Theodor W. Adorno is a gigantic figure in musical aesthetics, and many still consider his views relevant, not only for analyzing the modernist music he was inspired by and that he inspired himself, but also for more contemporary developments in classical music. John Adams is arguably the foremost contemporary composer who has tried to break away from the modernist musical language that was still very much dominant when he began his career as a composer, and he has been very outspoken (...) about his antipathy toward the Schoenbergian-inspired compositional techniques that are at the background of Adorno’s musical aesthetics, particularly his Philosophy of New Music. By presenting an interpretation of Adams’ music that draws on some key aspects of John Dewey’s aesthetics—aesthetic experience, rhythm, and his appreciation of common culture—I raise the question of how relevant Adorno’s seminal book still is for understanding the aesthetics of the new music of today. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music—that is, the way that we use music as an esthetic technology to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or nested acoustic environment that further affords possibilities for, among other (...) things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a musical affordance . Next, I look at how emotional affordances in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at social affordances in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers alike were preoccupied with the moral value of music; they distinguished between good and bad music by looking at the music’s effect on moral character. The idea can be understood in terms of two closely related questions. Does music have the power to affect the ethical character of either listener or performer? If it does, is it better as music for doing so? I argue that an affirmative answers to both questions are more plausible than (...) it might seem at first. (shrink)

I suggest that emotions are not the primary affective attitude towards music. If we are to explain music’s expressiveness according to the Resemblance Theory, that theory should be extended to include feelings. Because of the lack of intentionality in music and the dearth of universal emotional gestures to explain the subtlety of music’s expressive power, explaining this expressiveness by making recourse to music’s relationships with emotions is bound to face challenges. I will argue that, even though the movements in music (...) associated with musical expressiveness might not necessarily be associated with emotions, they might very well be associated with certain feelings of the movement itself. (shrink)

Bissell offers a new interpretation and clarification of Rand's definition of art, maintaining that an artwork, like language, functions as a "tool of cognition," and that it does so more specifically as a special kind of microcosm which presents an imaginary world. In particular, he argues that architecture and music are aesthetic microcosms and tools of cognition that re-create reality and embody fundamental abstractions and, thus, contrary to assertions by certain Objectivist writers, are forms of art consistent with Rand's definition (...) and concept. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

My pleasure in being here, at the Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck, to discuss the book Roger Scruton wrote on beauty, is twofold. It so happens that I am finishing a book on facial expression and facial beauty, and the chapter I sent to Roger to request his comments, resurfaced unopened in my own mail box, last week. Apparently something went wrong in the mail. Today I might get some of those comments. Secondly, reading Roger’s book, an impression of a kindred spirit has (...) stuck with me throughout.1) Sometimes, though, something like an ungrounded preference surfaces, which for Roger, clearly has intuitive force, maybe even the force of a conclusion, but for me this doesn’t always ring true. I only mention two instances where my own preferences would be different. One is, where after rightly criticising the reverence allotted to Duchamp’s Fountain, in a single sentence (on p. 98) both Radiohead and Brahms are mentioned, in an obvious effort to disqualify the former. The other is where he defends film as an art by comparing it to traditional art, by pointing to shots from an Ingmar Bergman movie, which “would sit on your wall like an engraving, resonant, engaging and composed.” (p. 102). What the incidental surfacing of such preferences makes available to us is that doing aesthetics is not a merely technical philosophical endeavour, but involves art criticism, from time to time. If you don’t love art or its core values, how could you do aesthetics? And there is a deeper thought behind this in Roger’s writings: that the use of taste belongs to the good life.2) All this, also, indicates my predicament, here and now. I feel most inclined.. (shrink)

The contribution of recent theories of sound and audition has been extremely significant for the development of a philosophy of auditory perception; however, none tackle the question of how our consciousness of auditory states arises. My goal is to show how consciousness about our auditory experience gets triggered. I examine a range of auditory mental phenomena to show how we are able to capture qualitative distinctions of auditory sensations. I argue that our consciousness of auditory states consists in having thoughts (...) that organize our experience. Although my proposals could be adapted to fit with other theories of consciousness, here I expand David Rosenthal’s high-order-thought theory and his quality-space theory, and show their usefulness for analyzing our auditory experience. I use quality-space to account for pitch, timbre, loudness, and sound location. I further show that our high-order-thoughts capture qualitative aspects of our auditory sensations. I conclude by demonstrating how a hypothetical listener in possession of a refined vocabulary describes and reports her high-order-thoughts about her musical experience. (shrink)

The current debate concerning musical profundity was instigated, and set up by Peter Kivy in his book Music Alone (1990) as part of his comprehensive defense of enhanced formalism, a position he championed vigorously throughout his entire career. Kivy’s view of music led him to maintain utter skepticism regarding musical profundity. The scholarly debate that ensued centers on the question whether or not (at least some) music can be profound. In this study I would like to take the opportunity to (...) relate Wittgenstein’s ideas on music to this current debate, thereby achieving a twofold goal: not only to reintroduce Wittgenstein’s ideas into the current debate, but also to use the current debate as a foil to better appreciating Wittgenstein’s otherness as a philosopher of music. I argue that Wittgenstein’s unique philosophical response to the Romantic framing of the discourse concerning musical profundity —specifically, its threefold emphasis on the specificity, aboutness, and artistically exalted status of music— occasioned a view, which was bound to be glossed over by a philosophical tradition, whose origins had made it inimical to Wittgenstein’s original philosophical insights. I conclude that, in a sense, Wittgenstein occasions a paradigm shift by his philosophical thrust to undo the gravitational forces which form the current debate: the very idea of aboutness pertaining to music, and the very idea that a clear line could ever be drawn between music and language. (shrink)

This study examines the piano teaching methodologies used to train final-year undergraduate performance students at four tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. As there is a hierarchical relationship among the philosophies, principles, and methodologies of teaching, this study discusses two chief areas of philosophy, five principles, and six aspects of teaching methodologies that were identified in the literature as being important in the teaching of piano performance. The philosophies include both philosophical ideas and philosophies that are derived from practical experience. The (...) philosophical ideas investigated include rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism, and the philosophies derived from practical experience cover the issues of inculcating in students an abiding enjoyment and love of music; acknowledgement of the place of aesthetic education in the teaching of piano; recognition of the teacher’s and performer’s roles in transmitting to others musical knowledge, personal insights, and a significant expression of culture; ideally, the need for pianists to be well-balanced intellectually and emotionally and not narrowly focused; the importance of instilling in students a sense of humanity that goes beyond their role as a mere pianist and, ideally, gives them a world perspective. The five principles identified relating to the teaching of piano performance majors include: the need to nurture in students an ability to express emotions and ideas; the importance of pianists producing a considered and appropriate tonal quality; the importance of developing the imagination and nurturing creativity; recognizing the need for encouragement and stimulation in teaching; and committing to quality teaching. These ideas provide the foundation for the discussion of the methodologies of teaching piano performance, which is divided into the six aspects of technique, style, memorization, practicing, acute listening skills (or extending aural ability), and devising solutions to stage fright. The information in this research was collected from the four tertiary institutions in Hong Kong that offer a Bachelor degree in music. The participants included the heads of department, the teachers of final-year undergraduate piano performance students, and undergraduate students of piano. Case studies of the ten teachers’ are presented that include their philosophies, their principles, and the teaching methodologies that they used to teach technique, style, memorization, practice, and the development of aural ability, and to solve the problem of stage fright. The data from the heads of department, teachers, and students were analyzed, and the findings from this analysis are presented. Models of philosophies, principles, and methodologies of piano teaching are proposed, and recommendations are offered for teachers, students, and institutions to improve the quality of piano performance teaching. (shrink)

For a long time, popular music has been presented as a field of loisir, devoid of artistic value, social expression of barbaric subcultures and product of a cultural industry aimed at mass distraction. In this perspective, the criticism of Theodor W. Adorno is crucial and, even today, his theses – on the aesthetic inferiority of popular music compared to the “cultivated” music and on the deplorable socio-cultural effects of its diffusion – are still a shared judgment. Even for this reason, (...) they deserve attention. After showing, we will focus on the critics about Adorno’s Theory by the most recent and important scholars. (shrink)