Music, Truth, Profundity :: Philosophy Art Papers

Music, Truth, Profundity PART I 1. Theme One of my long-standing philosophical ‘worries’ is what I describe as a ‘cognitive dilemma’ in relation to musical communication. How can an art form which lacks a discursive element and addresses itself primarily and indeed immediately to the auditory sense, be discerned as conveying ‘truth’ or ‘profundity’? The power is amply attested — so much so that alone among the arts music occasionally figures as a ‘surrogate religion’. The pieces of this kaleidoscope — ideas culled from Schopenhauer, Langer, Jung and others — did not fall together until recently after reading Peter Kivy’s Music Alone, an account of his quest for musical profundity which ends (as he confessed) in failure, but from whose dissection of the presuppositions I gained a platform for a synthesis of my own. In this essay the key concepts of an embryonal theory are presented as a quasi ‘abstract’ of the 19K draught which comprises its first formulation. 2. Sense and Mind Kivy’s main point is that profundity must be understood as â€Å"treating a subject matter in a profound way†, i.e. discursively. Accordingly the principal means of achieving profundity are verbal, in art the tools of novelists, dramatists and poets. But musicians lack those resources; therefore, as Kivy’s analysis of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier shows, no further yield than superb craftsmanship results — but how is this distinguishable from the craft of a Fabergà ©? These travails point to an underlying critical malaise, namely the comprehensive prejudice that reason and cognition are inherently discursive: to understand is plainly the ability to describe what one has understood. Therefore his failure to nail down musical profundity amounts to a tacit acknowledgement of the ‘ineffability’ of instrumental masterpieces — resulting in musical ‘truths’ being consigned to its sensory modality or else to a demand for marshalling verbal paraphrase for explicit decoding. My proposition is that both of these are blind alleys. Firstly, verbal analogues foster the illegitimate notion of a ‘residual language component’ (of which more infra). Secondly, sensory cortices are merely the incidental conveyances of communicative values; they are not possible sites for the germination of humanly significant meanings. Consider that speech is necessarily sound before it can be interpreted as utterance and thus belongs to the same sensory modality as music; but from this it follows that discrimination between words-as-sounds and words-as-meanings cannot be the work of the auditory cortex, but only of a mind.