A Philosophy of Music?
As for many people I think, music entered my life from childhood as a phenomenon which, so to speak, “undercut” other “messages” in its immanence and intensity by creating, (how can I characterize it?) “atmosphere” - something, a presence, that awoke intense feelings often accompanied by internal pictures, clearer or more diffuse. It was omnipresent and immediate in its effect, at least for the duration of its sounding in the particular present, in the particular space, and seemed to defy any obvious explanation of how and why it did that, nor did it require one of me.
For indeed music itself seemed to be the motor for, the guide to, the “illuminator” of “unobvious” and unimagined extensions of the known world of feeling and perception, also seemingly beyond itself or at least beyond what one might strictly observe about its components or even any sum of them.
(That music which I did not choose and may have been ‘forced upon me’, and I tried to escape, or at least ignore as best as I could, may also be said to have opened up with an immediacy, extended worlds of perception, but here more or less instantly unpleasant ones, which I always then regarded as shallow and unfruitful for me. In time I have also observed a third stream of experience: that there are also much-loved stretches of music which I cannot always listen to because the realms of feeling opened up by them are too difficult at certain times, but in no way fundamentally unpleasant or not intensely meaningful for me.)
I think I can speak in regard to this perception of music of a constellation comparable perhaps to the active life of our brain cells and neurotransmitters on the one hand, and the mysterious end product of consciousness itself on the other.
This is my personal history with music, but one which many people will recognize in themselves, I believe - as did many music lovers in the past.
For example: as attested by the early Romantic German writer of fiction and studies of music, E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776 - 1822) who reported to his friend Hippel in January 1796, “mich hat die Musik empfinden gelehrt, oder vielmehr schlummernde Gefühle geweckt”.(“…music taught me to truly feel, or better said, it awoke slumbering feelings.”).
This observation of E.T.A. Hoffmann is drawn upon by German musicologist Christiane Wiesenfeldt in her recent and pathbreaking book , “Die Anfänge der Romantik in der Musik”(Kassel/Berlin 2022. The Beginnings of Romanticism in Music”) a re-assessing of the roots of musical Romanticism in the context of the early Romantic movement as a whole in the years before and after 1800. Pathbreaking, because - seemingly unprecedented in the field of musical-historical scholarship and musicology(!) - it casts light on the writings of the known literary- philosophical founders of Romanticism around 1800 to make a very convincing case for music, of all art forms, as a central, if not the leading inspiration or impulse to the constituting and declaration of this aesthetic-new philosophical attitude. Wiesenfeldt draws upon Hoffmann’s remarks to exemplify the central role in her portrayal played by music in the birth of the Romantic movement as such, its literature (prose, poetry and philosophy) its painting,and of course its music. To quote her: “Music forms not simply one of several vehicles of expression alongside prose, poetry or painting. It is the epicentre of the ‘Romantic’ as such, music belongs to its founding raison d’etre and helped its early literature to understand what constituted Romantic perception at its core. Christiane Wiesenfeldt then cites Hoffmann, and goes on to add, ” (…Hoffmanns observation) gets to the heart of things: Music first awakes, more than all other artistic encounters, the Romantic as such in an (artistically sensitive) person, stimulates that person to be romantically artistically active themselves.” And so was E.T.A. Hoffmann. fundamentally inspired by the ‘ineffable’ in music to write his stories of the fantastic, not to mention his inspired - and in music-intellectual circles, famous/infamous - critique of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
It seems for the founding literary-philosophical Romantic generation around 1800 - and this is half-surprising and half-obvious - music in the form of later Mozart (e.g. Don Giovanni) particularly and later Haydn, and then at a later stage , Beethoven as well. Mentioned should also be the composer and writer Johann Friedrich Reichhardt, somewhat forgotten, but enormously influential in the early years in the formation of the literary-informed music Romantic.
In referring to Wiesenfeldt’s book and indeed to E.T.A. Hoffmann to illustrate my experience of music as a (almost ‘first cause’) generator of extended realms of perception - the „ineffable“ - I introduced an ‚elephant’ into the room. I mean of course the term Romanticism/(the)Romantic (German: die Romantik, der Romantische). How is this „awakening of slumbering feelings“ - not entirely foreseen by the conscious mind - „romantic“ ? What does this famous-infamous term actually refer to?
At its core Romanticism is an aesthetically-oriented view of life, „ philosophical attitude „ built around longing. (German,:’Sehnsucht’.) I had come to feel over the years that with our human consciousness - which can be very knowingly, as well as hardly knowingly, in places at times near or far outside where our body is at the moment - we are full of ‘longing’…(We might perhaps call it the more sophisticated, or the more sensitive variant of basic ‘desire’; and that most likely when our consciousness is tending further way from our current physical circumstance..) According to Christiane Wiesenfeldt, Romantic is “a term that alongside aesthetic phenomena - which it characterizes over the last 250 years just as much as actions or objects - refers today to almost anything that has to do with longing and the awareness surrounding it. Longing for true love, for ultimate fulfillment in life, longing for an ideal state in whatever context.”
‚Romanticism“ is the term for a way of seeing the world -„ eine Geisteshaltung“ or „Weltanchauung“ - which began to form as a distinct intellectual movement in the latter 18th century in Germany. It was very actively influential in artistic life in (northern?) Europe - but in Germany especially - through the 19th century. Beyond the 19th century the term has very much remained in circulation not only for the creative legacy of that „Romantic Age“ itself (1789 -1914?), but also for a generalized attitude to things in the spirit of this view of the world. The Romantic emerged thus in German literary and intellectual circles, especially in Jena and Berlin (and to some extent Weimar, the home of the Goethe-presided so-called Weimar Classical ) out of a basic need to re-address, and re-engage with, in a fresh way emotionally as well as critically, all those human longings, with their resulting questions, not entirely satisfied by the skeptical empiricism and rationalism of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment thought, but also, unable to be simply be contained by the old structures and strictures of orthodox Christian religious practice as they had been or appeared to have been. To elaborate Christiane Wiesenfeldt’s characterization above we are speaking of the longing for ultimate meaning, of ways to encounter the irrational or „über-rational“ , the ineffable, the inexplicable, the unexpected, the infinite: perceptions (still) requiring transcendent approaches. ART took on a new philosophical (rather than „merely“ theologically-serving, civilizing, liturgical or decorative) status at the centre of romantic efforts to interpret existence - as a realm in fact for the transcendent to dwell. Art became a place of the most real Reality and the truest Truth, the Reality behind the obvious empirical reality, where the Finite encountered the Infinite - where longing for the Absolute and absolute Good, the Infinite , the Sublime, also terror and wonder in face of undeniable precipices could be explored, stilled or fulfilled, or adequately evoked. And it appears to have been apprehended at first in no other art form more so than in music.
The writings of the last and greatest German Enlightenment philosopher, the Königsberg (today: Kaliningrad) thinker Immanuel Kant(1724 - 1804) also had a significant impact upon the founders of the Romantic movement. Especially his ground-breaking delineation between different forms of Reason in the two groundbreaking works, the „Critique of Pure Reason“ and the „Critique of Practical Reason“, his new engagement with aesthetic sensibility in the „Critique of the Faculty of Discernment“, not to mention his renewed understanding of political freedom. Kant determined a decisive role for the imagination in forming scientifically tenable conclusions (derived through pure reason) and a necessary place for reasoning based on belief and trust where little or no empirical evidence could be available (practical reason).
‚Pure reason‘ he postulated as a process of ‚‘synthetic’ judgements derived from the combination of given (a priori) terminological or ordering categories of the mind (the purely rational), being applied to, combined with, perceptions of the senses, (the empirical), which are in turn not possible without this fixed (a priori) ‚transcendental’ framework ( as he called it) of space and time as basis. With the a priori nature of space and time however, ultimate knowledge of the fundamental truth of reality, that which lies beyond the a priori, the given, Kant’s „thing in Itself“, can never be attainable through pure reason.
His „practical reason“ concerned itself with the formation of notions where a level trust or belief was unavoidable in reasoning: foremost ethics, also leaving a place though for religion and metaphysical discourse. This type of reason was then free of the burden of stricter proofs, but nevertheless based on the necessity arising from a priori imaginative impulses. A central part of this work was also the fresh impetus he gave to the notion of the free and morally responsible individual,. He famously spoke of the necessity for people to free themselves from their „self-imposed voicelessness.“
Another famous formulation of Kant can also be said to relate to his delineation between „pure reason“ and „practical reason:“ Two things fill our sensibility with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, according to how often and how sustained the reflecting mind preoccupies itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law in me.“ Beethoven is said to have had this statement pinned above his desk. (Jan Caeyers - Beethoven. Een Biografie. De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam 2009, in German, ‚Beethoven - der Einsame Revolutionär. Eine Biographie’ )
And in this last respect, like many intellectuals of the day, Kant was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution when it broke out in July 1789. Quite a few - Friedrich Schiller was one prominent example - turned away however when, with the Terror, from 1792, extreme brutal chaos had clearly taken over. But not Kant entirely. German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski (b. 1945) notes in his book on Romanticism (2007) that Kant’s sense of personal intellectual participation and in fact co-responsibility for the Revolution led to his sympathies with it, for the duration of his life, never being completely extinguished, despite all reservations that he developed in the course of time. Safranski writes: „ For him, on behalf of the whole of humanity, the great attempt was being undertaken in France to at last emerge from ‚self-imposed voicelessness.‘
We can speak of a „pre-natal“ time before the proclaimed ‚birth‘ of Romanticism through the young Romantic founders in the last years of the 18th century. This pre-natal period we can refer to as the time of the „Sturm und Drang. Those literary and philosophical figures who provided specific ‚pre-natal‘ assistance through the „Sturm und Drang“ were Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 - 1803) Johann Georg Hamann (1730 - 1788), (in Kant’s circle in Königsberg), Friedrich Schiller (1759 1805), Johann Friedrich Reichhardt (1752 - 1814) and partly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832). It began approximately with Goethe’s striking and sensationally successful early novel, „The Sorrows of the Young Werther“ (1774), the „novel of letters“ about the lovestruck and doomed young Werther, which is normally regarded as the igniting spark; or, more accurately according to Safranski, the spontaneous sea journey adventure of Johann Gottfried Herder in 1769 on a small freight ship from Riga on the Baltic coast to the French coast near Nantes, and the diary and writings that came out of it. Safranski calls him the ‚German Rousseau‘ Herder encountered the young Goethe later in a tavern in Strassburg, supplying the younger man with inspiration for his famous novel and other writings.
The founding literary-philosophical Romantic generation, still younger, of writers and philosophers - who received decisive impulses from music as well - included Friedrich Schlegel, ( 1772 - 1829) perhaps the central philosopher , his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767 - 1845), Caroline Schlegel (1763 - 1809), Novalis (alias Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg), Ludwig Tieck (1773 - 1853), Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773 - 1798), the reform theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 - 1834), E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776 - 1822) of course, and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775 - 1854), the bridge to the slightly younger„half-sister“ of Romanticism, the influential philosophical movement called German Idealism, which also includes Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1813).
We note that they are all more or less of the same generation as Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827). And all music lovers know the legend of his Eroica Symphony and the scratching out of the Napoleonic dedication upon the news of the imperial coronation. Safranski writes that the „new departure“ that was the early Romantic movement is Sturm und Drang gone through the experience of the French Revolution. The early Romantic generation was enthusiastic with its promise of freedom and democracy at first, like the Enlightenment thinker Kant. As they became aware however of the descent into terror and brutality new attitudes emerged. Safranski observes that,“ the pragmatic Enlightenment had inscribed predictability and planning capability on its banner. All this, „ (the Terror) „ shattered trust in an enlightened thinking“, which led these early Romantics to an important conclusion-confirmation for the formation of their view of things, and that was, that the Enlightenment had made matters too easy, „meaning: it was INCAPABLE of grasping the depth of life and its dark nocturnal sides.“
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) wrote a famous definition of the Romantic and the process of ‚romanticizing‘: „In that I give the commonplace, the everyday, the aura of the mysterious, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the nimbus of the infinite, I ‚romanticize ‚ them“. Elsewhere in the same vain Novalis asserts that:“ The art of estranging in a pleasurable way, of making an object strange and nevertheless known and attractive, that is romantic poetics.“ And: “Poetry is the genuine absolute ‚ real‘.“
The young philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775 - 1854) also counts to this circle of founding Romantics, and like the other literary and philosophical figures was in the first „fermentation centre“ in the 1790s, in Jena (Thuringia) - where apart from the unusual activity at its university, there was the infamous romantische WG (Romantic student share -flat!) - and then later in the second centre, Berlin, as well as Dresden. Safranski notes that Schelling advised in 1794 in Jena (in light of the revolutionary Terror) that it was now time to dare the bold step demanded by Reason of withdrawing from the terror of the objective world“ The Jena Romantics who became then the Berlin Romantics wanted to dismantle the separating wall between literature (or art) and life. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis coined the term „Romanticization“ for this undertaking.
We may indeed count Beethoven (whatever else has work might embody) und certainly Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828) to the earliest ‚romantic-infected‘ music generations. I think we can talk about a ‚mirroring-back‘ aspect, in that early Romantic literature and thought, and the spirit that it radiated in artistically and intellectually-oriented circles (e.g. through the phenomenon of the salon), in its turn re-influenced the attitudes of new composer generations, as this literature and thought had itself found fundamental inspiration earlier in music. If we think just of the opening movement of Beethoven’s so-called ‚Moonlight‘ Sonata (1801 - not so late in the composer’s career): the newest Universal Edition informs that it derives directly from an improvisation of Beethoven’s alone before the open coffin of a prematurely deceased friend in a room with black walls; which can hardly truly surprise listeners, extreme as this circumstance now sounds ( perfectly fitting though for the notions of the founding Romantic literary generation.) With regard to Schubert there are countless examples of the Romantic spirit, the world of the Winterreise (1827) being just one, the Impromptus (1828) and Moments Musicaux (1823 - 1828) another.
The haunting - mostly landscape - images of painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840) should not be left out of this list of (so far only writing and composing) early Romantics.
Musically as we know there followed Beethoven and Schubert through the nineteenth century - and into the twentieth - in the German lands alone, Felix Mendelssohn (1809 - 1847) ,Fanny Hensel (1805 - 1847), Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856), Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883), Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896), Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897) and Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911), to name only the most prominent.
This term itself came from the German word for the novel, „der Roman“ , which in its turn came from the French word for the same thing. There had been an explosion of novel reading, writing and publication from about the time of the appearance of Goethe’s famous „The Sorrows of the Young Werther“ in 1774. Some novels were regarded as having high artistic and intellectual worth; others more or less as trash to be „wolfed down“ by the casual reader in one or two sittings. Commentators emerged in the last part of the 18th century who regarded all the intensive novel-reading (and writing) in a not dissimilar light to the critics of social media consumption today: people were being drawn increasingly into virtual and fantastic worlds and ‚virtual lives‘. (So the view at least in the German world, where this activity may have been more intensive than in any other European national culture at the time. Something for another discussion.) The early Romantics took this phenomenon - the awareness of the French Revolution raging in the background - and sought to make their own geistige revolution out of these conditions.
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So am I a ‘Romantic’? Or more accurately is my philosophy of music romantic…? Does my music sound somehow then romantic? In the light of what has been described above with the founding of the Romantic and the development which followed , I would answer yes, certainly. Whether my music is at all effective or convincing, or whether it is for some, for others not, it is still reliant for its very existence on the music of that tradition (1789 - 1914 - with consideration of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, 1948!), consciously and unconsciously. And say far as I can sense, longing, so often mentioned above, lies at its heart…Are there additional aspects, other sources, other reliances as well? Yes, I would say, especially those of traditions before the Romantic, the Baroque, the Renaissance and the Medieval… and no doubt 'technically-expanding’ elements that were developed in the twentieth century (but less as a philosophical foundation).
With the emergence of the Romantic emerged also a new relationship to History , as a phenomenon and process (stimulated by Herder); the mystery of the past and distant past, (and sometimes the distant future) . Along with it came a new interest in folksong, in myth, in ruins, as well as the expression of the lyrical, (often accompanied by the melancholic), the fantastic, the mysteries of the night, the uncanny, the stars, not forgetting the sublimity of Nature itself, and death; religiosity was also viewed through new glasses: older religious practices, the emphatic and ecstatic religious devotion of medieval and Renaissance art. (We may think here of the great carved wooden altars for instance.) And when it could be encountered musically: Gregorian chant and the sacred polyphony of the Renaissance.
Here I want jump to a point in time, to an artist, who appeared in history, in Germany, between the Renaissance and the Sturm und Drang, activein the first half thenof the 18th century: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750). His music is of course understood, along with that of Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 - 1759) to be a culmination ‚of the Baroque. And Bach’s music particularly is seen to be a towering synthesis of much that came before him. Something that is important to re-state in this regard is the specific and unique religiosity of his work amongst all other Baroque composers. In this sense it is like a mirror to the spirit of the religious polyphony of the Renaissance. A fundamental characteristic of the structure of his music reflects that.: the fusion of the polyphonic - ‚horizontal’ - elaboration of the sacred Renaissance with the bass-anchored harmonic - ‚vertical‘ - determination of the Baroque from around 1600. Bach’s orientation is then religious within traditional Christian structures, theologically as well as expressively however of immense, and immense religious, depth. He is said to have possessed an extensive private theological library. (He also had to sit a difficult theological examination as part of the audition process to become the Cantor of St. Thomas’ Leipzig - Thomaskantor - his final post!)
In the introduction of his erudite and eloquent book, ‚Romanticism - a German Affair’, Rüdiger Safranski, after citing Novalis’ definition of the Romantic (quoted here above) about giving the „everyday the status of the mysterious, the finite the status of the infinite“, points to an underlying relationship to religion in these words, and remarks that the Romantic „belongs to the search effort, unceasing for the last two hundred years, to find something to set against the dis-enchanted world of secularization. The Romantic is alongside much that it is as well, also a continuation of religion with aesthetic means.“
I understand my music these days as being both centrally or mostly personallytraditionally religious in the sense of Bach and composers before (and after him, but mostly before) in possessing a more or less orthodox-presumed Christian theological identification (even if not obvious or visible at first) and in addition often, if not always, romantic, especially in the sense(s) described by Safranski above.
At one point in her book Wiesenfeldt makes this very interesting assertion : that the aesthetic and connected political and social culture we call the „Modern“, with which we continue to identify today, is essentially „equal parts Enlightenment and Romantic“… I would agree. I think firstly the conception of the core nature, the quasi-metaphysical status/authority (the content howeveris not necessarily being implied here), and the political role of Art for human society remains exactly that first consciously propounded in its entirety by the founding Romantics - at least for artists and art lovers, and their lobbyists. Secondly, the Romantic, which has then never really disappeared since its formation c.1800 has continued to provide the space for a discreet - if so desired - flexible, not-necessarily- doctrinal, non-ideological approach to the exploration - particularly through art - of the religious impulse, a fundamental, formational characteristic of humans according to anthropologists. And this does not mean denying in this age all those well-founded and well-functioning legacies of the (no doubt also ongoing) Enlightenment.
It remains for me - at least in this first chapter of possibly more - to observe that I see myself as a composer having two central pillars of inspiration and influence: Johann Sebastian Bach and Gustav Mahler. They seem to be polarities, the one before Sturm und Drang, before Kant, before the Romantic, but not so long before. The other at the end of the Romantic, who died in the new century (1911) not long before the outbreak of the First World War. And there are a lot of differences naturally. But certain kinds of similarity as well. Both are so to speak culminative composers, bringing together different elements of their inheritances, and reflecting on the past, but nevertheless new reflecting, creating something new out of the cumulative process, also in the smaller details, e.g. the subtle expansion of older sonic characteristics. Some music critics like to see Mahler principally as announcing the ‚birth of the Modern‘, especially the radical way initiated by his younger acquaintance Arnold Schönberg (1874 - 1951) and his school. This view is very lopsided and quite absurd, ignoring much of what Mahler’s music actually is. Schönberg, it can be said, did everything possible in his development to get away from Mahler, not to be him‘! And Mahler, if anything, in relation to contemporary culture, is - apart from constituting a musical apotheosis of the Romantic Age as such - a Wegbereiter for the ‚most-modern‘ modern, i.e. the post-modern modern, or even the post -post-modern modern! Mahler’ s works currently permeate - after long neglect till the 1960s (or really the 1970s ) - the orchestral concert scene like never before, and like few composers before. Understandably so. Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has indeed a comparable currency today, if (obviously) not in the large-orchestra programs. Somehow, intuitively at least, why that is so is also clear.
Mahler in a letter wrote about his principal ‚intellectual interests‘ being art and religion. On Bach’s manuscripts are to be found personal inscriptions like, „Solo Deo Gloria“ in exaltation, or as a cry of suffering, „God help me!“
Fundamental to the artistic expressions (and ever-growing reception) of both composers is the felt capacity to express the deepest human longings, whether issuing from a more traditional religious perspective or influenced by the Romantic renewed gaze upon the field of longing. The precipices, the abyss, the darkness come to expression in the deepest way as well, but always in relation to longing.
Other strong influences on me from the Renaissance have been the music of the Franco-Flemish composers Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420 - 1497) and Guillaume Faugues (before 1442 - after 1475) and the astounding Scottish Renaissance composer Robert Carver (1485 - 1570). Not to leave out the late medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut (1300 - 1377) and that great medieval corpus of melody, the Gregorian chant underlying all of pre-Baroque music.
Then I could list some additional sources of inspiration and influence primarily of the twentieth century. Born in the same year as Gustav Mahler (1860) I should first mention the French composer Claude Debussy who lived till 1918; and further into the twentieth century I can talk of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958) in particular, Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 1992), Arvo Pärt (b.1935) Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Henryk Gorecki (1933 - 2010). The music of Morton Feldman (1926 - 1987) and aspects of that of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007) have exercised an attraction for me also. I certainly must mention here too, Irish, as well as English and Scottish, folk music; and ‚cool‘ jazz and so-called ‚free‘ jazz and experimental improvisation.
A ‚philosophy of music‘ that seeks to delineate a connection between the analysis of precise musical components and their specific collaboration with each other on the one hand and a philosophical theory, inclusive of morally- analogous qualitative judgements, around an ontological meaning to be experienced by the receptive sensibility on the other hand - in the vein of Theodor W. Adorno’s famous/infamous „Philosophie der Neuen Musik“ (1948) - is that which I have outlined thus far not - yet. So far I have simply sought to establish a general philosophical-historical context in which I see my creative musical strivings without defining how specific ‚stylistic characteristics‘ might accord with the so described context. Perhaps partly, and on a small, representative scale, that might be undertaken in a future ‚chapter‘. We shall see.
Without going into the material ways and means with which my music, or the music of the composers emphasized above, seeks to illuminate the states and sensibilities I have briefly outlined historically and philosophically, I can conclude that the expression of humanlonging - or longings - is for me central to music. All sorts of directions within and outside of ‚classical music‘ are present today and many have their expressive validity. Nevertheless I think a national or continental landscape of newer music ascribed to the ‚classical‘ sector for instance (and I am not referring to works in isolation) that does not allow for, or discourages, the adequate expression of fundamental longings at all particularly the ‚benevolently ideal‘ aspect of longing - such that can indeed be grasped and felt without significant hurdles by the more sensitive listener we have in mind, who is always the composer’s (or the artist’s) partner in some kind of imagined relationship - is in a parlous predicament. A purely objective attempted portrayal (or we might say abstract projection in place of ‚portrayal’) of the dark, the night, the strange, the unsettling, the unknown, cannot fulfill its intended artistic function I think; because it is without also some kind of proximity to a successfully communicated expression of longing. And longing is in Art the true subject for any object I would assert. ‚Terror,‘ ‚the abyss‘, etc. only have meaning at all when set in relation to what we really long for.
Immanuel Kant in the lated 18th century defined a more significant role for the subject in our perceiving and interpreting of the world than previously postulated; even in what he delineated as pure reason. And more so then in that other field, to which artistic activity can be connected, that of practical reason. Many of the founding German Romantics and philosophers of the new German Idealism engaged intensively in their younger years with the work of Kant, and digested it in their ways - Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling (and Hegel) for instance. Needless to say the conception of the subject with the new assessment of the role and nature of Art became central; the subject and its inner experience was confirmed as the starting point. And the centre of that inner experience, longing.
In silently - and firmly - retaining the Romantic metaphysical status- conception of Art, as their Überbau - with all the subsequent political allure of that position - while at the same time deliberating seeking to diminish or deny and avoid the personal subjective centre of longing, let alone be seen as Romantic, some post -World War II ‚classical‘music and new ‚classical’ music movements and works have run into at times a significant - and not understood - ontological dilemma I think.
In any case longing in its various guises remains fundamental to my musical expression; without it my music could certainly only wither. The notion of longing and its role seems indeed to be at the core of a possible ‚philosophy of music‘ for me. And the starting point of one that might theoretically be developed.