This book will be of interest to critical theorists and musicologists wishing to build a more engaged practice without the pitfalls of a by now outdated ‘postmodern’ turn.
This book will be of interest to critical theorists and musicologists wishing to build a more engaged practice without the pitfalls of a by now outdated ‘postmodern’ turn.
On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come?
156
On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come?
156eBook
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Overview
This book will be of interest to critical theorists and musicologists wishing to build a more engaged practice without the pitfalls of a by now outdated ‘postmodern’ turn.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786606051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2018 |
| Series: | Values and Identities: Crossing Philosophical Borders |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 156 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Private Music: On the Harmony of the Faculties
Music is generally taken to be important: the questions as to what exactly is important about it, or in it, and whether what it is that is important is communicable, or of 'merely' private significance, remain difficult to resolve. The combination of felt and compelling significance, combined with nearabsolute indeterminacy, is expressed by Xenakis:
Music is not a language. Every musical piece is like a complex rock, formed by ridges and designs engraved within and without, that can be interpreted in a thousand different ways without a single one being the best or the most true. By virtue of this multiple exegesis, music inspires all sorts of fantastic imaginings, like a crystal catalyst.
The apparent resistance to interpretations that would establish fixed and public meanings for musical works has long been noted in both philosophical and musicological literatures. This resistance has variously been interpreted as a view that music appears opaque because, in fact, it has no meaning outside of itself, no purchase on anything internal or external in the listeners' experience. Alternatively, there is (or was) a view that the meaning of music is 'ineffable', that it points to something or other 'whereof we cannot speak'. In the course of attempts to establish some way of talking usefully about meaning – or meaningfulness – in music, certain commonalities in approaches can be identified. There are readings which hold that music is understood in a way that is grounded in 'feeling'. There is, secondly a view, not opposed to the first, that it is in the perception of form that the meaning and value of music is revealed, and that this form is intimately linked with its distinctive temporality and the associated means by which it articulates semantic content. Finally, there is a view, or rather a variety of views, that the full 'meaning' and thus the experiential value of music, can only be understood, both by the innocent listener and the theorist, in so far as it relates, either analogically, through structural similarity, or even prophetically, to wider social experience.
I propose in this chapter to concentrate only on the first two sets of views; theories that link music to the wider social world it inhabits will form the greater part of the discussion in later chapters.
For the moment, I wish to investigate, not the 'meaning(s)' of music so much as its 'meaningfulness'. I will argue that there is something revealed in and by the form of music, and by the ways in which we experience it, that directly suggests – or promises – access to meaning, even if determinate meaning itself remains beyond the reach of translation.
I will argue that Kant's model of aesthetic judgement in the Critique of Judgement, often criticised for its unsuitability as an aesthetics, may be marshalled in surprising ways to support a theory of musical 'meaningfulness without meaning'.
I would like to suggest the following line of argument:
(1) Kant's account of aesthetic experience can best be understood with reference to music.
(2) It may, in fact, be the case that only musical experience conforms to this account.
(3) Finally, and speculatively, rather than aesthetic judgement and experience being exemplary of reflective judgement 'in general' and as revelatory of an attunement to the world in general, the chain of inference may run the other way. Music – or musicality – may be foundational for a kind of understanding of the world that allows us the richest access to the value of experience.
The third part of the argument will be developed more fully in the next chapter, aligning the kind of musical cognition outlined below with the 'social situation' of music, and beginning to discuss the utopian function that forms – I argue – part of the DNA of music.
This chapter will proceed as follows: in the next section (1), I will look at various accounts from the philosophical and musicological canons of ways in which we might explain the felt meaningfulness of music. The next section (2) will begin with a short account of Kant's public – and not particularly rich – discussions of music. After a summary of Kant's Analytic of the Beautiful (sections 1–22 of the Critique of Judgement), I will develop an account of aesthetic experience, as distinct from judgement, that can be read from the third moment of the judgement of taste, purposiveness without purpose (sections 10–17). I suggest that this particular experiential mode articulates an orientation towards the world that is distinctly aesthetic, of which music, and the experience of music, is ideally exemplary. This account relies on an argument that expands the role of the imagination, as set out in the two version of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason and shows how this is modulated in the Critique of Judgement. In the final section (3), I investigate ways in which the orientation of taste towards the future, guided by the imagination, might play out with regard to popular music.
ON MUSIC AND MEANINGFULNESS
Music, so DeBellis argues, has 'representational content'. This does not propose that music represents specific, semantically available and fixed meanings. Rather, what is claimed is that the contents of a piece of music – notes, rhythms, larger forms and structures – constitute a way of representing, or, to put it another way, a set of representational properties. Or, minimally, suggest a structure that feels as if it ought to represent. It is entirely possible that these apparently representational properties could be almost completely fallible. The content we identify in music, informed by such properties, may be as unreliable as reading human-like emotions from the facial expression of pets.
The issue then arises as to whether professional competencies mean that understanding of the technical complexities of a piece of music render that experience qualitatively different, or whether such expertise simply allows the musical analyst to redescribe an experience available, in principle, to all. Or as Malcolm Budd puts it,
To perceive phrasing, cadences and harmonic progressions, for example, does not require the listener to conceptualise them in musical terms. A listener can experience these phenomena whether or not he hears them under the descriptions they are given in a correct analysis of the music.
On this view, the ability to hear music as or to hear the representational content requires no more of the listener than, by analogy, the ordinarily linguistically competent hearer needs to distinguish meaning in speech through modulations of tone, context and emphasis – or, indeed, whether knowing the names of the parts of speech or how to analyse a sentence is necessary to be a competent user of language. Bartel disputes this and argues that as the ability to hear differential pitch and rhythmic order is the product of a process of enculturation, so the more this ability is developed through training, the more the listener 'hears'.
This is an issue, because, clearly, the great mass of people who listen to, and take pleasure in, music are not trained in any way beyond the unavoidable, and obviously necessary, process of being taught to recognise the 'musical' and learning to understand the appropriate modes of appreciation. For the most part, and for most people, this process is as automatic and unproblematic as the acquisition of a first language and therefore music and musical experience feels entirely natural. The importance attached to such experience varies between subjects of course, and there are those – such as Freud – who appear incapable of taking any pleasure from it. However, for those who do 'take pleasure' from music, part of that pleasure must be attended by a feeling that the experience has some content and that this content is meaningful and that therefore the experience has value.
There have been attempts to isolate and identify the representational properties of music and map them onto fixed objects of reference; the idea that 'music is a universal language' is one that has wide popular currency, but generally deprecated across the literature. Instead, there is a general sense that music has an 'aboutness' about it, but 'what it is' that it is about remains obscure.
To say that the meaning of music is ineffable is to push the question further down the road without coming close to answering it. In what way 'ineffable'? A possible taxonomy of ineffability might contain the following species:
• Music has no meaning in the sense of representing something external to itself. It simply 'is' and the meaningfulness we find in it is because we are psychologically conditioned to believe that something that affects us so profoundly must have some connection with things that are 'really' profound. The idea that the mere arrangement of tones in harmonically and rhythmically pleasing ways might move simply and solely because it beautiful calls into question a lot of the basic assumptions we make about significance and signification.
• Music is ineffable, because, although it 'describes' things, it does so in a way that is untranslatable into language (or any other medium). Musical objects have 'meaning' because of their correspondence to other areas of experience that are similarly unnameable because of their opacity to conceptual determination: such areas might be the shape and experiential traces of feeling or the 'metaphysical'. These correspondences are mimetic in that there is some kind of isomorphic relationship between one and the other without there being any conceptual correspondence.
• Music is ineffable, not because it is meaningless, or because its content refers to thing that are themselves similarly resistant to conceptual determination, but because it represents too much – music suggests near-endless chains of association, of determinations that move with each tonal shift, combining and separating and recombining. The experience is personal and subjective in the sense that it is mental and uncommunicable, not because the subject cannot find words, but because the description is endless and yet does not exhaust the musical material.
One of the idees fixes of musicology is that it lags somewhat behind research in other area of investigation in artistic practice. It is commonplace in twentieth and twenty-first centuries literature to read that 'only now' is musicology coming to terms with deconstruction/feminism/postmodernism 'long after' literary theory or research in the visual arts. Nor is it confined to our era; Eduard Hanslick begins his investigation into the musically beautiful with a lament that 'the aesthetics of poetry and of the visual arts are far in advance of that of music and have for the most part abandoned the delusion that the aesthetics of any particular art may be derived through mere conformity with the general, metaphysical concept of beauty'. In order to at least begin to make some kind of progress towards a view of music that is not beholden to 'degenerate subjectivity ... [the] delight of dilettanti', musicology must rid itself of the tendency to mistake 'giving an account of the feelings which take possession of us' with an account of that which is 'objectively' beautiful in music.
Hanslick's translator justly compares his work with that of Hume: 'a devastating critique of unsupportable views' (xi). Hanslick identifies two myths about the relationship of music and feeling, 'both false'. The first is that the purpose of music is to arouse 'delicate feeling', and the second is that feelings constitute the content of music. This leads to, in his view, the disastrous conflation of the content of music with the feeling evoked in the listener, from whence it is a short step to believing that a 'language of feeling' can be predicated of music. Hanslick is firm on this; 'it is not by means of feeling that we become aware of beauty but by means of the imagination'. For Hanslick, it is important that we separate the experience of music, and the appreciation of its beauty, from any admixture of use value, whether morally instructive or socially useful:
We are sometimes not sure if a piece of music is supposed to be a police order, a teaching aid, or a medical prescription.
Hanslick dismisses the idea that, over and above the realm of the conceptual, there is a dimension of 'feeling' that is separable from and, to a degree, intelligible, without a necessary connection with its occasion. So 'love' is a feeling that is capable of being isolated from any or all of the people or objects that we love, and furthermore, music, by its form as 'indefinite speech', can capture and communicate this. Music may evoke such feelings in us by dint of association, but it is a mistake, in Hanslick's view, to imagine that music can, in any quasi-linguistic way, convey feeling: 'music can as little do one as the other'.
Music is powerful because it is beautiful; this beauty impels us to search for meaning – or meaningfulness – since we find ourselves compelled to believe that something that affects us so profoundly 'must' mean something beyond itself, point to something in – or beyond – the world. The beauty that we find in music is, however, qua Hanslick, 'a specifically musical form of beauty', one that consists 'simply and solely of tones and their artistic combination'. It is notable that, for Hanslick, 'melody holds sway over all other forms of musical beauty'. This privileging of melodic expression over harmony, rhythm and of instrumental music over vocal music is characteristic of what, in the musicological lexicon, is referred to as 'absolute music', a discourse that both valorises a particular, and historically determined type of music, and indexes all other musical activity to it.
Hanslick's 'formalism' is generally held to be Kantian; he himself notes in passing that Kant is among 'the eminent people, mostly philosophers' who have taken music to be 'contentless', though, we shall see, this lack of content in music was not, for Kant, necessarily to music's credit. For Hanslick, though, the moments of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement with regard to the beautiful underwrite his excision of music from all 'extra-musical' considerations: the kind of enquiry proper to music is 'aesthetical' and 'does not know and should not know anything about the personal circumstances and historical background of the composer ... it hears and believes only what the artwork itself has to say'.
For Hanslick, what is expressed are 'musical ideas'; it is, he claims, 'extraordinarily difficult' to talk about this kind of 'autonomous beauty' beyond the realms of technical description or of 'poetical fictions'. The realm of music is 'truly not of this world'. And yet, although it is not of this world, due to its untranslatability, it shares a 'gratifying reasonableness' with other manifestations of our being in the world, based upon certain 'fundamental laws of nature'.
This commonality is not, however, to be extended beyond the proper study of music (which is music):
It is only recently that people have begun to look at artworks in relation to the ideas and events of the time which produced them ... being a manifestation of the human mind, it must, of course, also stand in interrelation with the other activities of mind: this however is art-historical and not at all an aesthetical procedure.
Music, in Hanslick's formulation of the activities proper to its composition and reception, is like a subject in custody behind a two-way mirror: while we see and hear it from the perspective of a world that contains all sorts of other activities and discourses, and indeed, music itself, in its production and reception, is situated in all kinds of contexts, social, economic and historical; music can, when it looks in the mirror, see only itself.
Susanne Langer strikes an intermediate note concerning the ineffable: beginning with an examination of the supposed function(s) of music with regard to the expression and evocation of emotion, dismissed by Hanslick, as we saw previously, she supports the notion that music, rather than being a representation or transmission of emotional content, is 'some kind' of symbolic structure, but sui generis, and not a language. She suggests, drawing support from Köhler and gestalt psychology, that 'the inner processes, whether emotional or intellectual, show types of development which may be given names, usually applied to musical events, such as crescendo and diminuendo, accelerando and ritardando'. She develops a model of musical meaning that indexes musical events via 'a certain similarity of logical form' to feeling: not feeling as – or confined to – emotion, but to the way in which we experience inner life in time and, in a special and loose sense of the word, rhythmically.
The atomic components of music, moreover, have a 'remarkable tendency' to behave in ways that are quasi-linguistic in that, just as with words, they are able to 'modify each other's characters in combination'. Therefore, it would seem as if music might have 'representational powers' that would enable it to accurately describe inner events. 'Describe' though is, according to Langer, decisively the wrong word: because description implies translation and representation, whereas what music does is 'articulate forms: present rather than re-present. Music is 'an unconsummated symbol, a significant form without conventional significance'. Music shows rather than tells. It can however, and crucially, do a little bit more than that: because the semantic power of music is so intimate, it can draw us to places unknown, show us what it would be like to feel a new thought: what it cannot do is present that thought in conceptual, translatable language.
If, for Hanslick, the idea of meaning of music as representing something beyond itself is a dead end, and its ineffability is entirely constituted by the very refusal to signify, and for Langer, the meaningfulness of music is constituted by its isomorphic, but non-conceptual, relation to the 'shape' of feeling, for Vladimir Jankelevitch, the ineffable in music is more complicated. Music is a force of excessive but still undeterminable power, a force that captures and enslaves without making it all clear to its host the 'why' and 'how' of this possession. 'Music', he writes, 'means nothing and yet means everything'.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2018 Stan Erraught.
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Table of Contents
Introduction / 1 – A Reading of Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” / 2. Aesthetics into Politics
3. Aesthetic Theory / 4. Kant against Adorno, Adorno against Adorno / 5. (Coda) – Music, Finally.