John Stuart Mill’s interest in music is seldom mentioned in the literature on his life and work. One of the few commentators who have paid attention to Mill’s writings on music was J.R. Hainds, who reported that in a five-year period beginning in 1829, Mill ‘manifested considerable interest in setting forth views concerning music, histrionic art, and poetry’.Footnote 1 The present contribution aims to show that Mill made considerable contributions to the philosophy of music. In various publications he expressed cogent and interesting views on musical and music-related issues such as the ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of music, the utility of music, the nature of musical abilities and the reasons why so few composers are women. This article opens with a background on the role of music in Mill’s personal life. This is followed by presentations and analyses of his inquiries into the philosophy in music. I begin with his contributions to the most fundamental theoretical parts of musical philosophy, namely its metaphysics and epistemology. This is followed by expositions of his work in the more practical parts of musical philosophy, namely the value theory and aesthetics of music. The final section summarizes my findings and shows that they provide ample grounds for considering John Stuart Mill a philosopher of music.
Music in Mill’s Personal Life
In his Autobiography, Mill tells us that music was ‘[t]he only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure’.Footnote 2 He took piano lessons and so did at least three of his siblings.Footnote 3 Piano was the dominant instrument for amateurs in Mill’s time. However, it was almost exclusively conceived as an instrument for women; male amateurs were expected to play the violin or the flute.Footnote 4 According to the music critic Joseph Bennett, it was ‘a rare thing indeed to find a gentleman capable of playing even a few chords upon the instrument’. On one occasion in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Oxford students hissed a male pianist off the stage, considering it inappropriate for a man to play the instrument.Footnote 5 Mill’s – or possibly his mother’s – choice of an instrument was therefore unusual for its time.
When Mill was 14, he spent a year in southern France with the family of Samuel Bentham, Jeremy Bentham’s younger brother. Music had a big role in this family, and all the four children took music lessons.Footnote 6 Mill took daily piano lessons and weekly lessons in solfège, music theory and dancing.Footnote 7
Six years later, in the autumn of 1826, Mill suffered a mental and philosophical crisis that can possibly be described as a period of depression. His appreciation of music was ‘suspended during the gloomy period’.Footnote 8 In his process of recovery, he was ‘helped forward by music’, in particular by Weber’s opera Oberon, which had had its world premiere in London in April 1826.Footnote 9 In this period, he was also plagued by ruminations about the combinatorial limits on musical innovation. He worried that ‘[t]he octave consists only of five tones and two semitones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered’.Footnote 10 Looking back on these worries almost 30 years later, he likened them to those of ‘the philosophers of Laputa who feared lest the sun should be burnt out’.Footnote 11
After receiving news of the outbreak of the July Revolution, in 1830, Mill and a group of other young radicals, including John Arthur Roebuck, went to Paris to follow the developments there. According to what Roebuck wrote more than 40 years later, they took active part in the revolution when visiting an opera house.
On the occasion of Louis Philippe’s first visit to the opera, these young Englishmen happened to be present, and they presently began to shout for ‘La Marseillaise’, in which the house joined; and then they shouted ‘Debout, debout!’ until the whole audience, including the king himself, actually stood up during the playing of the revolutionary tune.Footnote 12
In his twenties, Mill spent much time on musical activities. His most important musical companion in these years was Henry Cole, with whom he often met to discuss music.Footnote 13 The two also went to the opera together.Footnote 14 London was at this time a major centre for the operatic arts, where almost all the major new operas from other European countries were performed.Footnote 15 Together with some of their friends, Mill and Cole also spent many evenings with the Kingston family, where Mrs. Kingston’s performances on the piano were a major attraction. Sometimes this group met instead in Cole’s apartment.Footnote 16 However, in 1834, Mill became a less frequent participant in these musical gatherings.Footnote 17
It was probably around 1830 that Mill first met Eliza Flower, one of the few female composers in Britain at that time. She was highly respected, and both Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Browning considered her to be a musical genius.Footnote 18 She was also Harriet Taylor’s best friend.Footnote 19 Flower was a proponent of political and civil rights for women, but as a composer she stayed within the genre that was considered to be most suitable for female composers, namely music for voice and piano.Footnote 20 She wrote both psalms and secular songs. Mill admired her music and promoted it, both by recommending it to acquaintancesFootnote 21 and by writing no fewer than seven highly positive reviews and notices on different musical works that she published.Footnote 22 According to Mill, Flower was a ‘musical genius, in the highest and most exclusive sense of the term’.Footnote 23 To a modern reader, this profusion of laudatory reviews of works by a personal friend seems inappropriate, but sensitivity to such issues appears to have been low in musical life in London at this time. Conflicts of interests worse than Mill’s, such as economic debts and attempts to become a composer’s future librettist, appear to have been tolerated.Footnote 24
As Kate Bowan noted, Mill’s reviews of Flower’s music are entirely devoted to music as a ‘higher pleasure’ in the sense which he was later to discuss in Utilitarianism.Footnote 25 He did not discuss political issues in these texts, although one of the songs by her that he reviewed took a clear political stand against the Russian repression of Poland.Footnote 26 Only on one occasion did he discuss a technical aspect of her music. In her ‘Song of Annot Lyle’ there was ‘one very unusual interval’, which ‘gives a peculiar tinge to the whole, and which is scarcely ever found in modern music: though it is to be met with in one or two of the best Scottish airs’.Footnote 27
In the early 1830s, Mill also wrote several essays on aesthetic topics, including music; I will return to these below. After that, he wrote less about aesthetics or music, but music continued to be important in his private life. This can be seen in the letters he wrote to his wife when travelling alone on the Continent in the years 1854 and 1855. His detailed reports to her include descriptions of his musical experiences. He often visited opera houses,Footnote 28 and he continued his long established habit from London to visit Catholic churches to listen to the music, both at High Mass and on other occasions.Footnote 29 He also had plenty of opportunities to listen to military music.Footnote 30 In Greece, he saw an Orthodox procession with a band playing ‘really good’ music on wind instruments.Footnote 31 He also heard ‘some Greek songs sung to the guitar by the writer & composer who wrote many of the songs sung in the Greek war of independence’.Footnote 32
Mill was not only an avid listener and concertgoer. He was also an accomplished pianist, although he only played in a small circle of family and friends.Footnote 33 On a musical gathering with Henry Cole and others in November 1831, Mill played what Cole described as ‘a vast quantity of music from Memory’.Footnote 34 In 1849 his mother described what was probably a family gathering: ‘We played at cards till 12 o’clock last night and between while he played upon the Piano without music some of his own compositions’.Footnote 35 His stepson Algernon Taylor has provided what is probably the most extensive description of Mill’s piano playing.
Mr. Mill … used, now and then, to perform on the piano, but only when asked to do so by my mother; and then he would at once sit down to the instrument, and play music entirely of his own composition, on the spur of the moment: music of a singular character, wanting, possibly, in the finish which more practice would have imparted, but rich in feeling, vigour, and suggestiveness: the performer taking for his theme, may be, the weird grandeur of cloud and storm, the deep pathos of a dirge, the fierce onset of the battle field, or the triumphant, joyous time of a processional march. When he had finished, my mother would, perhaps, inquire what had been the idea running in his mind, and which had formed the theme of the improvisation – for such it was, and a strikingly characteristic one too.Footnote 36
Programmatic keyboard improvisation – often with storms and other nature themes as objects of depiction – was a major art form in the late baroque and classical periods. After a culmination in the first three decades of the nineteenth century it went increasingly out of fashion (perhaps surprisingly, since other forms of programmatic music were in vogue throughout the century). Mill was one of relatively few amateurs who pursued this genre of music-making.Footnote 37
At this time, the piano-vocal score was the major medium through which operas reached amateur musicians and the public,Footnote 38 and in addition to improvising, Mill used piano scores to acquaint himself with operas and other musical compositions.Footnote 39 His interest in music and his proficiency at the piano appear to have been known in wide circles. After his death, the Musical Standard published a brief note on his musical activities, recognizing that ‘his playing and improvisation was distinguished by refined taste and striking originality’.Footnote 40
The Metaphysics of Music
The scientific study of sound made great advances in the nineteenth century.Footnote 41 This gave rise to extended discussions on the metaphysics of music. Scientists strove to explain music in terms of the physics of sound and the physiology of sound perception. Some scientists, most notably John Tyndall, claimed that music could be explained with reference only to materialist concepts. Many writers on music maintained that there is much more to music than what science can explain. Religious authorities asserted that music could only be understood in spiritual terms.Footnote 42 Mill was convinced that a complete separation between issues of mind and matter is impossible, since they are closely interwoven in many areas of human concern.Footnote 43 In an essay from 1836 he applied this standpoint to music, an area in which he maintained that no one would ‘venture to pronounce that the facts they are conversant with belong either wholly to the class of matter, or wholly to that of mind’.Footnote 44 In his System of Logic (1843) he returned to the topic, emphasizing that musical sounds can be studied from both a mental and a material point of view.
[T]he science of music teaches us to discriminate between musical notes, and to know the combinations of which they are susceptible, but not what number of vibrations in a second correspond to each; which, though useful to be known, is useful for totally different purposes.Footnote 45
This can be read as a cautious criticism of the scientists who tried to adjudicate on issues of pitch and temperament with physical arguments.Footnote 46
In An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), Mill discussed a somewhat more subtle metaphysical issue, namely the nature of that which one perceives when hearing a musical chord. Sir Hamilton, whose philosophical views he was scrutinizing, had claimed that when listening to a harmony, we attend to two or more objects (sounds) at the same time.Footnote 47 Mill had another proposal on how harmonies are perceived:
When a number of sounds in perfect harmony strike the ear simultaneously, we have but a single impression; we perceive but one mass of sound. Analysing this into its component parts is an act of intelligence, not of direct perception, and is performed by fixing our attention first on the whole, and then on the separate elements, not all at once, but one after another.Footnote 48
Mill’s proposal is much closer than Hamilton’s to the way in which chord recognition is taught in Western musical traditions. Possibly, the lessons that he took in solfège and music theory in Toulouse, in 1820, helped him solve a metaphysical issue more than four decades later.Footnote 49
In System of Logic he took the trouble to refute the Pythagorean speculations about ‘the existence of an inaudible music, that of the spheres: as if the music of a harp had depended solely on the numerical proportions, and not on the material, nor even on the existence of any material, any strings at all’.Footnote 50 He also called attention to a rather subtle difference between our linguistic tools for expressing the material–mental distinction for the objects of music and those of the visual arts. Probably the clearest expression of his views on music in this respect can be found in an early draft of the book.
A sound, for example, cannot be said to be either a body or a mind; yet it is not an attribute. Sonorousness is the name of an attribute, but sound is a concrete name. It is a name for a certain sensation considered in itself, not implying that it emanates from any object. We know in point of fact that sounds always are produced by objects; but we can conceive that the case might be otherwise. We may conceive everything annihilated in the universe, except sounds, and ourselves hearing them. If we shut our eyes and listen to music, we may form to ourselves a conception of such a universe.Footnote 51
We also have ‘a whole vocabulary of words to denote the various kinds of sounds’.Footnote 52 In contrast, he said, our vocabulary for visual impressions is more limited. The word ‘white’ refers to objects producing a certain sensation, and ‘whiteness’ to the quality common to those objects. However, our language has ‘no single-worded or immediate designation’ for the sensation itself, which ‘though it never does, might very well be conceived to exist, without anything whatever to excite it’.Footnote 53
Before the recording of musical sounds became possible, a musical performance differed from the production of a painting or a statue in leaving no physical trace behind it. Mill connected this difference with Aristotle’s distinction between practice and production, which he also expressed with the English phrases to do and to make.Footnote 54 This meant that ‘dancing and music are practical, as leaving no work after their performance: whereas painting and statuary are productive, as leaving some product over and above their energy’.Footnote 55 This difference had since long been noted by those who wanted to relegate music to a lower position than some of the other arts.Footnote 56 In Mill’s time, the issue of productivity in the arts was mostly discussed in an economic context. Adam Smith had distinguished between productive work, which leaves behind some new or improved physical object, thereby adding to wealth, and unproductive work, which produces no physical object of value.Footnote 57 The work of painters and musicians fell on different sides of this distinction. Smith’s distinction had been criticized by the economist John Ramsay McCulloch in a book from 1825, in which he defined productive work as work that produces utility. McCulloch’s definition implied that the work of singers, instrumentalists, and dancers should be counted as productive, just like work resulting in material goods.Footnote 58 In an essay published in 1844, Mill defended Smith’s distinction. Since a performance on a musical instrument cannot be saved for the future, it does not contribute to wealth, he said, and therefore the performer was ‘not a productive but an unproductive labourer’. Similarly, the work of a singer such as Giuditta Pasta was unproductive, since she ‘performs, immediately for the spectators’ enjoyment, and without leaving, as a consequence of the performance, any permanent result possessing exchangeable value’. However, the workman who makes musical instruments is a productive labourer, and the same applies to ‘those who instructed the musicians, and all persons who, by the instructions which they may have given to Madame Pasta, contributed to the formation of her talent’. They performed productive work, since their work had a permanent manifestation in the skills of the musicians and the singer.Footnote 59
In his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill repeated his defence of the traditional definition. Work could only be productive if it left ‘a permanent acquisition in the improved qualities of any person or thing’, and therefore, ‘the labour of the musical performer, the actor, the public declaimer or reciter, and the showman’ was not productive in the technical sense.Footnote 60 However, he was also eager to emphasize that ‘[p]roduction not being the sole end of human existence, the term unproductive does not necessarily imply any stigma; nor was ever intended to do so in the present case’.Footnote 61
Epistemology and Musical Abilities
Mill analysed the nature of two types of musical abilities and their acquisition: skills on musical instruments and the art of musical composition. With a modern definition of knowledge that includes practical knowledge (know-how), both these issues fall within the domain of epistemology.Footnote 62
Eighteenth and nineteenth century proponents of associationist psychology often used the learning of a keyboard instrument to illustrate how sequences of motions can become automatized. David Hartley (1705–1757) may have been the first to use this example.Footnote 63 James Mill followed this tradition. He observed that in learning to play an instrument, every note will at first be ‘found by an effort’, but after sufficient exercise, ‘the proper choice is made so rapidly as to appear as if made by a mechanical process in which the mind has no concern’. In the same way, other habits proceed so easily and rapidly that ‘the reflection and the act cannot be distinguished from one another’.Footnote 64 In an essay on his father’s psychology, John Stuart Mill defended this view.Footnote 65 In his An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), he went into additional detail on the nature of manual skills, using piano playing as an example.
When we learn any manual operation, suppose that of playing on the pianoforte, the operation is at first a series of conscious volitions, followed by movements of the fingers: but when, by sufficient repetition, a certain facility has been acquired, the motions take place without our being able to recognise afterwards that we have been conscious of the volitions which preceded them. In this case, we may either hold with Sir W. Hamilton, that the volitions (to which must be added the feelings of muscular contraction, and of the contact of our fingers with the keys) are not, in the practised performer, present to consciousness at all; or, with [Dugald] Stewart, that he is conscious of them, but for so brief an interval, that he has no remembrance of them afterwards.Footnote 66
In this issue, Mill sided with Stewart. He maintained that a person learning to play the piano has ‘a conscious volition, anterior to the playing of each particular note’. When the player has learned a piece of music, the memory of these volitions has disappeared, so that there is not ‘the smallest remembrance of each of these volitions, as a separate fact’. This description stands out as being closer to the experience of learning to play an instrument than Sir Hamilton’s account. Possibly, Mill’s own experience of keyboard playing may have guided his approach to a discussion on musical skills that was conducted on an abstract level without much relation to practical musicianship.
Mill compared the unremembered volitions in music-making to an experience shared by all his readers: the turning of pages when reading a book. After we have finished reading, we do not have ‘the smallest memory of our successive volitions to turn the pages’, but we still know that ‘we must have turned them, because, without doing so, we could not have read to the end’.Footnote 67 In an interesting passage, Mill applied this view to the relationship between wholes and their parts.
We forget the details even of objects which we see every day, if we have no motive for attending to the parts as distinguished from the wholes, and have cultivated no habit of doing so. That this is consistent with having known the parts earlier than the wholes, is proved not only by the case of reading, but by that of playing on a musical instrument, and a hundred other familiar instances; by everything, in fact, which we learn to do. When the wholes alone are interesting to us, we soon forget our knowledge of the component parts, unless we purposely keep it alive by conscious comparison and analysis.Footnote 68
In Principles of Political Economy he used this analysis of practical skills in an explanation of the advantages of division of labour. Learning a practical routine begins by performing it at first ‘slowly with accuracy’, but after training it can be executed ‘quickly with equal accuracy’. This applied to both bodily and mental acts. He used playing a musical instrument as an example of a bodily act and playing music at sight as an example of a mental act. The increased dexterity was obtained after shorter practice for a task with only a few components than for a more complex task.Footnote 69
Following the tradition from enlightenment philosophy, Mill had a strong belief in the equal inborn capacities of all human beings.Footnote 70 In particular, he harboured a lifelong contempt of ‘the vulgar doctrine that women are not equal in intellect to men’.Footnote 71 In The Subjection of Women (1869) he referred in very general terms to the ‘unspeakable ignorance’ that led to the misconception that ‘[w]hatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be’ is regarded as a natural (innate) tendency, although it should be obvious that the true cause is to be found in ‘the circumstances in which they have been placed’.Footnote 72 This applied to artistic abilities as well as intellectual ones. He rejected as false the common saying nascitur poeta, which indicates that one is either born a poet or not a poet at all.Footnote 73 These standpoints were in stark contrast to the prevalent Romantic cult of the genius, which postulated large differences in inborn capacities and excluded women from the higher echelons of artistic ability.Footnote 74 Mill made only one exception to his general claim that all humans have the same inborn mental abilities. That exception was music.Footnote 75 He believed that there could be considerable differences in innate musical aptitude:
Music belongs to a different order of things; it does not require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependant on a natural gift … Footnote 76
However, even for those who had this natural gift, musical abilities would not come without effort. For the gift to be ‘made available for great creations’, study and professional devotion were necessary.Footnote 77 ‘Even a Mozart’, he said, ‘does not display his powerful originality in his earliest pieces’.Footnote 78
In the nineteenth century it was often discussed why there were so few eminent women composers.Footnote 79 In The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill joined this discussion. He saw no reason to believe that the natural gift of music was less common in women than in men. What women lacked was access to advanced education and professional opportunities.
This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation than the familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in anything else: the vast superiority of professional persons over amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught more or less of some branch or other of the fine arts. but not that they may gain their living or their social consequence by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind which confirm the general truth. Women are taught music, but not for the purpose of composing, only of executing it, and accordingly it is only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men … In musical composition, for example, women surely have produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male amateurs.Footnote 80
Mill was frequently ridiculed for his support of women’s emancipation, including equal rights and opportunities to work professionally with music. In 1872, John Ruskin criticized him for encouraging women to pursue ‘lucrative occupations’, one of which was singing ‘if it be shrill enough’. He warned husbands that ‘you will not get your wives to sing thus for nothing, if you send them out to earn their dinners (instead of earning them yourselves for them), and put their babies summarily to sleep’.Footnote 81
The Value of Music
In the eighteenth century, music was generally considered to have an inferior position in the hierarchy of arts, below both poetry and painting. Its status gradually increased, and at the middle of the nineteenth century it was often placed at the top of the hierarchy.Footnote 82 Mill does not seem to have propounded any overall ranking of the fine arts but is clear from his writings that he did not see music as inferior to any of the other arts. In one respect he considered music to rank higher than all the others. In his autobiography, he said that music ‘surpasses perhaps every other art’ in ‘exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character’.Footnote 83
Since the Middle Ages, vocal music had usually been assigned a higher status than instrumental music, largely because of its capability to express emotions with the help of words. Around the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, a ‘relatively sudden shift of instrumental music from the lowest to the highest of all musical forms, and indeed of all the arts in general’ took place in Germany, pioneered not least by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) who argued that music has a language of its own that can express human emotions better than what any words can do.Footnote 84 This was followed by a similar change of attitudes in Britain.Footnote 85 Mill treated vocal and instrumental music equally, and he does not seem to have expressed any general preference for one over the other.
Mill identified as a utilitarian.Footnote 86 One could therefore expect him to assign no other value to music than its value as a means to produce pleasure and reduce pain. However, in a key passage of Utilitarianism (1861), he pointed out that a desire that was originally ‘a means to happiness’ can develop into being ‘itself a principal ingredient of the individual’s conception of happiness’. It would then be ‘desired for its own sake’, but not in addition to happiness but ‘as part of happiness’.Footnote 87 He used music as an example of this. The art of music is ‘good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure’,Footnote 88 but it does not follow from this that the value of music is merely instrumental.
The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, are to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end.Footnote 89
Mill’s view that music has a value in itself is remarkable since it deviates from the instrumentalism of Benthamite utilitarianism. It is not unreasonable to wonder if his choice of music as an example of value-in-itself has something to do with the great role that music had in his own life.Footnote 90 It should also be noted that in his System of Logic (1843), Mill claimed that the three principles ‘Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Æsthetics’, alternatively called ‘the Right, the Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble’, in combination form an art to which all other arts are subordinate and which ‘must determine whether the special aim of any particular art is worthy and desirable, and what is its place in the scale of desirable things’.Footnote 91 This approach appears to give a larger role to aesthetic values than the one presented in Utilitarianism (1861).
Mill’s views on the value of music should also be related to the discussion on the value of music in Victorian Britain. The positive value of music was widely propounded, but as a means to moral improvement rather than a good in itself. Articles on the moral value of music were common, not only in journals devoted to education or music, but also in major general journals. Many diaries and letters by prominent intellectuals from the period contain comments on the positive effects of music on the listeners’ and the performers’ characters.Footnote 92 Mill concurred with this view. He used listening to an oratorio by Handel as an example of how ‘the mere contemplation of beauty of a high order produces in no small degree this elevating effect on the character’.Footnote 93
Mill was well aware that the appreciation of music differs between individuals. Already in his lecture notes from a logic course he took when he was 14, he wrote that just as there are people who cannot stand the smell of a rose, there are ‘others to whom music is more or less like the noise from carts is for others’.Footnote 94 In On Liberty (1859) he observed that differences in musical taste belong to the generally accepted differences among humans in their ‘sources of pleasure’.
Nowhere (except in some monastic institutions) is diversity of taste entirely unrecognised; a person may, without blame, either like or dislike rowing, or smoking, or music, or athletic exercises, or chess, or cards, or study, because both those who like each of these things, and those who dislike them, are too numerous to be put down.Footnote 95
Mill’s acceptance of diversity in taste did not lead him to aesthetic nihilism. To the contrary, he was more than willing to distinguish between music of high and low quality. Such distinctions are problematic for classical utilitarianism. If the value of a musical experience is determined exclusively by the degree of happiness it gives rise to, then a trivial melody is more valuable than a masterpiece if it brings about more happiness. However, this problem does not affect Mill’s version of utilitarianism. Contrary to Bentham, he maintained that ‘some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others’. The higher pleasures included ‘the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments’. These pleasures had ‘a much higher value as pleasures’ than ‘those of mere sensation’.Footnote 96 In particular, ‘the peculiar character distinctive of aesthetic feelings’ is associated with ‘stronger stimulus and a deeper delight to the imagination, because the ideas they call up are such as in themselves act on the imagination with greater force’.Footnote 97 According to Mill, a certain quantity of happiness obtained from a high pleasure can be worth much more than a larger quantity of happiness obtained from a low pleasure. He applied this analysis to music, and often referred to the distinction between higher and lower pleasures from music, speaking for instance about ‘the higher kinds of beauty’ and ‘beauty of a high order’.Footnote 98 In 1832 he wrote that someone who saw and heard the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder Devrient without realizing the deep emotional source of her acting was ‘not competent, in respect of sensibility, to judge of Art’.Footnote 99 In 1869 he wrote that ‘[e]very one who takes pleasure in a simple tune’ would be able to fully enjoy Weber’s and Beethoven’s music, but those who were unfamiliar with ‘the higher forms of beauty’ would often derive ‘little or no pleasure from a first hearing of them’.Footnote 100
Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures made his utilitarianism compatible with Romanticist strivings for the cultivation of higher values. It also provides a solution to the ‘standard of taste’ problem that philosophers have discussed intensely at least since David Hume’s essay on the topic in 1757.Footnote 101 The problem is how to combine two intuitions, namely that (i) individuals can legitimately have different opinions on what is beautiful, and (ii) there is often wide agreement that certain objects are beautiful, which makes it seem as if beauty were a property inherent in these objects. The Millian solution is that there is a standard of comparison, but it is only accessible in each particular case to persons who are well acquainted with all the objects under appraisal. The determination which of two pleasures is highest should be done by ‘those who are competently acquainted with both’.Footnote 102 This is a comparatively egalitarian and non-elitist solution, since individuals qualify as judges of beauty by having had certain experiences, rather than by being born with characteristics that make them suitable for the task.
Given the high value that Mill assigned to the ‘elevating effect on the character’Footnote 103 produced by music, it should be no surprise that he defended the freedom to perform and listen to music. In On Liberty he warned that wherever Puritans became a strong political force, as they were in New England and had previously been in Britain, they ‘put down all public, and nearly all private, amusements: especially music, dancing, public games, or other assemblages for purposes of diversion, and the theatre’. On Mill’s view they should ‘mind their own business’ and let others enjoy the amusements they preferred.Footnote 104
In the 1850s, the reactions of religious groups against amusements on Sundays grew in strength. So-called Sabbatarians argued that the Lord’s Day should be devoted to religious service, and therefore free from all kinds of secular amusements. Largely as a response to the Sabbatarians, the National Sunday League was founded in 1855. They proposed that edifying amusements should be available on Sundays. In particular, public museums, libraries and gardens should be open on Sundays.Footnote 105 Mill was sympathetic to these strivings, but he could not support the league since they did not go far enough. The League had declared that they opposed ‘any frivolous and vicious places of amusement’ on Sundays. According to Mill, this disclaimer was bound to be ‘understood as a protest against permitting, for example, music, dancing, & the theatre, all of which I should wish to be as free on the seventh (or rather the first) as on any other day of the week’.Footnote 106 In a parliamentary debate in 1867 he criticized a proposal by another member of parliament to allow Sunday lectures. The proposal was too limited, since ‘the Bill of my noble Friend does not include music’.Footnote 107
Street organs were common in London, but they were also subject to much controversy. They provided many of the less affluent inhabitants with most of the music they had the opportunity to hear. However, many business owners and homeowners found these instruments unbearable. Organ grinders were often treated harshly by constables and magistrates, and many attempts were made to have street music more strictly regulated or even prohibited.Footnote 108 In 1851 Mill wrote a newspaper article protesting against the severe judicial treatment of an Italian street organ player working in London. A tradesman had sued him, claiming that the sound from the organ was the reason why his horse had run away and damaged the gig. The magistrate sentenced the organ grinder to pay fines of £2 and damages of £10 or, if he couldn’t pay, spend one month in prison. Mill defended the organ player’s ‘legal right to grind his organ in the streets’ and claimed that the horse owner was himself to be blamed for the accident. Such sensitive horses, he said, ‘ought not to be brought into London streets’.Footnote 109
Musical Aesthetics
In 1832 and 1833 Mill published two essays on aesthetic theory.Footnote 110 He also expressed views on aesthetic topics in several other publications, including the Inaugural address (1867) and James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869), and in letters to various correspondents. Most of his focus was on poetry, but he also discussed the aesthetics of music.
Mill defined music as ‘[a]rt by the instrument of rhythmic sounds’.Footnote 111 He considered it to be the art most capable of arousing emotions. In a diary note from 1854 he also described music as the least intellectually demanding form of art:
That the mind of this age, in spite of its prosaic tendencies, is quite capable of and gifted for Art is proved by its achievements in music, in which it has excelled all previous times. Why, then, does it fail in all the other so-called fine arts? Because music, which excites intenser emotions than any other art, does so by going direct to the fountains of feeling, without passing through thought. It thus can be carried to any degree of perfection without intellect, or at least with only as much as is needed for mastering the technicalities of that as of any other pursuit. This is not true of any other of the arts; greatness in any of them absolutely requires intellect, and in this age the people of intellect have other things to do.Footnote 112
Mill was far from alone in describing music as a non-intellectual art form. This was a common message of the Romantic movement. To mention just one example, Wilhelm Wackenroder derided those who searched for the ‘scientific profundities of music’ and claimed that they ended up with ‘a clumsy and insensitive soul’.Footnote 113
The view that music expresses emotions more directly than what verbal expressions can do was commonplace at the time.Footnote 114 Already in the early eighteenth century, Roger North had written that musical sounds do not represent ‘the things comonly signifyed by words, but the thoughts of the person that useth them’.Footnote 115 In the Romantic period this was the received view.Footnote 116
It should be emphasized that although Mill agreed with the Romantic aestheticists on the primacy of emotion rather than intellect in the appreciation of music, he showed no sign of being attracted to the mystical and spiritual ideas that were voiced in particular by German Romanticists. For instance, Wackenroder supposed that ‘God’s invisible harp’ resonates with our earthly music,Footnote 117 and E.T.A. Hoffmann maintained that ‘[n]o art arises so directly from man’s spiritual nature, and no art calls for such primary, ethereal resources, as music’.Footnote 118 Friedrich Schelling claimed that music reveals the structure of a transcendental Absolute,Footnote 119 and Arthur Schopenhauer that it represents the absolute will of the world.Footnote 120 These were all ideas alien to Mill’s secular and rationalist worldview. His stance was therefore closer to modern expressivist views on music than to those that dominated in his own times.
Mill also emphasized the importance of emotions in the theatrical arts, not least opera.
[T]he actor of genius is not he who observes and imitates what men of particular characters, and in particular situations, do, but he who can, by an act of imagination, actually be what they are: who can so completely understand, and so vividly conceive, the state of their minds, that the conception shall call up in his own the very emotions, and thereby draw from him the very sounds and gestures, which would have been exhibited by the imaginary being whom he is personifying.Footnote 121
Such acting, he said, would ‘reach depths in the human heart, which no man’s opportunities and powers of mere outward observation could ever have enabled him to attain to’. To exemplify such masterly acting he mentioned Wilhelmine Schröder Devrient, whom he had seen as Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio.Footnote 122
It is notable that Mill identified the feelings expressed in opera performances as feelings of an ‘imaginary being’. The common view in his time was that art expressed the feelings of the artist, in the case of music usually the feelings of the composer. There are difficulties with this position, for instance it makes it difficult to understand how composers can create a musical representation of extreme agonies that they have not themselves experienced.Footnote 123 These problems are avoided with Mill’s reference to the emotions of an imaginary being. His approach can be seen as a precursor of Susanne Langer’s theory, according to which music is not an expression of the composer’s own emotions, but rather an ‘exposition of feelings which may be attributed to persons on the stage or fictitious characters in a ballad’.Footnote 124
His father’s associationist psychology could give rise to an all-encompassing associationist aesthetics of music. On such an account, all aesthetic sentiments aroused by musical sounds would have their origin in previous experiences of the same sounds in emotional situations. Such a ‘complete associationism’ was indeed advanced by Archibald Alison (1757–1839) in 1790.Footnote 125 However, Mill did not go as far as that. He saw such a resolution of ‘the pleasure of music into association’ as only half of the truth.Footnote 126 It was only one of two elements in musical pleasure. The other element was pleasure derived from the physical sounds themselves. The two elements are ‘intimately blended, but may, to a certain extent, be discriminated by a critical ear’.Footnote 127 The direct pleasure of the sounds, in turn, had three components:
[I]t can scarcely be doubted that there is also an element of direct physical and sensual pleasure. In the first place, the quality of some single sounds is physically agreeable, as that of others is disagreeable. Next, the concord or harmony of pleasant sounds adds a further element of purely physical enjoyment. And thirdly, certain successions of sounds, constituting melody or tune, are delightful, as it seems to me, to the mere sense.Footnote 128
Composers differ, he said, in the proportion between the associational and the direct physical elements of the pleasure evoked by their music. Beethoven and Gluck excelled in the associational part and Mozart in the direct physical part.Footnote 129 Whereas the associational element is presumably apparent at the first hearing, the direct physical pleasure is responsible for the need to listen more than once in order to fully appreciate a piece of music.
That the full physical pleasure of tune is often not experienced at the first hearing, is a consequence of the fact, that the pleasure depends on succession, and therefore on the coexistence of each note with the remembrance of a sufficient number of the previous notes to constitute melody: a remembrance which, of course, is not possessed in perfection, until after a number of repetitions proportioned to the complexity and to the unfamiliar character of the combination.Footnote 130
Mill was also aware that excessive repetition can diminish the pleasure of music. He ascribed this effect to diminution of the pleasure of ‘mere tune’, that is, the direct physical pleasure. Such pleasure, he said, ‘fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty’.Footnote 131 He saw the strong element of direct physical pleasure as characteristic of music in comparison to the visual arts. There was in his view a ‘direct element of physical pleasure in colours, anterior to association’, but this element was less prominent than in music. Instead, the element of association is ‘certainly more predominant in the pleasure of colours than in that of musical sounds’.Footnote 132
Mill’s dual analysis of musical pleasure in terms of pleasurable associations and physical enjoyment seems to have been original. However, it has a parallel in more recent discussions. Derek Matravers has proposed that ‘the ways in which music can arouse feelings or emotions’ can be divided into three broad categories. The arousal of feelings is of course a broader concept than the arousal of pleasure, but two of Matravers’s categories are very close to Mill’s. One of his categories is ‘associative’ arousal of feelings, which he illustrates with the ‘our song’ phenomenon and other cases of a merely contingent and external connections between the music and the emotions. This is essentially the category that Mill discusses under the same name. Another of Matravers’s categories is ‘music-specific’ reactions to music. It is characterized by changes in the emotion as the music changes. It corresponds closely to Mill’s category of ‘direct physical and sensual’ reactions to music. Matravers’s third category is ‘affective’ reactions to music. It is exemplified by being bored, irritated, or excited by music.Footnote 133
Mill distinguished between two ‘perfectly distinct styles’ in music, one of which he called the poetry, and the other the oratory of music. The terms ‘oration’ and ‘oratory’ were frequently used since the eighteenth century to describe the large-scale structure of a musical piece or movement. The ‘poetry’ of music was also commonly referred to. However, the oratory and the poetry of music were conceived as closely aligned.Footnote 134 Mill’s use of these terms for two contrasting musical styles appears to have been original. They align closely with his approach to the difference between poetry and prose. In poetry, ‘the source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility’, whereas novelists arouse emotions by ‘a series of states of mere outward circumstances’. He described poetry as ‘the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion’ and as ‘confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude’. Therefore, poetry is always ‘of the nature of soliloquy’.Footnote 135 Mill conceded that it might seem strange to use that word about something that is printed in books for everyone to read, but in fact, he said, it is not strange at all.
[T]here is nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself. The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill.Footnote 136
Similarly, the poetic style in music represented a mind focused inwards. It was expressed in the ‘the musing, meditative tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven’.Footnote 137
When the mind is looking within, and not without, its state does not often or rapidly vary: and hence the even, uninterrupted flow, approaching almost to monotony, which a good reader, or a good stager, will give to words or music of a pensive or melancholy cast.Footnote 138
The soprano aria ‘Dove sono’ in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro is a prime example of such soliloquy. According to Mill, we perceive it as overheard, rather than heard. Another example was the aria ‘Paga fui’ in Peter von Winter’s (now seldom heard) Il ratto di Proserpina, which Mill described as ‘the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude: fuller of meaning, and, therefore, more profoundly poetical than the words for which it was composed’.Footnote 139
The oratorical style also expresses passion, but this is ‘garrulous passion–the passion which pours itself into other ears: and therein the better calculated for dramatic effect, having a natural adaptation for dialogue’.Footnote 140 It was eminently exemplified by some of Rossini’s compositions, such as the contralto aria ‘Tu che i miseri conforti’ in Tancredi and the duet for soprano and contralto ‘Ebben per mia memoria’ in La Gazza Ladra. Both of these are ‘highly tragic and passionate’ with a passion of oratory, rather than poetry. Another important example of this style was Leonore’s aria ‘Komm Hoffnung’ in Beethoven’s Fidelio.Footnote 141
Although most of his examples referred to vocal music, Mill maintained that the two styles could also be distinguished in instrumental music. He saw Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont, ‘so wonderful in its mixed expression of grandeur and melancholy’, as the ‘consummation’ of the poetic style. The oratorical style could be exemplified, he said, by ‘any fine military symphony or march’, but he did not specify any such example. The insight that passions, although of different kinds, could be expressed in both these styles could, he said, ‘put an end to much musical sectarianism’, such as the ‘contention whether the music of the modern Italian school, that of Rossini and his successors, be impassioned or not’.Footnote 142
Mill’s description of the poetic style in music corresponds closely to his description of poetry. In contrast, the oratorical style in music does not correspond to that of literary prose. Whereas the latter is characterized by telling stories, oratorical music expresses emotions, albeit of a different nature than those expressed by poetical music.Footnote 143 In modern terminology, we can describe Mill’s views on musical meaning as highly expressionist, since the two types of music that he distinguished between were both characterized by expressing emotions. Timothy Costelloe rightly calls Mill’s view on poetry a ‘rather extreme version of expressivism’.Footnote 144 The same can be said of his stance on music.
Mill’s distinction between a poetic and an oratorical style in music seems to be the only of his ideas on music that has been explicitly referred to and developed in modern musical aesthetics. Malcolm Budd makes use of it in his theory of musical expression. He defines poetic music as ‘music which seems to be the expression of emotion that takes place without consciousness of an audience’ and oratorical music as music that ‘appears to the listener to suppose an audience which is to be affected by the act of expression’. He also makes the interesting observation that contrary to poetic music, oratorical music can have ‘a discrepancy between expression and emotion: the expression is designed to convince others of a strength or depth or purity of feeling which is unreal’.Footnote 145
In his writings on the aesthetics of poetry, Mill put much emphasis on its relation to music.Footnote 146 Verse, he said, is ‘speech made musical’,Footnote 147 and ‘the only reason for preferring verse to prose’ was ‘the music of its sound’.Footnote 148 His view that poetry and music are closely related was by no means original. Already in 1589, George Puttenham wrote that poetry should be ‘a kind of musical utterance’.Footnote 149 In 1781, Rousseau wrote that ‘the periodic and measured recurrences of rhythm, the melodious inflections of accents caused poetry and music to be born along with language’.Footnote 150 In Victorian times, the connection between music and poetry was well-established and uncontroversial.Footnote 151
In a letter to the philosopher George Henry Lewes, Mill commented on Lewes’s wide definition of poetry, which would include narratives and drama written in prose. Mill recognized that this was a matter of terminology and that Lewes was in his right to ‘use the word Poetry in a different extension & as synonymous with “Art by the instrument of words”’. However, in that case he would himself ‘claim the privilege of drawing within this large circle a smaller inner circle which shall represent poetry κατ’ ἐξοχήν [par excellence] or poet’s poetry as opposed to everybody’s poetry’.Footnote 152 In poetry in this restricted sense, metre was an essential constituent.
Hence, ever since man has been man, all deep and sustained feeling has tended to express itself in rhythmical language; and the deeper the feeling, the more characteristic and decided the rhythm; provided always the feeling be sustained as well as deep; for a fit of passion has no natural connexion with verse or music, a mood of passion has the strongest. No one, who does not hold this distinction in view, will comprehend the importance which the Greek lawgivers and philosophers attached to music, and which appears inexplicable till we understand how perpetual an aim of their polity it was to subdue fits of passion, and to sustain and reinforce moods of it.Footnote 153
Mill’s view that metre is an essential component of poetry was the conventional view throughout the nineteenth century. For instance, Edmund Gurney maintained that ‘given poetical subject-matter and sentiment, metre (or some equivalent for it) is the element of order which makes poetry poetry’.Footnote 154 Free verse was uncommon and much objected to until the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 155
According to Mill, the technicalities of rhythm were ‘essential for criticizing a poem, but not for enjoying it’.Footnote 156 Mill himself applied them for instance in criticizing Alfred Tennyson for lacking ‘powers of versification’. According to Mill, Tennyson ‘often seems to take his metres almost at random’.Footnote 157 On occasions, Mill also referred to poetry in melodious terms. For instance, he praised the ‘melodious language’ in Richard Monckton Milnes’ poetry.Footnote 158 In a letter to Robert Barclay Fox, who had asked for advice on his literary endeavours, Mill said that ‘there seems to me enough of melody in it, to justify your writing in verse, which I think nobody should do who has not music in his ear as well as “soul”’.Footnote 159
Although he was a Francophile, Mill took a negative view of poetry in French, claiming that the lack of ‘long and short or accented and unaccented syllables’ makes that language ‘essentially unmusical’. The only chance for French poetry to ‘be raised at all above prose’ was to obtain variety of rhythm through variety of versification.Footnote 160 This should be read against the background of long and heated debates in France on the merits and demerits of the French language, in particular during the Querelles des Bouffons in the early 1750s. In 1751 Diderot wrote that in spite of many other advantages, the French language was unsuitable for the theatre, and in 1753 Rousseau wrote that ‘there is neither metre nor melody in French Music, because the language is not susceptible to them’.Footnote 161 Mill’s judgment on the French language was not more severe than Rousseau’s.
Conclusion
Music had a large role in Mill’s life. However, opportunities to listen to music were still relatively rare in his time, which is why he went to Catholic churches to listen to the music. He was an accomplished pianist, and he used piano scores to acquaint himself with operas that he had heard of. He was also a talented improviser, but he only played in a small circle of family and friends.
His writings include many passages dealing with a wide range of topics in the philosophy of music, including the ontology of music and musical sounds, the productivity or non-productivity of musical work, the apparent automatism in playing an instrument, the relationship between musical and intellectual abilities, why there are so few women composers, the non-instrumental value of music, the mechanisms through which music evokes emotions and the role of musical elements in poetry. He proposed conceptual tools for the philosophical analysis of music that can still be useful. One example of this is the distinction between on the one hand those of our reactions to music that are based on associations between the music and non-musical experiences, on the other hand those reactions that are based on properties of the music itself.Footnote 162 Another is the distinction between a poetic and an oratorical mode of musical expression.
In the nineteenth century, philosophy of music was not yet an established academic (sub)discipline. Its practitioners were either philosophers who were laypersons in music or musicians who were laypersons in philosophy. Writings on the philosophy of music were usually a small part of their production, and no one before Eduard Hanslick seems to have taken it as their main field of scholarship.Footnote 163 For instance, Schopenhauer, who is generally cited as a major philosopher of music, wrote only three short pieces on music – a total of about 30 pages.Footnote 164 Therefore, the relatively small volume of John Stuart Mill’s writings on the philosophy of music is no reason to belittle his accomplishments in this area. Given the breadth and percipience of his contributions, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.
Sven Ove Hansson is professor emeritus in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His philosophical research includes contributions to moral and political philosophy, the history of political philosophy, the philosophy of risk, the philosophy of science and technology, decision theory, and logic. He is editor-in-chief of the philosophical journal Theoria and past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. He has authored or edited 20 scholarly books and is the author of more than 400 philosophical papers in refereed international journals and books. He is also an amateur violinist and a board member of the Swedish Early Music Society.
Open access
