“All art aspires to the condition of music” - Walter Pater. The quote suggests that music is the purest and most elevated form of art, and that other forms of art strive to achieve the same level of emotional impact and transcendence as music does. 

I love this quote, and i like it for many reasons. Firstly, I believe it to be true. Secondly, if all arts is to create an attack on the senses and if art is designed to express something on the nature of human existence; then music is a form that achieves this succinctly compared to other artistic disciplines. Lastly, I like it because it uses the term ‘aspires to the condition’ which I invokes the idea that music has a methodology, a set of variables about its ‘condition’ that other forms of art would ‘aspire’ to use in creating an evocation. 

Art vs Science

I often have been inclined to view art and culture through the lense of psychological and sociological research. I’ve been keen to try to find empirical evidence as to how the evocation of emotion, memory and action is transmitted through forms of art. The “arts” and the “sciences” are commonly opposed to one another, taking up different faculties in universities for example. Science is highly quantitate, where the numbers and ‘matter of fact’ assertions are priority. The sciences use language and a structuring of meaning make sense of data after the facts are stated. ‘The arts’ prioritises the opposite;  language and ‘the qualitative’ are the focus and these subjects give more weight to expression and evocation.  

I feel as though there has not been enough focus on bridging the disciplines of science and art to help us to bridge the human experience into the predictability of the sciences. The reasons for this is that data needs to be explained and ‘the story’ we tell with data can change with new data, it can be masked by type I & II errors and data can be used to support a ‘story’ that suits the tellers motivations. Economics is often called the “dismissal science”. Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish philosopher and historian, in the 19th used the term “dismissal”  to describe economics because he felt that the field was overly focused on mathematical models and quantitative analysis, which he believed ignored the complexities of human behaviour and societal issues. A study like economics which encompasses quantitative measures like productivity and nominal value along with with qualitative experience like the human experience is one example of where we struggle or just completely fail to understand human motivations, emotions and actions in creating predictable models.

Psychology as a bridge

Psychology which is often said to be a ‘weak science’ and encounters the same problem as Carlyles views on Economics. It’s not that psychology doesn’t wish to be a real science but, put simply, the analysis of a EEG or PET scan, experimental data from a study and all other quantitative data, etc. - are disagreed upon when it comes to what the data means.

Studies from debated even today in 2023. The gap between the human experience and the hard sciences is so disparate we almost give up trying to make sense of both sides in relationship to each other. Psychology, however, does offer us the best tools we have in understanding the human experience – from the cognitive models of the 1970’s to biological measuring techniques to today.  Psychology can certainly be understood as the study of human experience in its most scientific form.

Music’s important potential for answering some of these questions

If art then is the most non-empirical, self expressive phenomena that calls to it “evocation” and is the purest expression of something about the human experience and if music does that with the most perceivable and direct results: then surely music is the best stimuli we can find to study our relationship with art. Music is important to study as is the best expressive stimuli we have in understanding how we are evoked by art.