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Re: analytical vs continental philosophy & microsound

Anglo-American philosophy has been completely hermetic for the past century, sealing itself off from contact with other disciplines. It is true that in the past twenty years, the analytic branch of philosophy has made careful liaisons with neuroscience, ecoscience, and biomedical science, but, in order to enter into the analytic philosophical discourses, these 'related' fields had to remain fairly narrowly defined, lending only scientific and non-speculative conclusions to the philosophical arguments. As such, your initial intuition -- that continental philosophy is better prepared to consider culture and its artifacts -- seems to be the deciding factor. Analytic philosophy has a really hard time considering anything so fuzzy as music, especially when it is music on the cusp of culture, not yet canonized and still resistant to the 'high-art' analyses that English-speaking philosophy is used to offering. Continental philosophy is just better at dealing with fundamental irreconcilabilities, ambiguities, and paradoxes, concepts too subtle to be captured by the relatively rigid logic applied in the US and the UK.

Moreover, (and to reveal my true colors), I think your second intuition -- that analytic philo is more realist or rigorous when it comes to the ontological or metaphysical -- is simply incorrect. That is, you presuppose that reality is the rigid, rigorous object that analytic philosophy loves to study. If reality (and this very way of talking is starting quickly to seem absurd) is really more like music, poetry, etc., if there are really a multitude of perspectives that cannot be reconciled or even brought together (in a kind of Putnamian realism), then isn't Continental philo actually more realist, more true to the real? For one hundred years, analytic philosophy has tried to formulate the world in its own image, create a system that will account for everything. This is the very (self-)definition of rigor, but it falls well short of reality.

Musicologists have traditionally used methods more akin to those of the analytic philosophers: analysis of structure, analogies based on features, correspondences between perception and sound. Musicology has, as such, also confined itself largely to the high-art tradition of European 'classical' music, since this sort of analysis doesn't know how to begin approaching things like microsound. In the absence of a score, musicologists are often baffled. Perhaps ethnomusicology, inasmuch as it combines culture and music, is better equipped to deal with microsound, but only by abandoning its commitment to the 'rigor' of analytic approaches.

Finally, I know I haven't addressed the most interesting aspect of your question, which is how microsound (and related musics) in particular resist analytic approaches. I'll have to save this thought for another time. Back to the book,

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Why is it that the more academically/theory inclined people involved with
microsound music (in whatever way) tend to favor/employ a
continental/post-structuralist/post-modernist framework/context (eg.
Foucault, D&G, Baudrillard, Heidegger, Bhabha, Derrida, etc.) opposed to say
a framework rooted in the analytical/contemporary philo. of
mind/language/science/etc tradition (eg. Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Davidson,
Strawson, Putnam, Fodor, etc.)?

My knee jerk reaction would be that continental/post-modern frameworks tend
to consider culture and cultural artifacts (i.e. music) more so than
analytical philosophy. But the analytical tradition (post-logical
positivist)tends to deal with ontological/metaphysical questions (which
really are just a hop, skip and jump away from music) in a much more
rigorous and realist manner which would at least, on the surface, appear to
be of some interest to those inclined towards Theory (neutral use of capital
"t") and music.

So for those interested, what do you think?

matt laffey