My friend Jude recently posted a nice little meme on my Facebook wall the the prompt, "discuss:" The photo was of some generic, romantic looking score and said "music is the strongest form of magic."
As per my usual mode, I take this kind of sloganism too seriously, because it is, in effect, really easy to paint the world in very lazy abstractions and powerless metaphors, and so, people do. Were we to replace such trivialities with more depth, more creativity, we would simply have a better, more discursive, more democratic world. And of course, I already understand how silly it is to go after seven anonymous words in a systematic way, but I would hope that the discourse below would be helpful to those who find themselves in the position to confront these erroneous and terrible simplifications, especially when they are in dialog with music professionals who are trapped in these lazy modes of thought.
Commence bourgeois rationality and overly analytic argumentation: the statement makes two simultaneous direct claims, one ontological (that music is magic), and one evaluative (that it is the strongest magic). There is also a claim to be analyzed as an implicit suggestion arising from its image (that music is old scores in a bundle). The last one is preposterous enough, and a quick search of this blog for "Heidegger" will bring up my standard quote for arguments about the ontology of the score.
If we, for a moment, take the ontological claim as truth and focus on the evaluative claim, we see little more than Plato's hierarchy of the arts in the Republic. There, Plato develops his "art imitates life" aesthetics by judging the closeness of the reflection of life, as given through each category of art. Music is the highest form of art because it is the most representative of itself; it reflects life through what he thought was pure emotion, where architecture, for instance, doesn't so much reflect life, but is an ornamentation of a necessity for shelter (even if it is shelter for a deity). Further, in Book III of the Republic, Plato makes it well known that the affective work of music is dangerous, because it is so easy to translate affect into action. This leads to Socrates' idealistic ban on particular modes, scales, and instruments. This line of thought is still rampant in Western culture, but it is only as true as social fact can support it in a particular place and time.
A good way to test Plato (on the general and universal affective power of music) is to play songs on a jukebox in a bar that specifically repudiate the assumed identity of the bar and/or its patrons. If Plato's concerns are still valid, the music will transmit some overwhelming emotional power and reshape the individuals' character. Putting techno on in a country bar will be problematic, but not because the music is doing some emotional violence as music... It is about individuals taking over the physical space with sound waves and imposing their individual musical will on the other patrons who are not sympathetic to the music (for a handful of reasons that are ultimately social truths). Authoritarianism, for Socrates, is a generative force for control; the techno fan in the country bar is attempting the same coup, just without the power to do so.
Music is uniquely suited for such experiments not because of its universal qualities, but because of its universal portability. I am not necessarily interested in making this argument purely about mediums and materials, but it should be clear that the definitive ontological qualities of music, its relationship to the voice, and its ability to happen anywhere there is air, form the basis for music's specificity. Any claim that would evaluate music's "strength" against other forms of art or ritual or production would necessarily address the ontology of music, and work out to social truths at every level. The "capital t Truth" that Plato is looking for is an essentialist cage (befitting, as he could very well be called the inventor of essentialism). The universal essence of Beauty and Art, is, obviously, an illusion, since it is not capable accessing socially constructed truth. If art defines itself locally and socially, it is more likely that relative truth, from medium to medium, genre to genre, requires an interest in the emotions being reflected, the knowledge of the production process, &c. Without being able to see the larger picture of freedom of creation and freedom of interpretation, generalizations about the work of art become authoritarian and arbitrary, just as Plato's do. So goes analytic philosophy to this day, and so reads the meme. Strike one: music is nothing without relative social truths, so music cannot be evaluated against other art objects, at least not without a great deal of specificity.
The specificity that is offered by the image, does, however, suggest that Western music as noted in Western notation is the music which is magic. We need only note this, that the slogan is pointing toward the common practice period composers, because it suggests a disconnect with particular modes of production. That is to say, it attempts to make all composers into Mozarts, gifted prodigies with mystical powers for creating great art. And of course, such a model makes Beethoven look like he was ill-suited for being a composer, because his work was laborious, not magical.
And here is the fun part: the syllogistic truth that music is magic. Western languages, since Greek, have a marked distinction in the form, source, and direction of power, but the two do overlap, or at least may overlap (depending on how socially true it can be made). Mousikos, from which we get music, is the techne of the Muses, the art through which the muses can be brought into the world. The word magikos, on the other hand, is the art done by the learned man, the magos, the mage. In this sense, it is possible to envisage the overlap, as magic could be the embodiment of a Muse, performed by a mage.
It is unsurprising that the two would fit together in pre-modern European culture, not to mention all non-European cultures (which developed radically different local truths). Of course, due to the conflation of magic with illusion (which did not happen until the mid-19th century), magic is, ironically, weakened to the point of embarrassment. We must, in our defining and basic apprehension of this word, remember that today is indeed today, and that the meme suggests a possible conflation of music with illusion, as much as with ritual.
As an adumbration to a point below: illusion fulfilled itself as a grand performance art in the 18th century, as secularized magical ritual in the wake of the enlightenment, which had caused the emancipation of culture from religion. This transformation corrupted "magic," alienating it from that which gave it its ritual power. Before magic became illusion, it may have been impossible to claim that music was mysterious in a dismissive way, but in modern parlance, conflating music and magic certainly strives toward trickiness and falsehood contained in music, the negation of illusion.
As an adumbration to a point below: illusion fulfilled itself as a grand performance art in the 18th century, as secularized magical ritual in the wake of the enlightenment, which had caused the emancipation of culture from religion. This transformation corrupted "magic," alienating it from that which gave it its ritual power. Before magic became illusion, it may have been impossible to claim that music was mysterious in a dismissive way, but in modern parlance, conflating music and magic certainly strives toward trickiness and falsehood contained in music, the negation of illusion.
But is music still magic, or capable of being magical, in the classical sense? The historical development of music, magic, and social life is speculative, but important. To address such an issue, I'll refer to two musician/philosophers with different points of view on what is important about the separation of music and magic: Theodor Adorno and Dane Rudhyar.
Dane Rudhyar (1895--1985) is a scarcely known French-American musician, philosopher, composer, painter, poet, novelist, theosopher, and astrologer. I have recently been studying his text, which is often called Art as a Release of Power (1928--1930), a series of seven essays that describe an entire, unique philosophical system. Rudhyar's most important influences are Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Rudhyar's thought, like Adorno's, is an unspecialized series of interpretations making up a full model of the world, disrespectful of limits to the work that can be done in speculative thought. For Rudhyar, the only thing worth talking about, in the end, is the power for humans to build their metaphors and develop them into actions that support a "universal brotherhood." In a few shining moments in these essays, Rudhyar encapsulates the project of Marxist cultural speculation, while still being somewhat apart from that tradition.
The beginning of Rudhyar's book looks for the homologue between musical intervals and social organization, and explains that consonance and dissonance are, when mapped onto society, tribal and pluralistic, respectively. Working through this lens, and always being careful to make positive analogies that facilitate a better, more universal world, Rudhyar later works through an entire theory of history, a la Spengler, with "spirit-power" at its core. Spirit-power is the work of individuals, through sacrifice, to bring a new idea to the world, and for that idea to expand to its greatest possibility in a culture or civilization. Instantly distinguishable in Rudhyar's conversation is the role of theological thought, and the language of spirituality, which he scrupulously redefines in a way of reclaiming what was lost through the secularization of Western culture. Deniz Ertan, writer of Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art, is fully aware throughout her analysis, that Rudhyar's work is somewhat unbecoming of a modernist philosopher, which contributes greatly to the lack of scrutiny given to his philosophical work.
Rudhyar asks specifically, in his essay "Art as a Release of Power," "what is magic?" He feels the weight of illusion's commingling with magic: "The word has become the synonym of fraud and charlatanism; and this is most unfortunate, because it was an excellent word which expressed perfectly well etymologically and otherwise an idea which the world needs intensely today." He continues with his definition, stating that "magic is merely the release of power through an efficient form by an act of will. It is in fact life itself; but life in terms of human characteristics, destiny and will-power." (emphasis original) In Rudhyar's mind, the concept of magic was a way of bringing form to abstractions. Gods that never existed were made real, visible, and touchable by art; their constituent powers gave power in the minds of man.
An example he gives in subsequent pages is an Indonesian dagger where the handle is the image of a "weird and monstrous face," a god of war or hunting. "... is [the dagger maker] attempting to create 'beauty?' Indeed not. The word probably means nothing to him. What he wants is to conjure the elemental power whose cosmic function is to kill, to force this power to incarnate into his sword; why?... so that the sword may kill better." There is power, built of abstractions, that needs to be willed by humans to make it real. This fits perfectly with the Greek sense of magic, since the dagger maker is a learned man, making a practical art from his knowledge, bringing it into the world to do physical, actual work.
Rudhyar argues that the loss of the sense of magic turns Western art into impractical, needless prettiness (earlier, he stated that Western art is better at building ornate frames than it is at building paintings to go in them). He would rather art be filled with this power, spirit-power, created by individuals and for all who would join in with the artist to sustain power and gestures of meaningfulness. Of course, if we are capable of such powerful acts, we are responsible for using it in an ethical manner, to benefit civilization (the entirety of humanity) by releasing them from the limits placed on their social relations. Such a world starts with pluralism, the full acceptance of individual difference (dissonance, harmony), and not sameness (consonance, the womb).
The difference between this view of the world and Adorno's is fundamentally tied to their respective differences in the theory of history. Where Rudhyar would say that the spirit-power of individuals to transform the world is always possible (but often defeated by reactionary ideas), Adorno's negative dialectics show that not all historical ideas can form a synthesis with each other, and hence, progress and development can stop. He creates the negative dialectic of secularization in the opening essay of Aesthetic Theory (1961--1969 [1997]), "Art, Society, Aesthetics."
"The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil... The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed."(AT, 6) The way Adorno sees art's role in society is a reflection of what is not in the world. It is then, the individual who creates their own world, with bits of the world (material: bricks, scores, frames). This means that art strives for autonomy from the entire world, repudiating the world as it exists for a world its own. In this, the realm of the sacred was an historical fact, and art sought freedom from the sacred by employing the profane. The synthesis of the profane with art allowed it to find new types of autonomy, clean of the lies of religious metaphysics. Adorno would be referencing, here, Beethoven and Schoenberg, more than anyone else.
Beethoven's profanity was his autonomy from the church, throughout his career, whereas Mozart only gained that autonomy in the latter third of his life. Without needing to serve a metaphysical lie, Beethoven's life was the repudiation of the economic and social world (freelancing fairly unsuccessfully), and so, his music was also the repudiation of the contemporary bondage of form. (See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style.") Schoenberg, on the other hand, was repudiating the world of tonality, the bourgeois common sense of music, and creating its antithesis. By doing so, Schoenberg, for Adorno, was able to create a secularization of music itself, not against the sacredness of a religious metaphysic, but against music's accepted ruling language of consonance and dissonance in moderation.
"[The] realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular."(AT, 6) This, to bring back Rudhyar's Indonesian dagger, is the process of looking at the handle as if it was beautiful, that the handicraft of the maker was somehow valuable, regardless that the subject that adorns it never existed. In this way, the objects of the world, for Adorno, lose their power because they are no longer true or universal. I doubt that Rudhyar would disagree; Adorno's social criticism often lacks his own position, to a perilous extent, and it makes it hard to figure out what he is looking for in this process. Besides, Adorno had already tenured his "Resignation" in The Culture Industry, saying that there is no positive action that seems to matter in the field modern social thought.
In Adorno's "Theories on the Origin of Art," (AT, 331) the dialectic of enlightenment is brought in as his overarching historical force:
Again, the difference between Adorno and Rudhyar comes to a historiographical difference: where Adorno believes that art freed itself from lies and developed itself as a great form during this period, Rudhyar sees music and art as the Prodigal Son, who has wandered away and felt the harshness of the world, and would presumably be better off reunited with his source of power. I think a shorthand for explaining the differences of the two philosophers can be given by how seriously they take Niezsche's Madman, which I will reproduce below for those who have not read it in full. Rudhyar is interested in reestablishing what made us spiritual, but doing it now, on our terms, without an unobservable metaphysic controlling us. Since we are in control of the character of our society, if we were all to act in a universal manner, one which promotes difference and cooperation, society would change. It is now only a "seed-idea," one that needs to develop to its fullest possibilities, one that art could channel into action in the world.
Adorno's focus is more detailed and directed to what he calls the "dual character" of art, that its only options in modern life are to either be a commodity or cultural authority:
So, I suppose, if I must create an answer here, I must say that the two of these philosophers (whose viewpoints are companionate, that is, work dialogically and never break the ability for their ideas to be discussed together) assume that the time for good ideas is just historically not now. With more and more force to secularize and lose individual power in art, Rudhyar placed his thoughts in the world to reinvigorate "the new man" (a direct resynthesis of Nietzsche's ubermench), of whom there are few. Adorno worked to make better terms of social analysis in the popular consciousness, of which, a few have stuck; ultimately, the forces of the ruling class are not seeming shaky, and we have changed little in the past 150 years.
Is music magic? The problem is that people want it to be, for the wrong reasons. There are still pedagogs in the academy that believe and transmit this to their students, so that they can perpetuate a sense of doubt, one that is usually conflated with pluralism. The reason for this doubt is to keep people from committing to music, or justice, or revolution, or anything. When people are not committed to their ideals, they are easily controlled by others. Those others are sometimes Lacan's Big Other, sometimes "bourgeois stinking life" (as Rick Roderick called it), or worse, they are individual authoritarians basking in their dualities.
Epilogue, Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:
Rudhyar asks specifically, in his essay "Art as a Release of Power," "what is magic?" He feels the weight of illusion's commingling with magic: "The word has become the synonym of fraud and charlatanism; and this is most unfortunate, because it was an excellent word which expressed perfectly well etymologically and otherwise an idea which the world needs intensely today." He continues with his definition, stating that "magic is merely the release of power through an efficient form by an act of will. It is in fact life itself; but life in terms of human characteristics, destiny and will-power." (emphasis original) In Rudhyar's mind, the concept of magic was a way of bringing form to abstractions. Gods that never existed were made real, visible, and touchable by art; their constituent powers gave power in the minds of man.
An example he gives in subsequent pages is an Indonesian dagger where the handle is the image of a "weird and monstrous face," a god of war or hunting. "... is [the dagger maker] attempting to create 'beauty?' Indeed not. The word probably means nothing to him. What he wants is to conjure the elemental power whose cosmic function is to kill, to force this power to incarnate into his sword; why?... so that the sword may kill better." There is power, built of abstractions, that needs to be willed by humans to make it real. This fits perfectly with the Greek sense of magic, since the dagger maker is a learned man, making a practical art from his knowledge, bringing it into the world to do physical, actual work.
Rudhyar argues that the loss of the sense of magic turns Western art into impractical, needless prettiness (earlier, he stated that Western art is better at building ornate frames than it is at building paintings to go in them). He would rather art be filled with this power, spirit-power, created by individuals and for all who would join in with the artist to sustain power and gestures of meaningfulness. Of course, if we are capable of such powerful acts, we are responsible for using it in an ethical manner, to benefit civilization (the entirety of humanity) by releasing them from the limits placed on their social relations. Such a world starts with pluralism, the full acceptance of individual difference (dissonance, harmony), and not sameness (consonance, the womb).
The difference between this view of the world and Adorno's is fundamentally tied to their respective differences in the theory of history. Where Rudhyar would say that the spirit-power of individuals to transform the world is always possible (but often defeated by reactionary ideas), Adorno's negative dialectics show that not all historical ideas can form a synthesis with each other, and hence, progress and development can stop. He creates the negative dialectic of secularization in the opening essay of Aesthetic Theory (1961--1969 [1997]), "Art, Society, Aesthetics."
"The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil... The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed."(AT, 6) The way Adorno sees art's role in society is a reflection of what is not in the world. It is then, the individual who creates their own world, with bits of the world (material: bricks, scores, frames). This means that art strives for autonomy from the entire world, repudiating the world as it exists for a world its own. In this, the realm of the sacred was an historical fact, and art sought freedom from the sacred by employing the profane. The synthesis of the profane with art allowed it to find new types of autonomy, clean of the lies of religious metaphysics. Adorno would be referencing, here, Beethoven and Schoenberg, more than anyone else.
Beethoven's profanity was his autonomy from the church, throughout his career, whereas Mozart only gained that autonomy in the latter third of his life. Without needing to serve a metaphysical lie, Beethoven's life was the repudiation of the economic and social world (freelancing fairly unsuccessfully), and so, his music was also the repudiation of the contemporary bondage of form. (See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style.") Schoenberg, on the other hand, was repudiating the world of tonality, the bourgeois common sense of music, and creating its antithesis. By doing so, Schoenberg, for Adorno, was able to create a secularization of music itself, not against the sacredness of a religious metaphysic, but against music's accepted ruling language of consonance and dissonance in moderation.
"[The] realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular."(AT, 6) This, to bring back Rudhyar's Indonesian dagger, is the process of looking at the handle as if it was beautiful, that the handicraft of the maker was somehow valuable, regardless that the subject that adorns it never existed. In this way, the objects of the world, for Adorno, lose their power because they are no longer true or universal. I doubt that Rudhyar would disagree; Adorno's social criticism often lacks his own position, to a perilous extent, and it makes it hard to figure out what he is looking for in this process. Besides, Adorno had already tenured his "Resignation" in The Culture Industry, saying that there is no positive action that seems to matter in the field modern social thought.
In Adorno's "Theories on the Origin of Art," (AT, 331) the dialectic of enlightenment is brought in as his overarching historical force:
... strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrowminded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it drinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment.Thus, we can see Adorno conflicted about the dialectical nature of enlightenment, which sought to free the West from religious lies and supplant it with empirical harshness, because it may have ripped away the possibility of feeling and emotion along with it. In this sense, the conception of music losing its magical process, having been secularized into l'art pour l'art, possibly cut itself off from a considerable amount of feeling itself, and ironically, perfected itself in a scientific manner. The irony here, is supplied by Adorno's interest in Hegel's "end of art," that art may have only been possible at a particular moment in history. Great art, says Adorno, was a feature of a secular society, because it was able to detach from the lies.
Again, the difference between Adorno and Rudhyar comes to a historiographical difference: where Adorno believes that art freed itself from lies and developed itself as a great form during this period, Rudhyar sees music and art as the Prodigal Son, who has wandered away and felt the harshness of the world, and would presumably be better off reunited with his source of power. I think a shorthand for explaining the differences of the two philosophers can be given by how seriously they take Niezsche's Madman, which I will reproduce below for those who have not read it in full. Rudhyar is interested in reestablishing what made us spiritual, but doing it now, on our terms, without an unobservable metaphysic controlling us. Since we are in control of the character of our society, if we were all to act in a universal manner, one which promotes difference and cooperation, society would change. It is now only a "seed-idea," one that needs to develop to its fullest possibilities, one that art could channel into action in the world.
Adorno's focus is more detailed and directed to what he calls the "dual character" of art, that its only options in modern life are to either be a commodity or cultural authority:
For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself.In this sense, the work of society, its irrational relations and structure, make art ineffective as a transmission of power. Because of this ineffectiveness, the superstructure and base both need to change to enable art to have a revolutionary character, one that has been stifled by the negative dialectics offered by the enlightenment. That is to say, under the current conditions, the ideas of the ruling class are too difficult to defeat. Rudhyar's point would be that there just has not been enough power invested in defeating them.
So, I suppose, if I must create an answer here, I must say that the two of these philosophers (whose viewpoints are companionate, that is, work dialogically and never break the ability for their ideas to be discussed together) assume that the time for good ideas is just historically not now. With more and more force to secularize and lose individual power in art, Rudhyar placed his thoughts in the world to reinvigorate "the new man" (a direct resynthesis of Nietzsche's ubermench), of whom there are few. Adorno worked to make better terms of social analysis in the popular consciousness, of which, a few have stuck; ultimately, the forces of the ruling class are not seeming shaky, and we have changed little in the past 150 years.
Is music magic? The problem is that people want it to be, for the wrong reasons. There are still pedagogs in the academy that believe and transmit this to their students, so that they can perpetuate a sense of doubt, one that is usually conflated with pluralism. The reason for this doubt is to keep people from committing to music, or justice, or revolution, or anything. When people are not committed to their ideals, they are easily controlled by others. Those others are sometimes Lacan's Big Other, sometimes "bourgeois stinking life" (as Rick Roderick called it), or worse, they are individual authoritarians basking in their dualities.
Epilogue, Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
