Trying to avoid the risk of a romanticized metaphysics of music, this paper will start by examining the concept of "ineffable" in musical phenomenology through five adjectives: overwhelming, mysterious, opaque, antinomian and unsaturated. The character of disproportion that portrays the ineffable is analyzed through some historical contributions such as the Norton Lectures by Leonard Bernstein or the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. The ineffable is explored in the boundary between ambiguity and clarity that has characterized musical compositions in different ways throughout history; this unsaturated character is then compared with the concept of pattern, also relating it to contemporary neuroscientific research.
Elena Gigante (Fri,) studied this question.