3 Read more at location 452
Note: 3@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ il significato della musica è ciò che comprende chi capisce la musica come riconosciamo chi comprende la musica? w assimila la compr della musica alla compr. della mimica facciale la grammatica musicale (es tonalità o dodecafonia) non è la grammatica della musica. non si capisce la musica spiegandone la grammatica linguaggio naturale vs musica: la comprensione della prima è tastimoniata dall uso corretto. x la musica qs non vale x w comprendere la musica (come la mimica) eqivale a comprendere un espressione. s sostiene che un espressione nn può essere compresa senza interiorizzarla (mettendosi nei panni) e rievocando proprie esperienze 2 significati del verbo esprimere. a w. basta l intransitivo ma a s no. senza l espressione transitiva nn esiste semantica e giudizio. la connessione con l espressione xsonale nn può che essere transitiva l introspezione è decisiva x il giudizio estetico: l esperienza e il coinvolgimento in prima xsona fanno emergere in noi il sentimento della bellezza Edit
one of the problems in the philosophy of music that is not a general problem of aesthetics: the problem of musical understanding.Read more at location 455
It is true that Suzanne Langer's theory of musical meaning in Philosophy in a New Key is explicitly derived from Wittgenstein. But her source is the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, whose theory of logical form she puts to stunning and outrageous use, in order to articulate a new version of the Croce-Collingwood theory of expression. Read more at location 458
discussions of musical meaning have followed the path laid down by Hanslick and Gurney in the nineteenth century, debating whether music is capable of expressing, representing or in some other way conveying extra-musical emotions, and whether-if so-this is an important part of its value. Musical meaning has been seen, in other words, as a relation between music and something else.Read more at location 460
In his later philosophy Wittgenstein awakens to the true importance of Frege's insight, that we can speak of meaning only where we can also speak of understanding.'Read more at location 463
Hence the concept of musical understanding displaces that of musical meaning:Read more at location 467
In many places where Wittgenstein raises the question of musical understanding he connects it with two other subjects that obsessed him: facial expressions, and the first-person case.Read more at location 470
What does it consist in: following a musical phrase with understanding?Read more at location 474
Don't look inside yourself. Consider rather what makes you say of someone else that this is what he is doing.Read more at location 478
Those sections connect directly with Wittgenstein's `third-person' approach to philosophical psychology.Read more at location 480
This is not a species of knowing that, nor a species of knowing how: it is in fact entirely sui generis, and might be described as `knowledge by acquaintance', in order to emphasize that it is not knowledge of a fact, but familiarity with it. Wittgenstein's hostility to the Cartesian habit of `looking inwards' in order to discover the meaning of a word, the reality of an experience, or the sense of a work of art, is revealed in the second section quoted above. In effect he is saying that we can never discover what we mean by musical understanding from our own case alone.Read more at location 486
Wittgenstein had been a modernist in architecture, following Loos in the bid to purify and decongest the lines of the classical style. But he was not a modernist in music.Read more at location 492
In fact, however, the knowledge that G sharp must follow, in my hypothetical example, is no sign of musical understanding. I can have this knowledge, even if the passage makes no sense to me. And it can make sense to me, even though I have no knowledge that G sharp is required by the grammar. The grammar of twelve-tone music is not a musical grammar.Read more at location 498
Musical understanding is not a form of theoretical understanding, and the kind of necessity that we hear in a musical phrase or sequence, when we hear that it must be so, is not the kind of necessity that we know from rule-following or mathematical proof. Read more at location 505
We can agree with Wittgenstein that we are not going to find an answer to this question by looking inwards. But we may doubt that he has given us a clear alternative.Read more at location 508
A person demonstrates his understanding of a word by using it,Read more at location 513
But most of us are not performers, and ours is a listening culture. It is in listening, not playing, that the average musical person exhibits understanding,Read more at location 514
Moreover, musical understanding is not revealed in performance in the way that linguistic understanding is revealed in speech. A person who speaks woodenly, unfeelingly, grotesquely, may nevertheless show that he has understood the words he utters. A person who performs woodenly, unfeelingly or grotesquely may make all the sounds prescribed by the score, but he will show nevertheless that he has understood nothing. Musical understanding is a form of aesthetic understanding:Read more at location 516
it is not only the performance that is being judged: there is the music itself.Read more at location 520
Consider two people listening to a grossly sentimental song, one naively enjoying it, the other turning up his nose. The first says to the second: `you just don't understand this music'. `On the contrary,' the second replies, `I do understand it. And that is why I hate it.' Do we say that they have both understood the music, but understood it differently?Read more at location 526
Wittgenstein wishes to say that understanding a passage of music is in some way like understanding a facial expression.Read more at location 529
Surely you could be an expert at transcribing the observable features of a face, and yet miss the expression, and vice versa. (Picasso could capture an expression in a few lines and an eye; photographs capture everything, except the expression.)Read more at location 531
it is certainly true that two people can understand a person's expression and yet react to it differently. The grim disaffection on the face of the teenage pop-star, for example, is understood equally by the one who identifies with its pseudo-defiant aura, and by the one who is repelled by it. It is not that they understand the expression differently; it is rather that they understand it in the same way, and react differently.Read more at location 533
The term `expression' can therefore be used in two ways-on the one hand to denote a property or aspect of the face; on the other hand to denote a relation between the face and a mental state.Read more at location 541
When we speak of `recognizing the expression' in a piece of music, or playing with expression, the term `expression' is being used `intransitively'.4Read more at location 545
Expressions can be ambiguous in something like the way that aspects can be ambiguous.Read more at location 547
We do not merely recognize expressions. We look behind them to what they mean. We seek and find character, mood and emotion in faces, as we do in gestures and words. And if understanding music is like understanding facial expressions it too must admit of this search for a meaning beyond the immediate Gestalt. Read more at location 552
Likewise in art, the act of recognition is the first stage in a process of imaginative involvement, the end point of which is familiarity with a character or a state of mind.Read more at location 558
In his anxiety to prevent us from `looking inwards', he fails to see that you can be looking outwards and yet gaining first-person knowledge.Read more at location 560
But by focusing on the other's features and gestures we find these states of mind unfolding within us-not really felt, but entertained in imagination. This is why the face is so important to us:Read more at location 568
It is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgement to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind that in our better moments we seek to shun. But this discrimination would be impossible if we did not advance, in our thinking, from the intransitive to the transitive idea of expression. Read more at location 576
At least we can recognize that Mahler is, for us as for himself, a problem, and that this problem can be fully understood only if we allow ourselves a richer conception of musical understanding than Wittgenstein, in his more austere remarks, is prepared to offer. That richer conception requires us not to dismiss the first-person case, but to give a fuller account of it-to recognize that there is such a thing as first-person knowledge, even if the object of that knowledge must be described (should we wish to describe it) from the third-person perspective. Read more at location 581
Nevertheless, even if we are looking outwards, our ability to understand what we are looking at depends on what is happening within. To give a full account of musical understanding, therefore, we must go beyond Wittgenstein'sRead more at location 585
We must see music as an act of communication, which crucially depends upon placing within the listener's first-person perspective a state of mind that is not his own. Read more at location 587
