Nick Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality. Formalism and the Limits of Description (2015) (original) (raw)

Often when a group of people hear a piece of postmodern music, for example Alvin Curran's Vindobona Blues, a common reaction is: even I could have done that. In such situations what usually seems uncontroversial for the person who made the judgment is that she regards herself as competent of producing an object identical to that which is given the situation at hand with regard to the sonorous properties of the object. What is usually neglected is the intentional, theoretical context in which the composer has placed her object with which it is transformed and weaved together into a unit in which perception is understood through conception and vice versa. To reply the person mentioned above with: what do you understand about the given piece?, can equal out a balance between the perceptual and conceptual conditions that have historically determined the identity of a work of music. Why modernists have a difficulty in accepting such an equality is, in my view, because of the ontological expansion of a work of music; to be understood through a diversity of identifying contexts , which does not guarantee the autonomy of a work of music based on either its purely conceptual or purely perceptual self-reflexive conditions. With that being said, it does not necessarily follow a resolution of the final or immanent worth or specific criteria of a work of music. The conception of music today encompasses what can be regarded as categorical errors or paradoxes, such as both dialectical modernistic and culturally relative expressions. To refute the history of the conception of European music would be contradictive, while at the same time, the criteria determining the value of music today are not necessarily identical or dialectical of a given historical epoch. It is against the situation sketched above, which I will refer to below as the cultural and historical ‘inscribedness’ of music, that I consider a pluralism and sensitivity of cultural relativism more apt of understanding music in a wide sense, than the influential dialectic of G. W. F. Hegel. To recall and actualize a given theoretical frame work of a historical epoch to show its relevance today is referred to below as an ‘actualizing act’. My intention with this text is to render an ontological perspective on contemporary music. Oddly enough, given the situation sketched above of perceptual and conceptual unity in contemporary music, there are not only modernists but also contemporary critics and philosophers of music who have made normative claims preferring tonally centered European classical music over serial and atonal music. Roland Barthes approach to understanding music through a hedonistic framework, which is discussed below in chapter two, is in my view problematic because of its primarily perceptual perspective. R. A. Sharpe’s approach of music and language being analogous to each other contrasts with Barthes’ but it is equally problematic because of its predetermined conceptual perspective. Sharpe’s approach is discussed in the third chapter. In the fourth chapter I will give a brief summary of the discussions held, offer a few conclusive remarks as well as my speculative intuition of what the future of ontology of music may concern.