In order to say anything meaningful about music at all, it is necessary to thoroughly examine the elements out of which music arises or, in other words, the elements that we invest with the meaning of musicality. The majority of the perceptions that become the object of the musical are phonic perceptions. It is therefore clear that there is something uniquely peculiar in the way we animals relate to sounds. It is, I argue, through the productive play between our boundaries against the external world and our experience of embodiment. These two polarities, one outgoing, directed at the environment through perception, and one ingoing, directed at the internal feelings of our own body, create the electric potential out of which all artistic production arises. This productive tension immediately invests the objects of our perception with meaning, and this becomes particularly evident in our relationship to sound. We hear rhythm in everything. From the falling of rain to the sound of a language, each one of our phonic perceptions is experienced through what we might call a musical lens. Time becomes ordered, and it acquires meaning, in virtue of us relating our physical perception of recurrent phonic events to our experience as embodied beings. The internal perception we have of ourselves is put into relation with the perception we have of external objects (or mental images of objects obtained from said perceptions). It is this double-aspectivity, as Plessner[1] would call it, characteristic of the human condition, that leads to us relating to sound as we do. We understand sound, at least partly, in relation to our internal experience of embodiment. We relate to this aspect of music explicitly through dance, but it is nonetheless present (if not predominant) in all of our forms of engagement with sound.
It is worth pointing out a fundamental element in our perception of sound, and, even more so, of rhythm, is the temporal element. As perceptions arise from our existing immersed in space and time, it’s only obvious that they will be shaped by them. The time to which perception is originally susceptible, however, is itself completely different from the objective perception of time we normally have. Time, Kant teaches us, is necessarily an a priori form of perception and thought, and as such it constitutes an essential element of human existence: in being bodies, we constantly experience the passage of time first handedly. The time we witness in our own body, however, is not that of the macroscopic scale of aging (that is to say that our experience of time is not a linear one), but rather on the microscopic scale of recurring cycles or rhythmic repetitions of events.
Our understanding of sound is always filtered by our embodied experience, which is in turn largely defined by movement. From the beating of our hearts, to our breathing, to the movements of our limbs: to be embodied is to be moving. This embodied sense of movement is what creates for us ordered time, which is itself a necessary condition for any meaning to exist at all. Consistently recurring internal feelings of movement give time meaning and structure. The so-called “rhythm of life”, the cyclical rising and falling of our chest, the feeling of our heartbeat, and so on, are the first orderers of time. In this sense, animals, as moving bodies, are themselves completely immersed in time. In attributing a meaning to sound, we create a playful dialogue between this internal timeliness, related to the kinetik realm of the body, and an external perception, namely that of a phonic event. Our experience of sound is based largely on our experience of movement. We can never hear a sound without positing its cause, as Kant points out in the Critique of Pure Reason. Sound is something that pertains to the realm of the physical, and as such it must abide by the law of causation. We never hear a disembodied sound, we always hear the sound of something (or someone). When we ask “what was that sound?”, we rarely refer to the quantitative qualities of it: we don’t want to know that it has a certain frequency and amplitude or that it decays in a certain number of milliseconds. We want to know what in the house sounds like dripping water.
Sound is always related to a source, not only because they consistently present themselves in conjunction with each other in experience, but also because of the very way in which we attribute meaning to sound. Sound is recognised as a property or activity of objects. Of course the modern scientific worldview is much sparser than that, but at its core it still functions through an understanding of the movement (of a vibrating string, or of air particles) that produces our perception of sound. If our perception of sound is shaped as movement, then it is clear that the experience of rhythm is really the experience of movement[2]. In particular, it is the experience of a phonic event as a form of recurring movement not unlike that of our own bodies. That is why, largely speaking, rhythm is often considered to be cyclical[3] (either on a macro or micro scale). Just like we feel cyclical movement in our bodies, we presuppose external recurring movement to also be the product of a cyclical, almost bodily process. When we hear water dripping onto a surface, we don’t necessarily experience it as a separate and distinct series of phonic events, but rather as one whole, as if all the single water drops constituted one unity, moving in cycles through time. It is therefore essential to bear in mind, throughout the following considerations, that sound is experienced through this sort of embodied framework, and it is always experienced as movement of something in a certain way. Sound is always tied to a sounding body.
1.1 The Grain
What holds true for our experience of sound in general becomes much more evident when we are confronted with sounds produced (or assumed to be produced) by living beings, especially when they are themselves human. Here, a certain phenomenon of sympathetic understanding of the body behind a sound becomes clear. We hear and interpret voices based on our own having a voice. When we hear a human voice, we always also presuppose that there is an actual human tied to it, and we might imagine them to have certain physical or psychic qualities, based on our own understanding of the human body and voice. A voice is always necessarily tied to a body, even in imagination, because we understand sound in general to be the product of movement, and voices more specifically as the product of animal movement. Especially in the case of human voices, the link between each voice and its body is not simply the product of pattern recognition, but rather of the productive play between our understanding of our own body and the phonic event[4]. In simply witnessing a sound, we always create a pre-linguistic meaning for it, founded on our experience of embodiment. This is perhaps what Roland Barthes would refer to as the “grain of the voice”, as tension between the linguistic and non-linguistic meanings begotten by sound. We create for ourselves the sounding body out of which the voice rings. This sounding body stands in a reciprocal relationship of influence with the actual, physical body that produces the voice in the first place. The person and their body is, at least partly, the result of the sounding body that emerges as producer of the voice, and vice versa the characteristics we ascribe to one’s voice are influenced by the way we experience their body. The processes through which our bodies are able to produce sound are essential to us in every way. Someone’s voice is an integral part of their body and, therefore, of their identity. Once again, this is not simply a truism given by the fact that the voice is identified out of habit as the product of a body, but rather because a voice is the product of a willing movement of a body, that can be understood and interpreted insofar as we ourselves are bodies capable of willful movement. We hear smiles, tears, anger, and many more affections in a speaking voice, regardless of linguistic meaning (or the absence thereof): we understand which muscle movements have which effects on a voice, and can therefore tell that someone is curving their mouth, or sobbing, or that their voice is breaking. And, of course, this holds true from the most microscopic level of functioning of the vocal cords. Think of what it takes to try and imitate a certain pitch: one must know the feeling of singing a certain note, we are not simply reproducing a certain pattern of air vibration, but rather a certain employment of micro-musculature that leads to the production of a certain note. That is what makes a trained singer generally more on pitch than an amateur: constant practice makes one able to reliably emit a certain pitched sound precisely because it leads to the creation of “muscle memory”. The same, of course, holds true for all other instruments, in which the use of fine muscles is essential to the pitching of the sound: string and wind instruments are prime examples of this.
Roland Barthes referred his understanding of the “grain” to the singing human voice, which assumes what he calls a “double posture, a double production of language and music”. However, I think the concept can be expanded to encompass a much vaster range of phenomena. Insofar as linguistic meaning is attributed to music (as Barthes himself points out, in the form of objectification), and insofar as the act of speech is still experienced in conjunction with a sounding body, the tension between the linguistic and prelinguistic meanings of musical and linguistic acts remains pressing, whether one is dealing with the human voice engaged in language or any other tool[5] for the production of music. “Something is there, manifest and persistent (you hear only that), which is past (or previous to) the meaning of the words, of their form (the litany), of the melisma and even of the style of performance: something which is directly the singer's body”[6]. The element present in sound, that is all too readily left behind when music is objectified, and sound rendered an unsignifying symbol, is the body. Because we attribute a physical cause to every phonic event we perceive, and because that is inseparable in our minds from the sound itself, the play between our being a body and having a body necessarily encompassess this grain as well, making the body of the performer a necessary component of the perception we have of the performed sound.
This all becomes clearly evident when one considers the stance we take on timbre. Despite its severe under-theorisation (derived, most likely, from the very elusive nature of its subject), timbre and timbral qualities play an incredibly important role in the way that we perceive and rationalise music. What makes timbre hard to describe is its extremely multifaceted nature, which includes (but is not limited to) the concepts of overtone composition, sound envelope, pitch to non pitched sound ratio, air pressure and tessitura. Furthermore, to add to this already massive complexity, the concept of sound[7], which is arguably what one ultimately seeks to understand through the analysis of timbre, is an even more complex one, as even seemingly irrelevant elements, such as articulation, line construction and intonation contribute to its making. Precisely because of this extremely broad, almost inscrutable connotation, however, sound functions as the primary vehicle for the musician’s identity[8].
Timbre constitutes the prelinguistic meaning of sound, and as we have previously stated, its understanding is based on an understanding of one’s own body. It is in virtue of this sympathetic approach, this positing of a plausible cause for an increasingly specific phonic event, that this event acquires for us a meaning. The timbre that musicians produce is influenced by a wide range of factors, depending on their instruments, all of them deriving from their being and having a body – the way in which a pianist may choose to strike the keys of their instrument, the peculiar type of dance that a drummer may choose to pursue, or the subtle way in which violin players may use micro-musculature in both the fingering and bowing hand to obtain a certain vibrational response from the strings. In the case of wind instrument players, the range of factors is even wider and more inscrutable, as it involves hidden musculature affecting aspects such as diaphragm support, throat position, tonguing and embouchure. The resulting interplay between all the mechanical habits (which are trained with the often subconscious objective of obtaining a specific sound out of the instrument) that a musician develops and consolidates over time are what makes timbre their own. Interestingly enough, although through the development of mastery of one's instrument one might be able to "bend", so to speak, their timbre in a particular direction, every musician still possesses a neutral timbre - just the way that a great actor might be able to imitate different voices and accents, but still keep his own, neutral voice as part of his identity. To make matters more complicated, a particular timbre, over time, necessarily evolves into a particular “sound”. If timbre is related to the physical act of setting a string in vibration, “sound” is a constellation of other musical techniques, such as articulation, phrasing, and, in the case of improvisational music, the melodic and rhythmic lines that one decides to construct. All of these aspects, in turn, interact with timbre, so that there is a mutual influence between the two aspects that slowly melt into a single element of musical and personal identity. It is unthinkable to imagine John Coltrane's or Eric Dolphy's timbre without also picturing their overall sound - the very particular and specific way in which they articulate phrases, as well as the geometric shapes that those phrases create. In the same way, it is impossible to imagine Glenn Gould's timbre without also imagining the very particular way in which he physically articulates every note.
In certain cases, the pre-linguistic meaning of music seems to be more important than the linguistic one, as can be attested by the fact that we often see transcriptions of great jazz musicians relying on pseudo-notation that emphasises timbric elements more than strictly melodic or harmonic ones. This more 'soundly', 'textural' notation is often used, for example, when the importance of phonic events and musical textures surpasses that of exact pitches (in a sense the bare buildings blocks of the language of music) – from the milder instances of glissandos and bends being employed in transcribing fast passages from John Coltrane or Cannonball Adderley to the more extreme example of graphic notation in Westendorff (1995) in the transcription of specific passages of Cecil Taylor’s performances. Furthermore, we see many incredible Black avant-garde musicians, such as Pharoa Sanders, Archie Shepp, and even the late Jackie McLean, subordinating the ideas of pitch and rhythm to their timbric virtuosity, with the result of creating an extremely personal approach to music, and a highly recognisable sound, one that could be used as a synonym for their musical identity. It is important to stress here that, although the concept of sound ecompasses, to a certain extent, phrasing and articulation, it only does so insofar as they are considered to be the mere product of physical action. The moment linguistic meaning enters the picture is, then, the moment in which those qualities of the body enter into an opposition with the constructed identity of its owner, and musical meaning comes itself into play with this discursive reality.
Returning to timbre, another interesting fact to observe is the way in which the instrument itself seems to be largely inconsequential to timbre when compared to the actual body of the musician. Proficient musicians, those who have been acquainted with the practice of playing their instrument for a number of years, are often readily identifiable through their timbre, regardless of the instrument they are playing. Charlie Parker, as an example, famously played many saxophones over the years, often pawning or losing his own instrument, and quickly finding an often cheap replacement for gigs or recording sessions. At one time, notably, he played on a Grafton resin alto saxophone[9], and yet his sound was, reportedly, unaltered by it. What we can conclude from these observations, then, is that the qualities of timbre that we consider to be meaningful pertain to the prelinguistic layer of meaning, and have much more to do with the musician’s body than they do with the instrument they use. Their timbre is, in many ways, part of their identity, as it is a unique and distinctive characteristic particular to the individual qua body. It is the unique sound of someone's voice, a characteristic we immediately associate with a certain individual as a window of possibility for sympathetic understanding. When listening to a sound, in the playing of a specific musician, we often and naturally picture the physical act of their playing (as we might picture the act of someone like Jackson Pollock or Lucio Fontana painting), and identify the techniques (or, at least, give our best educated guess to what they may be) and the gestures executed by the performer. In doing so, in relying on the idea of embodied musicality, however, we also contribute to creating the identity of the performer[10].
1.2 Aural Art Forms
It is important now to observe that, because of the way in which we humans constitute sound, and give to it rhythmic and melodic meaning through our experience of embodiment, any artistic product relying on sound will itself be deeply rooted in our body. It is very obvious to say, but music and poetry[11] developed as they did specifically in virtue of our internal experience of being a body, and its play with our body’s outbound polarity, blurring, as play does, the boundaries between our internal and the external aspectivities. This type of experience, which we could identify as an originally musical one, is wholly centered on this interaction between our two polarities. It creates a musical and cyclical time, which takes in musical experience the place of linear, scientific time, inside of which a succession of phonic experiences is given a special kind of meaning, that in turn help constitute musical time itself. The most banal example of this is beautifully expressed in a quote popularly attributed to Gioacchino Rossini about the music of Richard Wagner: “Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour”. In musical experience, time is compressed or stretched out based on the musical meaning we attribute to events inside it. We understand a certain succession of pitches to be a single musical phrase, and when it is played rallentando we have the impression that time itself is slowing down. The alternating of tension and resolution, both in a linguistic (music theory) and pre-linguistic (embodied) sense shape musical time, and their absence is able to annihilate musical time completely, leaving one completely unstuck in time.
Because of its very nature, the linguistic meaning of music is much more readily expressed in language than its pre-linguistic component, and this has led to all sorts of incredible inventions. First and foremost, the development of music theory: the tools we use to reliably establish a fixed set of relations between pre-linguistic, embodied experiences which we regard as musical (which are themselves the act of producing sound as a sounding body), with the primary purpose of encoding these musical experiences (and, in the case of musical notation, of encoding the musical actions out of which those experiences spring) in a system abstract enough to allow for the infinite range of variation that occurs on the level of individual embodied experiences. The object of music theory is never music itself, but rather the quantitative qualities of music that we take to be relevant (pitch, duration, agogics, dynamics, etc.) and that we are able to encode through language and scientific understanding. And this fact alone is already enough to completely deviate our understanding of music, just as language fundamentally shifts our understanding of reality. Because we have music theory, a system apparently able to describe the musical phenomenon, we are convinced that there are certain truths about music, and regardless of whether we take them to lie inside the Western understanding of musical theory or outside of it, we still think consider musical events to possess some kind of meaning, we still believe music is able to express emotion not because of its perfect employment of certain tools of meaning, but because it seems to relate to something that lies beyond those tools. This is what drives us to the development of new musical technologies, to the subversion of whole bodies of theoretical knowledge (think of Arnold Schönberg and Heinrich Schenker) in order to gain new tools, new grids of meaning to impose on reality, bringing new aspects of music to light while obscuring countless others.
The theoretic understanding of music, then, together with its subsequent encoding through both ordinary language and musical notation, while capable of expressing infinite beauty, are destined to obscure the fundamental underlying role of the sounding body, present in both the action and the perception of music. The sounding body becomes hidden from us, and even in engaging physically with music, we do so in posing a distance between our body and the sounding body itself, both as performers and spectators. The musical phenomenon is first objectified and then transfigured through an additional layer of metaphor, that takes the embodied understanding we have of sound and further morphs it to make it an object and place it wholly outside of the boundaries of the body. The pretence to objectivity of music theory lies precisely in this: eradicating our understanding of the musical phenomenon from our body, giving to it objectivity, and forgetting the increasingly numerous layers of metaphors that we apply to it[12]. Music, like poetry, wholly depends on the body for the creation of its subject, as well as for the structuring of the time inside of which this subject unfolds and the true meaning we attribute to it. Just like the reading of a poem written on paper requires the positing of a sounding body and a poetic time, inside of which the words are uttered (or sounded out), the reading of an orchestral score does not depend so much on the identification of relationships between the symbols on the page, as much as it does on the positing of a sounding body (as an aggregate of individual sounding bodies) and the time that body is able to create.
This is fairly evident when one thinks of the discrepancies between musical practice and musical notation: praxis varied widely across time and space, so much so that the studies of specific musical practices have become their own area of study. Not only is the interpretation of musical notation relative to a certain musical culture situated in time and space, but in some instances it also implies a certain set of theoretical notions: think for example of basso continuo, which required the interpreter to know and apply the rules of thorough bass. Actual musical practice, like actual poetic language, is rooted in the tool of theory, a language, as it is in play with the body and its double aspectivity, so that the artistic action transcends the ordinary rules of the language or theory game.
Again, this becomes even clearer when one looks at musical traditions in which the embodied element of musicality is given greater importance, musical traditions in which the role of notation is not totalising, what we might be inclined to call aural traditions. Even contemporary Western music, in her meticulously codified corpus of musical knowledge, can be said to have an aural element, of course: after all the experience of music necessarily goes through the body. But it could be said that musical experience runs the risk of becoming almost secondary to the theoretical investigation of it. Symmetrical to the contemporary Western conception are all those traditions in which notation does not exist at all, or if it does it only very vaguely codifies a musical ethos, like a mode or clave, for example. A great deal of musical traditions lie in between these two extremes: all popular music and the second most seriousmusic in Western culture, jazz, which, in entertaining a very close and complicated relationship with “Classical Music[13]”, has secured for itself the esteem of the classical music world[14]. In those traditions, a theoretical understanding of music is constructed, and it becomes something for the body to play with, in ways much more radical than in “Classical Music”. In other words, in theory driven frameworks of music, the play between body and theory is relegated to increasingly smaller domains, whereas in prevalently aural frameworks the play goes so far that the body may yet thwart the theory and deform it to its liking. Think of free jazz, the music of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayer, Archie Shepp… the list goes on. The understanding of theory in those contexts is at times completely irrelevant, and at others not clearly distinct from a purely embodied perception of sound. That is to say, for example, that in much of Ornette Coleman’s playing, the impression one gets is that the reason he plays the notes he plays as he plays them is a result of his existing as a sounding body playing with other sounding bodies. Whereas this embodied experience is abstracted from in proportionately increasing degrees the more prevalent the theoric element and the score are. This of course in no way means that it is not present, but only that it is transfigured, it is channeled through the language in a way that completely obscures its true nature.
The fact that the embodied or, rather, pre-linguistic element of music is subject to varying degrees of objectification or, at best, of metaphor, is worth bearing in mind when making more general considerations about the matter, as to not be blinded by culture.
1.3 Musical Action and Ethos
If we were to be so ambitious as to attempt the tracing of a genealogy of human musical experience (i.e. human interaction with the musical phenomenon), we would, sooner or later, be faced with one terrifying question: “why?”. Even if we were to take, through a sort of infinite musical regress, entire millennia of inscrutable musical practices for granted, thus being able to single out, theoretically, the first ever occurrence of a musical phenomenon, we would be hard pressed to answer the most seemingly essential of questions about it. In the history of evolution, species which interact with sound in similar ways to humans do so in order to fulfil specific social needs – be it the attracting of a mate, the relaying of information and instructions, or the fostering of social bonding. This almost Darwinian approach to music seems to me in a way very reductive, as it too easily allows one to think of music as a tool, as a means of survival granted to animals of the earth so that they might survive the hostile environment and each other. This type of account seems to give the musical phenomenon an almost Promethean[15] character: the product of human techne is simultaneously very close to and yet completely different from the animal engagement with phonic events. Because man has begotten fire, he has sublimated a simple animal trait into an exquisitely human one. This is clearly not the case when it comes to the way in which we experience and exist through music. Making music is an activity, and it is an activity of human bodies[16]. To uncover the essence of music, it is not particularly useful to ascertain its anthropological genealogy[17]. Our line of questioning should instead be about what it means to be making music, forsaking all established categories of musical discourse. For, if we are to investigate pre-linguistic meaning of music, then we cannot in any way appeal to the categories of both language and the linguistic aspect of music.
It is important now to address this matter of the linguistic aspect of music. Phonic events, seen as movement of air particles in waves, do not hold any meaning. Rather, meaning is attributed to them by us during perception through the employment of causal relations, available to us in the form of reflection upon our own body (the slapping of hands, the stomping of feet, the use of our voice, and so on) . The observation of phonic events in conjunction with physical ones, for example the sound made by a falling object as it impacts the ground, while extremely important, is not sufficient to explain to the full extent the workings of phonic perception, as will be clearly shown later in the text. For otherwise we could not instinctively understand sound to be always produced by bodies: what about the sound of hidden crickets, the blowing of wind, a drop of rain falling out of sight? I think it is just as important a fact that we consistently observe that our every action (even our breathing and the beating of our hearts) produces itself a sound: it is not that we observe sound to only be present when external bodies are present, but rather that we observe our own bodies to be always accompanied by sound (produced by us or finding its way to us). When the object is not clearly perceivable to us, so that we only hear a sound, without having any other sensory evidence for its cause, we presuppose its cause to be an external body whose qualities we can deduce from the sound, in virtue of the established causal relationships between sound and bodies (derived either from experience of embodiment or repeated experience of external objects of different kinds). This is what I call constructing the sounding body: it is important to note that the sounding body is not a literal body, nor an image of a body, but rather like a collection of imaginary vibrating strings. In other words, the physical entity that produces the sound is supposed to be an object constituted as a set of sound-making qualities engaged in some sort of movement. When we hear a sound, we first of all understand it to be the product of some physical entity or event, and the phonic qualities of the sound inform us as to the nature of this entity or event. If I hear a crash, I know it to be the result of a physical event, and I know the protagonist of this event to be a brittle object made of glass, ceramic, or some other material, and I estimate its size or speed (based on the perceived intensity of the crash). The resulting sounding body is a set of sound-making qualities, essentially fictitious voices of fictitious objects with certain fictitious attributes.
Language, then, is the systematisation and representation of these human actions that produce sound, which are in turn made into the signifier of a certain symbol. Reading a certain letter means taking a physical action that produces a certain sound, with quantitative qualities that constitute the principle of individuation that implies that a sound with certain quantitative qualities is the letter “a”, and nothing else. This is truly the dramatic dimension of language – the loss of meaning necessary for our survival as a species[18]. Nevertheless, this language is what shapes our thinking entirely, the principle of non contradiction being fundamental to what is regarded as rational thought. So it is in music: sounds are assigned, for example, to a certain pitch class, so that all sounds with certain frequencies are considered “an A” and nothing else. For the same reason that language cannot capture poetry, scores cannot capture orchestras. The meaning of music and poetry resides in the musical or speech act; on the actual uttering of the words, because the witnessing of human art goes beyond its mere linguistic content[19].
Hannah Arendt, in her work Labour, Work and Action, beautifully describes the nature of action and speech as principio individuationis, as that through which man ceases to partake of quality of Otherness and is no longer one among many, an emissary of his species, but rather an individual. Action, she adds, is always accompanied by speech, for there is no speechless action: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. Since through birth we entered Being, we share with all other entities the quality of Otherness, an important aspect of plurality that makes [sic] that we can define only by distinction, that we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from something else”. It is now clear why speechless action cannot be. Or, as Arendt would continue to argue: “if it exists [it] is irrelevant; without speech, action loses the actor”. Speech is an activity of the body, and the act of speech manifests the linguistic meaning expressed by ideal, written words (so, in reality, the mental categories ordered by the principles of causation and non-contradiction), through the action of the body. In this sense through speech acts we have agency: we materialise our self through manifest action appealing to the categories of reason, so that we are understood to be an individual with a meaning, that is itself and nothing else.
Something very similar can be said of musical acts. In carrying out a certain musical action, I express some kind of meaning, through both the symbolic plane, or the systematisation of sound, where a note stands for all sounds with certain frequencies and nothing else and vice versa, and of physically performing an act. Setting the mechanism of my vocal chords in motion to reproduce and imitate a certain Platonic ideal of a sound, the “larger than life” letter ‘a’. The symbolic order of sounds will be discussed in the later paragraphs of the text. For now, our interest lies in pursuing the road of the body until its natural end. It is clear that what musical notation represents and what musical acts express are fundamentally specular aspects: one is the act of an individual who reduces the meaning of reality to a set of relations, while the other is the act of an individual employing his body to convey meaning through the appeal to this ideal set of relations. Just like we use speech acts to identify ourselves as individuals, we use musical acts to express the meaning we have made for ourselves through linguistically systematised norms, and yet we expect to make sense of music and language only through their linguistic meaning, completely forsaking all inquiry into the body itself.
Musical action, because it is organised in ways akin to speech, is thought to express something, presumably an internal state, an emotion, if not a story. Edward Hanslick, in “The Beautiful in Music”, quite beautifully himself observes: “A philosophical disquisition into an art demands a clear definition of its subject matter. The diversity of the subject matter of the various arts and the fundamental difference in the mode of treatment are natural sequence of dissimilarity of the senses to which they severally appeal. [...] (A work of art, therefore, endows a definite conception with a material form of beauty. This definite conception, its embodiment, and the union of both are conditions of an aesthetic ideal with which a critical examination into every art is indissolubly connected. The subject of a poem, a painting, or a statue may be expressed in words and reduced to ideas.) The whole gamut of human feelings has with almost complete unanimity been proclaimed to be the subject of music, since the emotions were thought to be in antithesis to the definiteness of intellectual conceptions”. This interpretation seems to escape a sort of Platonic pessimism about language: the thing in itself is perfect and inexpressible, we have an imperfect language that can only approximate it. All dialogue ends in aporia, but “Where words fail, music speaks[20]” : music is able to escape the limitations of language and get at the thing in itself directly. That would, indeed, be very desirable to some – namely, everyone up to the Romantics, and many people still. “The essence of music”, however, as Hanslick tells us, “is sound and motion”. The beauty that is expressed in music is, for Hanslick, “an arabesque, not still and motionless, but rising before our eyes in constantly changing forms”. The beautiful in music is expressed as movement: the movement of a sounding body so beautiful that it is able to produce the most divine of symphonies. What is beautiful is not just the notes of the symphony itself, but to see and hear it executed by an orchestra moving in perfect concert, producing an aggregate body that moves in such a way, through its internal organs, as to produce the music itself. This is also what makes the abstraction to language possible: it is precisely because we understand sound to be the product of movement and physical action that we can proceed to systematise sound into organised systems we call languages. Once again, we see the pre-linguistic and linguistic layers of meaning of music standing in this position of productive tension, almost as opposites. The process of musical action, just like that of speech acts, however, is itself structured as a play between the two, so that the symbolic association is not just one of identity, but becomes itself the toy of the musician, who is not only playing at music, but also playing with it. Productive play then, is essential to the musical experience, and it is between the pre-linguistic and the linguistic components of music, which is itself both acted out and used as a tool. That is why music itself is not a tool, we don’t stand in a relationship of usage with it, but rather, in musical experience, we exist in it, as musical agents and musical bodies. This productive play is what Roland Barthes called the “grain”, the presence of the body in the speech act.
Returning to the implications of this idea of musical agency, this means simply that through the actions of our body, we are able to affirm our identity as individuals, and we are able to do that as sounding bodies, by existing as beings that constantly produce sound, and acting out this potentiality to the extreme, by engaging with it as an end in itself. Musical beauty is an end in itself, it is self-justifying, just like the banging of a drum, or the tapping of our fingers, are all activities that fulfill no end beyond themselves, and yet seem to be gratifying to us. This play-element inherent in the musical experience creates a space for our existence in a world saturated with meaning. We are what we do, and what we do is make music, beat our chest, snap our fingers, play the piano and in doing this we affirm our existence as individuals.
There is, however, one part of the musical experience that has until now remained unnamed, namely that of the audience. For if an individual becomes such through a certain musical action, or performance, then the beholder of such an act is suddenly confronted with the materialisation of the performer’s self. And the reception of this product of musical action seems to be as important, in the process of crystallisation of the self in action, as the actual performance of it.
[1] The Levels of Organic Life and the Human: Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology
[2] As studies in embodied cognition (cf Vijay Iyer) would suggest.
[3] This is reflected in the cyclical way in which we order musical time (in a series of bars, all containing a certain number of notes…)
[4] Cf V. Iyer, Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound
[5] Though it should not be concluded from this that music, too, is a tool.
[6] Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice.
[7] As in “the sound of a certain musician/ensemble”
[8] Solis, Timbral Virtuosity: Pharoah Sanders, sonic heterogeneity, and the jazz Avant-garde in the 1960s and 70s
[9] A horn often associated with Ornette Coleman, notoriously the proud owner of a very different and unique timbre.
[10] Cf J.K. Saslaw, Far Out: Intentionality and image schema in the reception of early works by Ornette Coleman.
[11] The use of language unbound by conventional meaning, centered purely on this sort of “original” linguistic experience.
[12] Cf Nietzsche, Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
[13] I am myself very sceptical of this term.
[14] This might seem like a weird statement. One of the following paragraphs explores the history of power in the intellectual domain of music.
[15] Referring specifically to the telling of the myth by Protagoras in Plato homonymous dialogue (320c-322d).
[16] Music making is defined as specific to man in virtue of his ec-centricity, as defined in Plessner.
[17] Cf Mithen.
[18] Or, as Nietzsche would say, of the weak.
[19] Again, beautifully captured by Roland Barthes in “Image, Music, Text”.
[20] Hans Christian Andersen
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