Written by Tevis Tucker
Susanne Langer is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Langer is infamous for her views of symbols as vehicles for conceiving reality (Bowman, 1998). Langer sees this ability as important because the brain is constantly receiving sense data from outside (and inside) the body and trying to figure out how to “make sense” of these ambiguous signals—a view that is supported by our most current understanding of modern neuroscience (see Barrett, 2020). Notably, Langer was also very intrigued by music’s relationship with time itself.
Langer believed that music “made time audible” and created a “sonorous image of passage”—both very much in line with Immanuel Kant’s idea of “music as an art of time” (Bowman, 1998). All arts play on humanity’s love for patterns, complexity, and order, but Langer believed music had the unique ability to render time’s “essential nature” conceivable. And because of time’s ever-changing nature, and music’s motion, music has the ability to make change perceivable. Music plays with our perception of time (pushing and pulling what Thomas Clifton calls our temporal horizons)—making it ever-present, and filling it with a “dense fabric of concurrent tensions” (Bowman, 1998). Time is the water in which we swim, but music is what can make time—specifically the present—rich, lived, and felt (Bowman, 1998).
Time is one of our most precious resources, and, thus, is often taken advantage of and forgotten. Time is one of the few constants that exist in the universe and all else may, can, and will change. Music, like feelings (as Langer states), are both “temporal phenomena” that can only be experienced in time. Georg Hegel wrote about how this makes music the least tangible and most perishable of the arts—something that makes our fleeting displays of music some of the most “vital expressions” of what it means to be human. Furthermore, Iain McGilchrist notes that music brings out “an aspect that is always present within time, its intersection with a moment which partakes of eternity” (McGilchrist, 2012).
Music only exists in the ever-present, eternal, now—and experiencing music reminds us of this. As Christopher Small says, music is not just some abstract “thing,” but instead a uniquely human activity that is focused on relationships—between people, between notes, and between time (Small, 1998). Music allows us to return to something familiar—flooding us with memories that take us back to a previously felt present. But, importantly, every time we return to a piece of music, it is never exactly the same because we are no longer exactly the same. As the proverb goes, “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We all have been, and will continue to be, shaped by the passage of time, and music allows us to be keenly aware of this—forever returning us to “a present lived, not just encountered” (Bowman, 1998).
References
Barrett, L. F. (2020). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. Mariner.
Bowman, W. (1998). Philosophical perspectives on music. Oxford.
McGilchrist, I. (2012). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. Yale.
Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Wesleyan.
Philosophy of Music 