 Music Essays
The philosophy of music is the oldest branch of aesthetics, and also the most influential, being responsible for the cosmology that came down from the Pythagoreans, via Plato, Ptolemy, St Augustine, Plotinus, and Boethius, to the poets and philosophers of the Middle Ages. The Copernican revolution that destroyed the old cosmology, destroyed also the philosophy which inspired it. Although Schopenhauer wrote brilliantly of the 'metaphysics of music', modern philosophers have ventured into this terrain, as a rule, with little confidence that it will cast light on anything outside itself, and even Schopenhauer's theories depend more on his global system than on a detailed study of the musician's art. As for Kant and Hegel - the two giants of modern aesthetics - no person with an ear can read the observations of the first on music without being acutely aware that he was more or less deaf to it, while the second, who confessed to being little versed in the art, seems to be improvising during much of the chapter devoted to music in his lectures on aesthetics.Finally Croce, their greatest successor, ignored the subject altogether. It is an odd experience, indeed, to read Croce's essay on the relationship between the Countess and Cherubino in Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro, and to discover that the author makes no mention of Mozart, whose music made this relationship so moving and so clear.
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