Many years ago – during the final term of my undergraduate program – I encountered the writing of Susanne K. Langer* in the last class I took prior to my graduation.  Her incredible understanding of the power of music has helped focus my understanding ever since – for that I am very grateful.  Following is some of her words that I have used many times since that first reading.

Because the forms of human feeling are much more congruent with musical forms than with the forms of language, music can reveal the nature of feelings with a detail and truth that language cannot approach. (235)

Quoting from composer Richard Wagner:  What music expresses, is eternal, infinite and ideal; it does not express the passion, love, or longing of such-and-such an individual on such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself, and this it presents in that unlimited variety of motivations, which is the exclusive and particular characteristic of music, foreign and inexpressible in any other language. (221-222)

The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be “true” to the life of feeling in a way that language connot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have.  This is, I think, what Hans Mersmann meant, when he wrote:  “The possibility of expressing opposites simultaneously gives the most intricate reach of expressiveness to music as such, and carries it, in this respect, far beyond the limits of the other arts.”  Music is revealing, where words are obscuring, because it can have not only a content, but a transient play of contents.  It can articulate feelings without becoming wedded to them. (243-244).

*Langer, Susanne K.  Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art.  Third edition.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1957.