Music:

Copy of the Will

Communicating the Incommunicable

Schopenhauer offers not one theory of art, but two, because music differs too radically from the
other arts to fit within a system which revolves around the elucidation of Ideas. Music "stands
quite apart. . . . In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature
of the world." 240 Music's relation to the innermost essence of existence is mediated neither by
images of individual things, nor by Platonic Ideas that are Will's 'adequate objectification': music's
relation to Will is direct and immediate. Its impressions and effects are uniquely powerful,
speaking profoundly and directly to our innermost being in an "entirely universal language, whose
distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself," and whose infinite truth is
"instantly understood by everyone.

"241 Where other arts provide indirect intuitions of Will, music "passes over the Ideas" altogether,
is "quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent,
could still exist even if there were no world at all . . ."242 Because it is "by no means like the other
arts . . . but a copy of the [W]ill itself,"243 its effect is "much more powerful and penetrating than
is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music [speaks] of the
essence.''244 Although Will is manifest in both Ideas and music, music penetrates the veil, casting
aside Ideas' inherent plurality. Music is "as immediate an objectification of the whole [W]ill as the
world itself is," and it alone is "the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented.

"245 Schopenhauer is well aware of the striking paradox this presents. He concedes that
characterizing music as "a representation to that which of its essence can never be
representation" is a position whose logical demonstration is "essentially impossible."246 Yet it
satisfies him, and he remains confident that others who similarly direct their attention purely to
the impressions the 'wonderful art of tones' affords, who give proper priority to the actual
experience music, as (presumably) opposed to abstractions about it, will find his view persuasive.
Music is, mystically, miraculously, a means for communicating the incommunicable, for speaking
the ineffable, for presenting that innermost essence of the universe which cannot, by definition,
be represented. A more ambitious claim for music can scarcely be imagined: an art which, solely
through the impressions of its tones, affords knowledge of the unknowable. That this claim is as
impossible and contradictory as it is ambitious, however, was only a minor deterrent to its
endorsement by people convinced of music's supremacy and conditioned by the enormously
influential Hegelian tradition to embrace the fantastic. Since echoes of Schopenhauer ring
throughout the Romantic era and continue to reverberate even in a great deal of contemporary
thought, his music philosophy deserves careful and detailed examination.

Music bears no overt resemblance to "the world as representation, i.e., nature," but there is
between music and nature "a distinct parallelism," 247 believes Schopenhauer. He finds in music
the "analogue of the fundamental disposition of nature."248 Music consists in a hierarchy ranging
from the weighty, fundamental tones of the bass through the free lyricism of melody. Bass, tenor,
alto, and soprano (analogous in Schopenhauer's view to the root, third, fifth, and octave)
correspond in their interrelationships to those of Will's objectification in the mineral, plant,
animal, and human domains. The distance between inorganic matter and the lowest form of life is
analogous to the construction of a chord, which is always "more powerful and beautiful" in open
than closed voicing. 249 Moreover, the bass moves slowly and ponderously in contrast to the
soprano line's lyrical freedom, a fact which also parallels the contrast between crude, inorganic
mass and the freedom of Will's higher representations. The bass lacks the "sequence and
continuity of progress which belong only to the upper voice that sings the melody.''250

"[M]elody alone has significant and intentional connexion from beginning to end."251 But just as
organic life is reliant upon the inorganic realm for its existence, so too is melody's apparent
freedom always reliant upon the harmonious support of its supporting voices, the bass being the
indispensable foundation. These analogies are scarcely less extravagant than the Hegelian
excesses Schopenhauer despised. He says, for instance, that in chordal harmony, "I recognize the
whole gradation of the Ideas in which the [W]ill objectifies itself. Those [voices] nearer to the bass
are the lower of those grades, namely the still inorganic bodies manifesting themselves. . . . The
definite intervals of the scale are parallel to the definite grades of the [W]ill's objectification, the
definite species in nature."252 And finally, in melody, "I recognize the highest grade of the [W]ill's
objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man."253 What Schopenhauer describes as
analogy clearly aspires to more.

Melody and Rhythm, Tension and Tranquillity

Novel and interesting as these claims are, they are not the most influential and enduring aspect of
Schopenhauer's musical philosophy. It is in his remarks on melody that his influence can most
clearly be seen. Melody, he asserts, "relates the most secret history of the intellectually
enlightened [W]ill, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the [W]ill, everything
which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling. . . . Thus it
has always been said that music is the language of feeling and of passion, just as words are the
language of reason."254 Language is to reason as music is to feeling. Its sonorous images help to
shape, structure, and make comprehensible an otherwise amorphous realm. And melody has a
distinctive capacity to elucidate human experience's alternating patterns of yearning and
satisfaction. Melody is "a constant digression anddeviation from the keynote in a thousand ways . .
.[expressing] the many different forms of [W]ill's efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately
finding again a harmonious interval, and still more the keynote." 255 More specifically yet, melody
seems to reflect dramatically the powerful reciprocal attraction between these dialectically
opposed experiential states. "[T]he non-appearance of satisfaction is suffering," writes
Schopenhauer, and "the empty longing for a new desire is languor, boredom."256

Music's alternating patterns of tension and release, discord and concord, are analogous to the
patterns of human willing and satisfaction. As human pleasure is marked by the relatively rapid
and effortless satisfaction of desire, so too "rapid melodies without great deviations are
cheerful."257 On the other hand, "melodies that strike painful discords and wind back to the
keynote only through many bars, are sad, on the analogy of delayed and hard-won
satisfaction."258 Feelings of deepest satisfaction and release "can follow only the most pressing
desire."259 Therefore, light, quick phrases "speak only of ordinary happiness which is easy of
attainment,''260 whereas longer phrases and more protracted deviations bespeak " nobler effort
towards a distant goal."261 Adagio, for instance, "speaks of the suffering of a great and noble
endeavor that disdains all trifling happiness", and "in the minor key reaches the expression of the
keenest pain . . ."262 This early effort to explore music from its 'inside', to illuminate something of
the manner in which melody's convergence and divergence from tonal center is linked to the
phenomenal experience of life's ebb and flow, is a remarkable step forward in the description of
music. So, too, its attempt to account for the depth or profundity of the experience.

But melody's tonal motion is not the whole story. Its qualitative, tonal component is
complemented in crucial ways by a quantitative, rhythmic one. "Rhythm is in time what symmetry
is in space, namely division into equal parts . . . that are again divisible into smaller parts
subordinate to the former."263 The horizontal, spatial aspects of tonal relations are always
experienced against the 'vertical' impact of its rhythms. And although of pitch and rhythm, rhythm
is the more fundamental since it can by itself "present a kind of melody,"264 interaction between
pitch and rhythm is fundamental to melodic effect. When pitch and rhythm move disjunctively, the
effect can be "disquieting,"265 and without proper rhythmic reinforcement a melodic return to
tonic cannot affect a full sense of closure. Furthermore, "we see in this procedure of the melody a
condition to a certain extent inward (the harmonious) meet with an outward condition (the
rhythmical)": a situation which portrays in musical terms "the meeting of our desires with the
favourable external circumstances independent of them, and is thus the picture of happiness."266
Thus does Schopenhauer describe the way music's kinetic patterns of discord and reconciliation
derive from the interaction of tonal and rhythmic patterns, from anticipation and appreciation of
the particular ways they pursue their complementary courses. Music, like human willing,
alternates between desires and their satisfaction, now separating inside from outside, and now
bringing them together to create a temporary sense of unity and tranquillity. Music is a "constant
succession of chords more or less disquieting . . . with chords more or less quieting and satisfying;
just as the life of the heart (the will) is a constant succession of greater or lesser disquietude
through desire or fear with composure in degrees just as varied." 267

Due to the extent of its influence on succeeding generations of thinkers, this line of thought does
not require elaboration. Here in Schopenhauer can be seen the ancestry of Langer's assertion that
music is the "tonal analogue of the emotive life": a sonorous parallel to the cyclical ebb and flow of
human sentience. And here in rudimentary form can also be seen the beginnings of the effort to
trace the felt aspects of music to specific formal determinants.

The Inner Kernel of Being

Schopenhauer is insistent, though, that what he is describing are only analogies and no more.
"[M]usic has no direct relation to [feelings themselves], but only an indirect one; for it never
expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself of every phenomenon, the
[W]ill itself. Therefore music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or
that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind . . .[but rather] their
essential nature, without any accessories, and also without the motives for them."268 Music's
significance, then, has nothing to do with particular feelings the kind that resides in the
phenomenal realm but only with the inner essence of feeling. Imagination, stirred by its
recognition of the unspeakable Will, inevitably tries to give it a concreteness, "to clothe it with
flesh and bone, and thus to embody it in an analogous example."269 Yet music bespeaks human
passions and emotions "only in the abstract, without any particularization . . . their mere form
without the material . . ."270 Music presents the form of feeling, the abstracted inner nature of
feeling, and not feelings per se. The need to relate this copy of the indescribable Will to something
familiar, to associate it with fundamentally different things from the phenomenal realm, is a
perfectly natural tendency, but it is nonetheless misguided: it neither promotes nor enhances
enjoyment of what is fundamentally musical, "but rather gives it a strange and arbitrary addition.
It is therefore better to interpret it purely and in its immediacy."271 Music must not be construed
as a stimulus that induces or arouses feeling. For what it presents is the formal essence of the
eternally striving Will, in all its innumerable nuances and degrees of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction. This explains why music "never cause us actual suffering, but still remains pleasant
even in its most painful chords."272 In musical experience, Schopenhauer claims, we actually take
pleasure in "the secret history of our will and of all its stirrings and strivings with their many
different delays, postponements, hindrances, and afflictions . . ."273 In everyday life, "our will
itself is that which is roused and tormented," and "we ourselves are now the vibrating string that
is stretched and plucked." Musical experience, on the other hand, is a function of "tones and their
numerical relations''274 What it conveys, it conveys always and only "in mere tones."275 Thus,
the difference between feelings felt and musical 'feeling' is easily explained, believes
Schopenhauer: "The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a
paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so
inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but
entirely without reality and remote from its pain." 276

Using materials and a language uniquely its own, music "expresses only the quintessence of life
and of its events, never these themselves . . ."277 Melody's "constantly renewed discord and
reconciliation of its rhythmical with its harmonious element"278 present what the imagination
takes to be feeling. But music speaks with a universality of which mind is incapable, a universality
known only to Will itself. Music's is not the "empty universality of abstraction,"279 but a
universality which is "united with thorough and unmistakable distinctness."280 Thus does the
significance of Schopenhauer's having posited Will rather than Ideas as primal make its
significance fully manifest: music, as copy of the Will, has a deeper universality than reason or idea
can ever attain. It requires nothing from the phenomenal world of Ideas, concepts, or words,
speaking a language completely its own. It speaks a truth which is truer to reality than any concept
or verbal proposition can ever attain. Indeed, were music to attempt portrayal of phenomenal
things and events, it must be judged defective for failing to speak its own language. Where Hegel
had faulted Rossini for failing to remain true to the ideal content of his text, Schopenhauer praises
him for having avoided that temptation: "his music speaks its own language so distinctly and
purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even when rendered
by instruments alone.''281

In this contrast between Hegel and Schopenhauer can be seen vividly the transition between the
conception of music as a supporter of text and the conception of music as a truly autonomous art.
Music is, in Schopenhauer's view, no ornamental support for poetry, but a wholly independent art:
"in fact, it is the most powerful of all the arts, and therefore attains its ends entirely from its own
resources."282 When words and music collaborate, the musical tones invariably take the upper
hand: "[W]ords are and remain for the music a foreign extra of secondary value, as the effect of
the tones is incomparably more powerful, more infallible, and more rapid than that of the
words."283 Words give only the "stripped-off outer shell of things," whereas music gives us the
innermost " kernel."284 And the human voice, which Hegel had declared the most musically
favored 'instrument' in virtue of its capacity to directly convey ideal content, is "originally and
essentially nothing but a modified tone, just like that of an instrument."285 Music itself is utterly
and completely indifferent to text and ideal content. Indeed, "like God, it sees only the heart."286
Purely instrumental music is not inferior as Hegel claimed, then, but music most true to itself. This
explains the seemingly ironic capacity of a Beethoven symphony to present us "with the greatest
confusion which yet has the most perfect order as its foundation; with the most vehement conflict
which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful harmony. It is . . . a true and
complete picture of the nature of the world, which rolls on in the boundless confusion of
innumerable forms, and maintains itself by constant destruction."287

Music cannot, as music, be the imitation of anything consciously known, for in that case it fails to
express Will's inner nature, and "merely imitates its phenomenon inadequately." 288 Nor, by
extension, can the composer consciously set out to compose a piece whose expressive aim is fully
known: the composer's achievement must arise "from the immediate knowledge of the inner
nature of the world unknown to his faculty of reason . . ."289 Imitative music that draws its
inspiration and content from or imitates the (phenomenal) world of perception should be "entirely
rejected."290

Given Schopenhauer's lofty claims for music, it is easy to overlook the fact that beneath them lies
a dark and pessimistic metaphysics. In the end, whatever pleasures music affords must be
transient, because satisfaction is momentary and fleeting, striving eternal. Perfect harmony is
impossible, even in music: "a perfectly pure harmonious system of tones is impossible, not only
physically, but even arithmetically."291 The imperfections and compromises necessary for the
equal temperament system are proof that "a perfectly correct music cannot even be conceived,
much less worked out; and for this reason all possible music deviates from perfect purity. It can
merely conceal the discords essential to it by dividing these among all the notes, i.e., by
temperament."292 Music's pleasant episodes, then, afford but temporary escape from Will's
perpetual striving. The high value of art is its capacity to console in the face of an essentially
meaningless existence, to transfigure ordinary experience by providing momentary freedom from
Will's tyranny. In this limited sense, art is rightly regarded as "the flower of life."293 But what
remains when the bloom withers and fades is "the in-itself of life, the will . . . a constant suffering
[which is] partly woeful, partly fearful."294 The contemplation of musical beauty is no absolute
''quieter of the will," for "it does not deliver [us] from life for ever, but only for a few
moments."295 However it may seem to "exalt our minds," to "speak of worlds different from and
better than ours," it ultimately "flatters only the will- to-live" by giving a distorted, "glowing
account of its successes."296 In the end, it seems, music's chief value is its capacity to lighten the
burden of pointless, ceaseless striving. The distinctive status of music as copy of the Will does not
alter the fundamental fact of life's inherent meaninglessness and Will's blind striving.

Schopenhauer in Review

Its enigmatic metaphysical assumptions notwithstanding, Schopenhauer's treatment of music is in

Music's deep significance arises neither from feelings it portrays, nor from feelings aroused,
undergone, or 'felt'. Itonly reminds us of these because of an analogous relation to phenomenal
feeling. Music gives us feeling without its object, the innermost "kernel" of which our worldly
strivings and satisfactions are but an "outer shell." The stirring power of music derives from its
ever-evolving patterns of tension and resolution; of expectation, anticipation, and desire, yielding
to gratification, satisfaction, and momentary peace. Because music copies the universal Will,
Schopenhauer metaphorically characterizes music's inner workings as a 'universallanguage', one
linked through imagination to the phenomenal realm of feeling.

Schopenhauer articulates a powerful and historically influential argument for music's autonomy
not only from other arts, but from the natural world, and from the verbal and conceptual realms
as well. Music achieves what it achieves entirely with its own resources. It is, in effect, a closed
system, but is not on that count an empty, confused, or noisy diversion. Music's significance relies
neither upon text nor idea. It is significant in virtue of its capacity to represent the
unrepresentable in-itself of the universe, that which undergirds all human thought, allanimal and
plant life, and which even comprises the inner essence of inorganic matter. It is somehow
congruentwith, and thereby the mirror of, the blind force that is the indestructible essence of all
that is.

At the same time, Schopenhauer presents a powerfully influential argument for music's
fundamental reliance upon feeling. Despite his insistence that Will and human willing are two
different things, he calls them both by the same name and mixes descriptions of the two, thus
conflating music's elucidation of Will with understanding of the phenomenal will. To remain wholly
consistent with his metaphysics, Schopenhauer would need to maintain that music illuminates no
more and no less than the otherwise unknowable pointlessness of existence. This is at least
implicit in his assertion that the pleasure music affords, its capacity to transfigure everyday
experience, merely 'flatters' the human will to live, imparting a delusory sense of meaning and
purposiveness to the inherently repulsive truth of Will's aimlessness. At the heart of his theory,
then, lies a deeply troubling paradox: that this wonderfully stirring copy of the Will (the 'picture of
happiness', the 'flower of existence') is the copy of something one must, having recognized it as
inherently chaotic, miserable, and repugnant, ultimately renounce. By renouncing the material
world and all personal wants, saints and Buddhist monks apparently achieve something far more
real and enduring than music can ever deliver.