Contemporary Musical Logos

Contemporary Musical Logos
Author(s): William Teixeira and Silvio Ferraz

Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , December 2021,
Vol. 52, No. 2 (December 2021), pp. 173-202
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society
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IRASM 52 (2021) 2: 173-201
W. Teixeira – S. Ferraz: Contemporary Musical Logos
William Teixeira
Federal University of Mato

Grosso do Sul
Av. Costa e Silva, s/nº,
Bairro Universitário
Campo Grande - MS,
79070-900 Brasil
Contemporary
Email: william.teixeira@
ufms.br
Musical Logos Silvio Ferraz
University of São Paulo
Prédio 6 – R. da Reitoria,
215 – Butantã,
São Paulo – SP, 05508-900
Email: silvioferraz@usp.br
UDC: 78.01
Original Scholarly Paper
Izvorni znanstveni rad
Received: 16 November 2020
Primljeno: 16. studenog 2020.
Accepted: 1 September 2021
Prihvaćeno: 1. rujna 2021.
1. Beginnings
Abstract – Résumé
This essay explores the
»In the beginning was the Word.« Thus begins meanings of logos, that is, the
St John’s Gospel, or, as in the original in Greek, Ἐν logical aspects of music. The
discussion is divided into three
ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος. The apostle defines Jesus Christ as main categories: the definition
the logos (λόγος), the creative Word that was from of music, the definition of musi-
cal discourse, and the definition
the beginning, paraphrasing the book of Genesis. of musical meaning. The
combination of the three results
The second person of the Trinity was the means by in the general definition of what
which all things were made. In the beginning, logos we understand as contempo-
rary musical logos, fitting,
was both speech and act. J. R. R. Tolkien translates therefore, the current status of
this starting point and its initial unity in another the concept in philosophy
(represented by philosophers
way in his Silmarillion. Eru, the unique and uncreat- such as Gilles Deleuze,
ed being, created all things and beings from his Nicholas Wolterstorff, and
Michael Polanyi) and music
voice. And his voice was music.1 (especially musicology and
If, unlike what some music history textbooks musical composition). The main
conclusion is that the logical
say, it is well known that something like the music aspect of music cannot be
we know did not begin with the Greeks, not even known today without an in-
depth analysis of its conse-
with Pythagoras, we assume it is impossible or even quences in performance, as an
unnecessary to search for reports of its beginning. intrinsic component of its
concept.
Some of the oldest traces ever found of the human Keywords: contemporary
music • musical perfor-
mance • philosophy and
1
J. R. R. TOLKIEN, Silmarillion, Crowns Nest, 1977. music
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species contain the oldest traces of musical practice, as indicated by the artifacts
of the Hohle Fels caves.2
It is known that not even the term mousiké (μουσική), the origin of our word
music, designates something similar to its current definition; its meaning is more
related to a set of artistic manifestations such as poetry and dance, and not to a
practice isolated from the others.3 Although the Pythagorean proto-acoustic seems
to indicate a theoretical definition of music, it still preserved the central theological
teleology of the practice of music in all its forms in that society, always linked to
a knowledge given by the gods and offered to them, which was constantly put
into practice within religious rites.
It seems contrived to interpret the music theory from Ancient Greece just like
contemporary theories. The earliest conflicts recorded between different musical
practices refer more to different types of ethics than to incompatible definitions in
their study. The most notorious case is that of the ‘New Music’, attacked by Plato
in his dialogue on the Laws. Its greatest representative is Timotheus of Miletus,
from approximately the fourth century BC. In the Republic, Plato praised the
ethical attributes of music, that is, of artistic practices, as a tool to shape the values
of the character of the citizen, stating that these arts would be the ‘gymnastics of
the soul’.4 However, in the above-mentioned dialogue from the Laws, he also
expressed his concern for the New Music, which would corrupt values by adopt-
ing new forms, that is, new types of groups of people who would perform the
artistic acts, leading to new poetic structures of movement and sound, which
became clear when Timotheus introduced more strings to the lyre. However,
there is no distinction between a theoretical view and a practical view of music, as
many seem to think. What we see, rather, is a deprecation of the professional
practice of music and of the music made by individuals who are paid for it, many
of them free citizens and not merely servants and slaves. The first virtuosi stand
out, and mousiké reaches new and higher artistic levels or, to use the Greek term,
technical levels (from techné). Although professional practice was belittled due to
the social role of the performers, no document criticizes the practice per se.
The search for a definition for this object, practice or process we call music
becomes then a very complex issue, and its implications are equally difficult. How
can we argue that a certain type of musical practice is possible if we are not even
capable of defining what music is? If the term mousiké indicates a different artistic
2
Nicholas J. CONARD – Maria MALINA – Suzanne C. MÜNZEL, New flutes document the
earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany, Nature, 460 (2009), 737-40.
3
Penelope MURRAY – Peter WILSON, Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical
Athenian City, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 1-8.
4
Armand D’ANGOUR, Intimations of the Classical in Early Greek Mousiké, in: James I. Porter
(Org.), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006, 104.
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practice from the one that we know, other societies far away in time and space
also do not have anything similar to our practice of music. For the most part,
civilizations that have not been affected by modern Western thought do not even
have a term for what we call music.5 But does that mean that they do not make or
do not have music? If, according to the common sense, music seems to encompass
a set of sounds to which we can attribute a positive value in some way, the
attempt to define it ends up needing to be objective. Taking it as an object, we at-
tribute to it a conceptual skeleton, a basic structure that sustains it as something
that it is, as opposed to what it is not. Thus, the study of a certain aspect of music
needs to be compatible with these structures if the goal is to seek knowledge
about music. In other words, if what defines music is the presence of notes or
harmony, the terms that dictate how the study of music must be carried out have
already been defined here.
The definition of a res musica, of a thing like music, or of music as a thing, is
essential when we try to conceive music as a thing. But this is not the only possi-
bility. For instance, music is present in the writings of the Hebrew Bible, the Old
Testament of Christians, a set of writings ranging from the second millennium
before the Christian Era to three hundred years before its beginning. It contains a
very extensive account of its culture, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic influences.6 What is interesting in
this case is that the linguistic and cultural influences are as common as the
references to musical activity, which mention different types of musical instru-
ments, the act of playing and singing, the people responsible for its practice and
even the action that was primarily done, praising. However, there is not a term
that names the product of praising or the result of the action of those who praised,
even if translations incorrectly do so. It is clear, then, that music was something
made by somebody, in some way and for some purpose, but it did not need to be
by itself to exist. For example, the term ,‫( יִלְּכ‬kĕliy) that is used for a musical in-
strument also refers to any type of tool or weapon and to the act of handling it.
The only term that comes close to the notion of music, ‫( הָניִגְנ‬nĕgiynah), derives its
meaning from the declination of the root ‫( ןַגָנ‬nagan), which is the act of plucking
a string instrument. However, even in this case the term refers to a performed
action, not to a thing or object.
If ancient and distant cultures do not define what music is, and not even the
Greeks, cultural ancestors of the West, had something close to the current mean-
ing of music, where does its understanding come from? Although Plato himself
did not criticize the practice of music as opposed to a more segmented and
5
Bruno NETTL, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts, Champaign: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2005, 17.
6
Gordon J. WENHAM, Genesis 1-15, World Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Thomas Nelson Inc.,
1986, p. xliii.
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theoretical view, as previously seen, the same cannot be said of those who revived
its postulates in the Christian Era. Aristides Quintilianus, in the second century
AD, wrote in Greek, as did his contemporary Sextus Empiricus, but both were
absolutely immersed in the Roman culture, with all the Latinization that its
philosophy had gone through, thus placing them side by side with Ancient Greece
would be ineffective. In his treatise on music, Quintilianus creates the first defini-
tion of music that we know of, saying that music is the »knowledge of the seemly
in bodies and motions.«7 As mentioned before, we are considering a positive valu-
ation, a metaphysical aspect of value that grants ‘bodies and movements’ the
condition of being music, with both terms clearly understood as a synthesis of the
physical world, according to the perception of the Pythagoreans. What follows
the definition is as interesting as the definition itself – the discrimination between
the distinct natures that music would have, represented by the following table:
natural
Natural
arithmetic
Theoretical
harmonics
Technical rhythmics
metrics
Music
melic composition
Application rhythmic composition
poesy
Practical
instrumental
Expression odic
theatric
Table 1: Divisions of music for Aristides Quintilianus.
(Source: Mathiesen 2001)
The ‘multidisciplinary’ dimension of music is again evident, but for the first
time a clear distinction was made between the theoretical and practical realms of
music. This division, which was hardly invented by Quintilianus, in fact only
manifests the understanding that prevailed in classical Rome, which would last
throughout the Middle Ages. It is within this concept, for example, that Augustine
develops his view on music, as the Neoplatonist that he was, adding Christian
theology to the discussion. In his treatise On Music, he offers a tripartite division,
7
Thomas J. MATHIESEN, Aristides Quintilianus, in: Grove Music Online, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001. Date of access 6 October 2020, <https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/
view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000001244>
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which is the music for God, the music for the soul and the music for the body,
corresponding to the division that Boethius would later propose between musica
mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis. Neoplatonism then takes a
more definite form, since the meaning of mundana (worldly) refers to the divine
and the cosmic and discusses the highest realities of music only through theory.8
Music can only be defined by Augustine as the ‘science of good measure’ in this
way,9 and he also refers to the movement of sound in time and space in the same
manner as Quintilianus. Augustine criticizes the professional musician as well,
but he is clearly referring to any type of musical practice, in a comprehensive
artistic sense, but with more sharpness, which can be exemplified when he says
that »if all pipers, flute-players, and others of this kind have science, then I think
there is no more degraded and abject discipline than this on.«10 As Burnett puts it,
this is the view of the once sensualist Augustine, who now seeks an ascetic life,
pure and removed from the temptations of the world, and music seems to be
made not only for the intellect, but for the whole being.
In the Middle Ages, however, the term music is still far from its modern mean-
ing as a ‘thing’ or a product, as Noske well puts it:
Originally this was a Greek adjective which was soon latinised and used as a noun. In
the early Christian Eras and during the Middle Ages ‘musica’ acquires various
meanings, of which ‘scientia bene modulandi’ is the most relevant to our subject. One
could translate this by, ‘the art of singing or playing well’, which also implies ‘compos-
ing well’. Medieval man did not consider music as a product, but as an activity.11
This understanding of music persists for centuries, for more than a millenni-
um in fact, while the music for the body continues to be practiced outside the
walls of sacred buildings. However, Humanism and the Renaissance gradually
began to reverse this, reviewing man’s own ontology and the ‘evil’ that lived in
him. From the theological point of view, it was Martin Luther, an Augustinian
monk, who was responsible for this review, saying in the sixteenth century that
»after theology I grant to music the highest place and honor.«12 Luther speaks of
a new music that was being made in all Europe, especially in the Italian and Ger-
man states. The Medieval tripartite understanding continued to be studied, but
8
Philip BURNETT, Augustine in Music; Augustine and Music: Bridging the Gap, MA thesis, Univer-
sity of Bristol, 2011, 9.
9
AUGUSTINE, De Musica, transl. by R.C. Taliaferro, in: Hermgild Dressler et al (eds.), The Fathers
of the Church: A New Translation, Volume 4, Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 2002, 172.
10
Ibid., 180-81.
11
Fritz NOSKE, Forma Formans, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, VII/1
(1976), 43-62 at 44.
12
Dietrich BARTEL, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music, Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 4.
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the appreciation of the music practice began to increase, especially after its contact
with the discipline of Rhetoric. By then, music meant a certain type of discourse.
In the German Reformation of the sixteenth century, Luther gave music a
new role. The same cannot be said of the Swiss Reformation and its leader, John
Calvin, an Augustinian who was cautious about musical practice. In the same
Geneva of Calvin, some centuries later, a thinker that gave definitive contribu-
tions to the understanding of music was born: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From a
Calvinist family and being formed as such, Rousseau made a great contribution
to the discussion on music, reviewing its relation to the very nature of reality. In
his Dictionary of Music, he conceives a new definition for music which sums up
quite a lot of what would become the Romanticist music and its Classicist proto-
-manifestations. Rousseau defines music as the ‘art of combining sounds in a pleas-
ant way to the ear’.13 No matter how superficial that definition may seem, it contains
a drastic inversion. What defines music is no longer its mathematical proportion
and its bond with a metaphysical entity, but the fact that it pleases the human ear;
moreover, music by definition is something to be heard by people. Rousseau
resorts to the definition of Quintilianus and the divisions of Boethius but equates
the value of theory and practice, both compositional and interpretive, by adding
a new division between natural music and imitative music. ‘Artistic’ music, which
is composed to be just music, belongs to this second category and assumes a
mimetic attribute, an attribute of imitation, and always refers to something else,
especially to some reality from the first category, such as popular songs, religious
hymns and all music that was created due to another primary action. The defini-
tion of music starts to belong more and more to this second category. While
preserving the theoretical lineage that has lasted since the beginning of the Chris-
tian Era, it is within this definition that the study of music can be conducted.
Although aesthetics struggled to define what ‘pleasant’ meant, Rousseau’s
definition sums up the understanding that prevailed throughout Romanticism
and that is still relevant today in the current thinking about man and music. How-
ever, in the twentieth century, the definition of music was widely discussed since
it contained the terms within which its practice and study could take place. Arnold
Schoenberg, for example, maintains Rousseau’s idea that the essential matter of
music is the note (Ton),14 and it is in this context that the ‘Evolution’ (Entstehung)
of music would happen.15 In this sense, Rousseau’s definition is maintained, but
it is expanded in the sense that an evolutionary process takes music from its natu-
ral meaning to a historical process of evolution of the Spirit (Geist). No matter how
sophisticated it may have seemed, this understanding started to be challenged
13
Jean-Jacques ROUSSEAU, Dictionnaire de Musique, in: Collection complète des oeuvres, Genève:
Peyrou & Moultou, 1780-1789, vol. 9. [1764], 195.
14
Arnold SCHOENBERG, Harmonielehre, Vienna: Universal-edition, 1922, 15.
15
Ibid., 380.
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when the supremacy of the object began to be questioned, together with all its
fundamental features such as pitch, harmony and rhythm. There is then a change
from tone (Ton) to sound (Klang); musicians began to realize that the limits in
music making were imaginary and that the very way of conceptualizing music
should be reviewed.
Only fifteen years after the treatise on harmony of his teacher Schoenberg,
John Cage reassesses the definition of what music would be, contesting that »if
the word ‘music’ is sacred and reserved for instruments of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, we can replace it with a more significant term: organized
sound.«16 Since the material principle was changed, the earlier definitions became
inadequate with the new way not only of creating music, but of experiencing it,
which would affect even the old repertoire. Edgar Varèse reinforces Cage’s
understanding, not so much from the compositional point of view, but in regard
to the material principle, defining music as ‘organized sound’ as well.17 For both
of them, however, there is a point of view that gives continuity to the modern
understanding, which is the element of value. In a sense, ‘organized’ is perhaps as
definable as ‘pleasant’.18 If the material principle has been expanded, the same
cannot yet be said of the formal principle of music. Cage himself, for example,
after all the randomness and freedom of his writing, complained that his music
was not performed properly, since musicians paid attention to the notes and not
to what really mattered; but then what does matter and how can one know that?
Finally, Cage points out: ‘performance is music’.19
These contradictions between the discourse of music and the discourse about
the music that a composer makes are constant, but they are important for under-
standing the compositional issues faced by both discourses. Luciano Berio created
a more structured work than Cage, but the opening of his work resided more in
the possibilities of listening than in compositional and interpretative choices,
which lead him to the point of defining music as »everything that one listens to
with intention of listening to music.«20 This kind of understanding, however, is
tautological since it does not define the music that is listened to in scattered
sounds. Or as noted elsewhere, »it is not a matter of listening to street sounds and
simply saying ‘this is music because I want it to be’, but of listening and thinking
about how they reveal something musical.«21 In this sense, Berio reviews the
16
John CAGE, Silence, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1973, 3.
17
Edgar VARÈSE – Chou WEN-CHUNG, The Liberation of Sound, Perspectives of New Music, 5/1
(1966), 11-19 at 18.
18
Silvio FERRAZ, Livro das Sonoridades: notas dispersas sobre composição, São Paulo: 7 Letras, 2005, 76.
19
John CAGE – Bruce DUFFIE, Composer John Cage: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie, 1987. Date of
access 6 October 2020, http://www.bruceduffie.com/cage.html.
20
Luciano BERIO – Rossana DALMONTE – Bálint András VARGA, Two Interviews, translated and
edited by David Osmond-Smith, New York: Marion Boyars Publishers Inc., 1985, 19.
21
S. FERRAZ, Livro das Sonoridades, 75.
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listener’s responsibility, but he stresses Cage’s criticism on performance. When

asked whether he appreciated the performances of his music, he clearly said that
»very often no, especially with solo performances.«22 Once again, the question
raised is: what matters in music and what is fundamental in it? If it is the act of
listening that defines what music is, what does performance do or does not do
that makes it not correctly musical.
Returning to Greece, but in the second half of the twentieth century, Iannis
Xenakis defined music, perhaps being more thorough and meticulous than his
contemporaries. Taking into account all the understandings that were presented
in this article so far, his way of conceptualizing music is precise because, instead
of establishing a single predicate, he covers seven boundary concepts that clarify
what music means to him. Within this scheme, music:
1. It is a sort of comportment necessary for whoever thinks it and makes it.
2. It is an individual pleroma, a realization.
3. It is a fixing in sound of imagined virtualities (cosmological, philosophical, …
arguments).
4. It is normative, that is, unconsciously it is a model for being or fordoing by
sympathetic drive.
5. It is catalytic: its mere presence permits internal psychic or mental trans-
formations in the same way as the crystal ball of the hypnotist.
6. It is the gratuitous play of a child.
7. It is a mystical (but atheistic) asceticism. Consequently expressions of
sadness, joy, love, and dramatic situations are only very limited particular
instances.23
Xenakis believes that opinions such as Cage’s still demonstrate a weak

romantic attitude since they rely on a mimetic function for music, regardless of
what music can do by itself. He also rejects theoretical models that try to under-
stand music as a language, in the sense that they would demand a syntax of their
own and that, in doing so, they would again fall into absolutely arbitrary judg-
ments. In his definition, however, by far the best formulated one so far, he states
in the first concept that music is a behavior or, to use another term from it, an
action; an action coming from act and thought, as parallel units. In the second
limit concept, he defines music as a pleroma, as the plenitude of concentrated
divine power, especially in its transcendent aspect. In the third item he presents
the link between the virtual and the actual in music, the immaterial that material-
izes in the sound. The fourth concept presents the aspect that governs the essence
22
Luciano BERIO – Bruce DUFFIE, Composer Luciano Berio: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie, 1993.
Date of access 6 October 2020, http://www.bruceduffie.com/berio.html.
23
Iannis XENAKIS, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition, Stuyvesant, NY:
Pendragon Press, 1992, 181.
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of what music can be and does, its ontological attribute, which precedes one’s
own perception, in a reality of pathos, of a more primitive passion. The fifth limit
concept introduces the ethical aspect of music, the potential for modulating the
ethos, once again at a level that precedes meaning. In the sixth concept, Xenakis
adds a metaphorical aspect, perhaps referring to the sense of satisfaction and at
the same time of simplicity that music brings in itself, preceding any rationaliza-
tion. In the seventh and last concept, he defines the spiritual aspect of music,
where, even when the figure of a god is removed, music has a greater power of
reality than basic sensations and feelings, enabling access to a reality which
precedes the subject itself.
Still in the twentieth century, ethnomusicologist John Blacking performed a
groundbreaking research for the global definition of music as a human capacity.
In his essay, Blacking proposes a distinction between the Western notion of music
and the wider musical making, where music is only part of a broader social action.
Thus, Blacking emphasizes the human factor in music as the basic ontological
matrix, emphasizing that »the ‘art object’ by itself is neither art nor non-art: it
becomes one or the other only by the attitudes and feelings that human beings
direct to it.«24 Both the resulting sound and the gestures and rituals involved in
making it can ultimately be encompassed in a more comprehensive and general
notion of music, since the musical structure itself is »above all sensuous and non-
referential«25 and does not fit into purely symbolic approaches. It cannot be
defined by its material means, not even by its sound quality, because these means
are as arbitrary as any cultural data, leaving that which precedes human action in
its patterns: man himself.
Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff adds some remarks that may help define
what music is among so many different views, such as the good but complex defini-
tion of Xenakis and Blacking’s anthropological view. Following the movement of
philosophy known as ‘philosophy of action’, Wolterstorff aims to think of music
and arts in general as action, or rather, as chains of actions. Thus, music has its own
chain of actions, in the sense that what defines it ontologically and ethically (its
ethos) is precisely what it does as an action, rather than how it does something (notes,
harmonies, sounds) or why or for whom it does something. While making music,
the individual performs a series of actions, such as composing, playing or singing,
but there is also a professional work, a social act, or even an action for which music
is only secondary, such as cooking or worshiping. What defines the meaning of this
chain of actions is the degree of responsibility of the individual. Is the individual as
responsible for the sounds he produces as he is for the payment he receives?
Responsibility can be a vague and even arguable notion, but at this moment it is
24
John BLACKING, Music, Culture and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking, Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995, 225.
25
Ibid., 240.
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enough to remember the concept of guilt and malice from Philosophy of Law; the
degree of intention and agency of an action ultimately defines the aggravating
factors that blame an entity for its act. In the same way, although constituting a
chain of actions, what are the fundamental actions that make music be what it is?
Wolterstorff presents his clear conclusion that »An action A is distinct from an
action B if it is possible to perform A and not B, or B and not A.«26
Wolterstorff uses the example of a ritual mask to explain how an artistic work
can be understood as a chain of actions and how different actions can be related
within that chain as generative actions of two types: those that count-generate
another action and those that casually generate another action.27 The artist who
created the mask of the example performs the action of creating the mask and
count-generates the action of representing one of the guardian spirits of its clan,
that is, he assumes this intrinsic action. By wearing the mask, he causally gener-
ated the action of hysteria in the rest of the community, an action extrinsic to his
own. Thus, a work of art can be an instrument in the performance of actions that
will generate other actions. On the other hand, it may have a function in the per-
formance of generated actions. Simply put, the work of art can assume different
roles in different types of actions, provoking even unintentional actions. The
example of the mask is suitable because it presents the community attribute in
this chain of actions: not only does an individual perform actions, but a group of
them is involved in the set of actions that defines the work as what it is, which
means that there is no such easy separation between ‘creative’ entities and ‘recep-
tive’ entities. The role of the work changes depending on the direction of the
vector of responsibilities, but what remains the same is the structure of relations
between the actions implied.
Within this understanding, music can be made for many purposes, by many
groups of people waiting for different types of experience, and with different
meanings. What does not change is the reality that, for some reason, music is
made. Music can fit into a chain of actions as the action primarily made, as an end
in itself, or it can be an action generated by praising a deity. It can also be an action
caused by a request, for example, that aims to causally generate the satisfaction of
a patron. In all cases, a fact remains: music is made. The fact remains because it is
through a certain limited number of actions that music is. Some actions are
performed, and while they are performed, they produce music. As an action,
music is always generated by other primary and more elementary actions, such as
composing, singing, playing or programming. The list is not exhaustive, but it is
not infinite. Regardless of the chain of actions in which one is placed, these funda-
26
Nicholas WOLTERSTORFF, Art in Action: Towards a Christian Aesthetic, Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1980, 12.
27
Ibid., 14.
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mental actions are inevitably present. Therefore, we can state that music is what
people do in performing musical actions.
To synthetize the definition of Xenakis in its elementary particles, music
presents itself as reality without having to be supported by a rational set of math-
ematical proportions, either in its great form or by the mathematical ratio that
separates one frequency from another (notes), or even by the organization of these
frequencies, including those which do not follow a constant progression (sound).
The experience of the other also does not define music as real, regardless of their
level of interpretation of the fact. But music does not simply exist. According to
Blacking’s proposition, music is a human action. And as an action, it needs some-
one to perform it, someone responsible for it, an author. It is for this reason,
finally, that this definition has an ethical scope. It has the dimension of the author,
which maintains responsibility as a limit concept so that it is music and not
something else. If music exists, there is an author.
2. Musical Discourse
»In the beginning was the logos.« A few centuries before the Gospel, logos was
also the main concept behind another set of writings, known for some centuries as
the Organon, from Greek philosopher Aristotle. The simple concept of logos is so
deeply connected to these texts that there has been an uninterrupted search for its
meaning throughout the history of Western thought. One of them comes from its
Latin translation, discursus, or simply, discourse.
‘Musical discourse’ is a very common expression in our music vocabulary.
Its use is part of our job of writing about music, and it is one of the synonyms
for our object of study, similar to ‘musical work’ or perhaps ‘piece of music’.
However, when we try to talk about our job as music analysts for non-musi-
cians, they dare ask us one very simple, but dangerous question: what is this
musical discourse all about? And suddenly we see ourselves trapped inside
many misconceptions and, while trying to explain what seems obvious, we
figure out that the obvious is not as evident as we thought. Aristotle calls this
type of dialectical case a petitio principii, which is when someone asks us about
our premises, the fundamental things that are assumed as common sense and
upon which we build our argument. When this question was asked about our
study, we realized that few were interested in spending time with books and
papers to define what musical discourse is.
Evidently, this would be not necessary if there was a consensus among all
studies, but this article compares the existing definitions and, in the search for a
common denominator, it attempts to come up with a definition consistent with
most philosophical discussions on the subject.
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The clearest definition of musical discourse comes from Robert Hatten, who
includes the term discourse in the glossary of his book Musical Meaning in
Beethoven. He says:
DISCOURSE: For music, loose term describing the strategic or thematic/topical flow
of ideas in a musical work, as in »musical discourse« or »thematic discourse.« Differ-
ing levels of discourse (or reflexivity of discourse) may be suggested by sudden shifts,
or cued by the recitative topic.28
Hatten begins his definition very wisely with the term ‘loose’. In fact, as
stated earlier, the word discourse is actually like quicksand for musicologists in
general, but his definition offers some important observations: 1) Discourse
involves a temporal sequence of events; 2) It happens in the musical work; 3) Dis-
course flow can be maintained and stopped, involving continuity and interrup-
tions. Since Hatten’s theory is set upon topical categories, which would build a
plain discourse, a piece of music could have different levels and types of discur-
siveness. However, it is not necessary to adopt this conceptual framework, which
will not be done here, to understand that, more than a category of semantic struc-
ture, a discourse is composed of a succession of linguistic gestures. These gestures
can be understood through the most different linguistic tokens, possibly a topic,
but more consistently they are sonorities grouped according to their gestuality or
their functional figurativity, and not by semantic referentiality, that is, by neces-
sarily meaning x for y (or in the case of the author, a hunting or dancing topic).
Finally, Hatten adds another important property to the concept: although
musical discourse cannot be a propositional discourse, which means it is not
possible to verify if it is true or false, it is still capable of dealing with the connec-
tions of a given body.29 This body could either be a set of sounds or sonorities or
even a musical process. The fact is that musical discourse can articulate ideas and
language; perhaps not in the category of a propositional reality, but in that aspect
of reality which Heidegger calls Stimmung, which, as Berio recalls, may be the
emotional or sensitive origin of a musical gesture which, upon being updated,
fragments reality and serves as a local impulse, that is, it includes a new event of
continuity or cut in the discursive flow.30
Another definition of musical discourse is given by Kofi Agawu, who consid-
ers the comprehensiveness of the term and lists three different ways to under-
stand musical discourse: 1) just as Hatten, a musical work is conceived as a
sequence of events; 2) events are structural sets of organized sounds, just like
Hatten developed his idea of topics; 3) musical discourse is not only the discourse
28
Robert HATTEN, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation,
Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004, 289.
29
R. HATTEN, Musical Meaning, 279.
30
Luciano BERIO, Du geste et de Piazza Carità, Contrechamps (Paris), 1 (1983), 41-45 at 44.
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of music, but also its relationship with the discussions for which it serves as a
trigger. Thus, Agawu adds a new element to the concept, which is the fundamen-
tal importance of the receptive entity of the discourse, promoting it from receiver
to participant, since its response is part of the discourse that originated it.31
The last contribution from this tradition of musical semiotics comes from one
of its pioneers, Jean-Jacques Nattiez. He does not specify in a sentence or excerpt
what he actually considers to be musical discourse but offers good points of refer-
ence for the development of the idea. Just as Agawu, he is interested in creating a
dialogue between the discourse of music and the discourse on music as an
approach to musical analysis, which could be related to Roland Barthes’ theory of
Scripture, since the commentary of a text becomes part of the text itself due to its
intertextual relationship, a concept that becomes much more radical with Derrida.
Perhaps the great contribution of Nattiez is the distinction that he makes between
musical discourse and musical score. The score is merely a prescriptive text, a
scheme that drives the discursive process. Nowadays, analytical efforts still tend
to focus on the musical text, which is part of the musical discourse, but just one
part of it. In this sense, musical text could be defined as any normative record of
musical information. From oral tradition to a very detailed musical score, passing
through a certain language of improvisation, all the media disseminate the funda-
mental structures of a given musical discourse, which still needs to be updated.
Even random music has the musical text, an orientation to its procedures, which,
finally, structures and defines its musical discourse. Nattiez understands this
separation between text and discourse, but he does not offer many resources to
deal with musical discourse as a whole, instead of worshiping the text. Moreover,
it is still necessary to understand what composes musical discourse as a whole.32
It is possible to compare Nattiez’s contribution with the musicological approach
of John Blacking. Blacking also discusses the contradictions between the discourse
on music and the discourse of music. In the same direction as Hatten, he considers
that musical discourse is not capable of affirming truths, but he includes an impor-
tant consequence of this, which is the metaphysical inherence of any discourse on
music due to this type of incapacity.33 To understand music, we should not separate
the discourse from its sociological and anthropological premises and all its contex-
tual information, or from its Weltanschauung, to use the Kantian concept.34 If, in
some sense, the semiotic and postmodern traditions propose a ‘deconstruction’,
31
Kofi AGAWU, Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009, 7-9.
32
Jean-Jacques NATTIEZ, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999, 133.
33
John BLACKING, The Structure of Musical Discourse: The Problem of the Song Text, Yearbook
for Traditional Music, 14 (1982), 15-23 at 16.
34
David NAUGLE, Worldview: The History of a Concept, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002.
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comparing a musical discourse with the discourses that come from it, we could say
that Blacking proposes rather a ‘reconstruction’, a holistic way to approach musical
discourse with its metaphysical and epistemological premises.
As mentioned in the introduction, one of the first records of the study of
discourse is that of Aristotle. In addition to the modern set of the Organon, it was
in his Rhetoric that the Philosopher studied the means by which someone could
persuade others for a given end. Rhetoric also discusses the logos, not its demon-
strative aspect, but its persuasiveness. Aristotle recognizes that not even a valid
syllogism has the power to make someone feel, think or be something. That is the
role of rhetoric: to study how a discourse can be truthful and affect the audience.
Logos is the only aspect capable of shaping ethos and pathos. Discourse is defined
not only by its ability to convey truths, but also to provoke emotions and com-
municate authority in its deliver. Rhetoric understands discourse in its fullness:
the first insight about a persuasive aim, the inventio; the ways to shape this neces-
sity in a textual structure, the dispositio; the embellishment and empowerment of
an argument in the elocutio; memorizing these points and controlling the memory
of the audience of the presented points, in memoratio; and, finally, the way
discourse is delivered through speech, in pronunciatio. Only the whole process
could persuade someone about something.35
It is interesting to note that the term was only translated into Latin much
later. Discursus is the supine declination of the word discurro, which originally
means the idea of running to or from something, or of running over and around
something. It took a long time for the word to mean a structure of arguments;
neither Augustine, Boethius or Anselm used the term with this meaning. It was
only at the end of Scholasticism that, as Barthes notes, it started to refer to a
portion of language.36
Rhetoric’s role of studying and teaching persuasive discourse was main-
tained from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when it became even more
prominent with Christian reformers such as Luther and Calvin. Inside the scope
of Liberal Arts, rhetoric studied not only verbal speech, but also another type of
discourse that previously belonged to the quadrivium: musical discourse. The rise
of rationalist and scientific philosophies made the rhetorical empire crumble, and
discourse became a utilitarian mean to obtain things. The only discipline capable
of dealing with logos was Logic, especially Formal Logic. This was the context of
the mid-twentieth century, when there was a new attempt to rescue rhetoric and
discourse with the New Rhetoric movement led by Polish philosopher Chaim
Perelman, from the Free University of Brussels. Perelman’s work aimed to update
the Aristotelian rhetoric to the reality of contemporary thought. As Aristotle had
35
ARISTOTLE, Rhetoric, 1356a.
36
Roland BARTHES, How to Live Together, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, 145.
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previously noted, logic is not able to influence people to choose the right things
and deal with the human condition. For Perelman, setting a strong relationship
between the orator, the speech and the audience was a safe way to understand the
negotiation of meanings that occurs within a discourse. He was not interested in
cataloguing rhetorical figures, such as Aristotle suggested and the Romans
commonly did, as well as musical rhetoricians; he was interested in understand-
ing how an argument can affect the audience to the point of turning opinions,
decisions and emotions.37
Discourse began to be noticed again as an important instance for linguistics,
since it deals with the interaction between all parties involved in communication.
If the propositions of Ferdinand de Saussure showed that linguistics was only
capable of studying language, and not speech, given the stability of the former as
opposed to the volatility of the latter, one of his pupils, Emile Benveniste, paid
special attention to the application of this linguistic theory to the act of its use, or
enunciation. Enunciation is language in practice, the actual realization of a
linguistic system. For Benveniste, »man is in the language.«38 Man is trapped
inside language because he is bound to live with others, which makes communi-
cation necessary. In this sense, discourse is an action, making it difficult to under-
stand a language without the act of it being spoken. He was not interested in
studying the enunciated text, but in its production and its product, that is, speech.
If, on the one hand, Benveniste tries to create a bridge between language and
speech, between langue and parole, he still cannot overcome the dichotomy itself.
Perhaps this dichotomy would only really be transposed a few years later in
England, with the work of John L. Austin, which influenced both Gilles Deleuze
and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Both constructed their philosophies based on the
elocutionary theory, but mainly on the postulates of Austin known as the ‘speech
act theory’. The theory overcomes the dichotomy precisely because it considers
impossible for a system to be disconnected from the act of being used, or better, of
being made. Austin proposes categories that are more defined by the action of the
enunciator than by their linguistic stability, thus being an ethical system that gives
the producer responsibility for a discourse. The theory can be briefly summarized
by the three components of a speech: the illocutionary act, which deals with the
action performed by a speech, e.g., affirming, promising or teaching something; the
locutionary act, which comprises linguistic tokens, that is, what is being said,
which are words, phrases and all syntactic and semantic structures; and finally,
the perlocutionary act, which deals not with what a discourse does, but with what
it does in the other, whether it is to inform them, persuade them, or any other
37
Chaïm PERELMAN, The Realm of Rhetoric, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2017.
38
Valdir N. FLORES – Marlene TEIXEIRA, Enunciação, dialogismo, intersubjetividade: um es-
tudo sobre Bakhtin e Benveniste, Revista Bakhtiniana (São Paulo), 1/2 (2009), 143-64 at 158.
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consequence. Within this concept of discourse, it is impossible to have the mean-

ing of something; what exists is the meaning made in something.39
Influenced by another scholar from rhetoric and linguistics called Oswald
Ducrot, Deleuze, in one of his books with Felix Guattari, notes that the perform-
ativeness of discourse is the most important part of its effectiveness, not only
because it is the act of enunciating, but also because that aspect contains in itself
an essential part of the act that motivates the ‘speech’ of a discourse, so to speak.40
This is what Austin calls illocutionary action, which is understood by Ducrot as
implicit presupposition. In this sense, performance is not only an a posteriori for
discourse; it is part of its own ontology since it has an essential element of
discourse instead of only reproducing it. According to Benveniste’s concept,
discourse happens to the other, so it is always an act of communication, which
resorts to the traditional understanding that discourse is something one says about
something in some way for some purpose. In that sense, the emphasis is not that per-
formance is pointing to something, but that it is pointing. Recalling Deleuze’s
epistemology, discourse does not address which objects are involved, but their
connections. Discourse is connection.
Nicholas Wolterstorff gives us some complementary remarks on this subject
in his Wilde Lectures in Oxford. When defining what is divine discourse, the
discourse delivered by God, he explains the illocutionary action within the speech
act, »the very same action which can be related to a locutionary action in such a
way as to be an illocutionary action can be performed without the use of words.«41
This could be the case of musical discourse, since it consists of musical actions.
Thus, discourse has a place in time and also has temporal limits. It may inhabit
that dimension of time that the Greeks call kairos, the qualitative time abundant in
meaning, which is exactly the word used by Aristotle to describe the temporality
of discourse. If discourse exists in time, Wolterstorff states that the ontology of
musical discourse demands a temporal separation between its composition and
its performance, since musical work is a virtual and mediated potency.42 The
definition of philosopher Paul Ricoeur could help us in this context: for him,
music is a ‘two-time art’43 because it needs a musical text, which is the normative
record, and its actualization, also required by its ontological feature of monstra-
tion, or the essential attribute of being experienced by another.
39
John L. AUSTIN, How To Do Things With Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
40
Gilles DELEUZE – Felix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1987.
41
Nicholas WOLTERSTORFF, Divine Discourse. Philosophical reflections on the claim that God speaks,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 37.
42
Nicholas WOLTERSTORFF, Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 75.
43
Paul RICOEUR, Arts, langage et herméneutique esthétique: Entretien avec Paul Ricœur par Jean-
Marie Brohm and Magali Uhl (1996). Available on: http://www.philagora.net/philo-fac/ricoeur.php.
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Based on the premises presented so far, musical discourse as a concept should

be applicable to all musical repertoires, from plain chant to contemporary avant-
garde music, including the music of indigenous peoples, for example. This defini-
tion, somehow, brings music back to musical studies in the sense that it includes
performative data as a fundamental part of musical discourse.
Therefore, it could be said as succinctly as possible that musical discourse is
the communicative act mediated by musical actions in a delimited time. By communica-
tive act, we refer to the fact that this act always happens to others. It involves the
relationship between the orator and the audience, as defined by rhetoric, but does
not require a verbal and referential locution to be considered as such, and it still
considers the audience’s response as an integral part of this network of relation-
ships. Mediated refers to the musical discourse’s need to be updated and to its
two-time ontological feature. With musical actions, we encompass all the parts or
actions of musical dynamics, which are both the musical composition of a score
and its performance, but also the relationship with the environment where the
piece will be performed. Lastly, delimited time establishes the limitation of the dis-
course between a beginning and an end, as well as the temporal quality of its suc-
cession of events.
3. Meaning in Music
Kevin Vanhoozer recalls an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust where Faust attempts
to translate the above-mentioned passage from the Gospel of John from Greek
into German. He tries many possibilities: in the beginning was Thought (Sinn),
Power (Kraft), but in the end he chooses »In the beginning was the Act (Tat).«44
Perhaps we would say, »In the beginning was the discourse.«
The logos is embodied in discourse just as music is embodied in sound. Logos
is the means by which the metaphysical touches the physical and the transcend-
ent is immanent. When embodied, the logos takes form, or figura in Latin. This
form or figure is therefore the only means by which the logos is known. Knowing
the mean by which something comes to be is a long-standing search undertaken
by man, knowing that which assumes a sign or a mean, or what is meaning.
Meaning carries within itself the presupposition of the metaphysical, since it
assumes that something comes to be and not simply is; therefore, the negation of
metaphysics denies the very existence of meaning. In this sense, the discussion of
musical meaning should necessarily present its premises, whether it is the
presumption of the death of the metaphysical – the death of God in Nietzsche45 –
44
Kevin VANHOOZER, First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics, Downers Grove: IVP Aca-
demic, 2002, 162.
45
Michel MEYER, De la Métaphysique à la Rhétorique, Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1986, 136.
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or the belief in its existence. However, the main studies on the subject seem to
focus more on establishing a descriptive model than on validating its logic.
The quarrel is old and finds notorious representatives on all sides, whether
Aristides Quintilianus or Sextus Empiricus, Hanslick or Wagner, or the whole
contemporary trend of semiotics in opposition to a study more focused on the
structural and physical-acoustic operations of sound. More than ever, in the face
of the diffused reality of contemporary thought and twenty-first century music, it
seems necessary to reflect on the basis of any musical practice, be it analytical,
performative or compositional. The inconsistencies may be found precisely in the
absence of clarity about their presuppositions or even in the contradiction between
the assumed reality and the proposition presented.
In his classic work, Leonard B. Meyer begins his proposal on musical mean-
ing taking for granted the reality of meaning. He briefly divides the groups of
opinions on the subject as ‘absolutists’ or ‘referentialists’ and then moves on to the
development of the theory itself.46 Still within the musicological canon, Robert
Hatten adds Peircean semiotics to Meyer’s proposition and develops his theory of
musical meaning, which he calls ‘expressive meaning’.47 This kind of meaning
defines the motivation that leads the composer to make a particular musical
choice. Hatten seeks to understand meaning within Meyer’s first category, work-
ing only with musical data, but hoping that such data will lead him to the second
category by inferring symbolic references. Again, however, the very existence of
meaning in music is a belief which is not explicitly justified. Eric Clarke, review-
ing the current theories of musical meaning, situates his own as a theory of
perception of meaning, attributing to listening in its most physical sense the
constitution of that meaning.48 Lawrence Kramer makes use of a hermeneutical
notion in which the subject is central, with the matrix of meaning residing in its
ontology.49 On the other hand, we could mention great musicological references
that already start from the assumption that there is no such a thing as musical
meaning. Felix Salzer proposes his theory of structural listening starting from the
assumption that harmonic significance only occurs internally, in its functional
laws.50 Fred Lerdhal and Ray Jackendoff, while justifying the impossibility of
music being configured as language, conclude: »Music is pure structure.«51 This
46
Leonard B. MEYER, Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, 1.
47
R. HATTEN, Musical Meaning, xvi.
48
Eric CLARKE, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning,
Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2005, 7.
49
Lawrence KRAMER, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2002, 2-3.
50
Felix SALZER, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music, New York: Dover Publications,
1956, 10.
51
Fred LERDHAL – Ray JACKENDOFF, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1996, 9.
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article does not aim to comprehensively examine the nature of the studies on
musical meaning, but rather to briefly show that the justifications for validating
something like musical meaning are neglected and that the attempts to use the
concept of meaning to refer to different dimensions of music are scattered.
We also mentioned the belief in metaphysics. This statement alone is frighten-
ing, because it seems to contain some kind of mystical obscurantism. However,
the fact is that the affirmation of metaphysics can only take place as a belief, since
by definition something like pure metaphysics would be indefinable and physi-
cally unknowable. In classical epistemology, belief is a fundamental aspect of
knowledge, but Thomas Kuhn brought to the philosophy of science of the twen-
tieth century the need to reflect upon the role of a type of dogma in every discourse,
making the fideistic component a logical necessity.
Kuhn argues that the hypothesis itself is metaphysical data, since it is a thesis
that still does not exist. It is the belief in its existence that motivates scientific
research.52 On the contrary, it is also the discomfort and the sense of opposition to
a previously held belief that moves the subject away from a proposed hypothesis.
Canonized musical works are sedimented as a paradigm by a collective belief, a
correspondence between the discourse made and the belief held. Kuhn adds that
the artistic work benefits from the fact that it does not express contradictions,
since its meaning does not encompass propositional assertions. Hence, it may
constitute a more extensive paradigmatic canon. What varies from piece to piece,
from performance to performance, is precisely the set of beliefs that sustain and
motivate each one of them.
In this sense, the belief in the metaphysical is necessary to state that there is
something as meaning. Two basic questions arise more clearly with regard to the
metaphysical and its implication for musical meaning: the question of belief and
the very possibility of meaning. As for the first question, the focal point is that
only belief can sustain the affirmation or negation of musical meaning, given its
nature. In this way, any creative or interpretive understanding will express, more
or less explicitly, its presupposition about meaning, necessarily bringing it with it.
The possibility of belief as a bond, as a relation and connection to a subsidiary
knowledge, has been widely discussed and has become more consolidated in the
reflections of Michael Polanyi, the scientist who influenced the propositions of
Thomas Kuhn.
Polanyi assumes that all knowledge is personal. The Copernican Revolution
went from geocentrism to heliocentrism, but both cosmologies remained centered
on the same point of reference: man. Anthropocentrism changes its affective refer-
ences but it is still the human being that creates knowledge. This happens because
52
Thoman KUHN, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962.
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what changes the understanding of the world is not the logic embodied in a pro-
position, but something that precedes it, an affect. Passions are at the core of the
constitution of meaning, even before they are purposely formed. In this context, it
is possible to suggest and remember what Aristotle used to say: logos, pathos, and
ethos differ in degree, but not in nature. The three components go hand in hand,
even though each has its own role in what Polanyi says is the ‘act of knowing’.53
Knowledge itself gains the status of action; not as a thing or a good, but as some-
thing made by someone. This affective data is not simply defined as a preconcep-
tion, but as an intuition, a reflection. Polanyi defines:
Scientific discovery reveals new knowledge, but the new vision which accompanies it
is not knowledge. It is less than knowledge, for it is a guess; but it is more than
knowledge, for it is foreknowledge of things yet unknown and at present perhaps
inconceivable.54
This ‘tacit knowledge’, as defined by him, does not discourage scientific

work, but rather enriches it. The belief in something still unproven from the logi-
cal point of view is the energy that makes logic possible. Tacit knowledge is the set
of metaphysical data in which we believe and that supports knowledge itself.
Since it is not yet materialized, it can only be achieved as a belief. A belief can be
justified and formalized, but the traces of the belief that originated it will remain
in it as the ‘tacit coefficient’. As for meaning, Polanyi adequately defines the term
itself: there is an action of meaning, a meaning created by an author. The reality
that belief is present as much as meaning resurfaces.
Belief and meaning or belief in meaning inhabit the simple reality. There is no
such thing as musical meaning in reality. Instead, there is meaning made in music.
Polanyi exposes his view of how a notion of inconsistent meaning gives way to a
type of destructive analysis of reality, even using music as an example in this long
valuable excerpt:
The fact that skills cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their particulars may lead
to serious difficulties in judging whether or not a skilful performance is genuine. The
extensive controversy on the ‘touch’ of pianists may serve as an example. Musicians
regard it as a glaringly obvious fact that the sounding of a note on the piano can be
done in different ways, depending on the ‘touch’ of the pianist. To acquire the right
touch is the endeavour of every learner, and the mature artist counts its possession
among his chief accomplishments. A pianist’s touch is prized alike by the public and
by his pupils: it has a great value in money. Yet when the process of sounding a note
on the piano is analysed, it appears difficult to account for the existence of ‘touch’.
When a key is depressed, a hammer is set in motion which hits a string. The hammer
53
Ibid., 17.
54
Ibid., 143.
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is pushed by the depressed key only for a short distance and is thereby flung into free
motion, which is eventually stopped by the chord. Therefore, it is argued, the effect of
the hammer on the chord is fully determined by the speed of the hammer in free
motion at the moment when it hits the chord. As this speed varies, the note of the
chord will sound more or less loudly. This may be accompanied by changes in colour,
etc., owing to concurrent changes in the composition of overtones, but it should make
no difference in what manner the hammer acquired any particular speed. According-
ly, there could be no difference as between tyro and virtuoso in the tone of the notes
which they strike on a given piano; one of the most valued qualities of the pianist’s
performance would be utterly discredited. Such is indeed the conclusion you find in
standard textbooks like Jeans’ Science and Music (1937) and A. Wood’s Physics of Music
(1944). Yet this result relies erroneously on an incomplete analysis of the pianist’s
skill. This has been demonstrated (to my satisfaction) by J. Baron and J. Hollo, who
called attention to the noise that the depression of a key makes when all chords are
removed from a piano. This noise can be varied while the speed imparted to the
hammer remains unaltered. The noise mingles with the note sounded by the hammer
on the chord and modifies its quality, and this seems to account in principle for the
pianist’s capacity to control the tone of the piano by the art of his touch.55
In the middle of the century, Polanyi notes how inadequate are the analytical
methods that ignore performance data as part of the very meaning of the reality
of music. The example leads to the conclusion that, although the human being is
bound to describe his beliefs about reality, his description is not reality. In fact, the
presuppositions, the subsidiary data of an action, are what constitute meaning.
The meaning can be denotative, when the action points to something; thus, action
becomes a sign for an object, and both form the whole (Gestalt). However, an
action may not point to something and simply functions in itself, being itself the
whole, which is what he calls existential meaning, the type of meaning Polanyi
attributes to music.56 Belief in the meaning of music ultimately takes on this status
of belief, and the understanding that there is no meaning in music can only be
sustained under the same mechanism.
The idea that the logic of a statement is not only in the formal data that
compose it stands out in the research on the functioning of language. In the paper
that influenced Deleuze, written in partnership with Jean-Claude Anscombre,
Oswald Ducrot understands that even verbal language in its most elementary
units demands a presuppositional aspect to establish any kind of meaning. Using
a type of ‘integrated rhetoric’,57 the authors propose that the understanding of a
statement can only occur if two levels of interpretation are reached, the linguistic
55
Ibid., 52.
56
Ibid., 60.
57
Oswald DUCROT – J. C. ANSCOMBRE, L’argumentation dans la langue, Langages, 10/42
(1976), 5-27 at 11.
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component and the rhetorical component.58 They approach, respectively, the analysis
of linguistic tokens and gestures, and the formal aspects and situational aspects
associated with the application of a given system in a given circumstance. Ana-
lytically, the implicit presuppositions are the sum of the marks that the linguistic
component brings, of what is set, plus the knowledge of the situation in which the
statement is given; the statement is only what it is and therefore only has meaning
because it is formulated as it is in the situation in which and for whom it is made.
Finally, Ducrot concludes that these statements are the very energy that originates
the speech act, understanding them as the illocutionary force that performs the
act and constitutes the very logic of language.59 The forces that are parallel to the
proposition become greater, but that does not mean the death of the proposition;
only its repositioning, making it more adequate within the institution of meaning.
The rhetorical logos arises with Aristotle as an antidote to the excessive proposi-
tional formalization, and historically the same has happened to music.60
The possibility of a belief in metaphysics immediately leads to a notion of
meaning, but its own existence is still unjustified, especially when a possible
result is meaning in music. Composer Roberto Victório synthesizes these relations
well by recalling that even Newton and Descartes, the foundations behind modern
science, discovered answers to metaphysics in God and developed their theory of
knowledge based on a holistic approach to reality, and not on the fragmentation
of knowledge which their own postulates caused later on. This abandonment of
an integral idea of reality affected the whole sphere of human action, including
music, which stopped being conceived as a part of life in its broadest sense to start
being treated as an accident in the midst of reality. Contemporary music is capable
of rescuing the idea of a Metaphysics precisely because music essentially does not
require a syntactic logic, which might be difficult for other types of discourse.
Music inhabits this first reality, and in its making there is the »materialization of
this entity in the real world,«61 even though it keeps trying to »return to virtuality
by performance, or infinite possibilities of reading« due to its bitemporal nature.
The image of the ritual appears as an analogy, but it can teach important
aspects about meaning in music, in the sense that the act of worshipping is
composed of gestures which ‘literally’ incorporate a type of external entity into
the physical world. But the ritual is not the entity yet, only a glimpse of its exist-
ence, physically manifested. The logos is the incarnation of the transcendent, the
58
Cristiane Dall CORTIVO LEBLER, Pressupostos e subentendidos segundo a Teoria da Argu-
mentação na Língua, Gragoatá (Niterói), 40 (2016), 295-316 at 298.
59
Oswald DUCROT, Logique et linguistique, Langages, 1/2 (1966), 3-30 at 13.
60
M. MEYER, De la Métaphysique, 122.
61
Roberto VICTÓRIO, O paradigma holístico e a reinterpretação da totalidade (2006). Available on:
http://www.robertovictorio.com.br/artigo/arquivos/paradigma-holistico-e-a-reinterpretacao-da-total-
idade/.
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immaterial taking form in matter, the virtual that is actualized; it is the imma-
nence of the intangible and ineffable, and when it comes to be, it reduces itself, if
not essentially, to manifestation. The expectation of a meaning that lies in the ob-
ject finds at most that what it seeks, a grave. The dissection that the analysis pro-
motes, when leaving aside the discursive dynamics of a work, finds only traces of
a lifeless body, with members that do not contribute in any way to the life of that
body, that are only viscera without any function.
Thus, when we validate the mechanism of belief, either as an affirmation or
negation, it is still necessary to discuss the very possibility of metaphysics so we
can understand the need for a proposition about meaning in music. Although the
idea of form seems to be suggested in this article, we should not jump to conclu-
sions before the concept is fully presented. The first notion of a substance that
takes form should be introduced, without the preexistence of this form being
necessary. The notion of matter and form does not need be abolished for its con-
tingency to be proposed.
Based on this, physicist Werner Heisenberg concluded that the Aristotelian
propositions were correct, since his notion of matter was just metaphysical,
preceding the assumption of a form. Commenting on his experiments on particle
acceleration, Heisenberg states that:
If we compare this situation with the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, we can
say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere ‘potentia’, should be compared to our
concept of energy, which gets into ‘actuality’ by means of the form, when the elemen-
tary particle is created.62
It is worth remembering that Heisenberg’s contribution to science was deci-

sive, causing Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr to discuss the possibility of determin-
ing the position of a quantum particle in time and space. Einstein was reluctant to
accept the indeterministic position, since it would be impossible to quantify the
relation between time and energy, whereas Bohr defended this indeterminacy.63 It
is important to highlight that the conflict occurs in the epistemic order, with the
possibility of knowing the energy quantitatively before it materializes, and not
during its existence. Thus, even within this controversy, the ontology of matter in
its metaphysical state had not been challenged.
In later theories, such as the ‘chaos theory’, the possibility of metaphysics
remains valid. Although the theory is based on the hypothesis of unpredictability
and instability as factors of the imponderability that generates matter, time is still
62
Werner HEISENBERG, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, New York:
Harper, 1958, 160.
63
Niels BOHR, Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics (1949). Avail-
able on: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/bohr.htm.
195

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maintained as a metaphysical entity, especially in the proposition of the irrevers-

ibility of time made by Ilya Prigogine.64 David Bohm, another proponent of the
theory, shares the same idea of a process philosophy, concluding that »metaphysics
is an explicit expression of a worldview.«65
Consequently, belief and metaphysics are established as two instances which
can be affirmed or, at least, accounted for in the realm of reality. The last issue that
needs to be clarified in order to provide a solid basis for thinking about the mean-
ing of music is the idea of music as a language, or a musical language. Although
the metaphysical presence of a meaning can be assumed in music, it seems impru-
dent to claim that this meaning demands a structure such as a language to take
form. The very term that designates language is related to the organic medium
used to produce its chain of signaling actions, the tongue, in Latin. If with language
we refer to a set of operational rules, as in computer programming languages, it is
possible to accept it as an analogy, for the lack of a more adequate term. Writer
C.S. Lewis, in his last article, attests to the inherent presence of a language in
human nature itself, recognizing that the term can designate any kind of systema-
tization of signals, but that as a rule it consists of »vocal noises with meaning,«66
defining language as a »system of vocal noises meant (in the psychological sense)
to mean (in the symbolic sense).«67 However, this aspect is present in a community
context and in more or less denotative agreements, to use Polanyi’s terminology,
which differ from the order of meaning in music. Rules are part of what language
is, but they are not language. Thus, music, in its existential meaning, does not
need to and cannot be attached to the referential bonds of the word. For this
reason, linguistic approaches in music must beware of the very nature of meaning
before applying its systems to sets of musical actions. The meaning of music does
not require a linguistic structure to exist, and something like a musical language
can only be affirmed analogically, protected from the arbitrariness of the sign
designation.
François-Bernard Mâche proposes an understanding of music as a universal
language, seeking minimal structures that cross musical ‘languages’, whether it is
a rhythmic ostinato or the relation between a musical gesture and its gesturing,
which has different types, but it is always present as an occurrence.68 Neverthe-
less, Mâche still takes the structuralist sense of language and looks for the mean-
ing that is in the structures, and not made in them. When one assigns its own rules
64
David R. GRIFFIN, Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine and Process
Philosophy, New York: SUNY Press, 1986, 20.
65
David BOHM, On Creativity, London: Routledge, 1996, 118.
66
C. S. LEWIS, Language and Human Nature, VII: Journal of Marion E. Wade Center, 27 (2010), 25-
28 at 25.
67
Ibid., 26.
68
François-Bernard MÂCHE, Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d’Arion, Paris: Klincksieck,
1983, 36.
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to the established game, there is once again the risk of arbitrariness. If it is possible
to attribute something universal, maybe it should be humanity itself, something
that unites every human being as humans. It is the human who performs the
action, regardless of the type of structure operated to perform a certain communi-
cative act.
The idea that music would be a universal language would depend on two
definitions: what is language and what is universal. It is problematic to define
universal from an analytical point of view, since it would mean taking a single
view, among the many views of reality, to be a general truth. When speaking of
something universal in music, taking as a starting point the practice established in
the West, we exclude many other ways not only of making music, but of thinking
of the human being.69 However, the more different systems of life are placed side
by side, the more one notices constant intersections, revealing points of contact
that, finally, show that there is something in human beings that precedes culture;
something in making music that precedes Music (with a capital M). The idea of a
universal language, in the same way, cannot depend on the search for analytical
standards such as the conceptual skeleton mentioned in the definition of music. It
is a mistake to try to think of an underlying structure of the human language,
excluding the ontological data of the human being, or at least drastically reducing
it. This method generates, at most, a totalizing and ethnocentric universality. In
fact, the mistake is in reducing a chain of actions to one thing. If there is some-
thing universal in music, it is the fact that, regardless of its sound structures, it
always has certain common attributes: 1) it is made by someone; 2) it is produced
by musical actions, such as singing and playing, even if they are secondary to a
previous action, e. g., cooking, praying or even a dramatization. Once again, it is
the reduction of subject to object or, worse, the presumption of this easily dichot-
omizable division that prevents a more accurate examination of the actions
involved in human acting.
Starting from the two validated points, it is possible to think of something as
a metaphysical presence in the musical work. If meaning is made in music, instead
of simply inhabiting it, someone needs to make it. It starts to become clear that
performance, in a sense, is part of the agency of musical meaning but, given the
bitemporality of music, the question is whether there is a meaning present in the
first ontological time of music. What can there be of the composer’s presence, as
the author behind the meaning, while music is just a potential?
Jacques Derrida disqualified this type of search, calling it logocentrism, a
totalitarian attitude that aimed to obtain some stability of meaning in points of
reference that are subsequent to the communicative act itself. Derrida under-
stands that any interpretation is a political act and that, at the beginning, it aims
69
B. NETTL, The Study of Ethnomusicology, 43.
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at legitimizing an oppressive force. Thus, the ethics of interpretation should lead

to the abolition of any kind of authoritative agent, creating new readings that
provide the liberation of the oppressed. Although this ethics may be volatile, it
leads to the death of the author as an agent of any intended meaning.70
This debate seems to have two poles struggling for the supremacy of the
institution of meaning in relation to reality, or in relation to Realism as a possible
category of things that exist independently of the human mind. On one side, a
pole claims that there are no things other than rational fabrications and, on the
other, an extreme assumes a perfect correspondence between language and
reality, a type of naïve Realism. The existence of something as an author is neces-
sary for meaning, yet it becomes unfeasible when the notion of authority is la-
beled as oppressive, thus being a political creation that must be eliminated. If
there is no author, there is no authorial intent.
Derrida calls metaphysics itself the ‘science of presence’71 and, as already
stated, the assumption of its reality and therefore the presence of some kind of
author can only be verified or not through belief. However, the notion of intention
as a trace of the act of meaning of the author should not incur the naïveté of naïve
Realism, believing that interpretation is able to arrive at an ultimate meaning of
reality, as some semiologies, including musical ones, seem to propose. The best
defense of a balanced idea of intention seems to be that of literary critic E. D.
Hirsch. He does not believe that there is a meaning in things, but that meaning is
made in them. Hirsch defines intention as an authorial action, fixed in the text.
Thus, intention takes on a sense of directionality, of connection between the mind
of the doer and its act. One should not confuse intention with desire or any kind
of romantic inspiration. The intention of the author, that the interpretation intends
to obtain, should not be the thing that the author aimed at in his action, but the
direction which the action took, the connection between subject and object. There-
fore, meaning differs from significance because it has to do with the internal
operations in the middle, and not with the external points to which he sought to
connect the act.
Intention can be better defined when its meaning comes from the ‘speech act
theory’, where the equivalent to intention within the language system and its use
is the illocutionary force, as previously defined. Intention is not what the author
intends to do to the other in his communicative act, but what he does in the act.
However, if we remember Ducrot’s proposition, understanding is to some extent
persuading the mind of the other about something that did not affect them before,
working as an internal rhetoric. The clues to understanding this intention can
only be grasped through the locutionary act, the traces of intention already
70
Kevin VANHOOZER, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998, 63.
71
Ibid.
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mentioned in presuppositional terms. Interpretation is not a gnosis, which de-

pends on a knowledge outside the text to be properly understood. This direction-
ality of intention can then be defined as the state of directing oneself to something,
or as an affection. Thus, we can represent the meaning in music as F(p), which is
a product of what is made – the illocutionary force (F), in the representation of a
reality (p), of a projected world or a Stimmung. Intention is precisely the operation
of F in p, in the tendency, direction and forces applied. J. L. Austin, the author of
this theory, argues that performative action is an action performed and not a
thing, thus it cannot be judged in itself as true or false, good or bad.72 The ethics of
meaning arise when the responsibility of the metaphysical value of meaning is
put into practice, and not from a moral valuation of the object. Thus, it is by actu-
alizing a virtual in the performance that meaning is finally and effectively made,
without any linguistic constraints from the propositional point of view.
Consequently, the performance is located on the plane of composition of
music itself, ontologically speaking. It is part of the chain of actions that make it
exist, and hence of its own meaning. In the ‘mist of virtual images’73 that surround
the music potentially actualized in composition, performance has the role of
actualizing them, making the current object overflow, but without going beyond
what made the it what it was. Hence, performance is always unique, actualizing a
different set of virtualities in each performance and, at the same time, always
having the possibility of playing the same music. »The plane of immanence
includes both the virtual and its actualization at the same time, without there
being any assimilable limit between the two.«74 Although Deleuze tries to remove
the metaphysical from the Bergsonian virtual through the eternal return of
Nietzsche,75 we remember once again that the very adoption of the metaphysical
category is a choice. Thus, if it is the virtual of the future or the plane of the
immaterial that justifies the permanence of something as meaning, the fact is that
this permanence can be lived even in parallel with the state of death, of emptying,
experienced in each local event at every moment.
To conclude this article, we present one last idea for our proposition of mean-
ing: the concept of myth. Although Kevin Vanhoozer warns of the risk of using
this term after its credibility was discredited by modern philosophy, which
considered it only a tale unrelated to reality, its origin comes from Aristotle, as my-
thos, a dramatic plot whose meaning can only be realized when put into action.76
72
J.L. AUSTIN, How To Do Things, 6.
73
Gilles DELEUZE, O atual e o virtual, in: Éric Alliez (ed.), Deleuze Filosofia Virtual, São Paulo:
Editora 34, 1996, 49.
74
Ibid., 51.
75
Fernando Meireles MONEGALHA HENRIQUES, O atual e o virtual em Bergson e Deleuze, PhD
Thesis, Federal University of São Carlos, 2016, 18.
76
Kevin VANHOOZER, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 5.
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Myth, in this sense, refers not to objects and persons, but to the representation of
movements and actions. In the Aristotelian sense, myth does not refer to things of
a world outside the real plane, but to the actions within this world. A myth cannot
be re-enacted or relived; a myth is a configuration where form and content are
integrally connected. In the same way, musical discourse takes place as a myth, a
multiplicity of incidents. It is the projection of a world and, as such, it can only be
lived. When speaking of myth, Mâche considers its modern meaning and states
that language is necessary for music to be configured as discourse.77 However, a
myth in its broad sense cannot be told; it can only be created. Wolterstorff does
not acknowledge the ‘biotic’ need of a phenomenon for its artistic mimesis to take
effect; on the contrary, sea waves are not music, unless someone makes music out
of them.78
Polanyi and Prosch complement this view, recalling that the myth always
refers to something that comes to be, to beginnings. In fact, the myth is related to
what man himself becomes.79 It is by making the myth that man is made, in a
primordial ‘sacred time’, ‘in the beginning’. The myth is not told; it is lived. In
fact, man does not live the myth, he lives himself. Music as discourse is not just
part of the framework of existence; it is an inseparable element of reality itself.
Writer Jorge Luis Borges said that »if life’s meaning were explained to us, we
probably would not understand it.«80 The concept of meaning is possible, but its
understanding, like its own ontology, can hardly be had, much less exhaustively.
Thus, perhaps the understanding of meaning can be made. Borges died in 1986,
after requesting that Pastor Edouard de Montmollin officiated his funeral service.
At the funeral, held at the St Pierre Cathedral in Geneva, the pastor preached
about the excerpt quoted above from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, which
says that Jesus Christ is the Eternal Word historically incarnated in this world.
Pastor Montmollin said that »Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched
for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of
things.« He explained, however, that no man can achieve this word through his
own efforts and that, when he tries, he gets lost in a labyrinth. Montmollin
concluded: »It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to
him«81 (Williamson, 2004, 490). In the same way, we may state: »It is not man who
discovers the logos, but the Logos that comes to him.«
77
F.-B. MÂCHE, Musique mythe, 113.
78
N. WOLTERSTORFF, Art in Action, 85.
79
Michael POLANYI – Harry PROSCH, Meaning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, 122.
80
Jorge Luis BORGES, Conversations, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, 240.
81
Edwin WILLIAMSON, Borges: A Life, New York: Viking, 2004, 490.
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Sažetak
Suvremeni glazbeni logos
U ovom se članku istražuju značenja logosa, tj. logički aspekti glazbe. Rasprava je
podijeljena u tri glavne kategorije: definiciju glazbe, definiciju glazbenog diskursa i definici-
ju glazbenog značenja. Kombinacija tih triju kategorija rezultira općom definicijom onoga
što shvaćamo kao suvremeni glazbeni logos, koji stoga odgovara sadašnjem stanju pojma
u filozofiji (s predstavnicima kao što su Gilles Deleuze, Nicholas Wolterstorff i Michael Po-
lanyi) i glazbi, osobito muzikologiji i glazbenoj kompoziciji. Glavni je zaključak da se logički
aspekt glazbe danas ne može spoznati bez dubinske analize njegovih posljedica u izvedbi
kao istinskoj komponenti njegova pojma.
Traženje definicije za taj predmet, praksu ili proces koji nazivamo glazbom vrlo je
složeno pitanje, a njegove su implikacije jednako teške. Kako možemo raspravljati o tome
da je neki tip glazbene prakse moguć ako nismo sposobni čak ni definirati što je glazba? U
većini slučajeva civilizacije koje nije dotakla moderna zapadna misao čak ni nemaju termin
za ono što mi zovemo glazbom. No znači li to da one ne proizvode glazbe ili da je nemaju?
Ako u skladu sa zdravim razumom izgleda da glazba sadrži niz zvukova kojima na neki
način možemo pripisati pozitivnu vrijednost, pokušaj da ju se definira završava u potrebi da
bude objektivan. Drugim riječima, ako je ono što definira glazbu prisutnost tonova ili harmo-
nije, onda su uvjeti koji diktiraju kako se mora obavljati proučavanje glazbe već time defini-
rani, pa tako se suočavamo s ontološkim pitanjem na koje ovaj članak ima cilj odgovoriti.
201

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Contemporary Musical Logos

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Contemporary Musical Logos

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Contemporary Musical Logos

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Federal University of Mato

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listener’s responsibility, but he stresses Cage’s criticism on performance. When

Xenakis believes that opinions such as Cage’s still demonstrate a weak

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consequence. Within this concept of discourse, it is impossible to have the mean-

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Based on the premises presented so far, musical discourse as a concept should

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This ‘tacit knowledge’, as defined by him, does not discourage scientific

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It is worth remembering that Heisenberg’s contribution to science was deci-

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maintained as a metaphysical entity, especially in the proposition of the irrevers-

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at legitimizing an oppressive force. Thus, the ethics of interpretation should lead

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mentioned in presuppositional terms. Interpretation is not a gnosis, which de-

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Suvremeni glazbeni logos

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