Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Reflections on Music” – Culture

As is well known, Ludwig Wittgenstein was not only one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, but also a passionate teacher. He was prone to corporal punishment to an extent that went well beyond the broad scope of practical education at the time. His teaching career then came to an abrupt end. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein remained a teacher, but now teaching himself and posterity.

As a musical person – he played the clarinet and was well acquainted with the works of Viennese Classicism and Romanticism – he also had something to say on this subject. Nevertheless, he never wrote the book “Beberatungen zur Musik” that has now been published. But he formulated the idea that can be found in his manuscripts: “The title of my book: ‘Philosophical reflections, arranged alphabetically according to their subjects’https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.”

The Berlin composition professor Walter Zimmermann has now taken up the idea and summarized everything on the subject of music that the Wittgenstein archive in Bergen has to offer alphabetically in generic terms: from “form types” such as fugue, symphony, waltz to “tones” such as keys, tone rows, scales . Does it make sense? Not necessarily, because Wittgenstein did not provide a template for a music lexicon, and the sentences compiled for the individual keywords rarely explain the facts in more detail. Rather, they are a fixed point from which and around which Wittgenstein’s thoughts revolve. Some sounds distant and far-fetched at first, others make sense immediately.

For example, when he searches for irony in music and brings not only Wagner’s “Meistersinger” into play, but the fugato in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth: “Here is something that corresponds to the expression of grim irony in the speech.” He equates the ironic with the “distorted” and comes up with Grillparzer, who said that Mozart only allowed the beautiful in his music. So the non-distorted. Wittgenstein is – rightly – unsure whether this is the case and immediately solves the problem by stating that the term “beauty” has also done some mischief here.

Elsewhere, Wittgenstein is less critical, including of himself. Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, for example, which often develop in the alienation of found music, are felt by Wittgenstein to be inauthentic, even a lie, “a kind of fraud”. But then it’s less an accusation against Mahler than against himself: “To lie to oneself, to lie to oneself about one’s own inauthenticity, must have a bad influence on one’s own style; for the result will be that in it can no longer distinguish the genuine from the false. This may explain the inauthenticity of Mahler’s style + I’m in the same danger.”

Wittgenstein becomes downright emotional here, he finds Mahler’s music “bad”, “worth nothing”, but he does not reflect further on the criteria used. At this point, “fake” can’t mean much more than unoriginal, not even unoriginal. Johannes Brahms was accused of that at the time. However, the fact that the substance of a work of art must be consistently new and unique in order to be recognized as significant art is not a universal rule of the times and rather shows a narrowed perspective, which at that time tied creativity above all to the discovery of catchy melodies. Composers know: they’re not even half the battle.

You have to look for statements about Wittgenstein’s core area yourself

Such passages make you a little sad. How much more one could have learned about Mahler if Wittgenstein had approached him with the same positive meticulousness as, for example, Franz Schubert, whose melodies he aptly contrasted with those of Mozart, or if he followed the mathematician Rudolf Rothe’s observation that Schumann was “through Wagner’s effectiveness has lost a large part of its rightful effect”.

Even more regrettable, however, is the fact – and here the alphabetical order of keywords again obscures more than it helps – that one has to find one’s own statements about Wittgenstein’s core area of ​​language and meaning, i.e. the similarity to language and the meaningfulness of music. Here one can expect deeper insights than in the observational descriptions of practical musical experience.

Sentences like this indicate: “Humans have the ability to build languages ​​with which any meaning can be expressed without having any idea of ​​how and what each word means.” And in the direction of modern sign theories: “Yes, symbols contain the form of color + of space and if, for example, a letter once designates a color and sometimes a sound, it is a different symbol in both cases – + this is shown by the fact that other rules of syntax for apply to him.” But where do language and music differ?

Often you can only think if you speak to yourself in a low voice

One could call speaking the instrument of thinking, says Wittgenstein, but one cannot say that the process of speaking is an instrument of the thinking process, or that “language is the carrier of thought, as it were, just as the tones of a song can be called the carrier of words “.

Some longer sections in this context are written in English: Often one can only think if one speaks to oneself in a low voice. But no one would say that thinking accompanied speaking unless they were tempted or compelled to do so by the existence of the two verbs, speaking and thinking. If anything can be said to accompany or accompany speech, it would be something like modulating the vocal meanings of the expression. “But does the expression accompany the words in the sense in which a melody accompanies them?”

The editor refrains from a translation, it would be difficult. If one translated “accompany” with “accompanied”, one would assume that sounds accompanied a spoken word in sung language. So it would be spoken and sung simultaneously in separate action.

So she doesn’t speak to us at all? We are not meant at all?

It is obvious that Wittgenstein is looking for the character of musical meanings in the English exaggeration, and yet he exposes them as chimeras, thereby depriving the reader of the seductive romantic belief: “The melody is a kind of tautology, it is complete in itself; it masturbating.” So she doesn’t speak to us at all? We are not meant at all, not part of the art at all? That would be sobering, depressing – and comforting.

Sometimes Wittgenstein’s thoughts are a bit “muddled”, which means less the disorder than almost the opposite, the inexorable consequence of his thinking, the irreversibility of the knowledge he has gained. Mudelt is “like silver paper that, once crumpled, can never be completely smoothed out”. There he is too much in the music to keep the distance from the ignorant, and not quite in it to think out of it and speak for it. questions lead on. What does the unmusical lack? “What is wrong with someone who does not feel that something is lost when the word ‘bank’ is repeated more often; its meaning; + it now becomes a mere sound?” Wittgenstein’s answer that it is a kind of aspect blindness remains unsatisfactory, the reader has to think for himself. A teacher cannot achieve more.