Fabled by the Daughters of Memory -Part Seven
‘Lannigan’s ball! Now a drive on the naval! The Shallburn Shock. Never mind your gibbous. Slip on your ropen collar and draw the noosebag on your head. Nobody will know or heed you, Postumus, if you skip round schlymartin by the back and come front sloomutren to beg in one of the shavers’ sailorsuits. Three climbs threequickenthrees in the garb of nine. We’ll split to see you mouldem imparvious. A wing for oldboy Welsey Wandrer! Well spat, witty wagtail! Now piawn to bishop’s forthe! Moove. There’s Mumblesome Wadding Murch cranking up to the hornemoonium. Drawg us out Ivy Eve in the Hall of Alum! The finnecies of poetry wed music. Feeling the jitters? You’ll be as tight as Trivett when the knot’s knutted on. Now’s your never!’
- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’, 1939
Lanigan’s ball LYRICS — The Bards — YouTube
The customers of the Mullingar House, Dublin, in their cups, cheerful and sportive, jesting and jaunty, full of good cheer, singing and sibilant, are nonetheless rapidly transforming into a lynching party, incensed at having been forced to leave the public house. Four old codgers having now arrived at their wits’ ends slip the four of them all off the gangplank and fall into the water below where they flounder about bobbing up and down while their donkey berthed upon the road above to the west brays and they were all trying to and baffling with the walters of hoompsydoompsy walters of … subsequent to which there is an extended statement by the customers dumped onto the bank wherein they revile the old tavern keeper who should be ashamed of himself they say hiding that shepe in his goat and for resembling so barefacedly old crookback, Richard the Third. The drink he serves would be an insult to a pig’s trough they want to have his license stopped to have him gaoled going on the way he does taking his leisure like a god on pension and chasing women in the rain in the park and trying to squeeze himself into young girls’ tights getting dizzy spells and concealing himself under various guises the bloody old rogue. In consideration to the musicians he ought to have kept the house open, damn him. ‘Pass out your cheeks, why daunt you? Penalty, please!’
Ah music! Euterpe, whose name means ‘rejoicing well’ or ‘delight’ is the muse of music and lyric poetry. ‘The giver of delight’, the ancient poets called her and it certainly requires finesse to wed poet and music. Finneces, legendary Irish poet and sage, teacher of Fionn mac Cumhaill, mythical hunter warrior of Irish mythology, who devoted years endeavouring to ensnare the Salmon of Wisdom, a fish that will endow all the world’s knowledge upon whomsoever eats it. Finneces, thhwarted in his aims until he takes the young Fionn into his charge, although as Fionn is cooking for him he scalds his thumb and puts it in his mouth whereupon he receives the knowledge of the fish which he can subsequently access by putting his thumb into his mouth again. Upon eating the salmon he recommends Finn take up the name Finn to fulfill the prophecy as to who will gain its wisdom, originally he was named Demne. All part of Fenian lore as an ancestor of Fionn, the name Finn-Ecas meaning ‘Finn the Seer’.
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) had a deep far reaching influence on the art of song, poetry wedding itself to music, the latter being an essential part of life for him, a source of solace and redemption. The musicality and fluidity present in his verse appealed to composers from all over the world, such emotionally and spiritually uplifting poetry acclaiming yea to life, joyous and jubilant, heavy-hearted and inward looking, both religious and irreverent, composer of wise epigrams and vicious satire, occasional or nonsensical scribblings, the bawdy and indecent too, but forever penning musical poetry that attracted composers of song. Goethe was in addition capable of emulating the kind of work to be found among the finest classical authors of Greece and Rome, the Persian lyrics of Hafez, the naturalness and artlessness of folksong, and furthermore he continually renewed and reinvented himself continually into his old age. Within his writings we find the healing power of music extolled. In his play Faust it is music that delivers Faust from thoughts of suicide. In Heaven God had wagered with Mephistopheles an agent of Satan that he would not be able to lead astray His favourite ambitious and most aspiring scholar, Dr. Faust. Faust meanwhile broods in his study, disappointed and disillusioned by the knowledge and results attainable by the natural means of science, and so had tried and failed to attain knowledge of nature and of the universe by magical means. Crestfallen by his failure, Faust’s thoughts turn towards suicide, but he is restrained from the act by the noise of the start of Easter celebrations.
FAUST:
Why, here in dust, entice me with your spell,
Ye gentle, powerful sounds of Heaven?
Peal rather there, where tender natures dwell.
Your messages I hear, but faith has not been given;
The dearest child of Faith is Miracle.
I venture not to soar to yonder regions
Whence the glad tidings hither float;
And yet, from childhood up familiar with the note,
To Life it now renews the old allegiance.
Once Heavenly Love sent down a burning kiss
Upon my brow, in Sabbath silence holy;
And, filled with mystic presage, chimed the church-bell slowly,
And prayer dissolved me in a fervent bliss.
A sweet, uncomprehended yearning
Drove forth my feet through woods and meadows free,
And while a thousand tears were burning,
I felt a world arise for me.
These chants, to youth and all its sports appealing,
Proclaimed the Spring’s rejoicing holiday;
And Memory holds me now, with childish feeling,
Back from the last, the solemn way.
Sound on, ye hymns of Heaven, so sweet and mild!
My tears gush forth: the Earth takes back her child!
Symphony №8: Final Scene from Faust: Gerettet ist das edle Glied — YouTube
It is music that serves as a restorative for the eponymous hero in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Several composers have been charmed by Mignon, a thirteen year old somewhat androgynous figure who in the novel is rescued by youthful merchant Wilhelm from a troupe of acrobats who had kidnapped her from her native Italy and brought her to Germany. The child establishes a close connection with Wilhelm who finds her exotic nature and latent sexuality thoroughly beguiling but alas and alack only later do we find out that she will perish of a broken heart as she was born out of an incestuous relationship between Augustin a harpist (who finds peace from bad dreams by playing his harp and singing) and Sperata his sister. In Kennst du das Land Mignon recalls the scent of Italian citrus trees and gives expression to a longing desire to find a father figure in Wilhelm.
Do you know the land where citrons bloom,
Golden oranges glow among dark leaves,
A gentle wind blows from the blue sky,
The myrtle is still, and the laurel stands tall?
Do you know it well?
It is there! — there
That I would go with you, my beloved.
Do you know the house? Its roof rests on pillars.
Its hall is resplendent, its chambers shine;
And marble statues stand and watch me:
What have they done to you, poor child?
Do you know it well?
It is there! — there
That I would go with you, my protector.
Do you know the mountain and its cloud-covered ridge?
The mule searches for its path in the mist;
In caverns dwell the ancient spawn of dragons;
Rocks tumble down, and over them, a rush of water!
Do you know it well?
It is there! — there
That our path leads us! Oh Father, let us depart.
Hugo Wolf — “Kennst du das Land” — Schwarzkopf — YouTube
And in Goethe’s play Torquato Tasso music revives and reinvigorates the poet Tasso, (1544–1595), author of Gerusalemme liberata, (Jerusalem Delivered), with its absorbing tales, and its accounts of skirmishes, sacramental rituals and solemnities, secret gatherings and campaign manoeuvres. Tasso was presenting something new in the 16th century, for here was a poet producing poetry of sentiment, that is what endows the work with its everlasting value, but by which is not meant sentimentality, and it was in accord with a burgeoning feeling for woman and with the craft of music then very much in the ascendancy. By sentiment is meant that which is cultivated and polished, elegant and high-minded, while artless and matter-of-course, immersed in melancholy, sublimely harmonious, pitiably moving, all of which permeates all of the scenes within the work, while discovering a metrical expressiveness of the broodiness contained within the rhythms of the mellifluousness of the verse, sustaining the perfectly realized lives of such captivating and attractive heroines the names of whom were quite recognizable all over Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Goethe’s play delves deeply into the struggles of the artist. In addition he composed a cantata text, Rinaldo, the inspiration for which was canto XVI of Jerusalem Delivered, later set to music by Johannes Brahms, (1833–1897).
O leave me still a moment here, I pray;
For here by Heaven’s will am I abiding:
The desert rock, the wood-embosom’d bay,
Arrest my foot, and bid me sere to stay.
Once were you fair — to terror now converted,
The charm of earth, the charm of heav’n is fled;
Why haunt I still this place so dread?
My only joy, my poor heart here deserted.
Golden days, again o win me,
Days of Paradise again;
Loving heart; beat, beat within me!
Long-lost day s, true spirit bring me!
Breath of heaven, thou dost sing me
Songs of joy and songs of pain.
James King: Rinaldo by Brahms — YouTube
In The Sorrows of Young Werther music soothes the protagonist in his grimmest most despairing moments. The tale concerns an intense and inordinate reaction to a love unrequited, and is presented as a collection of letters penned by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. A closely personal account of his sojourn in the fictitious village of Wahlheim is given, the village folk of which have entranced him with their artless folky ways. It is there that he encounters Charlotte, a beautiful young maiden who, after the demise of their mother, now cares for her siblings. Werther falls in love with Charlotte in spite of the fact that he had known prior to being smitten that she is engaged to a man of the name of Albert, who is eleven years her senior. And in spite of the suffering and agony this causes him he passes his time in the following few months in working upon developing an intimate friendship with the two of them:
JULY 16:
‘How my heart beats when by accident I touch her finger, or my feet meet hers under the table! I draw back as if from a furnace; but a secret force impels me forward again, and my senses become disordered. Her innocent, unconscious heart never knows what agony these little familiarities inflict upon me. Sometimes when we are talking she lays her hand upon mine, and in the eagerness of conversation comes closer to me, and her balmy breath reaches my lips, — when I feel as if lightning had struck me, and that I could sink into the earth. And yet, Wilhelm, with all this heavenly confidence, — if I know myself, and should ever dare -you understand me. No, no! my heart is not so corrupt, it is weak, weak enough but is not that a degree of corruption?
She is to me a sacred being. All passion is still in her presence: I cannot express my sensations when I am near her. I feel as if my soul beat in every nerve of my body. There is a melody which she plays on the piano with angelic skill,- so simple is it, and yet so spiritual! It is her favourite air; and, when she plays the first note, all pain, care, and sorrow disappear from me in a moment.
I believe every word that is said of the magic of ancient music. How her simple song enchants me! Sometimes, when I am ready to commit suicide, she sings that air; and instantly the gloom and madness which hung over me are dispersed, and I breathe freely again’.
Werther — ‘Clair de lune’ (Joyce DiDonato and Vittorio Grigolo, The Royal Opera) — YouTube
Which brings us to Mary Shelley’s, (1797–1851), Frankenstein, wherein the creature happily stumbles upon The Sorrows of Young Werther and other books in a lost satchel in the woods, through which he learns or rather re-learns how to read and upon reading it he comes to view Werther’s case as comparable to his own. That is to say, of one that has been spurned by those that he had loved. Eloquent and mentally agile as he is the creature presents us with an account of the first days of his life as he got by on his own, in the wilderness, finding out that people feared him and loathed him in virtue of his appearance, leading him in turn to fear them and to hide himself from them. Whilst residing in a deserted structure adjacent to a cottage, he had become rather attached to the occupants, a family living in poverty with a blind father, Mr. De Lacey, a guitarist, for whom he discreetly gathered firewood, cleared the snow from off their path, amongst other tasks to assist them.
Through clandestinely living in this manner for many months the creature learns to speak through listening to them and as already noted instructs himself to read through discovering a lost satchel of books, and as he continues to learn more and more of the family’s dire circumstances he grows more and more attached to them, eventually approaching them in the hopes of becoming their friend, entering the house while only the blind father Mr. De Lacey a guitarist was there, but as the two of them engaged in dialogue the others returned and were frightened and so the creature is outcast and rejected once again. And so the story goes, well, there is eventually only one way out of it for him in the end …
However, the novel does raise a rather intriguing thought concerning music. The motif of music is present throughout the whole of the novel, indeed the creature provides us with a commentary upon music as he pays attention to different sources of sound, acquiring awareness as he continues to observe both human and animal he is especially entranced by the draw of music, from the music of birds to Mr. De Lacey’s guitar, and these estimations and considerations distinctly testify to Mary Shelley’s apprehension of music as not merely a human experience but also of the natural world itself, which serves to alienates the creature even further, who, upon escaping into the forest, very quickly becomes aware of the birds singing around about him:
‘I was delighted when I first discovered that a pleasant sound, which often saluted my ears, proceeded from the throats of the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light from my eyes… sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable… sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again’.
Music is thereby graded with regard to its degree within the human experience, for even prior to the creature learning language from listening to the DeLacey family, he not simply takes note of but delights in the musical improvisations of the birds themselves. Indeed, he can only identify them as little winged animals after he has developed a proficiency in language. His creator, Shelley that is, is thereby placing more relevance upon music than language merely by the order in which she placed the creature observing them. Initially, he is aware of sensory experience as he observes his vision being obstructed by some figure, then he is delighted by a sound that he observes, and then he endeavours to imitate the sounds and becomes self-conscious as he attains awareness of his own vocal inadequacy by comparison. The creature is not simply dissatisfied with his voice when he endeavours to imitate the bird, rather, he is so repelled by his own auditory outcomes that he is ‘frightened… into silence again’. The creature’s sounds are so inferior to that of a natural creature that he is startled into silence, and it is at this point that the creature first experiences a kind of placement in the order of things so to speak rather than mere rejection, for once he had felt the pang of rejection when his creator, Victor that is, looked upon him aghast before fleeing. This creature’s experience of the music of birds foreshadows his finally cursing his stature in society that alienates him, not just from humans but from the entire world of nature, we know how that ends …
Olivier Messiaen — Le Merle noir (The Blackbird) [Kenneth Smith, Matthew Schellhorn] — YouTube
And it is certainly intriguing that it is music that awakens such feelings in the creature. Aristotle, (384–322 BC), like Plato, (428–348 BC), before him, discoursed upon music with particular reference to its significant role in education, the objective of which was to make people good by bringing rationality, custom and nature into harmony with each other, filling up the deficiencies in the nature of humankind, guiding it towards perfection, completion and fulfilment. With what is most primeval and fundamental in humans does education begin, touching first upon the appetite, and thereafter proceeding to the formation of reason. Within this context Aristotle identifies three generally acknowledged reasons for incorporating music into education, each grounded upon a different effect music generates in the listener. Music is something that is sought for in virtue of the amusement it delivers, or because it contributes to and promotes moral virtue, or in the pursuance of intellectual gratification. The first end of music is in the giving of pleasure, the one thing most of us look for in music, comparable to sleeping or drinking which are pleasant because they afford us with diversion, enjoyment, recreation and diversion. The pleasure music provides derives from the relaxation it grants fatigued and overtaxed men and women, it as a ‘remedy of pain caused by toil’, Aristotle says, while presenting us with a caveat, that, like medicine, music should be used with caution and brought forth only upon appropriate occasions. The comparison between pleasure and medicine is developed further when Aristotle states that music can ‘give an innocent pleasure to mankind’ when by it ‘all are delighted’. He invokes common opinion as a witness to the fact that music is pleasing, and in the Politics he quotes the poet Musaeus (whose name of course means ‘of the Muses’) as even further evidence of this:
‘Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest’.
Pleasure is good for men and women, we may take that as a given, and music is ‘one of the pleasantest things’, and were pleasure to be the only benefit to be derived from music, ‘on this ground alone we may assume that the young ought to be trained in it’. And so it would seem that through leaming how to play an instrument or to sing a person is guaranteed of being able to participate in the universal joys of music at will and this on its own is a good enough reason for having and learning music in virtue of the fact that ‘music has a natural sweetness’ from which natural delight emerges an additional benefit, that of the influence upon character, for experience demonstrates that music influences character in virtue of the fact that people are aroused and stimulated by certain types of music. As for those that are not:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
- Shakespeare, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Act 5, Scene 1.
Music can influence someone’s character for the better given that its facility to conduce to virtue is grounded upon two things, its capability to shape our minds, to move and stir us that is, and its capability to accustom us to authentic and real pleasure. The implication here is that there is a further end to music than the three that Aristotle explicitly states, and furthermore, to comprehend quite how music predisposes one toward virtue or vice one must take into consideration that music moves us, or it imitates emotion, and experience reveals to us that upon listening to music ‘our souls undergo a change’ for ‘rhythms and melody supply imitations which hardly fall short of the actual affections’. Music is very similar to the emotions because both are movements, the musical rhythm moves more quickly and more slowly and the melody rises and falls, and the movement is not merely at the level of sensation it is in addition a principle of other movements, a movement that moves us, the emotions are movements, movements of humans, a compound synthesis, not the movements of the soul alone but rather of a man or woman with a soul, the emotions are principles of movement as well as movements themselves, and emotions move both men/women and brutes on the level of sense.
Music therefore, Aristotle reasons, imitates the emotions because like the emotions it is a principle of movement on the level of sense, and furthermore, alternate types of music move us in diverse ways dependent upon the emotion imitated:
‘The musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. Some of them make men sad and grave, like the so-called Mixolydian, others enfeeble the mind, like the relaxed modes, another again, produces a moderate and settled temper, which appears to be the peculiar effect to the Dorian; the Phrygian inspires enthusiasm …. The same principles apply to rhythms; some have a character of rest, others of motion, and of these latter again, some have a more vulgar, others a nobler movement’.
- ‘Politics’.
Music sets up a proportion between its own movement and that of the listener, through music a harmony arises between the sound and the soul of the listener, and he or she is moved with a movement so near to our own emotional movement that some people happily identify music and the soul, and it follows from what Aristotle declares concerning the power of music to move the listener in harmony with itself that the skilful musician will be able to reproduce almost any emotion so that it can be felt and recognized by the listener, he or she can make him or her melt with tenderness or bristle with rage, have you a heart of stone even then it will reverberate upon the plucking of the right string.
‘… a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o’er-the-hazy’.
- ‘Finnegans Wake’.
Lydialike, ladylike, and Lydian, the designation of one of the modes in ancient Greek music, characterized as soft and effeminate.
This is indeed what imitating emotion entails, and because music imitates emotion it can affect the character, it can imitate either well-ordered or disordered emotions, it is effective in guiding us in the direction of moral virtue because in moving us emotionally, it is able to ‘habituate us to true pleasures’, and the pleasure that we naturally discover in music can lead us to enjoy good emotional dispositions:
‘Since then music is a pleasure and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions’.
- ‘Politics’.
What makes an emotions either good or bad? For Aristotle it depends upon whether they are well-ordered or badly ordered, for a good emotion is properly measured, a bad emotion is either disproportionate or lacking within a a certain set of conditions, and it is reason that determines whether or not an emotion is well-ordered, and music will be good or bad dependent upon whether it moves us in a well-ordered or in a disordered manner. Through the pleasure it provides for the listener in divers kinds of emotional movement music can dispose him or her to delight in well-ordered or in disordered emotions. If music familiarizes the listener with balanced emotional movements it fosters virtue in him or her, but if it familiarizes him or her with excessive or with deficient emotional movements by stirring him or her up or calming him down too much it readies the ground for vice: ‘The habit of feeling pleasure and pain at mere representations is not for removed from the same feeling about the realities’, and his is especially true of musical imitations which hardly fall short of the actual affections’. And it evidently follows on from these considerations concerning both music and virtue that music only disposes one in the direction of moral virtue without giving this virtue directly. In the manner by which he defines moral virtue this latter entails the right choice of what is appropriate according to reason, and the implication of music being an imitation of emotion is that music can only directly move someone in an emotional way but it is unable to directly touch reason.
Haydn Symphony №22 “The Philosopher” — YouTube
Since music does not touch reason directly, it cannot give knowledge of, but only familiarity with, well-ordered emotions, and by this means it disposes the listener toward virtue but does not make him or her virtuous. After establishing that being pleased or troubled by imitations is very close to having the same feelings for the realities, and after showing that music imitates emotion, Aristotle concludes: ‘Enough has been said to show that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young’. Music should be incorporated into education in virtue of the fact that one of its purposes is disposing toward moral virtue, and the granting of intellectual gratification is the finishing argument that Aristotle presents us with for the coaching of a child in the art of music. And so it was that music was traditionally included in education, for it is plain enough that there are branches of learning and education that are to be studied purely with a view to the pursuit of leisure in intellectual activity, and such are to be prized for their own sake. Music put to use for intellectual enjoyment in leisure, one of the ways by which a man or woman with aspirations towards being educated and cultured should pass their leisure time.
However given that intellectual amusement and gratification is noble and suited to the perfection found in men and women as opposed to the imperfection to be discerned in children Aristotle raises an objection to a child studying music that sheds some light upon the nature of this aim and objective of music, namely that the pleasure subsequent upon the intellectual gratification of music is noble in virtue of the fact that it entails delight in noble music. Music can be designated noble in so far as it induces a well-ordered emotional state in the listener and delivers to him or her the type of pleasure that the virtuous man or woman experiences, but Aristotle suggests that music can deliver noble gratification in yet another way, namely, a gratification and fulfilment that is noble in virtue of the fact that it is not tied an intellectual gratification of music. That is to say, men and women do not discover intellectual gratification simply in feeling and enjoying well-ordered emotional movements, rather, it derives from contemplation upon the emotional ardour that music imitates. We feel a sense of well-being when our emotions are well-ordered through music, but men and women do not only enjoy feeling, in addition they enjoy knowing. ‘All men [and women] by nature desire to know’, and knowing involves seeing order. Music provides intellectual gratification in virtue of there being an order in it that men and women like to consider. And given that music is fundamentally an imitation of emotion, this order will be aesthetic, etymologically speaking, rather than mathematical.
Numbers do not move us and nor are we changed when mathematical proportions change, and yet musical harmony makes us bend with its fluctuations and our emotions ebb and flow with the music. Precisely as sound that leaves us indifferent and unmoved is not musical nor is the mathematical beauty of harmonic progressions the measure of the enjoyment given by a musical work. On the contrary, the intellectual gratification of music will be grounded upon the contemplation of the proportion between the development in a musical imitation and the emotion itself, and while attending to music a man or woman can enjoy noticing the relation that exists between an emotion and its imitation. It is natural for man or woman to be delighted by imitations given that such delight is based upon their natural desire to know.
This natural satisfaction of imitations through melody is not only at the basis of our enjoyment of music but is in addition the fount of musical creation itself for upon music establishing a suitable emotional order in the listener it can thereby deliver gratification transcending any to be discovered in other imitations. Not only will a man or women be delighted by observing the relation between the imitation and the reality, but he or she will in addition delight in contemplating the appropriateness of the emotion imitated and will discover additional gratification in coming to see that he or she is being moved in a manner that accords with or is in tune with the feelings of a virtuous man or woman. Intellectually gratifying music depends upon experience and understanding both to recognize imitations and to appreciate an appropriate emotional order upon its creation. Children may be moved by music in a well-ordered way but they can merely be pleased with this order and cannot comprehend why this order is good, the intellectual gratification of music is out of reach for them while musical education can merely prepare children for the intellectual gratification they will experience as adults. Such delight, proper to well-educated adults, is the fourth end that Aristotle grants to music. In total the four ends assigned to music are the giving of pleasure, the disposing toward virtue, imitating emotion, and providing intellectual gratification.
This order thus discerned between these ends can be inferred from what Aristotle has to say concerning the principles of education in general and the position of music in education in particular. Granted that intellectual gratification will be the highest end and the last to be accomplished the perfection of the higher faculties is achieved posterior to the lower ones, and men and women can perform the lower functions anterior to their performance of the higher ones. As understanding and intellectual development will follow on from the training of the appetite, in addition the end of music related to the intellect will be the highest and at the same time the last attained. Imitation of emotion will be the first end in the sense of the most fundamental, for it is presupposed to both disposing in the direction of virtue and providing pleasure. In virtue of the fact that music moves the listener it can both please him or her as it does and help dispose him or her to virtue by ordering his or her feelings well, and disposing in the direction of virtue follows on from music’s gratifying effects. In the order of generation the end of music which is disposing in the direction of virtue will succeed upon that of provide gratification.
On the other hand, providing gratification should be subordinated to disposing toward virtue, and given Aristotle ‘s conviction that musical gratification should be subordinated to moral goodness it follows that instruments serving only for gratification should not be put in the hands of children for whom music should serve as a means to goodness. As a former supply teacher who has been put in charge of music lessons I endorse not giving musical instruments to children in a classroom setting, but the kind of musical gratification granted in a particular situation is measured by whether or not that higher end, virtue, is sought after. Aristotle believed that gratification and the pleasure concomitant upon it is ultimately subordinated to virtue, and as a consequence he sees the following order in the ends of music, the most fundamental is imitating emotion, gratifying pleasure follows upon this, disposing in the direction of virtue is higher than pleasure, whereas the highest is intellectual gratification.
Is it even so? Does music really signify anything other than itself? According to formalist theories the meaning of a musical composition is determined by its form, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), apparently endorsed such a view that pure instrumental music is an aural arrangement signifying nothing when observing that in music as an art ‘sound, just as sound, is treated as an end in itself … its own form, artistic note-formation, can become its essential end’. And furthermore, music that actually works (is philosophy capable of explaining why it does or does not? It is surely not just a subjective matter?) need not be based upon any verbal text, for music has the supreme potentiality of liberating itself from any actual text and also from the expression of any precise subject-matter, always with an eye upon finding gratification entirely within the self-contained sequences of associations and concurrences, advancements and developments, contrarieties and confrontations, pitches and tones, all of which fall within a purely musical ambit of organised noises. However, Hegel also notes that music that is merely a self-enclosed development ‘remains empty and meaningless’ and to eliminate any such danger of spewing out what is but meaningless noise it must needs attain ‘spiritual content and expression’, for failure to attain such content would be failure to be a genuine art. And so it would appear that Hegel is committing himself to the Aristotelian view that successful music must in someway be about something.
Let us moderate our pace here. It is to be remembered that Hegelianism is one might say an antidote to the one-sided philosophical views with which philosophy abounds. Hegel noted that the classical style of music of his day through its retreat from explicitly defined content had ‘lost its power over the whole inner life’ to develop into something that is for the cognoscente merely. And yet in addition he noted that ‘nowadays … miracles in conception and in virtuosity have occurred in music’ and he declared that ‘music carries [the] liberation [of the soul] to the most extreme heights’. Such on the face of it contradictory views, both for and against formalism, the music of his time as vapid and insipid while remarkably endowed with spirit and feeling, are furthermore situated within an historical frame of reference that modern day thinking concerning the arts may regard as somewhat singular and abstruse. Music for Hegel, is ‘the second romantic art’ between painting and poetry, whereby historical eras are differentiated one from another through an important prominence of a particular artistic medium. That is to say, architecture for the symbolic phase of art, sculpture for the classical phase of art, painting, music, and poetry in succession for the contemporary post-Roman romantic phase of art. But may we not object that works in various media have existed during many historical epochs, for the Greeks, the Romans, the medieval Europeans and other civilisations all had their music? Upon what grounds should poetry be thought of as more significant than music in the present age (recall the discussion of Goethe above)?
As it happens Hegel’s observations upon music are neither contradictory nor historically inept but deliver the means whereby we may apprehend the real penetrative understandings to be found within the contrary factions, formalism or against formalism, the classical style as vacuous and elitist or as eminent and setting a standard, free of the hyperbole and perplexities that frequently attend upon the straightforward taking of sides in such controversies. For Hegel a successful composer of music must take close heed of both structure and ‘content (true a rather vague one)’, an essentially vague content indeed, though it will transpire that it will involve repeated and sensed desires and longings for a meaningful, consolidated life in addition to a sense of present states of affairs as at the same time inhibiting such aspirations. Such a content of a felt sense of the aspirational and a complex sense of states of affairs can intrinsically achieve materialisation in particular types of structures of developing sound, with particular flexible degrees of unrestrictedness. But for both the nature of the human content of music and how that content intrinsically allows materialisation in purely musical structures to be made clear, one must review more standard, more open to analysis, and yet in the end one-sided philosophical perspectives concerning music and meaning.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel observes that when we desist from thinking about ourselves as essentially bearers of representational awareness but instead also think of ourselves as agents, then we are thinking of ourselves as in a situation in which our ‘certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is to itself the truth’. That is to say, as emerging agents coming to assume a miscellaneous practical stock of roles, dramas, techniques afforded within a cultural state of affairs, we have an initial incipient sense, a subjective certainty, of being this or that, a music afficionado, an idle schoolboy, a workplace jester, an ambitious go-getter, and so on, an initially diffuse subjective certainty that is an object of our awareness, something to be put to the test, to be worked through, one develops one’s musical appreciation, takes to one’s books, comes up with better gags, works harder and with more focussed objectives. We are capable of reflecting on the different skills and ways of being that we take ourselves to possess, and cutting across all many different things we do there is a ‘unity of self-consciousness with itself; and hence the sensuous world is for it an enduring existence which, however, is only appearance, or a difference which, in itself, is no difference’.
However, such unity is to begin with merely implicit, in the sense that how and why one resorts to doing this and that now and then is characterised by a certain opacity, it is not always so clear to us and furthermore determined by contingent circumstance as opposed to reasons. If things subsequently prosper as we mature, within one’s individual perspective as well as and historically and culturally, then ‘self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this antithesis is removed, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it’. Between its turning now this way and now that and its being clearly uttered and rationally self-identical throughout its different activities there is an antithesis that is eliminated, and the identity of itself with itself is thereby rendered explicit, manifested, brought about, in a condition of becoming.
The Phenomenology of Spirit is a bildungsroman describing the human endeavour to regain possession of oneself, so to speak, at every period of individual history the person begins from a position of subjective certainty, subsequently harmonising his or her actions with the directions of that certainty, observing the unexpected consequences of his or her initial intention, thereby discovering its objective truth. Then the project is suitably adjusted, set to go again, becoming conscious once again of the abstract that is to say the merely conceptualised or non-actualised qualities of the new project, until ultimately subjective certainty delivers objective truth, it arrives at fulfilment, and in the light of consciousness the person becomes fully aware of what he or she was all along albeit obscurely. The ideal but actualisable and even self-actualizing end of this process of development and maturation is a human life that is free, understood as the reasonable expression of both one’s particular talents and one’s shared human, rationally reflective nature, within a cultural backdrop of mutual recognition and endorsements (more than of the LinkedIn kind but they are appreciated). One arrives at both agential and representational subject-hood from within a specific culturally afforded ensemble of practices from which one develops a perspective upon the practices and upon oneself as capable of this or that in relation to the practices and thus one tarries awhile in some practices to establish how things are done and so practice at them, while one retreats from other practices having felt impeded and thereby disenchanted. From the point of view of history practices are themselves suitably adjusted through this merry dance of engagements and withdrawals until a culture of freedom is attained wherein each and every person can live freely and reasonably in ways the worth of which is patently visible to each and every one.
As Hegel formulates it elsewhere:
‘… the human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, he attains his self-awareness only by regarding the other as other. Thus freedom lies neither in determinacy nor in indeterminacy, but is both at once. The will which limits itself exclusively to this is the will of the stubborn person who considers himself unfree unless he has this will. But the will is not tied to something limited; on the contrary, it must proceed further, for the nature of the will is not this one-sidedness and restriction. Freedom is to will something determinate, yet to be with oneself [bei sich] in this determinacy and to return once more to the universal’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Right’
Freedom resides neither in indeterminacy, a retreat from all typical performances, particular approaches, total engrossment in content, nor in determinacy, what is merely presented contingently, bereft of reflection and reflective endorsement. It resides in both together. One that possesses an apperceptively (capable of relating past percepts to present experiences) unified and judgmental consciousness would be expected to be committed to the pursuance of a free life so defined. One would also expect that such a project could be completed by anyone in and through the formation of a culture of rational freedom albeit that the latter is merely at the margins of appearance. It is true however that there are those that get stuck in the unhappy consciousness phase (struggling for recognition from another to realize themselves as a self-conscious subject). A self-diremption (internal division, self-alienation) without a resolution. Such a one may be capable of reflection upon their subjective certainties and committed thereupon to the project of an expressively rational freedom with a shared cultural life but incapable of completing the project.
In the case of music as a central romantic art however this is no more than an acknowledgement that there are those that are impervious to its charms (see the quote above from Julius Caesar). Music as a central romantic art subjected to the Hegelian treatment accords with the notion that a rationally expressive freedom permeating cultural life is still but an ideal neither empty for one nor yet quite altogether actualisable, insofar as the music is at least sufficiently capable of arousing interest. Musical development models in an abstract manner our persistent efforts to attain an expressively rational freedom and unity with ourselves across our various social roles. The modeling neither socio-historical nor semantically concrete, for this ideal is not though it may become actualized throughout personal and social life. Musical development of a particular type is a foreshadowing of a particular freedom and is not its concrete socio-historical successful attainment. One’s partaking as listeners in the process of musical development directly indicates one’s involvement in the actualization of this ideal insofar as listening to music obliges a person to be aware of him or herself as actively listening to continuous hopefully uninterrupted musical development over time.
Upon listening to music one exercises and develops the same power of reflective self-awareness directed towards a gratifying bringing to an end upon which our commitment to an expressively rational freedom hangs. How so? Because music together with painting and poetry is a romantic art, one of ‘the arts whose mission it is to give shape to the inner side of personal life’. It is thus distinguished from the symbolic arts the most exemplary of which is architecture, and from the classical arts, the most exemplary of which is sculpture, for the romantic arts do not centre upon undertakings that present something external for its own sake as a ‘free individuality’, but involve instead ‘spirit’s inner self-apprehension and its preoccupation with the sphere of its own circumstances, aims, and actions’. A turning of one’s back upon external free individuality shows forth even in illustrative or representative painting for the objects presented in a painting are presented from a perspective and for an actively observing intelligence that must take up a particular perspective that also follows a narrative in order to apprehend and comprehend the painting, as opposed to a sculpture of a recognizable object that may typically imply no narrative and be observed from diverse spatial perspectives.
Music goes further than painting in its rejection of all depiction of definite objects, for painting persists in its depiction, granted through a presentation of three dimensions indirectly in only two, while music ‘keeps firmly to the inner life without giving it any outward shape or figure’. It is according to formalists urge in this sense about nothing, from a point of view of depiction, it is non-representational. On the other hand the reduction by music of externality to temporality in itself has a significative purpose as music ‘takes the subjective as such for both form and content’. Music is concerned with what it is like to apprehend and to have experiences as a subject in general, with a subject’s general reflectiveness and associated aims and objectives. But according to the anti-formalists music is in this sense signifying something, for sounds succeeding one upon another in time are the appropriate medium for enticing reflection upon the having of a point of view and the pursuing of aims and objectives in general. Sounds ‘cannot. . . portray [objects] as they actually exist’.
Music very much befits sustaining the having of a perspective in general and a reflection upon it without having to adhere to the presentation of any specific object, and even beyond the rejection of all spatiality, the rejection of the painterly surface, beyond painting’s own rejection of three dimensional form, music in addition involves a ‘double negation’ of externality. First, we listen ‘to the results of the inner vibration’ focusing our attention upon the quality and development of the sound, not upon the piano or the harp as physical objects. Second, sound itself either decays once produced or it is sustained only through further effort and up to a limit set by available breath or the length of a bow or the extension of one’s hands. This is something that music has typically put to advantage anyway, and which could explain why when one hears electronically generated music, where such physical limits do not apply, one hears it primarily as a soundscape rather than melody susceptible to being genuinely felt. Which raises the further question: what is music? Is it just anything we listen to with the intention of hearing music, as Luciano Berio, (1925–2003), once claimed? Circular definitions are not always such a bad thing.
The romantic arts exploit a material condition or medium not merely as an object of sensory apprehension but strikingly as a means of expression and communication of the constructive capacity of arrangement discoursing with the constructive capacity of apprehension. Music after the medieval period, for instance, made use of equal temperament (a kind of tuning system) initially developed by Vincenzo Galilei, (1520–1591), in order to stretch the possibilities of temporally sustained constructive arrangements, thus breaking away from the medieval musical practice of the monodic replication of what had been thought to be the music of the celestial spheres, a constructive capacity of apprehension. Pythagoras, (c. 570 — c. 495 BC), for whom all things are numbers, led medieval music theorists to consider music as based upon numbers and ratios, and a universal music, a music of the celestial spheres, was a philosophical concept regarding proportions in the movements of celestial bodies, the Sun, Moon, and planets, as a form of music, inaudible to the human ear.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
- ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Act 5, Scene 1.
Galilei was well aware of musical practice owing nothing to musical theory, that any theorist challenging Pythagorean orthodoxy would face the wrath of the traditionalists, that eventually the gap between theory and practice was becoming impossible to bear. Aristotle as we have seen had vividly described the emotional effects of music. Why then did the polyphonic music current at the time not produce any similar effect? The conclusion by some was simply that modern music inferior to ancient music. Galilei was critical of modern contrapuntal music for not being able to achieve the same effects as the Greeks described, using as it did more than one melody simultaneously setting the same text, so that with the different melodies going in different directions a question arose as to how any of them could capture the affect. The ancient Greeks, according to Galilei, sang only one melody at a time. Having a narrow range it was set high or low in the singer’s voice according to the feelings it conveyed and the rhythm of the poetry determined the rhythm of the music. With regard to accompaniment Galilei endorsed the simple chordal style of the simplest of contemporary songs, a style called monody. After medieval times the emphasis in music was upon the constructive capability exercised in ordering the material and in hearing its order is carried to its very pinnacle, as it utilised ideal and vanishing sonic material in time.
There is in purely instrumental music no depiction of external objects and events and music does not possess a natural sphere outside its existing forms, with which it is obligated to concede. The precise latitude of its concession with law and the necessity of its forms fall primarily in the sphere of the notes themselves, which do not enter into so close a connection with the specific character of the content placed in them, and in their use mostly leave a wide scope for the subjective freedom of the execution. Though there are certain associations evoked by certain sounds, hunting by horn calls, the pastoral by woodwinds, and so on, even such associations as these are matters of history and convention, and a work of music is successful as art not simply insofar as it evokes such associations, but rather insofar as it achieves, as a consequence of ‘the subjective freedom of the execution’, that is, the composer’s constructive capability, ‘necessity … in the sphere of the notes themselves’. In order to succeed distinctively as music, music ‘must free itself from any given text’ and Hegel points out that in opera and song ‘the text is the servant of the music’ and that great scripted drama and poetry frequently do not make for great opera and song. In the pursuance ofmusical necessity, ‘sound, just as sound, is treated as an end in itself’, and ‘artistic note-formation [is] its essential end’.
‘The real region [of the musician’s] compositions remains a rather formal inwardness, pure sound; and his immersion in the topic becomes not the formation of something external but rather a retreat into the inner life’s own freedom, a self-enjoyment’. Such a withdrawal into inner freedom and self-enjoyment that purely instrumental music aspires to attain is not, however, for the sake of either mere aural enjoyment and delight or mere immediate sensory pleasure. Ideas, particularly the idea of completely accomplished individuality in its achievement of expressively rational freedom, are to enter into the composition not discursively, but in and through the arrangement of sound simply. ‘The difficult task assigned in music is to make [the] inwardly veiled life and energy [of the subject] echo on its own account in notes . . . and to immerse ideas into this element of sound, in order to produce them anew for feeling and sympathy’.
Arrangements of notes can take leave of the endeavour to embody the inner life of the expressively rational subject and thus become merely embellishment, as we may discover in the more standard and humdrum movements of Antonio Vivaldi’s, (1678–1741), concertos, or such as Johan Pachelbel’s, (1653–1706), Canon in C. Music ‘may easily become something Utterly devoid of thought and feeling. Freedom from any fixed content, either external or conceptually articulated, ‘will therefore always more or less carry on into caprice’, at least as compared to the definiteness of presentation in painting and in a good deal of poetry. The composing of purely instrumental music bears with it an intrinsic danger of crumbling into an activity of thoughtless fancy generating an arbitrary or merely an embellished ornate creation. The freeing of music from text and from representation, and the freeing of spirit that returns into itself in ‘pure sounding’ will ultimately lead to barrenness. For music to embody ideas it must make use of a text, a dramatic libretto in opera, or lyric poetry in song: ‘From the start the libretto gives us distinct ideas and tears our minds away from that more dreamlike element of feeling which is without ideas’, and thus assists in overcoming a tendency of music towards caprice and mere aural decorativeness.
However, while the danger of caprice is intrinsic in the composing of absolute music, that is, music that is not explicitly about anything, the outcome of caprice is not, for absolute music can embody content abstractly, without text, indeed it must do so if it is to be successful as a work of art of any significance. Hegel notes that even music as accompaniment:
‘.. must not sink to such servitude [of the text] that… it forgets the free flow of its own movements and thereby, instead of creating a self complete work of art, produces merely the intellectual trick of using musical means of expression for the truest possible indication of a subject-matter outside them and already cut and dried without them. Every perceptible compulsion, every cramping of free production, breaks up the impression [to be made by music’.
- ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’.
Rather the composer can and indeed must produce a strictly musical development, either in setting a text or in producing music alone, for only in this manner can ideas, and in particular the idea of being a subject capable of expressive individuality, be totally absorbed by sound for ‘feeling and sympathy’ directed at the developing sound itself. For music ‘claims as its own the depths of a person’s inner life as such’. And by what means does it accomplish such a feat? Initially the sounds that compose a musical work exist only as an ideal phenomenon, that is to say, as something in essence that is realized in experience as we hear the bounded vibrational outcomes of the use of a piano or a cello say rather than attending to the piano or cello as physical objects. Secondly, and more essentially, music as composed, developing sound exists intrinsically in recollection, as the listener follows the succession of the notes and their connection one with another.
A works of music has a three-fold structure, it is composed not simply of sounds, either as physically measurable pitches or pure phenomena of a moment but also of tones, heard as leading one to another, for music requires memory and attention to hold developing motives, themes, and harmonic and rhythmic patterns in mind as patterns, not all of whose elements are present at any single moment, and the pattern that is the music itself must be followed from within recollection. The implication being that only an entity with particular intellectual and imaginative capacities can actually hear music, the capacities necessary to be attuned to the three-fold structure of music. Or as Hegel puts it, a work of music ‘is a communication which … is carried by the inner subjective life, and is to exist for that life alone’. Only an entity capable of recognitive recollection can follow and apprehend the work, which itself exists essentially in being apprehended. And the composer creates a temporal arrangement of tones through which marked differences, that is, changes of pitch, of motive, of theme, of harmony, of rhythm, are encountered and also overcome, residing within an overall intelligible, and recollectable, ensemble or pattern. By this means composers test explicitly and develop their capacities to encounter and organize difference, thereby establishing themselves are comprehensible and intelligible subjectivities across time who have endured and thrive through an encounter with difference. Hegel writes:
‘Recollection [Erinnerung] of the theme adopted is at the same time the artist’s inner collection [Er-innerung] of himself, i.e., an inner conviction that he is the artist and can expatiate in the theme at will and move hither and thither in it’.
Via such recollection of a developing pattern expressive unity of the self with itself is put to the test and developed, abstractly across time, in and through the occurrence of different experiences, that is to say, notably new pitches, motives, themes, rhythms, harmonies, that are nonetheless experienced as forming a unified whole, established by overall harmonic development and rhythmic and instrumental consistency. The self in general has the possibility and task of ‘maintaining itself in its other as the self and only the self as such. The self is in time, and time is the being of the subject himself’. Initially its self-identity is ‘wholly abstract and empty and it consists in making itself its object’, that is, in having an accomplished, embracing of difference unity with itself as its task.
An empty succession of mere nows with no relation one to the other must be organized so that the listener can recognize his or her life in relation to his or her experiences as indeed his or hers. The identity of the self with itself must come about or be made explicit, and through organizing divergent materials into a unified pattern essentially displayed in a subject’s apprehension music thereby overcomes the incoherence and fragmentation of the self and attains, within its sphere of tones, expressive freedom and unity with itself. It ‘carries this liberation [from abstract, empty subjectivity and mere unintelligible temporal succession and into the experience of meaningful, differentiated totality and selfhood] to the most extreme heights’:
‘The self. . . only becomes a self by concentrating its momentary experiences and returning into itself from them. … The self is what persists in and by itself, and its self-concentration interrupts the indefinite series of points of time and makes gaps in their abstract continuity; and in its awareness of its discrete experiences, the self recalls itself and finds itself again and thus is freed from mere self-externalization and change’.
Such an achievement of the self is brought about initially through the composer’s feat of construction but is correspondingly carried out in and through the listener’s attentive following of the musical development, for composers are themselves initially listeners albeit in their imagination of their own composition as they oversee the course of the musical development that they are endeavouring to attain, overseeing on how it is progressing, for the self, whether composer or listener, experiences the temporal progression as its own, indeed, the listener experiences the music from within like it was his or her own expressiveness. There is an absence of definite representation here as well as frequently an absence of a definite expression of emotion but there remains significance for the subject, the accomplishment and reinforcement of his or her life as a subject, through this partaking. The profound gratification experienced in successfully finding one’s way from note to note or from phrase to phrase continually provides the listener with a feeling of inner victory even in music the general expression of which insofar as it is describable at all would not be designated triumphant. In mediocre music note after note and phrase after phrase seem to present themselves frivolously and inconsequentially, whereas in music that one enjoys as one progressively apprehends the form, the sense of absolute possession, of a feeling of unity with it, of the marked and unchangeable correctness of every step in one’s progress, can generate the most striking impression of a conquest moving forward.
The key to such a liberating establishment, through listening attentively, of the unity of the self with itself is musical development, the coherent, recollectable, integration of diverse musical elements one with another across time, and in his description of the achievement of unity of musical pattern across differences, Hegel presents an account of what later was to be designated and formulated as sonata form:
‘In a musical composition a topic can be unfolded in its more specific relations, oppositions, conflicts, transitions, complications, and resolutions owing to the way in which a theme is first developed and then another enters [exposition: first theme, second theme], and now both of them in their alternation or their interfusion advance and change [development], one becoming subordinate here and then more prominent again there, now seeming defeated and then entering again victorious’.
Hegel was explicitly critical of Carl Maria von Weber’s, (1786–1826), patchwork of diverse elements technique whereby persons are presented on stage through unintegrated characteristic musical motives, bereft of any thematic interweaving and development, as in his Der Freischutz, the Berlin premier of which Hegel had attended in June 1821. Hegel held to a normative classicism, a preference for the integrative formal techniques of the classical style.
Weber-Der Freischütz Overture-Kleiber (1970) — YouTube
Thematic contrast and development is not the only device for achieving unity of musical pattern across variation however. Hegel employed a general term for the overall structure of successful music:
‘Music is itself art only by being a cadenced interjection’.
Interjection implies something between a mere immediate wail and the putting forward of a conceptually formed judgment for pondering upon, something with more formed than a natural cry of feeling, something less formed and more specific to its material medium than a thought the truth or falsity of which can be assessed. Interjection implies the insertion into a structure of a compositional unit, a new theme or motif, melodious, rhythmical, or harmonious, as a marked new focus of attention. And cadenced implies that interjections necessarily lead towards some culmination, toward a resolution of the material that has been introduced, interjectively, for its is closure or consummation, rather than mere cessation, that must be accomplished. And the unavoidable means for establishing musical unity over significant stretches of short-term attention is rhythm. Introduction of a bar or measure functions ‘to establish a specific temporal unit as the measure and rule for the marked contemplation of the previously undifferentiated temporal succession’. In the absence of bars musical events cannot be readily marked for hearing by having beginnings and endings come on strong rather than weak beats. One requires a system of regular strong and weak beats in order to achieve this marking of thematic and melodic material for hearing, for:
‘Only if the definiteness of the measure conquers and regulates what is arbitrarily unlike [i.e., specifically different pitches and sonorities] is that definiteness proved to be the unity of accidental variety and the rule for it’.
Over significant stretches of short-term musical attention rhythmic patterning is required for musical hearing of what is significant. Over longer stretches of development there must needs be governing ‘deeper relations and secrets of harmony which have a necessity of their own’. A successful musical composition must by some means move from consonance into dissonance and then into resolution. Music that actually works:
‘… abandons a purely consonant progression, goes on to oppositions, summons all the starkest contradictions and dissonances and gives proof of its own power by stirring up all the powers of harmony; it has the certainty nevertheless of being able to allay the battles of these powers [i.e., to achieve resolution] and thereby to celebrate the satisfying triumph of melodic tranquility [in the coincidence of melodic closure with harmonic closure]’.
In general as the music develops, melody, that is to say, ‘the poetic element in music, the language of the soul’, then ‘float[s] independently above the bar, rhythm, and harmony’ as it has its own figuration. ‘And yet on the other hand it has no means of actualization except the rhythmical measured movement of the notes and their essential and necessary [harmonic] relations’. Rhythm is needed to mark significant melodic musical events, that is to say, beginnings and ends of phrases, and harmony is needed in order to lend to the melody a significant place in an overall, longer lasting harmonic development, where in the end harmonic closure and melodic closure coincide.
In thus focusing upon the importance of the coincidence of harmonic and melodic closure within a rhythmic structure, Hegel mediates the classic opposition between Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, (1712–1778), advocacy of melody as the natural and central source of the life of music and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s, (1683–1764), emphasis upon the necessity of properly developed harmonic development in a successful work:
‘In [its] close link with harmony the melody does not forgo its freedom at all; it only liberates itself from the subjectivity of arbitrary caprice in fanciful developments and bizarre changes and only acquires its true independence precisely in this way’.
The freely achieved substantive and meaningful unity of the melody requires appropriate harmonic cadencing as its closure. Melody stands to harmony as wilfulness or choice or subjective particularity) stands to rational necessity, reasonable rules for self-formation and expression in social life. Melody discovers its significance in relation to harmony and harmony discovers its significance in relation to melody, and for both the discovery is to be made only therein: ‘We have a battle between freedom and necessity: a battle between imagination’s freedom to give itself up to its soaring [in melody] and the necessity of those harmonic relations which imagination needs for its expression [as opposed to mere unburdening, discharge, or shrieking] and in which its own significance lies’.
Hegel’s account of music as a fine art certainly applies most to the classical style of music, Joseph Haydn, (1732–1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, (1756–1791), Ludwig van Beethoven, (1770–1827, particularly with its emphasis upon the importance of thematic developmental structure, exposition and development, overall harmonic organization, the employment of regular rhythms, the working through of motivic materials in overall compositional unity, and upon an appropriate formal structure being accomplished music is then properly released from dependence upon any text as it manifests a value for the life of a subject that is independent of extra-musical cultural practices, formal worship or rituals and so on:
‘Nowadays … two miracles have occurred in music: one in the conception, the other in the genius of virtuosi in the execution. … The result is that … the notion of what music is and what it can do has been more and more widened’.
One gets the impression that what art music properly can be and is has just been discovered. Hegel it has been reported made the remark at a dinner table conversation after having heard the revival of Johann Sebastian Bach’s, (1685–1750), St. Matthew Passion by Felix Mendelssohn, (1809–1847), in Berlin, March 1829: ‘That is no proper music; we have really gotten further than that now’. Similarly, E. T. A. Hoffman, (1776–1822), in his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony presented the view that Beethoven’s purely instrumental music wass itself of direct religious significance so that there is no longer a need to revert to textually based Passion music. And though it is not clear whether Hegel has Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven specifically in mind he did remark that ‘especially in recent times music has torn itself free from a content already clear on its own account and retreated in this way into its own medium’.
Hegel was aware that such a retreat comes at a price, namely, the loss of textual content meant that purely instrumental music:
‘… has lost its power over the whole inner life, all the more so as the pleasure it can give relates to only one side of the art, namely bare interest in the purely musical element in the composition and its skillfulness, a side of music which is for connoisseurs only and scarcely appeals to the general human interest in art’.
As a consequence of this retreat from textual content there arose in relation to music a division between amateurs and experts: ‘An essential difference begins to arise between the dilettante and the expert’. Amateurs continue to prefer text-based ‘music as accompaniment’ and are tempted to endeavour ‘snatching a meaning’ out of what is to them an ‘apparently insubstantial procession of sounds’. Experts on the other hand have at ‘their fingers’ ends the inner musical relations between notes and instruments [and] love instrumental music in its artistic use of harmonies and melodious interactings and changing forms’.
They are ‘entirely satisfied by the music itself’, and although Hegel had concerns about the intrinsic sanger of musical vacuity and about a tendency of musical development itself to become capricious, there was for him no going back to any earlier text and ritual based musical culture, and he identified more with the experts than with amateurs despite his own admission that he is ‘little versed in this sphere’. Fine art music must develop as music alone, and in virtue of the most natural and obvious application of Hegel’s views to music in the classical style one speculates as to whether such views amount simply to a preference for purely instrumental music in the classical style. However, such a preference on the face of it may seemingly be at heart a matter of class identification with educated experts, musical or otherwise, Hegel’s views offer insights into post-classical style musical life? For Hegel himself contended that in the end the danger of vacuous, formal, and merely decorative virtuosity in both composition and execution could be fought against not within music alone but only by poetry. Art cannot remain ‘exclusively [in] the element of the inner life’ as purely instrumental music does, but must go on ‘to bring to our contemplation not only the inner life but also, and equally, the appearance and actuality of that life in its external reality’. In particular it must demonstrate how intellectually formed ideas are lived, how the ideas one has of oneself does or can give a particular shape to one’s form of social life. And in order to do this, art:
‘…must use the sensuous material of its disclosure as simply a means of communication and therefore must degrade it [the sensuous material] to being a [conventionalized] sign which has no significance by and in itself”.
Music which attends only to the sensuous sound-material in itself and for the sake of the inner life alone, and so it is poetry that must become the more pertinent form of art, the form that is more adequate to art’s calling.
As for music after the era of the classical style, Hegel’s turn away from music alone and towards poetry and verbal-ideational content as the most pertinent form of art in later modernity can be best appreciated as a recognition of a real problem that music in the classical style and in the post-classical style has to confront. There is a danger that comes with the liberation of music from all textual content in order to concentrate upon the musical development of instrumental sound alone. Such liberation sets up real possibilities of vacuous, merely decorative formalism and of a musical art for experts that has lost all contact with domestic or native forms of life, in relation to which merely popular music continues associated more closely with song, dance, and social usage. The dialectic of liberation and alienation, of self-government and substantiality, which has been evidently realised in the new music of the twentieth century and up to today, had already been recognized by Hegel in his response to instrumental music, in particular to Beethoven, as a central problem.
La! Neu? — Autoportrait Rembrandt mit Viktoria + Apache — YouTube
Can such issues of alienation, loss of textual and social or ritualistic liturgical substantial content, of the fragmenting of musical culture into high expert culture and low popular art (a fragmentation that I, as a reader of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake do not recognise, not in culture as a whole never mind music…so much to be said about that but I won’t go into it here) be addressed by music alone and through an Hegelian lens? Yes, although the ready answer might appear to be no for times have certainly changed considerably since the Industrial Revolution. Since the Renaissance, to speak rather loosely, in the Western world there has been a promotion and development of individuality whereby some people at the very least those at the centre of culture considered it important to have a free and independent personality and to determine the shape of their own lives from their own resources of personality, rather than inheriting in a passive manner a life from their forebears. And furthermore, it came to be considered important that the life thus freely formed should be rationally intelligible to others, as opposed to living in that which has Hegel described as a ‘mush of heart, friendship, and enthusiasm’.
Subjective particularity would instead discover objective fulfillment in a shared and self-consciously willed life of social freedom, and as a consequence of the modern conditions of industrial work, astonishing production of commodities and their consumption, the extensiveness of bureaucracy, the mass reproduction of culture, one may suppose the necessary time or interest is no longer ready to hand for such cultivation of self and society toward social freedom and accomplished individuality. In Hegel’s day the most valued and central form of music was absolute, purely instrumental music that moved from an initial statement to complication to some type of surprising yet necessitated resolution, itself being a kind of abstract allegory of the central highly prized path of development to which subjectivity is or was considered to be accessible. Coming of age however brings with it self-imposed inhibitions and the readiness to bear uncertainties and the music that was most valued from the time of the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century displayed albeit somewhat abstractly a development towards such a coming of age .
What works best? Music of less structured sound surfaces, or that of syntactic development? And yet the very possibility of evaluating alternative possibilities and the reflective turning into the past for comprehension of the relationships betwixt musical happenings as they actually took place leads towards a self-awareness and an individualization that the syntactical reaction to music is of more value than those responses in which the self melts into air. Are such reactions still open to us? And what of the availability of the project of individualization? Increasingly through the twentieth century the notion of progress that is intrinsic in the processes of history no longer appears plausible. Structuralism and post-structuralism dissolves the self into a set of relations. Postmodernism fragments and decentres the self into a thing without essence, without depth, almost a mere figment of the imagination. As a consequence in the realm of music there coexists a number of alternative styles. Pluralism rules the day, with many alternative styles of music at hand and none of which are central for significant music relative to a significantly shared cultural project of which there is none. Compositions are produced to be received as pieces of formal organization, organized sound, that may or may not be appreciated by diverse people, and not as abstract delineations of the valued development of subjectivity in itself. As Hegel foretold, a pleasure-seeking living for the present consumerism is now dominant.
Consider the primary alternative styles of music now in circulation within culture. The serialism or atonality of Arnold Schoenberg, (1874–1951), music without a centre. Rock music dominated by repetitive rhythms and motifs, by verbal text, simple verse and chorus structure, little syntactical development, though it can be text-free and compelling, listen to German band Neu! One wonders what Hegel would make of it. The ambient music of Brian Eno, (1948 — ), or more aptly named elevator music because listening to it can be as tedious as being stuck in an elevator, light music in the background perhaps while one works or dines in a restaurant. Aleatory music, the music of chance of John Cage, (1912–1992), music of unstructured sound, in which one wonders who to credit with the composition as it is performed, the composer or the musicians playing it, or chance herself. Cage urged us to open our ears to the being of sound as sound without concerning ourselves much about compositional development. Much like Frankenstein’s creature in fact. The repetitive minimalism Philip Glass, (1937 — ), a rather extreme reaction to serial music in which repetition is anathema. The epigonic new Romanticism of Alan Hovhaness, (1811–2000). And much more.
Hegel’s account of absolute music as significantly embodying the inner life through cadenced interjection, however, most usefully suggests there are further alternatives still to exploit, for purely instrumental music must have development, it cannot simply tarry within a continual consonance, there must be interjections or marked musical events, further accommodated within an overall cadential structure. The Hegelian account suggests a number of compositional techniques that draw upon the normative authority of the classical style of music but without merely replicating it. To give but three examples, the range of dissonant sonorities that are introduced can be expanded, as in Gustav Mahler, (1860–1911), thereby making available their introduction within a new work as a marked musical event, or folk melodic motifs picked up and subjected to thematic variation, as in Bela Bartok, (1881–1945), and in Olivier Messiaen’s, (1908–1992), use of modal motifs taken from birdcalls. New instruments with new sonorities can be experimented with and introduced, as in the exploitation of percussion in twentieth-century works, such as that of Neu! Hegel himself had noted that ‘freedom from the pedantry of meter and the barbarism of a uniform rhythm’ may assist in keeping the melody from sounding ‘humdrum, bare, and lacking in invention’. Dmitri Shostakovich, (1906–1975), significantly exploited the possibilities of introducing accents on offbeats and employing more complicated rhythmic figures while varying the time signature from measure to measure.
Every compositional possibility brings with it’s own kind of hazards of course, an increase in the pace of harmonic development, an increase in dissonance, borrowed melodic motifs, new instrumentation, rhythmical variation, all tend towards drawing attention to the particular and immediate surface of sound and away from an awareness of overall harmonic development. But then, this is the very meaning of having a marked musical event, an interjection. There is no reason to suppose that it is not possible to accommodate interjections within an overall cadential structure in compelling ways that continue to engage the inner life of subjectivity. And what we hear as musical achievement continues to be describable in the Hegelian terms of cadenced interjection. As Theodor Adorno, (1903–1969), noted: ‘Hegel’s thesis that art is consciousness of plight has been confirmed beyond anything he could have envisioned’, and it never ceases to be established in purely instrumental art music as intensely as anywhere.
Hegel concludes his discussion on music with this:
‘These are the most essential things that I have heard and felt in music and the general points which I have abstracted and assembled for consideration of our present subject’.
Euterpe most assuredly takes delight in Hegel’s bearing witness to what he described as ‘the elemental might of music’ that continues to exhibit itself in our own time.
‘To Music’
by Franz Adolf Friedrich von Schober (1796–1882)
Oh sacred art, how oft in hours blighted,
While into life’s untamed cycle hurled,
Hast thou my heart to warm love reignited
To transport me into a better world!
So often has a sigh from thy harp drifted,
A chord from thee, holy and full of bliss,
A glimpse of better times from heaven lifted.
Thou sacred art, my thanks to thee for this.
‘An die Musik’
Du holde Kunst, in wie viel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt.
Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen,
Ein süßer, heiliger Akkord von dir,
Den Himmel be
ßrer Zeiten mir erschlossen,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür.
Kathleen Ferrier sings “An die Musik” — YouTube
Coming up next:
Clio, muse of history.
Notes
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:
1. Lannigan’s Ball: an Irish ballad.
2. Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin; and shellshock; and The Shan Van Vocht (song).
3. gibbous: Of persons and animals: Hunch-backed; having a hump; and while HCE’s fall frequently takes the form of an escape which allows him to elude his pursuers by entering the afterlife, he may also make his way back again unobserved via the bottom of the social pyramid.
4. slip: to get out of or into a garment, etc., in an easy or hurried manner.
5. noose:a loop, formed with a running knot, which tightens as the string or rope is pulled, as in a snare, lasso, hangman’s halter, etc.; and nosebag, a canvas bag that is used to feed an animal (such as a horse).
6. posthumus: a posthumous child (obsolete); postumus (Latin), Last-born: Roman surname; and posthumus (Latin), after burial, (erroneous ancient etymology for postumus); and postumus (Latin), last, late-born, posthumous; Posthumus Leonatus, Imogen’s husband in Cymbeline.
7. skip: to hasten, hurry, move lightly and rapidly; to make off
8. Schlummer (German): slumber; and Schleim (German), mucous, slime; and Shiel Martin, one of the summits on Howth.
9. begin.
10. shaver: boy, youngster.
11. sailor suit: a suit similar to that of an ordinary seaman, worn mainly by small boys.
12 times: and Nine of Finn’s men, all named Garb, were killed by Diarmuid in the quicken tree by his throwing them down in his own appearance so that the others attacked them (Cross & Slover: Ancient Irish Tales).
13. garb: style, manner, fashion; dress, costume; and ‘A friend disguised in the garb of an enemy’.
14. split: Of excessive laughter.
15. madam: and multum in parvo (Latin), much in little.
16. impervious, figuratively. That one cannot get through or penetrate; in modern use chiefly of a person or his mind.
17. wing (slang): penny.
18. old boy: a former pupil of a (particular) boys’ school, especially an English public school.
19. Wellesley (Wellington): Old Wesley, Irish Rugby football club.
20. Wanderers, Irish Rugby football club.
21. spat: to start up sharply or actively; to engage in a dispute, and said.
22. witty: capable of or given to saying (or writing) brilliant or sparkling things, especially in an amusing way; smartly jocose or facetious.
23. wagtail:a familiar or contemptuous epithet or form of address applied to a man or young woman (obsolete); a small bird belonging to one of the species of the genus Motacilla, so called from the continual characteristic wagging motion of the tail; and wagtail (slang) whore.
24. bishop: one of the pieces in the game of chess, having its upper part carved into the shape of a mitre; and pawn to bishop’s fourth (opening chess move in Queen’s Gambit); and Diarmuid, hiding in the quicken tree of Dubros from Finn and Oisin playing chess below, throws berries at men on the board, prompting Oisin to move and win (Cross & Slover: Ancient Irish Tales); and James Joyce: A Portrait V: ‘Pawn to king’s fourth’.
25. move: move (verb).
26. mumble: to utter in subdued or indistinct tones, to mutter; and Mendelssohn.
27. wedding march: a march (Mendelssohn’s, if not otherwise specified) composed for performance at a wedding.
28. crank: to make a harsh, jarring, or grating sound.
29. honeymoon; and harmonium.
30. Eve and Adam; James Joyce, Dubliners: ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’.
31. Hill of Allen: Hill (676 feet), 8 miles North-East of Kildare, County Kildare; famous in legend as the Otherworld seat of Finn MacCool. Seefin, a mound on its summit, is known as Finn’s Chair. Alma on Almhain, Ir. ‘whitened’; and Cross & Slover: Ancient Irish Tales: ‘A stronghold was built by the druid then in Almu, and alamu (lime) was rubbed to its wall, until it was all white; and perhaps it was from that the name ‘Almu’ was applied to it’.
32. Finneces: poet to whom Finn went to learn poetry and for whom he cooked the salmon of wisdom (Cross & Slover: Ancient Irish Tales); and finesse; and vanities.
33. jitters: extreme nervousness, nervous incapacity, agitation.
34. as right as trivet: thoroughly or perfectly right (in reference to a trivet’s always standing firm on its three feet).
35. knot: to tie in a knot; to form a knot or knots in; to do up, fasten, or secure with a knot; and knute (Norwegian); and knot; and knotted (i.e. hanging).
36. now or never (phrase).
