Music as Will

The concept of mimesis allows us to access the deepest nature of music, especially when we compose it with the concept of "Will." I am going to approach this concept from the point of view of Schopenhauer, as the best and probably the first Western representative of Advaita Vedanta, the knowledge of non-duality. Musical mimesis occupies a key place in Schopenhauer's philosophical system. From the analogy of music with the other arts - says Schopenhauer - we can infer that music must be in relation to the world as the representation to the thing represented¹.

Its imitative reference to the world must be very deep, infinitely true, and really surprising, because it is instantly understood by the whole world, and presents a certain infallibility by the fact that its form can be reduced to fairly definite rules expressible in numbers, out of which cannot move away without ceasing to be completely music².

In this passage our attention is first drawn to the general effect of music, an immediate effect that should make us suspect about its intimate relationship with nature human. To this must be added the mathematical character of its harmonic laws, their close relationship with the number that makes it a science. The numerical foundation of its laws does not mean that it must be reduced to the unconscious arithmetic exercise of which Leibniz spoke³, because if so, the pleasure it would provide would not exceed that of a well-done arithmetic sum, and not that intense experience that we have when we see the deepest parts of our life taken expression through sound and transforming our self.

However, the Pythagorean dimension of his proposal is very interesting: music is not just sound, in fact, sound is not really the foundation of music. According to Leibniz, music is an experience of the soul in relation to the order of time, performed by counting, albeit an unconscious counting process. Can we count unconsciously? Leibniz seems to suggest that arithmetic, or more precisely, the action of counting natural numbers, is a fundamental mental process that occurs out of the focus of our attention. Therefore, unconscious counting, or better, our experience of the unfolding of order and harmony in the course of time, would be a full liminal action. It is an action in the limit, sub-limen action, and sublime action. It happens in the threshold of conscious formation, and therefore with a transforming potential for individual identity as no other art form has. There is a basic intuition of the experience of time that music and mathematics share in relation to this approach to the roots of life-experience. Music and mathematics are liminal experiences that we have to turn into liminoid in order to experience them in everyday life. But not only music and mathematics share this connection to the very basic intuition of time, they both also operate with ideal or imaginal forms and types. And music has a trait that further distinguishes it from mathematics: it directly objectifies the Will even without the mid-world of imaginal forms.

It is difficult to determine the mimetic relationship between music and the world, a relationship that has been tried to clarify throughout the history of mankind. Schopenhauer's particular adds the concept of “Will” (Der Wille) to the equation. What is the Will according to Schopenhauer? Perhaps the best understanding of the concept comes from the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. According to classical Vedanta, Reality is Sat-Chit-Ananda, whose difficult translation includes more than three concepts in our modern languages such as Truth-Consciousness-Force-Delight-Bliss-Harmony. The Will would be the “Chit” part, Consciousness-Force, the impulse of living intelligence that generates and underlies all creation in the universe. The Will is objectified in representations, in all the range of different representations and their compositions. All the arts objectify the Will indirectly through ideas, and these ideas, in its Platonic sense, are objectifications of the Will. According to Schopenhauer, the idea is the unit that has fallen into plurality by virtue of the temporal and spatial of our intuitive apprehension⁴.

Music precedes the realm of ideas:

It is an objectification and copy of the Will as immediate as the world itself is, and how ideas are with respect to the multiple phenomenon that constitutes the world of individual things⁵

We could call such “objectification and copy” a morphism. So in our terms: music is a morphism of the Will, though not an isomorphism, for it is projected on our individual set of physical, psychological and spiritual forces. The metaphysical content of music leads Schopenhauer to affirm that music, to a certain extent, could exist even if there was no world at all⁶. Music is a form of knowledge, and more precise than any mediated knowledge of the world (like knowledge through reason) for it directly accesses the Will. Through its relationship with the Will, it is possible for us to recognize music in the world, and at the same time, to know the world through music. Schopenhauer thus expresses a suggestive analogy about the musical relationship that structures nature:

I recognize in the deepest tones of harmony, in the total bass, the degrees lowest objectification of the Will, inorganic matter, the mass of the planet. It is well known that all sharp, light, trembling notes, those that disappear more quickly, can be considered as results of the simultaneous deep bass vibrations. With the sound of the low note, the note high always sounds faintly at the same time, and it is a law of harmony that a low note can be accompanied only by those notes that actually sound automatically and simultaneously with it⁷.

That is, he is comparing our planet with the fundamental of the harmonic series and the rest of nature with higher harmonic partials. If we represent the fundamental of the harmonic series by “1”, the other notes of the series within the tempered system (or tempered fifths) sound simultaneously with it as partial vibrations of it, with exact integer multiples, according to the following division of the octave:

C D E F G A B C

1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2

According to Schopenhauer, this law of tonal harmony is analogous to the fact that all bodies and

organizations of nature can be viewed as having come into existence from a gradual development out of the mass of the planet, which is both its support and its source⁸. Humans are like the leading voice of harmony, the freer voice, as it already covers practically all pitches of the scale constructed out the harmonic series.

If we follow the historical evolution of music, we see that Schopenhauer's position was continued by Schoenberg during the 20th century. Twelve-tone music is precisely an extension of the freedom of the leading voice to its entire possible harmonic range, covering the twelve pitches in which Western music has divided the scale. The upper partials of the harmonic series are won for the art, both from perceptional developments and from the theoretical needs of fully modulatory music. Schopenhauer recognizes in humans the highest degree of objectification of the Will, the mental life that traces significant connections of thought, and portrays every effort and every agitated change of the Will that reason summarizes under the broad and negative concept of “emotion”, a concept that from rationality’s perspective cannot be “promoted” to the abstractions of reason⁹. The four parts of harmony: bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, or if you prefer, the fundamental, the third the fifth and the eighth, correspond to the four degrees of the series of the existence: mineral, vegetable, animal and human¹⁰.

Schopenhauer perceives the negative character of emotion in relation to reason, but does not quite perceive the narrow rational character of the harmonic system on which he bases his metaphysical intuition. Outside of the tempered system we do not have perfect fifths or octaves circles, but an unending spiral of pitches. The geometric circle gives way to the spiral. Nature, as Goethe understood, is best understood from the spiral. His studies of plants and living beings in general led him to the conclusion that the spiral shape, the shape basic development of the plant, is the basic law of life, in which there is a spiral tendency to starting from its simplest plant forms¹¹.

If we look at no-tempered music, its chords do not reproduce the lower frequencies in integer multiples: there is a “fine hair” that separates the integer relation of the octaves. A gap that makes things more complex. This Pythagorean coma is the evolutionary expression of emergence of the new in the universe, thought in musical terms. Schopenhauer fully aware of the power of music when he playing with Leibniz definition says:

Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know what

he is philosophizing¹².

On the one hand, thanks to its numerical nature, music gives us perceptual access to the abstract forms of the relationships between rational and irrational numbers. We perceive the ratio relationships: consonance (simple ratio relation) and dissonance (complex ratio relationship), and not merely in a conceptual manner as arithmetic does¹³. Such perception puts us in contact with subtle forms of identity-difference formations. On the other hand, this same numerical nature makes music a suitable language for physical phenomena, it builds a bridge to the world, projecting a morphism into our sensibility. The numerical character of dissonance, or if you prefer, of the irrational, of that which is in complex numerical relation to something else is, according to Schopenhauer, a natural image (we would say a morphism) – and we could add, sensitive - of that which resists our apprehension, and therefore, of that which resists our Will, so music becomes with its innumerable and complex sequences of consonances and dissonances the best material for the expression of the Will to human beings ¹⁴. Music and philosophy merge in this system as they did before in Pythagoreanism and Platonism. Harmony and counterpoint allow a conceptualization of psychology and nature with exactly the same conceptual symbols used by those Ancient schools.

Schopenhauer adds a new domain to traditional musical metaphysics by considering music, both practical (human) and mundane (and not only the mundane as in Antiquity), as metaphysical activities. The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world and the listener participates in the mystery. The listener always finishes the musical piece, he/she is the final composer, for the final morphisms are performed in his/her psychological and spiritual systems.

The unique epistemological dimension of music as the experience of spiritual morphisms (a link between the Will, the spiritual, and the imaginal realm) has been acknowledged since ancient times and revived in the Western tradition from Schopenhauer on, especially in Wagner, Nietzsche, and afterwards, in the 20th Century Avantgarde. Music occurs in a different space to that of ordinary experience, in the liminal, but from which principles applicable to everyday life and individuation emanate. Let us remember the final words of Socrates in the Phaedo , when he identifies music and philosophy:

Visiting me many times the same dream in my past life, which was shown sometimes, in one appearance and other in others, he said the same advice, with these words: "Socrates, make music and apply yourself to it!” And I, in my life in the past, I believed that the dream exhorted me and encouraged me to do precisely what I was doing, as those that encourage runners. The dream encouraged me to do what I practiced, to make music, in the conviction that philosophy was the highest music, and that I practiced it¹⁵.

Probably the deepest analysis of the liminal-limnoid tension in relation to music (understood in its broadest sense as the realm of the Muses) is found in Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, we can distinguish two mimetic forms or forces that lead to mimesis. On the one hand, an impulse that leads to transpose one's fullness in all things, an impulse of intoxication that leads to reconfigure the world from the internal order. On the other, we have an irresistible instinct that leads to the repetition of something external, an urge that is experienced as something contagious. But both forms constitute a single mimetic impulse that reaches different configurations and that is outlined with opposing movements: that of the Apollonian force and that of the Dionysian force.

There are two conditions in which art appears in man as a force of nature and at his disposal whether he wants to or not: as the compulsion to have visions and as the compulsion to an orgiastic state. Both conditions are also practiced in ordinary life, but in a weaker way: in sleep and in intoxication. But the same antithesis is obtained between dream and intoxication: both (dispositions) release artistic powers in us, although different: the dream those of vision, association and poetry; intoxication those of gesture, passion, song and dance¹⁶.

The visionary compulsion, or Apollonian compulsion, works together with the ecstatic and Dionysian compulsion to configure the artistic powers of which Nietzsche speaks, which are no other powers than those of imitation in which the balance between the formless impulse and the dream of individuation is reached. This double mimesis that leads to repeating what is inside out and what is outside in, which leads to the projection of the self on the outside and the inclusion of everything outside as part of the self, in a visionary and orgiastic double movement, can be understood as a battle of configuration of forces between order and chaos. The artist is then the master of chaos:

Become a master of the chaos that you are; to force the chaos that one is to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematical, law, that is the great ambition here¹⁷.

Chaos is not something external and neither is the form, the artist is a continuation of the work as the work is of the world. The logic and mathematics of which Nietzsche speaks are not those of positivist science, but those of a world governed by the Will to power, i.e, the Consciousnes-Force in the Vedanta sense. With regard to music, Nietzsche laments the absence, precisely with this same desire for order, of aesthetic laws that impose guidelines on musicians and give them a conscience from which to elaborate a conflict of principles.

We no longer know on what bases to base the concepts of model, mastery, perfection ¹⁸.

But the new formalism that Nietzsche seems to demand only wants to adjust the forms of art to those that favor life, to what he considers the forms of physiology. Art is a stimulant of life and increases the desire to live, and all human demands to have more art or to make more art and contemplate more beauty are understood by Nietzsche as an indirect demand to communicate sexual ecstasies to the brain: the world becomes perfect through love; beauty and perfection are notions coming from ecstasy. Nietzsche follows the tradition of the troubadours and of tantra, the tradition of aphroditism, albeit reformulated in a modern, physiologically more direct and descriptive language. For Nietzsche, art is a force of redemption, it is the force that makes human life possible. This heroic and redemptive art is an invitation to intoxication in the finiteness of the forces that operate in the world, all of them manifestations of the Will. It is an invitation to the physiological ecstasy of all the senses through a type of deification that occurs through the reproduction of forms, and the joy that occurs through continued self-stimulation with artistic forms. Nietzsche’s idea of the play with forms implies the transformation of human sensibility, its development from the social dimension of artistic representations to a cosmical dimension, and then beyond to a spiritual realm. It is an Advaita approach, a non-dualistic proposal poorly understood in relation to his aesthetics. Music redeems and transforms our impulses, it fosters the psychological morphisms of individuation, understood as a never ending process of ascension in the scale towards the highest realms of the Will.

Probably the most successful expression of Nietzschean musical thought in the field of the art of sounds is perhaps found, even more than in his own scores, in Mahler's music. Mahler's personal use of the symphonic form, his stubbornness in fitting rhapsodic thought within the framework of a symphony, is a possible way of interpreting the Nietzschean demand for the grand style. The self-limitation of the musical form of the symphony is the minimal Apollonian compromise for a basically Dionysian orchestral exploration, in which Mahler carefully exposes and follows the tensions of his creative intuition, objectified in the sound material that the inherited European orchestra offered to him. We see the traditional principles of mimesis: variation, repetition, imitation, at the service of the composer's own psychic world, as Beethoven did, although without the latter's systemic urgency at work in his works. Mahler's music faces life in all its breadth, it is a metaphysics of change, that is to say, it is the great artistic game with appearances that Nietzsche aspired as the maximum way of dealing with reality in order to transform it. And above all, Mahler's music is an attempt at redemption from the tragic side of existence through total immersion in horror, to transfigure it into a great action of acceptance of the world: the great yes of Zarathustra that best expresses its vigor in Walt Whitman's verses.

If art is redemption, as Nietzsche affirms, this implies that art is capable of putting a distance, of taking the one who enjoys it to another place from which values ​​reach the sense of becoming. If art transfigures terror to the point of making it desirable and if it is capable of identifying joy and pain, the place to which redemption leads is a place beyond good and evil, but also beyond life, since it supposes the very suppression of the appearance from its acceptance. This Dionysian intoxication is incompatible with everyday life, that needs to operate in the more basic realm of appearances, far away from that privileged place, that Valhalla that only art is able to reach. Only non dual knowledge solves the problem of life nihilism: Maya (the illusion of appearances) is also Brahman.

1Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World asWill and representation. # 52. Dover Publications, Inc. New York.1969. (2

Vol.). P.256.

2Schopenhauer. Ibid.

3Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi. Music is the unconscious practice of

the arithmetic that the soul does.

4Schopenhauer. Ibid.# 49. Ed. Cit.p. 2. 3. 4.

5Schopenhauer.Ibid.

6Cf.Schopenhauer.Ibid.

7Schopenhauer. Ibid, p. 258.

8Cf. Schopenhauer.Ibid.

9Cf. Schopenhauer.Ibid. p. 259.

10Cf. Schopenhauer.Ibid.Vol.2.Capt.39.Ed.Cit. p.447.

11Cf. Goethe . Excerpt from the Spiral Tendency in Vegetation . In Scientific Studies . Suhrkamp Publishers. New York

12Schopenhauer. Ibid. Vol I. # 52. p. 262.

13Cf. Schopenhauer Vol. II. Chapter 39. pp 450-451.

14Ibid. p. 451.

15Plato. Phaedo 60E-61A. Gredos. Madrid 1988 pp. 32-33.

16Ibid. # 798. Ed.Cit.p.p. 419-420.

17Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. # 816. Vintage Books. New York 1968. p. 432.

18.Ibid. # 838.Ed.Cit.p.p. 440-441.