[1] The great significance of the dictum 'the meaning of music is ineffable'-as well as the experience the dictum conveys -manifests itself in the continuity with which it has shaped Western discourse on music since its emergence in its modern version two centuries ago. (1) Although this significance is undebatable, there has been a vital and controversial discussion of its precise meaning since the nineteenth and-more intensely-during the late twentieth century, with critics asking in which particular way music can be considered ineffable and what (or what kind of meaning) it is that we cannot put into words. (2) This article does not contribute to this debate on the content of the dictum. Instead, it will focus on how the dictum and related concepts operate, that is, what this formulation and related formulations in their present shape explicitly 'say' and what they keep secret. This approach has been taken because I believe that the controversy of the past decades has not been caused by the enigmatic 'nature' of music itself, but by the rhetorical strategies implied in the formulation of the dictum. Carrying out a kind of critique, I will make visible values, hierarchies, and schemes the dictum and related concepts imply.[2] To this end, I will, first, analyze the dictum (section I) and, second, cross-check and compare it with other, similar theorems and concepts from diverse, not exclusively musical, contexts (sections II and III). This will serve as the basis for the development of an alternative theory that suggests different values, hierarchies and orders (section IV). http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.14.20.4/mto.14.20.4.kutschke.php KEYWORDS: music and ineffability, 'translation of music,' semiotics and similarity, cultural critique ABSTRACT: Past scholarship has often investigated what we mean when we say that music is ineffable; it has also explored issues surrounding whether music can-or cannot-be translated. In contrast, this article shifts the focus from music and its meaning to the relationship between music and other sign systems, including verbal language. One of its key hypotheses is that the dictum of music's ineffability, though apparently describing the 'nature' of music, in fact only defines the relationship between music and verbal language. As I will argue, the apparent plausibility of the dictum of music's ineffability is an effect of our (Western-cultural) habit of attributing primary status to verbal language in comparison with other sign systems. Consequently, in the final section of this article, I will investigate the relationship between music and other sign systems. This latter investigation is founded on the consideration of our world of meaning as an infinite spectrum of diverse sign systems, sign constellations, and sign procedures, each of them valuable in itself. I. Ineffablity -quality vs. relation
. Facts and the way we respond to factsReading Peter Manuel's article for the first time, I expected to learn primarily about the relationship between musical pieces and socio-political change. Looking at it more closely, I realized that his article is rather on views of musical pieces and views of socio-political change; it is more on ideas, attitudes, emotions, and the spirit that we (and other individuals) attribute to what we consider to be facts than the facts themselves. I will support this viewpoint in the following paragraphs.Peter Manuel's starting point is the observation that, in the course of the student and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, a vigorous scene or culture of political music developed around the globe that, since the 1980s, has increasingly vanished. He claims that this disappearance of the scene is related to (or has even been caused by) significant socio-political and economic changes climaxing around 1990: the end of the Cold War and, connected with this, the end of antagonists fighting over the hegemony of their favored economic-political systems (capitalism vs. communism; dictatorship vs. democracy) in the 1990s and, especially after the turn of the millennium, the rise or intensification of new menaces, first and foremost, "an amorphous global financial network" and "savage tribal, religious, and ethnic movements armed with modern weaponry." This is the explicit dimension of the text. The kernel of the article's argument, however, is the description of different kinds of spirit that Peter Manuel and other contemporaries (including me!) experience in response to specific historical facts and political music. What is so tricky about this experience of spirit is that we attribute the spirit to the historical facts and political music, and which we attribute to them as if those were their own properties. He points out that the movements of the 1960s and 70s and the music related to them are marked by a specific spirit or attitude. He describes this spirit as "an underlying invocation of compatible Enlightenment values-that is, essentially liberal, modernist, and universalist conceptions of social justice and human rights, often counterposed to commercialism and economic domination by elites or imperialist hegemons," in sum, "humanism." In the 1960s and 70s, Peter Manuel explains, those values and ideas operated as "secular metanarratives" that served as action imperatives for the movements. To what degree is this description of the movements' spirit significant for the overall argument of the article? As I understand his observations, they are less conclusions from detailed analyses of statements of the members of the political and musical movements than rather a summary of the "impression" he has. In other words, the spirit is a phenomenon that we, the recipients of
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