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Trouble in Arcadia: Music Aesthetics and the Bounds of Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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1 Two quotations suffice to show the critical tendencies. First, from Hanslick: ‘[there is a] paradox of why women, who by nature are preeminently dependent on feeling, have not amounted to much as composers. The cause of this lies … precisely in the plastic aspect of musical composing, which demands renunciation of subjectivity'; and ‘the moral influence of tones increases with coarseness of mind and character … as is well known, music exercises the strongest effect upon savages'. Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (8th edn, Vienna, 1891), trans. Geoffrey Payzant as On the Musically Beautiful (Indianapolis, 1986), 46, 61. Second, from Tolstoy: ‘[some works of art are said to be] very good, but very difficult to understand … [this] is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good, but that most people cannot eat it'. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, What is Art? (1898), quoted in Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (Alabama, 1966), 312.Google Scholar
2 See, for example, the criticisms in Bourdieu, Pierre, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979); David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London, 1987); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990); Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London, 1997); and Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam, 1998).Google Scholar
3 Kivy, Peter, for example, in discussing musical politics and the complex relationship between composer and performer, remarks as follows: ‘this is an interesting social phenomenon in the musical world, worthy of study by the appropriate disciplines'. Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 282.Google Scholar
4 Kramer, Lawrence, for example, in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1995), xiii–xiv, promises to ‘theorize the interrelations of music, musicology and postmodern thought … explore the consequences, many of them political, of taking up problems in music aesthetics [and] the cultural politics of music … [while] … an epilogue brings together many of the leitmotifs of the volume … [and the envoi attempts] … to begin widening further the possibilities of acceptable discourse on music'. For a critique of this approach see my review in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (1997), 90–2.Google Scholar
5 It should not be thought that the appeal to tradition has been the exclusive preserve of right-wing critics such as Peter Fuller and Roger Scruton. Fredricjameson, a Marxian critic, has stressed the importance of a ‘historicized’ tradition in his Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London, 1990), and Jürgen Habermas's ‘grand narrative’ view of tradition made him the principal target of Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1979).Google Scholar
6 Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London, 1983), 9.Google Scholar
7 Compare, for example, North American products such as The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (New York, 1991), and Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Brighton, 1980), with British and European examples such as A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. David Cooper (Oxford, 1992), and Carl Dahlhaus, Musikästhetik (Cologne, 1967). Even so, there are exceptions, with Americans such as Monroe Beardsley and George Dickie always preferring the term ‘aesthetics'. In Britain and France the preference for ‘aesthetics’ was probably established out of some kind of intellectual elision with the so-called ‘aesthetic movement’ in art: on this phenomenon see Chai, Leon, Aestheticism (New York, 1990), and William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, 1945). The term ‘aesthetics’ was invented by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735. A very rare (and slightly puzzling) example of cultural symbiosis on this matter can be found in the title of a book edited by Oswald Hanfling, Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford, 1992). The recently published four-volume international encyclopaedia of the discipline, edited by Michael Kelly from Columbia University, is entitled Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar
8 There are some scattered remarks on the subject. See, for example, Sparshott, Francis, ‘Aesthetics of Music: Limits and Grounds’, What is Music?, ed. Philip Alperson (New York, 1987), 33–98; Essays on the History of Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Rochester, NY, 1992), ix-xi; and my own favourite: John Passmore, ‘The Dreariness of Aesthetics’, Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton (Oxford, 1959), 36-55.Google Scholar
9 Crowther, Paul, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar
10 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Ashley Willoughby (Oxford, 1967). See especially the introduction, pp. xv-xx, for an account of the interplay between the unfolding consequences of the French Revolution and Schiller's aesthetic ideas.Google Scholar
11 Bowman's remark echoes a more famous one: ‘The history of Western philosophy is, after all, no more than a series of footnotes to Plato’, attributed to Alfred North Whitehead, but unsourced. See, for example, The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, ed. John Michael Cohen and Mark Julian Cohen (Harmondsworth, 1971), 240.Google Scholar
12 Scruton, Roger, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London, 1974), viii.Google Scholar
13 Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II. Scruton himself gives an excellent, brief summary of Locke's ideas in his A Short History of Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Wittgenstein (London, 1981), ch. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. James Meredith (Oxford, 1952). On the interplay between imagination and understanding see Book I, unit 22; on the antinomy of taste see the Second Section, unit 56; and on the moral and the aesthetic see Book II, units 29 and 42. For Scruton's appraisal of Kant see his Kant, Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar
15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Oxford, 1953). On the ‘grammar’ of private experiences see Part I, sections 572ff.; on seeing things ‘under an aspect’ see Part II, section xi; on language as a ‘form of life’ see Part I, section 23; and on ostensive definition see Part I, sections 27-36. For Scruton's view of Wittgenstein see his A Short History of Modem Philosophy, ch. 19, and the many references in his Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (London, 1994).Google Scholar
16 See, for example, Feld, Steven, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, 1982; 2nd edn 1990). And, further, the suggestion by Richard Wollheim (in his Art and its Objects, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1980, 102), that Messiaen listened to birdsong as if it were already music.Google Scholar
17 Strawson, Peter, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, 1959). See especially Part I, Section 2: ‘Sounds’, 59-86.Google Scholar
18 See, for example, Bennett, Jonathan, Events and their Names (Oxford, 1988); and Lawrence Lombard, ‘Event Theory’, A Companion to Metaphysics, ed. Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (Oxford, 1995), 140–4.Google Scholar
19 Trans. Anscombe, Part II, section xi.Google Scholar
20 See, for example, Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1962);Jacques Derrida, ‘La mythologie blanche’, Poétique, 5 (1971), 1–52, trans. F. Moore as ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, New Literary History, 6 (1974), 5-74; Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris, 1975); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980); Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford, 1987); and Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Oronty (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1993).Google Scholar
21 See Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1969), Section II, units 5-9. For a critique of Goodman's views see Scruton's ‘Art, Language and Nelson Goodman’, The Politics of Culture (Manchester, 1981), 58–63; and his Art and Imagination, 221ff.Google Scholar
22 Beardsley, Monroe, ‘The Metaphorical Twist’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22 (1962), 293–307.Google Scholar
23 Paddison, Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), 13. See also John Frow, ‘Mediation and Metaphor: Adorno and the Sociology of Art’, Clio, 12 (1982), 37–66.Google Scholar
24 For a critique of Scruton's views on musical representation see Kivy, Peter, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton, 1984), 146–59. Scruton's reply to Kivy can be found in The Aesthetics of Music, 124-5.Google Scholar
25 Roger Scruton's theory of metaphorical hearing has been developed over many years. For other criticisms of that theory see Budd, Malcolm, ‘Understanding Music’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (supp. vol., 1985), 239–45; Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination and Culture (Oxford, 1990), 24; and Naomi Cumming, ‘Metaphor in Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Music’, Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1994), 3-28.Google Scholar
26 See, for example, the accounts in John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, 1986); and Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge, 1997).Google Scholar
27 See Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’, Essays on the History of Aesthetics, ed. Kivy, 3-64. Kristeller's account was originally published in two parts in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), 496–527, and 13 (1952), 17-46.Google Scholar
28 See Music in European Thought, 1851-1912, ed. Bojan Bujić (Cambridge, 1988); Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William W. Austin (Cambridge, 1982); and Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (2nd edn, Oxford, 1997). For a variegated exploration of (amongst other things) the musico-transcendental traditon, see Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 1998). Some of Nietzsche's compositions were recorded on the Philips label in 1995 (Philips 426 863-2), and a selection of Adorno's works appeared in 1990 (Wergo WER 6173-2). The musical connections of Wittgenstein's family are well known.Google Scholar
29 Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art (London, 1987).Google Scholar
30 Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (London, 1971).Google Scholar
31 See, for example, his The Aesthetics of Architecture (London, 1979).Google Scholar
32 There are two novels – Fortnight's Anger (Manchester, 1981) and Francesca (London, 1991); a book of short stories – A Dove Descending (London, 1991); a collection of dialogues as if written by Socrates’ wife – Xanthippic Dialogues (London, 1993) – some of which were performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1990; and some musical works. His one-act opera The Minister was given a private performance in 1994, and again at the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, in May 1998. Moreover, The Aesthetics of Music quotes from two more of his compositions: Portraits and Weddings and Three Lorca Songs.Google Scholar
33 For example, Peter Kivy's Sound and Semblance and Jerrold Levinson's Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY, 1997) are both ‘extensively illustrated with music examples’, and the collected writings of several authors hint at a steady progression through the field of issues.Google Scholar
34 See, for example, his Art and Imagination, 98ff.Google Scholar
35 See his remarks in ‘On the Problem of Music Analysis’, introduced and translated by Max Paddison, Music Analysis, 1 (1982), 169–87 (esp. pp. 175-6).Google Scholar
36 Not surprisingly, similar issues arise in Scruton's The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism (Manchester, 1994), and in the book by the Prince of Wales, A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture (London, 1989).Google Scholar
37 At least, this is a common characterization of Hegel's position, though the scattered remarks in his Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. Malcolm Knox (Oxford, 1975), and his Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1979), are less clear than the formulation suggests.Google Scholar
38 Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986).Google Scholar
39 For a brief survey of these positions see, for example, Roger Scruton, ‘Art’, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London, 1982), 27–8.Google Scholar
40 Ernst Gombrich, ‘In Search of Cultural History’, Ideals and Idols (Oxford, 1979), 24–59 (p. 46).Google Scholar
41 For a survey of 12 types of autonomy to be found in art see Göran Hermerén, ‘The Autonomy of Art’, Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, ed. John Fisher (Philadelphia, 1983), 35–49.Google Scholar
42 Gadamer's fear that scientific methods of disclosure will usurp all other forms – that ‘method’ will consume ‘truth’ – can be traced not only in his Truth and Method, trans. Joel C. Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (2nd edn, New York, 1989), but also especially in his The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar
43 Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, MA, 1971).Google Scholar
44 Scruton himself invokes the distinction between function and purpose (p. 458), as does Lambert Zuidervaart in his Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of an Illusion (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 228–31. See also ch. XI ('Uses and Functions') of Alan Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964), and the discussion of Merriam's ideas in Bruno Netti, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, 1983), 149-61.Google Scholar
45 See above, n. 15. For a useful summary of the complexities of this notion in Wittgenstein's writings, see the entry ‘Form of Life’ in Hansjohann Glock, A ‘Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford, 1996), 124–9.Google Scholar
46 See Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, 1970).Google Scholar
47 Consequently he is reduced to making remarks such as the following: ‘If any social function can be ascribed to art at all, it is the function to have no function.’ Theodor W. Adomo, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London, 1984), 322.Google Scholar