In the first part of this essay, the relationship between music and language is discussed from two different points of view that simultaneously reveal two different dimensions of understanding music. Referring to Nelson Goodman, particularly to his term »metaphorical exemplification«, the possible meaning of a »language of music« is outlined. The »understanding« of this language is analogous to the (nonverbal) understanding of gestures, expressions, moods, atmospheres etc., and therefore akin to an understanding of meaning that does not require words. The understanding of musical art works, however, is not the understanding of a context of meaning (Sinnzusammenhang), since the means of creating musical coherence – such as repetition and variation, the game of identity and difference – are different from the means that create a context of meaning in verbal languages. Music’s affinity to language is at once music’s distance from language. The idea of understanding music must therefore be different from, or more than, the wordless understanding of gestural or expressive figures. Musical listening can rather be grasped as the re-enactment of an enigmatic interpenetration of sound, structure, and meaning, the understanding of which, among others, requires verbal explication. These forms of explication do not stand for a resolution of the enigma but, due to their interminability, sustain it. The second part of the essay demonstrates that the semiotic model of the understanding of music not only falls short due to its failure to accommodate musical coherence, but also because it blocks out areas of musical meaning that are only comprehensible structurally, and not necessarily amenable to wordless re-enactment. These areas include the crisis of the subject in new music (dating back to the late Beethoven), demonstrating a peculiar proximity between music and philosophy. This context connects music to a question of truth that not only refers to individual works, but also to the question of what art and music as an art form can mean today. One answer to this question, which has troubled modern art since the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, is suggested at the end of this essay in reference to Jacques Rancière: the tension between the autonomy of art and its dissolution of boundaries has become art’s condition of existence
