Oxford Handbooks Online: What Is Music, Anyway?

What Is Music, Anyway?
Oxford Handbooks Online

Andrew Bowie
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory
Edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings
Subject: Music, Music Theory Online Publication Date: Jun 2018

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190454746.013.30
Abstract and Keywords
Definitions of music are contested, not least because the notion of definition itself is
contested. Rather than define music, it can be more productive to trace how the use of
the term has shifted historically. However, this approach may fail to explain why it
matters whether something is music or not. Music itself can question the exclusive
concentration on discursive understanding of the world. The reasons for this relate to
differences between seeing music as an object of study and participating in music. Such
differences are also apparent in differences between formalist and other approaches,
which are reflected in political stances with respect to music. Historical discriminations
between music and non-music (for instance, in relation to language) can also illuminate
what we think music is. Rather than just being a philosophical mystery, music can bring
its own kind of sense to the world.
Keywords: music, definition, new musicology, philosophy, music and language, observation versus participation,
meaning
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Definitions
Faced with any object of study, the obvious demand would seem to be that one define the
key term in that study. However, anyone now expecting a definition of music is about to
be disappointed. Indeed, part of what I want to say is that seeking to arrive at a definition
of music may actually get in the way of comprehending music. The Cambridge Dictionary
does its definitional duty with the following: “a pattern of sounds made by musical
instruments, voices, or computers, or a combination of these, intended to give pleasure to
people listening to it.” So no 4.33, no natural sounds like birdsong, no avant-garde that
ensures that you can’t get any immediate sensuous or melodic pleasure from the music.
The Oxford English Dictionary probably does a bit better, always assuming that what is
“produce[d]” can be alternatives and are not all necessary for “music”: “The art or
science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony,
melody, rhythm, expressive content, etc.; musical composition, performance, analysis,
etc., as a subject of study; the occupation or profession of musicians.”
It is not that these characterizations are of no use: general terms for designating things,
however vague, play a vital role in everyday life. In this respect, one can see music in
terms of what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “family resemblance,” where nothing is identical
among different cases of what is at issue, but the cases are linked by overlapping
similarities. Definitions, in contrast, have to be able to set boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion that establish the scope of a concept. Such boundaries may be notoriously
unstable, though; indeed, the history of Western music in particular can be characterized
precisely by the ways in which the boundaries of the musical and the non-musical shift.
The Greek “art of the Muses,” μουσική, included much more than just patterns of sounds,
involving poetry and drama, for example, so the restrictions in the dictionary definitions
are themselves historical developments. The Greek notion of poiesis (creative production),
which the early German Romantics adopted for their idea of Poesie (which involved all
the arts), led the Romantics to suggest that we should appreciate how the arts interact
and may affect each other’s borders. But where does that leave one in terms of
contemporary attempts to characterize music as an object of study? In what follows, I
shall concentrate on the issues as they appear in the Western traditions, although I hope
that some of what I say will be relevant to other traditions.
The way out here might seem to be to historicize the concept of music, tracing how its
boundaries have shifted and what might have occasioned those shifts. This can make us
aware of how differently the concept has been used at different times and in different
places, and so alter our perspective on our own uses of the term. However, just
describing such shifts may not do justice to the way in which the tensions inherent in a
concept like music reveal things that are hidden from a historicist approach. Merely
detailing how the term “music” has been used in various contexts risks making an issue
seem not to matter much, when disputes about whether something is music clearly do
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matter a lot in many contexts. Otherwise, why would the Taliban and other religious
extremists ban it?
So far, we have touched on approaches that seek to establish music’s nature in discursive
terms. But one of the reasons that there has been such extensive reflection about the
nature of music is that music, especially in the modern period, can itself be understood to
pose questions about exclusive reliance on discursive means. The failure to define music,
in that case, may tell us more about music than attempts at defining it.
Form and Content

If what music is “saying” is supposed to be “unsayable,” success in verbally articulating
what it says would make the music itself superfluous. At the same time, verbal
articulation of the content of music can reveal things that would not have been manifest
without the verbal accounts. Otherwise, much of the study of music would be redundant.
One can see here the source of conflicts in the contemporary study of music that emerge,
for example, in relation to new musicology’s attempts to interpret music by locating it in
historical, ideological, gender, and other contexts, in a manner analogous to the
interpretation of literary and other texts.
A denial that such an approach tells us anything about the music in question is
implausible, but the desire to semanticize music in new musicology has to take account of
the objection that music’s resistance to semanticization can be as important as its being
understood through verbal articulation. Why this can be the case involves the difference
between observation of music as an object of study like any other, and participation in
music as a practice that can change our relationships with the world. The former has
tended to dominate reflection on the status of music, often at the expense of the latter.
The other aspect of resistance to semanticization relates in the modern period to the need
for forms of expression that can articulate what dominant cultural forms obscure. Why
this is the case will become apparent in a moment.
Musical formalism, of the kind that derives from Eduard Hanslick’s 1854 On the Musically
Beautiful, is one version of an anti-semanticizing approach. Mark Evan Bonds (2006, 108)
suggests why this is:
Hanslick’s treatise soon became […] the rallying point for all those who sought to
protect instrumental music—above all, Beethoven’s symphonies—against
encroachments from the world of politics. The musical work, by this line of
thought, is autonomous and nonreferential; while it may be susceptible to
differing interpretations, these perceptions have nothing to do with the work’s
true essence.
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In relation to such opposed concepts as the hermeneutic approaches in new musicology

and some versions of formalism, does one come down on one side or the other with
respect to music’s autonomy, in the name of establishing a true theory? Or is there an
alternative that does not lead to adopting contradictory positions, and thus to
incoherence?
Bonds’s point, that what is at stake in formalism is also political, indicates one reason
why music resists any attempt to define it as an object by characterizing its inherent
properties.1 The formalist attempt to insist that music does not refer beyond itself is
occasioned not least by a need for a sphere of value outside the social and political
antagonisms of a nineteenth-century world, where modern capitalism increasingly makes
value a solely quantitative matter. Formalism, therefore, actually depends on something
beyond the music itself, even as it seeks to make music self-sufficient. The still-contested
reception of Beethoven makes this evident: as Toscanini reportedly said of the Eroica
Symphony: “To some it’s Napoleon, to some it’s philosophical struggle, to me it’s allegro
con brio.”
The desire for music to be self-sufficient is also echoed in the changes in listening during
Hanslick’s period, when, as Heinrich Besseler and others have noted, musical listening
can become “mystical immersion in the work” (Besseler 1978, 153), and concerts of so-
called art music often become the preserve of certain sections of bourgeois society.
However, in a reversal characteristic of many historical responses to music, the anti-
political stance in some formalist conceptions subsequently helps give rise to
counterreactions, epitomized by twentieth-century attempts to semanticize music in the
name of racial or political ideologies, which took their most extreme form in Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union.
Why one might balk at such uses of music is itself part of the question of how to
characterize music: there are, after all, cases where we may think that music is aptly
employed for ideological and political purposes. The role of jazz in the Civil Rights
Movement suggests that music can be a force for achieving positive social and political
change. Importantly, this case does not rely on the explicit semanticization of music, for
reasons having to do with the connection between music and freedom, considered later in
this chapter.
At the same time, none of these connections to politics is necessarily an objection to what
can be learned from focusing on music in “formalist” terms—that is, those concerned with
structural, harmonic, rhythmic, melodic and other features, rather than on music as
primarily a social practice linked to politics, institutions, social/sexual roles, etc. Some of
the political mobilization of music in the Soviet Union, while condemning “formalism,”
still relied on evaluations that made sense only if they also related to formal aspects of
the music in question. Moreover, musical performance without some analysis of formal
issues is likely to make little sense, as Adorno (1982) shows.
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So, can the contradictions here be resolved by showing how music can be self-sufficient
and yet can also have ideological and other significance? In one sense, this is
unobjectionable: music, like most cultural phenomena, can function in ways that might
seem contradictory at first, because a different context will change the significance of the
phenomenon. However, that fact offers few resources for getting at why music can divide
people to the point where lives are at risk because they see it in conflicting terms. Just
saying that the Soviet authorities were mistaken because they did not realize that, qua
object of analysis, music involves an inherent formal autonomy doesn’t explain very
much.
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Essentialism and Normativity

Arguably, all this returns us to the initial definitional problem because it can seem hard
even to agree on what “music” is at all, which can be precisely what leads to
authoritarian stipulations. Furthermore, radical sonic innovation is often accompanied by
people insisting, “That’s not music,” when reacting to late Beethoven, Stravinsky’s Sacre
du printemps, Ornette Coleman, John Cage, rap, etc. So, does each person just have her
or his own idea of what music is, there being no specifiable common ground referred to
by the term? If that were the case, though, there could not even be any debate about the
problem of the content of the term. As Schleiermacher puts it: “Disagreement per se
presupposes the acknowledgement of the sameness of an object, as well as there being
the relationship of thinking to being at all” (1998, 132). People talk about music, and
what they talk about exists, but the question is how to negotiate the further fact that they
differ over what they think it is.
Trying to establish what music is gives rise to a series of theoretical questions that form
the preserve of significant parts of modern philosophy. Kant denies that there are real
definitions, apart from axioms in mathematics: “[M]y explanation [of a concept] can
better be termed a declaration (of my project) than a definition of an object” (Kant 1968B,
757, 1968A, 729). He therefore prefers to use the term “exposition” when dealing with
empirical concepts. So what would an “exposition” of the concept of music look like?
Here, a further methodological point emerges—namely, the very fact that, particularly in
the modern period, radical innovation in music often proceeds in terms of what was
regarded as extra-musical becoming intra-musical precludes any exposition that seeks to
map out the final scope, even of a dynamically conceived concept of music.
A resolution of questions about essence seems unlikely anyway, given what we know from
the history of philosophy. Important strands of modern philosophy, like pragmatism,
actually seek to circumvent questions of essence by replacing them with questions about
how the content of concepts is established by the social use of terms. From the latter
perspective, the question of music becomes “normative,” where use of the term is
something to be justified in what Robert Brandom calls the “game of giving reasons” (see
Brandom 1994). What complicates the issue, as it does throughout the history of modern
aesthetics, is that debate about the norms relevant to music also concerns subjective
affects—without which the thing in question loses a vital part of its content—but seeks
justifications that have claims to objectivity. Even if we drop the idea of music having an
essence at all, in order not to get entangled in an apparently endless philosophical
debate, we are left with normative disagreements.
Is “music,” then, best approached from a normative standpoint? Histories of music can be
written in terms of norms and their transgressions and transformations, such that many
kinds of music become possible only through their opposition to previous instantiations of
musical norms. This already suggests problems with an essentialist conception. The fact
that the Council of Trent laid down restrictions to prevent virtuoso organists embellishing
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sacred music can be read in terms of the ideological/religious aims of the Counter-
Reformation, thus involving something extramusical. However, it can also be seen as
offering new challenges to composers and players to make intra-musical sense while
adhering to the restrictions.
Something analogous takes place in relation to late European Romantic music with the
emergence of the movements in neoclassicism known as “Neue Sachlichkeit,” and
“Gebrauchsmusik,” against what are seen as overblown, worn-out, or reactionary forms
of expression. The new norms in both cases are closely linked to other ideological
domains, and the point at which the issue becomes “purely musical” is hard, if not
impossible, to establish, because the very status of “music” is itself once again in
question.
The complexity of the political implications of twentieth-century moves against Romantic

expressivism rules out any straightforward links between the musical and the political.
However, there is no denying that the new kinds of composition and performance would
not have become what they were, had economic, social, and political pressures not
demanded new kinds of symbolic response. Denying that World War I and its aftermath
had a major effect on Western music is as indefensible as denying its effects on
philosophy, theology, or on the other arts.
Negation
An instructive point does emerge here that has been implicit in what was said previously:
music can be said to be constituted by differing kinds of negation, both in its immanent
development, where one stylistic or technical norm is replaced or altered by another that
is opposed to it, and in its ontological status, where what was extra-musical can become
intra-musical. In the modern period, a link between philosophical reflection on negation
and music becomes manifest, which underlines in another way how the sense of music is
inseparable from its contexts.
In a conception that becomes crucial for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and German
idealism, Baruch Spinoza saw negation as what makes things determinate. Particular
things are identifiable by their not being other things: only the whole is positive, because
parts inherently lack completion. When applied to the internal workings of music, this
means that the notes or sounds in a piece of music gain their identity in terms of their
relations to the notes or sounds that they are not—either because they are of a different
pitch, duration, intensity, or volume, or because they occur at different times within the
piece.
Adequate production and understanding of music depend on how these negations are
integrated into a totality that makes sense. When notes in a piece are wrong, because
they make no sense in the context in which they occur, they can make us aware of what
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being right is.2 In isolation, relations between notes—for example, those in the minor key
involving the interval of a minor third (which is determinate by not being a second, major
third, etc.)—are just discrete data with no aesthetic significance. In the context of
Beethoven’s Fifth or Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, the resolution of the tension generated
by the use of the minor key at the beginning of the symphony, as well as by the use of the
major third in the coda of the finale, creates a kind of sense that is in one respect specific
to music.
Adorno argues, though, that in the Beethoven of the heroic period, this kind of cumulative
linking of negations into a culminating resolution is paralleled in Hegel’s philosophical
system, where “the true is the whole,” because isolated negative elements make proper
sense only when integrated into a dynamic, philosophically articulated totality. This link
between music and philosophy might seem like stretching an analogy, but the conjunction
of a specific kind of dynamic music, epitomized by Beethoven’s technique of “developing
variation,” and a philosophy that seeks to understand the logic of change, in which what
things are shifts in relation to their contexts and the movement of history, is more than
coincidental.
At a time when, in the wake of the French Revolution, political and social orders are
transformed, conceptual and expressive forms become dynamized in new ways, leading to
some of the most important music there is. At the same time, reducing the music just to
this parallel would involve semanticization of the kind questioned in the previous
discussion. So how are we to keep a degree of autonomy for music at the same time as we
sustain its evident connections to the world in which it emerges—connections without
which the cultural importance of music in the modern period would be hard to
understand? In Ernst Cassirer’s terms, music is a “symbolic form” (Cassirer 1994), whose
nature depends on what it articulates that other symbolic forms do not. By attending to
where and how discriminations are made between music and non-music, it is possible to
give a sense of what music means that both has a degree of conceptual determinacy and
leaves space for the specific non-discursive sense that emerges from music.
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Music and Language

It is here that the questionability of philosophical attempts to concentrate, in the manner
of analytical philosophy, on conceptual analysis of “music” becomes most apparent. In the
period from around the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe, there is a widespread
change in thinking, whose effects make it clear that seeking the essence of music is likely
to obscure the extent to which what music is depends on changing relationships between
forms of expression and articulation, and on changes in the relationship of humankind to
nature. When later, more radical approaches to music in the avant-garde emerge—such
as that of John Cage, exemplified in his claim that “one may give up the desire to control
sound, clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be
themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human
sentiments” (Cage 1973, 10)—the fluidity of the concept of music that starts to develop in
the eighteenth century becomes very apparent. The underlying changes that lead in this
direction are perhaps best approached in terms of changes in conceptions of language in
the eighteenth century, whose implications have, as Charles Taylor has argued (Taylor
2016), yet to be fully grasped, even in much contemporary philosophy.
Underlying these changes is a widespread shift away from the idea of what Hilary
Putnam has termed a “ready-made world,” that is, a world with a pre-existing, perhaps
divinely bestowed essence, and toward a sense that what the world is also depends on
what we think and do. The “world” need not be thought of solely as the object of
knowledge of the natural sciences, but can instead, in the manner of Heidegger, be
thought of as the changing context in which things mean something. This context is prior
to the objective knowledge sought by the sciences because things have to show up in the
world as needing to be explained before we can start to develop theories with which to
explain them. The point about the shift from a “ready-made world” is that it is not just the
product of theoretical deliberation, but instead occurs in ways which we cannot fully
describe in theoretical form, not least because our ways of theorizing about it are
themselves in part a product of what has occurred.
Something analogous applies to language itself, which, so to speak, happens to us, and
which, although it can be changed by creative initiative, also both normatively restricts
how it may be used and changes in ways that are beyond individual initiative. In both
language and music, the basic repertoire of sounds and words is often not radically
altered (rather, it is usually the manner in which the material is combined that is altered),
but what it means is altered. Two related phenomena can help explain what is at issue
here: the change in the relationship of people in Europe to wild nature in the eighteenth
century and the moves against the idea that language is essentially a means of
representing a world whose essence is immanent within it.
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In the former case, a world that had been seen predominantly in terms of the relationship
of humankind to the divine, where the natural world was significant in relation to
religious and other concerns, comes to be seen as valuable in itself, independent of
human instrumental goals. The emergence of landscape painting, which no longer makes
the human figure or a religious or historical scene the main object, is one sign of this, as
is the rapid musical development of “autonomous” musical forms, like the sonata, out of
forms which had a social or religious function.
The crucial point here in relation to the changing status of music is that value comes to
be seen in what is not expressible in verbal language—hence also the emergence of
interest in the sublime and its frequent connection to music by E. T. A. Hoffmann and
others from the eighteenth century onward (see Bowie 2003). From being a reflection of
the mathematically ordered structure of the universe, as it is in the traditions deriving
from Pythagoras and Plato, music can now be an expression of new forms of connection
to nature that see nature neither in theological terms nor as an object to be measured
and controlled.
In the case of language, the moves, on the part of J. G. Herder, J. G. Hamann, F. D. E.

Schleiermacher, W. von Humboldt, and others, away from what Charles Taylor (2016)
terms “designative” theories, in which language is primarily a means of designating pre-
existing objects, toward an “expressive” view, in which language is part of what
constitutes what the world is, raises in a new way the relationship of language to music.
This move puts in question any fixed division between the two, to the point where neither
can be given a discrete unified sense, because the musical is part of the linguistic, and
the linguistic part of the musical, both of which belong to the interconnected repertoire of
forms in which human existence is expressed. Rhythm, tone, gesture, timing, etc., all play
a role in the sense of both linguistic and musical articulation and expression.3
It is therefore unsurprising that the emergence of these theories of language is

accompanied by changes in the way that music is regarded, moving from largely being
seen as a subordinate art that accompanies social activity or religious observance, to
being seen by some as the highest art—especially in its textless form—an idea later
reflected in Walter Pater’s dictum that “All art aspires to the condition of music” (see
Dahlhaus 1978; Bowie 2003, 2007). A shift as radical as this, where something non-
conceptual comes to be seen as more significant than what can be rendered in conceptual
form, is a sign of a new kind of relationship between humankind and nature. The object of
study in music cannot be isolated in the form of a work, a score, or a performance,
without much of the sense that emerges from music being obscured. Research in
acoustics, psychology, biology, and other sciences contributes to the understanding of
music by conceptualizing it in more differentiated ways, but failure to consider the most
fundamental ways in which music makes sense can mean that those forms of objectifying
research lose sight of what first makes music an object of research at all. If this is right,
music poses a challenge to the scientistic view present in much contemporary culture.
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Music and Freedom

The idea that music is “auditory cheesecake,” proposed by evolutionary biologist Steven
Pinker, because “the direct effect of music is sheer, pointless pleasure,” blocks any
possibility of understanding the complexity of the history of music. It also makes it
impossible to see how music itself may enable us to understand and inhabit the world as a
context of meaning, which scientific research, seeking causal laws governing particulars,
cannot explain. The metaphysical assumption on the part of Pinker is that what
meaningful things, like music, really are can be reduced to an interaction between the
brain and the world that psychology can describe in terms of biological laws, such as
those which govern phenomena like the pleasure caused by auditory stimuli.
But in that case, as German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer, a pupil of Adorno who has
written extensively about music, argues, there is no way of accounting for the need for
novelty, which fuels not only artistic production, but also new scientific descriptions,
where “something new comes into the world, whose necessary conditions can admittedly
be researched in the form of previous knowledge, of ways of looking at problems, of
social constellations, psychic dispositions or biographical preconditions, but which cannot
be causally reduced to such conditions” (Wellmer 2009, 224). He maintains that there is a
link between art and freedom that does not depend on the metaphysical debate about the
existence or non-existence of free will: “That the new happens shows that the scope of
freedom of the human mind is not exhausted by that of the free will; rather, the freedom
of the will presupposes this other space of freedom, which is bound to language. The
latter manifests itself not least in the sphere of art” (ibid.). How does this apply to music?
As we saw in the previous discussion, one way of approaching music is expressed in

normative terms: without some way of judging or just feeling what “getting it right”
means, claims that something is or is not music make no sense; similarly, language
depends on fulfilling normative demands to be language. At the same time, the dominant
norms in music and language can become fetters on expression, leading to them ceasing
to “say” anything, and thus to the need for liberation from those norms. Such liberation
cannot itself function in terms of existing norms, which means that the result has to be
new, in the sense indicated by Wellmer, going beyond existing norms of expression. In this
respect, music can function as a kind of seismograph that registers social developments
before they become explicit within a society. The Second Viennese School’s radical reform
of compositional norms opened up space for more adequate responses to the new
psychological, social, and political uncertainties of the early twentieth century in Europe.
The School showed that the limits of what could make musical sense could be
transcended in the name of an open-ended revision of the ways that sonic material can be
organized to encompass extreme states and situations. For instance, jazz’s intensification
of rhythm, incorporation of expressive vocal techniques into instrumental playing, and
extension of the possibilities of improvisatory freedom act as a counter to rigid and
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repressive cultural and political norms. In both cases, the resistance that such music
encounters is a sign of how it challenges received assumptions about what can make
sense, opening up a new sense that can change how the world is seen and experienced.
Underlying this is a further aspect of changes in modernity, illustrated by the following

remark about an influential philosopher writing in the period of Beethoven. Dieter
Henrich (1987, 61) has suggested:
Fichte was the first to arrive at the conviction that all previous philosophy had
remained at a distance from the life and self-consciousness of humankind. It had
had ontological categories dictated to it which were taken from the language in
which we communicate about things, their qualities and their changes. With these
categories philosophy had then investigated powers and capacities of the human
soul. It was therefore fundamentally unable to reach the experiences of this soul,
the processes of consciousness, the structure and flow of its experiences and
thoughts.
Music’s non-propositional status allows it to be in touch with impulses, affects, and moods
that are repressed or inadequately expressed in other forms of social expression and
articulation. Indeed, music can influence the nature of moods and feelings, transforming
emotions like sadness or anger by incorporating their expression into forms that
transcend them. Music can therefore embody a particular kind of freedom that
acknowledges negativity while seeking to transcend it. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
out of the Spirit of Music, which ponders why drama based on the worst things that one
can imagine in a community, from matricide to incest, formed the basis of a successful
culture in Greece, sums up the way in which music often thrives on the transformation of
negativity—Schubert reportedly said that there was no joyful music. One does not have to
feel sad listening to sad music (although one can); rather, this music changes how we can
relate to sadness by imbuing it with a particular kind of sense.
Despite its questionable aspects, for example, with respect to jazz, Adorno’s criticisms of
the “culture industry” and its reduction of expressive resources to a series of preformed
patterns, in a manner related to the way that objects in modern capitalism can become
just exchangeable commodities, suggest the need for significant art to respond critically
to social circumstances. Expressive novelty involves a “space of freedom” in which
existing norms can be transformed. As Wellmer suggests, freedom in this sense precedes
the issue of freedom of the will. Without the pre-existing normative content of expressive
freedom within real social contexts, that motivates people to respond to their world, there
would be nothing at stake in freedom of the will. The exercise of the will would be a
random doing of one thing rather than another, either because of a causal history or
because one can choose, even though what is chosen doesn’t actually matter (see Bowie
2013, chapter 5). Norms have to be anchored in concrete motivations that make things
matter, so that exercise of the will generates sense in the social and psychological context
in which it takes place.
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In challenging existing musical norms and establishing new ones in the name of
something that cannot be fully explained in conceptual terms, music manifests a freedom
that cannot be conjured away by seeking to show, in the manner of Pinker, that it actually
depends on something else. Where norms can be conceptually explicit, as they are for
instance in politics, the sense of freedom as self-determination, which is central to
modern conceptions of freedom since Rousseau and Kant, can be deceptive because
adherence to norms may be a result of unconscious social influences.
Conceptually explicit norms routinely generate dissent among members of a society;

music, in contrast, sometimes offers space where people who disagree on explicit ideas
can still find common ground beyond what is verbally articulated (Barenboim and Said
2004). Ideological pressure for conformity evidently also often plays a role in music—
hence the idea of the culture industry—but music can still advert to possibilities of
freedom that result from liberation from convention, as well as the creation of new forms
of sense out of what in other respects may resist having sense made of it. These forms
can be shared by those who do not share political, philosophical, or social views.
The investment in seeking not to be bound by the cultural given that is present in creative
musical production testifies to an idea of freedom, of the kind characterized by Schelling
(see Bowie 1993, 2015). This acknowledges that freedom is empty unless it has a basis
that it opposes in order to realize itself: one can become aware of freedom only by being
aware of being inhibited by something that one is driven to overcome. Even at the level of
seeking technical mastery of an instrument or vocal technique, this freedom plays a role:
the effort made in gaining that mastery is in the name of transcending limitations that
inhibit the capacity for expression.
In modern Western music, there is a recurrent awareness that reliance on what has
already been done in music involves a failure to fulfill the potential generated by the
decline of traditional authority and the emergence of modern individualism. The technical
and expressive development of Western classical music, particularly from Bach onward,
which is then echoed in the rapid way in which the history of jazz unfolds, depends on
forms of social causality that are vital objects of musicological research, but the sense
made by that music cannot be grasped wholly in such terms, as its continuing appeal
makes clear.
Rhythm, Nature, and Culture

Instead of thinking of music as an object—a score, a performance, or a recording can be
described in objective terms, but that is not what makes it music—music is better
understood in terms that incorporate the internal movement of musical events, the
historical movement of inclusion and exclusion of types of sound (and silence), and the
Page 13 of 22

mobile relationships between performers, listeners, and the world which are involved in
music.
The borders between the musical and the non-musical play an essential role in the
workings of human culture. Human responses to music, however, do not just testify to the
development of more complex forms of signification than are present in the animal
kingdom; they also reveal a darker underside to the motivations associated with music.
This darker side relates to the danger of forms of non-conceptual expression that can be
used to generate uncritical collective assent, for example, in military music or music
associated with reactionary and authoritarian social movements. Such worries are
sometimes also, for example, expressed in relation to certain pieces by Beethoven, such
as the last movement of the Seventh Symphony, with its links to French Revolutionary
music. The need to establish an appropriate understanding of the relationship between
critical conceptual analysis of music and the acknowledgment of music’s power, both
positive and negative, which is based on its lack of dependence on conceptuality, remains
unfulfilled in many areas of the study of music. Music poses questions about our nature
that are not answered by scientific analysis of that nature; this is because what is
“natural” for us can be made sense of only in relation to what is “cultural.”
Take the natural phenomenon of birdsong: it is not produced as music, because music is a
cultural product dependent on social intercourse. But a bird’s song can be heard as music
and used in music in widely differing ways. Whatever the full biological function of
birdsong is, it is only when it is incorporated into a cultural context that it definitely
makes sense to call it music, because the meaning of music evidently goes beyond a
biologically given stimulus and response. At the same time, the element of imitation and
improvisation present in some birdsong, or the exchange of playful sonic signs and
gestures among higher mammals, suggests that the borderline between the merely
mechanical and natural, and what exceeds this in the direction of what becomes cultural
communication and creation, may not be straightforward.
The debate over whether any non-human animals can be said to have language further
indicates the complexity of the issues here. The scope of the term “language,” as
Wittgenstein shows in his later work, should clearly extend beyond words, to gestures
and to music, and thus to any symbolic articulation that can change our relationships to
the world and other living beings. Whatever is really the case concerning language—and
a definitive answer would have to deal with Wittgenstein’s claim that one “cannot
describe the essence of language in language” (Wittgenstein 1999 3, 30)—the continuity
between the natural phenomenon of birdsong and the cultural phenomenon of music
indicates something significant.
The question of what this continuity means, however, is a difficult one. Hindemith and
others claimed that biological features of hearing and mathematical relations between
pitches meant that tonality itself is a natural phenomenon. However, this view fails to
account for the historicality of norms that determine which pitch relations can be musical
pitch relations. Tonality, or the lack of it, is not always decisive anyway because certain
Page 14 of 22

kinds of music for percussion, where pitch is irrelevant in some respects, clearly count as
music in many contexts. If one is seeking links between the shifting domains of the
natural and the cultural with respect to music, they are best found with respect to
rhythm.
John Dewey maintains, “What is not so generally perceived is that every uniformity and
regularity of change in nature is a rhythm. The terms ‘natural law’ and ‘natural rhythm’
are synonymous” (Dewey 1980, 149). The underlying issue, here again, involves a major
philosophical issue—namely, how things can be identified at all. A random phenomenon,
like a noise that could occur as an element of a rhythmic beat, can recur over time
without generating any significance: this changes if it becomes a rhythm. Schelling
therefore maintains that rhythm is “introduction of unity into multiplicity” and
“transformation of a succession which is in itself meaningless into a significant one,” and
that it constitutes “the music in music” because music depends on sense emerging from
successions of sounds becoming linked (Schelling, 1856–1861, I/5, all 492).
Such significance also depends on there being something—a subject—that apprehends

the succession as unified, which therefore must itself remain the same. On the one hand,
then, rhythm relies on a subject that apprehends patterns (often unconsciously) as
involving meaningful identities between temporally separate phenomena. On the other
hand, without the occurrence of uniformity and regularity in nature itself, including the
subject’s own nature (its heartbeat, breathing, and other functions that work according to
natural necessity), there would be nothing for it to apprehend as rhythm and be able to
develop in new ways.
Conceptual sense consists of the production of identity from difference, enabling things
to be classified, taken as true, manipulated, etc. Musical sense, which is based on rhythm
of all kinds—any form of meaningful repetition is a kind of rhythm, as Dewey’s and
Schelling’s remarks suggest—involves the apprehension of identities, but these do not
have to be assigned a determinate significance, as repeated moves in a game do not,
because the sense that they make occurs in the actual playing of the game.
Something similar applies to metaphors in verbal language, especially in poetry, where

what counts is the play of what the metaphor can bring to light, which does not equate to
literal meaning. The effects of rhythm are also somatic: the body, as we have seen, has its
own rhythms, and behavior based on rhythmic play is essential to childhood development.
Rhythm can locate us in a world by structuring time in ways that give pleasure, in which
we can become absorbed, and which give coherence to experience through the play of
anticipation and fulfillment. This can go to the point of rhythm involving suspension of
certain aspects of conscious awareness.
Phenomena relating to rhythm, because they cannot definitively be said to lie either side
of the line between the cultural and the natural, suggest how music poses questions
about understanding humankind’s place in nature. The kind of sense that music
articulates precedes the conceptual sense that fixes aspects of how nature is understood
in an objective manner, and this helps to understand the relative ease with which music
Page 15 of 22

can be appreciated in cross-cultural contexts. The historical dynamic between the

concepts of “culture” and “nature” involves the idea that conceptual ordering is vital to
human existence, because of the need to control nature. But the division can, as claimed
by Nietzsche, and Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, also become a
form of repression.
These issues suggest why music takes on a new elevated status in the work of the
Romantics, the early (and sometimes the later) Nietzsche, and others at the same time as
wild nature is also revalued as a counter to the growth of the technological capacity to
gain control of natural processes. The new kinds of objectifying relationships to nature
that lead to modern technology and new forms of regimented industrial labor can damage
other forms of contact with both external and internal nature. Music’s connection to
emotional life, and to our impulses and aspects of our somatic existence, opens up and
keeps open dimensions of sense that are not reducible to how we verbally articulate these
dimensions, and thus can oppose some of the reifying aspects of modernity.
Identifying and analyzing emotions in psychological and other research is clearly an

important way to come to greater self-understanding. The expressive possibilities in
music, however, can enable us to experience emotions that did not exist before the music
that discloses them. That is a reason why in modernity—where, even as it also depends on
collective symbolic forms, new sense, as suggested in the remark by Henrich on Fichte
cited previously, tends to be generated at the level of the individual subject—the drive for
new expressive resources exemplified by innovation in music is often more emphatic than
in the pre-modern era.
Once these new expressive resources emerge, they can become the object of empirical
research, but without the prior level of sense that they embody, there would be no
motivation to try to objectify them. This prior level of sense is most evident in the
difference we have discussed, between analytical and other observations of music as
objects of research, and participation in the performance or reception of music.4 The fact
that the latter cannot be wholly replaced by the former, even though elements of each are
involved in the other (see Bowie 2013, chapter 5), can give rise to questions concerning
how we conceive of the very nature of thought.
The Philosophy of Music

The core issue here is the sense that music is understood as conveying, as well as how it
is conveyed. Often, the fact that music is capable of only a small degree of the
representation of the objective world characteristic of verbal language frames the
judgment on that sense. In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1923), the
extremist Enlightenment believer in rational progress, Settembrini, famously contends
that music is “politically suspect” because it has no clear meaning and is linked to aspects
of human existence that escape rational control. Similarly, in Hegel’s Aesthetics, music
Page 16 of 22

without words is assigned an inferior status because of its lack of determinate meaning.
For Hegel, purely “musical music” has to free itself from the “determinacy of the word,”
but instrumental, wordless music will appeal only to experts, who will enjoy it because
they can compare the music that they hear with “rules and laws [they are] familiar
with” (Hegel 1965, 322). This point, of course, does not do justice to Hegel’s view of
music (for a full discussion, see Bowie 2003, 2007).
Such views point in the direction of a philosophy of music in the “objective genitive,”
where music is the object of philosophical and other explanation and is very often
regarded as a mystery, or as inferior in sense, rather than as something that may convey
sense that concepts do not (see Bowie 2007). What can be termed the philosophy of music
in the “subjective genitive,” in contrast, looks at the idea that philosophy may emerge
from music itself. Rather than being a mystery whose solution is delegated to philosophy,
music is an expressive resource that brings its own kind of sense into the world. It is clear
from the inseparability of the musical element from verbal language, that sense in the
latter depends on elements of the former, but also that the sense of the former can be
augmented by the ways in which it is talked about.
Music can be used in this respect to interrogate some prevalent directions in

contemporary philosophy. In the wake of the orientation of such philosophy toward the
methods of the natural sciences, analytical philosophers very often make conceptual
clarity the overriding philosophical virtue. Now, it evidently makes no sense to advocate
lack of clarity in areas where clarity can be attained and may be lacking. The aim of
philosophical clarity, however, is not matched by philosophy’s actually arriving at
definitive theories that eliminate indeterminacy; indeed, we have already been observing
this with respect to “music” itself in this chapter.
The mistake, as Carl Dahlhaus points out with respect to music, is to assume that its
indeterminacy constitutes an inherent failing: “Indeterminacy through lack of an object
and determinacy in the sense of differentiation do not exclude each other at all; and one
might even maintain that musical expression gains in connotations what it loses in
denotations” (Dahlhaus 1988, 333). Dahlhaus is proposing something analogous to what
Kant means by an “aesthetic idea” (which had a significant influence on how music was
discussed in the Romantic era: see Neubauer 1986): “by an aesthetic idea I mean that
representation of the imagination which gives much cause for thought without any
determinate thought, i.e. concept, being able to be adequate to it, which consequently no
language can completely attain and make comprehensible” (Kant 1968B, 190; 1968A,
193). Kant sees this issue mainly in cognitive terms—aesthetic ideas allow the cognitive
faculty to play with different judgments without having to assent to them—but the scope
for a philosophy of music in the subjective genitive is wider than is contained in the
notion of an aesthetic idea. This takes us back to the issue of observation and
participation.
Page 17 of 22

Heinrich Besseler, who was a pupil of Heidegger and helped establish the idea of
Gebrauchsmusik, asserts, “The musical originally becomes accessible to us as a manner/
melody [in the original: Weise, which combines the older sense of ‘melody’ with the more
general idea of ‘way’ or ‘manner’—one might translate this as ‘mode’] of human existence
[des menschlichen Daseins]” (Besseler 1978, 45). Besseler is referring here to
Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein, which aims to circumvent the history of philosophical
and anthropological attempts to establish the essence of what man is. Rather than having
a definable essence, Dasein is “that entity which in its being is concerned with its
being” (Heidegger 1979, 12).
The open-endedness and indeterminacy of Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein is

precisely the point: we approach a future whose nature cannot be determined in advance,
because, at least in some respects, we make it, as it matters to us. Besseler therefore
makes music, like verbal language, part of what we are, suspending the dualistic views
that place us apart from music as an object of investigation, in order to capture the way
in which our existence is partly constituted by the musical. This can be exemplified in the
kind of understanding that is achieved in reflective participation in music. Conductors
who convey how they want something to go by a gesture or a look, rather than words, are
understood when they get the result that they are striving for, and they themselves may
understand what they want only by the action that they feel impelled to carry out in order
to get it.
There is here a striving for a kind of sense whose possibility is testified to when we fail to
achieve it. Indeed, as in Artur Schnabel’s remark that there is some music that is better
than it can be played, rightness can be a regulative ideal—something that motivates us to
strive for it while never being actually present. Getting it right in the most important
sense, then, is not meeting a preconceived, conceptually articulated standard, but rather
making something happen that makes maximal intersubjective sense.
In this context, Adorno characterizes music (and other art) as “judgementless

synthesis” (Adorno 2009, 327)—that is, the creation of sense that cannot be converted
into judgment, even though it involves something akin to what takes place in cognition
(and can have effects on cognition). This occurs in all the arts, but music’s relative lack of
representational content and direct link to somatic and affective existence, as well as to
the mobile nature of self-consciousness, have meant that it is associated most readily with
dimensions that are often underplayed in philosophy. There is no standard for getting it
right external to engagement with the practice of the art itself, but this does not make
things arbitrary or “subjective,” as too many views would have it. Music generates
cultures of evaluation that are inseparable from participation in the practice of music
itself. Norms and assessments constantly change in these cultures, but the music that
sustains itself through such changes, retaining its power to affect people, tells us
something vital by the way in which it renews its significance in different contexts.
Page 18 of 22

In this respect, music has its own kind of truth, which is akin to what Heidegger adverts
to in his discussions of truth and world disclosure (Wrathall 2011). Anything that is
apprehended as music by a listener makes some kind of sense—however questionable
that sense may be—but the sense disclosed by great music has a significance that can be
termed “philosophical” because the world manifests itself substantially differently in its
light, revealing aspects that would not emerge otherwise.
One way of suggesting how this is the case is to question certain versions of how
cognition is conceived. Anthony Cascardi suggests: “Feeling nonetheless remains
cognitive in a deeper sense; affect possesses what Heidegger would describe … as ‘world-
disclosive’ power” (Cascardi 1999, 50–51). Music should not, though, be seen exclusively
in relation to its emotional power: its combination of structural, somatic, mathematical,
and other aspects with its expressive possibilities offers both affective and other patterns
of sense that enable people to inhabit the world more meaningfully.
Music is a legitimate object of the game of giving reasons, but limiting how we
understand music to the attempt to explain it in objective terms can obscure some of the
ways that it engages so many people in so many different situations. The lack of
consensus about music in philosophy is part of the general lack of consensus about major
issues in philosophy. As a participatory practice, however, music can make sense of the
world in ways that philosophy sometimes does not, offering forms of communication that
can bring people together where argument and assertion divide them. At the same time,
though, music can also give rise to serious divisions between people, akin to those that
arise over religious and ideological matters.
This ambivalence lies at the heart of why music resists definitive characterizations.
Daniel Barenboim talks of music, which “is so clearly able to teach you so many things,”
being also able to “serve as a means of escape from precisely those things” (Barenboim
and Said 2004, 122). This dialectical remark captures the idea that thinking about music
inherently involves contradictions.
I have mainly used thinkers from the German tradition to try to illustrate this point, but I
hope that my remarks can help make sense of music of the most widely varying kinds,
from jazz, to folk music, to rock, to so-called classical music. Music can enable one to
cope with the world by incorporating and transforming precisely what can make the
world so painful. By the same token, it can seduce one away from the world when
analytical attention to the world may be what is demanded.
What makes the former so important is precisely what makes the latter possible; but the
latter does not mean that music cannot play a role in rationally based transformation in
the world by keeping open channels of communication and making sense where other
means of making sense may be lacking. Rather than seeking a definitive objective
characterization, then, engagement with music in both theoretical and participatory
Page 19 of 22

terms should respond to the ways in which the contradictory nature of music shapes our
understanding of ourselves and the world.
Acknowledgments
This article was written with the support of a Leverhulme Foundation Major Research
Fellowship.
Works Cited
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Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” translated by Max Paddison.
Music Analysis 1, no. 2 (1982): 169–187.
Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward Said. Parallels and Paradoxes. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Besseler, Heinrich. Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte. Leipzig: Reclam,

1978.
Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of
Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1993.
Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2003.
Bowie, Andrew. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2007.
Bowie, Andrew. Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Bowie, Andrew. “Nature and Freedom in Schelling and Adorno.” In Interpreting Schelling,
edited by Lara Ostaric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Brandom, Robert. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 1994.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1973.
Cascardi, Anthony J. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999.
Page 20 of 22

Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1994.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 1980.
Dahlhaus, Carl. Die Idee der absoluten Musik. Munich and Kassel: dtv, 1978.
Dahlhaus, Carl. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber, 1988.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Ästhetik, volumes 1 and 2, edited by Bassenge. Berlin
and Weimar: Aufbau, 1965.
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.
Henrich, Dieter. Konzepte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987.
Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Werkausgabe III and IV. Frankfurt am Main:
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Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe X. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1968A.
Kivy, Peter. The Fine Art of Repetition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kivy, Peter. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997.
Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
Neubauer, John. The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1986.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Sämmtliche Werke, volumes 1–10, edited by K. F. A.

Schelling. II Abtheilung Bde. 1–4. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–1861.
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Taylor, Charles. The Language Animal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
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Notes:
Page 21 of 22

(1) The idea of music’s properties dominates much discussion in the analytical philosophy
of music (see, e.g., Kivy, 1993, 1997, 2002).
(2) What counts as wrong is subject to massive historical transformation: jazz history can
be written in terms of making wrong notes in one style sound right in another.
(3) It is remarkable how much the focus on language in much analytical philosophy is
exclusively on the semantic dimension, when the social significance and effect of actual
utterances and linguistic performances depend to a considerable extent on aspects of
language connected to music.
(4) The current debates over performance as research indicate how this difference is vital
to reflection on how music is studied.
Page 22 of 22

Oxford Handbooks Online: What Is Music, Anyway?

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What Is Music, Anyway?

Oxford Handbooks Online

Subject: Music, Music Theory Online Publication Date: Jun 2018

Abstract and Keywords

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

Form and Content

date: 20 August 2018

In relation to such opposed concepts as the hermeneutic approaches in new musicology

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

Essentialism and Normativity

date: 20 August 2018

The complexity of the political implications of twentieth-century moves against Romantic

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

Music and Language

date: 20 August 2018

In the case of language, the moves, on the part of J. G. Herder, J. G. Hamann, F. D. E.

It is therefore unsurprising that the emergence of these theories of language is

date: 20 August 2018

Music and Freedom

As we saw in the previous discussion, one way of approaching music is expressed in

date: 20 August 2018

Underlying this is a further aspect of changes in modernity, illustrated by the following

date: 20 August 2018

Conceptually explicit norms routinely generate dissent among members of a society;

Rhythm, Nature, and Culture

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

Such significance also depends on there being something—a subject—that apprehends

Something similar applies to metaphors in verbal language, especially in poetry, where

date: 20 August 2018

can be appreciated in cross-cultural contexts. The historical dynamic between the

Identifying and analyzing emotions in psychological and other research is clearly an

The Philosophy of Music

date: 20 August 2018

Music can be used in this respect to interrogate some prevalent directions in

date: 20 August 2018

The open-endedness and indeterminacy of Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein is

In this context, Adorno characterizes music (and other art) as “judgementless

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

Besseler, Heinrich. Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte. Leipzig: Reclam,

Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester:

Bowie, Andrew. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Cascardi, Anthony J. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University

date: 20 August 2018

Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 1980.

Dahlhaus, Carl. Klassische und romantische Musikästhetik. Laaber: Laaber, 1988.

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979.

Henrich, Dieter. Konzepte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987.

Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Werkausgabe X. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

Kivy, Peter. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge

Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Sämmtliche Werke, volumes 1–10, edited by K. F. A.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Hermeneutics and Criticism” and Other Writings, translated

Wrathall, Mark A. Heidegger and Unconcealment. Cambridge: Cambridge University

date: 20 August 2018

date: 20 August 2018

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