Ethics

Recent histories of nineteenth-century philosophies of music have been dominated by two narratives. The first narrative, that of musical formalism, holds that philosophies of music in this period were concerned primarily with identifying a distinct sphere of musical autonomy. The second narrative, that of musical idealism, holds that philosophies of music in this period were concerned primarily with music’s perceived ability to offer insight into higher truths. This chapter contends that these narratives need to be augmented—and in some cases challenged—by an awareness of the vital role that ethics played in philosophical thinking about music across the long nineteenth century. It thus provides an alternative narrative focused on the musical-ethical thought of three key thinkers of this period: Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Utility and the Pleasures of Musical Formalism: Edmund Gurney, Liberal Individualism, and Musical Beauty as ‘Ultimate’ Value

Most contemporary assessments of Edmund Gurney’s musical thinking rely solely on his influential book The Power of Sound (1880), yet much of the work that appeared in this book was initially published in essay form in the liberal press, appearing alongside discussions of politics, economics, moral philosophy, and psychology. With this broader frame in mind, this article investigates the relationship between Gurney’s musical thinking and the traditions of utilitarianism, political economy, and liberalism through his association with Henry Sidgwick’s circle. It argues that one of the central tenets of Gurney’s musical formalism—namely the idea that there is an irreducibly ‘musical’ form of beauty—may be construed in relation to ‘liberal individualism’ as it was framed by the utilitarian liberals with whom he associated, who attempted to combine the cultivation of disinterestedness with the pursuit of pleasure as a means to attaining a balance between self-interest and the common good.

Gurney, Edmund (1847–88)

Edmund Gurney was an English psychologist and musician. His major work, The Power of Sound, is a vast treatise on musical aesthetics, ranging from issues in the physiology of hearing to the question of the relation of music to morality, but is mostly devoted to central questions of form, expression and value in music. It is the most significant work of its kind in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Commentators often couple Gurney with Hanslick as a supporter of musical formalism, but his views on the expressive dimension of music are neither as restrictive nor as doctrinaire as Hanslick’s. Hanslick insisted on denying specific emotional content to music, allowing it only to convey dynamic features, which emotions, among other things, might exhibit. Gurney, on the other hand, grants that some music possesses fairly definite emotional expression, and discusses at length the grounds of such expression; he is primarily concerned to deny that musical impressiveness, or beauty, is either the same as or depends on musical expressiveness. Gurney maintains that overall form in music is not of primary relevance to the appreciation of music. This is because the central feature of musical comprehension is the grasping of individual parts as they occur, and the grasping of connections to immediately neighbouring parts, whatever the overarching form of a piece might be. The value of a piece is directly a function of the pleasurableness of its individual parts and the cogency of sequence exhibited at the transitions between them, not a function of its global architecture.

Giant Steps In The Interpretation Of A Musical PDP Network

We first introduce the notion of chord progressions by describing a particular example (the II-V-I) that is related to the Coltrane changes. Second, we describe the Coltrane changes using a formalism derived from previous musical investigations with neural networks (Yaremchuk & Dawson, 2005, 2008). Finally, we describe how we trained a neural network to generate the Coltrane changes, how we analyzed its internal structure, and the implications of this interpretation. In particular, we discovered that a network represented transitions between chords in a fashion that could be described in terms of a new musical formalism that we had not envisioned. In short, this paper shows that the interpretation of the internal structure of a musical network can provide new formalisms for representing musical regularities, and can suggest new directions for representational research on musical cognition.

Form and Freedom: The Kantian Ethos of Musical Formalism

Musical formalism is often portrayed as the enemy of artistic freedom. Its main representative, Eduard Hanslick, is seen as a purist who, by emphasizing musical rules, aims at restricting music criticism and even musical practices themselves. It may also seem that formalism is depriving music of its ability to have moral significance, as the semantic connection to the extramusical is denied by the formalistic view. In my paper, I defend formalism by placing Hanslick’s argument in a Kantian framework. It is not hard to find Kantian elements in Hanslick’s work, such as his emphasis on the contemplative and disinterested nature of the aesthetic judgment, the nonconceptuality of music’s content, and his insistence that “beauty has no purpose.” I argue further that Hanslick’s formalism is in fact motivated by and manifests the Kantian conception of freedom as self-legislation. Thus understood, the kind of moral significance music may have rests upon its own autonomous rules.

E. T. A. HOFFMANN AND THE ETHEREAL TECHNOLOGIES OF ‘NATURE MUSIC’

ABSTRACTIn 1814, E. T. A. Hoffmann published his short story, Die Automate. The story concerns the dealings of two friends and a fortune-telling automaton, the Turk, whose prophetic utterances seem to reveal a supernatural and psychic ability. Although the story first appeared in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung, it has been mostly overlooked by music scholars. In addition to the lengthy passages dealing with artificial intelligence, the story includes an extensive discussion of music performance and music instruments. The instruments they discuss – machines capable of bringing forth the voice of nature – perhaps appear as fantastical creations of Hoffmann’s imagination. However, he refers to real instruments that played an established role in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century musical culture. This period saw the frenzied production of many novel and bizarre instruments such as the euphon, aiuton, aenomochord, xänorphica and the harmonichord. Though these instruments are all but forgotten today, they testify to a widespread preoccupation with timbre and instrumental sonority. The consolidation of the orchestra as a concept, musical body and institution in the eighteenth century went hand in hand with the notion that individual instrumental sonorities had distinct expressive characters. By the early nineteenth century, this idea manifested itself in two distinct traditions: an orchestral one, in which composers increasingly took advantage of the ever-growing palette of instruments, giving rise to the modern concept of orchestration and the romantic symphony, and an instrument-oriented one, in which musicians, scientists and inventors attempted to capture ‘ideal sonorities’ (usually timbres resembling the human voice) in specially designed instruments. These creations offer a missing link between idealist aesthetics of the period and musical practice. Though ultimately ephemeral, they represent a kind of ‘absolute’ music that was founded purely in ethereal sonorities rather than in musical formalism.