ABSTRACT
There is a special relationship between music and philosophy. A long tradition of thinkers like Adorno, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nietzsche, and in their wake, writers like Andrew Bowie, Daniel Chua, and Michael Spitzer, to name only a few men, have argued that the historical imbrication of music and philosophy symbolises or hides a deeper unity between the two modes of world-making. This chapter focuses on what it is within musical sound that lends itself to the types of relationship that such writers have claimed. What is the performativity of musical sound such that it can have this kind of relationship with philosophy? Musical Performance Philosophy provides a case study of the special relationship between music and philosophy. “(In)determination” is proposed here as a particular type of indeterminacy that is related to the manner of energetic expenditure in sound events, and requires a different phenomenological approach towards the practitioner’s body both to what usually suffices for Performance alone or Philosophy alone and to what might suffice for other modes of Performance Philosophy. With respect to music as a cultural practice, music’s special relationship with philosophy comes from its empirical being-towards-death, which is explored here in terms of entropy.
