Representation, Expression, and Improvisation

Schopenhauer is widely recognized as an innovator in the history of Aesthetic Theory, though it seems less well-known that Rousseau, in some of his earlier works, covers some of the same ground. The point of departure for Schopenhauer's theory is Kant's thesis that the content of Art is the otherwise non-sensible, but from there, Schopenhauer radically diverges from Kant. Whereas for the latter, the non-sensible is the realm of Rational Ideas, for him, it is Will. Accordingly, for him, the pre-eminent artistic medium is not Poetry or any of the Visual Arts, but Music. Furthermore, whereas those traditional media serve to represent non-sensible ideas, the pre-eminence of Music consists in that it directly expresses Will. Hence, one aspect of Schopenhauer's innovation is its focus on Art as non-representationally expressive, the influence of which is apparent in even the visual arts, e. g. Pollock's paintings. Furthermore, the impact on subsequent theory of his emphasis on Music is explicit in the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, and Langer. Still, neither Schopenhauer, nor any of these successors, seems to have anticipated the development, in the past century, of another special, if not unique, potential of Music. That development is the emergence of improvisatory Music, an Artform which is recalcitrant to even Schopenhauer's reformulation of the Aesthetic experience. Even as expressive, Music shares with representational Art the role of a medium for a content that originates outside that medium, whether it is a represented Rational Idea, or an expressed Emotion. In improvisation, the immediate content of the process is Creativity itself, and whatever might be taken to be represented or expressed is just a mode of Creativity itself. Hence, just as Music demonstrates for Schopenhauer the inadequacy of the Representational theory of Art, improvisational Music exposes the limitations of the Expressionistic theory.