1 Form, feeling, metaphysics, and music
Form, meaning, and contextPhilosophical writers on music who argue that wordless music does not
mean anything sometimes refer to it as ‘pure form’. Peter Kivy says of
Beethoven’sEroicaSymphony, for example, that ‘it has no content to
reveal, no message to decode’, and that in the teaching of the work
‘few instructors, trained in the modern analytical and musicological
traditions as they are, will be tempted to attribute anymeaningto it’
(Kivy 1993 : 29 ), it being, ‘in a sense... pure contentless abstract
form’ (ibid.: 30 ). Kivy’s second claim is, of course, simply untrue: many
professional ‘new musicologists’ would indeed attribute meaning to
theEroica. The sense in which it is supposed to be ‘pure contentless
abstract form’ is not clear, but from the rest of Kivy’s arguments it would
appear to have to do with the idea that theEroicadoes not designate
anything. The idea that a form, especially a musical form, can be ‘pure’
should, though, already be doubtful on the basis of what was argued
in the Introduction. For a form to be a significant form at all, it has
to be understood as such, rather than merely registered as a series
of unconnected data. Contextual and background factors that do not
belong to the data themselves must come into play here, and so must the
inferential apprehension of patterns of identity and difference, of the
kind required for language use. It is only when there are such patterns
that we need to interpret, so the very notion of form relies on the sense
that there is something to be further understood. Forms are therefore
always open to re-description when new contexts arise in which they
take on a different significance.
If such contextualisation is required to make sense of any phe-
nomenon, philosophical claims about ‘pure’ form must look decidedly
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