Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Linguistic Meaning and Music

Abstract

This article undertakes a comparison between Wittgenstein's philosophy of the early and late periods with the musical theories of Wittgenstein's contemporary, Heinrich Schenker, an influential Viennese theorist of tonality, as well as those of their contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. Schenker's reductive analytical procedure was designed to unveil fundamental and uniform ways in which all works of music function (and should function), unfolding a deep structure constituting their essence. Schoenberg deplored this line of thought, and for reasons strikingly parallel to those that led Wittgenstein back to what he called the 'rough ground' in his Philosophical Investigations. Ultimately, for Wittgenstein, the abstracted picture of the musical work as a platonic entity is nourished by grammatical conflations as well as by the Platonic and Cartesian legacies.

Thinking Through Music: Wittgenstein’s Use of Musical Notation

“…In Wittgenstein and his Times, edited by B. McGuinness. Chicago: The University of For recent work on these various broad concerns, seeAppelqvist (2023),Arbo (2013),Eggers (2014), Guter (20172019a;,Hagberg (2011;,Soulez (2012), and Szabados (2014).2 In 1981 Walter Zimmermann composed an improvisation for piano on the Leidenschaftlich theme, entitled Musik für Wittgenstein #1. The "world premiere" of a realization of the original fragment for string quartet was given at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2003(Heijerman 2005).…”

The Good, the Bad, and the Vacuous: Wittgenstein on Modern and Future Musics

“…As Garry Hagberg pointed out, Schenker was ultimately “the theorist most perfectly tailored to the tradition against which Wittgenstein's methodological revolution is reacting” (Hagberg , 393)…”

“…Considering the trajectory of Wittgenstein's thinking about music, from 1930 until his death in 1951, the peculiar use of the metaphors of transparency and nakedness in his remark on the music of the future can be interpreted in terms of his increasing emphasis on the idea (found also in GBV ) that music is physiognomic, intransitively transparent to human life, to “the preconditions, and the lived, embodied realities, of musical intelligibility” (Hagberg , 402). A musical gesture is transparent in the sense that it is already given to us with a familiar physiognomy, already internally related to our world of thoughts and feelings.…”