The Siren Voice of Transcendence
Four

Musical encounters can be life-defining events. Bound for Mexico and a reunion with her husband and children, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was headed for the airport when she detoured to the apartment of a friend, jazz pianist Teddy Wilson. In the course of their conversation, Wilson mentioned a relatively obscure jazz pianist, Thelonious Monk. She’d never heard the name. Knowing de Koenigswarter’s taste in jazz, Wilson insisted on playing Monk’s recording of “’Round Midnight.” (Several composers got their names on the copyright, but the tune is Monk’s. Lovingly called the national anthem of jazz, it now stands as the most recorded piece ever composed by a jazz musician.) Many of Monk’s compositions are angular, spiky, and dissonant. In a few spots, so is “’Round Midnight.” But the primary theme evokes a wistful, late-night mood. Hearing it for the first time, de Koenigswarter cried. She later said that she was so enraptured by it that she played it twenty times consecutively. That might be an exaggeration of memory, but it might be near the truth. She did not continue her cab ride to the airport. Instead, she took it to a New York hotel. As she interpreted “’Round Midnight,” the instrumental composition presented a vision of freedom that empowered her to reject all of the social expectations and constraints that had shaped the first four decades of her life. As a result of her chance encounter with three minutes of music, de Koenigswarter abandoned her husband and five children. She was determined to devote the remainder of her life to jazz and the company of jazz musicians. When she finally got the chance to watch Thelonious Monk perform, three years later, that experience led her to further reorganize her life. For nearly three decades, she supported Monk in any way she could. Often, this meant serving as his chauffeur when he had a gig in or near New York. Once, she risked imprisonment when she protected him by falsely confessing to a drug possession charge when he was the guilty party.

While this response to music is extreme, stories about music’s life-altering powers date back to the dawn of human record keeping. In The Odyssey, music is so intoxicating that it is life-threatening. In Book XII, Odysseus encounters the sirens, whose songs and singing are so enchanting that men will pilot their ships into the corpse-strewn rocks and die in order to hear them. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the blowing of seven horns was sufficient to collapse the walls of Jericho. The inhabitants were massacred. Other traditions regard music as fundamentally beneficial. Hindu tradition regards music as a gift of the gods, given to the sage Narada (“Knowledge-Giver”) in order to generate greater peace and cooperation among humans. Moreover, music is a path to spiritual liberation. Hindu theology regards melodic chanting of sacred texts as the primary mode of access to the divine, for at root the cosmos is primordial music. Human music that echoes the primordial music can bring enlightenment. While the Judeo-Christian tradition does not elevate music to that level, its spiritual power is significant. In the first book of Samuel, harp music frees Saul from the torments of an evil spirit.

The sacred connection is neither a relic of history nor a curiosity of non-Western cultures. It remains a core conviction of many music lovers. For example, consider the prominence of the topic in the documentary film, They Came to Play, which chronicles the fortunes of competitors at the 2007 Van Cliburn Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. The contest is restricted to adults above the age of thirty-five. The film follows a diverse group of amateur pianists, including a doctor, a lawyer, a jewelry designer, a dental assistant, a financial planner, a retired physicist from Berlin, and a retired tennis coach from Paris. Asked to explain their devotion to music, three of the profiled competitors insist that their musical ability is a divine gift and that musical performance is a religious or spiritual practice. Kent Lietzau, a military procurement planner whose other hobby is flying, enjoys playing the ragtime music of Scott Joplin. Music, Lietzau says, is a glimpse of a part of God. While I have never personally responded to Scott Joplin’s music in this way, I think it is a mistake to dismiss this response too quickly. Because it is an important dimension of music for many people in many cultures, it deserves serious consideration. At the same time, I am not ready to endorse the wide spectrum of spiritual interpretations that have been placed on music.

I. Ineffable Realities

Music’s capacity to reveal the sacred or divine is not necessarily related to God. William James once put it this way: “Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them.” James endorsed its capacity to disclose “a more spiritual universe.” We should also remain mindful of the fact that music’s special relationship to spirituality is prized by traditions that do not emphasize its capacity to reveal God or gods. The classical music and dance tradition of India is closely associated with Hinduism. Yet this route to enlightenment is not a path to deities. The ideal music, Ravi Shankar claims, is “a kind of spiritual discipline that raises one’s inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss.” Divine peacefulness is not ordinary peacefulness. It is not the peace of mind that comes from escaping the daily grind by sipping tropical drinks at a beach resort. Likewise, it is not the mood created by playing Mozart for Relaxation as background music. To generate divine peacefulness and bliss, music must instill awareness of aspects of reality that are, by definition, other than ordinary. If this process involves emotion, as Shankar assumes, then the music must do something more than express or arouse ordinary human emotions. Suppose there is an element of truth in the Hindu tradition that Shankar promotes. If so, the path to spiritual insight requires something more than ordinary expressiveness.

Furthermore, I will not address music that promotes particular religions and their theologies. Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is a programmatic chamber work inspired by specific passages in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Although he composed and first performed the work while a prisoner of war in a German Stalag during the Second World War, Messiaen was not expressing a personal vision of the divine. He understood that he was crafting musical symbols to convey particular theological truths of the Roman Catholic faith. As such, his quartet stands in the same tradition as G.W.F. Handel’s Messiah and Joseph Haydn’s The Creation. In all these cases, the music’s spirituality is a byproduct of its composer’s overt intention to support Christianity. It is accomplished through the incorporation of religious texts or, for instrumental music, through programmatic links to religious texts and theological doctrines. But this method of inserting the divine into music is a piggy-backing of religion on to music. Such music cannot count as evidence that music has a capacity to reach what is divine or spiritual. Anyone who is not already inclined to interpret it as spiritual will see it as nothing more than music put to a spiritual purpose, in the same way that Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid” has a political purpose because it has political lyrics. Guthrie could have used the same tune for a children’s song, like his “(Take Me) Riding in My Car.” However, if that is how Messiaen’s Quartet is spiritual, by programmatic or textual piggy-backing, then an external agenda imparts spirituality to what might equally well be profane. In the case of Handel’s Messiah, this charge is literally true. Handel composed much of the music for romantic Italian songs and then recycled it as religious music many years later.

Having set aside standard uses of music to express emotion as well as texts, extra-musical narrative, and the presentation of religious doctrines, what’s left for us to discuss? Historically, we are in good company if we say that music can be especially potent due to its capacity to reveal the mystical without the interpretive support of religious doctrines or descriptive programs. Some music conveys the divine by putting us in touch with what is otherwise ineffable, nameless, and beyond the descriptive capacity of language.

From the ancient Hindu Upanishads to the Islamic philosopher Ibn al-Tufail to Catholic medieval mystic St Catherine of Siena, there is agreement that a genuine spiritual vision is so sublime and unique that the tongue cannot describe it. Yet the desire to tell about it is inevitable. Music, it is frequently thought, can offer a way around the limitations of descriptive language. Ludwig Wittgenstein is famous for a number of aphorisms. One is, “There is indeed the inexpressible in speech. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” And, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This pair of remarks opposes speaking and showing. Speaking revolves around our capacity for description and using language to express propositions that are either true or false. Taken together, Wittgenstein’s two remarks underscore the basic problem that faces the mystical tradition. When we try to explain the mystical, we simply talk nonsense. If we want to communicate it, we need a different communicative strategy. Perhaps music, which is not speech, can break the silence in a way that shows the mystical. Perhaps a composer can design music that directs us to the thing that shows itself, but which we otherwise might not perceive. If we can substantiate music’s capacity to show the mystical and the ineffable, then I am certainly ready to endorse music’s revelatory connection with spirituality.

The ineffable is not necessarily a hidden plane of reality. For Wittgenstein, the mystical is simply “things that cannot be put into words.” For him, the mystical appears to include a great deal, including all absolute moral values. Jean-François Lyotard proposes that the problem of representing the unrepresentable also arises in the attempt to convey the significance of the Holocaust and other large-scale human atrocities. He offers the writing of James Joyce as an example of literature that “searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable.” Wittgenstein seems to have thought, similarly, that the mystical can only be conveyed through unparaphrasable similes. For composers and performers, the parallel challenge is to communicate something that is normally invisible or incomprehensible—something that cannot be put into words because it escapes conceptual categorization and recognition—without relying on words to allude to it. But without words, there is no simile. Perhaps Kiene Wurth is on the right track in emphasizing that the paradox is that we are seeking occasions of insight that arise from experiential rupture and displacement—the qualities that Pannonica de Koenigswarter interpreted as freedom in Monk’s “’Round Midnight.” Wurth notes that such ruptures are “inextricably intertwined with the forms, bounds, and contexts” of ordinary experiences. A rupture is only a rupture when it is understood in contrast to an established sense of the everyday, the profane, and the normal. However, this strategy is equally available to architecture, painting, poetry, and other media. It does not support the intuition that music is an especially potent path to the mystical or the divine, which is my goal in this chapter.

Having selected the ineffable as a criterion of spirituality, I caution that mere ineffability is not sufficient. An experience of ineffability is just a starting point for thinking that we have a potential candidate for the mystical. We must take care to distinguish between two species of musical ineffability.

1. We are unable to describe what music is doing to us when we hear it, because many features of music do not fall within the scope of what language can describe.
2. We are unable to offer a verbal paraphrase of what music communicates when what it communicates is beyond the capacity of language. For example, this happens when music is a conduit to something divine, transcendental, or supernatural.

We should resist the temptation to think that the first kind of ineffability demonstrates that the second kind is also present. Veterans of military combat generally regard its horrors as ineffable, beyond description. But they do not generally regard combat as a spiritual realm. What is worse, ineffability is not reserved for special cases such as combat. This first kind of ineffability, Stephen Davies observes, is present in almost every human experience. Experience is more fine-grained than language. Suppose that we are having dinner together and I order steamed mussels. I offer you a taste but you decline because you have a shellfish allergy. You ask me to describe the taste. How far will I get? However refined my palate and broad my culinary vocabulary, I will provide a rather shallow description. Most of the experience is inexpressible. Musical ineffability gets us nowhere if, as Davies argues, “the ineffability of music is a result of the ineffability of all sensory experience.”

If Monk’s “’Round Midnight” is ineffable for precisely the same reason that the smell of new-mown grass and the taste of cod liver oil are ineffable, then music’s ineffability is not a positive value for music and not a reason to listen to it. As a matter of fact, I think Davies is correct that ineffability arises for the basic qualia of experience and therefore of many aspects of musical experience. Therefore I conclude that mere ineffability does not demonstrate a “divine” connection. We need more than music’s own ineffability to substantiate the claim that music is ineffable in the second way: ineffable because it maps or pictures or directs us to something external to the music that is significantly ineffable. The remainder of this chapter makes the case that musical sublimity is the best candidate for creating the conditions for this second species of ineffability.

I must add a word of caution. In examining a certain kind of musical sublimity, I am merely offering it as an exemplary case of music’s spiritual dimension. I am not suggesting that my remarks about exemplification will account for the whole range of musical examples that are considered to be spiritual. I am not even saying that my account applies to all music that listeners regard as sublime. However, there seems to be an important experience of sublimity that does not depend on textual prompts or programmatic guidance, yet which is appropriately understood as informative about a broader range of sublime ineffability.

II. The Beautiful Gives Way to the Sublime

The European tradition has promoted two distinct ideas about music’s means of capturing what is otherwise ineffable. I summarized one of them in Chapter 1. It is the ancient tradition that the universe is filled with unheard music—one example is the music of the spheres—and that sound is organized musically when it conforms to the fundamental, divine ratios. If this correspondence is lacking, Augustine says, singing is merely “corporeal noise.” However, I argued that this tradition was too conservative. Mathematics ruled music, rather than the ear, and therefore music theory limited what could be endorsed as musically beautiful. The extent of the problem became clear when the older model could not account for the attractions of instrumental music that developed in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a particular affront to music theory. We now classify him as among the very greatest of composers. But I wager that many classical music lovers are not aware of the amount of critical hostility directed at Beethoven. Through much of the nineteenth century, many listeners and composers felt that the influence of his ugly, violent music was polluting what was beautiful and good in musical art. In order to defend Beethoven’s music, his supporters turned to German philosophy of art and extracted an alternative standard for artistic success. Music does not have to be beautiful. Instead, it can be sublime. The two categories are characterized by distinctive aesthetic responses. Beauty evokes admiration and pleasure. The sublime incites awe and astonishment. There is admiration and pleasure and even exhilaration, but sublimity has a dark side, too. There is a sense of being overwhelmed, which is sometimes mingled with the pain of incomprehension or fear or terror. According to Friedrich von Schiller, there is a sudden sense of freedom. Many writers of the early modern period thought that sublimity was seldom found in art, for its paradigm examples were mountain ranges, volcanic eruptions, violent storms, and other overwhelming phenomena. Immanuel Kant, one of the key figures in the German tradition, had difficulty naming any sublime art beyond architecture, such as St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

By 1810, it was apparent to some philosophically informed music lovers that they could side-step criticism of Beethoven’s music as undisciplined and ugly by re-classifying it as sublime. The best-known version of this position was presented by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Defending Beethoven’s superiority over all other composers, Hoffmann argues that his mature “Romantic” style suppresses personal expression in favor of “siren voices . . . [that] work upon the human soul” with “the character of infinite longing.” It is a siren call because the pleasure is mixed with pain: “Beethoven’s music sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering.” There is beauty in his music, but it is often an “awesome beauty.” Although Hoffmann seldom uses the word “sublime,” it is the controlling idea in this passage:

A number of musicologists and historians have explored the cultural forces at work in Hoffmann’s rhetoric. As a philosopher, that is not my main concern. I am concerned with the plausibility of the controlling concept, which is that music permits listeners to behold the ineffable. Since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sublime has been touted as a means by which music can achieve this goal.

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime provides a partial explanation of why there is so much disagreement about particular cases. Pressed to name instrumental music that speaks to me with flashes of illumination in the darkness of the ineffable, I would nominate some of Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets, some of the Grateful Dead’s epic improvisations on their “Dark Star” theme, and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. These are all, not coincidentally, music that satisfies the criteria for the sublime. But not everyone has a taste for the sublime. (What’s more, some experiences characterized as sublime do not fit my proposed criteria, such as Edmund Burke’s view that the experience always arises from terror.) I mentioned at the outset that I do not share Kent Lietzau’s opinion that Scott Joplin’s music offers a glimpse of the supernatural. In part, my hesitation derives from my preference for the sublime and my conviction that Joplin’s rags, while thoroughly enchanting, are not sublime. I would wager that Lietzau is responding to the beauty of the music’s interior logic. While a religious inclination makes it easy to see God in every beautiful artwork, the sublime reminds us that the God of Abraham is not all sweetness and light.

III. Schopenhauer's Account of Music

I don’t want to be too hasty in setting beauty aside. Many philosophers have connected musical beauty and ineffability. The most famous and compelling account was developed by Arthur Schopenhauer. His support for it includes arguments why alternative views fail. In this section, I explain and critique Schopenhauer’s position. I think that he goes wrong in linking music’s spiritual power to music’s status as a universal language. Later in this chapter I respond by arguing that music’s status as a cultural product does not undermine its revelatory capacity. It unleashes it.

Schopenhauer’s theory is presented in The World as Will and Representation. Influenced by his reading of both Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads, the third and final edition appeared in 1859. Admittedly, it is not read much anymore. Yet its influence on Western music is incalculable. From Franz Liszt through Arnold Schoenberg, Schopenhauer’s position that music is a universal, metaphysically significant language was endorsed by many composers during the nineteenth century. These ideas gained new circulation in the early twentieth century when they were popularized in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. Approvingly citing the authority of Schopenhauer, Steiner writes, “If we are at all capable of experiencing a foretaste of the spiritual world, this would be found in the melodies and harmonies of music and the effects it has on the human soul.”

Crudely summarized, Schopenhauer holds that the perceivable, phenomenal world is a superficial and distorting manifestation of reality. It does not matter whether you look at a towering redwood tree or at a heap of decaying garbage. Their obvious phenomenal differences are trivial. The division of the world into distinct things is a mask that objectifies an unperceived, unifying reality. Part of the problem, Schopenhauer warns, is that concepts and language are tools for making sense of the phenomenal world. They are tools or instruments for satisfying our desires. As such, they deal with the world from a limited perspective, suppressing the messy particularity of experience in order to view it from outside, from “without.” Therefore the inner nature of the world is literally inexpressible, as a realm that cannot be grasped conceptually or described.

So are we merely prisoners of our own subjectivity? Fortunately, according to Schopenhauer, there is an escape route. There is music, especially pure instrumental music. He holds that music has a unique, “secret” ability to unveil the reality beyond the phenomenal world. When it is not governed by disfiguring concepts, musical flow is governed by an otherwise hidden activity. From a simple folk melody to a symphony, Schopenhauer contends that melodic form directly reflects the strivings of the universal Will. Schopenhauer’s keen interest in Indian thought is the likely source for this linkage of melody, abstract emotion, and the strivings of the Will. (Contrary to the experiences of many people, Schopenhauer seems to hold that drumming cannot be revelatory.) Whenever a harmonized melody does its job properly, it conveys purified, abstract emotion. When it is not clouded by conceptual thought and language, melodic form has the power to provide a transcendent experience. Musical relationships are inherently revelatory, showing the reality behind the veil.

However, that means music, not mixed media. Music’s revelatory function is sabotaged when words compete for our attention or when the music is not sufficiently melodic. The conceptual task of processing language takes our attention away from melody. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer allows that some songs succeed in taking us beyond the phenomenal world. A properly designed and highlighted melody can place sung words into a subordinate position in the listening experience. His examples include the operas of Gioachino Rossini and some musical settings of the Roman Catholic mass. The fact that the mass is in Latin, so that we do not attend to the words, helps to mitigate their presence. But, Rossini and the mass aside, symphonic music is best. However, none of this implies that all instrumental music opens the way to the mystical. A great deal of instrumental music fails because it is “imitative.” It operates as a species of representation, “brought about with conscious intention by means of concepts.” Schopenhauer points to the imitations of nature in Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons, which features the croaking of frogs and a raging summer storm. Today, I suspect that most people will be more familiar with similar techniques in Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, or the sounds of exploding bombs in Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.” My own favorite example is Mississippi John Hurt’s use of acoustic guitar to imitate various train sounds when performing “Talking Casey.” For Schopenhauer, auditory imitation in music ruins it by dividing our attention. As with most opera and song, the music fails because melody does not dominate the experience. The musical line is perverted by extra-musical phenomena. Concepts intrude into the experience, which is therefore grasped from outside. The listener is directed away from the ineffable, and the music’s power to show without saying gives way to an ordinary, conceptually guided experience.

Schopenhauer’s argument hinges on dividing music into two types. He thinks that a melody is either an unfiltered manifestation of the universal Will, and thus a glimpse into the inner nature of the world, or the music functions as a representation, the way that all other art functions, and it does not reveal the mystical. The common failing of music in this latter category—including songs, imitation, and programmatic associations—is that the sonic experience displays and therefore encourages conceptual thinking. On this view, Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme album are as earthbound and limited as any other “imitative” art. (Let’s set aside the issue of whether these are all cases of imitation, and whether they always display conscious intention. Those are side issues.)

I have already explained why we should regard Schopenhauer’s first, privileged category as an empty set. My first two chapters argued that all musical design reflects composers’ and performers’ conceptual understanding of music and its possibilities. The basic melodic patterns that constitute the raga system of Indian music do not sound particularly melodic to Western ears. Recall Eduard Hanslick’s observation that all music is shot through with culture: “What we hear a Tyrolean peasant singing, into which seemingly no trace of art penetrates, is artistic music through and through.” However, if there is no “pure” music that can be created and then appreciated without conceptual guidance, then music’s capacity to communicate is no more universal than the other arts. So I reject Schopenhauer’s argument for music’s universal metaphysical significance. Music is art, and ignorance of its cultural and stylistic conventions shackles us.

A final criticism of Schopenhauer’s theory is that he does not endorse sublimity in pure instrumental music. Lacking subject matter that conveys tragedy or instills terror, there is no basis for the feeling of the sublime. And if it were possible, he assumes that the experience of the sublime requires the perceiver to feel personally threatened. This is nonsense, of course, since we can experience sublimity in films and other visual media without believing that what is represented is an actual threat. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer concludes that successful music is always beautiful, but it is never sublime. (Alex Neill points out that this position seems inconsistent with Schopenhauer’s recognition of the sublime in nature.) As for music, I do not think it necessary to locate a subject matter in Shostakovich’s late string quartets in order to experience genuine sublimity—we don’t have to respond to them, as is often done, as his musical autobiography. But any theory that cannot recognize the presence or value of sublimity in music without texts or programmatic association is seriously flawed, especially as an account of music’s capacity to reveal the ineffable. (In this respect, Schopenhauer’s view foreshadows Peter Kivy’s recent argument that pure instrumental music cannot be profound, for profound art requires profound subject matter. However, sublimity is an aesthetic property, whereas profundity is not so clearly one. So I will not pursue the topic of profundity any further.)

Luckily, I think that Schopenhauer’s account presents us with a pair of false dilemmas. The remainder of this chapter will argue that the presence of concepts and cultural conventions unleashes—rather than reduces—music’s capacity to show the ineffable. Specifically, I will make my case by concentrating on the aesthetic property that Schopenhauer does not assign to revelatory music: the sublime. There is a price to pay, however. We cannot suppose that music is the unique route to a revelation of some aspects of the inner nature of the world. I am willing to concede that many representational artworks can do it, too. An obvious example is J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). Another is Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (The Polar Sea, c. 1823). Coincidentally, both paintings show the forces of nature overpowering a ship. In each case the ship provides a sense of scale for the forces of nature. Imaginatively attuned viewers can then grasp the sublimity of what is represented, and will grasp the mystical or spiritual dimension of the scene. Although instrumental music does not work on our imaginations in precisely the same way, we can take comfort in Marghanita Laski’s finding that a significantly spiritual experience arises twice as often with music than with other art forms. Many of these experiences, which she calls “ecstasy,” fit into modern descriptions of the experience of the sublime.

IV. Isn't It Subjective?

Against those who encounter musical sublimity and interpret it as the siren call of infinity, Mary Mothersill warns, “The sense of spiritual elevation is not an indication of actual spiritual elevation.” When that sense of elevation comes by way of sublimity, we face the skeptical challenge that sublimity is utterly subjective. In Kant’s words, “sublimity is contained not in anything of nature, but only in our mind.” Therefore experiences of sublimity cannot be informative about a spiritual dimension of nature or the universe. This criticism is often buttressed with a dose of materialism. The experience is nothing more than a subjective awareness of some change in one’s body chemistry and neurological firing. A classic version of the skeptical response is provided by Ebenezer Scrooge upon the appearance of the ghost of his partner, Jacob Marley. “A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.” The sight of a ghost might be caused by something other than a supernatural being. It might have a more worldly explanation: “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” Substitute musical form for undigested beef, and the skeptic can deny that there is any genuine other-worldly significance in what seems to be an experience of the supernatural. Sound waves go into the ear, neural signals go to the brain, and appropriately receptive listeners respond with a sense of something spiritual.

Although I have my own reservations about reading too much into the siren call of music, this brand of explanatory reduction is inadequate. Granted, a material explanation tells us a lot about the process by which we come to have the experience that we have. For example, it explains how the process breaks down for some people. In Chapter 2, I mentioned congenital amusia. I have no doubt that it is due to abnormalities in the operations of the brain. However, it does not follow that there is nothing more to the experience of the ineffable or the divine than a particular brain activity. Knowing how a mobile phone works to produce the sound of my wife’s voice does not cancel out the fact that the sounds are highly accurate indications of what she is saying into the speaker of her phone. Analogously, identifying sonic patterns in music that reliably stimulate the brain to produce experiences of awe and of ineffable significance does not cancel out the possibility that something ineffable is conveyed by the music. The Book of Exodus says that God got Moses’ attention by setting fire to a bush. Then God spoke from the bush. And why not? In a tradition that holds that individuals are free to attend to God or not, as they choose, it makes sense to think that God will entice attention by creating spectacular occurrences. Where God created a bush that burns but is not consumed, Beethoven and Coltrane offer music. In each case, external stimuli are selected according to their ability to attract and hold attention.

Let’s enrich this sketch of an argument by examining visual perception. Science offers a very detailed account of the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. I watch a formation of geese rippling through the sky. In order to see them, the electrical stimulation of my occipital lobe must originate in my optic nerve. For its part, the signal that arises in the optic nerve must be a response to light waves that reach my retina, indicating movement of objects within my visual field. Provided with these facts, does anyone jump to the conclusion that seeing is nothing but conscious awareness of stimulation of a particular region of the brain? That there is no further significance to the activation of the occipital lobe? That inference is absurd! Granted, if any of the connections fail, then my seeming to see geese will be something other than seeing geese. If my visual experience is not responding to real-time changes in the world beyond my own body, then I am dreaming, or hallucinating. Because visual dreaming also involves electrical activity in the occipital lobe, a vivid dream may look just like the real deal. But that doesn’t reduce life to a continuous dream. The difference between “seeing” dream geese and seeing real geese is not simply a matter of what happens in the brain. It matters whether the electrical signals are appropriate responses to activity in the world beyond my retinas. Subjectively, seeing geese and dreaming of geese might be indistinguishable, yet they are very different with respect to their informational significance about the world at the time they occur.

These points about vision apply to hearing, as well. Like the eyes, the ears are pathways to the world. Sound waves are objective events in the world. Replace the optic nerve with the auditory nerve, the retina with specialized hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear, and the occipital lobe with the region known as Heschl’s gyrus. Granted, hearing is not always an indicator that sound waves have tickled the cochlea of the inner ear. As with the occipital lobe, the auditory cortex can generate “hearing” when there is no external stimulus. We can hear sounds in a dream. Many people experience earworms—those snatches of music that keep playing over and over in the head. Years of listening to music at high volumes often cause the phantom sounds of tinnitus—often in the form of a steady buzzing or ringing sound—arising from damage to hair cells in the inner ear. And there are auditory hallucinations, too. But these facts do not override the fact that the auditory system is designed to perceive external, objective relationships.

The next step is to emphasize that our perceptual system is an aesthetically sensitive system. We do not see mere shapes, colors, and movements. Responding to the complex interplay of countless features of what we perceive, our eyes detect an array of aesthetic properties. We see beauty, gracefulness, and delicacy. There are also disagreeable properties, such as ugliness, dumpiness, and garishness. As with other features of human perception, I assume that distinctive brain activity underlies them all, including our sense of awe and of revelation when we view sublime sights or imaginatively interact with representations of them. As neuroscience becomes more sophisticated, I anticipate that we’ll identify distinct neurobiological responses for many different aesthetic responses. I predict that we will verify that there are interesting gender and cultural differences in neurobiological responses to the same art, literature, and music. All of which reinforces the need to explain why humans have a proclivity to experience beauty in rainbows and in other visual data, and why we recognize so many different aesthetic properties intertwined with our experiences of the world beyond ourselves.

As before, it’s not simply a matter of seeing. We hear aesthetic properties, too, as features that emerge from combinations of sounds. In Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring cycle, the melodic motif of Fafner the dragon is ungainly. In popular music, many of Nick Drake’s songs are delicate. His singing has a fragile quality, giving his performances of them an admirable unity. In contrast, the songs and performances of the Shaggs are clumsy and awkward. Appreciated as moments in a culture’s development, musical compositions and performances can also display aesthetic properties with a distinctly historical component. Because his work is largely in film scoring, John Williams is the best-known living orchestral composer. Yet his work is phenomenally derivative. In the late 1920s, the songs of the Carter Family were traditional while the guitar playing of Maybelle Carter was highly original. Her “Carter scratch” also became astoundingly influential. The aesthetic properties of sounding derivative, traditional, and original will be inaudible to someone who approaches the music in a cultural vacuum. Nonetheless, these and other aesthetic properties are a significant element of the experience of music.

Along with the sound patterns that generate them, don’t experiences of aesthetic properties convey information about the external world? If they do not, why do humans possess a proclivity to make fine-grained distinctions among so many of them?

V. Experiencing Sublimity

The full list of aesthetic properties is enormous. From the thrill of a roller coaster ride to the stark nobility of many of Mark Rothko’s later paintings, it includes any feature of an experience that makes an aesthetic difference. In other words, an aesthetic property is present whenever an element of an experience makes that experience good or bad, better or worse, when we evaluate it simply as an experience. However, “experience” is a broader category than sense perception. Aesthetic properties are also present in experiences that arise in imagination and, occasionally, intellectual thought.

For my purposes, I do not have to offer a detailed account of aesthetic responses and their bases. It will be enough to focus on certain parallels between aesthetic properties and powerful human emotions such as fear, grief, and shame. Given their prominence in perception, it is unlikely that beauty and other paradigm aesthetic properties are merely subjective ephemera. My central proposal is that experiences of aesthetic properties are inherently significant. Like our emotions, they are directed at events and objects in the world. They are ways of regarding the world.

Once again, let’s consider an experience of seeing and hearing geese in flight. Their formation ripples gracefully. In comparison, their honking is coarse, bordering on ugly. Gracefulness and ugliness are aesthetic properties that emerge from our awareness of combinations of other properties that we experience. For my purposes, the important issue is whether aesthetic properties reveal something substantive about the world. I noted that many people are subjectivists when it comes to these properties. Another classic formulation is David Hume’s pronouncement, “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” However, even Hume grants that this mental response is not random. The perception of beauty is like seeing color or tasting the sweetness of honey. These three responses are similar in that they all involve sensitivity to objective forms and structures in the objects we perceive. Aesthetic properties emerge from and thus supplement the other properties we experience. The visible movement of the skein of geese tells me that they’re heading south. So what does the graceful flow of the skein show me, over and above the fact of movement? At the very least, it immediately conveys their successful group coordination. If I focus on the individual birds, I become aware of their individual athleticism. Each bird continuously beats its wings, its head held steady but its body dragging down as it loses altitude with each up-stroke of wings, then pushing itself up again on the next down-stroke, over and over again. Not very graceful. Taken as a group, however, their gracefulness is like that of an Olympic scull team of eight rowers. The individuals are straining, but the overall effect is lovely. In both cases, the gracefulness is a gestalt property. It is not observed when we shift our attention to the workings of the isolated parts. It is an aesthetic effect of the whole, signifying the highly successful coordination of those parts.

Although aesthetic properties involve an assessment of information about the world, I am not suggesting that experiences of gracefulness and beauty and sublimity require a conscious awareness of this information. In this respect, aesthetic responses are very similar to emotional responses. (Hume goes so far as to say that aesthetic responses are emotions; they are “calm” passions.) Central cases of emotion —anger, lust, fear, grief, joy—are modes of judging one’s relationship to the natural and social environment. This is different from saying that these emotions are caused by particular thought patterns. Remember my earlier observation that our emotions are thoughts: they are judgments that situate us in the world. A sudden feeling of fear is not a response to a perception of danger. The fear is itself a judgment that danger is present, bound up with a physiological response that prepares us to avoid a potential harm. Grief is not a reaction to the judgment that one has suffered a loss so much as it is itself a way of perceiving that there is a significant loss. In each of these cases, Robert Solomon notes, there is an important difference between making the judgment emotionally and then reflecting on it consciously. Granted, an emotion often leads to conscious reflection on its significance. If I feel angry, I generally think I know who I am angry with, and why. However, this conscious belief is not always correct, or remains obscure. Who has never had an inexplicable pang of fear, seemingly unrelated to any danger that could be consciously identified?

Analogously, experiences of aesthetic properties are judgments about the objects or scenes that incite them. Aesthetic properties can be regarded as subjective in so far as they are experiential aspects of perception and other cognitive processing, and thus mental phenomena. Furthermore, they are easily dismissed as subjective by anyone who holds that all value judgments are subjective. If we perceive a porcelain figurine as dainty and charming, rather than sentimental and cloying, we judge it positively rather than negatively. However, such examples also show that aesthetic judgments are not purely evaluative. They are assessments with a descriptive element. Once we move beyond completely generic terms of praise like “good” and “successful,” aesthetic terminology provides a degree of description about the object of the judgment. In describing the music of some of Amy Elsie Horrocks’s songs as “most dainty and charming,” the Musical News of 1895 calls attention to very different non-aesthetic features than when praising a religious anthem by another composer as melodious and “bright in character.” By extension, when I tell you that Shostakovich’s string quartet in C minor (Op. 110) is sublime and Warren Zevon’s song “Hasten Down the Wind” has a beautiful melody, I am informing you that they succeed in very different ways. When we praise music by describing it as beautiful or as sublime, we do not employ interchangeable terms of recommendation.

The further analogy with emotion is that the situational details that distinguish musical daintiness from brightness— and beauty from sublimity—are not transparently evident to the perceiver. When people become angry, their conscious belief about the reasons for the anger can involve self-deception or error about its real object. It is not self-evident which of the object’s aspects inform the angry response. The same is true of aesthetic judgment. In Peter Kivy’s words, “bafflement before the work of art is a common occurrence. How often have we experienced ‘unity,’ ‘balance,’ ‘rightness,’ and the like, and yet been unable to ‘put our finger’ on the feature or features responsible?” Many people experience the derivativeness of John Williams’s music for Star Wars without being able to name any specific sources, or they say that it sounds like Richard Wagner when it actually sounds much more like Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Furthermore, reflective judgments about aesthetic responses generally reflect cultural biases. Beethoven, for example, gives a specifically monotheistic interpretation to the experience of natural beauty: “The chance meeting of agreeable atoms did not make the world. If the constitution of the world reflects order and beauty, then God exists.” The great challenge, therefore, is locating the basic judgment about the world that is inherent in the experience of each aesthetic experience.

I grant that there are aberrant experiences. Some people hear voices when none are present. Some amputees feel pain in a missing limb. Likewise, some people experience ugliness where almost everyone else finds beauty. But that is no more troubling than recognizing that some people have aberrant emotional responses, too. What we want to understand is what judgment occurs as an element of the experience. This task is different from isolating typical external causes. Suppose that certain general musical patterns are present in many of the musical works that reliably generate feelings of the sublime and the associated belief that one is in the presence of something mystical or supernatural. The measured cadence of chant is a candidate. Identifying these patterns is only a small step toward an account of musical sublimity. We also want to know how our orientation to the world changes when we have this response. Anger and fear and other emotions influence human behavior. Does the experience of sublimity, as well?

As I noted earlier, the feeling of the sublime is characterized by awe, astonishment, admiration, and pleasure (even of exhilaration) that accompanies a feeling of being overwhelmed. Sometimes, it mingles with fear or terror or a painful incomprehension. As with other significant feelings, the fact that there is a strong physiological response should not blind us to the fact that the experience of sublimity includes a world-directed judgment. It is the judgment that we are in the presence of something that is simultaneously extraordinary and ineffable. It appears to depend on a sequence of two prefatory judgments. First, there is an immediate judgment of our cognitive disruption. Second, there is recognition of our insignificance in the face of some overwhelming scene or event. The sensory and imaginative disruption of our ordinary relationship to the world prompts, in Malcolm Budd’s very nice formulation, “the sudden dropping away . . . of our everyday sense of the importance of our self and its numerous concerns and projects.” Typically, the perceiver loses any sense of the distinction between perceiver and perceived. Individuals who make a positive evaluation of the disruptive experience regard it as revelatory. Some individuals do not regard it as positive and it feels confusing, or horrific, or unpleasantly bizarre. Thus a Shostakovich string quartet or an hour-long Grateful Dead improvisation that Deadheads regard as spiritually revelatory can seem merely horrific and boring to the ordinary pop music fan. But if Nica de Koenigswarter experienced sublimity in “’Round Midnight,” she may well have heard it as a declaration of freedom.

Contrary to John Keats, I do not believe “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The evaluative element of an aesthetic response is not truth-functional (i.e., subject to the contrasting values of truth and falsity). A great deal of beautiful art tells beautiful lies. Because aesthetic responses are simultaneously evaluations and beliefs, the aesthetic properties of artworks provide an important standard for success that is not truth-functional. In this context, recall Wittgenstein’s point that descriptive language cannot describe the mystical. After all, if ordinary language is adequate, then the mystical is not ineffable. The ineffable and the mystical arise at the point where description ends and where thoughts and communication cannot be evaluated truth-functionally. Success or failure in communicating the experience of the mystical must be measured by other criteria. In some art, this is done through the incorporation of sublimity. A work of fictional literature can contain many true statements, as when Joyce takes great care to provide an accurate description of the railings at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin. However, as Lyotard argues, the sublime element of Ulysses arises from Joyce’s employment of allusion, which is quite different from saying that it is an articulated truth within his strings of true propositions. To experience the sublimity of Ulysses, readers must aesthetically savor and positively assess its cumulative ineffability. In music, similarly, a listener’s sense of reaching the ineffable is intimately connected with the music’s aesthetic success. Mere awareness that the composer is attempting to do so is never sufficient. For those of us who find Arvo Pärt’s music boring and insipid, the music lacks sublimity. It promises revelation but disappoints. Genuine communication of the sublime is achieved by providing an experience of sublimity, a proposal that I explain in greater detail in the next section.

Pulling these points together, paradigm experiences of sublimity require an experience of something as limitless, so that it overwhelms our normal ability to make sense of its organization or scope. Ordinarily, such experiences are generated by the presence of something that overwhelms our perceptual and cognitive systems. At night in the wilderness, away from the distractions of artificial light, the sight of the stars in a cloudless night frequently generates a sense of awe. The number of stars and their brightness are both relevant to the experience. These experiences can be replicated in representations, so the same aesthetic effect—and so the same significance—is present in Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night (1889). Or, in a less frenetic mode, there is Caspar David Friedrich’s Northern Sea in the Moonlight (1824). The two paintings have very different styles. Van Gogh overwhelms us. In contrast, Friedrich’s composition is nearly formless. Lyotard notes that these two very different approaches to art are inspired by Kant’s analysis of the sublime: “a figural aesthetic of the ‘much too much’ that defies the concept [of genius], and an abstract or minimal aesthetic of the ‘almost nothing’ that defies form.” Musical parallels are Coltrane’s performances with Eric Dolphy at the Village Vanguard in 1961, and Philip Glass’s music for the film Koyaanisqatsi, respectively.

To take stock, several species of aesthetic response have come to be known as the experience of sublimity. One species is a positive response to scenes or events that overwhelm conceptual processing. Because the perceiver is appreciating this loss of coherence and attendant loss of sense of self, many details about what seems revelatory about the experience are necessarily ineffable. In this way, sublimity in music adds a layer of ineffability that supplements the normal ineffability of musical experience. Musical sublimity will therefore display both types of ineffability: the first is typical of all music, while the second is a disruptive impact on the sense of self and self importance.

VI. Exemplification

Schopenhauer’s account of music is historically important in several ways. He brought non-Western insights into European aesthetics and he gave philosophical support to the idea that music is “an entirely universal language” that reveals the ineffable. More to the point, Schopenhauer highlights the conflict between universality and artifice. His philosophy defends the widespread conviction that music is most powerful when it is not constrained by convention and tradition. Musical revelation eliminates the middle man, so to speak. The music communicates, rather than the composer. It is as if Beethoven did not play the piano: the piano played Beethoven. As a student of mystical philosophy, rock guitarist Robert Fripp has claimed that this position explains the haphazard history of his group, King Crimson: “Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice.” The same ideal informed John Cage’s adoption of chance procedures as a compositional technique. Coincidentally, and apparently without direct influence on Schopenhauer, this same stance towards music and composers appears in Hoffmann’s defense of Beethoven. Hoffmann treats Haydn and Mozart as historical individuals who crafted music to achieve their personal aims. But when the music is shaped by a composer’s intentions and training, its capacity to show the mystical disappears behind the veil of musical artifice. With Beethoven’s symphonies, the composer is no longer the active agent. Hoffmann says that music opens the door to infinity. The music, not the composer, “opens up to us . . . the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable.” (I owe this observation to Mark Evan Bonds.)

In this section I address this bias against stylistic or conscious interventions of composers and performers as active interpreters of the transcendent. Against this bias, I argue that human intervention is required to impart extra-musical significance to music. Sublime music cannot have an extra-musical reference apart from human use, and therefore it cannot have a revelatory function unless someone offers the music in that spirit. In the last section I argued that awareness of sublimity involves a distinctive judgment about the perceiver’s relationship to the sublime object. I will now argue that artistic intervention permits, rather than interferes with, the music’s capacity to reveal an ineffable, sublime dimension of extra-musical reality. Music does so through exemplification.

Throughout this book I have argued that music is a dimension of culture. Consequently, any response to it that is not hopelessly superficial is directed by language. So I am in no position to suppose the music’s spirituality will be found in a universal, culture-independent capacity of music. Instead, I propose that music’s ability to communicate the ineffable does not disappear if the experience is mediated by cultural conventions, conceptual thought, and artistic intervention. The Book of Revelation of the Christian New Testament is written in Koine Greek, and the Qur’an is written in a particular Arabic dialect. By itself, the fact of their having been encoded in a convention-based language counts neither for nor against their legitimacy as spiritual revelation. Similarly, the fact that Coltrane’s A Love Supreme displays a post-bop, free jazz style counts neither for nor against its capacity to convey spiritual truth. Instead, we should acknowledge that the presence of musical conventions enables composers and performers to introduce musical elements that will guide the aesthetic responses of their listeners. Sublimity is one such response.

Contrary to the tradition endorsed by Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, and so many others, let us suppose that Beethoven intended to create sublime music when he composed his seventh symphony. Suppose that the Adagio of Anton Bruckner’s eighth symphony and some Coltrane improvisations are sublime by design. Incidentally, I do not think that the relevant intention has to be the authorial intention of a lone individual. There are also group intentions, as when the Coltrane quartet works together to perform “Chasin’ the Train” and works cooperatively to make it sublime. When music is sublime by design, that feature of the music can be more than an instance of the general aesthetic property of sublimity. It can also serve as an exemplification of that property, thereby showing by direct example that there is an available path to the mystical. The plausibility of this argument depends on a distinction between being an instance of something, representing it, and exemplifying it.

As I have done repeatedly, I will begin with a visual example. The property of greenness is instantiated by many things: ripe Granny Smith apples, the jerseys worn by the Green Bay Packers for “home” games, and Kermit the Frog. Suppose I have a reason to determine which of these shades of green is darkest. However, I do not have a Green Bay jersey at hand and cannot recall whether its characteristic green is darker or lighter than Kermit. I search the Internet for color photographs of each thing. These photographs represent the objects that interest me. As representations, the photographs direct me to extra-pictorial things while offering limited information about them. Trusting that the shades of green in the photos approximate those of the represented objects, I can determine that Kermit is a lighter shade of green than the jerseys. However, while this method succeeds in this case, representations often mislead us or lack the information we seek. Many visual representations do not show the color of the represented object. Suppose that I locate a chalk and pastel drawing of Kermit wearing a Green Bay jersey, but the drawing is executed with the same color palette used by James McNeill Whistler for his Nocturne, San Giorgio (1880). Although the orange and brown colors will represent both Kermit and the jersey, the drawing does not employ green and it does not offer any clue about whether Kermit or the jersey has the darker shade of green. Silly as it is, this example illustrates why only a naïve viewer will believe that an object shown in a representation has the very same properties that the representation possesses. And it is not simply a problem of omission, as when the drawing of green things omits greenness. Representations frequently add properties to things that are not their genuine properties. For example, Paul Revere’s print of the Boston Massacre of 1770 clearly shows Captain Thomas Preston with a raised sword, which represents Preston as commanding his troops to fire on the unarmed civilians. Preston did no such thing. For expressive purposes, Henri Matisse runs a green stripe down the face of his wife in the portrait of 1905.

What about aesthetic properties of representational art? Once again, a representation’s aesthetic properties may or may not match the aesthetic properties of whatever it represents. For example, there is a long tradition in Western thought that praises art for its capacity to beautify nature. When Charles Batteux offers the first philosophically complete definition of art, in 1746, he defines “les beaux arts” as human products that beautifully imitate nature. No matter what the reality is, artists should beautify what they represent. Consequently, paintings executed within this tradition are not reliable guides to the degree of beauty that is really present in their subject matter. To put it crudely, cautious viewers will understand that the aesthetic property of beauty may be imposed as part of the artistic process. Today, we see a similar tendency in the practice of manipulating photographs in advertising, digitally changing the proportions of women to make them more attractive. Furthermore, beauty is not the only property at issue. Consider the use of “body doubles” in filmmaking. In Flashdance (1983), many close shots of the dancing of the character of Alex show someone other than lead actress Jennifer Beals. By editing together the dancing of two different women, Alex’s dancing displays aesthetic properties that Beals could not achieve.

Generalizing, Schopenhauer seems to have a point. A musical representation is completely untrustworthy. Fortunately, representation is not the only method of symbolization available to artists and composers. Nelson Goodman has taken pains to remind us about exemplification, in which one object that provides an instance of a property or group of properties is intentionally offered as a sample of the property or properties.

The practice of exemplification is not restricted to art. When I want to purchase new wall-to-wall carpets for a room, I go to the flooring store and look at carpet samples. The samples share relevant properties with the big rolls of carpet that are stored in the warehouse. By examining the samples, I can directly experience properties that are not adequately conveyed through representation. The samples exemplify what I can purchase. However, not all of a sample’s properties enter into the exemplification relationship. When I look at the sample in the showroom and turn it over, I find a label that says, “Do not Remove. Property of Jones Brothers Flooring.” However, I do not take this to mean that any carpeting that I purchase will have to remain in the showroom as their property. As with every exemplification, the sample refers the informed user to some, but not all, of its properties. The intended use of a sample plays an indispensable role in demarcating some properties as exemplified when others are not. Successful exemplification always requires an understanding of shared purposes.

The upshot of this account of exemplification is that an artwork can be used to exemplify particular aesthetic properties, thereby showing the aesthetic properties of something other than itself. This power to show is not reduced by intrusion of musical culture, as Schopenhauer fears. Musical exemplification is not secured by appeal to music’s status as a universal language. There is no symbolization through exemplification without the direction of culture. For example, the sublimity of St Peter’s Basilica is designed to exemplify the sublimity of the church (the earthly institution) and of God. Likewise, the adagio of Bruckner’s eighth symphony and certain Coltrane improvisations create sublime experiences in knowledgeable listeners by exploiting shared musical expectations. On a sympathetic reading of what Bruckner and Coltrane were doing, their music successfully exemplifies a relationship with extra-musical reality. If I am mistaken and Bruckner and Coltrane intended nothing of the kind when they made sublimity a prominent feature of their music, then their music possesses sublimity without exemplifying sublimity.

By providing listeners with an opportunity to experience musical sublimity that exemplifies non-musical sublimity, composers show without saying. They show listeners that they can enter into an ineffable relationship with revelatory potential.

Michael Mitias aims two objections at this theory of exemplification. First, artworks do not literally possess sublimity, so they cannot exemplify it. Second, aesthetic responses to art are always uniquely colored by the particularity of the artwork. Therefore they cannot be trusted to be accurate examples of the same property in anything else. Applied to Bruckner or Coltrane, the argument is that the music is not sublime and so cannot exemplify sublimity, and to the extent that they prompt a sublime response, Bruckner’s music and Coltrane’s music structure the listener’s experience in very different ways. Beyond the fact that each listener has a different subjective response in each case of hearing music, musical differentiation guarantees that music does not provide the same experience that is found to be revelatory in an extra-musical experience.

These objections are not convincing. Strictly speaking, aesthetic properties are aspects of mental responses, and on this basis we might concede that music is not literally sublime or beautiful. However, this concession is no more troubling than saying a green carpet sample is not literally green or brown, because the visual properties of greenness and brownness are subjective human responses. It doesn’t render visual experiences of color meaningless on a global scale. Objections have to be launched on a case-by-case basis, by detailing a concern about whether there is a connection to external stimuli. The same holds, I have argued, for the significance of experiences of ineffability and loss of self. It is the experience, strictly speaking, that is exemplified by the practice of creating sublime music in a context that invites listeners to understand it as a “sample” of the mystical side of extra-musical reality. We should question the musical competence of someone who thinks that the song “The Rain in Spain” in My Fair Lady (1964) is sublime, but not someone who knows Romantic music and says so about a Bruckner adagio.

The second objection also fails. Samples work by having some properties that they share with something else. To worry us regarding music, Matias’s objection would have to show that exemplification never succeeds. For purposes of this argument, let us assume that Roman Catholicism is the one true faith. Yet no one of that faith supposes that the sublime experience offered by St Peter’s Basilica is identical to the sublimity of God on the Day of Judgment. But so what? Every square inch of carpet in the carpet warehouse is unique in some way, too, but that doesn’t prevent the carpet dealer from showing functional samples to the customers. The point of a sample is that it offers a focused, limited experience in situations where it is not practical or not possible to have more. In principle, there is no reason why the experience of sublime music cannot offer us a genuine sample of the realm that Wittgenstein summarizes as “the mystical.” Individuals may interpret it as an experience of God, or the Universal Will, or something else, but that interpretation is not inherent in the experience.

In conclusion, I emphasize that my proposal is limited to communication of the ineffable involving musical sublimity. I have argued that some music provides a sublime experience, which of necessity involves a positive appreciation of an ineffable experience that both supplements ordinary musical ineffability and contains some degree of revelation, typically about human insignificance. When music provides a sublime experience in a tradition that encourages exemplification of the sublime, as has been the case in Europe during and following the Romantic period, the music makes a nonrepresentational reference beyond itself. Through exemplification, different styles of classical music, jazz, and even popular music can be employed to induce experiences of the sublime that exemplify and thus confirm a more general human capacity for ineffable encounters with the mystical. Claims about music’s capacity to reveal the mystical are not without merit.