Music played a central role in the thought of
existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-
1973). One of the most tantalizing claims he
made was in a set of conversations with Paul
Ricoeur. Employing a geographic metaphor, he
claimed that philosophy was the continent of his
work while his plays formed the off-shore
islands; but what was deepest was music as the
water that conjoins the two. One who wishes to
understand how he thought of music will find
that his philosophical writings contain only a
few, quasi-aphoristic, though significantly
penetrating things about the nature of music and
its relation to his thought. Disappointingly,
neither his short "An Essay in Autobiography" of
1947 nor his larger autobiography of 1971,
Awakenings, adds much to that beyond a few
remarks. But the latter work makes reference to
an article, "La musique dans mon vie et mon
oeuvre," a lecture he delivered in Vienna in
1959, that turned out to be a significantly
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