Music and Aesthetic Reality

Formalism and the Limits of Description

Nick Zangwill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135105082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature of musical experience, and philosophy of language issues about the metaphorical nature of aesthetic descriptions of music.

Among the innovations of this book, Zangwill addresses the limits of literal description, generally, and in the aesthetic case. He also explores the social and political issues about musical listening, which tend to be addressed more in continental traditions.

Part I
Music and Emotion

1 Against Emotion

Hanslick Was Right about Music

Should we understand music in terms of emotion? I agree with Eduard Hanslick:¹ The answer is ‘no’. Let me count the ways that there is no essential connection: it is not essential to music to possess emotion, arouse emotion, express emotion or represent emotion. Music, in itself, has nothing to do with emotion.

This negative thesis is restricted to absolute music (music with no nonaesthetic purpose). What is called ‘programme’ music can involve emotion if it is intended to be heard in the light of some narrative that expresses, arouses or represents emotion. And in a song, words may express, arouse or represent emotions. But both are different from the way in which absolute music has been thought to involve emotion.

My targets in this chapter are restricted to what I call ‘literalist’ theories, which invoke the existence of genuine emotion. There are theories that propose that in musical experience, we imagine music as somehow connected with emotions without real emotions being in play. Roger Scruton and Jerrold Levinson have proposed theories of this sort, and I offer objections to these views in other chapters.² The theories I criticize in this chapter postulate some real relation between music and genuine emotion. I will argue that Hanslick was right in his negative critique of literalist emotion theories of music. I will wait until later chapters to argue in favour of his positive view that beauty in music “consists simply and solely of tones and their artistic combination” (Hanslick 1986: 28).³

In this chapter, I restrict myself to defending Hanslick’s negative claim that it is not the essence of (absolute) music to possess, express, arouse or represent emotion. This is either because music does not and cannot do any of that or because when it does, it is inessential to the music and only does so because of what the music is, quite apart from any such relation to emotion.⁴

§1. Possessing Emotion?

Let us start with the simplest case, the possession theory, even if no one has actually held it. I shall argue—and I think this is quite easy—that it is not possible for music itself to have emotions. It might seem that I am cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, but in fact this will prove worthwhile when we turn to deal with harder nuts.

In order to pursue the issue, we must make some preliminary comments about the nature of emotion. The truth is that the emotions are not well understood. There seem to be an unruly range of them, perhaps with no natural unifying principle. However, it is not too controversial to say that many central cases of emotion have both an intentional content (they are about something)⁵ and a qualitative or phenomenological aspect (they are felt). These emotions lie in the intersection of intentional and qualitative states (unlike beliefs and pains). There is an issue about whether all emotions are like this. Perhaps some are phenomenological but not intentional, and perhaps some are intentional but not phenomenological. But, as we shall see, we need not worry too much about this issue about generality, because the emotions in question in the philosophy of music are for the most part emotions with both a phenomenological aspect and an intentional content, and not those emotions, if there are any, that are purely phenomenological or purely intentional. I shall stipulate that emotions have an intentional content—they are directed either at a state of affairs or an object. This excludes contentless moods—I deal with moods separately in section 3 of this chapter. This stipulation will not beg any questions.

Let us have some examples of emotional descriptions of music. Much classic flamenco is anguished; much brass band bullfighting music is proud; the steel guitar of Hank Williams’s country and western songs is mournful; and passages of the first movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony are angry.⁶ Anguish, optimism, pride, mournfulness and anger are all sophisticated, intentional emotions and not mere sensations or moods. This is part of our folk psychological conception of these emotions.

Folk psychology—that is, our commonsense conception of mental states—tells us not merely that the sort of emotions I am focusing on are propositional attitudes with a qualitative aspect but also that they stand in certain essential rational relations to other propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. When I say that propositional attitudes stand in essential rational relations, what I mean is that it is essential to a propositional attitude being the type of propositional attitude that it is (belief, desire, hope or fear, for example), that it is rational or irrational to have that propositional attitude given other propositional attitudes or that having that propositional attitude makes it rational or irrational to have other propositional attitudes (Zangwill 1998a, 2005, 2010). For example, it is irrational to feel pride unless one believes there is something good about what one is proud of; and fearing something rationalizes avoiding it. (These norms are ‘pro tanto’ rational norms—that is, they can be outweighed by other rational norms and indeed by norms of other sorts.) There are established debates over the rational properties of belief and desire but not as yet over emotion. It is not clear that we know what the issues are yet. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that emotions, as we conceive of them in folk psychology, do stand in essential rational relations to other propositional attitudes.

Given the foregoing, it is easy to see that emotions cannot be possessed by music. Emotions must be felt by a rational being—that is, a bearer of propositional attitudes that stand in rational relations. But a piece or stretch of music—whatever it is—is not a being with propositional attitudes that stand in rational relations. So music cannot literally feel emotions such as sadness. That is the easiest and quickest anti-emotion conclusion.⁷

Not much progress, you might think. But it is because the possession theory is so implausible that many reach for a relational view to the effect that music expresses, arouses or represents emotion. On a relational view, it is not that the music itself is sad or whatever. Rather, the music stands in some relation to sadness. In John Searle’s terms, music has ‘derived’ rather than ‘intrinsic’ emotional intentionality (Searle 1983). The trouble is that to reach for a relational expression, arousal or representation theory is already to put some distance between the theory and the data to be explained. For it seems that what we describe when we describe music in emotional terms is something in the music. To move to an arousal, expression or representation theory is likely to take one too far away from this. For when we hear music, we hear it as itself possessing the (nonrelational) properties that we describe in emotional terms. This is a problem for all indirect theories. The possession theory, for all its glaring faults, does better at respecting this phenomenology. Music has no mental states, so it is not itself mournful, anguished or optimistic. But it does seem that the music itself has intrinsic features that we are talking about when we describe it in these terms. It does not seem that we are talking about some relation that the music stands in. So, despite its obvious flaws, the possession theory does have something important going for it.⁸

§2. Arousing Emotions?

Is it essential to music to arouse emotions or to have the function of arousing emotions? Many theorists say that it is. However, folk psychology also rules out thinking of the immediate experience of music as an emotion that has the music as its object. Folk psychology says that emotions have certain essential rational relations to beliefs and desires. Suppose we describe some music as proud—for example, ‘El Gato Montez’ (the most famous Spanish brass band bullfighting tune). Think of the experience of that music. The intentional object of that experience is the quality of the music that prompts us to describe it as proud. It is easy to see that this experience cannot be the emotion of pride. For pride must be rationally related to the belief that one has some meritorious property or that one is related somehow to something that possesses some meritorious property.⁹ One is proud of possessing that property or of being related to something that possesses that property. But the experience of the property of the music that we describe as proud is not so related to such a thought. It is not required that one has such a thought about oneself when one experiences the music. So the experience is not pride.¹⁰

It is crucial to hold on to the fact that our state of mind when we listen to music has the music as its intentional object. (For this reason, I find it peculiar when aestheticians appeal to the idea that we have ‘objectless emotions’ when we hear music.) On many theories, there is a danger of losing the idea that musical experience is directed onto the music. This is a point that I frequently find myself wanting to make when reading the literature on musical expression. The tendency among some writers seems to be to focus on anything but the music itself and our experience of it.¹¹ It is almost as if they fear the music! We need to redirect our focus to the music itself and to the fact that our experience is of the music itself.

Given that almost all emotions, like pride or fear, have intentional objects other than the music, in so far as we are having such emotions when listening to music, we are not listening to or thinking about the music. We are thinking about what the emotions are about instead. The object of such emotions is not the music. Such emotions are a distraction from musical experience!

Of course, it cannot be denied that we sometimes feel emotions while listening to music. The music may remind us of some emotionally charged event. Perhaps it makes us sad by reminding us of something that once made us sad. But in this purely causal sense, sad music can make us happy and happy music can make us sad. Sad music sometimes makes us sad and sometimes makes us happy, and happy music sometimes makes us happy and sometimes makes us sad; but little of interest hangs on that. The same goes for the feelings of those who make music. The fact that they are sad might cause them to make sad music. But it also might not. It might also cause them to make happy music. How better to counteract the sadness?! These causes and effects are irrelevant to the essential nature of music—to what music is.¹²

This point about music being the intentional object of the immediate experience of music is related to the following substitutability point. When it is said that music arouses emotions, we need to ask whether something quite different could arouse the same emotions. If the arousal is a purely causal matter, then the answer will be ‘yes’. But then the music is a replaceable cause of the experience, and we have lost the idea that the experience necessarily has that intentional object. But if the intentional object of the experience is the music itself, then the music itself is not a replaceable cause. That experience could only be produced by that particular piece of music, or at any rate by one very like it.¹³

It has been reported that playing certain kinds of classical music to cows enhances their milk production. So should we seek to understand this music in terms of cows’ milk production?! Such a theory is perhaps more plausible than the standard emotional arousal accounts of music! For it is at least generally true that music has this effect on cows, whereas the effect of music on human emotions is highly variable.¹⁴ But even if music did have standard effects on human emotions, having these effects would be inessential and not part of what it is to experience music. It would have these standard effects in virtue of some independently constituted musical experience.

What about the idea that the experience of music is a specifically musical emotion? Such an emotion would have the music as its intentional object. I am sceptical about this idea. There are of course ordinary emotions that we can have towards music. For example, one might be proud of some music if one were responsible for it. But the proud quality of much Spanish brass band music is another matter. One could be proud of music that wasn’t at all proud. By contrast, specifically musical emotions are supposed to be unlike ordinary emotions such as pride. But what can we say about them? If all we say about them is that they are the experience of features of music that we tend to describe in emotional terms, then the idea that such a reaction is an emotion in any interesting sense has dropped out. Why call it an emotion if it does not stand in any of the rational relations that we normally think characterize emotions? We are left with a potentially obscurantist view which speaks of emotion but which is not prepared to pay the price, which is the spelling out of the rational relations that would justify us in doing so.¹⁵

§3. Arousing Moods?

What about moods? (Recall that I stipulated that moods differ from emotions in that they lack intentional objects.) There is no denying that there are sometimes causal connections between hearing music that we want to describe as sad and the inducement of a certain sad mood (as opposed to emotion) in the listener. As with (intentional) emotions, I suspect that that connection is a variable one. One piece of music will cause different moods in different people at different times. However, some people think that there is considerable convergence in response. But even if there were, it would still not be essential to the music to have such effects. Two familiar points are decisive here. First, by contrast with the merely causal connection between music and mood, genuine musical experience is directed to sounds and onto their musical qualities. There is a more intimate connection than a merely causal connection between music and mood, because the musical experience is of the musical qualities. But because moods are contentless, they cannot have the music itself as their object. Genuine musical experience is both caused by the music and has it as its intentional object. The music may also cause us to have moods as a consequence of genuine musical experience. This is most manifest when the music stops and we are left with a mood. But this is an inessential and variable causal relation. Second, such causal relations as there are, whether variable or standard, hold in virtue of our immediate experience of the music. Hence, the moods that might or might not be caused by the music are irrelevant to the essential nature of the music and to the essential nature of our immediate experience of the music. They are downstream from what we are really interested in.

Jenefer Robinson has argued that music can arouse emotions (Robinson 1994). She thinks that there is a close connection between the music’s expressive properties and the arousal of emotions or feelings. She agrees that some emotions are distinguished by their ‘cognitive content’. But she insists that some emotions, such as the startle reaction, only involve affective and physiological reactions, and music can induce such emotions (Robinson 1993: 18–19. See also Robinson 1995). In effect, she classifies some of what I would call moods as emotions. For example, she observes that music can make us feel disturbed or calm. And music can be soothing, exciting, unsettling or relaxing. So she thinks that music can be calming or unsettling in a quite literal sense. Thus there can be a straightforward relation between the ‘expressive’ properties of music and the arousal of this kind of emotion in listeners. This is an interesting suggestion. But in my view, it will not do as a quite general theory of emotional description of music, for the feelings she adduces, such as calm, are all what I would call moods not emotions, or if they are to be classified as emotions, they are contentless emotions in a way that cannot fit with the sort of emotional descriptions that we very often give of music and of our experience of it. These descriptions ascribe intentional emotions that have interesting rationality conditions. Robinson is within her rights to draw our attention to reactions such as the startle reaction. But such states do not have the cognitive and rational sophistication of the sort of emotional descriptions that are often in question in the description of music. In the description of music, we are, for the most part, dealing with the sort of emotions for which there are interesting rationality conditions, unlike the startle reaction. Robinson is right that some musi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Music and Emotion
• Part II Describing Music
• Part III Musical Experience
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Musicians, Composers and Musical Examples
• Author Index
• Subject Index