Live Music

The notion that music is in some radical way different from other arts, and superior to them, is old, and has been reiterated down the ages -- surprisingly, by poets as much as by anyone, despite the fact that they ae artists in a rival medium. And the distinction has persistently been associated with the fact that music does not depict anything in the phenomenal world. This also long ago gave rise to the idea that it must be Paradise. Although I do not think anyone ever supposed there were sculptures or plays in heaven, it came to be taken for granted that there was music. The underlying sense of this ancient wisdom was endorsed by Schopenhauer, who provided what he believed to be the true explanation of it. . . . . Music is a manifestation of that which the phenomenal world is also a manifestation, namely the noumenon*. Therefore what it articulates is that which is also the inner nature of the phenomenal world, ‘as it were the innermost soul of the phenomenon without the body’. If it is to be spoken of as ‘representing anything at all, then what it represents is the noumenon, but in the rather peculiar sense in which the phenomenal worls also ‘represents’ the noumenon. ‘Music expresses, in an exceedingly universal language, in a homogeneous material , that is to say, in nothing but tones, and with the greatest distinctness and truth, the inner being, the in-itself, of the world’ It ‘expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world. The thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly we could just as well call the world dmbodied music as embodied will ~ Page 183

1. * (in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.

. . . .The fundamental harmonic intervals permeate independently, and always have permeated, the material environment within which man has come into existence, and out of which he is formed (and, among other things, in response to which the biological mechanisms of hearing were evolved). What all this indicates, I think, is that some of our structures of response involving music are programmed into us at much earlier and ‘lower’ evolutionary levels than anything to do with language -- levels which are by countless ages pre-human. And it seems obvious that this fact has a connection with our feeling that music goes deeper than words. It could also help to explain why it is that atonal music, after nearly a hundred years, still seems to most music lovers, including most professional musicians, to be ‘not music’. More to the point of our present considerations, it relates music at a very deep level with the emergence of man -- and hence of consciousness -- out of inorganic nature, and thus provides solid substance to the overblown passages I have quoted to this effect from Wagner and Schopenhauer. Finally, I suspect it has something to do with what it is that Schopenhauer is trying to express when he says that music articulates the inner nature of things. ~ Page 188