Music, aesthetics of

8. Musical meaning: representation

Musical representation means the depiction by music of concrete persons, things or events. This is least problematic for sounds, or objects with characteristic sounds, that music can obviously imitate or approximate. But the scope of musical representation plausibly extends beyond this to concrete phenomena that can be heard in music, or that a passage of music might be heard as, which hearing may obtain in the absence of notable sonic resemblance between music and the phenomenon in question, but in virtue instead of certain structural parallels or isomorphisms between them.

There is an important distinction between musical depictions that attuned listeners recognize as such unaided, and those that are only so recognized upon provision of a verbal cue or label, but there seems little reason to identify that with the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational music per se. The issue has also been raised of whether musical representation requires the composer’s intention to represent the putative subject, and whether this intention must be signalled by a composer-given title, or otherwise publically recorded.

Some have questioned whether even the most explicitly programmatic music is ever truly representational, on the grounds that representation requires more than securing perceptual reference to some object or event, representation being held to require also a characterization of what is referred to or the attribution of predicates to it, which music is claimed powerless to accomplish. But it is not clear either that such a demand is warranted, or, if it is, that music cannot meet it.

Philosophers have also been concerned to assess the importance of such musical representation as there is. It has been asked whether, when a piece of music is representational, its representational aspect must be grasped if the piece is to be understood, whether such music is not sometimes equally enjoyable if its representational aspect is ignored, and whether the representational and expressive properties of music are not often interdependent – in which event, assuming expressive properties are always of artistic moment, the appreciative relevance of the representational aspect of music in such cases would be assured.