Earlier today I was at Crema Cafe with Stacy for our weekly writing session. I'm working on a paper on music, which earlier this week had amongst the tentative titles: "Hearing Serious Music, or Why Derrida Was Kicked Off the Stage at Ornette's Show in Paris." So today at about the same time Ornette passed, I wrote the following, prompted by two fragments from Adorno's essay on music and philosophy.
Fragment/Prompt 1: Adorno: "The obstacle to all epistemological reflections...the basis of [music's] right to exist."
I wanted to find the quotation about the non-intentionality of music, which is the fragment that enabled me to get traction on the abstract for my UBC paper [see below]. Perhaps I'll find it for the next go around.
That not yet re-located fragment offers the context for the one chosen as my prompt. When Adorno rules out the possibility of knowing what music is, we encounter a reverberation with the aphorism: "art precedes metaphysics." Because it is precisely metaphysics that Adorno is denying when he identifies the "obstacles" to epistemological reflections. Art precedes metaphysics is in this case heard as the basis of the right of music to exist. What does it mean for music to have a right to exist, and why do we need to insist on protecting this existence, that is, why proclaim an inalienable right unto music?
Music, the product of humanity, which is to say, an art, is free of meaning; that is, free of intentional meaning, intentionality. Human are medium through which music comes into existence. But we don't make it via intentionality.
Fragment/Prompt 2: "One could add that enigmatic element...in all music."
Still didn't find the non-intentionality quotation. Maybe next time.
When I ended the first session I wrote that music is made without intentionality. There's more to be worked out on this, because in a straightforward way that claim translated as: music has no meaning and this seems to be what Adorno is saying: music is music and has no meaning -- it just is. Ok, again, much more to be taken up on that.
The non-intentionality of music is identified as the "enigmatic element...in all music." And this qualification is helpful. Music is a Sphynx, Adorno says, and we are not meant to play Oedipus and solve the riddle, to correctly say "Humanity!" All of this strikes me as the anti-humanist turn famously taken by Heidegger. This is the return to Being, which Adorno is hesitant to say, as such. But uncharacteristically, the word "Being" does appear in this essay. If we are not meant to solve the riddle of music, then we are meant to be moved somewhere in our encounter with the riddle, the Sphynx -- [Holy Smokes: the riddle of music...the JGB symbol: Cats Under the Stars]
Fragment/Prompt 1: Adorno: "The obstacle to all epistemological reflections...the basis of [music's] right to exist."
I wanted to find the quotation about the non-intentionality of music, which is the fragment that enabled me to get traction on the abstract for my UBC paper [see below]. Perhaps I'll find it for the next go around.
That not yet re-located fragment offers the context for the one chosen as my prompt. When Adorno rules out the possibility of knowing what music is, we encounter a reverberation with the aphorism: "art precedes metaphysics." Because it is precisely metaphysics that Adorno is denying when he identifies the "obstacles" to epistemological reflections. Art precedes metaphysics is in this case heard as the basis of the right of music to exist. What does it mean for music to have a right to exist, and why do we need to insist on protecting this existence, that is, why proclaim an inalienable right unto music?
Music, the product of humanity, which is to say, an art, is free of meaning; that is, free of intentional meaning, intentionality. Human are medium through which music comes into existence. But we don't make it via intentionality.
Fragment/Prompt 2: "One could add that enigmatic element...in all music."
Still didn't find the non-intentionality quotation. Maybe next time.
When I ended the first session I wrote that music is made without intentionality. There's more to be worked out on this, because in a straightforward way that claim translated as: music has no meaning and this seems to be what Adorno is saying: music is music and has no meaning -- it just is. Ok, again, much more to be taken up on that.
The non-intentionality of music is identified as the "enigmatic element...in all music." And this qualification is helpful. Music is a Sphynx, Adorno says, and we are not meant to play Oedipus and solve the riddle, to correctly say "Humanity!" All of this strikes me as the anti-humanist turn famously taken by Heidegger. This is the return to Being, which Adorno is hesitant to say, as such. But uncharacteristically, the word "Being" does appear in this essay. If we are not meant to solve the riddle of music, then we are meant to be moved somewhere in our encounter with the riddle, the Sphynx -- [Holy Smokes: the riddle of music...the JGB symbol: Cats Under the Stars]
Abstract for UBC paper:
To the Music Itself!
Folk Phenomenology and the Return to Original
Melody
Education, as Hannah
Arendt showed us, exists in a pre-political sphere, and this means it is
properly understood as existing against
the state. How do we arrive at this
‘proper’ understanding of education, to this utopian intuition, which is to
say, How are we moved into and then occupy the utopos of Education? This paper takes up these questions by returning
to the category of music-making philosophy. The
category of music-making philosophy arrives to us from the prophetic writing of
Nietzsche, who prognosticated the renewal of a chorus based poetic praxis, or
what we would today describe as the dialogic learning community. Like the chorus of Greek tragedy, the
dialogic learning community occupies a time and space outside of the
chronological events unfolding in the state-controlled political realm; it
arises in the utopos of Education. Music-making
philosophy via poetic praxis is thus a collective working out of a counter-culture
through a mimetic representation of music’s non-intentional and radically
independent ontology. It is the dialectical negation of the
instrumental rationality of data driven ‘schooling’. The return to Nietzsche’s category enables this
paper to accomplish two aims: first, to take up what Theodor Adorno identifies as “the right of music – all music
– to exist,” and, second, to present the method, folk phenomenology, that
discloses this “right of music – all music -- to exist”; folk phenomenology mediates an effacement with
what Nietzsche called “the original melody.”
Thus, the thesis to be taken up in this paper is the following: the disclosure via folk phenomenology of
music’s right to exist is prior to any music-making philosophy. Before we enter Education, then, we must
first return to the music itself!
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