Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (review)

In his first book, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester, 1990; rev. edn. 2003), Andrew Bowie highlighted the need to remedy the 'blindness to aesthetics' characteristic of contemporary philosophy and the history of ideas (p. 1). He might have added 'deafness to music', since a crucial thrust of his work has been to impel modern philosophers—like their predecessors of the German tradition—to engage seriously with music and the problems it poses. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity marks the culmination of this project, offering a sustained and provocative account of music's significance to philosophy; it also surely confirms Bowie's stature as the most authoritative writer on German music aesthetics since Dahlhaus.

If Bowie's monograph is essential reading for musicologists as well as for philosophers and intellectual historians, they may well find engaging with it to be a somewhat disconcerting experience. What I have in mind is not the breadth of philosophical knowledge the book demands, or the sometimes dense and digressive nature of its argumentation. Rather, if approaching it from the vantage point of current musicology is somewhat awkward, this is due to Bowie's affirmation of values and figures often treated as marginal or superseded within our discipline. Bowie's wholly sympathetic treatment of Dahlhaus is a case in point, as is his assumption that the exciting work in new musicology is that which takes its lead from Adorno (dissenters, such as Richard Taruskin, are summarily dismissed (p. 14)). One key issue here is Bowie's reluctance to discard his Adornian conception of aesthetic autonomy, a stance reflected a few years back in his willingness to be counted as a representative of the 'new aestheticism' (see Andrew Bowie, 'What Comes after Art?, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds.), The New Aestheticism (Manchester and New York, 2003), pp. 68-82). Another is his perpetuation of decidedly hoary narratives of music history, several of which, again, suggest an unreconstructed Adornian viewpoint.

Bowie's monograph has the ambitious aim of rethinking the interaction between music and philosophy in modernity. At first glance, its chronological organization and broad coverage—from Herder and Kant through to Adorno—suggest a conventional history of music aesthetics. But the presence of unexpected figures, such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein, points to an altogether more intriguing agenda: rather than elucidating successive perspectives from the narrow field of music aesthetics, Bowie takes music as a means to probe and problematize modern philosophy. His argument is that through approaching music from perspectives shaped by theories of verbal meaning, much philosophy—particularly within the domain of analytical aesthetics—proves inadequate to explaining music's unique ways of disclosing meaning. Bowie's solution is to uncover an alternative philosophical tradition within which music serves, in contrast, as a means to scrutinize problems within existing accounts of meaning and as a stimulus for new approaches. In short, his concern is not with the philosophy of music as traditionally conceived but rather with 'the philosophy that emerges from music' (p. 11).

This and similar aphoristic formulations are more complicated than they initially appear, not least because the 'music' in question is protean and often left unclear. The book is filled with provocative comments on individual works, and Bowie frequently grounds his observations with references to his own experiences as a jazz saxophonist. But many of the texts he discusses work at several removes from music in practice. For several of the figures examined, music is purely a philosophical conceit, as in Wittgenstein's quest for 'a means of expression with which I can talk about language' (p. 272). Similarly, for early Romantic theorists such as Novalis and Schelling—regardless of their historical proximity to Beethoven!—music seems no less an abstraction, harking back to the idea of cosmic harmony or the music of the spheres. The relationship between such abstractions and everyday music is far from clear-cut, however: are all forms of the latter, a commentary on language, and if not, what...