Wittgenstein e la grammatica del discorso musicale

Abstract

The references to music scattered throughout the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have not escaped the attention of commentators, who have often pointed out their importance in illustrating essential aspects of both his biography and the historical and cultural background. From the theoretical framework that acts as a backdrop to these references this article aims to extract those issues that are useful for clarifying the interpretative exercise innate in musicological practices. While in the reflections that accompanied the writing of theTractatus, music amounts to little more than an analogy used to explain the functioning of language (and particularly, to confirm the theory of proposition), in his following writings, from The Big Typescript to the Philosophical Researches, Wittgenstein draws attention to the need to re-examine the terms of language with which we describe musical experience, observing the extent to which their sense can be referred to the rules implicit in their use. Investigation of the “grammar” of musical discourse translates into an analysis of notions such as “expression”, “comprehension”, “interpretation”, “sounding like”, etc. In particular, his elaboration of the concept of “linguistic play” leads him to return constantly to the theme of musical comprehension. In his formulation the suggestion is to pay attention to the responses or reactions that a work arouses within a culture and to reject the explanations founded on the criterion of introspection. No less important is his epistemological analysis of the distinction between causal explanation and aesthetic explanation: the aesthetic explanation, which rejects issues relating to the genesis of a work, resorts to the comparison between sensitive samples and is founded on an exact and shared description of the phenomenon.