Music (interview question #13)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
In a body of work that celebrates art and aesthetics in all their forms and variations, music seems to hold a special place in your philosophical perspective. Why is this? What’s special about music?
Yes, I think that is true. Although I defend a very broad conception of art – one that includes not only music, poetry, painting, and sculpture but also craft, ritual, architecture, gardening, and even the art of living itself – music indeed occupies a privileged place in my worldview. Partly this reflects personal experience as a passionate but amateur musician. Music has probably affected me more deeply and consistently than any other art form. It has accompanied every stage of my life – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. But I also think there are philosophical reasons why music holds such a special status.
My thinking here engages Schopenhauer and Nietzsche quite closely. Schopenhauer famously argued that music differs fundamentally from the other arts because it does not merely represent appearances in the world; it expresses something deeper and more immediate about existence – it expresses ‘the Will’ itself. Painting represents objects (or takes form as an object even if it expresses an idea or feeling). Literature narrates events and characters using words and concepts. Sculpture shapes material forms. But music bypasses conceptual mediation in a very direct way. It reaches beneath language and rationality into something elemental or ethereal.
Now, I do not fully endorse Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the ‘Will’ in the strict sense, but I think he was right to recognise that music touches dimensions of experience that concepts alone cannot capture. Even (or especially) without words, music communicates moods, tensions, longings, ecstasies, sorrows, and transcendence with extraordinary immediacy. It reveals that human beings are not merely rational creatures but affective, embodied, rhythmic beings.
Nietzsche radicalised this insight. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), music becomes associated with the Dionysian dimension of existence – the dissolution of the isolated ego into a deeper experience of vitality, chaos, unity, and becoming. This contrasts with the Apollonian dimension of representation epitomised by sculpture. Music can momentarily suspend the rigid boundaries of the self. It allows us to feel existence rather than merely interpret it intellectually.
I think music also exemplifies the Will to Art in a particularly pure form. Consider what music actually is. It is patterned vibration organised into meaningful experience. Nothing material remains after the performance ends. Music unfolds in time and then vanishes. It is ephemeral, intangible, and finite – and yet it can move us more profoundly than many supposedly ‘practical’ things.
That impermanence gives music special existential significance. Music becomes a kind of metaphor for life itself. A symphony exists only in its unfolding. Once completed, it disappears into silence. Human existence is similar. We unfold temporally, briefly, beautifully, tragically – and then we vanish. That is why I paraphrase T.S. Eliot near the end of SMPLCTY by saying: we are the music, while the music lasts.
Music therefore becomes an aesthetic model for how to inhabit finitude. Its beauty depends precisely on transience. A musical phrase matters because it passes. Silence is not the negation of music but part of its structure. What strikes me about this insight is that it also reflects the idea that less is more. If there were no rests, pauses, or silence in music, it would be too much, too full, too busy and chaotic. Likewise, mortality and finitude may not negate meaning but intensify it.
There is also a communal and ecological dimension to music that I find important. Music is often participatory rather than consumptive. People gather to sing, dance, celebrate, mourn, ritualise, and remember together. Long before industrial capitalism turned music into a commodified industry, music was woven into everyday communal existence. In many traditional societies, music was not something performed by specialists for passive audiences; it was a shared social practice integrated into work, ritual, spirituality, and seasonal life.
That resonates strongly with my vision of ecological civilisation. In a society organised around sufficiency rather than consumer excess, low-impact forms of richness become increasingly important. Music is a perfect example. It can generate immense beauty, emotional depth, and communal meaning with very modest material and energetic requirements. A guitar around a fire may contain more existential wealth than vast quantities of industrial consumption.
Music also reveals something important about human freedom and creativity. There are only a finite number of notes available within a musical system, yet the possible combinations are effectively inexhaustible. I use a similar metaphor in SMPLCTY when I say that humanity is not limited by ecological limits, in the same way a pianist is not limited by the 88 keys of a piano. There will never come a time when all the beautiful sonatas have been written. Within finite conditions, infinite creative variation remains possible. That is a crucial philosophical insight for ecological civilisation. Limits do not abolish creativity; they give it form. Scarcity begets creativity.
At the cosmological level, music also seems to capture something about the dynamic nature of existence itself. Reality is not a static substance but movement, rhythm, vibration, process, becoming. Music expresses temporality more directly than perhaps any other art form. It mirrors the flowing, unfolding, pre-conceptual character of existence.
And finally, music matters because it can redeem suffering without denying it. Some of the most beautiful music ever composed emerges from sorrow, longing, and tragedy. Music does not necessarily resolve suffering intellectually, but it can transform suffering into something luminous and shareable. In doing so, it offers perhaps the clearest example of what Nietzsche meant by the ‘aesthetic justification of existence’. In a finite and uncertain universe, music teaches us how beauty can arise precisely through fragility and transience. That, to me, is one of the deepest truths art has to offer. As Nietzsche wrote: ‘Life without music would be a mistake.’
