COMPHIL · Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music

Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music

Since around 1900, composers of classical music have regularly mined well-known philosophical texts for compositional material: in other words, they have “composed philosophy.” Starting with an explosion of settings and other musical adaptations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, compositions that set texts taken directly from major philosophical works, use operatic librettos on the lives of significant philosophers, or include a decidedly philosophical program have become increasingly common. Yet scholarship has produced a piecemeal and methodologically limited view of the practice, primarily due to the general tendency in historical musicology to heavily privilege the works of canonical composers and to ascribe philosophical expertise to these composers as well. The interdisciplinary project Composing Philosophy: Amateurism and Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music, offers an alternative view of the practice of “composing philosophy” that focuses on the status of classical composers as philosophical amateurs—my term for individuals who engage deeply with philosophy while being inexpert in it. This project questions persistent assumptions about mastery and canonicity within music, through exploring the significance of how philosophical amateurism and compositional creativity interact to reconfigure the way the relationship between music and philosophy is conceived. In my account, composers who are philosophical amateurs are primarily trained in and deeply initiated into classical music culture and not into the discipline of philosophy or its way of thinking about texts. The position of the musician as philosophical amateur is thus shared by and has been artistically significant for a large group of composers, and has led to a host of related, shared compositional practices within classical music in general. Three main objectives have guided the research in the project; they run as leitmotives through more specific research into individual chapter-length case studies, which will be published as a monograph. The project has determined subtle ways in which (objective 1) amateur approaches to the philosophical tradition inject a popularizing element into otherwise elite classical music culture; (objective 2) musical composition poeticizes philosophy, intervening in the relationship between philosophy and poetry; and (objective 3) gender, sexuality, and other social aspects of composers’ identities (including religious identity, a new discovery since the project was proposed) impacted specific composers’ adaptations of musical texts into their composers, as well as how these have been received by performers, music critics, musicologist, and to a more limited extent, philosophers. The particularity of the findings for each more specific chapter also offer a wealth of other reflections on how musical settings of philosophical materials operate in divergent historical and other contexts.

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