Logic, or internal connection, is the criterion which manifests the norm of musical perception. “The matters of compositional technique and of aesthetics which made ‘autonomization’ of instrumental music possible may be summarized in the concept of ‘musical logic’—a concept closely connected to the notion of the ‘speech character’ of music.”Footnote 1 That music was to be perceived within its own limits was not widely appreciated at the end of the eighteenth century. Johann Gotfried Herder spoke about the logic of music in 1769 in “Critical Forests: Fourth Grove” (Kritische Wälder: Viertes Wäldchen), but the concept was established some twenty years later by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the first biographer of J. S. Bach. As an advocate of the influence of language on music (this was characteristic of Baroque aesthetics), he stated:

Language is the garment of thought, just as melody is the garment of harmony. In this respect, one may call harmony [the] logic of music, because it stands in approximately the same relationship to melody as logic in language stands to expression, namely, it corrects and determines melodic writing so that it seems to become a real truth to one’s sensations.Footnote 2

Even before a thought is expressed, there has to be logic or “the art of thinking correctly.”Footnote 3 To Forkel, melodies are “sounding manifestations—musical formulations—of perceptions that make up the content and sense of music.”Footnote 4 Forkel “named the harmonic regulation of tonal relations ‘musical logic’, because through it the signs for perceptions are brought into ‘true’—i.e. corresponding to the nature of the thing—relation to one another in the music, similar to the way in which the signs for things and concepts are treated in language. Harmony is a ‘prerequisite’ for the ‘truth and determinacy’ of musical expression.”Footnote 5 After all, according to Martin Heidegger, language is the house of being, and thus musical-tonal language is also a way of manifesting the being of music (its idea). Heidegger describes the meaning of being as the truth of being. The meaning of being is its manifestation, its revelation. And that is the goal of the act of expression. Friedrich Schlegel emphasised thematic, rather than harmonic, logic. The thematic principle is “the specific aspect of music, from which development proceeds.” Tonal disposition and thematic process established musical form as a “broad, differentiated, and nevertheless unbroken, internally coherent process.” “The closure of form is the correlate of the autonomy of the work.”Footnote 6 Barely half a century after Schlegel, Eduard Hanslick, in his treatise “On the Musically Beautiful,” argued that

the nature of music is to be sought in its “specifically musical” aspects: not in the “poetic” character it has in common with other arts, but in the sounding form by which it distinguishes itself from them.Footnote 7 […] Forms set in motion by sounding are the sole and single content and object of music.Footnote 8

This claim is related to St Augustine’s reference to scientia bene movendi (the science of beautiful movement). It is worth recalling Hegel’s statement about beauty, which is understood as a sensuous showing of the idea. The showing is to be understood as the external form or manifestation of the idea. This is why the art of expression is so important and obligatory, because it is through expression that beauty, which has previously existed only in potential, is displayed in the work. The “idea,” which appears in the musical material, Hanslick called “form.” In his aesthetics, form is not the manifested form but the form of the nature of the thing: “inner form” is content only in this manner. “The forms that form themselves out of tones are [] spirit manifesting itself from the inside out.”Footnote 9 Thus “form must be determined as ‘energeia’, as ‘spirit manifesting itself from the inside out’ (this is very important for us—J. R.): as a process in which material enters into a coherence of meaning that in turn is material for a more comprehensive coherence of meaning.”Footnote 10

Hanslick’s concept of form, which is profound and related to content, is opposite to the then prevailing notion of it as a reflection or external form. “In music there is sense and consequence, but of a musical kind; it is a language that we speak and understand, but are incapable of translating.”Footnote 11 Like Forkel, Hanslick considers musical logic—“sense and consequence”—to be analogous to speech. The idea of a “spirit” of language, manifesting itself in its “form” Hanslick took from Wilhelm von Humboldt.Footnote 12 “Within this working of the spirit—the exaltation of articulated sound to the expression of thought, that which is constant and uniform, when expressed as completely as possible in its context and represented systematically, makes up the form of language.”Footnote 13

An interesting definition of the connections between language and music is provided by Søren Kierkegaard:

[Music] always expresses the immediate in its immediacy; it is for this reason, too, that music shows itself first and last in relation to language:Footnote 14 first, because a language that descends to its origins arrives at interjections, which “[are again] musical”; last, insofar as a lyrical language [

] attains a stage at which “at last the musical has been developed so strongly that language ceases, and everything becomes music” [

]. As interjection it is “not yet” music; as dissolution of lyricism into sonic magic, it is “no longer” music.Footnote 15

Theodor W. Adorno, in seeking to initiate a philosophical concept of absolute music (which he perceived as language above language),Footnote 16 asserted: “Every musical phenomenon points to something beyond itself by reminding us of something, contrasting itself with something or arousing our expectations. The summation of such a transcendence of particulars constitutes the ‘content’; it is what happens in music.”Footnote 17 Transcendence is to be understood here in two ways: with both an inner-formal and external meaning. The individual musical details—the sounds and the motifs—only constitute themselves as music in their context: they point to something “beyond themselves,” but at the same time remain purely acoustic phenomena. The quality of expression also depends on whether what is “beyond” is perceived, or whether one is satisfied only with the manifestation of an acoustic phenomenon.

Musical processes appeal directly to the logic and flux of mental and psychological processes. Musical meaning is taken to originate and be located within “psychological constants” presumed innate in humans. There is consequently no need to entertain the notion that music invokes the external, “objective” world. The ability of music to evoke meaning is facilitated through a conformity between the structures of music and the structures of the human mind.Footnote 18

This is similar to the view of Susanne Langer that the qualities of a person’s inner life which are similar to the properties of music—motion and rest, tension and release, and so on—allow music “to act in relation to the emotional world in the same way that language acts in relation to the propositional world of objects, events, and ideas—symbolically.”Footnote 19

In the case of music, which seeks to avoid empty structural moves in the course of their conversion into sound, it is important not to forget that music, and its expression, is not a completely separate artistic phenomenon, unconnected with its inner logic. It is subject to many requirements which are general and establish meaning. “Music brings to our daily lives an immediate encounter with a logic of sense other than that of reason. It is, precisely, the truest name we have for the logic at work in the springs of being that generate vital forms. Music has celebrated the mystery of intuitions of transcendence.”Footnote 20