'Belle catene in cui s'avvolge il dio nella carne sperduto…'. La riflessione di Merleau-Ponty sulla musica

Abstract

In the Phénoménologie de la perception Merleau-Ponty makes some observations on music that raise radical issue and fundamental points of debate. Music, he says, shows that 'the signification' of a composition lies not only in the signs specific to musical syntax, but also in the concrete sonic execution - to the extent that it is utterly incomprehensible without or beyond it. This peculiarity of music also suggests (again according to Merleau-Ponty) that conventional verbal language in reality alludes to a phonic gestuality on which it was originally grafted - and indeed still is grafted (though hidden). Hence the interest - a philosophical interest - in musicians like Schönberg and Berg. In such figures the discovery of 'polytonalism' is in some respects like the recovery of that 'poly-relationality' that also stands at the centre of Klee's research of painting. It is a recovery of a language that is capable of expressing that invisible 'modulation' that occurs between things: that 'between', that silent background - that elusive state of 'immanence', to use Klee's famous word - that can never be stated, but out of which we receive things, words and music. With the result that sounds, figures and signs become - to use the image in Valéry's poem La Pythie - the 'fair chains' in which a 'lost' movement is silently confined.