Music and the Aesthetic Copernican Revolution of the Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACT

In the mid-eighteenth century music underwent a sudden and drastic revolution when composers “discovered” a new dimension to their art. This had immense repercussions on the philosophy of art, for the music created before and after this divide represents two different species of aesthetic experience, which in due course affected our understanding of the meaning and import of the other arts as well. Despite the immense aesthetic repercussions of this Copernican revolution in music, philosophers of art seem not to have taken much notice of it. This essay details the emergence of the relevant musical criteria during the eighteenth century and dwells on their long-term impacts on the philosophy of art.

KEYWORDS:

• aesthetics
• music
• origin of classical style
• music qua art
• modern conceptions of art

Notes

1. Pater, Renaissance, 129.

2. Kant, Critique of Judgement, §51 (3) [A211].

3. Both quotes are from Honolka, Der Musik gehorsame Tochter, 7.

4. Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 1–2.

5. Despite the appearance of supporting the case, the Lieder genre (which is much more closely tied to words than any operatic vocalism) confirms the contrary argument: for the overwhelming bulk of settings by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms et al. feature verses by minor poets which would have difficulty standing on their own feet as poetry—which accordingly the convention assigns to the composer, not the poet. The music rules.

6. Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 8.

7. Lang, Music in Western Civilisation, 11–12 and 18–19.

8. Kant, Anthropology, 114.

9. We note, by the way, that Kant lifted this straight from Rousseau’s pages (cf. note 17 below).

10. Hegel, Aesthetics, 960.

11. This is all the more strange in that Kant should have been familiar with the music of Haydn and Mozart (but seems not to have been), and that Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and Schopenhauer should have been fully aware of Beethoven, Hummel, Spohr, Clementi, Boccherini (a.o.) who were all representatives of the classical style and prominent in the public eye.

12. For example, the cantus firmus of Ockeghem’s Ecce ancilla Domini contained 662 notes and 993 rests; and the whole work is presented as a musical image of the cross by the divisibility of all its structural elements by 5. The relationship between words and music is planned in a similarly exacting manner, their coincidence displaying a consistent ratio of 2:3.

13. Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, 7. Tovey’s remark on this is also telling: “In the early sixteenth century Obrecht and other Flemish masters habitually produced masses which made it impossible for the officiating celebrant to find his place.” But he goes on to characterise this practice as of interest to a history of absolute music, viz. “To a sixteenth century master with a gift for extended composition, the Mass is the occasion for a musical art form representing the summit of his purely musical aspirations.” Tovey, Essays, 205 (italics added).

14. The output of e.g. Vivaldi, Couperin, Telemann, Scarlatti, Bach, Handel is stupendous, ranging from 500 to over 1000 compositions; Beethoven in a comparable life span produced 130 works. The point made in the text is that post-Bach composers worked under different presuppositions. Noble patronage, on account of the servile status of music in their society, rarely challenged composers to reach for the greatest heights, being mostly content with the aural adornment of their environment. Bourgeois patronage on the contrary arrived eventually at the point where the utmost exertion was expected from practitioners of the art. The best yardstick for this trend after 1750 is furnished by the genre of string quartet, which was considered the most prestigious in terms of “absolute music,” and here the figures speak eloquently. Thus Haydn produced 70-odd, Mozart 23, Beethoven 16, Mendelssohn fewer than 10, Brahms just three.

15. Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 5.

16. Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente, 444, 1798 (Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, 87).

17. Rousseau was himself the author of a celebrated opera Le Devin du Village, a Dictionnaire de Musique (1767), and pamphlets titled Lettres sur la musique française (1743–53). He also contributed the article on Music to Diderot’s Encyclopédie. That Kant was very familiar with Rousseau’s writings needs no stressing.

18. Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music, 46–50.

19. Telemann and Mattheson both exhorted their colleagues to draw the consequences: “If you play upon an instrument, be sure to bring your knowledge of singing with you,” wrote the former; and Mattheson concurred by stressing that all music, vocal as much as instrumental, must be written cantabile. Rolland, Reise, 81.

20. Cooke, Language of Music, 8.

21. However, this order is not fixed; and indeed one of the virtues of sonata form is its freedom from stereotype. Although academic orthodoxy must insist on a certain amount of formalism, we can see e.g. among Beethoven’s 32 sonatas, that scarcely half abide by the rules which music professors extracted from them!

22. Lang, Music in Western Civilisation, 586.

23. The so-called “Mannheim rocket.”

24. Langer, Feeling and Form, 17. At the cost of untoward iteration, let us stress that this paragraph does not describe the “stills” of affective states which we encounter in pre-classical music, but the complex, continuous flow of affective contrasts of sonata-form.

25. Ibid.

26. That by and large their fellow listeners would agree on the nature, depth and intensity of the experience is not surprising, since music necessarily reflects basic human concerns and feelings; but they frequently disagree as to the semantic specificity of the experience. But it should be said at least once that this is not a deficiency and reflects accurately the ineluctable multistrandedness of human experience.

27. Greek modes expressed only linear harmony, i.e. melodic intervals. Their vertical harmony involved only the octave which coincides naturally with the division among human voices (soprano, tenor, bass). The problem mentioned in the text arose as a consequence of Western vertical harmonisation. The last examples of the older style are accessible from Burgundian polyphony, whose cadences of 1–3–4–8 still sound “severe” and “unfinished” to our ears. The major/minor mode substitution of 1–3–5–8 held the field since then. Cf. Cooke, Language of Music, 40ff. for a full discussion of the development of vertical harmony from natural tonal tensions in Western music.

28. Rosen, Classical Style, 120.

29. Cf. ibid., 194–95.

30. The new string instruments were generally bigger and more robust than the gamba family. The homogeneity refers to the blending capability of both strings and reeds, which was notably impossible with the highly individualised frequencies of the older reeds. All this made the continuo instruments inaudible; therefore the horns (two or three) were employed to support the double bass with their bright colour.

31. Cooke, Language of Music, is one exposition of this thesis. Another, Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, comes right out on page 1 with the assertion “that works of music have discursive meanings.”

32. Pater, Renaissance, 128.

33. Ibid, 129.

34. Ibid.

35. Cicero, Orator, 2.

36. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 4, §6.

37. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, §§34, 36.

38. It is not possible to pursue this matter here, but the interested reader may wish to consult Kivy, Philosophies of Arts, chap. 7, “The Liberation of Music” for an account of how he took up Schopenhauer’s thesis of the “soporific effect” and turned it into a thesis of the “liberating effect” of music on the human psyche.

39. Rosen, Classical Style, 43.

40. Ibid., 47.

41. Ibid., 22.

42. Kearney, Wake of the Imagination, 155–77.

43. Malraux, Voices of Silence, chap. 1 “Museum without Walls.”

44. Wollheim, Art and its Objects, §45ff.

45. Meyer, Style and Music, 164.

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Notes on contributors

Jürgen Lawrenz

Jürgen Lawrenz gained his PhD on the philosophy of Leibniz at Sydney University, Australia, with his thesis on “Leibnizian Double-Ontology” initiating a new category in Leibniz scholarship. He has since published seven books on philosophy, including two book-length studies of Leibniz, all published by Cambridge Scholars.