Aesthetics of Music

Musicological Perspectives

Stephen Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136486906
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Approaches is an anthology of fourteen essays, each addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to 'the music' as possible. Each essay includes musical examples from works in the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century. Topics have been selected from amongst widely recognised central issues in musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources, and developments of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or musical case studies in interpretation.

1 Introduction

Stephen Downes

DOI: 10.4324/9780203136348-1

The place of aesthetics in musicology

There is no self-standing entry on ‘aesthetics’ in Grove Music Online. A search for this term results in being directed to well over fifty other entries of bewildering diversity, from ‘affect’ and ‘Armenian music’ to the Czech composer and aesthetician Otakar Zich.¹ The plethora of apparently related entries suggests a topic pervasively relevant in musicology. Yet it seems undeserving of a single focused discussion.² A search under the alternative spelling, ‘esthetics’ in one sense provides even less joy. Again, there is no self-standing entry and now the reader is encouraged to seek out but one alternative, a subsection of the long multipart entry on ‘philosophy of music’. Pursuance of this link raises the spirits of the aesthetically curious in musicological hyperspace, however, for it supplies several richly informative pages covering the history of musical aesthetics from 1750, discussion of key figures (with Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Schleiermacher headlining), and focused consideration of topics such as ‘subjectivity and language’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘formalism’ and ‘disintegration’. The entry is written by Andrew Bowie, author of books widely read and admired by musicologists (especially Bowie 2003 and 2009). Bowie is a Professor of Philosophy and German. Through both its commissioning and its structure Grove clearly positions aesthetics as a subcategory of philosophy. Up front, however, Bowie’s professional website declares his conviction that philosophical issues are inseparable from ‘other key cultural responses to the problems of the modern world’. Few would disagree with this. (We need not only take Bowie’s word for it: as well as being a superior philosopher, Bowie is also a very capable jazz musician.) Bowie provides a fine subentry, but Grove’s editorial decisions raise the key question of the place of the aesthetics of music in the disciplinary and interdisciplinary scrutiny of this cultural activity.³

Work by philosophers on the German aesthetic tradition in which Bowie specializes has flourished especially strongly in recent years. The consideration of music in this tradition has been richly explored by, for example, a collection of essays edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter (2006) and Lydia Goehr’s Elective Affinities (2008), which also spreads its range to wider fields, for example, the aesthetics of John Cage (via Arthur Danto). More broadly, when philosophers have recently considered music, questions of ontology, expression and meaning are often the focus of attention, as represented by much of the work of the prolific Stephen Davies (e.g. 1994, 2003) and Peter Kivy (e.g. 2002, 2012).⁴ Other dimensions of the aesthetics of music are a prominent focus in the work of Jerrold Levinson; the second part of his Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996, 27–125) is devoted to the aesthetics of music, and this was quickly followed by Music in the Moment (1997); music also figures centrally in Nick Zangwill’s The Metaphysics of Beauty (2001) and his Music and Aesthetic Reality is forthcoming in 2014. This is but a small sample. Aesthetics seems to have a secure place and future within the philosophical discussion of music.

The fruits of this vigorous activity in the past fifteen years or so offer a positive contrast to Roger Scruton’s pessimistic statement made in the early 1980s:

There is little literature in the history of modern philosophy that is more exasperating than that devoted to the aesthetics of music. When the standard of philosophical competence is high enough to be taken seriously, the standard of musical competence is usually (as with Kant and Hegel) too low for the exercise to be worthwhile. Hardly any writer troubles himself with examples or analysis, and almost all rest their case in some vast and vague abstraction …

(Scruton 1983, 34)

On the other side of the musical aesthetic discourse it might equally be considered that musicologists have too often displayed lacunae in their philosophical competence. The result can be that even when philosophers and musicologists appear to be talking about the same thing, there is sometimes a despairing sense, to paraphrase Cole Porter, that while ‘You say sonata, I say sonata’. And so it may be tempting to call off any prospective interdisciplinary relationship. Yet, the philosopher Andy Hamilton has insisted, surely correctly, that aesthetics must not simply be a subdiscipline of philosophy: ‘writers in aesthetics should bring to bear as much critical awareness and practical knowledge of the arts as possible’. A plea one might, of course, reverse – musicologists who engage with aesthetics should bring as much critical awareness and knowledge of relevant philosophical insight as possible. Hamilton lays his Kantian and Adornian cards on the table, particularly lauding the latter’s efforts to ‘unify philosophical aesthetics and the analysis, criticism and history of art’, something he considers ‘essential though too rarely attempted’. He also hails Scruton as one of a rare breed of philosopher who can offer such a difficult ‘cross-fertilization’. Analytical philosophy, more broadly, gets it in the neck for a ‘puzzling philistinism’, the product of its characteristic ahistorical and ‘scientific bias’. For Hamilton, the aesthetics of music ‘has to be understood through its history’ and as dealing with something ‘humane in utterance’ (Hamilton, 2007, 2, 7–8).⁵

Hamilton’s more positive viewpoint suggests that philosophers and musicologists might, after all, be able to call the calling off, off. Scruton’s own Aesthetics of Music (1997), a full-length discussion of musical aesthetics tellingly rich in concrete musical examples and not shy of employing the terminology of music theory and analysis was clearly his own response to the bleak scenario he described in 1983. The book quickly proved productively provocative in musicological circles. Brave and bold, it is a work that wears the author’s musical expertise and his musical prejudices on its sleeve. In the view of a prominent music theorist and musicologist, Scruton’s book was especially important for drawing aesthetic inquiry closer to the concerns of music theory and analysis and thereby demanding critical scrutiny of the languages those disciplines deploy to describe music and its meaning.

Scruton’s work provides sufficient demonstration of the pertinence of aesthetic thinking to music theory. Taking aesthetics seriously has a number of practical consequences. Meaning, for example, can no longer be left implicit in what we do, but must be confronted more explicitly. And to get at meaning, we need to take a hard look at our meta-languages and to probe the necessarily metaphorical nature of all talk about music.

(Agawu 2000, 493–4)

Scruton, of course, remains a prominent figure who continues to write frequently on music and, in so doing, continues to stimulate vigorous debate. In a recent collection of essays responding to Scruton’s output on aesthetics (Hamilton and Zangwill 2012), a quarter are devoted to musical issues. But of the fifteen contributors (including Scruton himself), Michael Spitzer is the sole musicologist. Given the prominence of music in Scruton’s aesthetics, Spitzer’s may seem to be a token presence, even if it is a particularly authoritative one (Spitzer has produced two major musicological monographs steeped in philosophical erudition: Spitzer 2004, 2006). Elsewhere, Spitzer has urged for more balanced dialogue between musicology and philosophy. In his introduction to a collection of ten essays on significant figures in the German tradition of the philosophy of music (from Kant to Adorno), two of which are by musicologists, he lays down a gauntlet for both disciplines. On the one hand, he identifies an ‘inward turn’ in the ‘new’ musicology of the 1990s, which he characterizes as a ‘self-reflective’ scholarly project, one which, ‘where it does look out, is highly selective, or apparently unaware of the crucial philosophical backgrounds to its favoured sources of reinvigoration’. And on the other hand, he notes the disappointing ‘passing over of musical structure’ in the work of those analytical philosophers who deal with music, including, for example, Davies, Levinson and Kivy (Spitzer 2010). The recent formation and activity of the RMA and AMS Music and Philosophy Study Groups⁶ has provided a platform for scholars in the fields to engage more fully and publicly in Spitzer’s desired dialogue. Aesthetics would surely be prominent. And yet the inaugural 2011 conference of the RMA group listed just one session on aesthetics. The 2012 program included sessions whose titles focused on analysis, hermeneutics, ethics, perception, expression, music and language; as with Grove Online, it seems that aesthetics is nowhere and yet, one suspects, that it must be nearly everywhere.

While philosophers have continued to pursue a wide range of issues in aesthetics, the position of aesthetics within musicology in recent times has seemed much more uncertain. The entry on ‘musicology’ in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (to which this current volume stands as in part complement and part contrast) states that the ‘bulk’ of recent activity in the discipline has been engaged in ‘critical interpretation of musical works: what they mean (or meant); why there were composed; and how they may inform a larger historical, intellectual, or aesthetic discourse’ (London 2011). Aesthetics here can be read as the third-rated term, as something of an afterthought. A decade earlier the prospects of aesthetics in musicology might have seemed even bleaker. In Alastair Williams’s view, musicology throughout the 1990s reflected the fact that ‘“aesthetics”, with its elitist connotations, is not a widely used term nowadays in the fields of critical and cultural theory, since it evokes a rarefied branch of philosophy concerned with the appreciation of art and nature’ (Williams 2001, 10). Such a view seems to confirm that by the end of the twentieth century aesthetics had apparently become irrelevant to the new, culturally informed and cutting-edge critical interests of musicologists. Not so long before, however, a tranche of major musicological publications had offered authoritative histories, digests and anthologies of musical aesthetics. The English translation of Carl Dahlhaus’s condensed, concentrated Esthetics of Music (1982) was widely read in the 1980s (part of the rich series of translations of Dahlhaus’s work appearing during that decade). Dahlhaus co-edited with Ruth Katz a vast, multivolume collection of source readings (Dahlhaus and Katz 1986–93). A collection edited by Peter le Huray and James Day was warmly received as providing a long-needed musicological resource (le Huray and Day 1981), as was a contemporaneous and comparably authoritative collection by Edward Lippman (1986–90). Lippman also provided a magisterial, one-stop History of Western Musical Aesthetics (1992) a publication closely contemporaneous with the English translation of Enrico Fubini’s own historical survey (Fubini 1991, whose publication history in its original Italian goes back to the 1960s). Less than ten years later, were these books really in danger of gathering dust in the musicology remainder bin?

Musicological rumours of the death of aesthetics were, however, greatly exaggerated. Introducing the provocatively titled Resisting the Aesthetic (1998), a collection of musicological essays from the 1990s, Adam Krims called for a redefinition and interrogation, rather than indulgence in a ‘fantasy of escaping the aesthetic’. He argued that a rethinking of aesthetics needed to play a part of the development of a new musical poetics. In response to the ‘crisis of close reading’ which arose from the rush to discredit musical analysis as an activity that uncritically sustained outworn notions of aesthetic formalism and autonomy, Krims urged for the development of self-reflective modes of approach in which aesthetic questions gained a new place within critical practice. Crucially, for Krims, the disciplinary split between music theory and musicology, a ‘disciplinary reinscription of the text/context dichotomy’, needed to be overcome in order to develop a ‘postmodern’ music scholarship which resists the old ideology of aesthetic autonomy (Krims 1998, 2–11).⁷ (This disciplinary split has always been less operative in British universities, where they characteristically co-exist within music departments, but Krim’s arguments retained urgent currency across the oceanic divide.)

In a surreptitious footnote Krims reflects that a familiar aesthetic binary may be at play in musicology’s disciplinary agony: ‘the fact that beauty, not the sublime, has constituted [music theory’s] principal means of validation helps to explain its resistance to some postmodern theories’. This binary returns later more prominently in Krims’s main text where he describes the ‘sublime presence of “the social” returning to haunt the formerly sanitized world of musical structure’ (Krims 1998, 13, n. 1). Krims is overtly influenced here by Joel Galand’s 1995 essay, ‘The Turn from the Aesthetic’, itself a response to the famo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Values and judgements
• 3 Absolute music
• 4 Program music
• 5 Beautiful and sublime
• 6 Dialectics and musical analysis
• 7 Classicism/neoclassicism
• 8 Romanticism/anti-romanticism
• 9 Jazz – avant-garde – tradition
• 10 Narrative
• 11 Music and the moving image
• 12 Irony
• 13 Propaganda
• 14 Virtuosity and the virtuoso
• List of contributors
• Index of musical works, composers and performers
• Index of terms in aesthetics
• General index