  681–2 music creation and  682 posthumanism and  427–9 Années de pèlerinage (Liszt)  714 “An Schwager Kronos” (Schubert)  1034, 1035f Ansermet, Ernest  98–9 anthropology ethnomusicology and  12, 24n.2, 45 of sound  270 The Anthropology of Music (Merriam)  50–1 Anthropology of the Brain (Bartra)  663 The Anti-Aesthetic (Foster, H.)  639–40 antiblackness, blackface and  568. See also race anticipation. See expectations The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom)  447 “Apology for Raymond Sebound” (Montaigne) 157 appearance emotion in  970–2 musical hermeneutics, meaning and  386–8

1086   index Appen, Ralf von  539–40 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  5 applied ethnomusicology  288–9 applied physiology  34 evolution and music and  677 Apter, Emily  412 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 55–6 Archaic Greece (c.750–500 bce) 119–21 Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology, India  54 Argerich, Martha  476 Arianna (Monteverdi)  173 Aristides Quintilianus  118, 127, 129–31 Aristophanes 125 Aristotle  27, 117–18, 152n.8, 161, 593, 706 on aesthetics  123–6 on catharsis 864–5 on character and music  174 on dactylic hexameter  120 on diagōgē 864 on ethics and music  143–5, 284 on ethos 863–4 on harmonia 118 Middle Ages music and  150–1, 152n.12 on music and pleasure  123–4 on paidia 864 on performance and showmanship  477 on phronēsis  437, 443–4 on rhetoric  171–2 on society and music  863–5, 873 Aristoxenus of Tarentum  27–8, 118, 127–8 Armstrong, Louis  471–2, 548 arousal meaning and scepticism and  789–92, 800 musical expression and  718 art. See also art music artificiality of  709, 714–15 aspect-change and  388 authenticity and object of  923 criteria of  542–3 definition of  776 emotion and  718 institution of, absolute music and  635–6 jazz as representational  590–1 Nazism’s appropriation of  410–11 norms and  773

performance as  473–8 performance as, impediments to  476–8 popular music as  541–4 power of  867 rationality and practice of  776–8 truth and  1026–7 the unconscious and  715 Art and Its Objects (Wollheim)  66–9 Art as Experience (Dewey)  848 artificiality of art  709, 714–15 artistic genius  438–40 artistic signifiers, in analytic philosophy of music 70–1 art music aesthetics in  544 attentive listening for  537–8 autonomy of  545 intended use of  544–5 as popular music  537 popular music compared to  538–9 The Art of Fugue (Bach, J. S.)  785–6 The Art of Reason (Lever)  161–3 Artusi, Giovanni  1068 ASCAP (American Society of Composers and Performers) 570 Ashley, Martin  500–1 Ashley, Tim  477 Ash Wednesday (Eliot, T. S.)  799 “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (Hopkins) 660–1 aspect-change, art and  388 Ästhetische Theorie (Adorno)  959–60 “At a Solemn Music” (Milton)  167 Athenaeus of Naucratis  118 “At Last” (James, E.)  668 atomism 185–6 Attali, Jacques  871–2, 1072 attention expectations and  1006–8, 1011–12 group, jazz and  593–5 performance and joint  1049–50 attentive listening  484–91, 537–8. See also listening Aucouturier, Jean-Julien  441–2 audience-directed performance  479 audience involvement, in performance  1050–2, 1079–80. See also listening

index   1087 auditory processing, evolution and music and 677 auditory scene analysis  427 Auerbach, Erich  725–6 Augustine  141–3, 152n.7, 346–7, 706, 917n.5 authenticity art objects and  923 etiological 923 faithfulness and  923–5 historical 925–7 interpretive 934–7 performance and  69–70, 78, 924–6 personal 924 score-compliance 937 historical authenticity as  925–7 performance value as  927–34 work authenticity as  923–5 sincerity and  924 truth and  923–4 work 923–5 authorship, performance and  74–5 autonomous aesthetics  249–50 autonomy. See also meaning and autonomy absolute music and  765–6 aesthetic, absolute music and  632–3, 636–7, 639, 645–7 of art music  545 concept of  763–4 definition of  765 ethics and music and  285–9 galant music and  1021, 1023 time and  773–4 autopoiesis  417, 421–2, 425 autotune, camp and  500–1 avant-garde music, beauty and  945 Avison, Charles  707 Babbitt, Milton  523, 536, 549–50, 788, 959 babies, musical response of  680–1 Bach, C. P. E.  708, 710, 785–6, 954 Bach, J. S.  930–1, 936–7 Double Violin Concerto  1040, 1041f time and work of  985–6 The Art of Fugue 785–6 Partitas 936–7 St Matthew Passion 985 The Well-Tempered Clavier 930–1

Bach’s Circle, Mozart’s Arrow (Berger)  985 background music  491 Bacon, Francis  159, 169–71 Badiou, Alain  617–18 continental philosophy of music and  104–6 on gender and capitalism  732–3 on postmodernism and capitalism  729 on set theory  106 on truthful events  730–1 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de  168 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  654 Bangs, Lester  874–5 Barad, Karen  416, 418 Barber, Samuel  992–3 Baroque, as categorization  181, 185, 199–200. See also Enlightenment Bartel, Dietrich  182–3 Barth, Karl  643 Barthes, Roland  19–20, 22, 500–1 on challenging structuralism  108 on grain of voice  501–2 on total serialism  102–3 Bartók, Béla  48 Bartra, Roger  663 Barwise, Jon  1049–50 Barz, Gregory  58 Basch, Victor  239–40 Bashkow, Ira  274 Basinski, William  526 Bastian, Peter  315–16 Bateson, Gregory  419 Batteux, Charles  438–9, 708–9, 950 Baudelaire, Charles  219 Baumgarten, Alexander  29, 325, 950 Baxandall, Michael  80 Bayer, Raymond  239 beat-based processing  427 the Beatles  538, 540–1, 545, 1030, 1031f Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 605–6 beauty absolute music and  947–9 aesthetics and  943–5, 959–60 the agreeable and  945–7 analogies and  956–7 avant-garde music and  945 cultural variations of  944–5

1088   index beauty (Continued ) ephemerality of  955 formalism and  947–9 Germany’s intellectual traditions and 961–2 Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful and 953–8 as historical topic  950–3, 961–2 listening and  210–11 metaphor and  949–50 musical  941–5, 949–50 musicology and  950–60, 962–3 narrow sense of  943–4 Nietzsche on  219 organicism and  958–9 philosophy of music and  962–3 play and  952 pleasure and  942–3, 952–3 sublimity and  945–7 violence and  945–6 wide sense of  943–4 Beauvoir, Simone de  243–4 Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe (Batteux) 950 Beck, Leslie  252 Becker, Alexander  767 Becker, Howard  444–5 Becker, Judith  979–80 Beethoven, Ludwig van  439, 536–7, 545, 709, 843 autobiographical work of  713 and deafness  712–13 Ninth Symphony  729–32, 945–6 opera of  606–7 Piano Concerto No. 4  1040, 1040f Piano Concerto No. 4, Orpheus legend and 797–9 String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132  910–15, 911f, 913f, 914f violence in work of  733–5 being consciousness and  665–9 meaning over, Nietzsche on  218–19 Being and Event (Badiou)  104–5 Being and Time (Heidegger)  443–4, 666–7 Bekker, Paul  234 Bell, Clive  72 Benjamin, Walter  412–13

Bennington, Geoffrey  1020 Benson, Bruce Ellis  316 Benson, Edward White  507 Berg, Alban  28–9 Berger, Karol  184–5, 985–7 Bergson, Henri  103–4, 248, 778–9 on duration and extension  898 on time and duration  896–7 Berliner, Paul  440 Berlioz, Hector  212, 713–14, 883–4 Bernstein, Leonard  788 Besonnenheit (Hoffmann)  715–16 Bessler, Heinrich  235 on music as melody of human existence 851–3 BFE (British Forum for Ethnomusicology)  54 Bhandar, Brenna  565–6, 574n.6 Bharucha, Jamshed  998 Bicknell, Jeanette  295, 548–9 Bigenho, Michelle  12–13 birdsong, posthumanism and  419–20, 428 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche)  217, 616, 758n.6 Biswas, Ansuman  662–3 Black aesthetics  253. See also Blacksound; race blackface 561–2. See also Blacksound aesthetics of  556, 558–9, 565–6, 572–3 antiblackness and  568 coon songs and  561, 570, 574n.11 development of  564–5 embodiment and  566–7 in England  574n.4 Irish Americans in  565–6 “Jim Crow” and  565 legacy of  565–8 popular music and  566–7, 571 standard songs and  570 stereotype characters of  565–7, 574n.9 white identity and  562–3 white supremacy and  568 Blacking, John  538 Blacksound. See also blackface aesthetics and  558, 560 concept of  555–7, 572–3 copyright law and  559–62, 568–72 critical race theory and  557–9 historicizing 565–8

index   1089 identity and  562–3 intellectual property and  559–62, 564–8 marketing, in popular music  568–72 as technology of self  562–4 work-concept and  559–62 Bloch, Ernst  94–5, 246–7 Bloom, Harold  447 The Blue and Brown Books (Wittgenstein)  361 blues harmony  581–3 Blyth, Alan  475 Boas, Franz  49 bodily habituality, agency of  317–18 body listening with  484–5, 491–2, 495n.2 mechanical conception of  192–3 musical space and  828–9 neuronal inscription and  830 technicity and  747–8 theology and music and  353–4 voice of  502 Western art music and  829–30 Boethius  141–3, 145–6, 346–7 Böhm, Karl  798 Bonaparte, Napoleon  40n.8 Bonds, Mark Evan  167–8, 171–2, 183, 936, 955 boredom, information in performance and 372. See also absorption, musical Born, Georgina  640 Boschi, Elena  485–6 Boulez, Pierre  102–3, 454–5, 716 boundary concept  774–5, 781n.10 Bourdieu, Pierre  542, 546–7, 639–40 Bourriaud, Nicholas  294 on relational aesthetics  1061 on social behaviour and performance 1061–2 Bowie, Andrew  22, 81–2, 220–1, 287, 354–5, 670 on sense-making  770 Bowie, David  522–3, 527 Boyle, Robert  192–5, 201n.9 Boym, Svetlana  511 Bradley, Deborah  503 Brahms, Johannes  15–17, 219–20, 714 Piano Concerto No. 2  1043, 1044f Braidotti, Rosi  415–17 on insect music  420 Bramley, H. R.  506–7

“Brando” (Walker and Sunn O))) )  519 Brandom, Robert  78–9 Brattico, Elvira  1000–1 Brecht, Bertolt  716 Bregman, Albert  427 Brelet, Gisèle  249–50, 895 Brendel, Alfred  936, 1051–2 Brentano, Franz  232–3 British Broadcasting Company (BBC)  508 British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) 54 British Journal of Aesthetics 228 Britten, Benjamin  621–2, 883, 1034, 1036f War Requiem of  810–14, 880–1 Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings 883 String Quartet No. 3  1034, 1036f The Turn of the Screw 621–2 Brocklesby, Richard  189–90 Bronson, Bertrand  47 Brothers, Thomas  148 Brown, James  525 Brown, Lee, B.  442–3, 471–2 Brown, Steven  688 Browne, Richard  189–90, 193 Brubeck, Dave  446 Budd, Malcolm  14–15, 66–7, 886 on emotion in appearances  972 on resemblance theory  793 Buddhism  664–6, 669 Budner, Stanley  58–9 Buelow, George  182–3 Buigne, Gace de la  145–6 Bürger, Peter  764–6 Burgess, Geoffrey  183 Burke, Edmund  945 Burmeister, Joachim  172–3 Burnham, Scott  986–7 Burrow, John W.  201n.2 Burton, Robert  188 Busoni, Ferruccio  443 Butler, Judith  723 Butler, Katherine  184 Butt, John  930–2 by-product theory, evolution and music and  687, 691–2, 694–5 Cage, John  336, 523–4, 716, 945 Cahusac, Louis de  707

1090   index Caldwell, Roger  799 Callas, Maria  475, 820n.14 Calvinist Protestantism  504–5, 514n.6 Cameron, Ross P.  342n.8 camp, autotune and  500–1. See also technology; voice Camus, Albert  591 canonical texts, twentieth-century music and philosophy and  225 Canonne, Clément  441–2 Cantometrics (Lomax) 51 Čapek, Milič  897–8, 901, 903, 916n.1–2 capitalism gender and  732–3 postmodernism and  729 Caplan, Ben  76–7 care language of  393 meaning and  391–2 musical hermeneutics and  386, 392–3 paraphrasing with  394–6 time and  391 Carlos, Wendy  526 Carlsen, James  1001 Carnap, Rudolf  250–1, 326 metaphysics since  326–9 Carroll, Noël  534–5 Carter Family  541 Carvalho, John  254n.4 Case, John  159–61 Cassirer, Ernst  247–8 Castiglione, Baldassare  159, 174–5 castrato 500–1 catharsis 864–5 Cavalli, Francesco  604 “A Cavalry Near the Ancre” (Owen)  811–12 Cavell, Stanley  453–4, 847 Cavendish, William  162f Cavour, Pietro  607 Cervantes, Miguel  176 Chalmers, David  655–6 Chapin, Keith  17–18 character, music and  174 characters, mercy in music expressed by  805 chattel slavery  560–1, 564–5, 567, 870 Cheng, William  286 Chernoff, John Miller  272

Child, Francis James  47 China 236 Chladni, Ernst F. F.  31, 39, 40n.8 Chomsky, Noam  338, 372 Chopin, Frédéric  713 Prelude No. 7 in A major  990–2, 991t choral music  500 chord progression  583–4 Chow, Rey  236 Christianity. See also theology and music Anglicanism and  504–5, 514n.6 the body and  353–4 Calvinist Protestantism and  504–5, 514n.6 Christmas carols and  506–7 congregational singing in nineteenth-century England and  504–8 conversion and, in Middle Ages  143–6 disenchantment and  347–9 ethos and  175 faith, absolute music and  642–5 material environment and  351–3 Methodism and  504–5, 514n.6 missions and  506 re-enchantment through music and 349–51 Requiem Mass in, mercy in music and 809–15 A Christmas Carol (Dickens)  506 Christmas carols  506–7 Christmas Carols New and Old (Bramley and Stainer) 506–7 chromaticism 169 Chua, Daniel  637–8 Church, Michael  477 Cimini, Amy  20 cisgender persons  723–4. See also gender Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa  506 Clark, Andrew  17–18 Clark, Andy  655–6 Clark, Thomas  660 Clarke, David  646 Clarke, Eric  485–6, 662–3 class, intersectionality and  556 Classical Greece (c.500–300 bce) 121–3 La clemenza di Tito (Mozart)  816–19 Cleobury, Stephen  504 Clerc Parada, Miguelángel  492–4

index   1091 Clinton, George  525 closed hermeneutics  389. See also musical hermeneutics Cobussen, Marcel  283–4, 287, 444–5 Cochrane, Tom  1049–50 codes, society and music and  860–1, 869, 871–4 cognition. See also cognitive studies; consciousness active externalism and  662–3 emotion and  657 enactive 661–2 in evolution and music  683–5 Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (Krumhansl) 1001 cognitive non-consciousness, musical hermeneutics and  397 cognitive penetration, expectations and  1006 cognitive studies  54 analytic philosophy of music and  82–3 emotion and  980 posthumanism and  421 Cohen, Gustav  955 Cohen, H. F.  184 coherence theories, meaning and autonomy and 767–8 Coker, Wilson  379n.12 collective action  1043 subjectivity and  1066 collective intention, jazz and  593–5 collegiate a cappella music  500–1 Collingwood, R. G.  66–7, 73–4, 717 colour circle, of Newton  190–2, 191f Coltrane, Alice  755 Coltrane, John  592 communication epistemology of music and  277–8 posthumanism and  419–20 comparative musicology Lomax and  51 objectivity and  48–9 origins of  46–8 scientific racism and  48 social Darwinism and  48 technological innovations in, 1800s  47–8 compassion, musical expression and  803–4 competence, performance and  1038

The Compleat Gentleman (Peacham)  163, 188 complexity, popular music and  536 complex of meaning, music as mediated 772–3 compliance theory, musical ontology and 330–3 The Composers Quartet (musical group) 463n.9 The Composer’s Voice (Cone)  463n.3, 716 composition artistic genius and  438–40 creative process in  439 dissonance and  456 emotion and  369, 618–19 ethos and  176–7 Haydn’s method of  709 improvisation and  437, 441–3 intention and  708 interpretation and  455 listening and  453, 463n.5, 463n.7 method over outcome in  454–5 of musical works for kinds of spaces  881–2 of musical works for particular spaces 880–1 music theory and  34–5 as personal  462 pitch and  458–9 process of  452–3, 462 repetition and  459–60 rhythm and  458 of Rousseau  865–6 scholarly works on  451 sound into  210 spaces 880 status and  439–43 String Quartet (Crawford)  455–62 compositionality, context and  378n.4 computerized voice  513n.2 The Concept of the Mind (Ryle)  251–2 concepts, intuitions and  93 conceptually spatial music  879–80, 882–3 concrete succession  900–1, 903, 908 Cone, Edward T.  463n.3, 716 on persona  717–18 Confessions (Augustine)  141–2 conflict, perception and  1045 conflict resolution, intercultural  855

1092   index Confucius 284 congregational singing Christmas carols and  506–7 distributed subjectivity and  508–12 in nineteenth-century England  504–8 Congrès internationale de philosophie  227 Connor, Steven  502 Conrad, Waldemar  233 conscientious objector (CO) status  821n.20 consciousness being and  665–9 cognitive non-consciousness, musical hermeneutics and  397 core 661–2 culture and  663 defining 653–4 dependent origination and  664–5 embodiment and  661–2, 669 epistemology and  655–6 exocerebrum and  663 expectations and  998–1003, 1008 extended 661–4 field of  657–8 future studies of  670 heterophenomenology and  659 higher-order 661–2 inner, phenomenology and  232–3 internalist view of  661–2, 664 knowledge and  665–6 locus of  661–5 memes and  663 multidisciplinary views on  653–6 music and philosophy and  654–5 neuroscience and  654 ontology and  655–6, 665–8 opera and  656–8 overview of  668–70 perception and  1052 phenomenology and  655–6, 666 scientific accounts of  654–5, 658–61, 669–70 Self and  659–60, 668–9 subjectivity and  657 time and  659–60 Consciousness Explained (Dennett)  660–1 consensual musical ethics broad scope of  293

characteristics of  294–8 components of  290–8 as embodied  295–6, 300–2 as emergent  296–7, 300–2 everyday life and  293 formalist ethics and  293 of “Hide and Seek,”  298–302 implications of  302 as intuitive  294–5, 302 listening and  293 as practice-oriented  297–8, 302 as relational  294, 298–300, 302 terminology of  291–2 time and  296–7 conservatism, gender and  723, 726–9 The Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius)  143, 145–6 constitutive norms, score-compliance authenticity and  932–3 constitutive rules  379n.13 constitutive technicity  748 constraint, perception and  1046 Contemporary Music Review 18–19 contemporary philosophy of music  22–3 content expectations and  1003–9 medium and  213–14 nineteenth-century music and philosophy and 219–21 subject matter and  376 context absolute music and  640–1 compositionality and  378n.4 deconstruction of music and  406 contextualism, musical works and  76 continental philosophy  2 historical musicology and  17–19 language limits in  17–18 methodological features of  66 music theory and  28 continental philosophy of music analysis and  99–101 analytic philosophy of music and  78–9, 90–1 Badiou and  104–6 creative criticism and  107–9 debates in  95–106

index   1093 deconstruction of music and  99–101 defining 89–91 dialectic and  91–2 disputes over  94–5 French feminism and  101–2 future of  106–9 in Germany and France  95 New Musicology and  101 orders of philosophy in  92–4 phenomenology and  97–9 speculative character of  89–90 structuralism and  95–7 twentieth-century divide of analytic and 250–2 continuants, embodiments of  76–7 continuant theory historical substance and  334–5 musical ontology and  330, 333–5, 340 time and  333–4 contour, musical expression and  718 control, agency and  318–19 Cook, Nicholas  12–13, 267, 451 Cooke, Deryck  362–3, 793, 967, 975 on musical vocabulary  365–8 Cooke, Mervyn  812, 814 Cooley, Timothy  58 coon songs blackface and  561, 570, 574n.11 “coon shouting”  572–3 Cooper, Anthony Ashley  636–7 coping, topography of musical absorption and 313–14 Copland, Aaron  446, 521–2 Copleston, Frederick  159–61 Copyright Act of 1909  570–1 copyright law, Blacksound and  559–62, 568–72. See also intellectual property, Blacksound and core consciousness  661–2 Corinne ou l’Italie (Stäel)  197 correspondence theories, meaning and autonomy and  767–8 Coryat, Thomas  166–7 CO (conscientious objector) status  821n.20 Courville, Joachim Thibault de  168 Cox, Damian  285–6 the Cramps (Band)  539

Crawford, Ruth  451–2 on dissonance  456 pitch use by  458–9 repetition use by  459–60 String Quartet, composition of  455–62 Crawley, Ashon T.  555 “Crazy Blues” (Smith, M.)  571–3 The Creation (Haydn)  391–2 The Creation of the World or Globalization (Nancy) 406 creative criticism, continental philosophy of music and  107–9 creative participation, in listening  474 creative process, in composition  439 Crenshaw, Kimberlé  556 Criminal Justice Act of 1967, UK  926–7 The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl) 97–8 critical posthumanism  416–17 critical race theory Blacksound and  557–9 posthumanism and  418 Critical Theory  95, 245–7. See also Adorno, Theodor Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)  848–9 Critique of the Power of Judgement (Kant)  29, 196–7, 536–7, 542, 635–6, 766–7, 950 Croce, Benedetto  717 crooning 500–1 Cross, Ian  276–7, 1046–7 Cull, Laura  81 cultural relativism  49, 288–9 culture beauty across  944–5 changes in, subjectivity and  1068–70 consciousness and  663 epistemology of music and  270–3 improvisation and  440 musical engagement in  678–9 music’s universal features across  679–80, 693–4 nature and  736n.13 popular music as category of  534 posthumanism, technology and  423–5 culture industry  870–1, 874–5 Cummings, Naomi  977

1094   index Currie, Gregory  335–6 Currie, James  644–5 Cusick, Suzanne G.  725 cyborgs 417 Dabh, Halim el-  525 dactylic hexameter  120 Dadelsen, Georg  1065 Dafne (Rinnucini)  168 da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna  474 Dahlhaus, Carl  633, 643, 710 Dale, Ann  132 d’Alembert, Jean  208–9, 1069–70 D’Alembert’s Dream (Diderot)  208–9 Damon of Oa  117–18, 122 Damsio, Antonio  661–2 Danish String Quartet (DSQ)  309–11, 314–15, 319 Darío, Rubén  227–8 Darwin, Charles  422, 691 on emotion  975 Darwinism  660–1, 671n.12 Dasein 666 data mining, musical hermeneutics and 397–8 Daubert, Johannes  232, 254n.11 Davidson, Arnold  745–6 Davidson, Donald  847 Davies, David  331, 335–6, 467 on performance  468 on performance as art  473–4, 476 Davies, Stephen  14–15, 79–80, 374, 467 on analytic philosophy of music  68, 74 on art criteria  542–3 on emotion and composition  618–19 on emotion in appearances  970–1 on expressiveness and philosophy of music 370 on features of analytic philosophy  65–6 on musical expression and emotion  73 on musical performance  469 on performance of musical works  478–9, 481 on resemblance theory  793 on score-compliance authenticity  925, 928, 932–4, 937 on space  887

Davis, Edward B.  185–6 Davis, Miles  591 Dawkins, Richard  663, 671n.12 Deacon, Terrence  424–5 De’Bardi, Giovanni  171–2 Debussy, Claude  212, 395–6, 395f, 396f, 1039 de Clercq, Rafael  888–9 deconstruction of music concept of  403–4 context and  406 continental philosophy of music and 99–101 metaphysics and  404 music of deconstruction and  407–13 negative dialectics and  404 overview of  405–7 resonance and  410–11, 413 translation and  412–13 unsettled nature of  403 deep listening  979–80 Deep Refrains (Gallope)  289–90 deferred ostension  332 deflationary views, on musical ontology 337–40 De inventione et usu musicae (Tinctoris)  157 Deipnosophistae (Athenaeus)  118 Dekker, Thomas  163–4 De l’être musicale (Vial)  249 Deleuze, Gilles  103–4, 917n.7 on birdsong  419–20 on rhizome  508–9 Dell’Antonio, Andrew  176 Del Rey, Lana  875 Demers, Joanna  493 De Musica (Augustine)  346–7 De Musica (Boethius)  142 Dennett, Daniel  654–7, 659–61, 669, 670n.4 DeNora, Tia  562–3 dependent origination. See consciousness Derrida, Jacques  55–6, 167–8, 404–6, 485, 496n.11 on iterability of signs  495n.5 on Leroi-Gourhan  833 on Nancy  1020 open hermeneutics and  388–9 on “outside-text,”  406 on philosophy and listening  408–9

index   1095 on structuralism and phenomenology  93–4, 96 on tool-making  833–4 on translation  412 Derulo, Jason  298 Descartes, René  184–7, 848 descriptive popularity  535–40 La deshumanización del arte (Ortega y Gasset) 242–3 designative tradition, of Taylor  846–7 desire mimetic 236 sensualism and  214–15 Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (McClary)  169 Dessoir, Max  228, 232 determinant judgement  647–8 De triplici vita (Ficino)  164 Le Devin du village (Rousseau)  865–6 Devitt, Michael  266–7 Dewey, John  595, 848 diagōgē  864, 871 dialectic continental philosophy of music and  91–2 language and  854 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 668–9 Dialogo della music antica a della moderna (Galilei)  118, 171–2 dialogue, improvisation and  445–6 diatonic scale  1030f Dickens, Charles  506 Dickinson, Kay  500–1 Diderot, Denis  208–9 on opera and emotion  610–12 difference, ethnomusicology and  55–9 Di Grazia, Donna  500 Dionysius of Halicarnassus  125 The Disciplines of Vocal Pedagogy (Sell) 500 discourse analysis gender and  726 queer theory and  725 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality (Rousseau) 867 disembodiment. See also embodiment

musical expression and  706 voice as  502 disenchantment. See also enchantment theology and music and  347–9 Weber, M., on  983 The Disintegration Loops (Basinski)  526 dismissivism, musical ontology and  337–40 dispositional property, popular music as 540–1 Dissanayake, Ellen  682, 691 dissonance, composition and  456 La Distinction (Bourdieu)  639–40 distraction. See listening, distracted distributed subjectivity, congregational singing and  508–12 Dodd, Julian  75–7, 82, 330–2 Dolar, Mladen  161, 502 Don Giovanni (Mozart)  213–16, 606 Don Quixote (Cervantes)  176 Dotson, Kristie  555, 574n.2 Double Violin Concerto (Bach, J. S.)  1040, 1041f Douglas, Susan  508 Douglass, Frederick  754–5 Downes, Stephen  24n.5 Drake, Stillman  183–4 Dreyfus, Hubert  313–14 drone music  519 DSQ (Danish String Quartet)  309–11, 314–15, 319 Du Bois, W. E. B.  229–30, 754–5 on African oral traditions  869 on justice  868–71 on society and music  867–70, 872–3 on “Sorrow Songs,”  867–70 Duchan, Joshua  500–1 Duff, William  438–9 Dumbstruck (Connor)  502 Dummett, Michael  372 Dunn, Kyle Bobby  521–2 Dunsby, Jonathan  501–2 duration events and  902–3, 905–7, 916n.1 extension and  898 of sound  905–7 String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 (Beethoven) and  910–15, 911f, 913f, 914f

1096   index duration (Continued ) time, succession and  896–905, 916n.2 time and  902–10 viscosity and  917n.8 durational quantity  903–5 Dürr, Alfred  1065 Dusman, Linda  463n.1 dynamic expectations  1001–2 earbuds 485–6 early modern music ethics and  159, 174–7 metaphysics and  157, 164–8 ontology and  157, 161–4 physics and  159, 168–71 rhetoric and  159, 171–4 Ebbebrecht, Hans  1076–7 Eco, Umberto  639 Ecology Without Nature (Morton)  824–7 ecomusicology 54 Economy and Society (Weber, M.)  770 écriture féminine 101–2 Edidin, Aron  929 Edison, Thomas  47–8 Edmunds, Dave  539 Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich  268–9, 710 on beauty and play  952 Either/Or (Kierkegaard)  212–15 Elective Affinities (Goehr)  287 electronic music  15–16 acoustic music compared to  521–2 categories of  519–20 definition of  520–1 first-generation 520–3 as genre  526–30 history studies of  524–6 listening and  523–4 ontology of  520 popular music and  522–3 reflection and  526 retromania and  529 sampling and  525 technology and  520–3 Elements of Harmony (Aristoxenus)  27–8, 118 eliminativism 342n.8 space and  887–8 Eliot, George  207

Eliot, T. S.  644, 799 on poetry  1048–9 Elkins, James  641, 643 Ellington, Duke  582–3 Elliott, R. K.  972 Ellis, Alexander J.  47–8 embodied thinking  17 embodiment. See also body blackface and  566–7 consciousness and  661–2, 669 consensual musical ethics and  295–6, 300–2 of continuants  76–7 historical musicology and  20–1 performative 312–13 emergence, musical ethics and  296–7, 300–2 Emmerson, Simon  520 emotion absolute music and  791 acoustic cues and  975–6 affect and  973–5, 977–8 analytic philosophy of music and  843–4 anger  803–4, 978 in appearances  970–2 arousal of  968–9 art and  718 cognition and  657 cognitive studies and  980 composition and  369, 618–19 Diderot on opera and  610–12 environment influencing  968 ethos and  974 everyday life and  977–80 expectation and  973, 976, 998–9 experiences of musical expression and 969–73 fiction and  968 genre and  978 historical musicology and  16 human-action model of  977 meaning and scepticism and  789–92 mechanisms of musical  975–6 melody and  608 mood and  968 “moved” to  790–1 musical 973–80 musical expression and  72–4, 792–3, 803–4, 942, 975–7

index   1097 musical feelings and  1036–7 nature of  967–8 opera and  602–3, 610–12, 618–19 overview of  967–9, 980 participation and  979–80 perception and  1038–9 philosophy of music and  968 popular music for self-regulation of  546 realism and  977–8 reference as musical expression of  771 Rousseau on opera and  608–10 sadness 975–6 semantics and  366–7 tempo 975 tension and  973 universal musical expression and  680 wonder 978–9 Emotion and Meaning in Music (Meyer)  973, 997 enactive cognition  661–2 enchantment magic and  983–4 overview of  983–5 Prelude No. 7 in A major (Chopin) and  990–2, 991t re-hearing musical  992–3 Sirens myth and  984, 993–5 sound of  988–9 theology and music and  347–51 time, space and  985–8 transport by  992 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel) 823–4 The Endless Change of Color (Jules)  521–2 “end of philosophy,” music and  853–4 engagement cultural, with evolution and music  678–9 expectations and  1009–12 offline experiences of music and  1009 online experiences of music and  1009–11 with sound  268 England 243–4 blackface in  574n.4 congregational singing in nineteenth-century 504–8 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Child) 47

Enlightenment 602 affective-rhetorical tradition and  181–4, 198–9 emancipatory politics of  764 goal of  181–2 harmonic-scientific tradition and  181–4, 198–9 Kant in late  196–8 materialism and  208–9 mechanical philosophy and  185–95 medical power of music in  187–90, 193–4 musical expression theories in  706–10 musical thought traditions in  184–7 music as corroboration in  192–5 music as inspiration in  190–2 music as object of investigation in 187–90 overview of  198–200 Rameau and Rousseau in high  195–6 subjectivity and  1070 Eno, Brian  524, 547 entertainment, popular music as  542 Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Mozart)  815 entrepreneurialism, meaning and autonomy and 765 environment, emotion influenced by  968 epic songs, in Archaic Greece  120–1 epiphenomenalism 671n.18 epistemology of music aesthetics and  268–70 communication and  277–8 consciousness and  655–6 culture and  270–3 ethnomusicology and  270–3 justification in  328 language and  848 naturalistic  265–7, 273–7 normative 265–6 overview of  265–7 presentational and participatory  277–8 reductionist 274–5 rhythm and  848–51 schemata and  849 scientifically-grounded 273–7 Western ideas of  267–70 Epstein, Josh  24n.3 Eroica Symphony (Beethoven)  843

1098   index Essai sur l’origine des langues (Rousseau)  196, 608 Essay on Musical Expression (Avison)  707 An Essay on the Great Effects of Even Languid and Unheeded Motion (Boyle)  201n.9 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (Gobineau) 561 ethical autonomism  287. See also ethics and music ethical realism  328. See also ethics and music ethicism 287. See also ethics and music ethics and music. See also consensual musical ethics Aristotle on  143–5, 284 autonomy and  285–9 conceptual challenges in  289–90 Confucius on  284 consensual musical ethics and  290–302 early modern music and  159, 174–7 in fieldwork in ethnomusicology  52–3, 288–9 humanity and  291, 297 implications of  302 improvisation and  444–6, 745–6 as intrinsic or contextual  284–5 jazz and  446–7, 745–6 in Classical Greece  121–2 in jazz performance  588–90 in Middle Ages  141–6 morality and  285–9 naming and  393 opera and  601 overview of  283–4 Plato on  122, 143, 284–5 potential for  291 social 286–9 studies on  283–4 uniqueness in  291 ethnography, origins of  49 The Ethnomusicologist (Hood)  50 ethnomusicology 2 activist 288–9 ambiguity and  58–9 anthropology and  12, 24n.2, 45 applied 288–9 definition of  45 epistemology of music and  270–3

ethics of fieldwork in  52–3, 288–9 European heritage of, 1885–1960  46–50 future of  55–9 historical musicology and  12–13, 53–4 history of  46–55 internationalization of  54 Marxism and  52 from 1990 to present  52–5 postmodernism and  53 sameness, difference and  55–9 structuralism and  51–2 in United States, 1955–1990  50–2 ethos Christianity and  175 definitions of  174–5 emotion and  974 performance, composition and  176–7 society and music and  862–4 etiological authenticity  923 etiquette, improvisation and  444–5 Étude aux chemins de fer (Schaeffer)  525 Euridice (Peri)  621–2 Euripides 129 Europe, heritage of ethnomusicology in, 1885–1960 46–50 Evans, Bill  586, 588–9 events duration and  902–3, 905–7, 916n.1 joint attention to  1050 tenses and  908 time, succession and  898–9 truthful  730–1, 736n.20 everyday life consensual musical ethics and  293 emotion and  977–80 Everyday Music Listening (Herbert)  490 evocation, musical expression and  718 evolution and music adaptation and  690–5 African origins of  682–3 ancestral functions in  688–90 animal musicality and  682 animal response and  681–2 applied physiology and  677 approaches to  677–8 auditory processing and  677 by-product theory and  687, 691–2, 694–5

index   1099 central questions of  678–82 cognitive resources in  683–5 cultural engagement with  678–9 cultural transmission and, universal features in  679–80, 693–4 infants and  680–1, 687, 689 language and  686–8 multilevel selection and  691 neural circuits and  685 overview of  695–6 physiological preconditions in  686–8 sexual selection and  690–1 social resources for  683–5 soundscape segmentation and  685–6 exclusion epistemic, race and  555–6, 574n.2 in musicology, aesthetics and  1057 exclusive humanism  348 existence, music as melody of human  851–3 exocerebrum, consciousness and  663 expectations attention and  1006–8, 1011–12 cognitive penetration and  1006 conscious  998–1003, 1008 content and  1003–9 dynamic 1001–2 emotion and  973, 976, 998–9 engagement and  1009–12 harmony and  998 Implication-Realization theory and  997 improvisation and  447n.9 listening and  1001 mental imagery and  1006–8 Meyer’s theory of  427, 997 narrative structure and  1078 online engaged experiences and  1010–11 overview of  997–9, 1012–13 perception and  1003–9 phenomenology and  1004 poverty of stimulus and  1003–4, 1013n.4 predictive coding and  1004 rhythm and  998 schematic 1001–2 structure and  1003–9 veridical 1001–2 experiences, of musical expression  969–73

experimental philosophy, analytic philosophy of music and  83 expression. See musical expression The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin)  975 expressiveness, philosophy of music and 368–72 expressive tradition, of Hamann and Herder 846–7 ex-static absorption, in topography of musical absorption 309f, 311–12 extended consciousness  661–4 extension, duration and  898 extra-musical meaning  786, 801n.2 absolute music and  785–6 faith, absolute music and  642–5 faithfulness, authenticity and  923–5 Fanon, Frantz  253, 418 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Vaughan Williams)  882–4 Fantasies of Improvisation (Gooley)  745–6 Farber, Marvin  243 Faust (Gounod)  809–10 Feagin, Susan  539–40 fear, musical expression and  803 feedback circuits  422–3 Feeling and Form (Langer)  247–8 feelings, musical  1036–7. See also emotion Feld, Steven  271 Feldman, Martha  500–1 Felski, Rita  641–2 Feminine Endings (McClary)  728–9 feminism 1067 Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and  729–32 French 101–2 gender and  723–4, 726–9, 732–5 leftist critique and  727–8 materialism and  724–5 transphobia and  723–4 Fermat’s Last Theorem  332 Ferrara, Lawrence  30–1, 34–5 Ferrater Mora, José  251 festival, idea of  614 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols  507, 509–13 Feuerbach, Ludwig  854 Ficino, Marsilio  164, 187

1100   index fiction emotion and  968 musical 337–9 space and  883–4, 888–90 Fidelio (Beethoven)  606–7 Field, Steven  51–2 fieldwork ethics of, in ethnomusicology  52–3, 288–9 sameness and difference in  59 virtual 54 Fine Arts Quartet  463n.9 Fink, Robert  730–2 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich  880–1 Flaubert, Gustave  953 Fludd, Robert  157, 159, 160f, 164 Fodor, Jerry A.  275 La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais) 605–6 Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine (Ansermet)  98–9 Fonseka, Lionel de  237 footwork house music  874 For an Audience (Thom)  467 formalism beauty and  947–9 consensual musical ethics and  293 ineffability of music and  743 “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (Adorno) 752 Forrest, Edwin  574n.9 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica  1047 Forte, Allen  267, 342n.7 Foster, Hal  639–40 Foster, Stephen  569–70 Foucauldianism, gender and  728–9, 733–4 Foucault, Michel  55–6, 415–16, 725–6, 1067 on power  731 on subjectivity  601–2 France continental philosophy of music in  95 feminism in  101–2 Italian innovation resisted by, in seventeenth century  1069–70 phenomenology in  239–42, 248–50 study of aesthetics in  239–40 tragédie en musique in  603–5, 610–11

Franklin, Aretha  1065–6, 1079–80 Frauenliebe und-Leben (Schumann)  1031–2, 1032f, 1033f freedom, galant music and  1023 A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (Boyle)  192 Frege, Gottlob  90–1, 769, 961 French Revolution  730–1 Frenkel-Brunswik, Else  58 Freud, Sigmund  49, 715 Frijda, Nico  977 Frogs (Aristophanes)  125 Fröhlich, Joseph  712–13 Frost, Robert  991–2 Früchtl, Josef  601–3 frustration. See absorption, musical Fugue in D-flat Major, Op. 87, no. 15 (Shostakovich) 1045 Fuller, David  438 function aesthetics and  272 ancestral, in evolution and music 688–90 descriptive/prescriptive, of musical ontology 328–9 of Muzak 547 of popular music  544–8 “Functions of Music in Everyday Life” (Sloboda, O’Neill, and Ivaldi)  485–6 future tense, succession and  901–2 Fux, Johann Joseph  30–1 Gabrieli, Giovanni  881 Gabrielsson, Alf  979 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  445–6, 495n.5 on beauty  951 Gagliano, Marco Da  168–9 Galand, Joel  647 galant music autonomy and  1021, 1023 freedom and  1023 generalization of  1026 translation and  1019–22 virtuosity and  1023 Galilei, Vincenzo  118, 171–2 Gallagher, Shaun  315–16 Gallope, Michael  289–90, 645–6

index   1101 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  810–11, 820n.15 Garcia Quiñones, Marta  485–6 Gardiner, John Eliot  880–1 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  607 Gas (musician)  527–8 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  447 on signifyin(g)  1059–60 Gauntlett, Henry John  504 Gautier, Théophile  645–6 Gay, Peter  711–12 The Gay Science (Nietzsche)  496n.11 Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Nietzsche)  217, 616, 758n.6 Geertz, Clifford  51–2 Geiger, Moritz  233 Geist 957 GEMS (Geneva Emotional Music Scale) model 978 gender Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and  729–32 capitalism and  732–3 conservatism and  723, 726–9 construction, sexuality and  727 discourse analysis and  726 feminism and  723–4, 726–9, 732–5 Foucauldianism and  728–9, 733–4 identity and  723–4 intersectionality and  556 musical seduction fears in Middle Ages and 141–3 musicological examinations of  723–6 patriarchy and  725–6 Sonata Theory and  735n.7 generative linguistics  338 generative theory of musical syntax  427, 827–8 Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS) model 978 Gengras, M. Geddes  527 genius, artistic  438–40 Gennup, Arnold van  58 genre electronic music as  526–30 emotion and  978 expressive, reference as  771

Geometry of Music (Tymoczko)  885–6 Germany beauty in intellectual traditions of  961–2 continental philosophy of music in  95 phenomenology in  231–5 Gerusalemme Liberata (Tasso)  175 Gesamtkunstwerk 614 Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen)  523 Gesellschaft für ästhetische Forschung  228 gesture-calls 426 gestures Nietzsche on music and  217–19 performance and  473, 476–7 “Getting the Measure of Consciousness” (Humphrey) 660–1 Getz, Stan  592 Gibson, James J.  164, 662–3 Gieseking, Walter  798 Gioia, Ted  471 Girl Talk  529 Glass, Philip  522–3 Gluck, C. W.  605 Gobineau, Arthur  561 Godfrey of Boulogne (Tasso)  175 Godlovitch, Stan  467, 478–81 Godse, Nathuram  820n.15 Goehr, Lydia  287, 441–2, 574n.5, 882 on improvisation  757n.3 on musical works and work-concept  559 Goertzen, Valerie Woodring  469–70 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  711 Goodman, Nelson  74–5, 83–4, 252–3, 333, 339–40, 620 on analytic philosophy of music  68–9 on art and emotion  718 on identity of musical works  378n.5 on musical expression  72 on musical score as notation  341n.5 on performance of musical works  77–8 on resemblance theory  794 on space and metaphor  888 on symbolic forms  1078 Goodman, Steve  491 Gooley, Dana  745–6 Gordon, Kim  755 Gordon, Peter  246 Gouk, Penelope  165, 169–70, 184, 187, 190–2

1102   index Gould, Carol S.  441–2 Gould, Glenn  936–7 Gounod, Charles  809–10 Gracyk, Theodore  79–80 Graeco-Roman mercy  806–9 “The Grain of the Voice” (Barthes)  501–2 grammar, philosophy of music and  372–6. See also language; philosophy of language Grant, Roger Mathew  183, 187 Graziano, Michael  993–4 Greece, ancient Archaic (c.750–500 bce) 119–21 Aristotle on aesthetics in  123–6 Classical (c.500–300 bce) 121–3 instruments in  130–2 melody in  125–6, 130–2 music scholarship in  117–19 Orestes in  129 overview of  132–3 Pythagorean music theory and  117 rhythm in musical texts of  126–30 Seikilos song of  128–9, 128f theology and music in  346–7 voice in  130–2 Greenfield, Edward  476 Greer, Germaine  723–4 Grice, Paul  367, 369 grief, musical expression and  803–4 Griffiths, Paul  980 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior  1022 Grisey, Gérard  522–3 Grocheio, Johannes de  150–1 Grotowski, Jerzy  662 group attention, jazz and  593–5 Grusin, Richard  415–16, 420 Guattari, Félix on birdsong  419–20 on rhizome  508–9 Guido d’Arezzo  139–40 Guillaume Tell (Rossini)  607 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  951 Gurney, Edmund  216, 221n.11, 633 gymnastics, music and  173 Haas, Max  147 habeas corpus  565 Habermas, Jürgen  228, 430–1 habituality, bodily, agency of  317–18

Hagberg, Garry  294, 446 Haidt, Jonathan  294–5 Hall, Jim  588–9 Hall, Stuart  546–7 Halm, August  28–9, 642–3 Hamann, Johann Georg  846–7 Hamilton, James  80 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  174 Hamm, Charles  534 Handbook of Music and Emotion (Juslin and Sloboda) 975 Hänsel und Gretel (Humperdinck)  809–10 Hanslick, Eduard  28, 66–7, 72, 229, 544, 718, 1057 absolute music and  632, 634 on absolute music beauty  947–8 on aesthetics and exclusion in musicology 1057 on beauty and pleasure  942 on conscious expectations  999 on ephemerality of beauty  955 on Hegel’s philosophy of music  957 influence of  788–9 on meaning and scepticism  786–9 on meaning and scepticism, refuting 792–7 on musical beauty  942, 944, 953–8 on musical expression  714, 790, 794–5, 803 on musical ideas  956 on nature and musical works  958–9 on pure music  954, 956 on semantics and philosophy of music  364, 379n.16 on sense as musical logic  770 on subject matter and content  376 on Tonkunst 954–5 Hanson, Norwood Russell  723 Haraway, Donna  415–16 on tentacular thinking  417 “Harm” (Niblock)  522–3 Harman, Graham  416, 839n.4 harmonia 118 Harmonics (Ptolemy)  118 harmonic-scientific tradition  181–4, 198–9 harmonic space  885–6 Harmonielehre (Schoenberg)  373 harmony blues 581–3

index   1103 expectations and  998 harmonic-scientific tradition and  183–4 in jazz  581–4 sound and  210 theology and  346–7 time and  985 La Harpe de melodie (Senleches)  147–8 Harper, Heather  810–11, 880–1 Hartman, Geoffrey  109 Hartman, Saidiya  556, 558, 560 Harvard Dictionary of Music 440 Hatten, Robert  771 Haydn, Joseph  391–2 on artificiality of art  714–15 autobiographical work of  713 compositional method of  709 on keyboard fantasia  710 Hayles, N. Katherine  397, 421–2 on cyborgs  417 Haynes, Bruce  183 Hayot, Eric  236 Heap, Imogen “Hide and Seek,”  284, 298–302 “Little Bird,”  299 Speak for Yourself 298 “heard musical surface,”  827–8, 830–1 hearing, listening compared to  487–8 heavenly mercy  809–11 Hebdige, Dick  872–3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  34, 622, 643 on Geist 957 on philosophy of music  837–8, 957 Philosophy of Nature by  823–4, 835–9 on sound and matter  836–8 on weak nature  823–4 Heidegger, Martin  235–7, 655–6 on care  386 on consciousness  666–7 on Dasein  666 on language and objectivity  852 on philosophical listening  409 on phronēsis 443–4 on science and metaphysics  852 “Heiligenstadt Testament” (Beethoven) 712–13 Helmholtz, Hermann von  47–8 Helmholtz resonator  47–8 Hendrix, Jimi  945

Henrich, Dieter  601–2 Henslowe, Philip  163 Hentschel, Frank  764–5 Hepokoski, James  643–5, 742 Heppner, Ben  479–80 Herbert, Ruth  490 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  533–4, 636 expressive tradition of  846–7 Kant and  636–7 hermeneutics. See musical hermeneutics Hermerén, Göran  370, 379n.12 heroes/heroines, in opera  603–8 Hesiod 119 heterophenomenology 659 Hewlett, James  567 “Hide and Seek” (Heap)  284, 298–302 hierarchical concept, of mercy in music  804–5 Higgins, Kathleen Marie  283–4, 288, 290, 446 on emotion and participation  979–80 Higgins, Paula  728–9 higher-order consciousness  661–2 Hill, Calvin  440 hillbilly records  571 Hinduism, ineffability of music and  754–5 Hinton, Stephen  950–62 hip-hop 543–4. See also rap music Hisama, Ellie  460 historical authenticity, score-compliance authenticity as  925–7 historical musicology  2, 7 Adorno and  14–15 aesthetics and  13–14, 19–20 affective-rhetorical tradition and  182 analytic philosophy and  15–16 continental philosophy and  17–19 contradictions in  19–20 embodiment and  20–1 emotion and  16 ethnomusicology and  12–13, 53–4 harmonic-scientific tradition and  183 history studies problem in  19–20 listening and  21–2 New Musicology and  13, 24n.3 origins of  46–7 philosophy of music and  13–14, 21 silence and  22 historical substance, continuant theory and 334–5

1104   index historicist-contextualist theory of art  330–1 A History of Philosophy (Copleston)  159–61 Hobsbawm, Eric  506–7 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  198, 213, 611–12, 643, 715–16 on objectivity and musical expression  709 Hogg, Bennett  661–2 Holmes, Thom  524–5 Holtmeier, Ludwig  38–9 Homer  119–20, 152n.8 Homo heidelbergensis 684–9 homology 338 Homo neanderthalensis  684, 686–7 homoplasy 338 Homo sapiens  684, 686–7 Hood, Mantle  50 Hooke, Robert  192 hope, musical expression and  803 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  660–1 Horkheimer, Max  668–9 on Husserl  245–7 Hornbostel, Erich von  48 house music, society and  874 “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out” (Kerman)  100 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche)  217–19 human action interpretation and  774–6 model of emotion  977 humanist theory, posthumanism and  430 humanity, ethics and music and  291, 297 Hume, David  943 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk  469–70 Humperdinck, Engelbert  809–10 Humphrey, Nicholas  659–61, 671n.10 Hunter, Michael  185–6 Huot, Sylvia  145–6, 149–50 Huovinen, Erkki  268–9 Huron, David  973, 998, 1001–2 Husserl, Edmund  229, 235 Adorno and Horkheimer on  245–7 on art and aspect-change  388 challenging 242–50 Japanese translations of  236–7 Merleau-Ponty on  248–9 on metaphysics and self-presence  408 on phenomenology  97–9

Ryle on  251–2 on Töne 232–3 Hüttemann, Andreas  274–5 Hutton, Lawrence  574n.9 Huysman, Joris-Karl  645–6 Hymns Ancient and Modern 505 Hymns for Little Children 506 hymn-singing 505 hyper-indexicality 424–8 Iamblichus 164–5 “I Am Sitting in a Room” (Lucier)  826 ICTM (International Council for Traditional Music) 54 ideas, musical  956 identity affect and  510 Blacksound and  562–3 distributed subjectivity and  510 gender and  723–4 of musical works  378n.5 rhythm and  849–50 white, blackface and  562–3 “Idioteque” (Radiohead)  522–3 Ihde, Don  20 Iliad (Homer)  120 “I’ll Never Love Again” (Lady Gaga)  303n.6 imagery, mental, expectations and  1006–8 L’Imaginaire (Sartre)  241–2 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (Cage)  336 The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Goehr) 559 imagination mental imagery compared to  1013n.6 space and  888–9 subjectivity and  1048 imitations, society and music and  860–1, 866 immediacy of music  207–8 “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” (Kierkegaard)  212–13 immersion, aesthetic listening and  492–4 immigration, ineffability of music and  754–5 Implication-Realization theory  427, 997 implied thinking  17 impressionism 234 phenomenology and  254n.11

index   1105 improvisation artistic genius and  438–40 choices and executions in  470–2, 471f, 472f composition and  437, 441–3 cultural variations of  440 defining  437, 440, 443–4 dialogue and  445–6 ethics and  444–6, 745–6 etiquette and  444–5 expectations and  447n.9 ineffability of music and  744–7, 757n.3 interpretation and  440 jazz and  440–2, 446–7, 471–2, 480–1, 586–96 morality and  444–5 overview of  437–8 performance and  437, 441–3, 469–72, 471f, 472f phronēsis and  444–5 rethinking 443–7 score-compliance authenticity and  931–2 spontaneity and  440 status and  439–43 technicity and  747 L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi)  604 indeterminacy, musical expression and 798 individualism, meaning and autonomy and 764–5 ineffability of music definition of  741 formalism and  743 Hinduism and  754–5 history of thought on  749–53 immigration and  754–5 improvisation and  744–7, 757n.3 inconsistency and  742, 748–9 recording and  754 sonification and  744 Sufi mysticism and  754–5 Taoism and  754–5 technicity and  747–9 beyond Western art music  753–7 ineffable cardinal  741 infants, musical response of  680–1, 687, 689 information, philosophy of music and  372 Ingarden, Roman  239–40, 250–1, 442 phenomenology and  244–5

inner consciousness, phenomenology and 232–3 In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Gumbrecht)  951 insect music  420 instinct, posthumanism and  420 Institutioni harmoniche (Zarlino)  165 institution of art  635–6 instrumentalism, musical works and  76 instrumental music, non-conceptuality of. See non-conceptuality of instrumental music instrumental rationality  774–5 intellectual property, Blacksound and  559–62, 564–8 intended use, of popular music  544–5 intensive multiplicities  103–4 intention composition and  708 jazz and collective  593–5 perception and  1039 in performance of musical works  478 semantics and  367 intercultural conflict resolution  855 internalists, consciousness and  661–2, 664 International Copyright Act of 1891  568–9 International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) 54 International Phenomenological Society  243 interpretation composition and  455 human action and  774–6 improvisation and  440 in jazz  583–4 meaning and  398–9 meaning and autonomy and  773–9 interpretative experience  775 interpretive authenticity  934–7 intersectionality 556 intersubjectivity  57–8, 289, 1065–6, 1076 In This House, On This Morning (Marsalis) 332–3 Introduction to the Sociology of Music (Adorno) 489–90 intuitions, concepts and  93 intuitive ethics  294–5, 302 intuitive music  662 invented tradition  506–7

1106   index Ion (Plato)  861–2 Irish Americans, in blackface  565–6 irony 97–8 Irvin, Sherri  80 Islamic prayer  948–9 Israel, Jonathan  195 Italy 604–5 French resistance of innovations from, in seventeenth century  1069–70 madrigal 1068–9 iTunes 487 Ivaldi, Antonia  485–6 Ives, Charles  883 The Unanswered Question by  1041–3, 1042f Jackendoff, Ray  338 generative theory of musical syntax of  427, 827–8 Jackson, Andrew  568 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman  418 James, Etta  668 James, William  967–8 Jameson, Fredric  728–9 Jankélévitch, Vladimir  97–8, 167–8, 241, 621–2. See also ineffability of music on body and technicity  747–8 on ethics and improvisation  745–6 on faith  644–5 formalism and  743 history of thought on ineffability of music and 749–53 on improvisation and ineffability of music  744–7, 757n.3 on improvisation and technicity  747 on inconsistency of musical experience  742, 748–9 on ineffability of music beyond Western art music  753–7 legacy of  744 limitations to work of  743–4 on technicity and ineffability of music  747–9 Japan, phenomenology in  236–7 Jarman, Freya  500–1 Jarrett, Keith  474 jazz Adorno on  28–9 as art music compared to popular music 539

collective intention and  593–5 ethics and  446–7, 745–6 ethics of performance in  588–90 evolution of  586–7 group attention and  593–5 harmony in  581–4 improvisation and  440–2, 446–7, 471–2, 480–1, 586–96 interpretation in  583–4 journals on  447n.6 language compared to  591–3 melody in  584–6 ontology of  587 overview of  579–80, 596 pathfinders in  586–7 Pragmatism and  595–6 recording 590 as representational art  590–1 rhythm in  580–1 “Jim Crow,” blackface and  565 Jim Crow laws  230 Jirazbhoy, Nazir  54 John of Salisbury  142, 1068 Johnson, E. Patrick  566–7 Johnson, Julian  352, 534, 744–5 Johnston, Adrian  824, 830 joint attention, performance and  1049–50 Jones, Mari Reiss  998 Joseph, Craig  294–5 Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 228 Journal of Consciousness Studies 653–4 Journal of Research in Singing and Applied Vocal Pedagogy 500 Journal of Singing 500 Journal of Voice 500 journals on jazz  447n.6 of twentieth-century music and philosophy 227–8 judgement. See also Kant, Immanuel determinant 647–8 reflective 647–8 Jules, Marsen  521–2 Jusdanis, Gregory  645–6 Juslin, Patrik N.  975–7 justice, society and music and  868–71 Just Vibrations (Cheng)  286

index   1107 Kaizo 236–7 Kandinsky, Vasily  715 Kane, Brian  523 Kania, Andrew  79–80, 337–8, 342n.9, 590, 620, 1057 Kanizsa triangle, perception of  1033, 1034f Kant (Seung)  56 Kant, Immanuel  29, 34, 89–90, 182, 536–7, 542 on absolute music  635–6, 647–8 on aesthetic pleasure  943 on the agreeable  946 on artistic genius  438–9 on beauty  950, 952–3 on concepts and intuitions  93 on contemporary philosophy of music  22–3 on determinant and reflective judgement 647–8 on enlightenment  602 Herder and  636–7 on knowledge and pleasure  849–50 in late Enlightenment  196–8 on metaphysics  325–6 on morality and improvisation  444–5 on non-conceptuality of instrumental music 766–7 on schemata  848–9 on time and non-conceptuality of instrumental music  778 transcendental idealism of  326 Kantian paradigm  326 Karnes, Kevin  954–5 Karpeles, Maude  48 Kassabian, Anahid  485–8, 508–10 Kaye, Joel  147 Keaton, Kenneth  441–2 Kennick, William  67 Kerman, Joseph  11, 19–20, 798 on analysis and continental philosophy of music 100–1 keyboard fantasia  710 Kieran, Matthew  287 Kierkegaard, Søren  207, 220 on language and sensualism  214 on medium and content  213–14 sensualism and  208, 212–17 on time and music  216 Kim, Hyun-Ah  283

Kimura, Bin  317 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  820n.15 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp  708 Kitajima, Osamu  528–9 kithara 862 Kittler, Friedrich  33–5, 41n.11 Kivy, Peter  14–15, 229, 331, 548, 1076–7 on absolute music and emotion  791 on analytic philosophy of music  66–7 on artistic genius  438–9 on authenticity of performance  78 on Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony  843 on expressiveness and philosophy of music 370 on meaning and autonomy  768–9, 781n.7 on morality and music  285–6 on musical expression  73, 718 on opera and narrative  619 on personal authenticity  924 Klorman, Edward  1061 knowledge consciousness and  665–6 music of the Middle Ages and  148–50 pleasure and  849–50 Kockelman, Paul  424 Kojève, Alexandre  241 The Köln Concert (Jarrett)  474 Kontakte (Stockhausen)  521–2 Korsgaard, Christine  932–3 Koyré, Alexandre  241 K-pop 948–9 Kraftwerk 525 Kramer, Lawrence  13, 22, 220–1, 284–5, 403, 743 on submissive listening  487 Krauss, Karl  19–20 Krenek, Ernst  453 Kretzschmar, Hermann  232 Krueger, Joel  296 Krumhansl, Carol  1000–1 Kuhn, Thomas  90 Kuki, Shūzō  236–8 Kunst, Jaap  50 Kurth, Ernst Adorno’s writings on  39 on musical hearing  38–9 music theory of  36–8 Schopenhauer’s music theory compared to 37–40

1108   index LaBelle, Brandon  492 Lacan, Jacques  496n.7 Lacasse, Serge  500–1 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe  1021 Lady Gaga  303n.6 Lalo, Charles  239–40 Lamar, Kendrick  875 Landerer, Christoph  954, 956–7 Langer, Susanne  73, 362–3, 718 on emotion and composition  369 on ineffability of music  755–6 on self-expression in music  368–9 on symbolic forms  247–8, 368–70 Lang Lang  477 language. See also philosophy of language; semantics absolute music and  635 analytic philosophy of music and  846–8 of care  393 continental philosophy and limits of  17–18 dialectic and  854 epistemology of music and  848 evolution and music and  686–8 jazz compared to  591–3 musical expression compared to  793, 796–7 music and philosophy and  17–18, 23 in music theory  34–5 musilanguage 687–8 objectivity and  847–8, 852–3 paraphrasing with care  394–6 popular music barriers of  540–1 proto-language 687–8 schemata and  850 semantics and  363–4 sense and  846–8 sensualism and  214 social development of  1067 theology and music, transcendence and 356 voice mediating  499, 853–4 voice of  502 language-games 592 The Language of Music (Cooke, D.)  365–8, 793, 975 Languages of Art (Goodman, N.)  68–9, 252–3, 378n.5, 1078

Lasso, Orlando di  173 Last Theorem, Fermat’s  332 Lasus of Hermione  117–18, 121 Latour, Bruno  641 Lawes, Henry  169 Lawlor, Leonard  824 Laws (Plato)  861–2 Le Brun, Charles  975 Legrand, Dorothée  312–13 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  34 Leibowitz, René  639 length, durational quantity and  904–5 Leopardi, Giacomo  207, 607 on beauty and listening  210–11 on composition  210 materialism and  207–10 on novelty in sound  211–12 on sound  208–12, 220 Leppert, Richard  495n.3, 725 Lerdahl, Fred  338, 454–5, 463n.5 generative theory of musical syntax of  427, 827–8 on pitch space  885–6 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre  833–4 Lessing, Theodor  489–90 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 639 Lever, Ralph  161–3 Levinas, Emmanuel  289, 444–5 Levine, George  641 Levine, Michael  285–6 Levinson, Jerrold  24n.9, 333, 341n.4, 538 on artistic genius  438–9 on embodied thinking  17 on emotion in appearances  971–2 on Gould, G.  936–7 on instrumentalism  76 on interpretive authenticity  935 on musical beauty  943–4 on musical expression and emotion  73–4 on music in the moment  775 on performance and musical ontology 339–40 on persona  717–18, 972–3 on Ready-Hearability view  794 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  51–2 Levitz, Tamara  2

index   1109 Lewis, George  441–2, 755 The Lies that Bind (Appiah)  5 life, posthumanism and  421–3 life-world phenomenology  98–9, 105 Linear Counterpoint (Kurth)  36 linear time  900–1 linguistic fictionalism  337–8. See also language linguistic turn  66, 735n.2. See also language Lippman, Edward  859 Lipps, Theodor  232 listening aesthetic, immersion and  492–4 attentive  484–91, 537–8 beauty and  210–11 with body  484–5, 491–2, 495n.2 composition and  453, 463n.5, 463n.7 consensual musical ethics and  293 creative participation in  474 deep 979–80 distracted 484–91 electronic music and  523–4 expectations and  1001 hearing compared to  487–8 historical musicology and  21–2 metaphysics and  165–8 as multisensorial experience  483–5 music theory and  35 noise pollution and  489–90 performance and  320n.2 phenomenology and  235 philosophy and  408–9 reduced 530n.2 regimes of  485, 487–8 sonic strokes and  491 structural  485–6, 489–90 subject of  488–9 submissive 487 understanding of music and  375 “Listening to the World but Hearing Ourselves” (Weiss, S.)  56 Liszt, Franz  714 literalism, space and  887–8 The Literary Work of Art (Ingarden)  244–5 “Little Bird” (Heap)  299 “little journals,”  227–8 Locke, Alain  237–8, 242

logic philosophy of language and  373–4, 377–8 sense as musical  770 logical form, music and  845–6 Logics of Worlds (Badiou)  105–6 logos 122 Lomax, Alan  51 Longinus 125–6 Lopes, Dominic McIver  83 Lorde  540–1, 875 losing oneself in music. See agency Love, Alan C.  274–5 Low (Bowie, D.)  522–3 Lowe, Bethany  664–5 Lucas, Olivia  484 Lucier, Alvin  826 Luhmann, Niklas  417, 419 Lukács, György  246–7 lullabies, universality of  679–80, 694 Lyotard, Jean-François  103, 730, 854–5 lyre 862 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth)  711 lyric poetry  711 Machaut, Guillaume de  145–8 MacIntyre, Alasdair  444–5 madrigal, Italian  1068–9 Magee, Bryan  853 magic, enchantment and  983–4 The Magic Flute (Mozart)  815 Mahler, Gustav  776–7 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Adorno) 752 Malabou, Catherine  830 Malinowski, Bronislaw  49 Mallet, Marie-Louise  1020–1, 1026 Man, Paul de  97–8 Mandela, Nelson  820n.15 Mann, Arthur Henry  504, 507–8 Manuel, Peter  271 Marcel, Gabriel  240–1 Marclay, Christian  525 Marenzio, Luca  1068–9 Margins of Philosophy (Derrida)  408–9 Marks, Lawrence  484–5 The Marriage of Figaro (Mozart)  536, 602, 815–16

1110   index Marrone, Stephen P.  148 Marsalis, Wynton  332–3, 592 Marsh, Christopher  177 Marshall, Madeleine Forell  504–5 Le Marteau sans mâitre (Boulez)  454 Marx, Adolph Bernhard  714 Marx, Karl  573 Marxism, ethnomusicology and  52 “Marzipan” (The Alps)  522–3 A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Lawes and Milton)  169 Massumi, Brian  416, 420 master-narratives, postmodernism and  103 matching, in performance of musical works 478 materialism development of  207–8 Enlightenment and  208–9 feminism and  724–5 Leopardi and  207–10 musical works and  74–7 materiality, voice and  502–3 mathematics, Platonism and  331–3 Matheson, Carl  76–7 Mathews, Charles  567 Matravers, Derek  718 matter, sound and  836–8 Mattheson, Johann  707–8 Maturana, Humberto  417 Maus, Fred  342n.7, 1060 Mazzini, Giuseppe  607 McAuley, Tomás  81–2, 780n.6 McClary, Susan  101–2, 169, 640, 725, 727–9, 743. See also subjectivity on beauty and violence  945–6 on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and feminism 729–32 McCracken, Allison  500–1 McDowell, John  78–9 McGinn, Colin  663 McLeod, Hugh  506 McNeill, William  1066, 1068 McTaggart, J. M. E.  916n.3 Mead, Margaret  49 meaning care and  391–2 complex of, music as mediated  772–3

defining 781n.7 extra-musical  786, 801n.2 interpretation and  398–9 musical hermeneutics, appearance and 386–8 musical hermeneutics, locating  388–94 over being, Nietzsche on  218–19 in philosophy of language  363–5, 371–2 in philosophy of music  371–2 programme music and  389–90 propositional, reference as  771 as reference  771–2 semantics and  1078–9 as sense  768–71 technique and  390, 399–400 time and  390 titles and  389–90 understanding of music and  375, 377–8 meaning and autonomy absolute music and  768 coherence theories and  767–8 correspondence theories and  767–8 defining 781n.7 entrepreneurialism and  765 historical relationship of  763–8 human action, interpretation and  774–6 individualism and  764–5 interpretation and  773–9 Kant on non-conceptuality of instrumental music and  766–7 music as mediated complex of meaning 772–3 non-conceptuality of instrumental music and 764–6 overview of  779–80 rationality and practice of art and  776–8 reference and  771–2 sense and  768–71 time and  778–9 meaning and scepticism arousal and  789–92, 800 Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Orpheus legend and  797–9 emotion and  789–92 extra-musical meaning and  801n.2 Hanslick on  786–9 Hanslick on, refuting  792–7

index   1111 overview of  785–6, 799–800 phenomenology and  789–92, 800 value and  789–92, 800 means-ends rationality  774–5 mechanical philosophy body and  192–3 Enlightenment and  185–95 music as corroboration and  192–5 music as inspiration and  190–2 music as object of investigation and 187–90 mediation concept of  781n.8 of music and complex of meaning  772–3 sense as social and structural  770–1 medical power of music, in Enlightenment  187–90, 193–4 Medicina Musica (Browne)  189 medium content and  213–14 musical hermeneutics and  386 nineteenth-century music and philosophy and 219–21 symbolism and  777 Meelberg, Vincent  491 Meer, Nasar  229–30 Meillasoux, Quentin  416 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Wagner, R.)  479–80, 656–7, 667 melancholy 188 melody in ancient Greece  125–6, 130–2 emotion and  608 of human existence, music as  851–3 in jazz  584–6 Kurth on  36 novelty in  211–12 phenomenology and  240–1 Schopenhauer on  30–3 truth of  795 melos 862 memes, consciousness and  663 Mendelssohn, Felix  705–6 mental imagery expectations and  1006–8 imagination compared to  1013n.6 Menzer, Paul  234

The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)  166, 806–7 mercy in music characters expressing  805 egalitarian concept of  804–5 future research on  819 heavenly 809–11 hierarchical concept of  804–5 human construction of  814 Mozart and  815–19 musical expression and  805 overview of  803–6, 819 Requiem Mass and  809–15 Seneca and  806–9, 815–16 textual guidance for  804 top-down mercy and  809–15 War Requiem of Britten and  810–14 in Western philosophical tradition  806–9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  78–9, 248–9 Merriam, Alan  50–1 Mersenne, Marin  186–7, 192 Mersmann, Hans  234 Metallica 522–3 metaphor beauty and  949–50 musical expression and  72, 795, 803 perception and  1034–9, 1058–9 reference through  771–2 space and  888–9 subjectivity and  1075 succession and  916n.4 metaphysics deconstruction of music and  404 early modern music and  157, 164–8 Kant on  325–6 listening and  165–8 negative 852 opera and  620–2 Platonism and  331–2 Schopenhauer on  612 science and  852 self-presence and  408 since Carnap and Quine  326–9 theology and  749 Metaphysics (Aristotle)  161 Metastasio, Pietro  604 Metheny, Pat  593

1112   index Methodism  504–5, 514n.6 Mew, Peter  718 Meyer, Leonard B.  362–3, 718–19, 1013n.1 on conscious expectations  999–1000 on ethos and emotion  974 on expectations  427, 997 on meaning and sense  768–9 on meaning and understanding of music 375 on musical emotion  973–6 on philosophy of language and logic 373–4 on understanding of music and listening 375 Michaelis, Christian Friedrich  1061 microaggressions 736n.16 Middle Ages, music and philosophy in the Aristotle’s influence on  150–1, 152n.12 Christian conversion and  143–6 ethics in  141–6 knowledge and  148–50 modern musicology and  146–50 musica and  137–41 musical ontology and  138–41 musical seduction fears in  141–3 notation and construction of ideas in  146–8 polytextual motets and  149–50 Middleton, Thomas  163–4 Mike Ink (musician)  527–8 Miller, David  507 Miller, Glenn  541 Millikan, Ruth  334–5 A Million Years of Music (Tomlinson)  824, 831–5 Mills, Charles  555–6 Milner-White, Eric  507–8, 511–12 Milton, John  167, 169 mimesis  866, 870 desire and  236 understanding and  775 minor literature  103–4 missions, Christian  506 Mitchell, Donald  811–13 Mitchell, W. J. T.  394 Mithen, Steven  688 modern classicism, scepticism and  644 modernity

analytic philosophy of music and  844–5 nature and Romantic  825 Monet, Claude  16–17 monody 169 Monson, Ingrid  1061 Montaigne, Michel de  157, 165–6 Monteverdi, Claudio  169, 173, 548, 602, 604, 621–2, 1068 mood, emotion and  968. See also emotion; feelings, musical Moog synthesizer  526 Moore, A. W.  770 Moore, Henrietta L.  270 moralism, moderate  287. See also ethics and music morality improvisation and  444–5 music and  285–9 score-compliance authenticity and obligations of  928–9 moral relativism  49 Moreno, Jairo  22, 754–5 Moreschi, Alessandro  500–1 Morgan, Robert P.  959 Morley, Iain  684–5 Morley, Thomas  166, 169, 174, 176–7 Morris, Robert  386–7 Morton, Timothy  416, 824 Ecology Without Nature and  825–7 Harman and  839n.4 Moten, Fred  573, 873–4 movement, musical expression and  971. See also gestures Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  174, 439, 536, 548, 602 autobiographical work of  713 Die Entführung aus dem Serail 815 Don Giovanni  213–16, 606 La clemenza di Tito 816–19 mercy in works of  815–19 operas of  606, 815–19 Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550  974 The Magic Flute 815 The Marriage of Figaro  536, 602, 815–16 time, space and work of  985–7 Mozart’s Grace (Burnham)  986–7 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare)  166

index   1113 multilevel selection, evolution and music and 691 Murphy, John P.  447 Murs, Jean de  144, 152n.8 Muses, in Archaic Greece  119 Music, Criticism and the Challenge of History (Karnes) 954–5 Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Gouk)  165, 184 Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Meyer)  1013n.1 “Music, Language, and Cognition” (Kivy)  370 musica, in Middle Ages  137–8 musica ficta essays  148, 152n.14 musical ontology and  138–41 musicology and  138 production of  139–41 subdivisions of  139 musical absorption. See absorption, musical musical affect  71–2 musical beauty. See also beauty aesthetics and  943–5 descriptions of  949–50 after Hanslick  958–60 Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful and 953–8 metaphor and  949–50 music and  941–3 musical citizenship  646 musical emotion  973–80. See also emotion musical ethics  284, 287. See also consensual musical ethics; ethics and music consensual 290–302 implications of  302 The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener (Sessions)  452–3 musical expression analytic philosophy of music and  71–4 approaches to  705 arousal and  718 contesting of  705 contour and  718 definitions of  705 disembodied 706 emotion and  72–4, 792–3, 803–4, 942, 975–7 Enlightenment theories  706–10

evocation and  718 experiences of  969–73 indeterminacy and  798 intransitive theories and  718–19, 793 keyboard fantasia and  710 language compared to  793, 796–7 mercy and  805 metaphor and  72, 795, 803 movement and  971 from 1920 to present  715–19 objectivity and  709, 715–16 overview of  719 performance and  707–8 persona and  73–4, 717–18, 793, 972–3 phenomenology and  790 philosophy of music and  368–72 reference as emotion through  771 resemblance and  718, 974 Romanticism and  710–15 as secondary object  795 self-expression and  368–9, 711–13, 716–17 sincerity and  709–10, 714–15 tone and  795 truth and  795 musical feelings  1036–7 musical fictionalism  337–9 musical grammar  82–3 musical hearing, in music theory  38–9 musical hermeneutics  232 care and  386, 392–3 closed 389 cognitive non-consciousness and  397 data mining and  397–8 double paradox in  385 locating meaning in  388–94 meaning and appearance in  386–8 meaning and interpretation in  398–9 medium and  386 naming and ethics  393 open 388–9 overview of  385–6, 398–400 paraphrasing with care and  394–6 rejection of  234 technology and  396–8 musical hyper-indexicality  427–8 musical ideas  956 musical logic, sense as  770

1114   index musical ontology  329–40 affordances and  164 categories in  330 compliance theory and  330–3 continuant theory and  330, 333–5, 340 deflationary views on  337–40 descriptive function of  328–9 dismissivism and  337–40 in early modern period  157, 161–4 history of  325–6 metaphysics since Carnap and Quine and 326–9 in Middle Ages  138–41 musical fictionalism and  337–9 performance theory and  330, 335–7 Platonism and  330–3 prescriptive function of  328–9 shakiness of  340–1 viol and  157, 161–4 musical perdurantism  341n.5 Musical Performance (Godlovitch)  467 The Musical Representation (Nussbaum, C. O.)  824, 827–31, 973, 977 musical score, as notation  341n.5 musical seduction fears, in Middle Ages 141–3 musical semiosis  427 musical space  828–9, 884, 890–1. See also space musical texts, rhythm in, of ancient Greece 126–30 musical theatre  534–5 “Musical Thinking?” (Levinson)  17 musical vocabulary  365–8 musical vocalization, physiological preconditions for  686–8 musical works. See also specific works as abstract objects  331–2, 342n.9 as allographic  77–8 composition of, for kinds of spaces  881–2 composition of, for particular spaces 880–1 contextualism and  76 historical substance and  334–5 identity of  378n.5 instrumentalism and  76 materialism and  74–7

nature and  958–9 as norm-types  332 notation in  68–9 performance of  69–70, 74–8, 467–8, 478–81, 480f philosophy of music and  843 Platonism and  74–6 as self-expression  716 sonicism and  76 as types  74–7 work-concept and  559 Musical Works and Performances (Davies, D.)  74 Music and Ethical Responsibility (Warren, J.) 283–4 music and ethics. See ethics and music Music and Ethics (Cobussen and Nielsen)  283–4, 444–5 Music and Meaning (Coker)  379n.12 music and philosophy. See also philosophy of music canonical thinkers and works in  6–7 collisions and collaborations in  4 consciousness and  654–5 defining 2 history of  3 interdisciplinary friction and  962–3 key concepts in  4 language and  17–18, 23 mapping field of  2–3 as medium  33–6 meeting points in  1–2 musical traditions and practices in  4 non-Western, terminology of  5–8 overview of  2–5 philosophical traditions and practices in 3–4 philosophy of music compared to  1–2 race and  555–6 time and  896–7 Western, terminology of  5–8 Music and Philosophy Study Group, Royal Musical Association  84 Music and the Ineffable (Jankélévitch)  742, 744–5, 754 music and violence studies  54–5 Musica Poetica (Bartel)  182–3

index   1115 Musica Poetica (Burmeister)  172–3 Music as Creative Practice (Cook)  451 Musica speculativa (Murs)  144 The Music Between Us (Higgins, K. M.)  288 music education  288 Music for Airports (Eno)  547 musicianship, phenomenology of  307–9 Music in Renaissance Magic (Tomlinson) 164–5 Music in the Moment (Levinson)  775 musicking  22, 829–35 music of deconstruction  407–13. See also deconstruction of music The Music of Our Lives (Higgins, K. M.)  283–4, 288 musicology. See also comparative musicology; ethnomusicology; historical musicology; music theory aesthetics and exclusion in  1057 analytic philosophy of music and  83–4 beauty and  950–60, 962–3 gender and  723–6 Middle Ages music and modern  146–50 musica in Middle Ages and  138 origins of  11–12 philosophy compared to  963 subdivisions of  11–12, 23n.1, 46 systemic 46–7 musicophobia 523 “Music Philosophy and Aesthetics” (Brelet) 249 music psychology  288 music theory  2 Aristoxenus on  27–8 composers and  34–5 continental philosophy and  28 of Kurth  36–8 of Kurth compared to Schopenhauer 37–40 language in  34–5 listening and  35 musical hearing in  38–9 music as philosophic medium in  33–6 Pythagorean  27–8, 33, 117 Schopenhauer of  29–33 time and  895–6 music therapy  288

music videos  483–4 Musikpsychologie (Kurth)  39 musilanguage 687–8 musique galante  1022–3. See also galant music Muzak 491–2 functionality of  547 “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (Franklin)  1065–6, 1079–80 Myers, Paul  936–7 mystification, absolute music and  639–42 Nagel, Ernst  369–70 Nägeli, Hans Georg  1061 naming, ethics and  393 Nancy, Jean-Luc  21, 405–6 on galant music  1022–6 on hearing compared to listening  487–8 on Nazism’s appropriation of art  410–11 on philosophical listening  409 on resonance and deconstruction of music 410–11 on sound and resonance  1019–20 on touch and music  1020–1, 1024 Narmour, Eugene  427 Implication-Realization theory of  997 Naroditskaya, Inna  54 narrative opera and  619–20 structure of  1077–8 time and  1077 Nash, Nick  511–12 Nassar, Dalia  826–7 National Anthem Project (NAP)  503 national anthem protests  514n.3 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques  51–2 A Natural History (Bacon)  159 naturalism, theology and music and 348–9 naturalistic epistemology of music  265–7, 273–7 natural law  848 natural rhythm  848 natural selection  422 nature ambient music and  825–6 culture and  736n.13 Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and  835–9

1116   index nature (Continued ) Morton’s Ecology Without Nature and  825–7 musical works and  958–9 music’s weak force and  835–9 Nussbaum, C. O.’s, The Musical Representation and  827–31 Romanticism, modernity and  825 sound, matter and  836–8 sound and music without  825–7 strong, music as  827–31 Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music and 831–5 tool-making and  831–5 weak  823–4, 831–5 Nazism 235 art appropriation and  410–11 Neanderthals  684, 686–7 negative dialectics, deconstruction of music and 404 The Negro and His Music (Locke)  237–8 Nehamas, Alexander  951 Nettl, Bruno  50, 276–7, 442–3 neural circuits, music-specific  685 Neurath, Otto  250–1 neuronal inscription, body and  830 neuroscience, consciousness and  654 Newcomb, Anthony  718–19 New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effect (Boyle)  192 New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers 724–5 Newman, Barbara  149–50 New Musicology  13, 24n.3 continental philosophy of music and  101 society and music and  859 The New Negro (Locke)  237–8 New Objectivity  715–16 Newton, Isaac  190–2, 191f NFL (National Football League)  514n.3 Niblock, Phil  522–3 niche construction  422–3, 425, 430 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle)  144, 443–4 Nickles, Thomas  199–200 Nielsen, Nanette  283–4, 287, 298–9, 444–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich  34, 91–2, 207, 220, 496n.11, 603 The Birth of Tragedy  217, 616, 758n.6

The Gay Science 496n.11 Human, All Too Human  217–19 on aesthetics  749 Also Sprach Zarathustra 387 on art and truth  1026–7 on beauty  219 on ineffability of music  758n.6 on meaning over being  218–19 opera and  616–17 Wagner, R., and  616–17, 853 on words, gestures and music  217–19 “Night and Day” (Porter)  540–1 Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (Di Grazia) 500 nineteenth-century music and philosophy aesthetics in  207 immediacy of music in  207–8 Kierkegaard and  207–8, 212–17, 220 Leopardi and  207–12, 220 medium and content in  219–21 Nietzsche and  207, 217–20 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven)  729–32, 945–6 Nishida, Kitarō  236 Nite Flights (Walker Brothers)  527 Nketia, Kwabena  54 noema 388 noesis 388 noise pollution  489–90 non-conceptuality of instrumental music 763–8 Kant’s critique of  766–7 meaning and autonomy and  764–6 time and  778–9 nonhuman otherness  417 Nono, Luigi  639 non-Western music and philosophy, terminology of  5–8 Nørgaard, Asbjørn  309–11, 314–15, 317–18 normative epistemology of music  265–6 norms art and  773 constitutive, score-compliance authenticity and 932–3 expressive, reference as  771 norm-types, musical works as  332 nostalgia reflective 511–12 restorative 511–12

index   1117 notation logical exercises and  147–8 in Middle Ages music  146–8 musical score as  341n.5 in musical works  68–9 Ockhamist Nominalism and  147 score-compliance authenticity and  926, 930–2 sound and  209–10 “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (Frost)  991–2 La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau)  608 Novalis 32–3 on rhythm  850 novelty, in sound  211–12 Nussbaum, Charles O.  275–7, 718 on musical emotion  973, 976–8 The Musical Representation by  824, 827–31 on musical space and body  828–9 on Western art music and body  829–30 Nussbaum, Martha  288, 816 on language and music  847–8 Oatley, Keith  975 Obama, Barack  1065–6, 1079 Obelkevich, Jim  505 objectivity aesthetics and  960 analytic philosophy of music and  843–4 comparative musicology and  48–9 language and  847–8, 852–3 musical expression and  709, 715–16 subjectivity and  1075–6 object-oriented ontology  416. See also ontology oboes 927 “observer effect,”  59n.2 Ochoa Gautier, Ana Maria  273 Ockhamist Nominalism  147 octatonic scale  1030f Odello, Laura  21–2 Odyssey (Homer)  120 “Of Custom” (Montaigne)  165–6 offline experiences of music  1009 offstage instruments, space and  883 Of Grammatology (Derrida)  55–6, 167–8 Øland, Frederik  309–11, 314–15, 317–18 Oliveros, Pauline  523–4 Omojola, Bode  54 On Anger (Seneca)  806–8

“Once in Royal David’s City” (Alexander)  504, 507–13 “On Concept and Object” (Frege)  961 O’Neill, Susan A.  485–6 online experiences of music, engagement and 1009–11 Only a Promise of Happiness (Nehamas) 951 On Mercy (Seneca)  806–8 On Music (Aristides Quintilianus)  118 On Music (Philodemus)  118 On Music (Plutarch)  118 On the Musically Beautiful (Hanslick)  66–7, 72, 229, 714, 770, 786, 942, 953–8, 962, 999 ontology. See also musical ontology among arts  329 consciousness and  655–6, 665–8 descriptive function of  328–9 early modern music and  157, 161–4 of electronic music  520 history of  325–6 of jazz  587 metaphysics since Carnap and Quine and 326–9 object-oriented 416 opera and  620 prescriptive function of  328–9 shakiness of  340–1 On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida) 1020 open hermeneutics  388–9 opera aesthetics and  601 analytic philosophy and  620–2 of Beaumarchais  605–6 of Beethoven  606–7 consciousness and  656–8 Diderot on emotion and  610–12 emotion and  602–3, 610–12, 618–19 ethics and  601 heavenly mercy in  809–11 heroes/heroines in  603–8 metaphysics and  620–2 of Mozart  606, 815–19 narrative and  619–20 Nietzsche and  616–17 ontology and  620

1118   index opera (Continued ) Rousseau on emotion and  608–10 Schopenhauer and  612–13 subjectivity and  601–3, 620–1, 623n.3 time and  619–20 of Verdi  607–8 voice and  620–1 Wagner, R., and  613–18 opera buffa  604–5, 610–11 opéra comique 604–5 opera seria 604–5 Oper und Drama (Wagner, R.)  614 Opticks (Newton)  190–2, 191f The Order of Things (Foucault)  415–16 Orestes (Euripides)  129 L’Orfeo (Monteverdi)  169, 602 organicism 958–9 Organised Sound 744 Orientalism 725–6 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger) 667 Orpheus Academy  84 Orpheus legend, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major and  797–9 Orseme, Nicole  144–5 Ortega y Gasset, José  238–9, 242–3, 716 “outside-text,” Derrida on  406 Owen, Wilfred  811–12, 814 Owen Wingrave (Mitchell, D.)  813 Pacifica Quartet  463n.9 pacifism  810–11, 820n.15, 821n.20 Page, Christopher  149–50 paidia  864, 871 Palisca, Claude  183–4 panpsychism  664–5, 672n.20 parahumanism 415–16 paraphrasing with care  394–6 participation. See also listening creative, in listening  474 emotion and  979–80 participatory music  277–8 Partiels (Grisey)  522–3 Partita (Bach, J. S., as rendered by Gould) 936–7 The Passions of the Mind in General (Wright)  170–1, 188, 201n.6

The Passions of the Soule (Descartes)  186 Passmore, John  67 past tense, succession and  901–2 Patel, Aniruddh D.  692 Pateman, Carol  562 The Pathetick Musician (Haynes and Burgess) 183 pathfinders, in jazz  586–7 patriarchy 725–6 Paul, Jean  213 Payzant, Geoffrey  954, 956–7 Peacham, Henry  163, 174–6, 193 on medical power of music  188 Peacocke, Christopher  888. See also perception; relational properties on agency and performance  1059–61 on metaphor and perception  1058–9 on psychological truth  1059 on relationality  1058 semiotics and  1058 on “we,”  1062–3 Pearce, Marcus T.  1000–1 Pears, Peter  810–13, 821n.20, 880–1 Pederson, Sanna  642–3 Peirce, Charles Sanders  424–5, 917n.6 perception aesthetics of relational properties and  1046–9, 1061 conflict and  1045 consciousness and  1052 constraint and  1046 emotion and  1038–9 expectations and  1003–9 intention and  1039 of Kanizsa triangle  1033, 1034f metaphor and  1034–9, 1058–9 of music as action  1039–46 of performance  1049–52, 1059–61 poetry and  1046–9 of relational properties  1029 of similarity  1046 syntactic properties and pitch relations and 1030–4 topics, reference and  1058–9 perdurants 76–7 performance agency and  1059–61

index   1119 analytic philosophy of music and  81 as art  473–8 as art, impediments to  476–8 audience-directed 479 audience involvement in  1050–2, 1079–80 authenticity and  69–70, 78, 924–6 authorship and  74–5 boredom and information in  372 competence and  1038 definition of  468–9, 476–7 ethics of jazz and  588–90 ethos and  176–7 gestures and  473, 476–7 improvisation and  437, 441–3, 469–72, 471f, 472f joint attention and  1049–50 listening and  320n.2 musical 469–73 musical expression and  707–8 musical ontology and  330, 335–7 of musical works  69–70, 74–8, 467–8, 478–81, 480f overview of  468–9, 481 phases of  470, 471f phenomenology and  307–8 plan, execution of  479–80, 480f presentation of music in  472–3, 480 in recording  1051–2 relational properties of  1049–52, 1059–61 scholarly works on  467 score-compliance authenticity as value of  927–34 showmanship and  476–7 social behaviour and  1061–2 spaces 881–2 space within  882–5 studio, of rock music, recording of 79–80 performative body  312–13 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista  604–5 Peri, Jacopo  621–2 Perky, Charles West  1007–8 Perry, Ralph Barton  237 persona, musical expression and  73–4, 717–18, 793, 972–3 personal authenticity  924 Pesic, Peter  183–4, 190–2

phenomenology 229 acoustics and  232 of action  1039–40 aesthetics compared to  233–4 African Americans and  229–31, 237–8 concept of  307 consciousness and  655–6, 666 continental philosophy of music and 97–9 defining 234 expectations and  1004 in France  239–42, 248–50 German origins of  231–5 goal of  233 heterophenomenology 659 Husserl and  242–50 impressionism and  254n.11 Ingarden and  244–5 inner consciousness and  232–3 international spread of  235–42 in Japan  236–7 life-world  98–9, 105 listening and  235 meaning and scepticism and  789–92, 800 melody and  240–1 musical expression and  790 of musicianship  307–9 performance and  307–8 scepticism towards  234 scholarly writing on  307 in Spain  238–9 structuralism and  93–4, 96 time and  896 tone and  232–3 topography of musical absorption and  309–13, 309f totalitarianism and  243 transcendental 98–9 of we-intentionality  320 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 248–9 Philodemus of Gadara  118, 124–5 Philomel (Babbitt)  523 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Newton) 190–2 The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Čapek)  897–8

1120   index Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 845 philosophical listening  408–9 Die Philosophie der neuen Musik (Adorno)  246–7, 752 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 243 Philosophy in a New Key (Langer)  247–8, 368 The Philosophy of Art (Schelling)  950–1 philosophy of language expression and expressiveness in  368–72 grammar and  372–6 logic and  373–4, 377–8 meaning in  363–5, 371–2 musical vocabulary and  365–8 overview of  361–3, 376–8 philosophy of music and  362, 377 reference and representation in  365–8 semantics and  363–4 sense and  843–5 philosophy of music. See also analytic philosophy of music; continental philosophy of music; music and philosophy aesthetics and  338–40 beauty and  962–3 circularity of  16–17 conflict in  854–7 contemporary 22–3 definitive, questioning  856 emotion and  968 expression and expressiveness in  368–72 grammar and  372–6 Hegel on  837–8 historical musicology and  13–14, 21 information and  372 meaning in  371–2 Middle Ages music problems for modern 150–1 musical works and  843 music and philosophy compared to  1–2 music as melody of human existence and 851–3 overview of  376–8 philosophy of language and  362, 377 pitch hierarchies and  373 popular music in  548–50 reference and representation in  365–8

semantics and  364–5, 379n.16 syntax and  370–1 women and  243–4 Philosophy of Nature (Hegel)  823–4, 835–9 A Philosophy of New Music (Adorno)  246–7, 752 Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Davies, D.) 467 phonograph, invention of  47–8 phronēsis  437, 443–5 Phrynichus of Athens  125 physics early modern music and  159, 168–71 time and  897–8 physiological preconditions, for musical vocalization 686–8 Piano Concerto No. 2 (Brahms)  1043, 1044f Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major (Beethoven)  797–9, 1040, 1040f Pierce, Charles S.  52 Pindar 120–1 Pinker, Steven  655–6, 669, 692 on music and pleasure  658–9 pitch ambiguity concerning  886–7 composition and  458–9 hierarchies, philosophy of music and  373 relations 1030–4 space 885–90 timbre and  886 A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (Morley, T.)  166, 169, 176–7 Plato  40, 55–6, 71, 117–18, 496n.11, 706 composition restrictions of  131–2 on ethics and music  122, 143, 284–5 on ethos 862 on gymnastics and music  173 on harmonia 118 on logos 122 on melos 862 on pleasure and music  122–3, 130 on society and music  861–3, 873 on subjectivity and danger of music 1067–8 Platonism mathematics and  331–3 metaphysics and  331–2

index   1121 musical ontology and  330–3 musical works and  74–6 play, beauty and  952 pleasure aesthetic 943 Aristotle on music and  123–4 beauty and  942–3, 952–3 knowledge and  849–50 Pinker on music and  658–9 Plato on music and  122–3, 130 rhythm and  850 virtue promoted by  144–5 Plessner, Helmuth  233–4 Plotinus 665–6 Plumley, Yolanda  152n.13 Plutarch 118 Poetics (Aristotle)  864–5 poetry perception and  1046–9 symbolism and  776–7 Poizat, Michael  619–20 Poland 243–4 Political Emotions (Nussbaum, M.)  816 Politics (Aristotle)  123, 143–5, 174 politics, absolute music beauty and  948–9 Pollux 125 polyphony  165, 899 polytextual motets  149–50 Pop (Gas)  527–8 Popper, Karl  742 popular music  485–6 accessibility of  538–41, 546 aesthetics in  544 agency in  1060 as art  541–4 art music as  537 art music compared to  538–9 blackface and  566–7, 571 Blacksound marketing and  568–72 commercial orientation of  534–5 complexity and  536 as cultural category  534 definition of  533–4 descriptive popularity and  535–40 as dispositional property  540–1 electronic music and  522–3 for emotional self-regulation  546

as entertainment  542 functionality of  544–8 intended use of  544–5 language barriers and  540–1 overview of  533–5 in philosophy of music  548–50 quantitative popularity and  535–40 studies 54–5 popular song  534 Porter, Cole  540–1 posthumanism 54 animal behaviours, music and  427–9 birdsong and  419–20, 428 cognitive studies and  421 communication and  419–20 critical 416–17 critical race theory and  418 culture, technology and semiotics and 423–5 goals of  415, 418–19 humanist theory and  430 insect music and  420 instinct and  420 lineages of  415–19 music and  419–21, 425–9 nonhuman otherness and  417 prehumanism and  429–32 rationality and  430–1 technology and  416, 418, 423–5 terminology of  415–16 transhumanism and  416–18 transspeciesism and  416–18, 420 virtuality, abstract machines, life and  421–3 postmodernism 415–16 capitalism and  729 ethnomusicology and  53 master-narratives and  103 post-rock 529–30 “Potato Head Blues” (Armstrong)  548 Potter, John  500–1 Pound, Ezra  644 poverty of stimulus, expectations and  1003–4, 1013n.4 power of art  867 Foucault on  731 society and music and  860, 867

1122   index The Power of Sound (Gurney)  216, 221n.11 Pragmatism, jazz and  595–6 The Praise of Music (Case)  159–61 Pratinas of Philus  129–30 praxis, consensual musical ethics based in  297–8, 302 predictive coding, expectations and 1004 prehumanism, posthumanism and 429–32 Prelude No. 7 in A major (Chopin)  990–2, 991t Prendergast, Mark  524–5 presentational music  277–8 presentation of music, in performance  472–3, 480 presentism 201n.3 present tense, succession and  901–2 prima donnas  500–1 Principles of Art (Collingwood)  66–7 probe-tone method  1001 programme music absolute music and  219–20 meaning and  389–90 space in  884 progress, harmonic-scientific tradition and 183–4 propositional meaning, reference as  771 protests, national anthem  514n.3 proto-language 687–8 Pro Tools  520–1 proto-self 661–2 psalmody 505 pseudo-science, racism and  561 psychological truth  1059 Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Brentano) 232–3 Ptolemy 118 Puccini, Giacomo  809–10 punk rock  874–5 pure music  879–80, 908, 954, 956 pure sonicism  76 pure succession  900–1, 903 Pythagoras of Samos  117, 164–5, 706 Pythagorean music theory  27–8, 33, 117 Pythagorean Theorem  332 “Pythian Air” (Sakadas)  131

quantitative popularity  535–40 quantity, durational  903–5 quantum physics, time and  897–8 queer theory, discourse analysis and  725 Queer Voices (Jarman)  500–1 Quine, Willard Van Orman  326 metaphysics since  326–9 Raab, Friedrich  234 race. See also Black aesthetics; Blacksound; critical race theory; white supremacy epistemic exclusion and  555–6, 574n.2 intersectionality and  556 justice and  868–71 music and philosophy and  555–6 white normativity and  555 race records  571 Rachmaninov, Sergei  336 The Racial Contract (Mills)  555 racism 235. See also blackface; Blacksound music and  253 pseudo-science and  561 radio  508, 541 Radiohead 522–3 Raffman, Diana  82–3, 454–5, 463n.5 on musical feelings  1036–7 Rameau, Jean Philippe  30–1, 39, 40n.9, 185, 865, 978–9 Rousseau’s clash with  195–6 Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot)  610–11 Rancière, Jacques  302n.1 rap music  547–8, 752–3 as code  872–3 society and  874 rational analysis  775 The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (Weber, M.)  770 rationality art practice and  776–8 posthumanism and  430–1 sense as  770 social action types of  774–5, 781n.9 Rationalizing Culture (Born)  640 Ratner, Leonard  771 Ravn, Susanne  312 Rawls, John  430–1 Ready-Hearability view  794, 798

index   1123 realism, emotion and  977–8 Real Presences (Steiner)  350–1 recording ineffability of music and  754 as interpretation  341n.6 jazz 590 performance in  1051–2 of rock music studio performance of  79–80 space in  885 reduced listening  530n.2 reductionist epistemology of music  274–5 Redwood, André  186–7 re-enchantment. See also enchantment efforts for  983 theology and music and  349–51 reference as expressive norms, genres, styles, and topics 771 meaning as  771–2 through metaphor  771–2 as musical expression of emotion  771 perception, topics and  1058–9 philosophy of music and  365–8 as propositional meaning  771 reflection electronic music and  526 topography of musical absorption and 313–14 Reflections on Antient and Modern Musick, with the Application to the Cure of Diseases (Brocklesby)  189–90 reflective equilibrium  328 reflective judgement  647–8 reflective nostalgia  511–12 Regulae (Guido d’Arezzo)  139–40 regulative rules  379n.13 reharmonization 583 Reich, Emil  239–40 Reicha, Anton  35 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud)  294 relational agency  1061 relationality 1058 consensual musical ethics and  294, 298–300, 302 semiotics and  1058 relational properties aesthetics and  1046–9, 1061

musical features heard metaphorically-as  1034–9, 1058–9 perception of  1029 perception of music as action  1039–46 of performance  1049–52, 1059–61 psychological grounding of  1037–8 syntactic properties and pitch relations 1030–4 Le Remede de Fortune (Machaut)  145–6 The Renaissance Ethics of Music (Kim)  283 repetition, composition and  459–60 representation, philosophy of music and 365–8 representational art, jazz as  590–1 Republic (Plato)  71, 123, 143, 173, 861–2 Requiem Mass, mercy in music and  809–15 Reschke, Renate  950–3 resemblance, musical expression and  718, 974 resemblance theory  793–4 resonance deconstruction of music and  410–11, 413 sound and  1019–20 restorative nostalgia  511–12 retromania 529 Revista de Artes y Letras 227–8 Rey, Georges  337–8 Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rachmaninov) 336 rhetoric affective-rhetorical tradition and  181–4 concepts of musical forms shaped by  183 early modern music and  159, 171–4 Rhetoric (Aristotle)  171–2 rhizome 508–9 rhythm composition and  458 dactylic hexameter  120 dochmiac 129 epistemology of music and  848–51 expectations and  998 identity and  849–50 in jazz  580–1 in musical texts of ancient Greece  126–30 natural 848 of Orestes 129 pleasure and  850 schemata and  849

1124   index rhythm (Continued ) of Seikilos song  128–9, 128f swing 580 Rice, Timothy  54–5 Richardson, John  667 Ricoeur, Paul  386, 391, 663, 765 on interpretation  774 Ridley, Aaron  333, 548–9, 717–18, 934–5 philosophy of music and aesthetics  338–40 Riegl, Alois  1059–60 Riemann, Hugo  232 Riley, Terry  528–9 The Ring cycle (Wagner, R.)  616, 787 ringtones 492 Rinnucini, Ottavio  168 rituals, hyper-indexicality and  426–7 Rivers, Sam  444–5 The Roaring Girl (Middleton and Dekker) 163–4 Robinson, Jenefer  73–4 on musical expression and emotion  942, 975–7 on persona  717–18 robust causal chain, in performance of musical works  478 Rochlitz, Friedrich  439 rockabilly 539 rock music, recording and studio performance of  79–80 Rohrbaugh, Guy  76–7, 333–5 on score-compliance authenticity  934 “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” (Weitz) 252–3 Le Roman des Deduis (Buigne)  145–6 Romantic Harmony (Kurth)  36, 38–9 Romanticism Enlightenment and  197–8 musical expression and  710–15 nature, modernity and  825 subjectivity and  1072 Rorty, Richard  430–1 Rose, John  157, 158f, 163 Rose, Tricia  872–3 Rosen, Charles  961 Rosen, David  809 Rosenbaum, Susan  714–15 Rossini, Gioachino  607, 613

Rothfarb, Lee  954, 956–7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  182, 185 compositions of  865–6 galant music and  1024–5 on melody and emotion  608 on mimesis  866 on opera and emotion  608–10 on power of art  867 Rameau’s clash with, in high Enlightenment 195–6 on society and music  865–7 on voice  866 Routley, Eric  507–8 Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group  84 “Royals” (Lorde)  540–1, 875 Rückverzauberung 10/Nationalpark (Voigt) 527–8 Russell, Bertrand  90–1 Ryle, Gilbert  52, 246, 270 on Husserl  251–2 Sachs, Kurt  48 sacralization, aesthetics and  643–4 The Sacrament of Language (Agamben)  393 the sacred, in polytextual motets  149–50 sadness 975–6 Said, Edward  725–6 on intercultural conflict resolution  855 Sakadas of Argos  131 Salzer, Felix  959 sameness, ethnomusicology and  55–9 sampling, electronic music and  525 Samson, Jim  12–13 Sanders, Todd  270 Sanjek, Russell  569 Sapir, Edward  49 Sappho 120–1 Sartre, Jean-Paul  241–2, 591, 639 Satie, Erik  524, 714–15 Saussure, Ferdinand de  51–2, 96, 372, 735n.2 scales tonal tensions and  366 universality of  679 scepticism, absolute music and  642–5. See also meaning and scepticism Schachter, Carl  959

index   1125 Schaeffer, Pierre  493–4, 495n.4, 523–5 Scheleiermacher, Friedrich  388 Schelling, Friedrich  32–3, 209–10 on beauty  950–1 on language and schemata  850 on rhythm and identity  849–50 schemata 848–50 schematic expectations  1001–2 Schenker, Heinrich  373, 391–2 on organicism  958–9 on Ursatz 958–9 Schering, Arnold  182–3 Scherzinger, Martin  18–20, 419–20 Schiller, Friedrich  639, 642, 648 on beauty  950–1 Schlegel, Friedrich  220–1, 848–9 on rhythm  850 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  349 on voice and language  853–4 Schloezer, Boris de  241 Schmidt, Julian  712–13 Schnädelbach, Herbert  852 Schoenberg, Arnold  373, 446, 536, 776–7 on art and unconscious  715 on noise pollution  489–90 scholarly conferences, in twentieth–century music and philosophy  227 Scholes, Percy  499–501 Scholz, Heinrich  234 Schönberg Ensemble  463n.9 Schopenhauer, Arthur  40n.5, 217–18, 362, 603 Kurth’s music theory compared to  37–40 language in music theory of  34–5 on metaphysics  612 on musical sound  33–4 on music and reality  787 music theory of  29–33 opera and  612–13 on unconscious  749 Wagner, R., and  38, 613 on will  612, 667–8 Schroeder, David  220–1, 1076–7 Schubart, Daniel  710, 954 Schubert, Franz  1034, 1035f Schulkin, Jay  657 Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter  707 Schumann, Robert  713, 1031–2, 1032f, 1033f

Schutz, Alfred  1061–2 scientific racism, comparative musicology and 48. See also race; white supremacy scientific revolution  181 score-compliance authenticity  937 aesthetics and  929 constitutive norms and  932–3 as historical authenticity  925–7 ideals and  929–30 improvisation and  931–2 minimal level of  928 moral obligations of  928–9 notation and  926, 930–2 as performance value  927–34 success of  928 work authenticity as  923–5 scriptural imagination  345–6, 351–7 Scruton, Roger  220–1, 354–5, 615 on aesthetics and exclusion in musicology 1057 on culture and nature  736n.13 on gender  726–8 on metaphor  771–2 on morality and music  285–6 on musical expression  719, 795, 972 on perception of music as action  1045 on the Ring cycle  787 on score-compliance authenticity  929–30 on syntax and philosophy of music  370–1 on virtual causality  1043 secondary object, musical expression as  795 Second International Congress of Aesthetics 239–40 secular, in polytextual motets  149–50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  416 Seeger, Charles  456, 458 Seeing Red (Humphrey)  659–61 Seikilos song  128–9, 128f selection 425 Self. See also subjectivity consciousness and  659–60, 668–9 tonal 1070 self-expression in music. See also expression development of  711–13 Langer on  368–9 musical works as  716 theories on  717

1126   index self-presence, metaphysics and  408 Sell, Karen  500 Sellars, Wilfrid  78–9 SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology)  50 semantics. See also language emotion and  366–7 expression and expressiveness and 368–72 grammar and  372–6 intention and  367 meaning and  1078–9 philosophy of language and  363–4 philosophy of music and  364–5, 379n.16 reference and representation and  365–8 syntax compared to  363–4 Semi, Maria  187 semiotics posthumanism and  423–5 relationality and  1058 symbolic 426–7 Seneca, mercy in works of  806–9, 815–16 Senleches, Jacob  147–8 sens 302n.1 sense “end of philosophy,” music and  853–4 epistemology of music, rhythm and 848–51 irresolvable conflicts and  854–7 language and  846–8 meaning as  768–71 music, logical form and  845–6 as musical logic  770 music as melody of human existence and 851–3 philosophy of language and  843–5 as rationality  770 as sense-making  770 as social and structural mediation  770–1 sound and  411 sense-making 770 sensualism desire and  214–15 Kierkegaard and  208, 212–17 language and  214 Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (Britten) 883 La serva padrona (Pergolesi)  604–5

Sessions, Roger  452–5 set theory  106 Seung, T. K.  56 The Sexual Contract (Pateman)  562 sexuality gender construction and  727 intersectionality and  556 musical seduction fears in Middle Ages and 141–3 sexual selection, evolution and music and 690–1 Shadows in the Field (Barz and Cooley)  58 Shakespeare, William  166, 174, 806–7 Shannon, Claude  419 Shapin, Steven  181, 199–200 Shapiro, Helen  545 shared subjectivity  1065–6, 1076, 1079–80 Sharp, Cecil  48 Sharpe, Christina  556 sheet music, copyright law and  569–72 Shorter, Wayne  589 Shostakovich, Dmitri  716, 1045 showmanship, performance and  476–7 Shusterman, Richard  547–8 Sider, Theodore  328–9 The Sight of Sound (Leppert)  495n.3 signifyin(g) 1059–60. See also Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. signs iterability of  495n.5 semiotics and  424–5 silence, historical musicology and  22 similarity, perception of  1046 Simmel, Georg  228–9 sincerity authenticity and  924 musical expression and  709–10, 714–15 Sirens myth, enchantment and  984, 993–5 Six Little Piano Pieces (Schoenberg)  776–7 Sjölin, Fredrik  309–11, 316–17 SLEs (standard linguistic entities)  337–8 Sloboda, John A.  485–6, 975, 1053n.6 Sloterdijk, Peter  388 Small, Christopher  22, 831–2 Smalley, Denis  520 Smart, Mary-Ann  620–1 Smith, Mamie  571–3

index   1127 social action, rationality and  774–5, 781n.9 social behaviour analytic philosophy of music and  80 performance and  1061–2 social Darwinism, comparative musicology and 48 social ethics of music  286–9 social imaginary  347–8 social mediation, sense as  770–1 social resources, for evolution and music  683–5 society and music Adorno on  870–5 approaches to  860 Aristotle on  863–5, 873 Attali on  871–2 catharsis and  864–5 codes and  860–1, 869, 871–4 culture industry and  870–1, 874–5 diagōgē and  864, 871 Du Bois on  867–70, 872–3 ethos and  862–4 global inconsistencies on  872–5 house music and  874 imitations and  860–1, 866 justice and  868–71 melos and  862 New Musicology and  859 paidia and  864, 871 Plato on  861–3, 873 power and  860, 867 punk rock and  874–5 rap music and  874 relationship of  859 Rousseau on  865–7 “Sorrow Songs” and  867–70 terminology of  860 voice and  866 Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)  50 Socrates 862–3 Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (Boyle) 192–4 Sonata Theory  735n.7 “Song” (Scholes)  499 sonicism, musical works and  76 The Sonic Self (Cummings)  977 sonic strokes  491

sonic wallpaper  492 Sonic Warfare (Goodman, S.)  491 Sonic Youth  755 sonification, ineffability of music and  744 “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” (Debussy)  395–6, 395f, 396f sonus, definition of  138–9 Sørensen, Rune  309–11 “Sorrow Songs,”  754–5, 867–70. See also African American spirituals; Du Bois, W. E. B. Souchay, Marc-André  705–6 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois)  867 sound. See also sonicism; sonic strokes; sonic wallpaper; sonification anthropology of  270 into composition  210 duration of  905–7 of enchantment  988–9 engagement with  268 harmony and  210 Leopardi on  208–12 matter and  836–8 musical 33–4 without nature  825–7 notation and  209–10 novelty in  211–12 reality shaped by  220 resonance and  1019–20 sense and  411 succession of  905, 905f words and  217–18 sound art  825–6 sound logos  492 soundscape segmentation, evolution and music and  685–6 sound terms  374 Souriau, Étienne  239 Soused (Walker and Sunn O))) )  519 Souvtchinsky, Pierre  241 space acoustically spatial music  879–82 compositional 880 composition of musical works for kinds of 881–2 composition of musical works for particular 880–1

1128   index space (Continued ) conceptually spatial music and  879–80, 882–3 eliminativism and  887–8 enchantment, time and  985–8 fiction and  883–4, 888–90 harmonic 885–6 imagination and  888–9 literalism and  887–8 metaphor and  888–9 musical  828–9, 884, 890–1 music and  890–1 offstage instruments and  883 overview of  879–80 performance 881–2 within performances  882–5 pitch 885–90 in programme music  884 in recording  885 stereo 885 Spain, phenomenology in  238–9 Sparshott, Francis  470 Speak for Yourself (Heap)  298 speculative realism  416 Spencer, Herbert  691–2 Spiegelberg, Herbert  240 spirituals. See “Sorrow Songs” Spitzer, Michael  771–2 spontaneity, improvisation and  440 Spotify 487 Stäel, Madame de  197 Staier, Andreas  935–6 Stainer, John  506–7 Stamitz, Johann  30 standard absorption, in topography of musical absorption  309f, 310 standard linguistic entities (SLEs)  337–8 standard songs, blackface and  570 status, improvisation and  439–43 Stebbing, Susan  243–4 Steiner, George  216, 350–1 Steinhardt, Arnold  320n.2 stereo space  885 Stern-Anders, Günther  234 Sternhold, Thomas  176–7 Stesichorus 120–1 Stetsasonic 547–8

Stiegler, Bernard  832–5 St Matthew Passion (Bach, J. S.)  985 Stobart, Henry  12 Stockhausen, Karlheinz  521–3 Stone-Davis, Férdia  354–5 Stradella, Alessandro  1070 Strauss, Richard  212, 387 Stravinsky, Igor  362, 788–9 on improvisation and composition  441 on musical expression  715–16 String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 (Beethoven)  910–15, 911f, 913f, 914f Strong Experiences with Music (Gabrielsson) 979 strong nature, music as  827–31 Stroud, Barry  268 Structural Hearing (Salzer)  959 structuralism challenging 108 continental philosophy of music and  95–7 ethnomusicology and  51–2 phenomenology and  93–4, 96 structural isomorphism  364–5, 369–72 structural listening  485–6, 489–90 structural mediation, sense as  770–1 structure, expectations and  1003–9 The Structure of Iki (Kuki)  236–7 studio recording of rock music  79–80. See also performance Stumpf, Carl  47, 232 Sturm und Drang era  710 style, expressive, reference as  771 style galant  1022–4. See also galant music subject content and  376 of listening  488–9 subjectivity aesthetics and  960 African American music and  1072 collective action and  1066 congregational singing and distributed 508–12 consciousness and  657 cultural changes and  1068–70 danger of music to  1067–8 definition of  603 Enlightenment and  1070

index   1129 historical events influencing shift towards 1071 historical scholarship on  1065 imagination and  1048 metaphor and  1075 objectivity and  1075–6 opera and  601–3, 620–1, 623n.3 as personal responses  1076–9 Romanticism and  1072 shared  1065–6, 1076, 1079–80 vocal music and  503 sublime, the  787, 790 sublimity 945–7 submissive listening  487 Subotnik, Rose  403–6, 446, 1067 succession concrete and pure  900–1, 903, 908 events and  898–9 metaphor and  916n.4 of sound  905, 905f tenses and  901–2, 917n.7 time, duration and  895, 897–905, 916n.2 Sufi mysticism, ineffability of music and 754–5 Sullivan, Erin  201n.6 Sulzer, Johann Georg  707–8 Sunn O)))  484, 519 “Brando,” 519 Soused 519 Suor Angelica (Puccini)  809–10 Sweet Anticipation (Huron)  973, 998 swing rhythm  580 Switched-On Bach (Carlos)  526 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon)  169–70 symbolic anthropology  52 symbolic forms Goodman, N., on  1078 Langer on  247–8, 368–70 Wittgenstein on  368–9 symbolic thinking  684 symbolism absolute music and  776–7 medium and  777 poetry and  776–7 pure music and  956 Symphonie fantastique (Berlioz)  713–14, 883–4 Symphony No. 1 (Glass)  522–3

Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550 (Mozart) 974 Symposium (Plato)  496n.11, 947 syntactic properties  1030–4 syntax philosophy of music and  370–1 semantics compared to  363–4 systematized indexes  426 systemic musicology. See musicology, systemic S/Z (Barthes)  102–3, 500–1 Szendy, Peter  21, 405–6, 494, 830–1 Tafelmusik 491 Tanay, Dorit  147–8 Tancredi (Rossini)  613 Taoism, ineffability of music and  754–5 tarantula bite, music as cure for  187, 189, 193–4, 196–7, 201n.9 Tarare (Beaumarchais)  605–6 Taruskin, Richard  83–4, 787–8, 801n.2, 945 Tasso, Torquato  175 Taylor, Charles  252, 347–8, 851 designative tradition of  846–7 technicity, ineffability of music and  747–9 technique, meaning and  390, 399–400 technology comparative musicology and, 1800s  47–8 electronic music and  520–3 musical hermeneutics and  396–8 posthumanism and  416, 418, 423–5 of self, Blacksound as  562–4 tool-making and  831–5 voice manipulation with  300–1 temperament, cents system  47–8 tempo, emotion and  975 temporality. See time Tennor (Potter)  500–1 tenses future 901–2 past 901–2 present 901–2 time and  901–2, 908, 917n.7 tension, emotion and  973 tentacular thinking  417 Thagard, Paul  266 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta  724–5

1130   index Théberge, Paul  520–1 theology and music. See also Christianity; mercy in music in ancient Greece  346–7 body and  353–4 disenchantment and  347–9 future possibilities in  351–7 harmony and  346–7 material environment and  351–3 metaphysics and  749 naturalism and  348–9 overview of  345–6 re-enchantment and  349–51 scriptural imagination and  345–6, 351–7 terminology in  346 trajectories and disjunctions of  346–51 transcendence and  354–7, 643 Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (Nettl) 50 theory of mind  691–2 String Quartet No. 3 (Britten)  1034, 1036f Thom, Paul  467 Thomasson, Amie  82, 327–9 Thompson, Evan  311–12 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 419–20 Timaeus (Plato)  40 timbral sonicism  76, 332–3 timbre, pitch and  886 time autonomy and  773–4 Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132, duration and  910–15, 911f, 913f, 914f care and  391 concrete and pure succession and  900–1, 903, 908 consciousness and  659–60 consensual musical ethics and  296–7 continuant theory and  333–4 durational quantity and  903–5 duration and  896–9, 902–10, 916n.2 enchantment, space and  985–8 events and  898–9 harmony and  985 linear 900–1 meaning and  390 meaning and autonomy and  778–9

music and  216, 240–1 music and philosophy and  896–7 music theory and  895–6 narrative and  1077 non-conceptuality of instrumental music and 778–9 opera and  619–20 overview of  915–16 phenomenology and  896 physics and  897–8 signature 895–6 succession and  895, 897–905, 916n.2 swing rhythm and  580 tenses and  901–2, 908, 917n.7 Timmers, Renee  975 Timotheus of Miletus  130 Tinbergen, Niko  420 Tinctoris, Johannes  157, 159 Tin Pan Alley  570–1 titles, meaning and  389–90 “To a Locomotive in Winter” (Whitman) 389–90 Todd, Janet  504–5 Tomlinson, Gary  164–5, 172–3, 617–18, 683–4, 694 A Million Years of Music by  824, 831–5 on musicking  831–2 on opera and metaphysics  621–2 on operatic voice  620–1 on tool-making  831–5 Tonal Pitch Space (Lerdahl)  885–6 tonal Self  1070 tonal tensions, scales and  366 tone musical expression and  795 phenomenology and  232–3 Tonkunst 954–5 tool-making 831–5 top-down mercy  809–15 topics expressive, reference as  771 perception, reference and  1058–9 topography of musical absorption. See absorption, musical totalitarianism, phenomenology and  243 total serialism  102–3 touch, music and  1020–1, 1024

index   1131 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)  368–9, 845–6 tradition, invented  506–7 Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Bronson) 47 tragédie en musique  603–5, 610–11 Traité de l’harmonie (Rameau)  40n.9 Traité de mélodie (Reicha)  35 Traité des objets musicaux (Schaeffer)  495n.4 transcendence theology and music and  354–7, 643 will and  667–8 transcendental idealism, of Kant  326 transcendental phenomenology  98–9 transgender persons  723–4. See also gender transhumanism 416–18 translation deconstruction of music and  412–13 galant music and  1019–22 transphobia, feminism and  723–4 transport, by enchantment  992 transspeciesism  416–18, 420 La traviata (Verdi)  607–8 trigger warnings  736n.16 Trilling, Lionel  709–10 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner, R.)  37–8, 37f, 220–1, 614–15 Truax, Barry  492 Trump, Donald  514n.3 truth art and  1026–7 authenticity and  923–4 events and  730–1, 736n.20 musical expression and  795 psychological 1059 Tucker, Sherrie  724–5 Tucker, Sophie  572–3 Tumarkin, Anna  243–4 Turner, Victor  58 The Turn of the Screw (Britten)  621–2 Twardowski, Kazimierz  243–4 twelve-bar blues  581–3, 589 twentieth-century music and philosophy. See also phenomenology academic complications with  226 aesthetics in  228–9 analytic and continental divide in  250–2

canonical texts and  225 continental-analytic divide in  225–6 Critical Theory and  245–7 global history of  225–31 Husserl challenged in  242–50 Ingarden and  244–5 journals of  227–8 Langer on symbolic forms in  247–8 scholarly conferences in  227 Tymoczko, Dmitri  885–6 Tynnichus of Chalcis  125 ubiquitous musics  509–10 Ubiquitous Musics (Garcia Quiñones, Kassabian, and Boschi)  485–6 Uchida, Mitsuko  797–8 Uexküll, Jakob von  896 ugliness, music and  945 “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (Adler)  46 The Unanswered Question (Ives)  883, 1041–3, 1042f unconsciousness. See also consciousness art and  715 expectations and  998–1003, 1008 music and  749 understanding of music  796–7 listening and  375 meaning and  374–5, 377–8 Unger, Hans-Heinrich  182–3 United States ethnomusicology in, 1955–1990  50–2 jazz and Pragmatism in  595–6 The Unity of the Senses (Marks)  484–5 universal Darwinism  660–1, 671n.12 Ursatz 958–9 Ussachevsky, Vladimir  525 Valéry, Paul  239–40 on art  776 value meaning and scepticism and  789–92, 800 rationality 774–5 van Inwagen, Peter  327–8 Varela, Francisco  417 Varèse, Edgard  456, 461 Varró, Gabrilla  568

1132   index Varwig, Bettina  183, 187 Västfjäll, Daniel  976 Vaughan Williams, Ralph  442, 882–4 Verdi, Giuseppe  607–8, 809 veridical expectations  1001–2 Il viaggio a Reims (Rossini)  607 Vial, Jeanne  249 Vicentino, Nicola  185 Vickers, Brian  182–3 victim impact statements  820n.13 Villegas Montiel, Francisco Gil  228–9 viol 158f ethics and  159 metaphysics and  157, 164 musical ontology and  157, 161–4 physics and  159, 170 rhetoric and  159 violence beauty and  945–6 Beethoven’s work and  733–5 Gandhi on  820n.15 virtual causality  1043 virtual fieldwork  54 virtuality, posthumanism and  421–3 virtue, pleasure promoting  144–5 viscosity, duration and  917n.8 Vishnevskaya, Galina  880–1 Viswanathan, T.  54 vocal music  512–13 choral music and  500 Christmas carols and  506–7 congregational singing and distributed subjectivity 508–12 congregational singing in nineteenth-century England  504–8 national anthem protests and  514n.3 scholarship on  500–3 subdivisions of  500 subjectivity and  503 terminology of  499–500 voice types and  500–1 vocal pedagogy  500 Voegelin, Salomé  484, 488, 523–4 Vogel, Mathias  767 voice in ancient Greece  130–2 of body  502

computerized 513n.2 as disembodied  502 grain of  501–2 of language  502 language mediated by  499, 853–4 materiality and  502–3 operatic 620–1 in perception of music as action  1045 society and music and  866 technology manipulation of  300–1 types 500–1 A Voice and Nothing More (Dolar)  161 Voice and Phenomenon (Derrida)  408 Voices of Today (Mitchell, D.)  813 Voigt, Wolfgang  527–8 Der vollkommene Kapellmeister (Mattheson) 707 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Hanslick). See On the Musically Beautiful “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” (Hendrix) 945 vox, definition of  138–9 Wagner, Franz Joseph  30–1, 40n.10 Wagner, Richard  34, 212, 479–80, 603, 656–7, 667 absolute music and  634, 639–40 festival and  614 on musically sublime  787 Nietzsche and  616–17, 853 opera and  613–18 Ring cycle of  787 Schopenhauer and  38, 613 Tristan und Isolde  37–8, 37f, 220–1, 614–15 Wahl, Jean  241–2, 251 Wald, Gayle F.  724–5 Walker, Scott  519, 527, 530n.3 Walker Brothers  527 “Walking Back to Happiness” (Shapiro)  545 Wallace, Alfred Russel  691–2 Wallrup, Erik  496n.13 Walser, Robert  872–3 Walton, Kendall  451 on fiction and space  888–90 Warner Brothers  570 Warren, Calvin  568 Warren, Jeff  283–4, 289, 444–5

index   1133 War Requiem (Britten)  810–14, 880–1 “Watcha Say” (Derulo)  298 Watts, Isaac  504–5 Ways of Listening (Clarke, E.)  485–6 “we,” Peacocke on  1062–3 weak nature  823–4, 831–5 Weber, Gottfried  35 Weber, Max  228–9, 770, 774 on disenchantment  983 on rationality and social action  774–5, 781n.9 Webern, Anton  1031, 1031f Weheliye, Alexander G.  565 Weil, Simone  243–4 Weiner, Norbert  419 we-intentionality, phenomenology of  320 Weiss, Gail  229 Weiss, Sarah  56 Weitz, Morris  67, 252–3 Well-Tempered Clavier (Bach, J. S.)  930–1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Schopenhauer). See The World as Will and Representation Wesley, Charles  504–5 Wesley, John  504–5, 514n.6 West, Kanye  755, 875 “West End Blues” (Armstrong)  471–2 Western art music  54–5, 273 body and  829–30 ineffability of music beyond  753–7 mercy in  806–9 signifyin(g) and  1059–60 terminology of  5–8 Wetzel, Justus Hermann  234 “What a Musical Work Is” (Levinson)  76 What the Bleep do We Know!? 59n.2 “When I’m 64” (the Beatles)  1030, 1031f Whig history  201n.2 Whitehead, Alfred North  900–1, 903, 907–8, 917n.5 white identity, blackface and  562–3 white normativity  555 white privilege  225, 572 white supremacy. See also race ideology of  568 structures of  253 Whitman, Walt  389–90

“Who Cares If You Listen?” (Babbitt)  536, 788 “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (Latour) 641 Wiebe, Heather  506–7, 814 Wilde, Oscar  645–6 Wiles, Andrew  332 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe)  711 will 612 transcendence and  667–8 Williams, Bernard  2, 214–15, 225–6, 287 on opera and time  619–20 Williams, Graeme  511–12 Williams, John  544–5 Wills, David  1021 Wireless Fantasy (Ussachevsky)  525 Wire Recorder Piece (el-Dabh)  525 Wishart, Trevor  520 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  250–1, 361, 367, 592, 856 on aspect-change and art  388 on compositionality and context  378n.4 on logical form and music  845–6 on logic and philosophy of language  373, 377–8 on meaning and understanding of music  374–5, 377–8 on symbolic forms  368–9 Wolfe, Cary  417, 419 on autopoiesis  417, 421 on cognitive studies and posthumanism 421 Wolfe, Kristina  744 Wolff, Christian  325 Wolff, Francis  1053n.4 Wölfflin, Heinrich  232 Wollheim, Richard  66–9, 74–7, 717 Wolterstorff, Nicholas  75–8, 330–1 women, role in twentieth-century philosophy of music  243–4. See also gender wonder 978–9 Woodson v North Carolina 808 Woolfe, Virginia  489–90 Wordless Rhetoric (Bonds)  171–2, 183 words. See also language naming and ethics  393 Nietzsche on music and  217–19 sound and  217–18

1134   index Wordsworth, William  711 work authenticity, as score-compliance authenticity 923–5. See also score-compliance authenticity work-concept. See also Goehr, Lydia Blacksound and  559–62 Works and Performances of Music (Davies, S.)  467 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer)  30, 30f, 34, 40n.5, 612 The World of the Spirit (Mitchell, D.)  813 Worringer, Wilhelm  232 Wright, Thomas  170–1, 188, 201n.6 Writing and Difference (Derrida) 55–6 Wynter, Sylvia  563, 830

Young, James O.  295 Young People’s Concert series (Bernstein) 788 A Young Person’s Guide To Kyle Bobby Dunn (Dunn) 521–2 YouTube 541 Zambrano, María  242–4 Zangwill, Nick  785–6 on beauty  941–50, 960–2 Zarlino, Gioseffo  165, 185, 187 Zeno, Apostolo  604 Zibaldone di pensieri (Leopardi)  208–10 Zimmerman, Robert  634 Žižek, Slavoj  727–30, 732 Zweiter Kongress für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 231–2