Listening to music

Jacob,

Thanks for your interesting post.  A couple of questions:  Do you think of Christian time as teleological? If so, does this challenge the analogy to music? I don't tend to think of music as having a teleology, though I haven't thought much about it.  Does the unity of a musical composition consist in its anticipation and living toward its conclusion? (Does anyone have more background here than I? I read some of Martin Esslin's dramatic theory this summer as I thought about how the perception of a performance was different for Elizabethans than for us today; I'd love to know who writes in the same vein for music.)   I think Shakespeare's quite interested in time, and I'd love to continue this discussion about time across sonnets like our conversation about beauty.

Secondly, I'm interested in the relationship between music and listener, both in your thought and in your reading of the sonnet. The sonnet is interested in not just the music, but also the perception of music. The poem begins by pointing out how the subject is listening ("Why hear'st thou music sadly?"), suggesting that resonance between music and listener is possible because the listener's essence is "Music to hear." (Or, if the listener is not essentially composed of music, at least the speaker's perception of the listener is fundamentally musical.  Here again is the question about beauty.) The poem progresses, suggesting a different mode of listening: "Mark how one string..." The poet is correcting the subject, telling him how to listen.  I agree that this can be read as an analogy for correcting the mode of worship:  Recognize that your essence is God too, that you can't stand alone, and perceive everything within this relation.

You write that today, most people don't hear an external order singing to them, telling them how to perceive it.* I'm still working my way through Taylor's A Secular Age, and find his description of the "enchanted world" relevant here.  Even devout believers today have "buffered selves," set off from the creation surrounding them. We today probably think of music as something that cannot exist without an audience to perceive it. Music happens when sounds are processed by human being with ears. We're fascinated by art grounded in this paradigm:  Musicians such as John Cage, interested in randomness and the human capacity, even tendency or need, to perceive music in our experience. Or computer-generated music, beautiful to listeners (even distinctly recognizable as Beethoven or Mozart), even though it was generated algorithmically.  This is characteristically modern. I would guess that to most Elizabethans, and certainly to medieval Christians, music would seem as vital and alive, as grounded in its own self-sufficient essence, as human beings.  For them, music would not have been something that required interpretation to come into being, just as the world around them was alive, aware, and potent, utterly undependent on human perception to sustain its reality. I'm not sure what Shakespeare would have made of computers that write sonatas.

I thought it was interesting that this sonnet praises the "speechless song" of music, suggesting a reality deeper than words, and perhaps undercutting the poet's own potential for meaning-making. Maybe words can only point the way.

* I'm interested in how frequently literature explicitly teaches you how to read it.  Take Dante's Inferno: the poet is a stand-in for the reader, even explicitly challenging and cautioning the reader to understand the text correctly.  Virgil is not just a teacher to the poet, but to the reader as well.  If literature is a mirror of reality, this feature suggests that the world too can teach us how to read it, or, in the case of this sonnet, how to listen.  When I taught Inferno last year, my students found this relationship to the text pleasant, recognizable, and natural.