form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 31than the much more plausible idea that they should be effective in
achieving our aims. The demonstration in some analytical approaches
that music does not provide narratives in the manner of verbal narratives
fails, for example, to deal with the fact that some of the most insightful
performances of wordless music succeed because they convey a narra-
tive sense which we can only seek to articulate verbally in metaphors.
Brahms F-minor piano sonata, in which the fourth movement reuses
material from the second to create a wholly different mood and atmo-
sphere, only makes sense, and can only succeed in performance, if one
appreciates the narrative element of the sonata, in which a move is
made from something like passionate love to icy bitterness. The inter-
play of what can be said in words and what can only be evoked by the
music offers dimensions of communication which the desire to estab-
lish a banal fact like the lack of narrative connectives, etc., in wordless
music simply obscures.
Once we understand music as part of our being in the world its
connections to other aspects of that being cease to be so mysterious.
Underlying these arguments is a point which affects the very nature of
what we think philosophy should try to achieve. If we think in terms of a
‘philosophy of music’ we can easily prejudge what is at issue in a manner
which blocks access to vital resources. This occurs not least because the
resources of the analytical philosophy of music tend to be the worn-out
resources of the empiricism-based analytical tradition, rather than the
resources of the most significant new philosophical developments. By
attempting to specify a circumscribed domain of ‘aesthetic’ questions,
the analytical philosophy of music fails to see that it is in the ways in
which music connects to other aspects of philosophy that the interesting
questions lie.
Analytical philosophers who have not taken on board the ideas of
the later Wittgenstein continue to work on the assumption that lan-
guage is primarily to be understood in terms of its ability to represent
an objective world. The dimension of language which enables us to
articulate the world via the employment of singular terms and predi-
cates is therefore regarded as the key to language per se, and the main
question is exactly how statements tie up with the world. This dimen-
sion of linguistic articulation is indeed a vital part of the basis of our
ability to establish validity claims, but the dimensions of language and
other kinds of articulation which play other roles can be neglected if
one adopts an exclusively representational approach. In the present
context it is therefore important to look at language as a multi-faceted