# Music and The Ineffable



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Has anyone ever read _"Music and The Ineffable"_? Here are extracts from a 2004 book review. I agree wholeheartedly with everything said in it.

Begin Review:

"Vladimir Jankelevitch makes a distinction between what is 'untellable', unable to be spoken of because, as in the case of death, _'there is absolutely nothing to say',_ and the 'ineffable', which _cannot be explained because there are infinite and interminable things to be said of it'_.

Music, he argues, embodies the qualities of the ineffable: it creates a kind of enchantment that bewilders the mind and puts it at a loss for words. Of course, that music is a thing of mystery and wonder that eludes the grasp of words is a truism to which we all pay lip service. We all know that music is radically other to the words with which we approach it, and yet, in our busy professional lives, where music becomes the object of our scholarly enquiry, we work *as if* that were not so. To be sure, we may produce valuable and fascinating work - as history, criticism, theory, philosophy, or analysis. But somewhere, like a ghost in the machine, the music haunts such systems to which it remains perpetually elusive.

Jankelevitch speaks to anyone who has once had a sense that, were we able to step off the professional merry-go-round for a few moments, all our theoretical discourses around music add up to a kind of avoidance of something more urgent, a way of holding music's power at arm's length, an ordering in rational networks of what might otherwise be too disturbing. He is surely right that the rush into hermeneutics of any kind (amateur or professional) expresses a kind of anxiety - a refusal of the music, a fear of allowing it to persist on its own terms, a compulsion to render it safely into the verbal.

At the very least, when confronted with the degree to which music exceeds the ways in which we frame it, we have perhaps lapsed into despondency, surviving only by separating out our professional writing and our 'real' (private) experience of music. For that reason alone, his book should speak to many of us.

[…..]

In essence, the book reads as a single poetic-philosophic meditation on a single theme - the ineffability of music. As a topic this is both profound and banal at the same time, and therein lies the productive difficulty with the book. On the one hand, it tells - once again - that we cannot talk about music. More precisely, it opposes the way in which music is appropriated by analytical and discursive practices that remain always outside its substance. It does so, however, in such a compellingly beautiful and intellectually inspiring manner that it revivifies one's capacity for both thought and feeling in relation to music. In this way, it provokes thought about music while at the same time appearing to undermine it. It thus joins a select history of great writing on music that tells us - compellingly - that there can be no great writing on music.

The first line of Carolyn Abbate's introduction sums up the matter nicely: "Music is no cipher; it is not awaiting the decoder"

Music is not, argues Jankelevitch, amenable to hermeneutics. He forces us to question the discursive framework through which we attempt to speak about music and to make that *hubristic* claim - _'to understand music'_. He insists that all the terms with which we attempt to grasp hold of music are always and only metaphors and analogies, redrawing the lines between the ungraspable nature of music - resistant to logical schemes at every turn - and the structures in which we seek to 'make sense' of it. The language of music theory, whether in aesthetics or analysis, is spatial not temporal.

In the same way, Jankelevitch argues that music is not a discourse and that the idea of development, a process of thought unfolding through time, is misplaced in relation to music. References to development are, he says, merely _'manners of speaking, metaphors and analogies, dictated to us by our habitual discursive ways'_. For Jankelevitch, there is nothing in the music _'to be understood'_ and he pours scorn on the idea that the music can be _'followed'_, as in the tracing of a succession of themes. He has no time for technical analysis, which he characterizes as a resistance to the music's enchantment, an activity that is both _'manically antihedonist'_ and yet frivolous at the same time. It is the separation between the hermeneutic act and the music that Jankelevitch takes issue with. Thinking about music, in technical analysis or in other discursive forms, entails a separation from the music that makes the music peripheral.

Once again musicologist Carolyn Abbate sums it up:

_"So much of what he says disturbs the comfortable state of musicology (old and new alike), an effect he achieves because he upends complacencies hard won through years of disciplinary servitude"_

His accusation that what we [musicologists] do falls short of the music should be welcomed with penitence; he voices our own, usually unspoken, anxieties. His book brings *"our failures* home to us"

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## Guest (Sep 25, 2015)

I can find the book, but not the review from which you cite extracts. Where can I find it, so I can fill in the gaps?


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Without musical analysis and a skill of understanding how the aesthetics of music are created it would be impossible for anyone to compose music _and_ it would be impossible for anyone to interpret and perform such music in a stylistic and 'feeling' manner.

It is not required to analyse music to enjoy it though. The listener is passive and the hard yakka of composers and musicians combine their knowledge of music theory, composition and interpretation with subjective human emotion. The listener then listens to whatever it is that was composed and performed and then decides that it is 'inefffable' because the knowledge of the prolonged dissonance of an unresolved half diminished chord has no impact on such an activity as purely hearing the sound of it.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Stop! You're both right! It's a floor wax _and_ a dessert topping! (Old SNL parody.)

Musical analysis can help one understand "why" a piece of music works-- and as such is not wholly superfluous (if not badly done) -- but can't, ultimately, find a piece's soul.


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## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> I can find the book, but not the review from which you cite extracts. Where can I find it, so I can fill in the gaps?


The review can be found in the journal _Music and Letters_ (Oxford University Press), volume 85, No. 4 (November 2004)

It was written by Julian Johnson, Regius Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

That definition of 'ineffable' also applies to some discussions of/in philosophy. This is not good.


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## Epilogue (Sep 20, 2015)

> Thinking about music... makes the music peripheral.


Building a better world by deleting embedded clauses.


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