Continental Philosophy of Music

This chapter begins by questioning the distinction between “analytic” (anglophone mainstream) and “continental” (mainland European) philosophy. It then traces ideas and movements of thought that have figured prominently in continental philosophy of music. These have their source in German post-Kantian idealism and its descendants, the latter taking different forms in Germany and France. Among them, mostly coming via literary theory, are the musical applications of Marxism, phenomenology, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, Deleuzean anti-metaphysics, and Alain Badiou’s mathematically based dialectic of being and event. The chapter surveys ongoing debates within the field, as between proponents of musical analysis and those, like deconstructionists or New Musicologists, who challenge their approach on jointly theoretical and ideological grounds, often concerning tonality and/or “organic form.” The chapter goes on to suggest future critical-creative directions for continentally oriented philosophy of music.

Enchantment

In this essay, a philosopher (Graham) and a music analyst (Burnham) explore the nature of music’s power to enchant. Graham establishes this enchantment as the result of a desirable relocation into an alternative sonic world that nevertheless shares important features with the everyday material world. The huge range of descriptive language that music is able to sustain, including temporal and spatial terms, reveals the tangential relationship of music to the world of everyday experience, while more specifically musical terms (for example, cadenza) show that music operates as a truly different world. Burnham elaborates on the emotional rewards of relocation into the world of music by describing our investment in two specific musical worlds, a brief Chopin piano prelude and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. We are eager to be put under the spell of such pieces because relocations into the enchanted worlds of music ultimately anchor and enhance our sense of self.

Emotion

This chapter considers the expression of emotion by music, the most interesting of the relations between music and the emotions. It is written from the dual perspective of Anglo-American philosophy and of musicology. The former focuses on the conceptual analysis of emotion, the latter on the underlying causes of the listeners’ experience. The theories of Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson are considered and criticized, and recent work in the psychology of music is examined in the light of the pioneering account of expression from Leonard Meyer. Finally, there is some speculation as to the future of work in this area.

Nature

This essay explores ways in which a notion of “weak nature” drawn from certain strains of recent philosophy (especially works by Adrian Johnston and Leonard Lawlor) might be mobilized in critical engagements with contemporary and historical writings on music and sound. To thematize nature’s weakness in this context means to understand ecological phenomena as rooted in contingency, transience, non-identity, and non-presence. Through readings of texts by Timothy Morton, Charles O. Nussbaum, Gary Tomlinson, and G. W. F. Hegel, this essay shows how philosophical thought on music often works to deny or foreclose nature’s weakness, rooting accounts of musical experience or music history (including music’s deep evolutionary history) in visions of nature as consistent, gapless, and present. This same inquiry, however, suggests that musical thought that gives fuller rein to nature’s inconsistency can do greater justice to the spectra of difference that range across the many phenomena of musicking.

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy

Ethnomusicology is the study of music in human social and cultural life. Closely related today to the discipline of anthropology, its basic method is ethnographic fieldwork. This chapter begins by presenting a history of the field of ethnomusicology, from its earliest beginnings (as comparative musicology) in late nineteenth-century Europe to its present standing as a major music discipline worldwide. The chapter proceeds by providing a critical analysis of current debates, theoretical directions, new practices, and challenges, before concluding with an examination of some important issues affecting the future of ethnomusicology. These include the effects of postmodernism (such as the development of new paradigms foregrounding fragmentation and multiple subjectivities) on the study of music; the rise of various technologies as harbingers of a new formulation of music as simply one category of sound; the effects of globalism on diasporic studies, conceptions of “musical flow,” and the ethics of fieldwork; and, finally, the roles of sameness and difference as organizing principles of ethnomusicological analysis and practice

Galant Music

Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy advances a provocative thesis: namely, that the term galant be generalized beyond its traditional historical limits to characterize music’s relationship to sense and to freedom more broadly. Nancy uses the notion of musical galanterie, with its connotations of charm, elegance, finesse, and also ornamentation and bravura, to reprise and develop some of the issues he has raised in previous texts about sense and sensation, such as Listening and Corpus. Specifically this idea of music as galanterie allows Nancy to reconfigure music’s distinctive relationship to signification and redefine the nature of its much-vaunted autonomy. Arguing that music is an “art of passage” and the approach of the impossible, the text makes striking use of the metaphorics of touch and tact and the translator’s introduction argues that all of Derrida’s suspicions in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy about the limits of Nancy’s deconstruction of touch should also be brought to bear on the problematic at stake here, including on the possibility of traversing unbridgeable idioms.

Mercy

The idea of discovering mercy as an expressive topic in music might initially seem unpromising; nevertheless, this chapter suggests that mercy is not only a possible topic for musical exposition, but also that understanding how composers marshal resources to express mercy gives key insights into how to interpret their works. The chapter begins by distinguishing between “hierarchical” and “egalitarian” conceptions of mercy derived from Graeco-Roman (especially Senecan) and Christian traditions. A close examination of the words and music in pieces ranging from Benjamin Britten’s War Reqiuem to W. A. Mozart’s operas The Marriage of Figaro and La clemenza di Tito then reveals how composers demonstrate emotional insight in expressing mercy through music. In conclusion, I suggest that the gentle intelligence and sensitivity that are among the qualities of mercy expressed in music are desperately needed in order to move beyond contemporary obsessions with anger and revenge.

Evolution

Making or listening to music is pan-cultural, nearly universal, and highly valued. Musical behaviours probably appeared between 500,000 and 60,000 years ago. The more recent date captures the era when Homo sapiens spread globally from Africa. The older date corresponds with a time when song might have produced individual or social benefits and the physiological and cognitive conditions for its production were present (in our predecessor, Homo heidelbergensis). Music is so multifunctional, however, that it is not clear if it was an evolutionary adaptation (as opposed to a by-product or non-biological technology) or, if so, what it was an adaptation for. This chapter examines these issues with a particular focus on questions of musicality, fitness, language, and sound processing.

Consciousness

Our understanding of the numerous and significant problems of consciousness is inseparable from the often incommensurable disciplinary frameworks through which the topic has been approached. Music may offer a range of perspectives on consciousness, some issuing from interdisciplinary alliances (such as with cognitive psychology and neuroscience), others tapping into what is distinctively musical about music and what music shares with comparable aesthetic formations. Philosophically speaking, music might afford valuable complementary perspectives to approaches within the empirical sciences that see consciousness as essentially a computational process (Pinker, Dennett), or as solely an epiphenomenon of neural activity within the brain. This chapter will look to experiences of music that support views of the mind as extended and embodied, and that see consciousness as ecologically bound up with Being-in-the-world, to adopt notions from Gibson and Heidegger respectively. In this way, music studies can make a contribution to the philosophical study of consciousness from epistemological, phenomenological, and ontological standpoints.

Music Theory and Philosophy

In principle, music theory and philosophy are close allies, both trying to understand the fundamental issues of music. In practice, however, a deep rift has remained ever since the time of Aristotle and Aristoxenus. Rather than present a survey, this chapter focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the foundations were laid for our current music-theoretical practice, to examine the sources of tension and attraction between the two discourses, using Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Ernst Kurth’s Wagnerian music theory as a twin case study. Both Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music and Kurth’s energistic model of tension-relaxation present related views on harmony and melody. When considered in combination, the two go a long way to bridging the age-old disparities between both disciplines.