274 music, philosophy, and modernity
to Heidegger in the later work, but the move is not just from a more
logic-based to a more pragmatic conception. Music can suggest a way of
linking these positions which does not require one to make the exces-
sive restrictions on the notion of meaning characteristic of the austere
reading.
In theTractatusthe idea of language’s relationship to the world is
regarded in terms of a ‘representing internal relationship’, like that
between ‘The gramophone record, the musical thought, the musical
notation, the sound waves’, all of which can convey the same music
because they share a ‘logical construction’ ( 4. 014 Wittgenstein 1984 :
27 ). The important thing is the scope of what Wittgenstein discusses in
terms of ‘logic’, which has to do with ‘representation’. The remarks on
the gramophone record, etc., can be connected with the ideas that the
‘image’ is a ‘model of reality’ ( 2. 12 ibid.: 15 ), and that the ‘form of the
representation (‘Abbildung’) is the possibility that things relate to each
other like the elements of the image’ ( 2. 151 ibid.). In theNotebooks
he gives the examples of hieroglyphic writing and of a drawn image of
two men fencing, to suggest that ‘realpictures of states of affairs canbe
rightornot be right’ (ibid.: 95 ). He uses the word ‘stimmen’, which has the
musical sense of ‘being in tune’. ‘Logic’ has to do with the form common
to image and reality, and he is concerned with how it can be discussed
in philosophy. The image ‘cannot represent its form of representation;
it shows it (‘es weist sie auf’)’ ( 2. 172 ibid.: 16 ), and what it shows is
‘logical form’ ( 2. 18 ibid.). Representing the form of representation
would threaten a regress of ‘representing the representation of the form
of representation’, etc., so there must be something ‘immediate’ about
‘showing’. This implies a link between nonsense and the immediacy we
experience in understanding an image – or music. There seems to be
little space in the austere reading of theTractatusfor such a link.
Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘image’ is unusual, as the remark that
‘The proposition is an image of reality’ ( 4. 02 ibid.: 26 ) suggests. It is
therefore important that when he also uses music as an example to indi-
cate the role of logical form he still employs the word ‘language’. In his
elucidation of the remark on the conveying of music by record, score,
sound waves, etc., he talks of a ‘universal rule’ for ‘translation of the lan-
guage of notes into the language of the gramophone record’ ( 4. 0141
ibid.: 27 ). The differing ways in which a score and a record encode the
physical components of music, from frequencies to durations, can be
given a scientific explanation. The fact that what is encoded is then man-
ifested as frequencies and durations by sound waves is also explicable,