Void and Excess in Music

Abstract

“Today, the first notes of a popular baroque piece like Pachelbel's Canon are automatically perceived as the accompaniment, so that we wait for the moment when the melody proper will emerge; since we get no melody but only a more and more intricate polyphonic variation of (what we perceived at first to be) the melodic accompaniment, we somehow feel "deceived". Where does this horizon of expectation, which sustains our feeling that the melody proper is missing, come from?”

An extract on music from Slavoj Žižek’s new book on Hegel to be published in autumn 2017.