Metaphysical Hearing ebook

English translation John Comber

translation supervision Jim Samson

project coordinator Ewa Bogula, Teresa Nowak

index Tomasz Barszcz

graphic design and typesettingLAVENTURA Maciej Sawicki

e-bookLAVENTURA Maciej Sawicki

cover image: Grand piano bridge pins and strings blurred background, (J4YXT6), © Alamy/BE&W

© copyright by Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina, 2021

published by

Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina

ul. Tamka 43

00-355 Warszawa

www.nifc.pl

ISBN 978-83-968033-6-8 (mobi)

ISBN 978-83-968033-7-5 (ePub)

Co-financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Contents

Introduction

IA critique of musical reason (Part 1)

Professor JOY

Witch hunting

Philosophical anhedonia

The Persian carpet and the question of emotion

IIA critique of musical reason (Part 2)

A cure for musicognosis

Grey matter

Abbate versus Berger and the Chopin Competition

IIIMetaphysical hearing

I alone as an Other

The inner record collection

A critique of life

The case of little Hanno

IVFrozen finiteness

A Larkinian sneer

‘A stranger I came, a stranger I depart’

VThe metaphysical hearing of Chopin

On the consolation brought by music

VIDeath or birth?

Musical genesis

Without beginning, without end

On the edge

VIISelf-portrait of a listener

A lesson in ascoltando

The misprized discourse of touch

Against an insensitive typology

Joyous science

VIIIWe are all critics. Interpretation as the experience of the foreign

Fidelity and betrayal

Disinterested dividends

The secularisation of Mystery

IXAre there no true critics left?

The metacritical perspective

An examination of conscience

The ethics of interpretation

XThe competition as a bourse of values, or music put to the test

The open work

The success of narcissus

The competition’s ‘here and now’

Artistic relativism

XI‘I was waiting for a musical messenger’

XIIAnatomy of madness

An existential thrill

Ontological security: integrity and distinctness

Music and trance

XIIIMusic and ecstasy, or the fear of flying

The thrill of emotion and peak experience

Anatomy of ecstasy

Mnemosyne and the brain

XIVAmorous unison and the discourse ofneurotransmitters

Heaven to rent

Love like music

Postscript: Sexual night

XV(Ir)reproachable manoeuvres on a slippery slope

Strategy one: sexually motivated murder

Strategy two: a catharsis of unbridled urges

Strategy three: the neutral whip

XVINostalgia for the Absolute: the morality of musicaccording to Peter Kivy

The mask of kalokagathia

Case study

XVIISecularised ritual, or the listener in a data cloud

Per aspera ad astra

The media and the degradation of music

The media and new rituals

XVIIIAltered states of body

The two bodies of the performer

Intimacy

XIXVirtuosity asthe transgression of corporeality

Paris as Pianopolis

The return of Marsyas

Orpheus

XXThe sick musician: crying out for help

The fragile home of the soul

Music as a source of suffering

Craftsman or sportsman?

Movement is life

Conclusion ποιέω

About the Author

Introduction

My piano stands in the library. When I practise on it, I often yield to the temptation to glance at a book lurking on a shelf, which usually draws me away from playing and forces me first to read and then immediately afterwards to write. Thinking in music – which is, after all, a non-verbal activity – is hard to conceptualise and far removed from describing things in words. Yet quite often an extended period of wordless thinking, of a kind familiar to the practising musician (and to many a music lover), allows us to succumb to the illusion that we can, precisely through this wordless thinking, grasp some important aspect of human experience in its entirety. We then discover, like Daniel Barenboim, that Everything is Connected.1 Music is underpinned by mathematical structures, and at the same time it somehow enables sudden brief flashes of insight into the meaning of our lives. The wordless logic of sounds stirs our thoughts. Barenboim’s book pulled me away from the piano today and forced me to have a stab at verbalising what it is about musical experience that is connected to life and that allows us to come close to realising George Steiner’s dream of seeking in music an answer to the question of what a human being really is.

In Real Presences, Steiner complains about the verbal prodigality of the paper Leviathan of derivative speech. He aims his accusation primarily at journalism, which exposes everything – the arts included – to the ‘bourse of momentary sensation’. Another guilty party is the modern-day university, which turns the humanities into a blind imitator of the sciences, measuring success by the accumulation of points, and judging scholars on the basis of an Impact Factor that supposedly gauges their academic effectiveness. Hence humanities specialists churn out their texts, ideally showing a scholarly interest in subjects that are new and have not yet been tackled by their rivals. In so doing, they purportedly produce research that can be empirically verified, as in the sciences, since only by realising grant projects can they hope to survive in the academic world. Against that background of verbal prolixity on one hand, and of pragmatic imperatives on the other, music comes across not only as a condition to which poetry might aspire (a perfect tautology of content and form), but also as a robust and pure mode of cognition, a new epistemology. One may even imagine that at times it deserts the ranks of the fine arts and joins mysticism and mathematics in forging the triad of Plato’s Timaeus. For music to lend us its wisdom, we should allow ourselves to be guided by the ‘thinking ear’ and develop that which – after Barenboim – I would call ‘intelligent listening’.

That is precisely the cognitive faculty that in this book I call metaphysical hearing. It should not be identified with specialised musical hearing, involving for example absolute pitch, a highly developed harmonic awareness, an exceptional musical memory, or any other of those tools that can be objectively measured and that condition the work of the musician, musicologist or music critic. Metaphysical hearing enables one to go beyond the aesthetic in musical experience. It is possible, after all, to deal with music in a competent professional capacity without possessing this ability. We might indeed regard ourselves as musical ignoramuses, unfamiliar with musicological terminology, and yet notice that everything is connected thanks to music. Let us imagine what a reviewer endowed with metaphysical hearing might write:

When I leave the philharmonic deeply moved after Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, that emotion runs the gamut: an increased heart rate, a sense of falling, goose bumps, a sort of fear, but also the feeling that something incredibly important has unfolded before my very eyes, and that this is a reference point not just for my aesthetic experiences, but for my life experiences in general. I cannot treat music as aesthetic pleasure alone.

(A) The all-embracing experiencing of sounds, which psychologists call ‘peak experience’, together with (B) musical embodiment, experienced by the performer as s/he absorbs and incorporates sounds, make it difficult to sustain most of the prevailing theses advocating musical formalism. Also over-reaching in this context are the declarations of some finitistically-orientated neuroaestheticians, who, in their attempt to investigate the nature of musical emotions, predict the appearance of such emotions and even attempt to catalogue them, based on empirical evidence about how the brain functions when observed using modern methods of neuroimaging. Following that path, one can no doubt answer many questions about the nature of musical stimuli and about how these operate on the receiver’s perceptual apparatus. One may also enhance one’s knowledge of the functioning of this apparatus, phenomenally designed by God and/or evolution. Yet that accumulation of knowledge inevitably comes up against a sense of mystery. Altering our perception of the world, the all-embracing emotion evoked in the context of individual musical experience cannot be categorised or unerringly captured by means of positron emission tomography or magnetic resonance. The musical brain is being described with increasing efficiency, but it still holds many secrets.

Metaphysical hearing is linked to the relinquishing of any hope that the world of musical experience can be set in order once and for all, and that it can ever be fully known. As the late Maciej Jabłoński, author of a manifesto directed against non-sensitive musicology and himself blessed with metaphysical hearing, used to say, the world captured in musical experience cannot be verbalised.2 Musical experience can, however (in a musical, not linguistic, way), be structured (this is where the role of the performer comes in), in order to seek out apt metaphors that enable the heard order to become graspable and ‘readable’ by all those to whom we wish to give an account of our experience, in order to impart a ‘social signature’ to it (the true role of those who speak and write about music).

For me, Maciej Jabłoński was a teacher who promoted dialogue between many methodologies that on the surface appeared mutually exclusive. Like C. P. Snow and John Brockman, he regretted that humanities scholars were unable to come to some understanding with representatives of the sciences. Hence he began forging a dialogue between a humanistically- and anthropologically-orientated musicology and neuroaesthetics. He listened closely to the evidence provided by empirical research into music as message, remaining faithful to the principle of infinitism (involving the abandonment of all hope of ultimate, certain knowledge about humankind and the world). Metaphysical hearing as a cognitive faculty, as described in my book, does not tolerate deafness to the achievements of the natural sciences. Thus, placing my trust in metaphysical hearing, I also follow the path taken (but not completed) by Jabłoński.

The non-verbal structuring of musical experience manifests itself (in a particularly noble way) in performers’ irrepressible urge to create further layers of interpretation of works that are perfectly familiar to the public. Paul Ricœur wrote about an ‘urge to translate’, fanned by dissatisfaction with the multiple successive translations of literary works. There are many charming analogies between the literary translator and the performer of a mu-sical work, but at the same time there is much that divides them. Generally speaking, musicians do not interpret a work for the umpteenth time due to any fundamental dissatisfaction with what other virtuosos have done. Even if they strongly accentuate the distinctness of their interpretative vision, they realise first and foremost Steiner’s postulate of ‘answerability’ – of providing answers to the question embodied in a work.

As we read in the essay ‘A Secondary City’: ‘Unlike the reviewer, the literary critic, the academic vivisector and judge, the executant invests his own being in the process of interpretation. His readings, his enactments of chosen meanings and values, are not those of external survey. They are a commitment at risk, a response which is, in the root sense, responsible.’3

This is a pure form of ‘faithfulness to the source’ or – to put it differently – respect for the canon, which values authenticity more than the novelty and innovativeness that is so fashionable in art. Steiner points out that the etymology of this word (‘source’) puts the humanities specialists on their guard: it speaks of beginnings, of restoration, of a return to the point of departure; it resonates with the rhythm of the source that throbs in the distance.4

One particular example of that irrepressible urge to incorporate and give new life to works that are already very familiar is that of performance competitions, including the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition held in Warsaw. Hence, elaborating on the intuitions of George Steiner, I will allow myself to make performers our ‘master intelligencers’. It is they who turn music composed in the past into a ‘present presence’, steering our listening and our interpretation of that music in a way that no musicologist or critic can do from outside. So it is to performers that I dedicate these essays, in which I attempt to describe the experiencing of music from their perspective, discerning common ground for mutual understanding between performers and audiences. The greatest proportion of case studies relate to the experience of the pianist and derive from piano music, and those references result from my own musical biography. One of the tools by which I venture beyond phenomenological insights into a wider experiencing of music is modern neurobiology. That is the path along which, as a humanities specialist, I begin to discover the natural sciences. I also refer repeatedly to the state of music criticism, which forms a bridge between artists and audiences, a bridge that may be understood to represent our (musicians’ and listeners’) shared need to arrive at responsible interpretations. Most of these texts were published in Ruch Muzyczny between 2014 and 2018; here they are revised and expanded.

I

A critique of musical reason

Part 1

Why must I be always ready with a witty comment on the latest novel by Jonathan Franzen and read everything signed by the mysterious Elena Ferrante? The answer is simple: because one ought to have an opinion on these subjects. Yet when I mention a moving rendition of Schubert’s Winterreise, I meet with surprise, indifference and helplessness among my highly educated humanities colleagues. And no one – myself excluded – feels embarrassed at that. Why is it increasingly rare for classical music to be the object of profound emotions, and for us to make some attempt to inscribe those emotions into the realm of enduring human values inhabited by listeners?

I am afraid that it is often we music writers ourselves who bring about this state of affairs. We turn music into an abstract arabesque or a subject for intellectual debate. Or else we succumb to passing fads and play with it like an experiment, while gleefully discovering that essentially everything can be music. Anyone empowered by modern technology to mix a couple of sounds together can feel like a performer and composer, and then, without feeling in the least incompetent, set up a band, strum a guitar or record the soundscape of their native city as part of a grant in support of experimental art.

And if that is the case, why does anyone need Schubert and his Winterreise,or reflections on different interpretations of Die Kunst der Fuge? Jerrold Levinson, in Music in the Moment, advises us to encourage non-musicians to develop a sympathetic attitude towards the classical repertoire by listening repeatedly to the same works, which allows even those who question the power of music to form a bond with it.5 But that can probably be done only under duress, as a kind of sophisticated torture, since our soundscaping grant scholar will not want to replace recording the sound of dishes in a hipster bar with listening to Winterreise.

Levinson’s prescription fails because the American philosopher moves within different circles of well-educated humanities scholars – if only because he was born in a different country, and a few decades before me. His elite circles discuss the flaws in arguments about musical formalism; mine do not. Yet we both know that it is far easier to write and speak about literature than music; after all, we are all creatures of the word. We also know that music triggers a different mode of thinking, and our experience of it does not really need verbalisation, so even if someone does fully experience music, they are better off keeping quiet about it. It doesn’t do to write about musical experience, because why would you reveal your essentially unscientific delight and defencelessness in the face of some notionally elusive beauty? Our grant scholars certainly would not – they would not invite ridicule with an affectation of confidence, too scared of falling into rhetorical traps. One of those traps is the supposedly trite topos that posits the inexpressiveness of music. It is safest to marry that with formalism, because then you will come across as learned and wise, and in extreme cases you will also diagnose your own lack of musicality. For the non-musical, music will never be something earth-shattering; at most it might be a source of aesthetic pleasure. Possibly also an object of admiration, like a duel between two chess masters or – in a slightly more refined version – a mathematical proof as followed by a fascinated observer.

Jerrold Levinson emphasises that musical formalism (together with intellectualism) does nothing to make people fall in love with music. Also of little use in such endeavours, in my opinion, is the forced ‘scientising’ of the humanities, which affects every scholar today, musicologists included. I will examine this critical situation, seeking fault in myself: perhaps, as a practising scholar, I am contributing to the appropriation of music by pure reason.

Professor JOY

My ally in this undertaking will be James O. Young, author of Critique of Pure Music. As a music philosopher, he fights against the demons of musical ontology, valiantly writing about its limitations and about what he terms the ‘pseudo-problems’ formulated within that field. He willingly enters into logic-based skirmishes when taking issue with his brilliant colleagues, among whom he most often chooses Peter Kivy. Kivy’s philosophy is also the prevailing system of reference for the questions addressed in Critique of Pure Music, the title of which evokes unequivocally the work of Kant (Professor JOY, as students of the University of Victoria in Canada call him, often employs word games, not only in the titles of his works). It would be an exaggeration to state that Peter Kivy’s concept of pure music (Music Alone) was just as important for music philosophers as Kant’s pure reason was for historians of philosophy. Yet the concept of Music Alone works as a finely-tuned defence of formalism.

The underlying ambition of Young’s book seems to be to offer a broader perspective on something that impairs the ‘pure reason’ of the musicologist and the music philosopher. Here, the critique of musicological reason involves cleansing reflections on absolute music of any impulse to turn it into a carefree, abstract arabesque, the sole rationale of which is to be both pure structure and at the same time ‘about nothing’. For Young, the pet examples of such ‘being about nothing’ are two abstractions: the mosaic displayed by a kaleidoscope and the Persian carpet. There is no doubt that neither one nor the other fulfils the ‘aboutness criterion’, and let us remember that this criterion is evoked by philosophers wrangling over the profundity of music: Peter Kivy and Stephen Davies. Although Davies is by no means a defender of the aesthetics of content, he does evoke the aboutness criterion in his reflections on the depth of music, confessing that it stirs intellectual unease within him. At the same time, he notes that the category of depth could be applied to works that are sophisticated in terms of compositional technique; they might remind one both of a mathematical proof and of a duel between chess masters, and in both those instances we are surely entitled to speak of depth. In relation to both the chess game and the mathematical proof, one might also say that they meet the aboutness criterion.

The same might be said about music. When it is sophisticated and complex on a structural level, it compares with mathematical proof by way of its intellectual complexity. Such music is ‘about something’ just as vital as a complicated mathematical proof, concludes Davies.6 Kivy, on the other hand, focussing on purely instrumental music, offers the reader a distinction between an adverbial and an adjectival understanding of depth. In his opinion, instrumental music may be deeply moving, but he does not agree that one may describe it as ‘deep’, precisely because the adjectival use of the category of depth requires a simultaneous satisfaction of the aboutness criterion.

It might seem that such a criterion could easily be met by opera, which does after all possess a plot. Kivy, however, doubts the ability of a banal and usually predictable libretto to reveal the psychological depth of the characters’ experiences. In his opinion, only belles-lettres – capable of speaking about complex states of mind – can be profound. Instrumental music, and even vocal-instrumental music, cannot be profound and cannot be about something essential; it reveals only the outstanding capacities of the human mind that created it. We may certainly ascribe the category of depth to those capacities, but not to the music itself.7 So it appears that music differs from the pictures in a kaleidoscope and from the Persian carpet only in that it is the product of a great mind – just as great as the mind of a mathematician or a chess master.

For Young, it is touching that Davies and Kivy seem to want to prove the profundity of music; and that they also want to show that it is about something essential. They are urged to do so by their musical sensibility and by their delight in music, reined in by pure reason. Kivy in particular is often surprisingly inconsistent in his reflections, as if disturbed in his cold, analytical philosophising by the ‘feeling and faith’ that say more than the wisdom of ‘lenses and learning’. He loses his thread when getting all het up against Davies. Thus it occurs – as Young notes with satisfaction – that ‘In the space of a page or two, Kivy holds both (1) that no absolute music is profound and (2) that Davies is wrong because some supremely well-crafted music is profound and some supremely well-crafted music is not profound.’8

One of the basic problems for Kivy and Davies appears to be their inability to distinguish between supreme craftsmanship and profundity. Describing the boundary between good craftsmanship and outstanding art poses a separate challenge, crucial not just for aestheticians. Let us note that this boundary determines the notionally elusive, yet tangible difference between supreme craftsmanship and something beyond craftsmanship in such a priori non-artistic fields as medicine (surgery in particular). That difference is of an axiological character and cannot be described without consciously referencing ethical, artistic and aesthetic values. Hence James O. Young rightly notes that it would be worth dwelling on the difference between outstanding, well-crafted music and profound music. The former can indeed be compared with chess games and with a logically deduced mathematical proof, whereas the latter requires insight into a world of values shared by both composer and listeners. Since this difference is of an axiological character, it cannot be grasped on the level of the pure analysis of concepts. It is also impossible to demonstrate that music carries intellectually profound truths, although Davies and Kivy do join forces in making the attempt. The only one to emerge victorious is Jerrold Levinson. Abandoning any attempt to show equivalents to true or false judgments in musical structures, he points to another possibility: to make it easier for listeners to gain insight into the world of their own experiences and to discover universal truths about humanity and the world (even if they are given in music in a veiled, and far from obvious way).

Witch hunting

The reader might find it hard to believe, but the experiencing of music need not be confined to listening; the silent perusal of a score can be just as satisfying. At least, that is according to many declared or unwitting advocates of formalism. That form of activity is of a purely mental character and – in Young’s opinion – often takes the form of an intellectual game, involving the formulation of some hypothesis concerning the musical ‘events’. So the listener, or rather the reader, gets excited when the composer springs a surprise by resolving a chord in an unexpected way, or is happy to have second-guessed the composer’s thinking. So it boils down to forming hypotheses and divining what will happen in the music. If indeed, for the formalist, ‘our interest in music is limited to interest in abstract patterns’, as Young argues, then ‘music lovers can substitute experience of reading the score of a composition for experience of listening to a performance of the composition, and receive the same aesthetic reward.’9 This kind of contact with music is more convenient, practically speaking, than actually listening to it. We can pause at any point and resume our reading after a lengthy break, just as we do when reading a novel. Another, softer version of the ‘heresy of substitutable experience’ is listening to recordings or live performances of music solely in order to identify the formal structures and to note what complex combinations of musical material the composer is serving up to us. In this context, Young writes about a game called cherchez le thème, which requires musicological knowledge and proficiency not just in reading a score, but also – and this can pose a greater challenge – in audibly picking out formal structures.10 That game – played either silently or in the real presence of the music – is accessible to few listeners; it excludes those music lovers who follow their intuition alone, and are unable to distinguish, for example, an inverted form of a theme from an augmented form. Young writes about ‘substitutable experience’ because that which is the principal object of the formalist’s intellectual game has little to do with the aesthetic experiencing of music.

At this stage, doubts and questions arise that should be directed not at the formalists, but at James O. Young himself. First, you do not have to study a score in silence in order to effectively play the game of cherchez le thème, since you can catch it by ear while listening to the music. Secondly, it is not clear why the game of cherchez le thème ascribedto the formalists should continue to entertain them during each successive reading of the same work. That which provides intellectual pleasure first time around will not have such a pronounced effect on a second reading; that is assuming that the effect of music depends solely on the accurate prediction of how some passage is going to develop. The pleasure we derive from our contact with music is surprisingly repeatable and far more complex, given that it arises many times over, even when the listener knows perfectly well what to expect from a work or a performer. So it looks like the formalists are playing not just cherchez le thème, but something more besides. And if that is the case, then Young is simplifying their position. Thirdly, as Young rightly notes, the silent reading of a score may be linked to a powerful musical experience extending beyond the intellectual game of cherchez le thème, provided that the score reader is able to imagine nuances of performance and also able to yield to the power of that imagining. (In this context, suffice it to recall the scene from Amadeus in which Salieri experiences musical ecstasy when looking through the score of a youthful work by Mozart.) Again it turns out that the heresy of substitutable experience does not essentially concern the act of reading a score per se. Here it is not the reading that is a substitute for listening; rather it is the cold analysis of formal structures that stands in for the experience of, and the emotional response to, music, and also for a sense of its profundity, in which Young, after all, believes. So we ought to take a close look at what advocates of formalism declare: if they listen inwardly, with the ear of the mind, then there is nothing in that which would merit criticism. And if they are not listening at all, only perusing the score like a map of intellectual curiosities, then they are not really yielding to the music’s power or succumbing to its depth.Fourthly, and finally, there are many definitions of aesthetic experience that speak of the ‘cold’ or ‘cognitive’ experiencing of beauty which Young seems to reject (be it only beauty as a dialectic of freedom and necessity). After all, the traditional aesthetic perspective admits of distance and isolation, and the distanced contemplation of the work of art falls perfectly well, for instance, within the Kantian paradigm. Young should rather first define what he understands as (deep) musical experience, given that the definition of aesthetic experience proves insufficiently capacious for him.

If we wanted to go a step further than Young and diagnose the heresy of substitutable experience more broadly, we would find manifestations of it also among performers, who might focus entirely on technical details in the interpretations of other musicians. In this case we ought to speak about a game of ‘how it is done’ (comment ça marche). In such instances, it is difficult for listening performers to open up to deeper aspects of an interpretation, as they are most interested in the nature of the articulation in the rapid tempo of Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 2, or in a performer’s ability to pick out the themes in complex polyphony with unusual clarity.

We must ask again: what exactly is the true object of the experience here, and what is a mere phantom of that experience? Young suggests the following answer: the object of the experiencing of sounds ought to be some musical ‘represented world’. Its deeper structure consists of something more than just the formal elements of a musical work. So the heresy of substitutable experience dwells on the surface of a phenomenon; it reduces music to pure structure. It disregards aesthetic and artistic value, respecting only cognitive value, which in the case of a musical work does not generally play a principal axiological role.

It is time for conclusions and to attempt a critique of Young’s standpoint. The ‘heresy of substitutable experience’ is an airy notion, and not devoid of charm. It encourages the reader of Young’s book to expand the scope of the diagnosis and to add to the group of ‘heretics’ those performers who, as listeners, focus on ‘how it is done’. It also seems that reducing the heresy of substitutable experience to just a game of cherchez le thème is an unjust simplification of the formalist standpoint, a closer analogy for which would be the attitude of a mathematician slogging away at a proof or a chess player in a championship match; it is an attitude in which the mental faculties are quietly focused on grasping the essence of a musical structure. A malicious commentator might replace the mathematician or the chess master with a pathomorphologist examining a body’s tissue in order to understand the cause of an illness – normally too late, alas, from the patient’s perspective.

Philosophical anhedonia

Listening silently to music has already been a subject of debate for philosophers of music, with Peter Kivy and Jerrold Levinson among those who have written about it. Kivy set ‘architectonic’ listening above succumbing to the charm of a musical moment. Levinson defended the concept of concatenationism, arguing that it was characteristic of human perception to yield precisely to that which was sounding hic et nunc.11 I will just recall those strands of the debate that are linked closely to the heresy of substitutable experience and enable us to see it from a broader perspective than the one proposed by Young in Critique of Pure Music.

Levinson, as a proponent of concatenationism, accuses Kivy of a tendency to overrate the benefits deriving from a holistic understanding of musical form from the standpoint of the aloof rationalist. Instead of delighting in the sound of music here and now, Kivy prefers to devote himself to the silent reading of a musical score. Levinson considers that overrating score studies leads to the deprecation of sensory, spontaneous delight in the ‘music of the moment’ and denies many unqualified listeners the right to musical pleasure. That which is discussed by advocates of an integral understanding of musical form reminds Levinson more of an intellectual pleasure, like following a mathematical proof or watching a high-level game of chess. Thus a dispute arises over musical pleasure. According to Levinson, musical pleasure is of a sensory nature and possesses numerous charms; it may also bring a moment of catharsis to listeners, moving them to reflect on the nature of existence. Let us note that the perspectives adopted by Young and Levinson converge on this point: they both want music to be for the listener something more than just a sophisticated product of a great mind, accessible to a small group of qualified analysts. One might add that Young and Levinson go beyond the aesthetic perspective that presupposes a distance with regard to the work of art and seek in music a transcendence of the aesthetic that approaches the metaphysical.

According to Levinson, we should sympathise with supporters of Kivy’s views, given that in their musical experiences they have never ventured beyond the superficial pleasure of following the sequence of sound structures, appreciating the inner order of sounds or discerning the dominant idea that lies behind them. Even if that does constitute some kind of pleasure, it is of a non-musical character, since what is specifically musical in the experiencing of sounds belongs to a layer that can only really be labelled ineffable. That is precisely the musical mode of thinking: being in the (non-verbal) musical moment, free from conceptualisation, and deriving from it a kind of pleasure that is utterly unique. Hence Levinson does not want the intellectual pleasure of the chess player or the mathematician to be placed on a par with the pleasure of someone communing with music.

Here is how Kivy repels that attack:

The satisfaction taken in architectonic listening is, of course, intellectual in some pretty obvious senses. It requires thinking – conscious, self-reflective thinking – while one is listening. It requires possessing explicit musical concepts such as sonata form, canon, inversion, stretto, counter-subject, answer, episode, and so on. All of that is, of course, a function of intellect. Call architectonic listening ‘intellectual listening’ if you like; call the satisfaction it produces ‘intellectual satisfaction’ if you like. But do not take the illicit step from ‘intellectual listening’ to ‘not listening to music,’ or from ‘intellectual satisfaction’ to ‘non-musical satisfaction’.12

So it seems that the ‘heresy of substitutable experience’ diagnosed by Young corresponds to ‘non-musical satisfaction’, which amounts to cold reflection on a musical work, but not listening to it. This definition of the heresy might indeed be accepted and agreed by both Young and Levinson, and Kivy makes a crucial contribution to that agreement. The duel between the advocate of architectonic listening (Kivy) and the apologist of concatenationism (Levinson) should be declared a draw, since each of those forms of communing with the musical work of art is strongly present in the listener’s experience. So both philosophers address the subject of co-existent forms of experiencing music. One of them engages above all the senses, sensitivity and imagination, while the other draws on sober rationality. The former requires the ‘live’ experiencing of sounds. The latter may be effected after the music has faded, in absolute silence. Both these forms of pleasure concern music and listening to music – be it ‘live’ or imagined. To close, one might just note Kivy’s disturbing ‘armed neutrality’ towards musical beauty. He rebukes Levinson over his enthusiasm for the idea of popularising listening to music among people with no musicological training, but he himself seems to suffer from musical anhedonia, since for him, listeners ought to be told ‘the awful truth that classical music is difficult to penetrate; that work is required; that it will only open up its glories to those who are willing to do the real work.’13

Sometimes it is precisely after analytical toil and great effort that an unexpected reward arrives: the revelation of some truth, the delight in some beauty that had previously remained concealed. Then it turns out that the architectonic and concatenational perspectives are two sides of the same coin.

The Persian carpet and the question of emotion

Let us return to the uncomfortable question posed at the beginning. How to turn well-educated consumers of culture familiar with literature and fine art towards classical music? How to convince them that it is not too difficult, and that one can speak about it without using musicological terminology? That question is becoming painfully current in Poland today, where humanities graduates are increasingly incapable of saying anything about music, although they are able to formulate sophisticated judgments about literature and painting.

That is precisely why Young’s proposition about discerning in sounds the representation of feelings is so crucial. After all, if most people feel competent when looking at representational painting, because (to simplify things somewhat) they understand and know what the picture represents, then that is all the more reason for them to be persuaded by a concept according to which pure instrumental music represents emotions experienced by everyone. Irrespective of one’s antipathy or sympathy towards emotionalist theories, it is hard to ignore the fact that both music critics and theorists use emotive terms in their descriptions of music. Thus Young evokes the examples of Jerrold Levinson, for whom the ‘nobility’ of Beethoven’s Eroica is taken as read, and Otto Jahn, who ascribes a dignified and solemn character to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony.

Philosophers and musicologists are not the only ones to employ such adjectives in describing music. ‘Tragic’, ‘solemn’, and ‘dignified’ are among the adjectives that psychologists have long found to be applied to musical performances by ordinary listeners. The formalist has difficulty explaining how these adjectives are applicable to works of music. It is difficult to see how empty form can be noble, humane, tragic, or dignified. I dare say that no image seen through a kaleidoscope has ever been noble. I have never seen a tragic Persian carpet. Neither are carpets frivolous or shallow.14

That is why treating music as pure structure or abstract arabesque is in the end a simplification. Before formulating his own theory of the musical representation of emotions, Young reminds us of the main theories of musical expression. He devotes a great deal of space to the evolution of the views of Peter Kivy (who revised his conception of expression several times in the wake of his book The Corded Shell, where he expounded the so-called ‘doggy theory’, based on the facial expressions of a St Bernard dog) and also recalls Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of expectation, as well as the anti-formalist concepts of Roger Scruton and Jenefer Robinson. Importantly, Young also refers to empirical knowledge, pointing readers towards experiments that reveal listeners’ cognitive-affective responses to music.15 In so doing, he exposes several cases of prejudice, one of which is the scorn with which Peter Kivy writes about the ability of music to arouse emotion in listeners. Although that ability is an empirical fact, Kivy employs skilful sophisms to show that it should not be attributed to music.16

Meanwhile, for the author of Critique of Pure Music, music can represent emotions, arousing them in listeners and prompting those listeners to reflect on emotions, provided, that is, it meets the following conditions:

1) the composer (performer) intended the work to be perceived as expressive,

2) listeners perceive the work as expressive,

3) the work perceived as expressive also contains cognitive potential, although this is not necessarily in the form of conceptual knowledge.

It goes without saying that composers do not always want their music to express emotions, but Young by no means states that every musical work has to represent emotions. Fortunately, the conditions he gives can be empirically verified, and all the more effectively nowadays in that such verification is not confined to asking composers or listeners about their intentions; reactions to music can also studied by means of neuroimaging, for instance. And it turns out that music can represent emotions in a similar way to paintings, which also arouse affective reactions and cognitive responses in viewers. What is more, music sometimes evokes more powerful responses than words or images, as is indicated by experiments that assess the impact on the listener of music when used in conjunction with words or images.

Young emphasises that music’s ability to represent emotions also explains why, for many listeners, the experiencing of sounds affords them psychological insight into themselves. Let us recall Jerrold Levinson’s conviction that music, although it does not embody conceptual knowledge, does make listeners aware of a certain order to their inner world. It acts like a catalyst for our understanding of reality – and that is where its profundity lies.17

The author of Critique of Pure Music adds that music can do considerably more, since it possesses the capacity to represent what might be called the moral tenor of emotions. The possibility of representing emotions from a broader perspective and the fact that music can both arouse them in the listener and act as their expressive embodiment means that, for example, sadness can be depicted as noble, tragic or dignified.

The listener can recognize what emotions have been aroused and what expressive behaviour is represented in a piece of music. For example, the listener can feel sadness and at the same time recognize that the behaviour expressive of that emotion is dignified or noble. Listening to a different performance, the listener can feel joyful and yet recognize that the expression of the emotion is stately or playful. As a result, when listeners grasp the content of a work of music, they can know more than what the emotion feels like. They can also gain insight into the moral character of an emotion. They can learn, for example, that grief can be noble, dignified, or despairing.18

One argument against the concept of the musical representation of emotions might be the indeterminate nature of the Affekte represented by music. There are two possible responses to that accusation. First, that indistinctness, or non-specificity, is not a property of the music itself, but of the emotions. We often wrestle with this in our everyday lives, when telling someone about our emotional state and realising how hard it is to speak about it. Not infrequently, it is only through dialogue that we come to understand the emotions we have experienced. The same thing occurs with music, which allows us to recognise and name emotions precisely when it resonates with our inner life. Here there arises another doubt, which the advocate of formalism uses against Young’s conception, asking which emotions we are discussing: those present in the listener or in the music. Perhaps we should answer with a similar question: does Molière’s Tartuffe represent the inner hypocrisy of the hero or perhaps the hypocrisy of many of us?

Secondly, Young’s concept speaks of something more than just the reflection of emotions by way of music. Indeed, in light of his argumentation, music forms a complex and rich represented world, a world in which emotions generate a particular context and reveal various moral aspects of sadness, joy, anger or fear. Discerning this context is a task for sensitive and rational interpreters – a role taken not just by the performers of musical works, but also by the listeners (critics, music lovers) inscribing the musical experience onto their own world of values. That experience may then stimulate insights into interpreters’ own emotional worlds and – more crucially – reflections on their own axiological resources. And that would be a crucial step towards restoring to music its due place in our culture. Neither a Persian carpet nor a carefree arabesque can incline us to revise our views on eschatological matters and fundamental values. But music can. And that ability of music seems like a worthy challenge for the musical mind. It is linked to the need to grasp the difference between excellent craftsmanship and that axiological je ne sais quoi which means that musical experience embellishes our everyday life and turns it into a celebration.

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About the Author

Anna Chęćka – philosopher and pianist, Dr hab. in philosophy. She is currently head of the School of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the University of Gdańsk, where she works as a professor. She works regularly with Gdańsk Music Academy, the Artes Liberales Faculty of the University of Warsaw, and the Chopin Museum in Warsaw. Available on the Fryderyk Chopin Institute’s website is her series of lectures illustrating piano playing, entitled ‘With a philosopher’s ear’. During the pandemic, she has recorded a series of video lectures popularising the aesthetics of Roman Ingarden, which appeared on the Internet in June 2020 in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of Ingarden’s death. As an essayist and music critic, she works regularly with Ruch Muzyczny. She has published the books Dysonanse krytyki [Critical dissonance] (Gdańsk, 2008), Ucho i umysł. Szkice o doświadczaniu muzyki [Ear and mind: sketches on experiencing music] (Gdańsk 2012) and A jak Apollo. Biografia Alfreda Cortota [A for Apollo: a biography of Alfred Cortot] (Warsaw 2019).