For the purpose of discussing music, we almost prefer an average musical experience to a great one because of what happens when something is so great: there’s nothing to be said. If we heard some average music, we might have criticized which of its flaws stuck with us the most. We may each have different flaws to note or perhaps one of us would have found it unremarkable enough to nod ‘yes’ through the others’ critique and we would soon be discussing other concerns that affect us more deeply.

But when music is truly great, we are left still in our words. We could talk about, but it would amount to simple praises that would do no respect to the music. So why is it so difficult to discuss great music? It is not, after all, that we are unversed on the subject matter. It is because we were so forcibly possessed by those sounds that words seem unfit to address the experience.

Of course, great music is a language itself—a language of (pure) subjectivity—so, while great music may not be proliferate in the world to any individual’s mind, one may very well meet a person who is moved by his or her own conception of great music regularly. One notices the effect this music has in another’s speech and writing.

In speech, praise can take many forms: stuttering, endless sentences, surprisingly succinct utterances (e.g. “Love it”), grand gesturing, or fluxes in the speed of the delivered verse. In writing, it might take form of some incredible analogy. Often the writer will keep his or her reverence in check and attempt to describe those aspects of the music that were so phenomenal: How the sound was very tight (i.e. fitting to itself), how all the beats seemed to come at the exact moment; tuned to what we might call our being or spirit, the soundness of the structure or execution of it, the sound was well-balanced across the range, et cetra.

Might the difficulty of articulating something beyond these value judgments be a result of the poverty of human language? Or maybe our relatively weak command of this language? There are surely plenty of individuals who are particularly gifted and entertaining to discuss music with, so to say we have weak command might be a bit dramatizing. Even these fluent individuals, though, cannot recreate the intense and deeply-rooted feeling we gain when we encounter great music. It may be necessary to turn to the other arts to speak to the profundity of music. This turning itself is strange—is discourse itself not an art?

Writing and speaking and communicating in general are art forms that can be practiced and mastered—yet they continually speak superficially to the effect of music. Are there some art forms that speak to us more thoroughly? Can a painting, words formed into a poem, a theatrical performance or a drawing approach speaking to the laudability of music? Or would these too prove to be insufficient in communicating our experience? It may be that music speaks to something deeper and beyond human phenomenal experience.

This is consistent with the idea suggested by Schopenhauer that music is inherently nonrepresentational and stands out from other arts in this regard; even if music does have a physical representation (the collision of air molecules) it does not explicitly relate to any physical object. We may argue that we can learn to associate a note or sound with something in the real world, as we do with any language. One might counter that this symbolism in music is not as explicit or concrete as in a constructed language or physical work of art.

Thus, as Schopenhauer might say, we can use the non-representationality of music to escape the representational world or speak to the underlying reality of these objects (Schopenhauer’s Will). In this context, we would say language cannot adhere to music because it speaks to us on a different level. Good music is something that speaks effectively to the real world (the world beyond objects). This idea appears to be in conflict with itself: music both speaks to and provides relief from the underlying reality of the world or the Will. The paradox is relieved somewhat if we understand Schopenhauer’s Will not as some unknowable noumena, or things in themselves, but as experiencing the world beyond objects through ourselves and our all-too-human drives (according to Schopenhauer, primarily through the drive to live and reproduce).

Authors and philosophers have long spoken to the bounds of music and language — namely the terms by which the limits of language are defined. Nietzsche describes some of his early thoughts on music in terms of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, each representing, respectively, a sort of structure or semblance; and an intoxication and limitlessness. Nietzsche says “music struggles to inform us about its nature in Apolline images; if we now reflect that music, raised to its highest power . . . it must seem possible that music also knows how to find symbolic expression for its true Dionysian wisdom” (The Birth of Tragedy).

This means that while music can maintain itself in a non-representational and free and transcendental (Dionysian) world, it struggles to speak to the structured, representational (Apolline) world. Nietzsche further exemplified his analogy with Greek practices in theatre-going: the time when the masses came to disband their idea of the individual and join the masses in worship of Dionysus and the universal.

Music can become representational, as can any other language, but it is perhaps some underlying power of music to attach itself to something more profound—the Universal or core part of being—that makes it difficult to speak of in words within structure and convention. No matter how far we push music into an intellectualized process or a social pact, subjectivity will rule and we will continue to speak to this ‘universal’ idea within us all and retire to our comparably weak exclamations.

The section editor, drunken and reeling, clots of spittle and half-chewed food hanging in his beard like butterfly pupas, pulls two rusty and unsolicited pennies from his pocket and throws them in Eric’s face:

It is completely impossible to describe a work of art meaningfully—be it music, film, literature, or work in any other medium. There are only three legitimate uses of the ostensible description of individual works of art:

1) To evaluate the work in relation to the reader’s assumed aesthetic interests; to let a reader know if it is a thing they might want to check out or a thing they shouldn’t waste their time on. This is accomplished by a good review.

2) To clarify something about the work for someone who already has experience with it; to focus somebody’s thoughts on a particular characteristic or quality of a work they’re familiar with. This is accomplished by a good piece of criticism.

3) To describe a personal aesthetic experience derived from a work, disguised as a description of it. This is accomplished by a good literary description of a piece of art.

None of these can properly be said to be meaningful description of the work itself: the first is about the reader’s presumed values; the second takes familiarity with the work for granted; the third is about the writer’s personal experience. In none of them is the actual substance of the work evoked.