Aeolian Harp: An Essay Concerning the Nature of Tone

Generally speaking, the philosophy of music hitherto can be said to approach music, as it were, from above or from outside. Music, thus envisaged, can be «absolute» or «sounding forms in motion». It can be expression, have a linguistic meaning, tell a story, be a manifestation of «the world as will and conceptualization», and mirror society’s inward contradictions. Music is seen as an activity, sometimes as interactivity, not least through an anthropological approach in which prominence is given to its origins. This work is an attempt to reverse the argument, by taking the phenomenon of tone as the starting point to work the way up to an understanding of the phenomenon of music, to make a philosophy of tone the foundation of a philosophy of music. Such thoughts were already present in the author’s previous works, but, being available only in Swedish, will be enlarged here.