The Epistemic Value of Music

Sometimes philosophy seem to psychologists to be psychologising in a fashion that is uninformed and unrestrained by empirical data. (That's alright, sometimes psychology looks to philosophers like unskilled philosophising!) As this is the only chapter by a philosopher, I begin with an introduction outlining the nature of academic philosophy.

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predominant way to approach theories formulated as conditional or biconditional statements. In this paper, we examine selected theories of musical expressivity presented in such logical forms, analyzing the possibilities for constructing thought experiments against them. We will argue that philosophical intuitions are not available for the evaluation of the types of counterarguments that would need to be constructed. Instead, the evaluation of these theories, to the extent that it can succeed at all, will centrally rely on inferential, non-immediate access to our subjective musical experiences. Furthermore, attempted thought experiments lose their methodological function because no proper distinction can be drawn between the persons figuring in the thought-experimental scenario and the evaluator of the scenario. Consequently, some of the central contributions to what is generally understood to be analytic philosophy of art are shown to represent a form of aesthetic criticism, offering much less basis for rational argumentation than is often thought.

Percepta, 2020

Almost two centuries after the publication of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution to the Revision of Music Aesthetics and the consolidation of the formalist current, its principles are still at the core of understanding musical meaning as an emerging property of musical form. The consolidated creative paradigm of a composer "picking up" music from his imagination and then decoding it into a musical notation to produce a music sheet that will stand for the music itself to be read by a performer that will, in turn, restitute the musical work to its sonic nature still is roughly the norm in the Western world. This paradigm, however, poses several challenges to musical meaning in other musical practices, especially those that mainly employ improvisation. Starting from a different concept of writing, dislodging the musical work from its usual "place" on the music sheet, and going through the notion of experience as the primary human process of knowledge formation, this article proposes a concept of musical meaning as "embodied" in musical experience, determined and conditioned by devices explained by theoretical frameworks from the enactivist cognitive sciences.

This paper is about the musical meaning and its relation to verbal meaning. My aim is to show that musical meaning should be sharply differentiated from the verbal one, that it should not be understood as a subspecies of verbal meaning, or as a meaning of a verbal sort whatsoever. I will address this issue starting with the sounds of music and language, and working my way up from those: by comparing these sounds and the way they relate to their meanings, I will show that musical sounds are strongly connected with musical meanings, that they have token-like qualities. Resulting from this is a suggestion to redefine the way we use the concepts of meaning and articulation, so that they would allow for the concept of non-verbal, musical meaning. Additionally, my suggestion is that musical meaning per se should be differentiated from the non-musical meanings music can communicate and convey-one does not exclude the other.

This paper outlines a new theory of musical meaning, challenging the centrality of reference and representation in previous conceptualizations of meaning. There is a perplexity to questions of musical meaning. Scholars have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, and how those meanings got there. Asking these questions, however, presupposes understandings of what meaning is. Hence, a more fundamental question remains: what does meaning mean? But, since questions of meaning always presuppose understandings of meaning, the question " what does meaning mean? " is infected with those very presuppositions. Questioning cannot interrogate that through which it already operates. To avoid this impasse, I construct a performative theory of musical meaning, drawn from J. L. Austin's theory of performative utterances in his treatise, How to Do Things with Words. Austin undertook to radically rethink language meaning by grounding language meaning in the actions that utterances perform, rather than what they represent propositionally. Representing, stating, and declaring, thus become simply a few ways to do things with words. This use-theoretic, actional model of musical meaning grounds music's meaningfulness in how music is used to generate effects, how music's efficacies entail social and imaginative transformations upon its contexts of audition, and how we skillfully comport ourselves to meaningful music around us. Asking the classical questions of what narratives musical works disclose, asking what they reveal about their composers or historical points of origin, and asking what messages music transmits—these are just a few ways of catching music in the act of doing things with sound. Ultimately, a performative, use-theoretic understanding of musical meaning underwrites both the meaningful effects of music, and its representational, referential capacities. I demonstrate by analyzing Manrico's introductory aria " Deserto sulla terra " (hereafter, DST) from Verdi's Il Trovatore, showing how performativity intertwines with otherwise representational logics. DST—an acousmatic song delivered from offstage—materializes Manrico, transforming diegetic potentiality into phenomenal presence. DST is semiotically performative, its meaningfulness inheres in the way it actively " presences " and brings into being the very operatic subjectivity that it otherwise seems merely to disclose.

AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard

I suggest that emotions are not the primary affective attitude towards music. If we are to explain music's expressiveness according to the Resemblance Theory, that theory should be extended to include feelings. Because of the lack of intentionality in music and the dearth of universal emotional gestures to explain the subtlety of music's expressive power, explaining this expressiveness by making recourse to music's relationships with emotions is bound to face challenges. I will argue that, even though the movements in music associated with musical expressiveness might not necessarily be associated with emotions, they might very well be associated with certain feelings of the movement itself.

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:

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2005

The dilemma referred to in the title occurs in many contexts concerned with expressive meaning in art, and especially music, which suggests that the issue it raises will be central to any complete theory of musical expressiveness. One notable attempt to resolve the paradox of simultaneous generality and particularity in music is in Aaron Ridley’s book Music, Value and the Passions. I show why I consider his account unsatisfactory and then propose my own resolution of the paradox. It takes the form of distinguishing between two distinct notions of generality (which I term ‘generality’ and ‘abstractness’) and of particularity (‘specificity’ and ‘concreteness’), and of constructing two relatively independent oppositions: the concrete versus the abstract and the specific versus the general. Finally, I show that a description of music’s expressive meaning as abstract, but specific, rightly captures what is usually thought about music, and does not entail any contradictions.

Music Theory Online, 2019

In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.