HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF MUSICAL REPRESENTATION
(precis of wikipedia article Musical Aesthetics)
Immanual Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790) - argues that, although beautiful, music is ultimately trivial because it does not engage the understanding sufficiently and has no moral aspect. This seems to imply that it is incapable of representing concrete things or actions. He seems to imply that the addition of words or actions,m as in song or opera, heightens the aesthetic value because of the increased clarity of representation that is possible.
Conversely, Schopenhauer argued in The World as Will and Representation (1818) that because it can represent the metaphysical organization of reality, music, especially instrumental music, is the greatest of the arts. This is an attitude taken up with great enthusiasm by the composers of the Romantic era, who believed instrumental music capable of representing emotions and natural elements such as wind and water. Robert Schumann explicitly declared his piano work, Papillons (1832) to be a musical representation of the final scene of Flegeljahre by novelist Jean Paul.
Later in the 19th century a prominent debate ensued between those who saw the value of music in its representational and expressive capacity, and others, led by Eduard Hanslick, who denied the representational power of music and instead claimed that its aesthetic value lay in its structural and formal qualities.
This debate continued into the 20th century. For example Ezra Pound believed music to be "pure" (and therefore aesthetically valuable ) precisely because it did not represent anything. Albert Schweitzer countered this in his book J.S. Bach - Poet-Musician. However, Stravinsky, perhaps the most prominent and influential composer of the century, had very much a formalist attitude, stating that in listening to music, the only important thing "is his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings."
NOTABLE ARTICLES AND BOOKS ON MUSICAL REPRESENTATION
BOOK: Art and representation: contributions to contemporary aesthetics
editor: Ananta Charana Sukla
especially the paper "MUSICAL REPRESENTATION" by Stephen Davies
"In this chapter I consider whether music is presentational and I conclude that it is rather limited in what it can depict."
Music and Dynamic Processes - "Music, as an art of sound, is both structural and temporal. As such it articulates pattern and process. It embodies conflict and resolution, growth and decline, rising and falling, seeking and finding."
Dramatic Music and Songs - "As the weighty stone is heaved aside, the string basses produce a rumbling sound; as the fire flickers, leaping arpeggios mimic its effervescent motion..."
The Representation of Emotions - Davies claims that music can represent the emotion of a character, but cannot itself represent emotion. He clarifies this by comparison with the depiction of emotion in a painting. "Where the musical work presents human characters and deals with their actions and feelings, it will be appropriate to regard the emotions as represented (just to the extent that the subject experiencing the emotions is). This is common in opera and song, where the expressiveness of the music serves an illustrative role."
"In general, an emotion is represented only if its' "owner" is; otherwise the emotion is expressed by the artwork without thereby anyone's experiencing that emotion. Expressiveness is not always to be equated with representation."
wind chimes
