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Hanslick, Wagner, Chomsky: Mapping the Linguistic Parameters of Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Eduard Hanslick's The Beautiful in Music (1854) is a classic of musical aesthetics. Its influence has been profound, not least as a polemic against Wagner's Opera and Drama (1851). The polemic was defended by the author in his preface to the seventh edition of 1885, which contains the oft-quoted evaluation of music drama as ‘formlessness exalted into a principle’. The Hanslick/Wagner debate defines an aesthetic and theoretical ground zero around which significant forces have been arrayed. The results have been complex and mixed. While Wagner's music prevailed and his theories were generally dismissed, Hanslick's rejection of music as a medium for expressing feelings articulated an approach brought to fruition by Heinrich Schenker (who unsurprisingly shared Hanslick's negative view of Wagner as well as his polemical tendencies).
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References
1 Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, ed. and with an introduction by Morris Weitz (Indianapolis and New York, 1957), 6.Google Scholar
2 Thus Ernest Newman: ‘There is no need, no reason, to discuss the “philosophy” of such a mind. He is no philosopher: he is simply a perplexed and tortured human soul and a magnificent musical instrument’ (Wagner as Man and Artist, London and Toronto, 1914, 324-5). Thomas S. Grey dismisses Wagner's account of his own harmonic principles on the grounds of its ‘primitive technical vocabulary’ (Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge, 1995, 183-4).Google Scholar
3 Thus, for example, Carolyn Abbate recognizes that Hanslick's ‘absolutist conception of music as “sounding architecture” shapes most twentieth-century education in music appreciation’ (Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton, 1995, 17). For an example of such influence see note 30 below. And in her recent study of music criticism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Sandra McColl remarks upon the critic's seemingly disproportionate influence on twentieth-century music criticism and even theory, noting that in posterity's judgment Hanslick has dominated consideration of musical journalism to the exclusion of his colleagues (Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896-1897: Critically Moving Forms, Oxford, 1996, 2).Google Scholar
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5 For example: ‘an inward melody … and not mere feeling, prompts the true musician to compose’ (ibid., 73). Hanslick pre-empts audience response as irrelevant to ‘effects of music': ‘However strictly an aesthetic analysis ought to be confined to the work of art itself, we should always remember that the latter constitutes the link between two living factors - the whence and the whither, in other words, between the composer and the listener, in whose minds the workings of the imagination are never so pure and unalloyed as the finished work itself represents them. Their imagination, on the contrary, is most intimately associated with feelings and sensations'. (ibid., 71). Such emotion-finessing strategies are found not only among Romanticism-deconstructing musical but also literary critics; thus Paul de Man can argue that the ‘total duration of the fiction can only be understood and interpreted from the point of view of a subject capable of encompassing within its scope a consciousness of its beginning as well as of its end. Because the character of a fiction appears in the guise of an empirical person, it does not possess this knowledge which only the author can bring to light. Therefore, the relationship between author and character is not governed by intersubjective feelings such as desire or envy but solely by an act of understanding’ (Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, Baltimore, 1993, 21). Waiving de Man's incoherent categorization of ‘desire’ as a ‘feeling’ like ‘envy’ (a move that would obviate a number of belief-desire emotion theories, for example O. H. Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory, Dordrecht, 1992, in which ‘envy’ is constituted by the ‘belief in the fact of an enemy's unjust reward plus a ‘desire’ that this fact not be true), erasing the logical circularity of ‘explaining the necessity’ of ‘understanding’ a thing ‘solely by … understanding’ simply leaves the standard anti-Romantic move to conjure away the intersubjective feelings and desires.Google Scholar
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12 Ibid., quoted from Ferdinand Hand, Ästhetik der Tonkunst, i (Leipzig, 1837), 50. Hanslick dismisses as merely metaphorical Hand's claims regarding the affinity of music for natural sounds (The Beautiful in Music, 109).Google Scholar
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19 Hanslick did not hesitate to appeal to the ‘nature of music’ in his critical writings, and McColl refers the ‘mysterious influences’ in this passage of The Beautiful in Music to inconsistencies in Hanslick's critical adjudications of specific bits of tonal syntax, for example to the critic's 1897 condemnation of the parallel fifths in the marcatissimo trumpet passage from Puccini's La Bohème as ‘harmonic atrocities’ and ‘ill-mannered monstrosities’ (Eduard Hanslick, Die moderne Oper, vii: Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, 1895-99; 2nd edn, 1899; repr. as The Collected Musical Criticisms of Eduard Hanslick, vii, Westmead, 1971, 84; quoting from the Neue Freie Presse, 7 October 1897, 1-3), whereas 50 years earlier he had defended a similar progression in a work by Alfred Julius Becher as ‘an aesthetical demonstration of force against the police régime’ (Wiener Abendpost, 20 April 1848, 333, as quoted in translation by Geoffrey Payzant, ‘Eduard Hanslick and the “Geistreich” Dr Alfred Julius Becher’, Music Review, 44 (1983), 104–15 (p. 111); quoted in McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, 1896-1897, 212-13). McColl also notes ‘in Hanslick's reaction to Verdi, another Italian, a recurring protest against “ugly” dramatic situations which are at odds with the nature of music’ (ibid., 216) - a ‘nature’ which is to Hanslick specifically occult yet specifically non-linguistic.Google Scholar
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28 Ibid., 24. Such differentiation between subjective and objective sensations must be distinguished, for example, from the James–Lange theory in which the sensation component of emotion is firmly subjective and physiological in origin, and in whose terms Hanslick's metaphors ‘whispering’ and ‘clamour’ would be simply unintelligible. See, for example, William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind, 9 (1884), 188–205; repr. in Carl Georg Lange and William James, The Emotions (Baltimore, 1922), 1-30 (esp. pp. 18-19). For critiques of the theory's sufficiency that touch upon concerns relevant to musical emotivity, see Rapaport, David, Emotions and Memory (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 15-16; George Turski, Towards a Rationality of Emotions: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Athens, OH, 1994), 51-4; and Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of ‘The Principles of Psychology’ (Bloomington and London, 1968), 212-16.Google Scholar
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30 To Scruton, Hanslick's argument exemplifies the ‘philosophical seriousness and competence’ of this ‘influential treatise’ that has ‘few serious rivals in the field of musical aesthetics'. Scruton thus follows the critic into similar incoherences, claiming that because ‘every emotion requires an object: fear is fear of something, anger is anger about something and so on’, ‘precision of emotion is always and necessarily consequent upon precision of thought’ and thus ‘music … is logically debarred from expressing emotion’ (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture, Manchester, 1983, 58). Here Scruton's ‘precision’ is as imaginary as Hanslick's ‘indefinite emotion’ and for the same reasons. The object-boundedness argument is based not on empirical fact but on a prior assumption. Given that all general knowledge of emotion is based on reports of interrogated subjects and given the nearly universal testimony of composers and listeners representative of millions of normal persons, then even were musical emotion to prove ‘objectless’ (which it is not) the reasonable conclusion would simply be that emotion need have no object. That emotion may be real and yet have an empirically ‘imaginary’ object is evident from the Freudian ‘transference'.Google Scholar
31 For example: ‘the more overpowering the effect [of music] in a physical, i.e., in a pathological sense, the less is it due to aesthetic causes’ (Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, 87-8).Google Scholar
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33 Thus Robert M. Gordon is obliged to establish point-of-view and value binarities as the foundation for further structural analysis of emotion: ‘With few exceptions, emotions are intuitively characterizable as “negative” emotions, such as fear, embarrassment, and anger, or as “positive” emotions, such as pride and gladness’ (The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy, Cambridge, 1987, 27 and discussion).Google Scholar
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37 See, for example, Richard Wagner, ‘The Art-Work of the Future’ (1849), The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1993), 67–213 (esp. pp. 79-80).Google Scholar
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41 For example: ‘Music does not portray the Ideas inherent in the world's phenomena, but is itself an Idea of the World, and a comprehensive one, it naturally includes the Drama in itself; as Drama, again, expresses the only world's-Idea proportionate (adāqual) to Music … As a drama does not depict human characters, but lets them display their immediate selves, so a piece of music gives us in its motive the character of all the world's appearances according to their inmost essence (An-sich)’ (Wagner, ‘Beethoven’, 106).Google Scholar
42 In putting the question ‘Does a vocal persona know he is singing?’ Edward T. Cone converges with Wagner upon a relevant insight: ‘every singing persona seems to be subject to a tension between the verbal and the vocal aspects of his personality. From the realistic verbal point of view, such a character is unaware of singing, and of being accompanied. Yet on the musical level he must in some sense be aware of both. How are these two aspects to be reconciled? A solution becomes possible if we conceive the contrast between the verbal and the vocal as a symbolic parallel to the contrast between the conscious and subconscious components of the personality. … Siegmund certainly does not understand the significance of the Walhalla motif by which the orchestra identifies for us his vanished father, nor does Siegfried comprehend the prophecy of the magic fire by which the orchestra foretells the occasion of his first and only fear. In this regard, Wagner's orchestra has sometimes been compared to a “collective unconscious”, in which each character participates according to his own knowledge and ability. To a certain extent every accompaniment is like this. Whether it is taken as symbolizing the individual or the collective unconscious, or Nature, or the Voice of God - or none of these - it must be assumed to be available to every character in question; but what the character makes of it depends on his own potentialities’ (The Composer's Voice, Berkeley, 1974, 33, 36). Cone arrives, via reasoning derived from the material exigencies of the operatic medium, at the formulation derived by Wagner from philosophical considerations.Google Scholar
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48 Wagner offers this not as metaphor but as analogy, as described by Janet Martin Soskice: ‘Analogy as a linguistic device deals with language that has been stretched to fit new applications, yet fits the new situation without generating for the native speaker any imaginative strain. This can best be shown by example: suppose that one encountered intelligent life on another planet … that communicated by means of the arrangement of fibres on its body. If we were able to interpret this new mode of communication, even though it involved no sounds at all, we should quite naturally say that the Martian “told” us such and such, or made this or that “comment”. We would probably not regard it as speaking metaphorically; more likely we would regard it as justified extensions of what “told” and “comment” really mean. This would be not a metaphorical but a “stretched” or analogical use of language’ (Metaphor and Religious Language, Oxford, 1985, 64).Google Scholar
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55 Donald F. Tovey does so in discussing the historical development of harmony: ‘The art of music had not attained to the simplest scheme for dealing with discords before it traversed the acoustic criterion in every direction, it became a language in which sense dictated what should be accepted in sound’ ('Harmony’, The Forms of Music, London, 1963, 44-71 (p. 46)). Tovey reminds us that certain theoretically dissonant harmonic combinations were in fact incorporated into musical language as consonances in preference to others which, in acoustical terms, are actually more consonant. Grammar, itself unheard, is the form or structure that makes ‘sense’ of the ‘sound’ that is heard.Google Scholar
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