PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

Michael Pacher, Saint Wolfgang and the Devil (1471–1475)

Music—that art at once divine and satanic: more than all the others, it leads us into temptation! 

—Franz Liszt, December 1, 1877 

Introduction

In this essay I want to explore one way of understanding demonic music with the help of Soren Kierkegaard, Roger Scruton, and Franz Liszt. I will proceed as follows. First, I will give an overview of Kierkegaard’s theory of demonic evil. Second, I will show how this theory, when juxtaposed with Scruton’s idea of music as an image of a free subject, can make sense of demonic music. Third, I will offer some examples from Franz Liszt’s music, in particular his Mephisto Polka. I close by offering five reasons why demonic music can be so attractive to us.

Kierkegaard on Demonic Evil

Soren Kierkegaard, via his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (a Latin transcription for “the watchman of Copenhagen”), put forth an insightful account of demonic evil in chapter four of his eccentric work The Concept of Anxiety (1844). He claims the demonic person has anxiety about the Good which means he is both repelled by, and attracted to, the Good. This anxiety gives rise to freely chosen defiant actions that seek to undermine the Good in order to be free from the anxiety it causes. This active defiance reveals that demonic evil is not evil for evil’s sake; rather, it a form of instrumental evil that seeks to accomplish something. Demonic defiance has three interrelated modes: shutupness or inclosing reserve, the contentless or the boring, and the sudden. 

Kierkegaard notes that “The Good, of course, signifies the restoration of freedom, redemption, salvation, of whatever one would call it” (119, Princeton University Press). And these aspects of the Good can only come about through meaningful communication and disclosure. Thus the demonic person’s initial and fundamental strategy for defying the Good is to shut himself up with himself to avoid meaningful communication. Kierkegaard notes that this is the basic form of activity the demonic takes—a form of withdrawal from other people. He refers to this form as shutupness or inclosing reserve and notes that the demonic individual “becomes more and more inclosed and does not want communication” (124). Since the expansive, communicating power of language is “precisely what saves” (124), the demonic person ultimately chooses to be mute in the sense of not revealing anything about himself.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

The fact that the demonic individual’s reserve disappears into a crevice doesn’t imply he or she lacks all continuity with the world: he or she still talks and interacts. But this interaction, rather than being authentic, will seek to negate those aspects of the Good which, in speaking to our social nature, inevitably and continually generate anxiety. Such acts of negation seek to empty the world of good content and the vitality it offers. Thus we have the second aspect of the demonic, namely, the contentless or the boring. Note that we are not dealing with people who want to open up and unify with others but, due to their anxiety, struggle and fail to do so. Rather, we are dealing with people who want to open up but then choose to defy and even destroy those sources of the Good that call them out of their hiding places.

The sudden is shutupness from a temporal point of view. Communication is about meaning unfolding over time and this unfolding presupposes continuity. One thing comes after another in some ordered way so that meaning can accumulate and reach a consummation that brings together what went before it. For example, we see how a story comes to a dramatic end, how an argument reaches a conclusion, or how a melody reaches its final note. In each of these cases the final step is not just a step or a termination; it is a fulfillment or consummation of some sort that is organically connected to what precedes it. But the sudden is a negation of continuity: “At one moment it is there, in the next moment it is gone, and no sooner is it gone than it is there again, wholly and completely. It cannot be incorporated or worked into any continuity, but whatever expresses itself in this manner is precisely the sudden” (130). According to Kierkegaard, a self is integrated when its choices and actions establish a thread of continuity from the past into the future. The sudden disrupts this integration since “the sudden is a complete abstraction from continuity, from the past and the future” (132). A demonic person seeks to be isolated from others and would, ideally, do without others. All the selfishness associated with evil and the Devil is here given philosophical expression: the demonic person wants to be alone and thus discontinuous with others since “freedom is always communicating” and “communication is in turn the expression for continuity….” (124, 129). But if he defies continuity then he risks becoming afflicted with the sudden himself: his own personal identity, his own continuity from the past into the future, will be compromised. Kierkegaard likens this state to the “dizziness a spinning top must have, which constantly revolves upon its own pivot” and notes that the “monotonous sameness” of this state can “drive the individuality to complete insanity” (130). 

These modes of defiance are evil insofar as they willingly destroy integrated selfhood in oneself and others by negating continuity, communication, and meaning and leaving meaningless disintegration, muteness, isolation, and even death in its wake. Since integrated selfhood presupposes communication and revelation, the more the demonic person’s defiance succeeds—the more he is isolated and shuns modes of salvation and redemption—the more he disintegrates himself and, in the process, may unfreely disclose what was so carefully hidden. Evil is ultimately self-defeating.

Scruton on Music as an Image of a Free Subject

We can approach how the above can be used to understand demonic music by first considering Roger Scruton’s view that music can be an image of a free subject in his work The Aesthetics of Music (1998). He writes:

“When I hear music with proper understanding, I am in some sense putting myself into it, imbuing it with a life that originates in me. At the same time this life, projected outwards from its human prison, takes on another character: it moves freely in a useless space of its own, where bodily objects can no longer encumber it. Music therefore offers us an image of the subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in response to its own caprice. It does not describe the transcendental subject: it shows it, as it would be, if it could be shown” (149).

Roger Scruton (1944-2020) BBC

Three key aspects of music as free subject, which interestingly are the opposite of the three traits of the demonic, are as follows: (1) It will, like a free subject with whom we communicate, reveal something and speak to us in some way—we will have the sense that the work is addressing us as a person would; (2) the piece will have depth, interesting content, and will not lose itself in clichés, kitsch, and other forms of superficiality that threaten its individuality and unique meaning; and (3) the piece will, like in an integrated subject, manifest continuity as the work unfolds. It will appear to have a past from which possibilities organically emerge which, in turn, become the ground for further organic development and so on. The piece, like an authentic subject, will be integrated, self-propelled, and moving with purpose.

Demonic Music

Demonic music will negate these three properties to some extent.  It can’t negate them completely if we are to have demonic music. Recall that the demonic is an anxious defiance of the good.  Thus we need there to be an aspect of goodness represented in the work—freedom, purpose, meaning, continuity, and so on which can be expressed through integrated melody, harmony, and rhythm—to be defied.  Without this dimension of goodness we would just have something comic like a person mocking but mocking no one or nothing at all.  So demonic music will have, analogously, the three interrelated demonic properties we analyzed above:

(1) It will have a musical “shutupness”: there will be the sense that, however much or little musical activity is happening, that we are not being addressed by a free subject trying to say something. There will be sense that something remains hidden and that, whatever is disclosed, is not the whole story. The meaning of the music will, despite the sound, remain mute to an extent.

(2) It will, like a demonic person negating content in order to achieve shutupness, threaten or destroy the musical speech-like content of harmony, melody, and rhythm leaving us with some degree of “the contentless/the boring”. This can occur in many ways: through repetitive, cliché, formulaic, or mechanical sound events; transformation of rhythm into mere beat; extreme speed that negates what came right before it so that nothing seems to last; slowing music down; playing music backwards; extremely loud volumes; adding symmetrical whole tone and chromatic scales to a piece to threaten tonality; using glissandi, slides, and other “slithering” techniques; adding angular melodies based especially on tritones or augmented fourths, especially the diabolus in musica or B to F tritone; excessive use of minor keys; and engaging in musical mockery by adding dissonance to passages that stand for something sacred, traditional, and so on.

And (3) it will manifest the “sudden” to some extent: continuity will be violated and there will be a sense that things are happening in a lawless manner. It will not seem like musical possibilities are organically emerging from necessities. Indeed, it may seem at times that passages are coming out of nowhere, that the piece can end anywhere, that there is no way to make a mistake; and that the so-called ending is not a consummation of what went before but rather just an end point. 

An Example from Franz Liszt

We can make these philosophical observations a bit more concrete by turning to an example from Franz Liszt (1811-1886) who used these demonic negations of free subjectivity to great effect in many of his works (see his Sonata in B Minor, Mephisto Waltz (1-4), Danse macabre, Totentanz, Scherzo and March, Reminiscences de Robert le Diable—Valse Infernale, Gnomenreigen, Reminiscences de Don Juan (after Mozart), Waltzes from Gounod’s Faust, The Night Procession, Dante Sonata, Dante Symphony, Faust Symphony, Bagatelle Without Tonality, Mazeppa, Totentanz, Unsrern!—Sinistre, Wilde Jagd, and Erlkonig). Indeed, it seems clear his Christianity and moral interest in depicting the demonic helped him discover many new compositional forms (for an excellent account of how Liszt’s beliefs informed his creation of the danse macabre, the demonic scherzo, the demonic ride, and the vision of horror, see Derek B. Scott’s From the Erotic to the Demonic, chapter 6).

Henri Lehmann, Portait of Franz Liszt (1839)

For example, Liszt was often obsessed with certain motifs that he would repeat in various ways through various octaves and at various speeds. This occurs in his Mephisto Polka (1882-1883) in which there is a haunting motif that moves up and down the piano keys and is played at various speeds and with various dynamics. This gives the listener a sense that a narrative is unfolding, that something is being said to which we can relate. But if one listens closely, it will become clear that nothing much is being said after all due to the repetitions. There is, despite the hypnotic aspect of the enchanting tones, despite the potential for beautiful piano playing, something mechanical and perhaps even a little boring about the piece. In his book On Evil (2010), Terry Eagleton notes that

“Traditionally, evil is seen not as sexy but as mind-numbingly monotonous.  Kierkegaard speaks of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety as “the contentless, the boring.”  Like some modernist art, it is all form and no substance.  Hannah Arendt, writing of the petit-bourgeois banality of Adolf Eichmann, sees him as having neither depth nor any demonic dimension.  But what if this depthlessness is exactly what the demonic is like?  What if it is more like a minor official than a flamboyant tyrant?  Evil is boring because it is lifeless.  Its seductive allure is purely superficial…Evil is a transitional state of being—a domain wedged between life and death, which is why we associate it with ghosts, mummies, and vampires.  Anything which is neither quite dead nor quite alive can become an image of it.  It is boring because it keeps doing the same dreary thing, trapped as it is between life and death” (123-124).

And this puts us on edge since a lack of vital content signals a lack of subjectivity. If there is something being said it seems to be said in echoes that reverberate throughout the piece and symbolize the terrible solipsism and monotony of evil rather than any vital interpersonal dialogue and development. Thus we see that the isolation of shutupness and the contentless/boring are both in effect here.

Francis Bacon, Figure Crouching (1949)

The sudden is also exemplified in various ways. First, there are a few mysterious pauses and places where the music is reduced to single notes with no meaning. Second, the many repetitions and motifs of the piece fail to reach any ultimate consummation of what went before: the piece ends with a disturbing single F natural note that has nothing to do with the proceeding and is, in effect, the Devil’s mocking negation of any meaning the listener thought she had discovered. Given this ending we wonder whether the work could have ended at various places—perhaps anywhere. This suggests the piece is more a matter of arbitrary succession than continuity with a beginning, middle, and end. And third, Liszt uses plenty of chromaticism. The chromatic scale has twelve notes that are the same distance away from each other (one semitone). Like the whole tone scale, the chromatic scale has no tonal center because of the symmetry involved in the equally spaced notes. The term ‘chromatic’ derives from the Greek chroma for ‘color’. Thus chromatic notes have been typically employed to add colorful embellishments and brief deviations from diatonic scales. In Liszt’s music, however, chromaticism often expands to threaten the melodic and harmonic gestures of the music. Liszt was one of the first to experiment with atonal music, that is, music without a tonal center. This can be very demonic since a tonal center is usually what allows the music to gain purposeful direction. With a clear tonal center music can depart from a “home” and then return. This direction can establish a powerful analogue with human action; it is something to which we can relate as subjects. By using the symmetry of chromatic scales to negate the tonal center and the continuity it establishes, Liszt has created a work that can thwart our expectations to find ourselves as free subjects in the music. Indeed, the work’s continual tonal flux exemplifies that pseudo-continuity that corresponds to the sudden, namely, continual extinction. Thus the form of the work mirrors its content: Mephistopheles’ essence as “the spirit of eternal negation” (cf. Goethe’s Faust, line 1335) is present within the Polka. Check it out:

For a more wild and dynamic Liszt work that expresses the demonic in many ways, check out this rendition of Mephisto Waltz #1:

For some other classical or operatic works that have demonic elements listen to Mozart, Don Giovanni; Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischutz; Franz Schubert, Der Doppelganger; Richard Wagner, Faust Overture; Hector Beriloz, The Damnation of Faust; Charles Gounod, Faust; Jacques Offenbach, Orpheus in the Underworld and Tales of Hoffman; Ravel, Gaspard De La Nuit (Part III, Scarbo); Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring; George Crumb, Black Angels; Philip Glass, Dracula; and John Zorn, Goetia.

Why is Demonic Music So Attractive?

Many of the notions introduced above—being shut up within oneself, being empty of meaning, being cliché, being boring, extinguishing developing life, mocking virtue, suddenly appearing and disappearing, violating continuity, the disintegration of the self, and so on—are clearly notions that threaten integrated human subjectivity.  To experience these notions in the context of music is to have an uncanny experience, that is, an unsettling, even terrifying, experience of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar or vice versa.  In demonic music, there is the dimension of familiarity: some integrated melody, harmony, and rhythm, representing the Good, will indeed be present since there must be something to defy.  But then there will be the unfamiliar demonic elements that threaten this musical image of the free subject. This can obviously be troubling. But if this is the case then why do so many like demonic music? And why might it actually be good for us on some level? I have five interrelated suggestions to offer in response to these questions.

First, we can learn something about the nature of the self—both its healthy and unhealthy states—as well as the nature of evil. If music is indeed an image of a free subject representing Kierkegaard’s vision of the Good, then a musical analogue of a demonic self can give us an aesthetic model of an unfree subject representing evil. This model can help us understand more about what we can be, shouldn’t be, and so on. In Liszt’s case, I think the demonic played the role of a memento mori: a way to remember death and thus remember Jesus. It is a way of calling attention to the fact that, in the midst of the most glorious of melodies that represent man’s achievements, we must nonetheless resist our temptations to vanity.  Death awaits and we must be sure that our spirits are ready for the confrontation.

Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas (c. 1671) presents the three essentials for us to contemplate, namely, Life, Death, and Time

Second, art that includes analogues of evil can expand our vision of the facts of the world and help us become more honest. It is important to have beautiful art that represents ideals to which we can ascend.  Our world is imperfect and so are we; but this is no reason to mock and desecrate ideals that can inspire us to make it and ourselves better. That said, art need not always be so ideal. It can include the demonic and, in doing so, can include an aspect of reality that we should try and confront if we want to be serious students of the human condition.

Third, the uncanniness that can emerge from the unsettling mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar can, in some cases, be liberating in its ability to challenge the established orders of both reality and art. The demonic is about negation.  Negation can, to be sure, be destructive and mocking; but it can also, in some cases, be germane to creativity and liberation from conformity. This suggestion is informed by the romantic tradition which often saw Mephistopheles as a hero of individuality rather than a corrupting villain (see Jeffrey Burton Russell’s book Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World for a thorough account of this romantic view).

Fourth, we can see demonic music as a means to a catharsis: a purging of certain rebellious emotions.  There is often a desire to stand up to authority and fight various things in one’s life.  Demonic music offers a sublimation of these aggressive instincts through the image of order being intentionally disordered. In real life, such disorder would be unacceptable for various reasons both moral and legal. But in the free world of music one can imaginatively participate in destructive negation in ways that can be very satisfying.

The last suggestion I have is that demonic music, emphasizing the sudden, can offer us an exhilarating image of ourselves as radically free subjects.  Consider Kierkegaard’s argument regarding the supernatural aspect of the lawless sudden: “If the demonic were something somatic, it could never be the sudden.  When a fever or the insanity etc, recurs, a law is finally discovered, and this law annuls the sudden to a certain degree.  But the sudden knows no law.  It does not belong among natural phenomena but is a psychical phenomenon—it is an expression of unfreedom” (Concept of Anxiety, 130). Now, in real life we don’t want to live in ways that bring radical discontinuity to our self.  We don’t want a predominance of the sudden.  However, we must have the sudden as a part of our self insofar as we are free beings not determined by our past.  We must be able to disengage from all the physical continuity in order to freely evaluate the past and move into an engaged future as responsible agents. So the discontinuity of the sudden is crucial to freedom—it can be an expression of freedom rather than unfreedom. In demonic music this discontinuity is emphasized and, since it is art rather than life, there is something exciting about it: we see in the music an image of boundless freedom which can break any order and move from anything to anything without moral accountability, insanity, evil deeds, or death.  This can be pleasing to us free beings who long for more freedom within the confines of our physical and moral limits.

Faust and Mephistopheles by Eugène Siberdt (ca. 1900)

For my more thorough investigation into the demonic in Kierkegaard, go here. For my account of the moral and cognitive worth of Halloween, go here. For my series on Dracula, go here. For my posts on the uncanny, go here. For my many posts on evil, go here.