By Dominic Marcella

Much of the musical dialectic that I have recently encountered emphasizes the notion of expressivity in music. I have often heard it argued that a particular piece of music is either expressive or not expressive (and is consequently either good or not good), but to focus on such a notion of expressivity is to equate music to metaphor, and that is to ignore the “music itself”.

This is not inherently bad, but it is limiting. Igor Stravinsky, for instance believed that,

There are different ways of loving and appreciating music. There is, for instance, the way that I would call self-interested love, wherein one demands from music emotions of a general sort – joy, sorrow, sadness, a subject for dreaming on, forgetfulness of ordinary existence. But that devalues music by assigning it a utilitarian end. Why not love it for its own sake? Why not love it as one loves a picture, for the sake of the beautiful painting, the beautiful design, the beautiful composition? Why not admit that music has an intrinsic value, independent of the sentiments or images that it may evoke by analogy, and that can only corrupt the hearer’s judgment?

What Stravinsky referred to as “self-interested love” can be more aptly described as the Heideggerian concept of Gestell (enframing), which relates to the way in which the world reveals itself as a resource. Utilitarianism pervades our perceptions of the world around us to the point that even human beings become a resource by virtue of our valuation of a person’s ability to carry out certain tasks (which vary according to context). For example, I think of my father as my father, my friend as my friend, my waiter at a restaurant as my waiter, and the farmer who grew the produce I buy as a farmer. These people are all defined by the service with which they provide me, or by their utility. The same thing is happening (and has been) with music.

By evaluating music based on its expressivity, whether wholly or partially, we turn music into a resource – something that is there in order to provide us with a particular feeling or experience. But, then, how should we perceive music? To emphasize its aesthetics would still be enframing – when Stravinsky mentions “the beautiful design” and “the beautiful composition” he uses “beautiful” not in an aesthetic sense, but in a neo-Platonic one.

He emphasizes “la musique elle-même” (which at first seems ironic for a composer whose most famous works were ballets), but this is a notoriously difficult concept to define. In fact, Stravinsky himself defines it only by negation: it is not “the result of a reflection”, it is not evocative, and it is not the structure or the method of organization. It is certainly not music theory – to think about a piece of music as diatonic, octatonic, serial, atonal, etc. requires one to think about each pitch in terms of its purpose, and that would be enframing.

Musicologist, Pieter van den Toorn explains that the secret to “music itself” is the listener’s relationship with the music. He says, “This relationship is given immediately in experience and is not open to the inquiry that it inspires. Moments of aesthetic rapport, of self-forgetting at-oneness with music, are immediate. The mind, losing itself in contemplation, becomes immersed in the musical object, becomes one with that object.” At first, this seems like an admirable solution, but how do we enter such relationships? “Moments of aesthetic rapport” implies that they are still based on emotiveness or expressivity, or another aesthetic phenomenon, which in turn reduces music, once again, to a resource.

Our minds have been conditioned to enframe. “Function” and “purpose” are central tenets of our systems of logic and reasoning. Heidegger claims that the presence of enframing in these systems makes it impossible to use them to escape enframing. Perhaps, then, there is no logical, positive definition of “music itself”. To define it through negation may be the best method we have of comprehending it, and is not entirely impractical.

There is certainly a virtue in defining music by its expressivity, or by “assigning it a utilitarian end”. It has brought joy to countless listeners, and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future. Yet, it is important to remember that this is just one way of perceiving music. It is not the “right” way, nor is it the “wrong” way. A work cannot be considered unsuccessful music, “Because it is not moving,” or “Because it is not emotive or expressive.” These claims have relevance only within a single system of perception, and as Heidegger and Stravinsky point out, there are others in which they do not remain valid. We should enjoy these characteristics when they are present, but we must always remember that it is possible to perceive or appreciate a piece of music in more than one way.