During the Romantic era, the artist and philosopher were all but indistinguishable, with art being just another medium to express an idea in… but have things always been that way? And what have different philosophers had to say about music over the ages?
The Ancient Greeks
Music as a magic tool that makes us better… and math
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Once upon a time 25 centuries ago in Ancient Greece, Pythagoras1 (c. 570 BC - 495 BC) was walking down the street and heard the sounds of various hammers ringing out from a blacksmith’s shop. The tone of each hit was varied and this, mixed with the rhythms of their strikes, happened to create a melody that he found pleasing. He went inside to see how this was happening and saw that the different tones were caused by the different sizes of hammers used. Ever the philosopher, Pythagoras was curious to learn why this was…
Pythagoras’ subsequent studies on the nature of music would form the basis of music theory and essential concepts like octaves and intervals. He firmly believed there was a relationship between these intervals and various physical phenomena in nature, as well as more esoteric phenomena like improving the human soul. These ideas would also inform a concept known as “musica universalis” or the idea that the various numerical dimensions of planets and other celestial bodies correlated to frequencies and certain pitches or notes created as they travel along their orbit.
Pythagoras’ philosophy of music was based entirely on mathematics and the notion that some intervals were more harmonious than others. These studies would form the backbone of all discussion of music theory for the next 1,000+ years, a field that fell somewhere between astrology and physics. Much later on, the Latin church would fully incorporate his theories into its music, naturally seeing his mathematically “perfect” intervals as proof of God.2
Socrates, via Plato (c. 428 - 348 BC), would continue in this same tradition and suggested that “more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it.” (Republic, III, 40Id-e.) Music can have an effect throughout your entire body once you’ve heard it and it can even influence your emotions and character in certain ways.
Harmonically “ordered” music creates “order” within one’s soul and teaches one to have a natural appreciation for good and beautiful things in all aspects of life. Disharmonious music, on the other hand, can create disorder and weaken one’s soul, so it is very important to regulate the music one listens to.
For Plato, music was important not for pleasure but as a tool for education, famously stating that in his ideal Republic all children would have 2 kinds of education, gymnastics for the body and music for the soul. He wasn’t without his humor and pathos though, suggesting that daily choir practice gave noisy children something to do with their voices and taught them to appreciate order, and also noted how mothers will lull their babies back to sleep with little noises and rocking motions, not silence and stillness.
"I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning."
- Plato
It is important to note that the Ancient Greeks were not writing 3 minute pop songs as we understand them today. “Music” was an idea that incorporated poetry and often other elements of movement or group activities, other activities inspired by the Muses. In fact, Plato believed instrumental music had no real value. “Music must follow and accompany the speech, not the other way around.” (Republic, III, 400e.) This would be a popularly held philosophical belief for many years to come, but interestingly it is one of the rare areas where Aristotle differed from Plato with his ideas about music.
Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) also believed music should play a crucial role in education, due to its ability to imitate an emotion without the listener actually having to experience that emotion, a process which could spark self-development within that person. However, Aristotle also believed this effect on our emotions could contribute to a pleasing experience known as catharsis, helping us to balance ourselves. To him, this was a “feature” of enjoying music that was beneficial on its own, so he advised listening to music should be a regular part of a cultivated life.
This is also why instrumental music deserved to exist (gasp!) since simple melodies and rhythms could still evoke emotions. Aristotle was unique in this philosophical support of instrumental music for a very long time, with many people through to the 18th century arguing it was a lower art form due its inability to clearly communicate complex ideas.
Renaissance and Enlightenment
Music and it’s Subjective Nature
Much of the Ancient world was obsessed with the mathematical phenomena of music and its cosmological significance, and how this “feature” could be leveraged to make people better citizens. This trend continued well into Medieval times through the church, and here again it is important to note that up to this point there was still no real sense of creating music (or anything) “just” for the sake of creating. Self-expression on behalf of the artist was a foggy concept, at least intellectually, and there was barely even a language to discuss such an idea. Music and art weren’t without their grandeur and beauty, but always on some level functional tools for society. Art helped us understand order in the universe and was done for the greater good.
As with most histories, this mindset began to loosen up during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, when new theoretical discussions about music began to emerge. Still, there were some philosophers, like Leibniz (1646 - 1716), who argued that music was “just” a by-product of math, merely a calculation that had little value by itself. It was a “secondary” art, only there to support other true arts like poetry, dance, and drama.
“Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.” — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
This school of philosophical thought that dismissed instrumental music reached its conclusion with Kant (1724 - 1804) and his ideas around aesthetics. Kant ranked instrumental music among the lowest arts because, as he saw it, it did not engage our understanding enough and was morally trivial. Adding words to music, however, could change everything.
As a composer of instrumental music myself I of course find these discussions fascinating. I’m a fan of Kant with most things so here, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I might see this as a manifestation of a long building disgust with the obsession over objective mathematical rules in music, which made composing music a very rigid exercise. This severely limited what a person was “allowed” to authentically express via this art form, so rather than being “anti-instrumental” music I see Kant’s critiques as more “anti-formulaic” music. He does say:
“Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length.”
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
The Romantics
Music as a Force of Nature
The philosophical discussion around music really started to change with the Romantic era (c. 1798 - 1837), when people all of sudden seemed to remember those things Aristotle said about catharsis (no seriously, see image below.) Here we see the birth of art as a form of individualistic expression, though what many of the composers of this age wanted to express were still ideas about the sublimity of nature, something Pythagoras and Plato surely would have loved.
In this era, there was an acknowledgement that what we see when we look at or listen to something has just as much to do with our personal experience and history as it does about the object itself.
Instrumental music found new champions here: E.T.A. Hoffman (1776 - 1822) — most famous as the writer of the novella upon which Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet is based — argued that “music” was, fundamentally, the art of instrumental composition. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) took this to new heights, stating that instrumental music was the greatest art form; It had a unique ability to represent metaphysical aspects of reality that more visual and verbal arts could not because of their inherent literalness. It did not claim to be an exact representation of anything and it did not make exact statements about things either, meaning it could come closer to the “true” nature of things.
Here the claim is that one of music’s greatest strengths is its ephemeral nature, along with its ability to poke all depths of human emotions without having to experience the actual pain many of these things bring. This line of thought grew popular among composers of the era, heavily influencing creators like Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883), who it would be fair to call a philosopher in many ways as well. Debate about the inherent value of instrumental music raged across the philosophical community… what a time to be alive!
“In the 19th century, a significant debate arose between Eduard Hanslick, a music critic and musicologist, and composer Richard Wagner regarding whether instrumental music could communicate emotions to the listener. Wagner and his disciples argued that instrumental music could communicate emotions and images; composers who held this belief wrote instrumental tone poems, which attempted to tell a story or depict a landscape using instrumental music.”
Modernity and Back Again
Everyone Was Right About Music
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) devoted much of his writing to thoughts on music and was deeply passionate about the topic. He rejected the recently proposed idea of “art for art’s sake” but still felt that art had deep purpose and significance for society and particularly for its creator. Through music and its creation one can escape the hardships of life and experience something transcendent.
Unique among the philosophers mentioned so far, Nietzsche in many ways considered himself a composer just as much as a philosopher, even writing in a letter a few years before his death that “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am.” He was serious in his aims and composed a number of pieces but, sadly, these were laughed at by his musical idols. However, he would be redeemed when his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra inspired a “tone poem” by Richard Strauss in 1896 that has since been immortalized in classic scenes such as the opening to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
One popular idea that thinkers like Wagner and Nietzsche resurfaced was the Classical tradition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian being opposing forces of the creative process. The composer must balance the inherent structure of the natural world with the chaotic unpredictability of authentic emotions, outlining the dichotomy of music that is composed to represent divine, cosmological order vs. music that is composed purely out of the self-expression of it’s creator.3
In the 20th century, poets like Ezra Pound would continue to praise music for its purity of expression and in composers like Igor Stravinsky we can see where the artist has taken on the persona of the philosopher, albeit perhaps in a more grounded way than the lofty Romantic tradition. Regarding meaning in music, Stravinsky famously claimed that the only thing on his mind during the creation process is “his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings." (Stravinsky 1962, p. 115) Here again we are reminded that our interpretation of art often has as much to do with us as with it’s creator.
Around this time we see the rise of intellectual “hipsters” in music philosophy as well, like Theodor Adorno, who argued that music has to explore new and uncharted territory to be truly “good” — in many ways inventing the split between “popular” music and “art” music. “Culture industries” were eager to popularize unsophisticated and overly-sentimental music among the masses because more “difficult” and critical art could cause people to question aspects of modern societal norms.
Today this debate still continues - is music, or any art form, meant to represent the sublime aspects of nature, to inspire and motivate us as we explore what it means to be alive, or is its primary attribute and strength it’s visceral emotional expressiveness (or something else?)
Conclusion
Listen to More Music to Determine Your Philosophy
So we can see that, over the ages, our philosophical understanding of music has consistently grown and developed, and obvious as it may be it’s worth noting that ALL ages produced music of some kind. Nietzsche believed that music began to catalyze around a defining theme or archetype as an era drew to its end, and it would be interesting to review a historical retrospective of music throughout time to listen to its ebb and flow.
Even today, I think a bit of our personal philosophy can be seen in the music we each enjoy, and many popular musicians today could rightly be considered philosophers in their own way. There is no “wrong” way to appreciate music and, at the same time, music can have a powerful effect over how we feel on a day to day basis so it's worth considering what we listen to. Plato could probably have loosened up with some of his rules but he wasn’t wrong about music and its effect on people.
There is so much diverse music out there, exploring all sorts of ideas in all sorts of ways - all it takes is a few minutes of searching to perhaps enrich your life in ways you don’t yet know exist. So go out and listen to something new and different today, or go read a passage from a philosopher you find interesting and see if you can pair it with a song that makes you feel or think something similar.
Each of these Philosophers and eras could be the topic of a much deeper piece and I of course left out many, many people important to the development of these thoughts. Believe it or not this was the drastically reduced compilation of the research, so let me know if you have any favorites or questions and I’ll do a deep dive!
In the West, things often start with Pythagoras but of course the Ancient Egyptians and many other much older cultures had music, several thousands of years before he was born. The Egyptians did not have musical notation so we know very little about it. Priestesses and other high ranking officials were known to have titles that referenced sound or chanting so it’s clear that music, or at least tonal sound or singing, was an essential part of their worship practices, and probably much more that we simply don’t have an account of.
Ironically, the scale that Pythagoras created, based on continuous perfect fifths and used throughout most of the West through the Middle Ages due to its adoption by Christianity, would sound very odd to us today. When the piano was invented, it shifted everything to a new scale, in which all popular music is composed in today. This is a huge topic for another day but if you’d like to learn more this is a great video.
This is a topic worthy of its own article here but this framework seems like one of the true bridges to modernity. Modern discourse is littered with debate on how much of creative “genius” stems from divine inspiration vs. a structured understanding of the medium and methodical work ethic.