Sound Figures of Modernity——German Music and Philosophy

Does music have a language? If so, is it a language of its own?
What kind of language is it? If it can be conceded that music is or has a
form of language—and the jury among musicians and theorists of music
alike remains out on this point—how would the language of music relate
to the language of speculative thought, its grammatical categories
and organizing principles, its logic and its vocabulary? In his “Fragment
on Music and Language,” Adorno argues that “music resembles language
[Musik ist sprachähnlich] . . . in that it is a temporal sequence of articulated
sounds that are more than mere sounds. They say something,
often something human. The more sophisticated the music, the more
penetratingly they say it. The succession of sounds is related to logic:
there is right and wrong.” He continues: “But what has been said cannot
detach itself from the music. Music forms no system of signs [kein
System aus Zeichen].”5 Thus, although music and language share certain
modes of signification that, broadly speaking, could be construed as belonging
to the vast realm of textuality, the content of music cannot be
considered as belonging to the temporal gesture of its performance and
cannot be paraphrased without being erased. In its refusal to supply reliable
hermeneutic access to its arrangements of acoustic signs, music
singularly denies itself, if not to citation, then certainly to summary and
paraphrase.

【黑格尔】For Hegel, music does not simply reflect or capture the subject through the performance of a specific acoustic content; it elevates the self into its very unfolding.In music, theessence of the self comes into its own; when listening to music, the selfabandons itself to itself, hears itself as that which comes to itself by involuntarily abandoning itself to melody and rhythm. Music, as an aesthetic
manifestation of Spirit, allows the self to move on its way to the Absolute
at a pace and rhythm that the speculative discourses of abstract aesthetic
systems hardly can match.