Conference Agenda

Friedrich Nietzsche primarily understood himself as a composer. From an early age and throughout his life, he produced more than fifty musical works, including art songs, character pieces, and a symphonic poem. Although colleagues and critics ultimately discouraged him from pursuing composition in favor of philosophy, music remained central to his intellectual and aesthetic outlook. Nietzsche’s musical works reflect philosophical concerns that closely parallel those found in his writings, revealing his conviction that music functions both as a mode of instruction and as an aesthetic expression of existence.

A key philosophical idea that emerges in Nietzsche’s music is antiverbalism—the belief that spoken and written language are fundamentally inadequate for conveying certain meanings and affective states. For Nietzsche, music offers a means of surpassing the limitations of language, not merely supplementing verbal expression but, at times, replacing it altogether. This paper argues that Nietzsche’s compositions constitute an essential yet understudied site for understanding the reciprocal relationship between his philosophical and artistic projects.

Despite the breadth of Nietzsche’s musical output and the pervasive role of music in his thought, his compositions have received relatively little sustained analytical attention. This presentation begins by examining Nietzsche’s musical education and situating his compositional practices within the context of late nineteenth-century musical culture, before addressing the critical reception and controversies that contributed to his eventual withdrawal from composition. It then offers a conceptual analysis of one of Nietzsche’s art songs using the framework of conceptual integration networks (CINs) developed by Lawrence Zbikowski in Conceptualizing Music. Focusing on a song set to a text by Lou Andreas-Salomé, the analysis demonstrates how musical and philosophical meanings converge within the work—meanings that resonate strikingly with Salomé’s own reflections on Nietzsche.

By situating Nietzsche’s music within its historical, philosophical, and analytical contexts, this study seeks not only to recover the significance of a largely neglected composer, but also to shed new light on the thinker whose ideas profoundly shaped modern philosophy.

When we think about philosophical music, we generally think about the Schopenhauerian inspiration for Wagner’s music dramas or Nietzsche’s Übermensch resounding through Strauss’s tone poems. But Debussy’s music might also come to mind thanks to Bergsonian readings of Jeux (Pasler 1982), Pelléas et Mélisande (Abbate 1998), and L’isle Joyeuse(Adlard 2013). Such readings reveal the critic’s connections between dispersed elements of cultural context. Direct demonstrates of how philosophy could be heard in French music have been more elusive. Germaine Tailleferre’s scoring of Paul Claudel’s philosophical play Sous le rempart d’Athènes (1927), for example, was all but inaccessible until the critical edition appeared (Wehage and Boisseau 2011).

In this paper, through a careful reading of the text of the play, her score, and the philosophies of her time, including not just that of Henri Bergson but also those of Lionel Dauriac (1904) and Albert Bazaillas (1908), I show how the ideas become audible. I argue that the musical sounds directly relate to the concepts of multiplicity, change and movement, human love, and the sense of mystery that ties these concepts together. I show that, rather than the neoclassical “tapisserie sonore” Claudel heralded, Tailleferre’s music deepens the text, heightening the tension, conflict, and wholeness the characters experience. More broadly, positioning this score in a narrative connecting Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Tailleferre helps de-center the traditional figures of genius, re-casting them as members of an interconnected network of which Tailleferre, who consistently under-sold her own creativity and originality, played an active part.

This paper is part of a larger project of reading Hegel’s Logic in musical terms. The impetus for the project is a remark Adorno makes in a lecture in 1961, where he suggests that “an adequate interpretation of dialectical logic” is “feasible in categories of musical coherence.” While not specified further, the “dialectical logic” to which he is referring is unmistakably Hegel’s. As for “categories of musical coherence,” I argue that he is referring to the theoretical work of a tradition of compositional pedagogy that stretches from A.B. Marx to Arnold Schoenberg, a tradition that attempts to articulate the “logic” of “motivic-thematic” music—Beethovenian music. My thesis is that these categories can indeed be employed to grasp the immanent movement of Hegel’s Concept, and one of the aims of my project is to demonstrate how. The other aim, pertinent to the present paper, is reciprocally related. If one can interpret the movement of Hegel’s Logic in the categories of motivic-thematic music, the reverse should also be true: one should be able to systematically elaborate and develop said categories with Hegelian resources. Specifically, I claim that Hegel’s Logic holds the key to articulating to what Adorno referred as a “material theory of musical form,” something which he only intimated but never developed: a systematic exposition of the “universal” categories of compositional logic. My paper will explore the basis of this secondary aim: it will outline some categories of compositional coherence and attempt to situate them within a Hegelian framework. Key touchstones in my discussion will be the pedagogical work of both Marx and Schoenberg: Marx’s 1856 “Form in Music” and related elements from his Practical and Theoretical Method of Musical Composition, Arnold Schoenberg’s posthumously published Fundamentals of Musical Composition and related material from his “Coherence” and “Gedanke” manuscripts. Philosophical foundations are from Adorno and, of course, Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic and Science of Logic.