Petey, don’t you sometimes wonder about sound and vision? Goethe called architecture “frozen music.” If so, music must be liquid architecture.
I’ll go you one better: color is the sound of matter, brightness its volume, and texture its timbre.
First, can I buy some pot from you? Second, how is music even possible? In his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Victor Zuckerkandl asks
what must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur? How must I consider the world, how must I consider myself, if I am to understand the reality of music?
If he’s asking me, it is because music itself, in its very structure, tells us something of the nature of reality.
I am, therefore I jam?
Well, music had better be important, otherwise I’ve wasted much of my life listening to it, and I’m about to waste some of yours. So it is heartening to read that “Music is not only an art. It is a clue to the cosmos,” nor is it “just one phenomenon among many but the secret key to understanding the whole of reality” (Leithart).
For Zuckerkandl, “The knowledge of space that hand and eye possess is exactly matched by their ignorance of time.” Therefore, “A true image of time must be an image for the ear, an audible image made of tones.... Thanks to music, we are able to behold time."
Big claim.
Agreed, but what have I learned, exactly, from all my listening? For it is not as if music conveys propositional statements about the nature of reality. Rather, its very form is the message it conveys. Its mere existence leads us to wonder in what kind of Cosmos it is possible for it to exist. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a Cosmos without music would be an unforgivable oversight.
That settles it: today’s the day I’m gonna grab my trombone and blow.
Augustine, for example, “recognized that music offers special insights into the nature of time,” for it is the quintessentially temporal art, and seemingly testifies to an irreducibly positive character of time’s passage, not to mention a holism that unites the individual notes as the melody moves from anticipation to fulfillment.
Music itself has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: outside the context of the melody the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. This reflects one of the fundamental complementarities of existence, i.e., of continuity amidst discontinuity and vice versa.
Thus it is impossible “to take in music in a moment” but “only through the process of listening”: “Music forces time upon us, but shows us that the passage of time and the patience it demands are gifts to be received rather than evils to be endured” (Leithart). Otherwise the best song would be the shortest and fastest, or maybe just a single note pure and easy, like a breath rippling by.
Our mysterious interior relation to the external world is likewise mirrored in music, what with its “overlapping and interpenetrating” qualities.” Time itself shares “precisely this layered musical quality,” such that the structure of music “is a trace of the form of the whole cosmos” (ibid.). This is very much in contrast to an atomistic — and therefore tonedeaf — world of pure external relations, in which no note could be related to any other.
An eternal siren blast.
Schopenhauer thought of music as an “unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.” Thus, “our imagination is... susceptible to music” and “seeks to give form to that invisible yet lively spirit-world which speaks to us directly, and clothe it with flesh and blood.” But with Schopenhauer the glass is always half full of emptiness, so music is ultimately a reflection of the same old impersonal World Will.
Nevertheless, he gets the broad outlines correct, in that “we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing,” such that the “unutterable depth of music” reveals the “truth, the inner nature, the in-itself of the world...” Music itself is “a perfectly universal language,” but unlike, say, the universal abstractions of mathematics, it is both embodied and experienced in the body. Thus, “we might just as well call the world ‘embodied music’ as ‘embodied will.”
Here is the good news: “The inexhaustible variety of possible melodies corresponds to nature’s inexhaustible variety of individuals, physiognomies, and ways of life.” But with Schopenhauer there’s always a catch, for “the transition from one key to an entirely different one, since it breaks the connection with what went before, is like death, in so far as the individual ends there...”
It’s that kind of attitude that makes Schopenhauer such a cosmic buzzkill.
Yes, on the one hand, the impersonal Will in which we participate while alive “lives on, appearing in other individuals,” but this has no connection to us. We’re still superfluous, but at least the meaningless will that willed us wills on forever.
If only Schopenhauer had thought this through a little further. Again, he read the Upanishads every night, but had first encountered the Bhagavad Gita, which is known as the Song Supreme. Evidently, he found the Gita more a poetic summary of the unadulterated metaphysics of the Upanishads. The latter regard the world as illusory, and therefore advise escaping it via renunciation. Schopenhauer saw the Upanishadic sage as a fellow inward traveler much like himself who prefers to step off the annoying wheel of karma. You might say that our square laddie was a quiet living man — one of those chaps who prefers to hibernate in the silence of his room, in an atmasphere as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb.
A pensive man of philosophic joys, who likes to meditate and contemplate, free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise?
The pessimystical Schopenhauer saw renunciation as a pointed No to a pointless world, whereas the Gita presents renunciation more as the Yes to a higher source. Thus, the Gita’s more optimystic counsel just didn’t resonate. Perhaps it sounded too Christian, which others have compared to a form of bhakti yoga, the yoga of worship and devotion. The Gita relates the warmth of a personal relationship between a god and his devotee, but Schopenhauer would have no doubt preferred a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition than to ever let a Theos in his life.
∞
In an essay called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the “fundamental entities” of the world “is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature.” Of course, the particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, so the former may be analogized to notes, the latter to melody and harmonic structure. Andrews suggests that “both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music.” There can be no music without matter-in-motion, so our lives are a musical matter.
Perhaps the Incarnation can be analogized to the composer jumping into and taking part in his own composition?
Yes, “Word made flesh” is very much analogous to “composer become music.” This is especially apt because it factors in the dynamic/temporal element, not just the spatial/static.
In any event, Zuckerkandl concludes that a God “enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music,” and “Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?”
If that’s the case, how lucky will God be when he meets John Coltrane and gets to hear A Love Supreme for the first time!
It brings to mind the philosopher E.M. Cioran, who suggests that “If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.” For Cioran, Bach was a singular proof of God, and vice versa, for “When you listen to Bach, you see God being born.”
Along these lines, Einstein, after hearing Yehudi Menuin perform a program of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, scurried backstage, grabbed the violinist, and exclaimed “Now I know that there is a God in heaven.” If this isn’t a cosmotheandric way of listening to music, then it is a musical way of hearing cosmotheandrism, for it implies that the cosmic absolute of physical light is trumped by the aesthetic Light that streams into the Cosmos from God knows where.
Eh, Bach is overdoing it. Rather, Howlin’ Wolf is sufficient.
That is true. As Sam Phillips muttered upon first hearing him in the studio, This is where the soul of man never dies. Not to muddy the waters, but it is indeed a mystery how such a limited form as the blues can serve as a channel for the spirit. As Noël Coward quipped, it is “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.”
Three chords and the truth.
Which reminds me of something Mike Campbell (Tom Petty’s lead guitarist) says in his autobiography. He grew up in a poor household with few records, mainly Johnny Cash. His father would listen to them repeatedly while “staring off into space.” One day he asked his father why he liked Cash so much, and he responded that it was because he “sounds like the truth.” Which of course he still does, but why, and how?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Agreed, but we want to know why this is all we need to know, and how we can even know it.
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