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In modern times, it is probably fair to say that this reluctance to give lasting value to the physical in music has led to a focus not so much on Platonic-like eternal forms but more on the inner life of the individual, especially the emotional life. What Ernst Kris notes in the development of visual art from the 16th century—a shift from the artist as manual worker to the artist as individual creator—could well apply to music: "The work of art is for the first time in human history considered as a projection of an inner image. It is not its proximity to reality that proves its value but its nearness to the artist's psychic life." Perhaps the best-known version of this outlook is the philosophy of "individual expressivism"—the view that music is (or ought to be) the outward expression of inner emotion, an externalizing of emotional urges and surges, sometimes with the aim of stimulating the same emotion in others. The physical elements of music become the mere means to conveying and provoking a (supposedly) nonphysical emotion. This is an immensely popular outlook, often simply assumed by default, not least in Christian churches.
This mind-set received classic expression in the romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (though with much greater subtlety than in most contemporary versions). With some of the Romantics, the artist's inner life became linked to the rhythms of the cosmos, the restless, infinite, spiritual momentum of nature. The Great Tradition thus received a new lease on life—music was thought to turn into sound the infinite play of the cosmos, through the strivings and struggles of the romantic composer or performer. It was thought by many that music unencumbered by words could do this best: instrumental music came to be exalted by many as supreme. Rendered marginal for so long in modernity, art (in the form of music) has returned with a vengeance to assume massive proportions as part of a vast cosmology revolving around the human ego. But what we should not miss here is the implicit devaluing of the physical as physical. Indeed, in some versions physical nature, far from being honored and listened to in its own integrity, is seen as needing the creative artist to come to fulfillment.
This hesitation to give enduring value to the physical qua physical can take rather different forms, however. In 1910 the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) completed what was to become a famous and much-read essay, "On the Spiritual in Art," drawing on ideas from a philosophical movement known as Theosophy. Kandinsky is of particular interest here because he pulls in music to buttress his argument. He is anxious about a crass materialism in contemporary culture, a widespread belief that anything not verifiable by our five senses is meaningless: "Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul."
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