Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world. “Recent years have seen the return of the claim that music’s power resides in its ineffability. In Expression and Truth , Lawrence Kramer presents his most elaborate response to this claim. Drawing on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and on close analyses of nineteenth-century compositions, Kramer demonstrates how music operates as a medium for articulating cultural meanings and that music matters too profoundly to be cordoned off from the kinds of critical readings typically brought to the other arts. A tour-de-force by one of musicology’s most influential thinkers.”―Susan McClary, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music . “Challenges the reader to dig hard for a better understanding of the issues. . . . Highly recommended.” -- W. K. Kearns, Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder ― Choice Published On: 2013-01-23 Vintage Kramer: Musicology at its best and most responsible. Expression and Truth is a tour de force that continues the author s longstanding commitment to understand music as a form of knowledge, a critical but often marginalized element of the fundamental grammar of culture. This singularly original extended essay shows why and how music expression in its most concentrated form is the key to deciphering that grammar. Above all, as Kramer s new book puts it, we need not only to think about expression but also to think with it. Amen, and bravo. Richard Leppert, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota “Vintage Kramer: Musicology at its best and most responsible. Expression and Truth is a tour de force that continues the author’s longstanding commitment to understand music as a form of knowledge, a critical but often marginalized element of the ‘fundamental grammar of culture.’ This singularly original extended essay shows why and how music―expression in its most concentrated form―is the key to deciphering that grammar. Above all, as Kramer’s new book puts it, ‘we need not only to think about expression but also to think with it.’ Amen, and bravo.”―Richard Leppert, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota Lawrence Kramer , is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of many books, most recently, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History , Opera and Modern Culture , and Why Classical Music Still Matters . Expression and Truth On the Music of Knowledge By Lawrence Kramer UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-27396-2 Contents Musical Examples, vi, Acknowledgments, vii, Opening Soliloquy in Lieu of a Preface, ix, 1 • Wittgenstein, Music, and the Aroma of Coffee, 1, 2 • Speaking Melody, 32, 3 • Expression and Truth, 57, 4 • Melodic Speech, 98, 5 • Wittgenstein, Music, and the Tone of Crystal, 122, Name Index, 169, Concepts Index, 171, CHAPTER 1 Wittgenstein, Music, and the Aroma of Coffee EXPRESSION IS DESCRIPTION. WHAT DOES MUSIC EXPRESS? The question is an old chestnut, and I raise it here not because I propose to answer it in some dramatic new way, but precisely because I don't. When asked concretely what a particular piece of music expresses here or there, we usually mumble out some vague, relatively stereotyped statement, from which we customarily conclude that we really can't say what music expresses. We often follow up by saying that this inexpressible expressiveness is one of the things we like best about music. In what follows, I will be defending the first half of this scenario and dismissing the second. The vague statements are all right, in much the same way that Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that ordinary language is all right. Wittgenstein, in fact, will be my chief interlocutor here and throughout this book, a kind of duet partner, alternately playing primo and secundo. But as for music's ineffability, for that is the issue at stake when we mumble, this notion represents an error very much like the notion that we cannot know other minds (something else that exercised Wittgenstein, who could never quite make up his own mind about the minds of others). As J. L. Austin showed in a classic essay, the possibility of