On Music, Wine and the Criteria of Understanding

Abstract

According to an influential account of music, the listener's recognition of music's emotive character is a central criterion of her musical understanding. As the structural similarities between music and human emotive behavior do not unambiguously determine music's emotive character, the only available method of determining this character is to simply perceive it in the music. Appropriately backgrounded listeners should thus be not just well-versed in the specifically musical features of our musical system but also psychologically disposed to respond to music in an emotive way. In this paper, I argue that this view of musical understanding fails to account for the normative aspect of our notion of understanding. Given that there are no publicly shareable reasons to which one could appeal in order to justify or reject a given emotive attribution, we should read such attributions as nothing more than more or less illuminating comparisons between music and something else. Most importantly, emotive attributions should not be treated as criteria of musical understanding.