Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (Bollingen Series XLIV)

Excellent

This is an amazing, deep, ground-breaking book, which struck me as a revelation. It provides a phenomenology of musical experience - what we in fact experience when we listen to tonal music. More than just a musical appreciation book, or a guide to the many types of music, it situates musical experience in the heart of human experience, just as much as spoken language is. His argument is further developed in his subsequent volume, Man the Musician, which contains the astonishing and provocative assertion that, contrary to the renowned philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who concluded his masterwork Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the gnomic sentence "That about which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence", Zuckerkandl asserts: not at all - that about which we cannot speak, we can SING."

The best book on musical meaning I've ever read. Just fabulous. Insightful, profound, absorbing and completely compelling. It was £49 but it was worth every penny