At the beginning of the XX century music’s aesthetic is not an autonomous discipline with defined borders. Scholars dealing with it are neither philosophers in the strict sense nor merely historians or critics of music. In this paper, I wonder about the possibility of finding the traces of the first Italian aesthetics of music among the folds of a composite and ongoing reflection and through the study of some generally-considered musicological production also having some philosophical profile. Along this path, some (...) figures of particular interest emerge such as that of Fausto Acanfora Torrefranca, a “non-aligned” intellectual, who firmly tried to give musical studies an aesthetic-philosophical basis, on the one hand, and a much needed rigor in the early twentieth century Italy on the other. (shrink)

Musical improvisation is the expressive capacity of a performer fostered by access to their own “productive” or “reproductive” tonal imagery: a field of consciousness that includes experiences, images that are internal, combined, distorted, associated, or in competition between themselves. In the highly original form of life that is jazz, narrating means directing time: a time of epiphanies and introversions, of intuitions and revelations, of syncopated rhythms and aesthetic insights, which appear and disappear on the edges of interference between consciousness and (...) the unconscious. The performing urgency of gestures, voices, and sounds, although arranged in the same scene, highlights the difference in individual time. In this intense activity of opposition and resolution the experience becomes an unstable territory that rests on the capacity of the body to remember, decide, anticipate, and invent. The ego reveals itself to be an emerging representation of our nerve structures and, even if conscious organization continues to be attributed to it, its role is not at all crucial. Unity, if anything, means coordination. The conscious ego is the expression of the body. In its ultimate form its unity is a biological problem. (shrink)

The present work aims at providing an evaluation of musical formalism, as it was intended by Eduard Hanslick in his treatise On the Musically Beautiful, in the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aesthetics and music. After a short historical introduction concerning the origins of the concept of absolute music within the framework of Romantic aesthetics and the writings of authors such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Arthur Schopenhauer, I suggest a definition of formalism on the (...) basis of Hanslick's account of music. I compare, then, Hanslick's view on music with Wittgenstein's reflections on music and aesthetics, referring to both Wittgenstein's early philosophy – especially to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – and to the later writings – namely to the Philosophical Investigations and the Lectures on Aesthetics. The outcome of the comparison between Hanslick's and Wittgenstein's views on music leads the discussion to an evaluation of the plausibility of the dichotomy between formalism and anti-formalism, and to a reflection on the objects, aims and methods of aesthetics. (shrink)