In this third batch of 2016 articles, Per Musi #35 (Sept.-Dec., 2016) brings eight articles focusing on the aesthetics of music. Here are five selected and expanded articles presented at the 1st SEFiM (Symposium of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Music), organized by Professor Raimundo Rajobac on October, 2013 at UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) in Brazil. Three other articles address provocative issues about the senses through the challenge of music. Since the aesthetics and philosophy of music are research fields characterized by crosscutting speech and border mobility, the dialogue of music with other areas - literature, philosophy, social science, history and other arts - is seen as co-participant of building its own speech. Like a large portion of its historiography, music was discussed and theorized in treatises and writings that did not belong to what we call today musicology. Therefore, it is natural that its aesthetic and philosophical production be a mosaic-like nature.
Thus, in "The 'visions' of Tiresias", Gerson Luis Trombetta opens this discussion emphasizing one's knowledge acquired by means of listening, as opposed to reading. Attentively, Tiresias listens to meanings between the lines of discourse, for that what cannot be perceived by sight, reveals its contents to the ears.
The 'unseen', but heard, invites the reader to listen to the rhythm of the words, the aural images with their internal and external reverberations. In this way, Kathrin Rosenfield invites us to walk through the poets and philosophers' thinking about rhythm in the romantic tradition. Music, literature and philosophy intertwine in the writings of Hölderlin, going from Tieck to Rilke, also encompassing Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to finally reach Heidegger. After all, wouldn't living without music be a mistake?
Life and erratic music return here in another context. Approaching music as applied physiology, Raimundo Rajobac focuses on the text Nietzsche against Wagner, in which the philosopher establishes physiology as a category for his criticism of Wagner's music, pointing to a broader logic of the criticism to modernity and its aural plurality.
Resonances between the thought of two important aesthetes and philosophers of music, Adorno and Hanslick, is what presents us Mário Videira. In his essay he investigates the autonomy of music, seeking to disentangle possible conceptual echoes between the works of these authors, even if these are not evident.
However, musical echoes can also bring obscure messages. Approaching music in dark times, Lia Tomás recovers the ideological use of music in the Third Reich. Based on the analysis of Quantz and Wagner's texts, it is possible to observe how their aesthetic ideas were appropriated by the Nazis to fulfill other purposes, and propose the creation of another category of music, namely monumental music.
Monica Lucas addresses Der vollkommene Capellmeister, the last and encyclopedic work of Johann Mattheson that is based on the notion of the perfect music-speaker. This masterpiece of Baroque reveals values around the concepts of humanist courtier, encompassing both Christians and Lutherans in a poetic-rhetorical universe.
On a scenario of increasingly intertwined languages, Flavio Barbeitas proposes an emancipatory attitude to the vision that spread the perception of a certain "limitation" or "gaps" in music in relation to more traditional languages. Resorting to the thinking of Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno and Adriana Cavarero, he discusses difference as an intrinsic element of language, the self reference model and communication focused on vocality.
Paulo Roberto Peloso Augusto shares his reflections on the intellectual and emotional processes of Edward Elgar to elicit, yet not explicitly, a cryptogram in his masterpiece Enigma Variations. In his plural approach, the researcher reveals intricacies that intertwine elements of musical analysis, music history and art history, concluding with an unprecedented suggested solution to the riddle.
Enjoy your reading!
Fausto Borém
Founder and Chief Editor
Lia Tomás
Assistant Editor for Music Philosophy
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Sep-Dec 2016
