Nietzsche’s musical perspectivism : interdisciplinary ontologies in performance

Abstract

According to Peter Gay in his introduction to Walter Kaufmann’s translations in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is ‘in all probability, […] the most studied German thinker in English-, French-, and Italian-speaking cultures’. Even though, as Gilles Deleuze argues, ‘not perhaps in the way in which he would have wished […] it is clear that modern philosophy has largely lived off Nietzsche’. Indeed, the legacy of Nietzsche and the way it has penetrated different fields of study, is broad and far-reaching. ‘His ability to turn accepted moral certitudes on their head, his skeptical questioning of confident realists who see the outside world as easily accessible to the investigator’, are amongst the various reasons why Nietzsche remains relevant to those whose aim is to apply different perspectives to the nature of phenomena and fields of study. Gay’s assumption is therefore apt, and I doubt that anyone would have qualms with recognising the extensive scholarship generated around and as a consequence of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Equally apt, however, is Deleuze’s observation, particularly in view of the rather curious fact that music and the musical dimension that underpins Nietzsche’s body of work remain relatively untouched and seldom addressed critically. Music seems to have been rather central to Nietzsche’s life.