Abstract
What sense does it make to teach the aesthetics of music today? The discussion begins with the illusion of identifying music and language, by regarding language as communication. We use words and propositions in thinking about music, but music is “something other” than words. An analysis of Cook’s conception of a musicographic network leads to thinking about the non-verbal existence of musical works and musical experience.
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Notes
Kostelanetz (2005, pp. 245–246).
Guanti (2001, p. 63).
Xenakis (1982, p. 34).
Donatoni (1990, p. 268).
Cook (1998), Foreword and p. 14.
Benjamin (2008, p. 20).
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world”: I don’t demand that a student believe what I believe and, therefore, that he be grateful to me for having extended his world with some new words. Certainly even in crowded classrooms only a few students knew the meaning of adespotus and adespota. But, luckily, even the student who is laziest to browse through a paper dictionary is not too intimidated to click on Wiktionary, so that he also knows their literal meaning: masterless, ownerless, i.e., anonymous due to the lack of a creator’s signature, who could be unknown and therefore not mentionable, or notorious but not mentioned for several different reasons. Benefiting from this discovery, student S. asserted with evident satisfaction: “My hearing is adespoto par excellence, because I’m not interested in knowing who and how and why composed the music I’m listening”. So among the other students he gained a reputation as a skilful preacher of post-modernism.
Foucault (1971, p. 33).
The students near to graduation—which I recommend DeNora (1995)—admitted (may be not only for flattery…) that even reading a book can help us to listen to in a new and better way also the best-known music.
References
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Guanti, G. Teaching the Aesthetics of Music Today. Topoi 28, 125–128 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9056-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9056-5