Clelia Repetto
University of Turin
The issue of musical meaning is one of the main topics discussed in philosophy of music and it concerns the question of whether or not music possesses contents which can be comprehended and interpreted (e.g., Robinson 1997; Kivy 2009; Bertinetto 2017).
With regard to this debate, the structural analogy between music and language occupies a relevant position, since “functioning as language does” seems an inescapable requirement music should possess in order to have meaning (cf. Jackendoff 2009; Katz & Pesetsky 2011). Against this background, the evolutionary models that consider the musical and linguistic systems as developed from a common ancestor, i.e., musilanguage (Brown 2000; Brown 2017; Fitch 2010; Fitch 2013), provide a framework in which the structural analogy is re-read as a relationship of biological kinship and offer new insights on the arguments based on this analogy – invoked both to argue for and against the idea of musical meaning.
The purpose of this presentation is thus to re-frame the philosophical debate on musical meaning within such an evolutionary framework to explore the hypothesis that music retains a semantic dimension analogous to that of musilanguage, which conveys and processes meaning not compositionally, but holistically – through arbitrary associations between complex meanings and whole units of musilinguistic sequences (cf. Dummett 1973; Ziem 2014).
Chair: Tamaki Komada
Time: 05 September, 11:20 – 11:50
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 