Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics

5. The Sounds of the Ideal

Chapter 5  The Sounds of the Ideal I f sculpture and painting maintain a close link to classical and romantic Ideals, respectively, music presents a much more ambiguous, if not puzzling, case in Hegel’s aesthetics . Like painting, music is considered a romantic art, one that, like painting, came into its own only in the Renaissance. Yet the connection with the Ideal is not at all obvious at first glance. Moreover, whereas painting exhibits a richly developed history in Hegel’s account, music appears not to have the same historical development. Thus the art of music appears much less nuanced than painting. This is somewhat surprising, given the importance attached to this art by Hegel’s contemporaries, for the early nineteenth century was precisely the time when the operatic canon was transformed by Weber and Rossini, and the symphonic canon was defined as beginning with the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But if Hegel’s aesthetic is to account for the nature of all the arts, then it behooves us to examine his discussion of music in more detail. Perhaps there is more of a connection with the Ideal than appears at first glance, and more awareness of the historical development of the art that has proven so crucial to the success of music from the so-called Classical and Romantic periods. If so, then Hegel’s musical aesthetic must be taken far more seriously than it has been. As in the case of the other individual arts, Hegel’s treatment of music has received comparatively little attention. It has generally been regarded as not very satisfactory, a condition shared by other 105 idealist philosophies of music.1 Yet Hegel was more qualified than most philosophers of his day to discuss music. It is known that he sang in a choral group; he attended operas by Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, and Weber; and he heard performances of symphonies and string quartets by Haydn and Mozart.2 Nevertheless, his remarks on music have been dismissed as the product of someone who knew very little about music and who had little sympathy for the newer genres and styles of music. The important question, however, is whether or not Hegel’s aesthetic of music makes sense musically and if it is philosophically coherent. If so, then his arguments would be of more significance than has been recognized. In fact, they reveal the principles and aims of the art of music as it was practiced in his day, and as it continued to be understood by many critics in the nineteenth century. Hegel’s aesthetic poses a challenge, however, to the prevailing ahistorical ways of understanding music in the twentieth century, in which music becomes defined in terms of sound, the least common denominator accommodating both tonal tradition and the practices of modernism. Precisely because Hegel provides a philosophical argument justifying specific musical practices of the tradition dating back to the Renaissance, it cannot anticipate the developments of twentieth-century modernism: the emergence of atonality, the prevalence of dissonance , the deemphasis and often complete disappearance of melody, and the development of aleatoric practices. It is not simply that Hegel occupies a limited historical place in musical aesthetics; rather, he provides a way of conceiving a critique of modernism that makes fundamental the question of what music is. Perhaps, indeed, such an implicit critique is one reason for the neglect of Hegel’s idealist aesthetics generally. An idealist aesthetic of music is not necessarily easy to sustain. Hegel’s musical sense has often been questioned because his aesthetic defines art as the representation of a content, leading to a dilemma that is especially troublesome for instrumental music. On the one hand, a content is easy to specify in the case of vocal music, since the text gives what the music usually expresses. But in the case of instrumental music, a theory of music as the expression of a content may require a devaluation of instrumental music for its apparent lack of content.3 On the other hand, such a theory appears to impose content on instrumental music that it simply does not have. As one commentator concludes, Hegel’s view “represents a total misunder106 Between Transcendence and Historicism standing of the nature of music, by demanding a ‘content’ or meaning which is not there.”4 And if instrumental music is “pure” music— music purely and simply, as Hanslick claims5—then to assume that...