How can these ideas of depicting human experience as collective truth, and ideas of metaphysical music be expressed together, as a united whole, as a body and soul, that coherently understand each other? The method that I have hypothesized thus far, does not seem so far away from ideas expressed by Weizman. I will select several areas in the north-east of England, rural and urban and talk to people in the area, as well as making sound recordings of the space. Lyrical content will be built, from the local including images of the land and snippets of characters, to ground the music to a representation of the human, and the environmental world. To create a new musical language for the pieces to be based on, instead of using ideas generated more from myself as an individual, I will base the motifs on field recordings I have made of each recorded area, and then notate them. This will create musical material that takes the sounds of the area and makes it into musical language. The Will unites all aspects together with music elements, such as harmony and melody. 

With all this in mind, how can we make music that can combine these ideas and, as Hegel says, have ‘the aim of teaching’ (Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel, Hegel’s aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975) p.388) Music is perhaps the most immediately sensual art form, as Schopenhauer would suggest, and therefore it posits a problem when trying to engage with these ideas. The hypothesis I came up with goes as follows:

(lyrics and aspects on textures of music) Place and Local representation + Harmony and rhythm of the music= aesthetic whole capable of uniting collective of human and non-human

This is thus far a rough hypothesis, but it will be useful to consider. As Schopenhauer says in the ‘metaphysics of music’, music is such a seductive, emotive art form, the audience feel like they almost become ‘the vibrating string that is stretched and plucked’ (Schopenhauer, p.451). As an emotive witness-like testimony I see none more persuasive than music. I will use multiple perspectives and also the acoustics of space, of coastal areas in the north-east, and small towns to create the collective essence of place. This will give the environment a voice as part of the sound-language. The soul lies in the music, and the voices used will ground the piece in the problems of the world today, but these two elements are also forever entangled. 

Enlightenment aesthetics can also be brought into the Neo-liberal conundrum. Neo-liberalism is an inherently soulless economic policy- literally depicting the ‘marketisation of everything’ (David Harvey, ‘Neoliberalism as creative destruction’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 610, March 2007, pp.22-44.) The decline of the metaphysical and the dawn of mass capitalism now seem synonymous with each-other; with the world of marketisation crushing any practical need for what is hypothesized beyond the eye, beyond ‘the cave’. Trapped in our Neo-liberal cave, only able to see the bareness around us, makes it hard to see a use for the meta-physical in the 21st century.

It may seem far away from the truth collecting used by Weizman, but I insist that it is necessary to act on multiple levels to work against Neo-Liberalism. Duality in the twenty-century have become one the key ways that systems in place have been fought. Mari Matsuda discusses the unification of ‘nitty-gritty detail’ and ‘abstraction’ as ‘multiple consciousness’, that can communicate with-in and beyond systemic problems. (Mari J Matsuda, When the first Quail calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method, (14 women’s Rights law Reporter, 1992) p.3). 

Therefore the world of representation must not be abandoned for the meta-physical world, but the two are essential to one another. A way to deal with this could be grounding the lyrical content of my musical project in the world of representation. This can be used as a place for human experience to be taken account of, or at least an artistic interpretation of this. The music itself, lying underneath the words, is metaphysical unification. Thinking about music, and what it can do, is the perfect place to re-engage with metaphysical ideas. The music acts as an underlying ‘Will’ that unites these perspectives together, while also containing a form of sensual energy; taking the witness like testimonies beyond their place in the phenomenal world, uniting them in a sensual truth with harmony, rhythm and melody. As an emotive witness testimony, I see none more persuasive than music. This use of music can work as a rebellion outside the world of the Mass-Market, but while also using lyrical content to explore people’s lives in that world. Schopenhauer’s idea of Will that unites all, and takes us, although Schopenhauer would have used its purpose differently, away from mass individualization in the marketplace. It is ideas like the will, even the soul in philosophies like Hegel’s, that can reveal the unanimity of being. ‘The will, as the thing-in-itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man.’ (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2 [New York, Dover, 2016] p.201) Obviously, the language is somewhat dated, and replacing ‘man’ with ‘human’, makes the quote apt for the twenty-first century. The ‘Will’ as Schopenhauer says, exists beyond human intellect, and unites humans with each other, and with their own history, as something that has always existed through time. Schopenhauer sees the Will and music as directly connected: ‘music does not, like all other arts, exhibit the idea or grades of the Will’s objectification, but directly the will itself’ (Schopenhauer, p.448). The music reveals ‘secret information on the feelings expressed in the words’. This makes The Will key to understanding 

I shall start where I wish to finish, in the twenty-first century. As contentious as ever in the seemingly climactic year of 2019, the failings of Neo-liberal policy are a practical starting point for my project. The clutches of perpetual Capitalism seem as fixed as ever, and the issues surrounding the current political and global climate make it harder to consider positive future change in any way; how can art respond at such a time? 

To respond to the question of defying Neo-liberalism, I always go back to a thought inspired by David Harvey: the only way to defy neoliberalism is to act as a collective. The group that deals with these questions in a practical way, in recent years, is the ‘forensic architecture’ project, led by Eyal Weizman. The group has collaborated with artists, human rights activists, scientist, etc., to fight causes of social justice case by case. Weizman, in a 2018 speech, talks about using post-structuralist philosophies in a practical way, instead of contributing to the post-truth landscape, using ideas of ‘Collective Truth‘, through many ‘weak sensors’, to create a bigger picture that can contribute to the cases the group works on. Weizman says ‘post-structuralism’s culture of suspicion is essential in exposing the gaps, inconsistencies, biases, traces of manipulation […] in the statements of those in power’ (Eyal Weizman, Open Verification, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248062/open-verification/ accessed 12/11/2019). Wiezman uses ideas of truth in a practical way, since post-structural iconoclasts tore down the walls of the signifiers in place. Weizman employs ‘collective truth’ for collecting ‘different local, ground-level perspectives’. Here Weizman uses multiple perspectives of the local to act against so called ‘dark epistemologies’ of post-truth, and these perspectives can start to build a picture consistent to experience in that area. The Hegelian notion ‘the true is a process, not a conclusion’ (p.9) also seems to be encapsulated by Weizman (J Glenn Gray, introduction in Hegel on Art, Religion, Philosophy, (London, Harper Torchbooks, 1970) p.9). 

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