Music to Hear on Here: Aphex Twin

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Aphex Twin - "Avril 14th"

The excerpt I've responded to is taken from Schopenhauer's "Metaphysics of the Beautiful and Aesthetics". After a brief diatribe against the complications which arise from merging music and text, he compares the varied purposes of music to that of architecture's. Music and architecture must subordinate their status of high art in order to adapt to utilitarian purposes. According to Schopenhauer, text in music equates to unnecessary embellishments in architecture -- both of which impede our view of the "very few, clear, penetrating, and touching" ideas that may found within the core of the artwork (121). On pages 122-123, he describes how music should be properly received:

Indeed, to be properly interpreted and enjoyed, the highest productions of music demand the wholly undivided and undistracted attention of the mind so that it may surrender itself to, and become absorbed in, them in order thoroughly to understand its incredibly profound language.

The language of music, he continues, is one without picture or image. In the immersive experience of listening to music, we must limit the effects to which intuition or imagination conjures up images from our experience.

For this reason, I've chosen to include a recording of Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th", a very simple piano composition. I think it encapsulates the idea that the universal language of music, devoid of text, image, or embellishment, can yield a message that is purely musical and still remarkably moving.

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Course Description

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Martin Mull (or Elvis Costello)

Thinking about the meaning and value, intellectual, affective and neurological experiences, and aesthetics of music has occupied an important position in modern and contemporary philosophical writings. Central to the philosophy of music is a questioning of what music is insofar as it is an art form and practice, akin to but different from other arts, such as drama, literature, painting, sculpture, to name but a few examples. Claims have been made, in fact, that music’s effect, when performed and listened to, surpasses those of the other arts because of its abstact purity, of its universality, and of its singular capacity to express, represent and incite emotions. This course will explore such issues in 19th-20th century philosophy. We will begin with introductory readings of what composes the field and discipline of the philosophy of music. We will read—among other philosophers, novelists, critics and musicologists—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Barthes and Adorno’s writings on music. Finally, we will have the occasion to read about and listen to specific musicians, both high and low, and explore the contexts of their work, concentrating on the historical and political dimensions of the practice, performance and art of making music.