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Scruton's Musical Experiences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2010
Abstract
Roger Scruton's account of the nature of music and our experience of it foregrounds the imagination. It is a particularly interesting and promising ‘non-realist’ view in the aesthetics of music, in the sense that it does not postulate aesthetic properties of music that we represent in musical experience. In this paper I critically examine both Scruton's view and his main argument for it.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010
References
1 See especially Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997: 88–94Google Scholar; but see also Scruton, , ‘Understanding Music’, in The Aesthetic Understanding, Manchester: Carcanet, 1983Google Scholar; and Scruton, , Art and Imagination, London: Methuen, 1974Google Scholar.
2 Jerrold Levinson's account of our experience of music is similar to Scruton's since Levinson thinks that musical experience involves imagining a musical ‘persona’ in the music, rather than the awareness of aesthetic properties of the music. See Levinson, Jerrold ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics, Ithaca; Cornell. 1996Google Scholar; and Levinson, , ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’, in his Contemplating Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 McGinn, Colin, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
4 Scruton Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics of Music, and ‘Reply to Budd’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44, 2004: 184–187. See also his illustrious forebears, Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful, Indianapolis: Hackett. 1986Google Scholar, chapter 3; and Zuckerkandl, Victor, Sound and Symbol, New York: Prometheus, 1956Google Scholar. This thesis seems to me to be very important. I defend it in Zangwill, Nick: ‘Music, Metaphor and Emotion’, Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 65, 2007: 391–400CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For example, Scruton The Aesthetics of Music: 78.
6 Scruton's appeal to ‘metaphor’ is therefore metaphorical. For the Aesthetic Metaphor Thesis, by contrast, aesthetic linguistic description is literally metaphorical. On Scruton's use of the notion of metaphor, see Budd, Malcolm: ‘Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43, 2003: 209–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar, section IV.
7 Those who take emotion descriptions of music literally must say that the music stands in some relation (expression?, arousal?, representation?…) to real emotions. But in our common experience and thought about music, we do not locate features described in emotion terms somewhere else, such as in the composer or in an audience. Just as colours do not look like relations or dispositions, but look like simple properties (see Johnston, Mark, ‘How to Speak of the Colors’, Philosophical Studies 68, 1992: 221–263CrossRefGoogle Scholar), so sadness in music does not seem relational; sadness seems like a non-relational property of the sounds. Both the realist and Scruton can respect musical phenomenology, whereas literalists flout it.
8 The realist view is occupied by Zemach, Eddy, Real Beauty, State Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997Google Scholar; Zangwill, Nick 2003: ‘Aesthetic Realism I’, in Oxford Companion to Aesthetics, Levinson, Jerrold (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar; and perhaps Kivy, Peter, New Essays on Musical Understanding, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001Google Scholar.
9 Scruton Art and Imagination: 38–43 and 44 where he summarizes the argument.
10 Scruton The Aesthetics of Music: 154.
11 Zangwill Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca; Cornell, 2001, chapter 10.
12 Budd, Malcolm, ‘Aesthetic Realism and the Emotional Qualities of Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45, 2005: 111–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 In Zangwill, Nick. ‘Aesthetic Concepts and Musical Aesthetic Realism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2010Google Scholar.
14 In Nick Zangwill, Music, Essential Metaphor and Private Language, American Philosophical Quarterly, 2010.
15 Scruton, Art and Imagination; Davidson, Donald, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon, 1982Google Scholar.
16 Scruton The Aesthetics of Music: 84.
17 Scruton The Aesthetics of Music: 84.
18 Scruton, , ‘The First Person’, in Sexual Desire, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986Google Scholar, appendix 1; see also his Art and Imagination: 10–11 and Modern Philosophy, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994, chapter 5.
19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell: Oxford, 1953Google Scholar.
20 I recommend Hintikka, Jaakko and Hintikka, Merrill B., Investigating Wittgenstein, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.Google Scholar
21 Scruton put this argument to me.
22 In Art and Imagination, belief and the imagination are distinguished by the fact that it makes sense to order someone to imagine something not to believe it (Scruton Art and Imagination: 96; see also McGinn, Mindsight: 12–17). But if we are distinguishing imaginative perception from perceptual experience, this criterion does not work. One can order someone to pay attention to certain features of the world that they are perceiving.
23 A parallel sort of objection is urged by Paul Boghossian and David Velleman against secondary-quality views of colour. See Boghossian, Paul and Velleman, David, ‘Colour as a Secondary Quality’, Mind, 1989: 81–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 For statements of this objection, see Boghossian, Paul, ‘On Hearing the Music in the Sound: Scruton on Musical Expression’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60, 2002: 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zangwill ‘Aesthetic Realism I’, part 2. Levinson's view is also non-realist, and like Scruton, he appeals to the imagination; so he too faces a burden over explaining the source of the normativity bearing on the imaginative experiences that he thinks experiencing music involves.
25 Wollheim, Richard, ‘Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation’, in Art and its Objects, second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Scruton Art and Imagination, chapter 16; and The Aesthetics of Music, chapter 12.
27 See Zangwill ‘Aesthetic Realism I’, part 5.
28 Scruton Art and Imagination: 245–249; The Aesthetics of Music: 386–390 and 485–488.
29 Zangwill Metaphysics of Beauty, chapters 1 and 2.
30 This paper was given as a talk at a conference in honour of Roger Scruton organized by myself and my colleague Andy Hamilton in Durham castle in July 2008. A selection of papers from the conference appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics in October 2009. Thanks to Ariel Kernberg for comments.