Sound, object, projection: Wittgenstein and understanding music

Phenomenology of logical space in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in "Some Remarks on Logical Form" by Ludwig Wittgenstein faces the necessity to give the definition of objects, being simultaneously starting points and endpoints of the procedure of the logical analysis of language. Juxtaposition of two divergent interpretations of Tractarian objects - 'atomist' and 'wholist' ones -leads to indication of two principal attitudes towards the world, both of which derived from the acceptance of corresponding interpretations. Parallelism between the ambiguity of the attitude towards the world in Tractatus and divergence of composing practice strategy in P. Boulez and J. Cage is mentioned: technical improvement of the musical material against allowance for sounds to be themselves, i.e. to be anything. Phenomenological interpretation of Tractarian objects allows to give them definition 'anything', for anything can become simple object in the Tractatus. Comparing the notion of the object as anything with theoretical works by J. Tenney shows that any sound can be clang (unit of understanding "contemporary music"), hence the border between the musical and the non-musical vanishes. The breakdown of the border between music and sound implies the possibility of extrapolation of the projection principle from the Tractarian symbolism to the musical one, which is considered with the example of composition "Treatise" by C. Cardew, where the graphical notation leaves space for determination of the relationship between score and sound produced to the musician-performer. Thus inner relation between sign and corresponding sound is splitting, and there only remains possibility to understand music as unpredeterminated, unprescribed and hence any.

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