In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 17-29 [Access article in PDF] Intersections Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette These three concepts hold meanings that differ among musicians and aestheticians. In this essay I shall explore them in the writings of Susanne Langer. Contemporary musicians and aestheticians continue today to engage Langer albeit some favorably and others with disdain. Whatever their reasons, she (...) remains a dominant force in the philosophy of music.1 My purpose is not to defend her against her detractors, but rather to examine and to elucidate various aspects of these three concepts in her writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education.First, I consider the broad and complex notion of form and the various ways Langer employs it in her aesthetic theory. Next, the rather all-encompassing idea of feeling as Langer conceives it is studied in relation to the form of the musical work. The intersection of form and feeling in the concept of isomorphism concludes the discussion. [End Page 17] Form In her various writings Langer uses several adjectives associated with the word "form" which seem to organize well into three groups. The first concerns the dynamic, living, organic, and vital qualities of form; the second speaks to its logical and abstract nature; and the last relates to the emotional or feeling aspect of form including expressive and significant characteristics.2 These groupings overlap and intertwine, but focusing on each specifically rather than all as a totality offers important insights.Form as dynamic, living, organic, and vital suggests metaphorical reference. Obviously the form is not physically, biologically, alive; reference is to the apparent movement, growth, and aliveness of the musical form as it is heard or performed. Thus this idea of form implies an actual performance to be realized or perceived. Langer is sometimes criticized for giving little attention to the actual making of music, that is, performance, yet her theory assumes music as heard. Essential to perceiving a dynamic form or hearing a feeling is a processual event, namely, performance or listening to a performance. Rarely a professional musician or gifted amateur might be able to engage this concept of form by reading through a score and hearing the music in imagination.Dynamic form parallels Eduard Hanslick's notion of tonend bewegte Formen. One might object that Hanslick and Langer are in conflict as Hanslick opposes while Langer supports the conviction that form is expressive of feeling, but that is moving beyond the matter at hand and suggests a superficial reading of both Hanslick and Langer. Hanslick asserts emphatically that music's meaning is not the arousal of emotion but does not deny feeling in music; Langer holds the same view. But Hanslick allows that "the words content and form are used not in the purely logical, but in an artistic sense." To me this suggests that he recognizes a nonliteral or metaphorical interpretation. He writes about the relationship of musical tones as "fraught with significance... congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding-this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner contemplation and pleases us as beautiful." Certainly this parallels Langer's description of dynamic form.3 What is significant is that both philosophers are addressing the fluid, processual, active, movement-of-notes-through-time nature of musical form.The premise that forms are created by motion, are dynamic, is easily grasped by offering some examples. Fast cameras are able to take a series of photos of the movements of a pianist's hands giving still pictures of the moving forms created while performing a given passage.4 Alternately, forms are created by the movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light; they are, in effect, quite literally moving forms. Cartoon characters generate moving forms through the [End Page 18] use of many drawings or more recently by means of computer animation. Time is a dynamic or moving form which we divide into hours... (shrink)

This article reviews some of the ways in which philosophical problems concerning music can be informed by approaches from the cognitive sciences (principally psychology and neuroscience). Focusing on the issues of musical expressiveness and the arousal of emotions by music, the key philosophical problems and their alternative solutions are outlined. There is room for optimism that while current experimental data does not always unambiguously satisfy philosophical scrutiny, it can potentially support one theory over another, and in some cases allow us (...) to synthesize or reject traditional philosophical differences. (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

This paper examines the causal basis of our ability to attribute emotions to music, developing and synthesizing the existing arousal, resemblance and persona theories of musical expressivity to do so. The principal claim is that music hijacks the simulation mechanism of the brain, a mechanism which has evolved to detect one's own and other people's emotions.

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

Classic expression theory identified the emotional content of works of art with the feelings of the artists and the recipients. This content thus appeared to be external to the work itself. Consequently, formalism declared it to be irrelevant to a work’s value. A way out of this predicament – one which the Polish aesthetician Henryk Elzenberg (1887–1967) was among the first to propose – was suggested by the idea that physical, sensory objects can themselves possess emotional qualities. Thanks to Bouwsma (...) and Beardsley, this concept – of expressiveness as a quality – became common in Anglo-American aesthetics from the 1950s onwards. At the same time, these authors demanded that the term ‘expression’ be expunged from the language of aesthetics. But the widespread tendency to conceptualize the emotional content of art in terms of the expression of a certain subject (most often the artist) still requires some explanation – interpretation, rather than negation. One interpretation construes the expressiveness of works of art in terms of the expression of a fictitious subject, the ‘work’s persona’, conceived by Elzenberg in the 1950s and 1960s. This article discusses his concept and explains some of its more complex aspects, before addressing the emergence of a very similar concept within Anglo-American aesthetics. This concept was gradually elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s, but only in the 1990s did it become more fully developed and widely discussed. (shrink)

Klasyczne teorie ekspresji, identyfikując treści uczuciowe dzieła sztuki z przeżyciami twórcy czy też odbiorcy, zdawały się wyprowadzać je poza dzieło. W konsekwencji formalizm treści takie – jako wobec dzieła zewnętrzne – uznawał za obojętne dla jego wartości i istoty. Sposobem wyjścia z dylematu okazało się dostrzeżenie i uznanie istnienia jakości psychicznych w samych zmysłowo postrzegalnych przedmiotach, a jednym z prekursorów tej idei był Henryk Elzenberg (1937). Koncepcja taka – ekspresywności jako własności – stała się, począwszy od lat pięćdziesiątych, za sprawą (...) Bouwsmy i Beardsleya, szeroko akceptowana w estetyce amerykańskiej. Jednocześnie autorzy ci postulowali całkowite usunięcie terminu „ekspresja” z języka estetyki. Jednak powszechna skłonność do wiązania sztuki z ekspresją domaga się interpretacji. Dostarcza jej koncepcja ekspresywności jako ekspresji fikcyjnego podmiotu, opracowana znowu przez Elzenberga (1950/1960). Później podobne ujęcie wykształciło się w estetyce anglosaskiej, ale dopiero w latach dziewięćdziesiątych doczekało się satysfakcjonującej wersji, stając się koncepcją szeroko dyskutowaną. (shrink)

This article defends a persona theory of musical expressivity. After briefly summarising the major arguments for this view, it applies persona theory to the issue of whether music can express complex emotions. The expression of jealousy is then discussed by analysis of two examples from Piazzolla and Janacek.

This study examines the philosophical question of how it is possible to appreciate music aesthetically as an expressive art form. First it examines a number of general theories that seek to make sense of expressiveness as a characteristic of music that can be considered relevant to our aesthetic appreciation of the latter. These include accounts that focus on resemblances between music and human behaviour or human feelings, on music's powers of emotional arousal, and on various ways in which music may (...) be imaginatively construed by listeners. It argues that none of these are entirely satisfactory. Then it proposes an alternative account, focusing on what is involved when our appreciation of music as an expressive art is informed by our awareness of it as something that is expressively interpreted in performance. It is claimed that this offers the basis for a better understanding of at least some aspects of expressiveness in music and its relevance to aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)