‘Sound Art’, by Santiago Auserón: the day philosophy deprived music of the knowledge of truth | babelia

From the mysterious and mathematical harmony of Pythagoras to Theodor Adorno’s philosophy of new music and its mass production, philosophers have always reflected on sound art and its relationship to philosophy. Rousseau or Nietzsche have left us melodic pages on Euterpe’s art, not a few philosophers have also dared with musical composition. In our country, Eugenio Trías has left us his musical topics as another example of the link between music and philosophy, and Ramón Andrés has given us a history of the philosophy of music, seeking solace in music as Boethius sought in philosophy.

Everyone knows Santiago Auserón’s relationship with sound art as a singer and composer for Radio Futura. Under the name of Juan Perro, he has also recorded albums and even delved into the fields of jazz, symphonic music, ethnomusicology and won the National Current Music Award in 2011. His polygraphic facet is also well known and his titles include works What Rhythm lost. The black influence in Spanish song (anagram) or sound seed (Libros del Kultrum) on the spell of Cuban music. But it is perhaps much less known of his life that he studied philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and that he completed his philosophical training in Paris under the teaching of Gilles Deleuze, another philosopher whose thought is crossed by music .

We have replaced the melodious verbal and musical sonority, the metaphor, with petrified speech, with the rigidity of the concept

In sound art Auserón reflects on how lyrics and music anticipated philosophy, paving the way for it to transcend appearances. We are reminded how at the dawn of Western thought the cognitive value of harmony and rhythm contributed to the unveiling of being, and we are shown how sound imagination showed the ancient Greeks the way to abstraction. The harmony between word and sound, between Tersichore’s dance and Erato’s song, has already begun its journey as mosquito in the field of myth, in religious hymns under the inspiration of Apollo and his paean or through the dithyramb of Dionysus, in the accompaniment of the form of Homer’s winged words or in the long journey from orality to writing when the performance the music in the lyric choirs or in the Melpomene tragedy chorus harmonized the dramatic space, the cultic space and the civic space, that is, art with religion and politics. The bard or poet, long before the Ionian thinkers of the 6th century BC, received in their ears from the Muses the revelation of what is hidden in the depths of being. Through a fabled and sonorous function, as Bergson would say, they have used both the word and the lyre or the flute to respond to the needs of being and becoming and there are not a few who, like Auserón, have claimed the citharist as the first educator of Greece.

If the myth already prepared the advent of philosophy through musical myths, at the dawn of Greek thought the philosopher also used sonority to experience the fluid evolution and stability of first principles; Western logocentrism, as Nietzsche underlined and with which Auserón dialogues in this dense, profound and melodic essay, originally used words and music as complementary expressions for the unveiling of truth in the world, an adventure of knowledge that not only made use of discursive thought , ultimately the dominant one, but that the transition from myth to logos or, better, the relationship between myth and logos, drank from the sound source of music. An ontological dimension of memory was even grafted into which the evanescent evocation of individual memories, the gift of clairvoyance, gave way to the intuition of a permanent reality, to a episteme or anamnesis of the intelligible forms, in which, as Plato revealed to us, the successive aspiring repositories of knowledge should continue to dig. But this would soon no longer be possible as poet-musicians, discredited as true masters in the Platonic ideal city, but only as philosophers and sons of reason, of logos. Philosophy was born with the desire to extract from the sung or recited word the power to reveal the truth, the memory of the logos, substituting the melodious verbal and musical sonority, the metaphor, for the petrified word, for the rigidity of the concept.

From the song of Homer to that of Pindar, from the monodic lyric to the choral lyric, from the rhythmic elements of Aristoxenus of Taranto and the sung parts of the tragedies of Aeschylus or the comedies of Aristophanes to the logic of the rhythm of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, sound art by Santiago Auserón reminds us how verse, meter, foot, melody and rhythm, dance, sound texture, were and can be a privileged shore from which to observe the flow of being, from which to redo the passage of myth to logos and return to the musical substratum of thought that the ancient Greeks revealed to us, long before the word imposed its dominance over music, over sound art, in that unveiling of being in which the work of philosophy consists.

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