The first aphorism above, from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, is just one of a vast many that allude to the centrality of music to life, and especially its privileged relation to what makes a life worth living. For Nietzsche, as for many others, this trope locates in music a profound ability to stir not only our emotions but our deepest and most essential selves, and so it links us to something primordial and originary– something other or more than ‘worldly’. Music, for Nietzsche, makes life worth living by transcending the drudgery of our daily lives; it removes us from and operates beyond the passing appearances of both language and the mundane. Indeed, that Nietzsche repeatedly invokes aural metaphors in the philosophical task he has set himself, that of ‘sound[ing] out idols’, only makes this constellation of assumptions all the more interesting. He sets out ‘to ask questions with a hammer’, thus framing himself as an iconoclast (ergo an ‘image-breaker’) who will unseat the false, though often ‘most believed in’ idols of Western philosophy. And of course idol, like iconoclast, has a strongly ocular bias, and is variously defined as ‘an image or similitude of a deity’, ‘a representation’, ‘an image, effigy’, ‘a counterpart, likeness, imitation’, ‘visible but unsubstantial’ or a ‘false mental image’. Nietzsche's ‘great declaration of war’, through his sounding out of idols, is therefore premised on the apparent duplicity of the visual domain– the dissimulation of the world as it appears– and the privileged relation of the auditory domain– of sound, hearing and music– to depth, truth and the real.