Philosophy in a New Key
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The most obvious and naive reading of this "language" is the onomatopoetic one, the recognition of natural sounds in musical effects. This, as everybody knows, is the basis of "program music," which deliberately imitates the clatter and cries of the market place, hoof-beats, clanging hammers, running brooks, nightingales and bells and the inevitable cuckoo. Such "sound-painting" is by no means modern; it goes back as far as the thirteenth century, when the cuckoo's note was introduced as a theme in the musical setting of "Summer is acumen in."--Philosophy in a New Key "But similarly, nothing can prevent our falling back on mental pictures, fantasies, memories, or having a Sphärenerlebnis of some sort, when we cannot directly make subjective sense out of music in playing or hearing it. A program is simply a crutch. It is a resort to the crude but familiar method of holding feelings in the imagination by envisaging their attendant circumstances. It does not mean that the listener is unmusical, but merely that he is not musical enough to think in entirely musical terms. He is like a person who understands a foreign language, but thinks in his mother tongue the minute an intellectual difficulty confronts him. "--Philosophy in a New Key
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Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art is the main work of American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, first published in 1941. In it she declares that "Symbolism was the ‘new key’ to understanding how the human mind transformed the primal need to express oneself."
Synopsis
"Langer elaborates her thesis in freshly conceived and interesting studies contained in chapters treating of the logic of signs and symbols, a comparison of discursive and presentational forms of
symbolism (perhaps the heart of the book), verbal language, life symbols as the roots of sacrament and myth, the significance of music, the genesis of artistic import, and the fabric of meaning."
