ABSTRACT
Music’s communicability stands at the forefront of a hermeneutics for which music’s worlding power precedes the kinds of judgments of argumentation evidenced by deconstructive critiques. Aesthetic experience’s resistance to its critical mastery underscores the impossibility of attributing music’s power to redescribe reality to the aesthetic’s ideological containment. The work itself-which for aesthetic experience is inseparable from the work’s expression of its world-resists its assimilation, or better, subordination to the distinction aesthetic consciousness draws between the “pure” work of art and the world it leaves behind. This distinction, which is also the source of criticism’s ideologically constricted standpoint, fuels the temptation to relegate the work to the recesses of cultural analysis and social critique.
