Aporia

Milan Kundera, in Encounter. He borrows the phrase “sentimentality hoax” from Carl Jung, who wrote that we in the West “are involved in a sentimentality hoax of gigantic proportions… Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.” Stravinsky, for his part, asserted that the “foolish sigh” of emotion in response to music was, essentially, bullshit:

“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”

That we react emotionally to music, to art in general, to nearly everything we encounter is a quality of our species with which we’re all familiar, against which we sometimes struggle but which we at other moments celebrate; Kundera elsewhere describes much of European civilization as being driven by “Homo Sentimentalis…the man who has raised feelings to a category of value,” which leads, in his view, to the falsification of feeling, tacitly competitive emoting, and other grotesqueries.

Whether one accepts Stravinsky’s argument, or Kundera’s rather more gentle variation, there is little doubt that part of developing one’s sense of an art is learning to disambiguate whatever feelings it provokes from its formal qualities; very bad art, after all, regularly precipitates tears, joy, fascination, amusement, longing.

The question remains, of course, whether good art can fail to do so. If art can succeed without any appeal to the intuitive faculties of an audience, it does so through referentiality, through some essentially essayistic commentary on the history of its medium or style or content; I have at times argued that what is essayistic, what requires an essay on a wall in a gallery to explain itself, its raison d’être, ought to have been an essay itself, as opposed to text encoded in the visual, structural, or musical. But I am unsure.

In any event, it is an arresting idea: that “music’s curse” is “its mindless aspect,” its capacity to move us without creative justification, to strike at us without any formal sophistication or even compositional intentionality. It is a curse because we respond emotionally to what is familiar, to what we’ve associatively learned to consider moving –”unconsciously or by force of habit”– and as such we favor what is clichéd in music, or what is only very slightly inventive: a new way of producing the 1-4-5 of rock, a new way to process the banal harmonies of the singer, etc. It is a curse because it rewards the derivative and repackaged and punishes the novel, the creative, the bold.

It is a curse, too, because it is a wonderful quality which only a composer like Stravinsky could deny, a quality which all other forms of art must envy; a real curse must also be a gift, because it then becomes impossible to abandon or combat; and thus: music remains the most affective of the arts, the most universal, the most beloved, the most dynamic, yet as often as not the most foolish, if not in its essence than in the sighs it cannot but seek to stir.