Classical Music and Its Philosophical Phenomena

Baidu knows that there are always such questions in the world, and you don't realize how complicated the questions you ask are. Your question is the relationship between music and philosophy. To borrow a teacher's words, questions like this are "what a person can talk about after studying all his life", which are similar to such questions as "what is man", "what is beauty" and "what is goodness".

I can only tell you what I understand now, and many of them are just general ideas. I am an amateur who has listened to classical music for two years. If you really want to delve into this problem carefully, you can read some books written by philosophers specializing in music and philosophy. Of course they are much better than me.

Music cannot express a clear philosophical point of view. Philosophical viewpoints are all described in words, philosophical works are all composed in words, and philosophical propositions such as "I think, therefore I am" are also expressed in words. Music has no specific meaning. How to say it expresses a philosophical point of view?

The auditory experience of music can make people think of some philosophies. The sound difference of music itself exists objectively, and the audience can associate some philosophies according to the auditory feeling of the sound itself, but they are all vague and vary from person to person. For example, Mahler's symphony is much richer in timbre than the waltz written by Strauss, with many musical passages and many timbre changes. Most people will think that Mahler's symphony is much more philosophical than that written by the Strauss family, and they can relate it to themselves. For example, a lyric major melody of sunshine suddenly becomes a very intense and dark minor melody, and the audience can think that everything expressed in it has two sides, the transformation of yin and yang, etc., whatever you think. Another example is Beethoven's symphony of destiny. The sound of the first movement makes people feel depressed, while the sound of the fourth movement itself makes people feel very sunny and cheerful, like a sign of victory, so it reminds people that "people can overcome fate."

(3) Musicians can be inspired to write music after reading philosophy books, but there can be no strict correspondence between music and philosophy books (or because music has no specific meaning). For example, the symphonic poem Zarathustra written by Richard strauss was inspired by Nietzsche's philosophical work Zarathustra. You can think that the philosophical views expressed by music are the same as those in the book, but if I say otherwise, you can't argue with me.

(4) In the thinking behind classical music, we can dig out many western cultural phenomena, thus rising to the cultural level and summing up some philosophical viewpoints (not only music can do this, but painting, dance, religion and even modern movies and photography can dig out cultural phenomena and see some philosophical viewpoints). For example, from the development history of classical music, we can see that music pays more and more attention to contrast, including various strong and weak contrasts, large and small color pairs, fast and slow speed contrasts and so on. It shows that western culture really attaches importance to the opposition and competition of things. Another example is The Romantic Period's music. Most of them set a lyrical and pleasing major paragraph in the middle of depressed minor music. There are also many realistic scenes in the painting, but the blank flowing in the distance is like a charming paradise. This reflects the concept of "dual world" in western traditional culture, which holds that people live in the real world, but the real world is full of suffering, and people always pursue a beautiful spiritual world or ideal. The clear separation between reality and ideal is a philosophical view that has existed in the west since ancient Greece. An important feature of modern philosophy is to break this dual concept.