Abstracts of issue 1/1986 (4)

Haris Xanthoudakis

A Functional View on Musical Material

The aim of the article is the critical reconsideration – from the point of view of modern theory of language, phonology, acoustics and psychology – of traditional notions such as musical material, sound, timbre, pitch etc. and the study of the relationship between poetics and language in music. From a viewpoint of a functional meaning of material in music that includes the dimension of phonology, the article tries to establish a critique of the notion of historicity of material in the Aesthetics of music by T. W. Adorno. It argues that in Adornos aesthetics is hidden an ideological component and a logocentrism, elements that restrict the value of that theory for musical phenomena in the time after 1950.

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