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The author considers the metaphysics of Aristotle in its significance for the aesthetics and the philosophy of music, where the music is, first of all, by its nature is presented as a substance (essence, consisting in movement, rhythm, among other things, the divine mind) and, secondly, as a becoming shape musical art, the value of human interaction with the world. In the author’s interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the essence, the music is becoming substantialistically musical being. In the making of the musical form the laws of the logos, Mind, creation. Concepts: substance (essence), matter and form, entelechy, energy - are considered in the context of aesthetics and musical art. The author draws attention to the fact that the issue of music as an art form in the world of human existence, Aristotle was interested in music for the purpose of man, where he shared a professional work and making music, you need to nurture. Noting its purpose, according to the philosopher said, pleasure, recreation, virtue, purification of the soul, it was found that the ability of music to influence the moral aspect of the soul remained for him an open problem. Aristotle’s metaphysics approved idea of music as a musical form and substance as a process music as a means of value of human interaction with the world, which makes the belief in the stability of the laws of becoming of musical forms.

RESUMO O presente artigo reconstrói e desenvolve os elementos fundamentais da teoria da dissonância elaborada por Theodor W. Adorno em sua filosofia da música. Parte-se de uma breve exposição do tratamento conferido pela musicologia histórica - com toda sua equivocidade autoconsciente e constitutiva - aos conceitos de dissonância e consonância para dele se depreender as linhas fundamentais de um tratamento filosófico da dissonância. Lançando mão dos recursos mobilizados por alguns teóricos da nova música, são reconstruídas, assim, as estações da teoria crítica da dissonância entre desnaturalização, emancipação e liquidação da dissonância. Por fim, defende-se a tese de uma interpretação dinâmica do uso e da percepção da dissonância segundo contextos socioestéticos determinados. ABSTRACT This article reconstructs and develops the fundamental elements of Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of dissonance in his philosophy of music. It begins with a brief explanation on the treatment given by historical musicology, with all its self-conscious and constitutive equivocity, to the concepts of dissonance and consonance, in order to reveal the fundamental lines of a philosophical treatment of dissonance. Using the resources mobilized by some theorists of New Music, the article reconstructs the stations of the critical theory of dissonance among denaturation, emancipation and liquidation of dissonance. In its conclusion, it advances the thesis of a dynamic interpretation of the use and perception of dissonance according to given socio-aesthetic contexts.

Following the new reading of Kant’s third critique, which was proposed by Hannah Arendt in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, in this paper, the author deals with the function of art in the establishment, organization and profiling of political communities. The focus is primarily on the field of music. The analysis begins with ancient philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle) and continues with the problems which relate to artistic shaping of citizens’ lives in modern epoch (Rousseau, Kant, Schiller). The goal of the paper is to show that the philosophy of art and the philosophy of music, could be taken as a political philosophy, precisely because the analysis of these phenomena constantly convinces a close intertwining of politics and aesthetics, i.e. art and power, music and power. As a conclusion, we might say that a general aesthetic sense can be seen as a kind of human organ for public aesthetic gathering of citizens. Music, poetry, visual arts, etc., have become tools for the political shaping of citizens, i.e. the tools of their political life. Keywords: aesthetics, judging, politics, sensus communis, art, music, gathering of citizens

O ano de 1851 marca o primeiro contato de Richard Wagner com a filosofia de Schopenhauer, logo seguido por sua proclamada e algo surpreendente "conversão" ao schopenhauerianismo. Vinte anos depois, essa adesão é reafirmada em "Beethoven", escrito festivo que contém um esboço de uma filosofia da música, apresentada pelo compositor como fundamentada na estética schopenhaueriana e que terá grande influência na elaboração da noção do dionisíaco, tal como aparece em "O nascimento da Tragédia", de Nietzsche. Meu trabalho pretende, em primeiro lugar, investigar em que medida a estética musical esboçada em "Beethoven" é de fato compatível com as teses estéticas de "O mundo como Vontade e representação". A constatação de certas incongruências entre as duas concepções estéticas dá então oportunidade a reflexões sobre o caráter das relações entre Wagner, Schopenhauer e o jovem Nietzsche.In the year 1851, Richard Wagner had his first contact with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, a fact that was followed soon by his proclaimed and somewhat surprising "conversion" to schopenhauerianism. Tweny years later, his debt to Schopenhauer is reaffirmed in "Beethoven", a comemorative writing in which are to be found the outlines of a philosophy of music - claimed by the composer to be based on Schopenhauer's aesthetics - that had great influence in Nietzsche's theoretical elaboration of the dionysiac, as it appears in "The birth of Tragedy". My work aims primarily at investigating to what extent the musical aesthetics outlined in "Beethoven" is actually compatible with that presented in "The world as Will and representation". The pointing out of remarkable differences between the two aesthetic conceptions gives then rise to some reflexions concerning the character of the relations between Wagner, Schopenhauer and the young Nietzsche.

Die Hauptfrage, die ich in diesem Aufsatz diskutieren will, ist die folgende: Welche sind die ästhetisch-normativen Voraussetzungen für das richtige Verständnis und die richtige Evaluation von Jazz? Meine These lautet: Die Jazzästhetik ist eine Ästhetik der gelungenen Performanz. Sie ist nicht eine Ästhetik der Unvollkommenheit. Ich werde meine Argumentation in die folgenden Abschnitte gliedern. Nach der Einleitung (I.) wird in Abschnitt II. die ›These der Unvollkommenheit‹ dargestellt und in III. werden anschließend einige Argumente dagegen diskutiert. In den Abschnitten IV. und V. werden die für die Jazzästhetik wichtige Frage nach dem »Fehler« und das entscheidende Thema der Normativität untersucht. Dazu werde ich geltend machen, dass die ›These der Unvollkommenheit‹ insbesondere deswegen unbefriedigend ist, weil sie die spezifische Normativität von Jazz als Improvisationskunst missversteht. In Abschnitt VI. wird schließlich erklärt, in welchem Sinne von einer Normativität der gelungenen Performanz die Rede sein kann und warum dies für unser Verständnis von Jazz bedeutend ist. Abschließend (VII.) wird diese Idee gegen mögliche Einwände verteidigt.In this paper I aim at discussing the aesthetic-normative conditions for the right understanding and the right evaluation of jazz. My main point is this: The aesthetics of jazz is an aesthetics of the successful performance, rather than an aesthetics of imperfection. The paper will be structured as follows. SectionI introduces the topic. SectionII presents the ›imperfection thesis‹, while III discusses some arguments against it. Sections IV and V investigate two related questions: the first is about the role of the »mistake« in jazz; the second concerns the crucial topic of normativity. At this regard I will maintain that the ›imperfection thesis‹ does not work, especially because it misunderstands the specific normativity of jazz as improvisational art. Section VI is devoted to clarifying both in which sense the idea of a normativity of the successful performance is sound and why this idea is important for understanding jazz. Finally (VII) I defend this view against possible objections.

Ehrenfels, Höfler and Witasek competently contributed to a musical aesthetics based upon the principles of the Graz school. In spite of a shared general psychological framework, they deeply differ in applying it to the aesthetics of music. A double tendency can be pointed out. Ehrenfels and Höfler enthusiastically supported Richard Wagner and vindicated the aesthetic value of his music. Accordingly, they made large use of analogies between musical and organic Gestalten. In a platonic vein, Höfler also thinks of melodies as timeless objects, which are discovered rather than created by great artists. On the contrary, Witasek’s approach is quite rationalistic. Avoiding any intrusion of metaphysics, he describes the intellectual and emotional processes involved in hearing a piece of music. Wholly independently of Wagnerism, Witasek explains the complexity of musical experience in the general terms of Meinongian psychology.

In the dialogue What Is Music? between Carl Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, music is defined as a “mathematized emotion” or an “emotionalized ‘mathesis’”. As emphasized by Marija Bergamo, this is the way of underlining its equal and unavoidable constitution, based on emotion and rational organization in the time dimension. So, Marija Bergamo is continuously searching for those music determinants in a musical work as an “autonomous aesthetic fact”, whose base and real essence lie “within the nature and essence of music itself”. In other words, the starting point of the author’s concern with (art) music is her reflection on that which is “purely musical”, that is, on “the very nature of the musical”.The attempts to determine what the purely musical is and to understand the nature of the sense and inevitability of man’s musical dimension have been made since the beginnings of music and musical thinking. In that context, more recent knowledge and thinking about the phenomenon of music, which are derived from various disciplines, correspond closely to Marija Bergamo’s views. In a narrower sense, the notion of purely musical is closely related to aesthetic autonomy, that is, autonomous music or musical autonomy. From such a viewpoint – and in conformity with Marija Bergamo’s view – I would say that the purely musical in an art music work exists independently of non/autonomy (that is, independently of any function, except an aesthetic one), as well as independently of the origin of its content (musical or extra-musical), and that it always, whenever “one thinks in the sense of music and is seized by it” (in terms of emotion, mathesis and time), creates, brings and possesses its specific (non-conceptual perceptive) musical-semantic stratum. This is shown, at least partly, on a characteristic and (in many respects) paradigmatic example – the music of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy. Therefore, rationalism of the magic inspiration of music (and/or: in music; by music; and possibly /by music/ about music), as a “mathematized emotion” or “emotionalized mathesis” in the time dimension, makes it – in a purely musical sense, based on purely musical logic – a unique form of non-conceptual cognition.

Many countries in the 19th century wanted to assert their national character, with music being one way of doing so. We can distinguish four ways in which in music national identity can be established: composers may use the folk music, they can base their music on folk music, they can set the words of a nation to music and the last possibility can be found in the idea of an association of certain music with specific events and festivities in a tradition. The author discusses in detail these four possibilities of the establishment of Englishness in music in 20th century.

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions.

Aristotle's approach to music is articulated in three different ways: harmonics, psychology of music and its place in the system of education – sociology of music and musical catharsis. In this article, we will treat his understanding of music in the Metaphysics and his psychology of hearing and the voice in his work On the Soul. In the Metaphysics he studied some fundamental issues of Pythagorean harmonics. He critically rejected the Pythagorean and Platonic theory of numbers as intermediate entities between sensible substances and forms. He also rejected the Pythagorean idea of world music and introduced a very important distinction between mathematical and acoustical harmonics. Special attention is given to two notions of Aristotle's harmonics: his understanding of quarter-tone and his interpretation of musical concord or consonance. In his psychology, Aristotle studied music as the phenomenon of sense perception and through this he established the distinction between sound, voice and tone, which remained effective up to modern physical acoustics. From the aesthetical point of view, special importance can be attached to his definition of hearing as a ratio, λόγος and of the voice as a concord. When he compared the process of sense perception with the playing of a stringed instrument, he modified the Pythagorean notion of soul as harmony and indicated the artistic character of the auditory experience.

The paper is concerned with Tartini's views on aesthetics from the standpoint that in his time it was easier to live with music than to ponder upon it. It is pointed out that his work is based on patterns and models at a time when views on music and on requirements to be met by music were constantly changing and when instrumental music strove to become independent, a process that was both difficult and occasionally dramatic. At first he followed the rules set by baroque vocal music that determined also the affections in instrumental music. Then he started to comply with Mattheson's belief that instrumental music is a special kind of "Klangrede". What he did not realize as yet was that music is equivalent to language as regards expressing feelings or conveying a message with its own autonomous means, for his life and work concluded before such a view could be clearly formulated. He was not involved in the difficulties to which eighteenth-century music thinking was subjected to because of a deep mistrust of instrumental music at that period. He was protected (i) by a special status Italian music had at that time and (ii) by an alive, confident and almost self-sufficient Italian musical practice, in which he himself participated. That is why he could transfer, quite freely and without having too many doubts, aesthetic models and compositional patterns in terms of technique, which had been designed for and used by vocal music, to the field of instrumental music. He changed and adapted them inventively to the nature of the new medium, increasingly emphasizing the emotional expressive element of music. He aestheticized the doctrine of figures, removing its rhetorical basis, and took up new views on harmony "free composition" and the "activation" of musical texture. In conclusion, the author suggests that Tartini was both hindered and stimulated by the musical context of his time. On the one hand, he was protected by tradition and, on the other, he experienced the adventure of discovery, taking advantage of tensions and contradictions of that time, naturally according to his own creative abilities.