Goethe and Music

Torbjørn Eftestøl

Has Goethe’s Theory of Colours and his general scientific work any significance for music? And
isn’t Goethe’s world long past and his spiritual environment so far removed from ours that
only a historical backward-looking attitude finds anything of interest today? I believe this
would be a confusion of the spirit and letter of his work and that precisely in the impulses
of Goethe fruitful ideas ca n be harvested today. Consider for example this statement by the
French composer Olivier Messiaen, one of the most influential composers of the twentieth
century:

I believe in natural resonance, as I believe in all natural phenomena. Natural resonance is in exact
agreement with the phenomena of complementary colours. I’ve made several experiments with
complimentary colours. I have a red carpet that I often look at. Where this red carpet meets the
lighter-coloured parquet next to it, I intermittently see marvellous greens that a painter couldn’t mix,
natural colours created in the eye. Likewise, sound generates harmonics. When you hear a gong...
Make a long sound on a gong and you’ll hear some fantastic things. It’s a modernism that no modern
composer could surpass.1

Messiaen does not refer to Goethe, but his use of the phenomenon of the after-image to
portray his compositional strategy is an interesting bridge between creativity and the subtler
aspects of sensing that Goethe was so keen on observing. The synaesthesia of Messiaen has
often been touched upon, regarded as a more or less private-psychological phenomenon, but
this statement reveals some interesting paths of possible “Goetheanistic” inquiry.
The relevance of Goethe’s thinking for music has not been studied as much as his engage-
ment with colours and sight, living forms of nature and, of course, literature. This is natural
considering Goethe’s production. However, Goethe was in close contact with music in many
ways from early on. In his youth Goethe and his sister received musical education and trained
in piano, cello and singing.2 He later made the scenography for Mozart’s operas; the young
friend and famous composer, Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, frequently played in his house and
he met with Beethoven.
Goethe also worked on the musical equivalent of the Farbenlehre; the Tonlehre. Although it oc-
cupied him for many years it was never finished. But as part of his general thinking about art,
nature and cognition, Goethe’s world of ideas had a lasting influence on the history of music.
One example is with the concept of organic form. In the Romantic area, musical forms developed
where themes grow organically out of an initial cell. Some of the more extreme cases of this
are the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony or Liszt’s Symphonic Poems. These are musical
instantiations of a paradigm that has been called organicism. Beethoven has been credited with
developing this within musical composition. But when musicologists have tried to conceptualize
and discuss the nature of organic form they have frequently associated it with Goethe and his
ideas about metamorphosis. The famous analyst and musicologist Hermann Schenker – one
of the most outspoken representatives of this way of thinking – traces his idea of an Urlinie, the
basic structure behind a tonal composition, to Goethe’s idea of an Urpflanze. In this paradigm,
music and plant life seem to be almost indistinguishable in their formative growth.

264 Applying Colour

 At the time when music radically changed its face by substituting tonality for a new twelve-
tone system, Goethe was again called upon. In the letters and lectures by the composers of
the day – Mahler, Schönberg, Webern and Berg among others – Goethe figures as a recur-
ring reference. Anton Webern compared the Urpflanze to the idea of a “tone-row”: just like
the primal plant informed the growth and development of all the parts of a plant, the row
of twelve tones was the underlying, structural unity informing all of the musical material of
the composition. For Webern this was not only a matter of compositional technique, but of
understanding how “Goethe viewed art as a production of general Nature in the specific
form of human nature”, thus making artistic practice into a form of participation of nat-
ural-spiritual evolution.3 When art is brought into such an ontological perspective, artistic
practice approaches scientific enquiry. Webern carried a notebook of plants on his mountain
wanderings, as he believed a knowledge of plant life could bring one into contact with the
formative forces of Nature itself, an idea he traced back to Goethe in his lectures.
Goethe’s practice of both science and art is perhaps even more relevant as an example
today than in his time. In the nascent academic field called artistic research, the border be-
tween art and research is sought to be explored by researching one’s own artistic practice.
In this field questions of methodology as well as the need for an epistemology stir recurring
debates. I believe Goethe’s practice and ideas could be informative here, as he embodied an
epistemology capable of bridging research and art as well as being a great practical example
of their mutual interpenetration.
In my own work, which borders on artistic research, I attempt to research music as a poten-
tial for development and metamorphosis of consciousness. By fusing artistic practice with
philosophy, I hope to present a path that can show how musical practice harbours a potential
for human growth and development in general. The underlying idea is that music by itself
brings us into contact with aspects of consciousness that are normally hidden or covered and
that we can take up this as a potential to be developed.4 In order to develop this idea, I need
both an epistemology and a method. Goethe is one of the thinkers and practitioners that can
be of help in this regard.
In the epistemology of Goethe’s Spinozist cosmos, nature’s formative forces, natura natur-
ans, need to be cognized along with the actual phenomena, natura naturata. “Goethe echoed
Spinoza’s holistic vision of reality in his conviction that ‘spirit and matter, soul and body,
thought and extension... are the necessary twin ingredients of the universe, and will forever
be.’”5
In whatever we study, we must look at the phenomenon and regard it not only as it is, but
also seek out the constellation of formative forces that bring it about (its Ur-phenomenon,
Idea, Wholeness). Goethe came to regard this creative part of reality as a process of polarity
and intensification (Steigerung). In Theory of Colours, this polarity is expressed in the transcendental
principles of light and darkness; in The Metamorphosis of Plants in the forces of contraction
and expansion. The different colours and the various plant forms come about through the
interaction between these forces.
Also in music Goethe sought out this polarity. Ernst-Jürgen Dreyer has reconstructed this
in his article Die Tonmonade.6 Just like there is an ascending spiral of ever smaller intervals of
overtones, making the tone we identify as C a multiplicity of tones (see figure 1), so there is a
descending series of undertones, mirroring the overtones. Goethe saw these ascending and
descending spirals as expressions of the fundamental polarity of expansion and contraction
inside the tone itself: expansion towards an inaudible infinite periphery – a dilution of the
sound like the gradual weakening but also intensification of waves when we throw a stone
in the water and follow the ripples until they approach the infinite plane – and a contraction
towards an inaudible infinite centre. We could also say that this polarity constitutes the light
and darkness of the tone. Insofar as all of the undertones and overtones themselves also have
their own overtones and undertones, each tone becomes a monad, i.e. a concentration or fold
of the web of interwoven expansion and contraction. The audible tone is thus a product
of the two forces of contraction and expansion, systole and diastole. Each tone breathes in
and out and is a living audible manifestation of an inaudible force-field. This virtual field of
vibration or movement weaves an infinite web of expansion and contraction, which Dreyer
shows that we can trace in the spectral analysis of the tone.
To cognize this living productive part of reality directly (as opposed to tracing it analyti-
cally), a higher kind of experience is needed. Goethe calls it by various names, one of them
anschauende Urteilskraft, after Kant’s treatment of higher cognition in his third Critique.7
Goethe claimed to have developed such a capacity by studying and actively recreating
the phenomena and their metamorphosises in the imagination to the extent that such an

Applying Colour 265

Figure 1: The harmonic series, written by
Goethe using F and C clefs, represents the
partial tones (partials) present in a tone
produced by a vibrating string or column or
air. The index, written underneath, of each
partial gives its position in the series: (1) is
the fundamental – in this case C (Goethe
wrote the clef on the wrong line – and the
others are the overtones. The index also
corresponds to the frequency ratio between
the partial and the fundamental: the first
overtone (2), which is an octave higher than
the fundamental, has double the frequency
of the fundamental, the second overtone
(3) has triple the frequency, and so on.
Equivalently, dividing the length of the string
by the index gives a tone with a fundamental
that is the same pitch as that of the particular
overtone of the undivided string.
266 Applying Colour
imaginative activity became a participation in those ideal but real forces. In his article “The
Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object” Goethe writes about an
empirical evidence, composed of many others, [which] is clearly of a higher sort. It shows the
general formula, so to speak, that overarches an array of individual arithmetic sums. In my view, it
is the task of the scientific researcher to work toward empirical evidence of this higher sort – and the
example of the best men in the field supports this view. From the mathematician we must learn the
meticulous care required to connect things in unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step
by step. Even where we do not venture to apply mathematics we must always work as though we had
to satisfy the strictest of geometricians.8
Clearly, cognition is here neither a merely intellectual judgement nor an outcome that can
be registered after only a single experiment has been carried out. Cognition is related to the
attainment of an ability; it requires practice, just like the musician must learn to master the
forces of musical flow on the instrument. Cognition and self-development goe hand in hand.
The same is expressed in The Metamorphosis of Plants where Goethe says that to learn to see
the living powers of the plant one must become as “comfortable working with the principles
established above – expansion and contraction, compaction and anastomosis – as he would
with algebraic formulas.”9 To work with the principles of contraction and expansion means
that one must develop the ability to experience contraction and expansion in the imagination.
It must come to an experience of real forces which not only gives rise to new aspects of per-
ception but also changes the researcher.
How does this help us if we want to research the hypothesis that musical practice harbours
a potential for spiritual development?
For one thing it shows how in our normal conduct in the world we are actually participating
in these formative forces all the time – living organisms, light and colour; we are immersed in
these phenomena like a fish in water and Goethe shows us how we can take what is right in
front of us and make it into a mystery. We are already touching the limit of experience if we
only pay attention and strengthen our ability to apprehend. Nature is an open secret. With
music, this threshold-experience can perhaps be even more readily understood.
When one sings or plays a melody, the phrasing, the placing of each tone, is not something
we do by putting them together one by one in a linear fashion. When placing a tone, this
already means relating it to what has sounded and what will sound, feeling into the future as
well as the past. The phenomenon of coloured shadows nicely illustrates how an observed
colour is not independent of its spatial environment. Similarly, there is never one tone in a
melody isolated from its temporal environment, but always a greater whole. This sense of
wholeness is constitutive for each of the notes that together compose the melody in actual
sound and it also transpires as activity when there is no physical sound. Musical pauses are
not just the absence of sound, but rather moments where we can feel close to the inaudible
activity within sound, just like darkness and light that are both not seen as such but active in
everything we see.
This conception of wholeness as the formative and living dynamic relation that animates
and holds the parts together – music as a play of forces – is a natural result of Goethe’s view
of the tone itself as a “monad”. Music is already an encounter with forces, with real forces of
push and pull, contraction and expansion, that take us towards a time beyond the chronolog-
ical now: a different temporal experience of wholeness in which time is duration, “malleable
and transformable” as Messiaen says.10
Every practicing musician knows this experience of time as force. To perform a musical
piece means to participate in tension and relaxation, to both sense these forces of the music
and to mould the music from within this dynamic experience. These forces are felt with the
whole body, but they belong inherently to the music as such. In one sense these forces are the
music in an even more profound sense than the sounds we hear, even if they remain in the
background of consciousness, “behind” the notes we hear.11
Inspired by Goethe’s work, we can cultivate an experience of these underlying forces as
pure forces. Through this practice the listening activity becomes a dynamic experience of
self-created force, which can develop into a self-conscious experience of the influence of
external forces.12 Then we develop a higher kind of experience and, using the terminology
of the Middle Ages, move from the audible musica instrumentalis to the inaudible musica humana
and musica mundana. As a modern herald of such a Spinozist view of nature the French philos-
opher Gilles Deleuze writes that music is precisely about rendering inaudible forces audible.13
With the help of Deleuze and Goethe I hope to articulate a practice whereby one can make
music into a modern path of metamorphosis where we aspire to become consciously immersed
in these forces – music as a transformative practice where we enter a true becoming, learn to
slip in amongst things and discover Life as such; musica mundana.

Notes

1 In an interview in the film Olivier Messiaen. La Liturgie de Cristal, directed by Olivier Mille. Juxta Positions, 2002.
2 Claus Canisius, Goethe und die Musik, Piper Verlag, München, 1998.
3 Anton Webern, Der Weg zur Neuen Musik, herausgegeben von Willi Reich, Universal Edition, Wien, 1960,
page 10.
4 I discovered this idea when I read the autobiography of Rudolf Steiner. There he writes: “The true artist
yields himself more or less consciously to the spirit. And it is only necessary – so I then said to myself over
and over again – to metamorphose the powers of the soul, which in the case of the artist work upon matter,
to a pure spiritual perception free of the senses in order to penetrate into a knowledge of the spiritual world.”
Rudolf Steiner, The Story of my Life, chapter 7.
5 Gordon L. Miller, “Introduction” to J. W. von Goethe The Metamorphosis of Plants, MIT press, Massachusetts
2009, page xviii.
6 “Die Tonmonade. Goethes musiktheoretiescher Brief an Christian Schlosser” in Ernst-Jürgen Dreyer, Goethes
Ton-Wissenschaft, Ullstein Materialien, Frankfurt, 1985.
7 For a detailed treatment of this, see for example Eckhard Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, A
Systematic Reconstruction, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2012.
8 Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. Miller, page 16.
9 Goethe, Metamorphosis of Plants, §102.
10 Quoted from Benedict Taylor, “On Time and Eternity in Messiaen” in Messiaen: The Centenary Papers, ed.
Judith Crispin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), page 261.
11 The musicologist Ernst Kurth writes about this, saying that a melody is not a combination of tones but
rather an original unity out of which the tones unfold. The wholeness is felt as an inner “movement”, “energy”
or “force”. See Ernst Kurth, Musikpsychologie, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 1990, pages 76ff.
12 “Just like Goethe speaks of spirit-eyes and spirit-ears, so, one could say, emerges at the first elementary
stage spiritual organs of touch...This is a real life-process, a real process of growth...as real as the growing up
of the child, but one that brings the soul into regions which one had not experienced before.“ Rudolf Steiner,
Lecture 5. November, 1917. Published in Collected Works (GA) 73.
13 See for example Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2007, page 342ff.
Torbjørn Eftestøl is a freelance pianist, writer and teacher. He is currently doing a PhD in music and philosophy at the
Norwegian Academy of Music. A selection of his writings and concert recordings can be found at musicofbecoming.com.

Applying Colour 267