Lights on Music departing from the Philosophy of Language

Abstract

It has been said that one of the main goals of musicology could be the discovery of what "musical language" teaches us about the human being that is different from what is taught by spoken language and other manifestations and institutions. In these terms, it seems obvious that this task depends on what one means by "language." Despite the fact that the paradigm of language has turned into a catchphrase in Western musical conception, this comparison tended to emphasize more certain "deficiencies" and "gaps" of music, presenting it unequivocally as inferior and more limited as far as a possible cognitive function goes. This paper aims at revisiting this issue in the light of contemporary contributions of thinking about language, especially in the works of some Italian philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Paolo Virno and Adriana Cavarero.