Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music

So Jeong Park - - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 16 3: Qur'anic Recitation and The Aesthetics of Piety.

Paul Thom - - Philosophy Compass 6 9: Is a Kantian Musical Formalism Possible? Mulherin - - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 1: Elisa Galgut - - Philosophical Quarterly 61 Bicknell - - Mind Peter Kivy - - Oxford University Press. Philip Gossett - - Common Knowledge 17 3: Goehr - - British Journal of Aesthetics 50 3: Review of Peter Kivy, Antithetical Arts: An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature. Louis Mackey - - University Press of America. An Essay in Differences. Peter Kivy - - Cambridge University Press. Thomas Gould - The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Music, in any case, cannot be a source of philosophical insight and illumination—the music of Salieri least of all if there can be less than nothing.

The Real Story of Antonio Salierii, trans. Fromm International Publishing Corporation, , That issue gave rise to the subject of this book: The problem was, to put it another way, how to put words to music. The Western world, since time out of mind, had been, of course, thoroughly familiar with what might be thought of as the reverse problem: As an artistic practice, the putting of music to words seemed unproblematic, as the putting of words to the new instrumental music, that is to say, describing it, did not.

First the Music, and Then the Words, which suggests a complete reversal of the order, since time immemorial, the making of music with texts has followed in the West. There are, of course, well-known exceptions to this order of business, and I shall have occasion to mention some of them later on. The outline of the plot, in a nutshell, is this.

The librettist considers the task impossible, but the music is already completed and needs only a text. After a brief, brisk, and unpretentious overture, in more-or-less sonata form, the real business of the opera begins with a duet between the composer, Maestro, and the librettist, Poeta, bass baritone and baritone respectively, in the nature of a comic argument. A Drama in four days? The translation is frequently unidiomatic. No translator is credited. My friend, persuade yourself: At this point the poet acquiesces in the scheme, and gets on to more practical matters.

But none of these familiar antics needs detain us here. Casti, then, is operating under the assumption that it is not only absurd, but so absurd as to be laughable, to propose an operatic project in which the composer writes the music, for which the librettist then writes the words, rather than the other way around.

But why is it absurd? Why is it funny? To this the composer gives what first the music, and then the words 7 Casti obviously takes to be the laughably absurd reply that his music is suitable to any expressive character at all. I think it is absurd. The conclusion is, indeed, implied by what Hanslick says in that chapter, and he as good as says it outright on more than one occasion. So let us pursue this matter further. I will suppose, to keep things simple, that the composer has given his librettist an overture, and a string of wordless recitatives and arias. And again, to keep things simple, I will only consider the arias.

The arias will, of course, all be self-contained musical movements, in recognizable musical forms. Some might even be in the larger instrumental forms such as sonata form or rondo. Not only that, the texts must be expressively appropriate, and appropriate in every other way, to the music for which they 8 part i: Putting words to pre-existent music is not, as a matter of fact, unknown or so unusual. The more usual case is where a composer reuses a piece of preexistent music for a pre-existent text.

Hanslick makes very heavy weather of it in On Musical Beauty; and what he says is relevant here. As Hanslick puts his point: If the music in itself, however, were capable of representing devotion in its content, such a quid pro quo would be impossible. Our greatest masters of sacred music, Handel in particular, offer abundant examples in support of what we are saying here. He proceeded in this with great nonchalance. Winterfeld has shown that many of the most famous pieces in Messiah, including some of the ones most admired for their godly sentiments, are for the most part transcribed from the secular and mainly erotic duets which Handel composed in —12 for Princess Caroline of Hanover to madrigal texts of Marrio Ortensio.

A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Hackett, , But that is beside the point. And, after all, how could two texts be more radically different than an erotic Italian love poem and a verse from scripture announcing the birth of the Christ? They are like silhouettes whose originals we cannot recognize without someone giving us a hint as to their identity. What for Casti and Salieri was a capital joke, music appropriate to the expressive character of any text, was, for Hanslick, a basic premise of his formalist aesthetic credo.

Of course nothing of the kind follows from the examples Hanslick adduces. And the idea that any music is suitable to any expressive text is as ludicrous as Casti and Salieri thought it was. The reason that reusing pre-existent music for pre-existent texts is not a laughing matter should be fairly clear. No composer starts with a tabula rasa. I am not by any means suggesting that musical composition consists solely in the selection of pre-existent materials, merely that there may be more of that in the process than the lay person thinks.

Antithetical Arts: on the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music - Peter Kivy

That being the case, the gap between selecting pre-existent music that is appropriate to a given text, and composing music that is appropriate to a given text, is not as wide as one might think. It has taken historical musicology to detect the borrowings. To the musical ear it sounds as if the music were made for the place it occupies.

Thus, the joke of Prima la musica is not the reuse of pre-existent music for pre-existent texts. The joke is about the second kind of case in which the music precedes the words: Go you, make words to that music. Consider the following case. The thing is all the more remarkable because the pre-existent music is not vocal music at all but a pure instrumental piece: And the overture to the Fourth Orchestral Suite was chosen for a Christmas cantata, obviously, because the instrumental work has an exuberantly joyous character, well suited to the Festival of the Nativity.

Indeed, one cannot sing the melismas without making the syllables ha.. If I am right, that the words of this chorus were written especially for the pre-existing music, and it was not a case of matching preexistent music to pre-existent text, then two important points emerge from the example. The second point can be put, initially, in the form of a question. After all, opera scores are shelved in the music section of the library, not the drama section. As Maestro puts it to Poeta: The music should call the tune. In order to understand this apparent contradiction, indeed, perhaps more real than apparent, we must go back to the second half of the sixteenth century: Two events in the second half of the sixteenth century had a profound effect on what I have been calling the aesthetics of text setting.

First, hardly just an event in music history, was the so-called counterreformation, and the Council of Trent, during which many of its precepts and principles were formulated. It is part of musical folk lore that the ruling clergy, at the Council of Trent, seriously considered the abolishing of polyphony in the liturgy, because the complexity of the musical texture obscured the spiritual meaning of the words. As one of the proclamations of the Council put it: Clarendon Press, , 44— Norton, , Oliver Strunk New York: Norton, , p. Of course he meant it, just as a smoker really means that he wants to give up his habit all the while he continues to smoke.

He is addicted to tobacco, just as Monteverdi was addicted to musical composition. Their stated purpose was to musically represent dramatic speech, following as close as possible in the music, the pace, rhythm, accent, and emotive expression of the spoken text. The music alone is what people really want. The servant must be master as well: Or, as Mozart put it, again to his father 13 October Which of these precepts is dominant?

It is certainly the former that is most frequently enunciated. For it is always the unspoken assumptions that lie closest to the center. They are unspoken, of course, because there is no need to speak them: But sometimes even the most obvious must be said. The opera is a joke. The joke is that an opera is to be written backwards: Macmillan, , vol. Dent, , Mueller von Asow New York: Yet that precept exists alongside another, which the composer throws up to the librettist: For there is a musical practice, if not common, yet common enough to be familiar, of words being written for already composed music, even music originally composed for instruments.

And, ironically, Salieri himself seems to have done so, on at least one occasion, as well. There is no doubt whatever that this music posed a theoretical and, if I may say so, a philosophical problem for the people who thought about such things. University of Wisconsin Press, , But what concerns me principally in the present chapter is theory at a somewhat lower level: It is obvious from even a cursory perusal of the literature that critics and theoreticians of these times felt a deep need to talk about the newly emerging instrumental idiom.

What one cannot discuss one cannot understand, or explain to another. To put it more grandiosely, words give us power over things. Not only is this not a bizarre suggestion, it does, in fact, help us to understand why so much of the early Romantic interpretation took narrative form. But surely it is also that such an interpretive strategy already existed in the accepted musical practice of putting words to previously composed music. What is ready to hand one tends to pick up if one needs a tool. Peter le Huray and James Day Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , This is so both of instrumental and vocal music.

Any composer would be misguided if he started work before deciding on the character of his piece. Having determined the character of his piece, he must put himself into the emotional state that he wishes others to experience. Narrative interpretation is re-imagining, as it were, the emotive drama that the composer has imagined, and putting words to that drama. Prima la musica, e poi le parole. The view is attributed to him by Peter Lichtenthal — The style of this Allegro moderato is noble and full of pathos.

I believe that the best way to make my readers aware of its true quality is to set words to it. The feelings expressed by the composer are to be imagined as those of the beloved who is on the point of being deserted by her hero. The nobility of her rank, the warmth of her love, the greatness of her misfortune, all these persuaded me to make her the heroine of this piece. What they heard in absolute music was wordless drama. Eighteenth-Century Case Studies Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , — It was the concept of absolute music as a pure sonic structure with no secret or underlying meaning at all.

Perhaps one of the most startlingly advanced expressions of this proto-formalism is to be found in the late eighteenth-century writer, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, a name unfamiliar to philosophers, no doubt, but well known to the music historians. Here is how Wackenroder describes the experience of absolute music in one place: Whenever I go to a concert, I always enjoy the music two ways. Only one of them is the true one. This involves attentively following the progression of sounds, yielding completely to this stream of overwhelming sensations, and banishing and withdrawing from every disturbing thought and every alien sense-impression.

A certain effort is involved when one drinks in the sounds so avidly, and it cannot be sustained for any length of time. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form. Hanslick saw the alternatives being not between absolute music as dramatic narrative, and absolute music as pure formal structure, but being between absolute music as emotively expressive, and as pure formal structure, a false dichotomy, as will become apparent.

Narrative interpretation was, for Hanslick, anyway, no longer a live option. Capricorn Books, , There was a period in my own professional lifetime when formalism reigned supreme. It was not that narrative descriptions of absolute music were unheard of or uncommon. Formalism was an escape from the excesses of early Romantic criticism.

As one contemporary writer reports: That is my artistic and aesthetic world view. Southern Illinois University Press, , vol. They put words to the music, the words of musical drama. It was necessary then, for people to discover that what they were confronted with was not wordless drama to be augmented by an audience of self-appointed librettists, but a sonic structure to be grasped in a very different way, as I will argue in the closing chapters of this book.

Seeming intractability usually invites councils of despair. And disputes about how absolute music can correctly be described have tempted some to conclude that it cannot be described at all. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth struggled with this problem in an era when absolute music was a more or less new rather than familiar experience, at least as a major player in the art world. And vocal music, since the end of the sixteenth century, had been understood as a representational art: Rochester University Press, And it did not become a major philosophical issue until, at the end of the eighteenth century, pure instrumental music emerged as a major player in the game, at the hands of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

For it seemed to have no plausible object of representation: Storms and battles were pretty weak candidates. That Kant was the major source of formalism in philosophy of art I have no doubt. That Kant himself was a formalist, in the sense of someone who thinks form is the only art-relevant property, is totally false, as shall become apparent later on in this chapter. First, though, to the debate over musical form. For the musical reader, in any period of the modern era, musical form is taken to be the overall plan, the patterned sequence of events instantiated by a musical composition: It is the general outline of a musical composition, be it a whole composition or a movement in it.

Interestingly enough, Kant does not seem to think that the choice is of very great importance. Here is what he says: He would, I imagine, be quite astonished were he to see the commanding statue of Beethoven in Bonn, or the shrine to Mozart that the whole city of Salzburg has become. Clearly, he did not realize the importance of the philosophical issue he had raised.

James Creed Meredith Oxford: All quotations from the Critique of Judgment are from this edition unless otherwise indicated. But it does have a philosophical payoff. I very much doubt. Which is the authentic reading? And in the absence of other textual evidence, that might decide us in its favor.

But there are other considerations that support the reading of the third edition, and the Kant experts with whose work I am acquainted, who think about this textual problem, are generally in favor of it. But I will, later on, come back to consider whether we have really understood correctly just what Kant was saying here. I still in no way doubt [it]. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews Cambridge: On the one hand, Kant observes, it seems quite repugnant to common sense to think that we can perceive light waves or sound waves in the same way we perceive the waves of the ocean or ripples on a pond.

The present one, however, presents, at least as it has been understood in the past, only one plausible thesis, namely, that we do not consciously perceive the form of the vibrations of musical sound. But the experts seem agreed that the reading of the third edition is the correct one. For the moment but only for the moment I will let it stand, and get on with the argument. Music does have perceivable form, namely, Kant seems to say, in the sound vibrations of musical tone.

Alas, the case is not quite so simple. Here are two reasons why. First of all, in a series of lectures which Kant gave throughout his mature life, and published, in , under the title Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he states quite explicitly: But it lacks a second feature, namely, ideational content.

Martinus Nijhoff, , This is, however, just a rough account of what Kant is claiming. More exactly, what he turns out to be saying is that absolute music does not lack ideational content: You could get it from any number of other forms of expression, and that would leave artworks with no special role or function of their own. But our intuitions run in a different direction. We feel that artworks have ideational content in a very different way. We feel that their ideational content, unlike that of non-artistic means of expression, is somehow ineffable: It was a notion fairly ubiquitous in the Enlightenment that human speech has an underlying emotive sub-text universal to the species.

This tone indicates, more or less, a mode in which the speaker is affected, and in turn evokes it in the hearer also, in whom conversely it then excites the idea which in language is expressed with such a tone. Music, Kant thinks, follows the very same routine; and, furthermore, it goes beyond it. For the end product in the case of music is not the concept of an emotion, or emotions, but a chain of aesthetic ideas stimulated by the concept.

To understand this point, though, we must come to understand some of the basic machinery underlying the perception of beauty and what Kant calls the pure judgment of taste. How can judgments of the beautiful, which are based merely upon our feeling of pleasure, and therefore like the kinds of judgment we call purely subjective, also be judgments that seem to demand universal assent, as if they were objective judgments, based on commonly held concepts? Let us begin with an item of what might be called epistemological ontology.

According to Kant, what we might call factual and conceptual judgments are the result of an interaction between two mental faculties common to all: There is no particular need, for present purposes, to know how this all works. Furthermore, because this pleasure issues from the free play of cognitive faculties, which, on that account, must be faculties common to all human beings, since cognition is common, the pleasure itself is universally felt, when the pleasure truly has its source in the free play of these faculties, and not in some other bodily source, from which so many of our pleasures arise.

The free play of the understanding and imagination can be considered, then, as a kind of sense, common to us all, a sensus communis, as Kant calls it. When I see things, for example, their perception may give me various kinds of pleasures; but it is quite possible that none of these pleasures is the pleasure of beauty: The question then comes down to what kind of perception it is that thus engages the faculties of imagination and understanding.

How does perception put them in free play? That being the case, we have a right to assume that anyone who has achieved this state will feel the same pleasure we do, because they too would have been purged of anything that makes their perceptual experience different from ours. But what has form do with this? Simply that when perception is pared down to this bare, skeletal state, all that remains to be perceived is the pure form of the perceptual presentation.

Furthermore, that pure form of the perceptual presentation will be perceived by anyone who achieves this state; for he or she too will, as we have seen, have been purged of all personal interest in the object. The object of such delight is called beautiful. But if the sight of the object pleases disinterestedly, purely in virtue of the form of the perceptual presentation, then it matters not at all if I discover that the perception is a hallucination, or a dream, and the object of the perception non-existent.

For the pleasure is in the form, and the perceptual presentation will have that form regardless of whether it is a veridical presentation or some species of illusion. It is this disinterested perception that activates the free play of the cognitive faculties that in turn produces the disinterested pleasure of the beautiful: Is Music an Art? He achieves this unity by claiming that the ultimate payoff of content, that is, of the aesthetic ideas, is the same payoff as that of formal beauty, namely, the free play of the cognitive faculties. And it is just this payoff that the aesthetic ideas in music lack.

For whereas the aesthetic ideas in literature and the visual arts have their payoff in their interaction with the cognitive faculties, the aesthetic ideas in absolute music, for reasons I do not thoroughly understand, but at least have some glimmerings about, only have a bodily payoff: Here is how Kant puts his point. Fourth, music, for Kant, like the literary and visual arts, excites aesthetic ideas in the perceiver; but they do not engage the free play of the cognitive faculties.

Sixth, in placing musical form in the form of sound vibrations Kant was taking an absurd position, which reveals that he had absolutely no notion of where true musical form resides, namely, in the formal structure of musical compositions. But is Kant really maintaining the sixth, obviously absurd point?

I used to think so. Now, however, I am not so sure. Form and Composition Consider the following passage: The charm of colours, or of the agreeable tones of instruments, may be added: He is clearly not referring to the composition of musical tones themselves, as he was in the passage quoted previously, but to the composition which musical tones are used to make. This is clear from his juxtaposition of composition, in music, to design in painting.

Design is the large outline, the form, if you will, of a visual artwork. I will adduce one other for you, the only one I have so far turned up. But as we shall see, two passages that I have already quoted, and that others quote frequently, take on an entirely different complexion when read with the two passages in mind that I am now discussing. The second passage I want now to adduce will, I hope, not only support my claim that Kant did indeed have at least some notion of musical form as we understand it, but also perhaps will present a side of the great philosopher few of us suspected was there.

Such are all the charms that can gratify a dinner party. If the two passages just cited are to be read as I have done, then it appears that I must withdraw my earlier claim, in my previous writings, that Kant had no notion at all of musical form as we understand it, but thought of musical form only as the form of the sound vibrations of musical tones.

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It was a doubly doomed view: But even if it turns out that, as I have been arguing, Kant did recognize the larger aspects of musical form, there still remains the implausibility of his apparent view that we can perceive the form of the musical sound vibrations. Was he maintaining both? Vibrations Reconsidered At this point I want to return to two passages I have quoted and discussed before.

What I want to argue is that everyone I know of who has interpreted these passages, including myself, in my previous writings, has gotten them wrong; furthermore, when you get them right, they make perfect sense. I, still, in no way doubt. I now think this may be wrong. We read him as very much doubting it. Furthermore, philosophical considerations aside, it appears more likely that the third edition has the misprint. That the misprint crept into the third edition, unnoticed, seems altogether more plausible. Kant was no longer around to notice and correct it. The third edition must be echt.

Notice, however, how Kant expresses himself here, which is to say, in the passive voice. He does not say that pure colors and sounds are beautiful or that he thinks they are beautiful. What does it mean for a color or sound to be pure? It belongs merely to the form. In other words, we have pure sensations of color when the forms of the vibrations have their effect on us unperturbed by extraneous sensations; and we have impure sensations of color when the unperceived cause of the sensations, i. And the same is true of pure and impure sensations of sound. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans.

Guyer and Matthews, Critique of Judgment, Bernard, 60, Meredith, Critique of Judgment, Pluhar, But they are not, because they do not possess consciously perceived form. And, it should be added, the same would be true of paintings in color. Is this an implausible conclusion? For all Kant is saying, in effect, is that the beauty of absolute music lies in its perceivable formal structure, not in its individual constituent tones.

There is nothing absurd in the conclusion. It is wrong, I think, in denying that the individual tones of music can be beautiful; but being wrong is one thing, and being off the wall is another. Thus it seems to me that in interpreting Kant in this way we are saving him from three absurdities in his account of music. Kant, after all, seems not to have had a very high opinion of absolute music. If so, then in spite of the fact that Kant recognizes the larger compositional forms of music, they play, on his view, no part in the listening experience, as perceived forms, and hence do not redeem music from the realm of the agreeable.

Indeed the tenor of the passage is quite the opposite. It therefore appears not only mistaken to deny Kant had acquaintance with larger aspects of musical form; it is mistaken as well that he thought musical form resides in the vibrations of individual musical tones. We all should have known better.

But there it is. All well and good. And we have concluded as well that he meant by formal structure one of the things that we ordinarily mean by it: But was Kant a formalist in music? And if so, can we determine in any detail in what his musical formalism consisted? The relevant passage is as follows: We may also rank in the same class what in music are called free fantasias without a theme , and, indeed, all music that is not set to words. But, in any case, what he means is really irrelevant to present concerns.

And that, of course, is the relevant and vital claim. Arabesquelike ornaments], foliage for framework or on wall papers. For Kant, as we have seen, thought that music also, at least in a somewhat attenuated sense, had a content: As Kant put his point: That Kant was the father of modern formalism, in music, and, indeed in all of the arts, is beyond question.

For the aesthetic ideas are an ineffable content. Be that as it may, that Kant never quite bit the pure formalist bullet, when it came to absolute music, shows how deep and pervasive the ancient quarrel was and is. The bullet was, of course, bitten, famously, by Eduard Hanslick. And to that much discussed author I shall devote the next chapter with, I hope, something new to say. It is at any rate new to me. But for the philosophers of whom I speak, Of Musical Beauty, as I shall call it, has taken a special philosophical place in the history of their discipline.

It is generally denominated the inaugural text in the founding of musical formalism as a position in the philosophy of art. But what kind of work is Of Musical Beauty? Morris Weitz New York: The Liberal Arts Press, , vii. He is well known to all musicologists as a pioneer in the study of the musical Renaissance: Bernstein describes his accomplishment. Eine Studie zur Aesthetik der Tonkunst. The Boundaries of Music: A Study in Musical Aesthetics. Eine Studie zur Aesthetik der Tonkunst Leipzig: A Study in Musical Aesthetics, trans. Schirmer, , xii. I have no idea why the order of given names of the author is different in the English translation from what it is in the original German.

In the second, the feelings are designated as the content of music, that which musical art presents in its works. The two are similar in that both are false. For my previous attempts to get straight what Hanslack was saying, see: And since the arousal of emotions or the representation of them seem to be the only ways Hanslick envisioned for music to be expressive of the emotions, which is to say, to be describable in terms of the garden-variety emotions in an art-relevant way, he must be seen as entirely ruling out the relevance of emotive descriptions to our characterization of absolute music as an art.

There are, as a matter of fact, two places where Hanslick seems to deviate from this austere emotionless formalism. And I will get to them later on. But for now it is our task to understand how Hanslick defends the negative thesis; that is to say, how he undertakes to show that it is impossible for music, absolute music, that is, to either arouse or represent the garden-variety emotions. To represent, however, is to produce a clear and distinct content. How, then, can we designate something as what an art represents, when the very dubious and ambiguous elements of that art themselves are perpetually subject to debate?

It is as if one person were to say that the Mona Lisa represents a woman, another that it represents a tiger, a third that it represents a cowboy boot. Recall Hamlet, Polonius, and the cloud! And the best explanation, the obvious explanation for why this is the case, is that music is not in the emotive representation business at all. Furthermore, the same argument, if good, will show that music cannot be in the business of consistently arousing the garden-variety emotions either. Because if it were, then there would be general agreement about what emotive term describes what passage of music.

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It would be the term that correctly describes the emotion that that passage has aroused in you, and regularly arouses in most competent listeners. Hanslick does not explicitly state that the argument from disagreement applies as well to the arousal thesis. But it seems clear that he assumes that is the case. And we shall assume he so assumes. However, the argument from disagreement is a very bad argument, as I have already said. And it is very bad just because the initial premise of chaotic disagreement over what emotive description applies correctly to what musical passage is palpably false.

The feeling of hope cannot be separated from the representation of a future happy state which we compare with the present; melancholy compares past happiness with the present. I come to know that a friend of mine has suffered a misfortune and this causes me to become melancholy: But, again, nothing like this happens in my experience of absolute music because, as Hanslick is arguing, absolute music does not have the conceptual apparatus to represent the kinds of things that could cause me to be melancholic, as the novel does.

Thus the argument for the negative thesis that we are presently considering is good against the arousal theory. But it is good, eo ipso, against the representation theory too. And in my view, unlike the argument from disagreement, it is good. Having dealt with this extraordinary argument previously, we can give it short shrift now.

Hanslick understood there to be but two ways on offer for how absolute music could be expressive of the garden-variety emotions: His negative thesis was that since absolute music could neither arouse nor represent the garden-variety emotions, it could not be expressive of them, which is to say, could not be correctly described in emotive terms. That being the case, it could not be the primary function or any function at all of absolute music to be expressive of the garden-variety emotions, either as a stimulation to them or a simulation of them.

In his own day, as we shall soon see later on in this chapter, the opposition consisted in opposing, or at least amplifying his position so as to reenfranchise genuine emotive descriptions of the absolute music canon. In our day, the opposition has been twofold. It shall be so-called in this book, and alluded to on numerous occasions. It is just too totally wrong, these objectors insist. So the search is initiated for an interpretation of Hanslick that can save him from complete emotive skepticism.

But there is trouble from the start with this concessionist interpretation of Hanslick. For proposition 2 seems plainly inconsistent with the negative thesis, which denies to absolute music both representation and arousal of the garden-variety emotions. What can be going on here? And the answer that immediately comes to mind, which, in light of chapter IV, turns out to be correct, is: He writes in one place, just before the passages we have been examining: See, also, The Beautiful in Music, trans. For the German, see: A purely aesthetical effect addresses itself to a healthy nervous system and does not rely upon any degree of psychological abnormality.

If, for whatever personal, subjective reasons, I am in an emotionally overwrought state, or have some personal associations with a musical composition, then it might well move me to melancholy, or joy, or anger, depending on the circumstances, while leaving you completely unmoved to any of the garden-variety emotions. But my reaction, real though it may be, is aesthetically, artistically irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the musical composition qua artwork: But its launching pad, so to speak, is a denial of proposition 4 above.

And what is remarkable is that Hanslick himself held enhanced formalism, and the denial of proposition 4 in the palm of his hand and failed to recognize the possibilities for a more successful formalism than his own, for reasons I will get to in a moment. First, though, the missed opportunity. Here Hanslick writes of the negative thesis: The rose is fragrant, but we do not say that its content is the representation of fragrance.

The gardenvariety emotions are to music neither as the burp to the cider to appropriate O. They are phenomenological properties of the music that we hear in it as we see the redness of the apple and smell the fragrance of the rose. Hanslick had it right there, but failed to recognize the potential of the model or, therefore, avail himself of it. So it is reasonable to assume that when he wrote the book he had no such model in mind.

The fragrance analogy was an afterthought—a long afterthought, at that. Furthermore, it was an afterthought clearly inconsistent with the main text of On the Musically Beautiful. And were Hanslick to become a convert to the fragrance model, he would have had to completely revise his book to bring it into conformity. That, he was not inclined to do, as is made altogether clear by his republication of the main text, unaltered, in the eighth edition of , and all ten editions published during his lifetime with the exception of two passages to be discussed in the next section.

So the passage in the new Foreword, which seems to presage what I have been calling enhanced formalism, that is, a formalism that countenances perceived emotive properties of musical form and fabric, remained an interesting anomaly, a missed opportunity, perhaps, and nothing more. University of Nebraska Press, , It is not merely and absolutely through its own intrinsic beauty that music affects the listener, but rather at the same time as a sounding image of the great motions of the universe.

Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven Princeton: Princeton University Press, , For after so carefully developing the formalist argument, in the end Hanslick could not convince even himself to fully accept it. And so we get this last-minute recantation, completely inconsistent, plainly, with the argument that precedes it. Hanslick, then, seems to have remained steady to his skeptical, formalist text to the end, in spite of an intriguing but momentary lapse in the Foreword to the eighth edition, and the suppressed passages just discussed. However, his skeptical formalism did not go unanswered in his lifetime, as was pointed out at the beginning of this chapter.

And to that answer we now must turn. On the Limits [Grenzen] of Painting and Poetry. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellin Frothingham New York: What Lessing claimed in Laocoon, is that, to put it one way, poetry is well suited to the representation of actions and events, because poetry is a temporal art, an event art if you like, whereas sculpture and painting are not well suited to the representation of actions and events, because they are static, non-temporal arts and can only capture the pregnant moment.

Cambridge University Press, , Part I. University of California Press, For when he came to describe the shield of Achilles, Lessing points out, he chose to describe the process of its making, an action, a temporal event, to which poetry, a temporal art, is well suited, rather than to give it a static, tedious, item-by-item accounting.

Here again he has made use of the happy device of substituting progression for coexistence, and thus converted the tiresome description of an object into a graphic picture of an action.

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It is that when they do so they are working against the nature of their respective mediums: He begins, like Schopenhauer, with architecture. Matter in this case requires from the artist only that he should give it beautiful forms, wherein the architectural idea may clearly express itself.

And as matter matters less in sculpture than in architecture, matter matters still less in painting than in sculpture. The body, however, requires a soul. As he puts this point: We are right in calling music a poetic art. The point of contact between poetry and music lies in the excitement of moods [Stimmungen]. Contemporary advocates of absolute music as mood-arousing rather than emotion-arousing, as we shall see in Chapter 4, tout the former view as providing an explanation for how absolute music can arouse mood-states, where it cannot, they tend to agree, the garden-variety emotions.

Ambros, clearly, has the same intuition, although he fails to provide any clearly discernible account of how absolute music really does the job. He does, however, have a fairly clear idea of what the problem is, namely, how to do it without words. Language can arouse a mood, either in speech or writing, by presenting to the hearer or reader a sequence of ideas, say, the events and characters in a story, that eventually give rise to a mood in listener or reader: But absolute music cannot do that; it does not have the words. And another remarkable insight follows directly.

Rather, the listener goes on, then, to project the mood onto the music, as it were, as a perceived quality of the music. Eric Steinberg 2nd edn. Hackett, , 52n. Hanslick, as we have seen, had a glimmering of this fruitful possibility for the emotions, when he wrote the Foreword to the eighth edition of his book, in The State of Play: Random House, , I am not saying that Ambros was always steady to this text.

On the contrary, in the later parts of his book, the emotive and literary descriptions of the absolute music canon begin to exceed what even enhanced formalism would continence. Why it is the wrong mechanism we will have occasion to see in the next chapter. And that is the insight present-day enhanced formalism is fashioned to preserve. It is that attempt to combine what are antithetical arts, that this book is all about.

It is an extended argument against the attempt with a few digressions along the way. And with the historical background now in place, it is time to get on with it. And it is the purpose of the present chapter to explore that move in one of its contemporary manifestations. The idea that there is a very special connection between music and the affective life goes back, in philosophy, to Plato and before philosophy to Pythagoras and the Orphic mysteries.

It is important to remind ourselves that since the beginning, and until late in the eighteenth century, these claims about music had always been, as far as we can tell, claims about sung music: But with the emergence of pure, textless, instrumental music as a major art form, in the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, 80 part ii: Without a text, music lost its conceptual, representational, and narrative content.

And so it became an urgent priority to insist on its presence above all else. But in the absence of a text—that is, in the absence of conceptual, representational, and narrative content—pure instrumental music seems to lack all of those components that give the other arts their power over the affective life. It thus became, and remains a philosophical as well as music-theoretical problem to provide an explanation for how pure instrumental music, sans conceptual, representational, and narrative content can, nevertheless, arouse affective states in its audiences.

I have referred to its connection with our affective lives and its supposed capacity to arouse in us affective states. This has been done on purpose, and it is now time to make that purpose clear. It is precisely this latter strategy that Ambrose employed, as we have just seen. Formalists argue that it is nonsense to maintain that instrumental music arouses emotions. Music lacks the logical machinery to represent the kinds of objects that such emotional states require. Maybe the resolution to this dispute is to grant the formalist the concession that music does not arouse emotions properly so called, for the reasons he gives, but add that in many cases what music does arouse are moods—affective states that are objectless, global, diffuse, often ambiguous.

I think it is wrong, and for some of the same reasons I have given in the past for thinking that it is wrong to think music arouses the garden-variety emotions. Cornell University Press, , And with most of what Carroll says about moods with regard to arts other than pure instrumental music I am in total agreement, as I usually am with anything he has to say about the arts. It is only about moods in music that we disagree. I will now get on to that disagreement without further delay. Moods What are moods, as opposed to emotions?

The most telling characteristic of moods, in contrast with emotions, and perhaps the one from which most of the others follow, is that moods, unlike emotions, do not take intentional objects, which is to say, unlike emotions, they are not directed at anything. I do not propose to canvass the lot, as I think it is neither necessary nor useful to do so for present purposes. Emotions are selective and exclusive. Moods are incorporative and inclusive. So to fall back on emotive arousal to facilitate mood arousal is simply to give up the game.

And to that I now turn. Carroll offers two hypotheses for mood-arousal in music. The second, more elaborately worked out and steady to his previous text, is an attempt to do the business, as one would have been led to expect, without the discredited option of emotive arousal. Indeed, there may be ways in which even pure instrumental music can sometimes evoke emotional states. Some instrumental music is modeled on the sound of the human voice. And in virtue of its structural organization, pure instrumental music may surprise and possibly startle us, and, as well, engender certain varieties of suspense and frustration.

To the extent that we are willing to call these formally induced states emotions—emotions whose objects are the music—instrumental music can be said to elicit emotional responses and, subsequently, emotional spillover [in the form of moods]. To what does the lever connect? What does it push? But how does that get us to the sorts of cognitive biases that crucially comprise mood states? Where do they come from in the art that, by hypothesis, is barren of conceptual, representational, and narrative content?

We come equipped, in a manner of speaking, with innate motion detectors keyed to sound and vibration; it is an alerting system—sometimes an early-warning system, as when a herd of herbivores starts moving at the sound of a distant stampede. Many of the niceties of the account I have had to omit. There is no purpose, obviously, in trying to elaborate the possible musical machinery for curing warts, when there is absolutely no evidence that music has such curative powers. I have argued in the past that all the theories with which I am acquainted, as regards how absolute music can arouse the garden-variety emotions fail to satisfy at least one of the above conditions.

I have endorsed a similar view with regard to musical emotions, on numerous occasions, and what arguments I have advanced for it over mood and music 89 the years apply, in many, if not all respects to moods as well. But that is adequately explained by the hypothesis that Western music has been, since time immemorial, expressive of moods. We do not need the hypothesis that it arouses them. Moods are in the music, not the man. I am sure Carroll is also correct in averring that people often claim to select music according to their mood. But when they select music that is in the same mood as they are, I do not think it has anything to do with arousing or sustaining moods.

Somber music for funerals is a case in point. However, I scarcely think it is intended to make mourners somber; they already are. Clearly the stars and planets must affect our lives and can predict our futures. Why else would so many of us say that it can? Princeton University Press, ; reissued with extensive additions as, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions Philadelphia: Temple University Press, No doubt many people think that pure instrumental music can change their moods in virtue of its moods, as they also think that astrology works—evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

And, interestingly enough, I think the musical and astrological beliefs have been with us just as long, as well as having the same or similar sources: These convictions about the effects of music and the heavenly bodies on our lives are of ancient origin, and deeply embedded in our psyches. I take none of them as evidence of anything but human credulity.

But a word of caution here. However, I am certainly not arguing that there is no evidence great music can lift me, for example, from a depressed mood. It can and frequently does, by taking my mind off my troubles and immersing me in a great work of the musical art. The best evidence, really, it might be argued, for the belief that absolute music engenders moods in listeners would be a satisfactory account of how it can.

For if it can, then it will. And that being the case, we can forget about the lack of direct evidence that it does: Carroll suggests, it will be recalled, two ways that absolute music might arouse emotions. The hearing of an angry voice will not arouse a garden-variety emotion in me unless I know who is angry, what she is angry about, who she is angry with, and so forth.

Peter Kivy, Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music - PhilPapers

But surely this is an intolerable conclusion. That all of these passages, if they also engender suspense, elicit the same mood in listeners whatever it would be , and ditto for frustration, seems to me to be very hard to credit. Indeed, I do not think Carroll has much faith in this strategy anyway. For his argument is brief and quite perfunctory. In fact I have taken more time refuting it than he has spent propounding it. It is the second strategy that really bears the weight.

And to that strategy I now turn. I actually think that, in general terms, Carroll is right about this, and will explain in the concluding section of this chapter what kinds of feelings and moods I have in mind. But with regard to the kinds of feelings and moods that Carroll has in mind I am in disagreement. And the nature of that disagreement now needs to be spelled out. The listener perceives the apparent motion, feels the urge to move the way the music moves, and this, so to speak, makes her feel the way the music is described mood and music 93 as moving. Now there are many questions one might want to raise with regard to the psychological conjectures Carroll makes prior to this point in the argument; conjectures that, essentially, prepare us for it.

But I shall leave those conjectures alone, mainly because I am at a loss to know quite how, exactly, they are to be evaluated. To begin with, Carroll, of course, is absolutely right that pure instrumental music can, and no doubt frequently does, give rise to the kinds of mental images he is talking about in musical listeners, and in the way he suggests: But the canonical way that Carroll has explicitly stated he has in mind, my way, as a matter of fact, is the way of formalist listening.

To quote, on this point, a well-known formalist of impeccable credentials, whom I quoted earlier on: I do not claim that formalist listening is the only canonical listening, nor do I claim that if there are other canonical ways of listening to absolute music, it is the best of them. And so even though Carroll may be right about how absolute music can engender moods in listeners, he has not managed to negotiate a truce between formalists and arousalists. And, to conclude, the same holds for condition iv.

They may be relevant to some other kind of canonical listening; but that is for others to spell out, for whom that other kind of listening is canonical. I cannot credit this kind of listening, if indeed there is anyone who does or can do it, as canonical listening, at least in the formalist mode. There is neither motion in it, nor even the illusion of motion. I have argued at length about the compatibility of formalism both with the view that absolute music can be described in emotive terms and with the view that absolute music arouses emotion.

But a word, perhaps, is necessary. See The Corded Shell, 57—9. But here is not the place to go into it. Cornell University Press, I have nothing more to say on the subject of enhanced formalism here. Rather, I would like to conclude merely with some brief remarks suggesting why, the above criticism to the contrary notwithstanding, I can still agree with Carroll on two points: All depends, however, on placing the moods where they really are, and understanding what is aroused for what it really is.

Absolute music is sometimes expressive of them. And on that positive note I will close this chapter. For it is time now to dive into the main argument of the book: This page intentionally left blank 5 Persona Non Grata Introduction Literary interpreters of the absolute music canon tend to fall into two distinct groups. The musical persona performs, really, two functions for the narrativist: I shall critically examine both of its functions in what follows.

I turn to that now. An accomplished composer, part ii: Usually what happens is of an empathetic or mirroring nature. When we identify with music that we are perceiving—or perhaps better, with the person we imagine owns the emotions or emotional gestures we hear in the music—we share in and adopt those emotions as our own, for the course of the audition. And so we end up feeling as, in imagination, the music does. It displays in a small, concentrated conceptual space, almost the whole array of problems such theories must encounter.