Is Music a Language of the Emotions?

Aesthetics Today. Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society New Series Volume 25, 2017

Can music be "understood"?D oest he notion of understanding make sense when applied to music?I ne verydayc ommunication, understanding seems linked to words and (images of)o bjects. "Understanding" works of literary or pictorial arts, therefore, seems to be quite "natural".I ni nstrumental music, however,w herew ords, pictures or narrativep rograms are missing,w e onlycan refer to sounds, the form of their succession and the interrelations between their elements (tones). Twoissues arise here: First,what concept of understanding fits to hearing and interpreting music in general?Second, if thereisno general answer to the question of what understanding music in general means, understanding music might be something different depending on what kind of music we are dealingw ith. 1P references and Aesthetic Appreciation Probablya ll of us, when leaving ac oncert,h aveh eard people commentingo n the music they have just listened to some minutes ago, like this: (1) "Id idn'tl ike that." Or like this: (2) "Id idn'tu nderstand what was going on." Comment (1) is an expression of dislike: The person had no pleasure hearing the music. Comment (2)takes another stance. Instead of just expressingsubjective and momentary negative emotions, it expresses a lack of understanding. The underlyingc onviction will be the following:W hen we talk about music, we should not just express our personal likes or dislikes,rather we should refer to the features of the music and try to understand the music by adequatelyt aking notice of how these features are realized and how the music "works". Besides these two brief and rather simple comments,wecan sometimeshear people sayt hingsl ike the following: (3) "Idon'tlike that kind of stuff, but Idon'tdenythat it is masterful music, intelligent,c omplex, and at an aestheticallyh igh-level." Or this: (4) "It'so nlyr ock 'n' roll, but Il ike it."

In this project, I examine the question of the meaning of music through a historical survey of philosophical thinking. From there, I take some of those conclusions and look at them through the eyes of some of the hard sciences.

The question of musical meaning is one of the great practical and philosophical cruxes of the Western tradition especially since the rise of autonomous instrumental music in the eighteenth century broke the hitherto unquestioned links between musical performance and its verbal texts, and the propagation of the notion of absolute music in the nineteenth century detached music-making from its immediate social contexts. At the same time, however, whether from the viewpoint of what the medievals dubbed musica theoretica, or its less respectable cousin musica practica, the question of what music means, or how it means, paradoxically has been not so much raised as begged. Indeed such are the problems evoked by the notion of musical meaning, and how it relates to musical form, that a recent study explicitly drawing on a social-semiotic model , deliberately declines to use the key social semiotic concept of metafunction in order to analyse various semiotic uses of the modality of sound, including music. van Leeuwen chooses not to adopt the so-called metafunctional hypothesis whereby the expression plane of language is related to its interpretation plane(s), and through them to the social context, in terms of the three abstract generalized functions of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning, concentrating instead on the materiality of sound, on the one hand, and its ideological implications, on the other. It is interesting to note how he justi es his decision, contrasting his earlier analysis of language and vision with that of sound and music:

In this essay I approach the mysterious art of music from several perspectives. As a classical pianist, I think about music as an immensely powerful way of communication. As a music teacher, I am interested in explaining tangibles of music in the clearest terms possible. And as a scholar in the cognitive sciences, I believe that the psychology of music can advance our understanding of the human mind.

New Sound, 2012

Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2014