THE VARIETIES OF MUSICAL EXPERIENCE1 Brandon Polite United States bpolite@knox.edu Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device.2 This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private.3 While this seems plausible when 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Ninth Cave Hill Philosophy Conference, held at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados in November 2013, and the Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics Conference, held in Budapest, Hungary in June 2014. I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers and audiences of both conferences, especially Ed Brandon and Alexander Kremer, as well as Knox College's Committee on Faculty Research for funding my travel to them. I also thank Krista Thomason and Eric Chelstrom for helpful comments on prior drafts of this paper. 2 See, e.g., Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In contrast to this trend, see, e.g., Kathleen Marie Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Philip Alperson and Noel Carroll, "Music, Mind and Morality: Arousing the Body Politic," The Journal of Aesthetic Education 42:1 (2008): 1–15; and Jesse Prinz, "The Aesthetics of Punk Rock," Philosophy Compass 9:9 (2014): 583–593. 3 Nick Zangwill, "Music, Essential Metaphor, and Private Language," American Philosophical Quarterly 48:1 (2011): 1–16, and "Listening to Music Together," British we consider the essentialists' paradigm case, Zangwill's conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One's body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly "musical"? I maintain that we should. Using the silent, motionless listener as the model, I argue, has in fact shaped the account of musical experience that essentialist philosophers of music have constructed. It is simply question-begging to assume that these other experiences are not properly musical just because they do not fit the essentialist model. In what follows, I show how our account of musical experience changes once we look at different ways of listening to and engaging with music. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience,4 I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life. The Limitations of Essentialism Zangwill's account of musical experience rests on a distinction between what we can call pure listening and impure listening.5 "[L]istening that has a social or political aspect," Zangwill writes, "is not really musical listening at all, but another kind of a listening, or it is a mix of proper listening and something else."6 This Journal of Aesthetics 52:4 (2012): 379–389. 4 Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 489; and Zangwill, "Listening to Music Together," 389. 5 This distinction has parallels in the theories of both Kant and Hanslick. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 153 (Ak. 5:271); and Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), 15, 50–54. 6 Zangwill, "Listening to Music Together," 382. Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 94 impure kind of listening is constitutive of experiences of music that are not properly musical. In contrast, when one experiences music purely, or acousmatically, one listens to it as if it were autonomous-that is, without regard for where, when, how, or by whom it is produced, or with whom it is heard. According to Zangwill, this is the only way to attend to and thus experience music properly, qua music. He writes, "[S]eeing music as a human product, as people playing instruments, achieving goals, and as historically and politically situated is all a misunderstanding and devaluation of the awesome elevation that musical experience can be."7 Because impure listening is responsive to more than music per se-particularly, to the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions within which the experience of music is usually situated and away from which pure listening abstracts-Zangwill denies that it is conducive to properly musical experience.8 Zangwill also deems the experiences of music afforded by impure listening impoverished compared with those that pure listening affords us. In his view, the sounds that musicians produce are not themselves music; instead, the aesthetically sensitive listener transforms those sounds' auditory properties into musical ones in the act of listening.9 To listen purely to those sounds is thus to musicalize them fully. By restricting one's attention solely to the auditory properties of the sounds to which one attends, one can appreciate their full aesthetic and thus musical potential. In contrast, various ways of listening impurely musicalize the sounds one 7 Zangwill, "Listening to Music Together," 389. He agrees with Scruton, who, in The Aesthetics of Music, writes: "The acousmatic experience of sound is precisely what is exploited by the art of music" (3). 8 Of emotions in particular, Zangwill, in "Against Emotion: Hanslick Was Right About Music," British Journal of Aesthetics 44:1 (2004): 29–43, exclaims: "[They] are a distraction from musical experience!" (33). 9 Zangwill, "Music, Metaphor, and Emotion," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:4 (2007): 391–400, 398. hears to comparatively lesser degrees. Attending to what oneself or others are doing during a performance (or while a recording plays), because it removes one's attention from the sounds one hears, does not allow their aesthetic properties to manifest fully. Because one does not experience the full musical potential of those sounds, one's experience is less than properly musical. If we were to accept Zangwill's distinction, then most of our experiences of music would not count as properly musical. Indeed, listeners in most of the world's musical traditions would likely never have had a properly musical experience and would be worse off as a result. To listen to music purely is to treat it as an end itself. But the ways that one listens to the music while attending a punk rock show, singing with friends along to a pop song on the radio, and dancing with a partner to swing music, to mention just a few examples, is bound up within other activities-such as dancing, singing, and socializing-and is directed toward ends beyond merely appreciating how the music sounds-such as working out one's aggression, reinforcing social bonds, feeling connected to the musicians, and dancing well. These other activities and concerns direct one's attention away from what Zangwill considers the proper object of musical listening: the aesthetic properties of the sounds they hear. The object of one's experience, therefore, is not the music itself, but the larger, social activity within which the music is a constituent. Since additional, nonmusical ends constitute the experiences of music that these examples describe, they are not properly musical by Zangwill's lights. Zangwill's view entails that for an experience of music to be properly musical we must remain wholly spellbound by the sounds we hear, our attention fixed upon and transfixed by their aesthetic properties. Anything that breaks the spell, that significantly shifts our attention away from the music and onto whatever the musicians, our fellow listeners, or we ourselves are doing, however momentarily, will produce a comparatively impoverished Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 95 experience.10 Consider the audience at a punk rock show. They do not attend exclusively to the music. They also attend to the spectacle it calls into existence: the sea of bodies set into tempestuous motion by the snarling performers thrashing away on stage. The audience also participates in that spectacle and, together with the band, co-constitutes it. All of this, combined with the nonmusical desires and goals that ground the audience's participation-to be in the band's presence, to hear a particular song live, to connect with their fellow fans, and so on-causes their listening to be impure and renders their experience less than properly musical. The musical element, it would seem, cannot be inalterably extracted from the other aspects of an audience member's experience of the concert, as it both transforms and is transformed by those other aspects. This appears also to be true, mutatis mutandis, of singing along to a pop song, swing dancing with a partner, and indeed of most of our experiences of music. In Zangwill's view, it consequently follows that one's body and the social situation within which one hears the music make no significant aesthetic contribution to one's experience of music, qua music. He thus considers properly musical experience to be effectively disembodied, occurring wholly within the private concert hall between one's ears. The cases just discussed contrast sharply with those in which concertgoers listen to the music being performed quietly, motionlessly, and perhaps with their eyes closed, such as a typical concert of classical music. Such cases are paradigmatic of properly musical experience, in the essentialists view, because it appears that everything but the sounds and the individual listener's responses to them can be eliminated from her experience of the music. But I contend that this appearance is deceiving. In the paradigmatically "pure" concert space, concertgoers deliberately cooperate with each other, in terms of not so much what they do overtly 10 Zangwill, "Listening to Music Together," 382. as what they refrain from doing. Refraining from acting in a given way is itself a type of acting. It is the exercise of self-restraint. The norms regulating the behavior of concertgoers within the classical and other musical traditions specifically require them to refrain from distracting each other and the performers. Concertgoers tacitly agree to listen stilly and silently to the sounds emanating from the stage and to respond overtly to them only after they have ceased sounding or at other sanctioned moments-e.g., at a jazz concert, after the solos. In other words, concertgoers respond to each other continually and systematically, although covertly- in line with norms prevailing within the relevant listening practice-in order not to distract and thereby prevent each other from having the sort of elevating experience of music that Zangwill considers to be particular to pure listening.11 Of course, concertgoers within these musical traditions sometimes do have occasion to correct other listeners, and even themselves, overtly during a performance should they transgress the prevailing norms. Someone having a coughing fit, e.g., will either be shushed or silently excuse herself. Individuals who are humming too loudly, or too vigorously tapping their toes, bobbing their heads, pretending to conduct, and so on, will be requested to restrain themselves or forced to leave. As rock musician David Byrne writes, specifically of the classical tradition: "Nowadays, if someone's phone rings or a person so much as whispers to their neighbor during a classical concert, it could stop the whole show."12 11 Zangwill, in "Listening to Music Together," writes: "Listening to music is an isolated and lonely encounter with another world, a disembodied world of beautiful sound, far from the world of human life. [...] Only by receding away from the human world, from the Other, can we go beyond humanity, to a world of pure music. To humanize music is to desecrate it. Music is inhuman, and awesome because of it, like stars in the night sky" (389). See also his "Against the Sociology of the Aesthetic," Cultural Values 6:4 (2002): 443–452, 448– 449. 12 David Byrne, How Music Works (San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2012), 22. See also Alex Ross, "Why So Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 96 When listeners actively engage with one another during such a concert, their attention will be diverted from the music in a way that will have an appreciably deleterious effect on their musical experiences. Zangwill's view is consequently correct in these cases. However, I argue that his view's correctness is limited to only these cases. Total stillness and silence, as Byrne notes, is demanded in classical (and other) performance venues so that listeners can attend to the "[the] quietest harmonic and dynamic details and complexities" of the music being performed.13 But not all music possesses such aesthetic properties. Punk rock, pop, and swing music rarely do. To dance to or sing along with such music does not necessarily distract one's attention from its salient aesthetic properties. Quite the contrary. By slam dancing to a punk song-i.e., by repeatedly hurling themselves into each other-those members of the audience embody its most salient properties: its raucous rhythm, aggression, and reckless abandon. Slam dancing can thus serve as a public manifestation of one's appreciation of punk music, qua music. It can also shape how one appreciates the music, as one's responsiveness to and pleasure in the aspects of the music one embodies is amplified, intensified, and modified by embodying them together with other fans in the band's presence.14 As a result, rather than providing an impediment to experiencing the music properly, qua music, as Zangwill would have it, the nonmusical features of the experience-most especially, one's active and reactive body-can positively contribute to it. This is not to say that every experience of which music is a part ought to count as properly musical. If the slam dancers at the punk show become too aggressive and Serious?" The New Yorker (September 8, 2008). 13 Byrne, How Music Works, 22. 14 In support of these claims, see, e.g., Joel W. Kruger, "Enacting Musical Experience," Journal of Consciousness Studies 16:2–3 (2009): 98–123, and "Doing Things with Music," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10:1 (2011): 1–22. unruly, they would certainly embody the aggression and reckless abandon of the song being played. However, their embodiment of these aesthetic properties would be largely coincidental to the music and, thus, unmusical. This is because they would be responding far more to each other than to the aesthetic properties of the sounds they hear, which would likely be on the furthest periphery of their attention. To slam dance musically, rather than unmusically, thus requires responsiveness to what is actually happening in the music-just as to sing along musically to a pop song on the radio requires one to stay mostly on key and in time with the music. As the preceding discussion indicates, Zangwill has a reasonable claim where one accepts his asserting something along the line that some people misjudge music on the basis of a misplaced attention on aspects of a performance other than the music itself. But his further assertion that attention on these nonmusical aspects is always misplaced, I argued, is false. Our bodies and social situations sometimes are constituents of a properly musical experience. Zangwill goes wrong specifically in assuming that because so-called impure listening encompasses more than what is essential to engender a properly musical experience that it necessarily affords us experiences that are less than properly musical. What it is to listen to and thereby experience music properly, I suggest, varies from tradition to tradition, genre to genre, and style to style. Proper musical attention depends primarily upon the norms regulating the listening practices within whatever tradition, genre, or style of music to which one happens to be listening. To slam dance at a punk show, dance with a partner to a piece of swing music, or sing along to a pop song, rather than purely listening to the music, does not necessarily mark a failure to treat the music properly, qua music. Instead, to respond to the music in overtly somatic, affective, and interpersonal ways is simply what it is to Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 97 attend to and thereby experience music of these types properly. Music in the Flesh Consider the case of swing dancing. To dance well together, a pair of swing dancers must be receptive and responsive to both the music and each other. Each dancer has the complex task of coordinating her bodily movements to certain of the music's salient aesthetic properties-for instance, the vivacity of its rhythm or the playfulness expressed by its melody-and to her partner's similarly coordinated movements. Audition, vision, proprioception, affective response, selfand other-awareness, and overt, often vigorous and sometimes technically demanding, bodily action are all integrally bound up within the dancers' shared activity. Swing dancing thus involves reacting somatically, affectively, and interpersonally to the sounds the musicians produce, rather than contemplating them disinterestedly as one who listens to them purely does. Zangwill recognizes that dancing to music well requires understanding and appreciating it as music. He further recognizes that dancers will often mirror the music's salient aesthetic properties in their bodily movements, which publicizes her musical understanding and appreciation.15 But he appears to reject what I take to be this claim's principal implication: that by mirroring a piece of music's aesthetic properties, dancers become appropriate site of properly musical attention. Because swing, similar to most dance music, most often lacks the subtler sort of aesthetic properties that demand pure listening to be appreciated-it is made to be danced to, after all-there is nothing, in principle, to prevent one from fully understanding and appreciating it while dancing to it. Listening to music, regardless of how purely or impurely one may do so, involves selective attention. One attends more closely to certain features 15 Zangwill, "Listening to Music Together," 388. of the sounds one hears than to others and, in doing so, musicalizes them more fully than those that have receded to the perceptual background. These latter features, of course, will modify how one hears the former ones. Dancing to music is similarly selective. A swing dancer may embody, e.g., the vivacity of a particular tune's rhythm more than she does the playfulness of its melody. Through embodying these salient aesthetic properties, the dancer becomes them for their duration. In responding in kind to her movements, her partner is thus responding to the music in the act of becoming it himself. To watch them dance together, therefore, is to watch the music come to life in a very real sense. A viewer can thus gain a deeper appreciation of the music than listening to it purely would likely afford. Of course, this is also-and especially-true of the swing dancers themselves. Since watching and responding to one another focuses their concentration upon and heightens their sensitivity to the aesthetic properties of the sounds to which they are dancing, the dancers' respective musical experiences will almost certainly be intensified and enriched. It is worth mentioning that while listening and dancing both involve selective musical attention, the process of selection will not always be consciously directed. It will more often be somatic or affective. Consider a listener at a classical concert being made aware by an annoyed neighbor that she has been tapping her toes for quite some time. Here, the music's rhythm and tunefulness are so compelling that they infect the listener, take possession of her foot-or, at the very least, animate it-and cause her to act in a way that she knows she ought not to act.16 Music can also be so infectious as to take full possession of one's body. This fact has been well known since at least the ancient Greeks. It is what 16 For more on musical infection, see Stephen Davies, "Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion," in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 134–148. Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 98 motivated Plato to place such severe restrictions on the sorts of music to which the citizens of his ideal city could listen. With most types of dancing, though, the aspects of the music the dancers embody is normally selected through the dialectical interplay of conscious direction and musical infection. This is especially true when some amount of choreography is involved and the dancers are well practiced, as is usually the case with swing dancing. As the dancers practice their routine together, their explicit propositional knowledge of how to move to the music is increasingly transformed into tacit bodily dispositions, which are activated by the music. The ultimate achievement would be to reach the point where, instead of needing to think about what movements they must execute to dance to the music well, the music will just flow through their movements. At this point, the dancers would be thinking through their bodies, as Richard Shusterman would put it, rather than with their heads.17 What is true of those who dance to music is also true, mutatis mutandis, of those who make music. Any musician worth her salt knows that she plays with her hands-or the body parts relevant to her instrument- more than she does with her head. She normally has to concentrate on what her hands are doing only when they flub a note or when the actions they must execute are especially technically demanding. Similar to dancing, playing music need not distract a musician's attention from the music she (and her fellow musicians) produce in such a way that, as Zangwill would have it, her experience is rendered less than properly musical. It simply depends on the particular sort of music that she is playing. For instance, she might not be able to both play trumpet in a symphony orchestra performing Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and also attend to the most subtle and complex aesthetic properties of the sounds that she and the rest of the orchestra are 17 Richard Shusterman, "Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics," Journal of Aesthetic Education 40:1 (2006). producing. But this would be possible with many other pieces of music across a wide variety of traditions, genres, and styles-especially those lacking the subtler and more complex aesthetic properties that most classical music possesses.18 Similar to a dancer, a musician can embody the salient aesthetic properties of the music she produces and have a deeper, more intense musical experience as a result. Her body can also become an appropriate site of properly musical attention for those of us in the audience. Think of the grimacing bluesman, the thrashing punk guitarist, the possessed fiddler or jazz trumpeter, and the impassioned diva. Rather than causing our experience to be less than properly musical, as Zangwill claims it must,19 attending to the drama of the musician or musicians on stage and bearing witness to the thought and feeling they pour into the music opens us to aspects of the music we might have missed had we been listening purely, leading to a deeper, richer musical experience than we otherwise might have had.20 Not only do we feed off of the musical energy that 18 To take another example, there is nothing, in principle, to prevent the experience of singing along with others to a pop song on the radio from being a properly musical one. The object of aesthetic attention in this case is not the studio recording itself, but instead the music the singers are producing together with it. These individuals are effectively accompanying the singer on the recording, and the object of their musical attention is, for better or worse, the resulting aesthetic whole. 19 Zangwill, "Against Emotion," 33. Compare to Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 48–49. 20 Vincent Bergeron and Dominic Lopes, in "Hearing and Seeing Musical Expression," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78:1 (2009): 1–16, similarly argue that the mixture of pure listening with the various so-called "impure" modes of attending to music often enhances our musical experiences, especially by making us more sensitive to music's emotional properties. This point appears to have been confirmed by Chia-Jung Tsay, "Sight over Sound in the Judgment of Music Performance," PNAS 110:36 (2013): 14580–14585. Tsay's research demonstrates that, when asked to judge which of a number of performers won a given music competition, "both expert and novice listeners privilege visuals above sound, the very information that is explicitly valued and reported as core to decision making in the domain of music" (14583). Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 99 musicians often exude. Musicians in many folk and popular traditions just as often feed off the energy we give back to them through our overt shows of our musical understand and appreciation. As a result, musician and audience can reciprocally elevate each other's musical experiences. In bobbing our heads, dancing, and so on, to the musicians' activities and their sonic results, we similarly embody some of the music's salient aesthetic properties. With smooth jazz, one sways with the musicians to the groove; with hot jazz and swing, one dances vigorously in time with the bass, brass, and drums; with blues, one taps one's feet and moves one's head along with the guitarist's fingers, often grimacing empathetically to the pain she wrings from the strings; with heavy metal, one bangs one's head together with the guitarists; with rock, pop, and hip hop, one sings along with the singer during the chorus; and so on. As attentive audience members responding to and embodying the music in these ways, we show our appreciation not just of the music, but also for the musicians for affording us the opportunity to experience it, in two senses of appreciation: the first aesthetic, the second interpersonal. In doing so, our musical experience appreciates in a third, axiological sense of that term: its aesthetic value increases. These three senses of appreciation cannot be separated as easily as Zangwill and other essentialists believe they can be. Finally, consider the music director, conductor, or bandleader: an individual of whom Zangwill makes no note, but who is usually given a position of prominence in the listener's visual field at classical and some jazz concerts. The music director's role is not merely to direct the (other) performers' actions. She also directs the audience to concentrate upon certain aesthetic properties as the musicians produce them. She does so both by gesturing to the site of their production in the band or orchestra and by mirroring with her baton or hands the properties those musicians are producing- the melodic flow, the rhythmic pulse, the dynamic swell, and so on. By embodying aspects of the music, the music director becomes them for their duration and is thus an appropriate site of musical attention. From watching the music director alone, one can get a minimal sense of what is going on in the music. This is also true of the musicians she directs, especially of a featured soloist, whose physical separation from the rest of the band invites listeners to pay careful attention to both the actions she performs and their sonic results. In general, there is little apart from the willful exertion of self-restraint to prevent a musician from embodying salient features of the music they make. Where selfrestraint is not exercised, the musicians become proper sites of musical attention. There is also little apart from closing our eyes that can prevent those of us in the audience from witnessing the musical drama unfold on the stage. As a result, the musical experiences we have in most classical concerts halls and many jazz halls, which are paradigmatic sites of pure listening in Zangwill's view, can be fuller-bodied than he and other essentialists allow. Moreover, I suggest that we ought to allow these musical experiences to be at least somewhat fuller-bodied than the current listening practice, which traces back to the late nineteenth century, allows them to be.21 This is because, as I have argued, (first) attending to aspects of the performance other than just the sounds can enable us to concentrate more fully upon the aesthetic properties of the sounds we hear, and (second) embodying some of those properties ourselves-by gently tapping our toes, softly swaying or bobbing our heads, and so on-can deepen and intensify, if even just slightly, our understanding and appreciation of them.22 21 For an in-depth examination of the history of the current listening practice within the classical (and bebop jazz) tradition, see Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840– 1910 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). 22 On the likely multimodality of musical experience, see Bruce Nanay, "The Multimodal Experience of Art," British Journal of Aesthetics 52:4 (2012): 353–363. On the advantages of seeing a performance live, rather than just listening to a recording through speakers or headphones, see Christy Mag Uidhir, "Recordings as performances," British Journal of Aesthetics, 47:3 (2007): Pragm at ism Tod ay Vo l . 5, I ssu e 2 , 2014 TH E VA R I E T I E S O F MU S I C A L E X P E R I E N C E B r a n d o n P o l i t e 100 Conclusion In the first section, I demonstrated the limitations of essentialism with respect to musical experience through a critique of a recent, sophisticated, and compelling instance of the view-namely, that of Nick Zangwill. In the second section, I explored the implications of one part of that critique: that certain ways of listening to music involve the embodiment of its aesthetic properties in human action. Throughout this discussion, we noticed the varieties of properly musical experience; the body's centrality within them, as well as its own musical possibilities; the role of emotions, and the way the audience and musicians can feed off of each other and enhance each other's musical experiences. Ultimately, what we noticed is pure listening is not the only mode of attention productive of intense and aesthetically valuable musical experiences. 298–314. My aim in this paper has not been to argue that we cannot, in principle, have the sort of musical experience that Zangwill claims is properly musical-even if I did suggest that we might not want to have them. My central claim, instead, has been that a theory of music ought to make sense of our actual lived experiences with music, in all their variety, and capture the ways in which they can rightly be said to be musical. But with the possible exception of those afforded by pure listening, Zangwill's view does not satisfactorily capture our musical experiences. Contrary to Zangwill and others, there simply might be no single set of features essential to every properly musical experience. Instead, a wider set of features, at least some of which must be present in the way an individual attends to a given piece of music, might be constitutive of properly musical experiences.23 The investigation into what those features might be, however, must be left for another occasion. 23 It might even be the case that the object of a properly musical experience need not be music. That is, an individual could possibly have a properly musical experience in the complete absence of musical sound- e.g., while viewing a painting by Wassily Kandinsky or Stuart Davis, watching a music-less dance performance, reading a Thomas Mann novel, or enjoying a meal or a walk through the woods. While consistent with my view, and highly suggestive, I do not have space to examine this possibility in this paper.