Reddit reviews The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1

Schopenhaur is my favorite philosopher/writer. His writings are genius. I read http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Aphorisms-Penguin-Classics-Schopenhauer/dp/0140442278/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410879540&sr=1-1&keywords=schopenhauer after a suggestion here on TRP and I plan to read his main work, http://www.amazon.com/World-Will-Representation-Vol/dp/0486217612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410879540&sr=1-3&keywords=schopenhauer when I find the time. My recommendations to everyone: read him, it is very, very pleasant literature.

I'd also recommend reading Schopenhauer, and Ligotti's book The Conspiracy against the Human Race. I do enjoy Cohle's diatribes, but for people who haven't heard of philosophical pessimism he can just sound like a depressed angry guy.

My apologies for misunderstanding you. Your use of language here seemed to suggest you were working from a vague definition of Impressionism that doesn't accurately represent that movement (most definitions of Impressionism are like that, unfortunately):

>Like in the sunken cathedral, it is chock full of moments where debussy is playing the piano, using specific techniques and harmonic and rhythmic choices to give the listener the impression of bells ringing or the impression of the cathedral rising and sinking in the water or any other number of things.

The issue there being that Impressionism in visual art is not about "giving the viewer the impression" of a thing (which Symbolism has in spades), not of merely representing the thing (which you can do with any style and technique, really), but of communicating the painter's perception of the thing. Subjectivity is the topic of the painting. I assumed that if you were being careful about the distinction, you wouldn't be using that word so haphazardly.

>When I was taught about impressionism in music school, we still talked about all the things you talk about with debussy and symbolism, we just called it impressionism.

So our two choices are 1.) keep calling it Impressionism and perpetuate an inaccurate notion of what Impressionism was, or 2.) actually look up what Impressionism was and what Symbolism was and use that to inform our discussion about how and if to describe Debussy's music as analogous to art works in other media. It's pretty lousy musicology to look the other way on a historical movement with which the composer was actually associated in favor of a corrupted adjective that has been uncritically passed along, so I would vie for the second option.

>But when I say lets look at it in a vacuum, I really mean that Im not sure we define impressionism the same way in music as you do in visual art.

And this is a critical point! European modernist art movements contended with the problem of representation, responding to an established order that was breaking down in the newly industrialized 19th century, as well as to technologies like photography and new paint production methods. Impressionists could look at a subject and say, "That cloth is white... but I see a bunch of different colors in it, actually." Is there a way to do this in music? I really don't know. In a way, I feel like the Spectralists come close, in that their method was to do a spectral analysis of a trombone note for example and reassemble the structure of partials by orchestrating them out.

But this is at most an aesthetic and technical parallelism: the Spectralists had different priorities than the Impressionists, they were expressly mediated by computer analysis (consider the implications upon the subjectivity the Impressionists sought to preserve), and the analogy to representation in visual art is still pretty tenuous. The thing that confined Impressionism to painting was its focus on techniques and problems unique to painting. The requirements for an Impressionist aesthetic are perhaps incompatible to music or literature. Schopenhauer famously remarked upon how "direct" music is, how it does not need to rely upon representation of reality to get its point across:

>>The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. In the same way, the seriousness essential to it and wholly excluding the ludicrous from its direct and peculiar province is to be explained from the fact that its object is not the representation, in regard to which deception and ridiculousness alone are possible, but that this object is directly the will; and this is essentially the most serious of all things, as being that on which all depends. (The World as Will and Representation, vol.1, 264)

This makes music just fine for the methods of the Symbolists, but arguably makes Impressionism in music an impossibility.

No worries, I'm just chillin. Thanks for the recommendation, and I'll counter it with Schopenhauer's work, as it is more of my idea of God. https://www.amazon.com/World-Will-Representation-Vol/dp/0486217612