Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf: The Voice of Music

Who isn’t curious about what music actually says, expresses, conveys, or communicates? We always assume that this is the case—that music is a language. But which one is it? Apparently not the one in which we speak and think. It is a language of a different kind. Now, philosophy in the 20th century underwent the so-called “linguistic turn”—that is, it sought to answer fundamental questions about the philosophy of language—but a true philosophy of music and language was not developed, neither by philosophers nor by musicologists.

My book seeks to do just that: to explore and unfold music as a language sui generis. And the starting point is the voice—voice in both senses of the word: as an organ and as sound. Not language, which can also be written and occupies only a part of the voice. In doing so, I am bringing about a paradigm shift in the philosophy of music: away from language, toward the voice.

Therefore, the book must delve deep into the prehistory of modern humanity, to the origins of the voice and the ability to speak; go back to the very earliest stages of childhood; look back at the beginnings of instrumental music; and draw on other fields of study: linguistics, semantics, semiotics, and neuroscience.

The book begins in a traditional manner, by introducing the basic concepts—that is, what counts as music, as a work, as a performance, as a text, and as talking and writing about it. The book then provides a comprehensive exploration of the voice. This is always done in dialogue with the major philosophers who have written about music—not only Adorno and Wittgenstein, but also Plessner, Günther Anders, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Robert Brandom, and Peirce, extending all the way to body phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

A key chapter categorizes the modes of musical understanding—that is, musical semantics. I found no fewer than 25 different approaches. Each one addresses a specific, yet one-sided, aspect of music. None of them are wrong, but they are all perspective-based.

The main chapter focuses on explaining music as a language in its own right. It begins by describing music as a system with internal—and not just external—properties. It starts with a simple observation: We can recognize pieces in the blink of an eye; we can easily join in on a birthday canon, even if we think we have no musical talent. In principle, listening to music is child’s play. But why is that? What does our brain do to make us say, in the middle of a piece, “Yes, that’s Brahms’s Fourth”? In a sense, my book is also a work of transcendental philosophy, in that it seeks to explain precisely that.

The final section describes the historical, cultural, and social aspects of music, as well as its benefits and drawbacks for personal life. It also broadens our perspective on “our” music with two digressions on Indian and Central African music and on the origins of music long before the Neanderthals. The section concludes with an outlook on a society that will, hopefully, remain free.

– Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf