Abstract

This is the first application of William James's total philosophy to musical experience and its evaluation, perhaps because no essay or book of his speaks specifically to aesthetics. However, James concluded in the Principles of Psychology that aesthetic and moral questions required not psychological but metaphysical investigation, which he addressed later. He also expressed in the Varieties of Religious Experience his ardor about music and lyric poetry as an individual experience. ;Careful readings of James's phenomenally based radical empiricism, his ethics of belief and will, and his humanistic pragmatism answer problems about aesthetic experience and its evaluation. James's radical empiricism that embraces the relation between directly experienced feelings and ideas about an object of experience provides a compass for experiencing and gaining knowledge about music not heard before and about which no knowledge exists. His pragmatism shows how to verify the truth of this knowledge: the pragmatic method shows how disputes about the truth of different ideas about an experience can be evaluated with reference to particular facts; the genetic theory indicates how to evaluate our thought about present experience when it opposes generally accepted ideas about what is of value. ;This study has been designed according to the Ecker-Kaelin levels of the structure of aesthetic knowledge, whereby knowledge progresses either from metatheory to theory, from metacriticism to criticism, or in the reverse order. After establishing the need for the study in chapter 1, the design consists of: a metatheoretical critical review of James's thought among philosophers and critics, both his contemporaries and ours, as an introduction to James, chapter 2; a presentation of James's theories of experience, belief, and truth selected from his corpus, chapter 3; a model structured upon Jamesian theory as a tool for understanding the experiencing of music and its evaluation, chapter 4; a metacritical analysis of the literature on Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, and a critical application of the Jamesian model for understanding this concerto's first movement as experience and object, chapter 5. ;James's emphasis on experienced relations in evaluating significance points to potential improvements for musical education