ABSTRACT
When the question of the meaning of music was debated by the German Romantics, the idea began to emerge that there is an especially pure kind of music that would encapsulate what music really and truly means, without the 'adulteration' of words, dance or theatre. Even in the listening culture, however, listening is only one way of relating to music and always depends on another and more intimate engagement with sound. Music requires us to divide and measure time, to understand movement in time and to link actions to each other in terms of their temporal relations. In which case the claim that music has some special and intimate connection to the transcendental begins to look decidedly odd. The terms 'transcendent' and 'transcendental' have many applications, three of which particularly concern us. There is the theological idea, according to which God is said to transcend the world of creation and also to transcend our attempts to define or describe him.
