The problem of representation in music
One of the primary problems in musical aesthetics is the problem of representation. Literary and visual arts have traditionally occupied a higher cultural status than music precisely for this reason. Both are representational mediums. Take any painting or novel, especially from the period before about 1910. We have realist representations of life. Even when representing the fantastical, the words and images can be visualized in the mind’s eye. On the other hand, if I put on a Brahms’ symphony or a Schoenberg piano piece, what do they represent? As Marshall McLuhan famously said, the “the medium is the message,” and given music’s non-representational status, the ‘message’ is problematic.
By representation, I mean the concreteness of the images presented to our consciousness as expressed through words and images. Take for example this passage from James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
“He looked at Athy’s rolled up sleeves and knuckly inky hands. He had rolled up his sleeves to show how Mr Gleeson would roll up his sleeves. But Mr Gleeson had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed.”
Joyce paints a picture that we are able to reproduce in our mind’s eye, bringing us into the world he magically conjured up. The concreteness of the word enable us to do this. A word signifies a thing, and we bring that thing and its characteristics to our minds. It would be a relatively simple thing to draw or paint a picture of this scene. Conversely, that’s what visual art is able to do. Let’s now look at a painting by Van Gogh, his painting, “Two hands.”
Here, we really don’t have to imagine the hands as in Joyce’s prose description of Athy. Van Gogh’s representation of the hands are immediately present to us. But these manifestations of the phenomenal world raised to the level of art pose difficult questions for musical aesthetics. Let’s say that I decided to write a piece of music representing Joyce’s description or Van Gogh’s painting, making no mention of the source for my inspiration. Unless I specified the particular source, who would know? Who would even care? Music, especially instrumental music, had an absoluteness to the concrete conditions of life that sets it off from lived experience. Or so it would seem. There is yet another problem.
Words do more than represent the concrete objects we encounter in the world. They also represent ideals and concepts. Visual art too is able to use symbols that represent abstract concepts. But again, music seems by comparison to lack this ability. Let’s consider some of the most famous compositions of all time, compositions that sparked an entire aesthetic war in the 19th century over what music can or ought to express- Beethoven’s great Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. I am leaving out the Sixth for a later discussion.
Beethoven and the meaning of a work.
What made Beethoven’s work so compelling to his and future audiences was his coupling of musical structures to philosophical concepts. Rather than taking on the ninth directly, I want to start with his Fifth Symphony in c minor. The symphony opens with one of the most compact and famous motifs ever composed:
In the popular imagination, this motif has come to function as a metaphor. It is an aural metaphor for the arrival of fate, usually a fate we’d rather not face. While it is unlikely that Beethoven himself ever referred to this motif as “fate knocking at the door,” that is how many people understand it. In the absence of any clear verbal or visual explanation, it’s extremely difficult to say what exactly Beethoven meant here. I am not suggesting that the meanings language and visual art express are transparently obvious or not subject to ambiguity. That would be patently false. However, it is true that in the absence of text or image, the meaning of music is not at all clear qua music.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony drives this point home. The ninth symphony bears comparison with the fifth. Both symphonies start initially express conflict, struggle, and turbulent emotions. In the fifth, there is a final resolution to this indicated by a change of modality from c minor to C major at the end of the third movement. The fourth movement then explodes with triumphant calls of brass instruments and a joyous dance cum march. There is no text or program. The meaning seems obvious enough. Yet, Beethoven turned the final movement of his ninth symphony into as massive hymn complete with Schiller’s text proclaiming hope, unity, and joy. It was if major chords were not enough. Thus Beethoven resorted to a text with explicit meanings to represent the broader meaning of the work. One question this raises is that whether he had he found music alone to be insufficient? That’s certainly how some 19th composers and theorists understood it.
Music: craft or art?
Fast forward to the 20th century. With the breakdown of European culture in the first half of the century, the representational veracity of both language and visual art was called into question. Whether through stream of consciousness narratives, cubism, or abstract impressionism, the function of Art was no longer primarily representational as it had been at least since the Renaissance. One could say that insofar as Art became a replacement for religion in an increasingly secular West, it was forced into higher levels of abstraction and esoteric practices. Likewise, music became unmoored from the tonal language that had dominated its range of expression since the 17th century. In a real sense, music paved the way to these developments. The very abstractness of music, its lack of representational content, inspired artists from all domains. Music had gone from being considered barely a fine art at all in 1750 to the highest form of art by 1900 in Walter Pater’s famous formulation.
The question now is whether this assessment is still considered true. I think not. For one thing, we no longer live in a Eurocentric world in which the ‘high art’ of European culture is considered the pinnacle of human development and evolution. In other words, European dominance of the late 19th or early no longer applies. The other factor is the rise of music in media. Through media such as film, television, video games, ever present streaming platforms, and the piping of music of all kinds in public spaces, music has become such a ubiquitous phenomenon that its presence is practically taken for granted. Consequent to these developments is the fragmentation of musical culture into hundreds of genres and subgenres.
Final notes
So where does all this leave us? I started out talking about the problem of representation in music, and explaining why aestheticians questioned music’s status as a ‘high/fine art’ because of this very lack. Yet, the 19th century embraced that same quality to put music at the top of the hierarchy of all the arts. So, what then is music, craft or fine art? Further, do we even have a basis for talking about musical aesthetics that is neither hopelessly subjective or hopelessly elitist? I think we do, but any serious philosophical discussions must take account of developments in neuroscience and the psychology of musical perception. We have to start with the question of what it is that music does for us as a species that makes its very existence indispensable, pace Stephen Pinker. The answer to the question will take some time to ferret out.