Klang – musikværkets tingsmæssige grund

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss timbre and the quality of sound as the fundamental thingness of a musical work of art. With reference to Martin Heidegger’s work The Origin of the Work of Art it discusses the limitations and problems of a derived music-theoretical analysis of musical artwork. It argues that in our experience of music, the phenomenon of music has always already shown itself to us in an immediate and unthematized way, conditioning our very understanding prior to any theoretical encounter. The point of this inquiry is to provide a fruitful phenomenological approach to the examination of the experience of music. An analysis of Hugo Riemann’s function harmonic analysis exemplifies a kind of (pseudo) Kantian approach to the understanding of music experience. It also serves as an example of the limitations of a dichotomized and analytical approach compared to a phenomenological approach.