Abstract

I do not by any means with to take on the philosophy or aesthetics of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman’s Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical work of art? a taxonomy of music, a categorical scheme for the basic and universal aspects of music; a hermeneutics or semiotics of music, an answer to the question What, if anything, can music refer to? an epistemology of music; a theory of music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical work better than another? the foundations of a social philosophy of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion of Nelson Goodman’s seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment in the question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from the nonaesthetic.My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely, current theories of musical expression. “Expression” is not equivalent to “meaning”; I understand and shall use the word “expression” to indicate a kind of meaning that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, “rather obviously, to express is to refer in some way to what is expressed.”6 How this reference is made by the artwork is interaction with the listener, and what sort of purpose it serves—these concerns will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter Faltin’s careful arguments and from my own experience: there is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that operates without reference outside the internal operations or procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But through this may be ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most fundamental way for many listeners. 4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical Quarterly 66 : 305.5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols ; all further references to this work, abbreviated LA, will be included in the text.6. Goodman, “Reply to Beardsley,” Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1 : 171; and see Edward T. Cone: “Expressive values in any art … cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for a work of art to ‘express itself,’ then one must agree that expression, by its very definition, implies a relationship between the work of art and something else; while analytical values are derivable purely from internal structure” . Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He is currently at work on a book on musica ficta, Understood Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony, 1450-1600, and a study of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth-century music