| Uniform title | Musique et l'ineffable. English |
| Contents |
The Charme of Jankélévitch / Arnold I. Davidson -- Jankélévitch's singularity / Carolyn Abbate -- Music and the ineffable -- One: The "ethics" and the "metaphysics" of music -- Orpheus or the sirens? -- Bearing a grudge against music -- Music and ontology -- Two: The inexpressive "espressivo" -- The mirage of development. The reprise -- The illusion of expression -- Impressionism -- The inexpressive and objectivity -- Violence -- Expressing nothing whatsoever. Affected indifference -- The opposite, something else, less. Humor, allusion, and understatement -- To describe, to evoke, to recount along rough lines -- To suggest in retrospect -- To express the inexpressible into infinity -- Serious and frivolous, deep and superficial. Musical ambiguity -- The ineffable and the untellable. The meaning of meaning -- Three: The charm and the alibi -- The poetic operation -- Fevroniya, or innocence -- The spatial mirage -- Temporality and the nocturne -- Divine inconsistency. The invisible city of Kitezh -- The bergamasque charm. Melody and harmony -- Allegretto bergamasque. Pianissimo sonore, forte con sordina -- Wisdom and music -- "Laetitiae comes" -- Four: Music and silence. |
| Abstract |
Vladimir Jankelevitch left behind a remarkable oeuvre steeped as much in philosophy as in music. His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetic and on modernist composers such as Taure, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jankelevitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 157-167) and index. |
| Language | Translated from the French. |
| LCCN | 2002069299 |
| ISBN | 0691090475 (cloth : alk. paper) |
