Philosophy of Western Music

A Contemporary Introduction

Andrew Kania

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351810234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is the first comprehensive book-length introduction to the philosophy of Western music that fully integrates consideration of popular music and hybrid musical forms, especially song. Its author, Andrew Kania, begins by asking whether Bob Dylan should even have been eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature, given that he is a musician. This motivates a discussion of music as an artistic medium, and what philosophy has to contribute to our thinking about music. Chapters 2-5 investigate the most commonly defended sources of musical value: its emotional power, its form, and specifically musical features (such as pitch, rhythm, and harmony). In chapters 6-9, Kania explores issues arising from different musical practices, particularly work-performance (with a focus on classical music), improvisation (with a focus on jazz), and recording (with a focus on rock and pop). Chapter 10 examines the intersection of music and morality. The book ends with a consideration of what, ultimately, music is.

Key Features

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• Uses popular-song examples throughout, but also discusses a range of musical traditions (notably, rock, pop, classical, and jazz)

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• Explains both philosophical and musical terms when they are first introduced

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• Provides publicly accessible Spotify playlists of the musical examples discussed in the book

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• Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with questions for testing comprehension and stimulating further thought, along with suggestions for further reading

1 Song and the Medium of Music

Overview

Prompted by a real-life example, in this chapter we investigate the nature of artistic media, particularly music, language, and their combination in song. Along the way, I make some introductory remarks about what it is to do philosophy of music.

1.1 Are Songs Literature?

On Thursday, October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy rocked the literary world by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. The question that exercised many commentators was not whether Dylan’s work merited such a prestigious prize (most agreed with the academy’s judgment of his greatness), but whether it made Dylan eligible for the prize.¹ The worry was that the Swedish Academy had made a blundering category error: Bob Dylan is a musician. This prize is for authors of literature. Therefore, however good an artist Dylan may be, he’s no more eligible for this prize than a painter would be.² This reasoning seems to rely on an argument about artistic categories or media something like the following:

1. One is eligible for a literature prize only on the basis of one’s works of literature.
2. Songs are works of music, not literature.
3. Therefore, no one is eligible for a literature prize on the basis of their songs.

The obvious response, provided by many commentators, is to reject premise (2), that is, the idea that the categories of music and literature are mutually exclusive. Dylan’s songs are music, according to this response, but they are also literature, since they comprise words artfully arranged. Like uncontroversial examples of poetry, these arrangements of words have been published in printed volumes, such as The Lyrics: Since 1962 (Dylan 2014), apparently intended primarily for reading as opposed to singing. Indeed, much of the journalism discussing the prize was illustrated with pictures of just such books, often displayed in bookshops, as if to provide evidence that Dylan is in fact a literary author.³

There are at least three ways to take this response. One interpretation is that while a song itself is not literature, it contains a literary work – its lyrics – that can be appreciated independently of its musical setting. A second interpretation is that songs are categorially ambiguous, that is, they can be properly appreciated in two different ways: as musical or literary works. A third interpretation is that the songs themselves – words and music together, not the lyrics alone – are unambiguously works of literature. Most commentators, along with the Swedish Academy, endorsed the third interpretation, most obviously in appealing not only to the words of Dylan’s songs but also to their musical settings and performances. In this section, I will thus focus on the third interpretation, the claim that a song taken as a whole is a work of literature. But first I will briefly consider some issues raised by the first two interpretations of the defense of songs as literature.

We will consider, in §1.3 of this chapter, to what extent (if any) the lyrics of a song can be extracted from its musical setting and still be considered the same text. I will just note here that if we do consider a song’s words alone to constitute a work of literature, and thus that the song contains a work of literature, it does not automatically follow that the song as a whole is a work of literature. The film Four Weddings and a Funeral, for instance, contains a poem – W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” recited by one character at the funeral of his partner⁴– but the film as a whole is not thereby a work of literature.⁵

The second interpretation of the claim that songs are literature relies on the idea that songs are categorially ambiguous. Consider Tarantula (1971), Dylan’s best known uncontroversially literary work. Some call the book a novel; others call it a collection of prose poems. Perhaps one camp is right and the other wrong, or perhaps the book is just a mess of stylistic and genre features. Another possibility, however, is that it can be read rewardingly in two different ways, either as a novel or as prose poems; perhaps Dylan even intended this. Whatever the truth about Tarantula, could songs be like this – appropriately appreciated in two different ways, either as music or as literature? It seems unlikely, since appreciating Tarantula as a prose poem (rather than a novel) doesn’t require ignoring any of it, while appreciating a song as literature requires ignoring much of it – namely, everything that isn’t words, what we might intuitively call the music of the song.⁶ If song does occupy a puzzling middle-ground between music and literature, then, it is not puzzling in the way that the categorization of Tarantula is puzzling. Song is an established artistic category; we know what songs are in a way that we aren’t quite sure what Tarantula is. The question is how we should think of songs in relation to other, similar artistic categories, most notably literature and music.

Let us turn, then, to the most popular defense of Dylan’s eligibility for a literature prize – the third interpretation of the response that music and literature are not mutually exclusive – namely, that Dylan’s songs, in their entirety, are unambiguously works of literature. According to Horace Engdahl, presenting the prize on behalf of the Swedish Academy, “the straight answer to the question of how Bob Dylan belongs in literature” is that “the beauty of his songs is of the highest rank” (Engdahl 2016, ¶5).⁷ Great beauty alone can’t qualify something as literature, though, otherwise many sculptures, for instance, would count as literature.⁸ But if Engdahl is instead saying that Dylan’s songs are in the highest rank of beautiful literature, he is of course begging the question in which we are interested (that is, assuming the conclusion for which he is apparently arguing): Beautiful or not, are songs literature at all?

As Robert Orr notes in a thoughtful commentary on Dylan’s Nobel, the word “poetry” is widely used as an honorific:⁹

When a person says something like, “That jump shot was pure poetry,” the word has nothing to do with the actual practice of reading or writing poems. Rather, the usage implies sublimity, fluidity and technical perfection – you can call anything from a blancmange to a shovel pass “poetry,” and people will get what you’re saying. This isn’t true of opera or badminton or morris dancing, and it can cause confusion about where metaphor ends and reality begins when we talk about “poetry” and “poets.”

(2017, ¶7)¹⁰

Engdahl’s comments about the beauty of Dylan’s songs, then, might suggest that the Swedish Academy has conflated the idea that Dylan’s songs are poetry in the honorific sense with the idea that they’re poetry in the descriptive sense. The former idea is widely accepted, but it is the latter that would make Dylan eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Engdahl also appeals to history and etymology: “In a distant past, all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; ‘lyrics’ comes from ‘lyre’” (2016, ¶2). Now, we might question the validity of etymological arguments for substantive conclusions, but even setting that issue aside, as an argument for the classification of songs as literature, this too is circular. For the past performances to which Engdahl refers appear to be singings of songs. One cannot assume that they were instances of poetry, then, without assuming the very claim at issue.¹¹ Consider, for example, ancient Greek works such as the Odyssey or Iliad. We call such works “poetry” in part because we have lost virtually all knowledge – practical and theoretical – of their musical components, and hence have long appreciated only their verbal aspects.¹² Now, suppose that, in the distant future, a few copies of The Lyrics: Since 1962 survived, but all recordings and notation of Dylan’s songs were lost, along with the musical culture within which they would have made sense (roughly the position we are in today with respect to ancient Greek music). In this future, surely something – perhaps much – that is vital to appreciating Bob Dylan’s oeuvre has been lost. We should thus, likewise, take even our best understanding of ancient Greek sung “poetry” to be similarly impoverished and acknowledge that its status as literature is just as contestable as that of Dylan’s work.¹³ Compare this situation with our knowledge of the work of the ancient Roman Catullus. Though few of us speak Latin (and all are at some disadvantage with respect to the cultural context required to fully appreciate Catullus’s poetry), we appear to have at least some complete works of his. Since they were intended to be read silently or recited, but not sung, they seem uncontroversially to be works of literature.

Rather confusingly, given the historical argument just considered, Engdahl begins his case for Dylan’s oeuvre being literary by suggesting that it marks a “great shift … in the world of literature,” the kind of transformation of a demotic form into high art that changes “our idea of literature” (Engdahl 2016, ¶1). But while it is widely accepted that Dylan transformed rock or popular music (see Chapter 9, §9.3), it is a strikingly original claim that he has transformed our concept of literature. As Orr observes, “people don’t really think of songs as being poems or of songwriters as being poets,” in the descriptive as opposed to honorific sense. “No one plays an album by Chris Stapleton, or downloads the cast recording of ‘Hamilton,’ or stands in line for a Taylor Swift concert, and says something like, ‘I can’t wait to listen to these poems!’” (Orr 2017, ¶6). Indeed, if Dylan had transformed our concept of literature, it would be surprising that his eligibility for a literary prize should require defense. So it again looks as though Engdahl is simply assuming that Dylan’s work is literature, rather than providing an argument to that end.

It might seem that we haven’t yet considered the simplest reason for thinking that Dylan’s songs are literature: When printed, at least, “[l]yrics look like poems, or at least a particular kind of poem. They often rhyme. …” (Orr 2017, ¶3). Of course, the songs also include music – that’s why they’re called “songs” rather than “poems” – but perhaps they resemble paradigmatic poems enough to be admitted into the literary fold. One challenge raised by such a resemblance theory of poetry is that we need to identify the paradigms to which candidate poems are to be compared. But the more serious problem is that resemblance threatens to count too much as poetry. Shopping lists resemble paradigmatic poems to a certain extent. The obvious way to exclude them is to say that they don’t resemble the paradigms enough.¹⁴ The defender of songs as poetry is thus faced with the challenge of coming up with a criterion of sufficient resemblance. But even supposing they meet that challenge, they still face the basic objection just considered: People don’t typically think of songs as poems, so why should we think that the proposed criterion is correct? It might be replied that we get to decide what counts as poetry (though precisely who “we” refers to here is a further difficult question), but if this is really to be a decision rather than an arbitrary stipulation, we will want to hear a good reason for broadening our current conception of poetry to include songs. And it is precisely this reason for which we have been searching in vain.

1.2 Philosophy of Music

We could continue this discussion in a number of ways. For instance, we could pursue more sophisticated resemblance-theories of literature, or theories according to which something’s being literature is a matter of its being intended to be literature, or standing in a particular historical relation to previous literature, or being deemed literature by someone in a position of authority in the institution of literature.¹⁵ But since this is, after all, a book on the philosophy of music, I will stop here to reflect on why the discussion in the previous section could be described as philosophy.

Much of the time we go about our musical and other business without thinking much about it. But occasionally we encounter something puzzling that doesn’t seem to fit into our general understanding of the world or some part of it. If trying to solve the puzzle requires answering questions about the most fundamental ways we have of thinking about the world (or the relevant part of it), it is likely a philosophical puzzle. For instance, we all learn things about the world by observing it in one way or another, and scientists have developed extremely fine-tuned and fruitful ways of making such observations and developing wide-ranging and powerful theories on the basis of them. But it occurs to many people, often as adolescents, to wonder whether all this knowledge is ultimately justified: How can we be sure that the basic observations we make, whether in everyday life or the laboratory, are themselves trustworthy? Such questions lead us very quickly into epistemology – the study of knowledge and justification. Their enduring interest is manifest in compelling cultural productions from Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 bce) through Descartes’s malicious demon (1641) to the Wachowski siblings’ film The Matri...