Bollingen Series

Music and the External World

Victor Zuckerkandl, Willard R. Trask, Willard R. Trask

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691218366
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

An approach to music as an instrument of philosophical inquiry, seeking not so much a philosophy of music as a philosophy through music.

MOTION

PREFATORY NOTE

THE AIM of the remainder of this study will be to make clear how three of the foundation pillars of our picture of the external world, the concepts of motion, time, and space, look in the light of the experience of music.

To this end, we shall proceed as follows. In the foreground is always the musical experience: What do I hear? From this experience we isolate a motion component, a time component, a space component, describe them as accurately as possible; compare what we have described with the concepts of motion, time, and space that our intellectual tradition has rooted in the general consciousness. In so far as disparities between experience and concept are brought to light in this way, our investigation will become a critique of these fundamental concepts on the basis of musical experience: music makes us revise these concepts to bring them into agreement with our experience. In this procedure we can appeal to the precedent of the natural sciences, which, for their part, are constantly summoning fundamental concepts before the judgment seat of their observations and descriptions, and which, when necessary, recast them to maintain agreement between concept and experience. Our own twentieth century is well acquainted with this procedure: the shock of the so-called relativi-zation of space and time is still very much with us.

It is not usual to hear the voice of music testify in matters such as these. This is no reason, though, not to accept its testimony. To deny it the right to be heard would be a sign of unscientific dogmatism.

VII. The Paradox of Tonal Motion

SO FAR, tones as elements of musical contexts have been the subject of our investigation. We now turn and inquire into the context as such, into that of which the tones are elements. With what sort of context are we here confronted?

Again let us briefly establish what is not our aim in putting this question. We do not seek to know how musical contexts are created, composed; this is a question for musical theory. Nor are we interested in whatever moral, emotional, or other effects the hearing of musical contexts may produce in the listener. We simply ask: What is given in musical experience directly as context? What do I hear when I hear context? What do I call the thing that, interpenetrating the multitude of successive tones, connects them together?

Let us again begin from the fundamental experience; let us try to describe the phenomenon of melody. If we permit ourselves no straying into technical matters or into emotional commentaries, we shall inevitably speak of the tones as going up and down, of a rise to a high point, a descent, a lingering, of steps and leaps—in short, of motions. Let us listen, for example, to the beginning of the Marseillaise:

What is it—aside from being tonic and dominant, march time, up-beat; aside too from being beautiful, proud, heroic, aggressive, inspiring—but an ascent? And what an ascent! It is beautiful, proud, inspiring, because it is that particular ascent. The motion is the primary thing.

Musical contexts are motion contexts, kinetic contexts. Tones are elements of a musical context because and in so far as they are conveyors of a motion that goes through them and beyond them. When we hear music, what we hear is above all motions.

When motion in music is discussed, we naturally think especially of rhythm. Rhythm seems to us to be the real kinetic element in music. It is the rhythm of a march or of a dance which, as the expression goes, “gets into our legs”; it is the rhythmic power of the performance of a great interpreter which, if the audience were less civilized, would tear them out of their seats. Later we shall discuss the entire complex of rhythmic phenomena; here for the moment we shall leave them out of consideration. Rhythm is not a specifically musical phenomenon. It is the one element which music has in common with other phenomena and processes. The rhythmical instruments in the narrower sense—the percussion instruments, the various drums, cymbals, triangles—are not properly musical instruments, since, with the exception of the borderline case of the kettledrum, they produce noises, not tones. But here we are concerned primarily with tones, with the motion that lies in tones as such—with what we called the ascent in the opening of the Marseillaise. That was precisely not the rhythm, the ever identical rhythm of all marches; it was a motion which, apart from the rhythm, we heard in the tones as such. And we must not forget that what we call rhythm in music is a comparatively new thing, unknown to antiquity and the Middle Ages. But music has always been perceived as motion, entirely independently of whether it possessed rhythm in our sense or not.

It is, in fact, most striking with what uniformity, despite all differences between persons and periods, the idea of motion forced itself upon thinkers and scholars when the question of designating the essential element of music arose.¹ Saint Augustine has little in common with modern experimental psychologists in other respects; but when, in his profound utterances on the subject of music, he describes its nature as ordered motion, he and the antique tradition, which he here continues, reach across the millennia to the modern scholars who “hold that, in a study of melody, the focal point must be sought in melodic motion” and to whom “motion appeared to be the essential element.”² With changing periods, the concept of motion may change its meaning; but nothing changes in the interpretation of music as motion. If in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all art is held to be imitation, music is held to be the imitation of the motions of feeling. If to the earlier Romanticists music stood highest among the arts, it was because they believed that they perceived the mysterious flow of life itself in music—here we have a new motion symbol. Hegel speaks of music’s task “of echoing the motions of the inmost self,” of its power “of penetrating with its motions directly into the inmost seat of all the motions of the soul.”³ The Scientific Age finds its characteristic form of interpreting music as motion: Helmholtz undertakes to refer the effect of music back to its relationship with physical movements.⁴ Edmund Gurney, author of a remarkable book, The Power of Sound, opposes Helmholtz’s view; his musical instinct rejects the attempt to understand music in accordance with the motion of bodies but not the use of the concept of motion itself; to him music reveals itself as “ideal motion.” Eduard Hanslick’s definition of music as “tönend-bewegte Form” as “sounding form in motion,” is well known. (He was wrong, though, in claiming priority for this idea, as when he wrote: “Though the idea of motion appears to us a most far-reaching and important one, it has hitherto been conspicuously disregarded in all enquiries into the nature and action of music.”⁵ Can it be that his historical knowledge was as imperfect as his artistic judgment?) While Hanslick connected the concept of motion with a shallow and rigid concept of form, we find a far more fruitful linking of the two ideas, form and motion, in the work of the greatest musical theorist of our time, Heinrich Schenker, who understood the musical work of art as a complex kinetic organism.⁶ Ernst Kurth, setting out from a different basis and aiming in a different direction, coincides with Schenker in his conclusion that “all musical phenomena rest upon kinetic processes and their inner dynamics.”⁷ Not only theoreticians, but creative musicians too, are of the same opinion. “Basically, music is not so much sound as motion,” writes Roger Sessions in The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener. To conclude, let us hear a contemporary aesthetician and a contemporary psychologist. “Auditory movement [of a melody],” says Carroll C. Pratt, “as well as visual and kinesthetic, is an immediate fact of direct experience.”⁸ And in Erwin Straus’ Vom Sinn der Sinne we read: “The unity of music and motion is primordial, not artificial, not contrived, and not learned.”

But it is not only these and similar statements by authoritative thinkers and scholars which we can adduce in support of our contention that music is motion. From a direction whence we should not have expected it, from the side of exact measurement, comes confirmation that we do not deceive ourselves if we interpret the direct musical experience as an experience of motion.

In the first section of this book we spoke of the practical but somewhat crude compromise represented by the tuning of such an instrument as our piano, with its division of the octave into twelve equal half tones. The differences between this compromise, the so-called equal temperament and the just intonation, which rejects the compromise and which, for instance, a violinist would prefer, are audible to very acute ears, but are so slight that they lie below the threshold of disturbance. Hence the problems involved are of technical and scientific rather than artistic interest. And it was a purely...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Sound and Symbol
• Foreword
• Tone
• Motion
• Time
• Space
• List of Works Cited
• Index
• About the author