Programme & Abstracts

In his Aesthetics of Music (1997), Roger Scruton characterizes musical arrangements and transcriptions as ‘versions’ of an original work, ‘attempts to realize, in another medium, its musical essence’. This idea might be termed ‘fidelity-essentialism’, because it posits fidelity to the supposed ‘essence’ (or ‘expressive content’) of an existing work as the defining characteristic of any musical arrangement. In espousing fidelity-essentialism, Scruton’s definition reflects a broad consensus on this topic among analytic philosophers, including Stephen Davies (‘Transcription, Authenticity, and Performance’, 1988), Paul Thom (The Musician as Interpreter, 2007), and Joseph Moore writing with composer Richard Beaudoin (‘Conceiving Musical Transdialection’, 2008). These philosophers seek to formalize and refine so-called ‘common sense’ ideas about arrangement; their fidelity-essentialist approach therefore reaffirms and entrenches that which has dominated informal as well as scholarly discussions of the topic for well over a century. This paper, by contrast, offers a critical perspective on this fidelity-essentialist conception of arrangement. Its approach is musicological, driven by a receptive engagement with actual examples of music and relevant contexts that philosophical accounts often lack. These examples range from Schumann’s hearing of Schubert’s Grand Duo piano duet to Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 performed by a band of miners in the film Brassed Off (1996). In this way, the paper identifies both the aesthetic and ideological motivations of fidelity-essentialism and its drawbacks as means to understand arrangements in musical, cultural, and historical terms. The paper also proposes an alternative approach, arguing that it is more useful to consider arrangement as a mode of reception (or ‘way of listening’) than as a category of musical objects defined by their fidelity to an existing work.

The transatlantic complexion of Luciano Berio’s brand of postwar modernism has long overshadowed the importance of his relationship to the history of Italian music. Although evidence of this lifelong commitment can be found in his transcriptions of works by Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Boccherini, Giuseppe Verdi, and Giacomo Puccini, the fact that Berio’s transcriptions have been accorded a secondary status in assessments of the composer’s output has also meant that the question of what shaped his attitude toward the music of his Italian forbears remains to be fully explored. Thanks in part to an array of newly-available primary sources housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation, it is now possible to consider how Berio approached the task of transcribing these works, while also allowing us to situate the resulting transcriptions at the heart of his larger creative practice. In this paper I argue that the richly annotated “source scores” Berio used as a starting point for his transcriptions not only provide a unique perspective from which to address the recurring question in transcription studies concerning the ontological status of co-authored works, but also offer evidence of how he listened to the music he transcribed. Indeed, Berio’s autograph annotations make clear that while these transcriptions rely on an intimate knowledge of an original “text,” his relationship to these texts has also been shaped by the lingering sonic traces of the performed work as remembered and misremembered over the course of a lifetime of listening. Berio’s attempt to position himself as a listening subject whose deep music-historical awareness is often informed by a strong sense of ironic detachment is reflected with particular clarity in his transcriptions of Monteverdi (Orfeo, L’incoronazione di Poppea), Verdi (Otto Romanze), and Puccini (Turandot), an eclectic group of co-authored works that form part of a larger dialogue with the very notion of an Italian musical tradition that extends back to a generation of composers— including Berio’s teacher, Giorgio Federico Ghedini—who came of age in the 1920s and 30s.

In 2013 the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra premiered the “Final Symphony”—a set of orchestral arrangements based on Nobuo Uematsu’s music for the Final Fantasy video game series—at the Historische Stadthalle; just two years later, the London Symphony Orchestra released a recording of the Final Symphony. Even among the ever-growing brand of game music concerts, the Final Symphony stands apart with its extreme “highbrow” aspirations. Rather than being composed of orchestral suites and standalone pieces based on orchestral transcriptions of 8-and 16-bit music (as frequently happens in these game music concerts), the Final Symphony program instead borrows the music from three of the Final Fantasy games (Final Fantasy VI  (1994), Final Fantasy VII (1997), and Final Fantasy X (2001)), and freely arranges the music from these games into “proper” symphonic forms (a tone poem, symphony, and concerto, respectively). And yet, by nature of the unpretentious source music (“lowbrow” video games), these arrangements aspiring to Romantic Workhood occupy a space of transformative dissonance, speaking to the “fundamental incompatibility” William Gibbons sees between video games and classical music (2018: 157). Indeed, they inherently problematize Peter Szendy’s discussion of transcriptions and arrangements. More specifically, here the work precedes the Work.

Drawing on theories of arrangement (Szendy 2008), ontology (Goehr 1992; Kane 2017), and ludomusical (re)play (Gibbons 2018), I show that what Gibbons calls the “classifying” of game music leads to an explicit (postmodern) reversal of Szendy’s Lisztian (and Benjaminian) process of translation and the Schumannian notion of arrangement. I demonstrate this with Masashi Hamauzu’s contribution to the Final Symphony concert program: Final Fantasy X – Piano Concerto. Specifically, I examine the second movement, “Inori”, which is primarily arranged from Nobuo Uematsu’s “Hymn of the Fayth,” a piece which itself has multiple (diegetic) arrangements scattered across Final Fantasy X’s epic narrative.

Proponents of 4E cognition argue that we routinely “offload” our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones, search engines, and other people as memory aids. These environmental resources transform our cognitive profile in real-time by “scaffolding” access to novel forms of cognition and behavior. Recent debates in this area have taken a social turn. They stress not only the way agents interact with their world but also the way the world, in turn, interacts with agents at multiple timescales, within distinct sociocultural contexts organized by specific material and normative aspects that shape how agents relate to and understand one another.

In this talk, I adopt a 4E approach to music cognition. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music potentially scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behavior. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold self-regulative process constitutive of emotional consciousness, as well as shared behavioral mechanisms (mimicry, behavioral synchronization, affectively motivated movements, interactions, etc) responsible for our empathic connections with others. In developing this idea, I consider both the “material” and “worldmaking” character of music, two features of musical engagements largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. I argue that music not only scaffolds the development of individual perceptual and affective skills needed for empathy but, additionally, that it can also be used to construct empathic spaces: sonically-structured environments engineered to connect, share, and collaborate with others. From a 4E perspective, music should thus be seen both as a medium for empathic engagement as well as affording an empathic world in which we may explore, experiment with, and enact a range of subject positions and social formations. In developing these ideas, I discuss several case studies, including music as a weapon for torture and music therapy in autism.

A DJ is a musical performer who mixes together recordings of rhythmically stimulating music for dancing or head bobbing crowds in clubs, raves, bars, festivals and house parties. Perhaps the most central musical skill of a DJ is to mix records together in a way that does not disrupt the tempo of the groove. This is not a trivial task since different tracks will be recorded in different tempi. A DJ playing vinyl records on turntables will employ techniques known as slip-cuing and beatmatching to seamlessly mix tracks together and create a long and continuous dance track. What are the temporal processes involved in mastering such skills and what can DJ techniques tell us about how the mind perceives and produces regular beats? In this paper, I describe the processes of phase and period correction in rhythmic entrainment and consider how such basic human cognitive capacities must be consciously and masterfully manipulated in DJ practice. The beatmatching DJ is posited as an Extended and Enacted mind in which the temporal estimations that are often thought to occur within our own endogenous systems are instead physically enacted and distributed across the body, the brain and the turntables, highlighting the fundamentally embodied nature of entrainment. While strongly related, Enactivism and Extended Mind Theory have appealed to proponents of different models of brain function, with Extended Mind theorists accommodating Predictive Processing models and Enactivists drawing on Systems Dynamics. By considering entrainment in the beatmatching DJ, I highlight how these models differ in the extent of their embodiment and suggest that by choosing the Enactivist view, the enactive, predictive and extended properties of temporal processing can be unified in DJing and in sensorimotor behavior more broadly.

Some cognitive tasks involved in musical performance, listening, and composition feature an important element of anticipation to non-actual musical events; these phenomena have raised interesting research within the philosophy of music. Here, I will suggest that they also offer significant case studies for modal epistemology: an account of musical anticipation is an account of sensitivity and knowledge of musical possibilities. This has been completely omitted by modal epistemologists. Philosophers working in these two areas should pay attention to each others’ work.

One recent point of contention about the anticipatory features of auditory perception is whether it involves internal representational models, or if it relies instead on bodily or external mechanisms. Various authors (Krueger 2009, Schiavio 2014, Forlè 2016) have endorsed fully enactive accounts, while others (Maes et al (2013), Maers & Leman (2014)) endorse more moderate views. This debate (which I will try to assess critically) suggests an important way in which to incorporate insights from embodied cognition into the philosophy of music and epistemology. Indeed, I think this connection could also provide an independent way to defend the idea that our minds are “musically scaffolded” (Krueger 2014, 2019), effectively extending evolutionarily selected cognitive capacities into affective and social domains. From this I will extract some lessons for the modal epistemology of music.

Did particular philosophies serve as a backdrop to the formulation of historical liturgies, guiding their development? The fact that the chant repertoire is aggregated from various times and places can suggest that it is misguided to look for any overarching intention or blueprint for the end result. Yet the lack of a detailed blueprint does not necessarily mean the final organization is arbitrary. Besides how-to books and texts of the liturgy itself, two literary forms that can help address this question are the Expositio Missae and the Mystagogia. Expositiones present allegorical meanings of liturgical actions, but these are usually dismissed as fanciful, inventing new meaning rather than unpacking existing symbolism. Mystagogy is presented to offer deeper understanding of the sacred mysteries—the liturgy—to newly-baptized neophytes. Unlike Expositiones, mystagogical works can draw on a significant amount of philosophy to articulate their theology.

I suggested in a previous paper that the Exitus-Reditus pattern is repeated at different “magnifications” in every Mass, through liturgical seasons and finally through the Eschaton. This microcosm-macrocosm relationship, found also in Christian Platonism, may underlie the editorial arrangement of chants in the Mass. Here, I examine the thought of Maximus the Confessor (particularly in his Mystagogia) and his use of this concept to explain the meaning of liturgy. As an Eastern theologian, he is presenting the Byzantine liturgy, but his explanation does not hinge on its details. Instead, his starting point is a metaphysical account of the cosmos and its symbolic structure. Patterns Maximus uses to articulate theology map plausibly onto patterns in the chants promulgated in Francia in the eighth century. The Expositiones can be defended as a pedagogical “flattening” of a complex pattern. The historical facts of Maximus’ career suggest that his work could have influenced the organization of the Roman chant Propers, but this is not strongly argued. Rather, the investigation suggests an approach to meaning that allows for change and variation while conforming to larger patterns, honouring the intellectual acumen of its editors and compilers.

The paper explores how Carolingian readers may have understood 1) the notion expressed by Isidore of Seville, that the sounds (soni) of music cannot be written (scribi non possunt); 2) the notion of a structural similarity between verbal and non-verbal vocal sound (uox articulata and uox canora) maintained in Calcidius’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and seized on in the opening passage of the Musica enchiriadis. It makes an attempt to reconstruct the Carolingian comprehension of these two assertions in the light of concepts of Ancient Greek philosophy that had been passed on to ninth-century recipients north of the Alps in the context of late-antique (Greek-Latin) and Carolingian (transalpine) knowledge transfer: 1) the different classifications of vocal sounds taught by Roman grammarians (uox articulata, uox confusa; uox litterata, uox illiterata) and stemming back to distinctions suggested by Stoic logic (phone semantike, phone enarthros, phone engrammatos); 2) Boethius’ translation of and commentary on Aristotle’s Peri hermeineias (De interpretatione).In doing so, the paper offers observations on one line of the tradition of ancient philosophy,the impact of which on the formation of western music thinking during the Carolingian period has received little attention from music historians.

Antique texts about musica made available to the middle ages a specific body of numerical knowledge and particular ways of thinking about number. The ninth-century reception of these texts drew no nice distinctions between what was musical and what was athematical or philosophical, and we cannot often separate the one from the other. In this paper I shall trace one small part of this knotty reception. I shall turn to the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena and to his major work, the Periphyseon. This text ranges widely, and takes for its subject ‘all the things that are and all the things that are not’. In the third book of the Periphyseon Eriugena addresses the question of how all things may be at once both eternal and made, and how God might both make all things and be made in all things. He presents number as an example drawn from nature, by means of which this dilemma may be comprehended by the human mind. I shall argue that the the sixth book of Augustine’s De musica is an unacknowledged source for Eriugena’s account of number. Augustine sets out a numerical cosmology, in which the human soul is connected to the material world and to the divine by number, as it proceeds first into time and then into place. Despite his sometimes divergent readings of place and time, Eriugena adopts large parts of this Augustinian account in his own account of number. Central to this is memory, and its receipt of numbers both from the intellect and from the senses.

Written in Vienna in 1854, Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (OMB) and its aesthetic terminology operates within the traditions and limitations of its time and space. Though Hanslick’s criticism of the ‘feeling theory’ of music and his rather specific notion of ‘Gefühl’ (feeling / emotion) has attracted considerable attention, specifically from analytic philosophers of music, other aspects of his philosophical vocabulary and its often opaque and problematic nature went largely unnoticed. This is particularly true for Hanslick’s notion of ‘beauty’ resp. ‘the beautiful’ that is in the centre not only of the book’s title but also the basic core concept of OMB itself. Difficult to translate, Hanslick’s notions of beauty are even challenging in the original German text of OMB.

The talk aims at reconstructing Hanslick’s usage of ‘beauty’ and related concepts (‘schön,’ ‘das Schöne,’ ‘Schönheit’) and their role in Hanslick’s aesthetic theory. Most importantly, ‘das Schöne’ resp. ‘das Musikalisch-Schöne’ (‘the musically beautiful’), as used in OMB, refers to both, (a) a set of abstract aesthetic properties (resp. the whole class of aesthetic properties), and (b), a concrete aesthetic object (resp. the whole class of aesthetic objects), depending on the context. This is an important ambiguity at the core of Hanslick’s aesthetics that demands systematic investigation. The ambiguity also enables Hanslick to avoid clear ontological commitments, leaving a central part of his aesthetic theory somewhat underdetermined.

A second, frequently overlooked, conceptual tension in OMB is between descriptive and normative usage of beauty related vocabulary. While the descriptive usage of ‘schön’ (‘beautiful’) relates to Hanslick’s program of formulating a more abstract theory of aesthetic properties relatively independent of value judgments (thus reflecting on the historically contingent nature of such judgments), the normative usage focuses on ‘beautiful’ as an antonym of ‘ugly’ and aims at establishing criteria for the aesthetic evaluation of concrete works of music. The basic tension between the different aspects of beauty related concepts is seldom reflected in Hanslick scholarship, yet central for any more elaborated understanding of his aesthetic approach.

This paper discusses the new translation of the tenth edition (1904) of Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 1854) in light of modern-day translation studies and its distinction between domesticating and foreignizing modes of translation, as propounded in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 lecture On the Different Methods of Translating. The translation is of the foreignizing type, advocated by translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. It aims at preserving where possible the diction, rhetorical emphasis, and, in general, the intrinsic cultural and verbal characteristics of the German original. The domesticating type, by contrast, championed by Eugene Nida, neutralizes such characteristics of the source language, masking its strangeness for a non-native reader by transforming it into the idioms of the target language. As Schleiermacher vividly put it, a foreignizing translation transports the reader to the writer’s world, while a domesticating one, conversely, transports the writer to the reader’s world.

The paper takes as a point of departure the understanding of language as a vehicle for communicating sense and meaning through deliberate, strategic use of vocabulary, syntax, and rhetoric. Because languages differ from one another fundamentally in their means and modes of expression, beyond serving as vehicles for communicating meaning, languages also constitute meaning. Translation thus necessarily reconstitutes in the target language the thoughts and ideas expressed in the characteristic forms of the source language. Referring to various passages in Hanslick’s treatise, the essay contrasts the new, foreignizing translation with both Gustav Cohen’s mostly domesticating one of 1891 as “The Beautiful in Music”, and Geoffrey Payzant’s mixed-mode one of 1986 as “On the Musically-Beautiful”, which is at times foreignizing, at others domesticating, and yet others simply incorrect. Given the complexity of Hanslick’s ideas and the idiosyncrasies of his writing style, it is not surprising that it has prompted different approaches to translation. Further complicating the translator’s task in general is that the reconstituted meaning in a translation is in some measure always a matter of speculation because an author’s intent is never fully open to us.

Anglo-American research into the central tenets of Hanslick’s aesthetics has traditionally been conducted as part of analytical philosophy. The interpretation of Hanslick’s concepts is therefore dependent on the English renditions of On the Musically Beautiful (OMB) by Cohen (1891) and Payzant (1986). This setting created an ever-growing gap between German-language and English-language discourse(s) on OMB for two reasons: (1) They rest upon distinct versions of the same text. Whereas German-language scholarship is based on the initial edition of 1854, the translators used later editions that read more formalistic than earlier versions. (2) Furthermore, Anglo-American interpretations of OMB not only have to cope with the conceptual intricacies of Hanslick’s argument, they must also consider the inevitable interpretive choices carried out by the respective translators.

These choices pertain to the privileging of “advanced” versions of OMB as well as to the rendition of specific concepts. Their impact on the Anglo-American reception of Hanslick’s aesthetics is the topic of my paper. The importance of editorial decisions for the comprehension of Hanslick’s concepts becomes apparent especially in regard to Cohen’s translation of OMB as The Beautiful in Music. This translation contradicts Hanslick, who did not propose an abstract principle of beauty, retroactively applicable to music, but was concerned exclusively with musical beauty. Cohen’s rendition suggests a theoretical essentialism totally absent from Hanslick’s aesthetics, which shaped the interpretation of generations of scholars.

With this context in mind, I will pay special attention to Hanslick’s (in)famous sentence that the content of music consists in “sound and motion,” “tonally moving forms,” or “sonically moved forms.” These three translations—taken from the full-text English editions of OMB—are nothing but the most prominent examples of more than four dozen attempts to capture the meaning of Hanslick’s statement. These attempts fall into certain conceptual categories (“form” versus “forms,” the derivatives of “sound” versus those of “tone” etc.), which stand for distinct modes of interpretation. These modes in turn rely on general discursive features of Anglo-American scholarship in musicology and philosophy that will be explored as part of my paper.

Near the beginning of his early Compendium of Music (1618), Descartes lays out the book’s aesthetic and cognitive principles in a series of “Preliminary Points,” arguing (in brief) that “the senses” can take “delight” only in those objects which, because they exhibit simple proportional relations, are perceived “distinctly” (distincte). Proportions of excessive complexity, such as those involving irrational quantities, he asserts, “can in no way be perfectly grasped (cognosci) … by the senses (à sensu),” for when confronted by relations lacking the requisite degree of simplicity our “sense is always deceived” (sensum perpetuo decipi). Thus—as the eminent Descartes scholar Stephen Gaukroger has noted—right from the start Descartes is already focused on the crucial role of something very much like what will later, in his most celebrated and influential writings, constitute the epistemological foundation of the Cogito: those mental entities or events that he comes to call “clear and distinct” ideas or perceptions.

However, as I go on to show, clarity and simplicity of percepts and concepts—immediate, effortless aesthetic and cognitive perspicuity—had since antiquity played an equally foundational role in precisely the intellectual field in which Descartes was working in the Compendium, that is, musica theorica or speculativa: the “Pythagorean,” mathematical theory of music. Thus it is no mere accident, nor is it entirely owing to his unique genius, that the young Descartes here invests these perceptual and cognitive properties with so much value: it is, rather, a quite natural consequence of his engagement, in the Compendium, with traditional musica theorica.  After making these points I turn to the philosophical reasons why mathematical music theory—unlike geometry—from antiquity through early modernity had always rejected the irrational in favour exclusively of rational quantities, and had moreover sometimes regarded as “irrational” certain proportions that are in fact not so. In this way I identify an archaic and idiosyncratic “Pythagorean” form of “rationality,” the lifespan of which extended from antiquity into at least the seventeenth century, when, transmuted in the alembic of Descartes’ thought, it came to play an unlooked-for role in the foundation of modern philosophy.

The late treatises by Jean-Philippe Rameau are often dismissed for being based upon preposterous statements (such as that it is the music that provides the basic laws for the sciences), as well as employing some obscured neo-scholastic terminology (such as “antecedent” and “consequent” applied to harmonic functions). In Rameau scholarship, this reputation has been too often misused as a justification for studying his late treatises superficially and sticking to prejudices. Correspondingly, Rameau’s motivation for borrowing and developing some new concepts around 1760 is typically attributed to his pugnacity in the debates with the encyclopaedists and to his vain ambitions to find allies in other intellectual circles; his conscientiousness as a theorist is severely underestimated. I seek to contextualize Rameau’s late concepts and trace their origins, with a special attention to the practice of men of letters in the mid-18th century to pick only some elements from various philosophical systems – rather than to support or dismiss this or that system as a whole.

My goal is to show how the theoretical transfer undertaken by Rameau was driven both by the inner development of his theory and by the external intellectual context. Considering the former, it was primarily the abandonment of belief in the lower harmonic partials. As for the latter, it was the growing polarity between the camps of supporters of John Locke and Christian Wolff, which nevertheless sparked some fascinating attempts to reconcile and synthesize these philosophical systems. While in the philosophy such an enterprise was undertaken by Johann Heinrich Lambert in his celebrated Neues Organon (1764), in music theory it was Rameau with his Nouvelles réfléxions sur le principe sonore (1760) and especially unfinished Véritées egalement interessantes et ignorés (1764). I will argue that a proper contextualisation might overcome some of the misunderstanding these treatises have been suffering from for many years.

In his essay on Stéphane Mallarmé and mimesis, “The Double Session,” Jacques Derrida writes in passing that he is also commenting, furtively (en sous-main), on Mallarmé’s own account of the music drama of Richard Wagner. This remark, which seems cryptic at first, can be clarified somewhat by looking to Derrida’s earlier 1968–69 seminar, L’Écriture et le théâtre, in which he more explicitly situates his reading of Mallarmé in terms of the poet’s own relationship to Wagner, or at least to a certain Wagnerism. In this paper, then, I will explore Mallarmé’s agonistic readings of Wagner from the mid-1880s in relation to these two texts by Derrida, emphasizing how they provide a generally overlooked context from the history of opera against which Derrida developed his approach to mimesis. To do so, I will first address Wagner’s own resistances to the concept of mimesis, as he allegorized them in the character Mime in Der Ring des Nibelungen. I will then briefly describe Mallarmé’s suspicions of Wagner’s project, after which I will turn to “The Double Session” and L’Écriture et le théâtre, in order to show how Derrida’s interpretation of mimesis in Mallarmé’s writing (particularly as it relates to a use of the term “Hymen”) can be understood as a commentary on Wagner’s aesthetics of immediacy. Ultimately, this paper will suggest that Mallarmé’s critiques of Wagner, as they are taken up and broadly developed by Derrida, can offer a robust reconsideration of the role that mimesis might play in discourses on opera and program music—according to which the arts would be brought together not on the basis of their resemblances, but on the basis of their potential to produce differences and ruptures within one another.

The concept of “musica ficta” plays an important role in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s account of the aesthetization—or figuration—of politics, situating music within his critique of the metaphysical account of the subject as “onto-typology.” Adapted from Adorno (and not from Renaissance performance practice), the term musica ficta evokes the Latin fingere, meaning to form or fashion but also to feign or act. For Lacoue-Labarthe, this fictionning power of music—and for him all modern music is musica ficta—serves to fashion or to “type” plastic subjects and communities according to pre-determined figures, as catastrophically demonstrated by Wagner and Nazism. Lacoue-Labarthe’s account of musica ficta, however, is complicated by his claim in “Typography” and elsewhere that there is no “hither” side of mimesis, no pure appearance without (re)presentation. Indeed, while it seems clear that music is an effective medium for fashioning subjects, arguing that music, as musica ficta, is “subordinated” to fictionning implies that this is an accidental determination of an otherwise sovereign, non-mimetic music.

This paper works through these competing claims to conclude that, while not all music might be musica ficta, music is indeed inseparable from a more general notion of mimesis that Lacoue-Labarthe develops in “The Echo of the Subject” and later in Le chant des muses. There, music is a “catacoustic mimesis” of the “absolutely anterior” experience of hearing the mother’s voice while in the womb. This is the “original” music—essentially phrasing and rhythm—of which the rest is amplification and echo. Jean-Luc Nancy has explored the consequences of this thought for a theory of the subject in On Listening but, I argue, catacoustic mimesis is also what produces music’s affective, mimetic potential and thus the possibility of its being harnessed by totalitarianism through musica ficta. To conclude, I show how catacoustic mimesis echoes Plato’s accounts of music in the Republic, and how it also responds to Freudian and Girardian mimetologies where art is the sublimated repetition of originary murder or sacrifice.

When Wittgenstein introduced his core ideas on aesthetics in 1938, it was by asserting that the whole field of philosophical aesthetics was “entirely misunderstood”, as notions such as “beautiful” was prone to misconception. (LC I 1) What may mislead us, according to Wittgenstein, is the generality of the linguistic form “is beautiful´, which disguises the complex conditions of musical appreciation: full appreciation of a musical work of art requires deep cultural understanding.

Today, “beauty” has to some extent been replaced in contemporary analytical philosophy, by a variegated notion of “aesthetic properties” (denoting e.g. “harmony”, “vividness”, or emotive properties such as “being mournful”). This paper explores how this shift of locus may offer philosophical progress from a Wittgensteinian point of view, as it allows for a more complex image of appreciation. Nevertheless, the depth of our aesthetic engagements arguably still eludes us in our new focus on the generality of ‘properties’. Recognizing some of these pitfalls, philosophers such as Peter Kivy and David Michael Levin have drawn on Wittgenstein’s treatment of so-called ‘aspect perception’ to advance the debate. Interrogating Kivy and Levin, I argue that their contributions still fail to incorporate temporal, cultural and embodied dimensions integral to Wittgenstein’s own investigation of aspect perception. Drawing in particular on Wittgenstein’s suggestion that “grief” – more than picking out properties – is a variation-concept (deeply woven into various practices), I suggest that a way forward may be to pay attention to musical instruction in connection with hearing aspects. I present a brief case study drawing on the work of contemporary composer Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi. If – as Wittgenstein suggests – philosophy should understand musical appreciation through a lens of culture, Ahvenniemi’s instructions to the musicians who play her work serve as a potent example of how a more musical philosophical investigation may be carried out.

Crunchy. Sick. Nasty. Wrong. These are just a few of the words musicians use to describe a particular musical experience. The particular experience I have in mind is what I call ‘wrongness’ and its occurrence is something we are all aware of, whether one’s musical preferences ally with punk rock or with J.S. Bach. To put it generally, ‘wrongness’ is a musical phenomenon that involves the occurrence of unexpected events in the course of a musical experience. It is an occurrence that can be surprising, unsettling, shocking, or breathtaking, just to name a few, but the one thing that all cases of ‘wrongness’ have in common is the re-ordering of musical expectation. While there are many cases that involve the occurrence of unexpected events in the course of a musical experience, not all of which will be cases of wrongness, I will argue that wrongness is a unique kind of musical phenomenon that belongs to a class of its own. The two main features of wrongness that I will highlight to argue for this thesis are (1) that wrongness is reliably distinguished from other kinds of unexpected musical events, like mistakes, and (2) that ‘wrong’ notes or passages are often perceived as some of the most pivotal or significant moments in a piece of music. In my treatment of this phenomenon, I will proceed as follows. First, I will give provide a working definition of wrongness and support it with a selection of musical examples. Following this, I will argue that wrongness is of a singular class by examining and offering support of (1) and (2) above. I will conclude with some discussion of the ramifications that this understanding of wrongness might have for a broader theory of musical meaning and understanding.

Every musician knows what the term “dynamics” means. This term indicates the system of symbols that mark variations in the intensity of sound production. These “dynamic” signs regulate the discrete gradations of sound intensity. These signs are largely conventional, the intensity of which is never absolute, often linked to the specific piece of music or to the notational conventions of various musical eras and aesthetics. In a general sense, one might think that a clear conceptualisation of dynamics leads to the development of a new musical aesthetic, an aesthetic that has at its centre the concept of force. This new approach allows aesthetics to cross its own limits and step into the realm of Ontology. It could be possible that a deeper understanding of music could pass precisely through the idea that the forces that preside over musical dynamics are nothing but the same forces operating in nature.

This paper’s aim is to examine the conceptual relationship between the notion of dynamics in music and the idea of ​​dynamics as “power” and “potentiality” in metaphysics. What is implicit in both notions is the idea of “force”, as configured in a philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. It is no coincidence that the system of symbols that, in music, indicates the intensity of sound, its strength and its expression, takes its name from this philosophical concept. In which sense does the term dynamics, as a theory of force and potentiality, step into the field of music? The Aristotelian concept of dynamis, Leibniz’s theory of vis activa and the Nietzschean “Will to Power” reveal their profound meaning when related to the specific dynamic ontology realized by music. Two contemporary musical examples, taken from flute works by Sciarrino and Hosokawa, show with particular evidence how to understand a metaphysical idea of ​​musical dynamics.

Describing and evaluating aesthetic objects or events which stand outside familiar genre and stylistic boundaries presents a special problem. It’s not simply the difficulty of “effing the ineffable”, of finding exactly the right term or terms to capture the nature of the subjective experience, which is after all a familiar problem in criticism. It’s more that in the contemporary arts, the intelligible link between description and evaluation we take to exist in familiar critical terms such as “graceful” and “grand” has become dysfunctional. This is shown in the frequent use of such terms as “twisted” and “perverted” in film and fiction criticism, as terms of approbation. Clearly the link here between the named quality and the associated evaluation must work in a different way. One can observe an analogous phenomenon in critical writing and in everyday discourse around contemporary art music, where novel terms such as “immersive” and “hypnotic” have spread like wildfire in recent years.

Calling on recent work in ethics and aesthetics on the nature of “thick” and “thin” terms, which tries to explicate exactly how the functions of description and evaluation are differently combined in different sorts of term, this paper will offer an explication of the way these two functions are related in a number of terms now commonly used to describe the experience of listening to contemporary music. In doing so, the author hopes to shed a little light on the changing nature of avant-garde or “cutting-edge” musical experiences, as revealed in the terms listeners now use to talk about them.

In his later works, Merleau-Ponty seems to offer two contradictory claims about the phenomenology of music. In Eye and Mind, he is disparaging of music’s ability to capture brute meaning, which he thinks is vital to the project of phenomenology. Instead, he condemns music as only being able to depict the movement of Being. By contrast, in his posthumous Two Unpublished Notes on Music and The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes music as an ideal model of how meaning arises from sensible objects. He uses the specific notion of a musical idea to explore the complex relation between sensible experiences and the ideas that arise from them, a relation which he considers to pose the most difficult and important challenge to phenomenological analysis. In these later texts, Merleau-Ponty regards music as integral to and exemplary of his phenomenology.

Rather than rejecting these seemingly oppositional positions as inconsistent, I propose that they can and should be reconciled. In this way, the very reason why Merleau-Ponty thinks music is only able to represent the ‘ebb and flow’ of experience, is also the foundational reason for thinking that music is an exemplary model of perceptual experience. In order to argue for this, I will use Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘chiasm’ to reconstruct an account of the perception of music. Such an account emphasises music’s importance as an intermediary moment of transition between our sensible perception of music as ‘sound’, and our perception of music as ‘idea’. I will ultimately conclude that the disparaging characteristics bestowed on music in Eye and Mind, and the complimentary discussion of the musical idea in the posthumous texts are not just compatible, but mutually necessary for understanding Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological project.

This paper explores the relationship between jazz improvisation and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophy of J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Toril Moi. I begin by sketching an approach to understanding improvised music that discovers in certain exemplary improvised solos instances of what these philosophers mean when they use the concepts of the ordinary, the close-to-hand, the common, the unexceptional, and the everyday. My argument is that ordinary language philosophy provides us with a theoretical framework for challenging the commonly asserted notions of jazz improvisation as either as an ungrounded or aimless activity that is disconnected from people’s day-to-day experiences. Instead, I want to propose that jazz improvisation can be understood as emerging from, and reflecting on, those ordinary, unrehearsed, lived activities through which people become conscious of themselves talking with, and being among, others. The first part of the paper will compare the opening bars of a solo by Miles Davis on two different live recordings he made of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1937 song ‘My Funny Valentine’ and comment on several existing analyses of these recordings. My claim here is that these performances are in many ways paradigmatic of the problems of understanding improvisation as an imperfect art; and, furthermore, I want to suggest that this condition of imperfection exemplifies what ordinary language philosophers describe as a process of ‘returning to the ordinary’ (Cavell, 2005: 9). I conclude with a discussion of the implications of such incomplete or imperfect experiences for how we think more broadly about the problem of everyday aesthetics in music.

In ‘Aesthetic Supervenience’, Jerrold Levinson defends the thesis of emergentism as the best account of the dependence relation between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. My proposal in this paper is to challenge the application of his thesis to pure-interval (just) triadic harmony and defend the positive condition-governing position, which he rejects. In response, I argue that emergentism runs into problems when we consider the case of consonance as an aesthetic property. My objection draws on issues stemming from the use of equal temperament (the major third interval in particular, but not exclusively), which indicate that the positive condition-governing position is more adequate to understanding the metaphysical tie between the consonance of a major triad and the non-aesthetic properties of its constituting tones (e.g. a 5:4 ratio, or the equivalent measurement in cents). By implication, I defend the view that any attempt to describe the consonance of a just tertian chord as contingently emerging from its non-aesthetic base is tantamount to dismissing its uniqueness as both an aesthetic property and a sensory quality.

My aim is to critically discuss Benenti and Meini’s (2017) explanation of musical expressiveness. While discarding theories such as that of the imagined “musical persona”, Benenti and Meini propose to develop the “contour theory” (CT). According to CT, musical expressiveness depends on the resemblance between perceptible musical features and the external appearance of the ordinary expression of emotions. However, the perception of resemblances between musical expressive features and human expressive behaviour seems to be an effect, rather than a condition, for the perception of music as expressive. For this reason, Meini and Benenti correct CT. They argue that musical expressiveness does not depend on the similarity between musical and behavioural perceptive patterns, but on the presence of perceptual elementary dynamic features that “can indeed belong to the articulated pattern of emotions independently of their being instantiated by human, animate beings or by objects such as pieces of music” (Benenti and Meini 2017: 655).

This proposal does not work. On the one hand, the theory does not overcome the flaws of CT. The problems related to the role of resemblance recur when it comes to explaining how and in what sense music and human expressive behaviour share the same elemental perceptive features. Benenti and Meini simply move to a “deeper” level, from perceptual patterns to their elementary components, the place of the resemblance (which remains a prerequisite of their version of CT). On the other hand their theory seems able to explain only a “shallow” kind of expressivity (negative vs. positive emotions), modelled on an elementary visual expressiveness, underestimating the role of temporal development in shaping musical expressiveness. Consequently, this proposal does not explain the aesthetic complexity of musical expressiveness which is reduced to that of visual static emoticons. Moreover, as I shall argue, elementary perceptive features cannot ground musical expressiveness independently from the – musical, cultural, social, etc. – context in which they are perceived. Even at the purely perceptual level, the musical experience is organized holistically and it is this holistic organization that allows the musical articulation of a complex, profound, as well as aesthetically elaborated musical expressiveness.