Sartre on Music

Author(s): Paul E. Robinson

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer, 1973), pp. 451-
457
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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 PAUL E. ROBINSON

Sartre on Music

The whine of the disappointed petty bourgeois, of the hard-

done-by shopwalker- that exists in music too. And in music
under capitalism it seems to be a typical characteristic.
Hanns Eisler, On Stupidity in Art
We can expect that music in a Communist future will free itself
of all romantic whimpering and smug silliness, all hysteria and
ham-handed propaganda.
Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art

1IT 1is EASY to dismiss this sort of thing as
the ravings of Marxist propagandists.l After
all, nearly everyone knows by now that
music is non-referential, and many would
even agree with Stravinsky that music is by
its very nature incapable of expressing any-
thing at all whether an idea or an emotion.2
How could music possibly take sides in an
ideological dispute?
And yet there are those who persist in
believing that music must mean something,
it must have something to say to us, if not
about its composer and his feelings, at least
something about human feeling in general.
Few who have been profoundly affected by
the likes of Mozart's G-minor Symphony,
Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, or even
Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht believe that
A revised version of a paper read at the spring
meeting of the Tri-State Philosophical Association
at Meadville, Pa., April 1971.
PAULE. ROBINSON is assistant professor of philosophy
at SUNY at Fredonia. He is also a conductor, com-
poser, and music critic.
they have been guilty of imposing their
emotive fantasies on the music; surely the
emotion is in the music. And if it is in the
music, why stop at abstract feeling? Perhaps
music speaks not only of sublime sadness or
joy but also of the ideals of the French Rev-
olution (in Beethoven), of the frivolity of
the aristocracy in Maria Theresa's Austria
(in Mozart or Haydn), or of the decadence
of capitalism.
Sartre long ago accepted the prevailing
view that notes "refer to nothing exterior to
themselves," 3 and so exempted music from
the necessity of being committed or en-
gaged in a moral and political way. But he
was prompted to reconsider his views when
asked to write a preface to Rene Leibowitz's
L'Artiste et sa conscience.4 And from these
reconsiderations arose new hopes. To my
knowledge, Sartre's thoughts on this subject
have received little attention in spite of the
fact that he remains one of the most sophis-
ticated of Marxist aestheticians. In this
paper I wish to examine some of the claims
 452
engendered by Sartre's new hopes to show
that while Sartre, as ever, has breathed new
life into a very perplexing philosophical
puzzle, the support which he offers for his
hope that music may express the rage of the
oppressed and sing of their better future,
will not stand up to scrutiny.
We may distinguish two main points (1
and 2) which Sartre wishes us to accept as
true, and which, if true, may lend credence
to, if not entail, the truth of this hope (3):
1. Music expresses emotion and evokes it. "If so
many people find consolation in music, it
seems to me that it is becauseit speaksto them
of their sorrowsin the same voice which they
will use to speak of them when they are com-
forted, and because it makes them see these
sorrowswith the eyes of a future day."6
2. Music expresses the emotions of an age. In
Bach, for example, is expressed "the austerity
of Leipzig, the puritan stolidity of the German
princes, that moment of the spirit where rea-
son, in full possessionof its techniques,never-
theless remained subject to faith and where
logic of concept was transformed into logic of
judgment.'"
3. Music might express the rage of the oppressed
and its hope for the future. "Is it so impossible
that an artist... will transform even this
world, with its savage violence, its barbarism,
its refined techniques, its slaves, its tyrants,its
mortal threats,and our horrible and grandiose
freedom into music?"7
1. Let us examine first Sartre's claim that
music expresses emotion and evokes it. No
one has denied that people are consoled by
music, find emotional satisfaction in it, or
get stimulus from it, not even Stravinsky, if
one reads him carefully:
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 unconsciouslyor by force of
habit, we have come to confuse with its essen-
tial being.8
The point is that composers and listeners
can use music for expressive and evocative
purposes as a matter of convention. That is
to say, if it is agreed that a certain melodic
pattern, for example, connotes joy or sad-
ness, then it is correct to say that the music
expresses these things. But a composer such
as Stravinsky can attempt to sweep away the
PAUL E. ROBINSON
traditional system of connotation. He will
baffle and confound his listeners for a time,
but only until they learn the new system.
Music is a symbolic language which is very
nearly unintelligible if the connotations of
the symbols are not understood. This lan-
guage must be learned just as English or
German has to be learned before it can be
said to express anything. If I say "How do
you do" or "What a beautiful day" to a
man who understands only Swahili, it is not
clear to him that I am expressing anything
at all. He must learn that the sounds which
I use express my thoughts and feelings, and
he must also learn which sound expresses
which thought or feeling. It is much the
same with music, although there is, of
course, a significant difference which is that
the system of musical connotation is far less
specific than English or German. "How do
you do" or "What a beautiful day" can be
translated into German but not into music
except in the most general and ambiguous
way. We could set these texts to music, but
the music by itself could never express the
text. Even the feeling which accompanies
"How do you do" or "What a beautiful day"
cannot be rendered in music alone. A com-
poser may try to express in music what he
feels about the spectacle of a beautiful day,
but no one would know what he was trying
to express if there was only the music to go
on. The beauty of the day may make the
composer happy and at peace and he may
succeed in evoking the same feelings in
those who hear his music, but unless he
titles the piece appropriately his listeners
could never hear "What a beautiful day" in
the music.
Moreover, any attempt to render more
precisely what music expresses succeeds
only in revealing the ultimate futility of the
attempt. In Deryck Cooke's The Language
of Music, for example, one may find an
elaborate attempt to specify what each mu-
sical element means in the language of the
emotions. But when Cooke seeks to apply
this system to a complete piece of music,
specificity vanishes altogether in the com-
plexity of the music. Cooke has to argue
that certain intervals are decisive in a given
piece and determine the feeling expressed:
Sartre on Music
"We begin with our familiar term 1-3-1
(minor), which is, as it were, the womb of
the symphony, the fundamental mood from
which it derives its being-a brooding ob-
session with 'the darker side of things.' "9
But by what criteria is this pattern and the
mood it conveys, even accepting Cooke's
characterization of it for the sake of argu-
ment, more important than the multitude
of other patterns which one may find in
every bar of the score, often simultane-
ously? Applying Cooke's system with rigor
to a piece of music does not make the emo-
tions expressed in the music more intelligi-
ble; if anything, the exercise reveals an in-
credible jumble of emotions ranging from
A to Z. The logic of a piece of music is not
to be found on this level, but rather one
suspects, in terms of the music as music, i.e.,
the form, the harmony, etc., or in terms of
the psychology of stimulus and response.10
While granting that what is expressed in
music may be a matter of convention and
probably extremely vague, even then it
must be admitted that music does have a
therapeutic value if that is what Sartre is
claiming when he says that people "find
consolation in it." Many people seem to
find certain kinds of music soothing in cer-
tain situations; mindless Musak at the den-
tist's, for example. But it is not so much the
music as the psychological effect of the
soothing, tensionless sound. A babbling
brook or a continuous, soft speaking voice
intoning dreary bedtime stories would pro-
duce a similar response. By the same token,
military band music may be appropriate
when the aim is to rouse people into some
kind of action, e.g., a Nazi rally at Nurem-
burg. This music serves the same purpose as
a rousing and stirring oration. And cer-
tainly Soviet theorists had this property of
music in mind when they stipulated that a
musical composition ought to end on an
emotional plane which would inspire the
rworkersto return to their jobs revitalized
with eagerness and dedication. Much of
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, for exam-
ple, is savage and doleful by turns, but the
pompous rhetoric of its finale renders it of-
ficially acceptable. Is Sartre then on the side
of the Soviet theorists, who wish to use
453
music for purposes of brainwashing? Like
them, he seems to suggest that the expres-
sion of sorrow in music is justifiable only if
it makes people "see these sorrows with the
eyes of a future day." n The composer is
then as much concerned with what he
evokes as with what he expresses. Sartre
wants to make the leap from saying that
music does express emotion and does evoke
an emotional response, to saying that com-
posers ought to use these properties of
music in the cause of the socialist revolu-
tion. In fact, he expounds just this view
although he tries to disassociate himself
from the Soviet position. Whether he is suc-
cessful in this maneuver I shall consider in
section 3. What I wish to establish at pres-
ent is simply that the feelings expressed in
music and evoked by it are notoriously am-
biguous, and that it is further questionable
whether evocation is the main business of
the composer.
2. Sartre's initial claim, that music ex-
presses and evokes feelings seems reason-
able, but the very limitations, which must be
imposed on such a claim, render Sartre's
second proposition far less acceptable.
Sartre claims that just as the "Renaissance
smiles on the lips of the Mona Lisa," so
Bach's music reflects seventeenth-century
Protestant Prussia.12 But in what sense are
these things in the painting or in the
music? In Bach's case, are not the qualities
Sartre ascribes to the music rather in the
style and in the extra-aural dimensions of
Bach's work? Is Sartre justified in saying
any more than that Bach wrote church
music, fairly strict fugues, and other sorts of
academic pieces, and used the harpsichord?
The harpsichord, for example, is certainly
"austere" as compared with the piano; the
latter's tonal range, sensitivity to touch, and
so forth make it capable of greater warmth
and personality. Is Sartre not simply asso-
ciating the austerity of the instrument or
the style with the era? One would certainly
find it difficult to reconstruct the era from
the music, being familiar only with the lat-
ter. The music does not reflect the era; the
music is a cultural feature of the era. That
is to say, we know that Bach's music can be
placed in time and space, but we know this
 454
because we know something of cultural his-
tory, not because the music expresses the
time and place. One has only to cite a com-
poser whose style was by no means the only
one prevailing at that time and place to
become aware of the untenability of a view
such as Sartre's. He has mentioned Ravel,
for example, as being comparable to Bach
in reflecting his age. But the mind boggles
in the face of the diversity of styles evinced
by Ravel's contemporaries, e.g., Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Richard Strauss. Can they all
express their time and place? Perhaps we
should think that each expresses a different
facet of his time and place. But has anyone
been able to agree on what these facets are?
Apart from the difficulties of knowing what
music expresses, could one even reach a
consensus on the qualities which could be
ascribed to an era, such that this era could
be distinguished from that one? Sartre looks
at Bach's era and sees "the austerity of Leip-
zig, the puritan stolidity of the German
princes." Is that everyone's vision? Are we
to take Bach's music as social commentary?
Some might say that Sartre's picture betrays
a Marxist bias. The qualities of "austerity"
and "stolidity" are hardly flattering, and
other observers might characterize the era
in question rather differently.
And then there is the complexity of the
music itself, which, in Sartre's example, "a
Brandenburg Concerto," is ignored alto-
gether when it is described in terms of "aus-
terity," "stolidity," and the like. Surely
Sartre does not intend that any of these
epithets are to apply to the slow movements
of the Brandenburg concertos. However
one might choose to describe these move-
ments, among the least likely descriptions,
surely, is Sartre's. And yet, in claiming that
some descriptions of this music are more
accurate than others, are we not ourselves
admitting that Sartre is right in principle?
He may be wrong about what is being ex-
pressed-he admits after all that he is not a
musician-but he may still be right that
something is being expressed about an era.
But where? In the melody? The harmony?
The counterpoint? Which musical element
or combination of elements reflects Bach's
age as opposed to thle style? Sartre does not
PAUL E. ROBINSON
say but one gathers that it is the general
impression or feeling one gets; "it is present
in the sounds." He even goes so far as to say
that the average listener "could date to the
minute a work of Scarlatti, Schumann, or
Ravel, even if mistaken in the name of the
composer, because of this silent prescience,
inherent in all sonorous objects, of an en-
tire era and its concept of the world." 13
Sartre admits that the artist himself might
be quite unaware of this aspect of his work,
but even so, can one make any sense of this
claim? He is right, of course, that even mu-
sically illiterate people can tell when a given
piece was probably written. But this is
surely because they distinguish very quickly
a trend in music history from simplicity to
complexity, and come to know after a mini-
mum of experience what the music of a
period sounds like in a general way, e.g.,
the rhythmic regularity and harpsichord of
the baroque, the soaring romantic melodies
of the nineteenth century, the dissonance of
the twentieth, and so forth. It is unlikely,
however, that the average person could date
a piece because it expressed the spirit of a
particular period. And yet, there is a sense
in which romantic music, for example, ex-
presses the romantic period. Did not the
romantic composers express what many
people felt? Does not romanticism in music
also reflect the new spirit of individualism,
the celebration of the possessive individual-
ist? Surely this is more than merely an asso-
ciation we have formed. Surely romantic
music tells us something about the era in
which it was written. The very choice of
texts and titles in Schubert, Schumann, Ber-
lioz, or Wagner indeed supports this claim,
at least indirectly. It remains to be shown,
however, that tile music itself can yield up
any evidence. One may distinguish Mozart
and Haydn from Berlioz and Wagner in
terms of style and perhaps even in terms of
aesthetic purpose. But in what sense can it
be shown that these changes are caused by
or even correspond to, other cultural
changes? Most observers would opt for Mey-
er's view:
a considerable amount of evidence indicates that,
once its material, syntactical and ideological pre-
mises have been established, a style, if it is going
Sartre on Music
to change at all, tends to change in its own way
and may conceivably do so even at a time when
other aspects of the culture are quite stable...
moreover, if changes in the arts are a direct and
immediate reflection of cultural changes, how are
we to explain the tendency of an "art language"
(inl music or literature) to develop independent
of changes in the casual or vernacular language.l4
Could it not be argued, however, that in
spite of such tendencies, some composers
have used music to express the spirit of the
era or their attitude toward it? Think of
Berlioz's Harold in Italy inspired by Byron.
Unfortunately, this example also provides
support for an alternative hypothesis. Ro-
mantic composers felt it necessary to supply
a written program for their music because
they knew that the music itself was incapa-
ble of expressing these ideas. Berlioz's work
is simply a remarkable viola concerto unless
we are told that is based on Childe Harold.
The romantic composer supplied a pro-
gram because otherwise the music would be
hopelessly ambiguous. The opening pages
of Also Sprach Zarathustra are undeniably
brilliant, exciting, and awesome in cumula-
tive power, but unless Strauss had told us,
we would not necessarily have been re-
minded of a sunrise. After being told, we
might admit that the music is altogether
appropriate to this purpose, much prefera-
ble to the opening of the same composer's
Till Eulenspiegel, for example, but many
other bits of music would have served the
purpose too, and many other events could
have been so represented as long as they too
could be associated with brilliance, excite-
ment, awesomeness, and cumulative power.
The sighting of the peak in Strauss's Alpine
Symphony, for example, might have been
well served by the same music. In any case,
the programs one finds in such music are
invariably extremely general, episodes
being chosen because they may call to mind
the same emotions as the music or pattern
of music which the composer had in mind.
Romantic composers felt constrained to add
descriptive titles and programs to their
music to add another dimension to it, to
enrich the music by making its expression
more specific. The example of the last
movement of the Beethoven Ninth Sym-
phony haunted this age. Many composers
455
believed, Wagner being only the most
prominent among them, that music could
be much more powerful and expressive if it
was married to powerful and expressive lit-
erature. But so explained, it becomes clear
that the nature of the music was shaped by
the composer's aesthetic purpose and not by
some other spirit of the age. If we could
sweep away our knowledge of music history
and its accumulated associations, we should
find it much easier to think of eras in terms
of music written in other ages. In fact,
many people have been doing this for years
in opera and film. A composer such as Mo-
zart (Idomeneo), Cherubini (Medea), or
Strauss (Electra) can conjure up the spirit
of the ancient Greek world in the musical
style of his own age. Modern filmmakers
can use Bach (Bergmann) or Mozart (Bo
Widerberg) to express the spirit of our age.
What they are doing in each case, as the
composers of program music have done, is
to specify what the music is saying by
marrying it to a text and/or a visual repre-
sentation. Pure music is incapable of ex-
pressing the feelings of an age without the
assistance of non-musical materials. Benja-
min Britten's purely instrumental music,
the Piano Concerto or the Cello Symphony,
for example, does not and cannot express
his well-known humanism or the anti-war
sentiments of his age, but his War Requiem
does.
3. It is clear by now that Sartre is not
merely examining the properties of music.
He notes that music expresses emotion and
evokes it, an unexceptionable view if its
limitations are properly understood: that is,
the ambiguity of what is expressed, and the
questionable aesthetic purpose of seeking
evocation. He goes on, however, to expound
the less tenable view that music expresses
the feelings of a time and place, and on the
basis of these claims Sartre wants to draw
an inference of some import, namely, that
music ought to express and evoke the rage
of the oppressed and its hope for the future.
But this deduction is not even intelligible
without two further premises to the effect
that the artist is a morally and politically
responsible human being and ought to do
what is morally and politically justifiable
 456 PAUL E. ROBINSON

and that what is morally and politically jus- evaluating works of art, which is, as it was
tifiable is to take the side of the oppressed. in the case of the Soviets, a moral and polit-
Thus, his argument may be summarized as ical criterion? Music is good if it is morally
follows: and politically justifiable. But how can he
maintain this view if music is by its very
Premises nature morally and politically neutral? He
must decide arbitrarily, as Stravinsky and
1) The composer as human being ought had done, what music is to connote.
to do what is morally and politically Jdanov
But while Stravinsky sought to impose his
justifiable. new mode of connotation only on those
2) What is morally and politically justifi- who cared to take the trouble to under-
able today is to take the side of the
stand him, Jdanov and Sartre seek to im-
oppressed.
pose their connotations on those who wish
3) Music can express and evoke the feel- to write and those who wish to listen to
ings of a time and place.
anything at all.
To be fair to Sartre, he does shrink ulti-
Conclusion:
mately from the implications of his own
The composer's music ought to express argument. Faced with a choice between
and evoke the feelings of his age which Slavery and Terror,'6 "An art that is free
are morally and politically justifiable, but abstract, or an art that is concrete but
which is to say, the feelings of the op- indentured? A mass public that is ignorant
pressed (i.e., its rage and hope for the or a learned listener who is bourgeois?"
future). Sartre opts for Terror. He abhors the in-
In this paper I have tried to show that creasing abstractness and complexity of
the third premise is extremely dubious on a music and the resultant increase in the ali-
number of counts. While the first two enation of the public from the composer,
premises may be similarly suspect, it is not but he is unable to countenance bureau-
necessary to examine them to dispose of the cratic intervention. We too come down on
argument. Even Sartre admits that if music the side of Terror, but not merely because
cannot express and evoke the feelings of a like Sartre we fear the implications of the
time and place, then music is hardly capa- argument; rather, because the key premise
ble of doing what he asks of it. We have of the argument itself will not bear the
granted that music can and does express weight which Sartre seeks to place upon it.
and evoke feelings, but we have argued that
what is expressed and evoked must remain
far less precise and more ambiguous than 1 But others who cannot be so characterized have
Sartre had hoped. If Sartre wishes to adopt expressed similar views to the effect that music as
the Soviet stance he must do so only on music can take ideological sides. See, for example,
grounds which are purely arbitrary. Sartre D. Cooke, The Language of Music (London, 1959),
admits that he was misled by Jdanov's 1934 p. 237; Cooke maintains that the Mozart G minor
expresses "protest" and "rebellious dis-
speech to the First Soviet Writer's Congress Symphony
satisfaction" which may be taken to be an expres-
into thinking that "he was asking the artist sion of the spirit of the French Revolution.
to live the problems of his times freely and 21. Stravinsky, Autobiography (New York, 1962),
intensely, in their totality, so that the work p. 53.
of art could reflect them to us in this way." 8J-P. Sartre, Literature and Existentialism (New
York, 1949), p. 8.
He realizes now that "it was only a question 4Rene Leibowitz, L'Artiste et sa conscience (Paris,
of ordering didactic works of art from bu- 1950). Preface by Sartre, reprinted in Situations
reaucrats which they should execute under (New York, 1965) as The Artist and His Conscience
the supervision of the party." 15 Sartre dis- (hereafter AC). Leibowitz wrote a worthy reply to
sociates himself from the latter while con- Sartre which concludes the Leibowitz volume cited
above. He takes a somewhat different critical tack
tinuing to opt for the former. But is he not from my own.
in any case suggesting a new criterion for 6 AC, p. 222.
Sartre on Music 457
6 Ibid., p. 218. "AC, p. 222.
7 Ibid., p. 222. la Ibid., p. 218.
8 Stravinsky, pp. 53-54. 13Ibid., p. 218.
9Cooke, p. 239. The music under discussion is 14 L. B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas, (Univ.
Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor. of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 169.
10The classical source for this theory is now L. B. 15AC, p. 223.
Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, (Univ. of "The categories, as Sartre acknowledges, are
Chicago Press, 1956). borrowed from Hegel's Phenomenology.