The Banality of Music

Cavell’s Aesthetic Turn

Abstract

Cavell began life as a musician and came to philosophy because of a vocational crisis. As a composer he felt he was not saying anything with his music. In his autobiography he records one of the first moments where his change of heart dawned on him. Composing a musical arrangement for a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear at Berkeley, he writes:

I came not without considerable anxiety, to the first clear inklings, consciously and unforgettably, that I was more interested in the actions and ideas and language of the play, and in learning and understanding what might be said about them and what I thought I had to say about them, than I was in the music in which I expressed what I could of my sense of those actions and ideas in the words […].