Re-sounding: Towards an Ontological Hermeneutics of Being-Musically

Abstract

When Gadamer proclaims that “music must resound” (Gadamer, Truth and method. Bloomsbury, London, 2013, 120), he returns to a not uncommon theme in his work, the concept of Vollzug, which translates a connotative field in English encompassing senses of fulfillment, execution, enacting and performance. For Gadamer, a work of art is continually open to reinterpretation through its ongoing performances and receptions (Gadamer, Epoché J Hist Philos 26(1):251–258, 2021, 252). No doubt this is an apt and exciting concept for scholars of performance. But this resounding, understood primordially as re-sounding, opens the way to a more fundamental intuition in the ontology of music. The idea that music resounds, taken literally, as a resonance which re-sounds, as a performing which reperforms; or, as Nancy observes, “listening is musical when it is music that listens to itself” (2007, 67), opens the way to the fundamental hermeneutic temporal structure of music. In listening as music, in musical listening, the listener is performed by musical ways of being just as the music performs them. Music as re-sounding is not in its origin a musician playing or composing a selection of notes, timbres, tempos, and structures, nor a participation in ritual and social performances; neither a means of auto-assignation of identity and belonging, nor a site of aesthetic judgment. Certainly, music, in its everyday sense, can perform all these functions, but more fundamentally, before all its taken-for-granted purposes and functions, music is listening, is a way of listening, of giving-over-to, being opened-up and taken-by. Musical listening instantiates a way of being which escapes representational metaphysics and language. The hackneyed claim that music escapes language is wrong. The language which can say music is a yet to be found potential of human speaking. Speaking from music may be closer to a performative utterance, a spell, a poem. It requires a new hermeneutic which escapes message and receptor, sign and referent, subject and object. A languaging from, of, and for musical being.