"Recentering Musicology and the Philosophy of 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.

Why do we value music? Many people report that listening to music is one of life's most rewarding activities. In Critique of Pure Music, James O. Young seeks to explain why this is so. Formalists tell us that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. On this view, listeners receive pleasure, or a pleasurable ‘musical’ emotion, when they explore the abstract patterns found in music. Music, formalists believe, does not arouse ordinary emotions such as joy, melancholy or fear, nor can it represent emotion or provide psychological insight. Young holds that formalists are wrong on all counts. Drawing upon the latest psychological research, he argues that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. By resembling human expressive behaviour, music is able to arouse emotions in listeners. This, in turn, makes possible the representation of emotion by music. The representation of emotion in music gives music the capacity to provide psychological insight—into the emotional lives of composers, and the emotional lives of individuals from a variety of times and places. And it is this capacity of music to provide psychological insight which explains a good deal of the value of music, both vocal and purely instrumental. Without it, music could not be experienced as profound. Philosophers, psychologists, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers will all find something of interest in this book.

Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context, ed. Alexander Wilfing, Christoph Landerer, Meike Wilfing-Albrecht (Vienna: Hollitzer), 2020

Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”) remains up to today the fundamental text of modern European musical aesthetics. It is read and debated as a theory of musical autonomy, an argument for the internal and objective grounds of aesthetic value and meaning in Western art music, as against competing notions of expression, the imitation or representation of emotion (affect, feeling) as the grounds of musical value and meaning. This essay starts from the question as to whether the role of “beauty” in Hanslick’s argument, even re-defined as a “specifically musical” kind (“the musically beautiful”), is merely a vestige of Enlightenment-era aesthetics, up through Kant. Even from the older Enlightenment perspective, the concept of beauty could be considered essential to Hanslick’s arguments, in the sense that he is explaining music’s right to be considered among the “fine” (“beautiful”) arts. Because Kant’s ideas of beauty in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) remain a touchstone for in the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, these ideas are reviewed, not as direct influences on Hanslick but as a point of reference for understanding Hanslick’s “musically beautiful” in the context of Enlightenment and idealist aesthetic thought. Surveying then the rhetorical, philosophical, and concretely musical valences of “musical beauty” in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, I argue that the lasting impact of Hanslick’s book likes in its ability to engage with the arguments of philosophical aesthetics, while also problematizing these (whether purposefully or not) through the practical insights of a musician and critic. Hanslick’s attempts to locate musical beauty in the quality of thematic ideas and their deployment in overall design of a musical composition opens up his arguments to contingencies of historical change, cultural context, and a complex of subjective factors. The remainder of the essay turns to the status of beauty as term of aesthetic judgement in Hanslick’s music criticism, especially in decade following the publication of the treatise. Modern musical beauty since the era of Viennese classicism is for Hanslick a continuing negotiation (I argue) between more-or-less stable values of pleasure in well-crafted melodic-harmonic designs, on one hand, and a shifting, inherently unstable admixture of Geist and Interesse, on the other: intellectual and technical challenges to the listener, in addition to pleasure in euphonious craftsmanship. Beethoven, above all the later music, becomes a paradigm of this problem, which Hanslick sees successfully negotiated in the music of Schumann and Mendelssohn (but not Wagner or Liszt), yet never to be solved definitively by any canon of classically “beautiful” music. The arguments of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen are already imbued to a significant extent with critical and historical understandings of musical beauty. Subsequent layers of historicizing commentary and examples that accrued over later editions of the text reinforce the factors of historical and subjective contingency that distinguished Hanslick’s arguments from more strictly philosophical conceptions of beauty in the first place.

In this chapter, we consider Hanslick’s views on musical listening in "On the Musically Beautiful," focusing on chapters 4 and 5. In the first part of this chapter, we distinguish the main concerns of Hanslick’s treatise from those of most English-speaking analytic philosophy of music. In particular, we emphasize the normative dimension of Hanslick’s views on musical listening. In the second part, we describe a “ninefold framework” for understanding Hanslick’s views on composing, music, and listening. We distinguish three phases and three levels, which together form this ninefold framework, with causal relations between the phases along the three levels. We note some simplifying factors. The third and final part of the chapter undertakes a more thorough description of Hanslick’s distinction between proper aesthetic musical listening and the pathological effects of music.

Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2014

Attention goes to what we value-which is to say, what we already value. Or so one might think. Is this not the basis on which one selects certain things and not others from out of the buzzing multitude? Yet at the same time, attending to something may uphold its given value, affirm it-and in that sense produce new value. What first draws attention is in turn invested with more robust presence, more robust significance, in the extreme arriving at a fetish object. "It is because millions of tourists have come to see the Mona Lisa that millions of tourists rush to see the Mona Lisa," writes Yves Citton, maintaining that "valuecreation strongly depends on the way in which we distribute our attention." 1 In a similar vein, music scholars have often noted how acquired ways of listening, and their correlate acts of aesthetic description, deepen the grooves of perception by fixing and amplifying certain features over others. 2 It seems, then, that attention and valuation coincide, neither preceding the other, neither reducing to the other.