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21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 8. The Arts / a. Music

[philosophical aspects of music]

8 ideas
Music is a knowledge of love in the realm of harmony and rhythm [Plato]
     Full Idea: Music may be called a knowledge of the principles of love in the realm of harmony and rhythm.
     From: Plato (The Symposium [c.384 BCE], 187c)
Music has harmony like the soul, and serves to reorder disharmony within us [Plato]
     Full Idea: Music has harmonic motions like the orbits of the soul, and is not for irrational pleasure, but to reduce to order any disharmony in the revolutions within us.
     From: Plato (Timaeus [c.349 BCE], 47d)
Music charms, although its beauty is the harmony of numbers [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: Music charms us although its beauty only consists in the harmony of numbers.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §17)
     A reaction: 'Only'! This is a super-pythagorean view of music, as you might expect from a great mathematician. Did he understand the horrible compromises that had just been made to achieve even-tempered tuning? Patterns are the key, as always.
Without music life would be a mistake [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Without music life would be a mistake.
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols [1889], Maxim 33)
     A reaction: Cf Schopenhauer in Idea 21469. If you, dear reader, don't love music, then I sincerely hope that there is something in your life which can match it.
An interpretation adds further properties to the generic piece of music [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Interpretation may be regarded as the production of a token that has properties in excess of those of the type.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37)
     A reaction: I suppose so. If you play accurately everything that is written in the score, then anything else has to be an addition. If you play less than the score, you aren't quite playing that piece of music.
Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to it [Scruton]
     Full Idea: Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to the understanding of music.
     From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.74)
     A reaction: I would not have thought that many people thought music was representational, but Scruton particularly mentions passages in opera that seem to pick up aspects of the story. Do even bell sounds not represent bells?
One false note doesn't make it a performance of a different work [Simons]
     Full Idea: A performance of a certain work with a false note is still a performance of that work, albeit a slightly imperfect one, and not (as Goodman has argued) a performance of a different work.
     From: Peter Simons (Parts [1987], 7.6)
     A reaction: This is clearly right, but invites the question of how many wrong notes are permissable. One loud very wrong note could ruin a very long performance (but of that work, presumably). This is about classical music, but think about jazz.
Music is too definite to be put into words (not too indefinite!) [Davies,S]
     Full Idea: Mendelssohn said that what music expresses is not too indefinite to put into words but, on the contrary, it is too definite.
     From: Stephen Davies (The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) [2016], 6.4)
     A reaction: Not sure whether that is true, but it is a lovely remark. It certainly challenges the naive philosophical view that words are the most precise mode of expression.