Churchill's Black Dog

by Anthony Storr

  But biological and linguistic theories fail to explain the pleasure we get from music, or why we feel great music to be so important. Some musicians maintain that music has no meaning outside itself. Stravinsky, for example, says that “music expresses itself.” He describes music as “suprapersonal and supra-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions.” Although Stravinsky agrees that a composition has its origins in the emotions of the composer and may therefore be considered as symbolizing them, he goes on to state: “More important is the fact that the composition is something entirely beyond what can be called the composer’s feelings.… A new piece of music is a new reality.”13

  Formalists like Stravinsky not infrequently compare music with mathematics. They believe that the meaning of music is to be found in the perception of the musical relationships within a particular work, and that such appreciation is primarily intellectual rather than emotional. No one with any understanding of either music or mathematics will deny the beauty of pattern and structure. But, as G. H. Hardy pointed out in his classic account of a mathematician’s life, “Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot.”14 It is clear that the appeal and the effects of music cannot be entirely cerebral.

  While still affirming that music is nonreferential, and that its meaning is to be sought solely within the work of music itself, other theorists do admit that particular musical relationships and structures excite emotion rather than a purely intellectual response. However, some musical authorities question whether such emotions are genuine. Hindemith, for example, states, “The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings.”15 Hindemith does not believe that music expresses the composer’s feelings, and affirms that the composer is simply a skilled manipulator of the feelings of others.

  Here is what he really does: he knows by experience that certain patterns of tone-setting correspond with certain emotional reactions on the listener’s part. Writing these patterns frequently and finding his observations confirmed, in anticipating the listener’s reaction he believes himself to be in the same mental situation.16

  Hindemith goes on:

  Thus a composer can never be absolutely sure of the emotional effect of his music on the listener when using complex material, but by experience and clever distribution of this material, moreover with frequent references to those musical progressions that evoke the uncomplicated feeling-images of sadness or gaiety in an unambiguous form, he can reach a fairly close approximation to unanimity of all listeners’ reactions.17

  Perhaps it is arrogant of a mere listener to take issue with the statements of a distinguished composer, but I must confess that I find Hindemith’s theories unconvincing. Although Hindemith recognizes that “music touches both the intellectual and the emotional parts of our mental life,”18 he underestimates the compelling power of the satisfaction which a symbolic union between these two different aspects of our being affords us. Man’s greatest intellectual achievements depend upon being able to separate intellect from emotion. Perhaps his greatest satisfactions come from being able to reunite them. It seems probable that the great composers are not so much adept manipulators of the emotions of others, as Hindemith suggests, but rather individuals who are particularly skilled at making new syntheses within their own psyches. These gifted people command our admiration because they have been able to realize, in their own achievements, what we would all like to be able to do: to make a coherent whole out of the disparate elements which make up our personalities.

  In his biography of Elgar, Jerrold Northrop Moore expresses exactly what I mean. He prefaces his biography by deploring the traditional division between “life” and “works.” As he says:

  A creative life can have no general significance apart from its works, and works have no cumulative significance outside the worker’s life. What I wanted was some means of combining the two modes, so that each new adventure in theme and form could be understood as a chapter in the spiritual biography of the whole man. Such a book would seek its goal neither in musicology nor in the sensual man: rather it would seek the influence of each on each.

  Thus I have tried to understand what it is to look at the world through creative eyes, to listen through creative ears. The artist, like the rest of us, is torn by various desires competing within himself. But unlike the rest of us, he makes each of those desires into an element for use in his art. Then he seeks to synthesize his elements all together to form a style. The sign of a successful synthesis is a unified and unique style plain for all to recognize. So it is that a successful style can seem to its audience full of indefinably familiar things—and at the same time invested with godlike power of “understanding” that is far indeed from the daily round. The process by which a man has forged such a unity is the most profound and most exalted of human stories.19

  So style, in the case of the creatively gifted, is the cement which holds the differing parts of the personality together, and which makes manifest to others the unity which the artist has achieved. It is interesting that, today, we value this evidence of individuality so highly. Works “in the style of” count for far less, both aesthetically and in the marketplace, than those which are recognized as authentic products of a single individual. This is a modern development. Prior to the Renaissance, artists were treated as more or less anonymous craftsmen who executed the orders of their patrons, or who served communal, rather than individual, interests. It is only since the middle of the thirteenth century that the names of individual painters began to be recorded; and the idea that any of the arts could be used to further the psychological development and self-realization of the individual did not take hold until the seventeenth century or later.

  The style of a writer, composer, or painter may be easily recognizable without any implication that the artist himself feels that any ultimate goal of unity has been attained. Although the forging of a personal style is “a sign of a successful synthesis,” style continues to change and develop throughout an artist’s life, just as the works themselves do. Psychologists who have paid especial attention to psychological development in later life, like Jung, have always affirmed that individuation, or self-realization, is never permanently or completely achieved. Life always demands new adaptation. In the creatively gifted, the development of personality is made manifest in the works which they produce. Aaron Copland demonstrates his understanding of the relation between the creative process and the development of personality in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures:

  The serious composer who thinks about his art will sooner or later have occasion to ask himself: why is it so important to my own psyche that I compose music? What makes it seem so absolutely necessary, so that every other daily activity, by comparison, is of lesser significance? And why is the creative impulse never satisfied; why must one always begin anew? To the first question—the need to create—the answer is always the same—self-expression; the basic need to make evident one’s deepest feelings about life. But why is the job never done? Why must one always begin again? The reason for the compulsion to renewed creativity, it seems to me, is that each added work brings with it an element of self-discovery. I must create in order to know myself, and since self-knowledge is a never-ending search, each new work is only a part-answer to the question “Who am I?” and brings with it the need to go on to other and different part-answers.20

  Perhaps I can now explain why I earlier referred to music as par excellence a symbolic activity. First, music is a temporal art. The patterns of music exist in time, and require time for their development and completion. Susanne Langer refers to music as “a thoroughgoing symbol, an image of subjective time.”21 Although painting and architecture and sculpture make symbolic statements about relationships, these relationships are static. Music, like life, is in constant motion.

  Second, music symbolizes typical patterns in the emotional life of human beings. Leonard Meyer suggests that “music activates tendencies, inh
ibits them, and provides meaningful and relevant resolutions.”22

  Anyone who has been reared in the Western diatonic tradition recognizes that the resolution afforded by a final return to the tonic is analogous to “returning home,” winding “somewhere safe to sea,” or, at a more mundane level, resembles the familiar patterns of physical need and desire followed by release of tension and fulfillment. As Meyer points out, one of the ways in which composers arouse our emotions and excite our interest is by postponing completion and return. He gives as an example the fifth movement of Beethoven’s C-sharp minor quartet, opus 131. Beethoven denies the listener’s expectation by the progressive fragmentation of the rhythmic and melodic pattern:

  But at the very moment when rhythm, harmony, texture, and even melody in the sense of pattern seem all but destroyed, the little figure which opens the movement and the first phrase raises our hopes and redirects our expectations of completion and return. Now we are certain what is coming.23

  Meyer’s description is very close to the theory of music advanced by Hans Keller. Keller contrasts what he calls “background” and “foreground” in music:

  The background of a composition is both the sum total of the expectations a composer raises in the course of a piece without fulfilling them, and the sum total of those unborn fulfilments. The foreground is, simply, what he does instead—what is actually in the score.…

  Musical meaning … depends for its sheer existence on the clearly implied conflict between that which you hear and that which is being contradicted by what you hear. It is this tension, varying in intensity according to the structural juncture a composition has reached, between what the composer does and what he makes you feel he was expected to do that constitutes musical logic. The clearer the tension, the more logical the music—and the clearest tension is that which combines a maximum of contradiction with a maximum of unity between the contradicting elements.24

  Once again, in a different context, we encounter the idea that combining elements which are widely separated or discrepant is a profound and satisfying experience.

  This is not the only way in which music can be described as a form of “combining behavior.” Music integrates a variety of differing elements to form a whole. As Yehudi Menuhin writes, “Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.”25

  Music, therefore, symbolizes man’s attempts to make sense out of existence by discovering or imposing order upon it; and, because music is, for the most part, nonrepresentational, it is “purely” symbolic in a way which representational arts are not. This is the reason why Schopenhauer regarded music as the direct representation of the Will. “The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand.” After detailing various analogies between human emotions and different types of music, Schopenhauer continues:

  But we must never forget when referring to all these analogies I have brought forward that music has no direct relation to them, but only an indirect one; for it never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself, of every phenomenon, the will itself.26

  Schopenhauer here touches upon another feature of music which is explored by Susanne Langer. To express the essence of feelings, rather than the feelings themselves directly, requires abstraction. Aaron Copland, discussing his need to compose, referred to “self-expression.” But, as Susanne Langer observes, “Sheer self-expression requires no artistic form.”27

  We can all abreact our feelings of grief by howling. To reach the essence of grief, as does Purcell in Dido’s lament, requires not only the composer’s skill, by which he transmutes emotions into music, but the capacity to stand back from such emotions and, by imposing form upon them, universalize them. The notion of “psychical distance,” elaborated by Edward Bullough28 and used by Susanne Langer, is significant. So long as a composer is possessed by an intense emotion, he will not be able to symbolize it in music. Psychical distance, the ability to detach oneself from immediate experience, is characteristically human. Without this capacity, there would be no scientific discoveries, no mathematics, and, though this is not always appreciated, no works of art. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” It is only when psychical distance has been achieved that symbolization can occur. What we admire about the works of great composers and other artists is not only the evidence which they provide of the artist’s capacity for deep feeling, but also the proof which they afford of the artist’s power to master and integrate such feelings.

  Man’s quest for integration and unity seems to be an inescapable part of the human condition. Because of its ability to make new wholes out of contrasting elements, music is the art which most aptly symbolizes this quest. It is interesting that so many scholars have reached the same conclusion. For example, Susanne Langer quotes a sentence by Hans Mersmann: “The possibility of expressing opposites simultaneously gives the most intricate reaches of expressiveness to music as such, and carries it, in this respect, far beyond the limits of the other arts.”29 Edmund Gurney writes of music as seeming

  like a fusion of strong emotions transfigured into a wholly new experience, whereof if we seek to bring out the separate threads we are hopelessly baulked: for triumph and tenderness, desire and satisfaction, yielding and insistence, may seem to be all there at once, yet without any dubiousness or confusion in the result; or rather elements seem there which we struggle dimly to adumbrate by such words, thus making the experience seem vague only in our own attempt to analyse it, while really the beauty has the unity and individuality pertaining to clear and definite form.30

  Victor Zuckerkandl, discussing the function of music as opposed to language, writes: “Words divide, tones unite. The unity of existence that the word constantly breaks up, dividing thing from thing, subject from object, is constantly restored in the tone.”31 In a later passage, he states:

  Musicality is not an individual gift, but one of man’s basic attributes; man’s very nature predisposes him to music. In music, man does not give expression to something (his feelings, for example), nor does he build autonomous formal structures: he invents himself. In music, the law by which he knows himself to be alive is realized in its purest form.32

  If there be anyone who doubts the importance of symbolism in human life, let him meditate upon this passage.

  NOTES

  1. Herodotus, Histories, i.32.

  2. Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto, lines 97–98.

  3. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1951), in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), pp. 229–42.

  4. C. G. Jung, “Symbols of Transformation,” in Collected Works, 20 vols., trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953–79), vol. 5, para. 214, n. 22.

  5. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 11:188–89.

  6. Plato, Symposium, trans. William Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 65.

  7. Jung, “Mandalas,” in Collected Works, vol. 9, part 1, para. 713.

  8. Harrison Gough, “Identifying the Creative Man,” Journal of Value Engineering 2, no. 4 (August 1964)15–12.

  9. Rhoda Kellogg, Analyzing Children’s Art (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1969).

  10. Howard Gardner, Artful Scribbles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 41–43.

  11. Quoted in Alexander Findlay, A Hundred Years of Chemistry, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1948), pp. 36–38.

  12. Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 86.

  13. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 101–2.


  14. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 26.

  15. Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 45.

  16. Ibid., p. 42.

  17. Ibid., p. 51.

  18. Ibid., p. 48.

  19. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. vii.

  20. Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1951–52 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 40–41.

  21. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 118.

  22. Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 23.

  23. Ibid., p. 155.

  24. Hans Keller, “Towards a Theory of Music,” The Listener, June 11, 1970, p. 796.

  25. Yehudi Menuhin, Theme and Variations (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 9.

  26. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 260–61.

  27. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 216.

  28. Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5, part 2 (1912):87–118.

  29. Quoted in Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 243.