Concept

Aesthetics of music

Overview

Aesthetics of music is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste in music, and with the creation or appreciation of beauty in music. In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant.

Aesthetics is a sub-discipline of philosophy. In the 20th century, important contributions to the aesthetics of music were made by Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, and Stephen Davies. However, many musicians, music critics, and other non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. In the 19th century, a significant debate arose between Eduard Hanslick, a music critic and musicologist, and composer Richard Wagner regarding whether instrumental music could communicate emotions to the listener. Wagner and his disciples argued that instrumental music could communicate emotions and images; composers who held this belief wrote instrumental tone poems, which attempted to tell a story or depict a landscape using instrumental music. Although history portrays Hanslick as Wagner's opponent, in 1843 after the premiere of Tannhäuser in Dresden, Hanslick gave the opera rave reviews. He called Wagner, “The great new hope of a new school of German Romantic opera.” Thomas Grey, a musicologist specializing in Wagnerian opera at Stanford University argues, “On the Beautiful in Music was written in riposte of Wagner's polemic grandstanding and overblown theorizing.” Hanslick and his partisans asserted that instrumental music is simply patterns of sound that do not communicate any emotions or images.

Since ancient times, it has been thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and psychology; it can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato suggests in The Republic that music has a direct effect on the soul. Therefore, he proposes that in the ideal regime, music would be closely regulated by the state (Book VII). There has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize the paramount importance of compositional structure; however, other issues concerning the aesthetics of music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color (see also musical development).

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair and…
Plato, Symposium
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The pleasure or pain in the former judgement is called that of taste, in the latter, that of moral feeling.
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
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Yet the point of comparison between music and the world, the respect in which it stands to the world in the relation of a copy or repetition, is very obscure. Men have practised music in all ages without being able to account for this; content to understand it directly, they renounce all claim to an abstract conception of this direct understanding itself.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
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Philosophers who discussed Aesthetics of music

Nick Zangwill

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Outline of aesthetics.

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