ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the merits of the book on musical rather than philosophical terrain: this, after all, is the ground on which Zuckerkandl’s premises are based and where practically the whole of his argument is conducted. Victor Zuckerkandl’s book, Sound and Symbol is described on the dust-jacket as “a philosophy through music”, rather than a philosophy of music. He is, in fact, dealing with an historically determined state of the musical material exhibiting characteristics which belong to this particular historical period and none other – such as, for instance, the dynamics of harmony, based on the diatonic scale and on diatonic tonality. The philosophical problem of motion – a notorious one that has puzzled mankind for the two thousand years – is first approached by Zuckerkandl with the same animistic preconceptions which are bound up with his settled views of classical tonality, understood as a kind of closed system of gravity.
