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Booknotes, July 2009

In what is styled by its publisher a ‘major new work by the pioneer of philosophy of music’, Peter Kivy argues that absolute music has no representational or narrative content. (Peter Kivy, Antithetical Arts, On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2009.) He says that we cannot as yet say philosophically what its human significance is. Anything of quasi-moral force is ruled out (so much for Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche). And while Kivy has some sympathy for the view that music can produce a quasi-religious ecstacy, as a secularist he has little time for there being anything objective about that. In the end music produces pleasure, Kivy says, and pleasure is good: not the only good, but a good nonetheless. Kivy has no answer to the Benthamite who prefers push-pin to the late quartets, but then ‘one need not defend absolute music against push-pin, or the narrative and representational arts, for that matter. For those who have experienced its ecstatic effects, that is all the defense it needs, or can ever have, push-pin notwithstanding.’ But, what of the explanation of this power music has? It cannot rely in music’s narrative, dramatic or literary content, for (according to Kivy) it has none. ‘For me, its power over us remains a divine mystery. Or, in other words, I haven’t the foggiest.’ As this is more or less the end of Kivy’s book, readers may be forgiven for feeling a little disappointed. During the course of his 261 pages a lot of time is spent criticising specific attempts to supply absolute music with representational or narrative schemata, and to detach examples from any specific emotional meaning. A whole chapter is spent on Shostakovich, specifically on an attempt to interpret his Tenth Symphony as having to do with the mood in the USSR following the death of Stalin, in the course of which the by now somewhat familiar objections to Volkov’s Testimony are trotted out. But, however tenuous a particular interpretation of Shostakovich might be – and to see his music in such historically specific terms might well be unjustifiable – this is not enough to see absolute music as always and irremediably abstract. We do not need to see every piece of absolute music as if it were Til Eulenspiegel or Hamlet in sound, to take two other examples Kivy discusses.