## 1. What Is Music?


### 1.1 Music Alone and Together



It is plausible that song is the most common kind of music listened to
across history and the globe. Moving images (film, television,
videogames, etc.) are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, and most
have musical soundtracks. Nonetheless, most philosophy of music
considers what Peter Kivy calls music alone
(1990)--instrumental music with no non-musical aspects, elements,
or accompaniments. At least three reasons can be given to defend this
narrow focus. First, pure music often presents the most difficult
philosophical problems. The maudlin text of a song plausibly
contributes to the song's expressiveness; it is more puzzling
how a piece of music alone could be emotionally expressive. Second,
though the problems are more difficult, the solutions are likely to be
more easily evaluated with respect to music alone. Just as
apportioning blame is easier when one person is responsible for a
crime than when the blame must be divided between a number of
conspirators, the success of a solution to the problem of musical
expressiveness may be clearer if it can explain the expressiveness of
music alone. Third, the expressiveness of music alone will play a role
in the expressiveness of musical hybrids such as song or film.
Though its text may contribute to the expressiveness of a song, for
instance, the musical aspects of the song must play *some*
role. A maudlin text set to a jauntily upbeat melody will clearly not
have the same overall expressiveness as the same text set to a
plodding dirge. Though expressiveness is used as an example here,
these same points apply to discussions of musical understanding and
value.



Even if these three reasons are compelling (see Ridley 2004 for a
sustained critique), music's combination with other media raises
further philosophical questions. There is no space to consider those
questions here, but on the aesthetics of song, see Levinson 1987;
Gracyk 2001; Bicknell & Fisher 2013; and Bicknell 2015. On music
drama, see Kivy 1988b, 1994; Goehr 1998; and Penner 2020. On film
music, see Carroll 1988: 213-225; Smith 1996; Levinson 1996b;
and Kivy 1997a. See also the chapters in part V of Gracyk & Kania
2011. On hybrid art forms more generally, see Levinson 1984 and Ridley
2004.


### 1.2 The Definition of "Music"



Explications of the concept of music usually begin with the idea that
music is organized sound. They go on to note that this
characterization is too broad, since there are many examples of
organized sound that are not music, such as human speech, or the
sounds non-human animals and machines make. There are two further
kinds of necessary conditions philosophers have added in attempts to
fine tune the initial idea. One is an appeal to "tonality"
or essentially musical features such as pitch and rhythm (Scruton
1997: 1-79; Hamilton 2007: 40-65; Kania 2011a). Another is
an appeal to aesthetic properties or experience (Levinson 1990a;
Scruton 1997: 1-96; Hamilton 2007: 40-65). As these
references suggest, one can endorse either of these conditions in
isolation, or both together.



The main problem with the first kind of condition is that every sound
seems capable of being included in a musical performance, and thus
characterizing the essentially musical features of sounds seems
hopeless. (We need only consider the variety of "untuned"
percussion available to a conservative symphonist, though we could
also consider examples of wind machines, typewriters, and toilets, in
Ralph Vaughan Williams's *Sinfonia Antartica*, Leroy
Anderson's *The Typewriter*, and Yoko Ono's
"Toilet Piece/Unknown.") Defenders of such a condition
have turned to sophisticated intentional or response-dependent
theories of tonality in order to overcome this problem. If the
essentially musical features of a sound are not intrinsic to it, but
somehow related to how it is produced or perceived, we can classify
just one of two "indiscernible" sounds as music.



If one endorses only an aesthetic condition, and not a tonality
condition, one still faces the problem of poetry--non-musical
aesthetically organized sounds. Levinson, who takes this approach,
excludes organized linguistic sounds explicitly (1990a: 272). This
raises the question of whether there are further distinctions to be
made between arts of sound. Andy Hamilton defends a tripartite
division, arguing that *sound art*, as opposed to both music
and literature, was established as a significant art form in the
twentieth century (2007: 40-65). This is one reason that
Hamilton endorses both tonal and aesthetic conditions on music;
without the former, Levinson is unable to make such a distinction. On
the other hand, by endorsing an aesthetic condition, Hamilton is
forced to exclude scales and Muzak, for instance, from the realm of
music. Kania (2020: 296-301) suggests that it is a mistake to
think that music is necessarily an art. He argues that we should
distinguish the *medium* of music from its artistic uses, just
as we do in the cases of language and literature, depiction and
painting, and so on.



Jonathan McKeown-Green (2014) makes trenchant criticisms of
definitions of music that assume that the nature of music is
settled by our conception of music (395, italics removed). He
argues that no such definition could be future-proof, since it
would be hostage to our changing conception of music. At best, we
would end up with a kind of sociological history of music that would
fail to fulfill any of the functions of a definition. McKeown-Green
singles out the definitions of Kania (2011a) and Levinson (1990a),
stated in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, as of this
hopeless kind. But Kania (2020: 302-5) argues that
McKeown-Green's criticisms apply equally to the looser
definitions of Hamilton and S. Davies (2012).



Having discussed complications, it's worth returning to the
basic idea of "organized sound." Most theorists note that
music does not consist entirely of sounds. Most obviously, much music
includes rests. You might think that silence can function only to
organize the sounds of music. One counterargument is that an
understanding listener *listens to* the rests, just as she
listens to the sounds (Kania 2010). Another is to provide putative
cases of music in which the silences do not structure sounds as
ordinary rests do. John Cage's *4'33''* is
frequently discussed, though there is broad agreement that this piece
is not silent--its content is the ambient sounds that occur
during its performance. (See Dodd 2018 for dissent.) Anyway, S. Davies
(1997a), Dodd (2018), and Kania (2010) all argue that Cage's
piece is not music--Davies and Dodd because its sounds (if any)
fail to qualify as organized, Kania because they fail to meet a
tonality condition. Wadle (forthcoming) argues that the piece
*is* music, because of its contextual connections to previous
musical works. Kania considers several other contenders for the label
of "silent music," arguing that there are indeed extant
examples, most notably Erwin Schulhoff's "In
Futurum" from his *Funf Pittoresken*, which predates
Cage's *4'33''* by some 33 years.


## 2. Musical Ontology



Musical ontology is the study of the kinds of musical things there are
and the relations that hold between them. The most discussed issues
within this field have been the metaphysical nature of works of
Western classical music (the "fundamentalist debate"), and
what it is to give an "authentic performance" of such
works. Recently there has been growing interest in the ontologies of
other Western musical traditions, such as rock and jazz, and
discussion of the methodology and value of musical ontology. (For more
detailed overviews of these debates, see Matheson & Caplan 2011,
and Nussbaum 2021.)


### 2.1 The Fundamentalist Debate



Musical works in the Western classical tradition admit of multiple
instances (performances). Much of the debate over the nature of such
works thus reads like a recapitulation of the debate over the
"problem of universals"; the range of proposed candidates
covers the spectrum of fundamental ontological theories. We might
divide musical ontologists into the realists, who posit the existence
of musical works, and the anti-realists, who deny their existence.
Realism has been more popular than anti-realism, but there have been
many conflicting realist views. We begin with two unorthodox realist
views before moving on to more orthodox Platonist and nominalist
theories, concluding with a consideration of anti-realism.



Idealists hold that musical works are mental entities. Collingwood
(1938) and Sartre (1940) respectively take musical (and other) works
to be imaginary objects and experiences. The most serious objections
to this kind of view are that (i) it fails to make works
intersubjectively accessible, since the number of works going under
the name *The Rite of Spring* will be as multifarious as the
imaginative experiences people have at performances with that name,
and (ii) it makes the medium of the work irrelevant to an
understanding of it. One might have the same imaginative experience in
response to both a live performance and a recording of *The Rite of
Spring*, yet it seems an open question whether the two media are
aesthetically equivalent. But see Cox 1986 and Cray & Matheson
2017 for attempts to revive idealism.



David Davies argues that musical works, like all works of art, are
*actions*, in particular the compositional actions of their
composers (2004). Thus he revives what we might call an "action
theory" of the ontology of art. (An earlier defender of such a
view is Gregory Currie (1989), who argues that artworks are
*types* of action, rather than the *particular* actions
with which Davies identifies them.) Although deciding between theories
of musical ontology is always to some extent a matter of finding a
balance between the benefits of a theory and its cost in terms of our
pre-theoretic intuitions, action theories have a particularly hard row
to hoe since they imply that an instance of a work is some action
performed by a composer, rather than a performance. In order to make
up for such damage to our intuitions the theoretical benefits of an
action theory would have to be quite extensive.



Most theorists think that some kind of Platonist or nominalist theory
of musical works is more plausible than those so far considered.
Platonism, the view that musical works are abstract objects, is
arguably still the dominant view, though it seems to be losing ground
to sophisticated nominalisms. Its great advantage is its ability to
respect more of our pre-theoretic intuitions about musical works than
other theories can. On the other hand, it is the most ontologically
puzzling, since abstract objects are not well understood. Nonetheless,
Platonism has been tenacious, with much of the debate centering around
what variety of abstract object musical works are. What we might call
"simple Platonism" (known simply as
"Platonism" in the literature), is the view that works are
eternal existents, existing in neither space nor time (Kivy 1983a,
1983b, Dodd 2007). Puy (2019) presents a variation according to which
musical works are higher-order types, of which the types other
Platonist thinks are works are specific *versions* of works.
(See D. Davies 2021 for discussion.)



According to "complex Platonism," musical works come to
exist in time as the result of human action. The complexity is
motivated by a number of features of musical practice, including the
intuition that musical works are creatable, the attribution of various
aesthetic and artistic properties to works, and the fine-grained
individuation of works and performances (e.g., in terms of who
composed them, or what instruments they are properly performed upon)
(Ingarden 1961; Thomasson 2004; Wolterstorff 1980; Wollheim 1968:
1-10, 74-84; Levinson 1980, 1990b, 2012; S. Davies 2001:
37-43; Howell 2002; Stecker 2003a: 84-92).



Nominalists identify a musical work with something concrete. The most
obvious candidate is a collection of performances, whether the
collection be understood as a set (Goodman 1968; Predelli 1995, 1999a,
1999b, 2001), a fusion (Caplan & Matheson 2004, 2006), or
something more esoteric (Tillman 2011; see also Moruzzi 2018). Charles
Nussbaum (2007: 143-87) and P. D. Magnus (2012) argue for a
close analogy between musical works and species. Nussbaum (2021: 334)
points out that a sophisticated nominalist theory of species has been
developed in great detail over the years by Ruth Millikan (1984,
2000). While such views are attractive because they appeal only to the
least problematic kinds of entities, they face serious challenges.
Though many of our claims about musical works may be paraphraseable
into claims about sets of (possible) performances, some seem to make
intractable reference to works. For instance, most performances of The
Rite of Spring--even including the possible ones--include
several wrong notes. Thus it is difficult to imagine how the
paraphrase schema will avoid the nonsensical conclusion that The Rite
of Spring contains several wrong notes, if the work consists entirely
of performances. In response to this problem, most nominalists add to
the collection of performances some provenential item, such as an
original score or act of composition. Whether this addition can solve
the problem without necessitating the reintroduction of an abstract
entity is one question any nominalist must address.



Intermediate between Platonism and nominalism are the views of Philip
Letts (2018) and Guy Rohrbaugh (2003). Letts argues that any view of
musical works as *types* would be improved by identifying those
types with their associated properties, a proposal that may be
developed in a Platonist or nominalist direction. Rohrbaugh's
view of musical works as *historical individuals*
"embodied in," but not constituted by, physical things
such as scores and performances closely resembles to the views of
Nussbaum and Magnus, discussed above, but Rohrbaugh takes the work to
be an abstract object over and above its embodiments. (For discussion,
see Dodd 2007: 143-66.)



In contrast to all these realist views stand those of the
anti-realists, who deny that there are any such things as musical
works. An early proponent of such a view is Richard Rudner (1950),
though it is difficult to say whether he is best interpreted as an
eliminativist or a fictionalist, the two anti-realist views currently
on the table. According to eliminativists, there are no such things as
musical works, and thus we ought to stop trying to refer to them. Ross
Cameron (2008) defends such a view, but only with respect to
"Ontologese"--the language we speak when we do
ontology. He argues that ordinary English locutions such as
"there are many musical works" can be true without there
being any musical works. (For critical discussion, see Predelli 2009
and Stecker 2009.) According to fictionalists, the value of discourse
about musical works is not truth, and thus we ought not to abandon the
discourse despite the non-existence of its subject matter, but rather
to adopt a different, make-believe attitude towards it (or perhaps we
already do so). (See Kania 2008; for criticism, see D. Davies 2011:
45-50, Letts 2015, and Nussbaum 2021: 337.)



Much of this debate over the fundamental ontological category to which
musical works belong has turned on "technical" issues,
that is, controversial general metaphysical claims about the nature of
properties, causation, embodiment, and so on (e.g., Howell 2002;
Trivedi 2002; Caplan & Matheson 2004, 2006; Dodd 2007; Hazlett
2012; Kleinschmidt & Ross 2012; Dodd & Letts 2017; Cameron
2008). In the face of this, some theorists have pointed out that
musical works are cultural entities, and thus the methodology
appropriate to uncovering their ontological status might be quite
different from that of general metaphysics (Goehr 1992; S. Davies
2003a; D. Davies 2004; Thomasson 2006). For further discussion of the
methodology of musical ontology, see D. Davies 2009, 2017; Predelli
2009; Stecker 2009; Dodd 2010, 2013; Mag Uidhir 2012b; and Nussbaum
2021.


### 2.2 Higher-level Ontological Issues



It might seem that, since musical works are ontologically multiple,
once we have figured out their true nature, we will know what relation
holds between the work and its performances, namely, whatever
relationship holds between entities of that kind and their instances.
However, since the fundamentalist debate is about the basic
ontological category to which works belong, resolving that debate may
leave open many questions about the relation between a work and its
performances. For instance, is the use of a harpsichord required to
instance Bach's *Brandenburg Concerto No. 5* in
performance? Would producing harpsichord-like sounds on a synthesizer
do just as well? What about using another keyboard instrument from
Bach's time, or a modern piano? Learning that musical works are,
say, eternal types will not necessarily help settle this issue of
"authentic performance," which is perhaps the most
discussed music-ontological issue, of interest to philosophers,
musicologists, musicians, and audiences alike. (For an excellent
overview of the authentic performance debate, see S. Davies 2001:
201-53. For an investigation of authenticity with respect to
things other than instantiation of the work, see Kivy 1995; Gracyk
2001, 2009, 2017; Bicknell 2015; and Cray 2019.)



There have been two sources of widespread confusion in the debate over
authenticity in performance. One is a failure to recognize that
authenticity is not simply a property, but a relation that comes in
degrees and holds with respect to different aspects of its target.
Something may be more authentic in one regard and less authentic in
another (S. Davies 2001: 203-5). Another is the assumption that
authenticity is an evaluative concept, in the sense that
"authentic" implies "good." That this is not
the case is clear from the fact that an authentic murderer is not a
good thing (S. Davies 2001: 204). Thus, our value judgments will be
complex functions of the extent to which we judge performances
authentic in various regards, and the values we assign to those
various kinds of authenticity.



The central kind of authenticity that has been discussed is
authenticity with respect to the instantiation of the work. Most agree
that the fullest such authenticity requires the production of the
right pitches and rhythms in the right order. (For skepticism based on
the history of the practice, see Dyck 2014; Ravasio 2019a; and the
discussion in Dodd 2020b and Ravasio 2020.) *Pure sonicists*
argue that this is sufficient (e.g., Kivy 1988a). *Timbral
sonicists* argue that these pitches must also have timbres
reflecting the composer's instrumentation (e.g., Dodd 2007:
201-39). *Instrumentalists* argue that such sounds must
be produced on the kinds of instruments specified in the score (e.g.,
Levinson 1990c). Much of the debate is over what kinds of aesthetic or
artistic properties are essential to musical works. If the limpid
textures of Bach's *Brandenburg Concerto No. 5* are
essential to it, then one cannot authentically instance the work using
a grand piano instead of a harpsichord. As such, the debate reflects a
wider one in aesthetics, musical and otherwise, between
*formalists* (or empiricists, or structuralists), who believe
that the most important properties of a work are intrinsic ones,
accessible to listeners unaware of the historical and artistic context
in which it was created, and *contextualists*, who believe that
a work is essentially tied to its context of creation. Stephen Davies
has argued for a strong contextualism, claiming that one cannot give a
single answer to the question of whether particular instrumentation is
required for the fully authentic instantiation of a work. Works can be
ontologically "thicker" or "thinner" as a
result of the specifications of a composer working within certain
conventions (1991, 2001). The more properties of a fully authentic
performance a particular work specifies, the thicker it is. Thus for
some works (typically earlier in the history of Western music)
instrumentation is flexible, while for others (e.g., Romantic
symphonies) quite specific instrumentation is required for fully
authentic performances.



In addition to the question of what constitutes authenticity, there
has been debate over its attainability and value. Those who question
its attainability point to our historical distance from the creation
of some works (Young 1988). We may no longer be able to read the
notation in which the work is recorded, or construct or play the
instruments for which it was written. If so, full authenticity is not
attainable. But we rarely have no idea about these matters, and thus
we might achieve partial authenticity (S. Davies 2001: 228-34).
Those who question the value of authenticity often target kinds other
than work-instantiation. For instance, one might question the value of
producing a performance that authentically captures the sound of
performances as they took place in the context of a work's
composition, on the basis that musicians were not as highly skilled
then as now, for instance (Young 1988: 229-31). Such arguments,
though, have no consequences for the value of work-instantiation. Some
argue that although we might attain an authentic instance of a work,
the idea that we might thereby hear the work as its contemporaries
heard it is wishful thinking, since the musical culture in which we
are immersed enforces ways of listening upon us that we cannot escape
(Young 1988: 232-7). Thus the point of such authenticity is
questioned. In response, we may consider not only the possibility that
we are in a better position to appreciate historical works than
contemporary ones, but also the remarkable flexibility people seem to
show in enjoying many different kinds of music from throughout history
and the world (S. Davies 2001: 234-7).



Julian Dodd (2020a) argues that there is more than one way to be true
to a musical work, and thus to produce an authentic performance: One
can comply with the score, or one can be true to the music's
overall integrity or point (136). When the two conflict,
interpretive authenticity trumps score-compliance authenticity
(147) because the fundamental norm of work-performance practice is to
perform it in a way that evinces a subtle or profound understanding
of it (163), while score compliance is valued only because it
tends to lead to such performances. Andrew Kania responds that it is
unclear whether, even by the lights of Dodd's own theory,
Dodd's central examples are cases of interpretive authenticity
trumping score compliance (Kania 2022: 131-2). More importantly,
he argues that Dodd's conception of the music's overall
integrity or point misses the importance of the surface-level
details to a work's meaning or content. Kania suggests, instead,
that the fundamental norm of the practice is to evince an
understanding of the work *through* complying with its
score (2022: 127, italics altered).



Moving on from authenticity, a second area that may be independent of
the fundamentalist debate is that of comparative ontology. (For
dispute over this framing issue, see Brown 2011, 2012.) Just as
classical works from different historical periods may be ontologically
diverse, so may works from different contemporary traditions. Theodore
Gracyk has argued that instances of works of rock music are not
performances. Rather, the work is instanced by playing a copy of a
recording on an appropriate device (1996; cf. Fisher 1998). Stephen
Davies has argued that rock is more like classical music than Gracyk
acknowledges, with works for performance at the heart of the
tradition, albeit works for a different kind of performance (2001:
30-6). Gracyk's view has been amplified and defended in
attempts to find a place for composition, live performance, and
performance skill within his basic framework (Kania 2006, Bruno 2013,
Bartel 2017, Magnus 2022).



Work on the ontology of jazz has centered on the nature of
improvisation, particularly the relation between improvisation and
composition (Alperson 1984, 1998; Valone 1985; Brown 1996, 2000;
Hagberg 1998; Gould & Keaton 2000; Sterritt 2000; and Young &
Matheson 2000; Bresnahan 2015; Love 2016; Magnus 2016). This has been
a useful reminder that not all music is the performance of
pre-composed works (Wolterstorff 1987: 115-29). However,
improvisation can occur within the context of such a work, as in the
performance of an improvised cadenza in a classical concerto. Some
have argued that there is not as significant a distinction between
improvisation and composition as is usually thought (Alperson 1984).
Others have argued that all performance requires improvisation (Gould
& Keaton 2000). Yet others restrict the possibility of
improvisation to certain kinds of musical properties, such as
"structural" rather than "expressive" ones
(Young & Matheson 2000). However, none of these arguments are
compelling. Usually they turn on equivocal use of terms such as
"composition" and "performance," or beg the
question by defining improvisation in terms of deviation from a score
or variation of a limited set of "expressive"
properties.



Though jazz is not necessarily improvisational, and very few jazz
performances lack any sort of prior compositional process, the
centrality of improvisation to jazz presents a challenge to the
musical ontologist. One might argue that jazz works are ontologically
like classical works--composed for multiple, different
performances--but that they tend to be thinner, leaving more room
for improvisation (Gould & Keaton 2000; Young & Matheson
2000). The difficulty is to specify the work without conflating one
work with another, since tokening the melody may not be required, and
many works share the same harmonic structure. As a result, some argue
that the performance is itself the work (Alperson 1984; Hagberg 2002;
S. Davies 2001: 16-19). One problem here is parity with
classical music. If jazz performances are musical works in their own
right, it is difficult to deny that status to classical performances
of works, yet this seems to multiply works beyond what we usually
think is necessary. A third possibility is that in jazz there are no
works, only performances (Brown 1996, 2000: 115; Kania 2011b). This is
counterintuitive if "work" is an evaluative term, but it
is not obvious that this is the case.



Julian Dodd (2014a) argues that the kinds of considerations adduced in
favor of these views confuse questions of ontology with questions of
value. Jazz is ontologically like early classical music, according to
Dodd: the focus of critical attention is the improvisatory performance
rather than the composition it instantiates, but that composition is
no less a musical work for that difference in critical emphasis. (See
Fisher 2018 for an attempted reconciliation.) Similar considerations
might be adduced against the increasingly complicated ontologies of
rock referred to above. Such arguments return us to debates about the
methodology of musical ontology.


## 3. Music and the Emotions



The most widely discussed philosophical question concerning music and
the emotions is that of how music can express emotions. (For a more
extensive introduction, see part II of Gracyk & Kania 2011; for a
thorough treatment, see S. Davies 1994.) There is a second group of
questions centered around listeners' emotional responses to
music. These include questions about why and how we respond
emotionally to music, the value of such responses, and why we choose
to listen to music that elicits "negative" responses from
us, such as sadness. Theorists typically restrict themselves to
"pure" or "absolute" music on the grounds that
it is easier to understand how music with an accompanying text, say,
could express the emotions evident in the text. However, an important
criterion for the evaluation of such music is how appropriately the
composer has set her chosen text to music. So an accompanying text is
clearly not sufficient for the musical expression of an emotion. Thus,
a better reason for initially putting such music to one side is
perhaps that the interrelation of music and text, or other elements,
is likely to be highly complex, and best approached with as
well-developed a theory of the more basic phenomena in hand as
possible. (For an extended criticism of this approach, see Ridley
2004: 1-104.)


### 3.1 Emotions in the Music



Pieces of music, and performances of them, are standardly said to be
happy, sad, and so on. Music's emotional expressiveness is a
philosophical problem since the paradigm expressers of emotions are
psychological agents, who have emotions to express. Neither pieces of
music, nor performances of them, are psychological agents, thus it is
puzzling that such things could be said to express emotions.



One radical way to solve the puzzle is to deny that music is
emotionally expressive. A major burden of such eliminativism is
to explain away the widespread tendency to describe music in emotional
terms. This has been attempted by arguing that such descriptions are
shorthand or metaphor for purely sonic features (Urmson 1973), basic
dynamic features (Hanslick 1854), purely musical features (Sharpe
1982), or aesthetic properties (Zangwill 2007). There are many
problems with such views. For one thing, they seem committed to some
sort of scheme for reduction of expressive predicates to other terms,
such as sonic or musical ones, and such a scheme is difficult to
imagine (Budd 1985a: 31-6). For another, anyone not drawn to
this theory is likely to reject the claim that the paraphrase captures
all that is of interest and value about the passage described,
precisely because it omits the expressive predicates (Davies 1994:
153-4).



Conventionalism is the view that music's expressiveness
is a matter of the conventional association of certain musical
elements, such as slow tempi, with certain emotional states, such as
sadness. Such conventions must play a role in some cases of
expression--for instance, cases of particular musical instruments
(e.g., the snare drum) being associated with particular situations
(e.g., war) and thus emotions (e.g., foreboding). But such conventions
seem unlikely to account for all musical expressiveness, since much of
that expressiveness seems less arbitrary than conventionalism would
suggest. It seems implausible, for instance, that the convention for
funeral dirges might just as easily have that they should be
quick-paced and in major keys. Even in cases like the snare drum, it
seems possible that the instrument was chosen for the battlefield in
part because of the expressive character of its sonic profile.



The cliche that music is "the language of the
emotions" is often considered as a possible starting point for a
theory of musical expressiveness. The idea combines the attractive
simplicity of conventionalism with the formalist notion that
music's order is to be understood in terms of syntax. (See
Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983 for a theory along the latter lines.)
However, although Deryck Cooke (1959) and Leonard Meyer (1956) are
often cited as proponents, it is not clear that anyone holds a
full-blown version of the theory. The central problem is the great
disparities between language and music, in terms of the ways in which
each is both syntactic and semantic (Jackendoff 2011). A serious
subsidiary problem is that even if music *were* about the
emotions in the way that language can be, that would not account for
music's *expressiveness*. The sentence "I am
sad" is about the emotions, but it is not *expressive of*
sadness in the way a sad face is, though you could use either to
express your sadness. Most people agree that music's relation to
emotion is more like that of a sad face than that of a sentence. (This
last criticism is also applicable to Susanne Langer's theory
(1953) that music is about the emotions in a symbolic yet
non-linguistic way.)



We now turn to theories that attempt to connect the notion of
music's expressiveness to actual felt emotions. One obvious way
to do so is to argue that pieces of music or performances of them are
expressions of such emotions--those of the composer or performer.
There are two major problems with this "expression
theory." The first is that neither composers nor performers
often experience the emotions their music is expressive of as it is
produced. Nor does it seem unlikely that a composer could create, or a
performer perform, a piece expressive of an emotion that she had never
experienced. This is not to deny that a composer could write a piece
expressive of her emotional state, but for the expression theory to be
an account of musical expressiveness, at least all central cases of
expressiveness must follow this model, which is not the case.
Moreover, if a composer is to express her sadness, say, by writing a
sad piece, she must pen the right kind of piece. In other words, if
she is a bad composer she might fail to express her emotion. This
brings us to the second major problem for the expression theory. If a
composer can fail to express her emotions in a piece, then the music
she writes is expressive independent of the emotion she is
experiencing. Thus music's expressiveness cannot be explained in
terms of direct expression.



Those usually cited as classic expression theorists include Tolstoy
(1898), Dewey (1934), and Collingwood (1938). (A classic critique is
Tormey 1971: 97-127.) These theorists have been defended in
recent discussions, however, from accusations that they hold the
simple view outlined above (Ridley 2003, Robinson 2005: 229-57).
Jenefer Robinson has attempted to revive the expression theory, though
she defends it as an interesting and valuable *use* of
music's expressiveness, rather than an account of expressiveness
itself (2005: 229-347; 2011).



A second way to link music's expressiveness with actual felt
emotions is through the audience. According to arousalism, the
expressiveness of a passage of music amounts to its tendency to arouse
that emotion in a competent listener. Arousalism faces several
objections. First, some competent listeners seem emotionally unmoved
by music (or are at least not moved to the specific emotions expressed
by it). But perhaps the arousalist can simply restrict the class of
listener to which his theory appeals to those who are so moved.
Second, some emotions, such as fear, require a particular kind of
intentional object (something threatening), yet there is no such
object at hand when we hear fearful music. Thus it seems implausible
to claim the music's fearfulness resides in its arousal of fear
in us. But perhaps the arousalist can broaden the class of aroused
emotions to include appropriate *responses* to the expressed
emotion, such as pity. Third, in many cases it seems that listeners
respond emotionally to the expressiveness of the music. It is not
clear that the arousalist can handle such cases non-circularly. (A
sophisticated defense of the arousal theory is to be found in
Matravers 1998: 145-224, though see the second thoughts in
Matravers 2011. For an extended critique, see S. Davies 1994:
104-200.)



Despite the problems of the arousal theory as the whole story of
musical expressiveness, there is a growing consensus, thanks largely
to the work of Jenefer Robinson (1994, 2005), that our lower-level,
less cognitive responses to music must play some role in the emotional
expressiveness we attribute to it. However, this role is likely to be
a causal one, rather than part of an analysis of what it is for music
to be emotionally expressive.



Several theorists have defended accounts of musical expressiveness
known variously as resemblance, contour, or
appearance theories (e.g., Kivy 1989, though see Kivy 2002:
31-48 for recent qualms; Budd 1995: 133-54; S. Davies
1994: 221-67). The central idea is that music's
expressiveness consists in the resemblance between its dynamic
character and that of various typical aspects of people experiencing
emotions. The aspects appealed to include the phenomenology of the
experience of the emotion, the emotion's facial expression, the
contour of vocal expression or bodily behavior of a person
experiencing the emotion. Stephen Davies argues that such theories
hold music to be expressive in a literal albeit secondary sense of the
term. We say that a piece of music is sad in the same sense in which
we say that a weeping willow is sad (S. Davies 2006: 183). Such uses
are no more metaphorical than a claim that a chair has arms.



Jerrold Levinson agrees that there is an important resemblance between
the contour of music expressive of an emotion and the contour of
typical behavioral expressions of that emotion. He objects, however,
that such an account cannot be the whole, or even the most fundamental
part of the story (Levinson 1996a, 2006b). He drives in a wedge
precisely at the point where an appeal is made to the resemblance
between the music and typical behavioral expressions. He asks what the
manner and extent of the resemblance between the two must be,
precisely, in order for the music to count as expressive of some
emotion. After all, everything resembles everything else in all sorts
of ways, and so one could point out many resemblances between a
funeral march and an expression of joy, or for that matter a cup of
coffee and sadness. The resemblance theorist must give some account of
why the funeral march, and not the cup of coffee, is expressive of
sadness and not joy. Levinson claims that the obvious answer here is
that the funeral march is "readily hearable as" an
expression of sadness. If this is correct, then the resemblance the
music bears to emotional behavior is logically secondary--a cause
or ground of its expressiveness. The expressiveness itself resides in
the music's disposition to elicit the imaginative response in us
of hearing the music as a literal expression of emotion. As a logical
consequence, the imaginative experience prompted must include some
agent whose expression the music literally is.



In reply to this kind of objection, Stephen Davies has emphasized the
role of the listener's response in resemblance theories. Such
responses have always been appealed to by such theories, as evidenced
by Malcolm Budd's talk of "hearing as" (1995:
135-7), and Peter Kivy's discussion of our tendency to
"animate" that which we perceive (1980: 57-9). But
Davies now makes the appeal quite explicit and central, devoting as
much space to explication of the response-dependent nature of
expressiveness as to the role of resemblance (2006). For Davies, the
response of the competent listener upon which the expressiveness of
the music depends is one of an *experience of resemblance*
rather than imagined expression (2006: 181-2). Matteo Ravasio
(2019b) argues that this leads to further problems.



Since Davies's theory posits at base a contour-recognition
experience while Levinson's posits an imaginative experience of
expression, the link between literal expression and musical
expressiveness looks closer in Levinson's theory than in
Davies's. An empirical consequence seems to be that
Davies's theory will predict weaker emotional responses to music
than Levinson's. Whether or not this is an advantage or
disadvantage of the theory depends on the empirical facts about how we
respond emotionally to music.


### 3.2 Emotions in the Listener



There are three main questions asked about our emotional responses to
pure music, apart from what role they play in expressiveness. The
first is analogous to the "paradox of fiction." It is not
clear why we should respond emotionally to music's
expressiveness when we know that no one is undergoing the emotions
expressed. The second is a variant of the "paradox of
tragedy." If some music arouses "negative" emotional
responses in us, such as sadness, why do we seek out the experience of
such music? This leads to the more general question of the value of
our emotional responses to music. The first two questions are
addressed in this section, and the third in section 5.1.



Peter Kivy (1999) argues that those who report emotional reactions to
music are confusing the pleasure they take in the beauty of the music,
in all its expressive individuality, with the feeling of the emotion
expressed. Though most philosophers appeal to ordinary experience and
empirical data to reject the plausibility of Kivy's position,
they admit the problem that motivates it, namely, the conceptual
tension between the nature of music and the nature of the emotions we
feel in response to it. There is some consensus that emotions are
cognitive, in the sense that they take intentional objects--they
are *about* things--of certain kinds. For instance, in
order to feel *fear*, one must believe that something is
*threatening* (the "intentional object" of the
emotion). When one listens to a sad piece of music, however, one knows
there is nothing literally feeling sad, and thus it is puzzling that
one should be made sad by the experience.



Part of the solution is that not all emotional responses (broadly
construed) are cognitive (Robinson 1994; 2005: 387-400). For
instance, it is no more puzzling that one could be startled by a
*fortissimo* blow to a bass drum than that one could so respond
to a thunderclap. Another part of the solution is that the music can
be the object of our emotions, as when we are delighted by an
effective ending to a long and complex piece.



As for emotional responses to music's expressiveness, there are
at least two possible explanations. One appeals to the phenomenon of
"emotional contagion" or "mirroring responses"
(S. Davies 1994: 279-307; 2006: 186-8). When surrounded by
moping people, one tends to become sad. Moreover, such a
"mood" is not *about* some intentional object. One
is not necessarily sad *for* the mopers, nor whatever they are
sad about, if anything. Similarly, when "surrounded" by
music that presents an appearance of sadness, one might become sad,
but not sad about the music, or anything else (Radford 1991). For
critical discussion, see Robinson 2005: 379-412 and S. Davies
2011b.



If our experience of music's expressiveness necessarily involves
*imagining* that the music is a literal expression of emotion,
then our emotional responses to that expressiveness are no more
puzzling than emotional responses to other imagined expressive agents,
such as fictional characters in novels. The advantage is only slight
because the question of how and why we respond emotionally to fictions
is itself a philosophical problem of some magnitude. Nonetheless,
there are several theories available (see the
 supplement to the entry on imagination, SS2).
 One difficulty with appealing to a solution to the paradox of fiction
is that it is not clear that our emotional responses to the
expressiveness of music are the same as those to emotionally
expressive characters. For instance, the standard example of an
emotional response to music is being made sad by a dirge, while the
standard example of emotional response to fiction is (something like)
to feel pity for a sad character. If the former is to be explained in
the same way as the latter, we would expect listeners to feel
*pity* in response to the funeral march (pity for the persona
imagined to be expressing her sadness through it). However, we surely
do feel sad (in some sense) in response to tragedy, and it is not
obvious that we do *not* feel pity (or imagined pity, or
whatever one's preferred theory of emotional response to fiction
posits) in response to sad music.



Leaving behind the topic of how and why we respond emotionally to
music, we turn to the question of why we seek out music that arouses
"negative" emotions in us, such as sadness, assuming
henceforth that we are in fact aroused to such emotions. (Since this
problem is a close analog of the "paradox of tragedy,"
some of the references below are to literature not explicitly about
music, but the transposition of the arguments to music is not
difficult to imagine. (See also the
 supplement to the entry on imagination, SS3.)
 Most solutions assume that our negative emotional response is a price
we are willing to pay for the benefits of engaging with the piece in
question. The benefits appealed to include understanding and
appreciating the music, including the expressiveness responsible for
the negative response (Goodman 1968: 247-51; S. Davies 1994:
311-20; Goldman 1995: 68; Robinson 2005: 348-78).



A different benefit is Aristotelian *catharsis*, in which our
negative emotional response to expressive art results in a
psychological purgation of the negative emotions (Aristotle 1987: 6,
1449b21-1450b20). A less therapeutic approach is the suggestion
that, since these emotions are without "life implications"
(that is, as discussed above, we are not sad *about* any actual
tragic events), we are able to take advantage of our responses to
savor these emotions, gain an understanding of them, and be reassured
that we have the capacity to feel them (Levinson 1982). Two things
that must be explained by any defender of this kind of response are,
first, our persistence in seeking out music that elicits negative
emotional experiences after we have received the resulting benefit
and, second, the enjoyment we seem to take in these negative
responses, as opposed to putting up with them for their related
benefits.



A different kind of solution to the problem argues that responses such
as sadness that are evoked by expressive music are not really
negative. Hume (1757) argues, with respect to tragedy, that the
pleasure we take in the mode of presentation of the content of an
artwork does not simply counterbalance the negative emotion evoked,
but rather subsumes and transforms it into a pleasurable feeling.
Kendall Walton argues (also with respect to tragedy) that sadness is
not in itself negative. Rather, it is the situation to which sadness
is the response that is negative. Thus, though we would not seek out
the death of a loved one, *given* the death we
"welcome" the sorrow (K. Walton 1990: 255-9).
Similarly, we cannot affect the sadness of a musical work by not
listening to it, and so we welcome our sorrowful response to it as
appropriate. Berys Gaut (2007: 203-26) argues that though
sadness is *typically* aroused by situations we would prefer to
avoid, sadness in response to artistic expressiveness is an exception
and thus not negative in any paradoxical way. A difficulty for all
three solutions is the extent to which they accord with our emotional
experience in rejecting the characterization of our sadness as
negative.


## 4. Understanding Music



A central topic in the understanding of narrative art forms, such as
literature and film, is what constitutes an acceptable interpretation
of a work. One debate concerns whether there is a single correct
interpretation of any work or multiple acceptable interpretations.
Another concerns the constraints on acceptable interpretations, e.g.,
the extent to which the artist's intentions may or should be
taken into account.



Though these questions seem equally applicable to musical works (S.
Davies 2002a; Dubiel 2011), most of the literature on understanding
music has focused on two more specifically musical topics: first, our
understanding of basic musical features, such as pitch and rhythm and,
second, interpretations of works of the sort given by music theorists.
(For more detailed introductions to these and other topics in musical
understanding, see S. Davies 2011c and Huovinen 2011.)



Before we turn to those topics, it is worth noting that two distinct
activities go by the name of "interpretation" in music
(and other performance arts): what might be called
*performative* and *critical* interpretation (Levinson
1993). While a critical interpretation of a musical work (often called
an analysis) is roughly equivalent to an interpretation of a
novel--typically expressed linguistically--a performative
interpretation is a way of playing or singing the work, typically
expressed in a performance of it. It is not easy to clarify the
relationship between these two kinds of musical interpretation, but
see Levinson 1993, Maus 1999, Thom 2007, Neufeld 2012, and Dodd
2020a.


### 4.1 Basic Musical Understanding



Animals can hear music in a sense--your dog might be frightened
by the loud noise emitted by your stereo. People, by contrast, can
*understand* the music they hear. What constitutes this
experience of understanding music? To use an analogy, while the mere
*sound* of a piece of music might be represented by a sonogram,
our experience of it as *music* is better represented by
something like a marked-up score. We hear individual notes that make
up distinct melodies, harmonies, rhythms, sections, and so on, and the
interaction between these elements. Such musical understanding comes
in degrees along a number of dimensions. Your understanding of a given
piece or style may be deeper than mine, while the reverse is true for
another piece or style. My general musical understanding may be
narrow, in the sense that I only understand one kind of music, while
you understand many different kinds (Budd 1985b: 233-5; S.
Davies 2011c: 88-95). Moreover, different pieces or kinds of
pieces may call on different abilities, since some music has no
harmony to speak of, some no melody, and so on. Many argue that, in
addition to purely musical features, understanding the emotions
expressed in a piece is essential to adequately understanding it
(e.g., Ridley 1993; S. Davies 1994; Levinson 1990d: 30; Scruton 1997;
Robinson 2005: 348-78).



At the base of the musical experience seem to be (i) the experience of
*tones*, as opposed to mere sounds of various frequencies,
where a tone is heard as being in "musical space," that
is, as bearing relations to other tones such as being higher or lower,
or of the same kind (at the octave), and (ii) the experience of
*movement*, as when we hear a melody as leaping up or wandering
far afield and then coming to rest where it began. Roger Scruton
(1983; 1997: 1-96) argues that these experiences are irreducibly
metaphorical, since they involve the application of spatial concepts
to that which is not literally spatial. (There is no identifiable
individual that moves from place to place in a melody (S. Davies 1994:
229-34).) Malcolm Budd (1985b) argues that to appeal to metaphor
in this context is unilluminating since, first, it is unclear what it
means for an *experience* to be metaphorical and, second, a
metaphor is only given meaning through its interpretation, which
Scruton not only fails to give, but argues is unavailable. Budd
suggests that the metaphor *is* reducible, and thus eliminable,
apparently in terms of purely musical (i.e., non-spatial) concepts or
vocabulary. Stephen Davies (1994: 234-40) doubts that the
spatial vocabulary can be eliminated, but he is sympathetic to
Budd's rejection of the centrality of metaphor. Instead, he
argues that our use of spatial and motion terms to describe music is a
secondary, but literal, use of those terms that is widely used to
describe temporal processes, such as the ups and downs of the stock
market, the theoretical position one occupies, one's spirits
plunging, and so on. The debate continues in Budd 2003, Scruton 2004,
and S. Davies 2011d.



Davies is surely right about the ubiquity of the application of the
language of space and motion to processes that lack individuals
located in space. The appeal to secondary literal meanings, however,
can seem as unsatisfying as the appeal to irreducible metaphor. We do
not hear music simply as a temporal process, it might be objected, but
as *moving* in the *primary* sense of the word, though
we know that it does not literally so move. Andrew Kania (2015)
develops a position out of this intuition by emphasizing
Scruton's appeal to imagination while dropping the appeal to
metaphor, arguing that hearing the music as moving is a matter of
imagining that its constituent sounds move. (See also de Clercq 2007
and Trivedi 2011: 116-18.) Kania explicitly models his theory on
the popular Waltonian theory of fiction (K. Walton 1990), though
Walton seems to resist the application of his theory to basic musical
understanding because of the differences between music and more
paradigmatically representational arts (K. Walton 1988: 358-9,
1994: 53-4).



Apart from pitch space and melodic movement, there has been little
philosophical discussion of either the nature and understanding of
basic musical features such as melody, rhythm, meter, and harmony or
how these elements work together in complex musical wholes. But see
Roger Scruton 1997: 19-79, 2007; Stephen Davies 2001:
47-71; Hamilton 2007: 119-52; and Cheyne, Hamilton, and
Paddison 2020.



It is widely acknowledged that explicit music-theoretical knowledge
can aid deeper musical understanding and is essential for the adequate
description and understanding of musical experiences--including
one's own (Kivy 1990). However, several philosophers have argued
that one need not possess these concepts explicitly (nor the
correlative vocabulary) in order to listen with understanding (Budd
1985b; 245-8; S. Davies 1994: 346-9; Levinson 1990d:
35-41). Mark DeBellis (1995: 117-31) argues that
understanding fairly basic features of music, such as different kinds
of cadences, requires a fused experience in which one applies a
concept such as dominant seventh in one's perception of
the musical sounds. Stephen Davies (2011c: 88-94) responds that
the serious but untutored listener should be able to develop
such concepts, and thus have such experiences. Erkki Huovinen (2008)
provides an example intended to cast doubt on this. Suppose that a
melody is transposed from C major to D-flat major, but in a lower
octave. One listener might hear the melody as reappearing
higher, since D-flat is a half-step above C, while another
might hear it as lower, since the constituent pitches of the
second appearance are all lower than those of the first. Only a
listener who understands the sense in which *both* these claims
are true--that the melody has been transposed down a major
seventh--truly understands what is going on musically. Yet such
concepts of pitch organization ... are not usually learned
without some tuition (Huovinen 2008: 325).


### 4.2 Higher-level Musical Understanding



For various art-historical reasons, formalism was the dominant
approach to music-theoretic analysis, that is, the critical
interpretation of musical works, throughout the twentieth century.
(Hamilton 2007: 66-94 & 153-91 provides a useful
discussion of the history from a philosophical perspective.) In short,
the value of works of music was held to reside primarily in their
large-scale harmonic structure.



Jerrold Levinson (1997) makes a case against such
"architectonicism" in favor of
"concatenationism," the view that basic musical
understanding consists in following the musical and emotional
qualities of passages of music, and transitions between them, that are
short enough to be apprehended as a single experience
("quasi-hearing"). He qualifies this basic idea
considerably, allowing for the experience of previous parts of the
piece, and anticipation of future parts, to modify one's
experience of the music in the moment. He also allows that
architectonic awareness may play a role in enhancing one's
moment-to-moment experience, and may even play an ineliminable part in
the understanding of some pieces. Nonetheless, Levinson maintains that
the part played by architectonic knowledge in basic musical
understanding is minimal, and that the cases where architectonic
knowledge is necessary are very much the exception.



Peter Kivy has taken up the gauntlet on behalf of architectonicism
(2001; see also S. Davies 2011c: 95-9). While Kivy acknowledges
that the kinds of experiences Levinson champions are necessary to
basic musical understanding, he defends the idea that grasping the
large-scale form of most pieces of Western classical music, at least,
is necessary for an adequate understanding of them. He does not deny
that the experience of the form of a piece in listening to it is more
intellectual than quasi-hearing, but he rejects Levinson's
argument that it is non-perceptual, and thus marginal to an adequate
experience of it as music. Rather, Kivy argues, such experience is a
matter of bringing one's perceptions under sophisticated
concepts. (A tactic Kivy does not consider is an attempt to hoist
Levinson with his own contextualist petard, arguing that even if
architectonic listening is non-perceptual it is a well-established
mode of understanding pieces of music in the Western classical music
world, and thus that to argue music must be understood primarily
perceptually is to beg the question.)



The extent of the disagreement between the architectonicist and the
concatenationist is unclear. They agree that the aspect of musical
understanding the other emphasizes is a non-negligible component in
the full understanding of a musical work. Levinson has been explicit
since the first publication of his view that he intends it more as a
polemic against and corrective to architectonicism, rather than as a
replacement for it (1997: ix-xi; 1999: 485; 2006a). Perhaps that
purpose has now been fulfilled, but see Huovinen 2013 for a revival of
the debate and an attempted synthesis.


## 5. Music and Value


### 5.1 Music's Artistic Value



Most philosophical discussions of the value of music are implicitly
restricted to the artistic value of purely instrumental musical works.
To the extent that such discussions are motivated by the
abstract nature of such music (see below), it is not clear to
what extent they can be extended to musical hybrids such as song.
Moreover, as we saw in section 1.2, it is not obvious that all music
is art. Perhaps non-art music can be artistically valuable, but it
presumably has other values; a complete theory of the value of music
would apparently have to account for those values. (Presumably, art
music can also have non-artistic value.)



Following the literature, however, the remainder of this subsection
considers the artistic value of purely musical works. This is not the
place to go into the many disputes about the nature of aesthetic and
artistic value. (For an excellent introduction, see Stecker 2003b.)
For our purposes, we can note there are two central points about
artistic value on which there is some consensus. First, most
philosophers take the value of artworks to be intrinsic (or
inherent) to them, in the sense that the value of a work is
tied essentially to the experience that the work affords. Thus,
artworks are not (properly) valued merely instrumentally, as means to
some end, but "for" or "in" themselves (Budd
1995: 1-16; S. Davies 1987: 198-200; Scruton 1997:
374-6; Levinson 1992: 15-17).



The question that naturally arises next is what it is about the
experience an artwork affords that makes it valuable. That
*pleasure* is a non-negligible part of the answer to this
question is the second point upon which there is some consensus (S.
Davies 1987: 198-205; Levinson 1992; Kivy 1997b: 212-17).
However, concomitant with this consensus is an acknowledgment that
simple pleasure taken, say, in the sensuousness of the musical sounds
is too trivial to ground the great value widely attributed to music.
In looking for other sources, the puzzle that arises is that music is
supposed to be an abstract art, *par excellence*. If this means
that music is divorced from everything else that concerns us in the
"real world" (that is, extra-musical life), it is puzzling
why we should find so valuable the experiences musical works
afford.



There are a couple of dimensions to most solutions of the puzzle of
pure music's value. One is the extent to which it is agreed that
music really is abstract. To the extent that one thinks that music is
*not* divorced from the real world, one will be able to argue
that music's value is at least no more puzzling than the value
of arts more obviously related to the real world, such as literature
and representational painting and sculpture. The other dimension to
most solutions of the puzzle of pure music's value is the extent
to which one thinks the abstractness of music is the source of its
value. Thus, two theorists might agree on the extent to which music is
related to the real world (by being expressive, say), yet one locate
its primary value in that expressiveness while the other locates it in
its abstract, purely formal features.



Unsurprisingly, those who take the experience of music's
expressiveness to be a more intimately emotional one (through being
predicated on imaginative engagement with the music, say), tend to
emphasize that experience as more central to musical understanding,
and thus attribute a larger part of music's value to its
expressiveness. Those, on the other hand, whose theory of the
experience of musical expressiveness is more distanced (a matter of
noticed resemblance, say), tend to place less weight on this element
in their theories of musical value. At one extreme of this spectrum is
the position that denies music to be expressive at all, and thus
cannot attribute any of music's value to its expressiveness
(most notably Hanslick 1854; see also Zangwill 2004). Most theorists
agree, however, that music's value is to be located in different
kinds of experience, including the experience of formal and expressive
features; their disagreements are mostly about the relative weight of
these different kinds of experiences in a complete account of musical
value.



The extent of the disagreement between various parties to this dispute
is not clear. Those defending the value of music's
expressiveness tend to claim that its contribution to overall musical
value is significant, but many stop short even of according it primary
value, and do not argue against the value of formal elements of
musical works (Ridley 1995: 192-6; Levinson 1982, 1992:
20-2, 1996a: 124-5; Robinson 2005: 413; Young 2014:
150-4). They content themselves rather with pointing out the
ways in which expressiveness can be valuable, focusing largely on the
value of the emotional responses such expressiveness elicits in us.
These include many of the features discussed above with respect to our
interest in listening to music that arouses negative affective states
in the listener. To recap, our emotional responses to music's
expressiveness can enable us to savor, understand, and even (to some
extent) experience emotions in a "safe" way. They can
provide us with a cathartic release, and enable us to participate in a
kind of communication with the composer or communion with other
members of our musical culture (Levinson 1982, 1996a; Higgins 1991,
2012; S. Davies 1994: 271). Emphasizing this last point, Roger Scruton
argues that music's value is quasi-moral, in that the kinds of
music one responds to, or those valued in a particular culture,
reflect the state of that individual's or culture's
"soul" (1997: 380-91; see also S. Davies 1994:
275-6.) Stephen Davies (1987: 207-12) has argued that
there are beneficial consequences of an interest in music *in
general*, such as heightened emotional and aural sensitivity,
which are not properly valued as consequences of listening to
individual pieces, but which lead us to value musical culture as a
whole (just as we value kindness for its consequences in general,
while rejecting instrumental motivations for kind acts as
inappropriate).



By contrast, those who defend the value of formal features tend to
argue that the value of those features is primary, and that the value
of music's expressiveness is overrated. Peter Kivy, for
instance, argues that expressive properties serve merely to
highlight musical structure, as color might be used by the painter to
emphasize contour or mass. Other expressive properties serve as
structural properties in their own right (1990: 196). (See also
Sharpe 2000: 1-83, and Zangwill 2004.)



Alan Goldman (1992) argues against the idea that music is particularly
suited to the expression of emotion, claiming that representational
arts such as painting and literature are better at this. Moreover, he
disputes the grounds of the value of expressiveness given above. For
example, he denies that music can teach us much about the emotions,
and that we can savor our negative emotional responses to expressive
music. Similarly, after an extensive discussion of the nature of
musical expressiveness, Malcolm Budd argues that such expressiveness
cannot come close to explaining music's value (1995:
155-7). He points to the facts that much valuable music is not
expressive and that the equal expressiveness of different pieces would
be outweighed in a comparative evaluation by the differences between
them in terms of formal value.



Both Goldman and Budd locate the value of pure music precisely in the
abstractness that to some seems the greatest obstacle to explaining
that value. Budd (1995: 164-71) points out that we have an
extensive interest in abstract forms outside the realm of music, such
as those of natural formations and in the decorative arts, and that
such forms are capable of possessing valued aesthetic properties, such
as beauty, elegance, and so on. Thus, it is no surprise that we value
highly the works of an *art* of abstract forms. Goldman (1992),
by contrast, emphasizes the detachment from the world of practical
affairs implied by music's abstractness. The complexity of great
musical works demands the active engagement of our cognitive
faculties, which we find rewarding, yet not in the pursuit of some
practical goal that could be frustrated.



These issues are thrown into sharp relief in the debate over how
instrumental musical works could be "profound." See Kivy
1990: 202-18, 1997b: 140-78, 2003; Levinson 1992; White
1992; Ridley 1995, 2004: 132-65; S. Davies 2002b; Dodd
2014b.



There is no space here to discuss the evaluation of musical works and
performances. See S. Davies 1987, Levinson 1990e, and Gracyk 2011.


### 5.2 Music's Moral Value



There are musical aspects or elements of many uncontroversially
representational art forms, such as song. Jeanette Bicknell (2015:
81-91) and Aaron Smuts (2013) discusses the ethics of song
performance. But there has been little discussion, in the analytic
tradition, of the relationship between musical and ethical values (as
opposed to musical examples of more general ethical concerns, such as
cultural appropriation). Kathleen Higgins (1991, 2012) and Roger
Scruton (1997: 457-508) argue in very different ways that music
is - or should be - central to our thinking about ethics.
Garry Hagberg has explored many connections between improvisatory jazz
practice, ethics, and politics (2002, 2006, 2008, 2021; see also
Higgins 1991: 177). Peter Kivy (2008) argues against music's
capacity to affect our moral knowledge, behavior, or character.
Jerrold Levinson (2013: 51-5), Philip Alperson (2014), and James
Harold (2016) defend music's moral efficacy.



The debate over whether an artwork's moral flaws are artistic
flaws has focused almost exclusively on representational (especially
narrative) art forms. (Gaut (2007) offers an excellent overview.)
Music has largely been ignored because it has been assumed to lack
sufficient representational capacity to embody an attitude toward some
object. Maria Jose Alcaraz Leon (2012), however, argues
that music's emotional expressiveness is enough to apply
arguments about whether moral flaws are artistic flaws to pure
instrumental music. (For critical discussion, see Kania 2020:
254-5.) Musicologist Susan McClary argues that canonical works
of instrumental classical music oppress women by expressing a positive
attitude toward narratives of the subjection of feminine elements
(e.g., certain musical themes) by masculine ones. (See, for example,
McClary 1991: 19-23, 53-79; for critical discussion, see
Maus (2011).)