I have a critique of Lawrence Kramer's critique of ineffability. ("Oracular musicology"). It seems to me that music really is ineffable, and that there is a good reason for the trope. I think it is rooted in the very structure of musical language, which seems to be saying something, but we don't / can't know what it is saying, exactly. It is a language with phonology, prosody, syntax, punctuation, but without determinate semantic meaning. It has semantics, but not of a determinate kind. So the romantics invented the trop of ineffability for music (previously a trope applied to mystical experiences). But they did so because music is like that. Kramer wants to eliminate ineffability because he wants to talk about musical meaning in a more determinate way. Odd for a postmodernist!
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