ABSTRACT
Music may never be fully understood. An important reason for this is that music, since it is art, often strives for the new, the previously unknown, the unconventional. Some musical thinkers have therefore thought that musical utterances only fulfill their aesthetic goal to the extent that they deviate from what has previously been considered as syntactically normal (e.g. Dempster 1998: 61–2). Considering, say, the twentieth-century musical avant-garde, it may be claimed that an appropriate aesthetic response to these musical phenomena calls for a certain bafflement or lack of understanding (Danuser 2004). Following Theodor Adorno (1970: 184), one may even think that all true works of art are imbued with a certain enigmatic character that will not let them be fully understood. It is not hard to find something rather persuasive in these thoughts. Perhaps the function of art precludes complete understanding after all. Artworks – including musical works – rarely seem to be made solely for the purpose of, say, communicating a definite content to the public. If no such definite content can be singled out for a musical work, why should one even strive for a once-and-for-all understanding of it? Perhaps a part of the very essence of art is to be in a certain sense indefinite and thus to resist our understanding.
