Abstract
Cast in the form of a gloss on the passage on Hanslick from The Oxford History of Western Music, this essay considers such topics as musical beauty (versus the musical sublime), the relationship of musical form and content, the status of music as an artifact of culture rather than phenomenon of nature, the function of metaphor in the perception and description of music, and the ontological status of musical structure—in all cases framing its formulations as responses to the writing of Nick Zangwill (whose reply will be found in this volume).
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Notes
- 1.
See Taruskin (2005: 511–513) (Chapter V ‘Music in the Late Twentieth Century’).
- 2.
See Taruskin (2005: 441) (Chapter III ‘Music in the Nineteenth Century’).
- 3.
First enunciated by Edmund Burke one hundred years before Hanslick: Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, 1757.
- 4.
Quoted in Taruskin (1997: 253).
- 5.
In his answer to me elsewhere in this volume, Nick reverts to his trademark nonchalance, rejecting the whole idea of the sublime as a musical category and adding: “I do not care if a number of famous dead people have said the opposite.” Does he expect me—or you, the reader—to be convinced by a show of bravado? I think it better to seek a formulation on which he and I and the dead people can agree. How about this: Just as he insists that the “musically-beautiful”, hyphen fastidiously in place, is something particular and distinct from other manifestations of the beautiful, why not admit that there is such a thing as the “musically-sublime”, as exemplified pre-eminently by Beethoven’s Schrekensfanfaren? That way one can regard the horror-fanfare as contrasting to, say, the scene by the brook in the Pastoral Symphony, rather than along a spectrum with it. That would seem to accord better with Beethoven’s intent. If the hyphenated term gets by the Zangwill censor, I won’t mind using it, even though I would never insist on it.
- 6.
According to Immanuel Kant:
If […] we estimate the worth of the fine arts by the culture they supply to the mind, and adopt for our standard the expansion of the faculties whose confluence, in judgement, is necessary for cognition, music, then, since it plays merely with sensations, has the lowest place among the fine arts—just as it has perhaps the highest among those valued at the same time for their agreeableness. (Kant 2007: 158).
- 7.
It may have been the later economist Paul Samuelson, who, purportedly quoting Keynes, actually said it first. See Samuelson (1986: 275).
- 8.
Until his reply to me in this volume, that is, where he dismisses counterexamples to his claims about beauty with a truly Kivian nonchalance: “Who cares about a few avant-garde outliers?”.
- 9.
E.g. Zangwill (2015: 1, 11 (“music itself”), 155 (“music as music”)).
- 10.
See Taruskin (1995b).
- 11.
Quoted frequently in Zangwill (2015: 10). In his answer to me elsewhere in this volume, he says that “when citing Hanslick” he prefers this “pristine and clean” quote to “the musicologist’s favorite ‘tonally moving forms’, because he latter includes a crucial metaphor, of motion, and in the interpretation of that metaphor lie all the controversial issues”. But that metaphor is in my view the essential insight that makes Hanslick valuable, and it seems rather absent-minded not to notice that the phrase “artistic combination”, without which the definition is just a truism (is that what he means by “pristine and clean”?), harbors any number of controversial issues. What Nick seems to be revealing here is that his reading of Hanslick is in fact selective, and to that extent untrustworthy.
- 12.
As translated by Gustav Cohen in 1891, see Hanslick (1957: 11).
- 13.
Here I should have written “category distinction” rather than “categorical”, which suggest that there is no overlap or compatibility. Nick is therefore right to question the word in his reply and I gladly modify it.
- 14.
At least one philosopher, Roger Scruton, insists on the distinction at least as adamantly as I do, writing recently that philosophy “should be intent on distinguishing the human world from the order of nature, and the concepts through which we understand appearances from those used in explaining them”, adding that “for this reason […] I believe aesthetics to be central to philosophy, being the branch of philosophy that deals directly with our most studied attempts to create and discern what is truly meaningful” (Roger Scruton & Timothy Williamson. But Is It Science? Times Literary Supplement, 3 November 2017: 16). To boil down the rest of Scruton’s long argument in terms relevant to the present discussion, natural science looks for essence, humanities (i.e., the study of human artifacts) looks for meaning.
- 15.
And this, of course, is the nub and … well, essence of the difficulty between me and Nick on the matter of essence. In his answer to me elsewhere in this volume, Nick adduces biological organs as things that have mind-independent essence in the same way that music does. But I dispute that on grounds that I have learned from Nick himself. A heart has, as its purpose, the pumping of blood, and it had that purpose even before the purpose was discovered (that is, observed) by science. So its purpose is indeed mind-independent, and if you want to call that purpose its essence, you will get no argument from me. But the artistic combination of tones did not exist before we knew about it, for there was no music until we humans invented it. Hence, no mind-independence, and no essence. To smuggle essence into the description of music or other human artifacts and activities, moreover, by attaching it to other words (as in “essential function” or “essential motives”) fails so long as the words to which it is attached already suffice to describe or define. As far as I am concerned (that is, as far as my descriptive or explanatory needs require), the word “essential” adds nothing to the discussion of musical functions or human motives; it is just a placeholder, like “compositional” when describing what composers do, or “sincere” when describing one’s beliefs. As an experiment, the reader can bracket the word “essential” in Nick’s rebuttal and test whether the meaning is really affected by its removal. If the removal does not change anything substantive, then I believe “essence” to be shown, in effect, inessential to a discussion of music. But its superfluity does not therefore render it innocuous. Essentialist views are normative views. They not only delineate the way things are, but also define the way things must be. We have had quite enough of that in musical writings, whether on musical ontology, on performance practice, or on questions of value.
- 16.
Barnhart 1950.
- 17.
This was a careless error. Actually it was Hanslick who called his own teacher, Václav Tomášek (1774–1850), by this name. I was misremembering this sentence from Eric Sams’ article on Hanslick in the first (1980) edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
His own phrase for Tomášek in Prague, “the dalai lama of music” might well describe his own eminence not only in Vienna but throughout the German-speaking world, and beyond.
- 18.
See Karnes 2008, esp. Part I ‘Eduard Hanslick and the Challenge of Musikwissenschaft’.
- 19.
- 20.
See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Laokoon—oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 1765.
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Taruskin, R. (2019). Essence or Context?. In: Stanevičiūtė, R., Zangwill, N., Povilionienė, R. (eds) Of Essence and Context. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5_1
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