Abstract

Relying on Heidegger’s ›Being and Time‹, the paper discusses music as a discrete form of thinking. It argues that music should be understood as the future-oriented articulation of humans’ fundamentally affective relatedness to the world. Conceiving of music as the articulation of fundamental affectivity allows us to combine formalist and expressivist approaches to music: Music must have form in order to articulate, but has significance only insofar as it articulates humans’ fundamentally affective relatedness to the world. By taking this approach we are able to account for the discreteness of music as a form of thinking without limiting ourselves to art music.