Extended Deadline: 05.04.2020

The relationship between music and language has been complicated since the advent of post-Enlightenment musical aesthetics. On one hand, as Eduard Hanslick insists in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), music’s content consists solely of sound forms in motion; on the other hand, music does seem to have some sort of para-discursive semantic quality: “it is a language we speak and understand, but which we are unable to translate”.

Suspended between the project of a musical semantics and the myth of music’s ineffability, the philosophy of music has never broken its problematic link with the philosophy of language. Recently, analytic philosophy and neuroscience have addressed the question of the emotional content conveyed by music, taking advantage of new conceptual tools and empirical data previously unavailable; in this way, however, they have had to deal again with questions about the sense and meaning of musical experience.