ABSTRACT
In common parlance, the term 'philosophy of music' designates aesthetics, a branch of philosophy that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century and that (depending on one's standpoint) concerns itself with musical beauty, musical taste or musical pleasure. In this study, however, the philosophy of music is understood more broadly as providing explanations concerning three kinds of temporal processes: the production, transmission and reception of acoustic signals, the action of the attention in listening to music, and the unfolding of music itself as it moves through time. As a counterpart to tonality-a new musical practice that emerged around 1600,1 the philosophy of music, thus understood, was given its most defmitive determination by Hermann von Helmholtz in the fourth and final edition of Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage fUr die Theorie der Musik, published in 1877.2
1 Tonality reached its culmination in art music at the end of the nineteenth century, although the musical 'language' continues in evidence today in some art music and, most notably, in commercial music. Wienpahl, 'Modality, Monality and Tonality', outlines the emergence of tonality in a statistical study of 5, 179 items of music composed between 1500 and 1700. The OED gives 1838 for the first English use of the term; for its earlier introduction in Europe and for the wider context, see Hyer, 'Tonality'.
