Abstract
I still date my academic development in the performance of chamber music to the day in 1955, in Manhattan, when music coach Carl Mossbacher asked me whether I saw ‘pictures in the mind’ when I played. Not whether I felt emotions, which would at least have embodied the ‘pictures’ in some psychosomatic or psychocognitive way, or whether I concentrated on playing the musical notes, but saw mental ‘pictures’ — specifically ‘pictures in the mind’, pretty rivulets or wild oceans or dark clouds.
This chapter originated as the keynote address at the 2009 Berlin conference ‘On Discovering the Human’, and was accompanied by a live performance of Mendelssohn’s D-minor Trio, opus 49, with the author at the piano together with front chairs of the Berlin Staatskapelle. The original lecture demonstrated aspects of Mendelssohn’s ‘absolute music’ now lost in this reduction to a verbal text, and I have also removed many of the musical illustrations originally made at the piano. But not readily, for as a performing keyboard player and academic historian I continue to believe that both are necessary to understand the question about the ‘pictures of the mind’ that occupy the heart of this retrospective essay offering a personal view. In Berlin, moreover, the audience was mainly composed of non-musicologists and I therefore felt myself compelled to explain terms and developments I would not have before a more specialised conference. I hope readers immersing themselves in this book may find opportunities to listen to a recording of the Mendelssohn trio while reconsidering my suggestions about the type of ‘pictures in the mind’ it can give rise to. Since then I have also treated the matter at greater length, in the form of a personal memoir, in Rachmaninoff’s Cape: A Nostalgia Memoir (forthcoming 2015). I am grateful to musicologists Robert Gjerdingen of Northwestern University and Thomas Christensen of the University of Chicago for pointing me in some of the right directions and telling me when I was straying too far from the track, and to critic-scholar John Neubauer for commenting on various versions of this chapter. Recent contributions to these debates include Linda Austern, Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (London: Routledge, 2002), Kevin Barry , Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Baxendale, Pictures in the Mind (Stroud: Reaper, 2000), Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Michel Meulders, Helmholtz: from Enlightenment to Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010),John Neubauer, ‘Tales of Hoffmann and Others on Narrativizations of Instrumental Music’, in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, ed., Interarts Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 117–136, Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Picador, 2008) and Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), but I take responsibility for the views expressed here.
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Notes
This matter of emplotment is hugely important for all theories of mimesis and of utility to theories of representation arising specifically from musical forms; however, Neubauer, ‘Tales of Hoffmann’, demonstrates that emplotment, in this large theoretical sense, is more complex than one thinks. Furthermore, the encounter with Mossbacher occurred in 1955, almost sixty years ago, long before a so-called science of musical cognition existed, as represented in approaches such as Honing’s who claims that music stirs the profoundest emotions in listeners of all the arts because it challenges ordinary cognitive functions in the mind’s inner world. The question is how? Henkjan Honing, Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening (London: Transaction, 2011).
Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989),
Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (Leipzig: Weigl, 1854).
Walter Pater, The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry, Adam Philips, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
See also Patricia Hertzog, ‘The Condition to Which All Art Aspires: Walter Pater on Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (2 April 1996), 122–134.
Heinrich Schenker, William Drabkin and Ian Bent, Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of Youth, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
See also Tom Pankhurst, Schenkerguide: A Brief Handbook and Website for Schenkerian Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Kivy summarises his ideas over several decades, but see Neubauer’s reply to him in Neubauer, 1997. Peter Kivy, Music, Language, and Cognition: And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), Neubauer, ‘Tales of Hoffmann’.
Neubauer’s chapter on Kant is illuminating on this matter; see John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Chapter 3.
George Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Schubert’s book about the symbolism of dreams was one of the most widely read books of the Romantic epoch and had terrific influence on E.T.A. Hoffman, Freud and Jung. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg, 1814). Both Schubert and Carus refer to the psychology of music by digging into the prehistoric past, that is, ancient Greek and Chinese beliefs. In the third lecture of Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Views on the Dark Side of Natural Science, 1808, 63) he describes two theories of the origin of languages. In the first, the earth’s atmosphere was in a faster and more intense motion than it is now. Some type of divine language of music had to permeate its air, which functioned as a filter, while in the earth’s former state this language – Schubert called it a cosmic language – was a type of music, hence its divine origin. Since those prehistoric days the earth’s motion has slowed down, altering the filter, and the divine language of music was nowperceived as ‘noise’ similar to the howl of gales and the wind’s rustle through trees. Recent prophets, according to Schubert, interpret these noises as conveying mediums for divine wisdom whereas ancient prophets understood the sounds as the divine language as music. This genealogy explains music’s status, Schubert thought, as the oldest of the arts (parallel to astronomy as the most ancient of the sciences). I am indebted to Tobias Leibold of Bochum University for discussing the ambiguities of Schubert’s lecture with me, as well as the intricacies of Sömmerring’s neuromania in endnote 15. Carus was a fascinating figure in his own right, a polymathic personal physician to the King of Saxony, personally based in Dresden, who also regularly contributed to Goethe’s journal Zur Morphologie. Even among historians of early psychology Carus’s influence has been underestimated. For his collaborations with Goethe, see Stefan Grosche, ‘Zarten Seelen ist gar viel gegönnt’, Naturwissenschaft und Kunst im Briefwechsel zwischen C.G. Carus und Goethe (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001).
The most comprehensive analysis of Müller’s mentality in a single essay is found in Meulders, Helmholtz, 43–54. The most thorough investigation of his career and students is found in the work of Laura Otis, who writes that if George Henry Lewes — the English philosopher-critic who lived openly with Georg Eliot — ‘had translated the Müller biography, English readers might have viewed Müller as another Goethe, another German genius worthy of international acclaim’: Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 108. His importance cannot be overestimated as Germany’s leading physiologist in the first half of the nineteenth century for confirming the Bell-Magendie Law about the two different functions of the nervous system, that is, his famous frog experiment.
James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012),
James Kennaway, ‘Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing’, Social History of Medicine 25.2 (2012), 271–289.
See Meulders, Helmholtz, Chapters 9–11, for further detail. Meulders, an academic neuroscientist, comments on page 151 that Helmholtz consistently ignored anatomical data on the nervous system and strangely never referred to the brain. The reason for this omission was probably his mistrust of the concept of an anatomophysiological correlation that might have suggested that anatomical and psychological processes were identical, which was exactly the battle of the [contemporary] natural philosophers. Helmholtz’s ‘omission’ may indeed have been owing to the conflation of anatomical and psychological data. Yet he rarely overlooked the capacity of some music to arouse the fiercest of nervous responses. For example, in 1847, when he was working as an army physician and deeply in love, he attended a concert at which his lover Olga could not join him, and was so overwhelmed by Beethoven’s music that he wrote to her: … I was there quite alone, abandoned by the beautiful half of my soul, and it would have been the same if I had been listening to scales on the piano. It was not until the overture of Coriolanus that I regained my spirits: it is a pure jewel, short and concise, so proud and resolute, oscillating between nervous anxiety and the confusion of battle [einer Menge von Unruhe und wirren Kämpfen ] before finally dissolving into a few melancholic notes … Kremer Richard Lynn, Letters of Hermann von Helmholtz to his Wife, 1847–1859 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 195, underlining mine; this letter is not with the rest of Helmholtz’s correspondence in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, but has been cited by Lynn quoting Helmholtz’s biographer, Königsberger). E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose musical criticism Helmholtz knew and admired, also commented in 1812, on first hearing Coriolanus, on the ‘extreme nervousness’ instilled in him by Beethoven’s overture; claiming it displayed ‘implacable unrest […] insatiable yearning […] and tension everywhere’; see E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 289.
Duncan Wu, Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1351.
Wundt’s most important work has since been acknowledged as the formative one for the history of experimental psychology. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Zurich: 1874).
Robert J. Gjerdingen, ‘The Psychology of Music’, in Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 956–981.
Daniel K.L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xii.
Stanley Cavell, ‘Music Discomposed’, in Stanley Cavell, ed., Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 141–157.
Raymond Tallis, Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (London: Atlantic Books, 2010),
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 340–344.
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Rousseau, G. (2014). (Nervously) Grappling with (Musical) ‘Pictures in the Mind’: A Personal Account. In: Kennaway, J. (eds) Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_2
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