Joel Hill:

>I ran across a quote in the liner notes for Victory at Sea attributed
>to Walter Pater (should I know of him?) the quote is:
>
>"all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music."
>
>Nice thought, but I don't know if I agree with this any more than I think
>that Architecture is "frozen music".
>
>Are any of you Listers familiar with Mr. Pater or his quote?  Comments?

As a matter of fact, Pater (1839-1894) figured in my area of academic
expertise -- Victorian Lit.  His influence rises toward the end of that
period, really the inspirer of the early Aesthetes and Decadents like
Wilde and Dowson.  A cult figure among the Oxford professors among certain
brilliant undergraduates, he wrote a nearly-unreadable novel, Marius the
Epicurean, a book with almost no sense of narrative.  Only specialists
and grad students these days seem to read Marius, but Pater's critical
essays have continued to figure in an English major's general education
(or at least they did 30 years ago).  Indeed, at least one grand panjundrum
of Victorian studies ranks Pater with Matthew Arnold as the two great
Victorian critics.  I disagree, but I'm nobody.  The quote comes from
his study The Renaissance, the chapter titled "The School of Giorgione"
(1877).  The complete quote, which explains itself, is

   All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
   For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish
   the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make
   this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to
   obliterate it.  That the mere matter of a poem, for instance --
   its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere
   matter of a picture -- the actual circumstances of an event, the
   actual topography of a landscape -- should be nothing without
   the form, the spirit, of the handling; that this form, this mode
   of handling, should become an end in itself, should permeate
   every part of the matter: -- that is what all art constantly
   strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

I don't know about "all art aspires," but the distinctions among music
and other arts seems to me true enough.  In other words, music is usually
non-representational, abstract, its "ideas" not paraphrasable into words
or pictures.  Describing a poem, one can refer to the plot or ideas
separate from the poem.  Describing a representational picture (and in
Pater's day, that's all there was), one can refer to the form or the
"narrative" separate from the picture.  When one describes a piece of
music accurately, one uses a specialized musical vocabulary (highly
inadequate, by the way) that refers only to musical events.  Music
inhabits a world pretty much closed off from the sensate world.  Its
connections to our own are mainly conventional, culturally and historically
dependent.  I have no ready inkling, frankly, of what Mozart's g-minor
string quintet meant to Mozart.  I know what extra-musically it means
to me and perhaps to others.  On the other hand, if I see El Greco's
painting of Toledo during a storm, I'm on firmer ground as to what in
the real world it represents (ie, Toledo during a storm).

Controversy over this view will probably follow.

Steve Schwartz