Música

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2011.00330.x

lawrence m. zbikowski
Music, Emotion, Analysis

In one of the focal chapters of her book The Practice of Philosophy (1930),
Susanne Langer explored a supra-linguistic form of knowledge she called
‘insight’. Outlining the properties of this ‘sixth sense’, she wrote: ‘my thesis is that
insight is understanding by the five orthodox senses, isnon-discursive reasoning,
different from verbal expression only by peculiar characteristics of its symbolism’
(1930, p. 152). Those ‘peculiar characteristics’ gave rise to a symbolic system in
which content was subservient to form: what mattered were not the objective
representations accomplished by a mode of expression, but the intricate patterns
through which they were realised. Such patterns, whichwere the functional basis
for myth and the raison d’être of art, found their highest expression in music. As
Langer saw it,
[m]usic is the purest of symbolic media. Schopenhauer has rightly given it a
special place among the arts, because in not employing any mythical ‘literal
meaning’ it can represent its actual object with less obstruction than the arts
which must work through a distractingspecific subject. Could it be that the final
object of musical expression is the endlessly intricate yet universal pattern of
emotional life? (1930, pp. 160–1)

What ultimately interested Langer was less the affiliation of music with emotion,
and more music’s demonstration of the means through which insight was accomplished and the extent to which it could be developed. The means, as set out inher Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937), was human beings’ capacity for recognising connections between abstract patterns: analogy makes possible the appreciation of similarities between sequences of musical sounds and the experience of
emotions, and it also makes possible the apprehension of logical forms.1 An
explication of the non-discursive knowledge with which insight was associatedwas one of the central goals of Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942), and
nowhere was the symbolic representation of this knowledge more evident than in
musical expression. Building on the distinction between denotation and connotation common in mid-century analyses of semantics, she wrote, ‘there is ... a
kind of symbolism peculiarly adapted to the explication of “unspeakable” things,
thoughit lacks the cardinal virtue of language, which is denotation. The most
highly developed type of such purely connotational semantic is music’ ([1942]
1957, p. 101).
There is much in Langer’s philosophy that is stimulating for the music
scholar. That said, it also presents certain frustrations to those interested in the
place of music in human life: language is hardly as secure a base forknowledge
Music Analysis, 29/i-ii-iii (2010)
© 2011 The Author.
Music Analysis © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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lawrence m. zbikowski

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Ex. 1 Domenico Scarlatti, Sonata in A major, K. 208, bars 43–9
[Adagio è Cantabile]
5

7

as Langer makes it out to be; despite precision of thoughtelsewhere, she is
noticeably short on specifics when it comes to aspects of musical organisation;
and she too often falls prey to the commonplace that music is first among the arts
in its ability to summon emotions.This last point is particularly important to the
argument I wish to develop, for Langer is not alone in the belief that there is a
special relationship between music and the emotions. It isnot hard to see why
such a belief developed: as is our experience of emotions, our experience of
music is something that happens within us, developing and flowing through time,
mercurial in its sudden shifts and transformations. Nonetheless, the plain facts
are that we have emotional responses to a wide range of phenomena – broadly
defined, emotions are simply psychological and physiological...