Adventures in block quotes.

Still chipping away at the neuromusicology piece, losing myself a little in Adorno’s Essays on Music, as, alas, I am wont to do. Want to read this amazing passage I just revisited? It’s astounding.

In music, what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is a language, it is … a language sedimented from gestures. It is not possible to ask music what it conveys as its meaning; rather, music has as its them the question, How can gestures be made eternal? … As language, music tends toward pure naming, the absolute unity of object and sign, which in its immediacy is lost to all human knowledge… . But the name appears in music only as pure sound, divorced from its bearer, and hence the opposite of every act of meaning, every intention toward meaning… . [M]usic does not know the name … but attempts its conjuring … through a process.

…

The more music comes to resemble the structure of language, the more, at the same time, it ceases to be language, to say something, and its alienation becomes perfect at the instant when it becomes most human.

[[Gasp!]] Just astoundingly great.