For about a century from 1780 two developments in Central European culture progressed and may well have been related. One was the classical stream of musical composition and the other was more ambitious attempts to theorise the implications of human musical appreciation - what our capability to understand music reveals about ourselves and our place in the cosmos.
The compositional stream is easy enough to illustrate Haydn and Mozart, followed by Beethoven and Schubert; Mendelssohn and Schumann followed by Brahms. One could follow Brahms with Schoenberg as it seems he devised his 12 tone method so that he could compose Brahmsian thematic development on a truly chromatic basis. Sadly this original rationale seems to have been forgotten ignored or dismissed by those who took up that approach. Lots of people would say that the compositional development ended with Brahms - not me because I vastly prefer Schoenberg.
The aesthetic stream is less well mapped but seems to include Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Hanslick. Hanslick championed Brahms and was satirised by Wagner in the Meistersingers andhe published The Beautiful in Music in 1854 just as Brahms was starting his musical career.
Back at the start, Fichte greatly admired Kant but sought to go beyond his framework. He is the first philosopher to suggest that individual self-consciousness is a social phenomenon. Subjectivity means inter-subjectivity, a community of subjects and to be self conscious is to be conscious of oneself as some sort of thing or other. All this sounds very modern. Sadly the next step in the analysis is more uncongenial. Fichte thought that it was impossible that the material world could generate this kind of community of subjects and that the material must therefore be in some way dependent on the subject. This is not at all a fashionable point of view these days.
In Fichte’s defence it can be said that he may not have reached this conclusion if like us he was aware of the success of a lot of strange science since 1800. Natural selection, bio-informatics, the Standard Model in physics and so on.
Fichte also toyed with the primary status of the unconscious. He wasn’t sure that as self conscious beings we are aware of our whole selves or whether some parts of our mentality might be out of our grasp either in practical terms or as a matter of logic. I think we are still ambivalent on this. We can easily spot limited self awareness in others but is it even feasible to acknowledge it in ourselves.
I was exchanging ideas on improvisation with a friend in California over the weekend and he sent me a link to a local radio interview with an improvising musician. This person thought that good improvisation came from beyond the conscious mind. I can see that this idea can be based on genuine first person experience. But the implications are the interesting thing. If I improvise well for an audience does it mean that their appreciation involves a link with wherever my music comes from? I am genuinely uncertain but I think Fichte believed it does.
Schelling started out as a follower of Fichte but after 1800 moved off on his own track. These days S is given credit for being one of the first ecological thinkers in Western thought because he was prepared to recognise that the material world or nature was not a simple mechanism but involved all kinds of intricate linkages. He saw that if we believe that nature is there to be mastered or dominated then this risks human enslavement by our own nature. This idea was developed by exiled German left wingers in LA during the Second World War.
For Schelling subjectivity is double sided character - we are active aware subjects to such a degree that we can reflect on ourselves as subjects and in that sense combine our freedom to think with a discovery of how we maybe partially conditioned say by circumstance. He was tempted to think that the natural order might also be double sided - both product and process.
Schelling suspected that art might be the arena where the lawlike conditioned realm came close to and perhaps even joined human freedom. In terms of the improvisation example mentioned earlier there might be both (say) an internalisation of the laws of harmony, scales and progression - conditioned - with in the minute creativity which exemplifies freedom. Sadly Schelling changed his position frequently and never completed a grand synthesis that he thought might be possible.
Hegel is said to be the most original thinker on aesthetics since Plato. He is hard to read and has a vast system that seeks to explain the pattern within history. He went along with the Schelling conclusion that reality has to be in its foundation mental rather than material. Although his career overlapped Beethoven he never mentions the composer once although others including Adorno have tried to link Hegel’s ideas to the formal patterns used by Beethoven. H did say that he liked the music of Rossini - a composer that I believe Beethoven rather disliked.
Hegel maintained that music is a way that the free subject can demonstrate its character. Because it is an artform beyond space it exemplifies inwardness as the organised succession of vanishing sounds. He links music to the ‘ ah and oh of the heart’ but music brings structure and organisation to this so that the soul hears its own inner movements and can be moved again. It is able to bring unity out of diversity and as a such it is a source of mental satisfaction even where the emotions conjured are negative. The risk is that technical manipulation can lead to a disconnection with the human source resulting in pure artistry.
All of this makes him a theorist of early romanticism, possibly the best theorist of early romantic music that there is. He summarises and codifies the insights of Fichte and Schelling.
Hanslick’s book On the Beautiful in Music was published in 1854 and is seen as the beginning of musical formalism. He conceded that music may arouse emotions but denied that music can represent emotions or that emotional content in any way represents the content of music. He thought that music relies on freely moving musical forms which are sound in motion. He summarised composition as follows:
‘The initial force of a composition is the invention of some definite theme, and not the desire to describe a given emotion by musical means. Thanks to that primitive and mysterious power, whose mode of action will forever be hidden from us, a theme, a melody flashes on the composer’s mind. The origin of this first germ cannot be explained, but must simply be accepted as a fact. When once it has taken root in the composer’s imagination, it forthwith begins to grow and develop; the principal theme being the center round which the branches group themselves in all conceivable ways, though always unmistakably related to it. The beauty of an independent and simple theme appeals to our aesthetic feeling with that directness, which tolerates no explanation, except, perhaps, that of its inherent fitness and the harmony of parts, to the exclusion of any alien factor. It pleases for its own sake, like an arabesque, a column, or some spontaneous product of nature – a leaf or a flower.”
Formalism had powerful advocates in the 20th century including Stravinsky and Forte. It also had powerful enemies like Stalin. One of the crimes he accused Shostakovich of was formalism. Formalism relies on some musical symbolism and explains the music in terms of patterns in the symbols which represent musical development. Nicholas Cook has written a good introduction to formal analysis in music.
The obvious objection is that formal analysis misses the content - but to push this through a good account of the content is needed, beyond reference to emotions. Clearly music can be analysed formally but does any other approach work to illuminate aspects that formal analysis cannot or does not cover. Appreciation of formal aspects s bound to be limited to a minority of listeners. Audiences who lack formal understanding are not just listening to random sounds. The opposite pole is also valid - post WW2 composers often used elaborate formal schemes but struggled to gain acceptance from contemporary audiences who could not hear the sense.
Adorno said that the musical form of Hegelian philosophy was to be found with Beethoven but that there was more truth with Beethoven than with Hegel. After Adorno some more recent analysts have developed this nugget. The thought is that Beethoven foregrounded the musical process so that the formal core of the work wasn't clearly stated at the start but emerged through the work . The formal core of the work was only revealed to the listener as the work progressed. The process of the work is key for revealing its formal structure.
There could be a lot in this and indeed Schoenberg made a very similar point.