Music and Intrasubjectivity

This is a kind of follow-up on the last post "What song makes you, you". I was objecting to the idea that you can or should turn music into a soundtrack for your life. The older romantic idea is that music is a soundtrack to the composer's life or, to a lesser extent, the performer's life. I don't think any of this is right and I have philosophical reasons for thinking so.

Imagine if a composer or song-writer sits down and writes something that is 100% an expression of their inner self. What are the odds that this would make any sense to anyone else? Very low, don't you think? Of course there is a little of this in all music and some music may have a lot of it, but the more utterly individualistic a piece is, the less it will speak to us because we don't know what it 'means'. For the philosophical background to this, I will refer you to Wittgenstein's private language argument. Let me very quickly say that music is not a 'language' and it doesn't have 'meaning' in the usual semantic sense. But it does communicate and therefore the private language argument applies. The idea of a 'private language' is incoherent because the meaning, function and significance of language is to communicate. In order for this to be the case, the meaning of the terms have to be understood. This is the function of dictionaries. Now, of course, there is the famous reply to the claim that music is a language that goes, "if music is a language, where are the words and where is the dictionary in which we can look them up"? True, music is not a language and the way it communicates is rather subtle.

But music does indeed communicate and express and it does so in its own way. There are a host of culturally specific shared conventions that composers and listeners learn. Tonal harmony offers some good examples. Within the context of a key, some notes are places of rest and others of tension or movement. Some chords are consonant and stable and others are dissonant and unstable. Composers create a fabric of expression by using these characteristics and listeners learn to hear them. It is not a language in the semantic sense, but it is expression. We 'feel' what is going on quite clearly even though it is impossible to put in words. The famous rubato that Chopin championed, where the flow of the melody is sometimes held back, then moved forward, is an example of a means of expression discovered by a composer that the listener can share. If the listener can't share it, then the piece will not be successful. Chopin however is very widely appreciated. This can only be the case if what we are dealing with is not a completely individual subjectivity but rather a shared intrasubjectivity. We feel, to some extent, as Chopin did. What worked for him, works for us.

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The Experience of Music

I was just reading another essay by Peter Kivy, from the collection The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. He was suggesting that teaching music appreciation to humanities majors in college and university is done wrong. It is taught like literature: read a novel, discuss the themes, place it in historical context, perhaps talk about the literary techniques used. You can do the same with Beethoven: listen to a symphony or piano sonata, discuss the musical themes, place in historical context, perhaps talk about sonata form. But the difference, as Kivy points out, is that literature has content that we can absorb, giving point to the exercise. Dickens, for example, might give us insights into the terrible lot of child laborers in the 19th century; Jane Austen into the intricacies of human relationships and so on. But with music, it is quite different. The main reason according to Kivy, is that a symphony by Beethoven does not have content in the way a novel does. You can point to nothing in the symphony that gives us specific insights into the human condition. I think this is probably true. I have posted before about how the meaning of music is non-specific here.

Kivy makes the very interesting point that music is a unique art form in three particular ways: going back as far as we like in human history, music has primarily been a kind of ritual. Second, it is a community art, not a private one and third, it is an active, participatory experience, not a passive one. He is saying that teaching the musical canon like we teach the literary canon will not really work. You will have the proper experience of Jane Austen by reading the novels accompanied by information about the historical context and the literary techniques. And at the end, you will have access to the content of the artwork. But, Kivy argues, taking the same approach to a Beethoven symphony won't have the same result, because it has no content in the way a novel does. Instead, he argues, the way to approach music is to recognize it is a ritual, it is communal and it is active, not passive. So to access music in a genuine way YOU HAVE TO PLAY OR SING IT! Now that is an interesting thought! It seems correct to me, because it reflects my experience with music.

My mother was a fiddler, a violinist who played Canadian traditional music. Growing up, I cannot recall a time when, if you reached behind the couch or under a chair you wouldn't come up with a musical instrument case: guitars, violins, mandolins, octophones, banjos--you name it. Even an upright piano. I didn't catch the bug myself until my mid-teens, but my whole life I have had the unspoken sense that music was something you did. This is why I have always felt that pre-recorded, canned music, the kind you hear in the store, the mall, so many places, is not really music in the important sense. Because music is something you do, not something you just hear, passively.

I think you might pick up some of the ritualistic and participatory nature of music from that video.

For most of my career I taught people how to play guitar, for part of my career I also taught classes in music theory and history (appreciation). I am pretty sure that if you don't learn how to play or sing to some extent, there are crucial aspects of music that will not really make sense to you. I suspect that it also helps if you learn to read music as well, but it is the playing that is important. My first experience of Machaut, for example, was playing lute in a three-part motet of his in an early music ensemble as an undergraduate--actually, that was pretty much my first experience with chamber music, unless you count playing in a rock band! I had listened to a lot of recordings of Mozart, but the most vivid experience was singing the Requiem in the university choir. Bach, of course, is music I have played, almost on a daily basis, for the last forty years. Listening to Bach and playing Bach are very different experiences and I think that if you have just heard Bach without ever having played (or tried to play) any of his music, you will only have a partial experience.

Music is something you DO. If you play or sing, even just a little, you will enter into the world of music in a way that listening to a thousand recordings or viewing a thousand music videos can never provide. If we go back to Beethoven's or Mozart's time, the audience for one of their concerts probably consisted of a majority of musical amateurs who could read music (to some extent), who played piano (a bit, at least) and for this reason, could participate in the concert in a way that the passive audiences of today do not.

Which brings up some interesting thoughts about teaching music online...

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