1995-97 Music & Aesthetics (1)

Now, to more thinking!

In September 1995 Harvey began a two-year part-time degree course on Music & Aesthetics at The University of Sussex.

He was required to study works by 19^th and 20^th century philosophers, including –

‘The Critique of Judgement’ by Immanuel Kant

‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ by G W F Hegel

‘The World as Will and Representation’ by Arthur Schopenhauer

‘The Birth of Tragedy; out of the Spirit of Music’ by Friederich Nietzsche

‘Negative Dialectics’ by T W Adorno

(T W Adorno)

I could tell that Harvey struggled, as he tried to trace any ‘musical’ ideas in these seminal writings.  He recognised the importance of pursuing beauty and the ‘sublime’ in Kant’s thinking, and this helped his preaching.  He often thought that the Christian religion seemed to stress ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ to the detriment of that other great ‘fundamental’ in Greek thinking – ‘beauty’.

All the philosophers listed above were highly complex, but Harvey was interested to learn about the close connections between Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  However, after falling out with Wagner, Nietzsche claimed that his favourite composer was George Bizet! Carmen had more humanity and honest embodiment than, say, Brunhilde, Isolde or Parsifal.

T W Adorno was particularly difficult.  Although he was a composer as well as a social thinker, he seemed to be without humour or tonal subtlety. Most of all, his writings showed a total lack of ‘bodily’ awareness; it was totally, crushingly, ‘intellectual’ and obscure.

For his extended essay at the end of the first Term, Harvey chose to write about ‘A Mass of Life’, a work we have already encountered (a number of times in this diary), words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, music by our well-known Frederick Delius.

I was aware how this was a natural choice for Harvey.  It brought together his obsession with the Eric Fenby/Delius experience at the RAM, his longstanding fascination with Nietzsche’s writing, his questioning ambivalence about the reality of God and the nature of  Christian dogmatics, and the possibility of elevating the role of the ‘Body’ in the performance of truth-seeking.

Do you remember, in my post ‘Am I in tune? – a Spiritual Intermezzo, we noted that Nietzsche said he ‘philosophized with a hammer’, and how ‘hammer’ should read as ‘tuning fork’? 

In this end of term essay, I believe Harvey was trying to listen, with his whole body, for the sounds of a tuning fork in his calling as a preacher in the Church. 

Could it be that Jesus Christ is a Tuning Fork  striking a sound of transcendent love wherever he touches and resonates with the world?

Can the cross of Christ be ‘heard’ as a tuning fork?