Abstracts of issue 1/1986 (4)
Haris XanthoudakisA 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 Adorno’s 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.