The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music

ISI.ORG ^ | Fall 2001 | Robert R. Reilly

[cornelis]

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, OR
THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC

. . . According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century B.C. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ration 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the strings two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the ratio of 3:2. When a three-quarters length of cord was plucked, a perfect fourth was sounded in the ratio of 4:3, and so forth. These sounds were all consonant and extremely pleasing to the ear. The significance that Pythagoras attributed to this discovery cannot be overestimated. Pythagoras thought that number was the key to the universe . . . As Aristotle explained in the Metaphysics, the Pythagoreans "supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number." This was meant literally. The heavenly spheres and their rotations through the sky produced tones at various levels, and in concert, these tones made a harmonious sound that man's music, at its best, could approximate. Music was number made audible. Music was man's participation in the harmony of the universe.

This discovery was fraught with ethical significance. By participating in heavenly harmony, music could induce spiritual harmony in the soul . . .

The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition. Tonality, as the pre-existing principle of order in the world of sound, goes the same way as the objective moral order . . .

If there is no pre-existing intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it--which is the Creator--what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music turns inward. It collapses on itself and becomes an obsession with technique. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes simply the whim of man's will . . .

What was needed, according to John Cage (1912-1992), was to have absolutely no organization . . . He presented concerts of kitchen sounds and the sounds of the human body amplified through loudspeakers. Perhaps Cage's most notorious work was his 4'33'' during which the performer silently sits with his instrument for that exact period of time, then rises and leaves the stage. The "music" is whatever extraneous noises the audience hears in the silence the performer has created. In his book Silence, Cage announced, "here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos."

What was the purpose of all this? Precisely to make the point that there is no purpose, or to express what Cage called a "purposeful purposelessness," the aim of which was to emancipate people from the tyranny of meaning.

With his noise, Cage worked out musically the full implications of Rousseau's non-teleological view of nature in his Second Discourse. Cage did for music what Rousseau did for political philosophy. Perhaps the most profoundly anti-Aristotelian philosopher of the eighteenth century, Rousseau turned Aristotle's notion of nature on its head. Aristotle said that nature defined not only what man is, but what he should be. Rousseau countered that nature is not an end--a telos--but a beginning: man's end is his beginning. There is nothing he "ought" to become, no moral imperative. There is no purpose in man or nature; existence is therefore bereft of any rational principle. Rousseau asserted that man by nature was not a social or political animal endowed with reason. What man has become is the result, not of nature, but of accident. And the society resulting from that accident has corrupted man.

According to Rousseau, man was originally isolated in the state of nature, where the pure "sentiment of his own existence" was such that "one suffices to oneself, like god." Yet this self-satisfied god was asocial and pre-rational. Only by accident did man come into association with others. Somehow, this accident ignited his reason. Through his association with others, man lost his self-sufficient "sentiment of his own existence." He became alienated. He began to live in the esteem of others instead of in his own self-esteem.

Rousseau knew that the pre-rational asocial state of nature was lost forever, but thought that an all-powerful state could ameliorate the situation of alienated man. The state could restore a simulacrum of that original well-being by removing all man's subsidiary social relationships. By destroying man's familial, social, and political ties, the state could make each individual totally dependent on the state, and independent of each other. The state is the vehicle for bringing people together so that they can be apart: a sort of radical individualism under state sponsorship.

It is necessary to pay this much attention to Rousseau because Cage shares his denigration of reason, the same notion of alienation, and a similar solution to it. In both men, the primacy of the accidental eliminates nature as a normative guide and becomes the foundation for man's total freedom. Like Rousseau's man in the state of nature, Cage said, "I strive toward the non-mental." The quest is to "provide a music free from one's memory and imagination." If man is the product of accident, his music should likewise be accidental. Life itself is very fine "once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord."

link to pdf

[Eddeche]

"purposeful purposelessness,"

Would be a good name for Keith Richards.

[Savage Beast]

"some things are so stupid only intellectuals believe them"

That's very good, Drift. I hope you don't mind if I quote you.

I remember one college professor who was carried away by the sound of nuts and bolts jolted by a running motor. I think that was one of Cage's opera.

It also brings to mind the political opinions of so many "Liberal" academic "intellectuals".

[Savage Beast]

Twigs, could you recommend some Asian music, maybe on CD's? I suspect that there must be some very good music that I just don't know about, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian.

[Savage Beast]

I still like that old joke about titty rump titty rump. Ted Turner's father told that to me (et al.) many years ago one night at Tybee Island.

[T. P. Pole]

In a related thread, German Church Hosts Cage Concert

Here's the start:

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - A performance of an organ piece by American composer John Cage that is meant to last 639 years began in an eastern German church with 16 months of silence.

The project honoring Cage's avant-garde work started at midnight Tuesday in Halberstadt and foresees taking the composer at his word by stretching Organ2/ASLSP - the letters stand for As Slow As Possible - over centuries.

[Savage Beast]

Call me when they get ready to play the next note.

[AndrewC]

Of course, music is most influential when it is not entirely bad; it would hardly be popular in an absolute style for very long. Cage is not played on the radio.

Yes, and comic books are influential literature. However, I suppose most people left them ages past and their libraries contain great books not comic books.

It would take a stiff monetary incentive for me to sit through Cage. I'd rather listen to a mosquito in a dark room.

[avg_freeper]

"Then when I reread it, it was as clear as crystal."

Even after reading it twice I felt I only had an autistic glimpse of who the characters were.

I would be grateful if you could shed just a little light on this book for me.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Good recording of 4'33" by "Music Minus All."

[twigs]

I do not know any. I just know that this couple really likes it. They like a singer who died while relatively young (like in her 30's). They were not allowed to listen to her under earlier communist rule--she recorded from Hong Kong. The husband thinks the ultimate irony of her life was that she sang about love but could never find it herself. Sorry that I've been of no help. I will see them soon; I'll plan to ask them.

[SamAdams76]

John Cage must have been into some serious drugs.

[Savage Beast]

Well...I'm just an average man with an average brain...and...it took this college teacher an hour and a half to explain it to me--and I had read it four times--and she's adept at teaching, and I'm...well...not the best, but...

It really is a wonderful and very rich book, and I love it (though I doubt that I would have liked Falkner if I had known him personally).

I guess one thing I like is Falkner's concepts of life, time, civilization, reality, et al. which are easier to grasp in Absalom! Absalom!. The entire book, I think, may be an expansion of the theme from MacBeth--whether life has any meaning or not. I think Falkner's answer is that life is deep and rich with meaning.

I love the way Benjy tells the whole story, even though he's an idiot and doesn't understand any of it, but it's all there. The meaning of everything is there before us all, though we may not have the capacity to understand it.

I love the way it jumps back and forth in time, like memory or dream, and raises questions about the difference, if there is any, between reality and illusion.

I love the way the form of his works is an inextricable part of the content. Maybe life's like that.

One of his prvailing ideas is that all of life, all of history, is paraded before everyone's eyes, whether we be in a small town in Mississippi or wherever, over and over again; it's all there for us to see. Falkner's concept may have influenced my own conviction that the cosmos is God's holy scripture and that Truth is there for all of us to read.

The plot of The Sound and the Fury, it seems to me, is subordinate to everything else Falkner has to say. The Compsons are decadent aristocracy. Quentin commits suicide. Caddie comes to a dismal end. Etc. I think the plot, such as it is, is a vehicle for everything else, and one might say that the stories--or plots--of our lives are similarly vehicles for everything else.

I hope I've done justice to this. Many people could answer the question a lot better than I can, Avg. Maybe someone here on FR will.

One of my most memorable experiences--ever--was a day in The National Museum in Athens. The guide had a B.S. in archeology and she had been conducting tours there for 20 years. The first thing she said was: "I'm not going to show you anything that is great. I'm going to show you what I like." She did. And she explained to me why she liked it! What she found in it. What it said to her and not to anyone else. Sometimes she explained why she didn't like something and why something was inferior, even though it might appeal to someone else. She absolutely blew my mind. I have never gotten over that experience. I wish I could thank her. --SB

[Savage Beast]

Yes, ask them. Let us know. Thanks. --SB

[T. P. Pole]

Call me when they get ready to play the next note.

Next note?

"The first three notes won't be played until Jan. 5, 2003. Until then, time will be marked by the sound of air rushing through the bellows."

Mark your calendars.

[Savage Beast]

"Mark your calendars."

Couldn't you just give me a ring?

[RightWhale]

We can say that art, musical or pictoral, has two kinds of expression: the hieratic and the demotic.

That's logical. Can art be analyzed with art?

[cornelis]

Enjoyed reading your reply. And you are right, many things of great quality are not understood. And much literature, once understandable, has become obscure. There is no way that E.D. Hirsch (What Every 3rd Grader Ought to Know) will bring us up to speed on Pound's Cantos. One must first be responsible for the Rennaissance.

Still, life is short and often works of profound complexity yield no reward. It just isn't worthwhile studying Derrida or Foucault, not to speak of the mountains of secondary literature responding to it (perhaps Levinas is a worthwhile exception). Modern art has been at first deliberately private (even in the case of Faulkner, Joyce, and imitators) and then even more so by being deliberately intended not to be understood. This last is part of the tendency toward a dehumanization which concerned Ortega.

All good things come through hard work.

Thanks for you thoughts. There's probably more to be said.

[cornelis]

Can art be analyzed with art?

Yes, unless I've misunderstood what you mean. Is meaning self-referential? No.

[cornelis]

Thanks for the link.

Freeper Dakmar responds "These folks need to let about 100 pounds of air pressure out of their egos."

There is a good chapter on egotism in Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences

In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. We perceive this simply when his egotism prevents realization that he is an obligated creature, bound to rational employment. The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.

[RightWhale]

Here are a few tautologies, just to show where this is coming from:
Art is not an articulate form of expression, does not convey meaning. Art works while it acts on the recipient, when it is not acting it is not art and may not exist at all. Meaning lies in the logical world, not the artistic world. Analysis is a tool of logical meaning; aesthetics is an aspect of emotional expression - art.