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Music and the Ineffable

Vladimir Jankelevitch author Carolyn Abbate translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Princeton University Press

Published:22nd Aug '03

Should be back in stock very soon

Music and the Ineffable cover

Imagine! A philosopher who meditates on listening to music, not its ontology; who does not cast composers as heroes and villains; who does not expect music to prophesy the future, or tell us how to live, or solve our political problems; who is allergic to gassy Teutonic grandiloquence (indeed, to Germans tout court). Welcome the anti-Adorno; he has been too long coming to English. And thank Carolyn Abbate for bringing him to us in such excellent shape. -- Richard Taruskin, Class of 1955 Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley

Deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. This book argues that music is not a hieroglyph, nor a language or sign system. It argues that music is 'ineffable', because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains.Vladimir Jankelevitch left behind a remarkable ?uvre steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Faure, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jankelevitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense. Music, Jankelevitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is "ineffable," as Jankelevitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jankelevitch's singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Clement, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.

"Among significant influences in 20th-century philosophical thought on music, perhaps none is as sweeping as that of Vladimir Jankelevitch. Yet until now his works have not been widely available in English... Still provocative after 40 years, this book offers fascinating, fresh, and Occasionally befuddling perspectives on the vital phenomenon that is music."--Choice

ISBN: 9780691090474

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 340g

200 pages