How Music Can Articulate Ideas: Beyond Formalism and Emotion
How music can articulate ideas
Philosopher John Shand challenges a deeply rooted assumption about music: that it cannot, no matter what else it achieves, convey ideas. This essay sets out to overturn that formalist position and to show why accepting formalism rests on a mistake and a misunderstanding of how everyday language works. Shand intends "idea" to mean a viewpoint, along with a thoughtful consideration of that viewpoint, possibly involving a whole worldview. Saying that music articulates ideas in this sense means that music can present, communicate, and examine those ideas. That goes much further than the usual anti-formalist claim that music can only express emotions. The essay then demonstrates how music can in fact bring ideas forward. This follows from a proper understanding of how ideas generally come to be articulated. Unless music can incorporate such intellectual content, the high artistic and cultural significance we give it, alongside the way we naturally talk about musical works, would remain inexplicable — even though music certainly has other valuable aspects. So the question emerges: how is it even possible for music to articulate ideas?
‘Men will have to work a long time at cracking the nuts that I’m shaking down from the tree for them.’
Gustav Mahler, Briefe
Formalists maintain that music can articulate nothing beyond purely musical concerns. Most anti-formalists limit their claim to music's capacity to convey emotions. The argument advanced here pushes anti-formalism to the furthest extreme, insisting that music can indeed articulate fully formed ideas.
Many readers will likely find the position defended here unlikely or even objectionable. It certainly runs against the grain. Some may consider it aesthetically crude or perhaps even offensive — a threat to music's presumed purity. Yet such objections tend to come from a certain circle of specialists writing about the philosophy of music only when they approach the subject theoretically. Those judgments would not be shared by most people who write about music and cherish it as a high art form. What ordinary enthusiasts say about specific pieces, and how they treat music de facto as a major art form, makes this evident. The author's deliberately provocative claim is that the philosophy of music has fallen into a habitual style of thinking about ideas and music, a habit that no longer gets properly examined.
The controversial assertion here is that music can articulate ideas. One might phrase it as music expressing ideas, embodying ideas, or showing ideas. This paper does not claim to resolve every possible question or objection. It aims, however, to demonstrate that something widely considered impossible is entirely possible and capable of explanation.
First, a crucial clarification. The ideas in question are not the incredibly narrow range — if they qualify as ideas at all — allowed by one famous critic, which included concepts like speed, slowness, strength, weakness, and similar motion-related terms. The orthodoxy Shand challenges is no straw man; it represents mainstream thinking about music among those writing on music philosophy.
Second, the argument does not merely assert that music can express emotions. That debate has circled without resolution for years. The even weaker claim — that music simply provokes emotions without expressing them — is typically countered by pointing out that if music's value lay in causing feelings, drugs could achieve the same effect. Reducing music to such a mere instrument would radically undermine its artistic worth. The objection to music expressing emotions turns on the intentional nature of emotions. Emotions, it is said (excluding a few questionable objectless moods), are always about something. For music to be intentional, it would need to express propositional attitudes — which, critics insist, is plainly impossible. So music cannot express emotions either. Yet the view that music expresses emotions refuses to disappear, and rightly so: we cry with sadness or feel joy when listening and naturally ascribe those qualities to the music itself. Still, the matter remains unsettled.
Emotions alone, however, cannot account for the extraordinary cultural status we grant music. Emotions matter deeply in human life, but they are not the whole of it, nor the deepest or most significant part concerning the human condition. Limiting music to emotion would severely restrict its scope and value.
To avoid confusion, the position argued here extends even beyond recent anti-formalists. Roger Scruton suggested at most that music could embody some form of summit of cultural achievement without anything like the stark notion that it might articulate particular ideas. He explicitly denies the thesis of this essay. James O. Young, the most vigorous recent anti-formalist, goes no further than arguing that music can represent emotions and offer insight into human psychology. He does not claim music can articulate ideas.
Shand takes a different, more radical approach, questioning the very assumptions underpinning the debate about music's capabilities. This connects to the artistic value of music as an art form — a Kantian line of questioning: how is it possible that music holds such high cultural value? Indeed, these two considerations reinforce each other.
By "idea", Shand means a view, and a reflection on that view, which ultimately may broaden into a full worldview, a Weltanschauung. To say ideas are articulated in music means they are presented, conveyed, and considered. In music, they may also be advocated, denied, and assessed through argument, whether for or against, sometimes leaving ambiguity.
If it has proven ineluctably problematic to argue that music expresses emotions, then arguing that music articulates ideas may seem vastly more difficult. Ideas appear to be bare propositional attitudes stripped even of emotional overtones, and those propositional attitudes posed the central obstacle to saying music could express emotions. If expressing emotions seemed difficult, expressing (articulating) ideas surely appears impossible. Yet rather than retreating to an easier claim, an apparently harder one is made.
A basic mistake underpins the claim that music cannot articulate ideas — or for that matter, anything else. The error lies not in misunderstanding music, but in misunderstanding ordinary language. If one thinks ordinary language functions in a certain way and music does not match that pattern, one might conclude music cannot do what language does. This argument is fallacious: it takes the form "if A then B, not A, therefore not B" — denying the antecedent. Moreover, the first premise is false. Ordinary language cannot operate as many think it does either. Getting this wrong is what derails any proper assessment of whether music can articulate ideas.
To summarise: from the fact that music does not operate like ordinary language, it does not follow that music cannot articulate ideas. There may be two different ways — another way — to articulate ideas. No obvious reason exists to assume there is only one way. That argument could rest there, leaving the task of showing how music might offer an alternative method, rendering comparisons with ordinary language irrelevant. That would be a "two languages" view. However, a more radical claim is that ordinary language and music articulate ideas in the very same way — but not the way most people currently think ordinary language works. The correct approach surprisingly runs the other direction. Supposing music can articulate ideas leads one to see that ordinary language functions similarly. The task becomes showing not that music resembles ordinary language, but that ordinary language resembles music. This fundamentally changes our understanding of how language works and removes the difficulties around music.
The essential anti-formalist support for music articulating ideas is radical conventionalism. If music communicates ideas through conventionally established meanings, so does ordinary language in the same way. This is more plausible than the "two languages" suggestion. If a single method exists for expressing ideas, then wherever this occurs, the method should be the same. Some standard accounts of how language gains meaning are not nearly conventionalist enough. But if ordinary language is radically conventional, then the claim that music can articulate ideas becomes convincingly straightforward.
Curiously, conventionalism is standard and widely accepted in the visual arts.
‘Realistic representation…depends not upon imitation or illusion or information but on inculcation. Almost any picture may represent almost anything; that is, given picture and object there is usually a system of representation, a plan of correlation, under which the picture represents the object. How correct the picture is under that system depends upon how accurate is the information about the object that is obtained by reading the picture according to that system. But how literal or realistic the picture is depends upon how standard the system is…realism is a matter of habit.’
Nelson Goodman
If true of visual representation, it seems all the more obvious for ordinary language. Write the word "smile" and it bears no resemblance to what it signifies — far less than the emoticon ":)" does. That conventional representation might be thought to concern only the depiction of objects, but that is mistaken. View Caravaggio's painting: it plainly shows David's triumph or victory over Goliath. Nobody struggles with that. Yet where exactly is "triumph" or "victory" located in the image? This holds even without asserting the conventionality of the objects depicted — David, Goliath, the sword, the head — even though their representation too is conventional. If visual art works this way, it is hard to see why ordinary language could not be understood as essentially conventional, where mimesis is not even a remote option.
Two reasons explain why we imagine something non-conventional goes on in semantic events, one motivational and one theoretical. First, habit blinds us: because something reliably means something, we presume there must be a direct, mind-independent connection linking the signifier and signified. Second, the notion that a distinction exists between something being taken as representation and it truly representing proves troubling. But in matters of representation, the appearance is the reality. The basis for representation lies in a shared way of treating the signifier, absorbed through association with others — in short, a convention. Nothing supports a sign meaning something or this representing that beyond conventions of use.
The claim that representation could be anything other than conventional seems no more plausible even in sculpture, where mimesis might feel obvious. Look at Miro's Personnage Gothique, Oiseau-Éclair: it looks like neither a Gothic figure nor a lightning bird. Its meaning depends entirely on convention. Representation rests on collective habit, not on imitation.
Personage or a Bird-Flash – whatever they are – it is not imitation that is doing the work of meaning and representation. Yet that is what the sculpture refers to by meaning what it does.
Another everyday example that makes the power of convention in creating meaning apparent is gestures. Sticking your tongue out at someone has come to be regarded as a mild way of defying them, or saying you don’t care for what they think, or a triumph, or some such idea depending on context – and context is indispensable in crystallising meaning – but there is nothing whatsoever intrinsic in the gesture that would connect it to that meaning. Innumerable other gestures and cases of body-language have meanings in the same way – by what we will call a meme-convention.
The Neapolitan gesture of contempt – that of brushing with one’s finger tips the underside of one’s chin, palm forward – indicates clearly a convention establishing the meaning, a convention set among and by a certain social group. Nothing lies behind the gesture giving it the meaning it has apart from the establishment and acceptance of the convention that it has that meaning. That there is a convention that something has such and such a meaning is what something having such and such a meaning is – there is nothing behind or hidden that gives it that meaning – nor is there elsewhere anything that could be thought of its ‘real’ meaning.
Such a convention is transmitted through a culture, and may be transmitted with more effort across cultures. It is perfectly possible for the meme-convention of one culture to clash, or mean the opposite, in different cultures – or indeed have no meaning at all. Patting a child on the head may be regarded as affectionate in one culture, but insulting in another culture. But this variance does not matter for the sake of the argument here. What is important is that the meaning is settled by a convention, not what the meaning is that is settled by the convention.
These and other examples show up the distance between meaning and the thing meant – which does not have to be an object real or imaginary, but may be an abstract concept or idea – that is, between the way something may mean something and the thing that it means. The thing meant does not have to be in any way like the thing meant in order to mean it. Indeed, in nearly all cases the question of likeness cannot even be brought up as it makes no sense.
There are two widely experienced analogies that illustrate the power of convention, as well as the illusion that something else must be going on in order to bring about what results from the convention alone. The point is to demonstrate that something can become substantively what it is purely by convention – that is by the way it is viewed and treated – as well as to illustrate the temptation to think that there must be something else behind or underpinning the convention that really makes the thing what it is, when either no such thing exists or is quite unnecessary. This dispels the fallacy that something cannot really be what it is purely by convention. There is no reason to think that this may not be applied to meaning and representation.
The first I shall call the money analogy and the second I shall call the chess analogy.
The Money Analogy
What makes something money? What makes it that something is money? It was once thought that for something to be money it had to be intrinsically, or one might say really, valuable. Items used as money were made of gold or some other precious metal that had a value in its own right. But it was realised that that is not necessary. It is also sometimes thought – perhaps in the absence of putative ‘intrinsic value’ – that for something to be money it has to be ‘backed’ by an institution like a bank or the state, which in some way really gives the money the value it has and in the end makes it really money. But a little thought makes it clear that this is also a mistake. Only practical inconveniences point to the usefulness of such backing – they are theoretically irrelevant to what counts as money. And historical examples clearly demonstrate this. Pretty much anything may be used as money – practically all one needs is something that is abundant, reasonably uniform, and easily carried around. Economists call money a universal good or universal medium of exchange. Money does away with bartering and the difficulty of the coincidence of wants that that involves. If I have a violin but want a cow, if I barter, I have to find a person with a cow who wants a violin, and would be willing to swap one for the other. But with money this is not required. I sell the violin to someone who wants a violin and they give me money, and I use the money to buy a cow from someone who wants to sell one and he can spend the money on what he wants. In the past all sorts of objects have become money: bottle tops, cigarettes, beads, can ring-pulls, and the like. And the reason they are money is the way they are used – what is done with the objects. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing behind the use that makes what appears to be money really money. The reality that the objects are money is how they are used, is the appearance itself. What makes something money is completely on the surface and open to view.
The Chess Analogy
It is tempting to think that what makes something a bishop in chess (to pick one piece) has something to do with the way it looks. It is also tempting to think that what makes a bishop a bishop is the way it moves as defined in a rulebook. In the latter case this is to look at it the wrong way round. The rulebook is written to record the rule when it is established, it is not the rulebook that establishes the rule. What defines something as a bishop is the way that an object in relation to squares on a board (the arrangement of which is itself something established by convention) moves, namely diagonally, also how it is obstructed by and obstructs other pieces, and how it may be taken and take other pieces. The appearance of the piece, along with its size and weight, is accidental to its being a bishop within the game of chess. Only practical considerations, again, apply here. Something is a bishop because of what one does with something, how it is used.
In both the cases of money and chess, the reality of there being money and chess is established by convention. A certain amount and form of agreement is involved; but there is nothing lying behind that that exists, let alone is required, to make something what it is. The temptation to demand more persists: but what, beyond the established convention, really makes it money, what really makes it a chess bishop? The answer is: nothing does. What may make something what it is and not another thing is a convention, constituted by the way something is viewed, used, or treated.
Having given evidence of the creative power of convention and before moving on to music, it is necessary to say something about the nature of convention itself. It is not required to give an exact account of when a convention comes into effect and thereby determines that something with a certain meaning comes into existence. We may leave unexplored the details of the question of whether a lone individual may create a convention. There is an issue as to whether, if someone cannot check whether a convention is being used correctly, a convention has been created at all.
One may take it as a sufficient condition for what one may call a created semantic convention to be in place that there is agreement among a body of people that something is viewed and treated in a certain way, usually generated over time. The seeming of something that it means something thus created itself means that that meaning exists. Nothing need stand behind it that may be referred to in order to decide whether or not it has the meaning it appears to have. A convention may need a certain process of establishment; but there is nothing inherently problematic in that. It is just a matter of a certain weight and direction of view and treatment over a certain length of time. And meanings change by the same mechanism. If something is taken to have a certain meaning in certain circumstances – by a convention being established – then it has that meaning. This may, indeed will, involve context. A similar object may be expected to have a certain meaning arising from its context in relation to other objects. The details of this could be worked out more. The way, however, in which convention brings into existence things which have meaning or signification is clear.
It is necessary to clear up a possible misconception at this point. Understanding a piece of music goes along with experiencing it. To appreciate a work of art that is a musical one essentially involves an auditory experiencing, not, say, looking at the score, if there is one. What a thing means if it means something is by convention and nothing else. It does not follow from this that we in fact apply the conventions randomly. We are constrained and moulded by the contingent delimiting facts concerning the kinds of creatures that we are, including our sensibilities and consequent predilections, such that applying meanings to certain things is more natural and apt in some cases than others. It could be argued that it is a mistake to say that anything could mean anything by convention, one might say theoretically, because what conventions arise, indeed that they arise at all, involves the nature of the creature realising the convention. Predilections may arise from an individual personal basis, but it is more fundamentally established as a result of features common to humans in general. In the latter case we are referring to something like Heidegger’s Dasein or Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’. Nevertheless, although we may be more likely to ascribe certain meanings to certain music than others, it is the ascribing – and thence the established convention – that means the music has that meaning, not anything intrinsic to the music itself. It is music for us. It is, in short, a result of how we react. If we were a different sort of creature we would react differently. Indeed, individuals do react differently, but usually within bounds. This final point goes some way to explain why and how it is that people disagree about the meaning of a piece of music – what it means to them – although even then there is usually some wider cultural restraint, if it is a culture of which they are a part, on what the ascribed meaning may be. In another culture one might flounder, although perhaps as a fellow human being not quite utterly. So while anything may mean in a very wide sense anything by convention, if not as theoretical absolute, it does not follow that what in fact ends up having the meaning it does by convention does so utterly randomly, rather it stems from the way we are, from the facticity of our humanity and its situation.
Laying this groundwork makes it unproblematic and unsurprising that music may embody and convey meanings that articulate ideas. The meaning that music has is set by convention as a meme. A meme is defined as an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means. It is passed on within a culture, sometimes between cultures, and in all cases over time. Of course, as is the nature of conventions it may change and acquire additions or subtractions. This means that its nature will be highly complex. Indeed, its complexity is the very basis of substantive discussion about the meaning of a piece of music. But this may apply to any meaning-carrying medium.
It is important to consider why it is that we would think that music may articulate ideas. What might motivate that thought?
First, if music does not articulate ideas then it is impossible to explain the esteem music is often held in where it is sometimes characterised as the highest art-form. If music is taken to articulate nothing, then it is hard to see why it should not be considered as the aural equivalent of complex-patterned wallpaper, something essentially merely decorative. That it consists of aural arabesques – some kind of pattern, no matter how complex and clever – simply does not account for the importance of music and its being counted as a high art-form. Indeed we might consider it not art but a branch of design – but no-one does. We would not regard music as a high art-form were only this so, therefore music must consist of something else – something else must be going on. It might be thought, if one gives a little ground and suggests that music expresses emotion, that this would account for the regard in which it is held. But this is plainly inadequate. No-one proposes that a novel derives its chief justification to be considered a great work of art from its expressing emotion. Indeed, it might angle the regard in just the opposite direction with the suggestion that it merely expresses emotion, is gratuitously sentimental, and therefore does not qualify as a great novel, as a great artwork. In order for something to qualify as a great artwork we must consider the artwork engaging with our most important ideas. Ideas about how the world is, our place in the world – in short a Weltanschauung. One might bite the bullet and suggest that to think of music in this way, of its being able to do this, is simply a mistake. One might; but it hardly looks plausible. There seems no good reason to think that so many could have been wrong for so long as to how they think about music as a high art-form. But if it cannot engage with a Weltanschauung it is not possible to see why music should be regarded as an important high art-form; however, music is convincingly so regarded, therefore it must be able to reflect upon and articulate a Weltanschauung.
Second, even those who may hold that music is incapable of articulating – expressing, embodying, showing – ideas that reflect various features of or a whole Weltanschauung belie what they really think about music by the way they actually talk about it. While on the one hand saying one thing when arguing about what they think of music and what it can do in theoretical reflections, the same people will often say things about pieces that clearly indicate that they are treating the piece as articulating ideas, indeed often a Weltanschauung.
It is commonplace, for example, to hear people saying that the last movement of Mahler’s 9th Symphony expresses a certain attitude to life and death. Variously people consider it as mapping a person’s whole life and as expressing the value of life, even with its vicissitudes and in the face of death, along with the terrible regret of knowing that one is going to have to let it go. The details of what is said do not matter. The point is that things are said, and it is neither regarded as absurd that they are, nor utterly open-ended as to what they may be. There is the clear indication for people familiar with the music that Mahler is in a sense advocating a certain way of living, and a way of facing approaching death in the midst of full awareness of the loveliness of life. Now, is all this talk pointless?
It might seem ironic to cite Deryck Cooke as an example of discussing the idea a piece articulates, given his advocacy that music can be an expressive language of the emotions. Yet he doesn’t stop there as he should, contradicting his stated limitations on what music can do as thoroughly as if he insisted music is purely abstract. So we find Cooke describing Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony—quite defensibly, it should be noted—in these terms: “the slow finale, pianissimo thought, devoid of all warmth and life, a hopeless wandering through a dead world ending literally in niente ... nothingness, an ultimate nihilism beyond Tchaikovsky’s conceiving: every drop of blood seemed frozen in one’s veins.” Hopelessness, nothingness, nihilism, dead worlds, warmth, life—these are neither emotions nor expressions of them.
Misguided, wrong—some kind of vast category mistake? Hardly plausible.
One supposed knockdown argument against this is that people disagree about a piece of music’s meaning and the ideas it expresses. Someone might hear it differently. Yet disagreeing concedes the point that music can articulate ideas, for if you can be mistaken, then there is something to be mistaken about. Nor does that sort of disagreement separate music from other arts, where disputes over meaning are just as common. Different readers interpret Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in contradictory ways, but debating its meaning does not prove the novel says nothing.
An addendum to this argument might focus on “genuine” disagreement. Some maintain that for music—albeit not for literature or even the visual arts—such disagreements merely reflect tastes. But this would mean we could say nothing about being more or less informed regarding the music’s expressed ideas. Consider Beethoven and Delius, two composers with diametrically opposed Weltanschauungen. Delius lacks Beethoven’s striving, willed engagement with life, while the former’s wish to experience rather than dominate life articulates sensuality. One might quibble over details, but denying we can speak of music in these terms flies in the face of experience; reversal of these attributions reveals crass incomprehension of these composers’ visions. There is something to get right and wrong.33 Not all disagreement about ideas articulated needs definitive resolution. That some imprecision accompanies articulation falls far short of proving no articulation occurs: ordinary language undeniably thrives on ambiguity.