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Of Essence and Context pp 197–209Cite as

Where Is the Essence of a Musical Work?

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Part of the book series: Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress ((NAHP,volume 7))

Abstract

The essence of music engages the human ability to create symbolic meanings from any impression. In our search for this essence, we must first follow the communicative path of a musical performance. The double ontological status of music as both cognitive activity and observable object makes any transition from cognition to object a reduction from thick to thin entity, and any transition from notated/sounded work to interpretation/musical experience a thickening of the music’s properties. The process of elaborating upon the epistemological elements in this communicative chain positions the essence of the musical work as a discourse on relational dimensions that are culturally contextualized by the idea of a musical work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This view is in contrast to the fusion of horizons (Gadamer 1960), and more in line with accepting the “inductive cliff”.

  2. 2.

    Some consequences of this model for artistic research are elaborated by Dahl (2017).

  3. 3.

    There are no references to music in Bourriaud’s book, however.

  4. 4.

    Luhmann uses the same concept of information as Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1972) and reveals an interesting affiliation to Derrida’s différance.

  5. 5.

    Wolfgang Fuhrmann, in his presentation of Luhmann’s theory, concludes, rather bluntly: Without listeners, there is no music (Fuhrmann 2011: 147).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Per Dahl

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  1. Per Dahl
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Correspondence to Per Dahl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Music History, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Rūta Stanevičiūtė

  2. University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, UK

    Nick Zangwill

  3. Department of Music Theory, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Rima Povilionienė

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Dahl, P. (2019). Where Is the Essence of a Musical Work?. In: Stanevičiūtė, R., Zangwill, N., Povilionienė, R. (eds) Of Essence and Context. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5_15

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