Razumeti glasbo: igra zaznave in spoznanja

The present text elaborates on music from three main perspectives, determined by various approaches to its understanding in history. First, it raises the issue of music as the art of the sensuous. Therefore, it is dedicated to music that through the senses, first of all the hearing, of course, penetrates the conscience, stimulates sensations and, while listening, provokes various responses. Historically, the understanding of music by means of sensory perception has brought about the aesthetics of music that most thoroughly elaborates on the fundamental ontological problems and epistemological issues associated with it. However, the history of explaining the musical being and the cognitive frameworks of its understanding and representation manifest that the issues at this level cannot provide satisfying answers. Namely, music stems from the understanding of deeper contextual associations that adapt the arranging of sounds to the arranging of the natural order within oneself and the environment. Therefore, its understanding is incomplete, unless the rational cognition of its fundamental and concrete relations that determine it are attached to it. The issues of the rationally perceptible, established by appropriate expertise and craftily polished thus stand as a focal point of discussing music in terms of the mediator of rationally cognitive truth. But in the context of dealing with art even this comes out as insufficient, incomplete and unreliable; for this reason, this text, as much as is possible, also touches on the transcendental. The framework of one’s cognition, comprehension and interpretation of music therefore opens up on three levels: the levels of sensory perception, rational perception and metaphysical cognition. All three aspects, each in its own way, reveal an insight into music as art, but neither of them, respectively or together, is sufficient and complete, in spite of their bursting loquaciousness and quaintness.