Music, aesthetics of

10. The value of music

The value of individual pieces of music must be distinguished from the value to a culture of music as a whole – though the latter will likely depend, in various ways, on the former. The artistic value of an individual piece of music may plausibly be identified, in the main, with the intrinsic value of correct experience of it.

Chief among the artistic values of music is presumably beauty – what Gurney labelled simply ‘musical impressiveness’, and what Hanslick regarded as inherent in ‘tonally moving forms’. Musical beauty, it might be said, is that in virtue of which music is inherently pleasurable to follow, apprehend or contemplate. It is a point of contention whether such beauty is susceptible to explanation in terms of principles, if any, governing the emergence of beauty in other spheres, or is rather uniquely musical (see Beauty).

The other obvious artistic value of music derives from its expressiveness or extra-musical dimension generally. Music seems more valuable the more expressive it is, or the more richly, finely or profoundly it embodies whatever content it possesses beyond the purely musical.

Broadly speaking, views on the value of music divide into views that locate such value primarily in music’s presentation of an autonomous world of sound, one whose forms and qualities can be appreciated without reference to those of life, and whose virtue consists in removing one satisfyingly from ordinary human affairs, and views that locate such value primarily in music’s reflection of the real world, whose virtue is the effecting of a deeper or more intense immersion in the world, revealing or clarifying aspects of life that ordinarily remain obscure or only dimly grasped.