Philosophy of Music

Throughout my life, no matter what else was going on, two things have been constants – music and philosophy.  My love of music goes back to my first conscious memory of my Mother playing the piano as I fell asleep at age three.  My love of philosophy goes back to my first memory of a question about angels that I asked a Sunday School teacher when I was about ten.

I attended conservatory shortly after reading Atlas Shrugged. Because of my interest in music, one passage in particular intrigued me – the passage where Dagny is sitting in the train listening to someone whistling the Fifth Piano Concerto by Richard Halley. The paragraph that describes the concerto contains the answer, I believe, to the central question musical esthetics: what feature of reality does music re-create?  Here’s the relevant passage.  If you think about it honestly and without reservations, I think you’ll see what I saw and realize that the answer has been in front of us for a very long time.

. . . It was a symphony of triumph.  The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive.

One day, walking home from conservatory, trying to solve the puzzle of music, I remembered this passage and thought, that’s it!  Music is the abstract embodiment of human action.  And the strongest demonstration that this is true is that we dance.

Music, in fact, compels us to move and if we don’t, because the occasion does not allow it, we can feel the tension in our desire to snap our fingers or nod our head. 

I know practically every objection to this theory in the book.  The chief objection is that sound does not literally move in the sense required.  The propagation of the wave is not what is of interest esthetically.  The concept of movement is not formed from auditory phenomena but from visual.  Visually all that moves are the players as they play, but that I not the cause of our response.  And what are we to make of the organizational characteristics of music?  Is the sonata-allegro form of some cognitive value?  Literary plots do not repeat, why do musical ones?

This is not the place to go into detail and, in the absence of a complete theory all I can do is present an ostensive demonstration.  Dance, of course, is primary; its connection to music is clear and obvious.  But there are other examples as well.  Disney’s two Fantasia presentations are masterpieces of the translation of auditory movement into visual equivalents, with only a couple of duds in the entire collection.  Then, if those aren’t enough to convince you of the basic premise of the theory, you might try the Boston Fireworks display on July Fourth every year.  Where the Disney translations use, for the most part, specific perceptual concretes to carry the movement, the fireworks are a visually abstract representation of an auditorially abstract representation of what might be called a “movement sense of life.”

One of my favorites, however, is this skit performed by the ever-classy Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray to the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.