1. A parallel way 

Why should such a path be sought and embarked upon? Would it not be more appropriate to ask the question: What is the essence of music? or What are the essential foundations of music? This type of questioning is familiar to us through the long tradition of metaphysics. To seek a way to music is here supposed to indicate that a type of thinking that is no longer metaphysical is attempting to make its way, to make headway, or simply, to make way (Be-wëgen). In seeking to make its way, thinking is to travel on a path that runs alongside the way to language in order to experience something essential and intrinsic about music, in particular, its parallelism to language. Travelling on a path and having regard for the parallel way to language is supposed to provide orientation for the journey which should allow us to experience music in a way that is profoundly different from how music has been thought about within the metaphysical tradition. 

'The Way to Language' is the title of a late lecture that Heidegger held in a series of lectures sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of the Arts in Berlin in January 1959 under the title "Language". The lecture is the final text in a series of texts and lectures which Heidegger wrote in the fifties and published under the title On the Way to Language(1). As the chronologically last text and the text which gives the volume its title, 'The Way to Language' could well be regarded as the final, mature fruit of a decade of intensive thinking and writing about language. 

How are we to seek a way to music in parallel to a way to language? We can only do so by looking over towards the way to language to see how that way makes way. The formula announced at the beginning of 'The Way to Language' which is to serve as a thread for the way to language is: "Bring language as language to language." This literal translation of "Die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen" (242) is as such inadequate, since in German, "zur Sprache bringen" means simply "to thematize, to address (an issue), to express in words, to put into words". The formula would thus have to be reformulated in English something like: "Put language as language into words." Heidegger points out that what seems at first to be a formula will be transformed while under way. In its final reformulation, the formula will become: "Die Be-wëgung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen) als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden Wort)." (261), which can be rendered as "Making way puts language (the essencing of language) as language (the saying) into language (into spoken words)". Without having followed the path that leads to this ultimate reformulation of the apparent formula, this final rendering is initially incomprehensible. Furthermore, as we shall see, it no longer means a path of thinking which we travel along. 

Here, for the moment, we only have to ask: What does this formula imply for the parallel way to music? On this path we are trying to make way to music by way of thinking in language. The essence of music, or music as music will not be put to music but, at best, it will be put into thoughtful words. This shows that the way to music in thinking must be a way that runs alongside any way that leads to music as tuneful and attuning tones. Thinking can only seek a parallel way to music, and it can only make way in words that show it the way. The way to music in words is necessarily a way that runs alongside and next to the way on which music as music makes way to music. The formula that can serve as a thread for an attempt to follow a path in thinking to music as music is the following: To put music as music into music. This formula has to be transformed into the parallel formula: To put into words the making way of music as music into music. Since in thinking we are moving and making way in the medium of language, the "putting into words" in the formula is redundant. Later on, this formula will be elaborated and transformed into the as yet incomprehensible formulation: "Making way allows music (the essencing of music) as music (the quivering) to come to music (attuned sounds)".

The way to music that is attempted here (this must be openly admitted(2)) is plagiarism (from L. plagiare: to kidnap) in an essential sense for the sake of thinking which abducts another's progeny and thoughtfully compels it to walk along another, parallel way. 

The "as" in the formula should be noted. As we shall see, one signification of this as is that we humans hear music as music, music qua music. This should not be taken for granted as something self-evident. We can be sure that many animals hear music, but do they hear music as music? No, they don't. The metaphysical delineation of human being as the living being that has the lo/goj provided by Aristotle e.g. in his Politics is usually understood as the ability of human beings to speak, which includes of course that we can also listen; or it is taken to mean, more fundamentally, that we are 'rational creatures'. It would be too superficial now to claim instead that we human beings are essentially beings who can hear music as music, but this being-able-to-hear is presumably related to lo/goj and le/gein if this is taken in the sense of a gathering. In listening to music, we are able to gather that it is music and can thus hear it as music. That something is, i.e. its existentia or Daßsein, depends on le/gein as a gathering-that... Of what nature is this gathering that grants the as of music? In the further course of our way to music it will become apparent that the gathering is related to an attunement. Such relatedness (pro/j ti) derives from the parallel ways. Needless to say, such attunement as an issue for thought lies outside the ambit of metaphysical thinking. 

2. Music, metaphysically speaking 

Music, however, is not just musical sounds formed in some way or other, but is said to have some sort of meaning. Often this is described by saying that music is the language of the emotions. The view that music signifies something goes back to the ancients, i.e. to Plato and Aristotle. At the beginning of the Aristotelean text entitled  Peri\ Poihtikh=j we read: 

w(/sper ga\r kai\ xrw/masi kai\ sxh/masi polla\ mimou=ntai/ tinej a)peika/zontej, oi( me\n dia\ te/xnhj oi( de\ dia\ sunhqei/aj, e(/teroi de\ dia\ th=j fwnh=j, ou(/tw ka/n tai=j ei)rhme/naij te/xnaij a/(pasai me\n poiou=ntai th\n mi/mhsin e)n r(uqm%= kai\ lo/g% kai\ a/rmoni/#, tou/toij d" h\) xwri\j h)\ memigme/noij??: oi(=on a(rmoni/# me\n kai\ r(uqm% xrw/menai mo/non h( te au)lhtikh\ kai\ h( kiqaristikh\ ka)/n tinej e(/terai tugxa/nwsin ou(=sai <toiau=tai> th\n du/namin, oi(=on h( tw=n suri/ggwn: au)t%= de\ t%= r(uqm%= mimei=tai xwri\j a(rmoni/aj h( tw=n o)rxhstw=n, kai\ ga\r ou(=toi dia\ tw=n sxhmatizome/nwn r(uqmw=n mimou=ntai kai\ h)/qh kai\ pa/qh kai\ pra/ceij. (1447a19 29) 

Some make representations using colours and forms, making images of many things (some by art, and some by practice), and others do so with sound; so too all the arts we mentioned make a representation through rhythm, speech and harmony, but use these either separately or mixedly. E.g., the art of playing the oboe and lyre, and any other arts that have such a potential (e.g. that of playing the pan pipes), use harmony and rhythm alone, but the art of dancers [uses] rhythm by itself without harmony; for they too can represent stances/characters, moods/emotions/experiences and actions, by means of rhythms given form. (Trans. Richard Janko, mod. ME)

The Aristotelean conception of music as a representation parallels his conception of language as a representation in signs of the 'sufferings' of the psyche in being affected by what matters to it. What matters to the psyche is represented in the pa/qh, and the latter are represented in spoken sounds, and these, in turn, in writing, which are signs for the spoken sounds (cf. the beginning of Peri\ E(rmhnei/aj). This Aristotelean conception of music, through all its modifications, is with us to the present day in theories of musical meaning. Thus e.g. we find in Encyclopaedia Britannica the following note on Schopenhauer: 

Schopenhauer looked upon Platonic Ideas as objectifying will, but music is "by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself."
Schopenhauer acknowledged a connection between human feeling and music, which "restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain." Music, which he is presenting as an analogue of the emotional life, is a copy or symbol of the will.

Whether theories of musical meaning are "referentialist" (referring to meanings outside the music itself) or "formalist" (being autonomous and thus only 'meaning' itself), the problem of emotion in music remains to be dealt with, as Encyclopaedia Britannica notes: "The Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music (German edition published 1854), was a strong proponent of music as an art of intrinsic principles and ideas; yet even Hanslick, ardent formalist though he was, struggled with the problem of emotion in music." Thus the idea prevails that the sounds of music are signs and signify something to do with emotions and moods. In slightly modifying a passage in Heidegger's 'The Way to Language' it can be said: "Music is represented from the viewpoint of musicking with regard to articulated, structured sounds which are the / bearers of meanings. Musicking is a human activity." (cf. UzS:245f)

According to the well known Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet in his opus magnum, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine, which appeared in 1961 towards the end of the conductor's life, the physiologically perceived vibrations that are received by the body's sense organs are mirrored or reflected, i.e. represented, in consciousness, "since bodily affectedness is ... already the 'mirroring reflection' of physiological phenomena".(3)  From this starting-point of musical tones as a mirroring reflection in consciousness of physical and physiological processes, whereby the latter come to be represented in consciousness, Ansermet intends to show "how, in a resonant space, a spatio-temporal world is constructed from tonal structures and gains in form" (652) whose "emergence" is "in the cochlear area" (ibid.) 

We see that it is highly probable that electrical waves form for a duration on the basilar membrane which correlate to the perception of a tone. When tones that sound simultaneously are heard, other waves are formed here. Consequently, in the reflection of the phenomenon and in the gaze of perceptive consciousness, the tonal positions make a movement in space and time, whereas in simultaneity they form harmonious chords as if, in the cochlear area, a double train of waves had been formed, one of whose waves runs longitudinally in time, while the other is transversal and momentary. (Ansermet op. cit. 653)

Let us now imagine the above tonal schema [an example of three bars of music ME] as a spatial structure. In the cochlear emergence of this structure, the momentary wave which arises when the simultaneously vibrating tones are heard and which links the various cochlear positions with each other in a single act of perception, has made a synthesis of tonal positions out of the harmony of tones, just as a molecule is a synthesis of atoms. (ibid. 654)

This basic metaphysical position agrees with the fundamental Aristotelean inscription of the essence of music already cited above from the Poetics.

3. Making way 

If we carefully follow the trace or tracks of music as music, then we have already renounced the procedures for regarding music that have hitherto prevailed. We can no longer treat music as the representation of human experiences, nor as a mirroring of physiological sense data in tonal consciousness, nor as a formal structure of harmonious sounds, no matter how conventionally or unconventionally 'harmony' is understood, nor as a representation of anything at all. Instead of explaining music as this or that, and thus fleeing from music, the way to music wants to go through an experience (eine Er-fahrung) of music as music. In defining the essence of music as a representation or expression, music is indeed comprehended, but it is grasped by something other than itself. If, on the contrary, we pay attention to music as music, then it demands of us that everything that belongs to music as music be brought out into the open.

It is one thing to collect and order various elements that reveal themselves within the essence of music, and another to gather one's gaze into that which of itself unifies what belongs together insofar as this unifying dimension grants the essencing of music its own unity.

The way to music now attempts to follow more strictly the thread which the formula names: To put into words the making-way of music as music to music. The aim is to come closer to what is intrinsically characteristic of music. Here too, music shows itself at first as our musicking. We pay attention now only to what is always already resonating alongside when musicking, and that in the same measure, whether it is noticed or not.

People making and listening to music (i.e. musicking in the broad sense) belong to music as an activity, but not in the sense of cause and effect. Rather, those musicking have their presence, i.e. presence themselves and thus present themselves, in musicking. And where are they present? They are present with what they use for musicking; they are present where they while with what already affects them in individual and multifarious ways. What affects them, each in its own way, are other people and things and everything that attunes these people and affects these things as a whole. In musicking for each other, whether it be directly in bodily presence, i.e. live, or indirectly through the media, the whole range of moods is made to resound in one way or the other; it is modulated and perhaps developed, attuned in such a way that those musicking by making and listening to music attune each other and themselves. The songs sung with voice and/or instruments, alone or together, are manifold. What is musicked may disappear without leaving a trace or it may be preserved or linger on in some way or other. What is made to resonate in music may be long past, or it may have been long since allotted as a music destined to be brought to resonance. 

What is sung in the broadest sense of musicking, whether vocal or not, originates in manifold ways from what is unsung, what is unmusicked, whether this be what has not yet been musicked or what must be left unmusicked in the sense of what is withheld from music. Thus what is musicked, i.e. brought to resonance in music in manifold ways, has the appearance of being removed from music-making and music-makers and does not belong to them, whereas in truth it holds up to music-making and music-makers that towards which they comport themselves, no matter how they dwell in what is musicked from the unmusicked origin. 

A multitude of elements and relations becomes apparent in the essence of music. They have been counted, but not put into a sequence. In going through them in an originary accounting which is prior to any calculating with numbers, their belonging-together has been announced. Counting is a recounting which looks ahead to what unifies this belonging-together without, however, being able to bring it out into the open.

The impotence of thinking's gaze that becomes apparent here, to experience the unifying unity of the essencing of music, is an age-old heritage. This unity, therefore, has remained unnamed. The traditional names for what is meant by the name "music" always name it in one respect or another which is doled out by the essencing of music. 

Let the sought-for unity of the essencing of music be called the fugue. This name calls on us to look more carefully at what properly characterizes the essencing of music. A fugue is a musical composition in which several themes, which in their difference flee (L. fugere) from each other, are nonetheless held together by means of the laws of contrapuntal harmony. Here, by contrast, the fugue is taken to be the entire manifold of originary tunes held together and adjoined in the articulated unity of that fugue which resonates through and originarily opens up the free dimension of attunement that comes to resonate in manifold attunements. The fugue is here the originary articulated reverberation of the essencing of music, the total structured quavering of attunement in which those musicking and what is musicked and its unmusicked origin are joined in what has been allotted and conceded by the fugue. 

"Essence" is a word laden with meaning from the tradition of metaphysics, and is derived from the Latin stem "esse", "to be". The essence of something is what it is in its deepest, most intrinsic, unchanging sense, it is its 'whatness' or, in Latin, 'quidditas'. In German, "essence" is rendered as "Wesen", which is itself one of the forms of the verb "Sein". "Wesen" comes from the stem 'wes-', which is also preserved in English in the past tense of the verb "to be": "was" and "were". In Old English, the infinitive and present participles of the verb "to be" were still able to be formed using the 'wes-' stem; the present infinitive was "wesan", the present participle "wesende" (cf. the OED). The essence of music means what music is most intrinsically, in its innermost being; the wesan of music is its most characteristic, ownmost being. Forthwith we will rename the essence of music its wesan and, to put its ongoing, temporal character into words, we will call and name it by using the archaic present participle, the wesende of music. 

The fugue as the unified wesende of music remains hidden and muffled even in its approximate reverberation as long as we do not take care to note in what sense already musicking and what is musicked have been spoken of. 

Musicking is a making of sounds. It can also be conceived of as a human activity. Both are correct conceptions of music as musicking. Both are now put to one side, without us wanting to forget for how long the sounding of music has already been waiting for an appropriately attuned definition; for, the acoustico-physiological and harmonic explanations of sound-making and musicking do not experience their provenance in the pealing of stillness. Still less do they experience the attuned definition of sound-making which stems from and resonates with this origin.

In what way, however, have singing and what is sung, i.e. musicking and music, been thought in the brief recounting of the wesende of music given above? They already show themselves to be phenomena through which and in which something makes way to music, i.e. comes to resonance, insofar as music is made. Making mere sounds and making music (musicking) are not the same thing. Somebody may produce a lot of sound, even on the stage of a concert hall to a large audience, but it is only noise. By contrast, someone else may scarcely make an audible sound, or make no sound at all, and with this silence make music. 

But what does it mean to music? To experience what this phrase says we are bound to what our language itself calls on us to think in this word. "To music" is a nonce-verb to the noun "music", from Greek mou=sa, the mountain nymph who inspires the singer to sing. The singer can only sing when attuned with the musical source, and thus inspired, his or her singing temporarily and temporally permeates and colours existence as a whole with a particular mood or moods. Mood is the way the world is open to us momentarily as a whole in any particular situation at any particular time. Musicking must therefore be understood as an opening of world in a particular way in bringing a mood to resonance. 

We are saying something self-evident and yet something that has scarcely been pondered on in its significance and ramifications when we point out the following. To sing to each other in musicking means to bring each other to resonance, to reciprocally let oneself go with the mood of the music. To music with each other (albeit only by humming a tune or by saying something or moving in a certain way) means: to make something resonate together, to bring to resonance the tune that inheres in the music played and thus to allow a certain attunement to vibrate. What is unheard is not only that which lacks acoustic sound in not having been made audible, but is also the unmusicked, i.e. what has not yet gained resonance in an attunement. That which has to remain unheard is withheld in the unmusicked; it whiles as a hidden secret in muteness as that which cannot be made to resonate in an attunement. What is granted to resonance resounds as an attunement in the sense of what has been allotted, whose resounding does not even need any sound. 

Musicking, as the resounding of an attunement, belongs to the fugue of the wesende of music which is permeated by the modes and melodies of resonance in which moods are announced, conceded and denied, come to resonance and amplitude in attunement or withdraw, ebb and fade. What runs through the entire fugue of the wesende of music is the manifold resounding of attunements from various provenances. With regard to the relations or rapport of attuned resounding, we call the entirety of the wesende of music the quivering and admit that, even now, what unifies these relations of attuned resounding in the fugue of music has not yet come into sight.

The word "quivering", like many other words in our language, is now usually used in a pejorative sense. "Quivering" is regarded as a description for that which is not firm, which shakes and trembles (perhaps with fear) and thus is not steadfast, robust and sturdy. The earth may shake and quiver in an earthquake that brings destruction. A person or an animal may quiver with fright or agitation (the OED quotes: "His hand trembled and his flesh quivered." 1869), but perhaps also with sheer, overbrimming vitality. The quivering or rapid agitation of the prongs of a tuning fork allows a pure tone to resound. People quiver with emotions resonant with a situation. Every situation is resonant with the quivering of a mood which attunes those who are currently, i.e. temporally, in that situation. Quivering is the hearth in whose radiance the attunement of moods can come to resonance. We can understand quivering from the attunement which resonates with it. 

The wesende of music is quivering as the attuning of a mood. A mood is the mode or colour of any given situation. We are open to this originary quivering and can therefore resonate with it in an attunement or a mood. Quivering's attuning is not based on any feelings or sensibilities, but rather, all feelings and sensibilities stem from an attuning quivering within whose resonance feelings as such can be felt. 

With a view to the fugue-like character of quivering, we must not ascribe attuning exclusively or primarily to human activity. Attunement as resonance characterizes the presence and absence, the resounding and fading of moods of all kinds and degree. Even when attunement is brought about by our musicking, this attuning as the striking of a chord is preceded by a propensity and proclivity to resonate in a mood. 

Only when we think about our attunement in this regard can an adequate characterization of the wesende in all musicking be achieved. We know about musicking as a structured production of sounds by means of musical instruments and voices. But making music is also listening. Usually, making music and listening to music are counterposed to each other. Some make music and others listen. But listening accompanies and encloses musicking not only in the sense that music requires listeners. The simultaneity of making music and listening means more than this. Making music is in itself a listening. It is a listening to the music which we music. Thus musicking is not a listening at the same time, but is rather a listening beforehand. This listening to music precedes all other kinds of listening in the most imperceptible way. We do not just make music, but we music out of music. We can only do this by virtue of having already listened to music. What do we hear? We hear the musicking of music. 

But does music itself music? How could music do this, since it does not have any musical instruments nor a voice with vocal cords, mouth, tongue, etc. Nevertheless, music musics. In the first place and properly speaking, music follows the wesende of music: the quivering. Music musics by quivering, i.e. by attuning a mood. Its quivering emanates from the once musicked and still unmusicked quivering which vibrates throughout the fugue of the wesende of music. Music musics as attunement by reaching into all ranges of attunement from which moods are brought to resonance or fade. Accordingly, we listen to music in the mode of allowing it to attune us with its quivering. No matter in what other modes we also listen, whenever we listen to something, listening means allowing oneself to resonate with the quivering thus enabling all apprehension of mood and feeling. In musicking as this fundamental listening to music, we are attuned to the quivering that we have already heard and make it resonate. We let music's silent voice come and we reach toward the sound that has been reserved for us and call for it. Within the fugue of the wesende of music, at least one trait has now announced itself more clearly in which we see how music as musicking is brought back into its own and thus musics as music. 

When musicking, as listening to music, lets itself be attuned by the quivering, this letting-be can only be granted insofar and insonear as our own wesan (being) is immersed in quivering. We only hear it because we belong to it. Quivering only grants listening-to-music, and thus musicking, to those who belong to it. Such granting whiles in quivering. It lets us reach the ability to music. The wesende of music rests in quivering that grants the reach to musicking. 

And quivering itself? Is it something completely separated from our musicking to which a bridge has to be built? Or is quivering the stream of stillness which itself bridges its banks, attunement and our musicking, by forming them? Our usual ideas about music can scarcely reach this point. Quivering — when we try to think the wesende of music starting from it, do we not run the risk of inflating music into a fantastic, autonomous being which cannot be found anywhere as long as we think soberly and circumspectly about music? Music remains, after all, inextricably bound to human singing and musicking. To be sure. But what kind of bond is this? Whence and how does its binding hold sway and bind? Music needs human musicking and is nevertheless not merely something made by our activity in musicking. Wherein lies the essence of music? On what is it grounded? Perhaps we are asking in a direction that misses the wesende essence of music when we ask for grounds. 

Is quivering itself the resting which grants rest to what belongs together in the fugue of the wesende of music? 

Before we think about this further, let us once more pay attention to the way to music. Initially it was said: the more clearly music comes into sight as itself, the more decisively will the way to it change. Up until now, the way had the character of a path which leads our thinking in the direction of music within the strange interweaving of relations named by the formula for the way to music. We started from ideas about the essence of music as a formal structure of sounds or as a language of emotions or as a transformative mirroring of acoustic vibrations in consciousness to form tonal structures. After that, there came a recounting of what belongs to the structural fugue of music. By following this path in thought we reached music as quivering.

4. The quivering of propriation

What is a way? A way allows somewhere to be reached. It is quivering which, insofar as we listen to it, allows us to reach the musicking of music.

The way to musicking whiles in music itself. The way to music in the sense of musicking is music as quivering. What is characteristic and proper to music thus hides itself in the way in which quivering lets those who listen to it come to music. We can only be these listeners insofar as we belong to quivering. The way that lets us reach music comes already from being enabled to belong to quivering. This belonging shelters what is properly wesende in the way to music. But how does quivering hold sway that it is able to enable and grant such belonging? If at all, then the wesende of quivering in its own right must announce itself as soon as we pay attention insistently enough to what recounting has yielded.

Quivering is attuning. In everything which affects us, which touches us as a mood that has been brought to resonance, which attunes us, which waits for us as the unmusicked, but also in the musicking which we ourselves perform, attuning holds sway which lets moods reverberate and fade. Quivering is in no way a supplementary expression of mood; rather, all moods and their fading reside in and rest on attuning quivering. Quivering liberates moods into their proper reverberation and retracts other, fading moods into their dying resonance. Quivering permeates and composes the free fugue in the resonant temporal clearing which all moods have to seek out and from which all spent moods fade, in which all resonance and fading away have to reverberate.

Quivering is the composing gathering of the intrinsically many-fold modes of attunement which conducts the fugue of all attunement and in each case enables each mood to remain with itself.

Whence does attuning come? This question asks for too much and too impetuously. It suffices to pay attention to what stirs in attuning and brings its stirring to differentiated fruition. Here we do not need to search tediously. The simple, sudden, unforgettable and therefore perpetually fresh gaze into what is familiar to us suffices. Although it is familiar, we do not even try to get to know it, let alone to gain knowledge of it in an appropriate way. This unknown, familiar element which stirs all attuning of quivering into reverberation is, for each and every mood, whether reverberating or fading, the early morn of that morning on which the change of day and night first raises itself as a possibility: what is earliest and primordially ancient at one and the same time. We can only name it, because it does not tolerate being discussed at length, for it is the locality (birthplace) of all places and spaces for the play of time. We use an old word to name it and say:

What stirs in quivering's attuning is propriety.(4)

Propriation gathers the fugue of quivering and unfolds it to the fugue of many-fold attunement. Propriation is what is most inconspicuous  among the inconspicuous, the simplest among the simple, it is what is nearest among the near, what is farthest among the far, and that within which we mortals dwell during our life-time.

We can only name the propriation that holds sway in quivering by saying: Propriation propriates. If we say this, we speak in our own, already spoken language.

Propriation grants mortals their dwelling in their wesan so that they can be the ones who speak and music. (Even the mode of speaking, the way or how of speaking is in this sense music.) If law is understood as the gathering of that which enables everything to presence appropriately, i.e. to come into its own in the proper way, then propriation is the plainest and gentlest of all laws. Propriation is of course not a law in the sense of a norm which somehow hovers over us; it is not an ordinance which orders and regulates a process.

Propriation is the law of all laws insofar as it gathers mortals into propriation to their wesan and holds them there.

Because the attuning of quivering is part of propriety, being able to listen, to sense and feel also rests on quivering, on belonging to quivering in propriation. In order to see this in the entirety of its ramifications, it would be necessary to think through the wesan of mortals sufficiently in its interrelations, and of course propriation as such. Here, a hint will have to suffice.

In having its eye on human being, propriation appropriates mortals by giving them over to that which grants itself to humankind in quivering from everywhere towards what is encrypted. The enpropriation of humankind as the ones who are attuned to quivering is characterized by its releasing human being into its own, but only so that humans, as the ones who music, respond to quivering in their very own way. This is the making of music. The responding music of mortals is already an answer: a retort, a listening, attuned, accommodating musicking. The enpropriation of mortals to quivering releases human being into usage from where it is used to put soundless quivering into resounding music.

Through enpropriating usage, propriation allows quivering to reach resonance in music. The way to music belongs to the quivering that resonates out of propriation, parallel to the way to language that belongs to the saying defined out of propriation, as an accompaniment. What is characteristic of music encrypts itself on this way which belongs to the wesende of music. The way is propriating: propriation appropriates human being for its use through enpropriating it to quivering. 

To make a way, e.g. through a field covered with snow, is called "wëgen" even today in Alemannic-Swabian dialect. This verb, which is used transitively, means: to form a path, to keep it ready for use through forming it. Thought in this way, be-wëgen (Be-wëgung, not Bewegung, movement) no longer means to move something along a way which already exists, but to make the way, like ski-tracks across a field. Making way (Be-wëgung) is the originary movement that first makes the way and thus is the way.

Propriation appropriates humankind into usage for itself. In propriating attunement as its own property, propriation is the making way of quivering to music, just as, in parallel, in propriating pointing as its own property, propriation is the making way of saying to language. The formula for the way to music thus becomes:

Making-way brings music (the fugue as the wesende of music) as music (quivering) to music (resounding song). In talking of a way to music, it now no longer means merely and primarily the path of our thinking which thinks about music. The way to music has changed on the way. It has been displaced from our activity into the propriated wesende of music. But the change in the way to music only seems to us, from our own standpoint, to be a displacement that only now takes place. In truth, the way to music has always had its sole locality (birthplace) within the wesende of music itself. This, however, also means that the way to music in the first sense does not become superfluous, but only becomes possible and necessary through the way proper, the making way that propriates and uses. For, because the wesende of music rests in propriation as attuning quivering, which hands us humans over to the serenity of free, attuned listening, only the making way of quivering to music opens up to us the paths on which we think about the proper way to music.

The formula of the way: bring music as music to music, contains not only an instruction for us as the ones who are thinking about music; it also says the form of the fugue as the formal structure within which the wesende of music resting in propriation, makes way. This formal structure announced by the formula seems to express a network of relations in which music is entangled. It seems as if any attempt to imagine and represent music requires dialectical contrivances to master this entanglement. Such a procedure instigated by the formula neglects, however, the possibility of letting oneself reflectingly into the movement of making way to view the simplicity of the wesende of music, instead of wanting to represent it to the mind's eye. 

What seems like a tangled network disentangles itself, when viewed from making-way, into the liberation brought about by the making-way eventuating propriatingly in quivering. Making-way releases quivering into musicking. It clears the way on which musicking as sensitive listening captures what is to be musicked from quivering and elevates what it captures to music. The making-way of quivering to music is the releasing bond that binds by ap-propriating to itself.

Released into its own free element in this way, music can concern itself solely with itself. This sounds like talk of an egoistic solipsism. But music does not insist on itself in the sense of a merely egocentric self-mirroring which forgets everything else. As music, the wesende of music is propriating attuning which deflects from itself  precisely in order to liberate what is attuned into the propriety of its own mood.

Music which musics in quivering is concerned that our musicking, in listening to what is unmusicked, responds to music's quivering. Thus, silence too, which is often slipped under music as its origin is already a responding. Silence responds to the soundless pealing of the stillness of propriating-attuning quivering. Quivering that rests within propriation is, in attuning, an ownmost mode of propriating (as melody) that is parallel to the way language comes to speech. Propriation is attuning. Music thus musics according to the mode and melody in which propriation reverberates or withdraws.

A thinking pondering on propriation can still only surmise this, but nevertheless already go through the experience of it in the essence of modern economy that has been named with the still strange name of the gainful game or the gathering of the gainable(5).  Insofar as the gainful game entices humankind to reach out to gain all that seems or is valuable, the gainful game prevails in the mode of propriation in such a way that it obscures propriation at the same time, because all gainfully reaching-out-for is borne by a grasping mood responding to the quivering of the gainful game. Musicking is enticed to respond upbeat to the gainability of all that is in every direction. 

Musicking enticed in this way becomes commercial, venal music catering to popular taste. Commercial music itself is out for gain by being sold. It is only bought in being valued as in tune with the mood of modern lives en masse. In the age of 'here comes everybody' (Joyce), commercial music needs the mass market on which it is valued as being in tune with the mood of the times, and conversely, commercial music attunes masses of people by bringing certain timely moods to resound. Commercial music has to continually surmise which tune will attune and resonate with the music market or a segment or niche thereof; it deals in moods by catering to them and/or awakening them. Musicians can only live and support themselves as musicians in the gainful game by having their music valued on the large or small market representing their audience. Their musicking is always at the pivotal point between, on the one hand, catering, or even pandering, to the mood of the times, especially on mass markets, and, on the other, awakening a mood by being receptive to the quivering of propriation making way to music, through which humankind can be captivated by an attunement that need not be grasping, but rather mutually appreciative. 

Music is valued, including monetarily, by catering to people's tastes. Music does this at first and for the most part by repeating the well-worn, habituated melodies that people have come to accept and love as music evoking a familiar mood or time. People only gradually learn to distinguish music from noise, and appreciate music as music, through a process of habituation enabling them to appropriate the sound as musical (which is a hermeneutic phenomenon). The musical experience thus familiarized becomes the repetitition of something familiar, assuring listeners of their world, its mood. For this reassurance of world, and also for the uplifting of their mood, listeners will pay, and from this willingness, venal music, whether high or low brow, derives its market value. 

Propriation is attuning. This sounds like a statement. If we only hear a statement, then it is not what has to be thought. Quivering is the mode in which propriation musics; it is mode thus not so much as a type or kind but mode as mood and me/loj, the melody that attunes, since propriation's quivering brings moods to reverberate in their own right; it allows them to resonate in their own wesan (beyng) as the temporal colouring of the clearing.

Language has been called "the house of being". Language's sister, music, is the reverberation of quivering in and around that house. It is the care for quivering insofar as its reverberating remains entrusted to the propriating attunement to quivering. Music is the care for quivering because, as the response to quivering, it is propriation's mode as melody.

In order to think about the essence (wesende) of music and to say what properly belongs to music, a change in music is necessary which we can effect neither by force nor through invention. The change cannot result from acquiring a new kind of music. The change touches on our relationship to music, our rapport with music. This relationship or rapport is determined by the destiny of whether and how we are kept in rapport by the wesende of music as the originary quivering of propriation, since propriation, in propriating, holding and holding-itself-back is the epitome of all binding holds. For this reason, our musicking as a response always remains held in the binding hold of a rapport. Rapport is thought here throughout against the foil of propriation and no longer merely in the form of a relation between terms. Our rapport with music, our binding bond with music is determined by the attuned mood and mode in which we belong to propriation's quivering as those who, in belonging and therefore listening sensitively, are used by propriation for its resonating.

5. A remainder that cannot be gathered 

If music as human musicking is a way of bodying, of physical moving, that ineluctably is attuned to some mood or other granted by quivering, then even the art-form music cannot be confined to singing and playing instruments, but must include at least dance as well. The way the body moves in dance, an artful way of Dasein's bodying, is music too. The closeness of music and dance is apparent not only phenomenally, but also is indicated by language; the word we employ for an ensemble of musicians, "orchestra", comes from the Greek "o)rxh/stra" which means originally that part of the theatre between the stage and the audience where the choir sang and danced, from o)rxh/sasqai 'to dance' which, as Aristotle says, is a special way to move oneself (Met. 1034a15), a way denied to beings not in the way of human being: "Namely, many beings can move through themselves, but not in a very special way such as dancing" (polla\ ga\r dunata\ me\n u(f' au(tw=n kinei=sqai a)ll' ou)x w(di/, oi(=on o)rxh/sasqai. ibid.). Music and dancing as art-forms of human being colour the open timespace of existence with a certain mood and are themselves movements responding to quivering's moods. Quivering motivates human being with e-motions that come out as the movement of music. Listeners to music, in turn, move inwardly and outwardly to its vibes. The human psyche quivers in tune with the music; the human body dances. We enjoy music by virtue of its en-joying, up-lifting us with the vibrant vibrations of life's movements. 

The truth of music lies not in it bringing a truth into the open where it stands in outline and can be understood and said, but in its being attuned with a mood granted by quivering which it brings to resonance in a special mode of bodying, which may even be simply the vibrant resting of attentive listening. Both those making music and those listening belong originarily to the quivering, and only by virtue of this propriation can they music and listen and thus be musical. All musicking is originarily a moved listening to the quivering. All human being is an attuned moving to the quivering, through to the negative mode of an unmusical insensitivity that cannot be moved and is thus entirely unmelodious. 

Speaking too is a mode of bodying. If language as pointing comes to spoken speech in which beings are presenced and absenced, the way of language, its lilt, its mode is also attuned to quivering in some way or other. In its bodily moving modality, the way of speaking is willy-nilly attuned with a mood. A way of speaking always accompanies what is spoken, which makes all speaking musical in the broadest sense of a mode of bodying attuned to quivering in one way or the other. In particular, the art-form, poetry, its reciting, is lyrical. There is always music in poetry, and poetry is song. Reading and writing too are not without their music. What is said in writing is always accompanied by the music of how it is said. The unsaid underpins and embraces what is said; there is always an excess vibration beyond the said, since all speaking is a response to the "pealing of stillness" which cannot be entirely defined and confined in articulated language. This pealing peals in the silence between the words. Thus Beckett can write in his first, albeit posthumously published novel: 

The blown roses of a phrase shall catapult the reader into the tulips of the phrase that follows. The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory. (6)

So shall their voices pass away, begin and end, the syllables sound, sound and pass away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth and so on in order, until the last after the rest, and silence, with a bit of luck, after the last... (ibid. p.105)

We are musical beings insofar as the world opens up to us by way of resonating with a unified but manifold quivering. If, as Heidegger says, the "pealing of stillness" is the essencing of language which comes to spoken language, then, as the quivering, it is also the essencing of music which, as accompaniment, takes a parallel way to language in coming to the movement of audible music and visible dance. This parallelism means that there is always an excess resonance of pealing which does not come to spoken language but which comes to reverberate ungraspably and moodfully in music. The truth of beyng is a vibrant clearing not only for beings to show themselves as beings but also for the vibrations of a situation, a 'state of affairs', to reverberate in a definite, moved attunement, no matter how in-definable it may be. Because of the twofold in the clearing underlying the parallelism of language and music, there is always a remainder that does not come to language, and thus is not grasped by understanding. This remainder that cannot be gathered resonates nevertheless, and music is attuned with these resonances. Our sensitivity to the quivering makes us moved-moving musical beings physically bodying in timespace.

A determination of human being as musical here is not intended to replace the traditional metaphysical definition of human being as to\ z%=on lo/gon e)/xon. Rather, it points in the direction of the twofold dimensions within the openness of being. In 'having the logos', we humans are able to speak and disclose beings in their being. The moods which affect and move human being e-motionally are not a mode of disclosure which can come simply to speech; they cannot be decrypted in the defining work of language. This inability of mood to come to language, its non-amenability to being said, should not, however, be regarded as a defect or drawback compared with the disclosing, decrypting power of language. Rather, the opening-up achieved by mood takes place in the other dimension within the twofold of the clearing, and this dimension is the open, resonating accompaniment to all understanding and saying through which human being is moved and also moves itself in response. The clearing is two-dimensional or cloven, enabling the wesende of language and the wesende of music to pass through to human being, each in its own way. With equal justification one could say that understanding itself cannot as such come to music (song, dance, gestures) but must rely on the accompanying attunement resonating with quivering to be moved and so to attain presence in this musical dimension as the movement of musicking. When saying (the wesende of language), accompanied by quivering (the wesende of music), comes to language, it is lyrical poetry and song. Hence it can be said that, despite the thoughtful way to music being parallel to the way to language, and thus, in a certain sense, derivative of Heidegger's line of thinking on the way to language, the parallel way of thinking on music nevertheless justifies itself by showing the twofold dimensionality of propriation itself. It is therefore by no means superfluous, but complements Heidegger's mature thinking on language. The plagiarism is thus redeemed. 

The musical dimension of human being as its moved self-moving in time (including the vibrant rest of attentive listening) was not overlooked entirely in the beginnings of metaphysics, even as it was providing the fundamental essential definition of human being with its far-reaching consequences throughout occidental history. The lo/goj was given hegemony over the human soul (yuxh/). This does not prevent Plato, however, from seeing the phenomena and recognizing that the ability to dance is a god-given gift which is part of the human essence and a precondition for any form of education (cf. Leg. II 654a). This god-given gift too, and not just the lo/goj, the ability to speak, sets us apart from the animals as the quote above from Aristotle has already indicated. Our sense of order in movements allows us to partake of many moods, including joy in particular, through song and dance: 

Fhsi\n [o( lo/goj] de\ to\ ne/on a(/pan w(j e)/poj ei)pei=n toi=j te sw/masi kai\ tai=j fwnai=j h(suxi/an a)/gein ou) du/nasqai, kinei=sqai de\ a)ei\ zhtei=n kai\ fqe/ggesqai, ta\ me\n a)llo/mena kai\ skirtw=nta, oi(=on o)rxou/mena meq" h(donh=j kai\ prospai/zonta, ta\ de\ fqeggo/mena pa/saj fwna/j. Ta\ me\n ou)=n a)/lla z%=a ou)k e)/kein ai)/sqhsin tw=n e)n tai=j kinh/sesin ta/cewn ou)de\ a)taciw=n, oi(=j dh\ r(uqmo\j o)/noma kai\ a(/rmoni/a: h(mi=n de\ ou(=j ei)/pomen tou/j qeou\j sugxoreuta\j dedo/sqai, tou/touj ei)=nai kai\ tou\j dedwko/taj th\n e)/nruqmo/n te kai\ e)narmo/nion ai)/sqhsin meq" h(donh=j, h)/dh [$=( dh/] kinei=n te h(ma=j kai\ xorhgei=n h(mw=n tou/touj, %)dai=j te kai\ o)rxh/sesin a)llh/loij sunei/rontaj, xorou/j te w)nomake/nai para\ to\ th=j xara=j e)/mfuton o)/noma. Leg. II 644d - 654a 

This proposal says that all young beings, as they say, are unable to keep still (behave quietly) with their bodies and voices, but always seek to move and cry out, on the one hand by hopping and jumping as if they were dancing and playing with pleasure, and on the other, by calling out all kinds of sounds. The other animals do not have a sense for the order or disorder in movements, for that which is called rhythm and harmony. To us, however, the gods who, as we said, have been given to us to dance with, have also given the sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony through which they put us into motion and cause us to dance, by lining us up together in songs and round dances, and they called these 'choirs' according to their natural name which is related to chará (= joy).