This essay is written in a stuffy academic style so the author's main idea can get lost in his sea of words. Here's my attempt to understand it: First the tit

This essay is written in a stuffy academic style so the author's main idea can get lost in his sea of words. Here's my attempt to understand it: First the title, "Why Musicians Need Philosophy" can be mentally rewritten as "Why Musicians Need [An Aesthetic] Philosophy [to understand and counteract the Modernist Philosophy]" Essentially, he's saying that music that is created from emphasizing the "meta" aspect (e.g. modernism or abstraction) rather than composing aural landscapes that please the ear is a form of second rate philosophy. To support his position, he's claiming that something like the diatonic scales with its divisions is deeply rooted in humanity and not purely arbitrary culture. One can create music that works with this, or one can go "meta" and deliberately avoid it (e.g. atonal for ambiguity's sake). John Cage's "4'33"[1] seems to be the common go-to example of meta music. This same type of "meta" philosophy argument can be applied to art and literature. Art that "obviously" pleases the eye (such as Michelangelo and da Vinci) isn't all there is to art. The artists can "break the 4th wall" (aka "meta") and push the boundaries of abstractions. The art can draw attention to its medium and materials or try to ignore it. An artist can put a rectangle on the wall with a layer of silver particles covered by a sheet of glass and insist this is art. You as the viewer just see "a ordinary mirror". The artist (and his high-brow allies) then explains that you don't "get it" because there's more to the "reflection". You can see your face in an infinity of Mona Lisas etc. You as a viewer should not be constrained by a "canvas" or "pigments". Other examples might be a plain white canvas with a single dot in the middle. Or it could be a painted line -- and it happens to sell for $44 million[2]. The famous urinal[3] is another piece that invites analysis and commentary. Is all of this "art"? Or "philosophy" packaged as art? You decide. Discussing avante garde art/music/literature can get really weird and you don't know if people are trolling each other with Poe's Law.[4] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 [2]http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-white-line-sells-for-nearly-44-million-4-pictures/ http://twentytwowords.com/canvas-painted-blue-with-a-white-l... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law