The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these (...) paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof. (shrink)

This essay investigates some issues of the Twentieth Century French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Musical Aesthetics and Philosophy of Music, particularly referring to his original interpretation of the French musical Impressionism, with emphasis to some composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré. Specifically, the paper pays attention to the aesthetical and musical criticism of the author towards Debussy’s music. Which are the features and the characteristics of the Jankélévitch’s philosophical musicology? How much the purely theoretical and (...) ontological theories and ideas of the philosopher act on his view of Debussy’s work, of Impressionism and of music in general as an art and a human experience? Which is - consequently - the original and eccentric approach used by Jankélévitch in his musical writings and which are the final ideas expressed on debussysme? As a result of this study, it will appear a surprisingly nihilistic view of the life and of the reality, a totally unique, unusual, innovative and imaginative interpretation of Claude Debussy’s compositions, where music and sound become a ′′magical′′ phenomenon through which giving a deeply philosophical interpretation of the world and of the human life. (shrink)