Melodic variation in the Grateful Dead's "Fire On The Mountain"

 As part of their All The Years Live video series, the Grateful Dead's archival group posted a video of the group's performance of the song "Fire On The Mountain" (along with a substantial amount of the preceding "Space" section) from October 31, 1980, the final night of their concert run at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It's the same version released on the live compilation Dead Set, which means it may well be the first version of the song I ever heard since Dead Set was one of the earliest Grateful Dead recordings I ever got. (The first was the 1987 studio album In The Dark, which didn't do much for me; the second was the 1972 live album Europe '72, which most definitely did, especially the "China Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider" and "Truckin'>Epilogue>Prelude>Morning Dew" segments.)

It reminded me of something I'd been wanting to write something about: lead guitarist Jerry Garcia's remarkable melodic variation in the song. The song itself is made up of a simple oscillation between two chords: B major to A major. In terms of key signatures, the song is, then, quite clearly in the key of E major, where B is the dominant and A is the sub-dominant. In terms of modes, the most inside scale choices are B Mixolydian over B major and A Lydian over A major. Since both are modes of the E major scale, staying with its seven notes is the simplest choice. Garcia does sometimes use these—but not all the time. At other points, he uses B Ionian (i.e. B major), with its A sharp, B Lydian, with its E sharp, and A Ionian, with its D natural, revealing of his gifted understanding of and capacity for melodic variation. 

Below, I've written out the various modes along with transcriptions of composed moments where Garcia makes use of different modes with times from the video. The section beginning at 3:36 is interesting as he varies the mode, D natural vs. D sharp, in what is otherwise an exact repetition. I also really like the ending riff, beginning at 9:18, with its prominent A sharp that provides such an effective contrast with the many A naturals that have come before as well as the A major chord that follows.

 

 Another example of Garcia's facility for melodic variation is in the song "Cumberland Blues." From its beginning all the way up to the end of the bridge, around 4:30, he sticks to G minor pentatonic. At 4:32, however, even though the harmony is the same G dominant seventh as before the bridge, he shifts to G Mixolydian, with its B naturals rather than the Bb/A#s of the minor pentatonic. It gives a whole different sound to the song and is a better fit for the later chord changes.

The Grateful Dead at Veneta, OR: August 27, 1972

Today, August 27, 2020, is the 48th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's performance in Springfield, Oregon that is widely celebrated as one of the group's best, with which I certainly agree. Tomorrow, the film Sunshine Daydream, which documents this performance, will be streamed for free. It can be seen here. If you haven't seen it before, it really is worth watching as a cultural artifact of the rural America in the early 1970s if nothing else.

I discuss this performance in chapter three of my dissertation, specifically the "Dark Star>El Paso>Sing Me Back Home" segment. The "Dark Star" is particularly remarkable. If you're interested, it can be downloaded here.

Sunshine Daydream doesn't unfortunately capture all the music performed. If you'd like to hear the entire concert, it can be streamed from the Internet Archive.

Besides, the segment mentioned above, the "China-Cat Sunflower>I Know You Rider," "Birdsong," and "Playing in the Band" are all sublimely amazing versions of these songs.

On Improvisation and Musical Works: An Ontology of Difference

Musical works are odd entities. They consist of multiply instanced sounds, and (often) scores, while not being easily reducible to either. Whereas it is quite easy to say where the Mona Lisa is (the Louvre in Paris of course), the question, where is Beethoven’s Eroica symphony? seems almost laughably bizarre. One could have a score of it, a sound recording of it and be present at a performance of it as an instrumentalist, conductor or audience member, yet its totality seemingly transcends all of these particular instances. Indeed, the very fact that we use such qualifying words as “score,” “recording” and “performance” implicitly affirms our belief in the existence of something more to a work then these individual instances. But if so, what kind of a thing is a musical work?

This, in a nutshell, is the primary question of musical ontology—a philosophical field that has been the subject of extensive recent debate on account of the increasingly recognized historically and culturally contingent importance that the work concept has played in the history of European high art music, at least over the last two centuries. As the primacy of this genre of music, and of European-derived culture more generally, has come under increasing question, however, various attempts have been made to reconcile a work-concept understanding of music with the vast array of other kinds of music. For prior to the last few decades, inquiries concerning the ontology of music, when they occurred at all, were overwhelmingly based solely on the “classical” musical tradition even though it obviously encompasses but a limited selection of the plethora of musical possibilities. Not surprisingly, the answers proposed by such inquiries reflected the substance and values of the musical tradition studied: score-based, with a strict division between composition and performance, privileging large-scale horizontal harmonic form over melodic invention or rhythmic complexity.

As ethnomusicologists (among others) have aptly demonstrated, however, these values, far from being of universal import, reflect aesthetic understandings that are a product of western European history and thus have no a priori value. Not only is this true of these values, however, but also of the concept of music (certain kinds anyways) as works. In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr persuasively argues that the musical work-concept only came into conceptual existence around the year 1800 as an expression of the then emerging Romantic movement and is irrevocably tied to the compositional development of Beethoven—whose music has served as the paradigmatic example of the work-concept ever since.^[1] Although some have argued for various other years as being more accurate for dating its origins, the contingent nature of the musical work-concept, i.e. that it is a cultural construction, seems at this point unassailably correct. Yet this has not prevented various philosophers in recent years from developing comprehensive ontological theories of musical works that, while claiming to cover music tout court, implicitly depend upon this very historical contingency. Their theories, consequently, while admirable in many respects, fail to provide a convincing account of musical forms/styles that do not partake in their presumptions.

One of the most common, and arguably oldest, forms of music making, improvisation, is particularly under-theorized by philosophers of music.^[2] In a way this is not surprising given their, aforementioned, overwhelming focus on music in terms of the work-concept. In fact, Goehr argues that it was on account of the work-concepts increasing, and by the end of the 19^th century nearly total, hegemony over European art music that improvisation (or extemporization) came to be excluded from “serious” music making.

"Understanding of extemporization had altered over the centuries largely because of changes in notational practices. Before notation was used with any impact, the practice of music almost entirely consisted of musical extemporization; it almost was just the simultaneous composition-performance of music…[But o]ver the years it became increasingly limited. By 1800, when composition was defined as involving the predetermination of as many structural elements as possible, the notion of extemporization acquired its modern understanding. For the first time it was seen to stand in strict opposition to composition ‘proper’. In these terms, it is possible to see how changes in notation not only curtailed the liberties of the performer, but in close connection became the guard against extemporization."^[3]

Improvisation/extemporization, then, is, in a sense, the “other” of the work-concept having been ignored, denied, and deprecated in favor of ever increasing notational exactness—a process that reached its apotheosis in the 1950s with the “total serialist” compositions of Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono most notably.^[4] Over the last one hundred years or so, however, it has undergone a remarkable efflorescence in various guises (most notably jazz) and is now widely recognized as a legitimate music making practice.^[5] But then given the antipœdal relationship of improvisation and the work-concept ever since the latter’s inception, one must ask what effect the increasing legitimation of improvisation might have on understandings of the work-concept itself. Since, following Goehr, the essence of the work-concept is seemingly so opposed to the spirit of improvisation should it and improvisation remain forever distinct? Or, since the work-concept has enormous cultural, legal and financial import, should they try to somehow be reconciled so that improvisational musicians could share in the many benefits that those who make use of the musical work-concept in unarguable ways (art music composers, conductors and performers) partake in?

Although there are important differences between them, two noted philosophers of music, Jerrold Levinson and Peter Kivy, both opt for the first choice by making clear that their ontological theories pertain solely to music composed from approximately the latter half of the 18^th century to the present within the European high art tradition—that is, within the scope of Goehr’s historicist thesis.^[6] This saves them the obvious trouble faced by the second choice in having to delimit an understanding of the musical work that also encompassed improvisation, but it also renders their conclusions far less significant or interesting since they only consider a relatively small part of the total human musical experience. Julian Dodd, on the other hand, is much more ambitious. He claims that his musical ontology, what he calls the simple view, “appl[ies] to all works of pure instrumental music—that is, to jazz works in addition to fully notated classical pieces—and to works composed for recording purposes as well as to works composed for performance.”^[7] In a footnote to that very passage, however, Dodd explicitly rules out free improvisations as work instancing since they, “are not regarded as blueprints for performances, and our interest in them lies in their immediacy rather than in their potential repeatability.”^[8] In this he agrees with Stephen Davies who argues that while improvisation can, of course, realize music it negatively correlates to the instantiation of a musical work. That is, in Davies’ account of “thin” vs. “thick” works, the more that a work is of the latter the less room for improvisation there will necessarily be and vice versa. In the case of free improvisation, however, where there are no directions from a composer specifying the musical specifics that performers are supposed to realize, Davies rules out the possibility of there being a musical work instanced. “Music can be freely improvised… [but s]uch playing is not intended to instance a work and is not guided by a composer’s instructions, whether notational verbal or exemplified in a performance offered as a model.”^[9]
 

Yet Dodd and Davies’ arguments raise a simple question in response: what if the one or more people freely improvising do intend to instance a work? One can, after all, make a fairly clear conceptual distinction on the level of intentionality between free improvisations meant only for the particular time in which they are realized and those meant to be instanced again at a later time. For, as Davies himself admits, the difference between an improvisation that fills out a “thin” work and one that only uses some aspect of a work as its basis and is not a work itself is dependent on socio-historical context.^[10] Given this dependence it would seem plausible to argue that the advent of the ability to “fix” an improvisation for later listening, i.e. sound recording, enables a free improvisation to now, potentially, fulfill the multi-instantiability requirement that he believes a work must have.^[11]
  Anticipating this possible objection Davies argues that

            "An improvisation could be taped or written down, and thereby might always be repeated,             but that seems incidental to its appeal…Because they can be recorded on tape  or paper,             free improvisations may be imitated by others, but this potential for repeatability is not               sufficient to establish they are works. They are neither intended nor conventionally                  
            received as models to be copied. The ethos of [improvised] music…counts against the               idea that improvisations generate musical works, as does the social practice within which             improvising is expected and valued. There is then no virtue in regarding free extemporizations as works.^[12]

However, this seems to only dig Davies further into the trenches of dogmatism since his imperious claim as to how improvisational musicians universally intend their music to be received, as well as their audiences’ attitude of reception, are belied by his accepting that socio-historical context matters in such determinations. So while he is arguably correct about all improvised music prior to Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, the ever increasing ubiquity of sound recording since then has allowed the marriage of the intention to instance a work through free improvisation with the means of fixing it to be instantiated again at a later time thus fulfilling his own work instancing requirements.

As for the supposed lack of “virtue... in regarding free extemporizations as works,” this statement shows a remarkable naiveté on Davies’ behalf of the social significance of the work-concept.^[13]  Although he notes “that improvisers and performers… deserve no less praise for their creativity than composers receive” the fact is that composers do receive not only more praise than improvisers but have also had the ability, unlike improvisers, to financially benefit from their musical productions as works.^[14] Because he therefore seems to want to characterize this as a moral issue, there indeed does seem to be virtue in regarding free improvisations as potentially instancing works given the inequity, in terms of both finances and fame, of improvisers relative to composers given that it is now in fact possible to repeatedly instantiate them through sound recording.

However, Davies continues this line of argumentation writing that “[a] person cannot know and understand a work without having a sense of its offering a range of different prospects for its presentation. By contrast, when people improvise, it is the immediacy and presence displayed in what they do that attracts us.”^[15] But this is too simplistic. For Davies’ move from an epistemic claim about the understanding of a work to an aesthetic claim about what is appreciated in improvisation ignores the possibility of both being true of improvisations as well as that most paradigmatic example of a musical work: a symphony. A large part of the motivation to go see an orchestra, after all, is the immediacy and, yes, presence of the performance that one could not experience listening to a recording, or even live broadcast, of the same orchestra. Likewise, one of the avenues of appreciating improvised music is anticipating the range of different possibilities the improvisation can take. This is certainly the case when one is familiar with the ensemble and, therefore, with the inevitable commonalities of their musical style, but is applicable whenever the improvisation results, as it in fact always should, from responsive dialogical listening. For not only should improvising musicians follow the internal logic of the interaction in which they are involved to help determine what they play, but so to should audience members in order to fully appreciate the performance they are witnessing. Their ability to do so obviously depends upon their overall musical experience, but the mental engagement is of, at least potentially, the same kind. So though well-argued and imaginative, Davies’ argument is ultimately unconvincing. 

Dodd, on the other hand, using as an example the free piano improvisations of Keith Jarrett,^[16] insists, similarly to Davies, that “someone might listen to a recording of one of Jarrett’s improvisations and attempt to reproduce it, perhaps even adding some improvisational flourishes of her own; but this is insufficient to show that the original improvisation is itself a work.”^[17] His reasoning relates to his aforementioned “simple view” that he thinks best explains what he thinks are a musical work’s two necessary qualities: hearability and repeatability. Since, he thinks, free improvisations are by definition not intended to be repeated (see footnote 8 above) then they cannot obviously fall under a definition of the work-concept for which repeatability is of central importance.

But then what of this repeatability requirement given what has already been said against Davies’ own analogous demand? To answer this an exploration of Dodd’s “simple view” is necessary because while their motivations for believing that free improvisation is not work instancing are similar, there are important differences between his and Davies’ theories. Most notably, while Davies grants the significance of socio-historical facts in at least partly determining what is and is not a musical work, Dodd does no such thing. In fact, he claims that not only are socio-historical facts not at all significant in such a determination, but musical works are eternally existent entities. Explaining his rationale for this seemingly bizarre and outlandish claim is therefore necessary. 

Dodd argues that a type-token theory offers the best explanation for (again) the two qualities he thinks musical works must have: they must be hearable in their entirety and they must be intended to be, and be capable of, being repeated. By “type-token” Dodd means that when one hears a musical work one is hearing a token, or instance, of a type that exists prior to its being tokened. This, of course, raises the question of what the existence of a type then consists of, but to this philosophers have proposed various conflicting definitions, which are beyond the scope of this paper to discuss.^[18] Dodd, however, argues that a type is simply an abstract, unstructured and unchanging set of conditions by which it can be tokened. They are abstract because while a token, say 42, has a spatial-temporal location (in this sentence for one), its type does not since to even ask the question—where is the number 42 above/beyond its individual instances?—is to make a serious categorical error. They are unstructured because since types do not exist in space and time it makes no sense to say that a part of one is before, after, above, below (or any other spatial-temporal preposition one may choose) another part. 

To cash this out in terms of music, this means that it would be false to say that in the type The 12-bar Blues Form that the I (tonic) chord comes before the IV (sub-dominant) chord. Or that in the type The Sonata-Allegro Form that the recapitulation comes after the development. Instead, following Dodd’s argument, one has to say, using analogical predication, that one of the things that it necessarily means to be a well-formed token of The 12-bar Blues Form is for the I chord to come before the IV chord. Similarly, that one of the things that it necessarily means to be a well-formed token of Sonata-Allegro Form is for the recapitulation to come after the development.^[19] Lastly, a type is unchanging, according to Dodd, because since all it is to be one is to lay out conditions by which it can be tokened, for it to have different conditions is to denote not a difference in the type, but to rather refer to another type: “[a]ny attempt to describe a type as having changed, or a possible situation in which a type differs from the way it is actually, ends up, at best, as a description of a different type altogether.”^[20]

Given these three qualities, it does indeed seem to follow that types exist eternally. But what then follows from this? First (and most obviously), musical works are not created, but are rather discovered by their composers. Second, any qualities that a musical work ostensibly has in relation to other works, such as originality, being influenced by or derivative of someone/something etc., do not actually belong to the work, but rather to the biography of the composer. Third, any sonic event that fulfills the conditions of a type, whether intended or not, is a token of it irrespective of how it is produced. In Dodd’s words: “[s]uppose, by some gigantic fluke, a sound-sequence were produced naturally (perhaps by the wind rattling through an empty house) that was recognizable as a note-for-note facsimile of the sounds indicated by [Wynton] Marsalis’s score for In This House, On This Morning… To my mind, there is no harm in treating such a pattern of sounds as a genuine token of [it].”^[21] So not only in theory are the instruments indicated by a score not necessary for a musical work to be tokened (a contentious debate in itself), but the existence of people themselves is unnecessary; Beethoven’s Eroica perhaps first instanced by mating sounds of dinosaurs sometime during the Jurassic era.

But if intentionality is not necessary for the instancing of a musical work then on what grounds can Dodd exclude free improvisation from being capable of doing so? Recall that his rationale relates to his repeatability requirement: since they aren’t meant to be repeated, or generally taken as exemplars to be copied, they aren’t works. However, this seems to obviously contradict his statement quoted above that argued that intentionality is not required to instance a work. The only way for Dodd to be seemingly consistent in this regard would be for him to argue that since a human being could compose a work and then have it performed, he/she choosing to purely improvise somehow negates the work that the wind, or mating dinosaurs, could instance by making the same sounds on account of them not having the compositional capacity that human beings potentially do. But this argument is, of course, ridiculously ad hoc and, moreover, conflicts with Dodd’s avowed sonicist position that one of the ways that works are defined is acoustic indistinguishability: “whether a sound-event counts as a properly formed token of W is determined purely by its acoustic qualitative appearance. Nothing else matters [my italics].”^[22]
 

So it seems that just as Davies’ invalidation of free improvisation as work instancing is undermined by another element of his overall theory, so is Dodd’s. But there is another related implication of Dodd’s ontology that needs to be brought to light. For if a musical work is of the type-token variety, and types are, as Dodd says, simply sets of conditions detailing how they can be properly tokened, then it follows that not only can free improvisations token work-types, but that any sonic event is a token of a musical work-type. Since intention, as has been shown, is not a requirement for a token to be instanced, and any sound can be heard as music,^[23] there seems to be no way to avoid concluding, following Dodd’s own primary arguments, that there is an infinity of types for the infinite set of possible sonic events.

But what if the performance of a work, to use again the example of Beethoven’s Eroica, has an error in it; one of the cellos accidentally plays a D natural in the 7^th bar of the first movement instead of the C sharp that is so indicative of the work’s revolutionary character.^[24] Would it still be a token of it? Nelson Goodman, for one, says no because, he argues, if one accepts that there could be one error in a work’s instancing then one has no good reason to not accept two errors. And if one can accept two errors in a work’s instancing then one has no good reason to not accept three errors and so on until, to paraphrase Goodman, one has gone from the Eroica to Three Blind Mice. Goodman therefore argues that for a musical performance to be a performance of a scored work it must be free from errors in all work determinative ways as indicated by the score.^[25] What this of course means is that if one were an audience member at what you thought was supposed to be a performance of the Eroica and one of the cellos made the aforementioned error one would be, on Goodman’s account, unable to truthfully say that one had heard it even if every other work determinative demand of the score was complied with exactly. 

The devilish details here are what features of a score are work determinative and which are not. As many commentators have argued in response to Goodman, whatever they might be determined to be his deeply counter-intuitive account of the musical work should be avoided at all costs as it conflicts to far too great a degree with actual musical discourse.^[26] Dodd therefore offers the idea, taken from Nicholas Wolterstorff, of musical works as not simply types, but norm-types; that is of being capable of having both correctly and incorrectly formed tokens.^[27] As long as a putative performance of a work is recognizable as being of the work it is supposed to be, it is that work no matter how many errors have been made—though it may well be a very poor performance of it. 

This is indeed a far more satisfactory answer to the problem of performance errors than Goodmans’, but if true then Dodd’s theory becomes even more complicated than simply (!) positing an infinite set of works-types. For what follows from this is that each correctly formed work-token is also an incorrectly formed token of a nearly infinite number of other work-types. In other words, to use again the example of the single-error-in-the-cellists performance of the Eroica, Dodd must admit, for the reasons already discussed, the existence of a correctly formed work-type that is exactly the same as Beethoven’s Eroica with the exception that, according to its corresponding score, one of the cellists is supposed to play a D natural instead of a C sharp. So not only would this work-token be correctly formed according to one work-type, but every possible performance mistake by itself, as well as in every possible combination, would instance both a correctly formed token and an incorrectly formed token of countless other correctly formed ones. 

Dodd might be willing to bite the bullet and accept the existence of an infinite set of work-types, as might partisans of musical improvisation who want its results to be included within the definition of the work-concept. But being so broad as to include every possible sonic occurrence and their combinations this definition seems to lack any efficacy; if every sound event is a token of a work-type then the concept of the musical work itself is seemingly devoid of any value.

Inclusion of intentionality seems to therefore be necessary in order to have a work-concept definition that rules out such an expansive definition, and has any meaning in being able to say what sound sequences are and are not works. Although it is possible, but highly improbable, that the sounds of dinosaurs mating 70 million years ago could have perhaps instanced a sonic duplicate of the Eroica, because they could have had no aim of doing, these sounds could not have been an actual instance of Beethoven’s 3^rd symphony. In other words, all sounds and their combinations are not musical works unless they are intended to be so. This therefore rules out Dodd’s type-token answer to the categorial question—what kind of thing is a musical work?—as well as his sonicist answer to the individuation question: what are the identity conditions of the musical work? So how might one better answer these dilemmas?

Levinson’s idea of musical works as indicated-types might be of use here. Recall that he explicitly restricts the pertinence of his ontological conclusions to music from the late 18^th century to the present within the “classical” tradition. He does this because of the seemingly obvious inapplicability of a definition suited to score-based music to music that is not, or is only loosely, connected to a score. But while Levinson might not think so, his conclusions might, in fact, be pertinent to an understanding of improvisation in terms of the work-concept. For what is foregrounded in his ontology, in contradistinction to Dodd’s theory most prominently, is the importance of compositional context in what it is to be a musical work.

Levinson uses the concept of indicated-types as a means of constructing a definition that would be able to explain three requirements for a musical work: they “must be capable of being created, must be individuated by context of composition, and must be inclusive of means of performance.”^[28] Although these three criteria sit at the heart of the debate over what it means to be a musical work in the traditional “classical” music sense, they seem far less controversial when applied to improvised music. After all, according to the vast majority of its theorists and practitioners it is the context in which improvising musicians find themselves that they are supposed to, at least partly, reflect in their playing.^[29] While it is certainly possible for a solipsistic kind of improvisation to take place—in which a performer ignores, to the best of their ability, their surroundings—this would be commonly perceived by audience members and especially other improvisers as an aesthetic, even moral, fault. Indeed, to say about an improviser “they weren’t listening” is one of the most damming criticisms one can make against someone within a musical improvisational community.  

For Levinson, the answer that best satisfies his three requirements is that a musical work is a sound/performing-means (S/PM) structure indicated by someone (X) at a particular time (T).^[30] This has been extensively critiqued by Kivy and Dodd (among others), but (as has been already discussed) for reasons coming from their focus, whether admitted (in the case of Kivy) or not (in the case of Dodd), on score-based music. Given the very different nature of improvised music, however, and the problems that Dodd’s own type-token ontology is subject to, one has good reason to think that their criticisms are less than relevant to this kind of music that is so contextually dependent. Therefore, while S/PM by X at T might well be deficient as an understanding of a musical work in the “classical” music world, in the world of musical improvisation it could be not only sufficiently robust, but to also match up with how such music is intuitively understood.

What, then, can we conclude from this discussion so far? Although the historically dependent existence of the musical work-concept, and the concomitant de-legitimation of improvisation, appears certain, its continuing importance, in spite of the resurgence of improvisation over the last century, seems to require a new way of conceptualizing it. Perhaps, given how different score-based and improvised music (or rather musics?) are experienced, the very idea of having a singular work-concept definition that could encompass them both is the source of difficulty. As scholars of political pluralism have argued, the diversity of life suggests not a single answer to many of the most important human dilemmas, but rather an acknowledgment of the incommensurableness of values, and therefore the necessity to accept difference in not only how we understand ourselves but also in our very definitions. Though a single ontological account that would explain all that can be conceived as music (whether a work or otherwise) would indeed be useful, given the many problems to which such a theory must face, an acceptance of the seemingly necessary ontologies of music is of a far likelier veracity.

Bibliography

Berlin, Isaiah. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Edited by Henry Hardy

and Roger Hausheer, 191-242. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of                          Chicago Press, 1994.

Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: MA:               Harvard University Press, 2006.

Davies, Stephen. Musical Works & Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Dodd, Julian. Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Donat, Gregory S. “Fixing Fixation: A Copyright with Teeth for Improvisational Performers,”                 Colombia Law Review 97, no.5 (Jun., 1997): 1363-1405.

Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music.                2^nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 2^nd ed. Indianapolis:              Hackett, 1976.

Hamilton, Andy. “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Imperfection.” British Journal                        of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2000): 168-85.

Hodson, Robert. Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Kivy, Peter. The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music. New York:                               Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Levinson, Jerrold. “What a Musical Work Is.” In Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, edited by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, 78-91. Malden, MA:                         Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Lewis, George. “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” In                   The Other Side of Nowhere, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 131-162.                             Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

———. “Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer Reflects.” Contemporary Music Review                         25, no.5 (2006): 429-34.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of                Chicago Press, 1996.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford                University Press, 1980.

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^[1] Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 176-188.

^[2] Improvisation is under-theorized not only in music but as a human activity more generally.

^[3] Goehr, 234.

^[4] Examples include Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte both from 1952.

^[5] Notable exceptions to this recognizance would be Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Elliot Carter all of whom argue that the results of improvisation are necessarily only the performance of sound structures already known through prior practice and acquaintance and that, therefore, only disciplined compositional action (in the case of Boulez and Carter) or aleatoric mehods (Cage) can produce music that is truly “new.” For a discussion of Boulez’s views, see George Lewis, Improvisation and the Orchestra: A Composer Reflects,” Contemporary Music Review 25, no.5 (2006): 430. For Carter, see Andy Hamilton, “The Art of Improvisation and the Aesthetics of Imperfection,” British Journal of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2000): 179-80. For Cage, see George Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002): 220-23.

^[6] In the introduction to “What a Musical Work Is” Levinson writes “that I am confining my inquiry to that paradigm of a musical work, the fully notated ‘classical’ composition of Western Culture, for example, Beethoven’s Quintet for piano and winds in E-flat, op. 16… all claims herein regarding musical works are to be construed with this implicit restriction.” In Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 78-91. And Kivy, thought with less certainty, at the beginning  of his “Platonism in Music: Another Kind of Defense” argues, “It may not be true for improvisations, and it may not be true for certain kinds of electronic music. It may not be true in the absence of a notational system. Indeed it may not be true for most of the world’s musics. But for a great deal of the most valued art music of the West, since the development of a sophisticated musical notation, it seems to be true that there are musical works, and that there are performances of them.” In The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59.

^[7] Julian Dodd, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 2-3.

^[8] Dodd, 3 in footnote.

^[9] Davies, 12.

^[10] “We should sort cases at the borderline by placing playing events within the appropriate social and musical practice, not by inventorying their sounds or the degree of restraint or freedom those sounds seem to display. It is the performance tradition it taps into and is drawn from that distinguishes free improvisation from work performance. It is the players’ and genre’s social location and genealogy̶̶the musical practice they assume as their background̶̶that mark the difference.” Davies, 19.

^[11] “Works intended for performance take part of their point from their multi-instantiability—that is, from the possibility of their receiving more than one performance.” Davies, 13.

^[12] Davies, 14.

^[13] Why Davies would use here a word so laden in moral connotations as virtue I can only wonder.

^[14] Although this seems to be changing; the 1989 and 2005 amendments to the Australian Copyright Act are particularly notable in this respect. For a discussion of the legal issues involved see Gregory S. Donat, “Fixing Fixation: A Copyright with Teeth for Improvisational Performers,” Colombia Law Review 97, no. 5 (Jun., 1997), pp. 1363-1405.

^[15] Davies, 14.

^[16] Those performance included on the album the Köln Concerts being perhaps the most well known examples.

^[17] Dodd, 3.

^[18] For a thorough discussion see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online, s.v. “Types and Tokens” (by Linda Wetzel), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens/ (accessed April 18, 2008).

^[19] Types, being abstract entities, cannot have properties in common with their tokens, but they can have predicates in common. Analogical predication is, therefore, the doctrine by which one relates something being true of a token to its corresponding type. “It is not that types and their tokens can share the same properties, but that they can share the same predicates: predicates that, when applied to types, express properties that are systematically related to the properties expressed by these predicates when applied to their tokens.” Dodd, 46. Although the difference is subtle it is of crucial importance for Dodd’s overall theory.

^[20] Dodd, 54. The contents of this paragraph are taken from the chapter “Types I: Abstract, Unstructured, Unchanging” of his Works of Music.

^[21] Dodd, 34.

^[22] Dodd, 201.

^[23] A large part of John Cage’s oeuvre was, of course, intended to make this very point. Although focused primarily on the visual arts many of the insights of Arthur Danto can be usefully applied to music in this regard. See his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981).

^[24] For a comprehensive discussion of the Eroica and of the significance of this passage in particular see Grove Music Online, s.v. “Beethoven, Ludwig Van: The symphonic ideal,” http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.40026.14 (accessed April 18, 2008).

^[25] For the argument in its entirety see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2^nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).

^[26] Davies’ (2001) rejoinder to Goodman in his chapters “Notations” and “Performances” is particularly noteworthy (pun intended...) in this regard.

^[27] See Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

^[28] Levinson, 84.

^[29] For extended theoretical and ethnographic studies of jazz improvisation see Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Robert Hodson, Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2007).

^[30] Levinson, 84. By sound/performing-means structure he means the totality of a work’s purely sonic structure as well as its instrumental specifications. 

The Music of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Perhaps there never has been a philosopher who was, to this degree

at least, as much a musician as I am…”

(From a letter to conductor Hermann Levi – 1887)

“Without music, Life would be a mistake.”

(From Twilight of the Idols)[i]

Introduction

Written shortly before the mental breakdown that would last the rest of his life, Nietzsche attempted to explain all of his major writings in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo.[ii] Concerning the book he thought most highly of, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, what he has to say is particularly interesting given its unusual character: philosophical in content, but unlike any other philosophical text.[iii]  Rather than a work of logic and argumentation, its three-part narrative focuses on the historical character Zarathustra, founder of the Zoroastrian religion, followed by a fourth chapter made up of a series of epigrams. Describing when and where it was “the basic conception of this work” was first formulated, the idea of eternal recurrence (“this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”), what he says is especially interesting.

If I reckon back a few months from this day [that the idea of eternal recurrence first occurred to him], I find as an omen a sudden and profoundly decisive change in my taste, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music [italics mine];—certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its preconditions.

What an understanding of Zarathustra as music would actually mean is therefore a question well worth asking even though an answer is hardly obvious. Its difficulty being not a sufficient reason to not make such an attempt, however (especially when faced with such a direct injunction as given here by Nietzsche), this essay will try to make sense of this possibility.

Nietzsche and Music

Nietzsche’s relation to music is most well known through his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. At first friendly, and in the case of the dedicatory preface to his The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music arguably crossing over into worshipful, their friendship soured around 1876 with the completion of the “Maestro’s” (as he desired to be called) specially built opera house at Bayreuth. Nietzsche’s increasing disenchantment with Wagner led to him public breaking off their friendship.[iv] Although the story of his relationship to Wagner is well known to readers of Nietzsche, his love of and familiarity with music is not appreciated to the same degree. Even less well known are his numerous compositions—mostly from the 1860’—that while showing a lack of formal musical training, reveal a deeply musical sensibility not unfamiliar with the harmonic language of the late-19^th century.[v]

            What of Zarathustra in particular, this work that Nietzsche declares, “a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one who first creates truth” (EH)? What does music, or an understanding of it as music, have to do with its philosophical content?

Zarathustra as Symphnoy

One possible to think about Zarathustra as music would be to look at its structure. What is perhaps most obvious in this regard is the book’s division into four parts, thus possibly mirroring the (for the most part) standardized four part form of that most exalted of musical forms: the symphony.[vi] By the early years of the 19^th century, for many the symphony was not simply another musical form alongside all others. Instead, it was the musical form that best reflected the society and culture of which it was a product.[vii] Given Nietzsche’s love and passion for music, he undoubtedly would have to some degree shared such sentiments.

The expression of Nietzsche’s understanding of the need for the willing of eternal return—that everything that has and will occur returns again eternally—as the way of overcoming the “spirit of gravity” (nihilism) that he thinks has so infected the contemporary world, Zarathustra could perhaps be understood as a “symphony” along these lines in its attempt to express what is for him the truth of not just “a city, a state, or [even] the whole of humanity,” but of all life: will to power, which, in its positive formulation, is revealed to lead inevitably to the willing of eternal return. “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption” (II, 20). Lampert echoes this view writing that

The conclusion implied, but not named, in Zarathustra’s formulation of the problem of redemption is that the will to power that wills the past, and hence wills what is higher than all reconciliation, wills eternal return. The final naming of “will to power” is the first intimation of eternal return, not because the latter supersedes the former, but because eternal return arises out of will to power as its consequence. The will to power as redeemer overcomes and replaces the will to power as revenge when it wills the eternal return of beings as they are…As the agent of redemption, the will to power learns the most affirmative willing of itself and all that is and has been, an “unbounded Yes to everything that was and is.”[viii]

The likening of Zarathustra to a symphony is supported by the similarity that can be drawn between it and the implicit, and sometimes explicit, “messages” of three of the most foremost exemplars of the form that Nietzsche, again, would have been well aware of: Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies. The Third’s relation can be gleaned from the very title given to it by Beethoven as the Eroica (“Heroic”) symphony,[ix] a characterization Nietzsche surely intends for Zarathustra as he who first wills “beyond good and evil.” But in its being the first working out of Beethoven’s formulation of a new “symphonic ideal” that is in many ways similar to what is expressed throughout the course of Zarathustra. The substance of this new ideal, exemplified by all these works of Beethoven, is that “they all contrive to create the impression of a psychological journey or growth process. In the course of this, something seems to arrive or triumph or transcend.”[x] Specifically, this is brought about in the Third by the

similarity in the opening themes of the two outer movements [which] is scarcely coincidental and contributes to a broader sense of a dramatic psychological trajectory in which the finale does not merely succeed the previous movements but effectively represents a culmination of all that has gone before. Critics have necessarily resorted to metaphor in describing this emotional trajectory, and although these metaphors have varied widely in their level of detail they have almost invariably been associated with the idea of struggle followed by death and culminating in rebirth or rejuvenation.[xi]

The narrative of the book itself recounts a similar “psychological trajectory” in leading up to Zarathustra’s willing of eternal return in the final chapter of Part III, “The Seven Seals (or: The Yes and Amen Song), where he is finally able to declare “For I love you, O eternity!“—and the fourth part’s possible interpretation as the recapitulation and reworking of the themes and ideas introduced in the first three parts into a climactic whole.

            This overcoming of death is metaphorically enacted in Beethoven’s Third symphony where after the overall triumphant mood of the First movement, the Second is literally a funeral march—entitled Marcia funebre (Adagio assai)—for the fallen hero. This might be seen to parallel the role of Part II in the overall narrative, as it begins with Zarathustra returning to his mountain home having left his disciples in the hope that they would “seek themselves” and thereby live out his teachings in preparing the way for the overman, but after “months and years” in solitude he is startled by a dream in which he realizes that his

teaching is in danger; weeds pose as wheat. My enemies have grown powerful and have distorted my teaching till those dearest to me must be ashamed of the gifts I gave them. I have lost my friends; the hour has come to seek my lost ones (II, 1).

He has “died” to those he came to bring the teaching of Life (that of the overman who would create new values) to as they have made of him a “god” who has not been overcome, but has instead been idolized as declarer of the “Truth.” In a curious, and no doubt deliberately ironic, reversal of the Gospels account of Christ’s death, resurrection and subsequent appearance to his disciples as the confirmation of his divine nature, Zarathustra must go “live again” among his disciples in order to disabuse them of their error in seeing him as a new god.

That “The Tomb Song” is the literal central chapter of Part II (the eleventh of twenty-two) seems to validate this reading. Lamenting the death of all he had valued most highly, that through its “strangulation” by his enemies has brought about his own metaphorical death, Zarathustra curses those who “have taken from [him] the irretrievable” by “murder[ing] the visions and dearest wonders of [his] youth” (II,11). These are, presumably, his idealistic hopes and aspirations expressed in his declarations in the Prologue concerning his love of man (I,2) and need for “hands outstretched to receive” his overflowing honeyed wisdom now revealed as vain and foolish (I,1). In fact, his first mention of that honey since his initial address to the sun before he “began to go under” (I, 1) occurs here, but in terms of his cursing those who “galled my best honey and the industry of my best bees” (II, 11). Whereas he had initially hoped to bring to all men the teaching of the Overman, his experience with the people in the first town he comes to after his coming down off the mountain—laughing and jeering at what he has to say—reveals to him the folly of addressing the masses.

Zarathustra realizes instead that he must be much more selective by seeking out those who are ready to hear his teaching; “living companions I need, who follow me because they want to follow themselves.” However, the immediately following qualifier reveals the contradiction in his own position: “wherever I want” (I, 9). The rest of Part I recounts his finding those who would indeed follow him wherever he wants, but his realization at the beginning of Part II that, having continued to follow in his now absent footsteps, they have remained as but disciples and not the “fellow creators” he intends them to be fills him with despair. Part II as a whole is therefore concerned with the overcoming of this despair, a goal he does not manage to attain until his willing of eternal return at the end of Part III. Until then he must face the consequences of the misunderstanding of his teachings.

In the chapter “The Soothsayer” (II, 19), Zarathustra faces this misunderstanding head on when he “denies” (shakes his head) at “the disciple whom he loved most” in yet another reversal of the Gospel stories. According to widespread Christian tradition, John, the most beloved disciple of Jesus, was the revelator and authored both the Gospel of John and the book of Revelations.[xii] Although Biblical scholars now find this possibility unlikely, Nietzsche may well have believed it or at least assumed its truth in writing Zarathustra.[xiii] This disciple has just attempted to interpret (reveal) Zarathustra’s dream resulting from his hearing the Soothsayer’s nihilistic declarations: “All is empty, all is the same, all has been!” Zarathustra realizes that to grant his approbation would be to perpetuate their status as his disciples, a role he has become ever more unsure of throughout Part II. This attitude of caution and skepticism continues into the next chapter “On Redemption” (II, 20) where he is surrounded by “cripples and beggars” whose healing is to be proof not only to the cripples and beggars themselves as to the truth of his “doctrine,” and therefore to a Christ-like divine status for Zarathustra, but to “the people” as well whose judgment is revealed to depend upon the belief of the lowest among them. 

It is Zarathustra’s realization of the inevitable inadequacy of not only the people to the task that must be undertaken—the overcoming of the spirit of revenge/gravity—for whom this was made evident long before, but of his disciples as well. Content as they are on the “blessed isles,” they have forgotten the truth of the will to power and in so doing brought about his own “death.” To realize his own resurrection he therefore must climb out of the underworld where he had formerly placed his hopes on the coming of the Overman. He can no longer rely on anyone else to say what he knows must be said but instead must find within himself the necessary will to do so.

This journey is recounted in chapter two of Book III, “On the Vision and the Riddle.” Zarathustra tells how he

ascended defiantly through stones, malicious, lonely, not cheered by herb or shrub—a mountain path crunched under the defiance of my foot. Striding silently over the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that made it slip, my foot forced its way upward. Upward—defying the spirit that drew it downward toward the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy. Upward—though he sat on me, half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain (III, 2).

As he strives to rise above his “death” of despair, the spirit of gravity weighs him down, taunting him with its Schopenhauerian pessimism: “You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning—O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself” (III,2). Such despair of life is the living death that Nietzsche sees as the consequence facing European civilization after two thousand years of living Plato’s “noble” lie (exemplified by Christianity) of the good in-itself. Socrates’ argument before those who condemned him to death that “there is good hope that death is a blessing”[xiv] has degenerated to the point of Schopenhauer’s argument that “life is a dream.” Suicide should therefore by no means be objected to “when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off.”[xv] Against this despair, Nietzsche advocates a “courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, and thus brings about his own “resurrection,” for it says, ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!” (III, 2).

Though he is able to banish the spirit of gravity with the thought of its own eternal recurrence, Zarathustra is still unable to bring himself to will it until the end of Part III as he who has finally overcome his “great disgust with man” (III, 13). Returning to the analogy of Zarathustra as a symphony, Part III’s involving new developments as Zarathustra has overcome his state of “death” in Part II, but is, as of yet, not able to reconcile the consequences of what he has realized so far, could be seen to mirror the usual third movement of a symphony’s use of an explicit dance form in a triple meter time signature (such as 3/4, 3/8, 6/8) that contrasts with the usual duple meters (such as 2/2, 2/4, 4/4) of the other movements. This indeed seems to find itself reflected in the penultimate chapter of Part III that is, in fact, named “The Other Dancing Song” and narrates Zarathustra’s overcoming of his inability to will eternal return through his dance of love with all the manifestations of life itself.

To complete this symphonic analogy, however, we must find a way to understand Part IV in terms of what has been said so far. This might be considered difficult given that the book seems to find its effectual end with Zarathustra’s absolute affirmation and love of life realized through the willing of eternal return at the end of Part III, and the apocalyptic breaking of the seven seals that, like those in the Book of Revelations, herald the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth.

There is a great deal of evidence to show that Nietzsche himself considered the fourth part to be an addendum to the rest of the book; not necessary to the comprehension of the whole that is parts I-III, but rather an elaboration or interlude of sorts to the rest.[xvi] He in fact had only forty copes printed for the purpose of giving them away, but only to “those who had proved themselves worthy of it.”[xvii]

This therefore might be where the reading of Zarathustra as a “symphony” falls apart. A symphony, at least of the Romantic kind with which Nietzsche was undoubtedly most familiar, without its final movement can in no way be considered complete. For it is  in the final movement in which the summation of all the elements introduced up till that point are optimally synthesized into an emphatic and categorical whole.[xviii] So while this symphonic analogy has proved enlightening, it is limited in its application and needs to be supplemented with other ways of understanding this book as music.

For this purpose it is important to remind oneself of Nietzsche’s conflicted relationship with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche was impressed by Schopenhauer’s forthright atheism, but, as has been already discussed, saw his pessimism towards life as exemplifying the extreme suicidal decadence—the nihilism—that Platonism had degenerated into by the nineteenth-century. Schopenhauer’s view of music, however, found an always-sympathetic ear in the very musical Nietzsche.

Music is distinguished from the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectification of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more as the melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.[xix] 

Recalling Nietzsche’s statement concerning Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo that the idea of eternal recurrence (return) is the fundamental conception of the work and that, as has been shown, this “highest principle of affirmation” arises out of the will to power—being for Nietzsche the metaphysical basis of all life—a Schopenhauerian understanding of music as directly expressing this “truth” (quotation marks here given Nietzsche’s extreme suspicion of all supposed truths) would seemingly help to explain his positing the possibility of the whole text being “reckoned as music.”

            To make sense of this idea one must necessarily involve Nietzsche’s first major work, the already mentioned The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as it most obviously bears Schopenhauer’s influence, though, as Nietzsche himself says in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” written concerning it in 1886 fourteen years after it was published, more “by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste” (6). For above all it is a book that point to and celebrates (one must understand the positive connotation of his use of the word “tragic”) the role of music in the remarkable artistic flowering that occurred in Greece during the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC that Nietzsche argues was killed by the rationalism of Socrates. He characterizes music as the Dionysian art par excellence in its capacity for enchantment and inducement of ecstasy through its penetration beyond the rational ego. He contrasts this with the Apollonian arts of poetry and sculpture that are so defined by their rational order.

Apollo is the deity of light personifying order, measure, number and the subjugation of undisciplined instinct. He is the ruler of the inner world of phantasy and dream. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the complete opposite, exhibiting liberation, drunkenness, unbridled license, intoxication and orgiastic celebration. In The Birth of Tragedy Dionysus stands for the emotional element in art - the Dionysian art par excellence being music, whereas Apollo for the form creating force representing the representational arts and especially sculpture. In other words, the rational versus the irrational, form versus content.[xx]  

Nietzsche argues that it was the general balance of these two artistic impulses, but with the Dionysian always somewhat dominant, that made pre-Socratic Greece as great as it was.

            Writing in the aforementioned “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche is highly critical of the book,[xxi] but does not dismiss it completely arguing that its essential task, “to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life...” [His italics] (2), is still worthwhile and that the questions it asks are still deserving of answers.[xxii] For the purpose of this essay, however, what is most interesting about this retrospective critique of his youthful book is its ending. After critiquing his own present critique of the book as unsuitably romantic through the adoption of a second person voice, Nietzsche counters by using “the language of that Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra,” thus revealing a relation between his earliest book that he has so far for the most part disparaged and the book of his that he thought most highly of, by quoting five passages from the last three sections of the chapter “On the Higher Man” from the, at that point, still secret fourth part of Zarathustra.

Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!

This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today.

Zarathustra, the dancer, Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and heady, blissfully lightheaded;

Zarathustra, the soothsayer; Zarathustra, the sooth-laugher; not impatient; not unconditional; one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of the laugher, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!

That they do not appear in the same order in the text may be seen as significant,[xxiii] though it seems more likely to simply reflect Nietzsche’s poetic license to re-order what has otherwise appeared in a different context in order to make of the five a more sensible whole for his present purpose. But introduced as they are by his explicit characterization of Zarathustra as a “Dionysian monster,” the passages cannot help but evoke an understanding of Zarathustra in terms of the spirit of Dionysus, and music as the Dionysian art, as first presented in The Birth of Tragedy.

             The Dionysus of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not the same as the one that appears in the earlier work, however. No longer contrasted with his Apollonian antipode (a dualism for which Nietzsche castigated himself as unnecessarily Hegelian), this Dionysus is the Overman, “the meaning of the earth” (1, 3), that Zarathustra, when he first came down off his mountain in Part I, tries to teach first to the people in general and then to those whom he wished to be his companions, but instead remained only his disciples. Nietzsche’s explicit reference to Zarathustra as Dionysus in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” as well as in Ecce Homo, therefore reveals the overall trajectory of the work as the gradual realization by Zarathustra (Nietzsche?) that he cannot teach the overman—as even those who are seemingly ready to hear the message (his disciples) are liable to not truly understand it—but must instead become the overman himself.

            This is revealed most clearly in “The Stillest Hour,” the final chapter of Part II (that to some degree parallels Christ’s night spent suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane before his capture, trial and crucifixion by the Romans), where confronted by the realization of eternal return Zarathustra cannot bring himself to say it; “Alas, I would like to, but how can I? Let me off from this! It is beyond my strength!” (II, 22). He knows that the willing of eternal return is the only way to overcome the “spirit of revenge,” which he has only recently told his disciples is “the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was,’” by “recreat[ing] all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption” (II,20). But the task seems too great for him: “I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even of being broken by it” (II, 22). He is but the teacher of the overman not the overman himself. Despite his protestations, however, he cannot pretend to have not heard the call that has been made to him. He therefore must leave the comfort of those he now calls his friends in order to begin his “loneliest walk,” the climbing of the “ultimate peak,” to thereby overcome his own spirit of revenge that prevents him from loving life unconditionally (III, 1).

            Zarathustra’s realization of himself as the personification of the Dionysian spirit who has overcome all pessimisms and feelings of revenge through the love of his highest hope—life itself—again points to book’s musical character. Nietzsche expresses this in Ecce Homo, that

Zarathustra is a dancer—; how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the "most abysmal idea," nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence,—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, "the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen" ... "Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes" ... But this is the concept of Dionysus once again.[xxiv]

Zarathustra as Dionysus is therefore Zarathustra as music understood as the “highest formula of affirmation [of life] that can possibly be attained.”

            Nietzsche’s seemingly hyperbolic comments concerning Thus Spoke Zarathustra—that “this work stands altogether apart … perhaps nothing has ever been done from an equal excess of strength”[xxv]—can thus be seen to be in fact somewhat justified for it is a narrative that is conceived and realized in terms of the absolute love of life in all of its manifestations: health and sickness, joy and sorrow, love and hatred and so on. To will such a thing for oneself would indeed demand a strength that few if any possess.

It must be wondered, however, what the result of such a willing would be. Though Nietzsche’s descent into madness has traditionally been explained as the result of his having contracted syphilis in the early 1870s (possibly during his time as an orderly during the Franco-Prussian War), recent investigations have shown the available evidence to be incompatible with such a diagnosis.[xxvi] Other diseases have been proposed as the likely cause, but one might wonder, given the example of what happened to Nietzsche, whether the strength needed to will such an absolute affirmation might in fact simply be beyond the capacities of the sane human mind.

Bibliography

Laurence, Lampert. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Compiled from translations by Walter Kaufmann, R. J.

Hollingdale, and Anthony M. Ludovici; amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.

———. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (the title of the first two editions);

The Birth of Tragedy Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (the title of the third edition published in 1886 that contained the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”) Compiled from translations by Francis Golffing and Walter Kaufmann; text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.

———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.

New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1954.

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[i] Also quoted in Tali Makell, “The Aesthetic Nietzsche: Philosophy from the Spirit of Music,” http://nietzschemusicproject.org/aesthpg1.html (accessed December 15, 2004).

[ii] “Ecce homo” is the phrase in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament that Pontius Pilate uses to present a bound, crowned-with-thorns Jesus Christ to an angry, watching crowd. The suggestion of similarities between Nietzsche and Christ are certainly intentional.

[iii] Perhaps as James Chester says, “Zarathustra is a dithyrambic tragedy, the first in more than two thousand years”; “Introduction to the Exegesis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Public Appeal (http://www.publicappeal. org/node/view/121).

[iv] Addressing himself to Wagner, Nietzsche writes: “Let such ‘serious’ readers learn something from the fact that I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man to whom, as my sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay.”

[v] His “Das Fragment an sich” is particularly notable in this regard. See http://nietzschemusicproject.org/ fragpg.html (accessed December 15, 2004) for a discussion and recording of this piece. The only other modern philosopher with a comparable knowledge of music and who also composed in his early years is Theodor W. Adorno who was himself influenced by Nietzsche. See Karin Bauer, Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[vi] Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” and Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique—which bears many indications of Berlioz conceiving it explicitly as an “anti-Pastoral”—in being two of the most famous examples that disregard this convention in their use of five movements.

[vii] “Performed by a large number of players on a diverse range of instruments and projected to a large gathering of listeners, the symphony came to be seen as the most monumental of all instrumental genres. The all-embracing tone of the symphony was understood to represent the emotions or ideas not merely of the individual composer but of an entire community, be it a city, a state, or the whole of humanity. As reflected in the writings of such critics as Paul Bekker, Arnold Schering and Theodor Adorno, this perspective continued into the 20th century, yet by the end of the century it was all but lost. It nevertheless constitutes one of the essential elements in perceptions of the symphony throughout the 19th century.” “Symphony,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed [December 15, 2004]), http://www.grovemusic.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca.

[viii] Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986) 147; quotation from Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 189.

[ix] The title was originally intended to be the “Bonaparte Symphony” in dedication to the reforms introduced by Napoleon as First Consul of France in parts of Europe conquered by the post-revolutionary republican army that he led, but upon hearing that he had crowned himself emperor in 1804 (instead of having the then Pope Pius VII, who was at the coronation and had carried the crown to him, do the deed, thus symbolically representing his non-subservience to papal authority) Beethoven apocryphally tore up the title page, in rage at Napoleon having become simply another tyrant.

[x] “Beethoven; the symphonic ideal,” Grove Music Online.

[xi] “Symphony; Beethoven,” Grove Music Online.

[xii] D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 700-02.

[xiii] See, for example, ibid, 702-707; and R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), xxix-xxxvii.

[xiv] Apology, 41

[xv] Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” http://comp.uark.edu/~mpianal/schopenhauer.htm (Accessed December 15, 2004).

[xvi] “When it appeared in public, it bore the title ‘Fourth and Final Part.’ This is a title Nietzsche gave it, and it is in fact final in that it is the last part he wrote. But judged by its content, its being entitled ‘final’ is not as nearly as appropriate as another title Nietzsche gave it. ‘The Temptation of Zarathustra: an Interlude,’ a title that he called ‘more exact,’ ‘ more descriptive,’ ‘its proper title in view of what already transpired and what follows’ (letters to Fuchs, 29 July 1888, ‘An Entr’acte’; to Brandes, 8 January 1888, ‘Ein Zwischenspiel’)”; Lampert, 288. 

[xvii] From an introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra written by his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, 1905), http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Nietzsche/Zarathustra/ Zarathustra1.html (accessed December 17, 2004). She goes on to state that only seven copies were in fact given away. Concerning Nietzsche’s attitude towards it, Lampert quotes from his last known reference to it, part of a letter to Köselitz on December 9, 1888: “Dear friend, I want to have all the copies of Zarathustra four back, in order to secure this unpublished work against all the accidents of life and death….If after a few decades of world historical crises—wars!—I publish it, then that will be the proper time” (287-8). A realization that this was written less than a month before his first (incontrovertible) signs of madness might help us to understand Nietzsche’s seeming urgency, but what it is about Part IV in particular that demands such special treatment is a fascinating question for any reader of Zarathustra.

[xviii] Beethoven’s Fifth symphony expresses this tendency perhaps better any other “as a work of unusual historical importance, particularly as regards the question of cyclical coherence. With its overt manipulation of a single motive across multiple movements, its blurring of boundaries between the two final movements, and the extended return to an earlier movement (the third) within the course of its finale, the Fifth brings to the surface strategies of cyclical coherence that had long been present but rarely made so obvious. The Fifth is also significant for the emotional weight of its finale, which reintroduces and resolves issues and ideas left open in earlier movements. Beethoven thereby placed unprecedented weight on a symphonic finale in a manner that was immediately palpable.” “Symphony; Beethoven,” New Grove Online.

[xix] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, quoted in Harlow Gale, “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Music” (http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney48218.htm, accessed December 16, 2004). This valuation of music above all other arts should be understood in the context of coming after Immanuel Kant’s judgment that “if … one estimates the value of the beautiful arts in terms of the culture that they provide for the mind and takes as one’s standard the enlargement of the faculties that must join together in the power of judgment for the sake of cognition, then to that extant music occupies the lowest place among the beautiful arts … because it merely plays with sensations. The Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206.

[xx] Spiros Doikas, “Metaphysics of Art - Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's Theories of Art,” http://www.translatum.gr/etexts/moart.htm (accessed December 16, 2004).

[xxi] “To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, ‘music’ for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, ‘music’ meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in arbitus [in the arts]—an arrogant and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus [profane crowd] of ‘the educated’ even more than ‘the mass’ or ‘folk’” (3).

[xxii] Two of these being ““what is Dionysian?” and “What, seen in the perspective [Optik] of life, is the significance of morality?”

[xxiii] The first being from the first paragraph of the nineteenth section of the chapter, the middle three making up, in the same order, section eighteen, while the last makes up the final two sentences from section twenty, the last of the chapter.

[xxiv] Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 6.

[xxv] Ibid, 6.

[xxvi] See Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., "What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?" by Journal of Medical Biography, Royal Medical Society, London, February 2003, 11: 47-54.