Presenting Metamorfose. Een filosofie van de muziek.

by author Herman Van Campenhout



Metamorfose (Damon, 1999, no longer available) was my first attempt to dismantle the traditional aesthetics of music. Inevitably I had to give a critical analysis of the two basic metaphors that developed into the paradigms of the prevailing philosophy of music, namely music as language, and music as expression, especially of emotions. Contemporary aesthetics of music still go back to the theories of the Camerata dei Bardi – which however were not meant as an aesthetic doctrine, but rather as an apology for the then newer music. The Affektenlehre offered a new formulation of the ancient theory of mimesis. It asserted that music was able to represent feelings, or emotional attitudes, much in the way that an actor using words and gestures can portray feelings or emotional attitudes. In the course of the eighteenth century this doctrine was refurbished into the well-known expression theory. Romanticism went well beyond all this, claiming that music was the language of the ineffable and the metaphysical. With Schopenhauer and Wagner this theory became so authoritative that those who wanted to be critical of it and of the theory of emotional expression, like Hanslick or Nietzsche, were either not heard or condemned as formalists and aestheticists. In the previous century it was above all Adorno who tried to overcome the inadequacies of all previous aesthetics and who wanted to renew the old expression theory (nearly beyond recognition).



My book enters into a lengthy discussion with Adorno with a view to formulating an alternative theory. I found inspiration mainly in Nietzsche and phenomenology and the central idea seems to be that music is infra-linguistic and that it appeals to us somatically. Further concepts like playing or metamorphosis are used to articulate what the meaning of music could be. A last chapter tries to deal with the intractable issue of the ethical meaning of music in our culture, and with the dangers jeopardising that meaning.



The book was kindly received but was not read by those for whom it was meant viz. critics and musicologists. Obviously if you leave the beaten tracks, it is difficult in the present market world to find an audience.



After the publication of the book I was vain enough to be satisfied with my work. But that did not last long. After having published another article on the singing voice it began to dawn on me that the central idea of that text was actually the nucleus of a new approach to all the issues of the aesthetics of music. It was a typical instance of the après-coup, Freud’s Nachträglichkeit – translated as retroaction or deferred action, but then applied to the activity of thinking. It is only in retrospect that we understand what we actually did, said or meant, it is only with hindsight that we realize the effects of our own words or deeds. While working intensely on my Wagner book I continually felt the need to re-think all the issues I had dealt with in Metamorfose, and I began to take notes for what was to become Die Stimme des Verlangens. What happened was not that my ideas on music were changing, but that my whole way of thinking developed from a basically phenomenological and traditional approach into a post-modern mode of thought. My study of Derrida, Levinas, Lacan and Arendt had led me to my own version of what is called the linguistic turn in philosophy. I had begun to understand what l’Autre (the Other) means, and what the implications of Derrida’s paradoxical supplement d’ origine (the original supplement) were. In Metamorfose I had tried to explain that music is not an immaterial spiritual art, but a somatic art that touches and arouses us at an infra-lingual level. The concepts that I used for that articulation included metamorphosis, play and the other. But it then became clear to me that my phenomenological vocabulary was not adequate and that I would have to deal with the major questions using different concepts.