-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
MATTEO RAVASIO, wolff, francis. Pourquoi la musique? Paris: Fayard, 2015, 458 pp., 22.00 paper., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 74, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 113–115, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12247
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Francis Wolff's recently published book Pourquoi la musique? represents an interesting attempt to develop a philosophy of music centered on the problem of musical value, whence its title. Wolff's philosophical approach is not the one common in analytical philosophy. It shares with it, however, the systematic ambitions.
The book deals with most of the problems that have interested philosophers of music in the Anglo‐Saxon world. Starting from definitional and ontological concerns, Wolff then tackles issues such as musical expressiveness, musical representation, the value of music, and its place among the arts. Throughout the book, examples of music from different periods of history and cultures are offered. Quite interestingly, this work is supported by a website where the reader can listen to eighty‐eight of the pieces of music mentioned.
The book opens with the mystery of the anthropological universality of music. Where there are human beings there is also music. We cannot, however, cast any light on this mystery if we have no definition of what music is. Wolff starts from the basic idea according to which music is the art of sounds [l'art des sons] (p. 27). To qualify this first definition it is necessary to understand what sounds are and what their role in music is. Sounds, Wolff elaborates, are indexed to events: when something happens, a sound is produced. Rather than being the qualification of things, such as colors, they are qualifications of events. Sounds are identified with reference to their causes: the barking of the dog, the ringing of the doorbell, and so on. In the realm of music, however, sounds as event take a peculiar form, both ontologically and etiologically. In this latter respect, horizontal causality from sound to sound takes the place of vertical causality; that is, in music a sound is perceived as causally related to the preceding sound instead of being related causally to the event that originates it. Wolff speaks here of imaginary causality [causalité imaginaire] from sound to sound—a notion that was first developed by Roger Scruton under the label of ‘virtual causality’ (see Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 39). In the ontological respect, sounds are identified not by means of their physical causes but by reference to their position in a system (e.g., the seven notes of a diatonic major scale).
