Re-Centring Musicology and the Philosophy of Music

ABSTRACT

I defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when we are fortunate, this experience generates pleasure in musical beauty. As Hanslick rightly insisted, there is no way to begin to understand what music is, or to understand its value and why we value it, without putting musical beauty in the foreground and celebrating our experience of it. This positive position has negative consequences. Musical appreciation does not require pathologies of emotion, spurious political narratives, intimations of religious profundity and so on. The value is in the sounds. It is an immanent value, not a transcendent one. It is a this-worldly value, not an other-worldly delusion, or something self-indulgently in us. Musical beauty is there in the sounds, in “tones and their artistic combination,” as Hanslick maintained.

Keywords:

• music
• beauty
• sublimity
• experience
• pleasure

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick Zangwill

Nick Zangwill is Ferens Professor of Philosophy at Hull University. He taught previously at Durham, Oxford and Glasgow Universities. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Beauty (Cornell, 2001), Aesthetic Creation (Oxford University Press, 2007), co-editor of Scruton's Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Music and Aesthetic Reality (Routledge, 2014). [email protected]