Redemption through Art 101sense of unity. Wagnerian music was a mythical event for Nietzsche; it
gave expression to the bracing unity of life.
Nietzsche became a Wagnerian because he saw Wagner's music drama
as a return to the Dionysian and a means to grant him access to the ele-
mental strata of life. His philosophy of music in reference to Wagner
was the attempt to understand the musical world of sound as the reve-
lation of an inscrutable human truth. Nietzsche's inquiries raised issues
that Claude Lévi-Strauss later revisited in his major work, Mytbologica,
with the claim that music and especially the nature of melody hold the
key to the "ultimate secret of man." Music is the oldest universal lan-
guage, intelligible to all people, and yet impossible to translate into any
other idiom.
Music predates the Tower of Babel. If we consider that music, from
Bach to pop, is the only universal mode of communication, we can
regard it as a power that has triumphed over the confusion of tongues.
The related notion that music is closer to our essence than any other
product of our consciousness goes back to the beginnings of history.
This notion underlies both Orphic and Pythagorean doctrines. Kepler
used it in calculating his laws of planetary motion. Music was regarded
as the language of the cosmos and as figured meaning. Schopenhauer
pronounced music the direct expression of the world will.
If Logos were to break the silence of speechless objects and their
inexhaustible being still failed as a concept, and if myth were capable of
expressing what Logos cannot grasp, music would have to maintain the
most profound relationship to the mythical realm. Perhaps it is that
mythical residue that has vigorously asserted itself in the current era's
ubiquity of music, which has been made possible by technological
progress. Music is all-pervasive as white noise, atmosphere, and milieu,
and has become the acoustic backdrop of our entire existence. Anyone
who listens to a Walkman while sitting in a subway or jogging through
the park is straddling two worlds. Traveling and jogging are Apollonian
activities; listening to music is Dionysian. Music has socialized the act of
transcendence and turned it into a sport for the masses. Discotheques