28/11/2023

A RT HUR S CH O P E N H AU E R ,
F R IE D R I C H N IE T ZS C H E &
RO G E R S C RUTO N

Aesthetics

A RT H U R
S C H O P E N H AU E R
(1788-1860)

A RT H U R
S C H O P E N H AU E R
(1788-1860)
Richard Wagner :
“Schopenhauer recognized the true nature of
music" and was the first to define "the
position of music among the fine arts with
philosophic clearness,"
Gustav Mahler :
found Schopenhauer to have written one of
"the profoundest“
Loved the quotation:
"How often have the inspirations of genius
been brought to naught by the crack of a
whip!"

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Usual romantic-modernist musical debates in the 19th

Century:
• Does musical meaning reside in music's form, in its representational depth or surface content, or in its expressive
effect?
• How does purely instrumental music differ from opera?
• How does absolute music differ from program music?
• Why is the language of music able to speak purely through feeling, symbol, and gesture in ways other languages
cannot?
• How is music related to other arts?
• How in song and opera is melody related to text?
• In how concise and non-ornamental a form can musical meaning be encapsulated?
• How does music achieve abolute autonomy?
• How can "celestial music" be prophetic and articulate a politics for the future?

A RT H U R S C H O P E N H AU E R ( 1 7 8 8 - 1 8 6 0 )
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung):
Vol. I : 1818/1819
Vol. 2 : 1844
Parerga and Paralipomena (2 vols., 1851)

Two presuppositions:
1. Music is the embodiment of the Will
2. Music and nature share certain parallel features
• To prove this he sees parallels with the laws of acoustics referring to the Pythagorean principles of
sound vibrations and laws of "harmonics"
• Uses the music theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) as the basis for his understanding and
explanation of musical syntax
• He explores the relationship between formalism and referentialism (music can and does refer to
meanings outside itself)

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Schopenhauer's world involves two levels of existence:

1. a perceived world of representation = nature
2. a deeper world of the Will

The subject experiences its body :

• In much the same way as it experiences phenomena
• But also in a deeper way: we experience our inner selves as Will.
This Will exists independently of the perceiving mind and has nothing to do with our reason.

Schopenhauer's Will

= a world of struggle and discord, an

incessant flux driven by a "blindly
urging force" (WWi? 1,117) which
underlies the world of phenomena
= an instinctive force of desiring,
yearning and "endless striving"
(WWR1,164).

The deeper level of the world as Will can be experienced

through aesthetic contemplation
 The aesthetic object is reflected upon as an ideal object
(remember Plato!!)
 In order to effect such a view of an object, the subject must
become purposeless, disinterested, released from willful wants,
cravings, and longings
 When one is freed "from the service of the will" and is thereby "will-less, painless, timeless
subject of knowledge" [WWR 1, 178-179)
=> in a state of "aesthetic pleasure“, one forgets oneself so that the perceived, pure aesthetic object
alone is left in the consciousness of the subject = objectification of the Will

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Each fine art exemplifies a specific stage

in the objectification of the Will

- Lowest stage : architecture :

Embodies Ideas of "gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities
of stone, those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of the will, the fundamental
bass-notes of nature" (PVW7? 1, 214).
- Higher grades of art capture the inner and deeper meanings of human life.
Moving through landscape painting, sculpture, historical painting, poetry and
tragedy

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Music "stands quite apart" from

the other arts

 It does not represent any singular grade of the Will's objectification as

Platonic Ideas, but directly "refers to the innermost being of the
world and of our own self" (PVWR 1, 256).
 Music bypasses the Ideas and is "independent of the phenomenal
world."
 It is not "like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of
the Will itself" {WWR 1, 257).

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Music as a universal language

 Music is being at one with the universe
 Music is not a universal language just because its meaning is available to all regardless of cultural
difference, but because it is the only language which mirrors the Will without mediation.
"We could just as well call the world embodied music," he concludes, "as embodied Will."

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Music as a universal language

As a universal language, music finds its profound

meaning:
It captures the entire endeavor of humankind –
all "the deepest secrets of human willing and feeling."

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Music is
the product of genius
Our constant "empty longing" for new desires
results in languor and boredom.

Composing music is far removed from

all conscious intention or reflection.
It is the product of
inspiration and imagination.
The composer "expresses the profoundest
wisdom in a language that his reasoning
faculty does not understand."

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Universal music is purely instrumental

True aesthetic contemplation is attained by relatively few persons.
 "[I]f music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events [of
the phenomenal world]," he writes, it is endeavoring to speak a language not its own. Only
composers like Rossini, who can keep "free from this mistake," allow music to speak "its own
language ... distinctly and purely.“

=> The most genuinely universal music is purely instrumental.

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Schopenhauer on vocal music

Music gives opera its soul.

True opera, therefore, is essentially a genre of music
and must be composed according to the principles
of purely instrumental music.

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Consonance and dissonance

- Harmonic dissonance in music strikes discord in

our consciousness because of its numerical
relations to large numbered vibrations as
calibrated in acoustics.
Dissonance is resisted by our will.
- Consonance, "the natural image”, satisfies the
Will.

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Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Traité de l’Harmonie (1722)

 the bass note is understood in terms of the root and music is conceived as a progression of
"vertical" states that imply a "functional harmony."
"I ... regard melody as the core of music to which harmony is related as the sauce to roast meat"
[PP 2, 431)

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Parallels between grades of the objectification of the Will in

nature and the syntax of music :
- The lowest bass tones of musical harmony correspond to "inorganic nature, the mass of the planet."
- The tenor and alto (middle voices or instruments) correspond to the vegetable and animal ("brute")
kingdoms, respectively
- The soprano (the highest tones providing the melody) represents the knowing subject.

=> The graded texture of music from the lowest voices to the highest correspond to
"the whole gradation of the Ideas in which the will objectifies itself... The definite intervals of the scale are
parallel to the definite grades of the will's objectification, the definite species in nature" (WWR 1, 258 and
WWR 2, 447).

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Formalism and referentialism

Art:
 Separates the "form from the matter"
 Leads us away from "the individual to the mere form” to the universal Idea
"It is, therefore, essential to the work of art to give the form alone without matter" [PP 2, 422).
In so doing, music's universality "is like geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal
forms of all possible objects of experience" (WWR 1, 262).

 Emotion in music is experienced in its pure or "mere form without the substance" of actual
"joy, sorrow, love, hatred, terror, hope" (WM? 2, 450).

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FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE
(1844-1900)

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Friedrich Nietzsche
and Richard Wagner

Meets Wagner in the late 1860s when he was a young

professor at the University of Basel
Found in Wagner (31 years Nietzsche's senior) a
fatherly, charismatic figure
For Wagner, Nietzsche was a formidable intellectual
who could lend credibility to his enterprise for the
rejuvenation of German culture
 Wagner was at that time composing his
monumental tetralogy Der Ring des Niebelungen

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The Birth of Tragedy out of the

Spirit of Music (1872)

Nietsche discusses the aesthetic, religious, social, and political

role of tragedy in ancient Athens and hoped to produce
something of a similar form in the Germany of his day

The treatise begins with a dedication to Wagner:

“My conviction that art is the highest task and the true
metaphysical activity of this life is based on an understanding
which I share with the man and fighter {Wagner} whose
sublime lead I follow and to whom I now wish to dedicate
this work”.

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The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872)

Thoughts on music :
1. A philosophy of music with particular reference to the relation between music and words
2. Wagner’s own ‘musical tragedy’ (as Nietzsche calls it from §21 onwards)
3. Opera
(The rest are comments in §6 on the melodic power of the anthology of German folk-songs, Des
Knaben Wunderhorn, and a couple of complimentary sentences in §19 on Palestrina, Bach and
Beethoven)

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At the heart of Nietzsche's analysis

are two aesthetic forces or impulses:

 the Dionysian and the Apollonian

Dionysus
is the god associated with wine, fertility, ritual madness,
and excess

Apollo
is the god associated, among other things, with light,
rationality, and order

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The Dionysian and the Apollonian

The Dionysian
is paradigmatically the art of music and dance

The Apollonian
is paradigmatically the art of sculpture and
epic poetry

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The Dionysian and the Apollonian

They are associated with different social belief systems and practices:
The Dionysian
involves cultic practices centered around the worship of Dionysus, involving collective intoxication
and frenzy, verging into violence (BT, 1).
The Apollonian
involves the “magic mountain” of the Olympian gods (BT, 3).
These radiant beings present us with a beautiful glorification of life.
They justify the life of humans by living it themselves,
and offer a sort of “veil” to protect us from life's horrors (BT, 3).

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The Dionysian and the Apollonian

Greek tragedy has its roots in both :
 Tragedies were an outgrowth of more basic kinds of Dionysian ritual — the dithyrambic
hymns, for instance, sung in the praise of Dionysus (BT, 5)
 Tragedy also takes a page from the Apollonian in giving a narrative order to what transpires
onstage

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Music
Art conveys the truth, but refracts this with aesthetic illusion
that makes this truth bearable.
For example:
Opera holds to an ideal of an attainable paradise, symbolized
by its representation of “the artistic and good man” who
“sings and recites verses under the influence of passion”. With
opera we dream ourselves back into an imaginary time “when
passion was enough to generate songs and poems; as if
emotion had ever been able to create anything artistic. The
premise of opera is a false belief concerning the artistic
process”.

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Music
The music is Dionysian
 Music with its metaphysical significance comes first
The words – and ‘the drama’ are Apollinian

 A composition that gives the word priority or that gives music the role of mediating is a vice
(for example in the opera (in §19)

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Music
The music drama of Wagner also consists
of Dionysian–Apollinian elements and
exercises the appropriate, combinatory
effect:

The spectator of ’musical tragedy’ is

‘receptive in his Dionysian state’ (§21)
and also subject to ‘the excitation of the
Apollinian emotions to their highest
pitch’ (§22).

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Wagner’s music drama

He had high hopes that Wagner might
be able to reunify a fragmented German
culture.

 These hopes are dashed at the first

Bayreuth festival in 1876, where
Nietzsche sees how decadent rich
enjoyed the music drama’s instead of
experiencing a quasi-sacred
experience

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The illusion of art

All art, even music, has an Apollinian element, it follows that all
art has an element of illusion. It is Apollo ‘through whose gestures
and eyes all the joy and wisdom of illusion, together with its
beauty, speak to us’ (§1) – and illusion is the artistic mediation of
truth by another name.
Here Nietzsche’s theory looks back to Schopenhauer and beyond
him to Plato.

In Nietzsche’s universe order is the illusion which art, above all

else, creates: life itself has none

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The illusion of art

The Dionysian element of art by itself is unbearably

wild and unacceptably destructive
But:
All creativity requires Apollo’s mediation

As an admirer of Wagner, he identifies all music with

music of the inward, ‘spiritual’, and thus Dionysian

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The illusion of art

“For a philosopher to say ‘the good and the beautiful are one’ is infamy. If he goes on to add, ‘also
the true,’ he should be thrashed. Truth is ugly. We have art, lest we perish of the truth” (WP, 822
[1888])
In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Joyous Science), he celebrates art as a “cult of the untrue”
founded on “the good will to illusion” providing a “counterforce” to our obsession with truth (JS,
107)

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Nietzsche on creativity

He admires people who do not merely play by the

existing rules, who “legislate” or “create” values
For Example : creative figures such as Johann
Wolfgang (von) Goethe (1749-1832) or Ludwig
van Beethoven (1770- 1827)

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Nietzsche on creativity
Creativity is not a matter of “laisser aller” (BGE, 188):
“Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his
‘most natural’ state is — the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving
form in the moment of ‘inspiration’ — and how strictly and subtly he
obeys 1000-fold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of
their hardness and determination defy all formulation through
concepts” (BGE, 188).

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Nietzsche on creativity
 Great artists respect constraints of style and find their artistic
excellence through subjecting themselves to these limitations
Discipline is thus a counterweight to innovation. Thanks to such
strictures, we foster the things “for whose sake it is worthwhile to
live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason,
spirituality” (BGE, 188).
(Nietzsche, the great celebrator of creativity, desperately wanted to be
a creative artist himself)

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RO G E R
S C RU T O N ( 1 9 4 4 -
2020)

Aesthetics

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Taste and Order

Understanding Music

Music and the Moral Life

Roger Scruton on Aesthetics of Music - 3. Imagination and Metaphor
Canvas Aesthetics of Music - 5. Representation

Aesthetics of Music - 8. Understanding

Aesthetics of Music - 11. Content

Aesthetics of Music - 14. Performance

Aestherics of Music - 15. Culture

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Roger Scruton - The Aesthetics

of Music

Contemporary Anglo-American philosopher

The Aesthetics of Music: examines almost all issues
of current interest in the philosophy of music,
among others

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Works of music are intended objects

“To hear music, we must be able to hear an order that
contains no information about the physical world, stands
apart form the ordinary workings of cause and effect, and
is irreducible to any physical organization”. (AM, 39)

Harmony, melody and movement are said to belong to the

essence of music, while instrumentation is accidental. (AM,
453)

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Music is not representational

Since music is a pure abstraction: music is not representational
• Music cannot represent extra-musical phenomena
• Music may suggest them: when for example a fanfare on the
horns suggests the hunt (AM, 126)
 Extra-musical thoughts prompted by music is because the
music makes a gesture towards something it cannot define. (AM,
132)
 Music inspires and consoles us, partly because it is
‘unencumbered by the debris that drifts through the world of life’
(AM 122)

44

Music is not representational

 It is possible to understand a piece of music “as music” without grasping its representational
content. (AM, 129-138)

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“If the primary purpose of metaphor is expression,

Understanding expressive quality in art can be assigned to its
metaphorical property”
music is
crucially and “We are using metaphors to describe something other
than the material world; in particular because we are
fundamentally attempting to describe how the world seems, from the
point of view of active imagination”.
informed by
metaphor

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“Perception is a natural epistemological power of the

organism, which depends on no social context for its
exercise.
Perception The musical experience, however, is not merely
perceptual. It is founded in metaphor, arising when

 unreal movement is heard in imaginary space.

Such an experience occurs only within a musical

musical culture, in which traditions of performance and

listening shape our expectations”

experience

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“Music is heard as though breathed into the ear of the

listener from another and higher sphere: it is not the
here and now, the world of mere contingency that
speaks to us through music, but another world, whose
order is only dimly reflected in the empirical realm.

Music = Music fulfils itself as an art by reaching into this realm

of pure abstraction and reconstituting there the

abstract or movements of the human soul”.

disembodied “When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we

hear something in sound, something which moves

entity with a force of its own”

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Metaphor
describes
exactly what “Metaphor cannot be eliminated from the description
of music, because it defines the intentional object of
we hear, when the musical experience.Take the metaphor away, and
you cease to describe the experience of music”
we hear
sounds as
music

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Tonality
The central metaphor for describing our experience of
music = tonality =
 the name we give the fictional world of music
 the metaphorical order we hear in sound when we hear
sound as music
“Tonal harmony enables us to hear simultaneous musical
events as similar or varied; as moving together through a
common intentional space; as creating tension and
resolution, attraction and repulsion; as answering,
commenting upon, and questioning each other; as moving
with the force and logic of gestures which are mutually
aware, and mutually accommodating. Triadic tonality is not a
system of conventions, arbitrarily devised and imposed by
fiat; it is the life-giving air which the voices breathe, and
through which they move in dance-like discipline”

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Atonal music
Non-tonal music, in other words, suffers from
a poverty of organizing metaphors, and
Scruton holds this lack more responsible for
the difficulties nontonal music has had in
finding and sustaining an audience than
anything in the actual sound of the music.

“Attempts to depart from tonality, or to discard

it entirely, seem only to confirm its authority
over the musical ear”

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Atonal music
“Atonal music in the theatre expresses states of mind that are always partly negative: every lyrical
passage is shot through with anxiety; each loving gesture is also a gesture of betrayal; there is no
affirmation of life that does not mask a will to destroy it. It as though anxiety were programmed
into this music and can never be wholly eliminated”.

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Pop music
Scruton ridicules the substitution
of rhythm by beat in popular
music and bemoans the “decline
of popular culture” (which
devolved from the cheerfulness of
jazz at the beginning of the
century to the nihilistic despair of
heavy metal and grunge today)

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Pop music
“Music soothes, cheers, pacifies; it threatens the
power of the monsters, who live by violence and
lawlessness. Those lonely, antinomian beings are
astounded by music, which speaks of another order
of being. . . It is this very order that is threatened by
the monsters of popular culture. Much modern pop
is cheerless and meant to be cheerless. But much of
it is also a kind of negation of music, a
dehumanizing of the spirit of song”.

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Mass culture
“If you ask yourself seriously, when the
transformation of popular music began, the
answer would surely be in the twentieth
century, with the reduction of the jazz and
blues tradition to a set of repeatable melodic
and harmonic formulae, held together by a
continuous ‘beat.’This was not a bourgeois
phenomenon at all, and had less to do with the
triumph of capitalism than with the triumph
of democracy.”

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Culture is in decline because the bourgeoisie are in decline

“Those with ears must guard them from the
white noise of modern life; and exercise them
only in private, or among those like-minded
listeners whom they encounter in the concert
hall”
“It is only in certain cultural conditions—
those which the bourgeois order most readily
promotes, by promoting the prosperity which
is the root of leisure—that this flowering of
the aesthetic impulse can occur”

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The category of taste serves to distinguish

cultures
“Democratic culture presses us to accept every taste that
does no obvious damage. A teacher who criticizes the music
of his pupils, or who tries to cultivate, in the place of it, a
love for the classics, will be attacked as ‘judgmental.’ In
matters of aesthetic taste, no adverse judgement is permitted,
save judgement of the adverse judge. This attitude has helped
America to survive and flourish in a world of change. An
aristocratic culture has an instinctive aversion to what is
vulgar, sentimental, or commonplace; not so a democratic
culture, which sacrifices good taste to popularity, and places
no obstacles whatsoever before the ordinary citizen in his
quest for a taste of his own” (page 497).

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Postmodern world
“What I have described is not the decadence of popular music, but its final
freedom—its breaking-loose from the channel of taste, into the great ocean of
equality, where the writ of taste no longer runs. The postmodern world denatures
music only because it denatures everything, in order that each individual might have
his chance to buy and sell. Popular music ceases to be music, just as sexual love ceases
to be love: nothing less than this is required by the new form of life—the fear,
inadequacy, and anger that attend the attempt to live without the blessing of the
dead—is itself expressed by the popular culture and reabsorbed by it. The
cheerlessness of so much pop music is therapeutic: an acknowledgement that we live
outside society, that we too, in granting equality to every human type, have become
monsters, and that a monster is an OK thing to be.”

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“Sentimentality is a vice. Not only does it place

someone at a distance from reality; it also involves an
overvaluation of the self at the cost of others. The
other person enters the orbit of the sentimentalist as
an excuse for emotion, rather than an object of it. The
other is deprived of his objectivity as a person, and
absorbed into the subjectivity of the sentimentalist.
The other becomes, in a very real sense, a means to
emotion, rather than an end in himself ”.
-> Scruton realizes that popular and high art are both
often sentimental.
Sentimentality

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“We are all to some extent sentimentalists”

 Sentimentality in Scruton’s reading is a kind of
defense against the (post)modern world.
 It allows us to surmount intractable difficulties by
saying: “let us pretend”.

Sentimentality

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Neo-romanticism
“The fact that an innocent stance towards the world is
unavailable, makes music uncomposable. That which music
expresses has gone from the world; and so music too must go”.

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The pragmatism of democratic culture

instrumentalizes musical thought and erodes standards
of judgment and taste:

Hope for a  Hope that a new bourgeoisie will emerge that will
be able to “restore” tonal thinking without
instrumentalization, sentimentality, or nostalgia.
new
bourgeoisie

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Aesthetic description
The good critic is not the one who ranks works of music
in an order of merit, or assigns credit marks to each, but
the one who alters our perception of the thing we hear, so
as to persuade us of his judgement”

64

Taste and Order

Understanding Music

Music and the Moral Life

Aesthetics of Music - 3. Imagination and Metaphor

Aesthetics of Music - 5. Representation

Roger Aesthetics of Music - 8. Understanding

Aesthetics of Music - 11. Content

Scruton on Aesthetics of Music - 14. Performance

Canvas Aestherics of Music - 15. Culture

65

Aesthetics of Music
3. Imagination and Metaphor

Metaphor
Imagination
The Indispensable Metaphor
The Life in Music
Non-Conceptual Content

 Reference: Schopenhauer

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Aesthetics of Music
5. Representation

Mimēsis (imitation)

Representation and Imitation

Representation and Abstraction

Representation in General

Musical Imitation

Reference and Predication

Representation and Understanding

The Leitmotif

Musical Understanding

 Reference: Plato, Wagner

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Aesthetics of Music
8. Understanding

Hearing and Playing

Listening
Windows and Pictures
Intentional Understanding
Aesthetic Interest
Windows, Pictures, and Metaphors
The Intentional Understanding of Tones
Tonality and the 'Description Under Which’
Imagination and the Human World

68

Aesthetics of Music
11. Content

Emotion
Hanslick Revisited
A Note on Levinson
Hanslick Yet Again
The Dance of Sympathy
Value and Structure
Ineffability and Empathy
A Note on Schopenhauer
Music and Drama
Antirealism

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Aesthetics of Music
14. Performance

Work and Performance

Authentic Performance
Performance and Culture
The Museum Culture
Composer and Audience
Versions and Transcriptions
Notes Towards a Definition of Musical Culture

70

Aesthetics of Music
15. Culture

Culture and Religion Culture of Listening

Art and Allusion Tonality and Postmodernism
Thoughts on Adorno The Consumer Culture
Historicity and Aesthetic The Decline of the Musical
Judgement Culture
The Flight from Banality The Music of the Future
Sentimentality
Instrumental Music, and the  Reference Nietzsche

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