At the very end of that thread I posted up an article by Kendall Walton which i thought took a better stab at a method
(his categories view) of accessing art then many other theories:
However I don’t think there can be any comprehensive “theory of art” - the most you can have is a subjective judgment which appeals to a wider community but puts forward some sort of reasons for that view (Kant in the Critique of Judgment more or less)
I mean the purest of all the arts - where there is apparently an almost perfect fusion of form with expression, where the form is somehow the content and the meaning, where there is no effort in absorbing what is written or expressed- where, in short, there is an ineffable communication and communion of mind and spirit. A quasi religious experience, higher than the other arts. In the other arts, there is more messiness, the tangling with language, actors, paint, stone - but music is more free of the medium of performance or setting. So it is more abstract and therefore can aspire more towards perfection.
I am not able to express myself with philoshopical precision unfortunately
I believe we can show that Bach is greater than Bartok - in a way that is somewhat analogous to the way we can say that X is a greater mathematician than Y
I have decided for myself that German music is the greatest - but I do not clearly understand why this came about (why the Germans had such a genius for music); nor do we in general understand the significance of the fact (it is a massive phenomenon after all); from there we should attempt to interpret this body of music in ways that have not been achieved. This is a matter for music-lovers, critics, scholars, and philosophers too.
To kossie:
OK i will look up the topic thanks and see if it offers illumination
The article I cannot access at present, but when I get to the local Uni library I should be able to - thanks
No worries - its a good read if you can get it or you can try print out the mangled cut and paste job I did of it on the end of the thread above.
I don’t think that aesthetic judgments can ever be presented as strongly as ones such as I know that that thing there is a common earth worm.
On the other hand I believe that grounds can be presented for saying x work is better then y - sometimes pretty strong ones.
Cleverly turning the old aesthetics problem around on philosophy itself the wonderful (to my mind) Stanley Cavell has put forward the idea that all philosophical views should be presented like aesthetic judgments e.g. as subjective views appealing for universal support on the basis of reasons but not put forward as absolute truths/generally applicable principals about the world.
That philosophy is not “entitled” to any higher level of certainty/knowledge/truth/foundation etc from which to defend itself.
A sort of Summary via Amazon books by Stephen Mullhall here
I’d not agree that music is more free of performance than other forms, and John Cage would certainly disagree with the argument of setting.
It has a purity in that it is arranged in only one dimension - time - as opposed to two (e.g. painting), three (sculpture) or four (dance).
I think you’d have to define the criterion by which a musician (or, for that matter, mathematician) is measured for greatness. A good knife is sharp, a good door is sturdy - for a musician you have no clear function. A virtue requires a goal to propel its holder towards.
Well then, simply decide for yourself that Bach is greater than Bartok. Problem solved
I’ve just finished reading Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus - if you’ve not read it, you might enjoy its lengthy discourses on music, high culture and barbarism.
The mooing of a cow and Beethoven’s ninth are both equally valid sensations. Do the pleasing and impressive qualities of something lie in the ear of the beholder? Does it lie in the sound? Where does it lie?
That is one great book. There we have the Nietzschian Dr. Faustus, portrayed as the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, whose story is told by his friend Serenus Zeitblom. This Faustus is an artist on a fantastic mission, who wants all the glory and greatness of genius as a composer and will do anything, sacrifice everything, to get it… and he does. Like Nietzsche, he visits a prostitute one time and contracts the “pox,” except that he, Leverkuhn, does so on purpose, in order to take in the spirochete, which he hopes will alter his brain in such a way as to make him receptive to conversations with Mephistopheles, whereby he can make a contract with said Mephistopheles and obtain the necessary inspiration and stamina that would enable him to produce great musical compositions. Thus, his brain indeed becomes open to the ministrations of Mephistopheles, but whether Leverkuhn is speaking with the real Mephistopheles or simply a figment of his diseased imagination is always uncertain; and it’s this ambiguity that accounts, at least in part, for the virtuosity of Mann’s work. This book includes much in the way of German art and the history of music, including Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost, the first opera composed by Leverkuhn… and the thematic thread of the diabolus in musica adds more resonance to the story:
Albrecht Durer also poses a very weighty influence on Leverkuhn, mainly through his work Melankolia, which contains the “magic square,” notwithstanding the sharing of the spirochete, with syphilis also being a significant corollary to Germany’s national misfortune.
The price that Leverkuhn pays, of course, is very high and involves much more than just the loss of sanity in the end; and the book also operates as a vehicle for showing people the decadence of early 20thc. Germany as a kind of hothouse bloom, represented by the narrator Serenus Zeitblom (Timebloom). The question is: do we remain in the decadent haze of nineteenth century views of mythology and religion? Or do we move ahead into a new and modern age, growing new and healthy blooms in a fine and wholesome earth where old and rotten plants, i.e., mistaken and out-dated ideas, are discarded for the sake of the new? These are questions we could be asking now as well…
And, as per a Nietszchean perspective, can the hammer of art, particularly music, truly play us like a well-wrought tuning fork? And the idea of Art as the great Unmasker is quite a speck, beam actually for some, to irritate each respective eye. Now, whether Art can unblind those who do not wish to see is another matter; but I do understand that the ear cannot close out the tone. Maybe music has a power over and beyond the visual.
If Chaplin is the contradiction to Hitler, visually and emotionally through a little kind of pathetic humor,… what is the contradiction to Wagner and the Uebermann? In other words, who is the Chaplin of music? Or do we need to combine the written word, the picture, AND music as Thomas Mann did with Doktor Faustus, where we get a great collage of Durer’s Melankolia, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, a rather unlikely but workable counterpositioning of opera and atonal music, and of course Zeitblom’s strangely ironic and wordy picturing of a particular German microcosm that “blooms” the hothouse flower of decadent Nazism and watches it rot.
I love this line:
Art has power. Art unmasks. Art tells lies in the service of truth. (Whereas governments lie in order to conceal truth.)
There are many symbols of math and alchemy. It’s the square with the sixteen numbers that’s important. In any direction, any four numbers in a row add up to 32.
Moving on… now we have the modern Faust, the man of power and corporate wealth who moves people and presidents around like pawns on a stick. But the question is not whether he is w o r t h something, or whether he is relatively better than the former Fausts or not. It’s that he must sell his soul for power and wealth; and in doing so, he l o s e s the very jewel of his life, his heart and his connection with the human and divine in himself and everywhere.
For an archetypal Faust, the crux of his journey is the p r i c e that he pays for getting what he wants that counts.
I saw it differently; Leverkuhn represents Germany, inviting the spirochete/Nazis to energise and empower him, leading to insanity and ultimately crumbling.
At the very least, it’s a comforting fairytale for the disenfranchised.
To Kossie:
Yes I have looked at the other thread - some interesting points raised, and quotations mainly from Nietzsche; and I have found your article which seemed to close the thread pretty effectively, and will read it soon.
It’s preferable to Wittgenstein isnt it? Sounds more Socratic.
Remster:
Which music in particular??
Humean
When you hear music, especially as we can on a player, you are less dependent on the production aspects than is the case with the other arts - reading aloud comes closest, but still you are conscious of the actor’s voice; please dont bring John Cage into it!
The dimensions of sound are different - one is the first note played and repeated; the second the notes around it; the third
the ‘space’ filled in the room or the head - then the fourth which is time
We can define the criteria on which to judge composers - we could start by saying that Bach and Mozart have the characteristics of great composers, and that Dittersdorf (along with plenty of others) is a mediocre one; and that John Cage or Michael Nyman is a fairly bad one, and go from there… (or it might be better to find bad composers from the 19th century, less controversial). We could build up the list of qualities on which musicologists and other experts are agreed. The function of a composer is to produce good or very good music.
Problem not solved by my own decision as you very well know!
It lies in the sound, yes, but also in the score, which is silent
To Jonquil and Humean:
Yes I know Dr Faustus, though a long time since I have read it. Fascinating as a study of the fate of music in Germany, which Mann sees as tragic (I cannot remember much about the impressions Mann gives of Leverkuhn’s music - except that it was modernist without being unattractive). Mann, not being a philosopher, saw aesthetic problems in symbolic terms. He in fact offers on answer to my Q on the greatness of German music - for him, at least in the 20th century, it happened because the composers sold their souls (is he implying that Wagner did as well??). Mann is very interesting in musical aesthetics, I think, because in such a significant number of his works he is working out the relationship of his art to that of music in Germany. And you sense the huge struggle involved - how he had to come to terms with the sheer power of Wagner (especially) and the German tradition (although it also inspired him). My impression is that he was not able to resolve this issue fully (who could have?). He would have been quite clear as to there being sound criteria for judging composers, even if he never wrote about it explicitly; and he was clear too that German music was the best!
Doesnt Leverkuhn represent primarily the German artist, corrupted by a society that worships power? Was Mann basing him on any individual, or any group of composers, do you think?
Since the ear does not hear, but sends the eardrum vibrations of the sound to the brain, it must be thought that induces a quality to the sound. Then it becomes your translation of the sound, your interpretation.
It is acquired taste that tells you that Mozart’s Prague Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations. The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought.
Music can be divorced from performance, but becomes sterile - sometimes intentionally, of course. But for most culture and most of history, music has been a collaboration between composer and artists. Take the Portsmouth Sinfonia as a provocative example!
Measured by popular vote, contemporary critics, modern critics? Whose opinions do you take on John Cage, for example - or even Wagner? And how do you compare a fugue to a Chinese opera?
Even if you want to restrict yourself to the conservative Western classical canon, do you judge the music on its aesthetic value or cultural value? Wagner’s a prime example of someone who was clearly culturally important, but who divides opinion on aesthetics.Do you give points to romantics for inspiring the emotions, or take them away for slushy sentimentality? There is no single context for judging music, unlike there is for measuring sunlight or weighing apples.
There’s no evidence he ever did, and a considerable amount of evidence that his collapse was not due to syphilis. leonardsax.com/Nietzsche.pdf
Of course, at the time Mann was writing, this wasn’t known.
OF course it is the brain which produces and appreciates sound. However, it is not just acquired taste if you mean the inidividual - if you mean the people, yes to some extent, so that a people, or mankind, has acquired the taste to distinguish sounds. Thus a very small child distinguishes between Mozart and the cats chorus (were you referring to Lloyd Webber or actual cats??) and can tell that the M is more appealing. Don’t forget that harmony is based upon nature.
As a Nietzschean, I’d say we have to measure it by what Nietzsche calls “the grand style”. However, the ‘grand style’ is not an objective measure:
An artwork in the grand style will remind the great man of the ascension of his type, and thereby cause the judgment “beautiful” in him. This is why the “beautiful feelings” an artist arouses prove nothing regarding his greatness [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 842]: only if he arouses beautiful feelings in a great man do these feelings mean anything. So seeking to define the grand style inevitably leads us to the task of ‘defining’ the great man.
[http://groups.yahoo.com/group/human_superhuman/message/283]
This depends on what “great” means in this context.
Your response to Only_Humean’s question why you consider music the art of arts reminds me of Nietzsche’s early metaphysics, where he thought that, whereas all the other artforms were basically reverberations (of parts) of the world, which was itself a reverberation of what he called “the Primordial One” (his then ‘God’), music was basically a direct reverberation of the ‘Primordial One’: for the Dionysian artist would, in his ec-stasy, be transported into the shoes of the ‘Primordial One’ (Who was immanent to all), and thus be able to create a kind of ‘second world’. The world was thus understood as a kind of piece of music (cf. BGE 56, where Nietzsche uses the musical term “da capo” to refer to a repetition of the world process), and music was understood as being as much a reality as the world itself —that is to say, a first grade illusion—, whereas all the other forms of art were second grade illusions, namely reverberations of reverberations or reflections of reflections (whereas music and the world were reflections of true Being, the ‘Primordial One’).
All the arts complement each other. The truly totalitarian art would have to combine the three most basic arts, namely dance (‘physical’), music (song, ‘emotional’), and visual art (imagination, ‘mental’). This can be done by a single human being at once—no need for tools, preparation, study, etc. Pure nature, no artifice.
I suspect it to be for the same reason that German philosophy is the greatest in history—except for the Greek, but then, essentially all of ancient Greek music has been lost to us. And just as German music is fundamentally different from ancient Greek music, so is philosophy. Thus Novalis said that all philosophy is really homesickness. But Greek philosophy was not homesick, as philosophy was at home among the Greeks. Likewise, German music, or so-called ‘classical’ music in general, is essentially romantic music.
[size=95]I here touch upon a cardinal question: where does our entire music belong? The ages of classical taste knew nothing to compare with it[.]
[Nietzsche, WP 842.][/size]
Ancient Greek and Roman music was great in an entirely different sense from so-called ‘classical’ music. It was basically Apollinian; whereas so-called ‘classical’ music is ‘Dionysian’, i.e., melodramatic. The latter appeals to ‘beautiful feelings’, to the emotions: these it seeks to excite. It is thereby essentially ignoble.
[size=95]In the Dionysian intoxication there is sexuality and voluptuousness: they are not lacking in the Apollinian [though they may well seem to be lacking]. There must also be a difference in tempo in the two conditions— The extreme calm in certain sensations of intoxication (more strictly: the retardation of the feelings of time and space) likes to be reflected in a vision of the calmest gestures and types of soul. The classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration—the highest feeling of power is concentrated in the classical type. To react slowly; a great consciousness; no feeling of struggle [though struggle itself is never lacking!].
[WP 799.][/size]
I recommend you read the whole of WP Book Three, part IV.
Perhaps it’s the two in a growingly decadent conjunction that gives us a great insight into Germany of that time, like an alchemy gone bad. It seems as though the supposedly sane, passive Germans like Zeitblom were unable to withstand or come to terms with the over-ripe or decadent bloom grown in the Faustian laboratory of the national psyche. The question is then: why is Zeitblom both the central character and narrator telling the ambiguous story of Leverkuhn, the Faustus, instead of the other way around?
That makes no sense to me, not in the least. If anything, Mann’s Doktor Faustus is a great antithesis to the fairytale mentality, or even better the mythos imbuing the German geist of that time.
