Beethoven
thanks to Ludvig
van Beethoven: a Musical Titan
Some problems of interpretation:
Chekhov: are his plays comedies or tragedies?
Beethoven: should his piano sonatas be played on modern
instruments?
Aztec art: what was the function of the forms of deities, men,
women and animals?
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Beethoven |
Take the Beethoven case. Pianos in his time had a more restricted - and any way a different - tonal and dynamic range. He composed for these instruments. So to hear the work that B composed it must be played on a period instrument. Played on a modern instrument it just isn’t B’s work that is heard. That’s one possible view.
Against this it may be said:
1. From the fact that a B sonata was composed in the knowledge that it would sound a certain way on contemporary instruments we can’t infer that that’s how B wanted it to sound. Perhaps, had he heard it on a modern Steinway, he would have thought that a fuller realisation of the work he intended.
2. Regardless of such speculation, why should we not take Beethoven’s score as something existing in its own right? It offers many possibilities of interpretation. The fact that some of them may not have been envisaged by Beethoven is irrelevant. All that matters is their value as music. Played on a modern instrument a sonata may be richer, subtler, more dramatic, more varied than he could have realised. He did better than he knew?
That’s a good example of the dispute between two views about interpretation:
1. Intentionalism: There is one correct interpretation of a work and that is the interpretation (meaning) intended by the artist. The task of the interpreter is to retrieve (i.e. discover or reconstruct) the intention.
2. Autonomism: The work is a separate entity from its creator. Interpretation should be about the work, not about the creator.
Critics of the first view (intentionalism) distinguish between the qualities of an object, and its causes. If we are concerned with the aesthetic character of an object then we need to study its qualities. To study its causes is to enquire in what ways it came to have those qualities, but from the point of view of aesthetics it does not matter how they came into existence, only that it actually has them. In brief the argument is:
To study the work is to study its qualities
The qualities of the work are distinct from its causes
So to study its causes is not to study the work
Now add the proposition that the artist’s intention is in most cases one of the most important causes of a work’s having the qualities it does, and the further conclusion can be drawn that to study the intentions behind the work is not to study the work.
If interpretation is getting at the meaning of a work, then intentionalism holds that what a work means is what the artist means or meant by it. What the work means depends upon the intention of the artist that it should have this or that meaning.
The autonomist’s reply to this makes appeal to a distinction between what a speaker means by a sentence, and what the sentence means. He points out that you cannot intend to mean whatever you like by a sentence, but that ‘what a sentence means depends not on the whim of an individual . . . but upon public conventions of usage that are tied up with habit patterns in the whole speaking community.’ (Beardsley)
By analogy it is argued that in so far as a work of art is, once released from the author’s study, painter’s studio etc., a public object, the meaning it has - as opposed to the meaning the artist meant it to have - depends upon conventions shared by the community of those who are versed in the art form concerned.
That implies that a writer is not an authority on what his or her work means. Who is? Two ways to go here:
• many different equally valid interpretations
• one correct interpretation, and again there are two possibilities:
- that of the ideal reader, listener, spectator
- that of a consensus of the best critics.
If we take the many-interpretations view the problem is how to set any limit to the variety: are there as many interpretations as readers etc?
If we take the other view we have the problem of defining the ‘ideal reader’ or ‘the good critic’.
The insistence on scrutiny of the work was a reaction to a type of criticism (esp of literature) in which works are taken as autobiographical, or as evidence of the life and thought etc of the author. Wanting to know about Byron is OK, but is not the same as wanting to understand his poetry.
In their classic paper, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ Wimsatt and Beardsley distinguish between internal and external evidence of author’s intention. Internal evidence of intention is evidence gathered from scrutiny of the work itself. External is evidence drawn from other sources, such as the author’s own testimony.
The argument is that if an intended meaning is actually realised in the work, then external evidence is unnecessary. If it’s not realised in the work then external evidence is irrelevant. The assumption is that it is the work we should be interested in.
‘How is [a critic] to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem - for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley)
According to W and B the author’s intention is ‘neither available nor desirable’. Not desirable, unless from the work, because irrelevant. Not available? Not always, but when available not relevant. One way of reinforcing the anti-intentionalist case is to point out that we are often dealing with work by artists of whose life and thought we know nothing except what their works tells us.
On the autonomist (anti-intentionalist) view we are no worse off as interpreters in these cases. This seems question-begging: we are no worse off if the autonomist is right in claiming that scrutiny of the work itself is always sufficient. Sometimes it is precisely because we have no clue to the artist’s intention that we feel lost in seeking to interpret the work.
Is it always an illegitimate wish that we could get inside the artist’s skin?
Consider the internal/external distinction. What is to count as internal, what as external? For example:
Is it external evidence if one turns to other works of the same artist to throw light on the particular work one is trying to interpret? What reason can the autonomist give for insisting that a poem or picture must be scrutinised in complete isolation from other works?
What about other literature, contemporaneous or earlier, to which the poet may be making allusion? To understand the allusion will mean reading the works alluded to.
Should we try to ignore all knowledge of the society and culture of the time at which the work was produced?
May not all these be sources from which we can improve our understanding of what is said in the poem, or what is meant by the painting?
Can we even exclude quite specific bits of information about the artist? For instance we know that Beethoven was keen to encourage piano makers to improve the instrument. That might support the view that present day interpretations on modern instruments are legitimate by reference to the composer’s intentions.
For criticism of the view that scrutiny of the work is the only legitimate resource for interpretaion see Wollheim, ‘Criticism as Retrieval’ (Feagin and Maynard 235-42). See especially his comment (p. 238) that the view ‘is seriously under-defined until an answer is given to the question, Scrutiny by whom?’ Wollheim has interesting things to say about the possible limits to the legitimate use of external’ evidence.
Michael Baxendall’s ‘Truth and other Cultures’ (Feagin and Maynard 242-9) discusses the way in which understanding the culture within which a work was produced can help us to reconstruct the artist’s intention.
Beardsley, at the end of the extract in Feagin and Maynard (227-8), tackles a test case for his autonomism: a poem whose author has made his intention clear, but a contemporary reader interprets the poem quite otherwise.
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Last revised 16:03:05 |
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John Benson |
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A module of the BA Philosophy programme Institute of Environment Philosophy and Public Policy | Lancaster University | e-mail philosophy@lancaster.ac.uk |