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Hegel On Music
Richard Thomas Eldridge
Swarthmore College, [email protected]

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Richard Thomas Eldridge. (2007). "Hegel On Music". Hegel And The Arts. 119-145.
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Hegel on Music
Richard Eldridge

At first glance, Hegel says some striking but apparently inconsistent things
about music. He appears, first, to defend musical formalism: the view,
urged by theorists from Eduard Hanslick to Peter Kivy, that pure instru­
mental music is an acoustic arrangement that signifies nothing. In music
as an art, Hegel notes, “sound, just as sound, is treated as an end in it­
self; ... its own form, artistic note-formation, can become its essential end”
(A 2:899).* He goes on to indicate in particular that successful art music
need not be based on any verbal text.

Music has the maximum possibility of freeing itself from any actual text
as well as from the expression of any specific subject-matter, with a view
to finding satisfaction solely in a self-enclosed series of the conjunc­
tions, changes, oppositions, and modulations falling within the purely
musical sphere of sounds. (A 2:901-2)

Yet, second, Hegel also remarks that music that is simply self-
enclosed development “remains empty and meaningless” (A 2:902). In
order to defeat this threat of meaninglessness, music must acquire “spiri­
tual content and expression” (A 2:902). If it fails to acquire this content,
then it fails to be “a genuine art” (A 2:902). These remarks suggest that
Hegel is committed to the view that successful art music must somehow be
about something—a position held by Aristotle and defended in contem­
porary music theory by Kendall Walton, Jerrold Levinson, Edward T.
Cone, and Ered Everett Mans.
About the now so-called Classical Style music of his own time, Hegel
remarks first that by retreating from definite content it has “lost its power
over the whole inner life” and become something “for connoisseurs only”
(A 2:899). Yet he also notes that “nowadays . . . miracles [in conception
and in virtuosity] have occurred in music” (A 2:936), and he claims that

119
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RICHARD ELDRIDQE

“music carries [the] liberation [of the soul] to the most extreme heights”
(A 2:896).
These prima facie contradictions (formalism vs. antiformalism; con­
temporary music as decadently empty vs. contemporary music as miracu­
lously ensouled) are further set by Hegel within a historical framework
that present-day thought about the arts finds peculiar and opaque. Music,
according to Hegel, is “the second romantic art” (A 2:889) between paint­
ing and poetry, where historical epochs are distinguished from one an­
other by the significative salience of a particular medium of art: architec­
ture for the symbolic phase of art; sculpture for the classical phase of art;
and successively painting, music, and poetry for art’s romantic—that is,
modern or post-Roman—phase. What sense can we make of this? Surely
works in various media existed at many historical times. The Greeks, Ro­
mans, and medieval Europeans all had music, as did other civilizations.
And why should poetry be thought to be more significant than music now?
In fact, however, Hegel’s views about music are neither contradic­
tory nor historically foolish. Instead his remarks on music provide a way
to embrace the genuine insights present in the opposed camps (formal­
ism vs. antiformalism; Classical Style as a matter of empty connoisseurship
vs. Classical Style as normatively authoritative) without the exaggerations
and confusions that often accompany the simple taking of sides in these
debates. The key to seeing how his remarks afford balanced insights lies
in unpacking his thought that a successful composer of art music must
give attention to both structure and “content (true a rather vague one)”
(A 2:954). The essentially vague content in question turns out to involve
standing, felt aspirations for a meaningful, unified life plus a sense of
present circumstances as simultaneously inhibiting those aspirations.
This content of felt aspirations and a complex sense of circumstances can
inherendy be embodied, according to Hegel, in certain kinds of struc­
tures of developing sound, with certain open-ended degrees of latitude.
In order, however, to make clear both the nature of the human content of
music and how that content inherently permits embodiment in purely
musical structures, it will be helpful first to survey briefly more standard,
more scrutable, and yet ultimately one-sided philosophical views about
music and meaning.

In his On the Musically Beautiful (1854), the Czech music critic Eduard
Hanslick distinguishes sharply between purely musical ideas and their
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

development in musical form, on the one hand, and conceptions that are
expressible in language, on the other.

A musical idea brought into complete manifestation in appearance is

already a self-subsistent beauty; it is an end in itself, and it is in no
way primarily a medium for the representation of feelings or concep­
tions. The content of music is tonally moving forms.^

Hanslick goes on to compare the self-contained, nonrepresentational

character of beautiful forms with visual arabesques that please the eye but
represent nothing, adding that musical arabesques, since they develop
temporally, are living rather than “dead and static.”® We may use what
Hanslick calls “epithets” to describe music and so characterize musical
motives as “arrogant, peevish, tender, spirited, yearning.”^ But we must
“never lose sight of the fact that we are using [these terms] only figura­
tively and take care not to say such things as ‘This music portrays arro­
gance.’ Music—at least beautiful art music—has nothing to do with any
content that is either borrowed from the rest of life or capable of embod­
iment in other media.

The beauty of a musical composition ... is a specifically musical kind of

beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is self-contained and in no
need of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of
tones and their artistic combination. Relationships, fraught with signifi­
cance, of sounds which are in themselves charming—their congruity
and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and sub­
siding—this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner con­
templation and pleases us as beautiful.®

Hanslick’s formalism has been widely embraced in modernity,

where there has been special importance placed on distinguishing differ­
ent spheres of experience from one another. It seems important to many,
at least when musical works are strikingly successful, not to confuse what
seems to be distinctly musical experience with, say, sculptural experience
or political experience or religious experience. In The Power of Sound
(1880) Edmund Gurney writes that “the explanation of the essential ef­
fect” of musical art “must be sought... in the independently impressive
aspect of Music.”’ “The ground for the essential effects of the [musical]
art must be sought... in the facts of mere note-after-note melodic mo­
tion.”® Though music is sometimes emotionally expressive and sometimes
calls up scenes by association, these things are not what is important about
it as an independent form of art; rather, its impressiveness is. When we
122
RICHARD ELDRIDGE

look for expressiveness and representation, we frequently find nothing,

and we invariably miss what is of central and distinctive value: note-after­
note melodic (and harmonic and rhythmic) motion.
Given the putative distinctiveness of musical experience, it would
then be a category mistake to attempt to “read in” to that experience
meanings and values that are properly realized in other domains. Such
readings-in would bespeak ignorance of musical experience rather than
insight into it. Following Hanslick and Gurney, Peter Kivy argues that
though it is possible “to make a claim about what some piece of absolute
music is ‘saying’ . . . making [that claim] good” is impossible.® We should,
Kivy urges, accept the thought that “the blessing of absolute music [is]
that it frees our thought to wander in worlds that are completely self-
sufficient,” where we are concerned only with musical processes and struc­
tures, and with musical tensions and resolutions, altogether liberated
from any thought about life otherwise.'® “The genius of absolute music is
to make you think of aught but itself and, in so doing, of its (and your)
liberation from the world.”" Stephen Davies defends a similar view, with
perhaps less metaphysical pathos, as he remarks that we are often just
“curious” about things and “capable of finding enjoyment in attempting
to comprehend . . . works in their particularity.”'^ Our involvement with
music, Davies urges, arises out of nothing other than “love of the activity”
that is engaged in “for fun.”'®
Such formalist views have considerable plausibility. Attempts to find
plots or messages in works of pure instrumental music are often contrived.
Musical structures and processes of development are frequently foci of
attention apparently “for their own sake.” Absorption in such structures
and processes can indeed be “transcendently” self-sustaining.
At the same time, however, it can seem dismissive of the significance
of pure instrumental music to regard it only as a pure acoustic structure
for formal attention. Does music not in fact both arise from and con­
tribute to human life more generally? It seems natural to regard com­
posers as undertaking to “say” something about human life, albeit ab­
stractly and symbolically. Purely musical processes seem to many listeners
to echo and allude to processes of action. As Paul Shorey remarks, Plato
and Aristotle regarded “music [as] the most imitative of the arts” in virtue
of its “communication of a mood or feeling” whose pattern it shares.'^
Even Gurney, who locates the essential power of music in melody alone,
concedes that “the general bearing of speech on melody” is responsible for
“the vivid effect, which a fine melody produces, of being something said—
a real utterance of transcendent significance.”'®
The music theorist Edward T. Cone suggests that the performance
of music involves taking up a role or persona that functions as a source of
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HEQEI. ON MUSIC

Utterance. Performers of musical works, that is, do something that is like

acting from a verbal script; they play a role. “All music, like all literature, is
dramatic;. . . every composition is an utterance depending on an act of
impersonation which it is the duty of the performer or performers to
‘ make clear.”'® Even in text-based music. Cone argues, musical personae
“express themselves at least as much by melody as by speech, and as much
by tone-color as by phonetic sound”: the music itself, that is to say, speaks.
True, purely instrumental music “has no content that can be paraphrased
in other music, or in words, or in any other medium; and its elements—
notes, chords, motifs—normally have no referents”;'® but verbal language
too “has a gestural as well as a strictly semantic aspect,” and “especially in
dramatic poetry . . . words . . . can be used to produce almost purely ges-
; tural effects that depend less on the specific meanings of the words than
i on the mode of performance . . . they imply.”'® The meaning of music is
; bound up with this gestural dimension of communicative utterance,
c Kendall Walton similarly suggests that musical expressiveness can be
’ regarded as a species of representation. “To be expressive is to bear a sig­
nificant relation to human emotions or feelings or whatever it is that is
i expressed. Why doesn’t this itself amount to possessing extra-musical
‘meanings,’ and why shouldn’t expressiveness count as a species of repre-
I ' sentation?”^® According to Walton, purely instrumental music prescribes
I imaginings: we are to hear in it imaginatively certain courses of emotional
development, in something like the way in which even abstract paintings
frequently prescribe that we see one figure behind another.^' Like Cone,
Walton suggests that these courses of development are frequently to be as­
cribed to an implied persona set up by the compositional action of the ac­
tual composer, just as a lyric poet sets up an implied speaker functioning
i as a locus of certain thoughts and feelings, as itself a role into which its
■i readers are to enter.
|; Peter Kivy objects against this suggestion that Walton has conflated
^ two quite distinct concepts of imagining: Kantian productive or construc-
;• tive imagination, through which we come to notice anything at all; and
I fictional imagination, in which we take ourselves to follow a story about
r nonexistent characters.^® While it is true, Kivy concedes, that we must
i imaginatively attend to the piece of music before us, it by no means fol-
lows that in doing so we are taking the music to be about any characters or
( actions. While this seems clearly right, Walton, too, notes that works of
\ music do not present us with (images of or claims about) definite objects,
[: persons, or actions that we can identify elsewhere, apart from the music.
I In this sense, there is, in Walton’s terminology, no “work world” presented
I by a piece of purely instrumental music.®® But this fact does not stop the
! musical work from offering us auditory experiences that we “use ... as
124
RICHARD ELDRIDGE

props” for imagining courses of emotional life, and when we thus imagi­
natively use props—as the work prescribes—then the work is functioning
communicatively: it “says” something to us or “represents” to us what cer­
tain courses of emotional development are like by inducing us imagina­
tively to undergo them.^‘‘
Jerrold Levinson defends a similar view, and he adds an account of
why we play such games of dramatic musical imagination. Musical struc­
ture alone can be worth our attention as an object of pure enjoyment, just
as Davies argues.'^'’ That is one of its benefits. But musical structure as a
prop for imagining also offers the further rewards of participating in emo­
tional resolution (feeling emotions to have courses of temporal develop­
ment, like the development of plot in Aristotelian terms from beginning
to middle to end), of cultivating expressive potency, and of communing
emotionally with another mind.^® Quite other than mere escape from the
world, experiencing music imaginatively functions as the catharsis—the
clarification and the cleansing—of the emotional lives we may share with
other human beings.
Taking the opening of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 95 as his ex­
ample, Fred Everett Maus argues not only that it is natural to hear in it “a
succession of dramatic actions,” but further that we cannot even develop
and apply the technical terminology of formal musical analysis (cadences,
suspensions, dissonance, resolution, and so on, as manifested in certain
harmonic relations and successions) without relying on hearing the drama
in the music.Structural description presupposes dramatic description
in order to identify the lexical units of formal analysis and the relations
of sequiturity among them within a work. “A satisfactory account of struc­
ture must already be an aesthetically oriented narrative of dramatic ac­
tion.”^® We hear the musical drama before we attend to the formal struc­
ture in itself.
A second strategy for characterizing the content of purely instru­
mental music focuses less immediately on the workings of the imagination
of the individual auditor and more on the social uses of works of music.
Broadly speaking, those who have developed this strategy are all inter­
ested in works of music as instruments of signification. Here the choice of
the term “signification” is deliberate. Rather than specifying a definite,
paraphrasable, single thought that a musical work encodes, these theo­
rists instead look at how the production of certain kinds of musical works
both proceeds from and refigures norms for the development of subjec­
tivity that are already in circulation in their cultures. In thus turning their
attention on the social uses of music in encouraging and inhibiting cer­
tain courses of identity development within the framework of the repro­
duction of social life, these theorists are turning the techniques of ethno-
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

musicology, originally developed to study music in non-Western cultures,

on Western art music.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik has contributed to this line of thinking by
developing a distinction between structural (formal) listening and style
(sound-surface) listening.^® Structural listening, she argues, is foreign to
most music in most cultural settings.™ “Only some music strives for au­
tonomy. All music has sound and a style. Only some people listen struc­
turally. Everyone has cultural and emotional responses to music.”^' Like
Mans, Subotnik argues that formal analysis presupposes stylistic listening.
“Style is not extrinsic to structure but rather defines the conditions for ac­
tual structural possibilities;. . . structure is perceived as a function of style
more than as its foundation.”^^ Building on work by Leonard Meyer,^^ Su­
botnik argues that when people do learn to listen structurally to absolute
music, they are entering into a course of development aimed at the culti­
vation of self-conscious, distinctive, putatively autonomous individual­
ity—the kind of being-in-the-world that has been cultivated in the West,
but not so clearly elsewhere, since the Renaissance.^^ Structural listening
requires “in its pure state . . . the renunciation of premises, organizational
principles, purposes, meanings, values, and meanings derived from out­
side of a musical structure” for the sake of focusing instead on structure
alone as an object of purely contemplative attention.®'^ This requirement
is part of post-Renaissance Western art music’s social meaning, a social
meaning that is bound up with the project of Western individualism.
Susan McClary develops a similar reading of the social functions of
post-Renaissance Western art music, focusing specifically, however, on its
roles in furthering certain conceptions of gendered identity.™ For ex­
ample, Monteverdi’s invention of the stile representativo in inaugurating
modern dramatic opera in the seventeenth century rested on his devel­
opment of distinct styles of musical expression for female and male char­
acters. The dramatic action of an opera requires women and men doing
things. The musical task of the composer in setting the action requires
writing music that cornments on and deepens the characterological rep­
resentation of the women and men presented. So what did Monteverdi
do? He wrote music for men that is lyrical, transcendent, dominated by
well-organized stepwise melodic motion and clear I-V-I harmonic devel­
opment with strong final cadences. Rewrote music for women that is much
more chromatic: there are more passing tones, more suspensions, less
sense of a governing key center, and weaker cadences, so that the music is
almost antiteleological. Why did Monteverdi do this? Because he was both
drawing on and reinforcing a sense already circulating in his culture of
how men and women respectively mostly do and mostly should think and
feel and act. Men control their passions, and they set and achieve goals;
126
RICHARD ELORIDGE

women are emotional, seductive, and unstable.®^ McClary also notes and
criticizes the standard use in the formal analysis of purely instrumental
music of the terminologies of masculine and feminine themes and mas­
culine and feminine cadences. Masculine themes and cadences have a
strongly marked direction of motion; feminine themes and cadences in
contrast are more wandering. The broad point is clear: the composition,
performance, and consumption of so-called absolute music—putatively
a set of structures designed for the absorption of any reflective intelli­
gence—are cultural practices bound up with the rest of culture, where
rights, powers, and roles of all kinds are constructed and contested. In its
cultural settings music does significative work.
Lawrence Kramer has offered what he calls three radical presuppo­
sitions for studying music that generalize the strategies of Subotnik and
McClary.
1. “Music participates actively in the construction of subjectivity.”*®
That is, composing, performing, and listening to music are activities
through which specific senses of a self and its interests are developed.
2. “We hear music only as situated subjects and hear as music only
that acoustic imagery which somehow ‘expresses’ part of our situatedness,
our ensemble of ways to be.”*® That is, what makes a piece of music intel­
ligible as music is not a function of form alone for all subjects. Instead, dif­
ferent subjects respond to and take an interest in different forms, and
which forms they respond to (and which they don’t) is in part a function of
what they in particular care about and do within specific cultural settings.
(Music can also teach us some new things to care about and do.)
3. The processes of subject formation that include processes and
practices of music construction and of music performing and listening
always further some ideologies and undermine others.''*’ That is, no con­
ception of what it is worthwhile for subjects to do and to care about effec­
tively articulates everyone’s interest. All conceptions of interest are con­
tested, and all are effective for some, but not for others. Specific ways of
composing, performing, and listening to music are always caught up in a
contestatory play of conflicting interests.

What ought we to make of these opposed formalist and antiformalist

stances in the philosophy of music? It does seem important to emphasize
that we typically listen to music with engaged imaginative attention, not
through ambient perception alone, and it seems plausible to suppose that
 127
HEGEL ON MUSIC

composing, performing, and listening to music are practices through

which subjective identities—certain routes of interest and feeling—are
developed, always within a particular culture as an ensemble of practices.
The interest of works of purely instrumental music as objects of imagina­
tive attention and as signifiers within cultural practices seems readily to
transcend simple escape, enjoyment, and fun (however much these are
present). At the same time, however, “readings” of emotional and depic­
tive plots of works of instrumental music can seem contrived. Are we
really prescribed to imagine pink elephants dancing or even to “swell with”
the music as our own emotional expression? Why not just listen?
What is in fact needed in order to mediate the formalist and anti­
formalist stances is a deeper and more complete theory of subjectivity, its
cultural situation, and its prospects. Such a deeper and more complete
theory must focus in detail on how purely musical content (tonally mov­
ing forms) can be used to articulate and address subjectivity’s situation
and interests, and do so in ways that are both parallel to and yet specifi­
cally different from other forms of articulation and address. This deeper
and more complete theory of subjectivity in relation to music is exactly
what Hegel provides in the section on music in his Aesthetics: Lectures on
Fine Art. In order, however, to see exactly how the Aesthetics \n general and
the section on music in particular develop Hegel’s theory of subjectivity
in relation to musical practice, it will be helpful first to rehearse briefly the
main lines of Hegel’s theory of subjectivity in his theoretical philosophy.
In an important summary passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Hegel observes that when we stop thinking about ourselves as essentially
bearers of representational awareness but instead also think of ourselves
as agents, then we think of ourselves as in a situation in which our “cer­
tainty is to itself its own object {Gegenstand^ That is to say, as emerging
agents coming to take up various practical repertoires afforded within a
cultural situation, we have an initial inchoate sense—a subjective cer­
tainty—of being this or that: the child of one’s parents, the class clown,
the possessor of a musical ear, a middling runner, and so bn. This initially
diffuse subjective certainty is an object of our awareness. It is something
to be tested and worked through, as one develops one’s ear, enters into
new ways of being with one’s parents, gives up running, or begins to take
schoolwork more seriously. We are capable of reflecting on the different
skills and ways of being that we take ourselves to possess. Hence we can say
that there is across the different things we do a “unity of self-consciousness
with itself Yet this unity is initially only implicit, in the sense that how
and why we turn to doing now this and now that remains opaque to us and
determined by circumstantial contingencies rather than by reasons. If
things go well as we grow up (both individually and historico-culturally),
then “self-consciousness exhibits itself as the movement in which this
antithesis [between its turning to now this, now that and its being articu­
lately and rationally self-identical throughout its different activities] is re­
moved, and the identity of itself with itself becomes explicit [wird: comes
about, becomes, or is made manifest] In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s use­
ful rephrasing of Hegel’s thought:

All of the Phenomenology of Spirit describes man’s effort to reappropriate

himself. At every period of history he starts from a subjective certainty,
makes his actions conform to the directions of that certainty, and wit­
nesses the surprising consequences of his first intention, discovering its
objective truth. He then modifies his project, gets under way once more,
again becomes aware of the abstract [i.e., merely conceived; unrealized]
qualities of his new project, until subjective certainty finally yields objec­
tive truth [i.e., comes to fulfillment] and in the light of consciousness he
becomes fully what he already obscurely was.*'*

The ideal but actualizable and even self-actualizing end of this pro­
cess of growing up, according to Hegel, is free human life, construed as the
reasonable expression of both one’s particular talents and one’s shared
human, rational-reflective nature, within a cultural setting of mutual rec­
ognition and endorsement. We come to both agentive and representa­
tional subjecthood from within a specific culturally afforded ensemble of
practices. We then develop a point of view both on these practices and
on ourselves as capable of this and that in relation to practices. We linger
in some practices as we catch on to how things are done and practice at
them, while we withdraw from other practices in frustration and disap­
pointment. Historically, practices are themselves modified through this
play of engagements and withdrawals, until, Hegel argues, a culture of
freedom is reached, in which each person can live both freely and rea­
sonably, in ways whose worth is evident to all. In the formulation of the
Philosophy of Right:

Freedom lies neither in indeterminacy [withdrawal from all repertoires,

techniques, and immersions in content] nor in determinacy [simply
given contingently, without reflection and reflective endorsement], but
is both at once. . . . Freedom is to will something determinate, yet to be
with oneself [bei sich\ in this determinacy and to return once more to
the universal.'*®’

One might well wonder whether Hegel’s argument for the claim that
all possessors of an apperceptively unified, judgmental consciousness
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

must be committed to pursuing a free life so construed is sound.One

might also wonder whether Hegel’s claim that this project can in fact be
completed by everyone in and through the formation of a culture of ra­
tional freedom that is on the verge of appearance is well founded. “Human
beings,” as Robert Pippin puts it, “may simply be the unhappy conscious­
ness; Hegel may be right about their ‘self-diremption’ but wrong about its
possible resolution.”^^ They may be capable of reflection on their subjec­
tive certainties and committed therein to the project of expressive-rational
freedom in shared cultural life, but be unable to complete that project.
Yet, astonishingly perhaps, these difficulties (if they are difficulties)
in Hegel’s systematic theoretical philosophy raise few problems for his
philosophy of fine art, especially his philosophy of romantic art. His treat­
ment of music as a central romantic art in particular is faithful to, even em­
phasizes, the thought that rational-expressive freedom in and through
cultural life remains an ideal that is neither empty for us nor yet quite
perfectly actualizable, at least insofar as there is compelling art. Musical
development, then, abstractly models our continuing efforts to achieve
expressive-rational freedom and unity with ourselves across our various
social roles. That this modeling is abstract, rather than sociohistorically
and semantically concrete, indicates that this ideal is not, or not yet,
wholly actualized throughout personal and social life. Musical develop­
ment of a certain kind is an anticipation of freedom, not its concrete
sociohistorical achievement. Our participation as auditors in the process
of musical development directly indicates our involvement in the actuali­
zation of this ideal, insofar as musical hearing requires us to be aware of
ourselves as actively listening to sustained musical development over time.
In listening to music, we exercise and develop the same power of reflec­
tive self-awareness aiming at satisfying closure on which our commitment
to expressive-rational freedom depends. In order to see how this hap­
pens, we can now take up the details of Hegel’s remarks on music.

Together with painting and poetry, music is, according to Hegel, one of
the romantic arts or “the arts whose mission it is to give shape to the inner
side of personal life” {A 2:625). In contrast to the symbolic arts, exempli­
fied by architecture, and the classical arts, exemplified by sculpture, the
romantic arts do not undertake centrally to present something external
for its own sake as a “free individuality” {A 2:888), but involve instead
“spirit’s inner self-apprehension and its preoccupation with the sphere of
its own circumstances, aims, and actions” {A 2:889). This turn away from
external free individuality is manifested even in depictive painting, for
the objects presented in a painting are presented from a point of view and
for an actively observing intelligence that must take up a particular point
of view, both narrational and perspectival, in order to grasp the painting,
unlike a sculpture of a recognizable object that may typically imply no
narrative and be seen from many spatial points of view.
Music goes beyond painting, however, in refusing all depiction of
definite objects. Unlike painting, which continues to depict (albeit by pre­
senting three dimensions indirectly in two), music “keeps firmly to the
inner life without giving it any outward shape or figure” (A 2:795). It is, as
formalists urge, in this sense depictively about nothing, nonrepresenta-
tional. Yet music’s reduction of externality to temporality alone has a sig­
nificative purpose. Music “takes the subjective as such for both form and
content” {A 2:889). It is about what it is like to apprehend and have expe­
riences as a subject in general, with a subject’s general reflectiveness and
associated aim. It is, as antiformalists urge, in this sense significative.
Sounds succeeding one another in time are the appropriate medium
for inviting reflection on point-of-view-having and aim-pursuing in gen­
eral. Sounds “cannot. . . portray [objects] as they actually exist” (d 2:891).
Thus they are suited to sustain both point-of-view-having in general and
reflection on it, without being tied to the presentation of any specific ob­
ject. Even beyond the abandoning of all spatiality (the abandonment
of the painterly surface, beyond painting’s own abandonment of three-
dimensional form), music further involves a “double negation” (A 2:890) of
externality: (1) we listen “to the results of the inner vibration” {A 2:890),
focusing our attention on the quality and development of the sound, not
on the violin or horn as physical objects; and (2) sound itself either decays
once produced or it is sustained only through further effort and up to a
limit set by breath or length of bow. (This latter point and how music typ
ically has exploited it explains why we tend to hear exclusively electroni­
cally generated music, where these physical limits do not exist, more as
soundscape than as genuinely felt melody, even not quite as music at all.)
Material media are used in the romantic arts not simply as objects of
sensory apprehension, but markedly as vehicles of constructive power
of arrangement speaking to constructive power of apprehension. Post-
medieval music makes use of equal temperament “nonnatural” tuning,
initially developed by Vincenzo Galilei in Florence in the 1580s, precisely
in order to extend the possibilities of temporally sustained constructive
arrangement, thus breaking from the medieval musical practice of the
monodic replication of what had been thought to be the music of the ce­
lestial spheres.^* In postmedieval music, emphasis on the constructive
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

power exercised in ordering the material and in hearing its order is car­
ried to its greatest height, as it exploits inherendy “ideal” and “vanishing”
sonic material in time.
There is, then, in purely instrumental music no depiction of external
objects and events.

Music does not possess a natural sphere outside its existing forms, with
which it is compelled to comply. The range of its compliance with law
and the necessity of its forms fall principally in the sphere of the notes
themselves, which do not enter into so close a connection with the spe­
cific character of the content placed in them, and in their use mostly
leave a wide scope for the subjective freedom of the execution. {A 2:898)

Though there are certain associations that are called up by certain sounds
(hunting by horn calls; the pastoral by woodwinds), even these associa­
tions are matters of history and convention, and a work of music is suc­
cessful as art not simply insofar as it evokes such associations, but rather
insofar as it achieves—as a result of “the subjective freedom of the execu­
tion” (the composer’s constructive power)—“necessity ... in the sphere
of the notes themselves.” In order to succeed distinctively as music, music
“must free itself from any given text” (A 2:952). (Aptly, Hegel notes that
in opera and song “the text is the servant of the music” [A 2:935] and that
great scripted drama and poetry often do not make for great opera and
song.) In pursuing musical necessity, “sound, just as sound, is treated as an
end in itself,” and “artistic note-formation [is] its essential end” (A 2:899).
“The real region [of the musician’s] compositions remains a rather for­
mal inwardness, pure sound; and his immersion in the topic becomes not
the formation of something external but rather a retreat into the inner
life’s own freedom, a self-enjoyment” (A 2:895).
This retreat into inner freedom and self-enjoyment that purely in­
strumental music is to accomplish is not, however, for the sake of either
pure auditory delectation or immediate sense-based pleasure only. Ideas,
particularly the idea of completely accomplished individuality in its
achievement of expressive-rational freedom, are to enter into the compo­
sition not discursively, but in and through the arrangement of sound
alone. “The difficult task assigned in music is to make [the] inwardly veiled
life and energy [of the subject] echo on its own account in notes . . . and
to immerse ideas into this element of sound, in order to produce them
anew for feeling and sympathy” (A 2:902). Arrangements of notes can de­
part from the effort to embody the inner life of the expressive-rational sub­
ject and so become merely decorative (the more ordinary movements of
Vivaldi? Pachelbel’s Canon in CP). Music “may easily become something
132
RICHARD ELDRIDGE

Utterly devoid of thought and feeling” (A 2:954). Freedom from any fixed
content—either external or conceptually articulated—“will therefore al­
ways more or less carry on into caprice” (A 2:955), at least in comparison
with the definiteness of presentation in painting and in most poetry. The
composing of purely instrumental music carries with it an inherent risk
of collapsing into an activity of thoughtless fancy yielding an arbitrary or
merely decorative product. As Carl Dahlhaus notes, “Hegel’s philosophy
of music is stamped, in every phase of its development, with his appre­
hension that emancipating music [from text and from representation],
and emancipating a soul that returns into itself in ‘pure sounding,’ will
lead off into sterility.”^® As Dahlhaus further sees, one way, according to
Hegel, for music to embody ideas is to make use of a text: dramatic li­
bretto in opera or lyric poetry as a point de depart for song. “From the start
the libretto gives us distinct ideas and tears our minds away from that
more dreamlike element of feeling which is without ideas” (A 2:937), and
so helps to overcome a tendency of music toward caprice and mere sonic
decoration.
But while the risk of caprice is inherent in composing absolute
music, the outcome of caprice is not. Absolute music can embody content
abstractly, without text, and it must do so if it is to be successful as signifi­
cant art. Hegel notes that even music as accompaniment

must not sink to such servitude [of the text] that... it forgets the free
flow of its own movements and thereby, instead of creating a self-
complete work of art, produces merely the intellectual trick of using
musical means of expression for the truest possible indication of a
subject-matter outside them and already cut and dried without them.
Every perceptible compulsion, every cramping of free production,
breaks up the impression [to be made by music]. (A 2:937)

Instead, the composer can and must produce a strictly musical develop­
ment, either in setting a text or in producing music alone. Only in this way
can ideas—and in particular the idea of being a subject capable of ex­
pressive individuality—be immersed in sound for “feeling and sympathy”
directed at the developing sound itself.
Music then, according to Hegel, “claims as its own the depths of a
person’s inner life as such” (A 2:891, emphasis added). How does it man­
age to do this? First, the sounds that compose a musical work exist only as
an ideal phenomenon, that is, as something essentially realized in experi­
ence. Hegel captures this point by noting, again, that we hear the bounded
vibrational results of the use of the violin or horn rather than attending
to the violin or horn as physical objects. Second, and more crucially.
r
133
HEGEL ON MUSIC

music as composed, developing sound exists inherently in recollection, as

we follow the succession of the notes and their connection with one an­
other. Roger Scruton makes this point by noting that works of music are
tertiary objects, composed not simply of sounds (as either physically mea­
surable pitches or pure momentary c[ualia) but also of tones, heard as
leading to one another. It requires memory and attention to hold devel­
oping motives, themes, and harmonic and rhythmic patterns in mind as
patterns, not all of whose elements are present at any single moment. The
pattern that is the music must be followed from within recollection. As
Scruton puts it.

We might say that a work of music is a tertiary object, as are the tones that
compose it. Only a being with certain intellectual and imaginative capac­
ities can hear music, and these are precisely the capacities required for
the perception of tertiary qualities.'*"

Hegel captures this point in his terminology by noting that a work of

music “is a communication which ... is carried by the inner subjective
life, and is to exist for that life alone” (A 2:891-92). Only a being capable
ia
of recognitive recollection can follow and apprehend the work, which
itself exists essentially in being apprehended.
The composer, according to Hegel, produces a temporal arrange­
ment of tones through which marked differences (changes of pitch, of
motive, of theme, of harmony, of rhythm) are both encountered and over­
come: housed within an overall intelligible, recollectable ensemble or pat­
tern. In this way composers explicitly test and develop their powers to m
encounter and organize difference, therein establishing that they them­
selves are coherent subjectivities across time who have survived and flour­
ished through an encounter with difference. In the single most important
passage of his remarks on music, Hegel writes:

Recollection {^Erinnerun^ of the theme adopted is at the same time the

artist’s inner collection [Er-innerun^ of himself, i.e., an inner conviction
that he IS the artist and can expatiate in the theme at will and move
hither and thither in it. (A 2:897)

Through this recollection of a developing pattern, expressive unity of the

self with itself is tested and developed—abstractly across time, in and
through the occurrence of different experiences (markedly new pitches,
motives, themes, rhythms, harmonies) that are nonetheless experienced
as forming a unified whole (established by overall harmonic development
and rhythmic and instrumental consistency). The self in general has the
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE

possibility and task of “maintaining itself in its other as the self and only
the self as such. The self is in time, and time is the being of the subject
himself” {A 2:908). Initially its self-identity is “wholly abstract and empty
and it consists in making itself its object” (A 2:907), that is, in having an ac­
complished, difference-embracing unity with itself as its task. An empty
succession of unrelated “mere nows” must be organized so that I can rec­
ognize my life in relation to my experiences as mine. The identity of the
self with itself must, in the terminology of the Phenomenology, come about
or be made explicit. By organizing divergent materials into a unified pat­
tern essentially displayed in a subject’s apprehension, music overcomes
the incoherence and fragmentation of the self and achieves—within its
sphere of tones—expressive freedom and unity with oneself. It “carries
this liberation [from abstract, empty subjectivity and mere unintelligible
temporal succession and into the experience of meaningful, differenti­
ated totality and selfhood] to the most extreme heights” (A 2:896).

The self. . . only becomes a self by concentrating its momentary experi­

ences and returning into itself from them. . . . The self is what persists in
and by itself, and its self-concentration interrupts the indefinite series
of points of time and makes gaps in their abstract continuity; and in its
awareness of its discrete experiences, the self recalls itself and finds it­
self again and thus is freed from mere self-externalization and change.
(A 2:914)

This achievement of the self is brought about initially through the

composer’s act of construction, but is likewise carried out in and through
the listener’s attentive following of the musical development. (Composers
are, after all, the first auditors—often in imagination alone—of their own
work as they monitor the course of the musical development that they are
attempting to achieve, thus checking on “how it is going.”) AsJulian John­
son puts Hegel’s point, the self, whether composer or listener, “experi­
ences the temporal progression as its own.”^^ In R. K. Elliott’s phrasing, we
experience the music from within “as if it were our own expression.”®^
There is neither definite representation here nor, frequently, is there def­
inite expression of emotion, but there is significance for the subject—the
accomplishment and reinforcement of its life as a subject—in this partic­
ipation. Despite his prima facie pure formalism, Gurney captures this
point well.

The deep satisfaction felt in winning our way from note to note, or
phrase to phrase, continually gives us a sense of inward triumph [even]
in music whose general expression, so far as it is describable, would not
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

be called triumphant. ... In poor music, note after note and phrase
after phrase seem to present themselves Uivially and poindessly; but in
music we enjoy, as we progressively grasp the form, the sense of absolute
possession, of oneness with it, the cogent and unalterable rightness
of every step in our progress, may produce the most vivid impression of
Uiumphal advance.®^

As already indicated, the key to the liberative establishment through

attentive listening of the unity of the self with itself is musical development:
the coherent, recollectable integration of various musical elements with
one another across time. In describing the achievement of unity of musi­
cal pattern across differences, Hegel offers a short account of what A. B.
Marx was later to baptize and codify as sonata form.

In a musical composition a topic can be unfolded in its more specific

relations, oppositions, conflicts, ttansitions, complications, and resolu­
tions owing to the way in which a theme is first developed and then
another enters [exposition: first theme, second theme], and now both
of them in their alternation or their interfusion advance and change
[development], one becoming subordinate here and then more promi­
nent again there, now seeming defeated and then entering again victo­
rious. {A 2:897)

Dahlhaus notes that Hegel explicidy condemned Carl Maria von Weber’s
mosaic technique of presenting persons on stage via unintegrated “char­
acteristic” musical motives, without thematic interweaving and devel­
opment, as in von Weber’s Der Freischiitz, whose Berlin premier Hegel
attended in June 1821 In his Freischiitz critique, Hegel shares with Hum­
boldt and Goethe a normative classicism or preference for the integrative
formal techniques of the Classical Style.®^
Thematic contrast and development is, however, not the only device
for achieving unity of musical pattern across variation. Hegel’s most gen­
eral term for the overall structure of successful music is “cadenced in­
terjection” {kadenzierte Interjektion). “Music is itself art only by being a
cadenced interjection” (A 2:903). Here “interjection” implies something
between a mere immediate cry and the putting forward of a conceptually
formed judgment for contemplation. It is something more formed than
“a natural shriek of feeling” and something less formed and more specific
to its material medium than a thought that can be assessed as true or false.
“Interjection” implies the insertion into a structure of a compositional
unit—a new theme or motif (melodic, rhythmic, or harmonic)—as a
marked new focus of attention. “Cadenced” then implies that interjections
must lead toward some culmination, toward a resolution of the material
that has been interjectively introduced. Closure or consummation, rather
than simple cessation, must be achieved.
The unavoidable means, according to Hegel, for establishing musi­
cal unity over significant stretches of short-term attention is rhythm. In­
troduction of a bar or measure functions “to establish a specific temporal
unit as the measure and rule for the marked contemplation of the previ­
ously undifferentiated temporal succession” {A 2:915). Without bars, that
is, musical events cannot be readily marked for hearing by having begin­
nings and endings come on strong rather than weak beats. One needs a
system of regular strong and weak beats in order to achieve this marking
of thematic and melodic material for hearing. “Only if the definiteness of
the measure conquers and regulates what is arbitrarily unlike [i.e., specif­
ically different pitches and sonorities] is that definiteness proved to be the
unity of accidental variety and the rule for it” (A 2:916).
Over significant stretches of short-term musical attention, rhythmic
patterning is necessary for musical hearing of what is significant. Over
longer stretches of development there must be governing “deeper re­
lations and secrets of harmony which have a necessity of their own”
(A 2:932). A successful musical piece must, somehow, move from conso­
nance into dissonance and then into resolution. Successful music

abandons a purely consonant progression, goes on to oppositions, sum­

mons all the starkest contradictions and dissonances and gives proof
of its own power by stirring up all the powers of harmony; it has the
certainty nevertheless of being able to allay the battles of these powers
[i.e., to achieve resolution] and thereby to celebrate the satisfying tri­
umph of melodic tranquility [in the coincidence of melodic closure with
harmonic closure]. (A 2:932)

In general as the music develops, melody, or what Hegel calls “the

poetic element in music, the language of the soul” (A 2:929), “float[s] in-
dependendy above the bar, rhythm, and harmony” (A 2:930): it has its own
contour. “And yet on the other hand it has no means of actualization ex­
cept the rhythmical measured movement of the notes and their essential
and necessary [harmonic] relations” (A 2:930). Rhythm is required to
mark significant melodic musical events (beginnings and ends of phrases),
and harmony is required in order to lend to the melody a significant place
in an overall, longer-term harmonic development, where in the end har­
monic closure and melodic closure coincide.
In focusing on the importance of the coincidence of harmonic and
melodic closure within a rhythmic structure, Hegel mediates the classic
opposition between Rousseau’s advocacy of melody as the natural locus of
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

the life of music and Rameau’s emphasis on the necessity of properly de­
veloped harmonic development in a successful work. “In [its] close link
with harmony the melody does not forgo its freedom at all; it only liberates
itself from the subjectivity of arbitrary caprice in fanciful developments
and bizarre changes and only acquires its true independence precisely in
this way” (d 2:930). The freely achieved substantive and meaningful unity
of the melody requires appropriate harmonic cadencing as its closure.
Melody, one might say, stands to harmony as Willkur (choice or subjective
particularity) stands to rational necessity (reasonable rules for self­
formation and expression in social life): the former finds its significance
in relation to the latter and only therein, and vice versa. “We have a battle
between freedom and necessity: a battle between imagination’s freedom
to give itself up to its soaring [in melody] and the necessity of those har­
monic relations which imagination needs for its expression [as opposed
to mere unburdening, discharge, or shrieking] and in which its own sig­
nificance lies” (A 2:932).

Hegel’s account of music as a fine art applies most obviously to Classical

Style music (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven). In keeping with its norms, Hegel
emphasizes the importance of thematic developmental structure (exposi­
tion and development), overall harmonic organization, the use of regular
rhythms, and the working-through of motivic materials in overall compo­
sitional unity.^® When appropriate formal structure is achieved, then music
is properly freed from dependence on any text, and it displays a value for
the life of a subject that is independent of liturgical or other extramusical
cultural uses.®’ Hegel himself remarks that “nowadays . . . two miracles
have occurred in music: one in the conception, the other in the genius of
virtuosi in the execution. . . . The result is that. . . the notion of what
music is and what it can do has been more and more widened” (A 2:936),
as though it has just recently been discovered what art music properly can
be and is. Hegel even reportedly remarked in dinner table conversation,
after having heard the revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion by Mendels­
sohn in Berlin in March 1829: “That is no proper music; we have really
gotten further than that now.”®® Dahlhaus, who cites this remark, goes on
to speculate that Hegel may here have been endorsing E. T. A. Hoffman’s
thought, in his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the 1810
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, that Beethoven’s purely instrumental music
is itself of direct religious significance, so that we need not revert any
longer to textually based Passion music.®® Though it is unclear whether he
has Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven explicitly in mind, Hegel does remark
that “especially in recent times music has torn itself free from a content
already clear on its own account and retreated in this way into its own
medium” (A 2:899).
This retreat has its costs, Hegel notes, in that loss of textual content
means that purely instrumental music

has lost its power over the whole inner life, all the more so as the plea­
sure it can give relates to only one side of the art, namely bare interest in
the purely musical element in the composition and its skillfulness, a side
of music which is for connoisseurs only and scarcely appeals to the gen­
eral human interest in art. (A 2:899)

As a result of this retreat from textual content, there has arisen in relation
to music a division between amateurs and experts: “An essendal differ­
ence begins to arise between the dilettante and the expert” (A 2:953). Am­
ateurs condnue to prefer text-based “music as accompaniment” (A 2:954)
and are tempted to try “snatching a meaning” out of what is to them an
“apparently insubstantial procession of sounds” (A 2:954). Experts, in
contrast, have at “their fingers’ ends the inner musical relations between
notes and instruments [and] love instrumental music in its artistic use of
harmonies and melodious interactings and changing forms” (A 2:954).
They are “entirely satisfied by the music itself” (A 2:954). Yet although
Hegel, as Dahlhaus has emphasized,®® worries about the inherent risk of
musical emptiness and about a tendency of musical development itself to
become capricious, there is, for him, no going back to arty earlier text- and
ritual-based musical culture, and he identifies more with the experts than
with amateurs (despite his own confession that he is “little versed in this
sphere” [A 2:893]). Fine art music must develop as music alone.
In virtue of the most natural and obvious applicadon of Hegel’s
views to Classical Style music, one might well wonder whether those views
amount only to a preference for purely instrumental music in the Classical
Style. Is this preference centrally a matter of Hegel’s class identification
with educated experts, musical and otherwise? Or can Hegel’s views offer
any insights into post-Classical Style musical life? Hegel himself argued
that ultimately the threat of empty, formal, and merely decorative virtu­
osity in both composition and execution could be met not within music
alone, but only by poetry. Art, according to Hegel, cannot remain “exclu­
sively [in] the element of the inner life” (A 2:796), as purely instrumental
music does, but must go on “to bring to our contemplation not only the
inner life but also, and equally, the appearance and actuality of that life in
its external reality” (A 2:795). It must show, in particular, how intellectu-
 139
HEGEL ON MUSIC

ally formed ideas are lived, how the ideas we have of ourselves do or can
give a particular shape to our form of social life. In order to do this, art
“must use the sensuous material of its disclosure as simply a means of com­
munication and therefore must degrade it [the sensuous material] to
being a [conventionalized] sign which has no significance by and in itself”
(A 2:796). That is, poetry, not music (which attends only to the sensuous
sound-material in itself and for the sake of the inner life alone), must be­
come the more salient form of art, the form that is more adequate to art’s
vocation.
But then what should we say about music after the heyday of the
Classical Style? Dahlhaus observes, with great insight, that Hegel’s turn
toward poetry and verbal-ideational content, away from music alone, as
the most salient form of art in later modernity can be understood as em­
bodying Hegel’s recognition of a genuine problem that Classical Style
music and post-Classical Style music face. There is a risk attaching to the
emancipation of music from all textual content in order to concentrate on
the musical development of instrumental sound alone. This emancipa­
tion sets up real possibilities of empty, merely decorative formalism and
of a musical art for experts that has lost all contact with vernacular life, in
relation to which “merely popular” music remains allied more closely with
song, dance, and social use. As Dahlhaus puts it.

The dialectic of emancipation and estrangement, of autonomy and loss

of substance—which one could say really became evident in the new
music of the twentieth century—is already recognized [by Hegel, in his
response to instrumental music, especially to Beethoven] as a central
problem.®'

Can these problems of estrangement, loss of textual and social-liturgical

substance, and of the fragmenting of musical culture into “high” expert cul­
ture and “low” popular art be addressed by music alone, in Hegel’s terms?
In Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Leonard Meyer argues that they cannot.
We live, Meyer argues, at the end of the Renaissance. Once upon a time,
from roughly 1450 in Italy to roughly 1950 in the United States and West­
ern Europe, the cultivation of individuality mattered as a central cultural
project. People, or at least some people at the center of culture, thought
that it was important to have a free and independent personality and to
determine the shape of one’s own life from one’s own resources of per­
sonality, rather than passively inheriting one’s life from one’s forebears.
They further thought it important that the life thus freely shaped should
be rationally intelligible to others, as opposed to living in what Hegel calls
a “mush of‘heart, friendship, and enthusiasm.’”®^ Instead, subjective par-
140
RICHARD ELDRIDGE

ticularity would find objective fulfillment in a shared and self-consciously

willed life of social freedom.
But alas, Meyer argues, that Hegelian project is no longer on the
books for us. As a result of the modern conditions of industrial work, spec­
tacular commodity production and consumption, and the bureaucrati­
cally regulated reproduction of culture, no one has time or interest any
longer in such cultivation of self and society toward social freedom and
accomplished individuality.
Once upon a time, when that Hegelian project was on the books, the
most valuable and central form of music was absolute, purely instrumen­
tal music that moved from initial statement to complication to some kind
of surprising yet necessitated resolution, as itself an abstract parable of the
centrally valuable path of development to which subjectivity is or was
thought to be open, just as Hegel argues. Meyer defines maturity as “self-
imposed tendency inhibition and the willingness to bear uncertainty,” and
the music that was most valued from 1450 to 1950 abstractly displayed, ac­
cording to Meyer, development toward maturity.®^ As opposed to a music
of less structured sound surfaces, Meyer favors the music of syntactic de­
velopment. “It is because the evaluation of alternative probabilities and the
retrospective understanding of the relationships among musical events
as they actually occurred leads to self-awareness and individualization that
the syntactical response [to music] is more valuable than those responses
in which the ego is dissolved.”®"*
But now, Meyer argues, such responses are typically not open to us,
for we no longer have the project of individualization available to us. In­
creasingly, from 1900 to 1975, “the idea that progress is inherent in the pro­
cesses of history no longer seems credible.”®® As a result, in the music world
there is now “a coexistence of a number of alternative styles” in “a kind of
dynamic steady state.” That is, pluralism reigns; many alternative styles are
available. But none of these alternative styles is central for significant music
in relation to a significantly shared cultural project, for there is now no
significantly shared cultural project. Things happen. People write this
and that. But the works that are thus produced are receivable only as bits
of formal organization that might be liked or not by different people, as
may be, not as abstract patternings of the valuable development of sub­
jectivity as such. A sybaritic presentism-cum-consumerism dominates, just
as Hegel feared could happen.®®
As the major alternative styles that are now circulating in culture,
Meyer lists the following:
1. Academic serialism in the style of Milton Babbitt—largely an intel­
lectual coterie music, dependent on government and university support
for its continuance, and not really finding any audience, because not pro­
ducing any hearable structures of significance.
 141
HEGEL ON MUSIC

2. Primitive or tribal music, i.e., rock, dominated by repetitive rhythms

and motifs, by verbal text, and by a simple verse and chorus structure, with
no syntactic development comparable to that of Western art music.
3. Ambient music or elevator music, the light music of distraction
while we work in our cubicles or dine with our friends.
4. Transcendental particularism and aleatoric music, or music as
unstructured sound, in the style of John Cage’s definition of music as
“sounds heard at a bus stop.” Zenlike, Cage urges, we are to open our ears
to the being of sound as sound, without worrying much about composi­
tional development.
And that’s about it. Various intermediate compromises are possible:
for example, the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich combines
bits of the repetitiveness of rock with the sound surfaces of ambient music
with aleatorism’s rejection of development. But music no longer plays the
central cultural role once fulfilled by Western art music. Explicit returns
to the structures of Western art music in the style of the new Romanticism
of David Diamond or Alan Hovhaness are hearable only as either pastiche
or empty melodism.
But is it quite true that these are the only available alternatives?
Hegel’s account of absolute music as significantly embodying the inner life
through cadenced interjection in fact usefully suggests further alternatives
that have not gone unexploited. Recall that Hegel argues that purely in­
strumental music must have development; it cannot simply linger in con­
tinuous consonance; there must be interjections or marked musical events,
further housed within an overall cadential structure. This account sug­
gests a number of techniques of composition that draw on the normative
authority of Classical Style music but without simply replicating it. The
rate of harmonic development (so-called harmonic rhythm) can be in­
creased; that is, the tonic can be moved away from at a more rapid rate, as
in the music of Berlioz, for example. The range of dissonant sonorities
that are introduced can be increased, as in Wagner, Mahler, and Debussy,
thus making available their introduction within a new work as a marked
musical event.®’ Folk melodic motives (particularly previously unexploited
modal motives) can be picked up and subjected to thematic variation, as
in Bartok and Stravinsky, or as in Messiaen’s use of modal motifs taken
from birdcalls. New instruments with new sonorities to be explored can
be introduced, as in the exploitation of percussion in twentieth-century
works from Bartok and Stravinsky through George Crumb and contem­
porary investigations of Javanese Gamelan music. Hegel himself notes
that “freedom from the pedantry of meter and the barbarism of a uniform
rhythm” may help to keep the melody from sounding “humdrum, bare,
and lacking in invention” (A 2;918); Bartok, Stravinsky, Copland, and
Shostakovich have significantly exploited the possibilities of introducing
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE

accents on offbeats, using more complicated rhythmic figures, and vary­

ing the time signature from measure to measure.
To be sure, each of these compositional possibilities carries risks. In­
creased rate of harmonic development, greater dissonance, borrowed
melodic motives, new instrumentation, and rhythmic variation all tend to
call attention to the local sound surface and away from an awareness of
overall harmonic development. But then, this is just what it means to have
a marked musical event: an interjection. Given the compositional achieve­
ments of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries—from Bartok and
Kodaly to Stravinsky and Copland, Shostakovich, and now to Ned Rorem,
William Schumann, and a wealth of younger composers just coming to
wider notice—there is no reason to think that it is impossible to house in­
terjections within an overall cadential structure in absorbing ways that
continue to engage the inner life of subjectivity. What we hear as musical
achievement continues to be describable in the Hegelian terms of ca-
denced interjection. As Theodor Adorno observes, “Hegel’s thesis that art
is consciousness of plight has been confirmed beyond anything he could
have envisioned,” and it continues to be confirmed in purely instrumen­
tal art music as powerfully as anywhere.®®
At the conclusion of the Gospel ofJohn, the writer assumes explic­
itly the role of witness to something sacred that has gone on to play itself
out in further events beyond the framework of his narrative. “This is the
disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we
know that his testimony is true. And there are also many other things
which Jesus did, which, if they should be written every one, I suppose the
world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”®® Hegel’s
own last words about music—perhaps legible as a distant echo ofJohn—
are: “These are the most essential things that I have heard and felt in music
and the general points which I have abstracted and assembled for consid­
eration of our present subject” {A 2:958). Many more things—words and
music—might be and would be written, but it seems apt to regard Hegel’s
account of instrumental music as a fine art as itself a form of witness to
“the elemental might of music” (A 2:908) that continues to display itself
in our own time.

Notes
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Ox­
ford: Clarendon, 1975). All references to this work will be given in the text as A,
with volume and by page number.
2. Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indi­
anapolis: Hackett, 1986), 28-29.
 143
HEGEL ON MUSIC

3. Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 29.

4. Ibid., 32.
5. Ibid, (emphases added).
6. Ibid., 28.
7. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880), 338.
8. Gurney, Power of Sound, 315.
9. Peter Kivy, Philosophies of the Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 1997), 155.
10. Kivy, Philosophies of the Arts, 209.
11. Ibid., 217.
12. Stephen Davies, “Why Listen to Sad Music If It Makes One Feel Sad?” in
Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997),
242-53, at 250.
13. Davies, “Why Listen to Sad Music?” 252.
14. Paul Shorey, notes to Plato, Republic I, trans. Paul Shorey (London:
William Heinemann [Loeb Classical Library], 1930), 224 note c.
15. Gurney, Power of Sound, 125.
16. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974), 5.
17. Cone, Composer’s Voice, 9.
18. Ibid., 161.
19. Ibid., 163.
20. Kendall Walton, “Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representa­
tional?” in Music and Meaning, ed. Robinson, 57-82, at 58.
21. Walton, “Listening with Imagination,” 61.
22. Kivy, Philosophies of the Arts, 47.
23. Walton, “Listening with Imagination,” 82.
24. Ibid.
25. Jerrold Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotion,” in Music and Meaning,
ed. Robinson, 215-41, at 231.
26. Levinson, “Music and Negative Emotion,” 234-36.
27. Fred Everett Mans, “Music as Drama,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Robin­
son, 105-30, at 118.
28. Mans, “Music as Drama,” 129. Maus qualifies this remark by saying that it
is true “for at least some music.” I am not sure what music he is thinking of for
which it is not true: perhaps pure (computer-generated?) soundscape arabesques
where we hear only background and no musical drama. Maus’s claim does seem
to apply to nearly all significant composed instrumental art music.
29. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in
Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 149.
30. Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 158.
31. Ibid., 175.
32. Ibid., 168.
33. See Leonard Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in
Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See espe­
cially chapter 5, “The End of the Renaissance?” and “Postlude.”
 34. Subotnik’s Deconstructive Variations includes a tour-de-force 108-page anal­
ysis of Chopin’s sixteen-bar A-M^or Prelude, arguing that it expresses, ambiva-
lendy, both a sense of the possible happy completion of the cultivation of individ­
uality within a social setting and the irrational violence that this cultivation always
entails (“How Could Chopin’s A-M^or Prelude Be Deconstructed?” 39-147).
35. Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations, 159.
36. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapo­
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). See especially chapter 2, “Constructions
of Gender in Monteverdi’s Dramatic Music,” 35-52.
37. Here I note that I am actually simplifying and flattening McClary’s anal­
ysis. She also remarks that the seventeenth century was a time of uncertainty about
gender roles and that Monteverdi did write some particularly “feminine ” music for
men. Yet that music was less popularly successful, she claims, than his more “stan­
dard” music, and the central norms of the musical representation of character that
Monteverdi laid down persisted at least well into the twentieth century.
38. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley;
University of California Press, 1995), 21.
39. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 24.
40. Ibid., 24, final paragraph.
41. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), paragraph 166, p. 104; G. 'W. F. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des
Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), 133.
42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 167, p. 105; Hegel, Phdnomenolo­
gie des Geistes, 135.
43. Hegel, Phenomenobgy of Spirit, paragraph 167, p. 105; Hegel, Phdnomenologe
des Geistes, 135.
44. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 65-66
(my interpolations). See also the discussion of the opening paragraphs of chapter
4 of the Phenomenology in R. Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Inten-
tionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 27-32.
45. G. W. E. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed.
Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), addition to sec­
tion 7, p. 42.
46. For doubts about tbe soundness of Hegel’s arguments for this conclusion
in either the Phenomenology or the Science of Logic, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 214-21 on the Phenomenology, and
225-57 on equivocations in the opening chapters of the Logic.
47. Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 167.
48. On Vincenzo Galilei’s development of equal temperament tuning, see
Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18-20.
49. Carl Dahlbaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William W. Austin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), 49.
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HEGEL ON MUSIC

50. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), 161.
i
;
51 .JulianJohnson, “Music in Hegel’s Aesthetics: A Re-Evaluadon,” BritishJour-
nal of Aesthetics 31, no. 2 (April 1991): 160. fi
52. R. K, Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art,” in Aesthetics,
ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 152.
53. Gurney, Power of Sound, 337.
54. Carl Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikdsthetik (Laaber: Laaber,
1988), 240.
: 55. Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikdsthetik, 242.
I 56. Compare the account of the Classical Style in Charles Rosen, The Classi-
I cal Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).
i 57. Here dance, which is essentially rhythmic and has a closer connection
f with music than does liturgy, for example, may be regarded as itself a musical
i rather than an extramusical use of music. 1 thank an audience for this paper at the
'( University of South Carolina for noting this point.
58. Reported by Therese Devrient in her memoirs, according to Dahlhaus,
Klassische und romantische Musikdsthetik, 245, where the remark is cited without
footnote; my translation.
59. Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikdsthetik, 248.
60. See Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, 49; and Dahlhaus, Klassische und roman­
tische Musikdsthetik, 236-39, especially the claim that for Hegel “Beethovens
Crosse ... ins Verhangnis fiihrte” (239).
? 61. Dahlhaus, Klassische und romantische Musikdsthetik, 238 (my translation).
62. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, preface, 16.
63. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas, 33.
64. Ibid., 35.
65. Ibid., 331.
66. See ibid., 334.
67. See Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975), for a nice,
brief account of the liberation of dissonance as the engine of the historical devel­
opment of nineteenth-century music.
68. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Min­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 18.
69. John 21:24-25, Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version (Boston: Chris­
tian Science Publishing Society, n.d.), 1385.