Peter Kivy, Sounding Off (original) (raw)

Review: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music

Current Musicology, 2012

At least since Plato the problematic of philosophizing about music, or even conceiving a kind of musical philosophy, has conditioned our discourses. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music shares in this problematic but raises its stakes, encouraging us to renew our attempts to think music philosophically. It accomplishes its primary goal admirably: it could very well accompany discussions of music and philosophy for some time to come. The articles it contains are for the most part emphatically if not explicitly written from the perspective of analytic philosophy, which suggests certain disciplinary alignments: music theory and cognition seem to align easily with analytic philosophy, whereas ethnomusicology and historical musicology seem to align with continental philosophy. One of the strengths of the Companion is its ability to appeal to readers from seemingly every music–academic discipline. The Companion thus provides a new standard of philosophical conversation toward which musicians can aspire.

Music and Meaning: A Reply to Peter Kivy

Sound is a basic property of the cosmos and, thus, of all of its members. Sound has meaning, but not all instances of sound. Only those sounds that constitute the physical individual animal, including the human animal, have meaning. Or, more precisely, such sounds are meaning. And these are not just sounds that the physical individual naturally can hear. Meaningful sounds include all sounds that constitute or intersect the animal, including all of the sounds that are too quiet, or two slow or too fast in wavelength, for the given individual animal to hear. So, in the sense merely of pressure waves moving through, say, air, ‘sound’ possesses no meaning. Nor, for the main part, possess meaning the ‘sound’ in the sense of the abstract concept of sound as (a) something coming from a source external to the individual and (b) the conflation of ‘hearing’ with those external sounds. This implies that, though most instances of sound originate external to the individual, any sounds that intersect the physical individual partly become part of the individual and partly reflect off of the individual. For instances of language that are expressed into the world outside the authoring person’s own mind, the meaning of such instances is underwritten by the authoring person as a meaner: literally, a mind that has things in mind. This is born out even by as little as the etymology of the word ‘meaning’. As to what degree to which human minds depend for their full development on expressed, and, in some ways more so, communicated, meanings is not clear; but such is by no means ancillary to that development. It especially is not ancillary in regard to an individual’s acts to maintain, preserve, or have maintained or preserved, certain of that individual’s basic physiological functions. So the necessity of meaning to acts of communication does not entail that acts of communication are the foundational substance of meaning. Meaning itself exists entirely in, or, more precisely, alone constitutes, individuals. This entails that the communication of individuals itself constitutes a kind of meaning. But this is communication itself, which is a property of individuals, not of the constructs and phenomenon existing external to individuals by which individuals communicate. Vibrations of the common domestic medium of air, or the production or existence of written material, have no meaning in themselves. They ‘have’ meaning only by virtue of being produced, and intersected, by individuals. Extra-individual entities thus ‘have’ meaning for individuals, in which the having is not that have-ed, or possessed, by those entities, but, rather by the individuals. Peter Kivy (2007, Music, Language, and Cognition, pg. 137-153) argues against musical meaning on grounds that propositional meaning foundationally is the province of shared language. I argue that the logical possibility of linguistic meaning, and thus of language as a personal and social good, is afforded by intellectual and motivational empathy, both for self and others. On logical and etymological grounds, I show that shared language is the province of the meanings we persons have in any case, not in shared language itself as a special entity or action. Kivy argues as if text is the standard of language, and as if culturally persistent speech acts, such as plays, are more foundationally linguistic than is basic, live, personally originative linguistic interaction. This reversal of the natural priority of meaning treats shared language not so much as a dynamic temporal denotative act for mediating between persons’ meanings, but mainly as inhering in the empirical forms constituting the ‘language’. I argue that our meanings originate in, and never actually exist outside of, our persons and of how we relate to our physically and socially external worlds. I demonstrate that a preference for the empirical forms of language as denoting meaning, over a holistic sensitivity to our inter-subjectivity, not only falsely renders music meaningless, but undercuts the effectiveness of language both as an innate tool of personal reasoning and as a crucial social mode of realizing, creating, and developing meaning.

Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music

The musical universe of the 20th and 21st centuries is a force-field in which styles, instruments, personalities and stories can be found that are ascribable to conceptual frameworks that may differ greatly one from another. Such complexity cannot be traced back to single theories or all-encompassing interpretations, but may be tackled, philosophically, starting from certain characteristics. This book identifies nine such characteristics: namely, Extremes, Noise, Silence, Technology, Audience, Listening, Freedom, Disintegration, and New Media. Each of these permits us to open up unforeseen philosophical-cultural paths and interpret, in its multifarious variety, the developments of contemporary music, profoundly interwoven with the history of thought, culture and society.