The lecture is dedicated to music as one of the key phenomena of human life.
It is possible to express the most diverse conditions of the soul via music. Music is sensual and emotional and simultaneously mathematically precise, which was a known fact as early as Pythagoras. Music doesn’t exist without creative self-expressivity—yet it can only be created using the strict canons of harmony and composition. In Nietzsche’s words, it was “the spirit of music” that, because of the dychotomy of the Apollonian and Dionysian, gave birth to art. Music can be unwanted and intrusive, as Eric Satie insisted that it has to be, or, alternatively, it can touch upon this world’s deepest meanings, as it was seen by Arthur Schopenhauer.
“Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.”
(Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. 1818)