032- Kant's Syntheses and the Ontologies of Music

This is a companion episode to the previous discussion of Kant's Three Syntheses. Here I use the three syntheses as a means for exploring some intriguing elements of the nature of music. Music, I suggest, has a very special relationship to space and time; that is, music produces an Imaginary (in Kant's sense) of space and time (the first synthesis). Music also presents fascinating problems in coming to grips with our ability to forge continuity among representations (the second synthesis); this relates to Aristoxenus's theory of melody. Finally, music is a relatively strange object. It features quantitative relationships (intervals) that reveal themselves as qualitative; it is a quality of another object that becomes substantive; it depends upon but also establishes relations; it both exists and is fictive. This illustrates the four basic concepts of the third synthesis: quantity, quality, relation, and modality.