Formalism and Expressivism in the Aesthetics of Music Ciaran Kamp University College London MPhil Stud 1 UMI Number: U593722 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U593722 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own and the work of other persons is appropriately acknowledged. Signed: 2 Abstract The claim of this thesis is that both formal and expressive qualities are equally relevant to our judgements concerning the aesthetic value of music. I limit my enquiry to the case of instrumental music. This is principally because, instrumental music seems to represent the “hard case” for my thesis, as while it appears uncontroversial that instrumental music has a specifiable form, it is less clear that it has expressive content, due to its abstract nature. Although the formalist would have us accept that the aesthetic value of instrumental music is to be found in its form alone, I believe that to exclude the expressive qualities of music from our aesthetic evaluation of it is misguided. Accordingly, I provide accounts of both the nature and value of the experiences of form and expression in music. I argue that formal, as well as expressive qualities, are subjectively determined features of our aesthetic experience, and that it is these features, manifested in our experience, that are the objects of our aesthetic judgements. I maintain that it is our musical understanding that determines the perceived formal and expressive qualities, which are the contents of that experience. This view departs from traditional approaches to aesthetics in that it admits to a degree of subjectivity, not only in our ascriptions of expressive content but also of form. 3 Table of Contents Introduction___________________________________________________ 5 1. Aesthetic Value and Aesthetic Experience_______________________ 9 1.1. The Affect-Orientated Approach___________________ 9 1.2. The Epistemic Approach__________________________12 1.3. The Axiological Approach________________________ 15 1.4. The Content-Orientated Approach__________________19 Conclusion_________________________________________20 2. Form_______________________________________________________21 2.1. What is Form?__________________________________22 2.2. Form and Value_________________________________24 2.3. Hanslick’s Argument for Musical Formalism________ 34 Conclusion_________________________________________44 3. Expression__________________________________________________45 3.1. Theories of Musical Expression____________________46 3.2. Expression and Aesthetic Value____________________68 Conclusion_________________________________________74 4. Musical Understanding_______________________________________75 4.1. Music as a Product of Understanding_______________ 76 4.2. Understanding and the Aesthetic Value of Music_____ 87 Conclusion_________________________________________88 Overall Conclusion____________________________________________ 89 Bibliography__________________________________________________92 4 Introduction The principal aim of this work is to support the view that both formal and expressive qualities are equally relevant to our judgements concerning the aesthetic value of music. I will argue that formal as well as expressive qualities are subjectively determined features of our aesthetic experience, and that it is these features, manifested in our experience, that are the objects of our aesthetic judgements. I shall maintain that it is our musical understanding that transforms our experience of sound into an experience of music for example, and that this process also determines the perceived formal and expressive properties which are the contents of that experience. This view departs from traditional approaches to aesthetics in that it admits to a degree of subjectivity, not only in our ascriptions of expressive content but also of form. Instrumental music is the most natural counter-example to the thesis. This is principally because, while it seems uncontroversial that instrumental music has a specifiable form, it can seem very difficult to understand how instrumental music has expressive content due to its abstract nature. Instrumental music thus represents the “hard case” for the idea that both form and content are relevant to the aesthetic value of music. So from now on, when I refer to music, I intend this to mean only instrumental music, by which I wish to exclude not just music which has vocal content, but also music set to a text. Both in the world of music criticism, as well as in the philosophical literature on music, there is an on-going debate between what we may loosely term the “formalists” and the “expressivists”. Formalists claim that a true appreciation of the aesthetic value of music should be concerned principally with music’s so-called “formal” properties. I shall say more 5 about these in part two, but roughly speaking, they are the building blocks of a musical arrangement such as the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic structures. Part of the motivation for the formalist approach to aesthetic appreciation of music is that formal properties seem to enjoy an objective existence that expressive properties do not. They are thought to be part of the music independently of our experience of it, whereas music’s expressiveness seems to depend on an individual hearing it as such. The formalist thinks that they have the best chance of ascertaining an objective basis for determining the aesthetic value of music. They seek to narrow the definition of our aesthetic appreciation of music to pure form in part, also as a reaction to a certain kind of interpretation and content attribution that is popular in some music criticism. Much of this was felt to be quite unjustified, especially in cases where it was claimed that the music, purely in virtue of its timbres and arrangements for example, is expressive of complex thoughts and ideas. Nonetheless, there is the lingering sense that by annexing off our understanding of music as an expressive medium, we are doing music, and ultimately ourselves, a great disservice. After all, music has been linked more strongly to the expression of the emotions than any other art form, sometimes referred to as the language of the emotions and even suppressed because of the fear that it carried undesirable emotional messages. In keeping with this kind of view, we can characterise expressivists as those who believe that it is certain of music’s non-formal qualities, most significantly its “expressive” qualities, which are of paramount importance in respect to questions of aesthetic value. One example of the kind of underlying motivation here, would be the thought that music is a means of emotional communication and thus to ignore this aspect of it is to misunderstand music altogether. 6 Both of these two views in the kinds of caricatured forms I have just outlined are evidently fraught with difficulty. For example, in order to make a convincing case for expressivism, we must provide an account of how instrumental music might be expressive, that not only agrees with our experience of the phenomenon of expression, but also shows that there is a genuine link between the music and what it expresses. If the connection between the music and what it expresses is really an illusion, or purely in the mind of the listener, it might seem that the formalist has won the debate: music cannot be valued aesthetically for a property that it does not actually possess. However, the formalist faces the challenge of providing a convincing argument for us to believe that the experience of music as pure structure of sound is the only aesthetically relevant experience of music. In what follows, I will argue that to restrict our aesthetic evaluation of music to form is misguided. However, I shall also argue that there is not at present a satisfactory account of expression that can show us either how music is in general experienced as expressive, or how there might be one correct application of emotion terms to a piece of music. What the discussion of expression does reveal is that it is an aspect of the listener’s experience of music that is manifest when the listener is in the appropriate condition to perceive it. The discussion will proceed in four parts. In part one I will investigate the nature of aesthetic experience. I shall assume that our judgements concerning the aesthetic value of music are grounded in our aesthetic experience of music. I will argue in favour of the so-called “content- orientated approach” to aesthetic experience, which holds that when we value music aesthetically, we value it as it is manifested to us in our aesthetic experience. Given this understanding of the nature of aesthetic experience, the remaining three parts of the discussion will be devoted to 7 making a case for the claim that both formal and expressive features of music can be justifiably included as contents of our aesthetic experience of music. Part two will be devoted to the subject of musical form. I will begin with a look at what I take the experience of musical form to consist in. Following that, I shall explore how we could value the experience of music for its formal qualities. Finally, I will give an account of Hanslick’s formalist argument for the claim that only the formal qualities of music are relevant to the aesthetic value of music. I will maintain that Hanslick’s argument does not establish that the expressiveness of music should be excluded from our appreciation of it. Part three will be devoted to the much discussed topic of expression in music. I shall conduct a survey of some of the theories of expression that I think are useful in building up an overall picture of what it might for music to be expressive. What I hope to make clear is that there is no single experience of expression, and no single cause of that experience. However, what I also hope to establish is that we can make sense of expressiveness experienced as a property of music. I will then show how expression can be considered an aesthetically valuable quality of music. Finally, in part four, I will address the claim that expression only has a subjective existence, which therefore renders it inferior to form in terms of its relevance to the aesthetic value of music. In answer to this, I will provide an account of musical understanding, which claims that both our experience of expressive and formal qualities of music are products of our understanding and therefore have only a subjective existence. 8 1. Aesthetic Value and Aesthetic Experience The aim of this part is to investigate whether an analysis of aesthetic experience can provide us with a reason to think that both formal and aesthetic properties are relevant to our aesthetic judgments. I will take it that when we judge something to have aesthetic value, the objects of such judgments are the properties revealed to us in our aesthetic experience. For example, musical works (at least in the vast majority of cases) are created to be heard and so it is natural to think that the aesthetic value of a piece of music must be somehow related to one’s aesthetic experience of hearing it. However, the nature and content of aesthetic experience has been specified in a number of different ways. In what follows I will consider four possible accounts of the nature of aesthetic experience. I will argue that three of them; the affect-orientated approach, the epistemic approach and the axiological approach (which connects aesthetic experience with a particular type of value), are incorrect accounts of aesthetic experience. I will concur with Noel Carroll (2006) that a content-based approach to defining aesthetic experience seems most promising. 1.1. The Affect-Orientated Approach The affect-orientated approach claims that aesthetic experience is distinguished from other experiences by a particular type of felt effect. The idea is that we are experiencing a piece of music aesthetically for example, if and only if we are experiencing a certain distinctive type of feeling. Naturally, proponents of this view need to be more specific about the nature of this feeling if their theory is to do any work. One suggestion for the type of feeling involved is sensual pleasure. 9