This is a follow-up to Sonali and Anish’s posts.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics,” Santayana wrote. What makes music and math so special? Math is unique among the sciences in that it describes itself. If we want to draw conclusions (theorems) about objects in some set S, then we must start off with statements (axioms, definitions, or more fundamental theorems) about objects in some superset of S. In other words, because mathematical proofs must be based on deductive reasoning, math is a closed system.
Similarly, music is different from all other art forms since it is also a closed system: the form and the medium are the same. When we create (i.e. either compose or perform) a piece of music, which, following Edgard Varèse, we loosely define as “organized sound”, we necessarily start off with smaller, constituent blocks of sound that we ourselves have produced for the explicit purpose of creating music. On the other hand, when we create a sculpture, which we can loosely define as “organized mass”, we do not necessarily start off which smaller, constituent blocks of form that we ourselves have produced for the explicit purpose of creating sculpture. The marble or bronze that might serve as our medium need not have been created specifically for our sculptures. Therefore, music is also a closed system; more precisely, music is closed under artistic purpose.
So why does music seem to draw out the spiritual in people, more so than other art forms? Eduard Hanslick, a conservative 19th century Austrian music critic, might argue that it is because music does not have to represent anything:
[T]he beautiful is not contingent upon nor in need of any subject introduced from without, but that it consists wholly of sounds artistically combined. The ingenious co-ordination of intrinsically pleasing sounds, their consonance and contrast, their flight and reapproach, their increasing and diminishing strength-this it is which, in free and unimpeded forms, presents itself to our mental vision. (Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Chapter 3)
Stravinsky also subscribed to this school, claiming that “the form is everything. [The composer] can say nothing whatever about meanings” (Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments [quoted from Wikipedia]). On the other hand, a composer like Wagner would argue exactly the opposite:
“[The language of music] expresses altogether, and in full measure, the emotional content of the elemental human language, independently of our word-language, which has become purely an informational tool. (Wagner, Drei Operndichtungen nebst einer Mittheilung an seine Freunde [quoted in Weiss and Taruskin, Music in the Western World]).
On the one hand we have critics arguing that music is not representative at all; on the other we have critics arguing that music is hyper-representative of the deepest experiences of human emotion.
But perhaps these two sides are not so different after all. In both cases, music is transcending something, allowing us to go beyond the specificity of our daily routines. People have a habit of incessantly characterizing objects, categorizing them and thereby dividing and subdividing the world into some kind of overgrown, blinding taxonomy. Perhaps the thinking is that the more dimensions along which we can characterize an object, the better we can understand it. In both Hanslick’s and Wagner’s formulations, music allows us breaks free of our taxonomies.
Music is uniquely suited to this purpose precisely because it is a closed system. A closed (or complete) system generates itself while an open (or incomplete) system does not. I suspect that the temptation to try to complete an incomplete system is so strong that we run outward, away from the fundamental, generative principles at the heart of the system, and let our taxonomic tendencies run rampant. On the other hand, if we are given a complete system, we might try to run outward, but we are more likely to eventually return to the system’s core, if only for a brief moment of epiphany.
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