What points more clearly to an outside than music? We are overtaken by its power, a resonance that is beyond what we know otherwise and serves no purpose.
There are ways to mathematically model what music does - bringing a system close to a threshold beyond which it would transform into something else. This place, the edge just before dissolution, has special properties: it is a window into AESTHETHICA, the heaven of becoming where forms are made and unmade.
Music is essentially hydraulic in this way. It is a convection generating a strange combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and enjoyment of an object that remains withdrawn from view, transforming the subject that it inspires - even producing this subject. And then, out of nowhere: a thought is born. A new thought. A discovery, an insight, a new color or quality. It leaps out of the whirlpool, seizing the subject with astonishment.
This thought and its accompanying astonishment is the threshold between music and philosophy.
Thought can't happen on its own. No logic that is only a logic within thought can be adequate to becoming. The dialectic begins with music, which never negates or establishes anything. All music does is whirl and grow in intensity, yielding, ultimately, an idea.
Wagner believed that music was meant to amplify the idea, but this is not so. Music generates the idea. And it does so with a pre- and post-human efficacy