The musician is at home in a harmony of sound and silence. Our primary attention is initially and naturally directed to sound. Sound is the external appearance of music and it has features and characteristics that can be described. Sound also relieves us of our solitude and establishes connections. Silence, on the other hand, remains initially internalised, seemingly subjective, self contained and isolated. In silence, our experience of the world recedes and our experience of isolation and interiority increases. In silence we are withdrawing into our self. The importance of silence, of that which is closest to us, is, however, often least likely to be noticed and understood.
Sound without silence would be noise. Silence without sound would leave us with an empty void. Silence in fact determines musical sound as the phenomenon of rhythm and rest indicate already within musical appearance. Silence describes the space between sounds. Without silence, musical sound would thus lack meaning. Silence is threatened by incessant talk, chatter or babble which undermines music and leads listeners into confusion. A performance culture which demands increasingly noisy, extrovert or flamboyant sounds to stimulate the attention of an audience, leads to a neglect and decline of silence. In the mistaken belief that more attention to sound will also generate more attention to the performance extrovert activism underestimates the importance of silence to sound. However, without silence, sound becomes nonsense.
Initially the phenomenon of sound is a phenomenon of semblance. In silence, semblance is suspended and truth may be uncovered. Yet, silence itself is mute. It is unable to articulate itself. Silence has a negative, fleeing appearance. It is present because sound is absent. The sounding semblance thus becomes necessary to direct us towards its ground: silence. From the perspective of silence, sound acquires an instrumental dimension. It uncovers silence, which is always already there.
A musical performance is initially heard as sound. But its meaning is gathered in its silence. We often do not attend to this, focussing instead on the obvious: sounding semblance. Sound and silence also determine our relationships. Continuous sound, incessant babble and chatter drive us to despair, lead to withdrawal into silence and a fragmentation of community. A dialogue in which silence is gathered is among the most successful forms of communication- hence the importance of humour, ambiguity and questioning to discourse. These are means of gathering silence. Musicians must heed silence for more than musical reason as their understanding, community and harmony is determined by it.
Form and Performance
The activity of performance is fundamental to music. Even where it does not take place in reality, music only comes to presence through the sustained and coherent activity of internal listening and imaginative presencing. The phenomenologist Alfred Schütz has identified this active ontological modality of music as “polythetic”. Like a mathematical proof, we must experience music and participate in its temporal unfolding to perceive and understand music at all. Music cannot be understood as objectively present in front of us. It exists within human intentionality, as temporal form and because of our directedness into the future. Music reveals itself in actuality and as formed in the activity of performance.
The existence of music as a temporal form distinguishes it from other realms of being that are a-temporally and objectively constituted. Music, however, does not admit objective identification readily and on its own. All musical presence differs on account of the essentially differing temporal horizon in its performance. At the same time, the intuition of a musical form can apparently be present in an instant. Mozart famously identified the act of composition as an articulation of an idea, present to the composer at once in a synoptic view. The intuitive conception of musical ideas in an instance thus appears to be the driving force of the unfolding of musical performance. The musical performance is then the clarifying and approximating reality of a synoptically conceived musical form only present in a directedness or intentionality of our consciousness.
The relationship between form and performance determines any corresponding human activity. Aristotle famously identifies their difference as the difference between praxis and poiesis. Praxis or mere doing, is self sufficient. The aim of the activity lies within the activity itself. Aristotle refers to sight as an example. The activity of seeing is self-sufficient. Its aim is simply to see. Poiesis or making on the other hand takes aim at a form outside the activity itself. Aristotle cites the activity of building. We build in order to build something. The activity itself is informed by taking aim at the potential object that is made. Praxis or doing is characterised by its actuality (energeia). Poiesis or making is characterised by its work (ergon).
Musical performances collapse the differences between actuality and work. We can thus only speak about making music in a sense that is different to Aristotle for whom all making is instrumental. It distinguishes possibility from actuality and identifies modalities of how a given aim is achieved. A doing or praxis preserves the unity of process and product and does not separate the “what”, the aim, from the “how”, the activity itself. In musical performance, a separation between the “what” and the “how” is ultimately not desirable. It leads to an inauthentic aesthetic experience. Music exists in a unified experience where process and product are joined. The musical work exists in the musical working. The paradigmatic form of musical creation is accordingly “play”. We do not make, but we play music.
Musicians appropriately tend to take a view that anticipated musical outcomes or aims determine paths teleologically and are in fact congruent with such paths. Their teleological paradigm suggests that where the imagination, inspiration and conception of an aim are strong enough, the activity and path towards its achievement will reveal itself without further reflection. In musical performance imagination must suffice to guide us towards reality. The deliberation or reflection about the “how” distracts the performer at the moment of performance and undermines the constitution of the musical work.
The play-reality of music contrasts with a reality where paths distinguish themselves from aims and in fact assume a detached importance in themselves. In the aesthetic context of music making a failure of achievement presents no critical problem. It may in fact not even be perceived in the power of the moment. The musical reality is after all a praxis and the activity and its aims remain united. The musical performer and listener exist in this sense in a suspended, aesthetic “play” reality. In the reality of human lives which deals with objective realities, a failure to respond appropriately to a partially known reality may have serious consequences to individual lives and result in significant failures of individuals and communities.
Collaborative conceptions of outcomes in particular imply a detached conception and articulation of aims and activities. They require a poiesis. Human society is no play reality and must be determined by a capacity to form and articulate aims and visions, to devise – and agree on paths towards their realisation and establish interpretations of outcomes and achievement. This dynamic is subject to a dialectic which separates aims (the “what”) and paths (the “how”). This has good reasons: Harmonious co-existence in a civilised society suggests that we approach challenges collaboratively. We cannot be confident that individuals conceive aims and understand outcomes completely at all times to determine a path adequately without further thought and assistance. In addition our individual imagination and inspiration may not hit upon the best or indeed most productive path towards the realisation of an aim immediately. We need to deliberate collectively about aims, outcomes and paths to achieve optimum results and thus need to separate them conceptually. From a perspective of praxis and the self-sufficiency of doing, a detached path is perceived as an obstacle, as a distraction and as unnecessary. Conflating contexts of praxis and poiesis in human communities leads to confusion and ambivalence but also to ignorance, fanaticism and intolerance. In extreme circumstances it will lead to a breakdown of human collaboration and of humane community altogether.
Acting and Thinking
Our lives unfold in action and thought. Acting and thinking are fundamental modes of human being. They are also in some respects mutually exclusive. Reflection requires a suspension of action and action requires a suspension of reflection. Reflection and action, however, nevertheless inform each other. Their harmonious balance is necessary for action to be effective and for reflection to remain relevant. Musicians are not naturally led towards thinking and reflection as they tend to be actively creative in an extreme way. Performers in particular must often make decisions in an instant relying on instinct, habit and committing to unreflected risk. However, their performance nevertheless incorporates a form of reflection. This silence of activity is called listening.
Musical performance cannot accommodate conscious or sustained critical reflection. In the moment of performance, sustained reflection distracts and undermines a compelling performance. The performer captivates her audience through her conviction. Conviction, however, is directly undermined by reflection. Conscious reflection progresses from perplexity, doubt and scepticism- attributes that would question a musical performer in the moment of her performance. Reflection requires a silence of activity and a suspension of actual renewal. Activity and renewal are central features of intense music making. While the musician is familiar with the phenomenon of reflection through listening, her active engagement in performance must suspend critical reflection and submit to the rule of conviction. In some cases conviction can reach levels of narcissistic absorption – this can prove successful in sustaining a performance but will also arrest development and disable the musician to develop their artistry over time.
A synthesis between action and reflection is achieved in musical performance through rhythm and through the silence of rests. The determining factors guiding the interplay between action and reflection are similarly timing and intentionality. Reflection cannot directly guide action if there is no time afforded to it or if it does not occur at the right time. In addition, reflection cannot determine action if we are not directed to it at all but are instead caught up in a vortex of activity. Considered action requires time for reflection and the capacity to suspend action in time for reflection or until such time as reflection is considered to be completed. In addition reflection requires a competency, an organisation and a discipline which is authentic to itself. An incontinent, loose assembly of ideas does not constitute thinking. Thinking requires internal cohesion, direction and a consistency of principle. The steps of the process of reflection must evidently and clearly suggest themselves. We refer to this cohesion as “logical” progression.
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Decisions to act or to reflect are made continuously by people and by organisations without necessarily stopping larger contexts of activity. Like musical performers, organisations need to develop rhythms synthesising critical reflection and action. A conscious organism will thrive if the switch from reflection to action flows easily and effortlessly and if the co-ordination of intention, reflection and activity is organic. Ordinarily such a switch and transition is the responsibility of “leadership” which gives the impulses for reflection or action and determines timing. In the case of a leadership that is rhythmically incontinent and incapable of switching organically from activity to reflection or alternatively is incapable to engage in either with sufficient ease, a harmonious reality cannot be achieved.
Discord and clarity: The dialectical forces in the musician’s existence
Notwithstanding that music is essentially wordless Plato suggests that musicians cannot accept a gap between words and deeds. He suggests that a true musician is precisely a person whose actions harmonise in reality with his expressions, intentions and aspirations. The Gorgias is a dialogue dedicated to the exploration of rhetoric and its contribution to truth. It features a paradigmatic clash between Socrates, the critical voice of reason, and Callicles, a representative of the mono-thetic view that action is self-sufficient. For Callicles active power is absolute. Outcomes justify means and might is right. Such a view remains stubbornly unconvinced by any dialectical arguments for truth which look for alignment of what we do with what we say. Instead Callicles affirms the supremacy of success and holds fast to political expediency in an essentially pragmatic world. What is said about such conduct remains to him irrelevant.
It is hard –if not impossible- to argue with anyone who is unwilling or unable to see the difference between reason and cunning, between truth and praxis. However, and as Socrates points out, an absolute commitment to Realpolitik (often accompanied by impunity for wrong done) diminishes internal harmony and ultimately imprisons the person or her community in a sustained discord. The implication is that unless we harmonise the articulation of truth with our actions externally we will experience debilitating dissonances internally. It is the internal dissonance which worries Socrates more than any external discord when he asserts: “And yet, I my very good sir, should rather choose to have my lyre or some chorus that I might provide for the public, out of tune and discordant, or to have any number of people disagreeing with me and contradicting me, than that I should have internal discord and contradiction in my own single self.” (Gorgias 482c)
A harmony between what they say and what they do seems central to individuals and organisations who aim for a flourishing existence. It appears that here musicians and the communities of musicians frequently fail spiralling seemingly towards a tribal chaos and a cacophonous discord. There is ample evidence that the dissonance between words and deeds that undermine musicians’ own interests and intentions are in fact created by musicians and their artistic imagination itself. Measures proposed to address this disorder tend to address the consciousness and conscience of the individual and her community. In particular they focus on standards of individual or collective behaviour. However, it is a question whether we are facing an ethical challenge or whether the matter has essentially intellectual roots and derives from confusion and ignorance. Socrates suggests the latter. This implies that any solution to this challenge may in principle be simple.
It is not too hard to see how intellectual confusion and ignorance are responsible for dissonance and why we must tackle and seek to confront it. Active confusion is the result of intellectual incontinence. The cleft between word and deed opens up because we say more than we can mean. At times this can be simply the function of babbling enthusiasm, at other times it shows a disorganized intellect at work. If we strive for intellectual discipline the cleft between word and deed closes. The measure needed here is clarity. Clarity includes attributes of distinctness, coherence, connectedness and consistency. In our perceptions clarity includes immediacy, simplicity even, recognition and identification. In our thinking clarity is identified by similar features and includes further association with meaning, significance, absence of perplexing contradiction, the presence of logical harmony and the absence of debilitating cognitive dissonance. These attributes are naturally only achieved if an individual displays a will to clarity. Such a will articulates itself in a capacity to search for clarification of our inevitable ignorance.
Advancing clarity leads to intellectual harmony which in turn leads to organisational harmony. If we focus on clarity we must subject our thinking to discipline and our actions to transparency. This overcomes cognitive dissonance. Fortunately, clarity and its benefits are familiar to musicians as clarity also plays a strong role in their experience: clarity of musical perception is guided by clear musical ideas and is concretely expressed in a clear articulation in sound. Tuning and balance are the relevant features of order here. Musical clarity is guided by inner hearing and directed listening. These are essentially reflective processes.
The process of active listening constitutes formal musical understanding and provides the consciousness of musician and listener equally with an experience of meaning. Without clarity a constituted meaning decays and becomes dysfunctional. A perception of musical meaning is essentially clear. Where clarity disappears musical understanding becomes confused, sense becomes nonsense and euphony becomes cacophony. While musicians are familiar with clarity in their realm of experience, their capacity to conceive clear forms of sound does not necessarily imply a capacity to actively conceive abstract, intellectual clarity, organisational clarity or indeed other forms of perceptual clarity to an equal degree. Nevertheless, if it applies to all levels of existence musicians will do well to transpose their familiar expectation of clarity into the abstract, intellectual realm.
Musicians know that the attainment of clarity requires deliberate practice. We also know that poor practice – worse than no practice – may lead to a decay of perception, to confusion and to ignorance. This suggests a need to wake up, practice our attention and sharpen our discernment. In reflecting about the existence of musicians and their communities it is time to explore dialectic divisions that may help to conceive the reality in which we musicians find ourselves. In particular we should look for authentically musical commitments that mould our habits and modes of thinking, shape our characteristics and determine our capacity to interact effectively with each other and with our world. We could think here of such dichotomies as action and reflection, pathos and logos, form and performance, past and future, will to power and will to truth and sounding semblance and silent significance. It is important to ask whether commitments that musicians must make in an aesthetic reality are productive in other contexts as well. Some dialectical divisions may alert us to dangers when applied to real world situations, others, however, may expose opportunities.
Behaviour matures on the basis of considered decisions. But such decisions rely on cognition. A harmony between word and deed is a function of understanding concepts and realities in their dialectic tension and synthesis. If we can clearly conceive such tensions and their sources any gap disappears or becomes synthesised as our words and our deeds follow our insight. Improvement of understanding and the promotion of clarity (provided it is sincerely sought) will lead to improved listening and may in fact offer the significant solution in bridging the gap.
Leverkühn and the Devil
Kierkegaard alerts us initially to a connection between music and the demonic. Thomas Mann takes up this lead in his novel Doctor Faustus. Here, none else than the devil himself philosophises about music. This establishes a precarious and provocative context. What is there to say about music from the perspective of evil and falseness?
The chapter in question commences with a report of the hero, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, reading in Kierkegaard’s discussion of Don Giovanni. Evidently, this is a significant starting point. It determines the following: An elaborate and somewhat shady discourse between Leverkühn and the devil. While Leverkühn is recovering from an attack of his illness which is gradually corrupting his mind and spirit, the devil adds to his confusion assuming three guises. He advances arguments as a lewd-bohemian, as an artist and intellectual and through his traditional, anti-theological self. All transformations are associated – easily it seems – with corruption and fraudulence. To be sure, it is not quite clear what status this conversation actually has and the spiritual corruption is not all that easy to unmask. Are the thoughts of evil to be taken consistently seriously? Is a double reflection at work here, a shady play with ambiguity? Is this an attempt to show the ambivalent in a radically ambivalent context? Or should we understand ideas, reflections and thoughts simply at face value?
Kierkegaard’s exposition of Don Giovanni in Either/Or identifies music as essentially demonic, as a “Christian art or, more correctly, as the art Christianity posits in excluding it from itself, as the medium for that which Christianity excludes from itself and thereby posits. In other words, music is the demonic”. (Either/ Or, 65) This indicates why Mann uses this reference to the “Christian who was infatuated by aesthetics” in this discourse. Qualifying music as the demonic is a peculiar thought. It appears on first impression objectionable. Is music not a medium of purification leading us towards transcendence? Does music not direct us towards metaphysics, towards the divine, towards Christianity? Is it a contradiction to refer to music as a Christian art and equally to refer to it as demonic?
The view that music leads towards transcendence may not deny its demonic, entirely this-worldly essence. For Kierkegaard music is a “Christian art” in a negative sense. It leads us to the divine by its very nature of establishing a contradiction to it. This puts music into an analogical relationship to evil which is predicated by the existence of good through expulsion. Such analogical form of reasoning also serves to establish the existence of the devil: God or the divine imply the existence of the devil and the demonic as their contradicting principle. Without the demonic the divine seems devoid of a fullness of meaning.
The merits of such a derivation aside, the conversation in Doctor Faustus corrupts the Christian starting point and extends further the complexities of the relationship between music and the metaphysical. This is an extensive argument, an argument that relies on analogy, on transposition and on metaphor. It is in itself an “artistic” argument, proving the corrupting possibilities of ambiguity which are said to inhere also in music and art. Leverkühn’s fate shows that ambiguity is responsible for the conception of music as demonic. But how does this come about?
In the first instance, the argument and music itself are separated from reason, from logos. Music is seen to reject the word as the primary disclosure of truth. The Christian view that in the beginning there was the word is replaced by the affirmation that in the beginning there is sound, inspired, intoxicated, transient and essentially unformed sound. This makes it easy for the demonic to actively claim music. Inspiration and enthusiasm are interpreted as intoxication and passion. In an inverted reasoning the devil explains why we can identify music as a “highly theological concern… like sin… The passion of the Christian for music is a true passion, which is precisely cognition and falseness in one. True passion” – he concludes- “only exists in ambiguity and as irony. The highest passion is directed to the absolutely suspect…” A unilateral transformation of ambivalence towards pathos supports any fall of music to the demonic.
In Leverkühn’s discourse, the devil is keen to seize this possibility of transformation. He claims for himself to be “the true master of enthusiasm” notwithstanding the original meaning of the word which refers to man in the state of enthusiasm as “possessed by the God”. (en-theos). The possession of enthusiasm is itself a formal possibility only. It requires a substantial qualification according to that which possesses us in the moment of enthusiasm. In Leverkühn’s case music becomes rooted in illness, in suffering and in pathos. Initially, music and art are nurtured and propelled by ambivalent forces. They are formed through a yearning for transcendence. Such a yearning is essentially erotic. In Leverkühn’s fate music establishes a dependency on illness when the originally ambivalent erotic drive is corrupted. It is also this ambivalence of the erotic that enables the transformation of illness into an essential attribute of life. Abstract reasoning suggests that illness is relevant to life in its contradiction. The startling and ultimately unsustainable real conclusion for Leverkühn is that illness nourishes his life and transposes it into a higher realm. “Illness, and especially suspect, discrete, secret illness creates a certain critical contrast to the world, to the average form of life, makes us resistant and ironical to bourgeois order and allows her man to find shelter in the free spirit, with books and with thoughts.” Illness is presumed to become an inspiration for art- in fact it transposes ordinary, “healthy” inspiration into the realm of the extraordinary. Illness nurtures music towards exceptional artistic achievement. With characteristic lewdness and corruption, a corruption that is nourished by metaphorical modes of persuasion rather than by reference to reason the devil’s discourse with Leverkühn exaggerates the abstract argument that illness is a part of life to imply that illness is in reality a ground, a foundation of life. Such a view does not only corrupt the thinking but it in fact corrupts life itself. A confusion of the ideal and real, a confusion driven by metaphor, claims real life for the devil.
It is evident that such ambivalences place music and the musician in a peculiar, though characteristic position. Music is a realm of possibility. Musicians are creators of aesthetic life. This also implies their potential engagement with music as a medium of decay. The conversation in Doctor Faustus formulates a terrifying consequence, a provocation and possible prospect: “The artist is the brother of the criminal, of the insane. Do you think that there was ever an entertaining work created without its creator being familiar with the existence of the criminal or the cretin? What, ill and healthy! Without illness life has not managed its entire life……” Confusing the distinction between illness and health, intoxication and inspiration has disturbing consequences. While the living force at work in either phenomenon may be congruent its substantial definition and interpretation transforms musical and artistic reality entirely. Leverkühn’s condition which is determined by a falleness to pathos constitutes ultimately an inversion of the human condition. It replaces a yearning for humanity with a lust for the demonic.
Tyranny and the true musician (Plato)
Tyrannical attitudes and titanic aspirations are not uncommon among musicians. Naïve patrons might believe that such characteristics necessarily accompany a strong, creative personality. Further still, some believe that these are only downsides of focused energy and creative determination and should in fact be nourished especially among public performers. A musician, so that view goes, who seeks to be successful must form single-minded desires, must crave spectacular fame and must pursue recognition relentlessly. She must nurture her powerful passions with extreme aesthetic or subjective convictions in the interest of music, in the pursuit of musical exposure and even regardless of the impact on others.
It is striking to note that Plato seems to suggest that a ruthless and extreme character of this kind may not even be a true musician. Book IX of the Republic contains a lengthy discussion about the nature and evolution of the tyrannical disposition. This discussion between Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus concludes with the suggestion by Socrates that the wise man “will always be found attuning the harmonies in his body for the sake of the concord in his soul.” Glaucon agrees with this conclusion. “By all means”, he replies, “if he is to be a true musician.” (Jowett translates: “If true music is found in him…”)
What is the feature of a tyrannical disposition? How does it come about? According to Plato everyone is potentially subject to a “terrible, fierce and lawless brood of desires”. The question is whether we allow these to determine our character and to form our existence and our habits without reflection or restraint. Plato suggests that a lack of proper education allows tyrannical habits to form. Absence of rigorous formation leads to unbalanced personal characteristics, pathological states of desires and amplified ruling passions. The tyrannical person develops because she is unable to resist the “indwelling tyrant Eros” and forms corresponding tyrannical habits and patterns of behaviour.
In circumstances of a pervasive liberal or democratic education – so Plato- a tyrannical disposition may in fact overwhelm and corrupt selected possibilities of the individual. This corruption progresses in a parasitic way: Unrestrained instincts capture desires which are found initially in a balanced context. These are converted into self-serving, self-sufficient subjective values and narcissistic aims. The tyrannical disposition operates entirely in the realm of appearance: assuming a “pomp and circumstance” it dissolves a functional harmony by amplifying single voices from a concordance of psychic forces. It suppresses the sound of legitimate desires. It denies without shame and without conscience any requirements for rational attunement or justification. In its relations with others, it seeks to establish power by forming associations of advantage and corruption and by nourishing its position through flattery and fear.
Plato’s understanding of the soul is relevant here. According to Republic IX the soul is driven by three “appetites and controls”: love of learning or wisdom, love of honour or victory and love of gain or money. The meaning and the validity of some of these values, however, is derivative. Honour and gain must be validated by reason. Rooted in appearance, the objects they seek are not necessarily able to fill the soul with meaningful or even pleasurable content. Such content can only be established if the will to power is committed to learning, understanding and wisdom. Without this grounding, the desires for honour and gain become tyrannical and the person becomes essentially unhappy, her soul devoid of meaningful pleasure.
How does this relate to the true musician? The brief comment in the Republic makes the suggestion that the true musician is in fact the person who is able to harmonise and attune the forces of her soul and character. This attunement takes place in relation to the love of learning or wisdom. In this sense the musician achieves the same as the philosopher: he listens to logos. That point seems to be further elaborated in the dialogue Laches where Plato defines as musical a person of particular disposition: “I take the speaker and his speech together, and observe how they sort and harmonize with each other. Such a man is exactly what I understand by ‘musical’- he has tuned himself with the fairest harmony, not that of a lyre or other entertaining instrument, but has made a true concord of his own life between his words and his deeds, not in the Ionian, no, nor in the Phrygian nor in the Lydian, but simply in the Dorian mode, which is the sole Hellenic harmony. Such a man makes me rejoice with his utterance, and anyone would judge me then a lover of a discussion, so eagerly do I take in what he says” (Laches, 188d).
According to this understanding what we say and what we do, the word and the deed are not automatically or accidentally aligned. They require an active will to harmony. Such a will must seek the guidance of reason. It accepts the priority of thinking and reflection in a search for understanding. This still implies an intuitive step in which we listen to- and hear the voice of reason. Such an attention allows the true musician to breach the abyss that naturally separates our reflections from our actions. He can do so with ease and confidence and on the basis of a will to harmony of action and reflection within his soul. If, however, this will and the love of learning are overwhelmed by a will to power, by amplified desires for gain and victory, the musician ceases to be true to himself. She turns into a tyrannical person finding herself constantly in the realm of action and at odds with human essence. The symptoms of such fundamental dissonance are an incessant flight and a pervasive fear. Plato’s point thus seems to be that amplifying a will to power in tyranny silences music while denying a will to harmony in ignorance corrupts the musician.
Musician or Philosopher: The Case of Friedrich Nietzsche
In 1887 Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher and amateur musician, sends a copy of his composition Hymnus to the conductor Hermann Levi accompanied by the following statement: “Perhaps there never was a philosopher who was in reality a musician to the degree that I am one. This does not mean that I could naturally be a completely failed musician.” Nietzsche’s comment is striking: How can a philosopher claim to be a musician? Why should this be relevant? And furthermore, how can we reconcile the view that someone claims to be a musician while admitting at the same time that this could well imply that he be “a completely failed musician”?
As often in the case of Nietzsche, we must beware of a superficial impression. Nietzsche was indeed a musician in the traditional sense. He was a competent pianist who could perform the piano reductions of operas from the Ring Cycle for Wagner, the master and his mistress, Cosima von Buelow, during visits to their home in Tribschen near Lucerne. In that respect Nietzsche surpassed Wagner, who claimed himself to have played the piano like “a rat plays the flute.” On occasion and when the master had retired, Nietzsche would improvise with ease on the piano for the mistress perhaps to disperse shyness and to dispel the awkward directness of conversation. Nietzsche was certainly an able pianist. He was also an enthusiastic, if self-taught composer. Music was central to his life. According to his own testimony he wrote music for “hygienic” and “dietary” reasons. Even when his complete mental and physical breakdown dictated long hours in darkness and silence, Nietzsche was- by some accounts- still able to play the piano. Reports suggest that he remembered fluently the first movement of a Beethoven Piano Sonata while no longer able to articulate thoughts and words coherently.
Nietzsche tried his hand at composition as a teenager. His musical works are published (Janz, Nietzsche. Der Musikalische Nachlass, Basel: Bärenreiter, 1976) and even recorded by curious and eminent performers (links to recordings of Nietzsche’s music). The musical and artistic quality of these compositions, however, already divided Nietzsche’s contemporaries. The distinguished conductor von Bülow, first husband of Wagner’ mistress and wife Cosima, assessed Nietzsche’s Manfred Meditations to have been the “most extreme in fantastic extravagance” and “the most unproductive and anti –musical” creation he had seen for a long time. He asked why a “high and enlightened spirit” like Nietzsche had plunged himself into such “piano cramps”? A Swiss violinist and conductor at the Zürich Opera House, Friedrich Hegar, articulated a more balanced view. Reviewing Nietzsche’s work he conceded that “naturally, the execution of musical idea is lacking in architectonic underpinnings so that the composition seems more like an evocative improvisation than a structured composition.”
It seems perhaps that Nietzsche was a failed musician in the technical and professional sense. While his general musicality and pianistic skills were competent he had never learnt the craft of structuring a formal composition or of orchestrating any of his works. His musical imagination appears now derivative and his music making may have been characterised by naivety and an absence of sophistication. The most important point, however, is that unlike the philosopher the musician Nietzsche remained a mere possibility because of such an absence of structured qualification. No matter how hard we try, we will not hear in Nietzsche’s compositions a reflection of his philosophy. This has a bifurcated reason: While Nietzsche’s philosophical capacity flourished, his musical ability remained undeveloped and his musical potential remained unexplored. This is precisely why Nietzsche may have referred to himself as a “failed musician”. However, what is left of the musician who fails in the technical or artistic sense? And furthermore: why did Nietzsche himself claim that despite his failure he was as a philosopher in reality nevertheless a musician?
In order to answer these questions we will need to consider the relevance of music to philosophy. In Nietzsche’s case, these two pursuits are closely related. As a fourteen year-old Nietzsche identified the transcending capacity of music: “God has given us music so that firstly we are lead towards higher things. Music combines all characteristics in it. It can elevate, it can tease, it can cheer us up, yes, it can even break the most brazen temperament with its tender and yearning sounds. However, its main aim is to direct our thinking towards higher things, to elevate and even deeply disturb us…” The capacity of music to challenge us and to lead our thinking towards a transcendence relates it naturally to philosophy.
For Nietzsche philosophy is a realm of riddles and of challenges addressing itself to those “with ears to hear”. In its comprehensive demands for a radical understanding of life, the thinking of philosophy ultimately encounters conceptual boundaries where the vessel of language flounders. The philosopher cannot restrict himself to propositional analysis and conceptual truth alone. He must be able to conceive and address the unsayable. At this point, music and philosophy are brought to a close encounter. Nietzsche indicates this encounter when he writes in the Yes-and-Amen Song in the third part of his Zarathustra: “Are not all words made for the heavy? Do not all words lie to the light one! Sing! Do not speak any longer!”
Philosophy and music emanate from the same source, wrestle with similar ambivalences and endeavour to articulate congruent fundamental truths. While both engage their subject matter within their particular technical, artistic and spiritual excellence, their limitations throw each upon the other: the limitations of music are exposed in her failure to find enduring form. The limitations of philosophy are encountered in the transpositions of transient thoughts into thinking. The philosopher must live with the limitations of philosophy just as the musician must live with the limitations of music. Nietzsche is not only a failed musician- he is also a failed philosopher, because failure is essential to the radical pursuit of philosophy. However, as a musician the philosopher achieves recompense for this failure and may complete the essentially incomplete. The musician too is able to achieve a completion: As a philosopher he can transcend the appearance of relentless transience and may indirectly save truth in the vortex of semblance and sound.
Music, time and temporality
Music creates temporal form while unfolding in time. This qualifies music as an art of- and in time. Our experience of music is ambivalent: music is particular yet universal, transitory in experience yet lasting in reflection. Our experience of time is similarly ambivalent: time is always present within our everyday concern yet it withdraws from our direct attention. Time is experienced with intensity, yet it recedes ephemerally from our consciousness. We experience time through music and we equally loose track of time in music. Time and music seem equally strange to understand.
When we directly confront time, we experience what St. Augustine identified in his Confessions: “For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time? And we understand, when we speak of it; We understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not; yet I say boldly that I know that, if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not” (Confessions, XI, 17).
Augustine identifies our fundamental perplexity when facing time itself. We become confused when we approach time directly. However, we understand time in its connection with Being. Time and being are essentially and strangely linked: without being in its various instantiations we have no conception of time. Without time, it seems we are unable to identify being. Hence Augustine’s affirmation that if something passes, is present or comes into being, time as past, present and future exists as well.
The philosopher of the enlightenment, Immanuel Kant identifies time as an inner sense, as the form of intuition, which itself cannot become the direct topic of our conscious attention or understanding. We perceive and conceive things only in so far as they are in time. However, this formal conception of time as a horizon of our consciousness and cognition, it seems, is not sufficient to explain the experience of temporality in music. In music we are faced with two distinct and seemingly incompatible manifestations of time: the time created by the music itself and the time in which the music unfolds. Susanne Langer has identified this as the difference between virtual time and clock time. Virtual time is the time of our experience with its intensity, flow and connectedness within consciousness. Clock time on the other hand is time as measured by the dimensions of past, present and future. Clock-time is a spatial projection, an externalisation of the experience of the flow of our consciousness. Clock-time is an objectified form of time. It does not represent out experience of temporality.
What then is the authentic experience of time? Bergson makes a well known distinction about time and its ontological roots when he distinguishes pure duration (durée) from spatialised duration. Our original and immediate experience of time is pure duration. This is the time of our experiential consciousness. Pure duration preserves the original interconnection of being and becoming. It preserves the entirety of experience in the moment of temporal unfolding. Pure duration (durée) presents us with a fundamentally musical experience of time. It is characterised by an absence of objective distinction, by an absence of measurement and by the absence of a spatial projection of temporal experience in a past, present and future point. Pure duration or durée is the experience of a flow which is not conscious of its own organisation, yet nevertheless connected in its unfolding. It is according to Bergson, the “form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” (Time and Free Will, chapter 2)
Time as we ordinarily describe and measure it, however, is conceived within a homogeneous succession of states. The homogeneity of temporal succession is based on a projection of time into spatial dimensions. The pure duration experienced in our consciousness originally as time is really a mere qualitative phenomenon. The conception of time as a succession of homogeneous states with its essentially spatial representation transforms time into a measurable quantity. A spatial conception allows the ordinary conception of time to measure time according to a movement of an object in space – the movement of a pendulum for example- and within the categories of past, present and future.
In music, an objective measurement of time and the conception of a determinable past, present and future diminish in relevance. Nevertheless, temporal form constitutes and structures music. This structure gives music objectifiable and even measurable characteristics and enables us to distinguish it from mere noise. But how does this temporal form structure the musical subject matter? It does not impose a temporal form from the outside but it rather creates a flow through immanent connections. Music constitutes an organic form of temporality. This is evident from the fact that at the point of listening, the listener does not always hold fast to her everyday determination of time. Music appears to create its own peculiar temporal form that is appropriate to the unfolding of its material and that is reflective of – and even congruent with its own intensity. Music constitutes its own temporal world within the unfolding of its material. The listener will loose herself in the temporality of listening and participates in the purely qualitative flow of intensity. To be sure, it may happen, that the ordinary consciousness of temporal awareness governs the listening attention in a background form. This attention may become transformed to a point where the musical experience absorbs it entirely or it may assert itself as a context of the musical experience. Composers may deliberately guide – or misguide- our ordinary temporal consciousness. Be that as it may, music affirms itself and its temporality and imposes temporal form on the listener. The phenomena of rhythm and meter show how musical intensity and temporality are related and how the listener becomes directly governed by temporal form.
Rhythm and meter are no purely cognitive or objective principles. They are fundamental principles of conscious life and fundamental to the constitution of being and becoming. Without the distinguishing powers of rhythm and meter and their capacity to divide the energies and intensities of our physical and psychic potencies, being would not have any distinguishing characteristics and it would remain inaccessible to our conscious experience- a senseless chaos. Rhythm, meter and the musical temporality of duration unify our existence and consciousness with its ontological foundations. Musical temporality thus appears to be at the core of human existence enabling the human consciousness to constitute meaning and to relate to being as formed and becoming as formable.
Rhythm connects music, being and consciousness. Because music is an art of- and in time, conscious perception is possible. Ordinarily we believe that such perception precedes music. In this understanding music is simply one of many aural phenomena made up of sound or sounds. However, this is not so. Music is the original sounding phenomenon. Sound is perceived because it is temporally formed. At this point, sound becomes music. Without rhythm, we would not hear sound just as we would not recognise any letters without knowing that such letters are organised into words.
Nietzsche and Wagner
The contact and conflict between Nietzsche and Wagner remains a most fascinating topic in the history of philosophical conversations. It continues to show us the fundamental tension which sustains music itself, a tension that extends beyond the clash of the thinker with the musician.
Nietzsche and Wagner met initially in 1868 in Leipzig. Although not a natural Wagnerian, Nietzsche, at the time an admirer of the music of Schumann, is drawn to Wagner on account of their mutual interest in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche and Wagner were both well acquainted with Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation and its references to the metaphysical centrality of music. Schopenhauer argues that music is the closest, albeit analogical reflection of the fundamental essence of Being which he calls “will”. Based on their creative imagination and intuition Nietzsche and Wagner are both attracted to Schopenhauer’s identification of “will” and to the elevated view that music sublimates individuation and difference and overcomes the alienation of essentially individuated, fragmented beings. For Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner music expresses, reflects and – on an aesthetic level- reconstitutes the primordial unity of Being. This unity is, however, threatened by conscious reflection. In his Birth of Tragedy and at the peak of his admiration for Wagner and Schopenhauer Nietzsche articulates this essence of music and argues that a decline of genuinely musical attributes is caused by critical spirit: The “spirit of Socratism”, the light of conscious reflection searching for justification, for reason or proof, expels the spirit of music and undermines musical essence. For the early Nietzsche, Wagner’s all-encompassing work of art (his Gesamtkunstwerk) aims to overcome this destruction reconstituting a unity of art not seen since the classical Greek tragedy. Wagner is seen to be reviving the essential characteristics of Greek tragedy and to be restoring music to its rightful place and character which is rooted in the Dionysian.
From 1869 Nietzsche, then a professor for philology in Basel, visits Wagner and his future wife Cosima von Bülow regularly in their residence in Tribschen near Lucerne. Wagner recognises in the young professor a kindred spirit. The composer hopes that Nietzsche’s thinking can provide a conceptual underpinning and public advocacy for his creative direction which may be acceptable to the intellectual establishment of the time. Wagner is looking for allies and even servants to his ambitious cultural project of placing his musical drama at the centre of German cultural life. The hope to find in Nietzsche a professorial servant becomes disappointed, however, when Nietzsche pursues radical philosophical depth and clarity which requires the articulation of a critical stance that includes Wagner and his work. With increasing philosophical radicalism and rigour Nietzsche realises that the understanding of a phenomenon cannot remain content with the articulation of an unambiguous view and with the pledge of uncritical, personal loyalty. His philosophical reflection asserts its freedom and autonomy. It must explore all dimensions and directions of thinking to bring to light the dynamic properties of the phenomena, of the subject matter at hand. This attitude includes a “rejection” and inversion of values. The phenomenon of life is at the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophical interest. Life – Nietzsche will argue- is only understood and affirmed if the fundamental contradictions that constitute it become clearly visible.
Nietzsche’s turn against Wagner is a necessary step dictated by his understanding of philosophy. In this sense Nietzsche will state that “attack is for me a proof of sympathy, in certain cases of gratitude.” (Nietzsche contra Wagner). Wagner and his wife Cosima, trapped in an everyday consciousness, will fail to understand this approach. To be sure, Nietzsche’s rhetorical flamboyance of referring to Wagner as a “magician”, an “actor”, a “decadent” and an “illness” is initially puzzling and must strike Wagner as offensive, since Nietzsche does not abandon his fundamental view that music properly understood and practiced must reflect an all-encompassing essence of life. But Nietzsche knows that in his duty to truth the philosopher must preserve a complex phenomenon in its complexity. There are aspects that contradict Nietzsche’s original enthusiasm for Wagner and there are aspects that contradict the very possibility of music and Wagner’s “all-encompassing work of art” becoming a metaphysical symbol. Indicators of these contradictions are Wagner’s involvement with semblance, his exaggerated sense of self and his need for “propaganda”, his unambiguous affirmation of death and his self-absorbed search for redemption, his emphasis on pity and – most of all- his invocation of an otherworld providing the human being with escape and redemption from the suffering of life.
Nietzsche insists increasingly on a comprehensive and radical approach in understanding the phenomenon of music philosophically. This view includes the need to explore how music – and Wagner- in reality promote untruth. On an existential level, Wagner was appropriating music for his own personal need of redemption. According to Nietzsche, he bends his knee in front of the cross and attempts to escape from life itself into a metaphysical “otherworld”. Yet, such an otherworld is a philosophical untruth, an unphilosophical fiction that denies life and leads to a diminished existence.
While remaining under the spell of Wagner’s music, a spell emanating from a “pact between beauty and illness”, Nietzsche rejects Wagner’s artistic directions on philosophical grounds. This rejection follows a re-evaluation of the place of the aesthetic. Nietzsche implies the demand that the musician – like the philosopher- must remain truthful and must remain committed to truth. This is difficult for the musician as music is an art of appearance and thus by essence rooted in untruth. But nevertheless, music and art must not become means to an end – not even to a metaphysical end. Wagner – so Nietzsche- precisely used music: in the first instance as a vehicle for dramatic illustration and secondly as a path to articulate and overcome his own personal suffering. Nietzsche’s point is that if music becomes a vehicle of life-denying personal therapy it looses its authenticity and integrity. The artist who uses music in this sense, shows his weakness and creative decay for it is primarily the role of the artist – as it is the role of the philosopher – to affirm life.
Two points thus seem to underpin Nietzsche’s aggressive attack on Wagner: Firstly, the demand that the existence of the musician must be truthful. This implies that the musician cannot use music for non-musical intentions. Music is essentially self-referential. It does not refer to metaphysical concepts. It may embody – or symbolise ontological forces. But it does not represent metaphysical dilemmas or solutions and it does not provide a vehicle for metaphysical escape. A musician who uses music for other purposes than making musical phenomena audible has abandoned his art and has become corrupt and untruthful. Secondly, the philosophical demand that music (like philosophy) must contribute to an affirmation of life. This is only genuine if life is affirmed in its entirety, including in its exposure to suffering, decay and death. Artistry which shrinks back from such comprehensive affirmation is for Nietzsche suspect as is a philosophy that fails to pursue radically an affirmation of life including its essentially and authentically abysmal contradictions.
Kierkegaard’s Don Giovanni and music as a spiritual art
Kierkegaard’s reflections on Don Giovanni (found in his book “Either/Or”) must concern us musicians: They identify music as the art of the “immediately, sensuously-erotic” and suggest that music is authentically devoid of reflective attributes. Transient temporality is affirmed as a fundamental determination of music. The pursuit of sensuality, an incessant desire for conquest and change and an absence of reflection and conscience all characterise Don Giovanni. This makes Don Giovanni for Kierkegaard essentially musical.
When confronted with this phenomenon an ordinary, bourgeois consciousness naturally thinks of moral disapproval. However, a moral judgment is strictly speaking not applicable here. Don Giovanni simply fulfills the conditions of an existence that is absolutely committed to continuous transience. The absence of a temporal consciousness excludes the moral perspective. An ethical state of existence only emerges where we find endurance and a conscious conception of presence, a temporal horizon. Only a consciousness of endurance and presence confronts us with responsibility. Don Giovanni’s transient being, his restless immersion in becoming, dissolves such a context and accordingly severs his attachment to responsibility. He remains unaccountable since he lives absolutely in the here-and-now.
An absolute commitment to transience and intoxication excludes Don Giovanni also from any form of communal justice. To be sure, a metaphysical form of justice catches up with Don Giovanni in the end. But this amounts to an affirmation of being versus becoming: The cold stone statue of the Commendatore becomes the hero’s undoing. Don Giovanni is presented with the consequence of his incessant becoming, with his own nemesis. But Don Giovanni is never brought to worldly justice or to moral account. He simply comes undone as his existence leads to an inevitable conclusion inherent in the original denial of being. The absolute affirmation of becoming (with its implicit denial of being) collides with a transcendent truth of being. The point is that an hermetic, absolute isolation of the aesthetic perspective cannot be maintained. It will meet – and fail in the challenge of enduring being.
For us musicians this seems to contain an important message: If Kierkegaard is right in identifying the aesthetic state of being as essentially musical, an absolute affirmation of music as a mode of aesthetic existence, of a relentless becoming, of incessant change and turbulent chaos, will loose its bearings. Musicians who deny being and relentlessly affirm becoming come undone. This occurs notwithstanding the fact that the essential nature of music is becoming and change or – in Nietzsche’s characterisation – the “Dionysian”. However, is music absolutely “aesthetic” or (with Kierkegaard) an expression of the immediately, sensuously-erotic? It does not seem so since music is also and perhaps foremost a spiritual art. A conception of music as a spiritual art commits us to conscious listening. Conscious listening is always reflective, however. It creates, discovers and commits to meaning within a flow of otherwise ever-changing impressions. In fact, the very possibility of musical perception requires the presence of consciousness. Reflection and consciousness enable the listener to recognise the signal as a musical symbol, to distinguish noise from music. At this point of recognition, however, the aesthetic perspective is transcended and forms of presence, of permanence and of endurance are introduced. Identities are established and with them the requirements of responsibility. It seems that this is the point of Don Giovanni as an opera. It is not the point of Don Giovanni as the character, though, who is a nihilistic phenomenon: a denier of the truth of being.
Musicians must take care not to confuse character and play: While grounded in becoming and in the sensuously-erotic, music is also sustained by being and mediated, reflective consciousness. In fact music forms a bridge between the aesthetic and the ethical state of being. This makes it highly significant. It makes it also subject to the tensions emanating powerfully from both force-fields at all times.