Taking Music Philosophically

Abstract

PHILOSPHICAL INTEREST IN MUSIC goes back to the very begin nings of Western thought. In the late sixth century B.c., the Greek phi losopher and sect founder Pythagoras discovered the mathematical basis of musical intervals, thereby assigning the study and practice of music to the activity of the intellect, well beyond the confines of the senses. In their cosmological speculations Pythagoras and his school extended the concept of music to include the music produced by the movements of the celestial spheres ? a music inaudible to the human ear but detectable in philosophi cal meditation. It could be argued that Western music never completely ridded itself of the Pythagorean spiritualization of this particular art form. Even in its institutional and sociological history, music was set apart from the other through its historical proximity to philosophy. The medie val educational system considered music one of the seven free or liberal arts (artes liberales), grouped together, in the quadrivium, with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and strictly separated from such mechanical arts as painting and sculpture. Throughout the centuries the recognition of music's affinity to philoso phy has taken various forms. Quite a number of philosophers, among them Augustine and Descartes, wrote musical treatises, others engaged in contemporary musical controversies or actually composed music. A few philosophers, most notoriously Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Adorno, did all three of those things. In the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysics of music, with its appreciation of music's unique power to express the essence of the world, proved highly influential among com posers (Wagner) and the wider public alike. In the twentieth century, efforts at taking music seriously from a philosophical perspective have been divided between a Continental camp, whose championship of the Schoen berg school tends to be partisan, polemic, and even pontificating, and the more sober and pedestrian work done by Anglo-American scholars trying to apply the tools of philosophical analysis to the recalcitrant topics of the production and reception of musical works of art. Over the past decade the American philosopher Peter Kivy (Rutgers University) has published a series of five books in the philosophy of music.