Music and the Ineffable: The Case for Profundity in Music

ABSTRACT

In this article we confront the ineffability of music to seek out a tenable conception of profound depths being plumbed in many such works. We take our initial bearings from the writings of the late Peter Kivy, who was a musically trained thinker and tackled the subject no less than four times. Our main interest lies in his outright dismissal of the idea. However, the scaffolding of his arguments reveals that he privileges the discursive metier without any evidence in his support. Hence the bulk of the article is devoted to an analysis of the criteria relevant to this form of experience and to the construction of a more tenable perspective. It will be shown that the issue of profundity in music cannot be segregated from the implications of our reactions and responses to literature and, by extension, to the arts as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• aesthetic criteria
• music
• intuition
• ineffability
• the sublime
• the tacit
• Peter Kivy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, sec. 7; and Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 74.

^2. Plato, Republic XVI.

^3. Aristotle, Poetics, chap. 14, 1452a–1453b15, in Basic Works.

^4. Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 9.

^5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Leopold Mozart, October 13, 1781. Moreover this “disrespect” to a poetical source is frequently observable throughout Western compositional history. We see it implemented in Bach’s so-called “parodial” practice, comprising the re-use of sacred music for cantatas with a worldly text and vice versa. This was a convention going right back to the Burgundian era, that is, to the composition of holy masses with themes drawn from popular folk tunes such as “L’homme armé.” In a word: The music rules!

^6. Aristotle, Politics, 1340a5–40, in Basic Works.

^7. The character traits of which Aristotle speaks are evidently moulded by nature and nurture, instinct and education. They are in very large measure implanted in us by the noises in which life experiences are embedded. Accordingly, a correlation between noises with import and the emotions generated by them is permanently memorised (which is indeed a survival necessity, apart from the pleasure or repugnance they might evoke). The impulse for reproducing such sounds by singing or blowing into a tube, banging a surface or plucking a string is very probably a spontaneous discovery that all humans make at some time in their life. From here, however, it is only one step to the Aristotelian mimesis, as those sounds would have a purpose tied to the conveyance of some kind of message: many of them for the sake of creating an alert, others for simply having fun.

^8. However, these considerations must be matched to others to which we moderns can hardly relate any more, namely that “we are dealing with a period of history which did not know [vertical] harmony or polyphony. The listeners of antiquity followed a non-polyphonic musical melody with an intensity unknown to us… they were capable of enjoying the slight and delicate inflections of a melodic line; their ears were keen enough to apprehend subtleties of intonation and colour which we, with our harmonically and polyphonically trained ears, cannot perceive.” Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 10.

^9. If that present “state” of the subject were to be waiting on a dance floor with an arm around a partner of the opposite sex, the music would then be a signal for them to dance in accordance with the rhythm of the music.

^10. A great deal of Jacobean drama fits that mould, but also novels such as Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, some of Kleist’s novellas and above all the fiction of Dostoyevsky.

^11. In 1853 Karl Rosenkranz broke the deadlock with his Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Aesthetic of Ugliness); a twentieth-century counterpart is Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1930) as well as Adorno’s chap. 3 of Aesthetic Theory (1853).

^12. Cf. Hermann Broch, “Kunst und Kitsch” and “Geist und Zeitgeist,” in Schriften zur Literatur 2 Theorie, 118–200; but also the elegant coffee-table book by Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness.

^13. Pieces in which the parameters are serialised, aleatoric or left to a computer program fall under a category of which Stephen Davies writes in Musical Meaning and Expression: “Where the composer relinquishes control of the progress of the work’s content… there is no reason to expect the result to sound musically interesting, no reason to expect it to ‘say’ something worth understanding” (361). One is tempted to say: it did not need being said!

^14. Kivy, Music Alone, 202ff; Philosophies of Art, 140ff.; and Music, Language and Cognition: 154ff. Hereafter page references to Music Alone are cited in the text.

^15. On the specific issue of tuning, “well-tempered” refers to the tuning of the instrument (e.g., a harpsichord) in such a way that the cumbersome re-tuning along the path of all 24 clefs is unnecessary, since a normal human ear cannot discern the minute departures involved in perfect tuning. In other words: the instrument is actually being “mistuned” according to perfectionist criteria; but without discomfort to either the player or an audience (the exception being those rare people who are imbued with perfect pitch).

^16. Goethe to C. F. Zelter (Mendelssohn’s teacher), 21 June 1827: “Als wenn die ewige Harmonie sich mit sich selbst unterhielte, wie sich’s etwa in Gottes Busen kurz vor der Weltschöpfung möchte zugetragen haben.”

^17. The prestige of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier induced a surprisingly large number of twenthieth-century composers to publish their own sets of 24 Preludes and Fugues. But even the ambitious Shostakovich could not (in the estimation of the critical confraternity) aspire to the same heights as Bach with his Op. 87, although it is more frequently performed and recorded than the sets of other composers (e.g., Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Nikolai Kapushkin, Pavel Novak, Trygve Madsen et al., all hitching a ride on Bach’s prestige, one of them, Kapushkin, even trying his luck and skill with the provision of such an opus for the domain of jazz).

^18. Kivy, Philosophies of Art, 141.

^19. Ibid.,142. Take note that Kivy singles out literature.

^20. Kivy, Music, Language and Cognition, 162–66.

^21. Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars, bk. VI.

^22. Cf. Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, chap. 4.

^23. Putting it in this blunt way is meant to emphasise that profundity is an outcome of private experience, known only to the person who is affected this way. If it were a fact, it would be ascertainable objectively and therefore remove all doubt on its actuality.

^24. Pursuant to the previous note, it is nonetheless beyond dispute that other individuals may be similarly affected. Therefore the claim that it is a fact in the human world serves as the basis of a consensual acceptance that a work of art conveys an import of profundity.

^25. It would be going too far to bring a discussion of the neurophysiological traffic into this essay: the gist of the point in the text is simply that percepts enjoy a natural precedence over concepts in the order of distribution into their relevant cortices. For example, it is far more important to be able to instantly identify a gunshot than a greeting. It stands to reason nonetheless that some verbal noises require no deeper identification than a gunshot because they signal danger and are therefore held in memory as verbal percepts (e.g., the case of someone crying “fire” in a crowded theatre—which needs no analysis to produce an instantaneous reaction).

^26. For an elaborate description of the “inner workings” of the conceptual faculty, see Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 645ff.

^27. Cognition in cooperation with the conceptual faculties may of course serve for the mediation of the many technical aspects of music, but evidently cannot spring into operation until some time after the aesthetic faculties have done their spadework. Inasmuch as it represents the intellectual dimension of music appreciation, it tends to assist primarily those aficionados who are either deeply interested or professionally engaged.

^28. Correspondence with Freud, quoted in Civilisation and its Discontents, §2.

^29. On this issue we owe a fundamental insight to Kant. How do we arrive at a judgment of the attributes of a work, such as its beauty? Wrong question! According to Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic: “The Kantian subject… discovers in it a unity and harmony which are in fact the effect of the free play of its own faculties [and] misperceives as a quality of the object what is in fact a pleasurable coordination of its own powers” (87).

^30. Levinson, “Hope in the Hebrides,” in Music, Art and Metaphysics, 336ff.

^31. Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 351.

^32. E.g. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key; and Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

^33. It goes without saying that none of the above covers the human spectrum entire. Modern musical sensibility, just as the tragic sensibility of the ancient Greeks, is a culture-dependent phenomenon. Spectators or auditors from a culture to whom these sensibilities are foreign will not make the same connections unless they are tutored. Irrespective of this, they are still likely to undergo some form of empathic receptivity.

^34. Whereas, to cite a counter-example, the music of Grieg touches no deeper chords than the bourgeois yearning for homely cheer and a little self-indulgent sadness.

^35. Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, points out that habits and all sorts of repetitive performances are apt to seep into the unconscious layer as a time and effort saving expedient, except when we are at rest and able to afford the luxury of concentrating on reading, writing, memorising, attentive listening etc. (143).

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Jürgen Lawrenz

Jürgen Lawrenz gained his PhD on the philosophy of Leibniz at Sydney University, with his thesis on “Leibnizian Double-Ontology” initiating a new category in Leibniz scholarship. He has since published four books on philosophy (Art and the Platonic Matrix; Life & Mind—A Philosophical Quest; Leibniz—The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature; Leibniz: Prophet of New Era Science), as well as a three-volume survey entitled The Metamorphoses of Philosophy), all published by Cambridge Scholars.