In his 1766 book Laokoon, oder, über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing refers to the Greek writer Simonides of Ceos (556-468 B.C.E.), famous for his saying that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture. In The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, written some 150 years later, the American literary critic Irving Babbitt reminds his readers of this simile, asserting that in modern times—which, for him, is the 19th century—another opinion seems to hold almost equal status, namely that of architecture as frozen music. Babbitt interprets these words, which he attributes to Friedrich Schlegel, as an expression signaling that emotion has conquered form to such a degree that it has even come to influence architecture, the most form-bound of all the arts. Architecture, he concludes with a note of irony, must apparently be understood as benumbed or congealed emotion. Such a notion may result, Babbitt believes, from the Germans giving such a high status to music, the art least bound by form. Yet he fears that this inversion of Lessing's dictum may lead to the understanding that other forms of art can only approach perfection by absorbing something of the essence of music. For Babbitt, such a perspective represents not only a questionable mix of the arts’ expressive character, but also a danger of slipping towards artistic flattening.

Positing connections between architecture and music has a long tradition. In the 1st century B.C.E. Vitruvius included elements of Greek music theory in his writings on architecture. Medieval thinkers held that architectonic proportions were based on cosmological dimensions; and the early motet is often compared with the Gothic cathedral. Goethe proposed an analogy between architecture and music that closely resembles the one Babbitt found in Schlegel, although for Goethe it is architecture's ambience that comes closest to music's effect.

Arthur Schopenhauer, similarly concerned with how architecture relates to music, refers to Goethe's “witticism” on architecture as congealed music. Schopenhauer grants that he, too, can accept a certain analogy between musical rhythm and architectonic symmetry, but claims that this in no way touches the essence of the two art forms: “Indeed, it would be ridiculous to try to put the most limited and feeble of all the arts [architecture] on an equal footing in essential respects with the most extensive and effective [music].”