ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein obviously loved music passionately although his taste in music was rather narrow and conservative, contrary to what Toulmin and Janik suggest. Firstly, he thought that understanding music could provide an analogy with the way the people understand sentences; he often compares understanding music with understanding language. This is, perhaps, the feature of his concern with music which has most interested philosophers. Wittgenstein was interested in those ways in which people think of music as expressive, as grave or sad, and he has some interesting things to say about this and about its analogies with gesture. Wittgenstein was, inter alia, a cultural critic and his sense of a decline in western culture was connected with a sense that music, emblematic of the greatest achievements of German bourgeois culture, was itself in decline. Wittgenstein obviously thought that a decline in music was symptomatic of a general cultural decline.
