100 music, philosophy, and modernity
its relationship to feelings, and its resistance to philosophical explana-
tion. This resistance itself has to do with the decline of the paradigm
of representation that leads at this time to the idea of ‘absolute music’,
which is regarded by some as the highest form of art (see Dahlhaus
1978 ; Chua 1999 ). It is the manner in which the differing forms of
articulation affect each other which is central to the Romantic con-
ception, and which is ignored in most approaches in the philosophy
of music. Schlegel himself, for example, often plays with the priority
between music and philosophy. This is apparent in the following pas-
sage, which contradicts the idea that Romantic thinking about music
regards it as the expression of emotions, and also prefigures the musical
technique of developing variation that will soon emerge in Beethoven:
those who have a sense for the wonderful affinities of all arts and sciences
will at least not look at the matter from the flat viewpoint of so-called
naturalness, according to which music is only supposed to be the language
of feeling, they will in fact not find it per se impossible that there is a
certain tendency of all pure instrumental music towards philosophy. Must
pure instrumental music not create a text for itself? and is the theme in
it not as developed, confirmed, varied and contrasted as the object of
meditation in a sequence of philosophical ideas?
(Schlegel 1988 : 2 , 155 )The somewhat cryptic remark about music creating a text is in one sense
performative. The deliberate paradox of taking the form of music most
distant from verbal texts as being what creates a text for itself forces one
to think about what it is that is meaningful about such music, which can
be seen as deriving precisely from itslackof verbal cues. The succeeding
remark, which again seems close to Beethoven’s compositional proce-
dures, both establishes the notion of specifically musical ideas against
affect theories, and gives substance to the notion by making it clear
that musical ideas can be as demanding as philosophical ones. Anyone
who has looked at Beethoven’s composition sketches will know what
this means. One either finds this kind of writing merely frustrating,
or very illuminating, because it can liberate one from received ways of
thinking. Its very resistance to interpretation brings it, of course, close
to music.
Central to Schlegel’s thinking is the notion of wit, the ‘combinatory
spirit’, via which new ideas are arrived at by unexpected juxtapositions
of disparate ideas. Wit is also seen as essentially connected to music:
‘All wit is musical, namely grammatical, mythological in the spirit of