World View

World View and Music

Again, music proves its protean susceptibilities in the service of disparate world views. Among humanist psychologists (such as the Americans Gordon Allport and Abraham Maslow) music may be one among other means toward self-fulfillment, integration, self-actualization; for aesthetic Existentialists (such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre) it is yet another crucial department of choice and freedom; for spiritual Existentialists (such as the philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber) it transmits transcendent overtones. For expressionists (such as the composers Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, and René Leibowitz) music carries austere, and sometimes doctrinaire, moral imperatives.Theodor Adorno, a composer–philosopher and pupil of Alban Berg, writes powerfully of these and speaks for an awareness of dazzling lucidity, but the tone, notwithstanding his humour, is one of obligation. Only the expressionists, among those mentioned here, are committed primarily to music, though Adorno, in particular, considers music and musicians always in interaction with their environments. The aesthetic concept of play is virtually absent, except among such humanists as Maslow. With Sartre, no less a humanist, the tone is one of responsibility. Many educators long held the explicit aim (at least in part because of a misinterpretation of John Dewey) of presenting the content of a discipline as “fun”; the present concern for aesthetic education, an area of great interest to Dewey himself, eschews this trivial view. But play, in the aesthetic sense, follows rules, as information theory has demonstrated; even “controlled aleatory” composition observes some limits. And the play may be very serious indeed, as in the important 20th-century atonal style known as"12-tone technique," practiced by the Viennese expressionists and their successors.