Abstract

There can be no question, of course, of any "influence" of Kant's or Rousseau's ideas on Mozart's musical structures. While I have used various loosely synonymous nonmusical terms—reverie, dream, unconscious, ethereal, and so on—the analysis could proceed on a nonmetaphorical, strictly technical basis. Indeed, much of it has. I should therefore clarify why I have superimposed this philosophical and literary layer on the musical analysis, even at the risk of giving the false impression that I wished to make the history of music dependent upon the history of ideas.My answer lies, first of all, in the contention—in which I follow chiefly Michel Foucault, though with qualifications—that at every period in history a subterranean network of constraints governs the organization of human thought. Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental activity affect them all. In this respect, the relationship of music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated. Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines, it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the necessity of comparative study. The infrastructure comes to light at the juncture of independent fields. In the present case, it is accurate to say that music and philosophy mutually illuminate one another precisely because they are such different media; where they coincide lie the true invariants of eighteenth-century thought.Marshall Brown, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of The Shape of German Romanticism, and Pre-Romanticism: Studies in Stylistic Transformation