I argue that our experience of expressive properties (such as the joyfulness or sadness of a piece of music) essentially involves the sensuous imagination (through simulation) of an emotion-guided process which would result in the production of the properties which constitute the realisation of the expressive properties experienced. I compare this proposal with arousal theories, Wollheim’s Freudian account, and other more closely related theories appealing to imagination such as Kendall Walton’s. I explain why the proposal is most naturally developed in (...) terms of simulation and briefly comment upon the impact of work on cross-cultural perception of facial expression, modularity and autism for the proposal. (shrink)

In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, (...) an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845. (shrink)