Zuckerkandl on Music

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:47 pm by Peter Leithart

Zuckerkandl on Music 2017-09-06T23:47:57+06:00 Peter Leithart

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I believe I first ran across Victor Zuckerkandl’s name in some of Colin Gunton’s work, and Jeremy Begbie makes significant use of Zuckerkandl in his book on theology and music. I’ve posted on Zuckerkandl before, but having now had a chance to read more of his book, Sound and Symbol , I’m all the more impressed with what he is doing. Essentially, he is challenging a host of basic modern philosophical and theological notions through a close analysis of the phenomenon of music. If we pay close attention to how music actually works, for example, we cannot be empiricists or materialists. The modern separation of reality into inner “psychological” and outer “material-physical” realities cannot make sense of the objective (outer) but non-material phenomenon of music. Toward the end of the book, Zuckerkandl summarizes his thesis as follows: “It has been the intention of this study to outline what may be called a musical concept of the external world. The attempt seemed worth while for its own sake as well as for the sake of a possible contribution to one of those permanent discussions that mark our intellectual history: that in which the concept of reality is at issue.” He insists that music is not a reality from “another world” but instead reveals the structures of THIS world: “The momen music becomes the voice of the ‘other’ world musical experiences can no longer challenge our concept of reality: where there is no connection, there can be no conflict. Hence the first and most important thing to do is to bring about the clash. Only when it can be demonstrated that musical expxeriences are NOT experiences of ‘another’ world, of an ‘unknown ideal life’; that the audible and visible belong to the SAMT reality; that motion of tones and motion of things take place on the SAME stage; that ONE space, ONE time embrace the world of visible event and the world of audible event – only then is a critique of our concept of reality from the point of view of music possible.”

One intriguing example of his approach is his treatment of the problem of motion which, quoting Spengler, he says brought the Athenian “enlightenment” up short because the problem was never solved. He begins by asking what it means for tones to “move,” and then begins to explore the problems of motion more broadly. He radicalizes the famous paradoxes of motion first articulated by Zeno, and then suggests that far from be an exception to the normal course of motion, which is conceived as purely corporal, music provides the key instance of what motion in fact is. All motion, he concludes, is tonal motion.

Repeating all the stages of this argument would take a while, but here are some quotations from key stages of that argument.

He says that the error of Zeno was to conceive of the “between” of motion ?Ewhat lay between the initial location of an object and its later location ?Eas an “interspace”: “They assumed that the process of motion could be entirely comprehended in spacial data; in Bergson’s language, they failed to maintain the distinction between motion and its spatial track, the PATH traveled. The contradictions and paradoxes thus arrived at . . . merely show that motion CANNOT be entirely comprehended in spatial-local data. It is precisely the essential element of motion which slips through the net of spatial relations — and the more surely, the tighter the net is drawn . . . . Rightly understood, what Zeno’s paradoxes teach is that the stage on which motion is enacted cannot be ?Eor cannot be only ?Ethe space of places. Motion must be something else than things changing place; it must also occur ?Eand perhaps occur essentially — where no more things change their places.”

This is precisely what motion means in music: “To hear a tone as a dynamic quality, as a direction, a pointing, means hearing at the same time beyond it, beyond it in the direction of its will, and going toward the expected next tone. Listening to music, then, we are not first IN one tone, the in the next and so forth. We are, rather, always BETWEEN tones, ON THE WAY from tone to tone; our hearing does not remain with the tone, it reaches through it and beyond it . . . . It is a process on two levels, on one of which, the ‘lower,’ there is nothing but the pillars, tones of definite pitch [which, Zuckerkandl points out are static]; on the other, the ‘higher’ nothing but the transition, the passing over. And the motion we hear is not at all the ‘tone|tone’ of the lower level; it is the ‘between’ of the upper level, pure betweenness, pure passing over . . . . the investigation of seen motion and the investigation of heard motion coincide in their end result . . . . The only difference lies in the fact that, in the motion of things, the core of pure dynamism is well concealed and had to be isolated artificially, whereas in tonal motion barely anything is perceived but the purely dynamic . . . . Not unjustifiably may we say that musical motion is at the core of every motion; that every experience of motion is, finally, a musical experience.”

Music is a phenomenon of the outer, external world, but it makes it obvious that the outer world cannot be comprehensively explained in terms of matter in motion: “Music makes us aware, unmistakably and inescapably, that ‘beyond the world of things and places’ is NOT, as common belief has it, identical with the world of the psyche; nor is ‘beyond the world of the psyche’ identical with the world of things and places. A third stage must exist which is netierh the world of the psyche nor the world of bodies nor yet a mixture of both, and which stands to the two others in the relation of the general to the particular, of the primary to the derivative. . . . if it is true that . . . at the core of every motion, even the motion of bodies, music lies hidden, then every motion, including the motion of bodies, belongs to the ‘third stage’ perforce of its inmost essence.”

This is one of the most rewarding and stimulating books I’ve read in a long time. I hope these quotations are appetite-whetters.

Music

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