Charles O. Nussbaum: The Musical Representation-Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012 (paper), ⅹⅱ + 388, $20.00, ISBN: 978-0-262-14096-6

摘要

Nussbaum has written a book merging his deep interests, music and philosophy. Pursuing a naturalist solution to the question of how musical experience emerges from organized tones, he offers several interesting ideas that could explain the ontological, emotional and meaningful faces of music. These ideas encourage the reader to delve deep into the book, but just at page 2, he states that he will talk only about Western tonal art music since 1650. Even in this all too restricted field of analysis, he neglects traditions or periods that belong to it, like jazz or the avant garde, focusing on composers like Brahms, Beethoven, Bizet, Mahler or Weber, among others. The richness of music is so diverse that trying to explain its nature focusing only on a tiny subset is very narrow-minded. To consider Western tonal music since 1650 as a good model from which to extrapolate all the worldwide realities of musical experience is in my opinion nonsense. And this is unfortunate, because the author has a brilliant mind and enough technical resources to really speak about music, not about a microscopic aspect of its reality. Cross-cultural studies are needed to record the diversity and richness of the musical experiences had in all contexts, which has the added benefit of minimizing biases from particular ethnocentric views.