EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Music and the Ineffable (Vladimir Jankélévitch)
Automatically transcribed from the episode audio. Some words and names may be inaccurate.
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Imagine imagine for a second you are Plato. OK. You're you know one of the greatest most fiercely rational minds in all of human history. You're busy building this theoretical blueprint for a perfect utopian society the Republic. Right. The classic text. Exactly. And you were deciding what laws to pass what education should look like what forces are basically safe for your citizens and your absolute biggest fear. the thing you want to heavily regulate or even ban outright it isn't a weapon yeah it's not a rival army it is um a flute a literal flute right a flute why because you know deep down A single intoxicating melody has the power to just instantly short circuit human logic. It really does. You know that no matter how perfectly constructed an argument is, music can just completely derail it. It is a terrifying prospect, honestly. I mean, for anyone who relies on logic to make sense of the world anyway. Totally. The idea that something completely invisible, you know, something made nearly a vibrating air can just bypass our intellect entirely and hijack our nervous system. It's wild. It really is. And yet, for those of you listening right now. Think about your absolute favorite song. Really think about what it does to you. Yeah, that physical reaction. Exactly. When you put on your headphones and that first chord hits, are you mathematically calculating the harmonic progression? Definitely not. No. You're feeling something massive, something physical, like something entirely magical that you probably can't even put into words. Right, because it defies words. Exactly. And today, this deep dive is going to validate that exact feeling. we are exploring a truly profound and honestly a pretty rebellious book. Oh, very rebellious.
Yeah, it's called Music and the Ineffable by the French philosopher Vladimir John Kalevich. Our mission today is to, well, traverse the ideas in this work chapter by chapter to uncover a radically different way of understanding music. And we really need a different way because the old way is just... It's flawed. It is. We're looking at the clash between human language, which is just desperate to explain everything, and what Jean Kalevich calls the ineffable. Which is this force that absolutely refuses to be explained. Right. But somehow it still offers infinite meaning.
Jean Kalevich is, he's throwing down a gauntlet here. against centuries of Western philosophical tradition. He really is taking on the heavyweights. Oh, absolutely. Because for hundreds of years, philosophy and musicology, they've treated music like a cipher, like a puzzle to be solved. Right, like an escape room or something. Exactly. They approach a symphony as if it's a secret message written in code. And, you know, the job of the smart listener is to decode it, to translate it into a specific verbal meaning. Like, ah, this cello means sadness. Yes. But... John Kilovich steps in and says, no, we have been getting it completely wrong. Music does not mean anything in the way a dictionary means something. Which brings up the composer Gabriel Foray. He asks this incredibly simple question right in the preface of the book, which is just, what is music?
It sounds so basic, but it's not. Not at all. Is it an enciphered language? Is it a mathematical puzzle? Or maybe just a frivolous diversion? So, okay, let's unpack this. If we aren't supposed to decode music, how are we supposed to approach it? Where do we even begin? Exactly. Where does John Kalovich even start to build this new framework? Well, we have to start with a foundational distinction. And this is beautifully teased out in the preface to the English edition by Arnold Davidson and Carolyn Abbott. OK, set the stage for us. They lay out John Kalovich's core philosophy by separating how we interact with the world into two totally different categories. the gnostic and the drastic see okay those sound like terms from a medieval theology seminar they kind of do yeah break down gnostic for me first like if i am approaching music in a gnostic way what am i actually doing you are treating it as an object of knowledge the word gnostic it relates to knowing to hermeneutics to interpretation so it's all in the head completely in the head if you were sitting in a concert hall with a furrowed brow You know, analyzing the sheet music. Looking for clues. Right. Trying to decipher the symbolic meaning of a recurring motif. Asking yourself what the composer intended to say about the human condition. You were trapped in the Gnostic. You're trying to extract a semantic truth from the sound. Exactly. So the Gnostic approach is basically treating a piece of music like a textbook. I read it. I extract the data.
I pass the test. Precisely. And that is the exact opposite of what Jankelevich thinks we should be doing. OK, so what's the alternative? The drastic. Yes. He argues that music belongs entirely to the realm of the drastic. Now, drastic here doesn't mean extreme or severe. Like taking drastic measures. Right. It's not an emergency. No. It comes from the Greek word dran, which literally means to act, to do, to make. The drastic is the realm of physical action. Action. Okay. It's the irreversible lived experience of doing something with your body in real time. Wait, wait. But listening to music feels pretty passive to me.
Like I just sit on my couch and let it wash over me. How is that an action? Because sound is a physical event. I mean, think about it. Composing it requires actual labor. That's true. Writing it all out. And playing an instrument is a grueling physical act. Striking keys, manipulating your breath, sweating on stage, and even truly listening is an event that acts upon your nervous system. Oh, wow. I never really thought about it like that. Yeah, music isn't a text to be read. It's a physical event to be endured and experienced. So if I'm trying to wrap my head around this.
Approaching music gnostically is like, well, it's like reading the chemical breakdown of a perfectly cooked steak. Oh, I like that analogy. Right. Like I can sit there and analyze the amino acids. I can read a scholarly paper on the Maillard reaction. I can memorize the exact temperature at which the fat renders. I have total absolute knowledge of the steak. You're a steak expert on paper. Exactly. But that tells me absolutely nothing about the actual experience. The drastic approach is the sensory, physical, irreversible act of actually putting the steak in my mouth and eating it. That captures the friction perfectly.
You cannot eat a chemical formula. No, you definitely can't. And building on that visceral reality, John Kolevich applies a very specific aesthetic morality to music because he views music as a drastic physical event. He champions composers who actually respect that rawness. Who aren't trying to feed us a chemical formula, basically. Right. He praises simplicity, reticence, and understatement. He constantly points to composers like Federico Mampu. Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy. Because their music doesn't try to lecture you. It's more austere. Yes. But he had some pretty harsh words for the composers who do try to lecture you. Oh, he's unsparing, isn't he?
Completely. He contrasts the modesty of someone like Debussy with the massive bloated excess of German romanticism. points his finger directly at Richard Wagner. Right. Wagner is like public enemy number one in this book. Pretty much. Yankelevich views Wagner's approach as magniloquence. Magniloquence. That's a great word. It means what? Pompous language? Yeah. Kind of arrogant, overblown, speechifying. Wagner famously used leitmotifs, right? Which are these little musical phrases that directly represent specific characters or ideas. Oh, like Darth Vader's theme in Star Wars. When you hear the brass playing that specific march. You know, immediately that Darth Vader is entering the room. It's like a musical name tag. That is the perfect modern example. And John Kilovich finds that deeply offensive to the true nature of music.
Really? Offensive? Oh, yeah. He calls it musical incontinence. Ouch. He famously refers to Wagner's opera Siegfried as a diplodocus. You know. A massive, lumbering, prehistoric dinosaur of a piece. A dinosaur. That is brutal. Why does he hate it so much? Because Wagner is trying to force music into the Gnostic realm. He is trying to make music operate like a dictionary. Like this chord equals this character and this melody equals this philosophical concept. So he's stripping the mystery away. Exactly. It strips music of its mystery and turns it into a heavy rhetorical lecture. So John Kolevich wants music to strip away all that rhetorical fluff. He wants the spell, basically, not the explanation of the spell, which brings us to this really key concept of charm. Yes, charm. This is crucial. And I want to be careful here because when we say charm in English, you know, we usually mean someone who is good at cocktail party banter or maybe like a cute little bracelet. Right. It sounds very lightweight. But Shankalevich means something much older and more dangerous. Right. He means charm in the sense of a literal incantation, an enchantment. In his philosophy, charm is an active... efferent transformational force. It's not just passive beauty that you observe from a distance. Not at all. Think of a magic spell.
A spell doesn't ask for your intellectual consent. It doesn't present a logical argument for why you should turn into a frog. Right. Excuse me, sir. Here are three reasons you should be an amphibian. Exactly. It just acts upon you. And John Kilovich argues that the charm of music operates the exact same way. It bewitches you. It bypasses the brain entirely. Yes. As he puts it. This charm has the power to make every listener into a poet. But wait, if music is purely this physical, drastic, enchanting spell, why do we fight it so hard? I mean, think about human history.
We spend enormous amounts of energy. We write thousands of dissertations trying to talk about what a Beethoven symphony actually means. We do. We're obsessed with it. If the spell's the whole point, why are we so desperate to decode it? Well, we suffer from what... Jankolewicz diagnoses as a metaphysical prejudice. A metaphysical prejudice. Yeah. Human beings are profoundly anxious creatures. Yeah. We are terrified of the dark and we are terrified of things that don't have a concrete verbal meaning that we can control. Oh, that makes so much sense. Right.
When we experience the visceral physical shock of music, when a piece of music literally brings us to our knees emotionally, we feel vulnerable. We don't like losing control. We hate it. So we use words to try and tame it. We try to throw a net over it. Exactly. We assign specific ideologies or historical narratives to a piece of music to make it feel safe. If I can convince myself that a symphony is actually just an essay about the triumph of the human spirit. Then you've put it in a neat little box. Right. I can control it with my intellect. I don't have to be afraid of the spell anymore. That fear of music's raw power is just fascinating. And it isn't just a modern phenomenon either. It leads us directly into how the greatest thinkers in history have reacted to this spell, which is what he covers in chapter one. Yes, the ethics and the metaphysics of music. Sienkiewicz points out that music acts physically on the nervous system and our vital processes. It completely bypasses reason. He says it takes up residence in our intimate self.
It's an invasion almost. Yeah. And you mentioned Plato earlier in the intro, but let's talk about the specific Greek myth he uses to illustrate this. The contrast between Orpheus and the sirens. It's a critical dichotomy in understanding how humanity views music. On one side, we have the Apollonian lyre, which is represented by Orpheus. The good, safe music. Right. Orpheus played music that was civilizing. It pacified wild beasts. It brought order to chaos. And it's really worth noting how the lyre works physically. It's a stringed instrument. Which is very mathematical.
Exactly. It relies on precise mathematical ratios. You divide a string perfectly in half, you get an octave. It's clean. It's predictable. It represents order and rational boundaries. Well, and to build on your point about the mechanics, contrast that string with the Dionysian flute or the music of the sirens. Oh, right. The scary stuff. The flute requires breath. It requires the body, spit. Physical exertion. The siren's music wasn't orderly or pacifying. It was intoxicating, dangerous, and destructive. It seduced sailors to crash their ships against the rock. Precisely. When Plato wanted to regulate music, he wasn't worried about the Apollonian math. He was terrified of the Dionysian breath. He recognized that the wrong melody could, as Jankolevich says, Derail the dialectic. Meaning it could ruin a perfectly good philosophical argument. If you and I are having a rigorous logical debate and suddenly we hear this haunting, intoxicating melody, we just lose our train of thought. We stop thinking and we start feeling. The logic just evaporates.
And that evaporation of logic causes immense resentment among people who base their entire identity on being rational. They feel threatened. Deeply threatened. Jan Kulewicz explores how this fear evolved into a literal grudge against music, harbored by some of the most brilliant minds in history. Look at the novelist Leo Tolstoy. OK, yes. Tolstoy wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, which is a fascinating, super dark novella. Give us the context of how Tolstoy viewed music in that story. So the protagonist of The Kreutzer Sonata actually murders his wife and he largely blames music for his actions. Wait, he blames a song for a murder? Specifically Beethoven's music.
Tolstoy essentially viewed music as this derationalizing force that leads directly to illicit passion and moral corruption. Wow. In the novella, the music acts as a kind of invisible seducer. It breaks down the social and moral boundaries between the protagonist's wife and the violinist that she plays with. So Tolstoy felt that music manipulated the nervous system in a way that was fundamentally unhealthy, like dangerous to civilized society. Yes. It's like he views a violin solo the way a modern parent views unregulated screen time.
Huh. Yes. It's a total hijacking of the brain's reward center. It just unplugs your morality. That's exactly how he saw it. And then you have Friedrich Nietzsche, whose relationship with music was even more agonizing. Because Nietzsche actually loved music. He did. Nietzsche wasn't just a philosopher. He was an amateur composer. He genuinely, deeply loved music. But he developed a profound, almost venomous resentment toward it later in life. He famously called it a narcotic, didn't he? He did. He viewed music as a swamp of solitude. You see, Nietzsche was deeply concerned with human agency, with the will to power, and...
active, vital engagement with the real world. He wanted people to be dynamic. Right. So he began to fear music's power to put what he called non -dialectical consciences to sleep. Meaning people who aren't constantly thinking critically. The average person. Yes. He saw music acting as a lullaby for the masses. Instead of taking real civic action to change their lives or change the world, people would just go to the concert hall. They'd listen to Wagner and zone out. Exactly. They would substitute real action with mere twilight dreams and emotional reverie. Music was a drug that pacified the populace. Jean Kalevich calls this the Puritan grudge, which I think is just such a brilliant diagnosis. That's accurate.
Imagine a highly logic -driven philosopher, right? He prides himself on his impenetrable rationality. Then he goes to a parlor, hears someone play a Chopin ballade, and suddenly finds himself weeping in the corner. He's horrified by himself. He feels duped. He feels like a charlatan reached into his chest and pulled a string. He actually blushes at his own nocturnal exhilaration, to use John Kilovich's phrasing. And what is the philosopher's defense mechanism here? How does he regain his dignity after weeping at a pretty melody? He rationalizes it. He demands that music justify itself. He insists that the music must possess some deep moral function or some profound metaphysical truth. Because if the music is actually a secret map of the universe, then weeping to it is an intellectual response, not a base emotional one. Exactly. He tries to amputate music's raw to make his reaction intellectually safe. Which perfectly explains why thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer went to such extreme lengths to intellectualize it. Oh, Schopenhauer is the ultimate example of this. Schopenhauer didn't just think music was pretty. He believed it was a direct metaphysical copy of the will, right? The fundamental driving essence of the entire universe. He literally thought music was ontology, the study of being translated into sound. But Jankilevich completely dismantles Schopenhauer's idea here. He exposes how arbitrary this elevation of music really is. He really does. He asks, Why should hearing, out of all our five senses, be the only one that gets a VIP pass to peer into the metaphysical realm? Right. Why don't we say that the smell of baking bread is a direct copy of the universe's will? Or the taste of an apple. We give music this unearned ontological superpower just because its physical effect on us is so overwhelming we feel it must have cosmic significance. But Jankilovic argues, no, music does not have a hidden metaphysical significance. It doesn't contain a blueprint of the cosmos. There is a phrase Jankilevich uses here that really struck me, actually. He says, music has broad shoulders.
Oh, I love that part. What does it mean for music to have broad shoulders? It means that music is fundamentally defenseless against our words. Because music is silent on the level of language, it cannot speak up and say, actually, I disagree. It has broad shoulders that can carry whatever ideological baggage we force onto it. It just takes whatever we give it. Yes. Think about a sweeping orchestral piece. A Marxist might claim it represents the inevitable triumph of the working class. A theologian might claim it represents the grace of God. And a nihilist might claim it represents the beautiful, meaningless chaos of the void. And the music will not correct any of them. It just plays. But that meaning is entirely projected. It comes from the listener, not from the notes. Okay, let's play Devil's Advocate here for a second. Even if music isn't a secret cosmic blueprint, and even if it's not a moral textbook, What about the actual physical notes on the page? What do you mean? Well, when I listen to a classical symphony, it feels like it's saying something. It has a structure. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Doesn't that mean it operates like a language? That assumption is exactly what Jankolevich attacks next in Chapter 2. He takes aim at the very structural foundations of how we appreciate classical music, specifically the concept of musical development. Right, like sonata form. If you take a basic music appreciation 101 class, they teach you that sonata form is the backbone of classical music. It's the holy grail of music theory. You have the exposition where you introduce a theme, then the development where you chop the theme up, put it in different keys, create tension, and finally the recapitulation where the theme comes back and everything resolves.
Right. It feels exactly like reading an essay. You have an introduction, a body paragraph full of arguments, and a conclusion. It does feel that way. But Jen Kalevich argues... that this entire concept is a mirage. We have falsely borrowed the rules of rhetoric and logical language and just pasted them over music. A mirage, but we can hear the theme changing. A symphony is not a form of discourse. A fugue is not a PhD dissertation. But it feels so logical. I mean, Beethoven takes a simple four -note motif, da -da -da -dum, and builds an entire universe out of it. How is that not a logical argument? Because a musical theme does not function like a premise in a debate.
In an essay, if I state a premise, let's say, all men are mortal, the subsequent paragraphs must logically stem from that semantic meaning. Right, they have to prove the point. But in music, the development of a theme is purely aesthetic and acoustic. When a theme returns in the finale, it isn't a logical conclusion that proves a point. It's simply a return to a sonic home base. It just sounds good to go back to the start. Exactly. When we listen to a symphony and think we are following a train of thought, we are hallucinating. We are just projecting our habitual, everyday ways of speaking onto an art form that operates on a completely non -semantic plane. He also tackles this idea of musical language by looking at polyphony, which I found fascinating. Oh, the polyphony argument is brilliant. For you guys listening, polyphony is when multiple voices or instruments are playing entirely different melodies at the exact same time. Think of a Bach choir. Right. We so often describe that as a dialogue or a conversation between the instruments, like the cello says something and the violin replies. And John Kalevich points out a glaring flaw in that analogy. Think about how human language actually works. A true dialogue requires sequential turn -taking. I present my thesis, you listen in silence, then you speak your antithesis and I listen. Right. If we both speak our competing ideas at the exact same time, what happens? It's a cable news debate. Yeah. It's total cacophony.
If you and I talk over each other, our brains cannot process the competing semantic data. The meaning is destroyed. Precisely. But in music, polyphony operates entirely differently. In a choir, four voices are singing entirely different melodic lines at the exact same time. They are not taking turns. No. They're not addressing each other. They're singing in concert for a third party, the listener. This just blew my mind when I read it. If two people talk at the same time, it is an argument and a breakdown of communication. In music, if two people sing at the same time, it is harmony. It's a completely different paradigm. Our brains process competing sound waves as a unified emotional landscape.
Yankelevich calls this a Concordia discourse, a harmonious discord. It is a simultaneity of opposites. I love that phrase, harmonious discord. In language, two opposing ideas cannot exist simultaneously without canceling each other out. In music, two opposing melodies played simultaneously create a richer, deeper truth. It is a phenomenon that only makes sense in the realm of sound. Let's look at another place where music totally breaks the rules of language, repetition. Oh, this is a big one. Because if I am writing you an email and I write the exact same sentence four times in a row, you're going to think my keyboard is broken or I'm just losing my mind.
I'd probably call a check on you. Right. In prose, repeating yourself is a flaw. It's stammering. Because didactic language seeks to communicate a factual truth. Once I have told you that the meeting is at 3 p .m., repeating it adds zero new information. It is useless. The meeting is at 3 p .m. The meeting is at 3 p .m. Yeah, it's annoying. Exactly. But music does not transmit factual data. Therefore, repetition serves an entirely different function. Think of an ostinato in classical music or a heavy bass loop in modern electronic music. Like daft punk, they can repeat the phrase around the world 144 times in a single song, and it doesn't feel like a mistake. It feels like a groove. It wins a Grammy. That is the perfect example. Chankalevich argues that musical repetition is a biological necessity.
It is an incantation. It's part of the spell. Yes. When a musical phrase repeats, it does not represent a failure to move an argument forward. It acts as a form of rejuvenation. With every repetition, the music forces the listener to sink deeper and deeper into the present moment. It drills down rather than moving forward. Precisely. Instead of moving horizontally toward a logical conclusion, repetition drills vertically into the depth of the now. This all loops back to why he admires composers like Debussy and Mussorgsky. They represent what he calls true modesty in music. What's fascinating here is how Jankilevich defines modesty. False modesty would be a composer writing a massive, complicated symphony, but then claiming, oh, it's just a little tune. Right, fishing for compliments. But true modesty is what Debussy achieves. and inexpressive objectivity.
Debussy strips away all the rhetorical amplification, all the grand fist -pumping finales that German Romanticism relied on. No Diplodocus. No Diplodocus. He presents the naked truth of sound, almost like observing an unvarnished natural phenomenon. The music isn't trying to deliver a sermon. It is just offering you the sound itself in its pure, immediate rawness. Okay, let's pause and figure out where this leaves us. If music deliberately dodges the rules of language, if it refuses to be an essay, if its development is a mirage, if it refuses to speak clearly, doesn't that mean it's just empty noise? A lot of people might assume that. Does it have no meaning at all?
The answer, according to John Kolevich, is an emphatic no. It has meaning, but we have to completely change our definition of what meaning is. We really do. We need to understand the difference between two crucial concepts. And this brings us to the absolute thematic climax of our deep dive. the difference between the untellable and the ineffable. This distinction is the very core of Jankelevich's philosophy. In our everyday lives, we use these two words interchangeably. Right. If someone sees something shocking, they might say it was untellable or it was ineffable.
But for Jankelevich, they are complete opposites. They are enemies. Let's start with the dark side. What is the untellable? The untellable is a purely negative state. It represents death. It is the black knight. The void, non -being. It is an impenetrable shadow. So why can't we talk about it? If I experience the untellable, why do my words fail? Your words fail because there is absolutely nothing to say. The untellable is a closed door, a blank wall that completely bars us from entry. It's just empty. It is a sterilizing inexplicability. You cannot speak of it because it contains no data, no meaning, no substance.
It is a vacuum. Okay, if the untellable is a void where there's nothing to say, then what is the ineffable? Because I can't put the ineffable into words either. So from my perspective as a speaker, aren't they practically the same thing? My tongue is tied either way. Your tongue is tied, but for the exact opposite reason. The ineffable is a positive state of infinite plenitude. Plenitude. Fullness. Exactly. It is the realm of God, of love. of true freedom, and crucially of music. You cannot explain the ineffable not because there is nothing to say, but because there is an infinite and interminable amount to say. It's too full. It is overwhelmingly full.
You can never exhaust its depths. Every time you try to define it, you only capture a microscopic sliver of its reality, leaving an ocean of meaning untouched. So what does this all mean? Let me try a visual analogy to see if I'm tracking this. The untellable is like a totally blank piece of paper. If you ask me to read it to you, I can't. There's nothing there. Right. Total void. The ineffable, on the other hand, is a piece of paper that someone has covered in a million intricate overlapping drawings and equations, writing over the same space again and again and again until the entire page just looks pitch black. I love that. If you ask me to read that, I also can't. They both defy reading, but for entirely opposite reasons. One is perfectly empty.
The other is overwhelmingly full. That is a phenomenal way to visualize it. And this perfectly explains the massive friction between human language and music. Language, by its very nature, is designed to be univocal. Meaning one voice, one meaning. Right. We need a specific word to carry a specific limited meaning so we can navigate the world without confusion. If I say, hand me that apple. I need you to picture an apple. Not an orange. Exactly. If the word apple also meant car and sadness and the concept of justice, our communication would collapse. Language functions by drawing strict boundaries around meaning. But music doesn't do that. No. Music is plurivocal or equivocal.
It expresses everything precisely by seeming to express nothing specific. Yankelevich calls this music's inexpressive expressiveness. Because music doesn't have a strict dictionary, because a C minor chord doesn't have a legally binding definition, it acts as an allegory for absolutely everything at once. Think about a single, unresolved, lingering chord played slowly on a piano. Just one chord. If you gather ten different people in a room and ask them what that chord means, you will get ten different answers. Definitely.
One person might say it sounds like profound... devastating grief. Another might say it sounds like the cautious, fragile hope of a new morning. Another might feel the tense, electric anticipation before a thunderstorm. And in human language, a single word cannot simultaneously mean devastating grief and cautious hope without being a contradiction. It breaks the rules of logic. But in music, there is no contradiction. That single piano chord holds a thousand contradictory emotions simultaneously, effortlessly. Its plenitude of meaning is infinite.
It is ineffable. That's beautiful. And this is exactly why our univocal language simply cannot handle it. When we try to write a review of a symphony, we are trying to force an infinite, plurivocal phenomenon through the tiny, narrow funnel of univocal words. It always feels insufficient. It makes you realize why we feel so fiercely protective of the music we love. When a song means the world to you, you sense that infinity you feel its ineffable fullness you feel it in your bones and then you don't want some critic coming along and shrinking it down to a single clever sentence it feels like an insult to the music to define it is to limit it but this brings up a massive practical question if music is this infinite ineffable force that defies logic and language How do the people who actually make it interact with it? You mean the composers?
Yeah, the composers and the performers, because they can't sit around just philosophizing about the void and the plenitude. They have deadlines. They have to actually put ink on a page and put their fingers on a keyboard. How does a composer work with the ineffable? Yeah, and Kelevich explores this in what he calls the poetic operation. And he brings us right back to the beginning, to the concept of the drastic. Action. Right. When a composer creates, they are not functioning as philosophers. They are deeply physically immersed in the drastic act of doing. He uses a wonderful metaphor from nature here. The composer is like a nightingale producing song or a bee producing honey. Okay, I like this. A nightingale doesn't sit on a branch and read an academic paper about the aerodynamics of its vocal cords. No, it certainly doesn't. It doesn't philosophize about the heroism of singing. It just sings. Its entire existence is bound up in the action. The composer's business is entirely absorbed in the blind toil of creation.
Their intelligence is in their hands, in their ears, in their intuition. It's like asking a professional center fielder to write a physics dissertation on how they catch a fly ball on the run. Oh, that's a great comparison. If you ask them to calculate the arc of the ball, factor in the wind resistance, the velocity of the bat, the trajectory of their sprint, they can't write that math on a chalkboard. No one could do that in real time. But when the bat cracks, their body just knows exactly where to run. The doing is the intelligence. For the composer, the only true mode of reflection is creation itself. Consider a massive historical shift. Like the crisis of atonality in the early 20th century, when traditional harmonic rules were just completely breaking down. A huge moment in music history. A true composer doesn't answer that crisis by writing a theoretical essay about the death of the tonic chord. They answer the crisis instinctively, by writing new music that navigates that unfamiliar landscape. They are workers, taken up by the deep, absorbing act of making. And Yankelevich points out that this act of making is entirely bound to the concept of time. He leans heavily on the philosopher Henri Bergson here, discussing temporality and nostalgia. Why is time so crucial to understanding music? Because music is fundamentally an art of becoming. Think about a painting or marble statue. A statue exists all at once in space. You can walk around it, you can look at the foot, then the head, then back to the foot.
The statue waits for you. It's static. But a piece of music... only exists in the irreversible forward flow of time. It unfolds. The moment you hear a beautiful note, it is already dying. It is already slipping into the past. You cannot hold on to it. Which means music is inherently tied to loss. Just by existing, it is vanishing. Because of this purely temporal nature, Jankolewicz argues that music is inherently nostalgic. It creates a profound space of reminiscence. Phrase nocturnes, or the piano pieces of Mampu, these aren't just pretty melodies. They act as vessels for an effective reminiscence. They evoke memories that cannot be explicitly described. He calls it a past that has never abandoned us. It might be the vague echo of a childhood afternoon, or something even deeper like the maternal heartbeat.
The charm of music, the enchanting spell we talked about, heightens itself exactly through this fleeting, precarious, temporal nature. It is precious, because it cannot last. Because it's dying. Yes. To demand that music stop and explain itself linguistically is an insult to its temporal magic. Because the magic only exists in that fleeting present moment. You can't pause a live symphony, ask it a question, and expect the spell to hold. Exactly. You break the spell. But inevitably, every performance must end. The conductor lowers the baton, the final chord rings out, the vibration stops, and the notes fade away. Which brings us to the ultimate canvas of music. the space where the ineffable lives most vividly, and the final chapter of Jean Kalevich's book, Music and Silence. This is perhaps the most poetic and challenging part of his entire philosophy.
We tend to think of silence as a negative. We think of it as just the absence of noise, an empty container waiting to be filled. Right. But Jean Kalevich asserts that silence is an active, profound force. It is music's precursor, its canvas, and its ultimate destination. He describes music beautifully as an island that is art so precious, floating on an immense ocean of prose and silence. And he doesn't treat silence as a monolith either. There are different flavors of silence. He draws a striking contrast between the silence of the night and the silence of noon.
Okay, the silence of the night is what we typically imagine, right? It is full of mystery, the unknown, a kind of dark, trembling expectancy. It's the silence of holding your breath in the dark. Exactly. But what is the silence of noon? That sounds like a contradiction. Moon is usually chaotic. It's the middle of the day. He calls it the silentium meridianum. Imagine the blinding, immobile plenitude of a scorching summer afternoon in the countryside. Okay, I can picture that. The sun is directly overhead. There are no shadows. The heat is so intense that nothing moves, yet the air itself feels heavy and vibrating. Everything exists at once in a hypnotic, buzzing drone. You can hear this perfectly in Debussy's work, like Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Oh, totally. Silence here isn't a dark void. It is a state of hyper -awareness bathed in blinding light. It is a silence that is overwhelmingly full. So silence can be environmental, but he also talks about silence as a behavioral choice, a form of reticence, like a deliberate moral choice not to speak.
And this connects deeply to the aesthetic morality of those modest composers he loves. Look at Monpoux, who literally titled a collection of his piano pieces Musica Caleta Silent Music, or Hushed Music. Silence here is a refusal to participate in the cacophony of conversation. It's of a positive choice. It is a form of continence and sobriety. It's looking at a world filled with people screaming their opinions and choosing to just close your mouth. It says no to the temptations of verbosity, to loquacious puffery, to the Wagnerian diplodocus that wants to lecture you for five hours. And the profound paradox that Dien Kalevich arrives at is this. Music is the very thing that allows us to actually hear this profound silence. Wait, music allows us to hear silence. How does noise illuminate silence? Think about your daily life.
You are surrounded by a constant low -grade hum of prose, machinery, and chatter. You never actually experience true silence. That's fair. There's always an air conditioner running. Right. But when a piece of music ends, When a delicate, unvarnished melody slowly fades into nothingness in a concert hall for those few seconds after the final note, before the applause begins, you hear a silence that is thick, heavy, and totally transformative. The music carved out a space for the silence to be felt. It's exactly like how you only really notice the total crushing darkness of a massive underground cave when someone lights a single match. Oh, that's a beautiful way to put it. The tiny flame doesn't illuminate the whole cavern, right? It doesn't give you knowledge of the cave. It just gives your eyes a reference point so you can finally understand the terrifying, beautiful scale of the dark.
Music is the match that makes us aware of the immense ocean of silence. If we connect this to the bigger picture, look at how Debussy uses this specific kind of silence in his opera, Pelleas et Mélisande. If you look at a traditional romantic opera, how do characters die? They usually get stabbed, and then they stand up and sing a massive, booming 15 -minute carmia at the top of their lungs about how much it hurts. Right. It's absurd. It's a refusal to accept the limits of expression. But in Debussy's opera, characters die almost without a word. Debussy uses these almost nothing deck crescendos fading into indistinguishable whispers. It's realistic. And humble. The music doesn't try to conquer death with a loud brass section. It humbly approaches the threshold and stops. Silence here becomes the ultimate expression of the ineffable. When words fail, and when even the musical notes themselves reach their absolute limit of expression, silence takes over to carry the infinite meaning forward. That is incredibly moving, and it brings all the threads of the steep dive perfectly together. We started with the physical drastic magic of charm, the idea that music is a spell that acts on our bodies.
We saw how it completely bypasses the brain. Yeah, we saw how music actively rejects the rules of language. It isn't an essay, it's a harmonious discord that thrives on repetition. We explored the infinite, unnameable depth of the ineffable, proving that just because something can't be spoken doesn't mean it's empty. And finally, we saw how all of this drastic action ultimately returns to this profound, shimmering silence. John Kelevich leaves us with a deep appreciation for the limits of our own intellect. He shows us that sometimes trying to forcefully decode and explain a beautiful thing is actually a way of destroying it. So to synthesize this entire journey for you, the listener, John Kelevich wants us to stop interrogating music. Put the microscope down. Exactly. Stop treating your favorite album like a rhetorical argument that you have to solve or a secret code you have to crack to prove you're smart. Stop projecting your own philosophies, your politics, and your emotional baggage onto music's broad shoulders.
Instead, start treating it as a drastic physical enchantment. Let it be what it is. Recognize that it is the ineffable. It is not an empty void. It is an infinite well of meaning that our tiny univocal language simply isn't equipped to handle. It is a reminder to embrace a form of grace and humility in the presence of art. Let the mystery remain a mystery. So the next time you put on your headphones, whether you're trying to prep for a stressful meeting or you just need to escape the absolute crushing information overload of your day, remember that you don't need to analyze the track. You really don't.
You don't need to intellectualize why the bass line drops or what the lyrics symbolize. Give yourself permission to just be bewitched by the charm. Let it be a purely drastic experience. Let the spell work. Just let the music do its work on you. But before we go, I want to leave you with a paradox to mull over on your own. We just spent an hour using language to explain a book that uses language to explain why language can't explain music. It's a bit of a mind bender. It really is. But if music is truly ineffable and resists all our words, What happens if we view our own lives that way? Oh, that's interesting.
We spend so much time trying to neatly define who we are. We write these tidy corporate bios. We come up with clever one -liners for our dating profiles. We practice our elevator pitches. We try to compress our entire existence into univocal language. And never quite fits. It doesn't. But what if the most profound parts of your own identity aren't the things you can articulate in a sentence at a dinner party? What if the truest parts of you are the silent, ineffable actions you simply do every day? The drastic actions. Exactly. The way you instinctively comfort a friend, the way your breath changes when you're afraid, the quiet daily rhythms of your life. What if you, just like music, are a drastic act of living that defies translation? That is a wonderful question to carry forward into the silence. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Go find something beautiful to listen to today.
Let it completely overwhelm you. And when it's over, say absolutely nothing about it. Catch you next time.