The Visceral in Music
Brian Hendrix
I
It is perhaps the height of understatement to say that music is a complex phenomenon. It may well be the most complex form of artistic expression, and so it is unsurprising that there are a great many theories directed towards understanding this particular form of human creativity. The close connection between our understanding of music and our understanding of its many contexts, or, in some cases, our denial of the relevance of those contexts to music proper, has produced innumerable controversies regarding the best way to determine the artistic value of musical works. While no single account of music predominates, it is the case that in the Western critical tradition, and particularly in philosophy of music, two schools of thought have been especially influential: formalism, which posits artistic value according to the formal structure of the work, and expressivism, which holds that the expression of emotion is the primary source of value. It is true that the tension between these two approaches has been a productive one, yet no decisive argument from either side has emerged. I shall examine the influence that formalism and expressivism have had on our understanding of what music is, as well as their effects on our evaluations of the artistic merit of musical works. I hope to demonstrate the need to recognize what I call "hybrid musical value," a feature of good music that is regularly overlooked because of idealist constraints engendered by traditional theories of musical evaluation.
What I mean by "hybrid musical value" will become evident once we've looked at two exemplars of the competing traditional schools: Eduard Hanslick and Susanne Langer. My argument in favour of a new model for understanding music rests upon a demonstration of the inadequacy of the traditional models. This is not to say, however, that we should reject those models altogether. Both formalist and expressivist modes of analysis reveal important aspects of musical value. On the positive side, Hanslick gives good reasons to see formal sophistication as the main means by which musical value is instantiated, if we limit our analysis to what we might call "Western art music" or even more narrowly to "The Great Tradition." Langer, on the other hand, provides a sophisticated explanation for the deeply emotional aspect of music. Both Hanslick and Langer have made a positive contribution to our understanding of musical value, although, as we shall see later, they have had a largely negative effect on our understanding of the ontology of musical works.
On the negative side, however, evaluative errors arise both from the improper application of the two traditional theories and from their untenable ontological suppositions. In the case of Hanslick, a certain cultural bias, in part overt and in part implicit, reveals a highly contestable presupposition regarding musical value. Hanslick developed a theory which he considered applicable to a small subset of Western art music, but then rather foolishly began to apply this theory to other musical traditions, an application inconsistent with his theory's stated context. Langer's more humanistic survey, on the other hand, founders upon what might be thought of as an inadequate ontological conception of musical works. Like Hanslick, Langer fails to recognize that there is a viscerality to music which is indeed musical and not "merely sound," as she claims. (I use the term 'visceral' to refer to the palpable, physical aspects of music: the resonant boom of a drum, for instance, or the heavy sound that an amplified electric bass can produce.) It is my contention that our cultural bias and a series of inadequate ontological conceptions have acted to prevent us from fully appreciating those musical traditions which emphasize viscerality.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with popular music and with technology. Simply put, there is a connection between many types of popular music, such as reggae music, and viscerality. I like to use reggae music as an example because it clearly exhibits the visceral potentiality that modern instruments, amplification, and recording techniques can demonstrate. Robbie Shakespeare's heavy bass sound cannot be achieved with an (unassisted) acoustic instrument; it is made far more forceful when projected through very large speaker cabinets; and studio "tricks" make it even easier to produce the desired effect. Rock music also exhibits a significant focus on the physicality of its performance. In fact, many popular musical traditions stand in close relation to specialized technological practices, practices which often focus on manipulation of the overall sound of a musical work rather than emphasizing its formal structure. The failure of traditional theories to consider such a ubiquitous facet of popular music is largely due to the notion that visceral effects are "merely pathological," as Hanslick and his idealist successors maintain, and thus not, properly speaking, musical. A similar mistake allows critics like Allan Bloom to suggest that rock music is a kind of drug rather than an art form. [1] Only by taking account of viscerality will we be able to evaluate popular musical traditions, especially those which make use of technological assistance.
II
There is a long-standing tradition in the philosophy of music which emphasizes the formal features of music and downplays or ignores all other aspects of musical experience. As a result, this evaluative approach comes to terms with only a portion of musical experience, though it cunningly argues that it is only this portion which is responsible for musical value. Within this tradition, Eduard Hanslick serves as a ready example; indeed, he may be seen as one of its foremost instigators. Although Hanslick's analysis aims to isolate the "truly musical" value of musical works, it has a very narrow sense of what music must be. Rejecting any "supreme metaphysical principle of a general aesthetics" [2] that might function within a general theory of art and human subjectivity, Hanslick opts instead for a narrower, less encompassing, "objective" approach to music, as had been deemed successful in the aesthetic understanding of art forms other than music:
The aesthetics of literature and that of the visual arts are going about the practical side of their business, namely criticism, already adhering to the principle that the primary object of aesthetical investigation is the beautiful object, not the feelings of the subject. [3]
Hanslickian formalism takes the musical work as an object to which techniques of analysis and dissection can be applied. [4] Beauty is predicated solely by the nature of the object itself, while the subjective experience that makes the work possible is dismissed as merely a medium through which the musical work is realized as an ideal mental object. [5]
This idealist formalism objectifies the musical work by emphasizing its formal aspects. It abstracts it from the embodied, physical experience of hearing and feeling sounds with one's body, and so it rests upon an untenable distinction between "feeling" sound and "hearing" music. For Hanslick, the material instantiation of music is not music itself.
That music shares the same material substratum (i.e. sound) with those manifestations in which sounds act so intensely upon the nerves will later be seen to have important consequences for us. Here we are emphasizing an antimaterialistic view, namely, that music begins where those isolated effects leave off. [6]
We are all aware that the ontology of musical works is a highly controversial realm, and I don't want to get into the subtleties here, but the key point to remember is that ideal mental objects are not capable of exhibiting visceral effects. They are given for rational contemplation rather than for the sake of physical experience.
For now I shall set aside the full implications of the formalist ontology, which I'll examine more thoroughly when I talk about Susanne Langer. I want instead to direct our attention towards the cultural bias that grounds two of Hanslick's more unfortunate statements. The first of these is his assertion that musical works must emphasize the formal sophistication of melody and harmony rather than other structural features. In Hanslick's view, melody, harmony, and rhythm are the three threads which go together to make a grouping of sounds into a musical object. When discussing the sounds of nature, Hanslick clearly specifies that without all three threads there can be no musical work.
[H]armony and melody are not to be found in nature. Only a third element in music, this one being supported by the first two, existed prior and external to mankind: rhythm. In the gallop of the horse, the clatter of the mill, the song of blackbird and quail, a unity is displayed into which successive particles of time assemble themselves and construct a perceivable whole. [7]
I don't want to mount an argument in favour of natural sounds being music, though there are good reasons for doing so (especially when it comes to birdsong). [8] What is more important is the fact that, while some element of melody and harmony may arguably be necessary to distinguish music from happenstance sounds, Hanslick reveals an evaluative bias when he denigrates properties of musical works, such as rhythm, whose presence oversteps the idealized formal structure of the musical work. This denigration is readily apparent when we consider his notorious passage regarding the music of the South Sea Islanders, where Hanslick asserts that:
when the South Sea Islander bangs rhythmically with bits of metal and wooden staves and along with it sets up an unintelligible wailing, this is the natural kind of "music," yet it just is not music.But what we hear a Tyrolean peasant singing, into which seemingly no trace of art penetrates, is artistic music through and through. [9]
The notion that only Western musical traditions are capable of being "artistic music" is inherently mistaken. While banging and "unintelligible wailing" of the South Sea Islanders - whose own musical tradition may well predate Tyrolese peasant songs by a considerable stretch of time - does not readily fit into the European melodic and harmonic structures that Hanslick's upholds as the putative foundation for "real" music, it is also true that those rhythmical compositions are musical nevertheless. Someone may wish to argue that they do not have as much musical value as Western art music, whatever that might mean, but it stretches the limits of credulity to deny their musical character entirely.
We should be careful not to be too hard on Hanslick. His comments regarding what he obviously considers to be primitive ritual, however ludicrous, are somewhat extra to his own avowed theoretical approach. In the Foreword to the eighth edition of On the Musically Beautiful, Hanslick states that he intends to examine music beauty in the way "our great masters embodied it," [10] and in his chapter entitled "The Relation of Music to Nature," he analyzes natural sounds strictly within the context of "our major and minor scales." [11] A charitable reading would suggest that Hanslick unwittingly and erroneously extended the scope of his theory of beauty in "The Great Tradition" of Western art music to encompass other musical traditions, even though he himself recognized that his theory was really only applicable to The Great Tradition.
As I warned earlier, the danger of traditional theories of musical evaluation is not so much in the theories themselves, which may be very well suited to evaluating a particular type of music, but rather in their application to those types which do not emphasize the same features. A Japanese drum troupe, for example, has a very different performative orientation than a string quartet. Even more so does the studio engineer, remixing a reggae song and transforming it into a new "version". In this day and age, it ought to be clear to one and all that many musical traditions are sufficiently dissimilar to put the lie to the universality of our traditional theoretical models. Harmony and melody, we must remind ourselves, do not universally assume the diatonic scale, and exceptionally rhythmical musical traditions often eschew tonal complexity in favour of metric complexity. We must reject any approach which presupposes a higher value for any single one of the threads of musical structure, or which ignores the viscerality of music. Such approaches are not only culturally biased: they are ontologically naïve.
III
My aim in the foregoing discussion is not to proclaim the simple fact that there is more than one kind of music, or that musical traditions with which we are unfamiliar may still have value, and to stop there. I hope, rather, that we may develop a model of musical understanding and evaluation which is truly universal. To that end, the traditional formalist model is obviously insufficient. Moreover, I suspect that any formalist model will fail to be universal in scope. This has more to do with its ontological stance than its tendency to wear the blinders of one particular culture or sub-culture.
The ontological difficulty becomes clear once we look at Susanne Langer's expressivist account of music. Now, any label can be dangerous and misleading, so let me qualify what I mean by expressivist. Langer's theory is still a type of formalism, for she no less than Hanslick gives ultimate priority to the intellectual or cognitive aspects of musical experience, thus carrying on the idealist tradition in the philosophy of music. Langer also disparages the so-called pathological or affective facets of musical experience. (Again, she doesn't think that these are truly musical features at all.) Langer does differ from Hanslick, however, in so far as she presents a richer account of the emotional depths of music, a characteristic which Hanslick may or may not have believed in. [12]
Langer's survey of music is broader in scope than Hanslick's account of "The Great Tradition" and successful avoids much of the high-culture bias that we so often find in philosophy of music. "Art," she notes, "is a public possession, because the formulation of 'felt life' is the heart of any culture, and molds the objective world for the people." [13] Langer's careful attention to the emotional aspect of musical experience and her examination of a much wider range of musical expression makes for a more universal account of musical value, but there remains at the root of her theory a very serious flaw, one which vividly demonstrates the limitations that an idealized vision of music carries along with it.
We don't have time to get into the nitty-gritty of Langer's theory of expressive form. It doesn't matter, though, for my argument doesn't rely upon a critique of the higher-level theoretical concepts she employs but instead attacks the very foundation of her model. Music, Langer claims, is good when it expresses feeling, when it acts as "the formulation of an idea for conception." [14] In some vague way, Langer thinks that music is a mode of rational contemplation regarding feelings or emotions. [15] The important word here is 'rational.' Langer is very fond of music because it allows, she thinks, for the logical expression of aspects of our felt lives that are otherwise inexpressible. Thus a musical work allows us to contemplate human feelings in a unique fashion. But rationality and logical structure is the linchpin of this connection between musical structure and emotional structure, not whatever emotions or feelings the music may excite in us.
We can see, then, that both Langer and Hanslick suggest that good music must be amenable to rational contemplation, while bad music is not valuable because it fails to entertain the intellect. If we set aside the expressivist readings of Hanslick - a minority in any event - we can say further that for Hanslick good music appeals to the intellect through its formal complexity, especially its melodic and harmonic complexity, while for Langer good music appeals to our desire to contemplate the deeply-felt structures of our emotional life. In either case, musical value rests upon an ideal mental object which musical sounds somehow transfer into our mind. But what about the visceral effects of music? Is it really the case that the palpability of Sly Dunbar's amplified kick-drum or the low rumble of Robbie Shakespeare's electric bass are "merely pathological" aspects of sound and do not assist in the instantiation of musical value?
Langer certainly thinks they don't. "[I]f music has any significance," she writes, "it is semantic, not symptomatic." [16] Her emphasis is on music's "intellectual value" and "its close relation to concepts." [17] Instead of reconsidering the notion that music is a pure, ideal mental object, she instead distinguishes between music and "mere" sound:
Music is known, indeed, to affect pulse-rate and respiration, to facilitate or disturb concentration, to excite or relax the organism, while the stimulus lasts; but beyond evoking impulses to sing, tap, adjust one's step to musical rhythm, perhaps to stare, hold one's breath or take a tense attitude, music does not ordinarily influence behavior. Its somatic influences seem to affect unmusical as well as musical persons . . . and to be, therefore, functions of sound rather than of music. [18]
By positing a strong (but false) dichotomy between musical effects and the effects of sound, Langer echoes the same distaste for the "pathological" so vehemently despised by Hanslick. Indeed, we can trace a continuous thread of suspicion from Plato through Hanslick through Langer right up to Bloom, and no doubt well beyond. The separation of ideal music from pathological sounds, a separation which is only defensible if we are to regard musical works as purely mental objects, separates music from its most palpable and forceful characteristic: its viscerality.
IV
It seems to me that no one who enjoys reggae music, to use just one example, is going to accept an argument which holds that reggae's entire value is separable from its palpable character, and arises solely from its usefulness for rational contemplation. Recently I attended a performance by the incomparable Lee Perry at a small concert hall in Toronto, and I can attest to the fact that Perry's work is extremely visceral, and deliberately so. This is not to say, however, that it is musically valuable simply because it is physically forceful. While Perry is obviously not primarily concerned with the sort of melodic and harmonic complexities we find in Mozart, it is clear that his work exhibits a significant degree of formal complexity. Yet a hanslickian or langerian evaluation of the performance I saw would fall short of crediting it with its full value.
Lee Perry's musical works exemplify the existence of hybrid musical value. His music is both cognitive and visceral. An idealized evaluative model which only considers pure formal structure risks overlooking the visceral side of things entirely. Given the duality of Perry's musical tradition, it is vital that we do not fall into the trap of suggesting that there are two types of "good" music: formal, cognitive music and visceral, palpable music. That would do a disservice to the holistic evaluation that allows us to identify the duality of reggae music, a duality which does not amount to saying that reggae music is somewhat cognitive but mostly visceral, but rather is a manifestation dependent upon the interplay between our intellectual apprehension and our embodied perception of sound. [19] Human beings are comfortable in both the ideal and the physical realm, and our music not uncommonly directs itself to both of these modalities at the same time.
Langer has a valid point when she asserts that the sounds which affect us physically are not necessarily musical. Is the blast of an air-horn music simply because it produces a sound? Of course not. But this does not mean that the palpable aspects of some sounds are irrelevant to musical evaluation. One can readily envision a musical performance by a chorus of carefully-tuned air horns (perhaps a peppy version of a military march.) The air-horn chorus would be an odd choice of instrumentation, to be sure, but by no means can it be thought that such a choice disallows the production of a musical work by such means. It would be unwise to claim that the visceral effect of the air-horn chorus performance prevents it from being a musical work. That would be much the same as making the claim that Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is not musical because the storm is too loud and palpable for our tender ears, that it distracts our sensitive rationality from its contemplation of the formal structure. Beethoven is a great composer in large part because so much of his music has a visceral, palpable "feel" to it. Some critics deride Mahler because of the forceful and supposedly overly dramatic elements of his works, but it would be difficult for all but the most committed idealist not to glean some enjoyment from a rousing and visceral performance of his seventh symphony. We may wish to claim that for certain musical traditions viscerality is an undesirable feature, but we go too far if we assert that their viscerality precludes sound from being musical sounds. All sounds appear in the physical world of nature and have a correpsonding visceral basis. Music is not, except in our wildest metaphors, the pure and rational voice of angels; it is rather the acoustic product of human minds.
If we wish to be on guard for undue idealism and blind adherence to the narrow evaluative scope of traditional, idealist theories of music, then we must ask ourselves whether Mahler's or Beethoven's compositions would actually be better had they made the palpable aspects of their works less pronounced and instead tried for more formal complexity. It seems unlikely. They would only be better for the idealists among us - not to those of us who have a fuller appreciation of what makes music such a fascinating mix of the mental and the physical. Trying to sanitize Beethoven's symphonies by removing their visceral features would be unthinkable. These are works within the canon of Western art music which clearly exhibit hybrid musical value. [20] The formalist, idealist position is inadequate for a full understanding of Beethoven, never mind reggae music, and this alone is sufficient reason to reject the notion that music is purely mental and intended for rational contemplation. However formally sophisticated a musical work might be, to consider only that aspect of it would be to fall into the very worst of rational errors: it would be to engage in mere ratiocination.
A formally complex musical work can, it is true, engage our intellect so completely as to grant a feeling of transcendence or total cognitive involvement with the work. But not all musical works do so; many do not even try. There is more to musical value than our cognitive interests can encompass. However ideal a musical structure may be, it still needs to be heard and felt: as embodied beings, we should not lose sight of the fact that humans feel at the same time as they think, especially when they are listening to music. Some musical traditions treat this felt perception as merely the intermediate stage to the real musical experience: as a waystation on the road to "pure" rational contemplation. But other musical traditions, such as reggae music, place a great deal of emphasis on the felt perception of the music. Often visceral effects are quite deliberate, composed with careful attention to music's materiality. Composers within these traditions often set out to deliberately affect the listener viscerally as well as cognitively and emotionally. A good composer of reggae music, for example, concerns herself with both the formal structure and the physical presentation of the music. For the reggae composer, sound is not only the medium through which the formal structure presents itself, it is also a means for affecting the listener such that she has a palpable awareness of the music's presence. While expressive form may be beautiful, or a means for presenting emotions in an abstract form, the visceral effects of amplified sound actually moves the listener by deliberately affecting different parts of the body. In this way the reggae composer makes use of both the formal structure of the music and the physical structure of the human listener, directing the music not only to the listener's cognitive capacity and emotional experience, but also to her awareness of her own physical embodiment.
We find the appeal to embodiment in many different musical traditions. The cannon in the 1812 Overture is one example of a visceral feature in Western art music. The "heavy, heavy" sound sought after by reggae bassists who prefer flatwound strings, and who espouse the virtue of the 1960s Fender basses, reflects their belief that without suitable instrumentation the notes they produce will not have the deep, resonant rumble that their musical tradition demands. Yet an idealized account of music quite simply disregards the patent concern that musicians have with the "feel" of their sound and the hybrid value that appreciators of popular and non-popular musics enjoy.
V
Where ought we to go from here? Now that we can see the need for a richer model of musical experience than that presented in formalist expressivism, should we try to extend these theories or instead develop an entirely new one? It seems to me that a careful expansion of the scope of these theories is not only possible but is the best route to take. Although I have argued for the importance of the visceral in music, I am unwilling to reject the formalist tradition altogether. It would be more productive to moderate its disparagement of the pathological by taking note of how "irrational" facets of music contribute, in part, to our conceptual apprehension of them. One possible path of development would have us compare musical aesthetics with rhetorical aesthetics. For a very long time philosophy of rhetoric has concerned itself with both the rational and irrational components in oratory. This has led some theorists, including Nietzsche, to conclude that good rhetoric exhibits a balance between the rational and the irrational, or between the cognitive presentation and emotional effects. Music, it seems to me, exhibits a tendency to achieve this same balance, although it does so in its own way. In any case, a richer model of musical experience, if combined with sound analysis and careful consideration of all its components, cannot but help increase expand the scope and depth of our understanding the art.
Notes
[1] See A. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 75-80. Bloom's polemic is a fine example of a reactionary critique of popular music. A good critical response is provided by Theodore Grayck. See T. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, pp. 127-143.
[2] E. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, p. 2.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Like most philosophers of music, I sometimes speak of musical works as if there actually are such things apart from anyone's experience of them. Without this abstracted idea of musical works we would have much difficulty in understanding the elements, features, and structures that make musical works what they are. But I want to stress that musical works only exist as the result of musical experiences - to speak of them as independent objects is to refer to them at one conceptual remove from their original appearance.
[5] Geoffrey Payzant writes, "Hanslick's Formenare forms of auditory Vorstellung, of images or representations in Phantasie (the active, productive human imagination). The system of relationships between these auditory images is objective though purely mental; it is a formal artifact of human culture and not a material instantiation of nature." (G. Payzant, Hanslick, Sams, Gay, and 'Tönend Bewegte Formen', p. 45.).
[6] E. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, p. 52.
[7] Ibid., p. 69.
[8] Charles Hartshorne's book Born to Sing, for example, gives lengthy arguments in support of the birds.
[9] E. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, pp. 69-70.
[10] Ibid., p. xxiv.
[11] Ibid., p. 69.
[12] While it is widely held that Hanslick denied that music could represent the emotions, there is some room for a middle ground. His Foreword to the eighth edition, where he talks about the polemical nature of his project, suggests that his main aim is to deny that emotional representation or excitation is the main aim of musically beautiful works. He also recognizes that the dynamic aspect of emotion may be found in music, though he is not totally clear on this point. For an interesting and fairly convincing interpretation of Hanslick as an expressivist, see R. W. Hall, Hanslick and Musical Expressiveness.
[13] S. K. Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, p. 401.
[14] Ibid., p. 126.
[15] It's difficult to define exactly what Langer means by "feeling" or "emotion." At times she equivocates using one term or the other, while at other times she draws a distinction between them. It does seem to be the case, however, that Langer believes there is a isomorphic similarity between the structure of emotions and musical structures. The difficulty is in determining what she considers to be an emotional structure, for at times it seems to be regarded as inseparable from the entirety of feeling, and she insists that particular emotions may not be presented in musical form because music lacks the specificity necessary.
[16] S. K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 218.
[17] Ibid. p. 238.
[18] Ibid., p. 212.
[19] Even reggae music has its formalist composers. The work of Pablo Moses is a good example of this, for he seems most concerned with melody and harmony, even at the expense of visceral palpability. I would be quite surprised to find any music which is either purely formal or purely visceral. Rather, all musics fall somewhere on a continuum between those two poles.
[20] An excellent example of the happy medium that can be struck is perhaps unwittingly exhibited by a series of exchanges between Bruce Baugh and James O. Young in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (See B. Baugh, Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music, J. O. Young, Between Rock and a Harp Place, and B. Baugh, Music for the Young at Hart). Baugh begins by suggesting that rock music has a concern with materiality - which for Baugh is much the same as what I call viscerality. Young's response consists in large part of the effective rhetorical tactic of embracing Baugh's idea, but expanding it by insisting that Western art music also is concerned with the palpable effects of music. Young's appropriation of Baugh's model is a step in the right direction, and gives some grounds for optimism regarding the possibility of a universally applicable method of musical evaluation.