Since Philip Alperson’s 1994 anthology What is Music, there have been surprisingly few good philosophy of music anthologies in the analytic tradition available, much less ones that are as richly satisfying as this one. Ten papers, mostly new, cover four areas of this sizable subfield of the philosophy of art: ontology, expression, meaning, and ‘new issues.’ Many of the authors will be well known to readers of the genre, and even though much ground will be familiar, this is not a mere rehash of worn out old doctrines. In the preface, Kathleen Stock claims that the book represents “some of the best new work in what is an exciting field of research” and I found this to be true.

It should be made clear that this is not a book for newcomers to the field, though I suppose if one were motivated enough, and willing to do some background reading while reading this book, one could work through it, as all the pieces are well-written. However, many papers here delve into details that might be opaque to the novice. (It should also be mentioned that ‘music’ here is meant to refer to music without words; it is called ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ music in the literature.)

A case in point is the very first paper in Part I: “Musical Ontology.” Here, in “Sounds, Instruments, and Works of Music,” Julian Dodd defends timbral sonicism: the claim that what constitutes a musical work are its sonic properties alone, including its timbral properties. (The word ‘timbre’ refers to that feature of a sound characteristically produced by a particular instrument. So an oboe produces a tone in a particular way, and a flute produces that same tone in a different way.) The rival position is instrumentalism: the claim that a musical work’s constitutive properties are the sonic ones and must be produced by the instruments the composer specifies in the score. So for the instrumentalist, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier must sound a certain way, must have particular timbral properties, and those sounds must be produced by a piano. For the timbral sonicist, the work must have all the same sound properties the instrumentalist insists on, but those sounds could be produced by a Perfect Timbral Synthesizer. Thus, a complete list of Hammerklavier’s properties would leave out the need for the use of the particular instruments appearing on Beethoven’s score, and include only the sonic properties (including the timbral ones).

Dodd’s argument begins with the claim that our experience of music is acousmatic. Coined by Roger Scruton in his 1997 book The Aesthetics of Music, this term refers to the way we apparently hear music by attending to the sounds themselves, apart from their causal origin. So to hear a work of music acousmatically is to attend to the pitch, rhythm, melody, and harmony, and not attend to the person or persons playing the work. Dodd argues that our intuitions drive us to regard music ontologically this way so much that we should consider sonicism “the default position” (33).

Indeed, if one’s starting point is acousmaticism, it does appear prima facia that including performance means properties doesn’t make intuitive sense. However, this starting point might seem dubious on closer inspection. What Dodd’s and Scruton’s theories leave out is precisely what is crucially important to understanding music: music is produced by people. While it is true that contemporary conventions tend to dictate that pure (classical) music is a free-floating, disembodied sound entity, this may be because our ‘intuitions’ have been formed by those conventions, rather than the other way around. Dodd’s timbral sonicist account is a very persuasive theory if we assume that music is to be treated in this way, but Dodd’s many fine arguments (which I do not have space to do sufficient justice to here) rest on a mistake in my view, and one that many ontologists of music fall into: they leave human beings out of the ontology of music.

This curious assumption, that music should be regarded as entirely independent of human makers, is one that is shared by all the authors of this book. In order not to grind any axes here, I will leave this point aside, and continue to canvas each of these interesting articles on their own terms.

A type/token theory of musical ontology, holds that a musical work is a type, and performances are tokens of that type. Think of a type as a kind of ideal that correct tokens must conform to. In “Doing Justice to Works of Art,” Michael Morris argues that the type/token theory of music is incorrect, because to understand a musical work as a type is to hold that works of music are discovered (because types are universals, and so are ordinarily regarded as eternal), not created. Thus, if music is a type or universal, this means that it must be eternal, and hence, discovered, not created. But if works are discovered, Morris argues, it doesn’t make sense to say that they are “there to be understood.” Only created things have the teleological feature of ‘being there to be understood,’ so musical works must be particulars, not universals (i.e. types). Something can only be interpreted, or ‘be there to be understood,’ if it was created. So anything that was not created cannot have this interpretationable feature. Responding to the objection that natural scientists may coherently believe they are treating the world (assuming it was not created) as there to be understood, he counters that this sense of understanding is like the cleaner who regards the dirt as ‘there to be cleaned,’ a result of being oriented to the world in a certain way, induced by their occupation. In a similar way, unless one holds that the natural world was created, the natural world is ‘understood’ only in the sense induced by the occupations of those doing the understanding.

In “Versions of Musical Works and Literary Translations,” Stephen Davies argues that when a composer changes any of the constitutive elements of a work after the time of its initial completion, but without creating a new work, this work should be termed a work ‘version.’ The terminology that Davies recommends seems helpful, but I’m not sure if building the caveat ‘without creating a new work’ will bear close scrutiny without seeming question-begging.

In Part II of the book, “Musical Expression,” the authors tackle one of the most notorious philosophy of music questions: “What is expression in music?” With such an immense literature on the subject available proposing so many competing variations on different theories (e.g., expressivist, arousalist, persona, etc.), it is probably advisable to narrow one’s focus on small parts of the bigger question. This is what the three writers in this section have done.

The first of these, Derek Matravers, in “Expression in Music,” uses an interesting strategy to defend his arousalist position. He diverts our attention from the question ‘how can music be sad,’ to a question that seems more answerable: ‘what might one mean when one says that the music is sad.’ So far so good. But he then goes on to claim that this latter question is equivalent to the question ‘what is someone experiencing such that they make the claim the music is sad.’ In other words, the place to look for an answer to the initial question is in the phenomenal state of the speaker. This is a perplexing move. When I say of Brie, ‘Brie is sad,’ would the best approach to understanding what I mean be the following: ‘to understand what Phil is saying, let’s examine Phil to see what he is experiencing’? No. What Matravers claims here, without much in the way of argument, amounts to saying that in emotional ascriptions, the right question to ask is one of the speaker, not of the object spoken of. This doesn’t seem correct in people, and it doesn’t seem correct in music. When we ascribe music as ‘sad,’ we are saying something about the object, music, and I think it is correct to look for the answer there rather than in the listener.

Paul Boghossian’s “Explaining Musical Experience” begins with a similar assumption, that our apprehension of expressiveness in the music is to be explained apart from any intentions in the performer or composer. But where Matravers thinks we should look at the experience of the listener, Boghossian thinks we should look at the musical properties, which he argues are in the sounds themselves. Arguing against the view by Scruton — that musical expression is found in musical meaning which is metaphorical, in that it is not a property of musical sound — Boghossian maintains that sounds cannot be metaphors, since it is essential to metaphors that they be intentional, and the unintentionality of music is an obvious feature of absolute music. Boghossian ends up favoring Stephen Davies’ view, that ‘music is expressive in virtue of sounding the way people sound who are undergoing that emotion.’ One might come away wondering why Boghossian doesn’t consider the intentionality of the composer and performer as being relevant to his discussion.

In any case, Aaron Ridley’s claim in “Persona Sometimes Grata” is that music is expressive in some music in virtue of the listener constructing an imaginative persona who is expressing that emotion. Imagine a weeping willow that we see as ‘sad,’ Ridley proposes. Are we seeing the tree as sad because we anthropomorphize it, or are we anthropomorphizing it because we see it as sad? Ridley holds that the answer to this question is not obvious, and this leads him to say, in effect, that ‘it depends.’ But though Ridley appears just as inclined to accept that ‘expressive attributions to the features lead us to anthropmorphize’ as he is to accept the claim that ‘anthropomorphizing leads to the expressive attributions to the features,’ I think he is too kind to the former view. How could one find features of something sad — drooping faces of animals, say — without anthropomorphizing them?

Part III of the book, “Musical Meaning,” explores metaphor and irony in music. In Jenefer Robinson’s article, “Can Music Function as a Metaphor of Emotional Life?” the author argues that in order to understand many of the nuances a work has to offer we must resort to metaphors. After discussing a theory of metaphorical meaning proposed by Nelson Goodman, and criticisms of that view by Stephen Davies, Robinson argues that in order to understand the music of a given historical period we have to understand which metaphors are structuring works written in that period. For instance, to fully apprehend the expressive qualities of Haydn’s string quartets, we have to regard these works as ‘civilized conversations,’ with instruments being ‘good natured,’ and ‘interrupting each other.’ Without hearing music in terms of the metaphors that structure them, we will miss important details.

In “The Structure of Irony and How it Functions in Music,” Eddy Zemach and Tamara Balter scrutinize irony using modal analysis. In their view, irony occurs when a possible situation is compared to the actual one, and the possible situation is qualitatively better than the actual one. If Joe is stupid, and I say ‘Joe is wise,’ I am being ironic because I am directing your attention to a possible situation where it is true that Joe is wise, and implicitly suggesting that you compare that possible situation to the actual situation where Joe is stupid. According to the authors, this brings out the ‘biting’ character of irony. It is hoped that when you compare the possible world where Joe is wise to the actual world where Joe is stupid you will grasp the “ludicrous deficiency of the real situation” (181). In music, listeners anticipate structures that can be satisfied or disturbed depending on the piece’s actual content. Irony occurs when an actual musical passage runs counter to expectations in ways that reflects badly on an expected passage. This difference between the two situations can create a mocking attitude toward the actual passage; a tension that reveals the actual passage as being deficient.

“New Issues,” Part IV of the book, examines topics that fall a bit out of the mainstream debates. In “Music and Electro-Sonic Art,” Gordon Graham examines the ‘redundancy argument’ at some depth. This argument holds that if the value of music is extra-musical, then the music itself is in principle dispensible. This leads to a brief exploration of the value of ‘sonic art.’ Sonic art is organized sound, so it satisifies most definitions of music. But unlike the so-called ‘atonal’ music of Schoenberg or Skryabin, — who both, after all, often used tones in unconventional ways — truly atonal music, like that of Varèse and Lutoslawski, are very different. Such sound, and especially the digital music that has evolved as a result of the influence of these pioneers, often doesn’t depend on tones at all. In fact, there is no gap between composition and performance; technology determines the performances. As a result, without the possibility of multiple performances of the same work, there is no interpretation, which limits the listener’s options in how to engage with it.

If Graham appears to be less than sanguine about the possibility of satisfying aesthetic experiences of electro-sonic art, Roger Scruton argues, among other things, that modern pop music actually disposes of music’s rhythm altogether. He argues that musical experience requires us to pay attention to spatial features of music, features that are provided by attending to the patterns of the tones we hear. Rhythm, then, is heard as a result of a certain phenomenology one experiences of the music. Somewhat couterintuitively then, real musical rhythm doesn’t depend on external sources like drumming and other explicit percussion. In fact, in music that is very beat-heavy, such as modern dance or rock music, this natural connection between much music and speaking and moving is lost when all of the emphasis is on the metre rather than on harmony and melody.

This book is a welcome addition to the debates in this lively field, and there are many fine musical examples as well. Though a great read for analytic aestheticians, Philosophers on Music will be challenging for any but the most patient and persistent beginners to the area. One will find a great sampling of the tremendous scope and variety of views, though some do, again, make assumptions about music that may seem puzzling to the ordinary listener. Even if some of the claims and arguments here tend toward the hair-splitting variety, this volume will encourage creative thinking and foster new appreciation of music in the Western classical tradition, as well as appreciation of some of the more modern music that is a response to it.

 

© 2010 Phil Jenkins

 

Phil Jenkins, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Marywood University, PA.