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Anyone reading much of what is written about music in the analytical tradition of philosophy might be hard put to understand why anyone bothers to listen to and play music at all. Repeated discussion of whether music expresses emotions, what a musical work is, etc., involves doing what some of the rest of analytical philosophy does in relation to other aspects of the world, namely, seeking to establish which concepts can be applied correctly to whatever the object of investigation is. This kind of approach to philosophy is part of what can be challenged by ideas that developed in the period of German Idealism and that are today again becoming central to philosophy, notably via the effects of recent new versions of pragmatism. Instead of the first question being ‘What is the truth about the properties of the object x?’, the questions that are implicit in certain aspects of the re-orientation of philosophy in German Idealism are ‘How has x come to be significant at all?’ and ‘What sense does x make, and how?’. With regard to music, such questions allow us to stop thinking of it as an object of philosophy to be determined by conceptual analysis or as an object of natural scientific investigation and, instead, think in terms of the sense that music makes of the world, and why this kind of sense-making is so fundamental to many people's lives today, in ways which much philosophy as presently practised demonstrably is not. My title, then, is meant in both the subjective and objective genitive: I want to argue for the ‘musical’ nature of some of the most interesting philosophy in the Idealist period, and to consider how the nature of music changes in ways that can both illuminate and be illuminated by Idealist philosophy. The approach adopted here will, as anyone familiar, for instance, with Hegel's assessment of music may already be thinking, not necessarily rely on what was explicitly said in Idealist philosophy about music, but rather on how we can use aspects of this philosophy to understand the often underestimated impact of music in forming the world we inhabit.

Locating the unconscious

Philosophical investigations which trace the genesis of a concept from what preceded it, and then trace how the concept influenced what succeeded it, encounter a problem in relation to “the unconscious.” This problem might admittedly seem to arise in relation to any concept, because disagreements about the content of a concept inevitably result from the never finally delimitable contexts in which it is encountered. Philosophers don't even agree, for example, on whether “Water is H2O” is “necessarily true in all possible worlds.” In such a case we can at least refer to the familiar fluid that we are disagreeing about and describe some of its properties. With respect to the unconscious the problem is more fundamental because we don't know what we are talking about: if we did, it would not be unconscious. As we shall see, much will depend here on the sense of “know.” Before getting to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1770–1854), who has some claim to being the first person to use the term “unconscious” in the kind of ways which have been important in modern thought, we therefore need to explore some of the issues that make the unconscious a peculiarly recalcitrant topic. This should also enable us both to avoid the problem of just parroting what Schelling says when he employs the word “unconscious” and related terms, and to gauge whether his ideas are still philosophically significant.

'Romanticism' has often been regarded as being impossible to define in a clear manner, and there is very little agreement on what characterises philosophers who, even just in a German context, can be specifically termed 'Romantic'. Some commentators restrict the term 'Romantic philosophy' to the 'early German', 'Jena' Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and, sometimes, F. D. E. Schleiermacher and K. W. F. Solger, whereas others include Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and others. If we look at a characteristically provocative remark by a philosopher and writer who helped to bring the term Romantic into common usage, we can both elucidate the issue of definitions and get a sense of how one self-styled Romantic philosopher regards the task of philosophy. Friedrich Schlegel talks of the 'Ungeheurer Irrthum, daB von jedem Begriff nur Eine Definition möglich sei' ('Massive mistake, that only One definition is possible of every concept'), and he suggests that we should rather seek 'Unendlich viele ... reale synthetische' ('infinitely many ... real synthetic [definitions]'). In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, second, expanded edition 1787; Critique of Pure Reason) Kant is also overtly suspicious of the idea that concepts can be strictly defined. He claims that definition is really only possible for mathematical axioms, and that 'meine Erklärung kann besser eine Deklaration (meines Projekts) als Definition eines Gegenstandes heiBen' ('my explanation [of a concept] can better be termed a declaration (of my project) than a definition of an object').

During the second half of the eighteenth century in Europe a remarkable change occurred in the evaluation and understanding of music. From being widely regarded as something to be used to accompany social and religious occasions, rather than be listened to and played for its own sake, music came to be regarded by some influential writers, philosophers and composers as the source of revelations that were inaccessible to any other form of human expression. This change in the reception of music paralleled the remarkable flowering in the production of music in Germany from the later eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century in the work of, among others, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. The status of music in this period is connected to new interpretations of language and subjectivity associated with Romanticism, and these interpretations affect many widely held theoretical assumptions. Philosophical accounts of music still, for example, tend to assume that music is a mystery which needs to be explained in a philosophical theory. However, conceptual and aesthetic developments associated with Romanticism already put this assumption into question, because it depends on the idea that the primary function of language is to represent the objective world.

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This chapter considers what makes the study of jazz different from the study of other kinds of music. It looks at jazz's mixture of assimilation and rejection of other music, and shows how it relates to important political, social, and economic issues. Problems in writing the history of jazz are examined, and the role of recording and transcription in the reception and teaching of jazz are stressed. The nature of improvisation is considered in relation to composition in classical music, and the tension in jazz between the drive for new forms of expression and the desire to appeal to a wider audience is investigated. The question of whether jazz can still remain a “critical” form of music when it is increasingly being formally taught in schools and universities is raised along with the issue of whether jazz should now be concerned with the preservation of its traditions, or with new musical exploration.

Key issues

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This chapter demonstrates why aesthetics, the branch of philosophy concerned with art and beauty, should be a part of the study of music. It outlines the emergence of aesthetics from the eighteenth century onwards in terms of the changing relationship between what is considered to be “subjective” and what is considered to be “objective.” This relationship has important implications for both the historical and the analytical study of music. In the modern period, ideas about objectivity are changed by the growing sense in many areas of Western society that there is no divine order of things, and that objectivity is therefore in some way dependent upon human subjectivity. Music is a form of art that is both objective, in the sense that it relies on rules of harmony, acoustics, etc., some of which can be formulated mathematically, and subjective, because it addresses human feelings and is judged in part on the basis of feelings. Music becomes important in the modern period because its meaning can be interpreted in very different ways, which are often influenced by issues in the society in which it is located. Aesthetic questions lie at the heart of debates in the contemporary study of music over whether music should be looked at in formal, analytical terms, or whether it should be connected to social and political issues.

Key issues

The task of philosophy

In early German Romantic philosophy communication and understanding are often regarded more as ways of acting and being in the world than as forms of representation of a pre-given reality. Music becomes particularly significant because it involves norm-based interpretation, on the part both of players and of listeners, and yet resists wholesale incorporation into representational and theoretical discourse. The question is what this means for philosophy. The interrogation of the nature of philosophy occasioned by the changes in thinking about language in Romanticism need not imply that, because modern philosophy fails to achieve some of the tasks it sets itself, it is therefore at an end, in the way the later Heidegger claims by his equation of philosophy and metaphysics. Such an implication would contradict the pragmatist side of Romanticism, which assesses discourses and practices in terms of their contribution to human flourishing, and so abstains from final judgements on the status of particular cultural practices. There is, however, no doubt that a significant strand of modern philosophy, from the Romantics, to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer, can be interpreted as questioning the assumptions of science-oriented philosophy in terms of the issues that we have been exploring via music.

Ernst Tugendhat has criticised this strand of philosophy as follows: ‘it is characteristic for the entire tradition of philosophical Romanticism from Schelling and Hegel to Heidegger and Gadamer that, in ever new ways, an ontologically inflated conception of art became a substitute for the question of the justification of norms, and it was in every instance an obfuscation of the concept of truth’ (Tugendhat 1992: 430).

Cheesecake, or metaphysics?

After Adorno's sombre analyses of the place of music in modernity, in which pleasure is often subordinated to truth, there might seem to be something refreshing about the bluff hedonism of Steven Pinker's claims that music is ‘auditory cheesecake’ (Pinker 1997: 534) and that ‘the direct effect of music is sheer, pointless pleasure’ (www.lse.ac.uk/collections/evolutionist/pinker.htm). The difference between Pinker and Adorno is a somewhat drastic illustration of how the split between metaphysics and metaphysics can manifest itself in modernity. In a riposte to the comical reductionism of evolutionary psychology's treatment of cultural issues, Louis Menand suggests against Pinker that:

Pinker is not worth taking seriously in this context (and in quite a few others): he too often fails to separate how an aspect of culture may have originated from how it subsequently becomes significant.

This is not a book about the ‘philosophy of music’ in the sense which that term generally has within academic philosophy. Rather than seeing the role of philosophy as being to determine the nature of the object ‘music’, it focuses on the philosophy which is conveyed by music itself. This idea is explored via the interaction between philosophy and music in modernity which is largely ignored, not only in most of the philosophy of music, but also in most other branches of philosophy. The consequences of my exploration are, I suspect, more important for philosophy than for the practice of music, but musicians, and especially musicologists – who these days seem increasingly interested in philosophy – may find what I say instructive. If they do, it will be because I want, via a consideration of music's relationship to verbal language, to question some of the ways in which philosophy has conceived of the meaning and nature of music.

The ideas for this book have been a long time in germinating, beginning during work on Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus for my PhD in the 1970s (Bowie 1979), and continuing with my work on the relationship of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy to contemporary concerns in the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s and beyond, and the ideas are, of course, by no means exhausted by what I have been able to say. Such a book is necessarily interdisciplinary, and the attempt to cover all the issues touched on in it in any detail would have resulted in an impossibly large volume.

Form, meaning, and context

Philosophical writers on music who argue that wordless music does not mean anything sometimes refer to it as ‘pure form’. Peter Kivy says of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, for example, that ‘it has no content to reveal, no message to decode’, and that in the teaching of the work ‘few instructors, trained in the modern analytical and musicological traditions as they are, will be tempted to attribute any meaning to it’ (Kivy 1993: 29), it being, ‘in a sense … pure contentless abstract form’ (ibid.: 30). Kivy's second claim is, of course, simply untrue: many professional ‘new musicologists’ would indeed attribute meaning to the Eroica. The sense in which it is supposed to be ‘pure contentless abstract form’ is not clear, but from the rest of Kivy's arguments it would appear to have to do with the idea that the Eroica does not designate anything. The idea that a form, especially a musical form, can be ‘pure’ should, though, already be doubtful on the basis of what was argued in the Introduction. For a form to be a significant form at all, it has to be understood as such, rather than merely registered as a series of unconnected data. Contextual and background factors that do not belong to the data themselves must come into play here, and so must the inferential apprehension of patterns of identity and difference, of the kind required for language use. It is only when there are such patterns that we need to interpret, so the very notion of form relies on the sense that there is something to be further understood. Forms are therefore always open to re-description when new contexts arise in which they take on a different significance.

The Wagner problem

In Search for a Method Sartre says of Paul Valéry that he is ‘a petitbourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Valéry’ (Sartre 1968: 56). The case of Richard Wagner gives us the analogous ‘Wagner was a resentful, vicious anti-Semite, but not every resentful, vicious anti-Semite was Wagner.’ In the light of the Holocaust it is, however, not enough to leave it at that. Anti-Semites in nineteenth-century Germany – who included a significant proportion of the German population, including Karl Marx – should not be equated with real Nazi perpetrators or fellow-travellers, but neither should they be seen as wholly blameless. At the same time, even though context cannot excuse everything, one should take account of the differing performative effects of texts and artworks in differing historical situations. What does make Wagner a real problem in relation to the questions posed by the present book is his main contribution to the ideology of the Holocaust, the reprehensible essay, ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850), which he insisted on re-publishing and explicitly defending against criticisms in 1869, thereby compounding the damage. The effects of the essay's odious contentions persist into the Nazi period, when Jewish music is banned because it was supposed to involve a ‘Jewish’ musical essence of the kind Wagner invokes in the essay.

Were it not for Wagner's anti-Semitism in this essay and other writings, such as the essay ‘Modern’, there would be little reason to regard the intense controversy generated by his work as meaning that it should be rejected as morally indefensible, even where it is anything but morally attractive.Das Rheingold, for instance, is remarkable for having not one character who is in any way admirable.

Philosophy and music

An ironic reminder of music's central role in many aspects of life in modernity was given not long ago by the report that ‘music’ had – albeit only temporarily – replaced ‘sex’ as the word used most often in Internet searches. The likelihood of ‘philosophy’ becoming the most popular word in Internet searches is, of course, pretty remote. This rather crude sign of the difference in the contemporary importance of these two elements of modern culture can also be read as an indication of a deeper issue. Why this is so can be suggested by the difference between two moments in the changing relationship between philosophy and music in modernity. The heroic period of modern philosophy in Europe epitomised by Kant's claims on behalf of self-legislation in opposition to obedience to traditional authority is contemporaneous with the development of the new ‘autonomous’ music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, as well as with the emergence of new ideas concerning music's connection to philosophy. Professional philosophy, particularly in the Anglo-American world today, has, in contrast, tended to become a more and more specialised academic activity with little direct bearing either on people's attitudes to or on the conduct of their lives. The idea that academic philosophy might now have a fundamental connection to music is, moreover, almost inconceivable in many areas. Music itself, on the other hand, has continued, in albeit sometimes problematic ways, to be a central feature of the everyday lives of people in modern societies.

One of the aims of this book is to show both that some recent directions in philosophy offer ways of re-establishing connections to music and that this is important for the future direction of philosophy.

Explicit and implicit music

The fact that it took until the work of Karl-Otto Apel in the 1970s (Apel 1973, 1976) for the affinities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger to be widely appreciated is a symptom of the divisions between ‘analytical’ and ‘European’ approaches in twentieth-century Western philosophy.These divisions appear in Kivy's claim, cited in the Introduction, that ‘Music, of all the arts, is the most philosophically unexplored and most philosophically misunderstood where it has been explored at all’ (Kivy 1997: 139). This is obviously not the case for the European tradition, and therefore could be valid only for the analytical tradition. But then consider the following. Wittgenstein must be regarded as part of the analytical tradition. However, even in his early writings, which helped to establish the terms of analytical philosophy, he used music as a means of asking questions about philosophy. On the other hand, Heidegger, for many the epitome of a ‘European’ philosopher, wrote virtually nothing about music, although he did think that it was important. Despite Heidegger's lack of attention to music, we have already seen that music plays a role in his work. I want in this chapter to explore this role a bit further, but I mainly want to argue at greater length that, along with the explicit role which music plays in Wittgenstein's thinking, it plays an important implicit role which has rarely figured in the main interpretations of his philosophy. My claim will be that the entanglement of music and philosophy is not primarily a philosophical problem for Wittgenstein, but is instead a resource for exploring the nature of language and the world.