When one truly describes music as sequences of sounds or tones, it immediately seems mysterious how it could have the value for us that it does. Pure instrumental music does not (or need not) represent anything or inform us about anything. It does not teach us about ordinary life or the objects that occupy us within it. Unlike painting and literature, it is an essentially abstract art, lacking referential content and any direct relation to the world of ordinary objects. From literature we can learn how to react to real people by reacting to fictional characters, and we can learn to visually perceive the world in fresh ways by viewing paintings. But we learn nothing of ordinary sounds by listening to music; they only sound worse in comparison. Ordinary sounds can inform us of the nature and location of the objects that produce them, but we do not ordinarily listen to musical tones in order to gain such information. In listening we gain information neither about ourselves nor about the world, despite claims of some theorists to the contrary. And even if they are right and I am wrong about this, we certainly do not typically listen in order to gain such information. Instead, we are interested in organized tones for their own sake, at least when we are aesthetically interested. But why should we be?
Not only do we have this interest, but it also seems to be universal in the human race across times and cultures. Music itself seems nearly ubiquitous. It accompanies our work, eating, shopping, and driving. In these contexts it may be a mere soothing effect we seek, and musical tones certainly are usually more soothing than ordinary sounds. But serious listening seeks a greater value, and yet it is more mysterious what greater value it seeks. Few philosophers of music have addressed this question directly, most concerning themselves with such topics as music’s expressiveness, its meaning, or its formal structures. Those who have addressed the question of value have for the most part simply noted a failure to solve the mystery. Peter Kivy, perhaps the most distinguished philosopher of music, cannot answer the question why listeners, including himself, value music they describe as profound so highly (Kivy 1990: 216–17). Malcolm Budd holds that music’s expression of emotions contributes only a minor part of its value, and while he notes the formal qualities that we value in musical pieces, he has no theory to explain why we find these qualities valuable, why we respond with such great interest (Budd 1995: 155, 158).
Our first clue to this value is pure music’s very lack of relation to the world of ordinary affairs, as well as the related felt ineffability of musical experience – our very difficulty in expressing in words the value that music has for us. Our second clue lies in the other instrumental values (other than soothing us) that music can serve. These instrumental values prominently include both therapeutic and communal uses. Therapeutically, movement disorders can disappear when treated with music, and music can be used to treat memory disorders and autism as well (Sacks 2008: 252, 257, 319). Musical memory survives longer than other forms of memory in those with dementia. Visual and verbal memory fade more quickly with time than musical memory of melodies; and musical accompaniment can facilitate other forms of learning and remembering, which is why musical jingles are used in advertising and rote learning, for example, of the alphabet. The latter uses may be more common than the therapeutic ones, but again do not enter into the reasons why we typically listen to music. Indeed, the same feature of music that confers these benefits can turn negative, as when musical imagery running through the mind becomes so insistent as to be pathological. The feature in question is the way in which music becomes so deeply engrained in our minds or brains, probably because of the way in which it stimulates different areas of the brain – those controlling emotion, movement, and cognition – simultaneously. The same feature, our second clue to music’s value, explains the many related social uses of music. It is used in many diverse social contexts with one principal aim: to bind people together emotionally – to prepare them for battle or confrontation, to celebrate joyous occasions, or to mourn or comfort in sorrowful ones. In these contexts, music’s rhythms can infectiously prompt movements and its melodies can alter moods, effects on individuals that can be put to social uses. Once more we see simultaneous effects on the body and on emotional as well as cognitive faculties of mind. Music helps to bind social groups together and can even spur them to action. Such bonding explains much of the attraction of singing in choruses (Storr 1992: ch. 1). Music’s emotional effect is obvious also in its use to enhance the dramatic effects of texts and pictures, as in the background of movies and in opera. This enhancement once more testifies to the emotional effect of music itself. Nevertheless, emotional bonding is once more not the reason we listen to music in the privacy of our homes.
Some suggest that emotional arousal in itself accounts for all the instrumental as well as intrinsic value of music. In regard to instrumental value beyond social bonding, it is claimed that we learn about our emotions or learn to master them better by listening to music, or that musical works provide a map of how emotions change through time (Langer 1951: ch. 8). But such claims are implausible. There is no evidence that music lovers master their emotions better than others. (Opera divas provide notorious counter-evidence.) And since expressive qualities in music change so much more rapidly and unpredictably than do emotions in real life, any map that music could provide would be highly inaccurate. Other philosophers – for example, Jerrold Levinson – point to other instrumental values they claim for music: the insights it provides into life experiences and points of view, the reinforcement of moral character, its giving us “a paradigm or practicum of how to move or be” (Levinson 1998: 95–6). But again, I must admit to remaining skeptical of such vague and sweeping suggestions that to my knowledge lack any evidential support.
Our topic here, then, will be the aesthetic value of music. That value is intrinsic, not instrumental. We can define the aesthetic value of music as the value of the way in which music sounds when experienced with understanding. This is the value of the aural experience of music in itself, not that of any external effects such experience might have. In regard to such intrinsic value, it is on initial reflection equally mysterious why we value as we do experiencing the expressive and formal qualities of music. Why, for example, do we want to have our emotions aroused, especially when the emotions often aroused by serious music of greatest value are negative, sorrowful, or anxious, if not tragic? Normally we seek to avoid such emotions instead of relishing them. To say simply that we relish them in the context of art or music is not to explain anything, but rather to pose a question that needs answering. We do not typically listen to music in order to feel the emotions it causes in us (unless we are preparing for battle). We do not listen to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth in order to expand our capacity for or our experience of grief. The expressive qualities we experience in those movements are instead valued as a part of our access to the music itself and to the unity of these marvelous movements.
The mystery extends from the value of arousing emotions to another claimed source of intrinsic value for the music listener: the recognition of form, often complex and intricate, in musical pieces. We can recognize such forms more easily from reading scores than from listening to the music they represent, yet no one thinks that great intrinsic value lies in reading scores and identifying the complex forms of pieces in that way. The intrinsic value of music must lie instead in actually experiencing works aurally. But why should grasp of form in that way, more difficult and often less accurate, provide such great value to listeners, any more than does emotional arousal? Again, to say that we simply do greatly enjoy or value such recognition of form in experience is to pose a question, not to answer it. Keeping our previous clues in mind, we may turn to a different tack in seeking the answer.
We appreciate the aesthetic or intrinsic value of a musical work only in experiencing it. Since aesthetic value is what we appreciate in such experience, we can perhaps learn of its nature by reflecting on the nature of musical appreciation. The answer to the question what it is to appreciate a piece of music is more readily at hand. We appreciate the value of a piece when we understand it as we experience it and when we evaluate it however positively it deserves. Thus, by describing what it is to understand a piece of music and the criteria according to which we evaluate pieces or judge some better than others, we should discover the nature of the value that at first seems mysterious.
The relevant kind of understanding is once more not to be gained from reading scores (absent accurate imagination of the sequences of sounds). Such understanding consists instead in hearing the music in a certain way. Reading scores can tell us how pieces were constructed or put together, but not why they are as good as they are. We must hear them to understand that. And once more our hearing or listening is not directed toward the satisfaction of any practical interests or development of any of our capacities: it is directed only toward the works themselves. Musical works have their own inner goals, but we have no external goals in listening to them, which is why our interest in them is not exhausted after several hearings (when such goals would be achieved). Grasping these inner goals, like grasping form and experiencing expressive qualities in a piece, are all part of understanding it, and so we must describe in more detail what these types of experience amount to.
What is minimally necessary for understanding or appreciating a piece is not controversial, although there is disagreement about what, if anything, further is necessary for complete understanding. Understanding a piece of pure music is not grasping any reference or representational content, since there is none to grasp. Listeners understand works when they are able to follow them, when they relate what they hear at any given time to what has come before and anticipate what is to come, when they are able to perceptually organize progressions of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements into groupings or gestalts. They then experience the ongoing developments in the pieces as intelligible sequences. When melodic phrases and themes are related to their previous appearances, they are heard as repetitions, elaborations, variations, contrasts, or transitions. Harmonic modulations are heard as such and as pointing ahead to further developments or resolutions. This is not to say that any of this must be verbally formulated as such, but instead that it is perceptually recognized. Musical understanding consists not in applying verbal concepts to stable objects, but in perceptually structuring the aural experience as it proceeds, following themes through their embellishments and variations and harmonies through their modulations. Such hearing is not passive but active listening that projects backward and forward.
When we understand or appreciate the inner logic of a piece in this way, we can hum along with it or reproduce sections in memory. If our listening is interrupted at any point short of the conclusion of the piece, it sounds unfinished. The final cadence itself is heard as the ultimate resolution of what came before and pointed ahead, and previous incomplete cadences are heard as partial resolutions. To hear a melody as such is already to follow a continuous logical sequence up to its final cadence as a unity or gestalt (Scruton 1997: 40). This ability may be innate for most people, or at least nearly universal. We naturally discriminate tones in terms of pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre, and we can as easily relate sequences of them into melodies. It is almost impossible not to hear melodies moving higher and lower through their individual tones. Likewise, we hear chords as consonant or dissonant and as open or dense. Following harmonic modulations is less basic and natural but is also part of musical understanding for the competent listener. As noted, musical competence or understanding requires recognition of repetitions and variations when they occur, but whether grasp of the longer overall forms of movements is required is a matter of dispute (Levinson 1997). For our purposes, we need note only what is involved in the understanding required to appreciate the musical value of a piece, and following relations of what is heard to prior elements and to those to come suffices for that.
Corroborating this account, when one fails to understand a piece of music, when one is at sea at a performance of an atonal piece, for instance, it is because one cannot follow and anticipate its course. One has no sense of being directed toward musical goals, of synthesizing sections into intelligible sequences in the process of hearing. If lack of understanding manifests itself in feeling this inability to follow, remember, and anticipate, then understanding consists in being able to do so. Further corroboration lies in the fact that appreciation of a piece grows instead of diminishing with familiarity. This is because one is able to follow the piece better and anticipate more accurately when one is familiar with it. Certainly one can anticipate better when one knows roughly what is to come, and appreciation lies partly in such anticipation. Reaching the goals of a composition does not end one’s listening endeavor once and for all, but instead enables one to return to the piece for greater appreciation.
Understanding music, as a form of understanding more generally, is grasping meanings. Here the meanings are not referential, but internal. Elements of music, whether melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic, point to or imply others, and therein lies their musical meaning. Harmonically, in tonal music, modulation to the dominant, subdominant, or relative minor keys points to a return to the tonic. Rhythmically, unaccented tones point to accented ones. Melodically, gaps point ahead to fills, regular rising patterns to eventual descent, and antecedent phrases, sounding like questions, point to consequents (Meyer 1973). Variations of themes and contrasting themes point ahead to repetitions of the originals. Once more, grasping these meanings or musical implications involves hearing and feeling tensions and resolutions, prolongations, embellishments, developments, variations, and repetitions. Familiarity with a style, if not with a piece itself, facilitates this ability. In short, a competent listener who fully appreciates a piece hears, grasps, and feels the functions of the phrases and chords as they occur, and does so perceptually, not necessarily verbally.
In this act of appreciation, all mental capacities operate together. The cognitive apprehension of form is achieved perceptually through felt tensions and resolutions, and it is expressed through imagined or anticipated musical goals in which our wills seem to be involved as well. Thus, cognition, affect, imagination, and will merge indissolubly in musical appreciation. At the same time, the listener appreciates the sensuous beauty of the tones and the emotional qualities in the music expressed by its imitation of a voice or of the movement of a person in the grip of those emotions (for example, low and slow tones for sadness). Just as humans are naturally sensitive to the musical qualities of the voice as revealing emotional states of speakers, so voice-like properties of music are immediately interpreted as expressive of emotion. This is another level of affect in listening to music, along with the felt tensions emphasized above, just as the appreciation of sensuous beauty in tone is another level of perception, along with cognitive grasp of form. Affect here functions cognitively; form is grasped affectively and perceptually. Feelings are involved not just in detecting expressive or emotional qualities, but also in discriminating and relating elements, especially harmonic progressions, in listening to works. Cognition and affect, like form and content, are inextricable parts of a unified experience.
Such understanding relates directly to evaluation in appreciating musical works. Just as we understand works when we grasp in experience the implications forward and backward among their elements, and when we feel their expressive qualities and sensuous beauty, so we evaluate works more positively the tighter these implications are, and the more expressive and beautiful the works are experienced to be. I do not mean to say that works are always better for being more predictable. Simple and shallow works and more popular forms are far more predictable than complex more serious works. Instead, the best sequences in music follow the pattern that Aristotle ascribed to great drama: subsequent sections should surprise when they occur but feel absolutely necessitated after the fact. Something similar is true of our evaluation of expressive qualities. We do not most value obvious melodramatic outbursts in music any more than in people. We react most deeply to more subtle and sincere expressions of emotion appropriate to their contexts. Perception of both form and expressive qualities is more satisfying after being challenged, and such understanding after challenge leads directly to positive evaluation and hence maximal appreciation. We evaluate pieces according to the ingenuity of their design, the cogency or fluidity of their progressions, and by the depth of their expressive qualities, as these inform our experience of them.
Just as sensory perception, cognition, affect, imagination, and will merge in musical appreciation, and none suffices in itself for appreciating music, so grasp of form and arousal of emotion are not isolated ends in themselves, but are valuable only as parts of this all-encompassing experience. Even the sensuous pleasure of hearing beautiful tone, not to be underestimated when, for example, one hears the tone of Leontyne Price’s voice or Jascha Heifetz’s violin, is not the end of musical appreciation, but again one contributor to the value of the overall experience. On the objective side, when each musical element is tightly related to preceding and subsequent elements, when music is rich in internal connections not easily predicted in advance, each temporal part is intensely meaningful when heard. On the subjective side, the experience of such musical progressions is itself vivid and rich, as the present is imbued with the past and future. We hear the whole in the parts of such pieces. And, as already emphasized, all our mental capacities are engaged and unified in fully attending to the music.
Just as what it feels like to lack musical understanding provides insight into the nature of such understanding, so negative evaluation of musical works indicates the criteria for positive evaluation. Aesthetic failure in a piece is failure to engage listeners in the way described above. The experience of such a piece is not intense and rich, but narrow, impoverished, or banal. The musical progressions are either completely predictable and therefore uninteresting, or loose and seemingly unconnected, lacking in musical logic. Emotional expression is either lacking or overdone. Perception, cognition, and affect are then either unchallenged or lost and wandering off course. Experience is most satisfying in music, as elsewhere, when our capacities are challenged but ultimately exercised successfully, and when, as Dewey described, the experience builds cumulatively to a unifying conclusion (1958: Ch. 8). Great tonal music provides such experience to those who understand it as they listen. The complex interplay between melody, harmony, rhythm, volume, and timbre challenges as it satisfies. All perception and cognition seek order in complex data, and success in actively finding it is pleasurable.
We can now see why the therapeutic and the social uses of music alluded to earlier are clues to music’s aesthetic value. People with memory disorders can nevertheless follow melodic and harmonic progressions and remember them in part because of the tight implications between different temporal parts of those sequences, and this is one criterion for the evaluation of music as well. Furthermore, music is so deeply engrained in the brain because it stimulates different regions simultaneously, and it does so because the engagement of all our mental capacities is required for appreciating the music. The clue with which we began, the complete detachment of music from the world of our practical concerns, remains to be explained and utilized.
I have suggested that experience of the type described in which we are fully engaged is its own reward. In this experience lies the value of music. But our question is not yet completely answered. Pure music, as indicated earlier, is the most abstract and yet most immediately expressive of all the arts, and the experience and appreciation of musical works is distinct from the experience and appreciation of painting and literature. This suggests that music has value for us distinct from the values that the other arts afford. Yet we have not yet completely isolated this distinctive value. All the arts engage our cognitive, perceptual, affective, and imaginative capacities (Goldman 1995), and so, while we may have described the nature of aesthetic value in general by using music as our example, we have not yet distinguished the peculiar value of music. To do that, we need to see how the means by which music engages us in this way differs from those of the other arts, such as painting and literature. We began to do this in the first section, when we noted the other-worldly nature of the tones of musical instruments in comparison to the media of the other art forms.
When we are completely engaged in the appreciation of a work of art, we seem to enter another world, divorced from the world of our practical affairs. Many aestheticians historically have pointed to this contrast between the appreciation of art and practical interests. The apt metaphor of another world to capture this contrast is perhaps most natural in reference to fictional literature, especially novels. Great novels seem to project us into full fictional worlds. But these are worlds in which ordinary propositions are fictionally true or false. Literature utilizes language, the primary instrument of our practical affairs, and it typically refers to objects and persons in a world that could be real even when it is not. Painting also often depicts real objects and events, and even when it is abstract, it presents visual forms and colors like those we might see elsewhere. Literature and painting use words and pigments to create worlds that overlap with the real world at many points, in their settings, scenes, events, characters, and broader suggested environments.
Our complete engagement in listening to music and resultant detachment from our ordinary pursuits, the complete loss of our practically oriented selves, justifies the description of seeming to enter another world in this case as well. But the world of a musical work is completely different from both the real world and the fictional worlds of the other arts. This results first from the medium itself. Musical tones are twice removed from the world of ordinary objects. Sounds are first of all more detachable, and experienced as more detached from the objects that produce them, than are visual sensations; we often hear sounds as such and not as objects located in physical space. And second, musical tones are not natural sounds, so that they are easily heard as occurring in an ideal rather than real space. Electronic reproduction enhances this illusion, and attention to the musical qualities of the tones and the musical contexts in which they are embedded accentuates the effect even more.
Structures of musical tones are unlike anything in the world of ordinary objects. A musical work is therefore a self-contained world that provides a more thorough escape from the everyday world in which to exercise our human capacities than the other arts provide. The way in which this world is totally different connects with the felt ineffability of musical experience, the difficulty we have in expressing its value in words. We are focused here on pure instrumental music, as we have been throughout. Songs, for example, in which the human voice is the principal instrument, appear less other-worldly, since the voice in song resembles the voice in speech. But both the mystery of music’s value and its solution derive from the highly abstract nature of instrumental music, which is therefore our proper focus. And while the recognition of expressive or emotional qualities such as sadness or anger depends on the resemblance of musical progressions to the voice and movement of people in the grip of those emotions, this resemblance holds only between the formal relations in very different media. The emotional dimension makes the musical world recognizably human, but it remains completely ideal or other-worldly.
The world of music is an ideal world in another sense as well, completely created by composers and tailored to their audiences. In this sense it is a totally human world in which there are no extraneous noises or threats, even when it is tinged with pathos or other negative emotions throughout. Our cognitive and affective capacities, ordinarily exercised in resistant physical and social environments that at best only sometimes or only partially satisfy them, here find complete gratification after effort and full occupation. Here we can truly rely on intelligent design to fashion a benign environment through which we make our way, instead of relying, as we must, on the satisficing mechanisms of natural selection to attune us to the real world. Here we are in a world of sensuous beauty, unthreatening emotion, and perfect coordination of aspects and moments. It is then no longer mysterious why being fully absorbed in this way is highly rewarding.
But there is a final part to our answer only hinted at so far in describing the emotional bonding that takes place immediately in the presence of powerful music. I said earlier that we do not typically, and certainly do not always, listen to music in order to bond with others, since we listen in private more often than in public settings. (I speak here of “we” at the present time; when music could be heard only at live performances, its social effects could have been a more prominent part of its value.) It can be admitted also that we do not intentionally listen in order to escape our everyday worlds or completely exercise our mental capacities. We typically attend to music for its own sake, because of our interest in structures of tones themselves (Davies 2003; Budd 1995). But this does not mean that the rewards I have been describing do not explain the value of pursuing this interest. This explanation of music’s value must appeal also to the bonding that occurs not only or mainly between different listeners, but also between a listener and composer, the connection that listening to music affords to the creative human mind. Once more this connection is more immediate in the case of music than in the other arts because of the nature of the medium.
The musical medium is not only other-worldly, but is also immanent, evanescent, ephemeral, transparent. We hear musical tones as wholly present to us, but only for the fleeting moments in which they occur. The feeling of transparency, the fact that our contact with this art appears to be unmediated by physical objects, indicates the purest meeting of minds possible within the confines of the physical world. Indeed, as already noted, the meeting appears to take place in a wholly different, ideal world. The musical object is constantly disappearing as it appears, leaving the creative force behind it more fully exposed. Music then represents the purest kind of Hegelian overcoming of matter by mind, the purest expression of the creative human spirit. Its peculiar value lies not only in its providing us models of perfect order that we seem to cooperate in creating while listening to them, but also in the purity of its revelation of the creative mind itself.
See also Evaluating music (Chapter 16), Music’s arousal of emotions (Chapter 22), Psychology of music (Chapter 55), Rythm, melody and harmony (Chapter 3), and Understanding music (Chapter 12).
Budd, M. (1995) Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music, London: Penguin.
Davies, S. (2003) “The Evaluation of Music,” in Themes in the Philosophy of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 195–212.
Dewey, J. (1958 [1934]) Art as Experience, New York: Capricorn.
Goldman, A. (1995) Aesthetic Value, Boulder: Westview.
Kivy, P. (1990) Music Alone, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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—— (1998) “Evaluating Music,” in P. Alperson (ed.) Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 93–108.
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