By rejecting reflective observation as an expression of futile musicological “epistemological optimism” (futile because it operates with a “fully observable,” “petrified” object), fundamental musicology in Ilya Yonchev’s understanding points to another way of grasping musical utterance, the musical work, and musical interpretation as modes of musical being. Thus, the object of fundamental musicology becomes the description of the musical apprehension of being.

This description or investigation of musical meaning is possible only as transcendental and ontological, because it is carried out from the only possible meaning-constituting position—“my position as subject of the musical event itself,” that is, my being drawn into the musical. And only when this existential musical situatedness is apprehended ontologically can discourse arise. But not in a “positivistically scientific manner,” i.e., from an external standpoint; rather, it must arise “through a truth-constituting holding-within the musical meaning and through its own conceptuality, whose elaboration requires effort in order to bring it to the scale of the problem.”

In undertaking the task of proposing such a conceptuality, Ilya Yonchev maintains that amid the predominantly surrounding musical inauthenticity, the musical-philosophical uncovering of musical meaning is today the only position capable of serving musical practice and pedagogy.

Из рецензия на Розмари Стателова