Music As a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Semi Maria

Author:Semi, Maria.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2012-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

The eighteenth-century British debate on the arts inherits certain fundamental questions from the past: which are the principles of the arts and by what are they linked? What is the relation between art and nature? How should we understand the imitation performed by music? How and what can a music without text communicate to man? What is the connection between music and passions?

Innumerable possible answers in detail can be given, as we saw, but the formulation of the problem remains the same. First of all, we can note how none of the authors dealt with, from Harris to Smith, understands the imitative dimension of music as mere mimesis of natural sounds. The pleasure of music has nothing to do with imitation of this kind. The problem most debated concerns the relation between music and passions. While the relation is unanimously acknowledged, there is disagreement over its interpretation: music can be said to ‘imitate’ the passions, or to ‘express’ them, or to arouse them by ‘sympathy’. And each of these options implies consequences. The most obvious is the concept of ‘expression’ – imagined first by Charles Avison – as a possible response to the imitative principle. In actual fact, imitation and expression pose an identical problem that turns on the questions ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ The theories that emphasize the expressive dimension of music, as in Beattie, have a hard time explaining the pleasure produced in man by instrumental music; more effective results are achieved by authors who rely on the sympathetic principle, whether understood in a physical-mechanical sense (like Webb) or in the more general sense of ‘natural resonance with something’ as we find in Harris or Jones.

The theories that seem to answer best to the needs of music are those centred on the notions of movement and time, underlining the rhythmic and metrical dimension of music and relegating the semantic problem to second place. In these cases, the main references are to Aristotle and Hume. Aristotelian movement may find itself associated with the eighteenth century’s discoveries in physiology and give rise to interpretations of a mechanical sort, like that of Daniel Webb, where the analogy between passions and music derives from the fact that both of these act on the mind in the same way and produce the same effects; or, as in Thomas Twining, it may take the form of a theory that employs the texts of Aristotle to interpret the relation between music and emotions, thence to exploit the modern concept of ‘imagination’ to complete a theory that seems to lack sufficient tools to account for the effects of instrumental music.

In this panorama the most complete and interesting arguments appear to be those of Lord Kames and Adam Smith. In some points, their ideas seem to repropound a new application of the classical concept of ‘order’: through their conception of a human mind ruffled by a continual passage of ideas and perceptions, they establish an analogy between the flow of human thought and the development in time of a piece of music.

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