Contemplating Art

CONTEMPL AT ING ART

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Contemplating Art Essays in Aesthetics JE RROLD LEV INSO N

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Jerrold Levinson 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Levinson, Jerrold. Contemplating art / Jerrold Levinson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–920617–9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–920617–1 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–19–920618–6 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–920618–X (alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics. 2. Art—Philosophy 3. Arts. I. Title. BH39.L492 2006 701
.17—dc22 2006016276 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–920618–X 978–0–19–920618–6 ISBN 0–19–920617–1 (Pbk.) 978–0–19–920617–9 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

1 I. ART

1. The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art

13

2. Artworks as Artifacts

27

3. Emotion in Response to Art

38

4. Elster on Artistic Creativity

56

II. MUSIC 5. Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music

77

6. Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression

91

7. Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music

109

8. Music as Narrative and Music as Drama

129

9. Film Music and Narrative Agency

143

10. Evaluating Music

184

11. Musical Thinking

209

12. Musical Chills

220 III. PICTURES

13. Wollheim on Pictorial Representation

239

14. What is Erotic Art?

252

15. Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures

259

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Contents

IV. INTERPRETAT ION 16. Two Notions of Interpretation

275

17. Who’s Afraid of a Paraphrase?

288

18. Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies

302

V. AE ST HE T IC PROPE RT IE S 19. Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility

315

20. What Are Aesthetic Properties?

336

VI. HISTORY 21. Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics

355

22. Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem

366

VII. OT HER MAT TERS 23. The Concept of Humor

389

24. Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life

400

Index

419

Acknowledgements ‘The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 367–79. ‘Artworks as Artifacts’, in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). ‘Emotion in Response to Art’, (as ‘Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain’), in M. Hjort and S. Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20–34. ‘Elster on Artistic Creativity’, in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.) The Creation of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 235–56. ‘Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music’ (as ‘Sound, Gesture, Spatial Imagination, and the Expression of Emotion in Music’), European Review of Philosophy 5 (2002): 137–50. ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’, in M. Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 192–206. ‘Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music’, in A. Haapala, J. Levinson, and V. Rantala (eds.), The End of Art and Beyond: Essays after Danto (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 122–39. ‘Music as Narrative and Music as Drama’, Mind and Language 19 (2004): 428–41. ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds.), PostTheory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 254–88. ‘Evaluating Music’, in P. Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 93–108. [An earlier version of this essay appeared in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 198 (1996): 593–614.] ‘Musical Thinking’, Midwest Studies 27 (2003): 59–68. ‘Musical Chills’. [Earlier versions of this essay were ‘Musical Frissons’, Revue Franc¸aise d’Etudes Am´ericaines 86 (2000): 64–76; and ‘Musical Chills and Other Delights of Music’, in J. Davidson (ed.), The Music Practitioner (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 335–51.] ‘Wollheim on Pictorial Representation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 227–33. ‘What is Erotic Art’, (as ‘Erotic Art’), in E. Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 406–9.

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‘Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures’, Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 228–40. ‘Two Notions of Interpretation’, in A. Haapala and O. Naukkarinen (eds.), Interpretation and its Boundaries (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1998), 2–21. ‘Who’s Afraid of a Paraphrase?’, Theoria 67 (2001): 7–23. ‘Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies’, in M. Krausz (ed.), On the Single Right Interpretation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 309–18. ‘Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility’, in E. Brady and J. Levinson (eds.), Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 61–80. ‘What Are Aesthetic Properties?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplement 78 (2005): 211–27. ‘Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics’, (as ‘Schopenhauer, Arthur’), in M. Kelly (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 245–50. ‘Hume’s ‘‘Standard of Taste’’: The Real Problem’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002): 227–38. ‘The Concept of Humour’, (as ‘Humour’), in E. Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 562–67. ‘Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 319–29.

Introduction Contemplating Art is the third of my essay collections in philosophy of art, following clearly in the line of Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990) and The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996). All three volumes are situated in what may be called ‘mainstream analytic aesthetics’, or ‘aesthetics in the tradition of analytic philosophy’.¹ The present volume brings together the bulk of my work in this vein in the past ten years, and contains twenty-four essays, making it considerably larger than its predecessors. That it covers a decade of work accounts in part for its size, but also relevant is the inclusion of one essay, ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, that is almost a small book in itself.² I have grouped the essays into seven parts, on roughly thematic grounds. Part I contains four essays on art in general, raising issues in art theory not closely tied to a particular artform. Part II, the longest in the book, contains essays dealing with philosophical problems specific to music, the art that has always been my principal occupation as an aesthetician. Part III brings together three essays that concern pictorial art, while Part IV brings together three essays that concern interpretation, and more particularly, the interpretation of literature and literary language. Part V consists of two essays on the nature of aesthetic properties, the sort of properties exhibited prominently, if not exclusively, by works of art, while Part VI consists of two essays that address issues in historical aesthetics. Finally, Part VII contains essays on two topics, humor and intrinsic value, falling somewhat outside the scope of aesthetics as usually conceived, though their relevance to central issues in aesthetics should nevertheless be apparent. ¹ For an overview of that mainstream the reader is invited to consult J. Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), though work outside the mainstream also receives extensive coverage. ² It was in fact published as such in France, under the title La musique de film: fiction et narration (Pau: Presses Universitaires de Pau, 1999).

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In the opening essay, ‘The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art’, I return once more to the intentional-historical theory of arthood I have championed since my first paper on the topic in 1979.³ After succinctly restating the account, according to which, reduced to essentials, arthood is a matter of being projected for regard or treatment as some earlier artworks, or what are taken to be such, are or were correctly regarded or treated, I underline in particular the historical element in that account, which captures an inescapable aspect of the modern concept of art, and which dooms to inadequacy any purely formal or functional account of arthood. Most of the essay is devoted to responding to recent reservations about the intentionalhistorical theory, though since of the making of objections there is no end, I harbor no illusion of having responded to all the reservations in its regard to be found in the current literature.⁴ The second essay, ‘Artworks as Artifacts’, is concerned with that same account of arthood, but here it is the nature of the artifactuality of artworks presupposed by the account that is the focus of attention. I develop my ideas on the artifactuality of artworks in counterpoint with recent contributions on the subject by Paul Bloom and Amie Thomasson. Against Bloom, who seeks to extend the intentionalhistorical account to all artifacts, I defend the claim that artworks remain a distinctive sort of artifact in possessing, perhaps alone of all artifact kinds, only intentional-historical necessary conditions. Against Thomasson, who maintains that artifact-making necessarily involves a substantive conception of what is being made, I defend the claim that the conception of artwork necessarily involved in art-making, although not without content, is about as insubstantive as an object concept can be. ‘Emotion in Response to Art’ is a survey essay on the range of philosophical problems that can be encompassed under that rubric. It details five such problems, according most of its attention to the first two of those, namely, the nature of the emotional responses had to art, and the puzzle of emotional responses to fictional entities known to be fictional (what is often labeled ‘the ³ ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 232–50, reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). This was followed by two further essays expounding and defending the theory: ‘Refining Art Historically’ (1989), reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, and ‘Extending Art Historically’ (1993), reprinted in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). ⁴ Two substantial critiques that appeared after the essay was published, to which I thus do not there respond, are Nigel Warburton, The Art Question (London: Routledge, 2003), ch. 4, and Victor Yelverton Haines, ‘Recursive Chaos in Defining Art Recursively’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 73–83.

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paradox of fiction’). But attention is also given to the puzzle of how people derive satisfaction from art expressive or evocative of negative emotion (what is often labeled ‘the paradox of tragedy’), and to the question of how abstract works of art manage to express or evoke emotions at all. ‘Elster on Artistic Creativity’ is a study of what of general import might be said about the processes or principles of creativity in art, conducted through an examination of a thought-provoking discussion of artistic creativity by the social theorist Jon Elster. I take issue with Elster’s account of creativity in art as simply a matter of optimizing choice within constraints following an earlier stage of choice of constraints, and also take issue with some of the evaluative consequences, both general and specific, that Elster draws from his account. All the essays in Part II concern principally the art of music, and most of them bear connections to earlier writings of mine. The first two essays are both concerned with the problem of musical expressiveness, how it is to be analyzed and what it is to perceive or experience it. ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’ is continuous with an earlier essay entitled simply ‘Musical Expressiveness’,⁵ and defends the analysis of that phenomenon reflected in its title, according to which music is expressive of an emotion or other mental state insofar as it induces us to hear it as the personal or personlike expression of that mental state. Along the way various competing theories of musical expressiveness, notably those of Malcolm Budd, Stephen Davies, Robert Stecker, and Roger Scruton, are submitted to critical examination. ‘Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music’, which in addition to drawing on ‘Musical Expressiveness’ also reworks material from an even earlier essay, ‘Authentic Performance and Performance Means’,⁶ emphasizes first the role of grasp of musical gesture in the grasp of musical expressiveness, and second, the role of spatial imagination in the grasp of musical gesture. ‘Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music’ is the oldest of the essays reprinted here, in terms of its date of composition, having been written for a conference on the future of art held in Lahti, Finland in 1990. The first, somewhat fanciful, half of the essay is not specifically concerned with music, but attempts rather to sketch a general framework for thinking about nonexistent yet possible artforms, issuing in a number of schematic formulas for generating such artforms in the abstract. The second, more concrete, half of the essay takes as a case study the relative nonexistence of visual music, despite ⁵ In The Pleasures of Aesthetics.

⁶ In Music, Art, and Metaphysics.

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Introduction

numerous attempts in that direction over the years, and proposes an explanation of visual music’s stubborn failure to establish itself as a viable artform. The next two essays deal, from different angles, with the relationship of music to narrative. ‘Music as Narrative and Music as Drama’ pointedly poses the question of whether music, especially as regards its succession of expressive properties or states, is fruitfully thought of as a narrative of some sort. The answer returned is guardedly negative, and the attractions of an alternate model, one owing to the musicologists Anthony Newcombe and Fred Maus, of expressive music as dramatized rather than narrated emotion, are touted instead. ‘Film Music and Narrative Agency’, which, as already noted, is the longest essay in this collection, is as much concerned with film as it is with music. It seeks to illuminate, on the basis of an account of making fictional along lines laid down by Kendall Walton, and through an extensive survey of examples, the ways and means by which extrinsic film music inflects the fictional content of a film, identifying two distinct modes in which that can occur, one in which such music is ascribed to the film’s cinematic narrator, and one in which such music is ascribed, less commonly, to the film’s implied director. The next essay, ‘Evaluating Music’, is an attempt to identify plausible midlevel principles by reference to which one might conceivably justify an evaluation of some music as good, where by mid-level principles I mean principles whose specificity lies between the extremes of, on the one hand, music’s being good if it affords appropriate listeners worthwhile experiences, and on the other hand, music’s being good if it displays this or that set of technical features held to be productive of musical worth, such as monothematic structure or coherent harmony. The perspective of ‘Evaluating Music’ derives from that developed in an earlier essay, ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?’,⁷ where I propose that the distinctive mark of aesthetic satisfaction in art is that it is satisfaction deriving from attention that focuses, above all, on the relation of content to form and form to content in the given work of art. The mid-level principles of musical evaluation arrived at in light of that perspective on aesthetic satisfaction are then illustrated in connection with one of Schubert’s piano sonatas, the Sonata in A major, D. 959. The last two essays in Part II, ‘Musical Thinking’ and ‘Musical Chills’, like ‘Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music’, tackle questions in musical aesthetics that have not been the focus of much, if any, discussion. ⁷ In The Pleasures of Aesthetics.

Introduction

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‘Musical Thinking’, which begins with a commentary on Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on musical understanding, poses the question of whether there is a distinctive, non-verbal form of thinking that music, or alternatively, the composing or performing of music, might be said to exemplify. A positive answer is returned, and three candidates for such distinctively ‘musical’ thinking are sketched; these are illustrated with a number of musical examples, most notably, Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata and Stan Getz’s rendition of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. ‘Musical Chills’, of all the essays in this collection, is the one that has undergone the most evolution since it was first drafted around 1998, having already been published twice, under different titles, and in truth my thinking on the subject remains in flux, despite my committing it to print once again. It is also the only essay I have written to date whose principal spur was an empirical study,⁸ one concerned with a musical phenomenon that has always fascinated me, namely, the distinctive and usually pleasurable chills, shivers, or frissons that listening to certain passages of music produces in many listeners. At any rate, after describing the phenomenon and situating it in the field of musical pleasures as a whole, and after considering and finding wanting the explanations of the phenomenon and its value that have been offered by cognitive psychologists, I try to construct a more satisfactory explanation, one illustrated most fully in connection with a piano piece of Scriabin, his Etude in C# minor, op. 42, no. 5. Part III initiates a shift of focus to the visual arts. ‘Wollheim on Pictorial Representation’ was written as a contribution to a symposium in honor of the distinguished aesthetician Richard Wollheim, and begins with a sympathetic summary of his highly influential account of depiction in terms of the successfully realized intention that viewers have a certain sort of seeing-in experience faced with a picture depicting a given subject. While agreeing with the basic thrust of Wollheim’s account, which makes a certain sort of visual experience in appropriate viewers criteria of achieved depiction, I differ with Wollheim as to whether that experience is invariably one of seeingin, given the twofold attention to subject and surface that that notion, as Wollheim conceives it, necessarily involves. I sketch an alternative account, Wollheimian in spirit, but closer than most recent proposals to the classic Gombrichian view of depiction as involving something akin to illusion. What I propose specifically is that a picture that depicts a subject is one fashioned so

⁸ Conducted by the neuropsychologist Jaak Panksepp.

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as to yield an experience of as-if seeing of its subject, but not an experience that engenders the false beliefs typical of illusion. As is evident, the next two essays in Part III have a common theme, namely, the erotic in art. ‘What Is Erotic Art?’, an expanded version of an encyclopedia article published in 1998, and my first foray into this domain, straightforwardly addresses the question of its title. The answer offered is not calculated to astonish: erotic art is, first, art, and second, erotic. In less sphinx-like terms, erotic art is art that aims to engage viewers sexually through explicit sexual content, and that succeeds at least to some extent in doing so. This answer is held up for confirmation to a range of examples of the category, some uncontroversial and some less so, and a number of useful subcategories of erotic art are identified. ‘Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures’, which like its predecessor confines its attention to the visual, was written in response to a 2001 essay of Matthew Kieran, itself prompted in part by remarks on the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic offered at the end of ‘What Is Erotic Art?’. Whereas Kieran holds that there is no incompatibility, and even precious little tension, between something’s being pornography and something’s being erotic art, I hold, and endeavor to demonstrate, that there is indeed such tension, and that the two statuses are in fact incompatible. That said, nothing is entailed as to whether pornography, though it is not art, may or may not be, for various reasons, of value. Another shift of focus is effected in Part IV, whose three essays concern for the most part literature and literary language. The first essay, however, is of somewhat more general scope. ‘Two Notions of Interpretation’ brings into relief a distinction among semantic interpretations, or among activities of semantic interpreting, that cuts across verbal and non-verbal phenomena. The distinction is between interpretations that aim to answer the question ‘What does such and such mean?’ and those that aim to answer the question ‘What could such and such mean?’, the former exemplifying the determinative mode, and the latter the exploratory mode, of interpreting. In the rest of the essay I investigate, through a range of examples literary and non-literary, the relationship between determinative and exploratory interpretation in a given inquiry, and the varying, sometimes interlocking, motivations with which determinative and exploratory interpretations are undertaken. In ‘Who’s Afraid of a Paraphrase?’ I turn specifically to the interpretation of metaphors. My principal claim, in opposition to the well-known stance of Donald Davidson, is that metaphors, however much their force or imagery

Introduction

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outstrips their semantic content, in fact usually possess relatively definite meanings, meanings which deserve the label of ‘metaphorical’, and which paraphrases can to a large extent express. The key to the stance on metaphors adopted is the conception of them as utterances in specific linguistic contexts, which acquire meanings in such contexts despite there being no rules of a semantic sort for the projection of such meanings. Examples of metaphors from both literary and non-literary contexts come in for examination. The conception of literary meaning as centrally a species of utterance meaning is the foundation stone of the view of literary interpretation dubbed ‘hypothetical intentionalism’ that I have argued for in two earlier essays.⁹ In ‘Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies’ I briefly restate the view, which locates the meaning of a literary text not in what its author intended it to mean (what one can call ‘utterer’s meaning’), nor in what the text might be said to mean as a piece of language in the abstract (what one can call ‘textual meaning’), but roughly in what an appropriate audience would most reasonably hypothesize the contextually situated author to have meant by composing precisely the text that he or she did. I then proceed to consider a fair number of objections to the view in the literature and attempt to respond to them. But as this is currently a very active area of research I am, as with my replies to objections to the intentional-historical account of arthood, under no misapprehension that these will constitute the last words on the subject.¹⁰ The concerns of the two essays in Part V, which are continuous with those in my earlier ‘Aesthetic Supervenience’,¹¹ are as much metaphysical as aesthetic. The central issue is the nature and objectivity of aesthetic properties, especially those belonging to works of art. In both essays I defend aesthetic realism, by which is meant the claim that aesthetic properties exist, that they are bona fide properties, and that their possession constitutes the truth condition of true aesthetic attributions. In the first part of ‘Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility’, written for a 1997 conference in honor of the influential British aesthetician Frank Sibley, I sketch a largely Sibleyan view of aesthetic attributions, though a more metaphysically ⁹ ‘Intention and Interpretation in Literature’ and ‘Messages in Art’, both in The Pleasures of Aesthetics. ¹⁰ An important recent set of words on the subject, for instance, of which no account is taken here, is Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ¹¹ In Music, Art, and Metaphysics.

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committed one than Sibley was inclined to hold, underlining the extent to which a descriptive core can be located in almost all such attributions, whatever evaluative force they may carry, and however implicitly relativized they may be to perceivers of certain sorts. I then proceed to formulate and respond to a number of concerns one might have about this brand of aesthetic realism. In ‘What Are Aesthetic Properties?’ I extend my defense of aesthetic realism, devoting most of my attention to the issue of how we should conceive of properties in general and of aesthetic properties in particular. What I propose is that at least paradigm cases of the latter are to be understood as higher-order perceptual ways of appearing. In the course of developing this proposal I address the vexed issue of whether or not aesthetic properties are response-dependent, or such that they cannot be conceived or analyzed except in terms of kinds of responses in relevant perceivers,¹² and conclude by suggesting that there is a spectrum, among properties usually thought of as aesthetic, from ones that are clearly response-dependent to ones that are clearly non-response-dependent, with many gradations in-between. The two essays in Part VI take up themes from the history of aesthetics. My aim in ‘Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics’, written as an encyclopedia article, is largely expository. I begin with Schopenhauer’s relationship to Kant, and the extent to which the great pessimist’s aesthetic philosophy relies on Kant’s metaphysics even more than it does on Kant’s aesthetics, and then go on to highlight the breadth of Schopenhauer’s vision of the role of art and of the liberating aesthetic experiences it makes possible. At the end I address the puzzle of how the art of music, which according to Schopenhauer presents us with blind, ceaseless, and hateful willing in its most unvarnished form, can yet provide aesthetic experience of the highest order, justifying Schopenhauer’s according to music the foremost position among the arts. My aim in ‘Hume’s Standard of Taste: The Real Problem’, on the other hand, is more polemical than scholarly. I there formulate a persisting problem about the authority of art criticism, one that should concern anyone for whom the arts occupy an important place in life, and situate this problem in relation to Hume’s search for the standard of taste in his famous essay of that name. I then sketch a complex solution to this problem, somewhat provocatively labeled the real problem left us by Hume, a solution whose complexity is justified by the thorniness of the problem in question. ¹² As seems to be the case, say, for properties like nauseatingness or disgustingness.

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‘The Concept of Humor’, also written as an encyclopedia article, surveys the main theories of humor in the philosophical tradition, and then proposes a novel account of the essence of humorousness, often regarded as an aesthetic property. This essence is held to lie not in perceived incongruity, nor in perceived superiority, nor in the power to trigger experiences of relief, but in the disposition to produce affect of a sort tied identifyingly to laughter. This account is dubbed the ‘affective theory of humor’, and some recent objections to it are discussed and defused. So far as the causes or mechanisms through which humorousness is achieved are concerned, I discuss the pros and cons of the leading theory in that vein, the so-called ‘incongruity theory of humor’, and side in conclusion with those who hold that resolution of incongruity is perhaps closer to the heart of the matter than incongruity per se. Finally, in ‘Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life’, I address a problem in the general theory of value that goes beyond the concerns of aesthetics as such, though aesthetic issues at one point serve to bring into relief the nature of the thesis about intrinsic value ultimately arrived at. That thesis concerns the form that defensible judgments of intrinsic value–roughly, what is of value in itself or for its own sake–must take, or equivalently, the sort of thing that may defensibly be claimed to have intrinsic value. The thesis defended, which tries to mediate between object-based and experience-based conceptions of the intrinsically valuable, is that a richly sentient life being a certain way is the only possible subject of a defensible judgment of intrinsic value. One consequence of this thesis is a disagreement with G. E. Moore regarding the intrinsic value of a beautiful world devoid of sentience, a famous thought experiment from his Principia Ethica. But a more important consequence is the suggestion, if I am right, of an intimate connection between the notion of a richly sentient life and the very idea of intrinsic value. Thanks are owed to all the following for helpful comments on the essays collected here at various stages in their evolution: Lars-Olaf Ahlberg, Jose Bermudez, Paul Boghossian, Malcolm Budd, No¨el Carroll, David Chalmers, Ted Cohen, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Jack Copeland, Gregory Currie, David Davies, Stephen Davies, Rafael De Clercq, Sabine D¨oring, John Doris, Hubert Eiholzer, John Fisher, Berys Gaut, Alessandro Giovannelli, Stan Godlovitch, Mitchell Green, Arto Haapala, Garry Hagberg, Robert Hatten, Peter Lamarque, Keith Lehrer, Paisley Livingston, Mike Martin, Derek Matravers, Fred Maus, Aaron Meskin, Daniel Nathan, Alex Neill, David Novitz,

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Elisabeth Pacherie, Derk Pereboom, Paul Pietroski, Diane Proudfoot, Aaron Ridley, Mark Rollins, Anthony Savile, Martin Seel, Roger Shiner, Elliott Sober, Robert Stecker, Joseph Tolliver, Saam Trivedi, Kendall Walton, Alicyn Warren, Susan Wolf, and Nick Zangwill. Finally, thanks to Peter Momtchiloff for his aid and encouragement, and to Ludmilla Kolokolova for her love and support, throughout the process of bringing this book to fruition.

PART I ART

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1 The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art I INT RODUCT ION I claim that our present concept of art is minimally historical in the following sense: whether something is art now depends, and ineliminably, on what has been art in the past. I claim, in other words, that the concrete history of art is logically implicated in the way the concept of art operates, and that some part of that history is involved, either opaquely or transparently, in the claim to arthood made by any work of art.¹ By contrast, the concepts square, red, pig, mountain, and so on are not obviously historical in this sense: whether something falls under them does not seem to depend in the same way on what specifically fell under them in the past, and to operate those concepts correctly you do not need to invoke the concrete history of their correct application. The gist of the intentional-historical conception of art that I advocate is this: something is art iff it is or was intended or projected for overall regard as some prior art is or was correctly regarded. As is evident, such a conception attributes to art, and centrally, the property of minimal historicality sketched above.² In this brief essay I will forgo defense of the sort of complete definition of art I am inclined to favor, and that I have tried to articulate in three This chapter was first published in British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 367–79. ¹ It has even been argued recently that this may be true of all artifact concepts, artistic and nonartistic alike. See Paul Bloom, ‘Intention, History, and Artifact Concepts’, Cognition 60 (1996): 1–29. I comment briefly on Bloom’s intriguing suggestion at the end of this essay, and again in the following essay. ² Jean-Pierre Cometti’s essay, ‘Mis`ere—ou grandeur—de l’historicisme?’, in Jean-Pierre Cometti (ed.), Definitions de l’art (Brussels: La lettre vol´ee, 2002) has helped me to see the importance of dissociating the minimal historicism of art claimed by my theory from more robust historicisms of a Hegelian or Dantoesque sort, such as ascribe to the development of art an inherent goal, or view the development of art as governed by inherent laws of stylistic evolution. In that light, it might have been better to denominate my theory of art a retrospectivist or auto-referentialist one, rather than a historicist one, in order to avoid such unwanted associations.

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previous essays.³ I will also largely ignore questions regarding the sufficiency of an intentional-historical condition for arthood,⁴ and questions as to the necessity of the intentional component of such a condition,⁵ in order to focus on the necessity, in some guise or other, of the historical component. My ambition in the present outing is thus modest. I aim to do only two things. One is to underline the necessity of a historical dimension in any acceptable account of arthood. Two is to sketch answers to certain objections that have been recently raised for an intentional-historical account of art, most of which offer a challenge to its insistence on an ineliminable historical element in any such account. In addition, in the course of underlining the historical character of the concept of art I hope to show that certain non-historical considerations appealed to by some theorists, for instance, institutional or functional ones, which appear to weigh importantly in some cases of arthood, in fact have an underlying or reinforcing rationale of a history-involving sort. II OBJECTIONS AND REPLIES I now consider a number of objections that have been lodged against the intentional-historical theory of art, and offer replies to them.

The Objection from the Implausibility of a Recursive Definition of Art6 Some writers have objected to the intentional-historical definition of art on the grounds that it is a recursive definition, or else entails that art can be defined ³ See ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 232–50, and ‘Refining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 21–33, reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and ‘Extending Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 21–33, reprinted in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). I have also replied to criticisms of my theory in some shorter pieces: ‘A Refiner’s Fire: Reply to Sartwell and Kolak’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 231–5; ‘Further Fire: Reply to Haines’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1991): 76–7; and ‘Art Historically Defined: Reply to Oppy’, British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 380–5. See also Robert Stecker, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 88–98, for a critical reconstruction of the intentional-historical theory of art. ⁴ These were queried vigorously by No¨el Carroll in his ‘Identifying Art’, in Robert Yanal (ed.), Institutions of Art (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 3–39. ⁵ See Graham Oppy, ‘On Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 153–61. Some of Oppy’s criticisms are anticipated in Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). ⁶ See, for example, Tom Leddy, ‘The Socratic Quest in Art and Philosophy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 399–410

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recursively, neither of which strikes those writers as a happy result. But strictly speaking, the charge is mistaken. My basic definition of art is a one-step affair, as is evident even in Stecker’s reconstruction of it. What I have proposed is that the full extension of art in a given tradition might be displayed by a recursive definition, but not that our present concept of art is to be explicated by such a recursion. Again, it’s true that my definition implies that the totality of art in a given tradition has a recursive structure, but that is not tantamount to my having defined art recursively. In underlining that the intentional-historical definition of art is not as such a recursive one I am thus denying that the notions of first art and ur-art, with which such recursions can be thought to begin, are elements in our concept of art, and that what we mean by an artwork is something that either is or stands in the appropriate relation to instances of first art or ur-art. This is, of course, all to the good, since it would be implausible to maintain that such notions are a part of the ordinary grasp of what arthood is.

The Objection from Unwanted Descendants of the Ur-Arts7 Ancestors of art activities, such as ritual cave paintings, may also turn out to be ancestors of present-day activities that are clearly non-art, such as deer hunting with high-caliber rifles. But then my definition, it seems, will wrongly count these latter activities as art. My reply to this is as follows. Though that sort of misfiring of the definition is conceivable, it is arguable that in presumed cases of this sort the links from remote to present-day activities are not precisely of the right sort, that is, of the backward-looking-intentional-invocation-of-regard sort. In other words, the generating principle of these other sequences, ones that begin with some ur-art and issue in clearly non-art activities, is likely not precisely of the sort involved in the generation of artistic chains. One would have to examine closely a putative concrete aberrant chain, leading from unequivocal ur-art to unequivocal non-art, to assess fairly the strength of this objection. But it is unclear that any such chains survive scrutiny.

The Objection from the Obsolescence of Art-Regards Here is a forceful statement of this objection, as put by No¨el Carroll: Levinson supposes that something might be art now just in case it supports any type of regard, treatment, or mode of appreciation that was appropriate to at least some ⁷ See No¨el Carroll, ‘Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 313–26

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works of art in the past. The problem here is that not every mode of appreciation that was lavished on artworks in the past is eternally available. Some modes may have become historically obsolete . . .⁸

Carroll then goes on to give a concrete counterexample to illustrate his abstract charge. This involves a benighted chicken farmer named Jones, one steeped in old-time religion, who sets out to make an artwork. ‘Specifically, he shoots a mass of chickens in record time in order to propitiate the gods. Moreover, he presents the massacre as an artwork: onlookers are invited to appreciate it, assess it, or regard it in terms of its effectiveness as a means of propitiating the gods.’⁹ According to Carroll, since propitiating the gods was an aim of some past artworks, and since such artworks were correctly appreciated in terms of such an aim, my theory must acknowledge for appreciation as an instance of god-propitiation as an art-making regard, and thus Jones’s action as an artwork, which, given Jones cannot be understood as either a Conceptual or a Performance artist, seems wrong. ‘[Jones’s] intention is simply to make something that is to be regarded . . . as a vehicle for propitiating the gods, where propitiating the gods was once an acknowledged purpose of art’.¹⁰ But Carroll’s conclusion is unwarranted. The problem with his objection is that it mistakes a single, isolated regard appropriate to some past artworks for a complete, integral ensemble of regards appropriate to some past artworks. It is only in being intentionally projected for the latter, not the former, that an object acquires the status of artwork on my theory.¹¹ Although some ancient artworks—say, certain tragedies or temples—were intended, let us assume, for appreciation as instances of god-propitiation, it is certainly not the case that they were intended solely for appreciation in that respect. Surely they were also intended for other regards, involving attention to those works’ emotional, formal, and symbolic aspects. Hence Jones’s chicken-slaughtering act, being intended only for appreciation as an instance of god-propitiation, is not an act intended for regard in the way any past artworks were as a whole correctly regarded.¹² So the charge that the definition misfires when it invokes obsolete ⁸ See Carroll, ‘Identifying Art’, 33–4. ⁹ Ibid. 34–5. ¹⁰ Ibid. 35. ¹¹ I in fact dealt with this objection preemptively in my ‘Refining Art Historically’. I there underlined that ‘only relatively complete or total ways of regarding are to be allowed as substitution instances’ of the artwork formula ‘thing which has been seriously intended for regarding-as-awork-of-art, i.e. regard in any way preexisting or prior artworks are or were correctly regarded’ (p. 24). ¹² But, it may be asked, what if Jones does intend that those other sorts of regards be taken to his act as well, those for which those ancient temples and tragedies were also intended? In that

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ways of regarding art itself misfires. Integral ensembles of regards appropriate to past artworks in fact never become obsolete, so far as their potential to enfranchise possible future artworks is concerned, though of course they may fall out of favor or fashion.

The Objection from the Putative Ascension of Attractive Nonartworks to the Ranks of Artworks There are admittedly many cases of attractive purely utilitarian objects subsequently treated as artworks by some individual or individuals, counter to or in the absence of any artistic intentions on the part of their creators. But it is an error, I suggest, to think this makes such objects into artworks: audiences, appreciators, consumers cannot make things art merely by treating them as such. Of course, as far as aesthetically appealing objects of real-world human cultures are concerned, e.g. pots, knives, masks, curtains, rugs, the idea that any of them were ever conceived or projected in a purely utilitarian way is implausible. Thus, when we exhibit such objects in art museums we don’t need to be thought of as transforming or altering their status, but as simply acknowledging the quasi-artistic status they already have, at least in part, as created. On the other hand, it is possible that some such objects, e.g. magic-ritual ones aimed only at invoking the spirits or manipulating natural forces, really don’t belong in art museums, given their original constitutive projection by their makers, however aesthetically interesting or artistically advanced they might seem. In any event, the least that can be said is that such examples of putative artworks lacking the appropriate sort of intentional projection by their makers are too much in dispute to serve as decisive counterexamples to an intentional-historical conception of arthood.

The Objection from the Puzzling Status of First Art13 What secures for first art its status as art such that it is art from the outset and thus capable of anchoring the chain of artworks that, according to historical theories of art, reaches from first art to the present? Stephen Davies puts the difficulty as follows: ‘First art must be art already at the time second wave case, it seems my theory might have to count Jones’s act as art; but then it would also be less counterintuitive to so count it. ¹³ See Stephen Davies, ‘First Art and Art’s Definition’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997): 19–34.

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pieces become art, otherwise second wave pieces could not be art as a result of standing to first art in the art-defining relation.’¹⁴ The intentional-historical theory of art seems to have no acceptable answer to how first art becomes art, since first art is, by definition, not related to any prior art by the art-making relation the theory proposes as crucial. I have elsewhere attempted to supply answers to that question, some of which were, admittedly, not acceptable.¹⁵ The answer I favor now is that first art is indeed art at the time of making, but that it is art in a somewhat different sense, or for a slightly different reason, than all subsequent art.¹⁶ Obviously, first art in a given tradition bears to ur-art—the ultimate non-art progenitors of artworks in that tradition—something like the relation that second art bears to first art, and that all subsequent art bears to art preceding it. The relation is roughly that of being projected for treatment or regard in ways that earlier objects were appropriately regarded or treated. But since ur-art objects are not art, this cannot be described univocally as projection for regard in the way earlier art was appropriately regarded. There remains an irreducible difference between ur-art and first art apart from mere temporal precedence, which consists in the fact that, for both ur-art and first art objects, while there are certain regards or treatments that are appropriate to them, only the latter are projected for regard or treatment in the way the former appropriately are regarded or treated. Though both first art and ur-art objects are artifacts, whose identities are governed by intentions, the intentionality that makes first art art ineliminably refers to earlier things and activities, but not so the intentionality that makes ur-art ur-art. Anyway, it looks like an expanded definition of art is needed if both first art and later art are to be comprised, and that this will need to be disjunctive in form. It would be that something is art iff either (a) it satisfies the basic definition or (b) it is an instance of first art—that is, one of those things from which all other art, that satisfying the basic definition, springs. ¹⁴ Ibid. 21. ¹⁵ For example, the suggestion that first art acquires its art status retroactively, after the art tradition which it stands at the beginning of gets going. (See my ‘Art Historically Defined: Reply to Oppy’.) As Davies rightly notes, an only-retroactively-conferred art status for first art would vitiate the recursive chain of artmaking from the outset. It is only retrospectively that we can determine, given adequate archeological research, the identity of the ur-arts for a given tradition of art, but it remains true that they always were that. It is not a matter of their retroactively becoming those ur-arts. ¹⁶ See ‘Extending Art Historically’.

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The Objection from Anthropocentricity17 It is surely the case that ancient Martians, active in the remote past, could have made art even though their artifacts would not have been intentionally related to any preceding works of human art, as the intentional-historical theory seems to require. Suppose we respond, then, by liberalizing the theory so as to allow for an object’s being art in virtue of being intentionally linked in the right way to succeeding works of human art. Matters would not, however, thereby be much improved. For granted that liberalization of the theory it would still be entailed that Martians could not even have known that their artifacts were art until humans came along, thousands of years later, which seems unintuitive. The intentional-historical theory thus fails to capture the concept of art in its full generality, the objection concludes, because it takes ‘what is contingent . . . [namely, art’s concrete historical realization] . . . for something essential in art’.¹⁸ Examples of this sort, which highlight for our attention possible artworks and art practices that predate human history altogether, do appear to call for some modification of the intentional-historical definition as originally proposed. For clearly these would be artworks that failed to possess intentional connections, even opaque-to-their-creators intentional connections,¹⁹ to earlier works of human art, there being by hypothesis no such earlier works. The liberalization I favor to meet that problem is not, however, that ventured above, that the works in question are art through having the right intentional relations to later works of human art. Rather, what I propose is that we might with justice consider such works as ancient Martians may have produced to be art in virtue either of (a) their having come about in a reflexive practice of making-and-intending-for-regard-asearlier-such-objects-were-regarded similar to our own practice of art, or (b) their having been made and intended for particular regards acknowledged in our own contingently evolved art history, or (c) the conjunction of ¹⁷ See Gregory Currie, ‘Aliens, Too’, Analysis 53 (1993): 116–18. For another reply to Currie, see Robert Stecker, ‘Alien Objections to Historical Definitions of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (1996): 305–8, and reprised with small changes in ArtWorks, 107–8. ¹⁸ Currie, ‘Aliens, Too’, 118. See also Oppy, ‘On Defining Art Historically’. ¹⁹ Currie correctly notes that the intentional connections between later and earlier artifacts may very well be of this kind, whereby the intention governing later artifact B connects it to earlier artifact A even though the maker of B is oblivious of A. See ‘Aliens, Too’, 117.

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(a) and (b).²⁰ Call the intentional-historical theory liberalized in some such fashion the extended intentional-historical theory. But what now about the argument from knowledge, which applies to extended intentional-historical theory as much as it applies to the theory as originally proposed? There are, it appears, two questions to address. First, could such artistic Martians have known that they were, by the theory’s lights, making art, and second, to the extent that they could not, is that indeed unacceptably counterintuitive? The answer to the first question is complicated. Here are some things that those Martians, in the course of making art, could have known: (a) that they were making things for a certain sort of regard or treatment; (b) that they were making things to be regarded or treated as certain earlier things made by them were properly regarded or treated. Here, on the other hand, are some things that they, in the course of making art, clearly could not have known: (c) that they were making things for a sort of regard or treatment featuring in some future earth art tradition; (d) that they were making things to be regarded or treated as certain earlier things made by them were properly regarded or treated, in just the same manner as that in which art on earth typically relates to preceding art on earth. But it is (c) or (d), it seems, that they would have had to have known in order to have known that they were making art on the extended intentional-historical theory of art. So, indeed, they could not have known they were making art, by our present concept of art, even if the extended intentional-historical account of that is correct. That is, they could not have known that their stuff was art in the full historically-reflexive sense I claim is now ours, though they could of course have known that what they produced was *art*, where *art* is some non-historicist predecessor of our current concept of art, one that was roughly adequate to artistic production in our culture prior to the early twentieth century. Now for the second question: how counterintuitive is that? Properly viewed, not very.²¹ What we have just seen is that those Martians could not have known that their stuff was art as we now understand that, that is, art ²⁰ I earlier ventured such a suggestion in ‘Extending Art Historically’, 422–3. Compare a similar and later suggestion by Stecker: ‘One can say that although Martian ‘‘modern’’ art does not stand in an appropriate relation to previous human art, it does stand in such a relation to previous Martian art . . . So Martian ‘‘modern’’ art is art in virtue of its relation to previous Martian art, and ultimately to Martian ur-art’ (ArtWorks, 108). ²¹ As Stecker puts it, ‘But why should [the assumed Martians] complain that they cannot apply our concept of art to their art? They would be no more able to do this than would ancient Egyptians or Greeks be able to apply our concept to their art’ (ArtWorks, 107–8).

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in the specific actual-history-reflective sense I claim is now ours. But as we also saw, they might very well, in virtue of knowing (a), have known that what they practiced was *art*. In other words, they could have known that they were making in art in a stripped-down, form-and-function-based sense not equivalent to the sense we operate with at present. Another, more recent, version of the anthropocentricity objection against historical theories of art goes as follows: ‘their account of an art-historical relation is insufficiently projectable: there could be art objects which are recognizable as such, but which stand in no art-historically significant relation at all to any of our art.’²² But it is not that a tradition of object-making must already stand in an art-historically significant relation to something in our tradition of art in order to be an art-making tradition, but rather that, insofar as anything outside our art tradition is properly said to fall under our concept of art, it is because we can appropriately relate it to our tradition of art, and in particular to the normative regards that have, as a contingent matter of fact, emerged in that tradition. Consider finally the hyperbolic question: could there have been art a million years ago, on a planet of the star Betelgeuse, if human history had never occurred at all? Well, yes and no. The answer is no, I think, if one means art in the specific actual-history-conditioned sense it now has, in the early twentyfirst century. The answer is yes, I think, if one just means objects made in certain ways, for certain kinds of reception, all intrinsically defined. But that, though it may once have served as our concept of art, and perhaps as recently as a century ago, no longer does.

The Objection from the Multiplicity of Art Traditions23 This objection, originally voiced by Stephen Davies, has been concisely formulated by Robert Stecker: Davies admits that historical definitions of art explain how something is an artwork by relating it to a given tradition. However, he claims that such definitions will be incomplete ‘until a basis is provided for distinguishing art traditions from other historically continuous cultural processes or practices’. If there are different art traditions, and if something is an artwork only in relation to some of these traditions, then ²² Berys Gaut, ‘ ‘‘Art’’ As A Cluster Concept’, in N. Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 36. ²³ Davies, ‘Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition’, in N. Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today.

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the explanation of why something is an artwork will not be complete without some account of what makes something an art tradition.²⁴

And here is the point in Davies’s own words: ‘A definition that characterizes art making as artworld-relative and that also concedes the existence of autonomous artworlds must explain how artworlds are of a single type. An account is required of what makes the various artworlds artworlds.’²⁵ As it turns out, Davies is sympathetic to the extension of historical definitions of art to accommodate non-Western art, provided one can say what makes a given practice of object-projection characterized by backward intentional invocation of predecessors an art practice, rather than something else. Davies suggests that this is to be done by recognizing the essentiality of aesthetic interests and regards, at least in initial stages, to any practice that might be accounted artistic, however far it may have diverged from its original aesthetic roots. This is a plausible proposal as to what, in surveying the known art traditions of the world, makes them all art traditions rather than internally historical traditions of some other sort of making. But whereas Davies views the necessary aesthetic origins of any tradition that can be recognized as artistic as a ground-floor fact, arrived at after reflection on both the ubiquity of art in human culture and the universality of aesthetic interests at the beginning of art traditions, I would be inclined to historicize further, and so render more contingent, the role of the aesthetic in the characterization of artistic practices. What I want to say is, yes, possibly anything we would recognize as an artworld or an artistic practice would display aesthetic concerns, at least at its origins, but that is because aesthetic concerns emerged centrally and persisted centrally for thousands of years in the Western tradition of artmaking. In other words, it is neither a strange accident nor a conceptual truth that anything we recognize as an art practice will have involved cultivation of and attention to humanly bestowed aesthetic features of things; it is just that those are the concerns that were original to and for ages almost uncontestedly dominant in what we unreflectively know as our practice of art.

The Objection from the Putative Two-Dimensional Semantics of the Term ‘Art’26 It has been claimed by Gregory Currie that if art is to be a historical concept in the relevant sense, that is, one in which ‘the very identity of our concept ²⁴ ArtWorks, 108. ²⁵ Davies, ‘Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition’, 212. ²⁶ Gregory Currie, ‘A Note on Art and Historical Concepts’, British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (2000): 186–90.

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of art depends on history’,²⁷ then it will have to be a concept (a) ‘that is our actual concept’, (b) ‘where its being our concept depends on some contingent matter of history’, (c) where some other concept or concepts might, if history had gone differently, been our concept of art, and (d) where there is ‘some overarching concept that binds them all together’, showing that ‘they are all, indeed, concepts of art.’ Currie further claims that this is the conceptual structure exhibited by natural kind concepts such as water, and thus that art, if it is to be historical, must exhibit the same general feature as natural kind concepts, even though it is not thereby claimed that art is a natural kind. The general feature in question, as the Putnamian analysis of ‘water’ suggests, is a two-dimensional semantics in which the meaning of a term depends on two things, a qualitative, purely observable notion like that of waterish stuff (i.e. stuff resembling water) in the case of ‘water’, and certain contingent facts about what in a given world constitutes the stuff in question, such facts being, in the case of ‘water’ and the actual world, that the waterish stuff of our acquaintance is H2 O, or hydrogen oxide. Thus, as applied to ‘art’, this analysis claims that if ‘art’ is to be similarly historical there must be a qualitative, purely observable covering concept like artish thing, and then certain contingent facts about what things actually fall under that concept in a given world, in order for the meaning of ‘art’ to be fixed in that world. But if so, then there is no avoiding the observable concept artish—the concept is presupposed in making out the putatively two-dimensional character of the concept of art —and, the objection concludes, there is no reason to think the concept of art we actually use is other than that of artish thing, thus undermining the rationale for a historical analysis of arthood. At bottom, I think this critique of Currie’s mistakes its target, taking the intentional-historical theory of art to be a claim about the dependence of the concept of art on art histories in other possible worlds, whereas the claim is rather that the concept of art is such that what can be art at a given time in a world logically depends on what is already art at that time in that world, since artmaking minimally involves an agent’s intentionally relating a proposed object to the body of already existing art. In other words, what is maintained is the dependence of the possible extension of ‘art at t’ on the actual extension of ‘art prior to t’, but not the dependence of our present concept of art on the ²⁷ Ibid. 187.

²⁸ Ibid.

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actual path of art history. So far as I can see the intentional-historical theory of arthood is not committed to the claim that our present, minimalist and intentionalist, concept of art would have been different if actual art history had been different. I want to say that the concept of art with which we presently operate, if historical in the way I have in mind, is not different in different possible worlds. It is rather, in any world, the concept of an object-identifying practice where what can count as art at t depends on what, contingently, already counts as art prior to t. The variation in the possible extension of ‘art’ from world to world occasioned by the contingencies of what has already fallen under the term ‘art’ at a given time, to which the intentional-historical theory is committed, does not seem to me modellable on the two-dimensional meaning account apt for natural kind terms, which involves an implicitly referenced underlying nature. The concept of art, I suggest, is structurally unlike that of water. Let us look more closely at the disanalogy between water and art. In the case of water, assuming Putnam’s account of natural kinds, when we consider other possible worlds where persons have, let us say, the same basic idea of water as we do (i.e. ‘watery stuff’), we do not count as water everything they count as water; we only count something in that possible world as water if it has the same underlying structure or material composition as our water. In the case of art, assuming my account of arthood,²⁹ it is true that in other possible worlds persons will be counting different things as art than we do, given the contingent development of their art history—most obviously, there may be objects in that world that do not exist in ours. But when we consider those possible worlds from this one, I claim, we have every reason to count or acknowledge as art what they count or acknowledge as art, that is, things intended for regard the way earlier presumed art in that world was correctly regarded. It is perhaps true that we can only identify what is their art practice—as opposed to other practices they might have that hold together through reflexive-retrospective intentions—by noting that it is the one where the normative regards invoked in the reflexive-retrospective intentions are those which contingently emerged as such in our art practice—e.g. aesthetic, formal, expressive, communicative ones. This is the key way in which ‘art’ as we now deploy it is anchored in the contingency of what is our own art history. Still, it seems true that we will count as art in that world what they count as art in that world. ²⁹ In particular, what I above labeled extended intentional-historical theory.

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Thus the contrast with how ‘water’ works remains. Given what we mean by ‘water’, where underlying constitution is essential, what persons on TwinEarth—where XYZ, not H2 O, fills the ‘water’ role—think of as ‘water’, nevertheless isn’t water. But given what I maintain we now mean by ‘art’, and have meant by ‘art’ for at least half a century, then if persons in another possible world think of something as ‘art’—that is, they label things that way within a practice we can recognize as an art practice because of its structural (backward-looking reflexive intentions) and substantive (involving the sort of normative art regards, ones it is correct to bring to such objects) parallels with our contingently developed art practice–then those things are art, albeit art in that world, even by our lights. Thus art, even if historical in the way I propose, is not plausibly regarded as a two-dimensional concept a` la water. Shorn of technicalities, the gist of Currie’s critique is that a concept operative in a given world and dependent on the contingent history of that world regarding what falls under it cannot be shown to be a concept of art unless a qualitative notion like artish is assumed to operate in conjunction with the first concept. More concretely, the implication seems to be that the backward-looking act of reference posited by the theory, which by linking present objects to past artworks makes of the former artworks as well, must involve a content on the order of preexisting artish things, thus undermining the theory’s pretension to outline a purely historical, non-qualitative concept of art. But that is not so. Intentional reference of the art-making sort need not be secured by appeal to an independent, qualitative notion of the artish. Rather, it can be secured purely demonstratively, as by a speech act or thought of form ‘as those things are properly regarded’, where the things demonstrated are in fact artworks, or else via paradigms, as by a speech act or thought of form ‘as Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and the like are properly regarded’. In other words, on the theory of arthood I espouse the facticity of arthood, including not only what things are art but what ways of regarding them are normative for them, ‘goes all the way down’.³⁰ Contra Currie, then, the intentionalhistorical theory of art need not fall back self-defeatingly on a quasi-observable notion such as that of the artish. On my theory, a qualitative notion like artish plays no role in how, in any given world, the future extension of ‘art’ necessarily relates to its past extension. ³⁰ Or at the least, all the way to the ur-arts, whatever those turn out to be.

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III ARE ALL ARTIFACT CONCEPTS ESSENTIALLY HISTORICAL? The psychologist Paul Bloom has proposed extending the intentionalhistorical theory of artworks to cover artifacts of all kinds.³¹ Bloom proposes, roughly, that for any artifact kind K, to be a K is to be successfully intended to be a K, where what it is to be a K in the latter context is given, inevitably, by past instances of K. Bloom is persuasive in pointing up the superiority of his proposal to existing competitors, those which analyze artifact concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, family resemblances, characteristic functions, or prototypes. But if Bloom is right, then what remains of the special historicality of the concept of art as opposed, say, to those of chair, pencil, or house? Two things, it seems. First, it should be observed that on Bloom’s analysis something is a K in virtue of being intentionally related in the right way to preceding K’s generally. But something can be an artwork, on my analysis, through being intentionally connected in the right fashion to some particular past artwork or artworks—the history of art thus enters more concretely into what art is and can be at any point than does the history of a given artifact kind into what is or can be an instance of that kind at any point. To know that something was art thus might require tracing relations to a particular episode or domain of art’s history, but nothing comparable would seem to be required to establish that a candidate chair, pencil, or house was indeed a bona fide instance thereof. Second, it is arguable that artifact concepts, in contrast to that of artwork, usually retain at least rough necessary conditions as regards either form or function; for example, a chair must exhibit shape within a given broadly circumscribed range—certain shapes, e.g. that of a javelin, would seem to be excluded—and must answer to or have been designed to answer to a certain purpose or use—to wit, that of being sat upon. But that is not the case with the current concept of artwork, which, if I am right, and in contrast to perhaps every other artifact concept, retains only certain purely historical and intentional necessary conditions. ³¹ See P. Bloom, ‘Intention, History, and Artifact Concepts’, Cognition 60 (1996): 1–29.

2 Artworks as Artifacts I T HE INTENTIONAL-HISTORICAL CONCEPTION OF ART What kind of artifact is an artwork? The answer to that question depends, clearly enough, on the conception of art that one is inclined to adopt. Past conceptions of art, according to which art was essentially a mode of representation, or a vehicle of emotional expression, or a display of skill in fashioning, or an exploration of form as such, or the pursuit of the beautiful, no longer seem remotely adequate to the nature and range of what have been accounted artworks in the past hundred years or so. The abstract canvases of Kupka and Kandinsky are almost a century old; John Cage’s aleatoric music of the 1960s seems devoid of emotional expression; Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing displayed no notable skill; Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych does not strike one for its exploration of form; and Francis Bacon’s tortured portraits are anything but beautiful. Accommodating art’s development since the nineteenth century seems to call for a more circumspect approach, one that is noncommittal as regards medium, style, form, content, and artistic objectives. I have defended a conception of art of this sort, one along intentionalhistorical lines, according to which something is art in virtue of being governed by certain intentions with an essential historical, or backward-looking, content. More specifically, what I claim is that an artwork, in the current understanding of the term, is something that has been intended by someone for regard or treatment in some overall way that some earlier or preexisting First published in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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artwork or artworks are or were correctly regarded or treated.¹ The artmaking intention involved may be either of an opaque sort, having roughly the content just expressed, one that simply references prior art as such, or of a transparent sort, invoking specific ways of regarding or treating objects that, as a matter of fact, and whether known to the agent or not, figure in the set of correct ways of regard or treatment for earlier or preexisting artworks. In either mode of artmaking, the concrete history of artmaking up to a given time is thus ineliminably implicated, in whole or in part, in any artmaking undertaken at that time. This conception of arthood has obvious points in common with the art-theoretical and social-institutional conceptions of arthood elaborated earlier by the philosophers Arthur Danto and George Dickie. Like those conceptions, it looks for a relational, situational, or contextual defining feature of art, rather than a formal, intrinsic, or perceivable one. All three conceptions have their roots in the enforced revision of traditional ideas about art that was effected by certain revolutionary ventures in artmaking in the early and middle twentieth century, notably those of the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. By appropriating, reframing, reconfiguring, and reprojecting as art any number of things theretofore assumed to lie outside of the ambit of art, artists such as the preceding managed to establish—since their ventures must be regarded, at least from our present vantage point, as undeniably successful—that more or less any object could be made into or could become a work of art, if suitably repositioned, reconceived, or, in Danto’s famous term, ‘transfigured’. Among the objects that were thus transfigured into art in those years, with little or no physical alteration or manipulation, were the following: a urinal, a snow shovel, a bottle rack, a beer can, a coffee cup, a disordered bed, and a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa. It no longer seemed necessary, then, that an artwork be fashioned by its maker with technical skill, that it make use of traditional materials in its construction, that it display form of any notable complexity, that it have any obvious aesthetic appeal, or that it inevitably reflect in its handling the individual personality of the artist. It is difficult to deny that the concept of art that emerged in the wake of those developments, now almost a century old, was an altered and notably broadened one, covering ¹ See ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 232–50, and ‘Refining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 21–33, reprinted in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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all that had previously been recognized as art, to be sure, but much that would not have been recognized as art under the traditional concept that had held sway, with only minor modifications, since at least the Renaissance. The intentional-historical conception of art differs from the art-theoretical and social-institutional ones, though, in positing as the crucial contextual condition of arthood not a relation to some prevailing artistic theory, nor a relation to a surrounding social institution, but a relation to the concrete history of artmaking and art-projection into which the candidate object hopes to enter. The intentional-historical conception differs also from its contextualist predecessors in taking its most direct inspiration not so much from the readymade and appropriational modes of artmaking that had been established by Duchamp and others, but from the subsequent, more radical activities of Conceptual artists—such as Robert Barry, Robert Morris, John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Vito Acconci—which seemed to establish that art per se had no need even of any concrete object, whether appropriated, readymade, or fashioned from scratch, but could apparently consist merely in concepts, words, statements, gestures, thoughts, and the like, with the apparent consequence that anything, or at least anything thinkable, demonstrable, or designatable, of whatever metaphysical or logical sort, could be, or at least could become, a work of art.² Not surprisingly, the intentional-historical conception of art has elicited a certain number of critiques, turning on such issues as the apparent circularity of such a conception, the status of first art on such a conception, the extendability of the conception to cultures or histories other than our own, and the problematic recursiveness of the procedure for identifying objects as art that the conception appears to entail. I have addressed those critiques elsewhere, if perhaps not to the satisfaction of all, so will not address them again here.³ I will instead simply assume that the intentional-historical conception is more ² The ontology of Conceptual Art is not as simple as it seems. In particular, the identity of a work of Conceptual Art cannot be equated with that of the concepts it invokes or deploys. There is arguably always something concrete involved in the making of a work of Conceptual Art, and in which its identity as that artwork, of that artist, is anchored. This applies even to one of the most emblematic of Conceptual artworks, Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking: 1:36 p.m., 15 June 1969, New York. For this work was created by a particular individual at a particular time and place, through a concrete act of articulation, one embodied in some particular physical inscription, to which its identity as an artwork would seem to be tied. ³ See ‘Extending Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1988): 411–23, reprinted in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), and ‘The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 367–79 (reprinted in this volume).

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or less adequate to what it now is to be an artwork, in the most comprehensive sense, in order to ask what that implies for the status of artworks as artifacts, and for the extent to which the artifactuality of artworks differs, if at all, from the artifactuality of artifacts in general. II ART WORKS VERSUS OT HER ARTEFACTS The psychologist Paul Bloom has attempted to extend the intentionalhistorical theory of artworks so as to cover artifacts of all kinds.⁴ Bloom proposes that for any artifact kind X, to be an X is to be an object successfully created with the intent that it be an X, where what it is to be an X at a given time is informed inescapably by past instances of X. Bloom’s insight is thus that all artifact concepts, and not just that of artwork, have an essential historical component, so that the past deployment of such concepts ineluctably enters into their present and future deployment, through the backward-directed intentions that the makers of such artifacts must of necessity possess. Bloom’s explicit statement of his proposal is as follows: ‘We construe the extension of an artifact kind X to be those entities that have been successfully created with the intention that they belong to the same kind as current and previous Xs.’⁵ Bloom is persuasive in pointing up the superiority of his proposal to existing competitors, those which analyze artifact concepts in terms of necessaryand-sufficient conditions, family resemblances, characteristic functions, or prototypes. But it remains to be seen whether Bloom’s own, original and sweeping, proposal is entirely acceptable. Suppose for the moment that Bloom is right, and that an analysis of the sort that captures what it is to be an artwork also captures what it is to be an artifact of any sort. What, if anything, would remain of the special historicality of the concept of artwork, as opposed to those of chair, pencil, house, or other standard artifacts? Two things, it seems. First, on Bloom’s analysis something is an X in virtue of being intentionally related in the right way to preceding X’s generally. But on the intentional-historical analysis of arthood, something can be an artwork through being intentionally connected in the right manner to a particular past artwork or artworks, whether or not intentionally connected to past art invoked generally. For example, someone could make an artwork of a sculptural sort by assembling pieces of wood ⁴ See Bloom, ‘Intention, History, and Artifact Concepts’, Cognition 60 (1996): 1–29. ⁵ Ibid. 10.

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and plastic with the intention of the assemblage being regarded in an overall manner appropriate to Henry Moore’s Reclining Nude, but without any intent explicitly invoking the category of art or even the subcategory of sculpture. The history of art, it appears, enters more concretely into what can be art at a given point in time than the history of a given artifact kind enters into what can be an instance of that kind at that time. So to establish that something was an artwork might require tracing intentional relations to a particular item or episode in the history of art, but nothing comparable would seem to be required to establish that a candidate chair, say, was an instance of that kind. Second, it is arguable that standard artifact concepts, in contrast to that of artwork, retain at least some necessary conditions as regards form or function, whatever the historical dimension of their correct deployment. For instance, a chair must exhibit shape within a given broadly circumscribed range, with certain shapes being excluded in advance. And a chair must answer to a certain purpose in the case of chairs, that of being sat upon with some degree of comfort, or at the very least, be aimed at answering to such purpose. But I maintain that that is not the case with artworks as such, which in contrast to perhaps every other sort of artifact, retain only certain purely intentional-historical necessary conditions. In other words, nothing can be declared a failed artwork, in the sense of not succeeding in being an artwork at all, through failing to display a certain broadly specified form or a particular sort of functionality. But something can be declared a failed chair, in the sense of not even being a chair, if shaped like a javelin or if incapable of being sat upon at all. Thus even were an intentional-historical account of artifacts in general to be accepted, artwork would remain distinctively historical, in contrast with other artifact concepts, in respect of the creation involved requiring only the satisfaction of certain intentional-historical conditions. It is difficult to say whether these differences between artworks and other artifacts, which amount to the latter being less purely intentionallyhistorically determined, would be contested by Bloom. And that is because of the specific way he formulates his intentional-historical theory of artifacts, in which crucial appeal is made to the action of successfully creating an X. What is it, though, to successfully create an X? Does successfully creating an X differ from simply creating an X? If so, it should be possible to create an X, but unsuccessfully, which is not, I think, what Bloom is after. So successfully creating an X, it would appear, is just creating an X. What the adverb serves

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to call attention to, however, is a minimal success condition that Bloom apparently regards as constraining intentional-historical artifact making in general. This is evident in his illustration of how chair-making, for example, might fail, even though the intentional-historical condition of such making was in place: ‘If someone intends to create a chair, but it falls to pieces as soon as it is finished, the person would not view this creation as successfully fulfilling his or her intent, and thus has not created a chair.’⁶ Thus for Bloom, something intended to be a chair but that was merely a heap of materials incapable of being sat upon would not be a chair regardless of how firm the intention involved that it belong to the category of chairs. That seems right, but Bloom’s justification of this judgment is rather peculiar. He implies that such an object would fail to be a chair not because it could not fulfill the basic function of affording single seating, but rather because its creator would not recognize it as the successful product of an intention to create a chair, that is, something effectively affording single seating. This is peculiar because it seems that whether or not something counts as a chair, though it may depend crucially on the intentions of its maker, should not ultimately depend on whether from the point of view of its maker those intentions are fulfilled, but rather on whether, from some objective point of view, those intentions really are fulfilled. For after all, a would-be chair maker may be deluded or confused, thinking that a pile of nails or a coiled length of rope for which he is responsible conforms well enough to past chairs to count as a successfully created new one. It seems that what is relevant to satisfaction of the minimal success condition is not the maker’s conception of a chair based on past acquaintance with them, but rather the conception of a chair endorsed by competent users of the term ‘chair’ in general, one that imports at least some minimal features of form or function. Given satisfaction of that condition, the identity of a candidate thing as a chair may indeed be entirely determined, as Bloom’s account would have it, by an appropriate chair-history-invoking intention in its making. But the insistence on a minimal success condition, which rules out piles of nails, lengths of rope, decks of cards, javelin-shaped rods, and so on, as chairs, shows that some non-purely-historical conception of chairhood is in play in circumscribing the boundaries of the category. As regards artworks, however, it is far from clear that any such non-purely-historical conception of ⁶ See Bloom, ‘Intention, History, and Artifact Concepts’, Cognition 60 (1996): 1–29.

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arthood is in play, or that there is any minimal success condition of a substantive sort on the making involved. Why is that so? It helps to recall what, in the Post-Duchampian era, are two salient features of artmaking in contrast to standard artifact-making. First, one can more or less simply declare something a work of art, and it becomes such. Or at least one can, in certain contexts, or with a certain standing, do so. Second, anything, whatever its material constitution, cultural category, or ontological status, can become, or can be incorporated into, a work of art. These features are arguably enough to distinguish the concept of artwork from that of other artifacts, even if such artifacts, if Bloom is right, share with artworks the primary determining of their categorial status by a historical, or past-invoking, intention in their making. What is special about the artifact concept artwork, one might say, is that it is a wholly relational one; it is more like those of observed thing or beloved object or prize winner than it is like those of standard artifacts, such as chair or cup or cabin, for which there are at least minimal conditions of form as regards finished shape, of constitution as regards material, of making as regards the activity of the maker, or of functional success as regards usability of the final product. III ARTMAKING AND SUBSTANTIVE CONCEPTIONS If the above is correct, then however sound the inspiration of Bloom’s intentional-historical theory of artifacts, he errs in blurring the difference between artworks and other artifacts, failing to appreciate that though minimal success conditions, rooted in some not-purely-relational conception of the kind of artifact in question, are ineliminably involved in the making of the latter, that is not the case with the former. Amie Thomasson, in a careful essay highlighting the insufficiently acknowledged role that background conceptions of artifacts play in their creation, holds Bloom’s analysis at fault precisely for not sufficiently acknowledging that role, and for thinking that artifact creation can proceed in a more conceptually thin or purely historical way than it in fact can.⁷ According to Thomasson, even the intention to create something of a given artifact kind K cannot consist merely in intending the object to belong to the same ⁷ See Thomasson, ‘Artifacts and Other Creations’, in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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kind as existing examples of K to which one can point or refer. Thomasson instead maintains, as a completely general principle, that a substantive conception of an artifact kind K must be involved in the intentional production of an artifact of that kind: ‘the relevant sort of intention to make a thing of artifactual kind K must thus involve a substantive, and substantially correct, concept of what a K is, including an understanding of what sorts of properties are Krelevant and an intention to realize many of them in the object created.’⁸ She adds that, for an artifact of that kind to be created, the intention in question must be ‘largely successfully realized’, which is the minimal success condition implicit also in Bloom’s account of artifactuality. Assuming that Thomasson’s principle is true for the making of gardenvariety artifacts, is it also true for the making of artworks, that most elusive species of artifact? Can one create an artwork without a ‘substantive conception’ of what artworks are? More specifically, does artmaking on an intentional-historical account of it require that an artmaker have a ‘substantive conception’ of what he or she is making? The answer depends, in part, on how ‘substantive’ is ‘substantive’. Can one make an artwork merely by intending something for the sort of regard or treatment appropriate to artworks, but without knowing what artworks are, in any qualitative sense, but only that there are such things, and that they are some sort of artifact, and without knowing what sorts of regards or treatments are appropriate to them, but only that there are such? I claim one can, and if so, one needn’t have a substantive concept of what an artwork is, one implicating characteristic properties or functions. Does one need to possess in any measure a theory of art, a` la Danto, in order to make art, or need one only know that there are such things as artworks and that there are ways it is correct to approach them? I claim not, and if so, once again an artmaker need not possess a substantive concept of what an artwork is—though of course virtually all artmakers will possess such, which concept will vary from artist to artist, and from artform to artform. Elsewhere in her discussion Thomasson offers an argument that could be seen as directly aimed at undermining the possibility just affirmed, one that according to the intentional-historical theory is sometimes realized in the making of art, that an artifact of kind K might be made merely by intending an object to stand in certain relations to existing instances of K: ⁸ See Thomasson, ‘Artifacts and Other Creations’, in E. Margolis and S. Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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If a later artisan does know of the existence of extant Ks, then he may have the intention to create one of those, with an implicit reference back to earlier K. Yet even so . . . his intention cannot be a mere transparent intention to create one of those . . . without any substantive concept of what ‘those’ are, of what features are relevant to being of artifactual kind K. In order for his making to be controlled and directed, his intention to make a K must be filled out with intentions regarding what features are to be imposed on the object of his creation in order to succeed at realizing his intention to make a K.⁹

But I think it clear that the stricture Thomasson here invokes, of a making filled out with feature-conscious or feature-directed subsidiary intentions, whose satisfaction is necessary for the making to succeed, though applicable to the making of standard non-art artifacts, such as chairs, as well as traditional art artifacts in established media, such as paintings, is inapplicable to artmaking in an appropriational or conceptual mode. Arguably nothing more is needed for successful artmaking in that mode than the belief that there is a practice of art, that various things are exemplars of it, and that there are correct ways of regarding, treating, or interacting with those things. So far as I can see, this necessarily involves the maker in some conceptions about art, to be sure, but not in substantive conceptions, in the sense Thomasson seems to have in mind, about the nature of artworks and their characteristic properties. IV TRADITIONAL ARTMAKING It would be remiss to end this short essay on the nature of artworks as artifacts without some remarks on the special character of artmaking of a traditional sort, that is, all artmaking before Duchamp, Warhol, and Conceptual Art, and most artmaking after them as well. In artmaking as traditionally conceived—and for simplicity I confine my attention to artmaking in the visual arts—there are distinctive raw materials, e.g. paint, clay, charcoal; there are distinctive techniques, e.g. carving, etching, impasto; and there are distinctive aims, such as visual beauty, representational verisimilitude, and emotional expression. But the making of chairs and pencils also involves distinctive materials, distinctive techniques, and distinctive aims, albeit utilitarian ones. So even if artmaking in the comprehensive, postDuchampian sense distinguishes itself from other sorts of artifact-making ⁹ Ibid.

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by its presumed purely intentional-historical character, is artmaking of the traditional sort, though issuing in a physical object whose interest is primarily aesthetic rather than utilitarian, fundamentally different from the making of physical artifacts generally, including the making of craft objects such as rugs or pots? To a degree. Dewey and Collingwood were two philosophers of art who had insightful and consonant things to say on the distinctive character of the making involved in traditional art, especially as in contrast with the making involved in the overtly similar activity of craft.¹⁰ What both thinkers stressed is that the making of an artwork is an open-ended, indefinitely extended creative-critical process, with alternating phases of making and assessing, or ‘doing and undergoing’, but one not governed by any fixed goal or preconceived idea of what the artwork must be, or how it must turn out. An artist making a sculpture, for example, in contrast with a craftsman making a rug or a pot, need not envisage what its dimensions will be, what it will look like, or what form it will have. This is unsurprising if one recalls that making a traditional artwork is, as much as anything, an expressive activity, but one in which, as Collingwood underlined, the artist does not know precisely what he has expressed until the process is completed. The maker of a craft object, though, must first and foremost assure the creation of a usable object of the craft in question, some of whose features, such as flatness or water-holding capacity, are accordingly non-negotiable, thus enjoining a preconception of some specificity on the craftsman’s part of the object to be created. Granted the above, the upshot for our discussion is this. If, as Thomasson urges, the making of standard artifacts is always governed by a substantive conception of the artifact in question, one that sets clear terms for success and failure in such makings, and if traditional artworks are accounted standard enough in that respect, then what is most noteworthy about the making of such artifacts is that the substantive conceptions involved in their creation are relatively insubstantial, that is, not such as to constrain notably them in formal, material, or functional ways. A sculpture, say, needs to be physical, perceivable, and perhaps smaller than the planet, but apart from that, it can be of any size, any composition, any shape, any color, and any subject. The relative insubstantiality of the conceptions governing the making of traditional ¹⁰ See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1934), and R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938).

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artworks fits well, of course, with the innovative and exploratory aim often ascribed to art, both traditional and non-traditional. V CONCLUSION So what sort of artifact is an artwork? In the past, and thinking primarily of the visual arts, one might have answered: a physical object, fashioned with skill, involving a recognized medium, designed to be of aesthetic interest, and whose making is governed by a fairly substantive conception of the genre of artwork in question. And such an answer would still be largely adequate to at least traditional artmaking today. But at present, and just confining ourselves to the activities of visual artists, such an answer is no longer even remotely adequate. That is because of alternate modes of artmaking that have become entrenched in the past hundred years, whereby artworks need not be fashioned by their creators, need not involve recognized artistic media, need not be aimed at satisfying aesthetic interests, and whose making need not be governed by any very substantial conception of a genre in which the artist is working. Those modes of artmaking have revolutionized the concept of art, making it the case that the concept-of-art-2005 is something fundamentally, and not just marginally, different from the concept-of-art-1905. Artworks are necessarily artifacts, since they are things intentionally brought into being through human agency. That much remains true. But if I am right, to be an artwork today is simply to be something governed by an intention relating it in a certain way to what have been accounted artworks in the past. By contrast, more is required to be an artifact of a standard sort, such as a chair, even if the intentional-historical connection sufficient for being an artwork plays a crucial role there as well, in the manner that Bloom has underlined.

3 Emotion in Response to Art Responding emotionally to artworks is a familiar enough occurrence, and hardly seems puzzling, recalled at that level of generality. Why should not works of art, in company with people, animals, natural objects and political events, produce emotions in us? Philosophers have, however, raised questions about emotional responses to art in particular contexts, or when viewed from certain angles. These questions suggest that there is indeed something puzzling about such responses. One such context is that of response to fictions, whether literary, dramatic, or cinematic ones, where emotions appear to be had, not only for the work or representation itself, but for the fictional characters or situations represented therein, even though these are perfectly well understood not to exist. A second such context is that of abstract or non-representational art, with music the example par excellence, where it is unclear both what could elicit such a response and what its object could be. A third context is that in which artworks expressive of negative emotion, for example tragedies, requiems, and tales of horror, engender parallel responses in perceivers without evoking avoidance or disapproval. And a fourth context in which emotional response to art has struck philosophers as problematic is where the proper appreciation of art is at issue, since such appreciation may be thought to be incompatible with experiencing life emotions of a familiar sort that art seems capable of raising in us. We might formulate the main philosophical questions concerning emotion in response to art as follows. (1) What kind of emotions are had in response to works of art? (2) How can we coherently have emotions for fictional persons or situations, given that we do not believe in their existence? (This query relates to what is known as ‘the paradox of fiction’.) (3) How First published as ‘Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain’, in M. Hjort and S. Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20–34.

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do abstract works of art, especially musical ones, generate emotions in audiences, and toward what do audiences then have these emotions? (4) How can we make sense of the interest that many appreciators have in experiencing empathetically art that is expressive of negative emotions? (A particular form of this query is ‘the paradox of tragedy’.) (5) Is there a conflict between responding emotionally to art and what the aesthetic appreciation of art demands? Answers to these questions depend, to some extent, on the conception of emotion adopted. I thus begin this essay by sketching a conception of the emotions that mediates between the sensationalist model of early twentiethcentury psychology and the cognitivist model widely favored in current philosophy.¹ With that as background, various answers to the above questions will be critically reviewed. I T HE NATURE OF EMOTIONS In order to fruitfully assess the varieties of emotional response to art it is obviously of use to have some account of what exactly emotions—in the occurrent, as opposed to dispositional, sense—are. Philosophical debate on the nature of emotions, informed to greater or lesser degree by available work in psychology, has in the past thirty years or so revolved around an opposition between feeling (or sensation) based, and thought (or cognition) based, approaches. The former holds that at the core of an emotion is an internal feeling or set of sensations, while the latter holds that at its core an emotion is a particular kind of thought, judgment, or evaluation. While the feeling approach has trouble accommodating the intentionality (or objectdirectedness) and amenability to reason of many emotions, the thought approach has trouble with the experiential aspect of emotions, that is, with what it is to feel them, as opposed to merely having the beliefs or entertaining the thoughts that may be associated with them, with the evident inertia and passivity of many emotional conditions, as well as with states of desire, whose ¹ See, for example, among major studies in a cognitivist vein, Robert Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1978); William Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Robert Gordon, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ronald De Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); and Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons (London: Routledge, 1989). A useful review of this literature, to which I am indebted, is John Deigh, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics 104 (1994): 824–54. An even more extreme cognitivism about emotions is presented in Martha Nussbaum’s recent Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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connection with many emotions seems more than contingent. Still, while the feeling approach can be faulted for too ‘mindless’ a picture of emotions, it is right to insist on bodily response and inner affect of some sort as a sine qua non of emotion, and while the thought approach can be faulted for too ‘mindful’ a picture of emotions, it is right to emphasize that many emotions include cognitive elements essentially, e.g. thoughts with specific contents, which contents are, in many cases, socially shaped. At present there appears to be some consensus that, in perhaps the majority of cases, an emotion is best thought of as a bodily response with a distinctive physiological, phenomenological, and expressive profile, one that serves to focus attention in a given direction, and which involves cognition to varying degrees and at various levels. The level of cognitive involvement runs from mere registering of presence, to ways of seeing or regarding that which is registered, to propositional conceptions of the object responded to, to articulate beliefs about or attitudes toward the object of response. Alternatively put, an experienced emotion can be said to have as its core a bodily reaction—comprising physiological sensations, feelings of comfort and discomfort, and orientings of attention—which reaction is often caused or modified by, and is sometimes necessarily bound up with, cognitions of various sorts and strengths, depending on the type of emotion involved. Note that on such a view of emotion, in which cognitive representations on the order of beliefs (or for that matter, desires) are seen as characteristic of, but not essential to, experienced emotion, the intentionality or directedness of emotions (as opposed, say, to moods) is preserved by the root feature of orientation of attention to or focusing of concern on that which the subject registers as significant.² On the other hand, there is also a growing acknowledgement that the pretheoretically recognized emotions constitute an irreducibly heterogeneous class, i.e. that they do not form a ‘natural kind’.³ It seems reasonable to recognize a spectrum of emotional states experienced by humans, from the startle reaction, involving minimal cognition, at one end, to pride, envy, shame, jealousy, grief, remorse, embarrassment and the like, involving complex and often morally conditioned cognitions, at the other end, with hunger, surprise, lust, fear, anger, joy, sorrow, and so on filling in the vast ² See, most relevantly, Jenefer Robinson, ‘Startle’, Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 53–74. ³ See on this, in addition to Robinson, ibid., Paul Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: From Evolution to Social Construction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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middle ground. The emotional responses typical of engagement with art, though, tend to be of the moderately, or highly, cognitively involved sort—a fact relevant to some recent attempts to dissolve too quickly the paradox of fiction by appeal to what need not be true of all cases of emotion. Although it is convenient to speak of emotions having elements or components of various sorts, e.g. thoughts, sensations, desires, feelings, pleasures, pains, shifts of attention, these should not be thought of as merely bundled together, and the emotion as a mere conglomeration. The truth is rather that an emotion is an ordered complex or structure of the elements it is taken to comprehend, with causal relations prominent among those in which this order consists. My anger at my daughter for having carelessly misplaced my keys, for example, is a bodily response, rooted in physiology and reflected in countenance, involving a focusing of attention on her, and feelings of agitation and displeasure, which feelings result jointly from my thought of her action and my desire that she not have so acted, while fueling, perhaps, my desire that she in some way pay for having so acted.

II EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO REPRESENTAT IONAL ART: THE PARADOX OF FICTION The much-discussed paradox of fiction can be formulated as a set of three propositions, to each of which we seem to have strong allegiance, but which are jointly inconsistent, and thus impossible to maintain coherently as a set. Solutions to the paradox, then, typically take the form of rejecting one or more of the propositions, with a reasoned justification for doing so. The propositions are these. (a) We often have emotions for fictional characters and situations known to be purely fictional; (b) Emotions for objects logically presuppose beliefs in the existence and features of the objects in question; (c) We do not harbor beliefs in the existence and features of objects known to be fictional. In the extensive discussion of this conundrum in the literature, almost every possible solution to it has been essayed. The following comprise most of the solutions that have found adherents. (1) The Non-Intentionalist solution: emotional responses to fictions are not, despite appearances, instances of emotions as such, but rather of less complex states, such as moods (e.g. cheerfulness) or reflex reactions (e.g. shock), which lack the full intentionality and cognitivity of emotions per se. As is evident, this solution involves the denial of (a). But the diagnosis it

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offers seems to comfortably apply to only a small portion of the full range of developed responses to fictions. (2) The Suspension-of-Disbelief solution: while caught up in fictions, consumers thereof temporarily allow themselves to believe in the nonexistent characters and situations of the fiction, and thus to have bona fide emotions for them, reverting to standing beliefs in their nonexistence once the fiction no longer actively engages them. Such a solution, turning on a denial of (c), though popular in the nineteenth century, unacceptably depicts consumers of fiction as having both a rather tenuous grip on reality and an amazing ability to manipulate their beliefs at will.⁴ (3) The Surrogate-Object solution: emotional responses to fictions take as their real objects not known-to-be-nonexistent persons and events in fictions, but other, existent and believed-to-be-existent, objects. This solution, in one way or another, thus calls (a) into question. On one version of this solution, the object of response is simply the fictional work or artistic representation itself, or parts thereof. On another version, the objects of response are rather the descriptions, images, propositions, or thought contents afforded by the fiction or representation.⁵ And on a third version, different enough from the preceding two to deserve a separate label—the Shadow-Object proposal—the objects of response are real individuals or phenomena from the subject’s life experience, ones resembling the persons or events of the fiction, and of which the fiction puts the subject covertly or indirectly in mind.⁶ The Surrogate-Object solution in its first two guises distorts the logic and phenomenology of emotional response to fictions. Whatever the nature or status of our response to fictional characters or situations, it is an emotional response to them, not to something else. Our responses, however ultimately analyzed, have those characters and situations as their evident objects, and not the vehicles that bring them to us or the thoughts through which they are delineated. Much the same complaint can be brought against the Shadow-Object proposal, though here it is clear that the sort of response to which the proposal draws attention does indeed often accompany and ⁴ For discussion, see Eva Schaper, ‘Fiction and the Suspension of Disbelief ’, British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (1978): 31–44, and No¨el Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (London: Routledge, 1990). ⁵ See, for example, Peter Lamarque, ‘How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?’, British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (1981): 291–304, and Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, ch. 2. ⁶ See, for example, William Charlton, ‘Feeling for the Fictitious’, British Journal of Aesthetics 24 (1984): 206–16.

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underlie the emotional response to fictional matters per se. Still, despising a fictional character, say, is not simply reducible to despising people of that sort generally, or to despising some actual similar individual of one’s acquaintance. (4) The Anti-Judgmentalist solution: emotional responses to objects do not logically require beliefs concerning the existence or features of such objects, but only weaker sorts of cognitions, e.g. seeing a certain way, or conceiving in a certain manner, or regarding as if such and such; thus, there is no good reason not to categorize as standard emotions the emotional responses had toward fictions, since they satisfy the demands of a more relaxed cognitivism about emotions. This approach to the paradox, which directly challenges (b), has a growing number of proponents, and merits extended discussion.⁷ The instances of emotional response that challenge judgmentalism—the view that the cognitive element involved in all emotions is a judgment or belief—are mostly of two types. The first type is where there is insufficient time for substantial cognition, so that no real representation of the object responded to is formed, there being only a virtually instantaneous reaction, instinctive or reflexive in nature, unmediated by conscious thought (examples: apprehension at a suddenly looming shape, disgust at an accidentally felt slug). A second type is where, though cognition is involved in generating the response, the representation thus formed is either not propositional in nature, or else does not have the status of a judgment, or both (examples: phobic fear of garter snakes, unfounded resentment of female superiors). As noted earlier, the emotions involved in responding to fictions, ones such as pity, sorrow, love, admiration, anger, hate, hope, lie in the main in the middle and upper ranges of cognitive complexity for emotions. It thus seems undeniable that, whether or not they involve beliefs, such emotions are centrally mediated by representations of various sorts, such as views, conceptions, or evaluations, which serve to characterize the object of response. But now even if emotions at this cognitive level do not necessarily involve beliefs of a characterizing sort about their objects, such emotions, it seems, must still involve existential beliefs in regard to those objects, or something very close to that, i.e. attitudes or stances on the order of taking to exist or regarding as existent. Otherwise, the state attributed becomes unintelligible, ⁷ See, for example, John Morreall, ‘Fear Without Belief ’, Journal of Philosophy 90 (1983): 359–66; for a response, see Alex Neill, ‘Fear and Belief ’, Philosophy and Literature 19 (1995): 94–101.

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whether as an emotion or anything else. How can one be said to pity, fear, admire, or hate something that one does not, concurrently with one’s emotion, at least take or regard as existing, now or at some other time? If indeed that cannot be said, then the problem resurfaces, despite what is right in the critique of judgmentalism: since sane consumers of fiction do not take, regard, or view fictional characters as existing, even when fully engaged with them appreciatively, they cannot really be in the full-fledged emotional states they are casually said to inhabit. The paradox of fiction is proof against antijudgmentalist dissolution, even if we grant that emotions can occur without characterizing beliefs.⁸ The sticking point of the paradox of fiction is the dimension of existence and nonexistence, as this connects to the cognitive characterization that emotions of the sort in question minimally require. When we view or conceive an object as having such and such properties, whether or not we strictly believe that it does, we must, on pain of incoherence, be taking said object to exist or regarding it as existent. For nothing can coherently be viewed or conceived as having properties without at the same time being treated as existent. A case of genuine emotion of a cognitively mediated sort, unlike a corresponding emotional response to a fictional character, involves at least viewing or conceiving an object as having such and such features, which thus in turn presupposes regarding it as existent or taking it to exist. But I do not, when reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, take Smerdyakov to exist, and so cannot strictly be viewing or conceiving him as having properties, such as being base or being a murderer. And though my evaluative Smerdyakov-thoughts, generated as I read, may largely be what causes my hateful response, directed ostensibly at him, for that response strictly to have him as its object, and so count clearly as an instance of hatred of Smerdyakov, requires, once more, that I take him to exist—which I clearly do not. ⁸ It is a mistake, in particular, to try to assimilate cases of fictional fear to cases of phobic fear, even apart from their evident divergence in behavioral consequences. With phobic fear we can say that, though the subject doesn’t believe the animal in question is dangerous, the subject at least conceives or views the animal as dangerous, all the while clearly believing that the animal exists, that there is something the subject is so conceiving or viewing. With fictional fear, however, it is not open to us to say that the subject even conceives or views some fictional individual as dangerous or threatening, since the subject does not, if in his right mind, believe that such an individual exists; he does not believe there is any such thing to be so viewed or conceived. Full-blown fear of X has an irreducible cognitive component, one part of which is a viewing or perceiving X as dangerous, but another part of which is a taking or regarding X to exist.

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It may, however, be the case that I imagine, or make-believe, that someone of that sort exists, and that as a result I imaginarily, or make-believedly, experience for him an emotion of hate. Elaborating, my response to Dostoyevsky’s character can be interpreted, not as truly one of hatred for Smerdyakov, but as various sensations, feelings, and focusings of attention caused in me by my Smerdyakov-thoughts in the course of making-believe that he and his world exist, which may as a result amount to my make-believedly, or imaginarily, hating Smerdyakov. (For more on this, see section (7) below.) (5) The Surrogate-Belief solution: certain emotional responses to fictions, e.g. that of pity, require only beliefs that, in the fiction, the character exists and is or does such and such, and those beliefs are indeed widely held by rational consumers of fiction. This solution thus rejects (c), though not in the manner of Suspension-of-Disbelief theorists.⁹ However, the beliefs this proposed solution highlights, ones about what is fictionally the case, can only ground the truth of one’s fictionally, or imaginarily, pitying a character, not of one’s literally doing so. Furthermore, that such beliefs play a role in generating emotional responses to fictions does not touch the heart of the paradox, which is that intelligible emotions for objects of the sort typical of engagement with fiction conceptually require beliefs in the existence of such objects, or at a minimum, an existential stance toward them. Beliefs about how things are fictionally can cause emotional reactions of some sort, to be sure, but they cannot logically ground intelligible emotions for entities whose existence is denied. Even where the emotion in question is such as to constitutively require beliefs, they are the wrong sort of beliefs to partly constitute such emotions. The beliefs I have in connection with Anna Karenina, say, cannot coherently make her the proper object of any pitiful reaction I might have. Pity involves concern for the welfare of and distress at the suffering of some creature. If one doesn’t believe that such welfare or suffering is actual, what can one be concerned for or distressed about? Pity may likewise involve wishes or desires, with respect to the thing pitied, but absent a belief in the thing, or more loosely, an existential stance toward it, there cannot coherently be any such wishes or desires. (6) The Irrationalist solution: while caught up in fictions, consumers of fiction become irrational, responding emotionally to objects that they know do ⁹ See, for example, Alex Neill, ‘Fiction and the Emotions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1993): 1–13; and Robert Yanal, ‘The Paradox of Emotion and Fiction’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1994): 54–75.

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not exist and thus do not have the features they are represented as having. Irrationalists either implicitly deny (c), proposing that we in some manner do endorse the existence of fictional characters and events—while apparently at the same time disavowing them—which qualifies as irrational, in the sense of inconsistent, or else implicitly deny (b), holding that we can have emotions for such as fictional characters and events, toward which we lack the usual beliefs, but qualifying such emotions consequently as irrational, in the sense of unwarranted.¹⁰ On the first construal the Irrationalist solution approaches closely that of Suspension-of-Disbelief, with the difference, perhaps, that no attempt is made to mitigate the clash of existential stances involved by suggesting that they are not simultaneously in full force. On the second construal the Irrationalist solution holds appreciators of fiction at fault, not for believing what they already believe the negation of, namely, that fictional characters and events exist, but for emotionally responding to such characters and events in ways contraindicated by their beliefs. It might seem that the Irrationalist solution, on this second construal, is saved from being a non-starter by the rejection of judgmentalism, since otherwise it could be held to be simply impossible, rather than just possibly irrational, to experience full-fledged emotions in the absence of certain beliefs. But as suggested earlier, if the critique of judgmentalism, applied to emotions of the sort that fiction typically elicits, shows only that characterizing beliefs, as opposed to existential ones, may be absent in such cases, the logical space this construal hopes to occupy may not be available. In any event, in the judgment of most commentators, portraying the normal consumer of fiction as fundamentally enmeshed in irrationality, however this be understood, is too high a price to pay for this to be an acceptable solution to the paradox. Before completing our survey of responses to the paradox of fiction, it is worth revisiting an issue we may have too quickly settled in setting up the terms of the problem. The issue is this: Is what underlies the paradoxicality of emotional responses to fiction a matter of the conceptual impossibility of a response being an emotion if it does not include, or is not premised on, certain beliefs—as embodied in (b) above in our formulation of the ¹⁰ See Colin Radford, ‘How Can We Be Moved By The Fate of Anna Karenina?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Suppl. 49 (1975): 67–93, and Harley Slater, ‘The Incoherence of the Aesthetic Response’, British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 168–72.

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paradox—or is it, rather, a matter of the irrationality of responding with emotion to things believed not to exist or not to be as they are described? We are now in a position to see that this may depend, to some extent, on whether one focuses on existence-beliefs or characterizing-beliefs regarding creatures of fiction. If the former—for instance, that Anna Karenina exists or existed—the problem is perhaps best understood as one of rationality: it is simply irrational to have an emotional response to something whose existence you don’t credit in any degree. If the latter—for instance, that Anna Karenina suffers or suffered—then although the issue might again be construed as one of rationality, since pitying someone you don’t believe suffers seems to qualify as irrational, it is perhaps better understood as concerned with the logic of the emotional concept in question. For the emotion pity for X might reasonably be held to strictly presuppose the belief X suffers, so that whatever one feels toward an item X, it can’t be pity unless one believes X to be, as it were, a logically fit object of pity. (7) The Make-Believe, or Imaginary, solution: emotional responses to fictions cannot, despite appearances, be instances of the ordinary emotions with whose names we tend to label them, but are instead instances of imaginary, or make-believe, emotions.¹¹ For first, the standard emotions of life arguably have belief or belief-like presuppositions, notably existential ones, that are not fulfilled in normal engagement with fictions, and second, such emotions have motivational or behavioral consequences that are not in evidence in the course of such engagement. The proposal is that in our interactions with works of fiction we experience make-believe emotions, or make-believedly experience emotions, for fictional characters and situations; it is thus (a) that is rejected on this solution. Make-believedly experiencing fear, say, is enough like really experiencing fear, especially internally, that it is easily confused with it, and yet make-believedly experiencing fear can be reconciled, while really experiencing fear cannot, with the absence of existential endorsement and motivational upshot vis-`a-vis the fictions that are feared. In this way is the paradox finally resolved. In considering this solution, it is important to distinguish the claim that what we feel for fictional characters is some kind of emotion, or constitutes emotional response in the broad sense, from the claim, here disputed, that what we feel for fictional characters and describe with some ordinary emotion ¹¹ See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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word is literally an example of such emotion. We are indeed moved, this solution affirms, but not strictly to the standard emotions whose names come to our lips. The issue is not whether making-believe can cause various emotional reactions, but whether those reactions, given certain cognitive conditions are not satisfied, qualify as full-fledged emotions of the ordinary sort. Note also that to classify our emotions for fictions as imaginary is to say that they are ones we imagine ourselves to be having, on the basis of experiences, contributory to emotion, that we are actually having, but does not imply that such emotions are illusory or unreal. What makes some reluctant to accept that our emotional relations to fictional objects might be of a different stripe from our emotional relations to objects we take as existent, as the Make-Believe theory insists, is the sense that, on the inside, they seem very much the same—they feel the same, we might say. But as has been observed, there is more to emotional conditions than feelings. Cognitive and conative commitments play a role in the identity of many, though not all, emotions; thus, if those commitments vary, so may the emotion which is present. But suppose it is replied that consumers of fiction do take or regard the characters encountered in fictions as existing, precisely insofar as they imagine them to exist as they engage with them? Very well. This can only mean that, imaginarily, they take them to exist, or that, in the fiction, they take them to exist—not that they take them to exist, period. A dilemma presents itself, in short, for those who would resist the MakeBelieve solution to the paradox of fiction. Either such taking to exist of their objects as these emotions must be understood to involve amounts to belief, in which case the subject, who denies that fictional entities exist, is mired in inconsistency, or else such taking to exist amounts to making-believe to exist, in which case any emotion both based on that stance and directed on its object will be make-believe emotion, of the appropriate sort. Though the Make-Believe proposal thus probably provides the best resolution to the paradox of fiction as such, a full account of our emotional responses when engaged with fictions—as opposed to our emotions for fictional characters per se —will want to acknowledge what is called to our attention by the Non-Intentionalist and Surrogate-Object proposals as well.¹² And even the Irrationalist proposal, on the first construal, may contain a grain of ¹² For discussion, see Jerrold Levinson, ‘Making Believe’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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truth, for perhaps we are, at least at moments of maximum involvement, in the incoherent states of mind it postulates as ours throughout. III EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ABSTRACT ART: MUSIC AND FEELING Emotional response to abstract art is puzzling, principally, because the strategies that provide obvious explanations of both why we respond emotionally, and what we are responding to, in the case of representational art, here seem not to be available. A novel, film, or Impressionist landscape gives me the image of a human world, elements of which I can empathize or identify with, react to sympathetically or antipathetically, or even mirror unthinkingly, by a sort of natural contagion. But with a symphony, sonata, minimalist sculpture, or Abstract Expressionist painting such explanations appear to have no purchase. Human beings and their predicaments are notably absent, at least as far as representation is concerned. So why, or how, does perception of such artworks raise emotion in us, and on what is such emotion directed?¹³ Concentrating for brevity’s sake on the art of music, rough answers are as follows. Insofar as music is capable of eliciting emotions in listeners, this appears to work through two different routes or mechanisms, typically operating in tandem. The first we may label the sensory, or cognitively unmediated route, and the second the perceptual-imaginative, or cognitively mediated route. It seems undeniable that music has a certain power to induce sensations, feelings, and even moods in virtue of its basic musical properties, virtually without any interpretation or construal on the listener’s part. Particular timbres, rhythms, intervals, dynamics, and tempi exemplify this power most ¹³ See Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1985) and Values of Art (London: Penguin, 1995); Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) and Music Alone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Colin Radford, ‘Emotions and Music: A Reply to the Cognitivists’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 69–76; Jerrold Levinson, ‘Music and Negative Emotion’ and ‘Hope in ‘‘The Hebrides’’ ’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), and ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics; Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Jenefer Robinson, ‘The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 13–22; Francis Sparshott, ‘Music and Feeling’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 23–35; Alan Goldman, ‘Emotions in Music (A Postscript)’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 59–69; Aaron Ridley, Music, Value, and the Passions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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clearly. Such properties need only be registered, as it were, to have their effect, at least for one acclimatized to a given musical culture. The rise in heartbeat caused by rapid tempo, the discomfort occasioned by dissonant intervals, the kinetic impulses induced by dancing rhythms, the excitement produced by quick alternations of soft and loud, the relaxation engendered by a certain tone color or manner of articulation, are all familiar phenomena. But if the capacity of music to elicit emotion were exhausted by the direct effects of sensing basic musical features, it would be a poor thing, falling far short of the evocation of emotions proper, or even the semblance of such. The gap is filled by the second, or cognitively mediated, route to such evocation. In addition to presenting an array of sonic features, simultaneously and successively, much music offers the appearance of human emotion, or of persons outwardly manifesting emotional states; arguably, that is what the expressiveness of music largely consists in. In other words, music is often heard as, or heard as if, or imagined to be, the expression of emotion by an unspecified individual, whom we may call the music’s persona. The degree of resemblance between the shape of music and the behaviors through which emotions are commonly expressed in life will have something, though not everything, to do with our being disposed to hear music in such ways. In any event, once this occurs, the mechanisms mentioned above and familiar from appreciation of representational art—mirroring, identification, empathy, sympathy, antipathy—can come into play, resulting in the arousal in the auditor of those same emotions, or else the feelings characteristic of them, or else those emotions on an imaginary plane. The sensory aspect of music alone indeed seems capable of inducing in us at least a number of simple states of arousal typically identified as constituent elements of one or another emotion. But it is the perceptual-imaginative aspect, manifested in our disposition to hear emotion or emotional expression in music, that is surely primarily responsible for the complex, more robustly emotional responses to music, whether mirroring or reactive, that so many listeners report. It remains to add that these mechanisms do not operate in total isolation from each other. The emotion I hear a passage as expressing may soften or accentuate the particular psychological effect some basic musical feature produces on me, while the effect induced in me, largely unthinkingly, by some basic musical feature may influence and constrain the emotion I am disposed to hear an image of in the music. But if emotions are often produced in listeners in virtue of auditing emotionally expressive music, toward what are such emotions directed? Music

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neither supplies any objects, nor appears itself to be an appropriate object, for at least the vast majority of such emotions as are putatively aroused. In addition, music does not seem to provide anything that would justify the beliefs or attitudes toward objects that many objects can be held to require. Among the ways of responding to this difficulty are the following. It can be held that music produces in listeners only moods, which intrinsically lack intentionality, e.g. anxiety or elation, or else ‘objectless emotions’, ones characteristically taking objects but somehow lacking them when aroused by music, e.g. sadness or joy directed on nothing, or nothing in particular. Alternatively, it can be held that music produces in listeners just the feeling component of an emotion, together with the sense of focus or directedness inherent in the bodily response at the emotion’s core, but not the cognitions which characteristically accompany or even partly constitute the emotion. Finally, it could be maintained that what music occasions in many listeners are states of imaginary emotion. The idea is that listeners readily erect, upon a basis of feelings produced in them by music whose expressiveness they empathetically grasp, imagined emotions of a corresponding sort, and that they do this through imagining, usually tacitly, objects and thoughts suitable to the emotions in question. The object of musical emotion, then, is not missing, but merely posited indefinitely in imagination, or perhaps appropriated, as it were, from the emotion imaginarily ascribed to the music’s persona.

IV EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO NEGATIVELY EMOTIONAL ART: THE PARADOX OF T RAGEDY The paradox of negative emotion in art—of which the paradox of tragedy is a classical illustration—is this. Art that is negatively emotional, i.e. art that represents, expresses, or otherwise deals with emotions such as shame, grief, horror, sorrow, anger, remorse, despair and the like, seems to have a propensity to elicit parallel responses in appreciators. But if that is so, one would expect appreciators to avoid, or at any rate judge as inferior, art of this nature. Yet not only do they not do so, but often they hold such art to be the highest or most rewarding art of all. A number of possible explanations have been given for how it is that persons rationally desire or value the empathic experience of negatively emotional

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art, given the ostensibly negative character of that experience. Here is a rough categorization of such explanations. (i) Compensatory explanations: negative emotion aroused by negatively emotional art is, as such, unpleasant, but undergoing it offers other rewards that compensate for this. (ii) Conversionary explanations: negative emotion, which is initially or ordinarily a disagreeable response, is transformed, in the context of artistic appreciation, into something that is in fact agreeable, or at any rate, capable of being enjoyed. (iii) Organicist explanations: negative emotion aroused by negatively emotional art is an essential element in a total experience, an organic whole that is desired or valued. (iv) Revisionary explanations: neither negative emotions, nor the feelings they include, are intrinsically unpleasant or undesirable, and thus there is nothing odd about appreciating art that induces such emotions or feelings. (v) Deflationary explanations: despite appearances, neither negative emotions, nor the feelings they include, are really aroused in us by negatively emotional art. Compensatory explanations include Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis, understood as a purging or purification of excess or unruly emotions of pity and fear through engagement with tragic drama, which justifies the raising of such emotions in the course of that engagement. Another such explanation appeals to the value of knowledge of important truths of human existence that emotional engagement with negative art is said to afford.¹⁴ A third explanation endorses such engagement, not for the knowledge of life it may afford, but rather for the knowledge of the artwork it facilitates, emotional engagement with a work being seen as a necessary cost, in many cases, of fully understanding it.¹⁵ A fourth such explanation invokes the moral exercise that is provided, or the moral deepening that results, as a benefit of engagement with negatively emotional art. And a fifth explanation appeals to purely aesthetic pleasures in the beauty, lifelikeness, virtuosity, or cognitive interest of the representation or expression itself, positing these as enough to outweigh whatever negative emotion is undergone in their appreciation.¹⁶ Conversionary explanations include Hume’s explanation of the appreciation of tragedy; like that just noted, Hume’s explanation highlights the pleasure in artistic representation and expression as such, but premises that this ¹⁴ See, for instance, Mark Packer, ‘Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 212–19. ¹⁵ See, notably, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), ch. 6. ¹⁶ No¨el Carroll’s resolution of the paradox of horror, a first cousin of the paradox of tragedy, is largely of this sort. See his The Philosophy of Horror.

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pleasure, being greater than the pain of the negative emotions concomitantly raised, does not simply offset that pain, but rather overwhelms and absorbs it, leaving an experience of uniformly positive character. A rather different conversionary explanation proposes that since the negative emotions raised by a work of art have no life implications for spectators, calling for no actions and betokening no real harms, such emotions must evidently be so altered by the artistic conditions under which they issue that, though still recognizable as this or that negative emotion, disagreeable affects intact, they are yet capable of being relished or enjoyed for experience’s sake.¹⁷ An example of an organicist explanation would be one invoking a satisfaction in some negative emotion’s being raised in one by a work of art, perhaps because the emotion strikes one as appropriately raised in such circumstances, and oneself as admirably human for being thus susceptible. Such a satisfaction would obviously be inseparable from the negative emotion raised, in the fact of which satisfaction is taken.¹⁸ Another such explanation would appeal to the value of working through negative emotions in connection with a work of art, via immersion in its formal, narrative, or dramatic structure, the emotions raised thus being an essential element in the experience valued as a whole.¹⁹ Revisionary explanations go something like this. The experience of negative emotions is not intrinsically unpleasant; the affects, that is, sensations and feelings, involved are not in themselves disagreeable, and can be unproblematically savored as such, in appropriate contexts. What is negative about negative emotions is only the evaluation of their objects that is central to such emotions. Thus, there is no special difficulty about people seeking these emotions from art.²⁰ Deflationary explanations come in at least three varieties. One hypothesizes artistic analogues of the life emotions, distinct from them in hedonic tone, conative connectedness, and behavioral implication, and proposes that only these are raised in us by engagement with emotional art, and not the life emotions themselves. Another deflationary explanation simply flatly denies that ¹⁷ See Marcia Eaton, ‘A Strange Kind of Sadness’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982): 51–63, and Levinson, ‘Music and Negative Emotion’. ¹⁸ See in this vein Susan Feagin, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1983): 95–104. ¹⁹ See John Morreall, ‘Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fiction’, Philosophy and Literature 9 (1985): 95–103; Jenefer Robinson, ‘L’education sentimentale’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (1995): 212–26; and Levinson, ‘Music and Negative Emotion’. ²⁰ A suggestion of this sort can be found in Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), ch. 7, and also in Berys Gaut, ‘The Paradox of Horror’, British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 333–45.

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anything like the garden-variety emotions are evoked in subjects in the course of engaging with emotional art, and suggests that the subject’s response, insofar as it is emotional, is exhausted by properly appreciative reactions, such as being moved by a work’s beauty of expression.²¹ A third deflationary explanation maintains that spectators are always only make-believedly in states of negative emotion in virtue of engaging with a work of art, and that on the assumption that make-believe emotions of the negative sort are not inherently displeasing, there is no special problem about people tolerating, or even actively pursuing, such experiences.²² Detailed assessment of these proposals awaits another occasion, but in my view there is more merit in compensatory and organicist explanations, and in the second of the conversionary explanations sketched above, than in revisionary or deflationary ones. V E MOTION AND THE APPRECIATION OF ART Are there emotions unique to the appreciation of art, or aesthetic emotions per se, had when and only when a work is apprehended aesthetically? Past theorists, notably Clive Bell, have posited something of this sort, but such a posit has not lately found favor, nor does it appear to answer to any pressing theoretical problem about art.²³ There may, on the other hand, be an interesting category of positive emotions that, if not had uniquely for art, are both distinctive of the appreciation of art and not of the sort that typically figure in the content of art. Candidates for membership in this category would be emotions such as admiration for a work’s skill, fascination with a work’s form, delight in a work’s beauty, or awe at a work’s depth of expression. What might also figure here are experiences, remarked by many, of momentary will-lessness or self-transcendence occasioned by intense absorption in a work of art. The question may also be raised as to the appropriateness of emotional responses to art of the ordinary sort. One form of this question concerns an apparent tension between the familiar picture of an emotion as a disturbing temporary derangement of the psyche and the image of aesthetic appreciation as a state of calm and unclouded attention to a work of art. ²¹ A suggestion of this sort, applied to music, can be found in Kivy, Music Alone, ch. 8. ²² Suggestions of this sort are also to be found in Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. ²³ But see the debates on this, pro and con, in Monroe Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), and George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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The traditional notion of the aesthetic attitude, whose roots are in Kant, Schopenhauer, and the eighteenth-century theorists of taste, depicts a frame of mind characterized by disinterestedness, detachment, and disengagement from the practical. Charitably construed, such a notion demands only that one’s personal situation or condition not be what primarily drives or directs one’s response to a work, but instead, the humanly significant material that the work presents. In other words, such a notion need not call for suppression of emotional receptivity generally. So long as one’s emotional response is a way of connecting to a work, of tracing its expressive outline, or grasping its dramatic import, rather than a means of being distracted from it, a springboard to simply wallowing in one’s private concerns, then there is no conflict between responding to a work with a range of ordinary emotions, on the basis of one’s life experience and individual sensibility, and appreciating a work in an aesthetically appropriate manner, as the specific embodiment of human content it is. By contrast, disinterestedness or detachment understood not as a principle for maintaining focus on a work rather than one’s own circumstances, but as a desired end-state of impassivity or imperturbability, is nothing that an account of artistic appreciation need embrace.²⁴ Finally, accounts of the value of emotional response to art can be divided roughly into those that exploit the value of emotional experience generally, for example in contributing to a full life, and those that seek instead to identify a particular value of emotional experience in the context of art and its appreciation, for example as a mode of understanding a work more fully or a means of reaping more efficiently the benefits a work has to offer.²⁵ ²⁴ For further discussion, see Jerrold Levinson, ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics. ²⁵ See, for example, the discussion as applied to music in Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, ch. 6.

4 Elster on Artistic Creativity

1. The French novelist Georges Perec wrote a novel, La Disparition, in which the letter e was nowhere used . . . This is an extreme example of the more general idea that artists may impose constraints on themselves in order to create better works of art. In Perec’s case the constraints were entirely idiosyncratic. In other and more frequent cases the constraints take the form of conventions that define a particular genre. Although freely chosen, in the sense that it is up to the artist whether to submit to the laws of the genre, they are not invented by the artist. In still other cases the constraints are imposed from outside . . . (175–6)

So begins Jon Elster’s discussion of creativity and constraints in art in the third part of his recent study, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, PreCommitment and Constraint¹. I return later to La Disparition, indicating my differences with Elster on the virtues of that singular work, but I begin by exploring how far we might take the tripartite division of artistic constraints that Elster here suggests, into chosen, invented, and imposed ones. Chosen constraints are ones adopted by the artist from a pool of preexisting styles, genres, or forms. Invented constraints are ones devised by the artist, and to which the artist subsequently adheres. And imposed constraints are ones rooted in external conditions that cannot be altered or evaded by the artist. Some examples of chosen constraints are: sonata form; sonnet; haiku; iambic pentameter; still-life painting; charcoal drawing; two-person play, comedy of manners; Greek temple; Roman arena. Some examples of invented constraints are: twelve-tone composition; musique concr`ete; ‘prepared piano’ pieces a` la John Cage; collage painting; kinetic sculpture; ‘readymades’ a` la First published in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds.), The Creation of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 235–56. ¹ Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Pre-Commitment and Constraint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Page references to this book in the text are given in parentheses.

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Duchamp; ‘rayograms’ a` la Man Ray; and absurdist theatre a` la Beckett or Ionesco. Some examples of imposed constraints, finally, are these: the maximum length of breath possible in singing; the maximum loudness attainable in solo piano music; the maximum height of jump in dance; the rectangularity of frames or shots in film; the irreversibility of shaping in carved sculpture; the prohibition of live firearms in installation art; the prohibition of certain subject matters in PG-rated film. With both chosen and invented constraints there is evidently an element of voluntary participation by the artist, whereas with imposed constraints this appears to be lacking. But it is worth observing that even with imposed constraints, the artist’s agency is not entirely annulled. In the first place, the artist is still faced with the choice between various attitudes that can be taken to the imposed constraint. For example, cheerful acceptance, stoic resignation, angry defiance, or blithe obliviousness.² In the second place, the artist is always free to decline the gambit entirely, electing not to create subject to the constraint in question, and simply passing on or forgoing the artform or endeavor in which that constraint is unavoidable. If an artist chooses a constraint, says Elster, he presumably believes he will benefit artistically from having a smaller sphere of choice. This is a case of standard pre-commitment, and the constraint is thus an essential one, i.e. consciously chosen for the expected benefits of it. In other cases a constraint is adopted or accepted, but not with an eye to reaping a benefit; it is then an incidental constraint. An incidental constraint may end up being of benefit, but such benefit is not the reason for its adoption or acceptance. And an incidental constraint may also evolve into an essential constraint, if endorsed by the artist for its expected benefits after initial adoption. 2. One of Elster’s main themes is the contrast between choice of constraints, at the outset of the creative process, and choice within constraints, occurring throughout the creative process: ² A nice example of a fruitful attitude one might adopt toward imposed constraints is provided by the following anecdote, from liner notes by Harry Halbreich to Arthur Honegger’s Le Roi David (Erato 2292-45800-2). Honegger, having been commissioned to write music for the theatre piece in question, but chafing under the rather peculiar musical conditions the commission involved, asked his fellow composer Stravinsky for advice. This was the advice offered: ‘It’s quite simple . . . Act as if you had wanted exactly that ensemble, and compose for a hundred singers and seventeen instrumentalists.’ Honegger comments on this advice that it constituted for him ‘an excellent composition lesson: never consider the givens of a commission as something imposed, but on the contrary as a personally chosen stricture, or an interior necessity.’

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The creation of a work of art can in fact be envisaged as a two-step process: choice of constraints followed by choice within constraints. The interplay and back-and-forth between these two choices is a central feature of artistic creation, in the sense that choices made within the constraints may induce an artist to go back and revise the constraints themselves. (176)

Elster’s description has the ring of truth: there are undoubtedly phases in the process of creating works of art, and the phases may typically be related in the way that Elster proposes. But still we must ask, if the artist is free to go back at will, at any point, and revise the constraints under which he had been operating, is it really useful to think of them as constraints, rather than as, say, provisional guidelines, or working assumptions? Elster’s idea of constraints as a constant and defining feature of the creative process seems somewhat too . . . constraining. To be fair, Elster acknowledges that there is an interaction between choice of constraints and choice within constraints in the making of art. An example he gives is this:‘A writer may initially plan to develop an idea in a full-length novel, and then, finding that it will not sustain that format, turn it into a short story of thirty pages.’ (201). Even so, Elster arguably underestimates the purely heuristic value for artistic creativity of mere opening moves or posits, ones not thought of as binding, and thus not reasonably construed as constraints. The self-binding of an artist, in other words, is rather unlike the self-binding which served as a paradigm in Elster’s earlier studies of the rationality of precommitment, namely that undertaken by Ulysses in having himself bound to the mast of his ship as a prophylactic against the sirens.³ For Ulysses’s selfbinding was entered into (a) deliberately and explicitly, (b) categorically and unrevisably, and (c) with a definite objective in view. But the self-binding of an artist, if we consent to call it that, is typically (a) inexplicit or only partly explicit, (b) eminently revisable, and (c) often entered into with no very definite objective in view. In short, Elster’s model of precommitment is unnecessarily inflexible, and sorts ill with the way artists actually go about creating works.⁴ 3. Elster is explicitly committed to an account of artistic creation that sees it as a project of knowingly engaged-in maximization: ³ See, in particular, his Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ⁴ Michael Bratman, by contrast, offers a more flexible model of pre-commitment, one that is perhaps a better fit for the artistic case. Bratman stresses the need for rational agents to frame future-directed intentions that have a certain inertia or weight, yet not be bound to ‘pour good money after bad’. See his Faces of Intention: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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. . . both choice of constraints and choice within constraints can be represented as a form of maximization. Specifically, artists try to maximize artistic value. (178) The process of artistic creation is guided by the aim of maximizing aesthetic value under constraints . . . Creativity is the ability to succeed in this endeavor. (200)

The idea that artists seek to maximize aesthetic or artistic value⁵ certainly has some plausibility. If agents are generally, to a rough approximation, utility-maximizers according to their own, often idiosyncratic, utility functions, then it is not too big a stretch to suggest that artists are, to some extent and in some contexts, maximizers of the utility that corresponds to aesthetic or artistic value. But is not Elster guilty of making the creation of art out to be a too predominantly rational affair? First, it is not clear that the maximizing aim stated above can plausibly be attributed to most successful artists, even at a less than fully conscious level. Whether on the basis of express avowals, observed behavior, or the character of completed works, the evidence does not make such an attribution inescapable. Second, even those most committed to rational explanation of human behavior usually allow that there is some share of the irrational, or at least nonrational, in creative activity, as in related activities of a sexual or religious kind, with their not wholly transparent bases. Now Elster might try to accommodate that by suggesting that acceding to a limited irrationality in the service of creative ends can be seen as a strategy that is overall rational, and perhaps even maximizing of aesthetic value, but surely this is to ascribe too calculating an attitude to artists who open themselves to the irrational in the name of art. In other words, though it is true that irrational methods are sometimes rationally chosen by artists—think of the ‘automatic writing’ experiments of the Surrealists—surely not all irrationality issuing in something of artistic value has been deliberately opted for by the artist on rational grounds. Third, and most importantly, there are positive aims we have good grounds to ascribe to artists as motivating them that do not reduce to that of maximizing aesthetic or artistic value. Some artists are driven to discover new relationships between elements of their chosen media, or new ways of expressing states of mind, or new techniques for achieving realistic representation, where their commitment to those goals as such overrides any direct concern they might have to maximize aesthetic value within given constraints. In even simpler terms, artists are most often driven to make works the works they want ⁵ Elster is not too careful of this distinction, a matter to which I return below.

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them to be, whether or not they are seen to maximize aesthetic value, even by the artist’s own lights.⁶ 4. Elster, like some other recent writers,⁷ takes a fairly firm stand against originality: ‘I distinguish creativity (working within constraints) from originality (changing the constraints), arguing that the latter has no intrinsic relation to aesthetic value’ (180). Elster sustains that judgment even in light of this later, ostensibly approving gloss of what originality involves: ‘Originality . . . can be defined as a durable break with existing conventions rather than as a momentary departure from them. The emergence of free verse, nonfigurative art, and atonal music are obvious examples from the past century’ (224). Elster recognizes that originality in a work of art can coexist with greatness, and that the search for originality may even enhance the pursuit of creativity, but he remains opposed to the idea that originality can be part of the value of a work of art.⁸ Elster’s judgment against originality per se, however, fails to recognize artmaking as an activity that, like most activities, involves the possibility of accomplishment or achievement, and the artwork that results as the embodiment of such accomplishment or achievement, which makes the work logically and appreciatively inseparable from the activity that generates it. Part of the achievement of some works of art is precisely the striking originality, whether of means, of ends, or of ends-in-relation-to-means, that they manifest. Once the achievement in question is solidified and secured, usually through the production of a series of related works, then later works, however similar, do not partake of that achievement and do not exhibit that ⁶ This observation, which I owe to Richard Wollheim, abstracts from purely extrinsic or strategic considerations, such as might induce an artist to make a work a certain way to please a patron, to secure a commission, or to annoy a rival. In a sense, an artist in such cases is making a work the way he wants it to be, but not for its own sake; in other words, he is not making quite the work he wants, qua artist, to make. ⁷ See, for example, Frank Sibley, ‘Originality and Value’, British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (1985): 169–84; and Bruce Vermazen, ‘The Aesthetic Value of Originality’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 266–79; and more evenhandedly, Paul Crowther, ‘Creativity and Originality in Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 31 (1991): 301–9. Sibley’s argument against originality as such goes like this: ‘ ‘‘original’’ is very commonly used of style, manner, technique, medium; Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Pointillisme, the twelve-tone system exemplify large innovations . . . In themselves, these were extremely original but aesthetically quite neutral . . . The value of such innovations is instrumental; it lies in what new aesthetic characters and values they render possible . . . So the enthusiastic praise often lavished on works employing innovatory techniques [or] . . . novelties of form or medium is misplaced unless these bring, or have the potential to bring, some new aesthetic character of value’ (174–5). ⁸ There is some irony, though, in Elster’s opposition to artistic originality, given the reputed creed of Elster’s musical hero, Lester Young: ‘You’ve got to be original, man.’

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originality, and hence are not as admirable artistically. The locus of originality in art is the historically rooted artwork itself, not the work’s maker as an individual, and not the work’s abstract form or detachable content. Arguments that originality is not an artistic value, moreover, tend to equate artistic value, or value attaching to art as art, with narrowly aesthetic value, that is, value derived from sensuous-perceptual-imaginative experience of an object’s formal and aesthetic qualities. But the two are not equivalent. Artistic value is a broader notion than aesthetic value, though it includes aesthetic value as its core. For clearly the experiential rewards afforded an audience by an artwork, and by design, are a large part of its value as art. But some of the value of an artwork is not anchored in its character as an object for perceptual or imaginative experience, which it may share with portions of nature, but is instead rooted in its being a human artifact, in virtue of which it, say, displays originality, expresses singular attitudes, communicates moral insight, or influences in a positive manner artworks to come. These contribute to its artistic value, though not to its aesthetic value in the narrow sense.⁹ 5. Aristotle famously offered a criterion of organic unity, the essence of which is that a work possessed of such unity can only be altered for the worse. Elster, it appears, is inclined to accept Aristotle’s dictum: ‘One piece of evidence for the view that artists are engaged in maximizing is the widespread belief that in a good work of art nothing can be added and nothing be subtracted (Aristotle, Poetics.) . . . Another piece of evidence is the widespread practice of artists of experimenting with small variations until they ‘‘get it right’’ ’ (202). But Aristotle’s dictum should not in fact be so uncritically accepted. From the fact that in a good artwork every element plays some role in the functioning of the work or the emergence of its artistic content, one cannot validly infer that only those elements could have served that function or have resulted in that artistic content. More generally, one cannot conclude that only the specific ensemble of elements that constitutes the finished work can be thought to optimize the value such a work might possess. This is because there may be several, equally effective ways of ‘getting it right’, that is, bringing a work to successful completion once it has reached a certain point. The practice of trying out small variations need not be seen as a search for a unique ⁹ For more on artistic value versus aesthetic value see my ‘Art, Value, and Philosophy’, Mind 105 (1996): 667–82. On the related though not equivalent distinction that can be made between the artistic and the aesthetic properties of works, see my ‘Artworks and the Future’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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local maximum. In fact, it need not even be viewed as a search for any local maximum, but might instead be seen as governed by a principle of ‘good enough’, that is, as conformable to a satisficing, rather than optimizing, model of human behavior. Even if ‘getting it right’ generally motivates the trying out of small variations of a work in progress, that may not require making it ‘best’, but only, say, ‘really quite good’. The error of unqualified adherence to the doctrine of organic unity, which maintains that successful works of art are so finely tuned that no alteration in them can fail to have an adverse effect, is related to that involved in unrestricted allegiance to the principle of aesthetic uniqueness, which holds that any two perceptually different works of art belonging to the same genre necessarily differ in some aesthetic respect or other. But though close to true, that principle falls short of universal validity.¹⁰ Though perceptually different artworks in a given genre necessarily afford different experiences —and perhaps even experiences that differ aesthetically, if the perceptual basis of an aesthetic property always comes within the scope of its appreciation¹¹—that does not yet imply that the works themselves necessarily differ aesthetically. Think of two abstract, calligraphic paintings—say in the vein of Mark Tobey—where one is a mirror image, or else a slight internal rearrangement, of the other. Is it clear that these will differ at all in aesthetic impact, despite their being easily perceptually discriminable? Both such paintings might ‘work’, so to speak, and in exactly the same way, and without inclining one to think that no other arrangement of similar elements could have ‘worked’ as well. 6. Elster’s discussion of the dimensions of value in temporal artforms, and their particular manifestation in the sphere of classic jazz, is to my mind the most satisfying and stimulating part of his inquiry into artistic creativity in Ulysses Unbound. I thus take the liberty of quoting from it at some length. I distinguish between two sources of emotional satisfaction through the arts. On the one hand, many works of art can generate non-aesthetic emotions—joy, grief, and the like. On the other hand, all works of art, if they have any artistic value at all, induce specifically aesthetic emotions by means of rhythm, echoes, symmetries, contrasts, repetitions, proportion, and similar devices . . . The specifically aesthetic emotions include wonder, amazement, surprise, humor, relief, and release. (206) In literature and music, sublime artistic effects are created when these two emotional effects go together and reinforce each other. As if by magic, the pleasure of a ¹⁰ See my ‘Aesthetic Uniqueness’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics. ¹¹ See my ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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rhyme that falls into place adds to the poignancy of the words. Although the components are analytically separable, they are not experienced separately. (206) In the case of jazz, the non-aesthetic emotions in the listener are produced by music that has what I shall call ‘emotional depth’. The aesthetic emotions can arise at two levels. At the simplest level, they are produced by music that possesses what I shall call ‘taste’. At a more advanced level, the aesthetic emotions are produced by the ‘story’ told by the music . . . (247) Taste—the sense of order, balance, proportion, timing—is an essential prerequisite for the production of the specifically aesthetic emotions . . . Emotional depth refers to the capacity to generate strong non-aesthetic emotions in the listener. (248) Taste and emotional depth are only two of the relevant dimensions of quality in jazz. The third—and the only one in which jazz differs radically from other musical performances—is inventiveness in storytelling. (252) The ability to ‘tell a story’ through melodic innovation is related to taste, but goes well beyond it. (253)

There is much with which to agree in the above extracts, and the discussion from which they are drawn is unquestionably an insightful contribution to the aesthetics of jazz. But I have, nevertheless, certain qualms. My first qualm concerns Elster’s claim that the storytelling dimension of a jazz solo, its ability to suggest, through its melodic, harmonic, and dynamic evolution, an abstract narrative of some sort, enters into the generation in the listener of aesthetic emotions, but not non-aesthetic ones.¹² This seems unwarranted. For the narratives that music can suggest are often themselves emotional ones, and it stands to reason that our response to an emotional sequence might be a further non-aesthetic or life emotion that would be appropriate to the sympathetic contemplation of such a sequence. For example, a solo conjuring up a narrative of trouble, followed by hope for that trouble’s disappearance, leading only to the dashing of that hope, would naturally conduce to a feeling of sorrow or distress in a listener, apart from any purely aesthetic reaction on the listener’s part to the rightness of the emotional narrative or its musical underpinning.¹³ My second qualm relates to the degree to which taste, characterized as a formal or configurational matter, and emotional depth, characterized ¹² What precise distinction Elster has in mind by aesthetic vs. non-aesthetic emotions is not entirely clear. Some emotions which he denominates aesthetic, for instance wonder, can certainly be had in connection with objects that are not works of art. However, I will accede in the distinction as drawn, taking it to be roughly this: aesthetic emotions are ones characteristically had for or directed on the aesthetic aspects, including formal ones, of objects, most notably works of art. ¹³ For an emotional scenario of that sort, and its role in the generation of musical frissons, see the discussion of a Scriabin etude in my ‘Musical Chills’ (Ch. 12, this volume).

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as a material or substantive one, are entirely independent and summable dimensions of musical value, as is suggested by Elster’s amusing diagram (251) locating various jazz artists in a two-dimensional space whose y-axis is ‘taste’ and whose x-axis is ‘emotional depth’.¹⁴ I think these dimensions are rather interlocking ones, with a musician’s formal sense of timing, proportion, and flow impacting on the non-aesthetic emotions his discourse will be able to elicit. For example, the concision, clarity, and drive of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, presumably the result of the great saxophonist’s taste, have quite a lot to do with the bold, life-affirming confidence the music expresses. And the relative structural freedom and relaxation of Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ is surely not separable from the serenely rapturous sense of the goodness of things that that music projects, especially in its first two sections. In addition, we may note that the formal and emotional dimensions of musical value in jazz or any other music are arguably subordinate to another, overarching and non-summative, dimension of value we can label ‘emotionin-relation-to-form’, or ‘content-in-relation-to-configuration’.¹⁵ That is, our ultimate judgment of the value of a piece of music arguably does not rest only on our separate estimations of the quality of its content and the excellence of its form,¹⁶ but also, and most particularly, on the specific relation or fittingness of the former to the latter. 7. Elster has interesting things to say on the topic of pre-commitment to chance or randomness in the making of art: . . . each choice made in the creation of a work of art serves as a constraint on later choices. An artist may decide, however, to generate the constraints randomly rather than intentionally. (242) ¹⁴ Although I agree with most of the critical judgments embodied in Elster’s diagram, and concur in particular with the placement of Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Johnny Hodges, and Django Reinhardt in its favored upper right corner, I would explain the relative undervaluation of Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Sinatra, who though accorded high y-values are accorded only middling x-values, in terms of Elster’s simply undervaluing certain realms of expression, namely the lithe/blithe/carefree, relative to others, namely the heavy/doleful/careworn. Only if ‘emotional depth’ is narrowly equated with the latter does Elster’s downgrading of Tatum, Vaughan, and Sinatra seem justified. I should also note that Elster in fact recognizes that his two dimensions of musical value are not entirely independent: ‘Taste and emotional depth do not . . . vary entirely independently of each other. Total lack of taste is incompatible with great emotional force’ (250). But I submit that he still overestimates the degree of their independence, as I try to show in the text. ¹⁵ See my ‘Evaluating Music’, in Philip Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), and Ch. 10 in this volume. ¹⁶ Understood here to include also its degree of inventiveness in storytelling, which is Elster’s third proposed dimension of musical value.

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Thus Francis Bacon began his pictures by throwing paint at the canvas, so that the resulting blots would serve as constraints on the further work, limiting his freedom and presumably enhancing his creativity. Jackson Pollock’s ‘poured paintings’ may be seen as a variant of this idea. (243)

But as regards the first of these cases, Bacon’s accidentally produced blots need not be taken as constraints on, rather than prompters of, further creative decisions, since it is in the nature of the medium of painting that any such blots can be covered over or scraped off, if need be. And to a lesser extent that would be true in the case of Pollock’s paintings as well. Elster next turns his attention to that enfant terrible of modern music, John Cage: To the extent that it relies on randomizing or on producing periods of silence, Cage’s work is entirely unserious. The most charitable interpretation is that it is a gigantic and successful put-on. (245) . . . the use of objective or epistemic randomness to select within constraints has no aesthetic justification . . . by removing choice rather than restricting it one destroys creativity rather than enhances it. (246)

This strikes me as a fairly uncomprehending reaction to Cage’s work as an artist, however one rates that work in the last analysis. Cage’s creativity manifests itself, in part, in the astonishing variety of evocative means he devised to circumvent the operation of human choice at the level of sound selection, in the name of an individual quasi-Buddhist philosophy of music and life. The irony of Cage’s work, though, is that his very distinctive personality shows itself, at a second level, through the specific range of means—dice, star charts, paper imperfections, the I Ching —he devises for the elimination of personality at the first level, and even through the very undertaking of the project of eliminating subjectivity or preference from music to begin with.¹⁷ Richard Wollheim, in a famous essay on art of the kind that subsequently became known as ‘minimal’,¹⁸ sketched a conception of ‘negative work’ in artmaking, that is, the sort of work appropriate to the production of objects of excessive simplicity and relative absence of articulation. Such ‘negative work’, suggests Wollheim, is largely a matter of decisions about what a piece will be like, ones involving ‘negative’ acts such as renouncing, eschewing, ¹⁷ ‘ ‘‘Personality is a flimsy thing on which to build an art’’, Cage once wrote. Yet he himself seems to make his most direct and appealing impact through his own personality’ (John Rockwell, All American Music (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 58). ¹⁸ ‘Minimal Art’, Arts Magazine, January 1965; reprinted in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968).

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withholding, or restraining, in relation to media, techniques, styles, or aims available in the artist’s milieu. If it is possible for an artwork whose genesis predominantly involves ‘negative work’ to exhibit creativity, then surely the creativity involved in some of Cage’s more radical musical self-removals is of that sort. As it happens, Elster’s skepticism about the value of avant-garde modes of art is not restricted to music: ‘[literary] modernism fails because it rests on an erroneous criterion of adequacy of a text to its object. Just as a flawed world is not better represented by a flawed text, a fluid or chaotic world is not better represented by a fluid or chaotic text’ (190). But this blanket condemnation ignores, among other things, the exemplifying and expressing functions of a literary text, as opposed to its representing function per se. As Goodman and others have stressed, artworks mean in ways other than by representing.¹⁹ Thus, a work of art may at least need to approach, if not wholly embrace, chaos and fluidity in order to exemplify or express, rather than just represent, those properties. 8. I return now to Elster’s discussion of the experimental novel La Disparition, invoked at the beginning of this essay: Preexisting or preset constraints enhance and stimulate the creative process . . . Yet not all constraints will do equally well. The constraint of writing a novel without the letter e may not make the task of the writer more difficult than writing in the demanding form of terza rima. Yet the latter constraint, unlike the former, can contribute directly to aesthetic value, over and above the indirect contribution that follows from the focus-enhancing effect. Because rhythm and meter generate an organized form, they have intrinsic aesthetic potential; the absence of a given letter in the alphabet does not. (209)

But one can argue that the systematic withholding of a certain letter, especially one as central to the French language as the letter e, gives by its absence a kind of form to Perec’s text, though obviously not form in the sense of meter or rhythmic scheme. And that form can even be expressed in a positive manner, as the requirement to craft sentences using only the vowels a, i, o, and u. For most writers, having to write around the letter e would be an irritating distraction rather than a stimulation, an obstacle to be overcome rather than a challenge to be met. (210) ¹⁹ See his Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976) and ‘How Buildings Mean’, in Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).

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That is no doubt true. But even so, it only means that willingly avoiding the letter e in writing would not, for most writers, be a spur to creativity. This says nothing, however, as to whether it was in fact a spur to creativity in a given case, namely that of Perec. Recalling Elster’s useful trichotomy of chosen, invented, and imposed constraints, we can ask whether the express avoidance of e in La Disparition counts as a chosen or an invented one. The question, in effect, is whether that sort of restriction preexisted Perec’s writing of his novel, or whether in so writing it, and in writing it so, he instituted that sort of restriction on literary production. Though Elster seems inclined to treat La Disparition as a case of invention, there is actually reason to see it as a choice to operate in an existing category, that of the lipogram, but in a more thoroughgoing way than had been previously attempted. A lipogram is precisely a text produced under the constraint of eschewing a given letter or letters of the alphabet, and was a form much favored by the group of avant-garde French writers to which Perec belonged, the Oulipo or ‘Workshop of Potential Literature’.²⁰ 9. Constraints like that adhered to by Perec in writing La Disparition are sometimes derided as purely arbitrary and unmotivated, and thus as issuing in nothing of any artistic worth. But if artistic creativity is, as Elster proposes, centrally a matter of operating innovatively within constraints, then how does one know which constraints are likely to give rise to artistic value and which not? Can there be a reasoned prospective criterion of goodness of constraints, rather than the obvious retrospective one of judging them by their fruits? These are difficult questions, which I am unsure how to answer. I want instead just to consider whether the success of Perec in crafting La Disparition should indeed be regarded as without artistic point, a pure exercise in self-binding for its own sake.²¹ I think not. For one, there is no reason to regard the skill, cleverness, and ingenuity of Perec in meeting the constraint he set himself as somehow beyond the pale of artistic appreciation. Surely we are practicing artistic appreciation when we admire the interest that Barnett Newman gave his paintings of very peculiar vertical format, roughly six feet high and four inches wide, or the elaborately constructed montage in the ²⁰ The name is a contraction of ‘Ouvroir de Litt´erature Potentielle’. ²¹ This is a good point to mention that there has been, astonishingly enough, a translation—or really, recreation—of La Disparition in English. It is by the novelist Gilbert Adair, and is cleverly titled A Void (San Francisco: Harper, 1995). Adair’s work presumably has some of the virtues of Perec’s, but not all, and arguably has some that Perec’s does not.

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‘Odessa Steps’ sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, or the resourcefulness with which Mozart manages the voices in the sextet from The Marriage of Figaro, or the magnificence of Racine’s alexandrines, unfailingly ten syllables to a line and a rhyme every time. Virtuosity, which broadly construed covers those cases and that of Perec, is unquestionably an artistic virtue, if not the highest of them, and is something appreciable for its own sake.²² The interest of La Disparition, in other words, is surely not merely that which Samuel Johnson infamously allowed that the phenomenon of female sermonizing might be said to have.²³ But the interest of La Disparition may in fact go beyond the attention its virtuosic surmounting of challenges properly merits. This is due to special features of both the writer and the context of writing. Born in 1936, Perec was the child of Polish-Jewish parents who died during the Second World War, one in the Resistance and the other in Auschwitz; he was subsequently raised in a Catholic boarding school in the Is`ere during the Occupation. Is it too much of a stretch, then, to see La Disparition, published in 1969, as referring not only to the victim in the murder mystery it ostensibly relates, and not only to the letter e mysteriously banned from its pages, but to the disappearance from Europe not long before of millions of individuals as arbitrarily declared persona non grata as that unlucky vowel? Might not La Disparition be seen as a meditation on how easy it was to get rid of, or do without, six million Jews, as much as an exercise in getting rid of, or doing without, tens of thousands of es? We know also that every one of Perec’s published works is an exercise in a different style. Does this not fit all too well with one who had to dissimulate and reinvent himself from a very early age? In any event, if such further dimensions are attributable to what might seem the purely formal stylistic exercises of a Perec, they give those exercises added value, in virtue of the fittingness between content and form invoked earlier as a primary locus of aesthetic value.²⁴ ²² See Thomas Mark, ‘On Works of Virtuosity’, Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 28–45. ²³ ‘Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ ²⁴ The roman nouveau of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and others might be mentioned here as another example of an artform subject to self-imposed constraints—ones as Draconian in their way as those under which Perec worked—where the resulting stylistic spareness and sobriety of detail has expressive value. Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie, for example, arguably expresses a world of individuals locked into their separate consciousnesses, their phenomenological identification with the objects of their experience suggesting a kind of ultimate isolation and alienation. But such expression is clearly a product of the severely detached and methodically descriptive mode of narration adopted by the author.

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10. Shifting to cinema for another case of chosen constraints of an ostensibly limiting sort, consider those with which Sidney Lumet operated in making his powerful film of jury deliberation, 12 Angry Men: a single, sparsely furnished room; a fixed set of characters; a continuous segment of time; and black and white cinematography. Yet 12 Angry Men is as transfixing and rewarding a film as cinema has to offer. Clearly in this case Lumet’s chosen constraints—his form of provisional self-binding—were a spur to creativity rather than a shackle on it. Some of Lumet’s specific techniques for sustaining cinematic and dramatic interest given those constraints deserve remark: (a) focusing on different characters, and different character pairs, at different points; (b) temporarily subtracting characters through the device of exits to the restroom; (c) rhythmic but not mechanical varying of long shots, medium shots, and close-ups; (d) alternating of evidence-sorting and reason-weighing discussions, on the one hand, with character-revealing and tension-provoking personal encounters, on the other hand, so far as the pattern of scenes is concerned. So Lumet’s film fits nicely enough Elster’s picture of artistic creativity as successful maneuvering within constraints. But it is worth observing that even if all artworks involve choices made within constraints of some sort or other—whether self-imposed or imposed from without, whether revisably or unrevisably adopted, whether conventional or idiosyncratic—there is a useful distinction to be made between artworks which foreground the fact of their operating under constraints, and those which do not do so, in some cases even managing to make us unaware of the constraints that governed their creation. In the first instance works are partly about their constraints, i.e. about virtuosity or the surmounting of challenges, whereas in the second instance they are not. In the first category belong, obviously, La Disparition; Hitchcock’s Rope, shot virtually in one continuous take; and Machaut’s rondeau ‘Ma fin est mon commencement’, a musical palindrome. In the second category, more likely, belong 12 Angry Men, Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, and the sonnets of Keats or Millay—works produced within formal confines but which do not especially draw attention to them. Twelve-tone music, the basic principle of which is that a given pitch cannot be repeated until all eleven other pitches of the chromatic scale have been sounded—a method which effectively destroys the feeling of tonality or key—is sometimes offered as a mode of musical composition that is too confining, one involving constraints that fetter rather than abet

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creativity. But it seems as if there are simply different cases here, which make any such generalization suspect. For Schoenberg the method was a way to inject new local interest into old global forms associated with Brahms and his predecessors in the Viennese Classical tradition, an effort in which Schoenberg succeeded notably in the Third and Fourth String Quartets, the String Trio, the Piano Concerto, and the Serenade Op. 24. For Berg the method was from the outset something to be intuitively modified and relaxed in the interests of dramatic expression, not a code requiring strict adherence, and yet it remains essential to the rigor and power of his twelve-tone masterwork, the opera Wozzeck. For Stravinsky, who came to twelve-tone music late and after much resistance, the method offered itself as something to selectively adapt and fuse with his preexisting neo-classical style, with perhaps greatest success in the ballet Agon; in other cases, e.g. the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, the results were crabbed and less appealing. Finally, for some composers, like the American George Rochberg, twelve-tone music—or rather, its subsequent generalization, serial music—became an indirect prod to creativity by serving as an orthodoxy against which to rebel, leading to that music’s total abandonment in Rochberg’s largely tonal and pointedly neoromantic Third String Quartet. 11. One of Elster’s examples of an externally imposed, yet ultimately fruitful, artmaking constraint concerns the nonfeasibility, prior to 1940, of recording popular music over three minutes in length, due to the limits of the old 78 rpm technology. In relation to this he comments that ‘jazz improvisation at a high level of quality is so hard to sustain that the 78 record with three minutes’ playing time was just about optimal’ (194). To my ears, this sounds like a too convenient retrospective Leibnizian explanation. For my impression of even the best solos of the great jazz players in the 1930s big bands, such as Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, or Lester Young, is that those solos would in fact usually have benefited from being somewhat longer, that they sometimes hardly get going before they are over. Certainly, there are many cases of mesmerizingly good improvised jazz solos extending over large stretches of time, for example, those by Coltrane and McCoy Tyner in ‘My Favorite Things’, which last upwards of four minutes each. Is it not rather plausible to think we might have had even more sublime solos from Hawkins and Young had they been able to dilate, on occasion, for two minutes or even three? 12. Let us turn to two other examples, ones which, at least at first blush, comport well with Elster’s thesis. The first is Michelangelo’s celebrated

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Laurentian Library vestibule. Michelangelo, who had no formal training as an architect, accepted as a constraint to employ the vocabulary of High Renaissance architecture—columns, corbels, pilasters, balusters, pediments, niches, and architraves—but not to employ them in the traditional ways. Rather, he set out to employ them, it seems, in pointedly illogical, that is, non-structurally justified ways, with the evident aim of more effectively stimulating the free play of the imagination in their regard. Michelangelo, untrammeled by habits he might have acquired had he been of the architect’s guild, was instead freed to create expressive form for its own sake: this anteroom, with its unusual somber white and grey color scheme, its high and narrow spatiality, its flowing and spreading staircase, and its constellation of familiar yet oddly deployed constructional elements, is one of the most imposing architectural ensembles I know. Its success indeed seems to be a function of adhering to certain constraints derived from the prevailing culture, while simultaneously explicitly flouting others. As Vasari apparently said of Michelangelo’s architecture, ‘it broke the bonds and chains of common usage’.²⁵ A second example is Picasso’s creation of the Portrait of Kahnweiler as a response to both a highly general, tradition-rooted Charge and a more specific, circumstances-involving Brief, in the terms of the convincing analysis of Michael Baxandall.²⁶ Picasso’s Charge, suggests Baxandall, was the standard painterly one of producing an object with ‘intentional visual interest’, while Picasso’s Brief, largely self-assumed, was the three-pronged one of reconciling the claims of color and form, reconciling the claims of twodimensional patterning and three-dimensional representation, and being true to painting as both cumulative process and completed image. According to Baxandall this posited Brief, together with the assumed background Charge, explain much about how Picasso’s portrait actually turned out. Still, with both Michelangelo’s vestibule and Picasso’s portrait, there is a real worry as to whether our hypothetical reconstructions of the constraints under which and in response to which those works emerged are not merely ‘just-so’ stories. Certain constraints are perhaps undeniable and documentable, particularly material and physical ones. But hypotheses about constraints at the discretion of the artist, however, seem more liable to be products of ²⁵ Quoted in H. H. Janson, History of Art (New York: Harry Abrams, 1962). ²⁶ See Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

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unfettered ‘backward thinking’ in light of what actually results. The fact that hypotheses are usually underdetermined by evidence urges caution here, at least, as to the reliability of such speculative reconstructions. Consider now a case of maximizing artistic value by violating a freely chosen constraint. This is illustrated by an anecdote told of Arthur Rubinstein during one of his first concerts in Paris in the 1920s. The first piece on his program, the then recently composed Valses Nobles et Sentimentales of Ravel, had not been well received, so following a second half consisting of pieces of Chopin that was rather better received, Rubinstein answered the clamor for an encore by playing the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales once again. Now the art in question here is, of course, a performing one, that of recital-giving, and the constraint in question, which comes with the territory, is that encores be both shorter than, and other than, the pieces making up the main program. But arguably Rubinstein gave a finer recital on that occasion precisely by flouting one of the defining norms of the performing art he was engaged in. 13. Is there a necessary connection between creativity and problemsolving? Assume for the sake of argument that there is a necessary connection between creativity and constraints, that creativity is roughly, as Elster suggests, a matter of value-maximizing choice within constraints. The question then becomes that of the relation between problem-solving and constraints. Are all cases of constraints in operation cases of problems calling for solution? One reason to deny this is that a problem, unlike a mere set of constraints, has something like a principle of unity, being often a matter of resolving some conflict, or meeting some need, or finding the answer to a definite question. Another reason is that a problem has at least a prima facie claim on one’s attention—that it is something that, at least on the face of it, merits addressing. Thus it is a problem how to compose comprehensible and engaging music outside the bounds of tonality, or how to maintain the integrity of the picture plane without giving up blatant imagery—problems that were solved respectively by Schoenberg and Berg, on the one hand, and Johns and Dubuffet, on the other. But writing a poem of fifteen lines that employs the word ‘dog’ in every line, or making a film that last fifteen minutes and costs less than $150,000, would seem to be cases of operating under constraints, but not really cases of solving problems. The two notions, then, should not be thought interchangeable. 14. By way of conclusion, let me move from the sphere of fine art to that of applied art, and briefly contemplate constraints on the design of chairs,

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those varied receptacles for our backs and bottoms. The case is well chosen, I think, to illustrate the reciprocity between constraints and creative activity conducted under such constraints—a reciprocity to which Elster’s analysis of creativity, however illuminating, seems insufficiently sensitive. For highly innovative chairs challenge, question, and refashion the very idea of a chair, subjecting its presumed necessary features—e.g. possessing legs, being sturdy, having a seat, being articulated—to intense conceptual pressure. Consider, in this connection, the intentional-historical theory of artifact concepts proposed by the psychologist Paul Bloom.²⁷ Bloom’s theory takes off from and generalizes upon my own intentional-historical theory of the concept of artwork, whose basic idea is that an artwork is something that is intentionally connected by its maker to a preceding practice or tradition of artmaking, possibly identified only through exemplars rather than a covering description, and whose art status is taken for granted.²⁸ On Bloom’s related theory a chair, say, is not something of a certain circumscribed form or something fulfilling an unambiguously understood function, but roughly something intended to belong to the category of chairs as antecedently exemplified, that is, something intended for regard or treatment as preexisting chairs were regarded or treated. The immense profusion of chairs displayed in the astounding book 1000 Chairs, which presents ‘the most comprehensive survey of chair design from 1808 to the present’,²⁹ not only makes Bloom’s theory attractive, but makes a theory of that sort almost unavoidable, rendering doubtful any conception of chairs in terms of essential shape or structure or purpose. The assault on chairhood represented by the many outr´e examples of chairs in 1000 Chairs might profitably be compared with the challenge to what a building is provided by the most envelope-pushing architectural offerings of postmodern architects such as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenmann, and Rem Koolhaus. Now Elster does, it is true, recognize a distinction between what he calls rebellion and revolution in art, which he glosses as follows: ‘Rebellions violate existing conventions, whereas revolutions abolish them and create new ones’ (p. 223). What I am gesturing at in the case of chairs and buildings, however, is something in-between, neither the simple abrogation of existing rules ²⁷ ‘Intention, History, and Artifact Concepts’, Cognition 60 (1996): 1–29. ²⁸ See ‘Defining Art Historically’ and ‘Refining Art Historically’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, and ‘Extending Art Historically’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics. ²⁹ Charlotte and Peter Fiell, 1000 Chairs (Cologne: Taschen, 1997). The quote is from the back cover.

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for such things nor the institution of new rules in their place, but the forced reevaulation, by an ostensible chair or building, of what the rules for such things really were or are. Creativity, in short, is sometimes a matter or reconceiving or reinterpreting or reconstruing given constraints, and not always a matter of either remaining inventively within them or entirely abandoning them.

PART I I MUSIC

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5 Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music

I INT RODUCT ION The main concern of this essay is musical expressiveness, and the role that the imaginative construal of sound in gestural ways plays in grounding that expressiveness.¹ But I will come to that main concern obliquely, beginning instead with some reflections on the nature of sounds and the sense of hearing. What I will be arguing, in the central sections of this essay, is that to hear the expressiveness of music is to hear it as personal expression; that to hear it as personal expression is to hear a sort of gesture in the music, or the music as gesturing in a certain manner; that to hear such musical gesture is to deploy a capacity to imagine in spatial terms, most obviously because that is required for apprehension of the behavioral gestures and performing gestures that underlie musical gesture. Thus, grasp of expressiveness is music is not detachable from a comprehension of the range of expressive human gesture and a comprehension of the means by which music is actually produced, each of which implicates possession by the hearer of a robust spatial imagination. First published as ‘Sound, Gesture, Spatial Imagination, and the Expression of Emotion in Music’, European Review of Philosophy 5 (2002): 137–50. ¹ This essay, originally presented at a colloquium entitled ‘Objets et espaces sonores’ held at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in March 2001, draws significantly on two earlier essays of mine, ‘Authentic Performance and Performance Means’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 393–408, and ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 90–125. For a broader perspective on problems of emotion in relation to art see my ‘Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain’, in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 20–34 (and reprinted as Ch. 3 in this volume).

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II THE NATURE OF SOUNDS At the heart of their book, La Philosophie du son, Roberto Casati and Jerome Dokic propose what they call a ‘th´eorie e´v´enementielle’ of sounds.² According to Casati and Dokic, sounds are neither auditory sensations occurring in our heads, nor sound waves arriving at our ears when we hear, nor secondary qualities of any sort, but rather something happening in the resonant object itself. They summarize their theory in the following formulation: sounds are vibratory events involving objects.³ I believe Casati and Dokic are right in that contention. Sounds are indeed events, and they are located just where the objects that produce them or in which they occur are located.⁴ But it seems to me that the proposal they advance is in need of some qualification, since not every vibratory event that concerns an object can reasonably be accounted a sound. For example, the atomic and subatomic vibrations that characterize every parcel of matter, the slow oscillation of an aspic de legumes, the gentle trembling of the hand of a sufferer from tremor, are all vibratory events in objects, but not thereby sounds involving those objects. On the other hand, as Casati and Dokic rightly insist, we should not require of sounds that they be humanly audible, otherwise we would unfairly exclude ultrasounds and infrasounds, which we have reason to consider sounds from a philosophic point of view even though they do not lend themselves to human hearing. We might thus add to the formulation offered that sounds are vibratory events in objects that are either humanly audible or of a physical order comparable to those that are humanly audible, and so at least a possible object of audition to other creatures we might credit with a sense of hearing. One might also remark that, without modification, Casati’s and Dokic’s proposal, identifying sounds with vibratory events in objects, has the consequence that the ‘music of the spheres’, of which the ancients spoke, is not after all a metaphor, but something to be taken literally. At least that is so if one supposes, as seems reasonable, that the movements of revolution and rotation of the planets are a sort of vibration involving them. However, I do ² Roberto Casati and Jerome Dokic, La Philosophie du son (Nˆımes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1994). ³ ‘Les sons sont des e´v´enements vibratoires int´eressant un objet’ (La Philosophie du son, 49). ⁴ The same thesis, one may note, is defended in Robert Pasnau, ‘What is Sound?’, Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999): 309–23, though with less precision.

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not regard it as a plus for a theory of sounds to count among sounds the supposed ‘music of the spheres’.

III THE APPRECIATION OF MUSIC AND THE SENSE OF HEARING One of the main claims in La Philosophie du son is that the sense of hearing, properly speaking, involves the formation of beliefs regarding the spatiality of sounds understood as vibratory events in objects, and thus presupposes an image of the space in which such events are located. Casati and Dokic go on to relate this conception of hearing to the phenomenon of music, in the following striking observation: If what counts in the appreciation of music is being able to have auditory sensations, rather than being able to form beliefs regarding the location of sounds in the environment, it follows that to appreciate music there is no need, strictly speaking, of a sense of hearing. One could in effect conceive of a perfectly solipsistic musical subject, one without any beliefs concerning external sonic events, but who, in prey to hallucinations, would hear whole symphonies.⁵

In my opinion this observation is partly just and partly not. I agree with Casati and Dokic that the sense of hearing, robustly understood, goes beyond the capacity to have auditory sensations, and involves the ability to form beliefs about the sources of sounds heard. But these beliefs, we may note, are of two kinds: one concerns the spatial location of the source of the sound relative to the hearer, while the other concerns the spatial nature of the source of the sound, apprehended in terms of size, shape, movement, and orientation. There are thus at least two separable abilities involved. Let us label the first of these abilities specific spatial imagination and the second generic spatial imagination.⁶ ⁵ ‘Si ce qui compte, pour appr´ecier de la musique, c’est d’avoir des sensations sonores—plutˆot que d’ˆetre capable de former certaines croyances quant a` la localisation des sources sonores pr´esentes dans l’environnement—alors pour appr´ecier de la musique, point n’est besoin de l’ou¨ıe. On peut en effet concevoir un sujet musical solipsiste, qui n’aurait aucune croyance sur des e´v´enements sonores, mais qui, en proie a` des hallucinations, entendrait des symphonies’ (La Philosophie du son, 28). ⁶ An illustration of the distinction is the following. In perceiving a particular sound I might have the thought that it is situated down the street, and moving in my direction, and also the thought that it is the sound of a car engine, understood as an object of a certain shape consisting of parts moving relative to one another in a certain way. The former thought is the product of specific spatial imagination, the latter of generic spatial imagination.

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Now it is true that to appreciate music of the standard sort we may perhaps dispense with beliefs of the first kind, and so with the first kind of spatial imagination. But it is not at all clear that we can dispense with beliefs, and so spatial imagination, of the second kind, and thus at least a part of the sense of hearing robustly understood. The reason is a fact about the appreciation of music that I will be foregrounding in this essay, namely that to appreciate traditional instrumental music adequately we have need at least of generic spatial imagination, enabling us to imagine possible sources of heard sounds, and possible agents and actions that could be responsible for those sounds. Thus, although Casati and Dokic may be right that appreciation of such music does not necessarily call upon the full sense of hearing, they are wrong to think that the mere capacity to experience auditory sensations could be adequate to such appreciation. A satisfactory account of a listener’s grasp of musical expressiveness entails that the listener has the capacity to imagine in spatial terms the possible sources of sounds heard. More broadly, we can take the question to be whether the appreciation of music is detachable from the normal operation of the senses with which human beings have been endowed. Assuming a capacity to imagine actions in a real space as possible sources of sounds heard is appreciatively relevant to most music, and that that capacity could only be firmly in place if at least one sense—hearing, vision, or touch—capable of providing spatial information and of priming the spatial imagination was at the disposal of the subject, the answer must be no. Contra the solipsistic supposition entertained by Casati and Dokic, then, the appreciation of music is not entirely separable from the senses in their normal functioning. A key premise in the argument just sketched is that the imagination of the sources of sounds, in terms of generating actions and objects, is relevant to the appreciation of music of the ordinary sort. I now devote attention to establishing that.

IV PE RFORMING GESTURE, MUSICAL GESTURE, AND SPATIAL IMAGINATION What I hope to show in this section is that a part of the expressive character of a passage of traditional instrumental music as heard derives from the impression one has of the manner in which it has been produced and the correlation of that impression with the sound of the passage narrowly construed. The

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sound of the sound, so to speak, does not suffice in itself to fix the expressive character of the passage, but only that sound in conjunction with a presumed manner of production. The same sounds present different appearances, and affect us differently, according to the notions we entertain at the same time regarding the actions or processes that have engendered them. Mozart’s Serenade in E-flat, K. 375, begins with a unison statement of the full cohort of winds—oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons—a five-note dotted phrase with marked sforzandi. That beginning has an assertive quality, and suggests a call to attention. But from what, exactly, does that assertive, attention-getting character derive? It derives, in part, from the fact that that stretch of music comes across as an instance of honking, as passages involving double reed instruments played forte often do. Given the manner in which the sounds have actually been produced, that is, by actions of wind players similar to those of waterfowl engaged in honking, that passage could in fact be considered to be a honking, broadly understood. Hearing the sounds of which that stretch of music is composed as having been produced by the rapid passage of air through narrow openings in wooden tubes, that is, as a honking, rather than by some entirely other process, makes for an experiential difference. Were we convinced that the sounds we were hearing did not result from the playing of wind instruments in the normal manner, but issued instead from a perfect synthesizer, that stretch of music would make a somewhat different impression on us. The reason is that a synthesizer, however powerful or accurate, cannot truly honk. That is to say, it cannot do what oboes, klaxons, and geese all naturally can. And this modifies, in a subtle manner, how the sounds the synthesizer emits are received, since those sounds are gauged against the background of a presumed manner of production. I have been arguing that knowledge of the actual sources of sounds affects how those sounds strike us. I have also been suggesting that such knowledge properly enters into aesthetic assessment of passages of music, which are presumably to be taken as what they are, say the product of windplaying, and not what they are not but only appear to be, as when a synthesizer mimics such windplaying. But in fact that is a stronger thesis than is needed for present purposes, so let me also articulate a weaker, less controversial one. All that is needed to show the indispensability of generic spatial imagination to a grasp of the expressive character of music is that a sense of the possible sources of sounds, not necessarily knowledge of their actual sources, is required if the expressiveness of sequences of sound is to be registered.

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Clearly the assertiveness of the opening of Mozart’s serenade only emerges if that opening is heard as a woodwind proclamation, leaving aside whether on a given sounding occasion it actually is, and whether it is known to be. This point is easily generalized. Descriptions of musical passages in terms of actions are extremely widespread. Passages can be described as sighing, whispering, chirping, purring, squawking, roaring, sawing, hammering, pounding, slashing, caressing, swooping, and so on. Now obviously one cannot recognize the applicability of such descriptions without possessing an image of the action literally denoted. For example, one can’t hear a passage as sighing unless one has a conception of what sighing is. But the applicability of such descriptions is also predicated on a sense of related performing actions from which the sounds in question are assumed to result. Absent a sense of those background generative actions such passages would not seem to merit those descriptions, or at any rate, would not do so unequivocally. One’s sense of a passage as a ‘slashing’ one is not completely detachable from the impression that it has been produced by a violin played staccato, and one’s impression of a passage as a ‘purring’ one is similarly not entirely independent of the impression that it has been produced by an oboe played legato. A ‘slashing’ or ‘purring’ sound not thought of as the product of those sorts of performing actions does not slash, does not purr, in quite the way it does when believed to issue from violin or oboe. Now just as generic spatial imagination is required to form a conception of the actions literally denoted in the action-based descriptions recalled above, so is it required to envisage the background performing actions behind musical passages which contribute to the applicability of those descriptions. For both sorts of actions, e.g. the literal roaring we may hear in a passage of music, and the rising declarations in the brass that underlie it, necessarily manifest themselves in space. And these action-based descriptions, in turn, have an obvious bearing on the expressive character musical passages are perceived to have, given the aptness of many such actions to the expression of emotion. Let me approach the conclusion that spatial imagination is necessarily involved in a grasp of musical expression in another way. The expressiveness of music is grounded on the fact—which I will shortly explore in more detail—that the actions or gestures that one hears in a passage of music recall the actions or gestures that serve as behavioral expressions of emotions, which allows us to hear the former as the latter, and so the passage as expressive of

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those emotions. But the gestures rightly heard in music are only heard in all their specificity if the apparent performing gestures behind the sequences of sounds per se are taken into account. For the gestures we are right to hear in musical sequences are those we hear in them when we are cognizant of the instrumental actions understood to generate such sequences. It is important to be clear on a crucial step in the preceding argument. It is not that the gestures heard in a passage of music—what in effect we hear the music as doing —are identical with the performing gestures that we imagine as responsible for the sounds we hear. It is rather that those gestures, which for clarity I label musical gestures, are in part a function of the performing gestures we are right to imagine in auditing a given passage. In other words, the gestures we are correct to hear in a passage of music, and on which depends our estimation of its emotional expressiveness, are partly determined by what we take performers of the passage to literally be doing in producing it.⁷ Some additional examples will serve to support this thesis of the intimate relationship between performing and musical gestures, and thus ultimately, of the necessary involvement of spatial imagination in the grasp of musical expression. Consider the rapid upward keyboard glissando. This familiar musical formula conveys most often an impression of gaiety or insouciance. The best-known instances of it are probably Chico Marx’s one-finger antics in various Marx Brothers movies, but a number of examples enliven as well the scores of Ravel, Prokofiev, and Gershwin. I claim that the characteristic impression produced by the upward keyboard glissando has its source, in part, in an image we form of the flicking or sweeping gesture behind the rising tones that we hear, a gesture that occupies a certain place for us in the field of expressive behavior as a whole. The imagined executive action melds with the rising tonal movement so as to create a musical gesture in which we readily hear a gay insouciance. One of the most vivid portraits in all music is that found in the sixth section of Job: A Masque for Dancing by Ralph Vaughan Williams. There the composer ⁷ A word about the gestures of conductors during performance is in order. Such gestures, probably the ones most on display in the musical arena, do not count as examples of what I mean by performing gestures. That is, such gestures do not figure among those a listener must have an image of in order to grasp the expressiveness of the music being heard, that is, in order to grasp its musical gesture. However, a conductor’s gestures might very well symbolize the musical gestures contained in the music being conducted, and reflect the conductor’s understanding of those musical gestures, but it is only rarely that there is anything approaching identity between musical and conductorial gesture at a given point.

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depicts the hypocrites gathered around the suffering Job. The slimy nature of these false comforters and the flavor of their viscous consolations could not be more clearly conveyed. The musical phrases charged with achieving this—slow, descending seconds and thirds, alternately major and minor, in a mellow timbre—are perfectly apropos, but they only make their optimal effect if they are taken precisely as the saxophone gestures they are. It is only in the light of that image that the music presents itself unequivocally as a stylization of the whining, honey-tongued vocal behavior typical of hypocrites. Take finally the standard expressive contribution of percussion in orchestral music. Notes on the timpani carry a powerful association of pounding or battering—it’s a matter of mallet strokes, after all—and in passages where timpani are prominent this effect can be overwhelming. However, it is not timpani sound per se that is efficacious, but the conjunction of such sound and the action of which that sound is the sign. That a phrase sounds a certain way, in the narrow sense, is not the only thing that counts so far as the musical gesture we will be disposed to hear in the phrase is concerned; equally important is our sense that the phrase has been sounded in a certain way. In the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the timpani’s statements are aggressive and interruptive, while in the first movement of Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony those of the snare drum are warlike and menacing, in virtue of their maddening repetitiveness. But in both cases, these effects are precisely what they are only if the utterances in question are heard as strikings and hammerings, and not as pure disembodied sequences of sound. This is a good place to offer a further observation on musical gesture, which as we have seen depends on performing gesture though without reducing to it. In many cases in which musical gesture is perceived one is able to characterize the musical gesture in familiar terms, metaphorically employed; for example, one might say of a passage of music that it was dancing, or striding, or thrusting, or hectoring, or meditating, or recoiling, or questioning, etc. But this will not be true in all cases in which one nonetheless registers gesture in music; in such cases one might perceive music to be gesturing in a certain manner, and as a result hear the music as, say, heroic, but without being inclined to identify, or even being able to identify, the manner of gesturing in terms of some prior category of action.⁸ ⁸ Of course it will always be possible to characterize retrospectively the manner of gesturing as ‘heroic’, but that would not be to invoke an antecedently familiar action concept so as to characterize the manner of gesturing heard in question.

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V M USICAL EXPRESSIVENESS AND HEARABILIT Y-AS-PERSONAL-EXPRESSION At several points in the preceding discussion I have leaned on a theory of musical expressiveness, but without elaborating it. It is now time to lay out that theory more clearly. I cannot here undertake a full defense of the theory, which I have argued for at length elsewhere,⁹ but I will try to make its attractions evident. The central idea is that musical expression of mental states—and for reasons of simplicity I stick to the most important case, that of emotions—must model itself on the primary expression of emotions by human beings, that is, expression of emotions through behavior or other outward manifestation, including countenance, posture, bearing, demeanor, actions, gestures, and modifications of voice. That is not to say that music is expressive in precisely the same sense as is behavior, for several reasons. One, music doesn’t actually exhibit behavior as such; two, musical gesturing is not literal but rather metaphorical; three, the character of expressive music is neither the immediate result of emotion experienced by the music, music not being sentient, nor always the upshot of emotion experienced by the composer; and so on. But despite these manifest differences between musical expression of emotion and human expression of emotion, it seems we cannot consider a piece of music to be strictly expressive of an emotional state S—rather than, more loosely, simply possessing a correlative emotional quality Q—unless we regard it as analogous to a being endowed with sentiments capable of announcing themselves in an external manner. In short, music expresses an emotion only to the extent that we are disposed to hear it as the expression of an emotion, but through different means, by a person or personlike entity. More formally, what I have proposed as an analysis of expression in music goes like this: a passage of music P is expressive of an emotion E iff P, in full context, is readily heard, by a listener appropriately backgrounded in the musical genre in question, as the expression of E in a sui generis, purely musical manner, by an indefinite agent, what we can call the music’s persona. The concept of musical expressiveness is thus a complex one, in which the ideas of ⁹ See ‘Hope in ‘‘The Hebrides’’ ’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 336–75, and ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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personal expression, human gesture, musical gesture, imaginary agency, and hearing-as each plays a role.¹⁰ What is it to hear a stretch of music as something else? For present purposes it suffices to locate hearing-as among perceptual acts that partake freely of or substantially enlist the imagination. The agents one hears in music when one hears it as an expression of emotion are thus inescapably imaginary ones, ones displaying the indefiniteness characteristic of all imaginary objects. To hear music as such and such is, perhaps, to imagine that the music is such and such, and, more specifically to imagine of the music, as you are hearing it, that it is such and such. In earlier discussions of the problem of musical expressiveness¹¹ I allowed myself to alternate the locution ‘hear X as Y’ with the more counterfactually–flavored locution ‘hear X as if it were Y’, suggesting that in connection with music these come to more or less the same thing. I am now less sure of that, so here confine myself to the first locution. The notion of hearing X as if it were Y may not be an entirely happy one. I suspect that is because the modifier ‘as if it were’ is more appropriate to acts of treating, regarding, or behaving towards than it is to acts of perceiving as such. For example, though one clearly understands what it would be for X to treat Y as if she were the only person in the world, it is less clear that one understands what it would be for X to see Y as if she were the only person in the world. What about the evocation of emotion by music? Is not music that is expressive of an emotion precisely music that evokes in us this same emotion, or that at any rate has a disposition or tendency to evoke in us that emotion? This is not the place to demonstrate that this popular theory of musical expressiveness is erroneous.¹² However, neither is it necessary. Because we can willingly admit that the emotion, and also the feelings and sensations, that a passage of music has a tendency to evoke in a listener influences what emotion the listener will be disposed to imagine the music to be the expression of, without it being necessary to identify the emotion expressed with that emotion, or those ¹⁰ For further ref lections on the concept of musical expressiveness, and doubts whether the expression that music is heard as when its expressiveness is being perceived should be held to be a sui generis mode of expression, rather than just expression tout court, see my ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’ (Ch. 6, this volume). ¹¹ Those cited in n. 9. ¹² But see Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Still, the evocation theory of musical expression continues to have advocates, of whom Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), is the most sophisticated.

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feelings and sensations.¹³ What one has a tendency to imagine, and more particularly to hear-as, in relation to a passage of music one is auditing, remains the key to its expressiveness, and not whatever power it may possess to provoke in us a corresponding emotion. Such is the theory of musical expressiveness to which I subscribe, and which figured in the background of my earlier remarks. What follows, as already intimated, is that generic spatial imagination is indispensable to the appreciation of traditional instrumental music. The argument to that conclusion, in summary form, is this: appreciation of traditional instrumental music requires grasp of musical expression; musical expression of emotion presupposes the notion of personal expression of emotion and rests on the emergence of musical gestures; personal expression of emotion, on the one hand, is fundamentally behavioral and so necessarily manifested in space, while musical gesture, on the other hand, is a function of both performing gestures understood as the sources of musical sequences heard and perceived resemblances between musical sequences and behavioral expressions; hence grasp of performing gestures and of behavioral expressions, and thus ultimately of musical gestures, requires generic spatial imagination; hence grasp of musical expression requires generic spatial imagination; hence spatial imagination is necessary to the appreciation of traditional instrumental music. VI MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS AND MENTAL SIMUL ATION A question that we can now pose is this: does the imagining of indeterminate personlike agents in music, who seem to be expressing their own emotions—which I take to be the core of an experience of musical expressiveness—involve us in acts of mental simulation, and if so, of what are these acts the simulation? Though I am unsure how to answer this question, I will permit myself a measure of speculation in connection with it. Faced with a passage of music that strikes us as behaving or gesturing in such and such fashion in virtue of its musical movement, its underlying performing actions, and other aspects of its sonic appearance, perhaps we frame for ourselves, without being fully ¹³ For further illumination on this point, see my ‘Musical Expressiveness’ and Jenefer Robinson, ‘The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’, in Philip Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 13–22.

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conscious of it, the hypothetical query, If someone was comporting himself in that way, what emotion is it likely he was feeling? However, perhaps it is the case that faced with such a passage we do not theorize in this manner, even subconsciously, in the aim of inferring what the music’s expressiveness must be, but that we rather try to imagine ourselves in the place of the music, that we assume as our own the musical gestures we hear the passage to be suffused with, as a consequence of which we find ourselves feeling, in imagination, such and such emotion, and so in that way come to know what the music expresses.¹⁴ It remains to add only that such postulated acts as putting oneself in the place of the music and assuming as one’s own the music’s perceived gestures might well be realized by some sort of simulation procedure. More precisely, in order to effect such a simulation one would have to enter into the presumed mental simulator in off-line mode thoughts or beliefs such ], [I am making the as [I am the music], [I am behaving in the manner musical gesture ], the content of the blanks being supplied by acts of mental ostension or demonstration, with the expectation of finding oneself consequently in such and such mental state, a state one would then be in a position to say was the state expressed by the music. I am not prepared to conjecture that we in fact do something of this sort, but such a scenario seems to me at least possible. At any rate, the theory of musical expressiveness here defended is certainly amenable to interpretation in a simulationist manner, if not such as to require that. VII EXPRESSION IN ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC The necessity of a robust sense of hearing, including the ability to localize sounds in space, to the overall appreciation of electroacoustic music—music written not for instruments, but composed on computer, tape, or synthesizer for direct transmission to loudspeakers—can be taken for granted, given that such music uses space as a primary structural material and derives probably its most striking effects from spatial manipulations.¹⁵ Appreciating such music draws on not only generic but specific spatial imagination in the most obvious ¹⁴ The process of imaginative projection by which we endeavor to seize the expressiveness of music is convincingly described in Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), though in terms of Verstehen rather than of simulation. ¹⁵ I should make clear that I am here thinking of a music of multiple channels, typically six or eight, capable of generating an ample acoustic space. Another term for electroacoustic music, especially in France, is acousmatic music, though the latter has a slightly narrower meaning.

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way. What is at issue at present, rather, is whether generic spatial imagination is necessary to a grasp specifically of the expressiveness of such music. With instrumental music the need for generic spatial imagination in gauging expressiveness is a consequence of the need to imagine the performing gestures behind the sounds, and behind those performing gestures, the gestures and actions that serve as the behavioral expressions of emotions. It is because those gestures and actions take place in space that a capacity to imagine them goes hand in hand with a capacity for at least generic spatial imagination. How, then, do matters stand with electroacoustic music? Since such music is not performed, grasp of its expressiveness cannot require us to imagine performing gestures from which it is presumed to issue. Still, though the expressiveness of electroacoustic music thus necessarily differs somewhat in its basis from that of traditional music, an argument can be made in its regard connecting a grasp of expressiveness to a spatial imagination of sources. As we have seen, the capacity to imagine the presumed sources of sounds, in terms of instruments, agents, and actions, plays a crucial role in estimating the expressiveness of traditional music. With electroacoustic music, by contrast, we generally have only a vague idea as to the sources of the sounds heard, because the sounds in question are usually unfamiliar and difficult to categorize, and information about their provenance is rarely indicated in ancillary material. Nevertheless, it seems that our habits of hearing-as are likely to be transferred, to some degree, from traditional music to electroacoustic music, without our being conscious of any categorization of sounds according to their likely sources. For instance, a sound resembling that of a chainsaw but not consciously classified by us as such would still probably be subconsciously assimilated by us in those terms, inducing us to take it as emanating from something like a chainsaw, with all that that implies expressively. Thus, even with electroacoustic music, where it is not incumbent upon listeners to hear stretches of sound in terms of their presumed sources, me may conclude that the capacity to imagine in a spatial manner possible sources of sounds heard will play a role in the expressiveness such music wears for us. On the other hand, insofar as the expressiveness of music rests in part on the sources one imagines sounds to have had, one can also see there an explanation of why the expressiveness of electroacoustic music, which would be hard to deny, remains yet more elusive than that of traditional instrumental music. It would be because in this music, as just noted, we find it difficult to classify the majority of sounds encountered as to their ostensible sources, and

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probably even our subconscious classifiers of sounds, such as they are, often rest undecided before a good portion of the sounds that escape conscious categorization. If so, then by consequence we will also find it difficult to grasp with any definiteness the musical gestures embodied in a piece of electroacoustic music, in contrast with those embodied in a piece of music composed for and sounded on familiar instruments. However, and there is perhaps appropriate compensation in this, to the degree that the expressiveness of electroacoustic music remains elusive to us we are in a certain sense liberated, and so free to deploy in an even more creative manner than usual the auditory imagination that is ours.

6 Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression I E XPRESSION AND EXPRESSIVENESS As a number of philosophers have rightly underlined, expression is essentially a matter of something outward giving evidence of something inward.¹ In other words, expression is essentially the manifesting or externalizing of mind or psychology. The scope of expression is thus not, pace Goodman and others, properties in general, or properties metaphorically possessed, but rather psychological properties, those pertaining to the mental states of sentient creatures. For only those can be intelligibly expressed, whoever or whatever is doing the expressing. And this holds as well for expressiveness, which we can initially understand as the sort of expression that some objects, and perhaps most notably musical works, manage to achieve, despite their not literally having inner lives. Exactly what sort of expression expressiveness amounts to will emerge as the argument proceeds. My discussion focuses on the case of musical expressiveness, but at a later point I offer some reflections on artistic expressiveness in general. II MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS I here defend an account of musical expressiveness elaborated in earlier papers,² replying to certain objections it has elicited, and underlining its First published in M. Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 192–206. ¹ For instance, Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Bruce Vermazen, ‘Expression as Expression’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 67 (1986): 196–224; and Aaron Ridley, ‘Expression in Art’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 211–27. ² ‘Hope in ‘‘The Hebrides’’ ’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and ‘Musical Expressiveness’ in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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superiority to the most plausible competing accounts on offer. Crucial to my account is the idea that the expressiveness of music resides in the invitation that music extends to the listener to hear it as expression in the primary sense—that is, expression, by persons, of inner states through outer signs. Thus, to hear music as expressive is to hear it as an instance of personal expression. Expressive music is music we are disposed to hear as expressing; and that is what its expressiveness fundamentally consists in. Since the primary vehicle of the expressing of states of mind—as opposed to articulate thoughts—is gesture, broadly understood, and since music is naturally assimilated to that kind of expressing, that means that we hear expressive music as gesturing of some sort, that we hear a sort of gesture in expressive music. Call this musical gesture. It is important to stress that though musical gesture is related to both the ordinary behavioral gestures connected to expression of states of mind and the specific performing gestures involved in the sounding of music, it is not equivalent to either of those. It is a matter, at base, of what we hear the music to be doing, in virtue, most importantly, of the movement we hear in music.³ Summon up in your mind the opening of Brahms’s First Symphony. You are inescapably presented, in listening, with the image of someone in the throes of emotion, which emotion is being manifested to you, through what one might call musical gestures. You may perhaps not know, or be able to articulate, what emotion the agent heard in the music is in the grip of, but in the grip of it he is, and this is something you directly hear. It is as if an emotion is being expressed, in the most literal sense, though it is somehow happening through music. The musical expression of states of mind—including emotions, feelings, attitudes, desires, and beliefs—must thus be modeled on the primary expression of such states by persons or human beings, whereby such states are revealed or evinced through behavior or other outward manifestation. In the case of emotions, the usual focus of musical expression, such manifestations include countenance, posture, bearing, demeanor, actions, gestures, and modifications of voice. Naturally there are differences between human expression and musical expression. For one thing, music is not literally behavior, and musical gesture ³ See Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) on musical movement, and Scruton, ibid., and Jerrold Levinson ‘Sound, Gesture, Space and the Expression of Emotion in Music’ (Ch. 5, this volume) on musical gesture.

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is not literal gesture. For another, expression in music is not the result of emotion experienced by the music, since music is not sentient, nor is it invariably the upshot of emotion experienced by the composer, since lived emotion and musically imagined emotion can readily diverge. But despite those evident differences between musical expression of emotion and human expression of emotion, we should not consider a piece of music to be strictly expressive of an emotion—rather than standing in some other, weaker, relation to it, such as possessing a perceptual quality associated with the emotion—unless we regard it as analogous to a being endowed with sentiments capable of announcing themselves in an external manner. In short, music expresses an emotion only to the extent that we are disposed to hear it as the expression of an emotion, although in a non-standard manner, by a person or personlike entity. More formally, what I have proposed as an analysis of expression in music goes something like this: a passage of music P is expressive of an emotion E if and only if P, in context, is readily heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in question, as an expression of E. Since expressing requires an expresser, this means that in so hearing the music the listener is in effect committed to hearing an agent in the music—what we can call the music’s persona—or to at least imagining such an agent in a backgrounded manner. But this agent or persona, it must be stressed, is almost entirely indefinite, a sort of minimal person, characterized only by the emotion we hear it to be expressing and the musical gesture through which it does so. It is important to keep that in mind when entertaining skepticism as to whether understanding listeners normally hear or imagine personae when they apprehend expressiveness in music. My basic analysis of musical expressiveness, again, is that music expressive of E is music heard as, or as if, someone expressing E. Of course one could fairly expand this as ‘music heard as, or as if, someone experiencing, and as a result expressing, E’, since ‘A expresses E’ presupposes ‘A experiences E’. But it is presumably the expressing part alone that enters into what the music can intelligibly be heard as, since we can, it seems, have no idea what it would be to hear music or musical process, as if it, the music or musical process, were an experiencing of something. It has been suggested, incidentally, that not all expressions are such that we think of their possessors or bearers as engaged in acts of expressing, in the sense of intentionally trying to communicate a state of mind.⁴ Since I ⁴ Vermazen, ‘Expression as Expression’, 198–9.

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analyze expressiveness in terms of as-if expression, not as-if-expressing, then even if that suggestion is valid, it is immaterial for my account. The suggestion can, in any case, be challenged. For it can be argued, pace Vermazen, that all expressions ascribable to an agent in fact are cases of expressings by the agent. It is just that not all such expressions are cases of intentional or self-conscious expressing. Earlier formulations of my proposal appealed to the idea of a sui generis mode of expression of emotion, suggesting that music, when heard as expressing, was such a mode of expression. But that idea may be an unfortunate one, and has attracted its share of criticism. Some commentators, for instance, have charged that there is something incoherent in the suggestion that one hears a passage of music as a sui generis expression of some emotion, on the grounds that we can form no conception of a mode of expression declared to be sui generis;⁵ others have charged that the appeal to a sui generis mode of expression in connection with music implies that we experience music as a novel corporeal means of sound production⁶ or else as an odd creature that somehow behaves musically.⁷ In light of these charges, it is probably a mistake to insist that the expression that music is heard as when its expressiveness is being perceived is sui generis expression, rather than just expression simpliciter. Little appears to be gained, and only confusion sowed, by such insistence. And yet the notion of a sui generis mode of expression, which the singularity of our experience of music as expressive suggests to us, may still have a role to play in the full explanation of musical expressiveness. What must be avoided, it seems, is making the idea of a sui generis mode of expression part of the content of the hearing-as experience involved in registering music’s expressiveness. (After all, thinking in Latin can hardly be a prerequisite for the grasping of expression in music!) The sui generis aspect of musical expression, such as it is, will have to be reflected in the analysis in a different manner.

⁵ Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131. ⁶ Kendall Walton, ‘Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 47–61 (p. 56); Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (London: Penguin, 1995) 132. ⁷ Kendall Walton, ‘Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension’, Philosophical Topics 26 (1999): 407–40 (p. 435).

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Compare hearing the sound of a train’s wheels as a baby whining (but in an unusual, because regular and rhythmic, way), and hearing a stretch of music as an expression of sadness (but of an unusual, because non-corporeal and extraordinarily fluid, sort). Now, do the parentheticals in those cases give part of the content of the hearing-as experiences in question? Perhaps yes, if we view such contents as highly backgrounded ones. But we might with more justice answer no, viewing those parentheticals not as giving part of the contents of those experiences, but rather part of the contents of subsequent reflections on those experiences. Thus perhaps the qualification sui generis that attaches to the expressing that we hear music as doing when we register its expressiveness does not enter into the hearing-as experience itself, but only into characteristic further thoughts about that experience. The modifier, ‘in sui generis fashion’, plausibly belongs to the content of a subsidiary thought on the expressing we hear in expressive music, not part of the content of the core experience of hearing the music as, or as if it were, an expression of some sort. The notion of hearing-as, it will have been noted, has been relied on rather heavily in the preceding discussion. So what is it to hear a stretch of music as something else—or alternatively, to hear that something else in that stretch of music?⁸ This remains a difficult matter, but for present purposes it suffices to locate hearing-as and hearing-in among perceptual acts that partake freely of, or that substantially enlist, the imagination. The agents one hears in music when one hears it as an expression of emotion, sui generis or not, are thus inescapably imaginary ones, ones displaying the indefiniteness characteristic of all imaginary objects. To hear music as such and such is, perhaps, to imagine that the music is such and such, and more specifically, to imagine of the music, as you are hearing it, that it is such and such. The worry is sometimes voiced, concerning the appeal to imagination in the analysis of musical expressiveness, that imagination is too unconstrained to secure the degree of objectivity that musical expressiveness appears to enjoy. But this worry can be put to rest by recalling that the appeal is not to what a passage might perhaps be imagined to be the expression of, but rather, to what a passage is most readily and spontaneously imagined to be the expression of, in which case the exercise often has a fairly unequivocal outcome. ⁸ On the effective equivalence of hearing-in and hearing-as in regard to music, see my ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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III RESEMBL ANCE-BASED VIEWS OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS Malcolm Budd, in a trenchant discussion of our topic, distinguishes a minimal, or basic, concept of musical expressiveness, and then identifies three accretions to that minimal concept, resulting in three more elaborate conceptions of musical expressiveness, the third of which is more or less the conception defended here.⁹ The minimal conception goes like this: a stretch of music is expressive of E if one hears the music as sounding like the way E feels, or perceives a likeness between the music and the experience of E, and it is correct to do so. My main objection to Budd’s minimal conception, which is a resemblancebased one, is that it is simply too minimal. What it defines isn’t yet musical expressiveness, but at most a rough precondition or typical upshot of musical expressiveness. Perceiving a likeness between two things A and B—and especially where, as in the present instance of musical passages and emotional states, it is a matter of cross-categorial perception—is not sufficient for hearing A as B. The latter is a distinct occurrence, which neither entails nor presupposes the former. Resemblance in various respects between the sound and shape of a passage of music and the inner experience or outer expression of an emotion is undoubtedly one of the chief grounds of musical expressiveness, but neither the resemblance as such, nor the capacity to make listeners aware of that resemblance, constitutes the expressiveness in question. I can perceive that or acquire the perceptual belief that a leafy tree resembles a bushy beard, for instance, and not have the experience of seeing the tree as a beard. I can notice the likeness between the two and yet not see the one in the other. But surely we cannot speak of a musical passage being expressive of an emotion unless listeners are induced to hear the emotion, or more precisely, an expressing of the emotion, in the passage, whatever degree of resemblance they might note, in whatever respects, between the passage and the emotion. Note further that even if a resemblance-based account of musical expressiveness could deliver the right verdicts in individual cases—that is, even if the degree of resemblance that an ensemble of musical features needs to have to some emotion for a passage possessing such an ensemble to be expressive of the emotion in question could be specified in some ⁹ Values of Art, ch. 4.

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general manner—that would not constitute an acceptable analysis of musical expressiveness. For it would not elucidate what musical expressiveness was, but only what ensembles of musical features were coextensive with and underlay such expressiveness. Stephen Davies, the most prominent defender of a resemblance-based view of musical expressiveness, maintains that emotion words used to describe appearances, whether in persons, natural objects, or works of art, are parasitic on the use of such words to refer to felt emotions; they thus represent a secondary, though literal, use of such words.¹⁰ In this secondary use, says Davies, emotion words describe emotion-characteristics-in-appearance, and it is in these that musical expressiveness lies. According to Davies, ‘the expressiveness of music consists in its presenting emotion characteristics in its appearance. . . . These expressive appearances . . . are not occurrent emotions at all. They are emergent properties of the things to which they are attributed.’¹¹ Davies goes on to explain that such musical expressiveness ‘depends mainly on a resemblance we perceive between the dynamic character of music and human movement, gait, bearing, or carriage’.¹² In conclusion, Davies affirms that emotions ‘are heard in music as belonging to it, just as appearances of emotion are present in the bearing, gait, or deportment of our fellow humans and other creatures’.¹³ Davies’s view might, I think, be stated as follows: P is expressive of E iff P exhibits an emotion-characteristic-in-sound associated with E, that is, exhibits a sound-appearance analogous to the human emotion-characteristic-inappearance of E. Though I am not unsympathetic to the basic thrust of this account of musical expressiveness, I have major qualms about the central notion in terms of which it is framed, namely that of musical emotion-characteristicsin-appearance. The problem is that the appearance of a passage of music is not precisely that of a person, or a person’s face or body in any condition, or a person’s behavior at any moment. It is instead a matter, when a passage displays an emotion-characteristic in its medium of sound sequences, of an appearance similar to that presented by a person in some state. But since everything is similar to everything else to some degree, the issue then becomes one of how similar such an appearance must be to one presented by human behavior in order to constitute an emotion-characteristic-in-sound of the ¹⁰ See his Musical Meaning and Expression. ¹³ Ibid. 239.

¹¹ Ibid. 228.

¹² Ibid. 229.

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emotion in question, or else, as Davies sometimes puts it, of how similar the experience of musical movement and of expressive behavior must be, in order for the appearance generated by such movement to constitute an emotioncharacteristic-in-sound of the emotion in question. I think it is plain that there is no answer to this question except by appeal to our disposition to hear that emotion—rather than another, or none at all—in the music, that is, by appeal to our disposition to aurally construe the music as an instance of personal expression, perceiving the human appearances in the musical ones, in effect animating the sounds in a certain manner, to use a phrase given currency by Peter Kivy.¹⁴ Only if this occurs does the music have the expressiveness in question, regardless of the degree of similarity between the music’s appearances and the human appearances by relation to which it ends up being expressive, or alternatively, the degree of similarity between the experiences of those appearances. There is simply no independent conception of and no access to what Davies calls musical emotion-characteristics-in-appearance apart from satisfaction of the hearability-in-the-music-of-an-expressing-of-emotion condition vis-`avis attuned listeners; the latter is what gives content, ultimately, to the former, however familiar the appearances in question might be. What the musical emotion-characteristic-in-appearance of sadness is, in general, cannot be derived from the behavioral emotion-characteristic-in-appearance of sadness in persons. There is no translation rule from behavioral appearance-characteristics to musical appearance-characteristics; only the act of perceiving in music the outlines of the former gives rise, so to speak, to the latter. Though Davies does not want to be committed to the view that musical expressiveness consists in analogy or resemblance to literally expressive behavior, his invocation of emotion-characteristics-in-sound as something founded in and emerging out of such analogy or resemblance in any event suggests that such characteristics are specifiable independently of experiences of hearing emotional expression in music, like the behavioral emotioncharacteristics-in-appearance associated directly with felt emotion. But that is to overlook the real differences between human emotion-characteristics-inappearance and the supposed musical emotion-characteristics-in-appearance being appealed to; the former can to some extent be catalogued independently

¹⁴ See Kivy, Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

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of individual judgments of expressive import on the part of perceivers, whereas the latter cannot. Let me elaborate on this. We can give content to ‘sad human appearance’ by glossing it as ‘the appearance or kind of appearance sad humans typically display’. But we can’t analogously give content to ‘sad musical appearance’. There is no such thing as the appearance or kind of appearance that sad music typically displays. There is no extractable profile of ‘sad musical appearance’, as there is of ‘sad human face’ or ‘sad human posture’; ‘sad musical appearance’, unlike ‘sad human face’ and ‘sad human posture’, is not, as it were, paraphrasable. The only way to anchor ‘sad musical appearance’, I submit, is in terms of our disposition to hear such music as sad. The analysis of music’s expressiveness must thus foreground that perceptual-imaginative experience, and not the resemblances that, no doubt, underlie it. Musical ‘emotion-characteristics-in-appearance’, if they are supposed to be something identifiable apart from experiences of hearing such and such emotion or expression of emotion in music, and as parallel to human emotion-characteristics-in-appearance, are an illusion. Take sadness. Sadness is an emotion, that is, a mental condition with various cognitive, conative, affective, evaluative, behavioral, and possibly physiological aspects. Next we have sad look, which is more or less the look—in face and body–that sad people typically wear, or wear when they are not trying to conceal or suppress their sadness. And then we have sad sound, which is more or less the sound—vocal, for the most part—that sad people typically make, at least when not trying to conceal or suppress their sadness. So characterized, sad look and sad sound are human emotioncharacteristics-in-appearance, as is their conjunction, which we might label sad appearance. But now we come to the alleged corresponding musical emotioncharacteristic-in appearance, or sad musical sound. How is that to be cashed out, in light of the characterizations of sad look and sad sound just given? One possibility would be, as the musical sound that sad people typically make. But that can’t be right, since sad people don’t typically make musical sounds of any sort, and the sounds they do make—weeping, sighing—are clearly distinguishable from music of an ordinary sort. A second possibility would be, as the sound that sad pieces of music have in common. But that is an even worse proposal, since it presupposes the prior identification of pieces of music as sad. A third possibility would be to appeal to purely technical or structural features of music, such as those of melody, harmony, tempo and texture. But that would be of no use, since even if there is a complex disjunction of technical

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or structural features coextensive with sadness in music, such a disjunction would not serve to explicate the concept of sad musical sound, nor would such a disjunction appear to play a role in our identifying passages as sad. The only proposal with any chance of success, then, must be that sad musical sound is sound resembling sad sound (the standard aural appearance of sadness) or, cross-modally, sad look (the standard visual appearance of sadness), or both. But to what degree? There’s the rub, for as we all know, everything resembles everything else, yet the degree of resemblance to an emotion required to make a musical appearance a musical emotion characteristic in appearance of that emotion cannot be specified in terms of some fixable degree of resemblance between the two. It can only be specified, it seems, as whatever resemblance is sufficient to induce appropriately backgrounded listeners to hear the music as sad, or as expressing sadness. But that, surely, is to give up the idea that there is a recognizable musical emotioncharacteristic-in-appearance of sadness, somehow analogous to the human emotion-characteristic-in-appearance of sadness, on which the analysis of musical expressiveness can rest. In sum, if there really are musical emotion-characteristics-in-appearance, to which the explication of musical expressiveness must advert, we should be able to identify them other than simply as being appearances in which the corresponding emotion can be heard. Thus, for sad musical sound, there should be some possible specification or profile, however schematic, of what sort of sound that is, other than ‘sound that invites hearing-as-sad’. But there isn’t.

IV INFERENCE-BASED VIEWS OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS Bruce Vermazen, Jenefer Robinson, and Robert Stecker are philosophers who subscribe to inference-based views of musical expressiveness.¹⁵ In the view of each of them, the expressiveness a passage of music possesses is something like the conclusion of an inference to the best explanation. In Vermazen’s case it is an ascription of a state of mind to the imagined utterer of the passage that best explains its distinctive features; in Robinson’s case it is an ascription of a ¹⁵ See Vermazen, ‘Expression as Expression’; Jenefer Robinson, ‘The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’, in Philip Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 13–22; and Robert Stecker, ‘Expressiveness and Expression in Music and Poetry’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 85–96.

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state of mind to the imaginary protagonist of the passage that figures in the best interpretation of the musical work taken as a whole; in Stecker’s case it is a best hypothesis on the part of an ideal listener as to what state of mind the composer of the music intended such a listener to hear in the passage. Though I share with Vermazen and Robinson the commitment to personae in the analysis of musical expressiveness, and with Stecker the notion that certain aspects of artistic meaning are amenable to analysis in hypotheticalist terms, I disagree with all three that basic musical expressiveness—that is, the expressiveness of individual passages—can be constitutively tied to the sustaining of inferences about the music. That is due to my belief that basic musical expressiveness—though perhaps not all sorts of expressiveness, such as that more typical of literature, involving articulate states of mind, nor that perhaps attaching to works of music as wholes—is something directly heard, not inferred, by attuned or properly backgrounded listeners. Otherwise put, inferentialist views of expressiveness fail to capture the immediacy with which we register basic musical expressiveness. I thus continue to think, pace Stecker, that immediacy is a proper desideratum for an account of musical expressiveness, and that my ready-hearability-as-expression account acknowledges that better than the hypotheticalist account that Stecker proposes instead. It is true, as Stecker points out, that hearing emotion in music and judging the expressiveness of music are not the same things. But there is a third thing, perceiving the music’s expressiveness, and that is not the same as judging its expressiveness to be such and such. The expressiveness of music, I claim, and not just the emotion in music, is standardly something directly registered, not just conjectured about. My account can accommodate this fact, as can also a resemblancebased account, but an inferentialist account cannot. Now Stecker, seeking to hoist me with my own petard, argues that my ready-hearability-as-expression proposal is ultimately as inferentialist as his own, since in order to determine that a work was expressive of E on the basis of his hearing an expression of E in it, even a properly backgrounded listener would have to engage in inference, taking the fact of his so responding as a premise together with the premise that he was in fact a properly backgrounded listener listening properly.¹⁶ But I anticipated and replied to that line of criticism in my previous essay on this topic.¹⁷ I there emphasized that ¹⁶ Stecker, ‘Expressiveness and Expression in Music and Poetry’, 92. ¹⁷ ‘Musical Expressiveness’, 118–19.

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a qualified listener who hears the expression of some emotion in music normally acquires, without reflection, the conviction that the music is expressive of that emotion, that is, would be readily hearable as such by other qualified listeners. And that, I suggest, counts as perceiving the music’s expressiveness, or as much as anything could. Whether the listener in addition thereby knows that the music is thus so expressive is another matter, one that may indeed involve further reflection or investigation. Here is a variant of that reply. Qualified listeners arguably tacitly assume, while listening to music, that they are qualified listeners, and are listening appropriately. Thus, on the view I favor, hearing an expression of E in a stretch of music becomes, for such listeners, tantamount to hearing the music’s expressiveness of E. All qualified listeners need do to hear the expressiveness of the music is to readily hear expression of emotion in it. Since they are, and unreflectingly assume they are, qualified listeners, listening appropriately, their readily hearing such and such an expression in the music directly manifests its being readily so hearable by such listeners! Note, however, that this line would not work to secure the immediacy of musical expressiveness on a hypotheticalintentionalist view of it, even were we to grant a parallel tacit assumption on the listener’s part, to the effect that he was an ideal listener. For arriving at a best hypothesis of what the historically rooted composer intended for one to hear in a given passage remains an ineliminably inferential affair. There is still another reason to resist a hypothetical-intentionalist account of musical expressiveness. Expressive content in music and expressive content in poetry certainly seem to be quite different sorts of things, hence it would not be surprising if they lent themselves to different sorts of analyses. The latter is largely propositional, and so reasonably assimilated to the kind of meaning—basic literary meaning—that a view like hypothetical intentionalism¹⁸ is designed to account for, whereas the former is largely non-propositional, hence not reasonably assimilable to basic literary meaning. I am inclined to think that a perceivability-as-if-expression account is apt not only for music, but for non-representational art generally. However, where we have to do with representational art, and perhaps especially, literary art—including narrative painting, epic poetry, theatre, cinema, and the novel—emphasis on the immediacy of expressiveness seems less apt, and the merit of a more inferentialist account of expressiveness seems correspondingly greater. The reason may simply be that immediacy of expression is an ¹⁸ See chs. 17 and 18 of the present volume.

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appropriate demand for affective states or attitudes, the core expressive content of non-literary arts such as music or abstract painting, but not for propositional beliefs or thoughts, the core expressive content of literary arts such as cinema or the novel. We can now offer an observation about expressiveness in art applicable across the arts, whether representational or non-representational, literary or non-literary. Remember that expression in general can be characterized roughly as the evidencing of a state of mind through some sort of external manifestation. In the case of art, the external manifestation is not behavior, but rather the artwork itself, in all its perceivable particularity. But just as we grasp literally expressed states in and through the behavior, verbal and otherwise, that expresses them, so with expressive art we grasp the asif expressed states in and through the concrete vehicle of the work, its metaphorical body. With expressive art, expressiveness is grasped through perceiving the work in its specific detail–whether of word, paint, sound, or stone—and the states expressed are ones that perceivers are thus aided to enter into in imagination precisely in virtue of perceiving the work through which, either immediately or inferentially, they grasp what states those are. V SOME OBJECTIONS TO THE HEARABILIT Y-AS-EXPRESSION VIEW OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS The first and most common objection is this. A number of writers charge that competent listeners do not in fact—or at least not all of them, all of the time—hear or imagine personae in music whose expressiveness they are registering, and thus that such imaginative hearing cannot be constitutive of hearing music as expressive and the disposition to induce such hearing as constitutive of the music’s being so expressive.¹⁹ Well, that may be how it sometimes seems, or seems on the surface, but if expressive music is, as I maintain, music readily heard as, or as if, expression, and if, in addition, expression requires an expresser, then personae or agents, however minimal, just are presupposed in the standard experience of such music. But, of course, one may not always notice or acknowledge what ¹⁹ Stephen Davies, ‘Contra the Hypothetical Persona in Music’, in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95–109; Walton, ‘Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension’; and Stecker, ‘Expressiveness and Expression in Music and Poetry’.

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is presupposed in one’s imaginative hearing of music. The claim is not that listeners are always explicitly aware that personae are involved in their hearing music as expressive. For people are often not entirely aware of what is implicated in a perception or experience they are having. A point I have made before is worth recalling here. It may indeed be true that listeners who recognize the expressiveness of a passage of music do not invariably hear it, then and there, as the expression of an emotion. But all that the theory requires is that they recognize the music as readily hearable as the expression of an emotion, even if, for one reason or another, they do not themselves give in to that inducement on a given occasion. Moreover, quite possibly all such cases are ones in which listeners are recognizing passages they have previously heard as the expression of given emotions, or else as ones highly similar to such passages, thus presupposing occasions on which the expressiveness in question was in fact grasped through an experience of hearing-as-the-expression-of. Furthermore, some of the discrepancy with the sincere avowals of listeners on this subject, I suggest, is that a passage of music may more loosely have an emotional quality, in virtue of suggesting an emotion through its appearance, without being strictly speaking emotionally expressive, understood as being such as to induce hearing-as-expression of that emotion. The finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, to take a stock example, is expressive of something like triumphant joy, and I think it is hard not to hear that finale as if there is someone, or some agent, there who is expressing his, her, or its triumphant joy in those familiar musical gestures, the character of which is rendered especially vivid in virtue of the movement in which they occur being the successor and culmination of the three that precede it. By contrast, the opening Prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier has an emotional quality one might describe as contentment or equanimity, and yet perhaps one is not induced to hear it as, or as if, the expression of that state of mind. But then it is probably also right to deny that it is expressive of contentment or equanimity, in addition to just possessing the corresponding emotional quality. The second objection is this. It has been suggested that the appeal to apt hearability-as-expression as a benchmark of real, as opposed to merely apparent, expressiveness, a feature of my original formula, will either not do the work that is required of it or else is called upon to do too much work.²⁰

²⁰ Stecker, ‘Expressiveness and Expression in Music and Poetry’, 91–4.

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I am at this point inclined to agree. The qualification of ‘apt’ in my original formula was an evasion. What I now think is that the burden of securing the objectivity of expressiveness, or equivalently, the normativity of judgments of expressiveness, must simply rest on the properly backgrounded listener and his or her hearing of a passage in its proper intrawork and extrawork context. Where there is ready hearability-as-expression under such conditions—evidenced most clearly by convergence in experiences among such listeners—then objectivity and normativity are present. Where not, then not. Exactly how large is the domain of objective expressiveness in music, which depends on such convergence, thus remains an open question. The third objection is centered on a related worry about my original formula voiced by Roger Scruton, to the effect that appeal to a reference class of qualified listeners whose ready hearing of a passage as expression of E serves as the mark of the passage’s being truly expressive of E is doomed to vacuity, because the reference class can only be characterized as the class of listeners who in fact perceive the passage’s expressiveness.²¹ But that is not so. It is like suggesting that the only way to characterize the class of appropriate, objectivity-anchoring perceivers for the color of a given patch of greenish paint is as perceivers who correctly perceive that the patch in question is greenish. The reference class of listeners anchoring the objectivity of expressiveness in a given musical genre—what I mean by ‘properly backgrounded listeners’—is roughly that of listeners demonstrably competent at understanding such music, such competence being manifested through various recognitional, continuational, and descriptive abilities, and whose other judgments of expressiveness are in line with established ones in uncontroversial cases. There is perhaps a certain amount of bootstrapping involved in this picture of the qualified listener for a given musical genre vis-`a-vis the expressive and other qualities of works in that genre of whose objectivity the qualified listener is to serve as a benchmark, but there is nothing, I think, fatally circular in it. At any rate, it seems the sort of difficulty that affects all attempts to analyze perceptual properties in terms of appearances or dispositions to appear relative to a class of perceivers of a certain sort. Paul Boghossian has recently seconded Scruton’s worry in a more general form.²² Boghossian charges that the appeal to qualified listeners in the analysis ²¹ Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 353. ²² Boghossian, ‘Musical Experience and Musical Meaning’, in Kathleen Stock (ed.), Philosophers on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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is vacuous because there is no way to characterize what makes for a qualified listener without presupposing an understanding of musical expressiveness that does not invoke such listeners or the ways such listeners are disposed to hear or otherwise respond to music. Again, qualified listeners for a given piece of music are naturally not to be characterized, unhelpfully, as ones who correctly hear the expressiveness of the given piece. How, then, are they to be characterized? As suggested earlier, perhaps as musically competent listeners whose judgments of expressiveness in the tradition in question accord with accepted ones in paradigm cases. But what are paradigm cases of musical expressiveness? Well, one conception of them would be as pieces in a given tradition on whose expressiveness almost all at least minimally musically competent listeners agree. Boghossian retorts that even on this suggestion, paradigm cases having the expressiveness they do remains unanalyzed, thus presupposing some ultimately non-experiential, non-response-dependent notion of such expressiveness. But I am not so sure. For the expressiveness of paradigm cases, we may suggest, comes to precisely the same thing as it does for non-paradigm cases, namely, the music’s being most readily hearable as the expression of such and such emotion by qualified listeners, the only difference being that, since these are paradigm cases of expressiveness, they will be so heard by virtually all listeners who are at least minimally musically competent. The fourth objection is another difficulty Scruton has articulated for my proposal that is worth addressing here. It is a particular elaboration of the skepticism acknowledged earlier as to whether we can form an idea of the singular way of expressing emotions that expressive music on my proposal is made out to be, at least in imagination, and whether or not in so doing we characterize it to ourselves as sui generis. I quote the objection in full: When we hear expression in music, Levinson suggests, this is like hearing another person express his feelings. But in what way like? We have no prior conception of what it would be to express feelings in music: if we can think of someone doing this, it is because we have an idea of the expressive character of music, and therefore can imagine someone choosing just this piece of music, to convey just this state of mind. Our ability to imagine a subject expressing his feelings in just this way is predicated upon our ability to recognize the expressive content of music. Only if we can independently recognize the emotional content of music, therefore, can we embark on the thought-experiment required by Levinson’s definition.²³ ²³ The Aesthetics of Music, 352.

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Scruton claims that my account is committed to listeners being able to conceive what it would be to express an emotion, in the literal sense, in or through music. He then suggests that their only way of doing so would be by imagining someone choosing suitable music to convey the emotion in question, which obviously presupposes an antecedent grasp of the music’s expressiveness, thus rendering the putative account of such expressiveness otiose. But both points in this objection are misplaced. First, my account does not imply that listeners who register expressiveness in music possess a concrete conception of what literally expressing emotions through music instead of behavior would amount to, or how such expressing would work. The account requires only that listeners are able to imagine music to be such a literal expression. Second, listeners who do that are not constrained to think of the music’s persona as somehow choosing from available musical items ones suitable to convey his changing moods, like a sound editor selecting tracks to go with the successive scenes of a film. Scruton has simply misunderstood the nature of the thought-experiment that, if my account of musical expressiveness is correct, one is effectively called upon to perform in order to grasp the expressiveness of music. It is not ‘imagine someone choosing from among preexisting music to convey a given state of mind; now, what state of mind would that be if he chose the music you are hearing?’ It is, rather, ‘imagine the music you are hearing to be the literal expressing of a state of mind; now, what state of mind does that appear to be?’, or perhaps, ‘imagine that the musical gesture you hear in the music was your own; now, what state of mind do you appear to be in? That thoughtexperiment, which my proposal is committed to, grounds identification of the music’s expressiveness, but does not, like the one Scruton saddles me with, presuppose such identification. If I am right, one grasps what a musical passage expresses precisely in virtue of imagining, or being disposed to imagine, a mental state it is as if the literal expression of. That there is no algorithm or procedure for this thought-experiment, unlike the one Scruton would substitute for it, does not entail that it cannot be carried out. We carry it out, in fact, every time we attend to some music’s expressive dimension and attempt to articulate for ourselves what it is. VI PE RSONAE IN MUSIC Many writers, including those sympathetic to imagined expressions and their personae, have voiced concerns regarding the indeterminacy of

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musical personae and the indefiniteness of the principles governing their postulation.²⁴ When is the persona of one passage the same as the persona of another passage? When is there continuity and when discontinuity of persona, as a work progresses from beginning to end? Might there be multiple personae present in a single passage? Might personae heard in different passages be related to one another through recognition, solidarity, or opposition? I cannot address these questions here, which go well beyond the scope of this essay. What I wish to underline, in closing, is just that the sustainability of the thesis of a minimal persona we are induced to hear in expressive music, and typically do hear in it when listening attentively, is not affected by worries of this sort, even if they are ultimately unresolvable. The persona implicated in the ready-hearability-as-expression account of musical expressiveness is merely the agent of the expression we hear in expressive music, or the owner of the musical gesture that is the vehicle of that expression. Whether that persona persists as the music proceeds, whether a given persona is accompanied by others, whether personae enter into relation with one another, and so on, are matters on which the account of basic musical expressiveness here defended can remain agnostic. ²⁴ See Walton, ‘Listening with Imagination’; Davies, ‘Contra the Hypothetical Persona in Music’; Fred Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1998): 56–73; and Gregory Karl and Jenefer Robinson, ‘Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions’, in J. Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 154–78.

7 Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music There is a difference between the realm of art as a whole, however we characterize that, and the class of all artforms that exist, or have existed, at a given point in time. That difference, seen from one angle, is the class of nonexistent but possible artforms. This chapter will be devoted at the outset to exploring this latter class. My tools, however, will be merely those of a philosopher, not a soothsayer. The problem concerning nonexistent artforms of perhaps greatest interest is why certain theoretically possible ones have not been essayed, or else have not proven successful even if essayed to some extent. Examples of nonexistent artforms, by at least the second of these tests, are kinetic painting, wordless song, danced poetry, olfactory art, and visual music. One reason this problem is interesting is that insofar as art as a whole has often evolved explicitly through the emergence of new artforms, the problem bears directly on the future of art; if there are fewer untried artforms out there, or if those which remain unpracticed even though tried are indeed inherently problematic, then the future of art is, in this respect, somewhat more dim than it would otherwise be. This essay has two parts. In the first part I propose some ways of thinking about the field of nonexistent arts as whole—in effect making some advance inroads into it—and in the second part I try to cast light on why certain artforms that seem eminently possible in fact fail to exist, through a case study of one such would-be art, that of visual music, i.e. a structured organization of colored presentations in time, such as might be provided through the medium of color film. Why doesn’t visual music, despite experiments in that direction, First published in A. Haapala, J. Levinson, and V. Rantala (eds.), The End of Art and Beyond: Essays after Danto (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 122–39.

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exist as an entrenched artistic activity, as a medium with promise and a loyal audience? One may be forgiven for suspecting, in a pessimistic vein, that the potential for a significant artistic visual analog to music is just not there. I will investigate, first, why this should be so, and second, how such an art might best proceed anyway—against the odds, as it were.

I T HE FIELD OF NONEXISTENT ARTS A central question is how the domain of nonexistent but possible artforms is to be circumscribed or delineated. How can we get a handle on, or sketch some of the features of, the domain we are interested in? One way to construe this question is as a request for acceptable principles of generating potential artforms. Taken that way, it seems there are two approaches we could adopt, which we might characterize, respectively, as the combinatorial and the extrapolational. The first, combinatorial, approach would be to set up an abstract matrix of artistic properties (materials, modalities)—e.g. spatial, temporal, representational, sonic, monochromatic, figurative, narrative, one-stage, stoneusing, wood-using, human-body-employing, etc.—in which every existing and also nonexisting artform would be represented as a particular conjunction of such properties (or their negations). Thus, classical Greek sculpture would be approximated by the conjunction: spatial/static/figurative/stone-using/ manually-worked, while a presently nonexistent artform would be represented by the conjunction: stone-using/temporal/dramatic/multi-colored. The other, extrapolational, approach would be to go beyond existing artforms by the use of various intelligible rules of projection, such as juxtaposition, reduction, fusion, opposition, or mutual accommodation. Thus, we might have an artform which involved the simple addition of dance to painting, or which resulted from the fusion of poetry, music, and calligraphy. On either approach, of course, the issue will remain of whether what is formally generated by combination of analytic elements or extrapolation from actual artforms is conceptually coherent, practically feasible, and artistically promising. That issue will be engaged, at least in one instance, in my consideration of visual music in the second part of this essay. One problem with the combinatorial approach to identifying nonexistent potential artforms is that we have not said where the primitive terms—the properties whose combination is to represent any given artform—are to come

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from. What justifies the particular set of elements out of which the matrix would be constructed? Why are stone-using, temporal, and narrative reasonably included in this set but not, say, water-soluble, high-risk, expensive, or innate? The answer must be that we only arrive at a plausible set of artformconstituting properties by working from the artforms we are acquainted with, and by relying on our background understanding of the nature of art in general, its typical objectives and achievements, and its overall place in human affairs.¹ That is to say, we start with familiar, understood arts, then ‘decompose’ them into their salient features, ones that both differentiate them from other arts and are important in criticism and appreciation. Having arrived at such ‘elements’, we can then mentally experiment with ‘recomposing’ them in different ways—grouping them in different packages—and reflecting on the outcome. It must be observed, though, that we will not, by this method, really have constructed all possible arts from the ground up—that is, from a purely abstract field of possibilities. For the terms of our matrix will inevitably come from the arts we know and love, as they are, or have been, constituted. The combinatorial method, despite initial appearances, could not be deployed ahistorically, at least not with any hope of interesting results. There is something unappealingly inefficient, as well, in the combinatorial method of generating possible artforms as I have sketched it. For if we are going to have to think in terms of existing artforms anyway, why not skip the step of decomposition into ‘elements’ and just consider combinations of, or confrontations between, existing artforms themselves? The combinatorial method seems inefficient, further, in that given a certain constellation of defining features, for a given position on the matrix, the actual shape of the artform or artforms so conforming to that position or set of properties will usually be excessively indeterminate, hard to form an image of. Third, the pure combinatorial approach seems quite likely to yield a number—and perhaps a majority—of combinations which are either conceptually problematic or practically infeasible. All told, then, I suspect we are perhaps better off pursuing the extrapolational method—combining or modifying existing artforms directly—as a way of thinking our way toward the field of nonexistent artforms. Such a procedure has also the advantage of paralleling, to a much greater degree, the ¹ For example, we know that the arts are activities, that they typically aim at pleasure or satisfaction of some sort, that they usually involve skills, that they are modes of meaning and articulating the world, and so on.

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evolutionary and synthetic process by which new artforms (e.g. film, kinetic sculpture, video art) have actually been generated in the past. Advances in art on the level of artforms have regularly come about through the impact of disparate arts on one another, or through the modification of existing artforms in the direction of others, but not through positing artforms de novo to correspond to abstract congeries of artistic properties not previously bundled together. In an earlier essay, ‘Hybrid Artforms’,² I explored the issue of existing artforms that have arisen through the combination of two (or more) preceding ones—labelling these ‘hybrid artforms’—and suggested a threefold categorization of such hybrids, into juxtapositional (additive), synthetic (fusional), and transformational ones. The distinction between them is roughly as follows. In a juxtapositional hybrid the arts are combined in a largely discrete, non-interpenetrating manner, so that the contributions of each artform entering into the result are independently identifiable. In an object of the hybrid art, objects of the contributing arts are still discernible as simply parts, spatial or temporal, of the hybrid art object. In a synthetic hybrid, by contrast, the contributing artforms are more or less fused in the result, so that an object of the hybrid fails to belong clearly to either of the contributing artforms, in their standard conceptions, and fails also to exhibit parts which can be simply assigned to one artform or the other. Finally, a transformational hybrid is intermediate between the previous two cases, and occurs when there is some interpenetration, rather than mere addition, of two artforms, as evidenced in the nature of the resulting art object, but where one artform clearly holds sway in the end and can still claim the product as one of its own, if singularly modified in the direction of the other art.³ Examples offered of these three categories were the following: (a) symphony with light show, dance with calligraphic drawings [juxtapositional]; (b) music drama, concrete poetry, shaped canvas [synthetic]; (c) kinetic sculpture [transformational]. Visual music, in the form of abstract color film, could probably be considered a transformational case—as color film pushed in the direction of pure music, adopting both its means and the sort of experience and expressiveness characteristically aimed at. This would be transformational, rather than ² See Jerrold Levinson, ‘Hybrid Artforms’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). This essay was originally published in 1984. ³ I also count as transformational hybrids cases of new artforms in which paradigm objects of the art are altered relative to those of α, the parent art, in a manner producing tension with the implicit structural norms of α, even if not in the direction of some identifiable second art, ß. (These are in effect cases of self-induced hybridization, or differentiation.)

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synthetic, because the result would remain unequivocally a film, though one whose obvious self-restriction (e.g. non-photographicness, non-representationality) would appear bizarre except for the intended parallel with music. More obviously, such visual music would be transformational, rather than juxtapositional, because music there serves as a model or inspiration, and not as a literal component in the result.⁴ I start, then, with these three categories of hybrid, in terms of the sorts of extrapolation they suggest for artforms which do not yet exist, and then proceed beyond them to consider further, or finer-grained, ways of projecting from existing artforms. So, first, we can imagine all those artforms that would involve merely juxtaposing objects or activities of preexisting arts that have not till now been placed in conjunction. Thus, we might have musidrawing, the art of drawings exhibited for prearranged lengths of time simultaneously with selected or newly composed stretches of music, or pulpture, the art of pairs of paintings and sculptures made to be presented and experienced together, in definite spatial relation to one another. An important variable even for artforms such as these, arrived at merely through unprecedented juxtapositions, would be the degree of interrelatedness envisaged between the components brought into conjunction. This could range anywhere from selfcontained, oblivious standing-alongside-of, to delicately nuanced mutual sensitivity and adjustment, of the components vis-`a-vis one another. The synthetic paradigm of hybridization, in which the identities of contributing arts are partly dissolved, is a more complicated one, and we can derive from it at least two distinct rules or procedures for generating notyet-existent arts. One is this. Given two artforms, α and ß, posit an artform whose objects are structurally or formally halfway between those of α and those of ß. The genres of shaped canvases (e.g. those of Frank Stella) and canvaseswith-attachments (e.g. those of Jasper Johns), are ones that have come about through that sort of cross-fertilization. Both cases mediate between painting and sculpture, in that objects of these genres are neither as flat and rectangular as the paradigms of the former, nor as three-dimensionally rounded and conceived as paradigms of the latter. But consider now the art of danceotry, intermediate between dance and poetry. A typical work of danceotry would involve a performer who goes through a series of movements during her recitation, but ones of more restricted scope and ambit than are generally found ⁴ Sound film in the familiar sense, though, could be considered as roughly a juxtapositional hybrid of silent film, music, and dialogue.

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in dance, and whose recitation, in turn, would be less elaborate and selfcontained, more sparse, than that normal for poetry offered on its own. Or consider archisculpture, whose objects are house-like constructions which both stand erect and enclose an interior space, but which otherwise flout many of the exigencies of the architecture of dwellings—e.g. intact roofs, usable entrances, sound construction materials—in favor of the formal freedom of sculpture.⁵ Or, third, consider sonopoetry, which involves the production of measured sequences not of words but only non-verbal vocal sounds, e.g. hiccups, snorts, gasps, whistles, whispers.⁶ Danceotry, archisculpture, and sonopoetry would all be applications of the rule of projecting an artform that is structurally intermediate between two given ones. A close cousin of this rule, though still distinct from it, would be one which projected artforms which in some way joined or compounded salient structural features of the objects of two arts, rather than, so to speak, splitting the difference between them. Of course in some cases mediation—the procedure involved in the previous rule—is the only manner of combination that makes sense; for example, if it is a question of a two-dimensional art (painting) and a three-dimensional one (sculpture), a synthetic hybrid can be more readily conceived whose objects are somewhere between two- and three-dimensional, loosely speaking—e.g. Johns’ paintings with protuberances—than one whose objects would be clearly both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. But in other cases, combination of arts could conceivably involve amalgamation, or compounding, of their distinctive traits or potentials. Consider aquarelloetry, a given specimen of which displays both the ordered sequence of carefully chosen words definitive of poetry and, superimposed upon it, an abstract pattern of water colors designed to complement—to enhance and be enhanced by—the sounds and sense of the words on the page. Or novellasong, which would involve short stories composed explicitly to be chanted, or intoned, by an unaccompanied performer; one can imagine this being done in such a way that the result seemed roughly equally a musical object and a literary narrative.⁷ ⁵ An object that may be an advance member of this artform was on display in the National Gallery of Art East, in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1990. It consisted roughly of a cube about 10 feet on each side, whose walls were mirrors inside and out, and whose rather cramped interior one could enter through a single opening. Perhaps fun houses and chambers of horror in certain amusement parks would also come close to qualifying. ⁶ This genre was actually devised and practiced by Dadaist pioneer Hugo Ball early in the twentieth century. ⁷ Some entries under the category of Performance Art perhaps already exemplify this description. Note also that the description is intended to exclude lieder, obviously already an existing,

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I turn now to the transformational model of hybridization for additional suggested rules for generating new artforms. The distinction between transformational hybrids and synthetic ones, recall, is that in the former case the new artform is most naturally seen as a variant of just one of its parents, the other, if any can be identified, serving as more of a godfather. One principle of generation with wide application might be this. Given an existing artform, whose objects exhibit certain standard (or defining) features, and certain variable (or elective) features, and for which certain features are contra-standard (or disqualifying), posit another artform that is just like the first except that some standard feature of the objects of the first artform is now allowed to become a variable, or contra-standard, feature, or else some variable or contra-standard feature allowed to become a standard feature.⁸ Thus, if we consider traditional sculpture and imagine that one of its standard (or category-defining) features, immobility and fixed spatial relationship of its parts, is allowed to become a contra-standard (or category-disqualifying) one, everything else remaining the same, then we end up roughly with kinetic sculpture—sculpture turned in a danceward direction. Or take traditional oil painting, for which a variable feature is the use of reds, and convert this to a standard feature, thus generating a monochrome subgenre of painting in which reds are de rigueur, and the use of other colors a flagrant violation of an implicit norm. Or take plays, for which number of characters is variable, and standardize that at two, thus generating a two-person subgenre of theatre, in which the appearance of a third party, or a lengthy absence of the first or second parties, is strongly contraindicated. The general idea behind this principle is one of modifying existing artforms by either imposing a restriction on a dimension where freedom had previously reigned, or else opening up a dimension which serves as a defining constraint, either positively or negatively, on the artform as normally constituted. Another transformational rule, perhaps a special case of the above, is familiar because it has often been invoked in this century. Take an existing artform and envisage a reductive or minimalist version of it, where this involves significantly limiting the structures, subjects, or contents of the objects produced, relative to normal procedure in the art. well-established art, whose allegiance to the category of music clearly dominates its relationship to literary storytelling. ⁸ The notions of standard, variable, and contra-standard properties relative to a category of art (e.g. artform, genre, medium, style) are taken from Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334–67.

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The minimal sculpture of artists such as Donald Judd or Carl Andr´e can be seen to have developed by taking constructivist or assemblage (as opposed to carved or cast) sculpture as it then existed and restricting it to a small diet of geometrical forms, a unity of material and color, and a severe set of possible spatial interrelationships. The early minimalist music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass defined itself as a genre by explicitly eschewing the melodic and harmonic complexity, the reliance on key movement, and the driving, developmental, and goal-oriented aspect of traditional tonal music, leaving manipulation of pulse, rhythm, and phase as almost its sole sphere of operation. The field of abstract painting generally, obviously enough, can be thought of as having arisen as an application of this rule, by deliberate exclusion of representational matter from the possible content of a painting. An important variety of minimalist cinema (as exemplified by some films of Michael Snow) can be understood to have come about through taking the filmmaker’s usual freedom of shot and camera movement and jettisoning those in favor of a self-imposed, spartan limitation to very long takes and fixed camera positions. The appropriational art of the photographer Sherrie Levine, finally, can be construed as an instance of the rule, where photography in the robust sense is transformed into a peculiar minimalist subgenre governed by the restriction that the only possible subject for a photograph will be a photograph of some earlier, usually famous, photographer. Imagining further applications of the rule of minimalist or reductive versions of existing arts is not difficult. Take kinetic sculpture, already a clear product of redrawing the lines around existing arts, and posit a subgenre which allows motion only in a single plane, where that plane is perpendicular to the line of sight of the viewer; the objects of such a restricted kinetic sculpture would tend to establish a kinship with painting, equal to any they retained with traditional sculpture in the round. Take the genre of the short, descriptive poem (e.g. haiku) and impose on it the restriction that all words except nouns be banned, thus confining the poet to getting his effects, creating images, conveying ideas, etc. merely through carefully judged and paced lists of things.⁹ Take modern dance and imagine a form of it in which all movements were to be carried out extremely slowly, almost at the limit of detection of movement. Now consider another principle for projecting a ⁹ The writer Georges Perec initiated a genre of this sort, by producing a viable instance himself: a novel written without using the letter ‘e’, entitled La Disparition. For additional discussion, see ‘Elster on Artistic Creativity’, Ch. 4 in this volume.

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transformation of a given art. Instead of imagining a reshuffling of defining and optional features of objects in an artform, or imagining a reductive version of a given artform, we might try to imagine how some artforms could remain themselves and yet be transformed so as to achieve something of the distinctive effects or characteristic experience of another artform. Kinetic sculpture has already been offered as an art viewable as the upshot of the rule of transforming a standard feature of an artform—immobility—into a variable or contra-standard one, but we could alternatively see it as originating in the notion of making sculptures that would achieve some of the distinctive effects of dance, and not initially in an envisaged structural reconception of the art. Now reversing this last thought we could ask, in accord with our latest principle, how dance, while in some sense remaining dance, might yet answer to some of the aims of sculpture. Possibly through the medium of choreotableaux, or ‘static dance’. A work of choreotableaux would consist of an unmoving arrangement of individuals on a stage, with all aspects of posture and gesture fixed, which would be assumed by dancers and held, for contemplation, during a period of a few minutes. Visual music, in the form of abstract color film, could be laid down to this same projective principle: take some visual art and modify it in such a way that it achieves some of the characteristic effects or experiences provided by pure music. Obviously this kind of thought projection will be successful in some cases but not in others; certain artforms are structurally and thematically so different that we get no purchase on the idea of the one realizing somehow, in its own medium, the qualities of the other. Thus, if we ask whether the novel might be modified so as to achieve the characteristic objectives and results of sculpture, we would have, so far as I can see, no foothold at all. I would suggest just one further transformational principle for generating, in the abstract way we have been pursuing, artforms that do not currently exist—one that, once more, yields visual music as an output. It is this: posit an artform, as far as possible like an existent artform, in which the sense modality centrally appealed to in the latter is replaced by some other sense modality. The idea is to see whether unprecedented arts, modeled on established ones, can be built around senses other than those already in play. This idea is perhaps particularly apt in connection with those unexploited, socalled ‘lower’ senses, e.g. touch, taste, smell, proprioception, which are not the primary basis of any established art at present. In the first case, if we start with ordinary sculpture—which is, by and large, for seeing, i.e. ambulatory visual

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beholding—and replace seeing by touching, we arrive at ‘tactile sculpture’.¹⁰ In tactile sculpture objects are fashioned for palpation and caressing with no concern for, or even explicit disregard of, how they look. What is only just tolerated, or even proscribed, for ordinary sculpture, i.e. tactile exploration, would be here the invited and exclusively prescribed mode of address. Nor would such tactile sculpture be hard to arrange, in practical terms: blindfolds, or enclosures with small openings for the hands, could be made good use of. I leave it to your imaginations what ‘olfactory music’, ‘gustatory painting’, and the like, might involve. I have not mentioned, in the foregoing, principles for projecting nonexistent artforms that could someday exist by appeal to radically new means and media that technological advances will make available. Most of the new artforms of the future, it is fair to say, will have such advances as a partial cause. The only problem, from present point of view, is that there is no way to anticipate what these might be—as noted earlier, my toolkit as essayist contains no crystal ball—and so nothing contentful on this wavelength to add to my sketch of the domain of possible but unrealized arts. It is hard not to appreciate the essential technological contributions to, or at least preconditions of, the emergence of photography, etching, cinema, computer music, musique concr`ete, video art, holography, earthworks, and jazz;¹¹ these did not come about merely because some overlooked combination or transformation of existing arts was finally hit upon, some underutilization of an existing sense capacity finally noticed, or some approach of one art to the aims of another finally worked out. Still, in many of these cases, one might locate the spur to develop technological means enabling these arts to exist, or at least a rationale for their emergence after the fact, in projections of the kind I have been pursuing. On this way of thinking, photography arises in part because a visual artform capable of the detail and precision of painting or engraving, but executable with the spontaneity and speed of, say, a charcoal sketch, was really asking to be brought into existence. Holography comes to fill the space opened up logically by positing a cross, in the biological sense, between photography and sculpture; a hologram is a synthetic hybrid that no longer comfortably resides ¹⁰ I am aware that artforms along these lines have already been pursued among and for the blind, and that the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi created some pieces in this vein, but that does not alter the fact that tactile sculpture does not exist as a flourishing artform in mainstream artistic culture. ¹¹ I am thinking here of the crucial role of the saxophone, a late nineteenth-century Belgian invention, in the evolution of jazz sound.

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under either banner, photography or sculpture, but exhibits features of both: fashioning by light, and three-dimensional form. Musique concr`ete, or ‘collage music’, while obviously unrealizable without the magnetophone or tape recorder, just as obviously gets off the ground conceptually by attempting to transpose the collage and constructivist procedures of modern painting and assemblage to the realm of sounds in time. In another vein, it could also be objected to the domain-exploring procedure I have adopted that it mainly looks for new artforms to generate themselves out of formal impulses, rather than expressive, moral, social, or political ones. That is largely so, but I think the form-based procedure adopted provides the only effective means to sketch any significant portion of the uncharted terrain. In any event, certainly the motivation toward new artforms can be either formal or material. In searching for new formal combinations, we may discover that there are things we can and want to express that weren’t possible before, or ways of embodying moral attitudes or advancing social claims that hadn’t been open to us. On the other hand, in searching for outlets for new expressive impulses, or in striving to put forward novel moral, social, or political perspectives, we may equally well induce new formal combinations in response. There is, in short, a healthy dialectic between formal/structural and material/expressive impulses toward, and justifications of, previously nonexistent artforms. New vessels may call forth new contents, and new contents may call forth new vessels capable of holding them. In summary, we have seen that there is a rich domain of nonexistent artforms that can be at least abstractly mapped by reference to the field of existing artforms. If α and ß are existing arts, then there are those whose objects involve mere juxtaposition of α’s and ß’s, ones whose objects are structurally intermediary between α’s and of ß’s, ones whose objects are structural compounds of α’s and ß’s, ones derived from α or ß by revaluation of what properties are standard, variable, or contra-standard for objects of the art, ones that represent minimal or reductive versions of a given artform, ones that aim at the characteristic effects and experience of a given artform through other means, and ones that derive from a given artform by substitution of the sense modality involved. II THE CASE OF VISUAL MUSIC I turn now to the question of why nonexistent yet possible artforms remain nonexistent, or more exactly, why any number of them that seem appealing

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in prospect, conceptually unproblematic, and technologically feasible are yet not pursued with any vigor. I think it is clear that there is no informative general answer to be given. Naturally we can always say that either the potential for fruitful development is simply inadequate, or that for historical, cultural, or even political reasons such potential as is present is simply not exploited, but such blanket, almost ‘dormatively virtuous’, explanations are singularly unilluminating. Case-by-case investigations thus seem to be what are called for instead. So what I do next is examine the case of visual music—to me the most intriguing of the envisagable yet stubbornly absent arts—to see what insight we can get into at least its nonexistence. We may, in the course of this investigation, glean some hints as to what distinguishes those arts, conceivable in the abstract but remaining stubbornly unrealized and unpursued, from those that have a chance of emerging from the shadows of the merely possible. Why, then, are there no successful analogs to pure music in other sensory realms, no enthralling temporal patterns of colors, smells, feels, tastes?¹² Why, in particular, isn’t the art of abstract color film—at least in any manifestation known to me—comparable to music in interest and value? Why don’t pure patterns of colors in time—temporal successions of hues—grab us as do temporal patterns of pitched sound? Why don’t they transfigure us the way great music can, or at least captivate us, as music that is merely good does?¹³ A short answer would be that there is surely some insufficiency in the structures of which abstract color film is capable, or some insufficiency in the human visual system relative to the auditory, or else some mismatch between those structures and the capacities of that visual system. But let us look to more specific explanatory factors, in the hope of giving more body to the schematic diagnosis just tendered. First, there is the fact that music—traditional Western music, at any rate— makes use of tones at fixed pitch levels, not of sounds drawn at will from just anywhere in the pitch continuum. For abstract color film to mirror this feature would require at least a prior systematic decision to employ a certain subset of hues, and no others, at precise points along the color spectrum.

¹² The hero of J. K. Huysmans’s novel A Rebours, Des Esseintes, has a mouth organ constructed that squirts a sequence of liqueurs on his palate in analogy with the peal of a carillon. That fictional example is about as close as anything known to me gets to what one might call ‘taste music’. ¹³ For the purposes of this essay when I speak of ‘music’ I have predominantly Western tonal music in mind.

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Second, there is the crucial role in tonal music of scales, chords, octaves, or more generally, preferred or privileged relations between tones, many of which are grounded in the harmonic series of a vibrating string.¹⁴ These relations, which are the precondition of so many of the fundamental qualities and effects of such music, e.g. tension and release, consonance and dissonance, cadence and closure, tendency and resolution, do not seem to have any obvious parallel in the color realm. The only possible candidate, perhaps, would be relations of complementarity among hues, but that is not nearly as rich as the web of relationships governing how the different notes of a musical scale stand to one another. Third, there is the notion of key (and key feeling), and the consequent possibility of key change (or modulation), which is the basis for so much of the large-scale dialectic of a piece of music, and for a good deal of its emotional power. It is hard to see what might do duty for this in the color realm, unless it would be something like the contrast between the ‘warm’ colors (red, yellow, orange) and the ‘cool’ ones (blue, green, violet), and the potential force of shifts from one set to the other. Fourth, phenomenologically speaking the series of pitches employed in tonal music form a space-like dimension, in which pitches seem to exist at definite distances from one another, and in which an experience of motion—rather than just one of succession—is thus enabled in connection with change of pitch over time. We hear movement in the course of a melody, and not just one note replacing another; we hear the music, as it were, go up and down, and do so with various predicates of pace, strength, intensity, and effort.¹⁵ The series of hues in the spectrum, by contrast, does not appear to form a space-like dimension in the same way; there is no clear impression of directionality in the succession of hues from red to violet, nor is there the sense of an underlying variable property which binds together the different hues, and in respect of which alone they differ from one another.¹⁶ By contrast, ¹⁴ Several of the factors I will cite as militating against the potential of the color realm for musicality are discussed in chapters VII and VIII of Edmund Gurney’s magnum opus, The Power of Sound ([1880], New York: Basic Books, 1966). (See my ‘Gurney, Edmund’, in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998).) ¹⁵ One development of this idea is Gurney’s notion of ‘Ideal Motion’, the distinctive characteristic of music as heard. An essay that deals with the essential spatiality and motion of music as experienced is Roger Scruton, ‘Understanding Music’, in The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983), 77–100. See also his monumental Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ¹⁶ To spell this out a bit more, I am suggesting that there is no inherent necessity in the order of the colors in the spectrum, though of course that order is physically fixed and grounded, and that different orders, within limits, could be allowed to be as acceptable progressions—not violating

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when one proceeds from C to C’ there is an unavoidable impression of rising, and the strong sense of a binding property—high/low-ness of pitch—that is being progressively modulated. For these reasons, it seems, succession of hues is not inevitably, and certainly not readily, perceived as a kind of motion or movement, but only as change simpliciter. If this is so, then there are more weighty consequences as well. Without a sense of dimensionality and directionality in the realm of pitches, i.e. without there being a space of pitches, there could be no experiences of movement through music, or even of melodic shape or contour. But without the possibility of hearing shape and movement in music, we would be barred, a fortiori, from hearing such shape and movement as gesture, and in turn, such gesture as the imagined expression of emotion.¹⁷ Thus, music without its spatial/kinetic aspect would be incapable of embodying expressiveness in the chief way that it seems to do. So if color sequences are unable, through measured succession of colors, to provide the experience of shape and motion in the color realm—and not just of rhythmic pattern—then their potential for emotional expression even faintly approaching that of music seems dim. In general, the prospects of color sequences ending up ‘meaning’ anything much, even if they managed to be perceptually absorbing, seem less than bright if we end up being unable to perceive such sequences in a spatially dynamic manner, which further resonance with worldly and human matters would seem to require. If in light of the above we accept that there can be nothing like the spatial and motional possibilities we are familiar with in the auditory realm available to us in the chromatic one, the artistic burden carried by rhythm per se—the temporal patterning of color presentations—will be correspondingly greater. Unfortunately, though, there is reason to believe that our sensitivity to visual temporal rhythm is considerably poorer than our sensitivity to rhythm in the auditory sphere. Small alterations in auditory rhythm are much more readily perceivable by us, it appears, than comparable alterations in visual rhythms.¹⁸ any phenomenological impression of underlying direction—as that which nature has ordained. For instance, the order of hues might have been given as GBIVROY, rather than ROYGBIV, without affronting any indelible sensory intuition. ¹⁷ Also adding to the hearability of gesture in musical progression itself is the fact that in traditional performed music a listener has a sense of the instruments and physical motions involved in the rendering of the sounds. It is clear that this, as well as the spatiality of the pitch dimension, funds the hearing of gesture in music on the abstract plane we are here concerned with. For additional discussion, see ‘Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music’, Ch. 5 in this volume. ¹⁸ For clarity’s sake I acknowledge that there is a use of ‘visual rhythm’ in connection with static visual presentations, for instance, the progression of colors across a canvas, or the repetition

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Our finely hewn sensitivity to speech, as a patterning of sound over time, in all its inflections and nuances, undoubtedly carries over to hearing and discriminating temporal relationships in music. There is nothing, however, in the natural repertoire of the developing human that calls upon fine sensitivity to timed sequences of light.¹⁹ This bears directly on the critical issue of recognizable basic units in our proposed visual music. Can the realm of visual music sustain something analogous to the reidentifiable melodic-rhythmic units—motives, phrases, figures—without which musical experience in the ordinary sense would be unthinkable? To what degree could such visual motives or phrases be remembered as such and recognized, if only subconsciously, upon reoccurrence? How fine may our discriminations for such temporal visual motives be? How easily would we tell apart two color motives which are the same except for a small difference in internal rhythm, e.g. a ratio of two-to-one versus three-to-one—a difference, however, which is salient to the ear? I suspect that our discriminations of such motives would be much coarser, and our retention of them less reliable, than of motives in music. Curiously enough, this might even have something to do with the fact that musical phrases are something we have the capacity to give back or reproduce —by singing, whistling, humming—whereas we obviously have no natural capacity to generate or mimic measured sequences of color or light; the capacity to reproduce may facilitate, or even be part and parcel of, our grasp and retention of temporal sonic form. There is, next, the question of transposition of such visual motives or phrases to other ‘hue levels’. Motives and phrases in music can be identified when transposed to another pitch level or harmonic setting, and this possibility is clearly crucial for most kinds of musical development (most obviously, for melodic sequencing). It is not clear, however, whether a temporal visual motive—a sequence of colors set to a rhythm—could have that kind of reidentifiability. To compound matters, the color spectrum is not extensive enough to allow for much moving around of a ‘color phrase’ in hopes of reidentification at a ‘lower’ (redder) or ‘higher’ (violeter) position; if we think of it, charitably, as having two ‘octaves’, red-to-green and green-to-violet, of ornamental figures on an architectural fac¸ade, but when I speak of ‘visual rhythms’ here I mean temporal visual rhythms, that is, patterns of durations of color presentations in time. ¹⁹ The fact that we are well adapted to picking out the motions of persisting objects, such as hands or birds, through space does not automatically argue for a capacity to grasp the temporal patterns of changing visual presentations at fixed positions in space.

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then this allows at a maximum twenty or so ‘hue levels’ at which such a ‘phrase’ might be perceived, as opposed to around a hundred for the standard compass of a piano, string quartet, or symphony orchestra. But it is quixotic to think that such a ‘phrase’ would, in virtue of the relational invariants it embodied, be reidentified at any other hue level; we just don’t seem to be sensitive to, and abstractive of, rhythmic color sequences in the right way. The limited extent of the color spectrum, in terms of what seem significant differences in hue across its span, would also, obviously, impact negatively on the number of theoretically possible color phrases or motives. I mention just three more factors which seem to militate further against the possibility of a successful ‘visual music’. First, the experience of duration, or sustainedness, of merely a held tone, is more vivid than that we receive from a held visual presentation—the former is perceived as a happening or event, even while in some sense unchanging, while the latter strikes us as a non-happening—less of an event than a fact or condition. Thus, even where there is no progression in a straightforward sense, a steady musical state or situation will always seem more alive to us than a corresponding visual one. Second, the ease and naturalness of combining separate lines —individual progressions of tones—in the auditory realm, yielding polyphony or counterpoint, is in strong contrast with the artificiality of an analogous procedure in (say) an abstract color film. Two or more tones or progressions of tones can be heard simultaneously and distinctly in the same ‘region’ of pitch space (or register),²⁰ whereas two or more colors can’t occupy the same region in two-dimensional space, or in one’s visual field, at the same time. Thus, to realize a multiplicity of chromatic lines in an abstract color film would necessarily require their presentation side-by-side, or one atop the other, or in some other spatial configuration, it being arbitrary which was elected, and it being far from clear that such independent and spatially separate streams could be integrated by the eye into anything like the blending and interpenetration of lines we experience in the sonic domain. Third and finally, counting once more against the possibility of a comparably gripping visual music, is the close connection of real, audible music with primitive emotional utterance. The prominent place of sound, especially vocal sound (yells, roars, laughs, grunts, squeals), in the expression of basic emotions and the communication of simple feelings and attitudes, is something that music, though a highly elaborate and rarefied use of sound, ²⁰ Differences of timbre obviously have a lot to do with enabling this.

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undoubtedly taps into. There seems nothing comparably visceral in human behavior for temporal patterns of color to resonate with. This might partly explain why color sequences, however diverting, seem relatively inert, without life impact, by comparison with sound sequences. The strikes against visual music just reviewed, uncovered in the course of our abstract examination of the question, seem a plausible explanation of why visual music is not a thriving enterprise. But it would be premature to foreclose on visual music completely, simply because of the possible handicaps we can expect it to labor under. For only empirical experimentation, after all, carried out with artistic imagination, will really show conclusively what can, or cannot, be achieved in this direction. Since I am not equipped to conduct such experimentation, I will just conclude with a few suggestions— guesses really—as to how ventures in abstract color film might best proceed, with the aim of achieving something of musical effect. First, it seems clear that a limited set of positions along the spectrum of hues should be selected and adhered to, as a background matrix, analogous to the domain of fixed pitches out of which tonal music is made. Second, the kinds of rhythms employed should be fairly simple, and the differentiation between different rhythmic figures fairly blatant. Third, moderate tempos are probably advisable, if there is to be much hope of fixing on isolatable temporal color patterns as distinctive and memorable, in partial analogy with motives and melodies. Fourth, efforts should be made to exploit the relations of complementarity among colors, as the only likely analog of those special relations of kinship and remoteness, attraction and repulsion, among pitches—the fifth, the third, the leading tone, the octave—which have so great a role in giving tonal music its teleological aspect, its tendency and directedness. Fifth, the potential of split-screen, in the attempt to generate something like polyphonic and interactive effects between two color streams, or even just in emulation of the effect of tune-and-accompaniment, should not be ignored, though the problem of the inherent artificiality of such a device should be somehow faced head-on. Sixth, incremental use could certainly be made of variation in parameters which I have assumed held fixed until now, namely those of brightness and saturation, as opposed to exact hue, of each color presentation or ‘visual note’. If variation in hue serves, in color music, as the only possible analog of movement in pitch, then variation in brightness and variation in saturation might, suitably managed, come to seem analogous to dynamic (loudness) and timbral (tone color) variation in the musical realm.

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Finally, if all choices in the dimensions just reviewed were to prove in vain, so far as generating a sequence of color presentations that would have the interest, appeal, and expressiveness of even the simplest music was concerned, one might then open the door to manipulations of size, shape, and two-dimensional patterning of color presentations as well—expanding and contracting color fields, swirling and intermingling chromatic constellations, many-hued patches dancing from left to right, and corner to corner, etc.²¹ But note that such ‘visual music’ would no longer be a strict analog of monophonic or simple polyphonic instrumental music, whose basic material is just sequences of pitches-with-durations. The sort of ‘visual music’ we have just envisaged, which is in effect a kind of abstract painting in time, might well be expected to have more power and impact than the strict, spartan music of colors whose prospects have been my proper target in this section; for one, it would partake of all sorts of representational resonances which forms in space, and especially changing ones, possess. Thus, whatever greater success such expanded ‘visual music’ may achieve does not thereby vindicate visual music in our original conception. Moreover, it is far from clear, from extant examples of the genre, whether spatially unrestricted sorts of abstract color film, even if aesthetically more engaging than what can be achieved by pure chromatic sequences per se, are more engaging in virtue of affording an experience closer to that which music—literal music—affords than is open to us through visual music narrowly conceived. III AFTERTHOUGHTS Not long after completing this essay I discovered some reflections of Ernst Gombrich on the subject of visual or color music.²² He notes that attempts to build a ‘color piano’ may go back to the sixteenth-century painter Arcimboldo, that the idea was revived in the eighteenth century in the form of ²¹ The films of the Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren, which might be thought to be an actual counterexample to my pessimistic diagnosis of the possibility of pure color music in this section, are, so far as I can tell, of this ‘impure’ type. That is to say, they make use of resources, particularly spatial ones, which go far beyond the idea of a rhythmic succession of simple hue presentations, or even two or three such successions simultaneously. In addition, a number of them even have soundtracks, which work in counterpoint with the complex color images constituting the purely visual component of these films. ²² See Gombrich, The Sense of Order. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), epilogue.

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a keyboard instrument that produced colored ribbons as well as notes with every touch, and that Sir David Brewster, the inventor of the kaleidoscope, predicted in 1819 a great future for an art wherein ‘combinations of forms and colors may be made to succeed each other in such a manner as to excite sentiments and ideas with as much vivacity as those which are excited by musical composition’.²³ Gombrich wonders, as I have done, whether color music can be viable in the absence of something which, in chromatic terms, would be a functional equivalent of the tonal system: Could a visual music be developed which would not only offer a succession of moods of pleasing kaleidoscopic patterns, but set up a field of force which could lead to that interplay of expectation and fulfilment, of tension and resolution, which is the stuff of music? He would be a bold man who would dare to predict that such an experiment could never succeed.²⁴

I am not that bold man, but on the other hand, neither would I venture the opposite prediction, that such experiments must inevitably succeed. Another writer who has treated this topic, I belatedly discovered, is Peter Kivy.²⁵ Speaking of his sense of wonder at the very existence of ‘music alone’, Kivy suggests that it ‘begins with what seems to me to be the genuine, if insoluble, mystery of why we have ‘‘pure’’ music at all, and why, since we do, we don’t have ‘‘music’’ for our other sense modalities.’²⁶ Nevertheless, Kivy proposes an evolutionary explanation for why humans have not developed visual music, in particular. It is, according to Kivy, because we have evolved ‘hardwired’ to see defensively, and so to unstoppably place a representational (or ‘realistic’) interpretation on visual perceptions, thus foreclosing on a temporally extended art of purely visual phenomena.²⁷ This explanation, even on its own terms, seems to me to fail. For in fact we do not, faced with abstract color sequences, have a noticeable inclination to perceive them representationally or realistically. They remain for us what they at first seem to be, namely, temporally evolving chromatic patterns. The explanation for their relative non-involvingness has to be sought elsewhere than in their putatively putting us frustratingly at cross-purposes with what evolution has disposed us to do with visual data. ²³ Ibid. 287. ²⁴ Ibid. 305. ²⁵ See Kivy, Music Alone. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch. 1. ²⁶ Ibid. 12. ²⁷ Ibid. 4.

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More importantly, even were this explanation on the mark, it would remain too external. Surely we need to appeal to something about the intrinsic nature of sounds as opposed to colors, or at least to salient features of familiar musical systems that have been constituted on the basis of the inherent potentialities of the sound medium. It is that sort of structural, and thus largely internal, explanation that has been offered here for the persisting absence of visual music.

8 Music as Narrative and Music as Drama I INT RODUCT ION To what extent can instrumental music be viewed as narrative in character, or understood as involving some sort of narrative? That is the central question of this essay, but a number of subsidiary questions will also guide my reflections. I will be interested in the varying potential for narrative construal of different forms of music, some of which may invite, and some of which may resist, such construal. I will be interested in what musical narrative, when present, might be a narrative of. I will be interested in whether musical narratives can possess certain of the features of standard narratives, such as literary or cinematic ones. But I will finally also explore, at some length, the appeal of an alternative construal of music: as dramatic, rather than narrative, in nature. It is salutary to ask ourselves, at the outset of an inquiry like this, exactly how often pure instrumental music impresses itself upon us as needing to be construed narratively in order to be understood. The answer, it seems to me, is not very often. This is of course not to deny that in appreciating such music we are made to focus on sequence and progression, from note to note, phrase to phrase, and section to section. For that is what following music by ear largely consists in. But it is a large step from that to the claim that music is, in its sequence and progression, narrating a story of some kind as it unfolds. Still, the idea that instrumental music, and especially the extended musical essays of composers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, might be understood as narratives is a staple of humanist music criticism, as exemplified by Donald Tovey, George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Bernstein, Antony Hopkins, Charles Rosen, Andrew Porter, Alex Ross, and others. It is, after all, not surprising that music, as an intentionally arranged, temporally First published in Mind & Language 19 (2004): 428–41.

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extended sequence of sounds, one that often displays a character of utterance, is readily thought of as recounting something or other, and likely something that is itself temporally extended, such as a sequence of actions, events, or mental states.

II THE CONCEPT OF NARRATIVE How should narrative be characterized? For our purposes, the more simply the better. One recent writer suggests that ‘a genuine narrative requires the representation of a minimum of two events and some indication of the ordering in time of the events depicted’.¹ If so, then there are three crucial elements to narrative: representation, events, and temporal relations. Another recent writer has proposed that a narrative must, in addition, indicate causal relations obtaining among represented events: ‘the basis of the narrative connection is that earlier events and/or states of affairs are at least causally necessary conditions, or contributions thereto, for the occurrence of later events in the relevant stories.’² Applying this to music, then, if music is to be narrative (a) it must represent; (b) it must represent events or states of affairs; and (c) it must represent temporal and/or causal relations among those events or states of affairs. Accepting these as the minimal features of narrative, the task would then be to assess whether any pure instrumental music—that is, music without program or text—in fact displays them. The prospects do not seem bright. The third condition, in particular, seems especially hard to meet, as it looks as if it would require the sort of temporal and singular referential devices that language, but not music, possesses. Yet that is where the distinctive feature of narration, as opposed to non-narrative representation, would seem to lie.³ ¹ George Wilson, ‘Narrative’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 392–407, at p. 393. ² No¨el Carroll, ‘On the Narrative Connection’, in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 118–33 at p. 133. ³ An alternative tack would be to locate the specificity of narrative representation in there being a discernible narrator internal to the representation, who tells or recounts the events and relations in question. But since a number of philosophers have argued for the possibility of ‘narratorless narratives’ (see Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and George Wilson, ‘Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration’, Philosophical Topics 25 (1998): 295–318), it is not a tack to be taken lightly.

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III OBJECTS AND CONTENTS OF MUSICAL NARRATIVE If musical narratives narrate events, a question arises immediately as to whether those events are musical or non-musical ones. In other words, one possibility is that music somehow tells a tale of musical events, such as the inversion of a motive, or the arrival of a cadence, or a modulation from B-flat to E-flat. Another is that music somehow tells a tale of non-musical events. Presumably the narratives of interest in music are of the second kind, for those of the first kind, to the extent they could be made out, would seem redundant. Since the sequence of musical events is directly present and immediately heard, what would be the point of its being narrated as well? In order to locate more plausible objects of musical narration, it will be helpful to offer a brief sketch of the musical apprehension of the ordinary, though musically sensitive and practiced, listener, at least as other than a strict formalist would conceive it. The experience of apprehension can be seen as comprising different stages or levels, though it is a mistake to suppose that these are either entirely separable or clearly sequential. In any case, first there is the level at which the most elemental properties of tones, such as pitches, durations, and timbres, are perceived. Then, following immediately upon that, is the level at which rhythms, motives, phrases, melodies, and harmonies, the fundamental building blocks of music, are perceived; note that that level involves the hearing of motion in music, rather than mere succession or alteration. Those two, perhaps not fully distinguishable, stages might be labeled the configurational level of musical apprehension. Next there is the level of gesture or action, that at which one hears the music doing something, something it is not literally doing. Note that the sense of the real gestures of the performers who are performing the music enters into the gesture—call that musical gesture —that one hears the music to be engaged in, but the musical gesture and the conjectured or imagined performing gesture are not the same. We can label that the gestural (or actional) level of musical apprehension. Next there is the level of states of mind heard behind the gestures or actions perceived at the preceding level of which those gestures or actions are the expression; that is the expressive level of musical apprehension. Assuming this rough picture of musical experience, what are then possible narrative objects of music? They would seem, at a minimum, to be these: (a) gestures, (b) actions, (c) expressions, (d) mental states. As for the content

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of a musical narrative, it would presumably be some sort of sequence of the preceding. Suppose for the sake of argument we focus on option (d), and construe the narrative content of music to be a sequence of mental states. A typical specimen would then go something like this: ‘First S1, then S2, then S3 . . . ’, where the Sns are mental states, plus whatever relations among the Sns might be implied, such as ‘S1 evolves into S2’, ‘S2 results from S1’, ‘S2 is a reaction to S1’, and the like. So, does expressively varied music indeed relate such a narrative? Do we, at any rate, hear such a narrative in such music? Agnosticism about that seems highly warranted, to say the least. We should observe, in addition, that certain features central to standard narratives of a literary or cinematic sort, even if not accounted essential to narrative, seem virtually impossible to locate in instrumental music. These include the capacity to predicate of a subject, the capacity for reflective selfcommentary, and the capacity to clearly signal pastness or futurity.⁴ To those three features difficult to imagine pure music exhibiting, we can add others, such as narrative voice, narrative point of view, and narrative true-to-lifeness.⁵

IV MUSICAL REPRESENTAT ION We need to examine more closely the idea of representation presupposed in the foregoing discussion. Taking representation to be a sine qua non of narration, if instrumental music is to count as narrative we will have to establish, first, that such music does indeed represent, second, that it represents nonmusical events, and third, that such music represents in a narrative mode, that is, by somehow conveying or recounting temporal or causal relations among those non-musical events. ⁴ See Fred Maus, ‘Narratology, Narrativity’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Indication of pastness may not, for all that, be beyond the powers of music to achieve. The most promising case is probably the emergence of nostalgia in music, whereby a passage of music appears to relate regretfully to an earlier one, or to the sentiment or action with which the earlier passage was associated. ⁵ This is not to deny that point of view, one attributable to the implied composer, plays a role in music involving humor, parody, allusion, and the like. Examples include Mozart’s ‘Musical Joke’, Bart´ok’s Sixth Quartet, Haydn’s ‘Joke’ Quartet, and parts of Ives’s symphonies. Such cases typically involve implicit commentary on something musically referenced then and there. Despite such examples, it is hard to see how there could be scope for the operation in music of full-fledged narrative point of view. As for true-to-lifeness in music, for an attempt to theorize that in regard to facts concerning the realm of emotions, see my ‘Truth in Music’ (1982), in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Though I do not entirely repudiate it, I am now less sanguine about the approach taken there.

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But with the very first task we confront an obstacle. Even if expressive music, according to the sketch of musical experience offered above, readily induces appropriately backgrounded listeners to hear gesture and expression in it, is that quite enough to say that the music represents those things? Unfortunately not. For artistic representation, as exemplified most clearly by pictorial representation, is a strongly intentional notion. Thus, for a picture to represent an oak tree an oak tree must be seeable in it, to be sure, but the maker of the picture must also actually have intended such seeing-in. Artistic expressiveness, on the other hand, is not a strongly intentional notion, nor is that of gestural content; a passage of music might be expressive of an emotion or might embody musical gestures, without its composer having intended the hearing of those gestures or that emotion in it, and in some cases, without the composer even having foreseen or anticipated such hearing. In light of that, it may be that the relation between music and the gestures and expressions it induces us to hear in it is more properly one of suggestion, rather than representation. Be that as it may, I will put aside this reservation for present purposes, and continue to speak of expressive music as representing the gestures, actions, and expressions that it perhaps strictly speaking only suggests. That will allow the question of music’s narrativity to remain open.

V M USIC AS EXTERNALLY NARRATIVE VS. MUSIC AS INTERNALLY NARRATIVE A distinction regarding music’s narrativity that will prove to be of some use is that between music as externally narrative—as something that is being told, by the composer—and music as internally narrative—as something that is telling of something else. In the first case, the sequence of musical events is the ‘story’; in the second case, the ‘story’, if any, is what the musical events are about. Of course, where music can be made out to be both externally and internally narrative, the responsibility for the internal narrative ultimately rests with the composer as well, the composer being the teller, in the first instance, of the sequence of musical events, and in the second instance, though sometimes unknowingly, of the sequence of non-musical events the musical sequence represents. In connection with music’s external narrativity—that is, the idea that the events of which the music consists are themselves being narrated—there is also the role of the performer to consider. The performer might be thought

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of as occurrently narrating the events that the composer has only narrated in a standing fashion, or alternatively, as the only proper narrator of musical events on any occasion of performance, the composer then not being a narrator of any sort, but only the designator in the abstract of events for narration. Having for the moment gone as far as I can with the idea of music as narrative, I want now to consider an alternative idea, that of music as drama. VI MAUS AND NEWCOMB ON DRAMA IN MUSIC In this section I summarize two analyses of musical compositions by philosophically informed musicologists that can be seen as recommending a dramatic, as opposed to narrative, model of the events musical compositions appear to image forth. The first is due to Fred Maus, and concerns the opening movement of Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 95; the second is due to Anthony Newcomb, and concerns the scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Maus’s analysis, which focuses rather minutely on the arresting first eighteen measures of Beethoven’s quartet, identifying in it individual gestures standing in certain relations to one another, issues in the following general conclusion: It would be natural to call the quartet a conspicuously dramatic composition. The analysis makes the sense of drama concrete by narrating a succession of dramatic actions: an abrupt, inconclusive outburst; a second outburst in response, abrupt and coarse in its attempt to compensate for the first; then a response to the first two actions, calmer and more careful, in many ways more satisfactory.⁶

Maus notes that his analytical description of the passage explains events by regarding them as actions, and by venturing motivations for those actions. But to whom, Maus asks, are those actions and motivations being ascribed? Neither the composer nor the performers, it seems, for though they are the authors of certain music-related actions, namely, composing and performing, they are not comfortably thought of as the authors of the actions heard in the music, actions such as asserting, objecting, responding. Rather, such actions, and associated motivations, are to be ascribed to a persona, or personlike ⁶ Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, in Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 105–30, at pp. 118–19 (originally in Music Theory Spectrum (1988)). Note that although Maus invokes narrating in this quotation, the narrating is being done by the analysis, not by the music being analyzed.

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agent, who is imagined as present, performing those actions in real time. ‘In listening to a piece’, Maus observes, ‘it is as though one follows a series of actions that are performed now, before one’s ears, not as though one merely learns of what someone did years ago’.⁷ Maus proposes that a piece of instrumental music such as the quartet movement he analyzes be assimilated to a play, and thus seen to have an essentially dramatic character, rather than assimilated to a narrative form like the novel. Plays have a number of salient features which music can share. They present a series of actions, which are the actions of fictional characters or personae, which actions are experienced as occurring as they are perceived, and which form a plot, or at least, make some kind of sense as a whole. Of course the actions heard in music are not as concrete or detailed as the actions of a stage play, which more nearly approximate those of life. The agents, objects, and motivations of musically embodied actions remain much more indeterminate. Music is, as Maus suggests, ‘a kind of drama that lacks determinate characters’.⁸ This difference in degree of indeterminacy of the characters or personae involved in music and in theater should not be thought to undermine the validity of the analogy. For, after all, playwrights such as Strindberg and Beckett have created stage plays, such as Endgame and The Ghost Sonata, whose personae are almost as indeterminate as those to be heard in the expressive instrumental music with which we are concerned. Anthony Newcomb, for his part, maintains that music is heard is a ‘reenactment of a complex pattern of intentional human action’,⁹ and his analysis of Mahler’s movement is designed to illustrate that. According to Newcomb, the imagination of agency in music, in schematic form, goes as follows: [first] the selection of [or focusing on] musical attributes . . . the interpretation of these musical attributes as attributes of human character or behavior . . . the combination of these human attributes in various configurations as possible or plausible human agencies . . . [and finally] the understanding of . . . these fictional agencies as relevant in the unfolding of a plausible chain of human actions and events.¹⁰ ⁷ Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, 121. ⁸ Ibid. 128. ⁹ Anthony Newcomb, ‘Action and Agency in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Second Movement’, in Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 131–53, p. 131. ¹⁰ Newcomb hastens to add this qualification: ‘It is important to realize that in music, as in other arts . . . aspects of agency are not continuously displayed . . . Even the most ‘‘expressive’’ music . . . at times simply swirls or dreams or chugs along in its decorative function’ (ibid. 133).

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Newcomb locates in Mahler’s scherzo three dances of different character, which are introduced individually, and then interwoven as the movement proceeds. The first is a medium L¨andler (A), the second a fast Waltz (B), and the third a slow L¨andler (C). When the second dance first appears, it suggests an agency distinct from that of the first dance, but there are two reasonable possibilities for what that agency is: either a second, entirely distinct persona, or else an element within the personality of the first persona. The culturalhistorical context of early twentieth-century Vienna, awash in the ideas of Schopenhauer and Freud, and sympathetic to the notion of hidden sides of the human psyche, favors the latter way of reading the contrast between the agency embodied in dance A and that embodied in dance B. Overall, Newcomb suggests, the movement offers a picture of a clumsy and coarse rustic personality swept away by a sophisticated and confident urban one, followed in due course by a sober and reflective personality, associated with dance C, who serves to rein in the second and perhaps restore, in some measure, the honor of the first. In the remainder of this essay I attempt to bring into relief further aspects of the dramatic and narrative models of musical content, and to weigh the respective merits of those models in regard to music of different kinds. VII MUSIC AS DRAMATIC VS. MUSIC AS NARRATIVE Music is expressive, I maintain, when it prompts us to hear the music as animated by agency of a certain sort, more specifically, when it induces us to hear the music as the expressing of a mental state, or perhaps equivalently, when it induces us to imagine a persona expressing a mental state through the vehicle of music. I call this the hearability-as-expression view of musical expressiveness.¹¹ But is a sequence of passages that are expressive of a sequence of states of mind thereby an emotional narrative? Only, it seems, if we have the sense that the first sequence involves acts of relating or telling, ones attributable to an agent who stands apart from the imagined agent or agents who are the subjects of the mental states and acts of expression that constitute the music’s expressive substance.¹² Otherwise, as the analyses of Maus and Newcomb ¹¹ See ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’, in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), and Ch. 6 in this volume. ¹² That is, in the terms introduced earlier, if the music appears internally, and not just externally, narrative.

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suggest, we would seem more justified in construing the music according to a dramatic model, on which personae and their expressive actions appear directly on the musical stage, than according to a narrative model, on which those personae and expressive actions are instead being recounted to us by a narrative agent. The locus classicus of the distinction between the narrative and the dramatic is Aristotle’s Poetics, the first serious attempt in Western thought to offer a taxonomy of the arts. Aristotle invokes the distinction to explain how epic and tragedy are distinct. He notes that though they have the same objects of imitation, namely, noble human beings in serious situations, and roughly the same means of imitation, namely, persons uttering words, they differ nonetheless in the manner of imitation: whereas epic speaks of the events with which the epic is concerned, tragedy presents those events directly. Alternatively, the epic reciter describes the events of the story, while tragic actors enact those very events. Again, on the view of musical expressiveness I hold, we hear expressive music precisely as if it were an expression of mental states. More generally, we hear such music, and much not specifically expressive music, as imbued with action. That is, we standardly hear music as acting in ways it is not literally acting, or doing things it is not literally doing, or gesturing in ways it is not literally gesturing. In the case of expressive music, the actions are, naturally, expressive actions, but in other cases they are actions of other sorts. From such a perspective, clearly, the most natural way to view instrumental music is as dramatic, that is, as offering a sequence of actions to be directly imagined, rather than as narrative, that is, as offering a sequential relating of such actions. VIII CONDITIONS FAVORING NARRATIVE CONSTRUAL OF M USIC When are we inclined to regard the actions that we hear in music as directly present to us, enacted by personae as we listen, and when as matters that are not directly present, but instead represented in a narrative conveyed to us by a narrating agency, whether the composer, the performer, or a narrator internal to the music? A most difficult question. Let me, then, pose a simpler version of it. When do we have the sense that unadorned instrumental music is relating a story to us, that such music is, in terms invoked earlier, narrating, and not just being narrated?

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I suggest, first, that the music must have a marked character of utterance, of seeming to speak, if that sense is to emerge. And not all music displays that. But second, there must also be a character more specifically of storytelling. What I mean by that is a measured, deliberate, reflective character, such as is conjured by phrases like ‘once upon a time’ or ‘long ago and far away’. Music of storytelling character recruits features traditionally associated with the storytelling mode of discourse, one we think of perhaps above all as unhurried. Thus slowish tempo, relaxed rhythm, and restrained dynamic are among the musical features conducive to the emergence of a storytelling character. An example of music with something like this storytelling character would be the opening of Smetana’s Ma Vlast. This is, admittedly, an explicitly programmatic work, but non-programmatic examples may also be found. The openings of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Franck’s Symphony in D minor, Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony, or Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony will perhaps serve. Another generalization we might try on for size is this: The more music strikes us as a direct utterance from the composer, the more we are likely to construe it as narrative, as in effect the composer testifying to or recounting something in sound; and the more music strikes us as constituting a world of its own, in which events occur independently of a guiding force, the more we are likely to construe it as dramatic, that is, as involving agencies that appear, interact, and depart before our ears. Or again: the more the agents imagined in connection with expressive music seem autonomous or self-directed, the more apt is a dramatic construal of the music; and conversely, the more the agents imagined seem framed or subject to outside control, the more a narrative construal of the music recommends itself. In any event, plainly not all instrumental music displays narrative character or lends itself to narrative interpretation. The extent to which it does seems to depend to a fair degree on the genre of music involved. With minuets, scherzos, toccatas, etudes, canons, variations, and the like, the form of such pieces dictates certain structural repetitions or certain kinds of ‘musical filler’ which tend to block narrative suggestion or undercut narrative momentum, whereby such pieces come close to fitting Peter Kivy’s characterization of instrumental music as ‘sonic wallpaper’.¹³ With sonata movements, by contrast, internal narrativity has more purchase, sonata form ¹³ Peter Kivy, ‘The Fine Art of Repetition’, in The Fine Art of Repetition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 359.

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being inherently progressive and developmental, and so more susceptible to narrative construal.¹⁴ Still, the most natural construal of a sonata movement is as dramatic rather than narrative. Sonata movements generally come across like a stage on which actors appear, directly express their emotions, and move on. (Alternatively, a single actor may be thought present, who passes through a sequence of states somewhat in the manner of a soliloquy.) In the opening movement of CharlesValentin Alkan’s little-heard Symphony for Piano, for example, one readily hears a protagonist, embodied most clearly in a particular five-note motive, express its peculiar mixture of yearning and suspicion. But one does not seem to hear a voice that tells of a third party. One does not have the sense of a mediator between oneself and the expressive gestures that one perceives in the music. Perhaps it would be best to admit that music can generally be heard as either strictly narrative or strictly dramatic, even if most music lends itself more readily to the latter. When music is regarded as the utterance or voice of the composer, then construing it as a narrative, one whose content consists of the gestures, actions, or emotions of the composer’s alter ego, is natural enough. On that model, the composer is analogous to a lyric poet, and the performer to a reciter or rhapsode. When music is regarded rather as the organized product of creative activity offered for our engagement, then construing it as a drama, one whose content consists in the gestures, actions, or emotions of various shifting personae, is arguably more natural. On that model, the composer is analogous to a playwright, and the performer to a director or producer. In the last analysis, construing music either narratively or dramatically, and not simply expressively, might best be regarded as an appreciative option, not something correct appreciation absolutely enjoins. Even when the option is exercised it is often irresolvable whether the music in question is better construed one way or the other. One likely source of this irresolvability as between narrative and dramatic construals of music is the fact that there are so many different candidates in the domain of articulate actions for what a given passage of music might be heard as fictively engaged in: monologue, ¹⁴ A similar claim could be made for fugue, which also avoids strict repetition, and which one could hear as relating a story consisting in the vicissitudes of its theme, and for jazz improvising on standard tunes, given that such improvising is often understood as at least in part a kind of commentary on the tune or its associated chord changes. (For interesting reflections on the narrative dimension of jazz improvisation, see the third part of Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).)

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dialogue, recitation, aside, soliloquy, meditation, diatribe, ballad, chronicle, report, confession, exhortation, peroration, elegy, admonition, and so on, some of which are dramatic actions, and some of which are narrative actions. IX NARROW AND BROAD SENSES OF NARRATIVE IN MUSIC Experienced from within, so to speak, a sonata movement strikes us as a drama, with actors corresponding to themes or motives. This is the way sonatas are usually experienced, as illustrated by the Alkan example above. Yet experienced from without, as the deliberate product of a creator, a sonata movement may take on the aspect of a narrative being related by the composer through the musical drama more immediately apprehended in listening. Thus, though not narrative in the narrow sense in which it contrasts with dramatic, the music of a sonata can be considered narrative in a broad sense, one in which narration is effected by means of drama. Consider an army commander narrating a past battle, using actors or puppets with recognizable identities or powers. This looks to be analogous to the stage-managing a composer engages in regarding his musical material and the personal agents such material gives rise to for imaginative hearing. What this amounts to, then, is the conveying of a narrative by the creating of a drama. Of course in this broad sense of narrative playwrights, who directly fashion dramas for enactment, are also engaged in narrative, even more clearly than are composers. Macbeth, for instance, certainly conveys a story, and there seems no objection to thinking of Shakespeare as, in some sense, the conveyer of that story. But neither in theatre nor in music does this amount to narrating in the stricter sense that applies to, say, literary fiction, in which a narrator can be identified in the fiction, in which there is a discernible narrative voice, in which narrative point of view is robustly present, and in which there is a clear distinction between narrative discourse and narrated story. X M USICAL PE RSONAE What disposes us to think of a musical persona heard in one stretch of music or portion of the musical fabric as the same as the musical persona heard in another such stretch or portion? It is very hard to generalize here, but perhaps at least a contiguous series of musical gestures of similar character will be interpreted, ceteris paribus, as the gestures of a single, continuing persona.

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Yet there is very likely ineliminable indeterminacy in such matters. Speaking of the dramatic personae hearable in the opening of Beethoven’s Op. 95, Fred Maus observes that: . . . nowhere is it clear whether the response to the first outburst is made by the same agent or agents. If the continuity in the performing forces suggests continuity of the musical agency, the registral discontinuity and utterly different treatment of the ensemble may suggest that a distinct agent or agents have entered to respond . . . . The actions that a listener follows in listening to the Beethoven passage do not belong to determinately distinct agents. More precisely, as the listener discerns actions and explains them by psychological states, various discriminations of agents will seem appropriate, but never with a determinacy that rules out other interpretations.¹⁵

Nevertheless, music for a single performer is more often than not heard as communicating a slice of the psychological life of a persisting persona. Even where there is a clear melody and accompaniment structure, or a contrapuntal texture with several distinct lines, one generally has the impression of a single expressive agency, at the service of which are the various distinguishable musical components. By contrast, in certain genres, such as that of the concerto, with its manifest oppositional structure, playing off soloist against orchestra, the presumption of single expressive agency is just as clearly overridden. And duo sonatas and trios may also often invite the kind of hearing normative for concertos, in which different instruments or performing forces are heard as the vehicles of different personae. XI A SONATA OF SCHUBERT I end with a musical example, the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in a minor, D. 845. It is instructive to trace the experience of gesture, expression, and action in this stretch of music, one that, like most movements in sonata form, sustains hearing in dramatic mode rather better than it does hearing in narrative mode. A pragmatic difficulty looms, though, in the effort to convince an audience of this through description of what appears to be going on in the music. For in doing so one is inevitably involved in narrating the succession of agents and actions that one hears.¹⁶ Still, the fact that in making a brief for the dramatic content of the music one perforce narrates one’s experience of that content does not turn the music itself into a narrative rather than a kind of drama. ¹⁵ Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, 123.

¹⁶ See n. 6 for the same caution.

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Three contrasting themes or theme groups—call them A, B, and C—can be discerned in this movement, with which three personae or personality aspects can be readily associated. The opening motive, A, is of a grim, inward character, while the next, B, is of restless character overall, consisting of three sub-motives of respectively rocking, flowing, and declamatory nature. The next motive, C, has a martial and strutting character, which is then succeeded by a fusion of C and B, which, though still vigorous, assumes a more lyrical character than anything that has come before, and which suggests in its fusion of motives a kind of rapprochement between them. Eventually C drops out and the flowing, arpeggiated sub-motive of B predominates, until the return of A in a key a third above the tonic. From there until the end of the exposition, another twenty or so measures, there is an alternation between A and C which has the air of a dialogue, one concluded gently by C. The beginning of the development section sees an alternation of A with itself, distinct contrasts of register and dynamic demarcating the two guises of A, giving the passage the sense of a soliloquy in which different sides of a question are being weighed. This is followed, after two held chords serving as a transition, by a section of more pronounced fantasy character: here the persona of A, though shadowed by the rocking, syncopated sub-motive of B in the bass, takes wing, ventures into unknown regions, and beginning around measure 120, wrestles with doubts, the upshot of which is by no means clear. Dark thoughts continue to accumulate, and the sense of crisis is accentuated by the fragmentation of A, reduced to its last four descending notes, which plunge somewhat desperately, again and again. This eventually subsides, allowing A to reassert itself once more in full, though now uncertain, spent of energy, and winding in on itself in a series of remote and inhospitable keys. There I shall leave our motives and their associated personae, with the return to the initial order, in the recapitulation, still some sixty measures off. In the foregoing narrative of a listener’s experience—or at any rate, this listener’s experience—of this music, I have mixed technical, expressive, and agential vocabulary. But the technical bits in the narrative serve only to pinpoint what is going on in the music on the other two levels, those of expression and agency. And what is going on, I would hope your experience confirms, is not so much doings that occurred in another place and time, of which one is receiving a report, but a drama of events happening here and now, with indefinite personae which are the shifting loci of the emotions and actions encountered throughout.

9 Film Music and Narrative Agency I In this essay I address certain issues about paradigmatic film music, that is, the music that is often heard in the course of a fiction film but that does not originate in or issue from the fictional world revealed on screen. What most interests me is the question, which confronts every filmgoer at some level, and to which he or she must, explicitly or implicitly, accord an answer, of who or what is responsible for such music. That is to say, to what agency is film music assigned by a comprehending viewer, and what is this music understood to be doing, in relation either to the film’s internal narrative, the viewer’s experience of that narrative, or the film as an aesthetic whole? Furthermore, by what principle does a viewer assign, however tacitly, responsibility for the music he or she hears? It will turn out that different answers to this question of agency are in order from one film to another, and even from one cue to another within a given film. The upshot is a basic division within the realm of film music, one I have not seen marked elsewhere, but which is probably more fundamental than others that are regularly noted. II I begin with some preliminaries. First, the music I am concerned with is usually designated nondiegetic film music, that is, music whose source is not the story (or diegesis) being conveyed by the film’s sequence of images. It is sometimes also designated soundtrack as opposed to source music, and sometimes

First published in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 254–88.

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extrinsic, as opposed to intrinsic, music.¹ Second, the films I am concerned with are all narrative fiction films, both of the classical (or ‘‘Hollywood’’) sort, and the modernist (or ‘‘art film’’) sort, though not any of the more extreme examples of the latter, in which the bounds of fictionality or narrative coherence are stretched to their limits.² Third, I consider film music here only as an integral component of a complete film, and not as a genre of music which, in the form of suites or soundtracks, might be enjoyed and evaluated on its own. Certain kinds of answers to our opening queries can be put aside immediately as not to the point. For instance, the source of nondiegetic film music might in one sense be said to be the composer who composes it, or the producer who commissions it, or the sound editor who integrates it into the finished film, but this does not address the question of where, in relation to the fictional world projected, the music is situated or positioned in comprehending the film. Similarly, the function of nondiegetic film music might be said to be, somewhat vaguely, the aesthetic enhancement of the film, or more specifically, the emotional manipulation of the film viewer, or more crassly, the augmentation of the film’s marketability and secondary profits, but none of these answers addresses the question of how such music is understood to function in relation to the central narrative of sight and sound, and thus to contribute ultimately to a film’s meaning. It should be noted straight off that there are two basic sorts of musical score regularly encountered in the domain of the sound film: the first, more traditional, sort consists of music composed specifically for the film in question, and generally tailored by the composer to the rough cut, scene by scene; the second sort consists of pre-existent music chosen by the filmmaker, often in conjunction with a musical consultant, and applied or affixed to scenes or parts thereof. Call the former sort a composed score, and the latter an appropriated score. Directly we can make at least two observations about these two types of score. First, with appropriated scores the issue of specific imported associations, deriving from the original context of composition or performance or distribution, rather than just general associations carried by musical style ¹ For more on these categories, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, ‘Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in Cinema’, in Film Art: An Introduction, 4th edn. (New York: Knopf, 1993). ² For instance, Michael Snow’s Wavelength or Alain Resnais’s L’Ann´ee Derni`ere a` Marienbad.

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or conventions, is likely to arise. Second, with appropriated as opposed to composed scores, ironically there will generally be more attention drawn to the music, both because it is often recognized as such and located by the viewer in cultural space, and because the impression it gives of chosenness, on the part of the implied filmmaker, is greater. To these two observations I add a third, more contentious one, that later discussion will support: music composed for a film (e.g. the soundtracks of Vertigo or The Heiress or On the Waterfront or La Strada), is more likely to be purely narrative in function than pre-existing music appropriated by a filmmaker (e.g. the soundtracks of A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon or Love and Death or Death in Venice). III There are some theoretical claims prevalent in the recent literature on film with which I will be disagreeing, and it is best I signal what they are at the outset. One is that nondiegetic film music is standardly ‘inaudible’, i.e. is not, and is not meant to be, consciously heard, attended to, or noticed.³ This seems to be clearly false, or at any rate, false for a wide range of films in which soundtrack music calls attention to itself unmistakably, or requires the viewer to attend to it explicitly if he or she is not to miss something of narrative importance. The ‘inaudibility’ claim seems most true for what is called underscoring, music at a low volume that serves as a sort of aural cushion for dialogue that remains the main order of business, or for melodically and rhythmically unmarked music helping to effect transitions between scenes of notably different character. Even here, when the music hovers in the penumbra of consciousness, it is rarely very far from being consciously focused, as is perhaps reflected in the fact of being immediately noticed if stopped. If nondiegetic film music were generally unheard, or not consciously noted by the viewer, then there would not be much of an interpretive issue for the viewer of how to construe such music in relation to the rest of what is going on in the film. But there manifestly is an issue of some significance, with respect to many films. Finally, even if it were the case that casual viewing of films with significant music tracks often goes on without a viewer’s explicit awareness of ³ This is a central thesis in Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and is echoed by other recent psychoanalytically oriented writers on film.

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that music, it hardly follows that an aesthetically justified or optimal viewing of such films remains similarly oblivious. Another idea with some currency is the disavowal of what might be called narration proper—the conveying of a story by an intelligent agent—as actually characterizing the standard fiction film. One variant of this has it that such films are not really narrated by anyone or anything within the film world, but instead narrate themselves. A second variant insists that such films are constituted as narratives only by the viewer, and contain no narration apart from that. A third variant maintains that such films are not only constituted as narratives by viewers, but are in fact narrated by viewers to themselves as well, in the course of viewing.⁴ I reject the first sort of disavowal on grounds of incoherence; if narration means anything, it is the conveying or imparting of a story by means that are distinct both from the story being conveyed and from that which is doing the conveying; if the film, or its processes, are the means of narration, then it, or they, cannot also be conceived to be the agent or source of narration. I reject the second and third sorts of disavowal because they seem based on conflating the viewer’s actual task of comprehending a film’s story and significance by actively reconstructing or piecing together the narrative on offer, with the viewer’s literal creation of that narrative, which would thus not exist apart from the viewer. But this is unnecessarily fanciful; our responsibility as filmgoers is to grasp what the narrative is, so as to reflect further on what it might signify, rather than to create that narrative for ourselves. Furthermore, were we really to create the narrative for ourselves, its significance would not, at any rate, be that of the film we were putatively attempting to understand. So I am going to assume, following Seymour Chatman,⁵ that if there is narration in a fiction film, if a comprehensible story is being conveyed to us, then there is an agency or intelligence we are entitled, and in fact need, to imagine ⁴ Though he argues vigorously against the third form of disavowal in his attack on ´enonciation theorists, there remains something of the first and second in the constructivism about film meaning defended by David Bordwell; see his Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) and Making Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For a critique of this aspect of Bordwell’s otherwise eminently sane approach to film, see Berys Gaut, ‘Making Sense of Films: Neoformalism and Its Limits’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 31 (1995): 8–23. Bordwell’s rejection of narrative agents in film as such is also criticized by Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch. 8. ⁵ See his Coming to Terms, especially chs. 5, 7, and 8. Another writer who seems to accept the necessity of positing narrative agency in narrative film, though he verges on abstracting this to the point of abandonment, is Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1984).

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is responsible for this, i.e. doing the narrating. That is, a narrator, though not necessarily an ordinary human being. There are, of course, alternatives to this assumption. As noted above, there are those who propose that films or filmic processes are themselves the performers or executants of narration, there not being of necessity any narrator within the film’s world, on the same plane as the events being displayed. But in addition to the fundamental incoherence remarked above, this proposal, to the extent it can be made out, is simply less interpretively useful than that of a narrator, however minimally characterized, for every successful narration. My response to yet another alternative, that in many cases of filmic narration, we imagine we are presented directly with the events of the story, without imagining there is any agent presenting them to us,⁶ is much the same: the postulate of narrative agency in cinema does a better job of accounting for how we, admittedly largely implicitly, make sense of films as conveyors of stories. For those who yet balk at this postulate, I would offer this. What I want to say about assigning nondiegetic music to narrative agents as opposed to implied filmmakers can, I believe, be translated so as to require instead only the assumption of narrative processes or mere appearances-of-being-narrated. So even if one does not regard the positing of internal narrators or presenters in film as inevitable, the issue will still remain of whether soundtrack music is to be thought of as an element in the narrative process or appearance of narrative presentation, as opposed to an element in the construction of the film by a filmmaker, standing outside both the story and its narration. It is that issue I hope to illuminate here.

IV I now review Chatman’s brief for both cinematic narrators and cinematic implied authors (that is, implied filmmakers).⁷ Chatman begins with an appeal to ordinary language, one it is hard to gainsay: It stands to reason that if shown stories are to be considered narratives, they must be ‘narrated’ . . . I would argue that every narrative is by definition narrated—that is, ⁶ A position taken, for example, by Gregory Currie, in ‘Visual Fictions’, Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1991): 129–43. I respond to Currie in ‘Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies’, Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1993): 70–8. ⁷ All text references in this section are to Coming to Terms.

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narratively presented—and that narration . . . entails an agent even when the agent bears no signs of human personality. (115)

If narrative films are then necessarily narrated by a narrator, what kind of narrator is this? Not, of course, the essentially linguistic narrator of a standard literary fiction: Film often has nothing like a narrative voice, no tell-er. Even the cinematic voiceover narrator is usually at the service of a larger narrative agent, the cinematic shower. But that shower can reasonably be called a presenter . . . (113) Films, in my view, are always presented—mostly and often exclusively shown, but sometimes partially told—by a narrator or narrators.⁸ The overall agent that does the showing I would call the cinematic narrator . . . The cinematic narrator is not be identified with the voice-over narrator . . . ’. (133–4)

Chatman also proposes that a cinematic narrator, operating mainly through the affording of sights and sounds, is closely analogous to the mute presenter of dialogue in a purely dialogic short story. So though in film a teller, whose standard format is that of the voice-over, is usually absent or secondary, a shower —or better, because the term covers more comfortably aural information, a presenter —can be taken to be invariably in place, and the primary agent of narration. The presenter in a film presents, or gives perceptual access to, the story’s sights and sounds; the presenter in a film is thus, in part, a sort of perceptual enabler.⁹ Such perceptual enabling is what we must implicitly posit to explain how it is we are, even imaginarily, perceiving what we are perceiving of the story, in the manner and order in which we are perceiving it. The notion of a presenter, whose main charge is the providing of perceptual access on the fictional world, is simply the best default assumption available for how we make sense of narrative fiction film.¹⁰ ⁸ This formulation of Chatman’s is actually somewhat off the mark: it’s not the film that is presented by the narrator, but various perceptual contents, various sights and sounds, i.e. what one is enabled to see and hear, courtesy of the presumed powers of such a narrator. The film as such is rather presented by the filmmaker or, interpretively, the implied filmmaker. ⁹ This is not to deny that it is sometimes in the purview of the cinematic narrator to present the mental contents of some character, e.g. memories, fantasies, dreams, visualizations. But two points about this should be noted. One, it may be unclear in such cases whether it is the cinematic narrator, acting on the character’s behalf, who shows the character’s mentation, or rather the character, acting as his own narrator, who is doing so. Two, the possibility of this sort of presenting requires a background of presentings of perceptual reality at a more basic story level. ¹⁰ Problems of terminology loom here which a preemptive strike of clarification might dispel. Of the three ideas, cinematic narrator, filmic presenter, and perceptual enabler, the first is perhaps the broadest and the third the narrowest. Certainly there are actions of the cinematic narrator which go beyond those of perceptual enabling or filmic presenting, most notably in this context, narrative pointing through nondiegetic music. Whether there is a distinction worth making between filmic

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While I thus accept Chatman’s postulate of narrative agency wherever there is narration, I do not endorse certain of his claims about the separation of narrators from the story worlds they are narratively presenting. Chatman says, for instance, that ‘the [literary] narrator, by definition, does not see things in the story world; only characters can do that, because only they occupy that world.’(120), and that ‘the narrator cannot impinge on story space but must stay within the bounds of discourse space’ (123). It is, however, incoherent to postulate a narrator who offers us a window on or reportage concerning the doings of a set of individuals the narrator takes and presents as real, and yet insist the narrator is on a different plane, fictionally speaking, from those individuals, and in principle incapable of perceptual awareness of them. Chatman is confusing a narrator’s fictional level, which must standardly be the same as that of the other characters whose doings he/she/it is purporting to convey,¹¹ and the narrator’s degree of story involvement, which is variable, often rather small, and in the limit, nil.¹² A narrator and the events narrated by the narrator must be on the same fictional plane, otherwise cognitive relations posited between narrator and events would not make sense. The cinematic narrator’s logical status vis-`a-vis the film world is to be distinguished from the narrator’s degree of involvement—causal, emotional, experiential—in the story, i.e. what literary theorists mark as the narrator’s being either homodiegetic or heterodiegetic. Being heterodiegetic, or an ‘outsider’ to the events being related, does not remove a filmic narrator ontologically from the characters he/she/it serves to offer us perceptual access to. Chatman fails to see that the narrator must perforce share the fictional plane of the characters, since they are apparently real and reportable to that narrator, and this is true whether the narrator is homodiegetic, i.e. involved in the story events, or heterodiegetic, i.e. uninvolved presenter and perceptual enabler is less clear; if so, the former would include the latter but comprise in addition resources such as character voice-overs or mind-overs, affording access to the fictional world in a wider-than-perceptual vein. ¹¹ Except when the narrator’s relationship to the story being presented is clearly signaled, in the novel or film, as one of relating a fiction as such, e.g. as through a disclaimer like ‘this is only a story, it never happened’. But this is quite rare in fiction film; it is even rarer in literary fiction, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair standing as a classic example, and John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman as a recent, though more ambiguous, one. Kendall Walton, in Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), marks this distinction as one between reporting narrators and storytelling narrators (368–72). The overwhelming majority of narrators in narrative fiction are reporting narrators, and as Walton points out, in such cases narrator and events narrated necessarily belong to the same world. ¹² As in the event of a wholly ‘effaced’ and ‘omniscient’ third-person narrator, the norm for cinematic fictions.

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in them, standing to those events in merely a witnessing and transmitting capacity. I turn now to the notion of implied author in film. The need for this concept is clear from the fact that films, like novels present phenomena that cannot otherwise be accounted for, such as the discrepancies between what the cinematic narrator presents and what the film as a whole implies . . . unreliable narration presents the clearest but not the only case for the implied author [in film]’ (130–1) . . . in cinema as in literature, the implied author is the agent intrinsic to the story whose responsibility is the overall design—including the decision to communicate it through one or more narrators. Cinematic narrators are transmitting agents of narratives, not their creators. (132) In short, for films as for novels, we would do well to distinguish between a presenter of the story, the narrator (who is a component of the discourse), and the inventor of both the story and the discourse (including the narrator): that is, the implied author . . . (133)

So in film we must generally distinguish between, on the one hand, the narrator or presenter of the story and, on the other hand, the ostensible inventor of (all of) the narrator, the story narrated, the narrative structure, and the cinematic entirety in which these are embodied—to wit, the implied filmmaker. The implied filmmaker is the agent who appears to have invented, arranged, and integrated the various narrative agents and aspects of narration involved in the film, as well as everything else required to constitute the film as a complete object of appreciation. The implied filmmaker, in short, is the image we construct of the film’s maker—beliefs, aims, attitudes, values, and personality—on the basis of the film viewed in its full context of creation. A film’s narrator presents the events of the film’s world from within it, whereas the implied author of a film, if he or she can be said to present anything other than the film itself, presents the world of the film, at one doxastic remove, from a position external to it. For the implied filmmaker, as for the viewer, but in contrast to the film’s narrator, the film’s world is a fictional one, acknowledged as fictional throughout. The implied filmmaker can’t be in the position of directly affording us, as with a silent gesture of ‘behold!’, the vision and audition of something that is only fictional with respect to himself, namely, the characters and their circumstances; that remains the prerogative of the film’s narrator or presenter, who is, in a fundamental sense, and pace Chatman, ‘one of them’.

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V Before proceeding to my main concerns I will address some worries about the general postulate of a filmic narrator formulated by George Wilson in his penetrating study, Narration in Light.¹³ These worries are the most substantial and explicit of which I am aware, so if they can be allayed, the ground for such a postulate will be that much clearer. A reason Wilson offers initially for being wary of a standing postulate of cinematic narrator is that such a narrator is often conceived as an agent who is necessarily observing events, the image track being thus identified as the visual experience of that fictional observer. But this, as Wilson quickly notes, is unnecessary. The essential function of such a narrator is to show us what is to be seen—or more broadly, to present to us what is to be seen and heard—in other words, to enable perception, albeit fictional perception, of those events. The agent who shows, or permits us to see, need not be thought of as seeing as well. This is apparent in Wilson’s own useful sketch of what a cinematic narrator would have to be: ‘a fictional or fictionalized being, presupposed in any viewing of the film narrative, who continuously provides to the audience, from within the general framework of the fiction, the successive views that open onto the action of the film’.¹⁴ The alternative, then, is to conceive the cinematic narrator as a kind of perceptual pilot through the film world, rather than as an observer of it whom we opportunistically inhabit. Considered in this fashion, the narrator is a fictional figure who, at each moment of the film, asserts the existence of certain fictional states of affairs by showing them to the audience demonstratively; that is, by ostending them within and by means of the boundaries of the screen. It is certainly part of our experience in film viewing that we feel, usually subliminally, a constant guidance and outside direction of our perception toward the range of predetermined fictional facts which we are meant to see.¹⁵

Having so well formulated this alternative, what problem does Wilson find with it? Just this: that the entity described is analogous not to the narrator of a novel, but rather to its implied author. His reason for this reluctant conclusion seems to be that although ‘the exact style and manner of this guidance— the fine-grained articulation of the processes of showing—manifests traits of ¹³ George Wilson, Narration in Light (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See also my review in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (1989): 290–2. ¹⁴ Narration in Light, 132. ¹⁵ Ibid. 133–4.

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sensibility, intelligence, and character’, these traits are ones we will naturally take to define the persona of the filmmaker as expressed through the film, or equivalently, the personality of the film’s implied author, thus leaving no room for a filmic narrator as such. This seems to me too quick. First, Wilson gives no reason why such traits should not be assigned, in some cases, to a filmic narrator, and in others, to the implied filmmaker. Second, Wilson fails to consider that the assignment of traits to the implied filmmaker might very well interpretively depend on the assignment of traits, the same or different ones, to such a narrator, much as our image of the implied author of a novel is necessarily based, in large part, on our image of the narrator and how the narrator is managed or positioned by the author. But third, and most importantly, Wilson overlooks the fact that the implied filmmaker just cannot occupy the role of perceptual guide to the film’s occurrences, and so, a fortiori, his particular mode of doing that cannot be what cues us to some of his traits. And that is because the implied filmmaker cannot logically be the presenter and ostender of events that are fictional with respect to him. That is to say, if we imagine anyone giving us access to those events, it cannot coherently be the filmmaker, in any guise. To be sure, the filmmaker can present representations of those events, i.e. the shots or images the totality of which constitute the film, but he cannot offer us the vision and audition of those events themselves.¹⁶ If he be allowed a surrogate, however, a narrating agent presupposed by the process of narration, and fictionally on the same level as its subject matter, then this difficulty disappears. A fourth and related reason why the filmmaker cannot do duty for the film’s narrator in this connection is this. Often we want not only to attribute traits of character, sensibility, or intellect to some agent connected with the film, but more specifically, attitudes or views concerning the story that is unfolding. But the filmmaker is not in the right cognitive position for this; that is to say, he or she will not actually have attitudes or views towards the fictional personages or occurrences involved in the story, knowing they are merely fictional.¹⁷ I suspect that Wilson is unable to find a place for, and thus underestimates the rationale for, the cinematic narrator, because he subtly conflates the ¹⁶ Of course he can and does offer us the vision and audition of various events which took place during the filming, namely, the enacting of various roles by various actors—but that is another matter. ¹⁷ See Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 366.

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devices or powers at the service of a director as crafter of a representation, and those in the command of an imagined perceptual guide to the world such a representation makes fictional;¹⁸ but these are different, and the ways they function to control our experience as viewers differ too. The filmic narrator allows us to perceive first this person, then that, at such and such an apparent range, and for so long, clearly or not so clearly, etc., all of which manner of showing may give us a certain impression of the shower’s attitudes or motivations; the filmmaker chooses or stages the profilmic events that are to be filmed, decides on the camera distances and movements required for a shot, determines the lighting and length of shots, orders those shots in a certain fashion, etc., thus ultimately composing a narrative of a particular sort, with a particular sort of implied narrator, all of which manner of making may give us a certain impression of the maker’s personality or outlook. But the view we form of the narrating agency or intelligence, from the way it carries out its main charge as perceptual facilitator, need not coincide with the view we form of the human maker of the film, from the way he or she fulfills the demands of filmmaking.¹⁹ Curiously, Wilson allows that we can indeed imagine a film where we would have grounds for a distinction between a voyeuristic filmic narrator and a satirizing implied film maker. In such a case, there would be enough of a personification of the manner in which the action is shown and enough of a contrast between the personification and what is implied about the filmmaker’s views of this to motivate the identification of [the former] as a narrator.²⁰

But to my mind, the very possibility of this kind of divergence is predicated on and presupposes the logical distinctness of the roles of filmic narrator and ¹⁸ Nor are supporters of the notion of a narrator internal to film immune to this confusion. Consider the formulation of Nick Browne, quoted by both Branigan and Chatman: ‘the authority which can be taken to rationalize the presentation of shots’ (The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 1). But since shots are constructional elements of films as made objects, that authority can only be the implied filmmaker; the authority, or agency, that Browne is really after is that which appears to rationalize the presentation of views, or sights and sounds. ¹⁹ There are other sources of Wilson’s reluctance to embrace filmic narrators on a standing basis. He suggests at one point that a filmic narrator distinct from the implied filmmaker would, by analogy to literature, have to be ‘a character that the text depicts directly or indirectly’ (Narration in Light, 136). But this is only half right; the narrator is indeed a kind of fictional character, but not one that need be depicted, as I understand that term. If purely dialogic short stories, or purely epistolary novels, have narrators, then such narrators are not depicted, either directly or indirectly. So the fact that cinematic narrators are standardly not depicted, i.e. nothing in films shows or announces them as such, is not a principled impediment to acknowledging them. ²⁰ Ibid. 136–7.

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implied filmmaker, even if in most films, unlike the one Wilson conjures up, the personal traits ascribable to the occupants of the two roles tend to coincide.²¹ As we have seen, Wilson questions whether every standard film narration must be understood to entail an implicit narrator distinct from the filmmaker. He maintains that in films governed by the classical paradigm of transparency, which covers almost all narrative film, we simply see the fictional events for ourselves, defeasibly taking the facts about them to be what we see them to be. But to my mind this sidesteps the question of how it is we are seeing what we are seeing, however reliable or unreliable it turns out to be. If this question, however, is not simply set aside then the only satisfying answer to it is that we are being shown such and such, by some agent, in some perhaps unspecifiable manner. That is to say, the posit, however unvoiced, of an agency that is offering us sights and sights—an agency with certain powers, motivations, and limitations—seems inescapable if we are to justify our taking anything to be fictional in the film world, on the basis of the moving images that are the only thing we are literally confronted with. It is not enough to just say that, with fiction film, the film’s world is made visible to us, perhaps adding that there is a convention to that effect. Reason—albeit reason operating in service of the imaginative understanding of fiction—demands an answer to how it is that a world is being made visible to us, and that demand, it appears, is only satisfied by the assumption of an agency responsible for that. One might still seek to avoid this conclusion by adopting the following stance: it is, indeed, as if we are being shown such and such, from a given perspective, by an agent within the film’s world, with certain powers to make views of that world available to us, but we need not assume that there is such an agent. Here, though, we arrive at a distinction virtually without a difference. If it seems to us, at some level, as if we are being shown such and ²¹ My discussion so far may give the impression that I regard the role of the implied presenter of a narrative film as confined to that of providing views on events understood as fully constituted independently of the shower’s activity. But while I think that that is indeed the dominant role of a film’s presenter, it need not be the exclusive one. The cinematic narrator might in part be thought of as a fashioner or shaper of events that are only then presented, more straightforwardly, in certain ways (e.g. in certain lights, or in a certain order). This fashioning or shaping of fictional events thought of as existing, on a more basic level, prior to narrative attention, can be seen as a more subtle way of presenting events taken to belong to the underlying event structure with which narration is concerned. If so, then the narrative structuring of films is a two-stage affair, and that which is effected through camerawork and editing is subsequent to that understood to be achieved in the staging of action and the manipulation of setting. (For more on this dimension of cinematic narration, and the rationale of its recognition, see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film.)

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such, are we not in effect imagining that we are being shown such and such, and thus, finally, that there is, on the imaginative plane, something doing the showing? So I would claim. VI That nondiegetic music standardly serves to advance a film’s narrative is something on which theorists of film appear to agree: Narrative is not constructed by visual means alone. By this I mean that music works as part of the process that transmits narrative information to the spectator . . . ²² Voice-over is just one of many elements, including musical scoring, sound effects, editing, lighting, and so on, through which the cinematic text is narrated.²³ The moment we recognize to what degree film music shapes our perception of a narrative, we can no longer consider it incidental . . . ²⁴

Another point widely agreed upon is that even if the primary purpose of nondiegetic film music is the advancing of the narrative, there may very well be others. Here is a typical admonition concerning film music’s multiplicity of ends: There is not one and only one function that music can perform in relation to movies. Aaron Copland suggested five broad functions: creating atmosphere, underlining the psychological states of characters, providing background filler, building a sense of continuity, sustaining tension and then rounding it off with a sense of closure. These do not seem to be necessarily exclusive categories, nor do they exhaust the range of functions that music can perform in movies.²⁵

Not surprisingly, I am happy to join this double consensus: film music often serves narrative in some way, but there is a range of other functions that such music sometimes performs. What I am concerned to demonstrate, however, goes beyond those two pieces of received wisdom. It is that the most fundamental division in the realm of film music concerns the viewer’s assignment of responsibility for such music, i.e. the agency the viewer posits, usually implicitly, as responsible for the music being heard. It will turn out that there is a rough coincidence between film music to which we intuitively accord ²² Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 30. ²³ Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 43–4. ²⁴ Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 11. ²⁵ No¨el Carroll, Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 216.

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narrative significance and film music for which we implicitly hold an internal cinematic narrator accountable, and between film music to which we do not accord narrative significance and film music that we implicitly assign directly to the implied filmmaker. When, though, can film music be said to have narrative significance? When does nondiegetic music function narratively? In order to answer this question we must have a plausible criterion of narrativity, or of actions within the purview of a narrator. In trying to arrive at one, it will be helpful to have before us a survey of the various functions that critics or theorists have observed film music to perform. These functions include: (1) the indicating or revealing of something about a character’s psychological condition, including emotional states, personality traits, or specific cognitions, as when the music informs you that the heroine is happy, or that the hero has just realized who the murderer was; (2) the modifying or qualifying of some psychological attribution to a character independently grounded by other elements of the film, as when the music tells you that a character’s grief over a loss is intense; (3) the underlining or corroborating of some psychological attribution to a character independently grounded by other elements of the film, as when music emphasizes something about a situation on screen which is already fully evident; (4) the signifying of some fact or state of affairs in the film world other than the psychological condition of some character, e.g. that a certain evil deed has occurred, offscreen; (5) The foreshadowing of a dramatic development in a situation being depicted on screen; (6) the projecting of a story-appropriate mood, attributable to a scene as a whole; (7) the imparting to the viewer of a sense that the happenings in the film are more important than those of ordinary life, the emotions magnified, the stakes higher, the significances deeper; (8) the suggesting to the viewer of how the presenter of the story regards or feels about some aspect of the story, e.g. sympathetically; (9) the suggesting to the viewer of how he or she is to regard or feel about some aspect of the story, e.g. compassionately; (10) the imparting of certain formal properties, such as coherence, cogency, continuity, closure, to the film or parts thereof; (11) the direct inducing in viewers of tension, fear, wariness, relaxation, cheerfulness, or other similar cognitive or affective state; (12) the lulling or mesmerizing of the viewer, so as to facilitate emotional involvement in the fictional world to which the viewer would otherwise prove resistant; (13) the distracting of the viewer’s attention from the technical features of the film as a constructed artifact, concern with

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which would prevent immersion in the filmic narrative; (14) the expressing by the filmmaker of an attitude toward, or view on, the fictional story or aspect thereof; (15) the embellishing or enriching of the film as an object of appreciation. Without deciding, for each of these functions, which are properly considered narrative and which not, it would appear that some unequivocally are, and some unequivocally are not. What I will do at this point is explore a number of suggestions as to what the criterion of narrativity might be in regard to nondiegetic film music, assessing them against the background of this array of observed functions, some of which, at any rate, would have to come out counting as narrative, some clearly not, and some having a status that might only be settled, clarifyingly, once a given suggestion were adopted. One possible criterion is this: (C1) does the music seem to issue from, be in service of, the agency one imagines to be bringing one the sights and sounds of the film’s world? If so, then it can be reckoned part of the narration proper, and assignable to the cinematic narrator. Perhaps an equivalent formulation would be: (C2) does the intelligence one thinks of as bringing one the music seem to be the same as that charged with conveying the story—as opposed to that charged with constructing the film? If so, then the music can be reckoned part of the narration, and assigned to the cinematic narrator.²⁶ Though I think these criteria point in the right direction, there is an evident problem with them, insofar as we hope to look to them for guidance, especially in difficult cases. And that is that they are uncomfortably close to what they purport to analyze or elucidate, namely, whether a use of nondiegetic music is narrative or not. So if we are unsure whether a given cue is functioning narratively, we are likely to be almost equally unsure whether it feels as if it derives from the film’s narrative agent. Thus, it would seem desirable to have some other mark, could we discover one, whose conceptual distinctness from the idea of narrative functioning was greater than that of C1 or C2. Such a mark might be that of making a difference in the narrative. Instead of appealing directly to an intuition of a connection of the music to a film’s internal narrator, we can appeal instead to the notion of making-fictional, or generating fictional truths, in a film. A criterion of nondiegetic music having ²⁶ This would apply, note, even when such music is unforegrounded: if it appears to respond to the demands of storytelling, broadly understood, then it can be construed as something like musical musing, sotto voce, on the cinematic narrator’s part.

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a narrative function, and thus being attributable to a narrative agent, could be this: (C3) the music makes something fictionally true—true in the story being conveyed—that would not otherwise be true, or not to the same degree or with the same definiteness. A counterfactual form of the suggestion is perhaps more transparent: (C4) would deleting the music in a scene change its represented content, i.e. what is fictional in it, or only how the scene affects viewers? If the former, then the music is an aspect of narration; if the latter, then not. We must briefly discuss what it means to make something fictional in a work of fiction such as a narrative film. Something is fictional in a film, according to a well-developed recent account, if it is to be imagined to be the case by viewers concerned to experience the film properly.²⁷ What thus makes something—a proposition about the film’s world—something that is to be imagined in the course of viewing is perceivable features of the film, a public object, taken as a prop for guided imaginings. When we make-believe in accord both with the features of artistic props and the usually tacitly grasped principles for imagining that are in effect in a given artform, we are engaged in tracing out imaginary worlds, ones in which things are make-believedly, or fictionally, so. The fictional world of a representational art work, unlike that of a daydream or fantasy, is as it is because features of the associated prop—text, canvas, film—properly construed, are the way they are; not all is up to the imaginer. Props, through their existence and nature, generate fictional truths independently of what individual perceivers might choose to imagine. What does it mean for a proposition to be fictional, or true in a fictional world, in respect of a given work of art? Simply that there is a prescription to imagine it, a prescription encoded in the particulars of the artifact that serves as a prop for making-believe, and whose force derives from underlying conventions of construing works of the sort in question. Being fictional thus has an ineliminable normative dimension: it is what is to be imagined in a given context, rather than merely what may be imagined. For example, in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s image on screen being that of a large man makes it fictional that Charles Foster Kane is a large man; the opening shots—a series of lap dissolves—having a certain visual content ²⁷ See Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. For an entr´ee into this important work, see my critical notice, ‘Making Believe’, Dialogue 32 (1993): 359–74 (reprinted in The Pleasures of Aesthetics).

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makes it fictional that at the beginning of the story one is shown Kane’s estate, Xanadu, from a distance and shrouded in mist, and then at progressively closer range; Ray Collins’s voice saying certain things on the soundtrack in the scene at Susan Alexander’s apartment makes it fictional that Collins’s character, Jim Gettys, has threatened Kane; the way the shot of Kane expiring is sequenced in relation to others which are understood as a flashback to Kane’s childhood, makes it fictional that Kane’s dying word, ‘rosebud’, refers to his beloved old sled, etc. Of course, much of this generation of fictional truths will be indirect, dependent on various conventions of the medium in effect and on other things taken provisionally as fictional, and accordingly, much of our knowledge of such fictional truths will be inferential. And sometimes, what is made fictional by a film’s narration is orthogonal to, or even the opposite of, what first appears to be the case, that is, what it initially seems we are to imagine is the case; unreliable, uninformed, or unforthcoming narrators, though not as common in film as in literature, are still a significant possibility. Applying this suggestion to the issue of narrativity in film music, then, the question becomes, of a given cue, whether it generates, contributes to generating, or at a minimum, more firmly grounds, a fictional truth in the scene which it accompanies. Thus, film music which, when interpreted in the light of prevailing conventions of the medium and the surrounding narrative context, indicated that a character was afraid or was remembering a past incident, or that a man had been executed or an agreement reached, or that a situation was fraught with danger or else full of hope, where these things would not be established, or not so definitely, without the music, would clearly count as narrative.²⁸ We should note that nondiegetic music may, indeed, generate fictional truths even if only attended to with half a mind, or not consciously remarked at all while present. It will do this by causing a viewer, say, to perceive a scene as fraught with danger, even if the viewer is not aware of what is making her have that perception. Nevertheless, if such an imaginative perception is reliably produced in attuned viewers, and not undermined by subsequent aspects of the narration, then it may well be fictional that the scene is fraught with danger, even though the rest of the narrative indicators are insufficient to ²⁸ ‘Film music . . . often contributes subtly but effectively to the generation of fictional truths—helping to establish, for example, that fictionally a character is nervous or cocky or ecstatic’ (Mimesis as Make-Believe, 172).

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establish that and the viewer never realizes that it is the background music that in fact makes it so.

VII It is time to look at a range of illustrative examples of film music. I begin with examples whose narrative functioning is obvious, and which conform, expectedly, to the making-fictional criterion proposed above. I then explore another range of examples, ones that exhibit a different sort of narrativity, and show how, on a more encompassing construal of the making-fictional criterion, these can be accommodated as well. Eventually, though, I turn to films containing nondiegetic music that is not, by that criterion or any other, reasonably construed as narrative. The music in such films instead serves other sorts of artistic function, ones attributable directly, I will argue, to implied filmmakers. One of the least ambiguous narrative uses of soundtrack music in mainstream film occurs in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, Jaws. I have in mind the ‘shark’ motto devised by the composer, John Williams. This consists of an ostinato alternation of low staccato notes at the interval of a second—a kind of aural sawing. The motto has an unarguable informational mission, namely, the signaling of the presence of the shark. It is true that there is another, visual, indicator of the shark’s presence when unseen, namely, shots from an offshore point of view, at the water line or slightly below it. But that indicator is not invariant in meaning, since it is sometimes employed when there is no shark about. The musical ‘shark’ motto is the only reliable signifier of the shark, and so has an ineliminable fact-conveying function. Correspondingly, it is clear that it is the presence of that motto on the soundtrack at a given point that makes it fictional that the shark, though as yet unseen, is in the vicinity of what is shown. David Raksin’s haunting score for Otto Preminger’s Laura provides some further instances of straightforward narrative use of film music. The ‘Laura’ theme, first encountered diegetically on a record player in the apartment of the ostensibly (but not actually) murdered heroine, pervades critic Waldo’s (Clifton Webb) represented recollections of the early days of his relationship with Laura (Gene Tierney), and unmistakably signifies his delight in her companionship. Subsequently we are treated to apprehensive versions of the ‘Laura’ theme as detective McPherson (Dana Andrews), alone in Laura’s

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apartment, studies the portrait of Laura over the fireplace; this cue then climaxes unsettlingly, revealing or underlining McPherson’s frustration with his investigation at this point. The most striking cue, one much noted in the film music literature,²⁹ is a weird version of the theme produced by playing it on a piano but only recording the overtones of each note struck. This is heard as McPherson views Laura’s portrait on a second occasion, before then drinking too much and falling asleep, and suggests the ghostly influence Laura is beginning to exert over his poor detective’s mind. In each of the foregoing cases, the music is plausibly viewed as making, or contributing to making, something fictional in the story: that Waldo delighted in Laura inordinately, that McPherson is (earlier) almost terminally frustrated with Laura’s case, that McPherson is (later) succumbing to bewitchment by Laura’s spirit. Another film rich in narrative pointing of a theoretically unproblematic sort is Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Regarding a scene in which Travis (Robert De Niro), the film’s semi-psychotic protagonist, is induced to move his cab away from the Manhattan workplace of a girl he is infatuated with and back into the grime and disorder of the city, one writer affirms that ‘the music . . . here reveals that Travis’s thoughts are not with the street but with Betsy.’ And of the bluesy, sensual saxophone tune itself, which stands for Betsy (Cybil Sheppard) in Travis’s mind, the same writer has this to say: ‘Travis’s vision of idealized womanhood, the music implies, is strongly erotic.’³⁰ Thus, Bernard Herrmann’s music does not serve merely to inform us about Travis’s mental life, or to second redundantly what other elements of the film establish about his mentality, but rather enters into making it fictional in the film that Travis’s mental life is a certain way at a certain time. Commenting on the blade-game fight scene in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, No¨el Carroll offers the following: ‘The uneasy, unstable quality of the music [by Leonard Rosenman] serves to characterize the psychological turmoil—the play of repression and explosive release—with which the scene, and the movie, is concerned.’³¹ If Carroll is right, the music of this scene, which intuitively seems an aspect of its narration, serves to underwrite as desired a fictional truth about the specific, highly volatile, character of the turmoil afflicting the young protagonists. Another instructive example from Rebel Without a Cause occurs later in the film, and consists of ²⁹ See Kalinak’s informative discussion in Settling the Score, 178. ³⁰ Graham Bruce, Bernard Herrmann: Film Music and Narrative (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 68. ³¹ Mystifying Movies, 217.

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a montage of two-way phone calls among various adults concerned with the whereabouts of the three main youngsters. This montage is covered by tense nondiegetic music, displacing the dialogue that would ordinarily be heard, the music thus signifying that the conversations, whatever their specific contents, are anxious ones. The opening of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront affords another illuminating example. An establishing shot of city docks, ocean liner in the distance, gives way to a street scene in which longshoreman Terry (Marlon Brando) becomes the focus of attention. Leonard Bernstein’s jazz-inflected score at this point involves a persistent drum tattoo overlaid with saxophone insinuations. Terry, in the darkening street, yells up to friend Joey’s window, persuading him to go to the roof to recover one of his pet pigeons, where unbeknownst to Joey, two men are waiting for him. After Terry releases the pigeon he has been holding, and promises to join Joey in a moment, the score becomes loud, aggressive, and insistent, its rhythms more syncopated. The music telegraphs us that something bad is in store, that the men glimpsed on the roof are trouble; the music can be said to prefigure Joey’s fall, pushed off the roof by thugs of the corrupt union boss, though without defining precisely what is about to happen. The cue is clearly narrative, and just as clearly, makes it fictional that Joey is in danger, even before he leaves the window for his fatal visit to the roof. Later on, after the boss tells right-hand man Charley to straighten out his brother Terry or else, Charley leaves union headquarters to do something, we know not what. Bernstein’s music at this point is very dramatic and tense: a series of rising notes in the brass, leading to a rhythmic explosion, the whole heard twice. The cue arguably conveys Charley’s complex state of mind, faced with the necessity of keeping his errant brother, who is threatening to do the right thing, in line: a mixture of anger, shame, and angst. If it does not singlehandedly make it fictional that that is Charley’s state of mind, the cue contributes ineliminably to making it so. A dissolve leads directly to the famous conversation between the brothers in the rear of a taxi. Consider, lastly, the final sequence in Fellini’s La Strada. Having five years ago abandoned his erstwhile assistant, the childlike Gelsomina, after she becomes too withdrawn and depressed to work, Zampano the strongman discovers, by accident, what became of her. That evening he does his act perfunctorily, gets drunk, starts brawling, then goes down to the beach, which reminds us of where he first acquired Gelsomina from her impoverished family. He walks into the water, goes back out, looks up at the sky apprehensively,

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then starts to bawl and grasp at the sand, on which he has flung himself in despair. At this point the ‘La Strada’ theme on the soundtrack removes all doubt as to what it is Zampano is bemoaning—namely, the loss of Gelsomina and her innocent love. VIII Clearly, making something fictional in a film is a sufficient condition of musical narrativity. Is it, however, a necessary one? Though providing the basic fictional truths of a story may be the central activity of a narrator, there are others that are almost equally paradigmatic of narration. One is the evincing of attitudes or feelings on the narrator’s part toward the story presented, in virtue of how the story is presented; another is the inviting of the viewer to adopt certain attitudes or feelings toward the story presented. In other words, in addition to giving access, in a particular manner, to the fictional states of affairs that constitute a story, a narrator generally manifests attitudes regarding the states of affairs to which access is afforded, and thereby suggests to the narratee attitudes to be adopted. In literature, for example, the narrator standardly tells us what happened, after his or her fashion, reveals, knowingly or unknowingly, his or her view of these happenings, and also suggests, explicitly or implicitly, how we should view what we are told happened.³² Now it seems plain that such narrational effects are often achieved by appropriate nondiegetic music: the music tells you how the presenter of the story regards the events being presented, or else how he would like you to regard them. But on the surface, this does not appear to be a matter of establishing, nuancing, or even confirming a fictional state of affairs in the story. So in light of that, can making-fictional be sustained as the effective mark of musical narrativity? I believe so. We need to make a distinction between what is fictional in a film’s story and what is fictional in the world of a film. The latter is a broader notion than the former. What is fictional in the film’s world comprises, in addition to the facts of the story, the facts of its narration by the special, often almost effaced, fictional agent known as the narrator. All that is still within the sphere of the fictional, that is, of propositions to be imagined by a viewer ³² In some literary fictions, for example, Hemingway’s The Killers or Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, this latter function may seem to have lapsed. But I would argue that even in such fictions there are attitudes the narrator implicitly invites the reader to adopt, precisely in virtue of so pointedly eschewing normal commentary.

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in comprehending the film. The film’s story consists of what is fictional about the characters who figure in the action; the film’s world includes, as well, what is fictional about the narrator, in relation to either the story narrated or the implied audience of that narration.³³ Returning to film music, a plausible construal of some nondiegetic cue will often have the implication, not that it makes something fictional in the story, but that it makes it fictional either that the cinematic narrator has a certain attitude or feeling toward some event being presented, or that the narrator encourages viewers to have such an attitude or feeling toward it. In either case, musical narrativity will still correlate with music’s making something fictional, only here it is a making-fictional in the film’s world, as opposed to a making-fictional in the embedded story. Some examples will serve to clarify this more encompassing interpretation of musical narration in terms of making-fictional. Music functions narratively, by any intuitive assessment, in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, particularly at junctures when a scrap of Lehar’s ‘Merry Widow’ waltz intrudes itself, suggesting the ‘Merry Widow Murders’ that are central to the plot. Several characters are heard singing or humming the tune in the course of the film, these occurrences being of course diegetic, but the tune is heard, in an altered form, as early as Dmitri Tiomkin’s title music, which accompanies a stylized shot of waltzing couples. Two notable nondiegetic occurrences after that are these. First, a few bars of the waltz theme in the cue that accompanies the family’s greeting of Uncle Charlie at the train station, as they walk off to their car to take him home: a tracking shot of the group, heading toward the camera, is eventually reframed so that only Uncle Charlie is in view, and that is when the scrap of tune is heard. Second, a more prominent statement of the theme when Uncle Charlie gives young Charlie an emerald ring, and she notices it is already engraved inside with an unknown someone’s initials. In both cases, the music arguably serves to communicate something to the viewer about Uncle Charlie’s identity, connecting him in some as yet unexplained way to the waltzing image presented at the beginning. But does the music make, or even contribute to making, something true in the film’s story as such, something that would not otherwise be the case? It is not clear that it does. To consider just the most obvious candidates, ³³ Of course, when a narrator in a film is also a character in the action, as with a homodiegetic voice-over narrator, then certain facts about such a narrator are also facts of the story.

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neither cue makes it true—even viewed in retrospect, when a connection to Lehar’s tune is understood to import as well a connection to the ‘Merry Widow’ murders—that Uncle Charlie is the murderer, nor does the second make it true, say, that young Charlie suspects that he is. The reason is that those fictional truths are firmly established, and independently, by other elements in the film.³⁴ What, then, might they be doing? I suggest that the first cue makes it fictional that the narrator is obliquely hinting to viewers with regard to Uncle Charlie’s identity, and the second makes it fictional that the narrator is, even more directly, connecting Uncle Charlie to something sinister in his past, though at that point viewers have no notion of what it might be. The second cue may, in addition, function as the narrator’s proposing of a deep psychic link between Uncle Charlie and young Charlie, one that her subsequent moral corner-cutting, in dealing with an uncle she then knows to be an unhinged killer, partially bears out.³⁵ In any event, the status of these cues as narrative can be recovered in the guise of what is made fictional, not in the story as such, but in the narrator’s attitudes or actions with respect to viewers. But what of the curious musical image of waltzing couples first encountered in the title sequence, which recurs nondiegetically and unchangingly at three crucial points in the story? In each case the image is superimposed over the action already on view, which continues underneath. The first occurrence is after the interaction between Uncle Charlie and young Charlie over the emerald ring, as young Charlie goes off to clear the supper dishes, leaving only Uncle Charlie on screen. The second occurrence is at night in the town library, when young Charlie, after reading the newspaper account of the ‘Merry Widow’ murders, gets up, almost reeling, as the camera tracks upward and away from her. The third and last is just as Uncle Charlie falls to his death beneath the wheels of a hurtling locomotive. ³⁴ For example, that Uncle Charlie is the murderer is underwritten by his unexplained money in the opening hotel room scene, by his evident concern to keep an item in the daily newspaper unread, by his unreasonable aversion to being photographed, by his maniacal utterance at the dinner table about fat, wheezing, useless widows, by the already inscribed ring itself, etc. That young Charlie suspects him does not become true until she is informed about the manhunt by one of the two detectives who have been trailing Uncle Charlie—though of course there have been signs, intended for and readable by the viewer, well before that. ³⁵ Their psychic kinship is adumbrated earlier in the film, in the parallelism of our first views of them both, reclining on beds with their hands behind their heads, in the worried, almost cynical remarks about family values that young Charlie makes when we first hear her speak, and in the coincidence of young Charlie deciding to send her uncle a telegram just hours after he has, unbeknownst to her, sent one in her direction.

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The first and second of these might be interpreted as the narrator’s display of the mental contents of the character then in frame, in the one case signifying Uncle Charlie’s meditation on his hidden identity, in the other, his niece’s realization of that identity. But in addition to being implausible because it does not reflect the very different emotional tones with which uncle and niece would have contemplated this identity, this sort of interpretation seems unavailable for the last occurrence, where ascription to the terrified and soonto-be-obliterated Uncle Charlie of a contemplative thought about his past strains credulity to the breaking point. This suggests that the recurrent waltzing image should be construed as a form of narrator’s commentary: it is employed by the cinematic storyteller at crucial moments to underline in an intentionally jarring manner—because achieved through the elegance and innocence of a waltz—Uncle Charlie’s horrific identity. Thus, what is made fictional by these musical cues is not that Uncle Charlie is the murderer, but that the narrator is adverting to that fact, almost sardonically, both before and after it is narratively established. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause provides another example whose analysis helps us to see our way here. The opening scene unfolds at a police station, where three juveniles whose lives will soon importantly intersect find themselves separately in trouble. At one point Jim Stark (James Dean), who has been talking with a sympathetic counselor, bangs and kicks a desk in frustration, at the counselor’s explicit invitation. As his outburst concludes, dissonant music surges up briefly on the soundtrack. This undoubtedly adds tension to the scene, but does it contribute to defining the fictional world in any way? That Jim is wildly and angrily frustrated is fully established by what the perceptual enabler of the film has allowed us to see and hear of his outburst. What, then, is the music, which certainly seems to have narrative force, doing there in narrative terms? Perhaps this: it serves to get across the phenomenology of Jim’s feelings, giving viewers access to the quality of his outburst from the inside, supplementing the access afforded from the outside by the ordinary perceptual data of the scene. Suppose that is so. Then on the one hand, this could be construed as a subtle sort of making-fictional in the story, namely, making it fictional that the quality of feeling in Jim’s outburst was precisely such and such—the quality the musical cue in question is expressive of. On the other hand, this could equally well be construed as a making-fictional concerning not Jim, whose emotional condition is perhaps overdetermined by other indicators in the scene, but instead the narrator’s stance toward the audience.

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That is, perhaps the cue’s cash value is that the narrator is inviting viewers to share in rather than merely observe what Jim was feeling, and as a consequence, encouraging viewers to adopt a sympathetic attitude to him. The cue’s narrativity, in other words, may be a matter of its definition of the fictional world of the film, comprising both narrator and story narrated, rather than that of the story per se. Consider now the common use of background music to create atmosphere in a scene, but without attributing mental states to any character therein. Is there anything that can thus be said to be made fictional in the film world? In cases where an appropriate atmosphere is created, i.e. one that seems consonant with the way the story is otherwise told, what is made fictional might be that the narrator wants the viewer to assume a particular mood or frame of mind as certain events are presented for perception. In cases, though, where the atmosphere created does not gibe with the style or tone of narration already established, then even indirect fictional generation of that sort may be absent. The musical creation of mood may then have to be understood not as a narrative action, but rather as one which aims to affect the viewer immediately in a way that has no fictional upshot. Where nondiegetic music adds atmosphere to a scene without plausibly making anything fictional in the film’s world, simply producing a mood in viewers, it seems that responsibility for it, as for other nonnarrative, purely compositional elements of a film, must rest directly with the implied filmmaker. Exploring the interpretive option just broached—of assigning musical cues to the implied filmmaker rather than the film’s narrative agent—will be the focus of the remainder of this essay. But before turning to that I conclude this section with a brief look at narrative uses of nondiegetic music in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Vertigo boasts perhaps the greatest of classical film scores, and its greatness as a film is due, in no small measure, to that score and its masterful integration into the film in almost every respect. The intrinsic interest and sophistication of Bernard Herrmann’s score has been much discussed, but what is most striking about it in the context of the film is how significant a burden it bears for limning the mental states and traits of characters, by comparison with most other films. Vertigo abounds in occasions where not only are viewers fictionally informed about the inner lives of the characters through soundtrack music, but the music is what in large part makes it fictional that their inner lives are to be so characterized. When Scottie (James Stewart) first sees Madeleine/Judy (Kim Novak) at the rear of a restaurant in San Francisco, the music serves significantly to

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characterize her for us and for him: ‘if the camera movement toward Madeleine lets us experience the physical nature of Scottie’s immediate attraction to her, it is the music that most fully conveys the sensual mystery of the woman.’³⁶ This scene is instructive in other ways as well. Madeleine gets up to leave, comes toward Scottie, pauses momentarily, and is very noticeably framed and lit in profile—shown, in effect, to best advantage. But who is doing that? The cinematic narrator, in order to indicate something about Madeleine and the overwhelming psychic effect she has on Scottie on first encounter. The filmmaker, Hitchcock, cannot do that—though he can do certain parallel things to Kim Novak and the set in order to bring about, on a fictional plane, the narrative result. The cinematic narrator is the one who, fictionally, showcases Madeleine, for our benefit as trackers of the story, and then underscores this showcasing through the musical resources under its control, e.g. by crescendoing at the point of held close-up.³⁷ After the crisis of the first part of the film, Scottie spends some time in a sanitarium, sunk deep in depression and aimless longing. Soon after his release, we are given a high pan over the front of Madeleine’s apartment building, as the ‘love’ motif—a four-note Tristan-like descending figure—is sounded romantically by French horns. This foreshadows Scottie’s appearance in frame at the end of the camera movement, with Madeleine obviously in mind: he approaches a blonde woman in front of the building, about to get into what was Madeleine’s car, only to discover that it isn’t her. The exact content of his hope and then disappointment is supplied by the musical cue. Scottie’s vertigo first occurs in the film’s opening scene, while he is hanging from a rain gutter, high above the city, having slipped in the course of pursuing a fleeing felon. This is importantly recalled in the plot’s pivotal event, occurring halfway through the film, which takes place at the Mission of San Juan Battista, from whose tower the real Madeleine, unwanted wife of Gavin Elster, will appear to have leapt to her death. As Madeleine rushes into the church, and Scottie begins to follow, Herrmann’s music foretells the recurrence of Scottie’s vertigo: ‘milder variants of the clash of tonalities which were heard in the [opening] rooftop sequence hint at the probable effect climbing the tower will have upon Scottie’.³⁸ The musical cue, it seems, generates ³⁶ Bruce, Bernard Herrmann, 143. ³⁷ This scene illustrates nicely a narrative possibility mentioned above (see n. 21), whereby a cinematic narrator might be thought of as presenting story events, conceived of as already existing fictionally at a basic level, in a certain way, through a partial shaping of the event being viewed. ³⁸ Ibid. 173.

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the fictional truth, at the point it sounds, that Scottie is going to experience vertigo when he climbs, though he is not experiencing it now. In other words, that Scottie’s vertigo is coming becomes something that is to be imagined by viewers at that point in the film. Alternatively, perhaps the truth is generated that Scottie knows it is coming, or is concerned that it might.³⁹ In the film’s final scene, also set in this tower, the tremolo trills which are prominent during this, Scottie’s second ascent, suddenly cease, suggesting he has at that point overcome his vertigo and will be able to complete his trip to the top. At the start of the ‘letter’ scene, the moto perpetuo string figures prominent in the opening rooftop scene recur, in an overwrought vein, accompanying Judy’s detailed recollection of the tower incident and her role in the deception perpetrated there. This underscores sonically how emotively charged the incident remains for her, and helps us understand why she is ultimately unable to carry through the writing of the letter of confession. In the famous ‘nightmare’ sequence, the habanera music associated with Carlotta—a dead woman with a tragic past with whom Madeleine appears to identify—becomes more discordant, almost parodic, through the addition of stereotypical castanets and tambourine, conveying unmistakably the intensity of Scottie’s oppression by Carlotta/Madeleine. But more specific psychological pointings yet have been laid at the door of the scoring in this film, with some plausibility. According to one writer, the rather banal music that accompanies a walk taken by Scottie and Judy in the park adjacent to the Palace of Fine Arts, soon after he meets her and senses a kinship with the lost Madeleine, ‘suggests Scottie’s feeling of dissatisfaction with this working-class version of the elegant, sophisticated woman of his memory’.⁴⁰ On a more general plane, Herrmann’s music helps forge a connection between Scottie’s vertigo in the literal sense, that is, dizziness caused by heights, and vertigo in a metaphorical sense, that is, emotional and metaphysical disorientation, which in Scottie’s case results from his obsession with someone who in effect does not exist. While the dual nature of vertigo—its involving both attraction and repulsion—is realized visually through an unprecedented combined forward zoom and reverse tracking shot, musically it is realized through rolling arpeggiated seventh chords punctuated by harshly bitonal ones. In some subtle but undeniable way it is due to Herrmann’s vertiginous musical cues ³⁹ Even more conservatively, perhaps the only fictional truth generated is that the narrator is reminding us of the possibility of Scottie’s imminent vertigo, without it yet being fictional either that it is imminent, or that Scottie believes that it is. ⁴⁰ Bruce, Bernard Herrmann, 163.

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that it is fictional, in Vertigo, that the physiological and the psychic aspects of Scottie’s affliction are but two sides of the same coin. I have tried to show, through the varied examples in this section, the viability of a ‘making-fictional’ criterion of narrativity for nondiegetic film music. There is, I submit, an intuitive match between the concepts: any nondiegetic music we would regard as narrative in status is music that can be seen as contributing to making something fictional in the world of the film and vice versa. IX Narration, though, however broadly construed and however subtly carried off, is not always the basic charge of nondiegetic film music, and serving a narrative function not always the best explanation of its presence. I want now to consider films where nondiegetic music is featured that appears not to be of a narrative sort—where thus, in my terms, the music does not make anything fictional in the world of the film and is not reasonably assignable to the film’s internal narrator. Instead, the music seems best understood as directly at the service of the implied filmmaker. I begin with some films that are in different ways intermediate or borderline in regard to the contrast I want eventually to draw. In Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 8 1/2, Guido, a famous but floundering director, has gone to a fashionable spa to try to recover his mental equanimity and decide on a direction for his new film. We find him in a spacious bathroom, as Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ begins on the soundtrack. There is a cut to masses of people taking the waters at the spa, walking in rows and carrying parasols, among whom Guido eventually takes his place and receives his allotted glass. We see a conductor conducting, though with no orchestra in sight, and later see that he is leading a small salon group—one that could not be the source of the music we hear in the form we hear it. That cue ends and Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville immediately starts up, but with a robustness, once again, that surpasses the resources of the musicians visually established as present. The effect of both cues, it seems, is one of gentle mockery of the behavior and attitudes of the spa’s clientele. The musical soundtrack during this sequence is what one might call quasidiegetic. That is to say, the music can be thought to be audible in the world of

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the story, because it is fictionally grounded in an observable source, and even confirmed later as something heard by a character (as by Guido’s subsequent whistling of snatches of the Rossini)—but not in the precise form heard by the viewer, in respect of volume, instrumentation, or performance quality. The same quasi-diegetic status attaches to the music in the final scene, the press conference-cum-party, designed to launch Guido’s supposed film, at the extravagantly erected ‘Spaceship’ site. We hear Nino Rota’s excited music, which begins with a variant on Khatchaturian’s ‘Saber Dance’, and eventually brings in almost all the other motives heard earlier in the film, as Guido is mobbed by impatient questioners and alternately shielded or prodded by his handlers, all captured in swooping, restless camera movement. Once again, we are shown a small band set up on a platform, and can even observe at one point the synchronization of the soundtrack with the rhythm, visually apparent, of the band’s drummer, but there is still a discrepancy between what we can hear of Rota’s marvelous score and our sense of what sort of sound the band visually in evidence could have produced. So, does such quasi-diegetic music serve a narrative function? To the extent the music is considered nondiegetic, its function seems to be, in the first scene, satirical commentary, and in the second, mood enhancement, both arguably from a point of view internal to the film. So despite their peculiar status, these cues, insofar as they are nondiegetic, are plausibly ascribable to the cinematic narrator. They make things fictional: in the first instance, that the narrator views the spa goings-on satirically, and in the second, that the narrator wants to induce a certain mood in viewers with regard to the final episode. The soundtrack music’s equivocal status as diegesis does not thus seem to yield anything correspondingly intermediate as regards narrative assignability. Another example of intermediate status occurs in the ‘rogue auto’ scene in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, in which the villain Van Dam’s henchmen attempt to kill the hero, Thornhill, by forcing him to drive down a dangerous cliff road while completely inebriated. I would claim that the music of this scene not only generates tension and underlines the driver’s state of drunkenness, but at the same time signals, through its jokey style and lighthearted character, the absence of any real danger for Thornhill. Is this then a communication from the cinematic narrator, or from the implied filmmaker? That is to say, is it fictional that Thornhill is not truly in peril, or at least that the narrator knows he is not? Or is it rather that Hitchcock is telling us, on the sly,

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that he does not intend to do away with his main character at this point? It is hard to say which, but in a film whose borderline self-conscious or modernist character has often been remarked, this is perhaps not surprising.⁴¹ Most of the music in Peter Weir’s Witness, composed by Maurice Jarre, functions in the by now familiar mood-setting, character-delineating, attitudeevincing, or thought-specifying way, and is unproblematically categorizable as narrative. It begins with floating, gently pulsating synthesized chords, as images of Amish farmers looking up out of fields, and buggies traveling down roads, occupy the screen.⁴² What is conveyed is a sense of harmony and awe, a sense of the homogeneous spirituality of the world inhabited by the Amish, especially as compared with the vulgar and violent world of ‘Englishers’ (the Amish term for their secular neighbors). During a sequence in which an Amish boy in Philadelphia’s 30th St. Station gazes high above him at an erotic statue of two mythic figures in some sort of embrace, the pulsating music, in voicelike chords, comes back, suggesting his bewilderment and wonder at the statue and what it depicts. A variation of this gently pulsing music is prominent during detective John Book’s night of healing—with Rachel, a beautiful Amish widow, at his bedside—at whose farmstead he has ended up with a gunshot wound. The music serves to suggest the growing intimacy and spiritual bond between them. After the violent climax, in which Book manages to dispose of his corrupt pursuers—with the help of some Amish corn, providentially stored in a silo—the pulsing music underscores the long, silent glances of farewell between the two protagonists, reaffirming the essential goodness of their interaction, which stops poignantly short of actual love-making. In all the foregoing, the music is naturally construed either as establishing something about the characters or else as evincing the attitudes of the cinematic narrator towards them—attitudes we are clearly invited to share. However, there is the virtuoso ‘Barn Raising’ scene, located roughly in the center of the film, to consider. This provides the occasion of the film’s main musical cue: an extended piece, lasting about four minutes, on the order of Pachelbel’s Canon (that is to say, variations on a ground bass). The image track shows us wagons laden with supplies, coming together, people on foot congregating, getting ready to work, and then, in stages, the raising of the ⁴¹ See Wilson’s discussion in Narration in Light, ch. 4. ⁴² The particular visual look of these images is due to Weir’s trademark use of idealizing telephoto shots.

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barn, beginning with walls assembled at an earlier time, and finishing with the whole superstructure in place. The music, by means of its unity, solid flow, and arching sureness of direction, admirably symbolizes the strength of the Amish and the spirit of life-affirming communitarianism exemplified in the activity of cooperatively building a newlywed couple the barn they will need to sustain themselves. What, then, gives any pause in regarding this cue as wholly narrative? Only this: the meter and rhythms of the music in this scene are largely and significantly, though not slavishly or mechanically, synchronized with the actions visually depicted. The pace and pattern of the visual editing seem to respond, not so much to any internal narrative demand, but rather, to the steady progression of the music. The cue is not so much designed to flesh out the scene as the scene seems designed to illustrate the cue. All told, this suggests assignment of the cue’s music to the implied filmmaker, as opposed to the internal narrator, since the artful synchronization noted is most naturally taken as an aspect of the aesthetic construction of the film as the conjunction of an image track and a sound track, rather than an aspect of how the narrator is presenting, through resources available to him, the story. It seems plausible to regard the music of ‘Barn Raising’ as attributable, at least in part, directly to the implied filmmaker. The main cue in Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire occurs near the beginning of the film, accompanying a scene of athletes in training: two dozen or so men running along the ocean in gym whites, represented as the fifty-yearold memory of one of the runners. Vangelis’s synthesized music, a tune of simple nobility over a throbbing bass with snare drum-like accents, is heard throughout, as the credits roll. The cue lasts a few minutes, and the scene ends visually with the group of men cutting inland and returning to the grounds of a building in Kent, where they have gone to train in preparation for the 1928 Olympics. Now this cue may contribute in part to narration—understood as makingfictional—by making more precise the state of the runners as exhilaration, as opposed to mere determinedness, or by evincing a narratorial attitude, e.g. one of confident control, or by indicating a mood the narrator would like to impose on the viewer, e.g. one of heroism. But there still seems to be a certain ‘surplus value’, as it were, to the cue. Those narrative ends do not appear to exhaust the functioning of the cue; its scale and expressiveness seem more than is called for with respect to those ends, imparting to the activity

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of jogging on the beach an almost godly aspect, without it becoming fictional in the story that such activity really has such status, or even that the narrator believes that it does. Instead, it seems tempting to regard it as attributable, at least in part, to the implied filmmaker directly: it appears to testify to the almost religious regard in which he holds the athletic efforts of those young Britishers of yesteryear. The emotive ‘surplus value’ of this cue, as far as plausible narrative functioning is concerned, is what points, it seems, to the implied filmmaker as a locus of attribution.

X Having uncovered some cases of film music with equivocal or partial narrative status, we are now ready to contemplate cases of substantially, perhaps wholly, nonnarrative film music. My claim is that such music, which I characterize as additive (or juxtapositional) film music, is attributable directly to the implied maker of the film. Such music alters, often powerfully, the artistic content or effect of the complete film, but it does not do so by nuancing narration, i.e. by making or helping to make things fictional in the film’s world. As a first example, consider Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. There is only one significant musical cue in the film, a segment of Monteverdi’s Magnificat. It is heard very near the opening, during which the titles are projected, and again at the end, when Mouchette, an abused country girl of 13 or so, commits suicide by rolling in a sheet into a pond and drowning. Lindley Hanlon gives a sensitive reading of the music in this film that supports, I think, a largely nonnarrative understanding of it, an understanding that connects it rather more closely with the filmmaker than with the film’s internal storyteller: From Mouchette on, Bresson uses music only at the beginning or the end of a film unless the source of the music can emanate from the space and situation of the film narrative . . . It is a more subtle, less intrusive means on Bresson’s part of authorial commentary on the action of the film . . . Recurring after Mouchette’s death, the Monteverdi music seems to function as Bresson’s requiem for the girl, who has wrapped herself in shroudlike vestments . . . The words of the ‘Magnificat’ affirm the possibility of another life after death and sanctify Mouchette’s decision to escape from the despair of her own life.⁴³ ⁴³ ‘Sound in Bresson’s Mouchette’, in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (eds.), Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 329–30.

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The music here is most plausibly assigned to the implied filmmaker—as affirming the general possibility of grace as exemplified in the tale of Mouchette⁴⁴— rather than to the film’s relatively effaced internal presenter, especially as it seems to frame the fictional narrative from without, like a pair of musical bookends, as opposed to shaping it from within. Terrence Malick’s extraordinary film, Badlands, provides an outstanding example of an appropriated score, consisting mainly of extracts from Carl Orff’s ‘Musica Poetica’ and Erik Satie’s ‘Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire’. This score also serves as one of my key examples of nondiegetic film music that is not, in the main, usefully construed as narrative. Badlands, based loosely on the Charles Starkweather shooting spree of 1958, contains a partially unreliable narration, since two components of it, the image track and the voice-over narration by one of the main characters, Holly (Sissy Spacek), are at odds with one another (in some respects, only at certain points, and in other respects, throughout). Here, as is customary, the visual representation is taken to be the more truthful, ‘on the convention that seeing is believing’,⁴⁵ and so when what is shown conflicts with what is told, we are inclined to credit the former. Orff’s and Satie’s music, I maintain, is characteristically employed in Badlands in a mode of distanced and reflective juxtaposition to the story narrated, by an intelligence standing just outside that narration. It is not, in general, attributable to the film’s narrating agent, but only to the implied filmmaker. To make this point I examine at length one particular cue. Fairly early on, we are shown Kit (Martin Sheen), the film’s other main character, working cattle in a feedlot, after having been fired from his job as a garbage collector. On the soundtrack is a striking, far from inaudible, portion of Orff’s score, consisting of sharply rhythmic xylophone or marimba music, built on an exotic scale, having no obvious connection with, or fittingness to, gritty scenes of cows being force fed, almost expiring in the heat. That is to say, there is nothing in the character of the states of affairs depicted that the music could plausibly be thought to second, nor anything indeterminate about those states of affairs that the music might plausibly be thought to specify. Could it be narrative in the sense of expressing the cinematic narrator’s view of the situation depicted? This seems unlikely, if only because it is rather ⁴⁴ In identifying this theme as of grace I of course rely on a knowledge of Bresson’s oeuvre as a whole, and of the artist implicit in that oeuvre, one with a deeply Catholic vision of the world. ⁴⁵ Chatman, Coming to Terms, 136.

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unclear what sort of attitude could be signaled by such music in relation to the events shown. In addition, the cinematic narrator, who often visually corrects or gainsays Holly’s romantic and simplistic notions of what has transpired in her time with Kit, comes across as an agency too sober and straightforward, almost nonhuman in its detachment—consider the odd montages of nature shots that occur occasionally during the film, giving the impression of an iguana-eye’s point of view—to be credited with a sentiment as quirky and mischievous as that expressed by this musical cue. Might the music be narrative in virtue of acting to characterize Holly’s recollective impression of Kit’s job at the feedlot? Such a hypothesis is multiply problematic. First, we haven’t been given any reason to think the nondiegetic music is in the service of the voice-over narrator, but at most, the cinematic narrator operating from the point of view of or on behalf of some character; that is to say, there must be rather special indications, not here present, before we will think of nondiegetic music as a resource belonging to, rather than applied in elucidation of, a character in the story. Second, since there is reason not to regard the image track as an accurate version of Holly’s memories—it regularly outstrips, and occasionally contradicts, her verbal narration of what happened—the ground for thinking of the soundtrack music as signifying Holly’s impression of those sights seems lacking.⁴⁶ There is little reason to think, in particular, that she ever visited Kit at the feedlot or witnessed the kinds of scenes we see on screen. Third, whatever attitude we found such music to connote, it seems not to be one we would ascribe to hazy-minded Holly while the thought of Kit at the feedlot was before her mind. This leaves as the only interpretively live possibility the assignment of the music to the implied filmmaker who, from a point outside both the story and its narration, has apparently added this music as a kind of counterpoint to the fictional drama. To what end? It is hard to say, especially without an interpretation of the film as a whole, but possibly one of aesthetic embellishment, or derangement of the viewer’s moral compass, or refraction of the story’s content in a distorting mirror, or external meditation on the film’s happenings. ⁴⁶ The sequences that make it clearest that the image track is not to be thought of as a reliable representation of Holly’s occurrent memories are one in which we see Kit shoot a football and then hear Holly, a minute later, recount this event, and another in which we see Kit, trying to outrun his police pursuers, suddenly stop his car, get out, shoot its left front tire flat, and then blatantly await capture, while Holly alludes to the incident, never observed by her, in a mode of speculation rather than reportage: ‘Many times I’ve wondered about why Kit didn’t get away. He said he had a flat, but from the way he kept coming back to that, I doubt it.’

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Now the music of Orff and Satie is characterized in general by an intentional simplicity, a primitiveness of musical materials, and a studied directness of effect, and that employed in this film is no exception. Thus perhaps the function of this music in the film—on a global plane, rather than scene-byscene—could be said to be a reflection of the basic childlikeness and obliviousness to social reality of the two principals, and especially that of Holly, the verbal narrator. I think that is so, but for the reasons given above this music, and that aspect of the film’s content, is best laid at the door of the implied filmmaker, rather than any agent internal to the narrative. My next examples come from Woody Allen’s Love and Death, whose appropriated score is derived entirely from the suites to Lt. Kije and Alexander Nevsky by Prokofiev. The sleigh-like music from Lt. Kije starts up after Natasha (Diane Keaton) announces her engagement to a herring merchant, and extends through her riding off in a carriage and subsequent shots of Russian troops in training, marshaled to protect Russia against Napoleon. This music has a satirical effect, more properly attributed to Allen as auteur, than to Boris, Allen’s character, as narrator, or even the cinematic narrator conceived as encompassing Boris’ verbal narration. A farcical battle scene between Russian and French troops, shortly thereafter, is accompanied by the grim and heavy music for the ‘Battle on the Ice’ from Alexander Nevsky; the mismatch is palpable, and the implied equation of the two battles laughable. Both the satirical intent inherent in this juxtaposition, and the frame of cultural reference with which it operates, seem to put it beyond ascription to either Boris or the cinematic narrator. The last example I discuss of a film much of whose musical soundtrack is best seen as additive or juxtapositional, rather than narrative, is Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The opening credit—the words ‘A Clockwork Orange’ on a garish orange field—is followed by a close-up of Alex and his pals (droogs) in a bar that dispenses drugged milk (moloko), disposing its consumers toward acts of ‘‘ultraviolence’’. Soon Alex’s voice-over is heard, which establishes what we will soon see as Alex’s recollections of his recent past. Walter Carlos’s synthesized music here is a slow-moving, quasiHandelian progression, with a hint of ‘Dies Irae’. It functions narratively in setting an appropriate mood, in suggesting something of the effect of molokodrinking, and in perhaps foreshadowing some of the grim doings the narrator, acting on Alex’s behalf, has in store to present to us, in due course. But the appropriated music employed in the film, notably that of Rossini and Beethoven, functions rather differently.

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Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra Overture begins on the soundtrack as an old man is being beaten by Alex and his droogs, continues over a cut to another gang of youths assaulting a naked girl on a stage, leading to a fight between the two gangs, and covers the escape of Alex and his droogs from the scene by car, fading out only as they approach a house in the country whose occupants they are going to terrorize. There is no obvious narrative appropriateness to the music: it seems neither to convey information about the events shown, nor to suggest the narrator’s perspective on those events, nor to suggest an attitude that viewers should plausibly adopt toward them. I take it that the first and third points will be granted without dissent; the second, though, might be supported further, as follows. If the claim of narrative function is to be sustained on that ground, it seems we would have to posit either a perversely inhuman cinematic narrator, whose lighthearted view of the proceedings is reflected in the music, or else a psychologically more normal one who merely signals to us, through the music, Alex’s perversely comic perspective on the violence he is perpetrating on others. The first possibility strikes me as unmotivated, while the second, though more promising, faces the problem that it casts Alex’s reactions on perhaps too high a level of sophistication. Thus we arrive, once again, at the assignment of this music directly to the implied filmmaker as interpretively the most reasonable option. As such, how does it function? Pasted onto the scenes of violence presented by the film’s internal narrator, it invites us, at least initially, to see them as a joke, thus making us complicit in the mindless pleasure of Alex and his pals in inflicting pain, in the expectation, presumably, of getting us to be even more horrified when we realize what we’ve been duped into. Kubrick, and not the cinematic narrator, is addressing us directly through this odd and unsettling juxtaposition of music and story. A similar scene takes place in Alex’s room at home, with two girls he has picked up in record shop. It is filmed in extremely fast motion, to the accompaniment of Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Here both the fast motion filming and the superimposed frenetic music seem to reflect the activity of the implied filmmaker, as opposed to that of the film’s perceptual enabler or internal commentator. A related, though distinct, use of music occurs in a scene also set in Alex’s room, to which he has repaired after the first night’s round of ultraviolence. He deposits things in his booty drawer, checks on his pet python, and puts the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on his sound system. The music,

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here diegetic, is synched to a montage of close-ups of statue parts, as Alex imagines acts of sex and violence, recounted in voice-over. But this intrastory perversion of Beethoven by the protagonist echoes and parallels the implied filmmaker’s superficially warped overlaying of Alex’s recollections of occasions of torture and fornication with Rossini’s diverting scores.⁴⁷ Near the very end of the film, Alex is being questioned by a few intellectuals, including the writer he crippled earlier in the film, about behavioral conditioning via background music. It is not too much to suggest that this scene obliquely raises within the film the issue of film music’s legitimacy and role, and of its possible subversive effects, e.g. the undermining of autonomy or the blunting of rationality. This self-consciousness in the film about what we may call nonaesthetic or incidental uses of music reinforces the assignment of additive, as opposed to narrative, status to the Rossini overtures appropriated by Kubrick for A Clockwork Orange.⁴⁸ XI Though in many cases where nondiegetic film music is more reasonably assigned to the implied filmmaker rather than the film’s narrative agent, we find that such music is being used ironically or satirically, e.g. as with Love and Death and A Clockwork Orange, it is important to remember that that is not the only possibility. The examples of Mouchette and Badlands, and in a partial vein, Witness and Chariots of Fire, illustrate as much.⁴⁹ And we may also observe, at this point, that nondiegetic music is not the only music in a film responsibility for which may redound, without intermediary, to the implied ⁴⁷ A contrasting, rather more cynical, view of the mode of film-scoring of which A Clockwork Orange was perhaps the pioneer is provided in this recent commentary: ‘Faced with the task of differentiating their scenes of brutality and mayhem from all the other scenes of brutality and mayhem, filmmakers are using music to distance the viewer from violence—or to comment ironically on it. As the images get more explicit, the accompanying tunes seem to get more frothy. Everything from Bach to hook-laden pop-rock songs provides background for images of fist fights, shootings, stabbings and torture’ (Kenneth Chanko, ‘It’s Got a Nice Beat, You Can Torture to It’, New York Times, Feb. 20, 1994). ⁴⁸ The scene may in fact be what Wilson calls a ‘rhetorical figure of narrative instruction’, something offered by the filmmaker to the viewer as a key to interpreting the film’s narration generally. See Narration in Light, 49–50. ⁴⁹ Another intriguing case is Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1983), whose soundtrack employs an overmodulated synthesized harpsichord version of eighteenth-century composer Marin Marais’s hypnotically repetitive Sonnerie de Ste. Genevieve du Mont. It is not clear to me—on the basis of a single viewing, many years ago—whether that music belongs in the satirical or the non-satirical subcategory of additive film music.

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filmmaker, and which may be read by us as a direct reflection of authorial stance or personality. Jane Campion’s film, The Piano, offers a case of film music commissioned and composed for diegetic insertion in a film—Michael Nyman’s music for mute protagonist Ada’s pianism—rather than nondiegetic accompaniment. The music’s characterization of its fictional originator—Ada—is a function that can only be assigned, it seems, to the implied filmmaker, as the agent who has chosen the characters, their actions, and their traits, in constructing and arranging the elements of the filmic object as she has.⁵⁰ How does the distinction we have been exploring, of film music as additive versus film music as narrative, relate to another standard classification, namely that of film music as commentative? The answer is: not simply. The equation of narrative and commentative will not do, for two reasons. First, some music of clearly narrative function is not reasonably thought of as commentative, unless all information-conveying counts as commentary. Second, some additive music seems to supply a commentary, if oblique, on matters with which a film is concerned. In light of this, we might distinguish between externally commentative music, assignable to the implied filmmaker, and internally commentative music, assignable to the cinematic narrator. Still, it is important to stress that musical commentary on the events of a fictional story as such, or the characters figuring in those events, remains a possibility only for the cinematic narrator internal to the fiction. Additive music, assignable to an implied filmmaker, might generate, as noted, a kind of commentary as well, but it could not be on the fictional events themselves, from a perspective internal to the fictional world, but at most on the representation of those events or on the significance of events of that type. The implied filmmaker of a fiction film is not on the same plane as the events of the film’s world—which are for him, as for us, fictional—and so his direct commentary on those events is not a coherent option. For instance, if the Magnificat cue at the end of Mouchette expresses Bresson’s attitude of consolation toward Mouchette’s suicide, this has to be understood not as an ⁵⁰ One critic has remarked on the music for this film as follows: ‘Both the orchestral and solo keyboard music suggest a modern minimalist gloss of Chopin and Liszt but spun off plain, abrupt folk tunes . . . the pianism suggests someone doggedly trying to speak through the keyboard . . . As distinctive as it is, the music is strangely cramped and emotionally arid . . . the solo piano passages sound too much like elementary practice exercises to soar into the stratosphere’ (Stephen Holden, New York Times, Jan. 30, 1994).

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attitude literally directed on the suicide of Mouchette—an event in which Bresson presumably does not believe—but instead as an attitude bound up with the film’s representation of that event, or directed toward events of the sort represented by the film. A standard function of nondiegetic film music, we have observed, is to reveal, confirm, or make precise a character’s feelings or attitudes toward something or other in the story.⁵¹ Such a function makes most sense in connection with a narrator, rather than an implied filmmaker, since it presupposes an agent on the same plane, fictionally, as the characters, whose existence the narrator credits, and whose lives the narrator selectively presents to us. The deliverances of narrative film music seem to come from one who shares a world with the characters, rather than one who has invented them, and everything else in the fictional world, from whole cloth. On the other hand, another standard function of nondiegetic film music is to bathe the incidents of a film in a common atmosphere. The thematic, instrumental, and stylistic continuities typical of film scores help to create a consistency of tone or feeling across the span of a film, especially where the events presented are not very tightly connected in a dramatic sense. Thus this, rather than any narrative task, seems to be the main function of Rota’s score for Fellini’s Amarcord. When nondiegetic film music has this function, it is more naturally ascribed to an implied filmmaker than to an internal cinematic narrator. Nondiegetic film music bridging scenes of different character, say, or smoothing over large lapses of time, is of this sort. Such music, like the presentational, voice-over, and mind-over narrators in a film, is understood primarily as constructed or arranged by the implied filmmaker in putting together the aesthetic object that is the total film, rather than as something used or employed by the cinematic narrator in its different narrative capacities. Returning to the five functions of film music recognized by Copland, I would suggest that only two—underlining characters’ psychological states and sustaining and releasing tension—are clearly assignable to the cinematic narrator. The others—ensuring continuity, providing background filler, and creating atmosphere—can with equal, or more, justice be regarded as activities of the implied filmmaker, in that they seem aimed directly at the viewer ⁵¹ A function highlighted by No¨el Carroll in Mystifying Movies, 216–23; Carroll labels film music of this familiar type ‘modifying music’.

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as an aesthetic subject, at causing his or her experience to be a certain way, rather than at defining or delineating the film’s fictional world.⁵² If we consider, similarly, the list of functions drawn up by Gorbman in her study of the operation of classical film music,⁵³ I would suggest that two—the signifying of emotion, and the referential and connotative cueing of narrative—are assignable to the cinematic narrator, while the remaining two—the provision of continuity and the achievement of unity—make most sense as assignable to the implied filmmaker. What of my own list of fifteen functions of film music, drawn up earlier, in Section VI? By present lights, I think they sort out as follows: functions (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (9) are arguably narrative, in that they involve making something fictional in the film, and so music functioning in such ways is assignable to the cinematic narrator. Functions (10), (11), (12), (13), (14), and (15) are arguably nonnarrative, and are often achieved through music of additive status, assignable only to the implied filmmaker. There is not, however, a perfect correspondence between the division of functions as either narrative or nonnarrative, and the categorization of cues as either narrative or additive, because a cue can have significant functions of both sorts. What is true is roughly this: if a cue has significant narrative function, whether or not it functions in addition nonnarratively, then it is a narrative cue, whereas if a cue has no significant narrative function, then it is an additive cue. The question I have been exploring in the latter part of this essay can be put as follows: when is nondiegetic film music primary a compositional element in a film, at the command of the implied filmmaker, and when is it instead, or in addition, an instrument we imagine as at the service of the cinematic narrator, generating truths in the world of the film, either about the story as such or about the act of its narration? But perhaps the same question poses itself, on close examination, for a number of other filmic elements viewed initially just as compositional, e.g. lighting or camera angle. When is the dim or filtered quality of light in a scene—as in Vertigo, when Judy reemerges into Scottie’s presence as Madeleine—merely a directorial choice and when a manifestation, as well, of narrative activity on the part of the film’s internal presenter, showing things in a light they would not otherwise appear in? When is an off-kilter view of a man running across a square—as in The Third ⁵² Though in regard to the last of these, creating atmosphere, it was suggested earlier how this can in many cases be understood as having narrative status, if the atmosphere involved is one the film’s narrative agent can be plausibly thought of projecting. ⁵³ Unheard Melodies, 73.

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Man—just a matter of the director’s tilt of the camera in relation to the actor being filmed, and when is it to be regarded as well as connoting an intervention of the cinematic narrator, as showing us the character from an oblique perspective, with whatever that suggests about either the character or the narrator’s view of him? The issues addressed here concerning the interpretation of nondiegetic film music resonate, I suspect, across the whole spectrum of meaning-making elements in film.

10 Evaluating Music Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. (Mark Twain) If it sounds good, it is good. (Duke Ellington)

The above opposed epigrams about musical worth neatly serve to introduce the sorts of issues I want to explore. Is Twain right, in terms of what he implies about the grounds for evaluating music, or is Ellington? If they are both right, how can we reconcile the apparent conflict between the principles suggested by their respective observations?¹ One possibility for reconciliation is that Ellington’s epigram is to be taken straight, while Twain’s is to be understood as tongue-in-cheek. Another is that Twain is alluding to secondary or sophisticated aspects of musical worth, while Ellington is focused on primary or elemental ones. A third is that their epigrams simply apply to different, and disjoint, spheres of music, Twain’s to the classical tradition, and Ellington’s to that of jazz. A fourth is that Twain’s observation reflects the fact that, for some music, evaluations evolve over time, First published in P. Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 93–108. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Revue Internationale de Philosophie 198 (1996): 593–614. ¹ These epigrams are not, of course, strictly inconsistent with one another. For Twain’s epigram does not even entail that Wagner’s music is good. But suppose, for the sake of argument, we take Twain’ s remark to have the force, that there is music that is good, but does not sound good. Even so, there is no conflict per se with Ellington’s dictum, but only with its converse, to wit, if music is good, it sounds good. However, if we construe Ellington as implicitly committed to the biconditional, which seems reasonable, then a contradiction emerges. Otherwise put, if we elaborate the principle behind Ellington’s remark to be ‘music is good just insofar as, and to the degree that, it sounds good’, and that behind Twain’s remark, taken straight, to be ‘music is not always good just insofar as, and to the degree that, it sounds good’, then the logical opposition of these principles is plain.

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so that impressions formed on first exposure are replaced, on deeper acquaintance, by opposite ones, while Ellington’s observation underlines that, for much music, the ear’s first impression is a pretty reliable guide to musical worth. I will forbear trying to decide among these possibilities for reconciliation. I will, however, assume there is some truth to Twain’s remark underneath its display of wit. We shall see a reflection of this shortly in our discussion of whether all the value of music as music can be encompassed under the rubric of how good it sounds, or even that of how rewarding it is to experience.

I When confronting the issue of musical value, two questions must be distinguished at the outset. One question is that of the value of music generally. Why is any music valuable, and how does music, of any sort, add to or enrich human life? A particular form of this first question, though one that takes it perhaps closer to the second question, asks what makes music distinctively valuable, as opposed to other arts; that is, what does music—more or less any music—offer that other arts or activities do not, or at least, not to the same degree? A second question is that of the value of particular pieces, genres, or styles of music, and is more obviously inherently comparative in nature. What makes a given piece (genre, style) of music valuable, or alternatively, what makes this piece (genre, style) of music more valuable than that one? In even pithier guise, the two questions are, in effect, (a) what makes music a good, or contributory to human good, and (b) what makes this music good, or better than other music? Once these questions are roughly distinguished as above, an immediate concern is what is the relationship, if any, between acceptable answers to them? Does knowing the answer to (a) help with the answer to (b), or vice versa? Is there a constraint in either direction, so that, for example, what makes music valuable generally is also essentially what makes particular pieces valuable, or that what makes particular pieces of music valuable is, writ large or in some way summed, what makes music valuable generally?² One possible relationship might be that a work that displayed in high degree the properties ² See Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 275–6.

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that make music valuable generally, or one that fulfilled well the function fulfilling of which makes music of value generally, was therefore a relatively valuable piece of music. But is that so? It seems unlikely that things are as simple as that. In any event, a clear case of divergence between the value of music as a whole—of the phenomenon or practice of music—and the value of an individual piece of music would be the opportunity music affords to bring people together in a social setting for shared experience and interaction. Call that the social value of music. This appears to be a value of music generally without being a differentiating value of any individual piece of music. Other candidates for values of music generally that are yet not such as to add much, if anything, to the comparative value of an individual work of music, would be these: serving as a vehicle of relaxation; serving as a distraction from practical concerns; serving as an accompaniment to and facilitator of activities involving bodily movement, such as dancing, marching, exercise, or physical labor. II In an important study devoted to the second of our questions, namely, that of the artistic value of individual works of art, Malcolm Budd offers a completely general conception of such value, meant to cover all artworks in all artforms.³ Budd aims to identify an artwork’s artistic value in such a way as to differentiate it from other values it may possess, e.g. as social record, religious artifact, financial investment, or totem of prestige. Budd’s straightforward proposal is that the artistic value of a work of art, its value as art, is determined by or is a function of the intrinsic value of the experience the work offers. By ‘the experience the work offers’ Budd means an experience in which the work is fully and correctly understood, its individual nature grasped for what it is. By ‘the intrinsic value of the experience’ Budd means the value of having such an experience for its own sake, rather than for the sake of any effects or consequences the experience may engender. What is excluded from the artistic value of an artwork is thus (a) anything about the work not directly reflected in the right sort of experience of it, and (b) any value of such experience that is not purely intrinsic, i.e. is in some way instrumental. ³ Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London: Penguin, 1995).

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Budd’s proposal, applied to music, is thus in line with, if obviously a refinement of, Ellington’s dictum that music’s value lies, above all, in how it sounds when you listen to it. There is little point in gainsaying the healthy intuition behind both Ellington’s dictum and Budd’s proposal. Still, though Budd’s proposal seems roughly acceptable, there are at least three grounds on which it can be challenged. One concerns the presupposition of a viable division between the effects or consequences of an experience, and the parts or elements of an experience, a division that may be difficult to sustain. The second concerns the restriction to the intrinsic value of the experience a work offers as the sole gauge of a work’s value as art, a restriction that appears inadequately justified. And the third concerns the confinement of artistic value to that which is manifested in or through experience of a work, a confinement that seems at odds with certain firmly grounded judgments of artistic value. I elaborate on these in turn. The distinction between an experience and its effects, though unproblematic on its face, has some tendency to dissolve under scrutiny. Experiences often have no unequivocal beginning and ending points. They characteristically do not start up with the sharpness of a pistol crack, nor do they characteristically close with a full stop. Many experiences have indeterminate beginnings, and take shape slowly. Often, rather than ceasing abruptly, they simply fail to continue developing or ramifying, though exactly where and when may remain elusive. This blurriness-around-the-edges is evident enough with traumatic experiences, such as losing a loved one, but attaches, if less blatantly, to many more ordinary experiences, appreciative ones among them. Turning to the case at hand, the endpoint of the experience of a musical work in audition, for instance, is fairly fuzzy, with no clear cut-off between the experience itself and what might be called, fittingly enough, its echoes and reverberations. A second, more important, challenge to the formula Budd offers us is this. Even if we assume the artistic value of a work of music to lie wholly in the value of the experience, suitably demarcated, that the work offers, it may not be defensible to restrict that value to the intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value of the experience, that is, the value of the experience itself as opposed to its effects.⁴ Granting for argument’s sake the workability of the division in question—between effects of, and elements in, a given experience—there ⁴ It may be that the broader value these instrumental goods contribute to—that a life is a certain way or possesses certain features—is intrinsic, even if they remain instrumental goods of the experience. (For discussion see Ch. 24 of this volume.)

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is insufficient reason to hold that only the intrinsic value of the experience a work offers is a measure of its artistic value, rather than what accrues in virtue of the experience’s effects. Suppose a given work of music is valued in part because it gives insight, when properly experienced, into the character of romantic love or the inevitability of suffering. If so, would this count as an intrinsic or an instrumental value of experiencing the music? The best answer would seem to be that it is both. For it is intrinsically valuable to have such insights while listening, or in the course of subsequent reflection on the music, but also instrumentally valuable, because the insights are thus, after all, acquired, something one can summon up for further use or benefit. If something counts as an insight, and if music affords it, then it is then an enduring asset, something whose value goes beyond the confines of the experience in which it is acquired. The same could be said about music that gave one access to a point of view that had not previously been available to one; the value of this would seem to transcend the value of the experience of achieving such access through the music, and thus be partly instrumental. It is also natural to consider here the possible moral effects of music.⁵ If there are any such, and if they could be shown to issue with some regularity from the comprehending experience of certain music, then they would constitute an instrumental value of the experience of such music that would seem to be at least a candidate for inclusion in the music’s artistic value. But is there not a Catch-22 of sorts lurking in regard to the putative improving tendency of certain music? It seems that either you already have a refined nature or developed moral sensibility allowing you to appreciate such music, in which case you will not improved by it, or else you do not, in which case you will not be able to properly appreciate the music, and so it will fail to have its proper effect. In other words, that you appreciate such music presupposes that you are a person of some moral capacity; thus, such music would seem to be powerless to transform you into that. A partial answer to this quandary is as follows. Even if you have to have certain minimal moral capacities in order to adequately appreciate great music, ⁵ Two essays on this topic are Colin Radford, ‘How Can Music Be Moral?’, Midwest Studies 16 (1991): 421–38, and Donald Walhout, ‘Music and Moral Goodness’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (1995): 5–16. The topic is also explored at length in Kathleen Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Higgins makes a good case for recognizing a moral dimension to music, though her focus is on plausible ethical effects of whole genres and practices, as opposed to individual musical works.

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calling as it does on emotional repertoire and practical insight as much as on perceptual ability, exposing yourself to such music plausibly helps to develop or reinforce such capacities, through providing a controlled arena in which such capacities to respond are exercised in a specific way, serving as a kind of touchstone of what it is to be human. In other words, it is true that you might already have to be disposed, in some measure, to a moral form of life, in order for great music to be of benefit to you, but immersing yourself in it might still function, ceteris paribus, to make you more human than you were before—without, of course, guaranteeing any such result. The example of Hannibal Lecter from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs is usefully recalled here, for that unparalleled film villain notoriously displays both the most malevolent cannibalism and the most cultivated appreciation of J. S. Bach. If one is so unkind as to observe that Hannibal Lecter is a fiction, and a meretricious one at that, it remains true that the coexistence of moral turpitude and aesthetic refinement in a given person is more than merely imaginable: Richard Wagner approached this, and many of the Nazis who later gloried in his music exemplified it rather fully.⁶ But such cases, fictional or actual, are largely a red herring in regard to claims of a moral dimension to music and the possible relevance of such to some music’s artistic value. No one would claim that great music can, entirely on its own, make appreciators of it better people, nor that great music, however supplemented and seconded, is likely to make all appreciators of it moral. The most anyone can sensibly propose is that such music, properly grasped, exerts, through the attitudes or states of mind the music projects or the complexes of feeling it evokes, a humanizing and moralizing force, though one easily enough overridden or neutralized, and thus that, all things being equal, people exposed to such music tend to be morally better, more humane, than they would otherwise be. Of course even this remains unproven, but it is not to be dismissed out of hand. At the least, good music may help to remove barriers to moral education by increasing an individual’s awareness of the subjectivity of others, which is ⁶ The examples of Hannibal Lecter and Nazi doctors enjoying their chamber music in the evening strike us so forcefully, I suggest, precisely because they are, in fact, exceptional. They violate an empirically grounded regularity of artistic taste comporting with some degree of moral awareness. While it seems almost natural for purveyors of gangsta rap, say, to be engaged in shady or illegal activities from time to time, given the thrust of the music and the implausibility of attributing it all to a persona unrelated to the rapper, it is more surprising when professional pianists and violinists are found to be so engaged. The exception—of immoral behavior from devotees of fine music—calls attention to the presumption that there is likely some degree of correlation between aesthetic refinement and moral awareness.

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clearly a prerequisite to treating others as ends in themselves and taking their interests into account in deciding how to behave. Appreciation of good music may plausibly lead to a more vivid imaginative grasp of the mental life of others, a necessary condition for regarding those others in a morally appropriate manner. But does great music simply inform us of morally relevant data or acquaint us with morally relevant perspectives, thus supplying a necessary condition of acting morally, or does it in addition motivate us, to some extent, to act morally? If it does not, then it will not be, even all things being equal, a morally improving force, but only something that lays the groundwork for acting in a moral way. However, I think there is reason to believe that some music, at any rate, is not only of epistemic value, but also motivating in relation to moral life. In sum, then, it is reasonable to take a musical work to be greater, and greater as art, on the assumption that it has moral effects or tendencies of the sort postulated among those who experience it fully and correctly, leaving aside whether it can be shown to have them. And this constitutes a ground of value, or reason for valuing, distinct from that of the specific musical merits in virtue of which the work possesses such moral force as it does. This is not, of course, to license every demonstrable benefit of the experience of a work as contributory to its artistic value. Being instrumentally beneficial in the ways—moral, cognitive, and emotional—I have been discussing is arguably a part of art’s proper purpose or mission—unlike, say, the capacity of experience of a work to alleviate mental illness, induce sleep in the weary, or promote a sense of self-satisfaction. The instrumental benefits to which I draw attention are consonant with historically prevalent intentions of composers for their works, as well as being implicitly involved in received judgments about greatness in art. Such benefits rightly enter, it seems, into the assessment of a musical work’s goodness as art. There are surely other instrumental benefits of the experience of music that could reasonably be reckoned relevant to its worth as art. Music can be instrumentally valuable in virtue of providing, through its sounding form, a paragon or practicum of how to move or to be—how, in effect, to go on. Good music, adequately experienced, can serve as a highly abstract, though suggestive, ‘design for living’.⁷ ⁷ This relates to Monroe Beardsley’s suggestion that music might reasonably be held to symbolize or exemplify general patterns of continuation, growth, or development. See his ‘Understanding

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Some music, correctly appreciated, may be instrumentally valuable in virtue of the influence exerted on one’s general outlook, enabling one to think or feel the world differently, thus enlarging one’s life as a result. Such music does so by embodying a process of thought or a frame of mind, one that through attentive and sympathetic listening one is allowed to enter, and that might not be otherwise communicable, or communicable in as vivid and effective a way. Some music, finally, may be instrumentally valuable through contributing to the sense of self and the formation of individual personality. Musical works can arguably help to constitute and define the self that attends to them, internalizes them, and identifies with them.⁸ Some music may even have the disposition to produce such effects on personality as to count as transfigurative. It is important to note that the objective value of a piece of music in this respect is distinct from its personal value in that respect to a given individual. Both are comparative, but only the latter is relative in a strong sense. The former concerns a piece’s power or potential, among pieces of music generally, to contribute to self-definition and the like in virtue of its formal and expressive qualities; the latter concerns the actual historical contribution of a given piece of music to shaping some person’s identity. The latter may be due, in part, to the former, but there are usually idiosyncratic factors at work as well. That some piece of music had a profound effect on Sam, and became a touchstone of his emotional and intellectual life thereafter, means that it is, unquestionably, a piece of music with personal value for Sam. But it may not, for all that, have much objective value in this regard, that is, it may lack significant potential to so affect prepared listeners generally. III I turn now to my third challenge to Budd’s proposal about artistic value. Even if the artistic value of music is acknowledged to be centrally a matter of the value of experience of it, whether intrinsic or instrumental, that does not exhaust what such value comprehends. Why? Because certain things enter

Music’, in Kingsley Price (ed.), On Criticizing Music (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). ⁸ See Leonard Meyer, ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music’, in Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 22–41; Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), ch. 6; and Higgins, The Music of Our Lives, ch. 6.

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into an artwork’s artistic value that are not reducible to the value of experiencing the work in the prescribed manner. The artistic value of a work of music, in other words, may quite reasonably outstrip its experiential value, even broadly understood. An important component of musical artistic value is what may be called influence-value, the impact a musical work has for the better on the future course of music.⁹ Examples of works in whose artistic value there is a significant component of influence-value include Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, Debussy’s ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’, Schoenberg’s Piano Pieces, Op. 23, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This component of the artistic value of music goes beyond the value, intrinsic or instrumental, of the experience it offers. It is reflected in the works of value that the aforementioned works have spawned, the new avenues of musical composition they have opened up, or the unforeseen sorts of musical experiences they prepare the ground for, but do not themselves afford. When we identify musical works as seminal, revolutionary, or ground-breaking, and praise them as such, we are in the realm of artistic value I am labeling influence-value. It may be suggested, though, that actual influence-value is one thing, and potential influence-value another. The former would consist in actual positive effects on the future of music, whereas the latter, by contrast, would consist in being such as to give rise to such effects, conditions of reception being favorable. In other words, a work’s potential influence-value would amount to its having the capacity to beneficially influence the future of music through its directly appreciable artistic features, to wit, its form, expression, or technique. Having distinguished actual from potential influence-value in this manner, one might then go on to suggest that only potential influence-value, which flows directly from a work’s having ‘the right stuff’, is relevant to claims of artistic value. Yet it seems to me that, despite the validity of the distinction between them, actual influence-value, and not just potential influence-value, is properly accounted part of the artistic value of works of music, especially when such works are seen not in isolation, but as part of an ongoing tradition of music-making and musical thinking. No doubt having ‘the right stuff’, and ⁹ I am ignoring, for simplicity of discussion, positive effects on other arts or spheres of culture. But in principle there is no reason to exclude these as irrelevant to an assessment of artistic value. Also, in speaking of influence-value I shall, unless otherwise indicated, have in mind positive influence value, that of influencing the future of art for the better.

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at the right time, figures in a work’s artistic value, but so, it seems, does what becomes of that historically. Since actual influence on the history of music depends, as we know, not only on the nature of the work and the relations it bears to its antecedents, but on a contingent degree of receptivity to and uptake of what it offers, we may need to recognize a measure of artistic luck in how much artistic value accrues to a work. For that is what actual, as opposed to merely potential, seminality, revolutionariness, and so on, require. But what of influence that is freaky, undeserved, or even a result of repugnance—as when an inferior work, in an unpromising mode, prompts an artist to angrily create something superior in a wholly other vein? The sort of influence that would seem germane to artistic value is where earlier art prompts emulation, adaptation, or further exploration in the same or related directions—where it serves as an example and inspiration to later art, rather than merely a negative spur to it. Perhaps, then, what is defensible is only that some actual influence-value contributes to a work’s value as art; perhaps only when such actual influence-value is coupled with, or rests on, a work’s potential influence-value does it do so. Still, in those cases, contribute it does.¹⁰ But suppose that, contrary to what I have just been arguing, it is really only potential influence-value that can be held germane to artistic value, a work’s particular fortunes in the subsequent history of music being discounted as irrelevant. The existence of such influence-value would still constitute a challenge to Budd’s proposal. For a work’s potential influence-value—its power or propensity to alter the stream of musical culture for the better—remains something over and above the features of the work in which that power or propensity inheres, and is distinct from and not reducible to the value, whether intrinsic or instrumental, of experiencing the work correctly. Having said this much, influence-value may now rightly be qualified as a secondary sort of artistic value, though a real one nevertheless. The reason is as follows. Such value is clearly parasitic on primary, experience-based artistic value, in the sense that it is value that accrues to a work in virtue of its issuing in or paving the way for other works that have a value beyond influence-value—presumably, experiential value. To have led to the creation of other works, but ones without notable experiential value, or ones with ¹⁰ Note also that influence-value, of either sort, might very well reside naturally in a set of pieces, rather than any particular one of the set, though those individual pieces would then share or participate in the influence-value of the whole. A good example would be the last ten or so of Mozart’s piano concertos.

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only influence value, would seem not to amount to artistic value of any kind. Influence-value is thus like a promissory note that needs to be redeemed by the exhibition of subsequent induced works of positive experiential value. But such notes can be redeemed, and have been, time and again. Finally, are there other varieties of artistic value possessed by individual works of music, apart from influence-value, ones that go beyond the value, intrinsic or instrumental, of experiencing the work comprehendingly? Here are some candidates: (a) Problem-solving value: part of the artistic value of a musical work might reside in the problems it solves subject to various constraints, formal or expressive.¹¹ It is true that the way a work answers to problems set by its predecessors might enter into how it strikes an informed ear, with awareness of such solutions being intrinsically rewarding to sustain, but the fact of constituting a solution to a preexisting artistic problem of some importance would seem to be a ground of value in itself, not reducible to the value of a listener’s awareness of such a solution having been arrived at.¹² (b) Originality-value: part of the artistic value of a musical work might lie in its originality or innovativeness relative to its tradition. Now although this might again be encompassed in the experience the work offers to an informed ear, in that originality, a backward-looking characteristic, comes across when one holds a work up against its context of emergence, its prototypes and predecessors, while listening. However, the originality of a work vis-`a-vis its background, a complex relational property, is of value in a way that goes beyond the value of appreciating such originality. (c) Performance-value: part of the artistic value of a musical work might be as a source of pleasure for performers in negotiating its difficulties, or as a vehicle for a performer’s display of emotionality or taste. Clearly, music might be especially enjoyable to play, or pose challenges to execution that are exhilarating to overcome, or provide unusual opportunities for selfexpression, without being particularly rewarding to listen to. Furthermore, some music might be said to be more valuable in virtue of allowing, more ¹¹ See Stephen Davies, ‘Musical Understanding and Musical Kinds’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 69–81; Anthony Savile, The Test of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). ¹² A similar brief might be lodged for constructional features of a musical work that are not appreciatively accessible, yet are partly causally responsible for features that are. One would have to make the case that there was value here that outstripped both that of the features made accessible to the ear and that derived from appreciative reflection on the role played by such constructional features.

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than most, for differently revealing interpretations from performance to performance—performances that work out differently the relation between the music’s form and content. So it seems that there certainly are other non-appreciative-experience-based sources of artistic value, apart from influence-value. I will not, however, try to settle here exactly how many, or how important, those sources are.¹³ IV My aim in the remainder of this essay is to explore the primary, that is to say, intrinsic-experiential, value of a piece of music for a listener. I want to try to pinpoint what that fundamentally consists in, and what it might, most generally, be gauged by. As the preceding discussion has made clear, I hold that a significant part of the artistic value of a piece of music, that is, its value as art, may be non-experiential, consisting in such things as originality, or influentiality, or being a solution to a standing problem in a musical tradition. In addition, I hold that the experiential value of a piece of music as art may in principle go beyond what is intrinsically valuable in such experience, and properly reflect extrinsic benefits of certain kinds. My target here, however, is precisely that central dimension of music’s value for listeners, namely, that which is intrinsic to the listening experience itself, wherein such experience is deemed worth having for its own sake. Even if we agree that the artistic value of a work of music is primarily given by the intrinsic value of experiencing the work with understanding,¹⁴ our criteria for assigning musical value are naturally apt to be considerably more concrete than that. Asked to defend the judgment that some piece of music was good as music, a listener will rarely, and certainly not only, submit that experience of it is of high intrinsic value. There seems surely to be a place for, or a role played by, various low-level criteria, such as attractive melody, interesting rhythm, intense expression, pleasing timbres, inventive harmony, ¹³ Another sort of value that might seem to figure in artistic value may be denominated composervalue. The composer-value of a musical work would reside in its functioning as a model for other composers of forms, techniques, or procedures for realizing valuable artistic ends. However, such value would appear to be pretty clearly parasitic on the value of works for listeners and performers, the intended recipients of music. That is to say, a musical work will be valuable in virtue of guiding and motivating other composers to further composition only insofar as it itself embodies value of some sort for listeners or performers; otherwise, that it prompts and enables further composition along the same lines would be, if anything, to its discredit. ¹⁴ Note that this might rightly be taken to include, in addition to apprehension of music as it sounds, retrospective reflection on music after audition is complete.

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intelligible overall form, and so on. Such criteria are, of course, invoked more frequently on the ground than is the inherent rewardingness of an understanding experience of music. Yet clearly, such low-level musical merits lack generality, and fail to be even presumptively good-making, taken by themselves. Music can be good, and easily so, without attractive melody (for example, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet), without significant harmonic invention (for example, much of Palestrina or Handel), without substantial rhythmic interest (witness Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1), without pleasing timbres (witness Bach’s keyboard music), without evident emotional expressiveness (as with Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano), and so on. What is interesting is whether there are any defensible intermediate principles, so to speak, ones less abstract than that of the intrinsic rewardingness of the experience of listening, but not so concrete as those just recalled. Between the most abstract condition that might be taken to analyze the core of music’s artistic value—that experience of it be intrinsically worthwhile—and the most concrete experientially satisfying merit features appealed to in casual justification of verdicts of goodness of music—e.g. attractive melody, varied orchestration—may lie midlevel principles that capture the ground on which such verdicts and justifications rest, while providing a specification of general validity of what experiential musical value centrally consists in. One approach popular in philosophical aesthetics for almost fifty years— though it has somewhat wilted of late under attacks from particularists about evaluation—is to identify general properties of works of art that invariably conduce to or underlie artistic goodness across the arts—and presumably do so because such properties are inherently satisfying to experience, alone or in combination, under appreciative conditions. The modern source of this tradition of theorizing is Monroe Beardsley, who proposed that there were three ‘primary canons of criticism’: unity, intensity, and complexity.¹⁵ The claim is that insofar as a work exhibits one of these features it is ipso facto better as art than it would otherwise be, and that any of its features that appear to contribute to its value as art can be shown to be forms of, or to rest on, those three primary criteria: unity, intensity, and complexity. ¹⁵ These were first enunciated in his Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958).

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But there has been significant skepticism over whether those three are always, in all circumstances, positive-tending features; whether there aren’t sometimes interactive effects among them, ones that prevent an increase in one such dimension from always being value-enhancing; whether those three are all the independent positive-tending features with regard to artistic goodness; whether there is any effective way to sum such criteria, so as to justify comparative rankings of works exhibiting the three primary criteria to different degrees; and whether the presence of such features, even in high degree, is ever sufficient by itself to support a judgment of high comparative artistic value.¹⁶ So rather than attempt rehabilitation of that approach,¹⁷ I want to pursue another tack, one that tries to bring into relief the distinctive grounds of value for individual musical works, as opposed to works of art generally, while at the same time hewing more closely to the intuition that artistic value is centrally a function of the worthwhileness of the experience it offers. What I have in mind are proposals that might naturally be regarded as specifications of that intuition as it applies in the musical case. V Consider these two approving responses to music: (a) ‘I like how it sounds’; and (b) ‘I like how it goes’. While neither of these responses, which strictly speaking are simply subjective judgments of approval, constitutes an adequate basis for judgments of the artistic value of a piece of music, (b) both says more than (a), and also comes rather closer to being such a basis than does (a). And that is because (b) captures a feature fundamental to music’s being good, at a level less abstract than that of experience of it being intrinsically rewarding. Someone offering response (a) commits himself only to approving, first, the mere sonic appearance of the music, and second, an aspect of the music manifestable in the smallest perceivable doses. Someone offering response (b), ¹⁶ Some writers, notably George Dickie, have expressed this skepticism by doubting whether there are any ‘strong’, as opposed to ‘weak’, principles of criticism involving such criteria. ‘Weak’ principles get one only to judgments to the effect that a work has some artistic value—which is, of course, compatible with its being a bad work of art. See his Evaluating Art (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). ¹⁷ But see Frank Sibley, ‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’, in J. Fisher (ed.), Essays on Aesthetics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); and John Bender, ‘General but Defeasible Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluation: The Particularist/Generalist Dispute’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 379–92.

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on the other hand, has gotten closer to the musical heart of the matter, since such a response reflects enjoyment taken in musical progression, in how music evolves from point to point, whose most obvious manifestation is perhaps rhythm, and the way music’s parts, and especially those of small span, are joined together from moment to moment. ‘I like how it goes’ is a more telling specification of ‘I find experience of it intrinsically rewarding’ than ‘I like how it sounds’, because the latter, strictly speaking, indicates nothing of the essentially kinetic nature of music’s basic appeal. ‘I like how it sounds’, one may observe, would apply equally well to an imaginary art of short-duration sound bursts, carefully synthesizer-designed for aesthetic delectation. The appeal of the products of such an art overlaps only slightly, I would claim, with the appeal of music, which is indicative of why ‘how it sounds’ is less apt as an epitome of what makes music good than ‘how it goes’. ‘I like how it goes’ connects with the absolutely crucial notion of following music. There is in fact a rough equivalence between ‘I like how it goes’ and ‘I find the experience of following it intrinsically rewarding’. To take satisfaction in some music is, above all, to enjoy following it, and its value as music is plausibly quite centrally its enabling an experience of following its evolution over time that is intrinsically rewarding. Leonard Meyer’s central idea on the topic of musical worth is very much in this vein. It is that music is valuable insofar as it sets up expectations in the listener for how it will proceed, and then subsequently fulfills or frustrates those expectations in various ways, to varying degrees, and with more or less delay. The most valuable music, for Meyer, provides a structure in which there is delayed, but not indefinitely postponed, fulfillment of expectations, the gratification that results ultimately being the more valuable for the delay involved in attaining it.¹⁸ Clearly this is a further concretization of the idea that music is valued insofar as one relishes how it goes, or takes satisfaction in following it, one that gives it more specific content still. Unfortunately, and especially as it seems to privilege the unlikely or deviant continuation, it may be too specific, too limiting, to cover all ways that music may ‘go’, i.e. unfold or develop over time, that people find intrinsically rewarding. Sometimes a continuation that just seems right, beautiful, or cogent, may not be particularly unexpected—may not, in terms Meyer favors in a later formulation, impart a large amount of information relative to alternatives. ¹⁸ See ‘Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music’.

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A related suggestion, in this middle terrain between the conceptually unassailable and the empirically false, which concretizes further the idea of enjoying following music as the key to its central experiential artistic value, was offered by Edmund Gurney.¹⁹ The idea is that music, or at least music of the sort Meyer has labeled teleological, that is, giving an appearance of purposiveness or goal-directedness, has experiential value almost entirely in virtue of the satisfyingness of its individual parts experienced sequentially, i.e. in virtue of the satisfyingness of its small-scale evolution or progression, from moment to moment. Now another such suggestion, on roughly the same level of concreteness, would bring in, finally, that on which I have so far been silent, namely, the expressive side of music, and locate the experiential value of music centrally in the satisfaction of apprehending and responding to music’s expressive aspect. If the previous suggestion aims to capture most comprehensively what music offers on a formal level, as a process uninterpreted in other than musical terms, then the present suggestion aims to capture most comprehensively what music offers on the level of content, or as a process interpreted in terms of human life. For surely much of the interest of music is wrapped up in what it intimates of human gesture, feeling, and agency. But a principle more adequate than either of these may be arrived at by, as it were, putting them together. More than merely enjoying following the music in its concrete particularity or finding satisfying precisely how it goes, and more than enjoying perceiving and responding to the gestural, affective, and agential qualities that emerge as the music unfolds over time, what one finds intrinsically rewarding in the experience a good piece of music offers, and what perhaps most importantly determines its artistic value, is its very particular wedding of its form and content. That is to say, with a good piece of music one enjoys ‘how it goes’, to be sure—its individual, temporally evolving form—and again one enjoys ‘what it conveys’²⁰—the attitudes, emotions, qualities, actions, or events it suggests—but above all, one enjoys ¹⁹ See his major work, The Power of Sound (1880). ²⁰ I here make use of ‘conveys’ as a blanket term for music’s relation to its content, broadly speaking, i.e. anything beyond the properties it possesses as merely a sequence of sounds. ‘Conveys’ is thus intended to cover ‘expresses’, ‘exemplifies’, ‘represents’, ‘symbolizes’, ‘signifies’, ‘suggests’, even ‘evokes’; that is, it is being used to stand for the whole array of meaning relations music may exhibit. Much the same, by the way, is true of ‘expressiveness’ and ‘expressive’, as those terms figure in later formulations; they too should be understood as covering dimensions of musical meaning beyond that which can strictly be denominated ‘musical expressiveness’, as I would analyze that notion. (See Chs. 5 and 6 of this volume.)

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and finds intrinsically rewarding the fusion of how it goes and what it conveys, the precise way in which what it conveys is embodied in and carried by how it goes.²¹ If we equate the ‘how it goes’ of a piece of music with its configurational (or kinetic) form, and the ‘what it conveys’ with its expressive (or interpretive) content, then the ‘what it conveys in relation to how it goes’ of such a piece might reasonably be identified with its form or its content, more comprehensively viewed—that is, with its significant form, or immanent content. Call this picture of things ‘Model 1’.

Model 1 (i) How it goes: how note follows note, chord chord, motive motive, phrase phrase, and passage passage: configurational/kinetic form. (ii) What it conveys: gesture, action, feeling, mood, emotion: expressive/ interpretive content. (iii) What it conveys in relation to how it goes: significant form/immanent content. Of course, marking off configurational/kinetic form from expressive/interpretive content in this manner is not meant to suggest that these are standardly distinguished as such in concrete listening experience. Usually one attends to content-infused form, or formally-embodied content, rather than either form or content per se, though it remains possible, with effort, to focus abstractly on such form or content as such. The progression or movement of music is usually heard as both configurational and expressive, with those aspects fused together. Indeed, the boundary between purely intramusical relations, motions, and tensions grasped at the level of configuration (or kinesis) and gestural, affective, or actional contents grasped at the level of expression (or interpretation), is perhaps essentially blurred. The above model, then, just makes explicit the two poles, so to speak, of the object on which musical appreciation properly focuses. ²¹ Of course this is a familiar idea in the annals of aesthetics, if not put in precisely these terms. Certainly Croce, Collingwood, and Dewey defended versions of the intimacy of form and content in art, and Budd endorses the idea at several points in his book. A congenial development of the idea can be found in an essay of Richard Eldridge, ‘Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (1985): 303–16, though it is there elevated, mistakenly in my view, into an account of the notion of art itself.

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What is here proposed as the main focus of musical appreciation—that is, what music conveys vis-`a-vis how it goes—helps explain, I think, why the prevailing attitude in relation to music one loves is the desire to experience it repeatedly and fully in actual hearing. For only through such experience, or the simulacrum of it that mental simulation can provide, can one access the specific fusion of human content and audible form my working formula points up. Merely abstractly recalling the form, or even reviewing it concretely but unrespondingly, does little to satisfy the distinctive hunger for a sorely missed piece of music. Even less does abstractly recalling the music’s content, referenced in some manner or other, without retrieving and rehearing its specific sonic embodiment or vehicle. The above model, and the formula from which it is derived, is perhaps most adequate to the experience of music on the basic or ground level, as a succession of events of relatively short duration, each with a significance of its own, more or less absorbing. But another, more complex, model also recommends itself to us, in which it is acknowledged that what I have designated the side of content itself admits of form—that is to say, a ‘how it goes’—at a higher level, which form then generates in turn a further dimension of content, thus providing ultimately for the relationship between that content and its underlying form. Call this ‘Model 2’.²²

Model 2 (i) How it goes on an expressive level: how an episode of one expressive character follows an episode of another such character, and the pattern of this succession as a whole: expressive form. (ii) What it conveys in virtue of how it goes on an expressive level: dramatic content.²³ (iii) What it conveys dramatically in relation to how it goes expressively: (global) significant form/immanent content. ²² For simplicity’s sake I am leaving out the fact that high-order, or dramatic, content depends on and emerges out of not only high-order, or expressive, form but also large-scale configurational form, that is, a piece of music’s architectonic structure. But to acknowledge that in this model would reduce its transparency even further. (For more on such complications, but a defense of the primacy, nonetheless, of small-scale configurational form, see my Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).) ²³ ‘Dramatic’ is not an ideal name for all varieties of global expressive content, but ‘dramatic’ here, like ‘conveys’ and ‘expressive’ earlier, is intended broadly, covering all sorts of content of a global sort that music may convey, in virtue of its overall form and its pattern of expressiveness as a whole.

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To complete the picture we would need to recognize that relationships between higher-order forms and contents and those on the ground level might also enter into the appreciation of music, that is, serve as potential foci of intrinsically rewarding attention. Thus, if from Model 1 we have three elements, configurational form, expressive content, and their resultant low-order significant form/immanent content, and from Model 2 three elements as well, expressive form, dramatic content, and their resultant high-order significant form/immanent content, then in theory there are another nine relationships that become candidates for musical apprehension or contemplation, and hence, loci of evaluative assessment. Of those, the relationships between expressive and configurational form, and between dramatic and expressive content, would seem the most relevant. But at this stage of reflection we surely begin to lose our grip on what the experiential value of music mainly consists in. Thus I think we may safely ignore any further relationships of this sort, and rest with the two models already articulated, in which the central object of musical appreciation is identified as the relationship of content to form, on lower and higher levels, with such form and content themselves functioning, as well, as secondary and supporting objects of attention.

VI Confining our sights to Model 1, the simpler and more fundamental of our two models, it might seem that there is an asymmetry between the component labeled ‘how it goes’ (configurational form) and that labeled ‘what it conveys’ (expressive content), as potential loci of musical value. For the former—musical form—appears to have an independent claim on listeners, that is, it is of interest to apprehend on its own, while the latter—extramusical content—may appear, taken by itself, to lack any such claim. Budd, for example, adopts such a viewpoint: ‘our experience of the expressive aspect of music is not separable from our experience of the music, and we value the expressive aspect not in itself but as realized in the music.’²⁴ In other words, that a work of music has a configurational form that is absorbing, expressive meaning aside, is already a ground of musical value, such form being an appropriate, if limited, object of musical appreciation; but not so, ²⁴ Values of Art, 152.

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it seems, that a work has this or that expressive content, identified apart from the musical form that realizes it. But is this really so? I think not. What is true is that there is an asymmetry in degree —in that a work’s expressive meaning abstractly identified is of less artistic interest, and less contributory to artistic value, than the quality of its configurational form or the manner in which the expressiveness emerges from said form, but it is false that such meaning, considered apart from its vehicle, is of no such interest, or that its nature has no bearing on the artistic value of a work. Unusual, rare, subtle, deep, profound targets of expression, if attained, make a musical work better, because such contents are themselves more rewarding to contemplate, engage with, or respond to. For instance, a musical work expressive of bittersweet melancholy, or communicating the gestures of resignation, is arguably artistically more valuable, all things being equal, than one expressing simple cheerfulness or conveying an ordinary sort of anger. Recall that for Budd, the question about a musical work’s artistic value is simply this: Is the experience the work offers intrinsically valuable? The question I have highlighted, by contrast, is rather: What is the nature of the experience musical works typically offer, so far as the intrinsic value of such experience is concerned, and what more specifically are the dimensions of the experience in which such value resides? I have ventured to generalize about the value-relevant dimensions of the experience of music, and have concluded that they are irreducibly three: experience of configurational or kinetic form, experience of expressive or interpretive content, and experience of the embodiment or realization of the latter in the former. So if the experience a work offers possesses intrinsic value, this will be because the work is found inherently rewarding expressively, or configurationally, or in terms of its fusion of the expressive and the configurational, or in all three ways. Thus we can, if we like, now identify three prima facie criteria of experiential goodness in music: one, how rewarding it is to experience how the music goes, that is, how rewarding it is to follow as tonal process; how rewarding it is to register or respond to what it conveys; and how rewarding it is to experience what it conveys in relation to, or as embodied in, how it goes. Does it then follow that a work that rates highly in all three dimensions of the experience it affords is thus necessarily better than a work that rates highly in only two such dimensions? For instance, that a work with a distinctive representational content that exhibits a musically absorbing form and weds the two in a successful manner is necessarily better than a work with a more

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commonplace expressive content exhibiting musically absorbing form successfully wed to that content? The answer, I believe, is that it does not follow. This is because of the possibility, even likelihood, of interaction or interference between the dimensions of such experience. For example, it may typically be the case that works of markedly representational character, even when musically absorbing and exhibiting good integration of the representational and configurational, do not afford an experience on the whole as inherently rewarding as much music of nonrepresentational and only middling expressive character; the value of the appreciative experience of such a work is not the sum of the values of the three dimensions of appreciation considered in isolation, because in trying to realize them all in a single appreciative experience one finds that attention to the representational dimension harmfully competes with attention to the configurational, more so than when music has extramusical but not representational content. Still, though the value of musical experience will not, if this is right, be simply the sum of the value of the three dimensions of such experience that I have identified, those dimensions would seem to be the ones in which all such value resides, and the satisfyingness in those dimensions taken separately the only prima facie reasons to regard a work as musically good. VII How do the formulas and models of experiential value proposed above fare when held up against a piece of unquestionable and surpassing musical worth? By way of conclusion I choose, for brief examination in this light, Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, op. post., D. 959. I suggest that this sonata’s experiential value, that is, its central value as music, fits comfortably under the umbrella provided by those formulas and models. For, in short, its goodness as music is a matter of how satisfyingly it goes as a purely musical process, of how satisfying it is to engage with the content it conveys, and above all, of how satisfying it is to experience the way in which what it conveys is embedded in, intertwined with, and borne by how it very precisely goes. But let us try to identify, in regard to this particular musical composition, some of what, in particular, makes it so good. Now the schematic midlevel answer to the question ‘Why is Schubert’s sonata musically so good?’ is that the experience it affords, on a configurational level, on an expressive level, and on the level of their interrelation, is so inherently satisfying or worthwhile. On

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the purely kinetic level, it is highly absorbing to follow, in its small-scale and large-scale movement; from beginning to end the ear is regaled with beautiful, cogent, and original forms, or ways of sounding in time. On the level of content, what it expresses or conveys is distinctive, intense, and well worth engaging with. And on the level of fusion, the specific manner in which the work musically conveys its content seems wholly compelling, exhibiting throughout an elegance and rightness of means to ends.²⁵ Still, it will not be amiss to go into somewhat more detail in regard to the expressive and dramatic dimensions of Schubert’s musical essay. I begin with the former. This A major sonata possesses an intensity and variety of emotional expression quite out of the ordinary, covering almost the full range of human feeling. It displays perhaps the greatest range of moods and affects of any of Schubert’s works, yet manages to tie them all together into such a satisfying whole that listening to it is like living a human life in microcosm. What are salient loci of expressive goodness in this sonata? The following are four instances of distinctive expression, distinctively achieved, in most cases through music that is, in addition, itself entirely satisfying on a configurational level: (1) The uneasy stasis, suggestive of restless anxiety or obsession, at the beginning of the first movement’s development, achieved through harmonic oscillation between C major and B major—as opposed to the more usual nonreversing journey from key to key. (2) The unique nostalgia of the first movement’s coda, in which the movement’s opening rhetorical theme is recollected as if through a haze—its vital, almost peremptory force drained off, but its essential identity intact. (3) The unparalleled violence, approaching chaos, of the slow movement’s middle section, a remarkable evocation of someone going desperately out of control.²⁶ (4) The charming perkiness of the scherzo movement’s main theme, which charm is based in part on the piano writing’s suggestion of string pizzicati. ²⁵ The means here would include the configurational form basis of the music’s local expressiveness, and the expressive form basis of the music’s dramatic content, or global expressiveness. Some expressive forms, or patterns of expressiveness, are less satisfying than others, whether as forms per se, or in virtue of the sort of higher-order content they generate or fail to generate. ²⁶ The specific image of a man distraught to the point of tearing out his hair is, for me, almost inescapable.

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I turn now to dramatic, or global expressive, content. A striking example is afforded by the intense, soul-searching dialogue in which the music’s persona is engaged at the climax of the second episode of the sonata’s rondo finale, at measures 180-210. In this passage the music’s persona seems to pose, then reluctantly answer, questions it would rather not face, but that can no longer be avoided. And a sympathetic listener cannot help but feel they are the life and death questions of his or her own existence as well. As for the source, formally speaking, of the passage’s dialogic quality, it is the stark alternation of treble and bass in the sounding of the passage’s sharply etched, individually expressive motifs. Another example of global expressiveness in this sonata is something almost impossible to put into words: it is reflected in the impression a listener receives during its first movement, and perhaps most pointedly, its opening statement, of being addressed by an adult, and as an adult, of reflectively and unhurriedly being given the benefit of someone’s wisdom and maturity. This is one of several quite singular attitudes of mind somehow communicated by this sonata in the large, attitudes that give it the sort of moral force I earlier speculated may belong to certain pieces of music. A final example of global expressiveness in this sonata concerns a special sort of unity that some pieces of music attain. One kind of most valuable music is that which displays unity in such manner and degree as to stand as a powerful emblem of the unification of opposites and the reconciling of the diverse, not through the subduing or overpowering of one element by another, but through the evincing of a deeper relatedness despite superficial differences. Call unity of this sort transcendent unity, in contrast to the merely formal unity that is, in most cases, its substantial underpinning. Such emblematicity of wholeness as I have in mind is not just an abstract relationship that one may reflect on intellectually, but rather something one feels or registers in the course of listening. Schubert’s sonata displays that sort of unity, if any piece of music does. There is a striking thematic, rhythmic, and harmonic unification effected in subtle ways throughout the sonata, despite the rich surface variety of its four movements, which helps to generate the pronounced transcendent unity the piece evinces. Here I will just note some aspects of the sonata’s formal unification, ones that seem to play some part in its achievement of the other sort of unification.

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The opening six bars of the first movement are echoed, in loose retrograde, by the closing eight bars of the fourth and last movement; the first movement’s development section is derived almost entirely from the opening figure of the movement’s second theme; there is a clear reminiscence of the agitation of the slow movement’s middle section in the interpolated repeated-note triplet figures in the reprise of the slow movement’s main theme; the tensions resident in the first and second movements reappear in the second half of the scherzo movement’s main section, employing a variant of the figure from the first movement’s development; the opening motif of the trio section of the scherzo is a loose inversion of the first movement’s opening motif; rising or falling semitone motion is an important element in the main themes of the first, second, and fourth movements, and includes the mysterious alternation of A major and B-flat arpeggios at the very end of the first movement; finally, there is a clear locus of harmonic gravitation in the sonata constituted by keys a third up from the tonic. Of course elements of formal unity in a musical composition, even when widespread, do not inevitably issue in the sort of global expressiveness I have labeled transcendent unity, whose ultimate mark is a sense of transfiguring oneness in the listener, but I submit that in this case, they do. It would be quixotic to think that this incomplete and selective survey of loci of goodness in one very fine musical composition can conclusively establish the validity of the schematic midlevel formulas proposed earlier for that in which musical value resides—to wit, configurational, expressive, and expressive/configurational satisfyingness, or at a higher level, expressive form, dramatic content, and dramatic content/expressive form satisfyingness—but at least it has turned up nothing that fails to fall handily under them. In any event, it is only through such midlevel formulas, I think, that we may perspicuously bring together on this subject the view from above, in which musical value is understood in terms of the intrinsic rewardingness of experience of a work, and the view from below, in which musical value is seen in terms of familiar features—ones of sound, melody, rhythm, or mood—directly cited by listeners as grounds for approving a work.

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11 Musical Thinking If a lion made music, would we get what he played? (pseudo-Wittgenstein)

1. It has sometimes been remarked that making music—that is, composing, performing, or improvising it—involves thought, or is a form of thought. If so, what is the nature of the thinking that goes on in making music? And what of listening to music? Is the experience of the comprehending listener also a kind of thinking? How does musical thinking differ from the paradigm of thinking, that is, the formulation and manipulation of thoughts in words? Can musical sequence itself, rather than the activity of producing or auditing it, be regarded as a kind of thinking? In short, is music thought? In the course of trying to shed light on these issues I will take as a springboard various remarks of Wittgenstein on music that are to be found here and there in his writings. I will also yield to the temptation to emulate, in a small degree, Wittgenstein’s elliptical, oracular manner, a manner particularly apt to the exploratory stages of a philosophical investigation, which is certainly the case here. Whether what results should be considered an homage, a parody, or some mixture of the two, I leave to my readers to decide. 2. It seems clear from a number of Wittgenstein’s remarks, especially ones directed to particular composers, that he was indeed inclined to regard music as thinking.¹ In one place we find the following invocation: ‘The strength of the thoughts in Brahms’s music’ (CV, p. 23). In another place we are told that one ‘can point to particular places in a tune by Schubert and say: look, that is the point of the tune, this is where the thought comes to a head’ (CV, p. 47).

First published in Midwest Studies 27 (2003): 59–68. ¹ The following abbreviations are used for the citations in the text: PI = Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edn. (New York: Macmillan, 1953); BBB = The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958); CV = Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

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What is most striking about these observations is how natural it seems for Wittgenstein to think of music as a kind of thinking, how little in need of defense he appears to take that view to be. What if one invoked, by contrast, ‘The strength of the thoughts in the cuisine of les fr`eres Troisgros’, or ‘The strength of the thoughts in Michael Jordan’s basketball playing’? Would this seem as natural? Could we easily speak of a moment in Jordan’s progress to the basket, or of a dish in a ten-course meal at Troisgros, where ‘the thought comes to a head’? I suggest not. 3. In the Investigations and elsewhere, Wittgenstein remarks that one might describe the effect of a passage of music by saying ‘Here it is as if a conclusion were being drawn’ (PI, p.182) There are a couple of things to note about this. First, Wittgenstein does not say that, in such a passage, a conclusion is being drawn; rather, it is as if a conclusion were being drawn. So far, then, we are in the realm of analogy or metaphor, or perhaps of the dawning of an aspect. Second, the character of some passages of music to which Wittgenstein is calling attention is specifically that of seeming to draw or reach a conclusion, as after a period of reflection; it is not the idea of merely concluding, in the sense of stopping or terminating. Compare the endings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 110 or Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony, which seem to sum up and crystallize what has gone before, with the endings of, say, minuet movements from symphonies of the Classical period, even great ones such as Mozart’s Fortieth or Forty-first. The former have this special rhetorical character of concluding, whereas the latter have only the mundane character of coming to a close—however satisfyingly. 4. Wittgenstein treats the phenomenon further in another place: ‘If I say, for instance: here it’s as though a conclusion were being drawn, here as though someone were expressing agreement, or as though this were a reply to what came before—my understanding of it presupposes my familiarity with conclusions, expressions of agreement, replies’ (CV, p. 52). What Wittgenstein is underscoring here about the appreciation of music is this. Music is not understood in a vacuum, as a pure structure of sounds fallen from the stars, one which we receive via some pure faculty of musical perception. Music is rather inextricably embedded in our form of life, a form of life that is, as it happens, essentially linguistic. Thus music is necessarily apprehended, at least in part, in terms of the language and linguistic practices that define us and our world. But by the same token, should we not expect that our understanding of linguistic phenomena will sometimes be inflected by our musical

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understanding, especially in light of the fact that our musical capacities are awakened at least as early as our linguistic ones? For example, we may describe certain speech as ‘sing-songy’, a conversation as not having the right ‘rhythm’, and the papers at a conference as not ‘harmonizing’. Furthermore, in tonal languages, such as Japanese or Indonesian, the distinction between speaking and singing is to some extent effaced. Though language may be essential to the human form of life—whereas music, though universal, arguably is not, since we can presumably imagine human life without music, but not without language—once both are present their interpenetration is assured, and we cannot help interpreting the one in terms rooted in the other. 5. It is true that the question ‘What are you thinking?’ most often elicits a verbal answer, such as ‘It’s going to rain’, or ‘I need to buy milk soon’, or ‘She is very attractive’. But why not, on some occasion, a musical phrase, or even a particular rendition of a musical phrase? If someone asks me what I was thinking, can I not sometimes truthfully say ‘the opening of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto’? Could I not, in response, even whistle that opening, and in a particular way? Note that the former response would not be the same as saying ‘I was thinking of the opening of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto’. For of course anything might be an object of thought. But that doesn’t make it into an example of thought. No, the Mendelssohn opening is what I was thinking, not what I was thinking of. 6. We say of some music that ‘thought went into it’, or ‘there was thought behind it’, and mean to contrast that with cases we might rather describe as ‘thoughtless note-spinning’. Is the distinction between ‘thoughtful’ and ‘thoughtless’ music—or ‘thought-filled’ and ‘thought-free’ music—coincident with that between good and bad music? If not, it is probably not too far removed from it. When we estimate the quality of music we often refer to the mind that is revealed in it, the mind one comes into contact with in listening to it, the mind that is reflected in it, and so on. Granted that there is more to mind than thinking, can there be less to mind than that? If not, then can we easily deny the label of ‘thinking’ to music of any worth, given the mind that stands before us in sound when such music is played? 7. Wittgenstein remarks in several places that it is common to experience a musical phrase as a question. It is also not uncommon to experience another phrase as an answer. And experiencing music in such ways seems part of what it is to understand music. Note that this is a matter of phrases striking us as questions and answers on more than the purely musical plane; that is,

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we are here speaking of more than the sense in which one phrase can serve as musically the answer to another, in terms of completing its melodic arch or balancing its harmonic movement. Now, if two phrases of music strike us as having a more-than-musical question-and-answer relation, must there be a content to the question that the first phrase seems to embody? In other words, must it be possible to say what exactly the first phrase is asking? If not, then what does the claim that the phrases have a more-than-musical question-and-answer relation amount to? Perhaps just that they convey the character or physiognomy of questioning-and-answering, though without constituting a specific question-andanswer. 8. In The Brown Book Wittgenstein observes: ‘ . . . if repeating a tune to ourselves and letting it make its full impression on us we say, ‘‘This tune says something’’, and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn’t say anything such that I might express in words or pictures what it says’ (BBB, p. 166). As we have already noted, very often music makes on us the impression of a communicative act, and more specifically, a speech act or utterance. There is nothing more common than the sense that expressive music is speaking to us, and though the embedded claim is perhaps not to be taken literally, neither is it merely a weak metaphor whose cash value would be simply that the music seems meaningful, or that one gets something out of it. As Wittgenstein says, the impression of speech from music is so strong that we often feel impelled, however misguidedly, to try to ascertain exactly what is being said. And we are not satisfied, it seems, unless we can exhibit what is said in other than musical terms, and preferably verbal ones. But should we be thus dissatisfied? Is there a communicative medium that should be privileged above all others which help to constitute the lived world? One is reminded of the anecdote in which Beethoven, having played for some visitors his latest piano sonata, was asked, ‘But what does it mean, Herr Beethoven?’, to which his response was just to play the sonata over again. To require that musical thought, if it is to truly deserve that label, must be such that it can be rendered articulate or verbally paraphrased, would seem to smack of a double-standard. It would not impugn the claim to being thought of a stretch of discourse to note that what it conveyed could not, so far as we could see, be put into music. Why, then, should it be held to impugn the claim to being thought of a stretch of music that what it conveys cannot, in general, be put into words?

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9. It is instructive to draw up an illustrated catalog of ‘thoughtful’ actions that we can hear in musical passages, or that we can hear musical passages as instantiating: asserting (e.g. the opening of Schubert’s Piano Trio, Op. 100 No. 2), questioning (e.g. the opening phrases of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18, Op. 31 No. 3), musing (e.g. Schumann’s ‘Des Abends’), imploring (e.g. the flute introduction to Bellini’s aria ‘Casta Diva’), angrily despairing (e.g. the opening of Mahler’s Second Symphony), menacing (e.g. the opening of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements), defying (e.g. the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), cajoling (e.g. the sixth part of Vaughan William’s Job: A Masque for Dancing), comforting (e.g. the first section in moderate tempo near the beginning of Faur´e’s Requiem), disapproving (e.g. the orchestral interjections in the first part of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), and even nose-thumbing (e.g. the opening of the finale of Beethoven’s Second Symphony). And there are passages in which can be heard meditating, applauding, bemoaning, heaven-storming, and so on. Can a medium capable of summoning up such a range of mindful actions be a domain in which thought is absent? 10. So one kind of musical thought is this: musical passages wearing an appearance of thoughtful acts, such as questioning, concluding, searching, and the like. But another kind, surely, is this: musical passages giving evidence of thought processes in their creator. Let us bring the contrast between these two senses of musical thinking into clearer relief. One is thinking that seems as if it is embodied in musical process, that is, thinking that the music itself strikes us as being engaged in, or perhaps, that we are induced to imagine that the music is engaged in. Two is thinking in the composer that we take to be implied by musical process, that is, thinking that the music betokens on the composer’s part. We might even go so far as to say, as Wittgenstein would urge us to do, that we directly hear the composer’s thought in the musical process. For we are confronted with compositional choices at every turn that we cannot but regard as manifestations of mind. Some examples of the first kind of musical thinking, of which we had a number of illustrations earlier, would be where music seems to be embarked on reflection, or to be lost in wonder, or where one musical phrase seems to answer the question posed by a preceding one. Examples of the second kind of musical thinking would be the assessment we infer Bach must have made in devising a fugue theme combinable with itself in counterpoint, or the judgment we suppose Mozart to have exercised, in composing a piano sonata, in

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designing a second theme whose character would contrast suitably with that of the first theme, or the vision we understand Beethoven to have displayed in opting for a C-sharp rather than a C-natural in the fourth bar of the opening theme of the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, setting up a tension exploited significantly later in the movement. Again: embodied thinking in music is thinking we ascribe to the music, as something it appears to be doing, and has no identifiable object, whereas implied thinking in regard to music is thinking we ascribe to the composer, and has a quite definite object, namely the evolving composition itself. 11. Yet possibly the most important way in which music is a kind of thought does not reside either in music’s frequent suggestions of thoughtful actions, in or its implications of thoughtful fashioning on the composer’s part. It may reside instead in the mere succession from chord to chord, motive to motive, or phrase to phrase at every point in any intelligible piece of music, whether or not there is any suggestion of recognizable extramusical action, or any implication of specific compositional deliberation. Call such musical thinking intrinsic musical thinking. But why call such succession thinking? Obviously this is not enjoined by any rule of language. Still, musical succession has features that set it apart from succession in general. It is a purposive-seeming, goal-directed temporal process, an intelligent form of continuation in time, and one naturally subject to assessment in cognitive terms, such as ‘coherence’ or ‘logicality’ or ‘making sense’. In addition, it is succession that we know emanated from a human mind, and that we hear under the influence of that postulate. If one insists that that is not enough for thinking, is one not just assuming that thinking is necessarily in words? And why should one assume that? Of course, if music be admitted to be thinking on the grounds just offered, the door is also open for dance, mime, and abstract film to be considered thinking as well. But such an implication is not, I think, to be feared. 12. Let me attempt to trace the process of embodied thought in the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Op. 31 No. 2, one of the most rhetorical pieces of music in all Beethoven’s oeuvre.² The movement’s opening gesture, a four-note rising motif in largo tempo beginning with an arpeggiated A major chord, has about it a pronounced air of uncertainty and wonder (ms. 1–2). It is followed by a descending allegro ² The details of my account follow in broad measure the analysis given in Charles Rosen, Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas: A Short Companion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 168–70.

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motif in D minor which anxiously frets, ending in an adagio turn of questioning character (ms. 2–6). Next the largo motif returns, to be followed by a more excited variant of the earlier allegro D minor music (ms.7–16), whereupon the music gathers resolve in a passage in octaves (ms. 17–18), before issuing in a full cadence on the tonic and the first episode of pure affirmation, a declaration in the bass and in allegro tempo of the opening four-note rising motif, now wearing a minatory cast, but rounded off in the treble by a new motif, plaintive and supplicating. Move now to the beginning of the development, where the rhetorical character of the movement becomes even more pronounced. The opening fournote largo motif returns, with its initial arpeggiated chord extended, and is heard three times, each time outlining a different chord, ever more removed from the tonic (ms. 93–8). It is hard not to hear this sequence of returns as a deepening of the uncertainty and wonder expressed by the largo motif on its first appearance, and the agitated minor key music that succeeds it as an exacerbation of the minatory proclamations of the exposition (ms. 99–118). Consider, finally, an episode at the end of the development prior to the recapitulation, where the music takes on even more unmistakably than before the appearance of a mindful agent. After six measures of sustained chords and a descending passage in bare octaves (ms. 133–42), which strike one as clearing a space for reflection, there follows a recitative with all the earmarks of a soliloquy, in part due to the thinning out of the musical texture and the starkness of the melodic line that remains (ms. 143–58). This utterance is at turns meditative, questioning, and anxious—the last of these due to an eruption halfway through of the fretting motif from the sonata’s beginning, though in muted form.³ As one attends closely to this movement, one cannot fail to be struck by the mind manifested in its progression, and more specifically, by the series of communicative acts incarnated in the music itself. Yet whose mind is so manifested, one may ask? In one sense, it is the mind of the imagined agent of those acts, what one may call the persona of the music. In another sense, it is the mind of the composer, who has in effect constructed, or caused to emerge, the persona to whom the communicative acts heard can be directly attributed. ³ This is a good point at which to note that the opening arpeggiated chord of the movement, which recurs in various guises, is a six–three chord, the type of chord that typically introduces recitative in opera, and which thus might be said to adumbrate the recitative that occurs later in the middle of the movement.

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But at this point an objection may be raised. Let us grant that the music of the first movement of the ‘Tempest’ Sonata exhibits a series of images of thought-filled actions. Does that show that the movement literally constitutes thought, or is literally a thought process? Here we must add that this movement of the ‘Tempest’ Sonata is, of course, not a random or accidental concatenation of such images. It is, rather, a meaningful concatenation of them, one that makes sense to us, and one that induces us to imagine a mindful agent of those acts, of whose mental life the music then appears as the narrative. However, the objector continues, all that shows is that music, or at least some music, is the narrative of an imaginary thought process, not a thought process itself. But how much of a difference is that? 13. Consider now, in a change of gears, how the sorts of thinking involved in the activities of composing, performing, improvising, and listening to music saliently differ. One way they differ is this: following is a key idea in the last of these—listening—but not the others. To understand music to which one is listening is, at bottom, to follow it, that is, to experience its evolution in an involved way, exercising certain perceptual abilities and emotional sympathies, anticipating and projecting that evolution, responding appropriately in the moment to each twist and turn. That following music—as opposed to mere listening, or half-listening—is a form of thinking is evidenced by the near impossibility of doing any other thinking, of an unequivocal sort, at the same time. Musical process absorbs and effectively fills the mind that attends to it with any seriousness.⁴ But following is not, it seems, of the essence of composing, performing, or improvising. Rather, determining —that is, the determining of notes as constitutive of a work—would seem to be the essential activity of composing; interpreting —that is, the interpreting in concrete sound of notes already given—the essential activity of performing; and generating —that is, the creating of music on the spot, subject only to relatively loose constraints, the essential activity of improvising. Now, on the one hand, these activities of determining, interpreting, and generating music might all be classed as productive, whereas that of following music might by contrast be classed as receptive, though that should not make one lose sight of the anticipatory and constructive element in the activity of following music by ear. On the other hand, the activities classed as productive ⁴ For further description of the activity of following as a core component of the appreciation of music, see my Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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in a sense also involve actions of following: the composer follows one measure with another as he composes, the performer follows his reading of one phrase with his reading of the next, the improviser follows what he has just played by playing something else. But those sorts of following are manifestly not the same as that involved in listening. In the one case what is central is the tracking of what already exists, whereas in the other case what is central is a bringing into being at each step. 14. As an illustration of the thinking involved in improvising, I turn to Stan Getz’s solo on his famous recording of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. Knowing Jobim’s basic tune, and hearing Getz’s treatment of it, we marvel at the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral possibilities that Getz brings out that we didn’t suspect the tune possessed. I would single out for remark just the high melodic leap Getz takes about midway through the repeat of the first strain—where the lyric, significantly, has the words ‘sways so gentle’—and the playful one-long three-short rhythm he introduces in the refrain in place of the original dotted one. If this is not thinking in sound, then what is it? Surely music that in the span of a mere forty bars manages to suggest a whole way of being—for my part, I have often wished to live some of the time as that solo sounds—cannot be music in which thought fails to be present. Note that with improvised music a distinction invoked earlier—between embodied thinking in music, wherein music presents us with images of thoughtful actions of an imaginary persona, and implied thinking in music, whereby musical process betokens or signifies thought in the composer—has almost no purchase. Is it Getz or is it the music’s persona who exults in that high-flying turn mentioned a moment ago? Is it Getz or is it the music’s persona who ‘gets down’ in that one-long three-short rhythm? And is there much importance to deciding? Music, we may note, and improvised music especially, stands as one of the supreme exemplars of the fusion of inner and outer in mental life that Wittgenstein was at pains to underline, a fusion that in the last analysis invites us to transcend the opposition between inner and outer, a transcendence that was perhaps the ultimate goal of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind. 15. If music is in some sense thinking, then, as noted earlier, bad music should tend to have the character of bad thinking. One of the ways we mark out bad thinking is by the epithets ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’. Hence, if music is thinking, at least some bad music should wear the appearance of dumbness

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or stupidity. One clear example, I would say, from an early work of a great composer, Franz Schubert, is the beginning of the finale of his String Quartet No. 7 in D. Now why is this music so stupid, and thus bad? The problem, zeroing in on just the opening six bars, which are even repeated, is that it consists in two largely unrelated ideas, and more specifically, of a first idea of utter banality followed by a second idea which is an emphatic closing gesture, one entirely unjustified by the meager four-bar ditty that precedes it. Compare this, though, to a little known piano sonata by Beethoven, the Sonata No. 16, Op. 31 No. 1, in G. This music once also struck me as somewhat stupid, because of its quirky premature use of a closing gesture similar to that featured in the Schubert, and the similarly unpromising character of its melodic materials. On longer acquaintance, though, the music seems anything but stupid. The Beethoven is, despite its modest materials, miles beyond the Schubert in development, flow, and organicity. Of course, not all bad music is stupid, or bad because it is stupid. Some music is bad because it is bland, or bombastic, or bathetic, or lacks balance— just to stick with ‘b’ words. This is to be expected, since even if music is thinking, and thus sometimes bad in the way thinking is generally, music is other things as well—movement, gesture, pattern, expression, narration, depiction—and can thus exhibit failures in those respects, and not just fallings-off from the cardinal virtues of thought, such as cleverness or cogency. 16. Finally, what is the connection between Wittgenstein’s views on understanding music—that it is manifested by a complex of behaviors, such as illustrative gestures, apt comparisons, suitable hummings, and appropriate movings to music, that its criteria are neither inner acts of comprehension nor articulate paraphrases of musical content but a range of outwardly demonstrable responses and capacities—and the claim that Wittgenstein also endorsed, which has been my focus here, that music, no less than language, incarnates thought? Here is one way to articulate the connection or connect the dots: Both music and language are forms of thought. Understanding music should therefore be analogous to understanding language. The former, like the latter, is a matter of use, that is, of knowing how to operate with the medium in question in particular communicative games, in particular contexts.⁵ But knowing how ⁵ I here use the expression ‘communicative games’, instead of ‘language games’, to avoid privileging language over other forms of communication or meaning-making.

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in regard to music, as with knowing how generally, does not consist in propositional knowledge but rather in behavioral and experiential abilities and dispositions. Hence if music is thought we should naturally come to understand it as we come to understand thought in words; not by learning how to decode or decipher it, but by learning how to respond to it appropriately and how to connect it to our lives. 17. Parallel to the question at the heart of this essay—Is music thought?—would be the question, Is speech thought? In other words, one might wonder whether a stretch of intelligible verbal discourse was literally thinking, or was instead only the expression of literal thinking, that is, certain occurrences or processes in the mind of the speaker. Wittgenstein, of course, argued that there is no reason to think of thinking as a purely inner process, of which our observable behavior, however intelligent, can be no more than the outer shell, and thus no reason not to recognize as thinking the normal deployment of language. But for those who balk at the idea even that intelligible verbal discourse is thought, that is, that thought has outer as well as inner forms, and who claim that such discourse only manifests thought, the central claim of this essay can be suitably recast. It becomes this: intelligible music stands to literal thinking in precisely the same relation as does intelligible verbal discourse. If that relation is not exemplification but instead, say, expression, then music and language are, at any rate, in the same, and quite comfortable, boat.

12 Musical Chills 1. Although the value of music goes beyond, in a number of respects, the pleasure it provides when appropriately attended to, the capacity to provide such pleasure is clearly a significant part of that value.¹ To be sure, there are values that attach to both individual pieces of music and music as a whole that do not cash out in terms of pleasures afforded listeners, but such values are not the focus of my present reflections. When I speak of pleasures properly afforded a listener by music, a particular sort of attention to music should be understood to be involved. First, such attention is close and concerted. Second, such attention is locally focused, though global-context-sensitive.² Third, such attention is aesthetic, or appropriate to music as art; in other words, attention carries to the role played by what is precisely heard in the music in the generation of any pleasure that results, so that the music serves, at least in part, as the object of such pleasure.³ Finally, such attention is stylistically and historically informed, if only on a tacit level, thus allowing each musical characteristic, whether formal, expressive, rhetorical, or representational, to be registered for what it is.⁴ 2. I recall here some obvious dimensions of difference among musical pleasures. Musical pleasures differ in how active they are, how intellectual they are, and how essentially physiological they are. Musical pleasures differ with Earlier versions of this essay were ‘Musical Frissons’, Revue Franc¸aise d’Etudes Am´ericaines 86 (2000): 64–76; and ‘Musical Chills and Other Delights of Music’, in J. Davidson (ed.), The Music Practitioner (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 335–51. ¹ For both sides of the issue, see my essays ‘Pleasure and the Value of Works of Art’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics, and ‘Evaluating Music’ (Ch. 10, this volume). ² For a defense, inspired by Edmund Gurney, of the primacy of local focus in the comprehension of music by ear see my Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). ³ For more on this aspect of aesthetic attention, see my ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). ⁴ For further admonitions in this vein, see my ‘Musical Literacy’, in Pleasures of Aesthetics, and Stephen Davies’s ‘Musical Understanding and Musical Kinds’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 69–81.

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respect to intensity, e.g. they may be acute or mild; with respect to duration, e.g. they may be passing or long-lasting; with respect to durability, e.g. they may be one-shot affairs or eminently repeatable; with respect to communicability, e.g. they may be highly esoteric or widely shared. Musical pleasures arguably differ in the different values thereof, e.g. elevated or trifling, in the different moral qualities thereof, e.g. humanizing or dehumanizing, and in their different social imports, e.g. solidarizing or exclusionary.⁵ Musical pleasures differ, further, in when they are taken, so to speak, relative to when the music to which they refer is heard. That is to say, though most musical pleasure, I would claim, arises from the real-time following of music in its formal and expressive evolution,⁶ some musical pleasure is anticipatory, preceding audition, and some musical pleasure is recollective, occurring after audition. One dimension of difference among musical pleasures corresponds to two contrasting modes of listening, or perhaps two contrasting stances towards the listening that is going on. On the one hand one may, without losing contact with the music in its full particularity, let a piece of music enfold one, envelop one, wash over one, so that one gives oneself over to it in a personal way, as to a lover, or perhaps a trusted therapist. On the other hand one may undertake to keep music at a distance, so to speak, observing its lapidary details, its emotional maneuverings, its dramatic gestures as something external to and apart from the self that listens. Each mode carries with it distinct sorts of pleasure, ones which, manifestly, are not easily combined on a given occasion. A question that naturally presents itself is whether there is a one-to-one correspondence between musical pleasures and pleasurable musical features. That is to say, is it the case that for every musical pleasure there is a musical feature such that the pleasure is a pleasure in that feature? To me this seems unlikely. Of course many instances will conform, and obviously so, to the proposition under consideration. For example, pleasure in the intricacies of Bach’s counterpoint, or pleasure in the mellifluousness of phrase in Mozart’s ⁵ On the social import of jokes, which serve at the same time to bind together members of a given group while putting at a distance those of other groups, see Ted Cohen, ‘Jokes’, in Eva Schaper (ed.), Pleasure, Preference, and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); the lesson applies, with modifications, to musical communities that form around a given work, genre, composer, or performer. On possible moral aspects of music see my ‘Evaluating Music’, and also Kathleen Higgins, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), Colin Radford, ‘How Can Music Be Moral?’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991), and Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), ch. 6. ⁶ See my Music in the Moment.

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late piano concerti, or pleasure in the sheer amplitude of Schubert’s C major symphony.⁷ But what of the pleasure of being simply transported—dazzled, blown away, knocked off one’s feet—by music? Naturally one can always say that it was the music as a whole, in all its concreteness, that transported one. But that doesn’t imply that there is any particular feature—say, formal perfection, sensual beauty, or expressive depth—that has claim to being the object of the pleasure in question. Alternatively, one could postulate a sort of transportative virtue—evidently possessed by the music, given it has transported one—and maintain that the pleasure of being transported is a pleasure taken specifically in that power of the music. But that would convince no one. I conclude that even if most musical pleasures readily reveal themselves to be pleasures taken in, or turning on, particular musical features, logically this need not be true of all musical pleasures. 3. I come now to the primary concern of this essay, namely, a strange and strangely pleasurable response to music that is, I assume, familiar to most serious music lovers, and one that has interested this music lover for the longest time. It is the singular phenomenon of music-induced ‘chills’, or as I will also denominate them, ‘frissons’. How do such chills or frissons arise, why do we take pleasure in them, and what broader significance or value might they have? My point of departure will be a recent empirical study of the phenomenon conducted by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp.⁸ The pleasure associated with musical chills is clearly of a sort we can label physiologically centered. That is to say, musical pleasure in such cases revolves around a particular physiological effect, in the present instance, the skinsuffusing chill in question, where such effect is an integral part of the pleasure experienced. And one reason the musical chill phenomenon is philosophically interesting is this. How can a mere physiological tingle or shiver, so to speak, a mere bodily disturbance, be of appreciative significance? Any number of philosophers of art, most famously Nelson Goodman, have accustomed us to view as ridiculous, through the ridicule they have heaped on it, the idea that sensations might as such have a legitimate role in aesthetic response.⁹ What good is a mere sensation, even an agreeable one, in the context of art? What does it tell of or testify to? Does it inform us of some matter of artistic fact? ⁷ Recall Schumann’s apostrophe of the symphony’s ‘heavenly lengths’. ⁸ ‘The Emotional Sources of ‘‘Chills’’ Induced by Music’, Music Perception 13 (1995): 171–207. All page citations to this article are given in parentheses. ⁹ See his Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

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Does it illuminate some artistic relation of ideas? If neither, then consign it, if not to the flames, then at any rate to the dustbin of appreciative theory. Such is the prevailing Goodmanian wisdom on this score. But it is not one I completely share, hence my interest in musical chills. I turn now to Panksepp’s study, beginning with some of his attempts to characterize the target phenomenon: ‘the tingly somatosensory feeling that can be evoked by certain kinds of music . . . ’ (172); ‘the provocative and often delightful bodily experiences that deeply moving passages of music arouse in many people’ (173); ‘a bodily ‘‘rush’’ commonly described as a spreading gooseflesh, hair-on-end feeling that is common on the back of the neck and head and often moves down the spine, at times spreading across much of the rest of the body’ (173). Panksepp notes that, despite its intriguing nature, ‘the prickly skin response usually called ‘‘shivers’’, ‘‘thrills’’, or ‘‘chills’’ in English has not received the experimental attention it deserves’. He observes further that ‘people rarely discuss the experience, and there is no unambiguous referent for it’ (173). Taking up that last point, there is indeed a terminological problem for what we wish to discuss, in that none of ‘chill’, ‘thrill’, or ‘shiver’ seems entirely apt to denote the phenomenon under investigation, each of those terms carrying connotations, whether of coldness (‘chill’), or risk (‘thrill’), or tremor (‘shiver’), that are in some degree undesired. Possibly the term ‘frisson’, a partly nativized immigrant from French, is the best of the designations available for the phenomenon. At any rate, I will often speak in what follows of musical frissons, though in discussion of Panksepp’s paper I will call them musical chills in deference to his preferred term for the experience in question. Experiments were conducted on undergraduates at a small midwestern university in the United States. Panksepp employed as his test material popular music of the 1970s and 1980s, items having been proposed by his subjects themselves as chill-inducing. Thus with few exceptions, the test selections were songs, mainly of the soft and hard rock variety. Ideally, of course, one would have preferred that the experimenters had used textless selections devoid of program—what Peter Kivy calls ‘music alone’—but it is no surprise that the design of the experiment, in which selections were elicited from the student population, did not conduce to that. Panksepp seems oddly unconcerned about the possible collateral effects of song lyrics, with the articulate ideas and sentiments they contain, on the phenomenon under study, but naturally it is a possible source of reservations about some of his results.

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Here is one specific experimental result, rather typical of the study as a whole: The highest rate of reported chills was .5 chills/min/person for the beginning 3-min segment . . . from Pink Floyd’s album Final Cut, which, on average, yielded essentially the same number of chills as one’s own song [that is, the selection provided by the subject himself/herself] . . . . . . it was clear that the majority of the chills to this piece occurred in response to the dramatic crescendo at the beginning of the second minute. (178–9)

As regards the most important general result of the study, it would seem to be this: ‘Overall, the data support the thesis that sadness or melancholy is an emotional dimension more significantly related to the production of chills than is happiness’ (187). In other words, it is negative, rather than positive, emotion in music that appears more efficacious in inducing the chill experience. Yet clearly some positively toned music in the study was found capable of inducing chills. This prompts Panksepp to the following speculation, one that would, if sustained, preserve a role for negative emotion in the generation of chills in all cases: ‘it will be worth considering whether the chills provoked during happy music are caused by segments where happiness and sadness are inextricably entwined in bittersweet feelings’ (187).¹⁰ I will later return to this conjecture, which I believe to be on the right track. 4. Panksepp’s studies targeted a number of different factors plausibly thought to bear on the incidence of musical chills. These included (a) the gender of the listener, (b) the degree of familiarity with the music, (c) the degree of liking for the music, (d) the emotional quality of the music, and (e) the dynamic and tonal contour of the music. Panksepp observed a strong correlation between chills and degree of both familiarity and liking, a strong correlation between chills and both rise in volume and rise in pitch, a fairly strong correlation, which we have already noted, between chills and music of sad–melancholy–nostalgic character, and a weak, but statistically significant, correlation between chills and being female.¹¹ ¹⁰ Panksepp expands on this thought later on in the following manner: ‘happiness and sadness work together, and the most moving music allows the two processes to be blended in such a way as to magnify our sense of ourselves as deeply feeling creatures who are conscious inheritors of the tragic view’ (198). ¹¹ That is, female subjects were generally more susceptible to musical chills than were male subjects—or at any rate, they were more likely to report having them.

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In my view there are probable determinants of the chill experience that Panksepp’s experiments did not target, though they are ones that would admittedly be hard to investigate quantitatively. Two worth mentioning are (1) the music’s fineness of expression and (2) the music’s temporal expressive shape. Panksepp seems not to have considered the possibility that fineness of expression, whether glossed as depth or intensity or exquisiteness of expression, may be crucial in triggering the chill experience, rather than the expressing of negative emotion per se. Panksepp seems also not to have considered the likelihood that a piece’s expressive structuring in time, that is, the pattern of succession of its individually expressive parts, what one might loosely label its expressive narrative, contributes importantly to its chill potential, with some sorts of succession, some kinds of narrative, being more apt to elicit chills than others. I elaborate on this observation later on. 5. Recall now Panksepp’s suggestion that music with the greatest capacity for inducing chills may well be of an emotionally hybrid nature—that it is music in which positive and negative affects are in some manner or other interwoven or combined. This connects to what I am inclined to propose, on the basis of my own musical experience, as perhaps the crucial determinant of chill-inducingness, namely poignancy of expression, or perhaps equivalently, expression of poignancy. A profound truth about life is that almost all situations or conditions encountered are of mixed character. One is cognizant of the bad, if only peripherally, even when firmly engaged with the good, and one glimpses the good even when caught up in the bad, intermingled as they are in virtually anything. Nor is this necessarily regrettable. For the mutual focusing of positive and negative elements that results arguably ends up enhancing the appreciation of whatever good is being enjoyed. The essential poignancy of human life, one may suggest, resides in its mixed nature, in the indissociable union of its joys and ills, the inescapable commingling of its pluses and minuses.¹² Thus, were we to assume that the prime determinant of musical frissons was poignancy of expression/expression of poignancy, it would not be surprising to discover that the music most reliably able to induce such frissons ¹² See Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), ch. 7, for related reflections. Similar thoughts are to be found in Nietzsche, as Anthony Storr observes: ‘Nietzsche realized—no one more vividly—that the only life we know is constituted by opposites. Pleasure is inconceivable without pain; light without darkness; love without hate; good without evil . . . . This is why the greatest art always includes tragedy’ (Music and the Mind (New York: Free Press, 1992), 158).

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was not that of unmitigated despair, nor that of untroubled gaiety, but that in which there was some admixture of the two.¹³ 6. Here is a somewhat haphazard list of pieces containing passages conducive to the production of ‘frissons’ or ‘chills’, at least in my experience: Brahms, String Quintet in G, Op. 111, first movement; Brahms, Piano Trio in B, last movement; Brahms, Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 1; Schubert, Piano Sonata in C, D. 958, last movement; Chopin, Prelude Op. 28 No. 6, Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4 and Etude Op. 25 No. 1; Scriabin, Etude Op. 42 No. 5; Sibelius, Symphony No. 5, first movement coda; Faur´e, Violin Sonata in A, first movement; Franck, Violin Sonata in A, last movement; Schumann, Piano Concerto, first and third movements; Saint-Sa¨ens, Piano Concerto No. 2, first movement; Poulenc, Sonata for Flute and Piano, first movement; Mahler, Symphony No. 5, fourth movement; Mahler, Symphony No. 6, first and third movements; Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, first and second movements; Ravel, Gaspard de la Nuit, first movement; Nielsen, Symphony No. 2, first movement coda. From that list it might appear that only highly charged music of the Romantic or early Modern period is capable of inducing frissons in this listener, but that is not the case. Here are some other pieces, of earlier vintage, that have this power: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109, andante; Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, first movement; Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, second movement; Vivaldi, Concerto for Four Violins in A minor, Op. 3, first movement; Vivaldi, Concerto for Two Violins in A minor, Op. 3, first movement; Albinoni, Adagio for Organ and Strings in G minor; and somewhat surprisingly, the first movement of Haydn’s sunny Piano Sonata No. 60 in C, where certain chromatic bridge passages in the exposition, recapitulation, and development usually produce the effect in my hearing of them. Passages with the capacity to induce chills need not even be heard, strictly speaking, for that capacity to be realized: it suffices in many cases for them merely to be run through vividly in aural imagination, courtesy of the mental ¹³ There is clearly a resemblance between this idea of the poignant as reflecting the essentially mixed nature of what life has to offer and the traditional idea of the sublime as the correlate of an aesthetic response distinct from that of the beautiful and involving a fusion of pleasure and pain. Yet the experience of the sublime and the frisson-centered experience of poignancy cannot be simply identified, first, because not all sublime experiences involve frissons, and second, because not all frisson-centered experiences exhibit the specific cognitive character of the sublime, in particular, the aspect of awe.

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CD player, for frissons to be produced. And it seems generally true that when one actively seconds or parallels music one is auditing, by a sort of inner singing, frissons are more likely to occur. If so, that stands as yet another of the many rewards of active, rather than passive, involvement with music, though the reward itself, as has been noted, might perhaps be described as passive in nature, being a sort of sufferance or submission. The opening movement of Brahms’s String Quintet in G, Op. 111, affords me one of the most sustained chill experiences of any piece that I know.¹⁴ But why, exactly, do I particularly relish that chill, as it steals up my spine and pervades my body, suffusing it with a sort of oxymoronic warmth? It is, perhaps, inherently pleasurable, but arguably no more so than having one’s hair stroked, or settling into a well-stuffed armchair, or consuming a nice mousse au chocolat. So why do I value it above, or at any rate, differently from, those other delights? What makes the musical chill I receive from this piece particularly welcome must be more than the mild corporeal pleasure it affords. That something more, in this case, and as far as I can understand it, seems to be an accompanying feeling of surrendering control, of letting go, of delivering oneself to a powerful force, a guide to the terror and mystery of existence. More generally, I suggest, chills of the sort in question announce themselves as the mark of a confrontation with some fundamental truth of life, bodied forth by the music that so moves us. Such chills are received not as mere physiological disturbances, but as ones fraught with significance. The echoes of religious experience here are intended. As has often been observed, the greatest music seems to provide a passable substitute for the sacred, for those who find themselves doxastically challenged in regard to the traditional demands of religion. For many music lovers the listening room is a kind of chapel, at least when certain items are on the order of service.¹⁵ Anyway, contrast that movement by Brahms with a roughly contemporaneous piece, the Russian Easter Overture of Rimsky-Korsakov. Though colorful, imbued with feeling, well put together, and possessing a comparable degree of forward momentum