music and romanticism 159connected to other human activity by a ‘great mass of productions which
come between’ (ibid.: 371 ) immediate movements of self-consciousness
and their expression, and the eventual emergence of the art of ‘inde-
pendent music’.
It is easy to misunderstand Schleiermacher’s position. He is not
proposing the kind of theory in which musical composition becomes
the direct expression of ‘moved states of mind’ of the composer, so
ignoring the fact that the composer must begin with forms which they
first encounter in the objective world. Schleiermacher is instead quite
explicit that such a moved state ‘would have to be long exhausted in its
expression before [the composer] had even completed it internally, let
alone produced it externally’ (ibid.: 379 ) with objective musical means.
Although he is evidently very concerned with the musical aspect of ver-
bal language, he is more discriminating than Hegel concerning the
relationship of music and verbal text. It might seem that adding music
to a text would ‘express the thought even more strongly’ (ibid.: 380 ),
but this is not the case because ‘if the thought is expressed in words then
one could underlay the same musical sentence/movement (‘Satz’) with
completely different verbal sentences; indeed each could have as much
justification as the others’ (ibid.). The primary relationship between
music and language is therefore not semantic.
The real connection of music is to poetry, rather than to prose: ‘only
poetry postulates music, and music only presupposes the poetic element
of speech’ (ibid.). Like lyric poetry, music ‘is never connected with the
communication and presentation of something known, but rather of
an inner moved state’ (ibid.: 381 ). Wittgenstein will talk of ‘The way
music speaks. Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed
in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of
giving information’ (Wittgenstein 1981 : 27 ). Furthermore, any direct
connection of music with natural forms of expression is contradicted
by the fact that developed musical forms do not simply correspond
to what immediate natural expressions convey. Schleiermacher makes
the wonderfully suggestive assertion that ‘Song is the indifference of
speech, crying, and laughing. Each of these can approach song, but
none of them becomes song without ceasing to be what it is’ (Schleier-
macher 1931 : 324 ). He even insists that most of the sounds in nature
are just ‘noise’ (Schleiermacher 1842 : 382 ), whereas music has devel-
oped endless differentiated forms of expression. In consequence, ‘we
can hardly grasp the reduction’ of the effects of music to ‘a single inner
state, but on the other hand, the inner effect of music in all its greatness