1. Proust and the musical phrase
1.1 The text
In Marcel Proust's novel Du côté de chez Swann, we find these reflections on a phrase in a sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil:
Swann n’avait donc pas tort de croire que la phrase de la sonate existât réellement. Certes, humaine à ce point de vue, elle appartenait pourtant à un ordre de créatures surnaturelles et que nous n’avons jamais vues, mais que malgré cela nous reconnaissons avec ravissement quand quelque explorateur de l’invisible arrive à en capter une, à l’amener, du monde divin où il a accès, briller quelques instants au-dessus du nôtre. ... Et une preuve que Swann ne se trompait pas quand il croyait à l’existence réelle de cette phrase, c’est que tout amateur un peu fin se fût tout de suite aperçu de l’imposture, si Vinteuil ayant eu moins de puissance pour en voir et en rendre les formes, avait cherché à dissimuler, en ajoutant çà et là des traits de son cru, les lacunes de sa vision ou les défaillances de sa main.
(Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, pages 413-414.)
Here is C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation:
So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. ... And one proof that Swann was not mistaken when he believed in the real existence of this phrase, was that anyone with an ear at all delicate for music would at once have detected the imposture had Vinteuil, endowed with less power to see and to render its forms, sought to dissemble (by adding a line, here and there, of his own invention) the dimness of his vision or the feebleness of his hand.
(Proust, Swann's Way volume II, pages 184-185)
1.2 Reality and constraint
There are several philosophical themes one could draw out of this paragraph and the surrounding text. Our concern will be with the claim that the reality of the phrase was shown by the fact that it was constrained to be exactly as it was. Any change would have been substantially to its detriment. It had to be as it was in order to be superlative, so it must have pre-existed to allow it to be discovered rather than merely invented. Only the pre-existing real has to have a particular nature.
In section 2, we shall consider how a piece of music might be constrained to be exactly as it was.
In section 3, we shall consider what sort of reality might be possessed by pieces of music.
The phrase in the sonata has also been discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Le visible et l'invisble, pages 195-204: Vinteuil is not mentioned by name, and Merleau-Ponty simply refers to the "petite phrase"). We shall however not pursue Merleau-Ponty's line of thought here. That would require a discussion in a different intellectual context from our preferred one, the context of mainstream analytic philosophy.
2. Constraint
2.1 Constraints and the superlative
The constraints that interest us are constraints on a piece of music's being superlative, not on its being music. There is no suggestion in Proust's words that the piece of music to which he refers would be constrained in the sense that alterations would lead to its ceasing to be music. It would merely cease to be superlative.
We shall focus on pieces being regarded by human beings as superlative. We shall take no interest in the idea that a piece of music might be superlative without human beings having the ability to recognise its quality. This is not to say that musical quality would be decided by majority vote, or by universal agreement. It is merely that we shall not suppose a quality that human beings could not discern. We do leave open the possibility that a piece's quality might only be well-discerned by people with particular expertise. But we take care to say "well-discerned". We do not say "rightly discerned", because that would hint at there being a standard independent of human judgement such that even the best human judges might not be reliable judges.
2.2 Sources of constraint
Constraint might arise from there being a quality that was possessed by only a small proportion of possible pieces and that was not to be derived from other principles, along the lines of goodness as a simple non-natural quality in G. E. Moore's book Principia Ethica (chapter 1, sections 5-14). But the quality could still be discerned by human beings.
Constraint might alternatively arise from principles of musical quality that were not fully to be derived from features of the world outside the sphere of aesthetics. The principles might be wholly of non-natural origin, or they might be partly explained by reference to natural features of human beings, in particular their perceptual organs and the workings of their brains. And the principles could be discerned by human beings.
Finally, constraint might arise entirely from natural features of human beings. The natures of our ears and our neural systems might suffice to determine which pieces of music would qualify as superlative.
2.3 Evidence for a simple quality or for principles
Constraint on a piece of music to be exactly as it was in order to be superlative would amount to evidence that there was some way to classify pieces of music as superlative or not which did not amount to allocating pieces to one class or the other at random.
It would amount to such evidence on the basis of an inference to the best explanation. A non-random way to classify pieces, whether by reference to a simple non-natural quality or by reference to principles, could easily forbid even very small changes. A random allocation of pieces would be more likely to allow into the class of superlative pieces some pieces that were only slight variations on a given superlative piece.
Thus the presence of constraint on pieces to be exactly as they were in order to be superlative would indicate that one or other of two alternatives held. The first alternative would be that there was such a thing as an intuitive grasp of musical quality, an ability reliably to recognise some simple non-natural quality that put pieces of music in the superlative class. The second alternative would be that there were principles of classification that could be discovered. And any such indication, whether of an intuitable quality or of principles, would be particularly strong if we could discern features that a good number of superlative pieces of music had in common but that lesser pieces lacked. That would give reassurance that there was something of systematic effect behind the identification of some pieces as superlative.
3. The reality of pieces of music
3.1 Ways to be real
Now we can consider whether it would make sense to say that superlative pieces of music that could not be altered without losing their status were real.
There is a straightforward sense in which they would be real. Sequences of notes and indicators of style of performance could all be written down, and recordings could be made. Pages of sheet music and drives that hold audio files are not ethereal, they are physical. And their informational contents, along with the informational contents of advice on how to perform pieces, are as real as other abstract objects. Moreover, we routinely refer to particular pieces of music in the way that we refer to other everyday objects.
This would however be a trivial sense of reality, which would extend to all pieces of music. It would not be any sense of reality that Proust could have had in mind. He was thinking of the pre-existing reality of a given superlative piece, waiting for a composer to discover it. The pre-existence in question would of course not involve the actual auditory production of the piece or the physical existence of sheet music. Rather, it would be abstract pre-existence of the kind that mathematical objects can easily be argued to have, the sense in which groups, rings and fields arguably existed long before the first developments in abstract algebra during the late eighteenth century.
One way to make sense of the supposed pre-existing reality of pieces of music, despite their naturally being taken to be human creations entirely dependent on their composers, would be baldly to assert their existence in a Platonic realm. Another way would be to draw on recent thought in the philosophy of science that ties reality to the task of making sense of the world. We shall explore each in turn, but first say a bit more about the idea of discovery rather than invention.
3.2 Discovery rather than invention
If a composer experiments with various options for motifs, sequences, key changes, harmonisations, and so on, and eventually concludes that there is only one way to turn an initial idea into a superlative piece, it seems right both to acknowledge that the initial idea was invented and to say that the finished piece was discovered. This may seem ambitious. Pieces of music seem obviously to be invented. But a case for discovery can be made.
The finished piece was not deducible from the initial idea, because it does not in general follow from an initial idea that a piece of music (superlative or not) must be as the finished piece actually is. Rather, there was a search for a piece that could be seen as perfectly embodying the initial idea. The position is analogous to that of a biochemist who has the idea that some molecule or other of a given general nature must exist to perform some important function in organisms, and then sets out to discover what the molecule actually is.
We are however left with the question of whether discovery would imply pre-existing reality. And the ontologically parsimonious could say that for music it did not. Rather, they could say that discovery in the sense in which it covered both molecules and music was simply a particular type of mental process of the discoverer, one that involved working out what was needed within tight constraints. And while that kind of process was required when the things discovered were pre-existing (as molecules certainly are), it could also be required when the targets of the mental process were not pre-existing (as pieces of music might be argued not to be).
We must therefore turn to approaches that would move us beyond what the mere idea of discovery can offer.
3.3 A Platonic realm
It would be possible simply to assert that a superlative piece of music pre-existed in some Platonic realm, waiting to be discovered. Pieces of music might be in the set of superlative pieces as a brute fact, and be possessors of a simple intuitable quality of superlativeness, or they might be in the set when they complied with certain constraints, constraints that arose out of certain principles. We shall consider the second alternative before finding ourselves driven to the first one.
Suppose that compliance or non-compliance with constraints founded on principles was a reliable guide to pieces being or not being superlative. In order adequately to motivate speaking of a Platonic realm, rather than taking the option of merely reducing pre-existence to compliance with principles and constraints that themselves pre-existed, the principles and constraints would need to be discerned by first contemplating pieces within the set of superlative pieces. They would need to be regarded as principles and constraints that indicated, rather than led to, membership or non-membership of the set. The direction of explanation would need to be top-down from the Platonic realm, rather than bottom-up from the principles and constraints. Without such motivation, assertion of a Platonic realm would be a mere ad hoc convenience to satisfy Proust.
We say that the direction of explanation would need to be top-down because if membership of the set of superlative pieces were to follow from general musical principles, the fact that alterations would spoil a piece would be adequately explained by the fact that those principles would then be violated. There would be no need to cite the piece's membership of the set, and an altered version's failure to belong to the set, as the explanation. To cite membership as the explanation, we would need membership to be a brute fact, on a par with the brute fact of the existence of a particular concrete object, not explained by general features of the world.
This does however give rise to a challenge to the Platonic approach. We would very often expect it to be explicable by reference to general principles why a piece of music had to be as it was, and not be any different, in order to be superlative. Even if being superlative amounted to possession of a non-natural quality, similar to G. E. Moore's quality of goodness in that it was not to be defined by reference to natural qualities, it might depart from Moore's approach in that it might not be a simple quality. Instead it might be defined in terms of other non-natural qualities, the instantiation of which was required by principles which were not grounded entirely in natural facts about human beings and the world. So it would seem that unless we could insist on Moore's feature of simplicity as well as that of non-naturalness, membership of the set of superlative pieces would rarely if ever do enough work to justify hypothesising a Platonic realm as a manner of pre-existence.
Moreover, working out the details of a Platonic realm of superlative pieces of music would not be straightforward. In order to be selective and not be open to all pieces of music, the realm would have to be populated by specific pieces, rather than by the form of musical pieces in general.
On the bright side we could say that pieces of music, at least when wordless, were form rather than content in the sense that they could be characterised in ways that did not require reference to physical objects. To that extent pieces of music would be well-suited to existence within a Platonic realm. One could explore such questions further by considering Schopenhauer's reflections on music in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, volume 1, chapter 52, although we shall not do so here.
Despite this reassuring thought about form and content, we cannot conclude that asserting existence within a Platonic realm is a well-motivated way to claim pre-existence for pieces of music. We must therefore leave Proust with less than is suggested by the second sentence of the paragraph we quoted, with its reference to supernatural creatures. We may however still be able to justify seeing superlative pieces of music as pre-existing in some less poetic sense. We shall now turn to an approach that is an alternative to the assertion of a Platonic realm.
3.4 Making sense of the musical realm
Hasok Chang, in his book Realism for Realistic People, makes a case for what he calls active realism. He ties reality to the activity of investigating and manipulating the world. As he puts it, "an entity is real to the extent that there are operationally coherent activities that can be performed by relying significantly on its existence and its properties" (page 121). The requirement for coherence in activities rules out attributions of reality ad hoc to entities that it might temporarily be convenient to regard as real, and attributions that would serve no purpose or would lead to incoherence in our activities. In Chang's words, "in order to try to make something happen, the agent has to coordinate carefully various movements and thoughts with each other and with external circumstances, towards the achievement of an aim. ... I propose to use the term operational coherence to refer to such a state of aim-oriented coordination" (page 24).
Chang's work is a contribution to the philosophy of science. And he gives us a concept of reality that can be a matter of degree (page 142). So we cannot expect simply to borrow his idea and use it to generate Platonic reality (an absolute, not a matter of degree) in music (a significantly different field when our concern is the aesthetic quality of pieces, rather than any physiological or neurological form of musicology). There is however some use to be made of Chang's approach.
We can make use of the approach by focusing on the question of whether there is good reason to regard superlative pieces of music, but not other pieces, as pre-existing, even though all pieces look as though they are simply invented by composers. This question of good reason is what matters within the context of a pragmatist approach such as Chang's. Under pragmatism, there is no thought that there might be a truly Platonic realm of things that existed independently of human thought. The question of existence reduces to a question of whether we should regard certain things as existing. Is it useful to regard superlative pieces, but not others, as pre-existing? Here use means use in the conduct of operationally coherent activities, not just temporary convenience.
We can identify a coherent activity that is aided by regarding superlative pieces as pre-existing. This is to account for the impossibility of varying superlative pieces without demoting them to everyday pieces. If superlative pieces pre-exist, they will do so in their precise form. Neighbouring pieces that incorporate small variations will not be within the realm of pre-existing superlative pieces. The composer of superlative music must discover the precise piece. Lesser pieces, on the other hand, can be seen as invented in that they could safely be varied, the choice of one variant over another being part of the act of invention.
This is not to say that the composition of superlative pieces is purely an act of discovery. The composer will engage in invention when he or she decides that what is needed is a piece along such and such general lines, and perhaps narrows that characterisation. But the final step will be an act of discovery of exactly how the piece should be. (We might compare the explorer who has a general idea that a river must have a source, perhaps a spring or perhaps a lake, and possibly a few thousand kilometres upstream, but who has to discover the actual location and nature of the source.) The composer of a lesser piece, on the other hand, need make no such final step of discovery. His or her work can be invention all the way, given both the freedom to make large and small adjustments, and the lack of a single correct solution out there to be discovered.
It is also not to say that this supposition of pre-existence is the only way in which we could account for the impossibility of varying superlative pieces without demoting them. Their composition could be all invention, with no need for a component of discovery. But it is a good way to account for the impossibility of variation. It gives us a picture of a landscape of possible pieces, with altitude corresponding to quality, in which there are some isolated peaks of quality with vertical drops to the surrounding terrain, rather than gentle slopes of variation on which one could take a position of high but not exceptional quality.
We should at this point note another theme in Hasok Chang's book, that while nature may be pre-existing it is not pre-figured (sections 2.1 to 2.4). Nature is as it is, so our theories can be found satisfactory or unsatisfactory. But that is not to say that the concepts we use to understand nature are already to be found in any pre-existing structure of nature. We have to bring our concepts to bear. As Chang puts it, reality is mind-framed (section 2.1). If use of the concepts we currently have permits coherent activity, that is all to the good. If it does not, we must try other concepts.
Turning to music, there are two layers to identify in the build-up to superlative pieces. The first layer comprises natural facts about human beings which mean that they will find some combinations and sequences of sounds more attractive than others. Those facts are set out using concepts that we have invented, and that allow us to conduct the coherent activity of investigating auditory perception. The second layer is a musical tradition, which includes the principles that govern the quality of music within that tradition. The tradition has been created by us to allow the coherent activity of composing good music. It is a discovery that the concepts used in formulating the tradition, and the tradition itself, are productive given the first layer. But the first layer does not contain either the musical concepts or the tradition as a whole. To apply Chang's picture, relative to the second layer (but not absolutely), the first layer gives us nature in itself and the musical concepts and tradition turn out to be a way to work productively given how things are in the first layer.
Finally, we can fit superlative pieces into the picture. The identification of them as superlative is accomplished without introducing any new concepts. Here there is a break with Chang's vision of the natural sciences. Given the musical tradition, it is not an act of conceptualisation that makes certain pieces superlative. They simply are superlative.
Here is permission, although not in itself sufficient reason, to think of superlative pieces as pre-existing. They are not fashioned out of a musical tradition by introducing new general concepts. Their individual existence is directly latent in the tradition. To move on to sufficient reason, it makes sense to think of them as pre-existing so as to account for the fact that small variations would demote them to pieces of much lower stature.
We have not achieved Platonic reality. But we have at least made out a case for an admittedly ontologically daring way to make sense of the feature of a superlative piece that so struck Swann, the impossibility of making small variations.
References
Chang, Hasok. Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l'invisible. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1964.
Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica, revised edition edited by Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Proust. Marcel. Du côté de chez Swann. Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1954.
Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, volume II. London, Chatto and Windus, 1934.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Several editions are available.
