conclusion 403ways in which sense is made in human societies. Such ways of making
sense do not have to be discursive: one raison d’ˆetre of music in moder-
nity can be regarded, as we have seen, as deriving precisely from its
being non-verbal. Burnham says of the need to sustain a conception
of music’s relative autonomy, rather than focus exclusively on its social
construction, that
something without its own voice would at best be a mouthpiece for
something else...Thecase for music’s autonomy is not simply the
default result of its lack of definable moorings in the world of referential
denotation; rather, any claim about music meaning something presup-
poses that it has its own voice. In short, precisely because music is musical
it can speak to us of things that are not strictly musical. This is how we
hear music speak: not by reducing it to some other set of circumstances
but by allowing it the opacity of its own voice, and then engaging that
voice in ways that reflect both its presence and our own, much as we allow
others a voice when we converse with them.
(Burnham 1997 : 326 )The fact that past ways of speaking through music still engage people,
despite music’s radical changes of context and significance, therefore
poses questions for musicological or philosophical approaches to music
which try to objectify it. Both traditional music theory, of the kind which
concentrates on objective analysis of musical works, and New Musicol-
ogy, which sometimes tends to over-semanticise music, and so neglects
the moment of potential transcendence that I have associated with the
idea of metaphysics 2 , can involve a questionable prioritisation of the
theoretical/philosophical over the musical.
The alternative to this prioritisation is suggested when Nicholas Cook
cites the splendid remark by Charles Seeger that ‘gaps found in our
speech thinking about music may be suspected of being areas of music
thinking’ (Cook 2001 : 191 ). Cook points to places where music may
be made less coherent as music by its relation to text or other media,
such as film, so suggesting the interaction of music’s internal workings
with the meanings and effects which arise via its connections to the
world. An approach like this takes account of music’s relative auton-
omy that is inherent in its predominantly non-intentional nature, while
acknowledging that this autonomy is always negotiated in relation to
its other. The approach therefore has consequences both for music’s
questioning of philosophy and for how theoretical and philosophical
approaches to music relate to the practice of music.