282 music, philosophy, and modernitytransformed ‘into a significant one’ (Schelling 1 / 5 , 493 ), and the same
applies to the concept of ‘music’.
One implication of such ideas is that the notion of music as a philo-
sophical mystery which philosophers over the centuries have striven
in vain to comprehend can look as though it might be based in some
respects on a misapprehension. It is not that music cannot have a whole
spectrum of deep significances, but the expectation associated with a
philosophical answer to the ‘unanswered question’ is that it will take the
form of an explanation, so that music would be accounted for in rep-
resentational terms. However, for Wittgenstein, neither language nor
music need be thought of as primarily having the function of explain-
ing or representing. His idea of the ‘making accessible’ of a gesture
can be understood in terms of the musical theme or phrase becoming
part of one’s world. This is not just a world of significant objects, but
also of movements, impulses, feelings, etc., and it is in this integration
into a world that its meaning consists.^9 Such meaning connects to all
sorts of other meanings, and this diversity of connections is arguably
what generates the idea of music’s mysterious nature. Music’s connec-
tions to the world it helps to constitute by, for example, establishing a
familiar mood or evoking a new kind of mood, framing a public event,
articulating a different sense of the tempo of things, giving significance
to a relationship between formal elements, or enabling the release of a
blocked emotion, depends on the contexts in which it is encountered.
These cannot be exhaustively incorporated into an explanatory charac-
terisation of any particular music. This perspective leads Wittgenstein
to maintain that ‘it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything,
or to explain anything’ (Wittgenstein 1969 : 18 ), and that he seeks only
to describe, rather than to establish a method of explanation like that
in the sciences. His approach can be read as part of what constitutes his
essential conservatism, but it can equally be read as a concern to regard
things like music as resources, rather than as philosophical problems.^10
In the austere reading of the early work ‘meaning something’ is con-
strued just in terms of ‘having thoughts’, which means that theTractatus
does not express any contentful thoughts. This raises the question of
how we are to employ the notion of a thought, especially in the light of
the notion, already present in Schlegel, of a ‘musical idea’. In a discus-
sion of understanding someone’s performing a bodily movement, such
9 See Cooper 2003 , who develops Wittgensteinian ideas in this direction.
10 Music can, of course, be both a resource for philosophy and a problem for philosophy,
but it has been too often seen solely as the latter.