What Music Can Learn from E. M. Hanslick

Why do we listen to music? Partly, we don’t choose to listen to music at all. It plays incessantly for us on the radio, in the car, on the street, on iPods, in movies and all kinds of places outside the concert venue. So whether or not we really listen to music, we’re always going to hear it. But what happens when we do listen to music? Are we expecting something? What are we listening for?

Sometimes, just hearing music can be a kind of listening, and maybe Eduard Hanslick was referring to this kind of listening when he spoke of the “pathological” form of musical perception: “Slouched in their chairs, these enthusiasts allow themselves to brood and sway in response to the vibrations of tones, instead of contemplating tones attentively… for all they would know, a fine cigar or a piquant delicacy or a warm bath produces the same effect as a symphony”. Sometimes, we put music on in the background or we play it in bars, cafes, or dance clubs, to create a certain mood or atmosphere. Like television, we often use music to vegetate, and we don’t really think about what we’re listening to. Hanslick wanted to show that we can never appreciate the beauty or artistic quality of a piece of music if we don’t pay proper attention to it, if we don’t contemplate it.

This might seem like the view of an overly-cerebral man. But Hanslick said something true about music. Music can serve the simple purpose of entertainment. But music is a form of art. Judging music and perceiving it as a form of art involves a different attitude from mere pleasure-seeking. When music ceases to be a background hum, and you suddenly take the time to listen to a piece of music for its own sake, the potential for a rich musical experience - an experience very different from that of a warm bath or a fine cigar – opens up. If taking mere pleasure in music is a “pathological” mode of perception, then we’ll want to know more about the ‘healthy’ (or, as Hanslick called it, the “aesthetic”) mode of musical perception. What happens when we ‘contemplate tones attentively?’

Hanslick was born in Prague in 1825. He wrote his most influential work, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, in the years leading up to 1854, while working as a government official in Vienna, Austria. As a successful music critic impressed by the scientific accomplishments of the first industrial revolution, Hanslick felt that a more objective, concrete, and scientific approach to the investigation of beauty (aesthetics) was needed in order to counteract the overwhelming influence of what he called “feeling-theory” on musical philosophy. Feeling-theory is Hanslick’s surrogate name for Romantic aesthetics, which holds that music has as its content and purpose the representation, expression or arousal of emotions. According to feeling-theory, the beauty (the artistic quality) of a musical work depends on the quality and power of the emotions it makes us feel. This is simply misguided, according to Hanslick, because the feelings or emotions we experience while listening to or playing music are not useful, in themselves, for judging the quality of music as a work of art. Let’s look at a passage from Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed, which echoes this point:

Of course, one cannot say that music (all music) is incapable of expressing feelings; the music of the Romantic era is authentically and legitimately expressive; but even about that music it can be said: its worth has nothing to do with the intensity of the feelings it provokes. For music can powerfully stir feelings with no musical art at all. I recall my childhood: sitting at the piano, I would throw myself into passionate improvisations for which I needed nothing but a C-minor chord and the subdominant F minor, played fortissimo over and over again. The two chords and the endlessly repeated primitive melodic motif made me experience an emotion more intense than any Chopin, any Beethoven, has ever given me. (One time my musician father, completely furious – I never saw him so furious before or after – rushed into the room, lifted me off the piano stool, and with a disgust he could barely control, carried me into the dining room and set me down under the table).

Milan Kundera, “A Little Boy in Ecstasy”, Testaments Betrayed.

Perhaps what Kundera played as a little boy was staggeringly beautiful and undeniably a great work of art. The point is: the artistic quality of his music was not due to its emotional quality. Think of soap operas. Soap operas are by definition emotional; people are kissing or fighting left and right. They make use of emotionally evocative music (as do most movies). But they grab us with cliché melodrama and predictable narrative twists. We are ‘moved’ by them, but not really. And if we really are moved by them we’ll probably resent that fact. Some music is intensely emotional but artistically not so impressive. Sometimes the sentimental quality of a work can be overbearing, making it cheesy or easy to dismiss. Musical thought has to be brought back towards a firm and concrete ground in what is most basic to music: not emotion, but, “tonally moving forms”: thus was born Hanslick’s musical Formalism.

Musical Formalism sounds dull already. After all, isn’t the obvious romantic or emotional power of music just the thing that makes it so engaging? ‘Form’ seems like the last thing one would want to pay attention to while listening to music. What is musical ‘form’ anyways?

Kant is generally understood to have been the first Formalist when he claimed, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), that what matters for the aesthetic appreciation of an object is “the mere act of judging its form” (Sec. 38, Pg. 165). Form, for Kant, is something like the formal pattern manifested by the object of art (the way its elements are interrelated in space and/or time). Hanslick takes up Kant’s idea in his own work and applies it expressly to the philosophy of music, where the concept of ‘form’ is understood in a specifically musical way. For Hanslick form is not some empty or dead acoustic material arranged in time according to the laws of symmetry, harmony or melodic counterpoint; it is a product of the auditory and artistic imagination: “The forms which construct themselves out of tones are not empty but filled; they are not mere contours of a vacuum but mind giving shape to itself from within. Accordingly… music is actually a picture, but one whose subject we cannot grasp in words and subsume under concepts. Music has sense and logic-but musical sense and logic. It is a kind of language which we speak and understand yet cannot translate.” I don’t know if this makes things any clearer, but at least it makes this much clear: music is not the language of emotions and cannot be properly translated into such a language or any other for that matter: music is a rich language of its own, with its own concepts and possibilities for expression. Musical form is just what gets spoken in musical talk, which is: tones and their artistic combination.

Healthy musical experience, for Hanslick, amounts to engaging with music in a way that reflects its true nature. As the unique energy and personality – the unique thoughts and feelings - of each composer’s imagination make their mark on the character of their music, the role of the listener is to be receptive to that character and to follow the movement and particularities that make it up. We can only do this when we listen to a piece of music attentively and for its own sake. When we do so, a new kind of satisfaction and pleasure becomes possible for a listener. Hanslick describes the experience of beholding spontaneous forms, fraught with significance, arising before his inner contemplation in their congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding, and the satisfaction he derives from this: “It is the mental satisfaction which the listener finds in continuously following and anticipating the composer’s designs, here to be confirmed in his expectations, there to be agreeably led astray. It goes without saying that this mental streaming this way and that, this continual give and take, occurs unconsciously and at the speed of lightning. Only such music as brings about and rewards this mental pursuing, which could quite properly be called a musing [Nachdenken] of the imagination, will provide fully artistic satisfaction. Without mental activity, there can be no aesthetic pleasure whatever.”

In a truly aesthetic (and not pathological!) musical experience then, at least two individuals come head to head. The composer/performer (Hanslick notes that music can cast its most gripping spell when these two coincide) presents us with a musical discourse, paints a musical picture. Meanwhile the listener, at lightning speed, is at every moment in imaginative and playful pursuit. “Out of the imagination of the composer, the piece of music arises for the imagination of the listener.” Musical experience is a dialogue; two artists have come together out of excitement. They can’t wait to present or behold a musical fantasy - a unique world of images, feelings, ideas, and expressions - that runs flowing through a musical work.

This is something we’ve all experienced. If you’ve ever picked out your favourite part in a song, a part that you listen for over and over again, that makes you feel something strong and maybe hard to describe, then you’ve been lost in music in the kind of attentive way Hanslick thinks is rewarding. We like certain artists for the specific character they give to their music, and we go and buy (or download) their new album as soon as it comes out, hopeful that our expectations will again be satisfied and not sadly disappointed. We love the surging, crazy energy of a certain song, the delicacy or lightheartedness of another, and the way this or that music evolves in an interesting way. In all cases we’re finding something beautiful in music; something beautiful about its form. Listening to music aesthetically is not the privileged activity of an elite group of music critics or intellectuals. It is something all lovers of music do very naturally.

Recently, Paul Johnson published an article in The Spectator entitled “The profound mysteries of why we enjoy music”. He describes his experience of listening to Beethoven’s Forth Piano Concerto, and the visceral impact of the “moment when, in the first movement, the second subject enters. My stomach contracted with a kind of ecstasy of fear or awesome reverence, as though a little miracle had taken place.” This is the kind of experience that comes when we are totally immersed in a piece. Something unexpected, but totally agreeable, took place in the composition and Johnson was in just the right state of mind to pick up on it. Johnson attributes the power and beauty of music to its mysterious link with the emotions; to the “fundamental grip” tonal relationships can have on our emotions. But was it the power of the emotion in the piece that made Johnson sense the beauty of the work, or was it rather the beauty of the work – the special way in which the second subject enters the musical scene (an aspect of the works form) – that made Johnson’s stomach contract as if he were beginning to fall on a roller-coaster?

Hanslick’s philosophy has received renewed interest in recent years. With a new English translation of his On the Musically Beautiful published in 1986, a slew of articles and chapters on Hanslick have appeared here and there, and a symposium on Hanslick’s philosophy was held in Montreal, Canada, for the Canadian Society of Aesthetics as recently as 1995. In his article ‘Something I’ve always wanted to know about Hanslick’ (1988) and his later elaboration of that article in ‘Hanslick’s Inconsistency’ (2001) the popular philosopher of music, Peter Kivy, addresses a tension in Hanslick’s work that you may have already noticed. To put it roughly, that Hanslick, on the one hand, rejects feeling-theory as completely wrong and yet talks of musical form as filled with ideality and feeling, is confusing. I agree. It is confusing. Kivy thinks Hanslick was not being philosophically honest with himself; that his philosophy belies his real-life emotional experiences with music. One way of thinking through this problem, however, is to take Hanslick to be claiming not that music cannot express emotions but, as we (and Kundera) have already said, that the emotions we experience as listeners or creators are not the proper criteria for judging the beauty or worth of a musical work. Hanslick was no stranger to the emotional power of music. But, he believed that the emotional quality of a work must be an aspect of the expressive nature of its form if any part of music at all. He reminds us that emotional expression is not the defining purpose of music. Music is an art-form; beauty is its defining aspect.

For Hanslick the imagination (as the activity of pure contemplation) “is the organ from and for which all artistic beauty comes in the first place”. The imagination is a sort of gateway for the emotional and spiritual satisfaction of the listener. A work has to engage us imaginatively before it can deeply engage us emotionally. If we think of artistic experience in this way, then maybe we can explain why only certain works of art, musicians, composers, or songs deeply affect us. Many soap operas, television commercials, movie previews and pop songs (to take random examples) may very seldom pass through the gates of our imaginations. They often fail to meet our artistic expectations or transcend our critical thresholds. They strike us as cheesy or commercial, sappy or sentimental. As Hanslick said, “only such music as brings about and rewards this mental pursuing… will provide fully artistic satisfaction.” Well, not all art is rewarding. Some music just doesn’t engage us imaginatively. Sometimes breaking through the sceptical crust of the imagination involves finding an original sound, a new musical idea, or even an ironic take on an old idea. As Homer said:

People care most for the song

That is newest from the singer’s lips

- Odyssey 1.351-2 [1]

Music, if it’s going to be worthwhile, has got to appeal to our imagination in some way. This doesn’t mean that all music has to be like that of Schoenberg, who was famous for his intellectually rigorous music and his use of the twelve-tone technique (where all twelve tones in a scale had to be used before any one note could be repeated). Music doesn’t have to be all-concept. But it also might suffer from being overtly emotional (as we discussed earlier). Maybe this is because, in both cases, music is too much about something non-musical; it has had concepts or emotions imposed on it from without.

Good music is going to be something at least slightly different for each of us. Even though mainstream music and the “the culture industry”, as Adorno called it, will continue to shape and ‘knead’ the listening public - telling it what it likes doesn’t like, what is ‘cool’ and what is not ‘cool’ - our personal and unique loves for music will always survive. But we have to face the fact that most great music is more likely to thrive on the peripheries of mainstream culture. Whatever music is brought under the radioactive spotlight of mass media culture will face the most tremendous pressure to conform, to sell, to be reproducible, and to appease rather than engage and challenge listeners. A lot of pop music is engineered to satisfy an audience. But the artistic process works best, I would think, when an artist aims to satisfy their own imagination. What could be more motivating for an artist than to be able to create something that satisfies their own imagination in a way that nothing that already exists in the world does? Maybe this is how and why art moves forward. The artist and the spectator both engage in the appreciation of a work of art, only that the artist creates a work that satisfies their characteristic imagination in a way that only their own work could.

So, what is Hanslick saying? That we can’t listen to music in the background while working or commuting? That we can’t dance to music? That we can’t listen to it like we take a bath or smoke a cigar? That we shouldn’t wear iPods left and right? That we always have to listen in “keenest vigilance”…? Definitely not. Hanslick was not crazy. He was trying to remind us that music is art and that, as such, fully appreciating it involves a special kind of attention. It’s probably easier for us to forget this than it was for people in Hanslick’s day, when widely respected works of classical music could be heard in only one rightful and musically sanctified space: the concert hall. Nowadays, as Marshall McLuhan noted, the music hall has no walls: “the sixteenth century is as available as the nineteenth, and the Chinese folk song as accessible as the Hungarian.” But how can this be less than a blessing, especially when we keep Hanslick’s words in mind? True aesthetical listening is an art in itself. And there’s certainly plenty out there to listen to, plenty to get to work on. The more we engage in the language of music, the better; the more communication and imagination in the world, the better. On that note, here is a quote from a compact disc insert:

Within the geological depths of a community those veins that bear the emotions lie deepest; they are the gold-bearing metal of its beating heart. And then, within the layers of emotion, the deepest are those expressed by the artist, true spokesman for the feelings of mankind: and the form of art that touches us deepest is, without doubt, music. Worthwhile endeavours are those which ensure the future of Mankind and the Arts give identity to the human family. Music more than any other art form has the power to transform our hopes and everyday concerns into moments in which we find solace as well as joy that take us from mundane to sublime. Life with all its misfortunes cuts us off from one another and even from ourselves. The Arts help to draw us together. Music binds us, with golden threads; it opens for us the door to the riches of salvation…

- Unknown Author, from the insert to, Encuentros, by musicians Paco Peña and Eduardo Falú.

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[1] Incidentally, Plato quotes this phrase from Homer’s Odyssey in the Republic to show that innovation in music is something that should be abhorred for its lawlessness. Adeimantus says to Socrates: “[Music] is harmless-except, of course, that when lawlessness has established itself there, it flows over little by little into characters and ways of life. Then, greatly increased, it steps out into private contracts, and from private contracts, Socrates, it makes its insolent way into the laws of government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private.” Perhaps it was musical innovation that brought Ancient Greek culture to ruins?!