Abstract
This chapter furthers recent reappraisals of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, working against Carolyn Abbate’s well-known claim that Jankélévitch’s ‘drastic’ thought opposes all hermeneutic methods. To do so, I illustrate how hermeneutic interpretation is itself a drastic act of doing, taking Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and outlining its drastic components through the prism of Abbate’s Jankélévitch-inspired terms. I then reconsider Jankélévitch’s music philosophy in the light of the drastic aspects of Gadamer’s thought, offering some surprising points of compatibility between the two thinkers. I show how for both philosophers, musical interpretation is a temporal event, one that develops as an interplay between listener and music, perception and preconception. Additionally, both Gadamer and Jankélévitch consider this interpretive process as potentially infinite, given music’s ineffability.
Towards the chapter’s end I shift focus slightly, to claim that products of interpretation, like musicological essays and books, are not only formed by the drastic process of interpreting, but are also responsible for further ‘doings’ – entering a meta-drastic process of ‘musical work’. Rather than just act as mere after-the-fact inscriptions of interpretative doing, these texts have an effect on both performance and our general conception of music, and as such, they ‘do’ something. To conclude, I acknowledge Jankélévitch’s regular denunciation of writing, yet also note the important exception he makes for poetry, offering a brief declaration of the important role poeticism must play in a drastic hermeneutics, with both Jankélévitch and Gadamer acting as key exemplars.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See in particular, Rings (2021) and Gallope (2017). Abbate herself has contributed to a less polemical reading of Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, more compatible with the impetus of this chapter (Abbate and Gallope 2021). For a variety of other perspectives on Jankélévitch’s music philosophy, see Gallope and Kane ed. (2012).
- 2.
James Risser has previously offered a brief comparison between Gadamer’s thought and Jankélévitch’s music philosophy in a broad application of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to music (Risser 2017).
- 3.
Michael J. Puri has already enlisted Gadamer’s ideas in order to question Abbate’s drastic/gnostic divide (Puri 2006); indeed, since philosophical hermeneutics ‘does not seek as its principal ambition to decipher or decode the intrinsic meaning’ of music or art (Davey 2013, 176) it brings many of Abbate’s claims regarding hermeneutics into doubt.
- 4.
Kramer offers little indication as to who exactly practices closed hermeneutics. Ironically, one example he does give is Gadamer – taking issue with the philosopher’s claim that a text is always assumed to be complete; that it has an ‘immanent unity of meaning’; and that there is a ‘truth’ in what it says (Kramer 2021, 400). Kramer’s reading of Gadamer seems rather selective in the light of those drastic or open components of philosophical hermeneutics pointed out in my previous section. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ‘romantic hermeneutics’ might be a better candidate, with Gadamer himself taking issue with Schleiermacher’s wish to ‘reconstruct’ a text’s original meaning. However, Andrew Bowie has also reassessed romantic hermeneutics, offering a compelling argument that Schleiermacher’s method is more open than Gadamer initially thought (Bowie 2004, 62–65).
- 5.
Jankélévitch mentions Clement of Alexandria, Saint Augustine, Richard Rolle, Fabre d’Olivet, and (as a lesser offender) Arthur Schopenhauer as examples of musical metaphysicians (Jankélévitch 2003, 10).
- 6.
For example, take Fabre d’Olivet, who, wanting to support his preference for a musical system that ascended in fourths from the note B (rather than in fifths from the note C), claimed that this order was inherently linked to planetary alignment and the days of the week. B should hence come first because it was linked to Saturday and Saturn, which (at least for him) came first in their respective systems (see Godwin 1995, 67).
- 7.
The metaphorical-metaphysical slight-of-hand that Jankélévitch critiques remains present in many hermeneutic of suspicion analyses, with their attempts to unveil behind music some wrong-doing, moral lapse, or involvement in oppressive structures. In these instances, the hermeneut tends to (paraphrasing Rita Felski) generate music’s hidden guilt ‘out of the axioms of her own interpretative practice’ (Felski 2015, 96).
- 8.
- 9.
Charm does not, however, seem to hold the same ontological primacy as does Gadamer’s Spiel. Whereas for Gadamer, we are always already engaged in the dialectic of play and artistic experience merely exemplifies this fact, Charm only occurs in privileged instances, as when listening to (certain types of) music.
- 10.
Jankélévitch borrows the term presque rien from Claude Debussy’s Preludes – a description for those moments of extreme quiet that stop short of falling into total silence.
- 11.
This is contra Abbate’s claim that ‘real music’ always lies in the moment of listening or performing.
- 12.
In his Deleuzian music ontology, Paulo de Assis uses the term in reference to a similar notion that music is an assemblage of various things in ongoing transformation (de Assis 2018).
- 13.
This also stands for the limit case of free improvisation, where although there is no pre-composed work, an ergon (or ergons) still exists in the form of pre-learnt tropes, styles, and an instrument’s material limitations.
- 14.
Furthermore, hermeneutic interpretation can result in a reappraisal of one’s self, given that the music engaged with ideally shifts one’s horizon. In this sense, any work done through the music (any ‘musical work’) will not only alter the composition in question, but also those individuals involved in the process, as well as the community they form (which itself determines future conceptions of the musical work, and so on).
References
Abbate, C. 2004. Music – Drastic or Gnostic? Critical Enquiry 30: 505–536.
Abbate, C., and M. Gallope. 2021. The Ineffable (And Beyond). In The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. T. McAuley, N. Nielsen, and J. Levinson, 741–761. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benson, B.E. 2003. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berger, K. 2005. Musicology According to Don Giovanni, or: Should We Get Drastic? The Journal of Musicology 22 (3): 490–501.
Bowie, A. 2004. Gadamer and Romanticism. In Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski, 55–81. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davey, N. 2013. Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
de Assis, P. 2018. Virtual Works—Actual Things. In Virtual Works—Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology, P. de Assis, 19–44. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Felski, R. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gadamer, H.G. 1986. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1989. Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 1997. Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. R. Heinemann and B. Krajewski. New York: SUNY Press.
———. 2001. Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, trans. R. E. Palmer. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gallope, M. 2017. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Gallope, M., and B. Kane, eds. 2012. Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music. Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (1): 215–256.
Godwin, J. 1995. Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750-1950. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Jankélévitch, V. 2003. Music and the Ineffable, trans. C. Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2015. Henri Bergson, trans. N. F. Schott. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kramer, L. 2021. Hermeneutics. In The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. T. McAuley, N. Nielsen, and J. Levinson, 387–402. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Puri, M.J. 2006. Review: Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment by Berthold Hoeckner. Journal of the American Musicological Society 59 (2): 488–501.
Rings, S. 2021. Jankélévitch, Fauré, and the Thirteenth Nocturne. In Fauré Studies, ed. C. Caballero and S. Rumph, 233–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Risser, J. 2017. Hermeneutic Considerations for Understanding Music. In International Yearbook for Hermeneutics 16, ed. G. Figal and B. Zimmermann. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Windleburn, M. (2024). The Drastic Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Vladimir Jankélévitch. In: McAuliffe, S. (eds) Gadamer, Music, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41569-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41570-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)