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I think it is more likely that similarities between philosophical thought and musical thought at a specific point in time are a result of a common zeitgeist rather than them having an influence on each other. I don't think it is a coincidence that romantic music and especially program music really took off at the same time as there was a renewed interest in metaphysics amongst philosophers. I put this down to the zeitgeist of the early 19th century that there was something beyond the physical to be discovered, felt or expressed. While I don't think that Philosophy has had an effect on compositional thought or practices, it has certainly inspired certain isolated works of music, an example being the tone poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss which was obviously inspired by Nietzsche's text of the same name. Another example would be early 17th century Italian opera and its predecessors in the 16th century such as the intermezzi which coincided with the humanist movement and a rebirth of Plato. A lot of these works include references to the theory of forms and the cave allegory as well as focusing on the stories from Homer's epics which are also scattered throughout Plato's writings. Also, it has been suggested that the actual idea of opera and singing the text of a drama comes from interpretations of Aristotle's accounts of classical Greek drama. Another aspect that you have touched on is aesthetics which has perhaps influenced the way we listen to music and how we derive meaning from a piece of music. There are basically two schools of thought here. The first is the formalist position which asserts that music can hold no objective meaning beyond itself. This position was first applied to music by Eduard Hanslick in his book, On the Musically Beautiful but the idea can be traced back to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement which is itself only developing ideas that Aristotle had a couple of thousand years ago. The other position is the hermeneutic position that the meaning of a piece of music is to be found within the work's social, cultural and historical context. While there may be a shred of merit to this view, it has unfortunately been abused by people such as Susan Mcclary who has used the position to argue in favour of her ridiculous feminist agenda, making outrageous claims like Beethoven's 9th symphony depicts a rapist's sexual frustration. I personally believe in something that is between the two but it would take thousands of words for me to accurately explain it so I will spare you for now. That is about all I can offer on the subject. You may want to come up with a narrower thread topic next time. People have written whole books just on aspects of some of the things you want to discuss so you're never going to get a good discussion about it on an internet forum unless there is less to deal with.

I notice an inverse relation. I wrote in a obvious Romantic idiom when I had a very stringent deterministic world-view. Now the latter is replaced by a more dynamic one, but I tend to pay more attention to a more stringent way of organizing my music. I can imagine that people are so consequentialist that their musical aesthetic is directly related to their philosophical ideas. But in this day and age of eclecticism, a relation will often just not exist. And frankly, I think, to say there is such a thing (or even, to say there should be one) is rather old fashioned.

I disagree: music is absolutely a waste of time.

philosophy is a waste of time, music isn't. i guess there's that.

i have a better idea i know this might sound crazy but bear with me... maybe you should get to know some musicians in real life... and write pieces for them... so that you have live recordings which sound infinitely better than even the most professional digital rendering??? :horrified:

As Sarastro has already pointed out, you don't seem to have a clear understanding of the term "philosophy", und that makes your statements somewhat messy. "Philosophy" is not - as you seem to imply in your last post - a bundle of unconscious aesthetic or ethic values, but a process of consciously checking the validity and cogency of arguments and theories. Philosophers have thought a lot about music, what you can see if you read Plato (Republic), or Kierkegaard (Either-Or), or Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation) and Nietzsche (The Birth of the Tragedy) and various writings of Adorno. On the other hand, some composers have also been influenced by the philosophers of their time to a certain degree (but perhaps not as strongly as the other way around, and it would be difficult to locate these influences in their music). This would indeed be an interesting topic, but probably too extensive to be discussed here. And now it comes to my mind that there are even some men who were both philosophers and composers: Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Adorno. If you really want to learn more about the contemporary philosophy of music, I recommend to start by reading the following article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is really up-to-date: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/

I think it's pity YC is degraded by spammy topics exploiting the naïveté of some who might actually believe that the poor quality of their compositions has anything to do with the substandard syntheticness of their audio presentations.

Yes, Austenite. And, No, you do not have to wait.

You are not using the word "philosophy" consistently. Sometimes you seem to be talking about philosophy as in true philosophy, sometimes as zeitgeist, and sometimes as a colloquial trivialization of the term. I'm afraid debate is pointless unless we know exactly what we are debating about. Your question is messy and badly formulated, sorry.