What Is Music?
This course is an introduction to one of the most
basic questions in the philosophy of music. The
course includes an historical overview, though
most attention will go to contemporary, (late)
20th-century ideas about the problems and
(im)possibilities to define music.
What is 'music'? A complex amalgam of melody,
harmony, rhythm, timbre and silence in a
particular (intended) structure (Hanslick)? A
sonoric event between noise and silence (Attali)?
A 'total social fact' (Molino)? Something in which
truth has set itself to work (Heidegger)?
Music. In the first place a word. As a word, it
has meaning. As a word, it gives meaning. Take
sounds for example: this sound is music. Which
actually conveys: 'we' consider this sound as
music. Music - as word - frames, delimits,
opens up, encloses. To call ('consecrate' as
Pierre Bourdieu would say) something music is a
political decision-making process. As a
grammatical concept, 'music' is useful: using this
concept, we differentiate between various
sounds. We divide, classify, categorize, name,
delimit: not every sound is music. Although,
since Cage, no single sound is by definition
banned from the musical domain. The word
'music' brings (necessary) structure and order
into the (audible) world.
But, there is also an other music; there is a
'musical dimension' that is much more difficult to
capture in words. This dimension might be
indicated as 'the sensual', something which can
and should (at least according to Søren
Kierkegaard) only be expressed in its immediacy.
This immediate - perhaps one could also speak
of 'the physical' - is erased at the moment when
it, through reflection, would be conceptualized; it
is by definition indefinable and therefore
unreachable by means of language. There is thus
something in music which can only be expressed
through or as music. The moment that language
tries to pinpoint this something, it dissolves and
is lost.
So, is it possible at all to define - that is: to
incorporate into a linguistic category - music?
Authors discussed: Plato, Eduard Hanslick, Jean-
Jacques Nattiez, Howard Becker, Martin
Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Richard Littlefield,
Jacques Attali.
