Davies and Levinson on the Musical Expression of Emotion

Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson have each offered accounts of how music can express emotions. Davies’s ‘Appearance Emotionalism’ holds that music can be expressive of emotion due to a resemblance between its dynamic properties and those of human behaviour typical of people feeling that emotion, while Levinson’s ‘Hypothetical Emotionalism’ contends that a piece is expressive when it can be heard as the expression of the emotion of a hypothetical agent or imagined persona. These have been framed as opposing positions but I show that, on one understanding of ‘expressing’ which they seem to share, each entails the other and so there is no real debate between them. However, Levinson’s account can be read according to another—and arguably more philosophically interesting— understanding of ‘expressing’ whereas Davies’s account cannot as easily be so read. I argue that this reading of Hypothetical Emotionalism can account for much of our talk about music in terms of emotions but must answer another question—viz., how composers or performers can express emotions through music—to explain this relation between music and emotion. I suggest that this question can be answered by drawing on R. G. Collingwood’s theory of artistic expression.

Completeness and Temporality

Babbitt’s music is constructed from a hierarchy of exhaustive lists, so one can understand completeness in his pieces to be a result of the completion of these lists. In many cases, however, the endings of his pieces are not coordinated with the completion of exhaustive lists. This challenges the significance of the concepts, drawn from cognitive psychology and Schenkerian organicism, that Babbitt uses to justify his hierarchical compositional techniques. A new model of interpreting completeness in Babbitt’s music—drawing inspiration from Jonathan D. Kramer and Jerrold Levinson—is suggested as an alternative approach. Rather than envisioning Babbitt’s music as a processual unfolding of exhaustive lists, this chapter encourages listeners to comprehend his music as made up of interconnected moments cut off by a conventional rhetorical signal indicating closure.

Emotion

This chapter considers the expression of emotion by music, the most interesting of the relations between music and the emotions. It is written from the dual perspective of Anglo-American philosophy and of musicology. The former focuses on the conceptual analysis of emotion, the latter on the underlying causes of the listeners’ experience. The theories of Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson are considered and criticized, and recent work in the psychology of music is examined in the light of the pioneering account of expression from Leonard Meyer. Finally, there is some speculation as to the future of work in this area.

Relire Ingarden : l’ontologie des oeuvres musicales, entre fictions et montagnes

Qu’est-ce qu’une oeuvre musicale? La question ontologique soulevée par Roman Ingarden dans sa critique de la phénoménologie de Husserl a de nombreux points communs avec la querelle du “platonisme musical” déployée dans les années quatre-vingt par des philosophes analytiques tels que Jerrold Levinson et Peter Kivy. En 1992, Lydia Goehr a proposé une historicisation radicale du concept d’oeuvre musicale, sans pour autant liquider un projet ontologique qui, tout récemment, insiste dans les réflexions de Roger Pouivet à propos de “l’oeuvre musicale rock”. Cet article fait le point sur ces débats philosophiques avant de signaler la crise sociologique de la notion d’oeuvre liée au virage numérique et à la fragmentation du répertoire classique selon les standards de l’industrie culturelle. Reprenant la définition d’Ingarden de “l’objet purement intentionnel” à partir de cet ébranlement du sens commun, il compare pour finir le statut ontologique de l’oeuvre musicale à celui des êtres de fiction, un personnage de roman par exemple, ainsi qu’à celui d’entités qui, telles les montagnes évoquées par la “théorie granulaire de la réalité” de Barry Smith, résultent de la projection d’une pratique langagière sur la surface sonore du monde.

History and the Philosophy of Art

In this essay I trace the role of history in the philosophy of art from the early twentieth century to the present, beginning with the rejection of history by formalists like Clive Bell. I then attempt to show how the arguments of people like Morris Weitz and Arthur Danto led to a re-appreciation of history by philosophers of art such as Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, Robert Stecker and others.