Reason and nostalgia -

the place of music in modern thinking

Abstract

It can be said that music has had a certain autonomous development in relation with the aesthetical problems of the art philosophy. Its semantic affinity with the other arts was always delicate and problematic, making that music, in the history of aesthetic, floated between the extremes of “hierarchy” of arts. Such a particularity occurs because music has always carried a particular status which is a consequence of two problems: the high complexity of its technical means and its impossibility of expressing rational facts of daily language. The discussion about the superiority or lack of expressivity of the music as an artistic expression can also be taken in a broader sense through the dichotomy rationality/irrationality: valorized because of its non-semantic and non-conceptual character, music would be placed in the top of arts, but in the rational understanding, it falls to the last place. Independently of the opinion of different authors concerning the expressivity of music as an artistic language, this discussion allows us to think about its place in the history of rational thought, as well as interpreter this rationality through an “object” that is, at the same time, highly rational (technical complexity) and non-conceptual (non-semantic).