Hearing Between the Lines

Impressions of Meaning and Jazz’s Democratic Esotericism

Abstract

Music is not speech; but like speech, it makes a claim on the listeners, or implicates them, inviting them, inviting or insisting upon their response. Stanley Cavell, in his late writings on music collected in the posthumous volume Here and There, arrived at a suggestive formulation to express this peculiar fact about music. His formulation is inspired by the crossing of thoughts of Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, marks a distinction between music and speech. There he characterizes the spoke word as “afflicted by meaning,” and he posits that this fact of speech provokes a “mournfulness” that in the seventeenth century sought an outlet in music. Wittgenstein, as if to bring 1 together what Benjamin pushes apart, suggests in the Investigations that “understanding a sentence in language is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.