Analysing Aporia

Abstract

Abstract This essay draws upon approaches from music analysis, the cultural study of music, and the philosophy of language to examine the meaning and function of borders in music. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of multiple aporias as metaphors for understanding the relationship of life to death, the essay begins by exploring three functions of aporia at the borders in music: 1) a line to be crossed; 2) a zone of difference; 3) an area of impossibility and unknowability. Three case studies provide a comparative framework that seeks to extend my analytical approaches beyond specific cultural, geographic, and historical repertories. In the first case study I examine the function of caesura at the borders between oral and written tradition in epic; in the second, I examine the coterminous moment of emptiness and fullness known askhāliin South Asian music; in the third, I analyse the compositional language employed by Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) in his concentration-camp melodrama,Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, to represent the musical transcendence of death in the Holocaust. By analysing aporia in such different traditions I demonstrate the ways in which they open possibilities for understanding the sameness that connects music from radically different musical traditions.

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