Songs that combine happy music and sad, violent, or morally disturbing lyrics raise questions about the relationship between music and lyrics in song, including the question of how such songs affect the listener, and of the ethical implications of listening – and perhaps singing along with – such songs. To explore those perplexing cases in which the affective impact of music and lyrics seem entirely incompatible, we first examine how song music – and the sympathetic musical affects it elicits – (...) can influence listener attention to lyrics. We propose that ‘happy’ music and mood in particular may discourage close attention to the semantic contents of lyrics in some cases, and impart a ‘positive glow’ to them in others. We also mine the kinds of moral questions to which emotional and imaginative immersion in fiction can give rise for their potential applicability to songs with disturbing narratives. We then explore how performance and performer may influence the understanding and interpretations of lyrics. This investigation of the complexities of such songs will use Tom Jones’ murder ballad “Delilah” as a template, taking into account both its impact and its presentation. (shrink)

Guy Rohrbaugh and Allan Hazlett have provided two arguments against the thesis that musical works are types. In short, they assume that, according to our modal talk and intuitions, musical works are modally flexible entities; since types are modally inflexible entities, musical works are not types. I argue that Rohrbaugh’s and Hazlett’s arguments fail and that the type/token theorist can preserve the truth of our modal claims and intuitions even if types are modally inflexible entities. First, I consider two alternatives (...) for the type/token theorist proposed in recent literature about the topic: the created types’ solution and the created abstract objects’ solution. I argue that none of them is attractive for the type/token theorist because they do not preserve the theoretical advantages of type/token theories to explain musical works’ repeatable nature. Then, I focus on the arguments’ common premise that musical works are modally flexible entities. A deeper analysis of musical practice will show that this premise is not true: our modal claims do not imply that musical works could have had different intrinsic but, instead, extrinsic properties. Finally, I show how the nested types theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact and how it captures the truth of our modal talk about musical works. (shrink)

In his article “Kant’s Musical Antiformalism” (Young 2020), with additional clarifications (Young 2021),1 James O. Young argues that Kant is an “antiformalist.”.

There are compelling reasons to believe that musical works are abstract. However, this hypothesis conflicts with the platitude that musical works are appreciated by means of audition: the things that enter our ear canals and make our eardrums vibrate must be concrete, so how can musical works be listened to if they are abstract? This question constitutes the audibility problem. In this paper, I assess Julian Dodd’s elaborate attempt to solve it, and contend that Dodd’s attempt is unsuccessful. Then I (...) discuss what I take to be the ideal response to the audibility problem, and show that it ultimately fails. I contend, consequently, that the project of construing musical works as audible is disheartening. Accordingly, in my last section, I will argue the audibility problem may be satisfactorily resolved without ascribing audibility to musical works. (shrink)

Summary The present paper introduces the theoretical conceptualization of perceptual communication through expressive qualities. Initially, the difference with respect to the modality of perceptual communication mediated by signs is analyzed. Conversely, the theory of expressive qualities reflects the psychological conception of direct perception: any assumption of a cognitive stage of representation is excluded. Perceptual communication immediately expresses the specific character of the structural essence of the object. The structural essence is well studied by the perceptual paradigms of Experimental Phenomenology. Plurivocity, (...) the case in which the same objects can share many expressive characters, is also considered. (shrink)

On offer here is a tradition-neutral way of understanding the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy of music. The distinction is drawn in terms of methodology, rather than content, by identifying contrasting methodological tendencies of each tradition—initial maneuvers that frame an investigation, which are related to one another insofar as they involve, or do not involve, two kinds of methodological detachment. These maneuvers are extracted through a consideration of contrasting pairs of examples. The pairs consist of an analytic and a (...) continental account of a core issue in the philosophy of music. The issues considered are musical experience, musical ontology, and the relationship between music and the emotions. The philosophers considered are Roger Scruton and Pierre Bourdieu, Jerrold Levinson and Lydia Goehr, Peter Kivy, and Andrew Bowie. (shrink)

This paper investigates what I call aesthetic emotions in the “traditional” sense going back to Burke and Kant. According to Kant, aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, and so maybe for Kant aesthetic emotions would be too, for Kant, but emotions by their very nature cannot be disinterested. After dismissing the idea that aesthetic emotions are a special kind of distanced emotions or refined emotions, I extract from the writings of Clive Bell, Peter Kivy, and Peter Lamarque the view that aesthetic emotions (...) are positive, pleasurable, consummatory emotions—emotions of appreciation—which are noninstrumental and which take as their intentional objects the intrinsic qualities of an artwork, more particularly, its formal interrelationships and the way that the overall formal structure of an artwork molds its content. (shrink)

We often use terms primarily concerned with the description of inanimate objects in order to characterize psychological states or dispositions, without being able to specify the connection between the two uses. I call this inanimation. In this paper, I propose an account of inanimation and of its connection to expressiveness.

In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped-down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I (...) conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs sports fans, we often experience what seem to be strong garden-variety emotions—everything from joy and euphoria to anger, dread and despair. In self-description, in physiology and even in phenomenology, these reactions to sporting events present themselves as genuine emotions. But we don’t act on these ‘sporting emotions’ in the ways one might expect. This is because these reactions are not genuine emotions. Or so I argue. Johan Huizinga suggested that play has a pretend ‘set aside’ ‘extra-ordinary’ character. And Kendall (...) Walton has argued that make-believe is involved in our emotional responses to fiction, as well as to sport. Here I articulate and extend the idea that sporting emotions centrally involve pretense and make-believe in ways that can meet some forceful objections. These extensions draw on a ‘double-consciousness’ I claim to find in the pretense of play. I end by saying why the proper characterization of our sporting emotions is important. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of the rich and insightful final chapter of Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression . There, Green seeks to elucidate the compelling, but inchoate intuition that when we’re fully and most expertly expressing ourselves, we can ‘push out’ from within not just our inner representations, but also the ways that we feel. I question, first, whether this type of ‘qualitative expression’ is really distinct from the other expressive forms that Green explores, and also whether it’s genuinely ‘expressive’. (...) I then scrutinize the nature of the ‘qualitative congruences’ that lie at the heart of Green’s theory; and I wonder whether they can play the role Green claims they can in providing a novel account of artistic expression. (shrink)

The mechanisms proposed in the target article are quite general and do not address variables specific for music. I argue that reactions to music include motivational mechanisms related to functions of music. To further the field, as the authors envision, consideration of internal mechanisms must be paired with specific hypotheses that include musical and musically relevant variables.

This article presents a new aesthetic of the improvised jazz solo, an aesthetic grounded in the premise that a solo is an act indivisible from the actor and the context. The solo's context includes the local and large-scale conventions of jazz performance as well as the soloist's other work. The theme on which a solo is based serves not as a “work,” but as part of the solo's stylistic context. Knowledge of this context inheres directly into proper apprehension of the (...) musical surface; it does not constitute a separate plane of appreciation. I begin by examining the improvisational error. This examination supports the position that the solo is an act, not a work. From this position, I detail a new aesthetic of the improvised solo, grounded in the soloist's virtues. In a successful solo, the soloist's actions display a balance of two aesthetic “virtues”: compositional skill and a commitment to the spirit of improvisation. Compositional skill manifests in a solo as coherence. The improvisational spirit manifests as courage, spontaneity, and related qualities. These virtues often come into conflict; each soloist negotiates this conflict differently. (shrink)

Philosophers since Plato, at least some philosophers, have, from time to time, seen music as an appropriate object of philosophical scrutiny. And, of course, in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche elevated music to a level of philosophical importance never reached before that time. But the marriage of music to philosophy ended in divorce at the close of the nineteenth century, and, as well, there occurred a sharp decline in the philosophical study of the arts tout court. However, with the (...) rise of interest in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, in the late 1960s, it was inevitable that philosophy and music should again enter into matrimony. And it is that remarriage, during the past thirty-five or so years, that I explore in the present article. (shrink)

Theorists have recently defended rival analyses of sound. The leading analyses reduce sound to sensations or mental representations, longitudinal compression waves, or sounding objects or events. Participants in the debate presuppose that because the features of the world targeted by these reductive strategies are distinct, at most one of the analyses is correct. In this article I argue that this presupposition is mistaken, endorsing a polysemy analysis of ‘sound’. Thus the ‘What is sound?’ debate is largely merely verbal, or so (...) I argue. All participants in this debate agree that there are the various reductions, they simply differ over which of them ‘is sound’. Yet there is no reason to think that, say, psychologists studying auditory sensations/representations, audio physicists studying sound waves, and anthropologists/ethnomusicologists studying sounding objects/events aren’t just studying different reductions of ‘sound’ despite the different explananda of their research. According to the polysemy theory of sound, we do not need to uniquely identify sound with one of these various explananda, outside of some context. (shrink)

The debate concerning the ontological status of musical works is perhaps the most animated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of music. In my view, progress requires a piecemeal approach. So in this article I hone in on one particular musical work concept – that of the classical Western art musical work; that is, the work concept that regulates classical art-musical practice. I defend a fictionalist analysis – a strategy recently suggested by Andrew Kania as potentially fruitful – and I develop (...) a version of such an analysis in line with a broad commitment to philosophical naturalism. (shrink)

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predominant way to approach theories formulated as conditional or biconditional statements. In this paper, we examine selected theories of musical expressivity presented in such logical forms, analyzing the possibilities for constructing thought experiments (...) against them. We will argue that philosophical intuitions are not available for the evaluation of the types of counterarguments that would need to be constructed. Instead, the evaluation of these theories, to the extent that it can succeed at all, will centrally rely on inferential, non-immediate access to our subjective musical experiences. Furthermore, attempted thought experiments lose their methodological function because no proper distinction can be drawn between the persons figuring in the thought-experimental scenario and the evaluator of the scenario. Consequently, some of the central contributions to what is generally understood to be analytic philosophy of art are shown to represent a form of aesthetic criticism, offering much less basis for rational argumentation than is often thought. (shrink)

In this article I show that although biological and neuropsychological factors enable and constrain the construction of music, culture is implicated on every level at which we can indicate an emotion-music connection. Nevertheless, music encourages an affective sense of human affiliation and security, facilitating feelings of transcultural solidarity.

Ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers alike were preoccupied with the moral value of music; they distinguished between good and bad music by looking at the music’s effect on moral character. The idea can be understood in terms of two closely related questions. Does music have the power to affect the ethical character of either listener or performer? If it does, is it better as music for doing so? I argue that an affirmative answers to both questions are more plausible than (...) it might seem at first. (shrink)

I give a brief overview of the major contentions and methodologies of my book, Self-Expression.

While it is widely accepted that music evokes moods, there is disagreement over whether music-induced moods are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music as such. The arguments against the aesthetic relevance of music-induced moods are: moods cannot be intentionally directed at the music and music-induced moods are highly subjective experiences and are therefore a kind of mind-wandering. This paper presents a novel account of musical moods that avoids these objections. It is correct to say that a listener’s entire mood (...) is not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. However, the experience of mood consists of having different feelings. Music induces feelings that are intentionally directed at the music and clusters of these feelings can be recognized as typical of a specific mood. Therefore, mood-feelings are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Myles Brand’s criticisms of what he calls the Standard View of the role and value of intercollegiate athletics. According to Brand, the Standard View, held by most faculty members, undervalues college sports and should be replaced by the Integrated View that properly stresses the educational value of participating in athletics. I claim that Brand’s analogical argument has a variety of problems. I show that Brand’s conclusion, derived from his attempt to compare the experiences of (...) student-musicians and student-athletes is unpersuasive, yet his argument forces us to confront persistent and important questions about liberal arts education and the role and value of the arts, especially music, in higher education. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

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 articles gives an overview of the main themes and arguments of _Self-Expression_ (OUP,2007; paper, 2011), and responds to some recent publications in which that book is discussed. In the process of these responses, the article provides refinements and elaborations on some of the book's central claims.

The communication of emotion in music has with few exceptions, as L. B. Meyer´s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) and the contour theory (Kivy 1989, 2002), focused on music structure as representations of emotions. This implies a semiotic approach - the assumption that music is a kind of language that could be read and decoded. Such an approach is largely restricted to the conscious level of knowing, understanding and communication. We suggest an understanding of music and emotion based on (...) action-perception theory - present moment perception, implicit knowledge and imitation. This theory does not demand consciousness or the use of signs. Neuroscientific findings (adaptive oscillators, mirror neurons) are in concordance with our suggestion. Recently these findings have generated articles on empathy – relevant to the understanding of music and emotion. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to account for expressions like “Cantor’s diagonal proof is elegant” or “Euler identity is the most beautiful formula of mathematics”. This type of expressions is common among mathematicians; however, they may result in two kinds of puzzled reactions: first, the non mathematician may find the use of the word ‘beautiful’ strange in this context. Second, the mathematician may try to reinterpret mathematical beauty in terms of the principles and precepts of mathematics itself. I present (...) an account of mathematical beauty that offers a way to avoid these puzzled reactions: mathematical beauty is just a type of “normal” beauty and no reinterpretation is necessary. To support this claim, I devise an aesthetic theory -by using insights and findings from experimental psychology, neurology, philosophical and psychological theories of emotion in art, philosophy of music and philosophy of science- that shows that aesthetic judgments in mathematics are genuine aesthetic judgments. (shrink)

Aaron Ridley posed the question of whether results in the ontology of musical works would have implications for judgements about the interpretation, meaning or aesthetic value of musical works and performances. His arguments for the conclusion that the ontology of musical works have no aesthetic consequences are unsuccessful, but he is right in thinking (in opposition to Andrew Kania and others) that ontological judgements have no aesthetic consequences. The key to demonstrating this conclusion is the recognition that ontological judgments are (...) a priori and aesthetic judgments are empirical. A priori judgements have no empirical consequences. Neither fundamental ontology of music nor higher- order ontological reflections have any aesthetic consequences. (shrink)

Kann Peter Kivys Theorie eines musikalischen Platonismus auch auf den Song "Rockstar" des deutschen Rappers Cro befriedigend, das heisst ohne Änderungen an der Theorie vornehmen zu müssen, angewendet werden, oder muss der musikal- historische Kontext mitberücksichtigt werden?

The current debate concerning musical profundity was instigated, and set up by Peter Kivy in his book Music Alone (1990) as part of his comprehensive defense of enhanced formalism, a position he championed vigorously throughout his entire career. Kivy’s view of music led him to maintain utter skepticism regarding musical profundity. The scholarly debate that ensued centers on the question whether or not (at least some) music can be profound. In this study I would like to take the opportunity to (...) relate Wittgenstein’s ideas on music to this current debate, thereby achieving a twofold goal: not only to reintroduce Wittgenstein’s ideas into the current debate, but also to use the current debate as a foil to better appreciating Wittgenstein’s otherness as a philosopher of music. I argue that Wittgenstein’s unique philosophical response to the Romantic framing of the discourse concerning musical profundity —specifically, its threefold emphasis on the specificity, aboutness, and artistically exalted status of music— occasioned a view, which was bound to be glossed over by a philosophical tradition, whose origins had made it inimical to Wittgenstein’s original philosophical insights. I conclude that, in a sense, Wittgenstein occasions a paradigm shift by his philosophical thrust to undo the gravitational forces which form the current debate: the very idea of aboutness pertaining to music, and the very idea that a clear line could ever be drawn between music and language. (shrink)

The present study is a theoretical discussion concerning some of the important processes that characterize human perception, which is understood as a fundamental structure of consciousness. The aim is to acquire new insights for a better comprehension of the human experience in the world and the way individual subjects become familiar with their environment. To accomplish this task, the experience of listening to music is analysed due to the widespread acceptance of music as an important aspect of human life. With (...) reference to a various research studies and hypothesis focused on the way listeners understand music, principles of perceptual organization which allow immediate awareness of music are investigated. Particular attention is given to studies in the field of music perception and cognition. Through an analysis of the main mental processes involved, the goal is to describe several relevant aspects of how listeners understand music at the perceptual level and constitute musical meanings in a subjective manner. This constitution results in a listener’s ability to become immediately aware of their auditory experience as having a specific meaning – that of being, first of all, a musical experience. Focusing on everyday experience and exposure to music, expectation and anticipation are presented as fundamental principles that contribute to the knowledge of the auditory environment and the meaning which acoustic events acquire for a subject. An in-depth analysis of their specific features will show the different influence expectation and anticipation have on a listener’s basic perceptual comprehension of music and in the constitution of musical meanings that are subjectively characterized. Within the framework of a theoretical investigation into human processes of musical knowledge acquisition, the additional objective is to create a dialogue between empirical research results in the field of music cognition and phenomenological descriptions of the structures of human consciousness. In particular, through clarification of the specific terminology that characterizes these two fields of research, the intent is to go beyond the historical gap which has existed between them. This combination of perspectives may increase our understanding of the way human beings know the world and learn how to react to the events which they encounter. (shrink)