Movements of the music philosophy: a reflection on the literature of the twenty-first century

Abstract

At least until the 18th century, the task of thinking music was primarily the philosophy of music, a field that collects a tradition with centuries of secondlevel reflection on the musical. From there were prefigured ideas, values and  categories that proved decisive for the advance, not only of the theoretical corpus (from which specialized fields such as musicology and musical esthetics derived), but of the musical art itself. However, since the mid-last century, new comprehensive frameworks have emerged, sprouted by the need to host other musical treasures that had been discarded in tradition, such as massive popular music. Thus, the entry into the present century leaves a lot of works that, from esthetics, anthropology and sociology, seek to understand other music and other phenomena that in the rational and formalistic traditions of the philosophy
of music had not been addressed. We talk about moving around some old themes of music philosophy that are modulated in these areas. The text presents a reflection on the literature on these movements, in which 107 texts were considered, identified with the search criteria “philosophy music” and “music philosophy” in the EBSCO and JSTOR databases since 2000. The work aims to approach some of those ideas which, appearing in emerging fields, are, in any case, reflections on the condition of music, that is, philosophical reflections on music.