[Fis] meaning of music

Dear Colleagues,

first, I like very much Michael Leyton's text about the meaning of music.
For more detailed analysis, I need to go through it again and again, but now
I will give some general comments and suggestions.

Maximal memory stores could mean that the musical composition can express
much more than it contains explicitly as a linear text. In general, it can
express the maximum information capacity which rises to the meaning of the
absolute. In terms of Schopenhauer, it expresses Wille by itself, not via
its representations. It is possible because music is the main art that is
organized in time. And time, according to the quantum mechanical views, is a
way of reduction of the potential field (Wille or Ding an sich).

What is the way of explication of the absolute itself? One way is to create
a flowing potential field which is greatly emotionally affectable. The
greatest examples are Chopin and Scriabin. Another way is to set a formal
structure which contains fixed elements and free developments within the
fixed structure. The fugue as it was introduced by I.S. Bach is the most
profound form for this. It may look as strictly deterministic, but can you
imagine continuation of the unfinished last contrapunctus of the Art of
Fugue? All parts of this great composition are considered by the author as a
some kind of training, similar to God's training in creation of the world.
And the resulting world contains both computable (physical laws) and
non-computable (free will) parts, which are present in this structure. To
understand this means to rise above all contradictions and suffering caused
by them. Thus a solution comes as a final fugue in Beethoven's sonata op.
106, or in his Grosse Fuge which finalizes not just his 13th quartet (he
wrote another final for it) but all his creative life.

Another possibility of the development of the meaning of absolute is to
generate a structure which develops initial simple structure as in the case
of Bach's Goldberg variations or Beethoven's Diabelli variations. In the
last example, the initial theme is even primitive, but it can generate all
infinite world in which it finally transforms into a beautiful minuet. In
this world some unexpected appearances occur, as Mozart-like movement in one
variation. This development is similar to the unfolding of the initial
structure of myth, that is why C. Levi-Strauss mentioned a similarity
between the structures of myth and music. A similar variational development
with the end open to infinity occurs in the final of Beethoven's op. 111
(Arietta). From this point of view, the finals like "An die Freude" or of
the last 16th quartet contain more relative meaning, representing a one
particular answer to the basic question of being. Also strictly religious
works usually follow some particular tradition and may be to some extent
less meaningful in the sense of carrying absolute meaning.

Representation of the absolute meaning as a negation could be considered in
some works of Webern (e.g. in his variations op. 27) or in the different
musical language in the last works of Shostakovich (e.g. 15th quartet).

To develop the approach to describe the meaning in music, we need to combine
some elements of modern logic with the semiotical point of view that the
sign can express much more than it has in its structure. This could follow
Florensky's approach to signs maybe more than Peircean. Generally speaking,
I would say yes, music has a meaning, but this is a special meaning which we
may not be able to catch formally. But we can approach to it using
logical-semiotical tools, remembering Wittgensteinian impossibility to say,
but the possibility to express.

All the best,
Andrei Igamberdiev

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Received on Fri Feb 6 18:37:03 2004