On this absorbing and culturally wealthy ebook Béla Szabados begins with the remark that the numerous remarks of Wittgenstein’s on music, and the central function music performed in his life and his thought, haven’t been given ample consideration on the planet of Wittgenstein scholarship. By the top of this rigorously constructed and eminently clear examine one sees why he says that, his having convincingly proven the extent to which Wittgenstein’s engagement with music intertwines along with his philosophical thought and the extent to which every casts particular or unobvious gentle on the opposite.
Szabados works outward from a centrally vital distinction: plenty of commentators have seen Wittgenstein’s remarks on, and curiosity in, music as a peripheral matter for him; that’s, they see him centrally concerned with issues within the philosophy of language, thoughts, and philosophical methodology, and so to the extent that they think about Wittgenstein on music in any respect they see this as a matter of making use of these concerns in language, thoughts, and so forth to the understanding of music. Szabados proceeds (and that is the principle cause this ebook is such a really priceless contribution not solely to our understanding of Wittgenstein but additionally to our understanding of music itself) from a distinct premise: that Wittgenstein was deeply and consistently involved with aesthetic questions, and that the aesthetic dimension of life was for him each at all times “on” and at all times a major contributory think about his considering on the vary of philosophical points for which he’s most recognized. Thus all through this ebook (a) quite intricate relations between music and language, (b) the complexities of musical understanding, (c) the multiform methods during which illustration, expression, and interpretation perform throughout the world of musical expertise, and (d) the ability and centrality of aspect-perception within the comprehension of musical that means, sense, and mental content material are all explored with philosophical subtlety and cultural sophistication.
Szabados does an exemplary job of following Wittgenstein into the hidden depths of his remarks and observations on Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and the maybe unjustly obscure Josef Labor. However we see right here not merely that Szabados clearly understands and engagingly communicates the content material of Wittgenstein’s observations; it’s quite that Szabados repeatedly enacts the very sort of richly contextual aesthetic appreciation he finds endorsed by Wittgenstein. That’s, Szabados sees and brings to gentle meaning-determining connections proper and left — between one comment on Bach and one other on Josef Labor, or one on Brahms and one other on Mendelssohn, or one on one other artwork, e.g. structure and one other on the artwork of music, or one on the appreciation of a line of poetry and the taking in of the importance of a melody, and so forth all through the ebook.
All of this (as I’ll talk about extra totally) factors to the truth that Wittgenstein just isn’t finest understood as a hard-line musical formalist within the custom of Hanslick. It’s quite that Wittgenstein is consistently weaving the connecting fibers that present music’s place inside what he calls our type of life. It’s thus not completely the relations inside a piece of music that generate its that means (though these, as Szabados understands, unquestionably have their place within the creation and comprehension of musical sense). It’s quite all of these inside compositional relations, seen themselves in relation to exterior and extra broadly cultural issues — our language, our expressive patterns, our social interactions, our modes of understanding one another, that make music significant.
In reference to this strategy, Szabados rightly brings out Wittgenstein’s remarks regarding the huge and exacting labor that he expended on arranging his remarks; this was a thinker who understood that sentences in our language are usually not reducible to remoted propositions that carry all of their content material internally or hermetically. Quite, relations, interconnections, linkages, solid gentle and convey that means, and Szabados acutely sees, and to my thoughts definitively exhibits, that Wittgenstein thought the identical of music and the humanities. And Szabados is alive to a different vital factor in understanding Wittgenstein’s life in music: saturated in a wealthy musical tradition from childhood, he understood music in the best way a performer does, or from, as we’d say, the within, from inside musical practices. To take one instance: when a dialog turned to a Beethoven quartet, Wittgenstein was in a position to precisely whistle the total viola a part of the third motion in reference to what was being mentioned. He was additionally in a position to whistle forty Schubert songs, along with his good friend David Pinsent accompanying on the piano (p. 28). That is vital, past biographical curiosity, as a result of it exhibits the extent to which Wittgenstein considered music within the most interesting element, on essentially the most nuanced degree of particularity. This clearly accords effectively along with his philosophical strategy usually, however the level right here is that this early grounding in follow inoculated Wittgenstein in opposition to over-general pronouncements regarding points similar to the character of musical that means, the character of the relation between music and ethics, and so forth. Certainly, we study right here that Wittgenstein mentioned that there’s a rare variety of completely different sorts of appreciation, however that his personal was “concentrated and circumscribed” (p. 29), by which I feel he meant each broadly culturally cultivated and but microscopically centered on element.
Szabados is skilled at summoning the telling element or anecdote for his bigger objective: He informs us of Maurice Drury’s (Wittgenstein’s good friend and scholar) writing that earlier than a Cambridge assembly he and Wittgenstein had been speaking and looking of the window on a uninteresting gray night; when he mentioned he had been listening to the spectacular second motion of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Wittgenstein replied “The chord with which that sluggish motion opens is the color of that sky (mentioning of the window)”. However then he added (now interweaving a synesthetic remark in regards to the music to a private affiliation to that music that also, if differently, tells us in regards to the temper, the tenor or character, of that motion): “On the finish of the conflict, after we had been retreating earlier than the Italians, I used to be driving on a gun carriage and I used to be whistling to myself that motion.” And as shortly, however now transferring again to an outline of the music and never his private interplay at a doubtlessly life-threatening time with it, provides, “Simply on the very finish of the motion Beethoven does one thing which makes one see the theme in a completely completely different gentle” (p. 31).
This, in microcosm, exhibits the community of relations that Szabados sees as the guts of Wittgenstein’s involvement with music and his conception of music’s capability to create, maintain, and convey that means. If we had been requested, “Is that this (a) formal-analytical, (b) personally relational, (c) music-to-atmosphere relational, or (d) conversationally-dependent remark?”, one can be proper to reply “All of them — and inseparably so”. And the very concept of seeing a factor in a completely completely different gentle is maybe the deepest connection between Wittgenstein’s conception of aesthetic expertise and his conception of philosophical work and progress: he confirmed us all the inherited downside of word-meaning in, certainly, a completely new gentle — past Frege, past Russell, and (in some methods) anticipatory of Austin and his era. Wittgenstein doesn’t have what one would possibly name, in tenet-listing kind, “a philosophy of music”, however as Szabados exhibits all through this examine he does have what one would possibly name a manner of seeing music throughout the expanded subject of a tradition. And that manner of seeing, in distinction to a extra philosophically customary thesis-itemizing place, brings solely new gentle into the sector. To state a considerably complicated methodological matter briefly: this ebook exhibits how a lot is misplaced by ignoring Wittgenstein’s strategy as a result of it doesn’t ship thesis-statements or conform to pre-identified classes.
Szabados writes: “The significance of cultural context and custom — whether or not understanding an individual, a language or a murals — is a fundamental premise in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical perspective” (p. 39). A musical work seen in its cultural context, a piece heard imaginatively inside its custom and its meaning-determining set of precedents, the informative parallel between understanding an individual and understanding a composition, the vary of comprehension required to know a language as analogous to the vary required to know a piece of music — these are all investigated right here, and what one leaves the ebook with is, fittingly to its central topic, extra a manner of seeing how a piece of music emerges, the way it interrelates, the way it capabilities in a human life, the way it each shows and cultivates a sensibility than a decreased set of propositions foundational to the development of a musical aesthetic. In his lectures on aesthetics Wittgenstein mentioned: “To explain appreciation it’s important to describe a complete tradition” (p. 39), and this ebook is among the many uncommon contributions to the sector that appear to deeply perceive that time.
Szabados offers a sublime and incisive dialogue of the relations between Hanslick’s strict formalism and the views of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and he right here insightfully brings within the at all times fascinating affect on the youthful Wittgenstein of Schopenhauer. However it’s the center to later work of Wittgenstein’s that gives the richest rewards right here. We see him in a lecture observing that we hardly hear the phrase “magnificence” in our engagements with the humanities — besides in aesthetics courses (p. 60-61). We see the relevance of Wittgenstein’s opposition, by no means to science, however to scientism as a deceptive affect on our aesthetic thought (p.63). We see him working in opposition to the Platonic presuppositions of essentialism (and they’re proven right here to be manifest to an extent in Hanslick) and the best way that overgeneralization (e.g. “music is a language”) can solid vital and instructive particularities in darkness and uninteresting our discernment (p. 68-71). However there’s something a reader would possibly want Szabados had additionally accomplished (significantly as a result of, as one sees on this ebook, Szabados may be singularly good at it): Szabados quotes Wittgenstein’s comment about his good friend and nice philosophical colleague Frank Ramsey:
He really relished music and with understanding. And one may see by taking a look at him what impact it had on him. Of the final motion of one among Beethoven’s late quartets, a motion he cherished maybe greater than the rest, he advised me that it made him really feel as if the heavens had been open. And that meant one thing when he mentioned it. (p. 70)
And that meant one thing when he mentioned it: there’s right here a gap to convey out in greater reduction the factor of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language that considerations the distinction between the meanings of phrases and the meanings of a individual’s phrases, after which to evaluate the importance of that distinction for our understanding of and involvement with music. However then to undertake which may have lengthened the ebook by half. Szabados does present how Wittgenstein repeatedly places side-by-side linguistic and musical questions, similar to asking, within the context of music, “What’s it to listen to a sentence or a phrase with understanding?” (p. 81). And Szabados actually strongly intimates what I’m calling for, by exhibiting in spectacular element the gulf between the strict number of formalism talked about above (the place solely structural relations inside to the work are acknowledged as determinative of its content material and that means) and Wittgenstein’s skill to see all that — but additionally a lot, far more. Szabados richly explicates Wittgenstein comment, “I feel that to be able to take pleasure in a poet, it’s important to just like the tradition to which he belongs as effectively” (p. 83). That’s, Szabados is emphasizing exactly the meaning-generating cultural resonances (p. 83) that lie past the attain of formalism, and these resonances perform because the culture-wide analogues to the non-public resonances that we might must fairly exactingly discern and outline to be able to really perceive an individual’s phrases (“And that meant one thing when he mentioned it”) as uttered about their life or as uttered about their expertise of a musical work.
Szabados sees deeply into a problem that weaves itself all through this eye-opening examine: he captures this problem succinctly within the sentence “As he [Wittgenstein] connects music to language, gesture, argument and the human face, the intractable conventional issues appear to soften away” (p. 84). That’s, what I’ve mentioned above regarding the different manner of seeing music and musical expertise that Wittgenstein gives (“different”, for one cause, as a result of it doesn’t tackle established narrowly-focused issues similar to expressive properties, illustration, identification situations, definition, or ontology) captures solely a part of what we discover right here. Szabados, by growing this theme intermittently after which addressing it immediately in a remaining chapter, exhibits by means of a sort of incremental conceptual motion that the view Wittgenstein gives is expounded to these issues — if usually solely by supplanting them, unearthing their presuppositions, or in a way enlarging their scope past their survival of their earlier independently-chiseled kind (therefore his metaphor “soften away”).
We’re additionally reminded that the family-resemblance metaphor can show of appreciable assist in serious about musical in addition to linguistic issues: We’d ask ourselves a query similar to “What’s melody, basically?”, the place the overall type of the query concurrently dulls acuity and marginalizes particularity as talked about above. Wittgenstein commented, “The melodies of various composers might be approached by making use of the precept: Each species of tree is a ‘tree’ in a distinct sense of the phrase. I.e. Do not let your self be misled by our saying they’re all melodies” (p. 88). This will certainly appear a flip away from a standard musical-aesthetic query (“What’s a melody?”), however (and maybe Szabados ought to have made this level extra forcefully) it’s not. Quite, it is a solution, however of a distinct type from the one we might have anticipated (i.e. as singular essence-defining), contemplating a variety of examples that present what they’re, the place we’d draw strains (e.g. the place a horizontal musical line is the highest line of harmonies however not functioning as a melody), and the way they play completely different roles in several musical contexts. And right here there emerges one significantly highly effective occasion of Szabados’ distinctive strategy to the bigger subject of Wittgenstein on music as talked about on the outset: he observes that Wittgenstein’s profoundly critical involvement with and deep understanding of music, as proven right here in his comment about melodies and the differing senses of the identical phrase “tree”, performed a particular function within the improvement of his philosophy of language (p. 89). Language itself, for Wittgenstein, was not hermetically or formalistically sealed off from tradition. And of the two-way road between music and language, Szabados writes, “Music just isn’t alone, as formalists recommend: it resonates with the entire subject of our language video games — with our different musical and cultural practices” (p. 92). However then this declare, as he exhibits, requires philosophical care; there’s a improper flip right here that it is rather straightforward to take.
Wittgenstein writes of a piece of music,
The impression it makes on me is related with issues in its environment — e.g. with the existence of the German language and of its intonation, however which means with the entire subject of our language video games. If I say e.g.: it is as if right here a conclusion had been being drawn, or, as if right here one thing had been being confirmed, or, as if this had been a reply to what got here earlier, — then, the best way I perceive it clearly presupposes familiarity with conclusions, confirmations, replies, and so on.
Szabados blocks the improper flip by specializing in the use right here of the repeated “as if” phrases: The “as if” prevents the equation of the that means of a musical theme with “the that means of an announcement or assertion” (p. 106). That’s, it has that means by resonating with “our language, methods of life, and social practices” (p. 106). After which, like language (significantly however actually not solely in instances of repetition, citation, and phrase-adaptation), the musical phrase can purchase that means by resonating with “the conventions and historical past of music itself” (p. 106). As soon as having taken the improper flip, we’ll ask, and anticipate a solution to (and won’t be conceptually glad with out), what the verbally-articulated content material of the conclusion, the affirmation, or the reply is. And exactly there, inattentive to the “as-if” meaning-generating relation, we collapse (and sometimes unwittingly so) the analogy between music and language to a relation of identification or equivalence — thus condemning ourselves to questions which are as unanswerable as they’re misbegotten. In contrast, an consciousness of the analogical relation or resonance — a heeding of Szabados’ Wittgensteinian warning — frees us to take the “as-if” description as what it truly is — the very articulation of the meaning-content for which we had been in any other case looking for.
However the matter doesn’t finish there. There are putting moments on this ebook the place the sort of analogical understanding simply described begins in our language and social practices, carries over to our understanding of music and the way we hear a given passage, after which travels again once more to not language however to the understanding of Wittgenstein’s bigger philosophical undertaking itself. Of musical counterpoint, Szabados writes,
counterpoint principally includes the interweaving of impartial voices or melodic strains that contribute to the rising polyphony, which, in flip, enhances and feedback on the person voices. In that case, then counterpoint gives us a key to understanding the construction and elegance of the Investigations as a matter of various voices inside a dialogue sketching conflicting philosophical views and aiming at their dissolution by doing justice to every (p. 119).
And Szabados sees fascinating particularized connections beneath this heading: of Schubert’s later-in-life return to the examine of counterpoint, he means that what Schubert actually desired, quite than to only increase his approach, was to know the place he stood in relation to the custom and artwork of contrapuntal composition, and that Schubert’s undertaking stands in an illuminating parallel with Wittgenstein’s need to know, to search out out — I might say to work out — the place he stood in relation to a fancy weave of dissonant voices with out adopting anybody dogmatically. This contrapuntal mannequin would additionally I feel assist articulate why it’s often misguided to attempt to extract codified typical philosophical positions (“Wittgenstein’s place” on x, y, or z — the analogy to a single simple musical theme) in a manner insufficiently attentive to or conscious of the conceptually therapeutic dimension of his work and methodological strategy.
Yet another factor: with the bottom he has lined behind him, Szabados is able late on this ebook to supply a transparent and highly effective clarification of why Wittgenstein was as vehemently opposed — or I might say maybe closed to as a matter of sensibility — to the developments round him in trendy musical composition as his philosophical writings, notebooks, and conversations present him to have been. If Szabados, following Wittgenstein, is true, then music as Szabados says “exhibits us our shared types of life, the grounds and origins of related language video games that are their refinement: musical gestures of dirge, of mourning, of prayer, or worship, of celebration, of violence and conflict, of coronation, of contemplation and so forth”. And these would thus be “expressive of fundamental central moments of our lives as human beings” (p. 127). All of the interconnections thus far thought-about contrapuntally interweaving language, music, and life are in play right here. And since Wittgenstein was unable to listen to, to sense or to really feel, and to make these humane interconnections to the Modernist compositional idiom, he discovered it alien. Mahler, for him, was the turning level, and so Strauss, Schönberg, Bartók and others had been all composing in a manner that appeared to him airtight, anemically autonomous, and in a meaning-draining manner, formalist.
This hyperlinks to a different perception, one effectively value considering: Szabados sees any such try and reductively seize or outline an essence of musical coherence and meaning-content as a direct aesthetic parallel to Wittgenstein’s “rejection of the formalist strategy within the philosophy of language” (p. 130) in his later work. That’s, for causes completely parallel to the state of affairs with music, “formalist makes an attempt to know the meanings of phrases and propositions fail” (p. 130). And this in flip is related again to the earlier consideration of melody and what it’s — or what completely different sorts of issues they might be. After the earlier comment, Wittgenstein writes, “In case you merely take a look at the sequences of notes and the modifications of key, all these buildings little doubt seem on the identical degree” (p.133). That’s, if one appears, from a traditional and over-general manner of seeing the difficulty from a really excessive altitude, issues do look the identical and generalities appear believable. However Wittgenstein subsequent makes a comment indicative of his strategy and one that’s in actual fact emblematic of all the strategy taken in Szabados’ conceptually reorienting ebook: “However when you take a look at the sector of power during which they stand (and therefore their significance), you’ll be inclined to say: Right here melody is one thing fairly completely different than there (right here it has a distinct origin, performs a distinct function, inter alia)” (p. 133). The sector of power, the importance, the language-game, the cultural resonance, the harmonic setting, the rhythmic definition and time signature, the analogy to verbal phrasing and locution, the “as-if” relations, the contrapuntal logic, the type of life: all of those phrases themselves resonate with one another, and Szabados’ lovely ebook — a outstanding contribution to our understanding of music in civilization — itself creates an surroundings during which we as readers are enabled to listen to and make these enriching interconnections.
