30 music, philosophy, and modernity
to understanding based on the pleasures of new kinds of anticipation,
delay, and fulfilment, which are fundamental to the world we inhabit
and which cannot be reduced to being ‘garden variety’ emotions. When
Bruckner creates his strange mixture of erotic, emotional, and religious
anticipation across huge stretches of his symphonies, where the climax
depends precisely on the new symphonic proportions, the music cannot
be reduced to erotic, emotional, and religious connotations, because
it gives us the freedom to find new ways of experiencing the meaning
and pleasure of anticipation.
The debate about music and emotions since Hanslick has been one
of those philosophical debates which generates little but disagreement,
where the positions advanced depend largely upon what philosophical
assumptions the theorist has already adopted before looking at music.
Tothis extent one either thinks the insights generated by the debate’s
inconclusiveness are stages on a path to an answer to ‘the question’,
or one thinks the debate itself may be mistakenly conceived. The idea,
for example, that one might learn most from the very fact that music is
resistant to being subsumed into a discursive theory, and yet at the same
time possesses deep cultural significance, rarely occurs to theorists in
this debate. This isnota call for the mystification of music, but rather a
call to make our ways of talking about music do more justice to it. There
are good grounds for being wary of philosophical debates which are
just carried on between philosophers when there is little sense in which
either the problems thrown up in the debate or the possible resolution
of the debate significantly affect the thing the debate is about. The
feeling when reading some analytical philosophy of music that what is
being talked about doesn’t seem to matter very much, because the main
thing is to get clear about how to determine its status, is an indicator of
more than just argumentative failings in the approach.
Why is it, for example, that people may be convinced that they gain
a deeper understanding of music when it plays a role in a literary text
like Proust’sIn Search of Lost Timeor Thomas Mann’sDoktor Faustus
than when it is discussed in philosophical texts? The simple answer
would seem to be that people value ways of talking about music which
enrich the practice of listening to or playing music, rather than those
which seek to tell them that music can’t do what they feel that it can. If
we regard music as a human practice, the significance of that practice
cannot, as we saw, be wholly divorced from the lives of those engaged
in it. Many of the objections to the application of extra-musical terms
to music rely on the idea that words must be clearly defined, rather