A human does not apprehend the world of their experience as something self-evident, but as something raising questions which they need to answer. Although a philosophical approach to musical expression is not necessary, it is only desirable if one has regard to the purpose of philosophy as the pursuit of every kind of knowledge and agrees with the view that “a human is a creature that always wants more than it can, and that can more than it must”Footnote 1—this means that a deeper approach to one’s activity is obligatory for a responsible human. “All pure music,” Friedrich Schlegel observed in the period between 1797 and 1801, “must be philosophical and instrumental (music for thought). […] Some find it strange and foolish when musicians speak of the thoughts in their compositions. […] But whoever has a sense of the affinities among all the arts and sciences will at least not view the matter from the uninspired viewpoint of naturalness, according to which music is only supposed to be the language of feelings, and will not find a certain tendency of all pure instrumental music toward philosophy to be impossible of itself. Must not pure instrumental music itself create a text of its own? And does not its theme get developed, confirmed, varied, and contrasted like the object of meditation in a philosophical sequence of ideas?”Footnote 2 Perhaps Schlegel said this, having in mind the overemphasis on the instrumental, artisanal approach to musical expression, which is not unfamiliar in our own times of technologies and specialisations. Heidegger argued that philosophy and poetry (understanding poetry in a broad sense, after the Greek poíēsis, meaning creation, creative work) are twin brothers talking about the same thing, yet in different languages.

The relationship between philosophy and art (including also musical expression) was studied extensively and very accessibly by Arvydas Šliogeris, thus confirming the necessity of interpretation of both philosophy and art. “Philosophy and art complement each other, fulfilling the same difficult but noble mission—to pull a person away from everyday life and, if only for a moment, bring them face to face with the mystery of transcendence.”Footnote 3 When speaking about the nature of philosophy, Šliogeris distinguishes between two sides of its life, the secret and the public, the individual and the universal, and this fits perfectly too with the two-sided nature of musical forms. The secret side of philosophy (and music) is its essential side, which contains more of the being than the external facts, by which the musical work is expressed—that is, the texts which have a completely independent life, but with their own secret side, or in our case the so-called inner form.

Šliogeris makes a distinction between the philosophical and everyday view of objects and things. This approach can be applied in our case to compare the quality of interpretation and performance. “The everyday view is essentially subjective, directed not towards what is seen, but to what sees, that is, ourselves.”Footnote 4 In explaining the philosophical state, he uses Plato’s famous allegory of the cave as an illustration of an enlightened and unenlightened view of things. To be able to see what is beyond the cave, from which an individual looking (with an unenlightened perspective) only sees the shadows of objects or essences, the person has to come to a different view. “If a man can defend his judgment by pointing to properties in the work which he has perceived and responded to, then he gives us reasons for accepting his judgment. Men of wide experience and trained discrimination make such judgments. Their opinions are therefore ‘authoritative.’”Footnote 5

This acquired habit, that is, a person’s entry into the philosophical state as a particular way of viewing things and, above all, of being open to the world, Plato calls paideia. This Greek word is often translated into the languages of the present as upbringing, training, even education or self-education. But this translation distorts its primal and rather elementary meaning. After all, Plato makes it clear that paideia is acquiring the habit to see, a thoughtful process of selecting visible things or, one might say, their classification.Footnote 6

In our case, it is hearing thinking: the state of looking at the signs of the notes and trying to grasp the meaning which they signify. Thus, “paedeia is thinking woven into seeing, which without thinking would be the opposite of true seeing—lack of sight, blindness. […] The full philosophical (and musical—J. R.) state is thinking seeing and seeing thinking.”Footnote 7 Like hearing with the eyes in relation to the texts being interpreted. We see specific objects (the signs of the notes), but we hear, as Heidegger put it, “with a thinking ear.” Due to this insight, a work of art reveals itself like a phenomenon of transcendence (from the Latin transcendens, meaning passing across, going beyond, to the other side of something). “The phenomenon of transcendence is a sensory being possessing a clear form, separated from the sensory mass of the everyday human world […].”Footnote 8

Is beauty—which is the goal of art—a transcendent quality of being? The history of aesthetics tells us that beauty has been understood and explained in various ways. Aristotle described beauty as something that was worth choosing in itself since, being good, it is pleasing precisely because it is good. Such a relationship between goodness and beauty was in antiquity called kalokagathia (from the Greek kalós kaì agathós, meaning beautiful and good). This combination of words retains their original meanings and has, since the very beginning of poetic reflection, raised the question of the relationship and interaction between beauty and goodness—the question of beauty capable of being created only when one is acting well and properly.

St Augustine asserted that unity is the form of any beauty. And unity is proportion, harmony and order. A uniform nature, or integrality, is the first objective quality of beauty. An object is beautiful if it has all the qualities and characteristics appropriate to its genus and species. Consequently, an understanding of a thing is necessary when seeking its manifestation by means of sound. Another quality is proportionality. This can exist where the various elements are connected structurally into a unit of relationships. This is a connection dictated by taste and education, which is manifested through intonations among various means of expression. Proportionality only constitutes beauty when it corresponds to the nature and purpose of the specific being, that is, the creative work. The source of beauty is, therefore, the substantive or inner form, since it unifies diversity, and claims for the being integrality and proportionality of structure. Beauty is the brilliance of order. For Immanuel Kant “beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose.”Footnote 9 Hence, what is beautiful is that which, “in a non-conceptual representation, gives rise to satisfaction that there is purposiveness in the representation. […] Kant connects aesthetics with morality (an echo of kalokagathia—J. R.): the categorical purpose of the beautiful serves as an analogy for moral good.”Footnote 10

More recently, in the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain, a Thomist thinker, described beauty as follows:

Beauty is the splendour of form shining on the proportioned parts of matter […], a lightning of mind on a matter intelligently arranged.Footnote 11 […] By brilliance of form must be understood an ontological splendour which happens to be revealed to our minds.Footnote 12

Aesthetic cognition is fundamentally different from conceptual cognition. “Musical aesthetics is not musical scholarship; it is musical experience and musical theory converging upon a philosophical problem. Aesthetics does not rest on documentary or similar evidence but on philosophical and psychological principles tested by experience.”Footnote 13 Maritain states that

beauty is related to the ontic structure of reality, and therefore belongs to every being. […] Every being has both a real existence (the sign form of the text – J. R.) and a particular substantive form (that is, an inner form – J. R.), therefore, we can speak of the transcendent nature of beauty. Beauty belongs to the metaphysical structure of every being.Footnote 14

“Metaphysical beauty is the beauty that enters the metaphysical structure of every being by virtue of its ultimate connection with the existence provided to every thing through its form.”Footnote 15 One thus needs to be aware that the transmission of the real sign form of an entity (the creative work) does not create beauty.

When I say that […] a piece of music is beautiful, I am not making a statement about any feeling that I or any other person or body of persons may have or have had in regard to it, or about a relation subsisting between my mind or the mind of any other person or body of persons and the […] piece of music in question, but I am making an assertion about a quality or property possessed by the […] piece of music itself; and that the assertion is to be taken to imply that in virtue of the possession of this quality or property, the […] piece of music stands in a certain special relationship hereafter to be defined to the world of value in general and to beauty in particular.Footnote 16

It follows that neither the judgement of beauty nor its expression has any worth if it is not supported by values. Only competence, based on thinking seeing and hearing, enables both the judgement and the choice of appropriate means for the realisation of what is understood. To provide every work with its own characteristic means of expression is the goal of interpretation, as a conscious, value-based activity. The means of expression are particular “frames” into which the artist-interpreter “inserts” the transformed form of the musical work, that is, reveals it through sounds. Thus, the art of performance in the highest sense is the transcendence of the idea of the work, its elevation into a sensory being.

The history of metaphysics and the history of art are parallel and intertwined: in both, being appears and hides, that is, truth is manifested or is not manifested. Heidegger puts it simply:Footnote 17 “The artwork opens up in its own way the being of beings. This opening up, that is, this revealing, that is, the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the work of art, the truth of being has set itself to work (ins Werk gesetzt) – this is the essence of a work of art”.Footnote 18

The comparisons made here between the features of philosophical and artistic (in our case, musical) activity confirm the truth that there exists an equivalence of laws in different phenomena. The principle of analogy allows a thought to pass in a reasoned way from what is clearer to what is still unclear. That is why the ability to apply philosophical ideas, and adapt these to one’s needs, can greatly facilitate and deepen a truer understanding of the subject of music.

“The expressly adopted and unfolding correspondence which corresponds to the appeal of the being of being is philosophy. […] It is in the manner of correspondence which is attuned to the voice of the being of being.”Footnote 19 The ability to hear the voice of the spirit of the being (the creative work) enables meaningful action, and stimulates the energy and possibility of expression. “Knowledge,” Nietzsche states, “works as a tool of power […]. In other words, the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species.”Footnote 20