hegel, philosophy, and music 133accompanies, plus whatever feelings constitute its necessarily indeter-
minate ‘content’.
The knock-down objection to this would seem to be that at the points
where they have the same text Bach’sB minor Mass, Haydn’s‘Nelson’
Mass, and Beethoven’sMissa Solemnistherefore have the same mean-
ing. That is not necessarily what Hegel intends, but if it is not, the
difference must lie in the feelings: ‘As feeling accompanies the content
of mind, then music as its expression is what accompanies’ – there is
no sense that it canaffect– ‘signs of ideas, words’ (ibid.: 270 ). Content
is therefore conceptual, whereas feeling is not. However, Hegel then
goes on to claim that the significance of independent (textless) music
is available only to the expert, others gaining satisfaction via the con-
tent of the words that music accompanies. The knock-down argument
which really is valid here is that plenty of non-specialist listeners (like
the present writer) do not experience any difference of kind between,
say, the sung fugues in Beethoven’sMissa Solemnis, and the fugues in the
late purely instrumental works, such as the non-choral movements of
the Ninth Symphony or theGrosse Fuge. Beethoven’s incorporation of
and transcendence of existing traditions of polyphony creates a musical
excess that is combined with a new kind of order, and is more important
than the semantics of the text of theMissa.
What music conveys also depends upon an immediate sense of its
meaningfulness as part of a world which inherently involves musical
significance, rather than existing independently of such significance.
Hegel offers no real way of grasping the effects of the music on the
understanding of the text of theMissabecause the music supposedly
merely accompanies signs of ideas in the way feelings can accompany
thoughts. One further questionable result of Hegel’s approach is that it
does not deal with how music can function as metaphor. Some passages
of Bruckner’s symphonies, for example, may evoke mountain vistas in
a manner whose phenomenology is neither merely visual nor merely
affective. This kind of evocation presumably still comes for Hegel in the
realm of what is ‘indeterminate and vague’. However, such a judgement
entails a very contentious evaluation of what matters to people and of
how and why they link the auditory, the visual and the affective. More-
over, the judgement of vagueness must also apply to verbal metaphors,
which can only be metaphors to the extent to which they cannot be
fully literalised.
What is decisive here is the idea, which underpins theAesthetics
and theLectures, that philosophy is the arbiter of the relative status