Why is Music Tragic?
On Nietzsche and Audio-Visual Culture
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that tragedy is an experience that enters our consciousness through hearing rather than vision.
Vision stuns us with order and beauty. But tragedy—whose heart is the chorus—enables us to feel that beauty is an illusion. The plastic arts dissemble as much as they reveal; tragedy makes us aware of the dissemblance where once we were simply taken in it by it.
Not that tragedy is all music; for Nietzsche, its success is in the conflictual combination it creates between visual and auditory realities.
Of course, we can’t answer whether music is tragic unless we define the tragic. Still, it’s worth asking what hearing does to our affective sense of reality that sight can’t offer. While most things today are audio-visual, we can still plot them on a spectrum.
What do we get emotionally from phone call that we don’t get from watching a zoom screen of muted faces (and vice versa)?
What is the affective difference between a religious experience that is sight-based and one that is hearing-based? If tragedy is the sense that there is something more than what meets the eye—a transcendence encountered through brokenness—shouldn’t we consider too much vision as a hindrance rather than an advantage? Could our inability to remember much by heart be linked to the flood of images that stalk us from morning until night?
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