Musical Vitalities

Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music

Holly Watkins

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780226594705
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226594842
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Does it make sense to refer to bird song—a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate—as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest?

Redefining music as "the art of possibly animate things," Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music's structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music's physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music's formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.

1

Reanimating Musical Organicism

Perhaps Theodor Adorno had the opening of Tristan und Isolde’s second act in mind when he upheld Richard Wagner’s opera as an exemplary instance of musical organicism (example 1.1). Melodic lines in the winds twist this way and that like so many fronds and tendrils, proliferating across the introduction with all the tenacity of a weed.1 Elaborating on the botanical metaphor in the 1961 essay “Vers une musique informelle” (“Toward an Informal Music”), Adorno remarked, “The minimal, as it were effortless, transition of semitone steps is regularly associated with the idea of growing plants, since it appears not to have been manufactured, but seems as if it were growing towards its final purpose without the intervention of the subject.” In Adorno’s reading, organicism originates in the impression that music is self-generating, that it is invested with an entelechy not unlike that of a living being. Chromaticism, by enhancing the directedness of musical motion, only increases what Adorno referred to as “the semblance of the organic as mediated by this language”—namely, the language of tonal music.2

Example 1.1. Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, act 2 prelude, mm. 29–55

Yet music need not be highly chromatic to inspire thoughts of organic life. The intricate motions of counterpoint put E. T. A. Hoffmann in mind of the “intertwining of mosses, weeds, and flowers,” while the musical enthusiasts depicted in his Kreisleriana hear the voices of “trees, flowers, animals, stones, water” resounding in their favorite art.3 Isolde too is drawn in by music’s capacity to evoke not only organic but also inorganic nature. A few moments after the aforementioned passage, she and Brangäne argue over whether King Marke’s hunting party has retreated safely into the night—the sign that Tristan can make his approach. Brangäne distinctly hears the men’s horns, while Isolde hears only the sounds of the garden surrounding the two women—wind in the leaves, water in the fountain. The orchestra’s music tracks the difference between the two women’s perceptions (example 1.2).

Unable to hear what her mistress hears, Brangäne complains, “You are deluded by the wildness of your desire into hearing only what you choose to.”4 In the wake of musicology’s attempt to purge its lingering Germanocentrism, one may be tempted to level the same accusation at proponents of organicism, who maintain that the best music displays the integration of parts into a greater whole and develops in a manner similar to the growth of plants. As Lotte Thaler and Lothar Schmidt have recounted in studies of organicist discourse, critics and analysts such as Adolf Bernhard Marx, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker advanced authoritative but unstable claims regarding what makes music organic in hopes of establishing the superiority of formal principles exemplified by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German music, most of it (pace Wagner) instrumental.5 Statements regarding the development of musical material out of a single seed and the reciprocity of parts and whole accrued rhetorical force despite the lack of consensus regarding their analytical demonstration.

Even worse, organicism today is commonly understood to entail distinctly regressive social and political values, thanks to its association with German nationalism and idealist theories of the state.6 In his provocative book The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton writes that organicism does the “heavy lifting for homophobic Nature,” meaning that its apparent emphasis on autonomy, boundedness, and internal versus external determination recapitulates values affiliated with a corrosive brand of heterosexual masculinity.7 Yet if what is thought to constitute musical organicism varies with contemporary notions concerning organisms in general, as Thaler concludes at the end of her study, then perhaps it is time to take a different view of organicism’s shortcomings.8 What if the problem is not with the thesis that certain musical processes create a semblance of the organic but with the models of the organism brought in to give content to that semblance?

Example 1.2. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, act 2, scene 1, mm. 72–92

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century organicists favored analogies between music and either human beings or plants. How might the significance of such analogies change in the face of biological research on plant cognition (summarized by Michael Pollan in a recent article for the New Yorker) and philosophical attributions of mind to even the simplest organic beings?9 Or in the wake of recognizing that humans share many biological features with both plants and animals? Philosopher Michael Marder alleges that “the human body and subjectivity alike are not pure expressions of Spirit but strange archives, surfaces of inscription for the vestiges of the inorganic world, of plant growth, and of animality—all of which survive and lead a clandestine afterlife in us, as us.”10 Thinking the human through the plant and the plant through the human clears the ground for a species of organicism that dispenses with humanism’s androcentric conceits and prompts renewed reflection on the points of connection between musical and organic processes.

After critiquing the conventional appeals to wholeness and end-oriented development usually associated with organicism, this chapter reconsiders some of the formal features that have motivated organicist analysis from the standpoint of biological and social systems theory. For the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, social systems, like biological systems, are self-organizing. Social systems reproduce themselves by way of recursive networking among many nodes of the system, which in music’s case include musical works, publishers and record companies, performing ensembles and venues, criticism, and scholarship. The networks that result are both the outcome of and the conditions of possibility for music’s entry, around the end of the eighteenth century, into the aggregate of modern (meaning decentralized, self-regulating, and self-perpetuating) social systems. By drawing attention to processes of self-organization and self-generation shared by living and nonliving systems, Luhmann’s work creates a vantage point from which human artifacts and cultural trends can be seen to exhibit formal tendencies not unlike those in other complex biological and physical settings. Exploring such similarities broadens the scope of the terms system and network beyond their customary technological domain. Indeed, tantalizing new research on forest ecology challenges the metaphorical supremacy by which the natural world is viewed through the lens of technology and expected to conform to the limitations of human understanding. Pollan describes how trees exchange chemical signals and life-giving resources by way of an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi—a kind of “wood-wide web.”11 Reversing commonplace assumptions about which creatures are the most highly evolved, biologist Stefano Mancuso states that plants, not humans, are “the great symbol of modernity.” Plants, in short, help us imagine what Pollan calls a “future that will be organized around systems and technologies that are networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant—and green.”12

Such views resonate with my own forward-looking but conservation-minded approach. That is, I wish to conserve affinities between music and the vegetal kingdom intuited by nineteenth-century listeners while transposing organicism into a register more in keeping with contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. To say this is not to claim that current perspectives on the natural world enjoy the status of incontrovertible truth; I do, however, mean to imply that knowledge can improve despite the epistemological limitations of human consciousness.13 My goal in this chapter is not to provide a definitive explanation of what constitutes either an organism or organicism in music but to offer a fresh account of the musical features and philosophical outlooks that contributed to the critical turn toward organic metaphors in the years around 1800. This account is necessarily bound up with stylistic features of European instrumental music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; however, I believe that music’s ability to create impressions of more-than-human vitalities in the minds and bodies of its listeners is not the privilege of any one style or tradition. I also believe that, in an era when the threats to nonhuman life on this planet are too numerous to count, such impressions should be a source of wonder rather than cause for suspicion. At the very least, the legacy of organicism challenges us to think anew about what our bodies, our sociality, and our creativity share with other living entities and the ecologies in which they are enmeshed.

The Paradox of Part and Whole

What does it take to hear music, with Adorno, as if it had not been “manufactured,” as if it were “growing towards its final purpose without the intervention of the subject”? The philosopher did not offer much explanation for this blurring of physis and techne apart from the sense of forward motion generated by chromaticism. In the twentieth century, Adorno thought, musicians had lost the ability—and, more important, the desire—to conceal their inherited materials behind a facade of inevitability. Those materials were now too stereotyped, too reified to sustain the illusion of naturalistic growth and development. Although Tristan’s idiom of plant-like proliferation was a thing of the past, composers could nonetheless strive to mimic organic modes of organization. “Art as an organized object,” Adorno explained, “quite literally resembles the organism in the relationship which obtains between the parts and the whole. But with the growing similarity to the living organism, it gradually distances itself from the artifact which, after all, it must remain. The virtually total organization, in which every feature serves the whole and the whole on its side is constituted as the sum of the parts, points to an ideal which cannot be that of a work of art—that is to say, the ideal of a self-contained thing in itself.”14

If artworks cannot achieve this ideal, it is not, as we shall see, because such pristine self-containment characterizes organisms rather than human artifacts. Adorno’s conviction that organisms are distinguished by a special kind of relationship between parts and whole nevertheless had an illustrious history. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant defined the organism as a “natural purpose,” by which he meant a self-maintaining entity whose existence cannot be traced to some external intention or end.15 He explicated the point with reference to trees, which propagate via reproduction and grow by dint of an internally regulated process that converts nutrients into bodily matter. A mechanical watch, by contrast, does not generate the materials out of which it is constructed, and it is created to serve a purpose devised by an external agent (its designer). In a tree, parts and whole are interconnected such that “the maintenance of any one part depends reciprocally on the maintenance of the rest.”16 This idea gives rise to the principle adopted by so many later commentators—namely, that an organism’s (or artwork’s) “parts should so combine in the unity of a whole that they are reciprocally cause and effect of each other’s form.” “Every part,” Kant continues, “not only exists by means of the other parts, but is thought as existing for the sake of the others and the whole.” Such a being is both “organized and self-organizing,” a formula that succinctly captures the complementary homeostatic and processual dimensions of organisms.17

Something is amiss in Kant’s discussion, however, as anyone who has done some pruning around the yard or raked up leaves in the fall might suspect. Trees and other plants clearly lose parts without any threat to the whole, a fact Kant neglects to mention. The philosopher’s elucidation of organic wholeness is doubly strange in that it refers to the practice of grafting, which combines separate organisms in a manner that confounds any easy conceptualization of the relationship between part and whole. “A bud of one tree engrafted on the twig of another,” Kant writes, “produces in the alien stock a plant of its own kind, and so also a scion engrafted on a foreign stem. Hence we may regard each twig or leaf of the same tree as merely engrafted or inoculated into it, and so as an independent tree attached to another and parasitically nourished by it.”18 If this is so, then the “unity of the whole” becomes distinctly plural. Even Goethe, in his capacity as a botanist, could not remain satisfied with the idea of wholeness. In an early remark on morphology (circa 1795), he claimed, “The most perfect organism appears before us as a unified whole, discrete from all other beings.”19 A decade of botanical studies was enough to overturn his earlier judgment: “No living thing is unitary in nature; every such thing is a plurality. Even the organism which appears to us as individual exists as a collection of independent living entities.”20 Indeed, today it would be quite shortsighted to draw the boundaries of the human in a way that excluded the colonies of bacteria living symbiotically inside and on it, or to isolate plants from the fungi that help roots absorb nutrients. As Donna Haraway colorfully puts it, “Organisms are ecosystems of genomes, consortia, communities, partly digested dinners, mortal boundary formations.”21

Strangely enough, the mutability of plants aroused a certain suspicion regarding their organic credentials. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (1830), for example, initially followed Kant by defining the organism as a “totality of articulated members, so that each member is reciprocally end and means, maintains itself through the other members and in opposition to them.” But He...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1  Reanimating Musical Organicism
• 2  Formalism’s Flower
• 3  Schopenhauer’s Musical Ecology
• 4  The Floral Poetics of Schumann’s Blumenstück, op. 19
• 5  Music between Reaction and Response
• 6  On Not Letting Sounds Be Themselves
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index