Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008

___________________________________________________________________

Nusbaum, Charles O., The Musical Representation, Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion; Cambridge, Massachusetts/London England, The MIT Press, 2007.  392 pages.  ISBN 978-0-262-14096-6.  Hardcover $38.00

 

Reviewed by

 

Daniel Barnett

 

            This book is an extremely closely reasoned work, whose goal is to locate the mystery of western art music’s effectiveness within the frameworks of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, biology, anthropology and religion. In this attempt it displays a breathtaking erudition and encyclopedic knowledge of work the author takes to be the essential background in the field.

 

            The method of exposition is quite orthodox: each chapter begins with an introduction and chapter conspectus and ends with a summary. In his general introduction Nussbaum lays out the preliminary questions that he must address, with extraordinary thoroughness. This style of close elaboration follows through the entire book, and to my mind represents its most serious potential flaw: the clarity of the argument is often sacrificed to this penchant for thoroughness. 

 

             Professor Nussbaum has elaborated a quasi-naturalistic philosophical theory of musical representation and in his introduction outlines the three theses to which he believes a philosophical naturalist, after Quine, must be committed – ontological, metaphysical and epistemological. From this he moves to a brief discussion of generative theories of language and music, pointing out that whatever a theory of representation is, it must partake of two distinct modes of meta-representational language. Throughout the book, he anchors his discussion intimately in the antecedents he feels he must consider, carefully evaluating the contributions of notable academicians, and qualifying his views in relation to theirs. For readers who are deeply familiar with the field, of course, this tendency serves to very precisely locate his argument. For those less familiar, the shorthand with which he does this will prove to clog the flow of his argument.

 

            The body of the book consists of five chapters. In the first he discusses the work of the noted psychologist of visual perception James. J. Gibson, and swaps out a visual analogy for a musical one in discussing how the idea of affordance - roughly an expression of field potential - can enable his idea of musical representation. This results in his safe claim that “Musical space is a joint product of the physical acoustics of sound, the physiology of the human ear and neural auditory system, and the motor systems of the human brain and body.” (21) .

 

            The next chapter, which deals with the question of how music means, posits a musical surface containing an elaborate field structure that is modeled on the structure of lexical fields. He calls this mode of musical meaning extramusical form. In a second mode that he calls extramusical content, he speculates that the listener uses models of scenarios in virtual musical space through which he moves in his imagination. In this he closely follows Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “body-in-the-mind metaphorical transference.”

 

            The next chapter compares musical works to biological species, claiming that “musical works are best regarded as reproductively established families of tokens. In the case of species, the tokens or replicas are individual organisms, in the case of musical works, the tokens are performances.” (21). In the next chapter he attempts to come to grips with the question of how music creates emotional responses in which he claims, “because of the touch-like aspects of musical sound, and because emotions are valent (i.e. evaluative) perceptions of scenarios or indefinite situations, the musical environment presents itself with a distinctly affective presence and intimacy.” (22). The final chapter attempts to come to grips with the numinous qualities of music. The claim here is simply that “The musical listener is temporarily immersed in a benignant virtual environment where contingency and brute, “superfluous” (de trop) material existence have been vanquished and where everything that happens, happens exactly as it ought.” (22).

 

            My criticisms of the book are four-fold. The first may arise from my own ignorance of many of the writers that Nussbaum cites. I simply failed to follow the thrust of most of his arguments and found myself lost in the maze of citations, arguments and counter-arguments. Whereas the picture that he paints is hugely detailed, I consistently missed the points that he was trying to make with the details, so that my impression was less one of clearly buttressed argument than erudite maundering. Secondly, I take personal issue with Nussbaum’s view of the categorical functions of language that thoroughly conditions the way he uses words. This is a complex criticism and I hesitate to make it because much of academic philosophy, in my mind, is subject to the same criticism – the shorthand view of which is that many philosophers continue to carry on as if Wittgenstein never lived. Thirdly, there is the issue of scope: where, according to the breadth of the background invoked, e.g. biology, anthropology and psychology, his claims should have universal force. But he in fact admits that they only pertain to what he calls modern western art music, a definition with which I would argue since it avowedly does not include the precepts of even western avant-garde traditions; not to mention non-western formal music, world popular music, and jazz, etc. In line with this there is the almost total failure to discuss the implications of rhythm – the most clearly haptic/somatic aspect of music.

 

            I found my resistance to the arguments of the book growing through the last two chapters. He summarizes the argument of the chapter titled Musical Representation to Musical Emotion with the observation “But what is the musical utterance if not a gesture with a “magical” or even, as we shall see, incantational aspect?” (256). If all the force of his argument collapses with an appeal to the mysterious, what have we finally gained?

 

            Besides rhythm, the aspect of the musical experience most notably absent from consideration in the book is taste. And it is here that my own taste in music butts up against Nussbaum’s arguments most strongly. His final chapter titled Nausea and Contingency: Musical Emotion and Religious Emotion can be summarized by the observation that “…what distinguishes works of art in general from other purposive, but nonartistic artifacts, is a certain drive toward the elimination of the contingent.” (261). Not only do I personally find this view insupportably romantic, but it flies in the face of the, to me, undeniably emotional and numinous power of the aleatoric works of, among others, John Cage.

 

            Finally, as closely as I attempted to follow Nussbaum’s arguments, I felt myself constantly foiled by his prose, laden as it is with double (even occasional triple) negatives, multiple iterations of the passive voice, and (again, to me) obscure allusions, so that the refrain from the old Ellington/Fitzgerald tune “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.” constantly ran through my head as I attempted to pick my way through his arguments.

 

            I freely admit that I am the dreaded “know-nothing critic” in this case. The book comes highly endorsed by three academics in the field, so I can only suppose that I am missing much, if not all of its potential elegance, subtlety and meat.