031--Kant's Three Syntheses and the Album

This episode explores the three syntheses Immanuel Kant describes in his Critique of Pure Reason. The first synthesis designates locations within time and space; the second finds associations to draw perceptions together in order; the third applies concepts to percepts. The four basic concepts are number (the whole and its parts), quality (the features of an object), modality (its mode of existence--whether real or fictional and many other states in between), and relation (how the object fits in the world). These are the concepts in general, the bare minimum for something to register as a thing. I then apply that way of thinking to music. First, I consider musical space and time as idealizations, then the issue of association, then the concepts in general as they apply to music. Finally, all of this is brought to bear on the conception of the album (starting around 1945) as a unitary thing that is, in some ways, superordinate to the various songs contained within it.