In contrast to Kant he accords a special efficacy to music:The effect of music is stronger, quicker, more necessary and infallible. Men have practiced music in all ages without being able to account for this; content to understand it directly, they renounce all claim to an abstract conception of this direct understanding itself.
Schopenhauer acknowledged a connection between human feeling and music, which “restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain.” Music, which he is presenting an as analogue of the emotional life, is a copy or symbol of the will.
Nietzsche posed an Apollonian–Dionysian dichotomy, the former representing form and rationality and the latter drunkenness and ecstasy. For Nietzsche, music was the Dionysian art par excellence. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche anticipated the 20th-century discovery that symbol making (whether in dreams, myth, or art) is a necessary and to some extent even automatic human activity. The rich suggestiveness and prescience of his insights embraced the concept of the “symbolical analogue”—the artistic function of ordering and heightening the ingredients of the actual world—and the polarities of experience symbolized in the Apollonian–Dionysian conflict itself, which Igor Stravinsky also explored. Nietzsche gave short shrift to mathematical aspects of music, and like Schopenhauer he deprecated blatantly programmatic music that abounds in obvious imitations of natural sounds. Discerning a power in music to create myths, he looked upon mere “tone painting” as the antithesis of its essential character.
Efforts of theorists to account for the universal appeal of music and to explain its effects have, since the 19th century, been various, contradictory, and highly controversial. In pointing out the chief points of view that have emerged, it must be emphasized that there are no completely isolated categories, and there is usually considerable overlapping; a single spokesman, the 19th-century English psychologist
Edmund Gurney, for example, may incorporate formalist, symbolist, expressionist, and psychological elements, in varying proportions, to explain the phenomenon of music. Although some disagreements are more apparent than real because of the inherent problems of terminology and definition, diametrically opposing views are also held and tenaciously defended.
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