The book “The Missing Structure” by Umberto Eco, together with the early works of J. Derrida and the late works of J. Lacan and R. Barthes, opens the tradition of European post-structuralism in humanitarian studies. Its main principles are the refusal of the “illusion of structure” in the methodology, of the principle of isomorphism (homeomorphism) and of the idea of the automatic delivery of “true models of reality” in synchronic reception. The article develops Eco’s main ideas in extrapolation to musical perception. It is proposed to consider its mechanism as an asynchrony (quasi-synchronism) between the sequence of musical-artistic events articulated in time according to the composer’s message — and an independent on-coming process of active hearing which is set up by hearer and is formed on the basis of his present understanding of the metalanguage of music. This allows us to reject the “reflection theory” finally, the basic one for the methodology of Soviet and Russian musicology since the 1920s to 1990s. The newly discovered problems (in particular — the cognitive opacity of modern academic music) are associated with its high degree of ambiguity, polysemy and the lack of its common metalanguage.
Abstract