Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music

Bainbridge, David Thomas (2023) Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music. Doctoral thesis (PhD), The Royal Northern College of Music in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearⁿ] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Insomuch as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument.