What is Music? - Ernst Jünger

This is from a journal entry but also serves as a nice book review or short essay. I also find it helpful in regards to Zeno’s Paradoxes.

Wilflingen, 20. October 1965

Reading: Erich v. Kahler, “What is Music?”. Obituary of Victor Zuckerkandl († 24. 4. 1965), who seems to have been one of the rare musicians interested in sound as metaphysics. At any rate, their number cannot be compared to that of the poets who reflect on the word, or painters who reflect on line and colour beyond technique and quality. My judgement is subjective, however, it is based on my own reading; there are surely sources that have remained inaccessible to me. I have read the best on the subject in The World as Will and Representation. In general, highly musical philosophers seem better in this regard than musicians.

According to Kahler, Zuckerkandl goes far beyond the phenomenon of music. “He shows, on the basis of the specifically musical, that there is a supermaterial reality.” Tones are immediate being, perceived as movement. It is not the tone that moves, but the movement that leads from one tone to another. “Different pitches are not different properties of the thing ‘tone’. If one subtracts the different pitches of two tonalities, what remains is not ‘tone’, but nothing.” Kahler adds: “Musical movement is therefore fundamentally different from all other movement; it is pure movement, that is, movement free from the thing.”

We are confronted with this “nothingness” again and again. It is also felt by the listener; during a pause, the full violence pours in.

Music is time transformed into sound. This relates to connections that have long occupied me and which I recently reflected on again in Luzon in front of a bamboo organ. When a spoken phrase becomes a sung phrase and a poem becomes a song, or even when a standing posture becomes a march and then a dance, it is not just a difference in modality. In song, not only do the things to which the spoken word refers disappear, but also the space in which those things are ordered. We do not merely change step, we enter into a different, ultimately inexplicable movement. In every movement there is something impossible, an echo of an origin that only vaguely touches us. This is the secret of music. It led, for example, to Zeno’s paradox in “Achilles and the Tortoise”. The Eleatic wanted to prove that all movement is ostensible. This is what eludes proof.

*

Zuckerkandl begins by distinguishing sound from noise. “Sound is the noise of nature, tone is the work of man.” He then distinguishes the technical from the purely musical, through which man reveals his inner world.

Fine, but what about the nightingale’s song? That too is a natural sound. In the first chapter of his Achse der Natur (1949), a work which proves that thinking had not yet disappeared in Germany, Hans Blücher affirms this emphatically.

In this work Blücher argues that music is undoubtedly different from all “mere noises”, “no matter how seductive they sound.” If a wanderer heard a nightingale at dusk and thought it was music in the same sense as the song he had just heard in the village, he would be mistaken. Socrates would have said to him, “The wax of your soul is tarnished.” And Blücher: “No, that is not music!” The trill of the nightingale is connected with the cry of the male during the rut and the bleating of the deer; these are natural sounds which cease when the rut is over. There is no freedom in them, they are bound to the course of nature – but in every song that passes through the throat of man something else is expressed, clearly and distinctly, from the bottom up, separated from all natural sounds.

Not only Zuckerkandl must agree with this, but all those who have found themselves spiritually within the opposites: sound - tone, nature - art, drive - freedom, physis - psyche.

*

Ultimately these distinctions do not hold. It is one and the same force which expresses itself, more or less perceptibly, both in nature and in art. Animals, too, have a limited freedom; on the other hand man follows his instincts to a greater extent. This is especially true of works of art, the form of which is clearly the result of a series of decisions. A poem, a painting, or a song can be presented in one form or another – there are often variations. But it is precisely when a work of art makes a compelling appeal to us that it is preceded by compulsion on the part of the artist. The conception is beyond our free will, even beyond time. Man is taken by surprise, as if by a fate.

Unity is sometimes revealed to us in great harmonies, as on a peaceful evening when everything echoes. The question of whether the sound of a bell is a sound or a tone is no longer relevant: every sound is infused into harmony. Creating symbols for harmony is the task of art, and not harmony itself.

Harmony becomes real in rare moments, even in cultures, not only in foreboding and dreamlike beginnings, but always anew, as a repetition of the foundations in chambers, of rings in the shaft of bamboo. The osmosis between sensation and consciousness, between specialisations in general, becomes more vivid.

In the monad there is no difference between material and psychic quality. The problem of the nightingale occupied Schiller as well, in “Spaziergang unter den Linden”: “Do you hear the note of the sweet Philomela from yonder tree? Well! I suppose we are listening to the Urn of Tibullus’s ashes.”

*

Music is a clue of the impossible, its translation into the possible. There is no wave in the deep, and that there is a music of the spheres can only be felt: to listen into the void, into the space closed to life. And even there one finds only atria.

I recall receiving from Professor Bierbaum in Münster not only Peter Wüst’s promised farewell address to his students but also an exact reference to Augustine’s conversation with Mother Monica on the beach at Ostia (Confessions IX, 10), which, as the professor writes, should not be read only in passing, but experienced meditando. In the meantime I have taken it up, and I must admit that it is a step towards a world literature leading deep into the atria.

“...so we arose and transcended by degrees the whole world of bodies.... and further we have ascended within, pondering, contemplating, and admiring your works, and we have come to our souls, and even further, so that we have ascended into the region of inexhaustible fullness, where you feed Israel eternally in the pasture of truth, where life is wisdom.”

Thus, at the window overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.