Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Michael Gallope. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 336 pp.

Review by Stephen Mulhall

23 May 2018

The key virtue of Michael Gallope’s book is that it articulates a framework within which the often dense and puzzling writings on music of four apparently very different philosophers can be seen as bearing productively on one another—as sharing thematic preoccupations, even as they disagree (sometimes radically) about the most illuminating ways of investigating them and about their ethical and political implications. Gallope achieves this by treating all four primarily as philosophers rather than as theorists of music and by relating them genealogically. In other words, he presents Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno as deploying Hegelian resources to build accounts founded on the centrality of tonality, whereas Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze share a Bergsonian emphasis on temporality that leads them to emphasize the centrality to music of the elusive moment and of rhythm, respectively. But Gallope further argues that these apparently distinct philosophical traditions are unified by their shared inheritance of Arthur Schopenhauer’s penetrating but obscure proposal that music be seen as an immediate copy of the underlying reality of things—as a medium that somehow permits unmediated access to life’s essence. This is modernity’s version of the paradox of ineffability—the sense that music communicates the incommunicable and so defeats our best attempts to characterize its power. Gallope sees it as central to the fruitful provocation that music has offered philosophy since Plato.

I learnt a great deal about all four philosophers from Gallope’s account (although Deleuze remained resistant), but I was also puzzled by some of his emphases and limitations. One such puzzle is the priority Gallope gives to Schopenhauer over Friedrich Nietzsche in articulating the most general framework of his account. Nietzsche’s early indebtedness to Schopenhauer is undeniable, but he develops his predecessor’s intuitions about music, art, and metaphysics into a far more sophisticated and reflexively sensitive worldview whose influence (even when negative) marked the intellectual terrain of his successors far more deeply than Schopenhauer’s, as Gallope implicitly admits by repeatedly adverting to the Nietzschean opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian to organize his discussion.

Another puzzle is Gallope’s decision to insert a short interlude acknowledging the interest in music of a philosopher who eschews any dependence upon Hegelian or Bergsonian resources: Ludwig Wittgenstein. As Gallope appreciates, his sheer presence is dissonant, since Wittgenstein’s early inheritance of Schopenhauer barely touches on, and certainly doesn’t privilege, music in the way that Gallope’s four protagonists do, and his later philosophical work interrogates the metaphysical impulse that all four embody, each in his own way. But since Wittgenstein is invoked, it is puzzling that Gallope passes over the full range of his (admittedly sporadic) remarks about music in his later writings. In particular, given Gallope’s interest in the way these philosophers variously succumb to, and interrogate, the temptation to grasp music by comparison with language, he might usefully have considered Wittgenstein’s own attempts to grasp linguistic understanding by comparing it to understanding a musical theme. He might also have given more systematic attention to some important American conjunctions of Wittgenstein with problems of artistic modernism. It’s pleasing to see Gallope name Stanley Cavell in this context, but disappointing to learn that he thinks Cavell’s complex treatments of music can be reduced to a “humanist” “opt[ing] for ‘improvisation’” (p. 164).

Of course, the early Wittgenstein is famously interested in the notion of ineffability—primarily its role in philosophy itself, but also its significance in aesthetics and on the borderline between morality and religion. But in both his early and his later work Wittgenstein shows a far greater willingness to question both the presuppositions and the coherence of that notion than does Gallope—a fact that points us towards the deepest puzzle this book is likely to pose for its readers versed in philosophy. The idea that there is a paradox of ineffability in our musical experience has certainly driven much philosophical consideration of music. It is difficult, though, to understand why an account that not only emphasizes that fact but explores with real sensitivity the difficulties it brings with it—whether employed as a lens through which to view music, or the world of human experience more broadly—never explicitly asks whether those difficulties might be generated by the choice of lens rather than by the objects it purports to bring into focus.

To begin with, since it is one thing to claim that what music communicates is incommunicable and another to claim that we lack any satisfactory means of describing music’s nature and powers, one might usefully reflect on the relation between these two claims. One might also wonder whether our apprehensions of music’s ineffability are sharpened by questionable assumptions about what might constitute an explanation of the meaning of a piece of music—for example, by the assumption that such explanations must be couched in language, and in descriptive language at that. There are, after all, familiar nonlinguistic or nondescriptive ways of conveying what one grasps when one understands a piece of music (playing the piece in a certain way, drawing an analogy between it and another piece, drawing a connection between it and a poem or a sculpture, comparing it to a specific kind of human gesture, and so on). If these succeed in conveying understanding to others, what exactly is ineffable about what is thereby understood?

More generally, if any paradox of ineffability requires for its articulation that we successfully refer to that which exceeds the bounds of the expressible, does that not presuppose that we can identify and individuate what it is that exceeds those bounds, and so that we grasp what is supposed to be beyond anyone’s grasp? One can certainly believe that there is always more to understand in a work of art than we have so far grasped, but that doesn’t require us to think that there is such a thing as a state of complete understanding that we are fated never to attain because its content transcends our expressive repertoire. That belief would be better captured by claiming that there is no such thing as an absolutely complete understanding of a work of art.

Of course, none of these sceptical questions is immune to counter-questions. But without a more explicit and detailed critical evaluation of the issues they raise, Gallope risks leaving his reader with the impression that what most deeply unifies these four philosophers is not their sensitivity to a deep metaphysical rift requiring us all to run our heads against the limits of language, but their being in the grip of a confusion that constitutes one of philosophy’s abiding refrains. Such a conclusion might seem deflationary, after the hard labour needed to track the complexities of four diverse philosophical vocabularies, but it is not necessarily dismissive. For philosophical confusions can themselves go deep, revealing aspects of our condition that might otherwise go unacknowledged; so their exploration can have its own ethico-political significance—its own ways of enabling emancipatory criticism of our culture.