ABSTRACT. The attribution to music of an extra-musical “sense” (that is, a sense not identical with musicological and physical elements and components of music) is highly problematic because its validity is either limited to the subjective conditions of reception of music or irrelevant regarding music itself. Yet also the complete exclusion of this extra-musical “sense” from the field of theoretical possibles is problematic: music risks to be reduced to mere sound, losing its aesthetic relevance. A mediated position is possible: the extra-musical “sense” of music exists in and can be grasped through its analogical (that is, artistic) representation, when music is present within other artistic expressions (such as literature or cinematography). This article assumes a specific form of musical writing characterized by the repetition of the same note and rhythm pattern (deduced by the analysis of baroque and minimalist compositions), and it seeks the extra-musical “sense” of this form of music via the reference to some cinematographic uses of it. pp. 42–70

Keywords: music; sense (music); language (music); minimalism (music); movie soundtrack; Johann Sebastian Bach; Philip Glass; Eduard Hanslick; Hermann Cohen; Albert Schweitzer

How to cite: Vestrucci, Andrea (2015), “Music, Analogy and the Beauty of Everydayness,” Knowledge Cultures 3(3): 42–70