Musikanalysens språk

Om musikförståelsens teoretiska förutsättningar

Abstract

The article is an attempt to discuss some aestetic aspects of importance for the status of music theory and the practice of music analysis. The two main positions in the recent discussions on the subject – a general mentalistic and an empiristic approach – and the need of an aesthetic perspective are in different ways related to the problem concerning the ontology of a work of art. From a perspective directed by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late philosophy this kind of ontological problems could be reduced to a problem concerning the theory of meaning. The same perspective allows another view of the problem of other minds and on the subjectivity of the experience of art, than what is usual in traditional cartesian or behaviouristic theories. The argumentation ends up in a claim that musical analysis aesthetically, concerning aims and assumptions, as well as conceptually should depart from the use of the musical work, a position which roughly coincides with a ’thick’ institutional theory of art. The discussion ends up around an analysis of Schumann’s Manfred ouverture and the fact that both the analytical means and the aestetic content here is closely dependent upon an cartesian and subjectivistic view of human mind.