Trying to write about music is like wanting to dance about architecture. The impossibility of the relation appears immediately, and only through imposture – or perhaps only through love? – could this impossible relation be remedied.

The only way to say music – and not say The Music, which does not exist – is by playing an instrument, any instrument: a pair of stones struck together in the Gobi Desert, a symphony orchestra at the Vienna State Opera, a jazz trio at the Blue Note in New York.

In fact, only music can say anything about itself. And music cannot say anything other than something about itself. All attempts to compose a piece of music that describes a different reality end in ridiculousness; they are always an abuse of language. What this means is that music does not say anything, it has no signification in the linguistic sense of the term. Therefore: "music is not a language" (Iannis Xenakis). Or also: "music is a non-signifying art" (Pierre Boulez).

And yet, what a singular density of sense can be achieved by what we call a "musical phrase" (another abuse of language). There are whole days that can be summed up in the effect that a simple sequence of sounds has on the body: do-la, at the beginning of the adagietto of Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony; so-re-do-so-la, at the beginning of Keith Jarrett's improvised concert on the 24th of January 1975 in Cologne.

This requires knowing how to do something very special with the constant force of the drive: a beat, a cut, a pulsating movement that interrupts that constant force to make the body vibrate in a different way.

Thus, music is a knot made of sound and time, a knot that links the object in question – the voice, in essence silent, a-phonic, as Lacan said – with the sense of an unknown jouissance.

And it is a knot that can change a life.

As our esteemed colleague Serge Cottet said: "Lacanians should be sensitive to the music of our time".