Music, aesthetics of

7. Musical meaning: expression

The sort of extra-musical meaning in music that has seemed to most observers to be of greatest importance is expressive meaning, that is, the expression by music of psychological states. The states music has been held to be capable of expressing include emotions, feelings, moods, attitudes and traits of personality.

Philosophical explication of the concept of musical expressiveness must not be conflated with investigation of the grounds or causes of such expressiveness. The identification of factors involved in making music expressive – tempo, timbre, major or minor mode, or similarities between music and vocal utterance, for example – is one thing, and the logical analysis of what musical expressiveness consists in quite another.

The expressiveness of music, though evidently related to the literal expression of psychological states by persons through behaviour, countenance and demeanour, must yet be clearly distinguished from it. Taking emotions as the paradigm states involved, the expression of emotion by a person is a dated occurrence, involving outward manifestations that warrant a reasonable inference to the person’s being in the given emotional state, and requires that the person actually feel the emotion being expressed. When, however, a musical passage is expressive of an emotion, the emotion is not an occurrent one, and any inference to emotion felt on the part of the composer would be unwarranted, and probably mistaken; nor is a musical passage literally a behavioural manifestation of any sort. Musical expressiveness, in short, is a property of music, not of individuals who happen to be connected to the music.

The logical distinctness of musical expressiveness and personal expression still allows for a remarkably persistent hypothesis, sometimes called the ‘Expression Theory’ of music, to the effect that the emotion a piece of music is expressive of is always as a matter of fact one that was experienced by the composer, and that the expressiveness of music is always in effect the expression of the composer’s own emotion, imparted to the music in the act of composing. But apart from its romantic appeal, the hypothesis has little to recommend it. The composing of music is typically too indirect, intellectually mediated, temporally extended and discontinuous for such a generalization to hold, even roughly. A composer in a sanguine frame of mind can very well write sanguinary music, or the reverse, with this being as comprehensible as the only somewhat more frequent match of music and mood mistakenly posited as universal by the Expression Theory. And talented composers can craft music expressive of a number of emotional states without themselves being in any of them at the time.

The emotional expressiveness of music must also be distinguished from its power to arouse or evoke corresponding feelings in listeners. There are numerous reasons for this, but two of the more important seem to be these. First, the expressiveness of music presents itself as a manifest property of it, or at any rate, something about how it is readily heard, rather than as an inferred power to raise affect in us. And second, the affects that music does produce in us while listening will often differ, in degree, kind and polarity, from those which it is expressive of; if they did not, it would be puzzling both that music expressive of negative emotion was as popular as it was, and that the aesthetic appreciation of expressive music of any sort, which calls for a certain amount of clear-headed attention, was possible at all.

As for what emotional expressiveness in music might consist in, a number of ideas are currently under consideration. They include music’s having a sound resembling the behavioural expression of an emotion; music’s metaphorically exemplifying some emotion; music’s sounding the way some emotion feels; music’s presenting the appearances of an emotion; music’s corresponding to an emotional state or being seen as suitable to its expression; music’s being imagined to be the gestures of an individual experiencing emotion; and music’s being hearable as, or as if it were, the personal expression of an emotion. In any event, it seems clear that the expressiveness of a musical passage should be conceived as something not detachable from, or experienceable apart from, the passage that possesses it.

Some theorists who fully acknowledge the expressive dimension of music balk at describing this as a species of musical meaning. Music’s expressiveness would only be a form of meaning, they maintain, if in addition to possessing and exhibiting expressive qualities music also referred to, denoted or was otherwise about the emotions or other states corresponding to such qualities. But the issue can be mooted by simply speaking of music’s expressive content, rather than meaning (see Artistic expression; Emotion in response to art §§4, 6).