ABSTRACT
For musicology is caught up in a “natural” and intellectualist philosophical tradition. The medieval musicus cannot be translated as “musician.” He was indeed the “muser.” Since that time music gradually became more and more restricted in meaning, so that in the last century with the help of German pedagogy the meaning of music was restricted to the practical musician and practical music. Contemporary thinking is rife with insights for new horizons in musicology. Logos as discourse, as the ontological basis of both reason and musical speech, is not only eksistent but temporal as well. The ars musica of medieval times, stemming from treatises by Aristides Quintillianus, Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore of Sevilla through the mediation of the artes quadriviales, relied on a philosophy of number as its rational basis. The live word that we speak to one another every day is a sound word, a word that sounds in “musical” cadences, easily identified by the student of language.
