music and romanticism 149train of ideas, any individual philosophical idea’ (Novalis 1978 : 554 ).
Elsewhere he claims that a lack of determinate drives is the source
of happiness: ‘Moods – indeterminate sentiments– not determinate sen-
timents and feelings make one happy... Of the most complete con-
sciousness one can say that it is conscious of everything and nothing. It is
song– mere modulation ofmoods– like song is of vowels – or notes’
(ibid.: 401 )–whereas consonants are the forms of determinacy and
specificity of thought. He also talks of the ‘universaln languageof music.
The mind is excited in a free, indeterminate manner – that does it so
much good – that seems so familiar to it, so patriotic – it is for these short
moments in its earthly home’ (ibid.: 517 ). Investment in indeterminacy
as a manifestation of freedom is evidently two-edged. The apotheosis of
indeterminacy is a form of mystical (un)consciousness, but this is hardly
compatible with Novalis’ concern for aspects of the world to become
ever more interrelated: for him freedom is precisely the freedom to
connect and articulate. Dahlhaus argues that music should make us
think carefully before we regard indeterminacy as being mere lack of
differentiation: ‘Indeterminacy through lack of an object and determi-
nacy in the sense of differentiation do not exclude each other at all; and
one might even maintain that musical expression gains in connotations
what it loses in denotations’ (Dahlhaus 1988 : 333 ).
Novalis’ questioning of determinacy as the aim of philosophy may
relate to F. H. Jacobi’s influential claim in the Pantheism Controversy of
the 1780 s that cognitive determination leads to ‘nihilism’, because each
particular determination just leads to further determinations, without
there being a basis which grounds the relationships between the deter-
minations as relationships between meaningful items (see Bowie 1997 :
ch. 1 ). Novalis therefore seeks a higher unity in the endless, never fully
determinate, possibilities of linking together aspects of the world in new
ways. The relationships in music, which are not intelligible in terms of
the merely relational, determinate aspect of mathematics, or of con-
cepts, become a pleasure-giving symbol of a unity created from ever
greater differentiation. The danger is that music might then seem to
be saying the same thing over and over, as an indeterminate symbol of
the unattainable absolute.
Such a philosophical construal of music would, however, miss the
point that it is the experience ofspecificmusic which cannot be reduced
to what we say about it that is important here. As we have seen, during the
period when Novalis is writing, autonomous music combines elements
into new forms which, although they are not semantically determinate,