“die Musik überhaupt ist die melodie, zu der die Welt der Text ist.” (“Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”) Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Metaphysics of the Beautiful and Aesthetics.
“Das Verständnis der Musik ist eine Lebensäußerung der Menschen.” (“Understanding music is a human life-expression.”) Ludwig Wittgenstein (MS-137:22)
Listening to Schumann, Fernand Khnopff: 1883.
Variation
Why does music matter? Music Matters for many reasons some of which are ones we share with one another (let’s call them more universal reasons), and some are personal reasons that make music specifically significant for each of us. Here, I would like to highlight one of these more universal reasons that I think can connect us all to music. This reason can to some extent explain what there is in music that makes its experience an integral part of our lives. A general formulation of that reason is: music connects us to something beyond us as specific individual beings, and I think that is also the source of joy in music.
There is something in music that ties the moment of listening to music to something beyond that moment, and bridges the individual act of listening to something beyond its contingency, particularity, and transience. These are probably special moments when musical experience dominates our being in the world and everything else in the background seems to be trivial and insignificant. You can simply think of a time when you were listening to music and you felt you wanted to cry or you actually did cry or you felt so much joy or so much sorrow or so much of some other particular type of feeling inside you that made you feel you were outside that particular circumstance, outside the time and place. One might describe such moments as flashes of ecstasy or moments of contemplation in which we immerse ourselves in an experience. That moment for many is experienced through some degree of dissociation or abstraction from the world as if there are possible objects that can stay outside our world, the regular context of meaning.
Whether we think music is a purely abstract art—which as Eduard Hanslick has famously announced in his On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen) describing these mysterious sonic forms that move and play around without meaning anything, causing pleasure in us only through experiencing their motion—or we believe that music is a representational art that speaks to us and says something; the most important point is that by listening to music we can never agree to some pre-given ideas that are being expressed in music. The very fact that notwithstanding the interpretation we have of a piece, we always consider some validity for other understandings and feel less biased than when we encounter a different interpretation of let’s say a poem, indicates that we never have any solid referential grounds for proving other interpretations wrong. Music, in this sense, offers a unique and quite exceptional intellectual/emotional democracy.
This democracy emerges from the freedom inherent in music, which is exactly what connects us to something beyond us as particular beings. If music had a meaning in the way language does (notwithstanding all its ambiguity and non-referential uses), then music would have never been able to make us feel dissociated from the particular moments we live in. Music’s very power of distraction, reflected in the way we transcend or, so to speak, unhear the world we are physically in, is the same force that turns the experience of listening to music a path for connecting to something beyond our particularity. It is, in a very strange way, an invitation to being universal, and communal. In this manner, musical abstraction, in a quite paradoxical way, is strongly social and political. Because, as Wittgenstein says, it is one way in which humans can engage in life-expression!
