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Aesthetics of music
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Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. Aesthetics is a sub-discipline of philosophy. However, many musicians, music critics, and other non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues besides beauty and enjoyment.
It is often thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions.
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Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. Aesthetics is a sub-discipline of philosophy. However, many musicians, music critics, and other non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues besides beauty and enjoyment.
It is often thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and our psychology; lyrics can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. For this reason, the philosopher Plato proposed that music is a dangerous entertainment that should be closely regulated by the state. (Plato, Book VII)
It is commonly believed that human responses to music are culturally influenced. For example, musical passages in Beethoven that sounded highly dissonant to his contemporaries does not sound dissonant to listeners today. As such, music's aesthetic appeal seems highly dependent upon the culture in which it is practiced, however there is a physical background which defines sound being proper or improper. Proper sound is perceived as gentle sound while improper sound is more or less considered nice sounding depending on what the listener is used to listen to. Harry Partch and some other musicologists like for instance Kyle Gann therefore have studied and tried to popularize microtonal music and the usage of alternate musical scales. Also many modern composers like Lamonte Young, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca paid much attention to a scale called just intonation.
Some of the aesthetic elements expressed in music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color (see also musical development). However, there has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize musical structure as the most important (or even only) aesthetic element that is important in the experience of music.
History: Aesthetics and European classical music
1700s
In the 1700s, music was considered to be so far outside the realm of aesthetic theory (then conceived of in visual terms) that music was barely mentioned in William Hogarth's treatise, The Analysis of Beauty. He considered dance beautiful (closing the treatise with a discussion of the minuet), but treated of music only insofar as it could provide the proper accompaniment for the dancers. However, by the end of the century the topic of music and its own beauty came to be distinguished from cases in which music is part of a mixed media presentation, as it is in opera and dance. Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment is generally considered the most important and influential work on aesthetics in the 1700s, argued that instrumental music is beautiful but ultimately trivial. Compared to the other fine arts, it does not engage the understanding sufficiently and it lacks moral purpose. In order to display the combination of genius and taste that combines ideas and beauty, respectively, music must be combined with words, as in song and opera.
19th century
In the 19th century, the era of romanticism in music, some composers and music critics argued that music should and could express ideas, images, emotions, or even a whole literary plot. Challenging Kant's reservations about instrumental music, in 1813 E. T. A. Hoffman argued that the art of music was fundamentally the art of instrumental composition. Five years later, Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation argued that instrumental music is the greatest art, because it is uniquely capable of representing the metaphysical organization of reality. Although the Romantic movement accepted the thesis that instrumental music has representational capacities, most did not support Schopenhauer's linking of music and metaphysics. The mainstream consensus endorsed music's capacity to represent particular emotions and situations. In 1832, composer Robert Schumann stated that his piano work Papillons was "intended as a musical representation" of the final scene of a novel by Jean Paul, Flegeljahre. The thesis that the value of music is related to its representational function was vigorously countered by the formalism of Eduard Hanslick, setting off the "War of the Romantics." This fight divided the aesthetics into two competing groups. On one side are formalists (e.g., Hanslick), who emphasize that the rewards of music are found in appreciation of musical form or design. On the other side are the anti-formalists, such as Schumann and Richard Wagner, who regarded musical form as a mere means to other artistic ends.
By the end of the 19th century, psychologist William James gave the auditory and optical sensations equal billing in his discussion of aesthetics. But he also took a detached view of the classical/romanticist disputes. James wrote that "Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art romantic." He stated that the "classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage."
1900s
A group of modernist writers in the early twentieth century (including the poet Ezra Pound) believed that music was essentially pure because it didn't represent anything, or make reference to anything beyond itself. In a sense, they wanted to bring poetry closer to Hanslick's ideas about the autonomous, self-sufficient character of music. (Bucknell 2002) Dissenters from this view, notably Albert Schweitzer, argued against the alleged 'purity' of music in a classic work on Bach. Far from being a new debate, this disagreement between modernists and their critics was a direct continuation of the nineteenth-century debate about the autonomy of music.
Among twentieth century composers, Igor Stravinsky is the most prominent composer to defend the modernist idea of musical autonomy. When a composer creates music, Stravinsky claims, the only relevant thing "is his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings." (Stravinsky 1962, p. 115) Although listeners often look for meanings in music, Stravinsky warned that these are distractions from the musical experience.
The most distinctive development in the aesthetics of music in the 1900s was attention directed at the distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' music, now understood to align with the distinction between art and popular music, respectively. Theodor Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life. False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness. Thus, those who are trapped in the false notions of beauty according to a capitalist mode of thinking, are only capable of hearing beauty in dishonest terms.
Beginning with Peter Kivy's work in the 1970s, analytic philosophy has contributed extensively to the aesthetics of music. Analytic philosophy pays very little attention to the topic of musical beauty. Instead, Kivy inspired extensive debate about the nature of emotional expressiveness in music. He also contributed to the debate over the nature of authentic performances of older music, and he argues that much of the debate is incoherent because it fails to distinguish among four distinct standards of authentic performance of music (1995).
Popular music
Bad music
Simon Frith (2004, p.17-9) argues that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music; the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce," and "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style." Another type of "bad music" is "rock critical lists," such as *"Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty" and "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
Frith gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p.28)
Frith's analysis of popular music is based in sociology.
Philosophical aesthetics of popular music
Theodor Adorno is the most prominent philosopher to write on the aesthetics of popular music. A Marxist, Adorno is extremely hostile to popular music. He formulated his theory in response to the growing popularity of American music in Europe between World War I and World War II. As a result, Adorno often uses "jazz" as his example of what is wrong with popular music. However, for Adorno this term includes everyone from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. He attacks all popular music as simplistic and repetitive, and for encouraging a fascist mindset (1973, p. 126). However good or bad it sounds to its audience, music is genuinely good only if it fulfils a positive political function. Although many popular musicians seem superficially to oppose the political status quo, their use of familiar song forms and their involvement in capitalism results in music that ultimately encourages the audience accept things as they are. Only genuinely experimental music can encourage audiences to become critical of prevailing society. However, the mass media cannot handle the confrontational nature of good music, and offers instead a steady diet of recycled, simplified and politically ineffective music.
Besides Adorno, Theodore Gracyk provides the most extensive philosophical analysis of popular music. He argues that conceptual categories and distinctions developed in response to "art" music are systematically misleading when applied to popular music (1996).
In Germany, the musicologist Ralf von Appen (2007) has published a book on the aesthetics of popular music that focusses on everyday judgements of popular records. He analyses the structures and aesthetic categories behind judgements found on amazon.com concerning records by musicians such as Bob Dylan, Eminem, Queens of the stone age etc. In a second step, von Appen interprets these findings on the basis of current theoretical positions in the field of philosophical aesthetics.
See also
Footnotes
Further reading
- Alperson, Philip (ed.), What is Music?. New York, NY: Haven, 1987.
- Bowman, Wayne D. Philosophical Perspectives on Music. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Budd, Malcolm. Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985.
- Davies, Stephen. Musical Meaning and Expression, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
- Davies, Stephen. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Gracyk, Theodore. "Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music," The Musical Quarterly 76 no. 4 (Winter 1992): 526-42.
- Gracyk, Theodore. Listening to Popular Music: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
- Hanslick, Eduard(1885/1957). Vom Musikalisch-Schön Tr. The Beautiful In Music. Bobbs-Merrill Co (June 1957). ISBN-10: 0672602113.
- Higgins, Kathleen M. The Music of Our Lives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991.
- Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. "The Magic of Music: Archaic Dreams in Romantic Aesthetics and an Education in Aesthetics." Philosophy of Music Education Review 13 no. 1 (Spring 2005): 77-94.
- Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. "In Search of the Sense and the Senses: Aesthetic Education in Germany and the United States." Journal of Aesthetic Education 39 no. 3 (Fall 2005): 104-116.
- Kivy, Peter. New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 9780198250838.
- Lippman, Edward. A History of Western Musical Aesthetics. University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
- Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 9780198167273.
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