Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics explored the mathematical and cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century, focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty and human enjoyment (plaisir and jouissance) of music. The origin of this philosophic shift is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant. Through their writing, the ancient term 'aesthetics', meaning sensory perception, received its present day connotation. In recent decades philosophers have tended to emphasize issues besides beauty and enjoyment. For example, music's capacity to express emotion has been a central issue.
Aesthetics is a sub-discipline of philosophy. In the 20th century, important contributions were made by Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, and Stephen Davies. However, many musicians, music critics, and other non-philosophers have contributed to the aesthetics of music. In the 19th century, a significant debate arose between Eduard Hanslick, a music critic and musicologist, and composer Richard Wagner. Harry Partch and some other musicologists, such as Kyle Gann, have studied and tried to popularize microtonal music and the usage of alternate musical scales. Also many modern composers like Lamonte Young, Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca paid much attention to a scale called just intonation.
It is often thought that music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and psychology; it can assuage our loneliness or incite our passions. The philosopher Plato suggests in the Republic that music has a direct effect on the soul. Therefore, he proposes that in the ideal regime music would be closely regulated by the state. (Book VII)
There has been a strong tendency in the aesthetics of music to emphasize the paramount importance of compositional structure; however, other issues concerning the aesthetics of music include lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color (see also musical development).
In the 18th century, music was considered to be so far outside the realm of aesthetic theory (then conceived of in visual terms) that music was barely mentioned in William Hogarth's treatise, The Analysis of Beauty. He considered dance beautiful (closing the treatise with a discussion of the minuet), but treated music important only insofar as it could provide the proper accompaniment for the dancers. However, by the end of the century, the topic of music and its own beauty came to be distinguished from cases in which music is part of a mixed media, as it is in opera and dance. Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment is generally considered the most important and influential work on aesthetics in the 18th century, argued that instrumental music is beautiful but ultimately trivial - compared to the other fine arts, it does not engage the understanding sufficiently, and it lacks moral purpose. In order to display the combination of genius and taste that combines ideas and beauty, respectively, music must be combined with words, as in song and opera.
In the 19th century, the era of romanticism in music, some composers and critics argued that music should and could express ideas, images, emotions, or even a whole literary plot. Challenging Kant's reservations about instrumental music, in 1813 E. T. A. Hoffman argued that music was fundamentally the art of instrumental composition. Five years later, Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation argued that instrumental music is the greatest art, because it is uniquely capable of representing the metaphysical organization of reality. Although the Romantic movement accepted the thesis that instrumental music has representational capacities, most did not support Schopenhauer's linking of music and metaphysics. The mainstream consensus endorsed music's capacity to represent particular emotions and situations. In 1832, composer Robert Schumann stated that his piano work Papillons was "intended as a musical representation" of the final scene of a novel by Jean Paul, Flegeljahre. The thesis that the value of music is related to its representational function was vigorously countered by the formalism of Eduard Hanslick, setting off the "War of the Romantics." This fight divided the aesthetics into two competing groups: On one side are formalists (e.g., Hanslick), who emphasize that the rewards of music are found in appreciation of musical form or design, while on the other side are the anti-formalists, such as Richard Wagner, who regarded musical form as a means to other artistic ends.
A group of modernist writers in the early 20th century (including the poet Ezra Pound) believed that music was essentially pure because it didn't represent anything, or make reference to anything beyond itself. In a sense, they wanted to bring poetry closer to Hanslick's ideas about the autonomous, self-sufficient character of music. (Bucknell 2002) Dissenters from this view notably included Albert Schweitzer, who argued against the alleged 'purity' of music in a classic work on Bach. Far from being a new debate, this disagreement between modernists and their critics was a direct continuation of the 19th-century debate about the autonomy of music.
Among 20th century composers, Igor Stravinsky is the most prominent composer to defend the modernist idea of musical autonomy. When a composer creates music, Stravinsky claims, the only relevant thing "is his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings." (Stravinsky 1962, p. 115) Although listeners often look for meanings in music, Stravinsky warned that these are distractions from the musical experience.
The most distinctive development in the aesthetics of music in the 20th century was that attention was directed at the distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' music, now understood to align with the distinction between art music and popular music, respectively. Theodor Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life. False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness. Thus, those who are trapped in the false notions of beauty according to a capitalist mode of thinking, are only capable of hearing beauty in dishonest terms.
Beginning with Peter Kivy's work in the 1970s, analytic philosophy has contributed extensively to the aesthetics of music. Analytic philosophy pays very little attention to the topic of musical beauty. Instead, Kivy inspired extensive debate about the nature of emotional expressiveness in music. He also contributed to the debate over the nature of authentic performances of older music arguing that much of the debate was incoherent because it failed to distinguish among four distinct standards of authentic performance of music (1995).
Simon Frith (2004, p. 17-9) argues that, "'bad music' is a necessary concept for musical pleasure, for musical aesthetics." He distinguishes two common kinds of bad music: the Worst Records Ever Made type, which include "Tracks which are clearly incompetent musically; made by singers who can't sing, players who can't play, producers who can't produce," and "Tracks involving genre confusion. The most common examples are actors or TV stars recording in the latest style." Another type of "bad music" is "rock critical lists," such as *"Tracks that feature sound gimmicks that have outlived their charm or novelty" and "Tracks that depend on false sentiment (...), that feature an excess of feeling molded into a radio-friendly pop song."
Frith gives three common qualities attributed to bad music: inauthentic, [in] bad taste (see also: kitsch), and stupid. He argues that "The marking off of some tracks and genres and artists as 'bad' is a necessary part of popular music pleasure; it is a way we establish our place in various music worlds. And 'bad' is a key word here because it suggests that aesthetic and ethical judgements are tied together here: not to like a record is not just a matter of taste; it is also a matter of argument, and argument that matters." (p. 28)
Frith's analysis of popular music is based in sociology.
Theodor Adorno was a prominent philosopher who wrote on the aesthetics of popular music. A Marxist, Adorno was extremely hostile to popular music. His theory was largely formulated in response to the growing popularity of American music in Europe between World War I and World War II. As a result, Adorno often uses "jazz" as his example of what he believed was wrong with popular music; however, for Adorno this term included everyone from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. He attacked popular music claiming that it is simplistic and repetitive, and encourages a fascist mindset (1973, p. 126). However good or bad it sounds to its audience, he believed that music is genuinely good only if it challenges society through its role as an inaccessible Other. This function is advanced by musical structure, rather than lyrics. In his opinion, although many popular musicians seem to superficially oppose the political status quo, the use of familiar song forms and the artist's involvement in capitalism results in music that ultimately encourages the audience accept things as they are - only radically experimental music can encourage audiences to become critical of prevailing society. However, the mass media cannot handle the confrontational nature of good music, and offers instead a steady diet of recycled, simplified and politically ineffective music.
Besides Adorno, Theodore Gracyk provides the most extensive philosophical analysis of popular music. He argues that conceptual categories and distinctions developed in response to art music are systematically misleading when applied to popular music (1996).
In 2007 musicologist and journalist Craig Schuftan published his book The Culture Club, in which he draws links between modernism art movements and popular music of today and that of past decades and even centuries. His story involves drawing lines between art, or high culture, and pop, or low culture.
In Germany, the musicologist Ralf von Appen (2007) has published a book on the aesthetics of popular music that focuses on everyday judgments of popular records. He analyzes the structures and aesthetic categories behind judgments found on amazon.com concerning records by musicians such as Bob Dylan, Eminem, Queens of the Stone Age etc. In a second step, von Appen interprets these findings on the basis of current theoretical positions in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Von Appen, in a later essay entitled "Electronic Dance Music and the Authority of the Synthesizer," concluded that "Levels" by the Swedish composer Timothy Bergling (Avicii) is of the greatest pieces of high culture music of the past century.
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