Abstract
Poets and philosophers have often wonderingly noted music’s miraculous and paradoxical ability to express the ineffable. However, the mechanics of historical musical expression, relevant though they are, are not addressed. By the mid-nineteenth century, the expressive vocabulary of western instrumental music—closest to the inexpressible itself, since it did not rely on words—was highly developed and well understood, encompassing conventions of genre, key, texture, and individual musical figures. For example, a particular horn gesture would reference not only horns themselves but the hunt and all the outdoor vigor associated with it, and a barcarolle evoked not just the Venetian gondolier’s serenade but also the intimacy of the couple in the boat, the sweet lapping of the wavelets, and the blissful contentment of a carefree afternoon on the canals. Emotions were thus accessed by reference to the more quotidian aspects of life with which they were associated. Today, though, much of this language has been forgotten. Ultimately, what to many of us sings of the Infinite might in its own time have evoked something far more explicit or even everyday, and (as Mendelssohn believed) it was music’s specificity that made meanings impossible to discuss, not the opposite. Thus, musical expressions of the ineffable and thoroughgoingly effable are far closer than we might suspect, with perhaps the key difference lying in the musical and cultural experience of the listener, not in the music itself.
Note to the Reader: The musical examples found throughout are intended to illustrate, for those familiar with musical notation, the specific gestures and passages discussed. As the content of each example is described in the text, though, neither they nor music literacy are required for the comprehension of this essay.
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Notes
- 1.
This is from the ninth of Heine’s Letters on the French Stage (written 1837; first published in 1840).
- 2.
“Ce qu’on ne peut dire et ce qu’on ne peut taire, la musique exprime.”
- 3.
Letter from Mendelssohn (Berlin) to Marc-André Souchay (Hamburg), 15 November 1842.
- 4.
From Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Trans. John Michael Cooper.
- 5.
The passage is taken from the end of the entry s.v. “Sonate” in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (1768).
- 6.
In Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, Richard Taruskin and Piero Weiss assemble a parade of such Enlightenment-era writers, from the English organist and composer Charles Avison in 1752 through the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1790.
- 7.
See Gallope and Kane 2012 for a variety of responses to Jankélévitch’s work.
- 8.
I will permit myself to observe that music scholars see a lot of this: a major figure in another scholarly discipline, perhaps even trained in performance, delivering opinions on music that are relatively two-dimensional, thus demonstrating that a mind that is subtle and penetrating in one area is still susceptible to naïve and credulous positions in another, and elevated academic prose can obscure that fact.
- 9.
The best introduction to the various aspects of eighteenth-century music as language remains Ratner 1980.
- 10.
Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, was was sketched out from 1831 to 1833, but not published until 1836.
- 11.
Jeffrey Kallberg suggests that this trio section may have originally been intended for another kind of work, and only later did the composer decide to use it here. If true, this would only offer further support for the idea that innumerable contextual and situational variables affect a particular piece of music’s “ineffability” far more than anything inherent (Kallberg 2001, pp. 5–8).
- 12.
The tune is found in Weber’s Op. 34 Clarinet Quintet, some 3 min into the second movement (mm. 41–46); the clarinet plays it over a sustained string accompaniment.
- 13.
A response in some ways similar was that of Leo Tolstoy, who one day in 1897 found himself little moved by Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 101, but derived intense pleasure from a group of peasant women clanging scythes and singing a song of welcome to his daughter, who was returning home after her marriage. See Stephen Halliwell 2010, pp. 50–52.
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Bellman, J.D. (2017). After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest. In: Knepper, T., Kalmanson, L. (eds) Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Comparative Philosophy of Religion, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64165-2_4
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