The Logic of What?
Benjamin A. Boretz · Journal of Music Theory · 1989
The ultimate act of musical creation is the auditory-mental activity by which alone a musical identity is brought into being, in the only way in which, epistemically speaking, it has being: as a consciously experienced determinate feel; that is, as an awareness-state of the whole perceptual consciousness of some one experiencing person, an awareness-state which is cognized by that person as a distinct experienced-sound entity within a certain range of such entities, and which is retrievable in principle and therefore in principle -though not necessarily in practice intersubjectively sharable. Hence 'musical properties' can be identified as consequential resultants of the interactions of acoustic signals with temporally bounded acts of attribution, extending from the attribution to a given acousticalsignal-span of the 'property' of being music, which in turn evokes an embedded set of dispositions to attribute to that acoustical-signal-span characteristics within a certain determinate range. Such music-attributive acts may be either consciously volitional or functionally autonomic. In either case, the configurations of the psycho-energetic attributing process, by which alone the stimuli made available by raw acoustic signals are transformed into experienced-music entities,. are the most intelligible denotata of such a [verbal] concept as 'music theory' Each such 'music theory', like each music-entity created by its operation, is, by this description, explicitly