His writings on moral quandaries reflect a lifelong devotion to music and performance, and, as a counterpoint, he wrote on music aesthetics and on modernist composers such as Faur�, Debussy, and Ravel. Music and the Ineffable brings together these two threads, the philosophical and the musical, as an extraordinary quintessence of his thought. Jank�l�vitch deals with classical issues in the philosophy of music, including metaphysics and ontology. These are a point of departure for a sustained examination and dismantling of the idea of musical hermeneutics in its conventional sense.Music, Jank�l�vitch argues, is not a hieroglyph, not a language or sign system; nor does it express emotions, depict landscapes or cultures, or narrate. On the other hand, music cannot be imprisoned within the icy, morbid notion of pure structure or autonomous discourse. Yet if musical works are not a cipher awaiting the decoder, music is nonetheless entwined with human experience, and with the physical, material reality of music in performance. Music is "ineffable," as Jank�l�vitch puts it, because it cannot be pinned down, and has a capacity to engender limitless resonance in several domains. Jank�l�vitch's singular work on music was central to such figures as Roland Barthes and Catherine Cl�ment, and the complex textures and rhythms of his lyrical prose sound a unique note, until recently seldom heard outside the francophone world.

    The book aims to be a guide through the little universe which is the working place of the man who writes music. As such it talks predominantly to the layman, although the expert composer may also find some stimulation in it... From the center of basic theory the discussion will spread out into all the realms of experience which border the technical aspects of composing, such as aesthetics, sociology, philosophy, and so on.