av福利社

Vladimir Jank茅l茅vitch left behind a remarkable 聹body of work steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Faur茅, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jank茅l茅vitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense.

Music, Jank茅l茅vitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is 鈥渋neffable,鈥� as Jank茅l茅vitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jank茅l茅vitch’s singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Cl茅ment, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.