Music, aesthetics of

References and further reading

	Adorno, T. (1938) ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening’, in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York: Continuum, 1982. (Condemns ‘easy listening’ music and habits, partly for sociopolitical reasons.)
	(1948) Philosophie der neuen Musik, trans. A. Mitchell and W. Bloomster, The Philosophy of Modern Music, London: Sheed & Ward, 1973. (A defence of advanced modes of composition, and of the superiority of art music to popular music generally.)
	Alperson, P. (1984) ‘On Musical Improvisation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43: 17–30. (Identifies the distinguishing features of improvised music.)
	Alperson, P. (1987) What is Music?, New York: Haven; reprinted University Park, PA, Penn State Press, 1994. (A collection of essays, mostly by philosophers, with substantial introductions and bibliographies.)
	Beardsley, M. (1981) ‘Understanding Music’, inK. Price (ed.) On Criticizing Music, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Distinguishes different types of understanding and explores the possibilities for semantic understanding of music in accord with Goodman’s notion of artistic exemplification.)
	Blacking, J. (1973) How Musical Is Man?, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. (An ethnomusicological perspective on some fundamental questions about music, focusing on the role of music in society and of society in music.)
	Budd, M. (1985) Music and the Emotions, London: Routledge. (A masterly critical survey of influential theories of musical expression and evocation.)
	Budd, M. (1985) ‘Understanding Music’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 59: 233–48. (Explores dimensions of musical understanding, and criticizes Scruton (1983).)
	Budd, M. (1989) ‘Music and the Communication of Emotion’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47: 129–38. (Examines the idea that musical expressiveness might consist in the musically mandated imagining of emotion.)
	Budd, M. (1995) Values of Art, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. (Advances in its last chapter an important positive account of the relationship of music and emotion.)
	Busoni, F. (1911) Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, trans. T. Baker, New York: G. Schirmer. (Explores, in loose-jointed prose, the ideal of absolute music.)
	Callen, D. (1982a) ‘The Sentiment in Musical Sensibility’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40: 381–93. (Analyses musical expressiveness as representation of fictive acts of emotional expression.)
	Callen, D. (1982b) ‘Making Music Live’, Theoria 48: 139–68. (Insightful discussion of what is involved in performative interpretation of music beyond merely playing ‘the notes’.)
	Cavell, S. (1969) ‘Music Discomposed’, in Must We Mean What We Say?, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Charges that certain modern modes of music-making are artistically fraudulent.)
	Clifton, T. (1983) Music as Heard, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (An approach to musical comprehension from a phenomenological perspective, drawing mainly on the ideas of Husserl.)
	Collingwood, R. (1938) The Principles of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains important reflections on the creative process in art and the operation of imagination in expression and appreciation.)
	Cone, E. (1974) The Composer’s Voice, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Develops a thesis about musical communication in terms of the composers’ musical personae, in both song and instrumental music.)
	Cone, E. (1989) Music: A View from Delft, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A collection of essays by the prominent music theorist, half of which have a philosophical dimension.)
	Cook, N. (1990) Music, Imagination and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A stimulating and provocative look at music from the point of view of both composer and listener, and a defence of the primacy of the latter.)
	Cooke, D. (1959) The Language of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Proposes that music is indeed the language of the emotions and seeks through a wide range of examples to locate the individual units of emotive meaning in music; responds to Hindemith (1952).)
	Copland, A. (1952) Music and Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A composer’s sensible view of the creation and appreciation of music, particularly good in its portrait of the gifted or ideal listener.)
	Cox, R. (1985) ‘Are Musical Works Discovered?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43: 367–74. (Gives interesting reasons for a negative answer to the question posed.)
	Dahlhaus, C. (1981) Esthetics of Music, trans. W. Austin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A historically informed survey of the subject by the leading German musicologist-historian.)
	Dahlhaus, C. (1990) The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. R. Lustig, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A historical and philosophical examination of the idea of ‘absolute’ instrumental music.)
	Davies, S. (1987) ‘Authenticity in Musical Performance’, British Journal of Aesthetics 27: 39–50. (Locates authenticity of performance in fidelity to the composer’s publically expressed and correctly understood intentions.)
	Davies, S. (1991) ‘The Ontology of Musical Works and the Authenticity of Their Performance’, Nous 25: 21–41. (A sensitive discussion of the interrelationship of these issues, with significant attention to non-Western musical traditions.)
	Davies, S. (1994) Musical Meaning and Expression, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A comprehensive and painstaking survey of its topics, covering some of the same ground as Budd (1985), but with a focus on work of the past twenty years.)
	De Bellis, M. (1995) Music and Conceptualization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Explores the nature of expert and nonexpert hearing of music, and the role and degree of conceptualization in each; draws on work in cognitive psychology.)
	Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience, New York: Putnam. (Contains important discussions of the creative process applicable to musical composition.)
	Dipert, R. (1980) ‘The Composer’s Intentions: An Examination of Their Relevance for Performance’, Musical Quarterly 66: 205–18. (Argues for the importance of distinguishing low-, middle- and high-level intentions on a composer’s part.)
	Elliott, R.K. (1966) ‘Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 67: 111–26. (Illuminatingly contrasts the experience of music ‘from within’ with the experience of music ‘from without’.)
	Evans, M. (1990) Listening to Music, London: Macmillan. (A recent discussion of some problems of musical meaning and comprehension, informed by the philosophy of Wittgenstein.)
	Ferguson, D. (1960) Music as Metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Claims that music, which is capable of resembling emotions in two different respects, provides metaphors for emotions and so represents them.)
	Fisher, J. (1991) ‘Discovery, Creation, and Musical Works’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49: 129–36. (Argues cogently for a creationist view of musical composition.)
	Godlovitch, S. (1988) ‘Authentic Performance’, The Monist 71: 258–77. (Canvasses a large number of defences of authenticity in musical performance.)
	Goehr, L. (1992) The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Surveys with dissatisfaction current accounts of the nature of a musical work, proposes instead adoption of a historical-cultural method, and suggests that the full-blown notion of a musical work may not predate 1800.)
	Goldman, A. (1992) ‘The Value of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50: 35–44. (Suggests that the central value of music is its presenting us with another world, removed from that of everyday life.)
	Goldman, A. (1995) ‘Emotions in Music: A Postscript’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53: 59–69. (Assesses the debate between Kivy and Radford on musical arousal of emotion.)
	Goodman, N. (1968) Languages of Art, New York: Bobbs-Merrill. (A seminal treatise in contemporary aesthetics, containing influential proposals regarding the relationship of works and performances and the nature of musical expression.)
	Gracyk, T. (1992) ‘Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music’, The Musical Quarterly 76: 526–42. (A critical response to Adorno’s elitist strictures on music.)
	Gurney, E. (1880) The Power of Sound, New York: Basic Books, 1966. (His major work, an important contribution to aesthetics of music in the nineteenth century.)
	Hanslick, E. (1891) Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, trans. G. Payzant, On the Musically Beautiful, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986. (The classic statement of formalism about music.)
	Higgins, K. (1991) The Music of Our Lives, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (Charges that contemporary philosophy of music largely ignores certain dimensions of musical experience, and argues in particular for the ethical role and significance of music.)
	Hindemith, P. (1952) A Composer’s World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A searching, if one-sidedly formalistic, examination of some fundamental issues of musical aesthetics.)
	Ingarden, R. (1957) The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, trans. A. Czerniawski, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. (Advances a view of the musical work as an intentional object, one culturally shaped and sustained, created in time and subject to dissolution.)
	Katz, R. and Dahlhaus, C. (1987) Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music, New York: Pendragon Press, 4 vols. (An immense compendium of source readings, though somewhat idiosyncratically arranged.)
	Kivy, P. (1984) Sound and Semblance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A careful study of the basis of musical representation, and the different species thereof.)
	Kivy, P. (1989) Sound Sentiment, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (A partly historical and widely influential account of the nature and causes of musical expressiveness, with supplementary essays defending the author’s thoroughgoing cognitivism about music. Includes The Corded Shell, Princeton University Press, 1980.)
	Kivy, P. (1990) Music Alone, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (An account of the experience of ‘music alone’, focusing on the role of explicit, articulable cognitions in the understanding of music.)
	Kivy, P. (1993) The Fine Art of Repetition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of essays, the most important of which concern the ontology of music and the curious status of music as an art.)
	Kivy, P. (1995) Authenticities, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A philosophical analysis of the whys and wherefores of the currently ascendant norm of ‘authentic performance’.)
	Krausz, M. (1993) The Interpretation of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of new essays by nineteen philosophers.)
	Langer, S. (1942) Philosophy in a New Key, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Advances the view of music as a presentational, rather than discursive symbol, and claims that what it symbolizes, though non-specifically, is the human life of feeling.)
	Langer, S. (1953) Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (A further development of ideas in Langer (1942) ranging across all the arts and featuring prominently the notions of ‘virtual space’ and ‘virtual time’.)
	Levinson, J. (1990) Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Contains six essays devoted to philosophy of music, covering the definition, ontology, meaning, performance and appreciation of music.)
	Levinson, J. (1992) ‘Composition, musical’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. D. Cooper, Oxford: Blackwell. (Treats the questions of what it is to compose a musical work, and of what, if anything, characterizes the process of musical composition.)
	Levinson, J. (1996) The Pleasures of Aesthetics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Contains four essays devoted to philosophy of music, including ones on song, musical literacy, musical expressiveness and musical interpretation.)
	Levinson, J. (1997) Apprehending Music, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (An account, inspired by Edmund Gurney, of what the listener’s core understanding of music consists in.)
	Levinson, J. (1998) Music in the Moment, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Contains four essays devoted to philosophy of music, including ones on song, musical literacy, musical expressiveness and musical interpretation.)
	Levinson, J. and Alperson, P. (1991) ‘What Is a Temporal Art?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16: 439–50. (Details fourteen different notions of temporality in art, many applicable to music.)
	Lippman, E. (1977) A Humanistic Philosophy of Music, New York: New York University Press. (An investigation of music from a cultural and historical point of view.)
	Lippman, E. (1994) A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. (The latest historical survey of the subject, beginning with ancient thought, but covering writers as recent as Leonard Meyer and Roger Scruton.)
	Mc Clary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (A feminist reinterpretation of the tradition of Western tonal music, raising many philosophical questions about the basis and grounds of musical meaning.)
	Maconie, R. (1990) The Concept of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An engaging and wide-ranging examination of the nature and importance of music.)
	Mark, T. (1980) ‘On Works of Virtuosity’, Journal of Philosophy 77: 28–45. (Proposes that the distinctive mark of works of musical virtuosity is a kind of musical reflexiveness or self-reference.)
	Mark, T. (1981) ‘Philosophy of Piano Playing: Reflections on the Concept of Performance’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 41: 199–324. (Likens a performance of a work to a quotation of it.)
	Maus, F. (1988) ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum 10: 54–73. (Proposes that musical discourse be conceived as essentially dramatic, as an arena in which musical characters perform acts of various sorts.)
	Mew, P. (1985) ‘The Expression of Emotion in Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics 25: 33–42. (Defends an evocation view of musical expressiveness.)
	Meyer, L. (1956) Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (The first of Meyer’s books, setting out his view in psychologistic terms, in which the notion of expectation figures prominently.)
	Meyer, L. (1967) Music, the Arts, and Ideas, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Ranges beyond music as such to other arts, and reframes some of Meyer’s key ideas in terms of information theory.)
	Meyer, L. (1974) Explaining Music, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Highlights, in the course of numerous analyses, the notion of hierarchic levels of musical implication.)
	Newcomb, A. (1984) ‘Sound and Feeling’, Critical Inquiry 10: 614–43. (A critical discussion of Kivy (1984).)
	Nietzsche, F. (1872) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kauffmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1967. (Discusses the conflict of the Apollonian and the Dionysian at the heart of Greek tragedy, and the relation of this to ‘the spirit of music’.)
	Pearce, D. (1988) ‘Intensionality and the Nature of a Musical Work’, British Journal of Aesthetics 28: 105–18. (Suggests that musical works have the kind of existence accorded to mathematical objects by intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics.)
	Pratt, C. (1931) The Meaning of Music, New York: McGraw-Hill. (The work of an important psychologist of music, who advanced the view that music sounds the way emotions feel.)
	Putman, D. (1987) ‘Why Instrumental Music Has No Shame’, British Journal of Aesthetics 27: 55–61. (Argues for and diagnoses the incapacity of music to express cognitively complex emotions.)
	Radford, C. (1989) ‘Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47: 69–76. (Replies to Kivy (1989), and argues for the power of music to induce simple emotions and moods in listeners.)
	Radford, C. (1991) ‘How Can Music Be Moral?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16: 421–38. (Suggests that musical works reflect morally relevant states of mind and traits of personality.)
	Raffman, D. (1993) Language, Music and Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Argues for three sorts of ineffability in connection with music, the most important being carried by uncategorizable nuances of sound as produced in concrete performance.)
	Rantala, V., Rowell, L. and Tarasti, E. (1988) Essays on the Philosophy of Music, Helsinki: Acta Philosophica Fennica. (A collection of twenty essays, representing a variety of approaches: analytic, semiotic, historical and phenomenological.)
	Ridley, A. (1995) Music, Value and the Passions, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (An impressive recent contribution, defending an emotionalism about music that mediates between cognitivist and arousalist approaches.)
	Robinson, J. (1994) ‘The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 13–22. (Emphasizes the importance of music’s capacity to affect the feelings directly, in cognitively unmediated ways.)
	Robinson, J. (1997) Music and Meaning, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A collection of ten recent essays by philosophers and theorists of music.)
	Rowell, L. (1983) Thinking About Music, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. (An introduction to the philosophy of music with an ethnographic flavour.)
	Said, E. (1991) Musical Elaborations, New York: Columbia University Press. (Three interrelated essays by a musically erudite cultural critic, focusing on issues of performance.)
	Schoenberg, A. (1950) Style and Idea, New York: Philosophical Library. (Definitive statements by the founder of 12-tone music.)
	Schopenhauer, A. (1819, 1844) Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, trans. E.F.J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation, New York: Dover Publications, 1966, 2 vols. (Contains a powerful brief for the metaphysical significance of musical process.)
	Scruton, R. (1976) ‘Representation in Music’, Philosophy 51: 273–87. (Argues that music is incapable of representation in a robust sense.)
	Scruton, R. (1976) ‘Representation in Music’, Philosophy 51: 273–87. (Argues that music is incapable of representation in a robust sense.)
	Scruton, R. (1983) ‘Understanding Music’, in The Aesthetic Understanding, London: Methuen. (Argues that musical understanding is a species of intentional understanding, and that musical features are strictly distinct from sonic ones.)
	Scruton, R. (1987) ‘Analytical Philosophy and the Meaning of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46: 169–76. (Argues for a conception of musical meaning as inseparable from the experience of music.)
	Serafine, M. (1987) Music as Cognition, New York: Columbia University Press. (A cognitive psychologist’s view of music.)
	Sessions, R. (1950) The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Offers exactly what its title suggests, and is illuminating in regard to each of its topics.)
	Shepherd, J. (1991) Music as Social Text, Oxford: Polity Press. (Explores music as a repository of social and cultural meanings.)
	Sloboda, J. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A valuable recent survey.)
	Sparshott, F. (1994) ‘Music and Feeling’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 23–35. (Sensitive to the many senses of ‘feeling’ invoked in claims about musical expression and evocation.)
	Sparshott, F. (1994) ‘Music and Feeling’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 23–35. (Sensitive to the many senses of ‘feeling’ invoked in claims about musical expression and evocation.)
	Storr, A. (1992) Music and the Mind, New York: Free Press. (Genial meditations by a psychotherapist on the origin, power and beauty of music.)
	Stravinsky, I. (1956) Poetics of Music, New York: Vintage Books. (Reflects an extreme formalism about music, arguably inconsistent with the composer’s own practice.)
	Sullivan, J.W.N. (1927) Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, London: Jonathan Cape. (Suggests that some music, such as the last compositions of Beethoven, embodies and communicates to a listener spiritually and cognitively valuable states of mind.)
	Tanner, M. (1985) ‘Understanding Music’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 59: 215–32. (Emphasizes a hierarchy of levels of understanding music, with higher levels presupposing lower ones if they are to have any point.)
	Tarasti, E. (1994) A Theory of Musical Semiotics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A comprehensive work by a leading advocate of semiotics as applied to music.)
	Thom, P. (1993) For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (Advances a naturalistic understanding of works in the performing arts.)
	Toch, E. (1948) The Shaping Forces in Music, New York: Criterion Music Corp. (A searching, lesser-known composer’s examination of the bases of musical form, and the special role of movement and connectedness therein.)
	Tormey, A. (1971) The Concept of Expression, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A seminal philosophical analysis, containing a devastating attack on the Expression Theory of music.)
	Tormey, A. (1974) ‘Indeterminacy and Identity in Art’, The Monist 58: 203–15. (Explores the sort of ontology of music suggested by, or appropriate to, certain modes of avant-garde composition.)
	Treitler, L. (1993) ‘History and the Ontology of the Musical Work’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51: 483–97. (Explores the relevance of historical scolarship in musicology to questions of musical ontology.)
	Walton, K. (1998) Looking, Listening, Imagining, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of essays by a leading aesthetician, some of which bring the author’s doctrine of make-believe to bear on issues about musical understanding and content.)
	Wolterstorff, N. (1980) Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains important proposals regarding the ontology and composition of music.)
	Zuckerkandl, V. (1956) Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A wide-ranging examination of the phenomenon of music, focusing on the paradox of tonal motion and the experience of musical time.)
	Zuckerkandl, V. (1973) Man the Musician, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A sequel to Sound and Symbol, focusing on the notion of musicality as exhibited in listening, performing and composing.)