Chapter 1

I. Introduction

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer famously assigned instrumental

music a special role in his ontology. He claimed that music, unlike other art forms, is non-

mimetic and abstract, i.e. it does not describe or refer to anything in the world, but it is the

ultimate true expression of the Universal;1 that it is inextricably linked to our emotions and thus

has nothing to do with reason and rationality. Before him, instrumental music was considered to

be the lowest of the fine arts, and Kant in the Critique of Judgment reduced its effect to the mere

pleasurable play of sensations,2 since he believed that due to its non-representability music does

not express any ideas which are necessary for the appreciation of art.3 We can see that music was

often treated separately from other arts, in virtue of its at least apparent non-representability, that

is, the lack of clear content. Every philosopher who writes about instrumental music, faces the

task of explaining how music comes to be meaningful, even though it cannot say anything

specific.

In the Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer suggests a classification of the

competing philosophical accounts of music based on their response to this challenge.4 I am eager

to introduce this classification at the very beginning, because I hope it will help the reader to

better navigate the field we are working in. First, Meyer distinguishes formalists and

1
“Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself…” Arthur Schopenhauer, The
World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane, and J. Kemp (London, 1909), I:333. “Music, therefore, if regarded as
an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality
of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things.” Ibid., I:339.
2
“...music, since it merely plays with sensations, has the lowest place among the fine arts… So in this regard the
visual arts are far ahead of it... Two kinds of art pursue quite different courses: music proceeds from sensations to
indeterminate ideas; the visual arts from determinate ideas to sensations.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment,
trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), 5:329-5:330.
3
“For though it speaks through nothing but sensations without concepts, so that unlike poetry it leaves us with
nothing to meditate about.” Ibid., 5:328.
4
See Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, (Chicago, 1956), 1—3.
 Sandler 2

expressivists. The former argue that musical meaning lies only in its formal properties (such as

tones, pitch, tempo, rhythm...), while the latter believe that music communicates emotions as its

main content. Meyer sees the main problem for formalism in its inability to account for how a

pattern of sounds comes to be aesthetically meaningful so that it can emotionally affect the

listener, while the main task for an emotivist is to show how exactly emotions come to be

embodied in sound. Second, Meyer identifies referentialists and absolutists. Referentialists claim

that musical meaning is not limited to the musical work itself, but can include non-musical

elements, such as its title, composer’s writings, etc. Absolutists, conversely, treat musical work

as a self-contained entity. Different combinations of those views are possible, but in this paper, I

will focus primarily on musical formalism and one of its main contemporary defenders, Peter

Kivy.

I will first lay out the theory of musical meaning of the most famous musical formalist,

Eduard Hanslick, in order to show that his account has been to a significant extent misunderstood

by his followers, as well as by his adversaries. Then I will talk about Peter Kivy’s interpretation

of Hanslick and the modifications he introduces to solve the main problem of formalism as he

identifies it—its inability to account for why, if music has no perceivable content, we necessarily

talk about it in emotive terms and feel emotionally moved by it.

The goal of this paper is to reevaluate the position of classical formalism with regard to

emotions and to argue that our musical experience is cognitive, that is music is understood and

not felt, and does not essentially differ from the pleasure we take in any kind of art, which is, and

I take is as a premise, the opportunity to exercise our imagination.5 I will argue that classical

5
As a working definition of imagination, I suggest the broader concept employed by Kant in his Critique of
Judgment. For Kant, imagination is one of our cognitive powers (understanding being the second one) used for the
process of reasoning. Imagination is a power necessary for making synthetic judgments. It bridges sensory
 Sandler 3

formalism is correct in claiming that music has no direct link with emotions and that emotional

response is not relevant to the evaluation of the beauty of a musical work. At the same time,

since it is an empirical fact that music affects listeners emotionally (as painting, theater, and

poetry also do) and we cannot discard them whatsoever, I will outline a so-called “simulation

theory” suggested by philosopher and cognitive scientist Alvin Goldman and developed and

applied to the field of musical aesthetics by Charles O. Nussbaum in his book The Musical

Representation, which provides a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon and at the same

time does not contradict but can potentially substantiate and strengthen the formalist approach to

the listening experience, despite the fact that it centers around our bodily responses to the works

of art.

My focus lies primarily on Peter Kivy, because he identified listening experience, and not

the music “as it is in itself,” as the primary object of his investigation. I believe that his cognitive

account of musical beauty is correct and the task that he sets himself of accounting for why we

perceive and describe music as expressive, is truly worth pursuing. However, I find his solution

of “locating” emotions in the music itself as objective perceivable qualities inadequate to our

actual experience, and I hope to prove that by the end of the paper. In addition, Kivy seems to

forget about an important faculty that is involved and directly affected in the process of the

musical experience, namely our imagination.

II. Croce and Aesthetics

impressions with analytic concepts and creates representations, which are used in the process of cognition. “But
since every appearance contains a manifold, thus different perceptions by themselves are encountered dispersed and
separate in the mind, a combination of them, which they cannot have in sense itself, is therefore necessary. There is
thus an active faculty of the synthesis of this manifold in us, which we call imagination, and whose action exercised
immediately upon perceptions I call apprehension. For the imagination is to bring the manifold of intuition into an
image it must therefore antecedently take up the impressions into its activity, i.e., apprehend them.” See Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge,1998), A120/239. Simply put,
imagination is a power to create images, and I believe this might be a very useful tool in our discussion of music.
 Sandler 4

As one of my premises, I suggest that we should posit some theory of art and beauty we

can refer to and ground the discussion in, despite the fact that those theories are many and none

of them can be taken for granted. One of my concomitant tasks in this paper is to dispel the

illusion perpetuated by Kant and Schopenhauer that music is a special art form and the pleasure

we take in it is governed by some very distinct aesthetic principles. I believe music should be

integrated with the rest of the arts, and I hope that Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic theory will help

me to do that.

Crocean aesthetics is grounded in a certain understanding of art as expression. He

distinguishes between intuitions (or expressions) and representations.

As a helpful tool in defining those concepts, I suggest first looking at a clear version of

this distinction introduced by David Hume for the purposes of his moral philosophy and

aesthetics. Hume saw the fundamental difference between expressions and representations in the

truth value of our utterances. Emotions and moral judgments are just the immediate expressions

of our approval or disapproval and have nothing to do with reason; therefore, one cannot

attribute truth value to our expressive judgments. While cognitive judgments, which we use to

describe the world around us, can be true or false depending on whether they correctly represent

something beyond themselves, i.e. matters of fact.6

Croce talks about this distinction in a similar vein. For him, representations have to do

with scientific concepts and truth-value judgments, as he calls them, “affirmations of reality.”7

All art, however, for Croce is based on artists’ intuitions (he often uses the word “imagination”

6
“Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real
existence and matter of fact. Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable
of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason.” See David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed.
L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1988), T.3.1.1, 458.
7
Benedetto Croce, The Essence of Aesthetic, trans. D. Ainslie, (London, 1921), 17.
 Sandler 5

instead), and intuitions are located outside the realm of truth and falsity. An aesthetic intuition is

a “synthesis a priori” of image and thought. Croce maintains that every individual artwork is

unique in virtue of its being the only possible expression of this particular intuition in this

particular way, and that the “same” intuition expressed differently would already be a different

intuition and a different artwork. In art, he says, “aspiration alone stands for the representation,

and representation alone for the aspiration.”8 In other words, an artist does not think in terms of

what idea he or she wants to express in which form, but the thought is born already embodied in

the only suitable form. Hence, Croce thinks it is fallacious to separate form and content in art. I

suggest that from this aesthetic theory we can draw a conclusion that if art is the product of

imagination and its meaning has no truth value, we can certainly claim for imagination the

central role in the aesthetic experience of art.

To reiterate his point about the key importance of the artist’s intuitions in an artwork,

Croce writes: “...all the arts are music, if it be thus intended to emphasize the genesis of aesthetic

images in feeling...”.9 In this quote, the question of musical meaning and its necessary

connection to emotions is solved in favor of expressivism, and it shows once again how closely

emotions and music are tied together in our commonsense understanding. At the same time,

Croce brings the arts together in that they are all similarly expressive, and our task should be to

account for how and in virtue of which qualities music comes to be expressive. I will start,

however, with recounting some of key components of Hanslick’s theory of musical beauty, to lay

out some features of the object of our inquiry—the music itself.

III. Hanslick and Musical Formalism

8
Ibid., 30.
9
Ibid., 32.
 Sandler 6

Eduard Hanslick is considered to be one of the founders of what has been called “musical

formalism,” a theory of musical meaning claiming that as an art music does not operate with

representations and concepts, but our understanding of it is focused only on its form, i.e.

temporal pattern of sounds. Rather infamously, formalism is believed to exclude emotions from

the field of musical aesthetics and in some interpretations even to deny music the ability to

arouse emotions whatsoever. However, I suggest looking closely at Hanslick and his answer to

the question of what and how music means.

In On the Musically Beautiful Hanslick claims that music is a non-representational art

form, i.e. that music is not about anything. While in a painting we can recognize its object, for

instance, Titian’s The Rape of Europa is telling roughly about a bull carrying away a scared half-

naked woman (even if we do not know that it is Zeus who turned into a bull to abduct a woman

he fell in love with named Europa, we can still recognize what is represented), music tells us

nothing of this kind, and in this sense, Hanslick concludes, it is “pure form.” However, he does

not say that it is just a form, but that form and content in music are inseparable. At the same

time, the content must be conceived only musically—in terms of sounds, i.e. music does not

refer to anything “outside” of music. He further gives distinct definitions of the musical content

and of the musical form: “form” being the architectonic of the piece and the relation of its parts

(e.g. sonata form: exposition, development, recapitulation), “content” being the architectonic of

its themes (e.g. melodies and motives of this sonata and their variations). He writes, “If one

wants to consider the content of a motive, one has to just play it.”10 He says, that composer

“writes and thinks in sounds,”11 and thus music is a certain type of untranslatable language.

10
„Will man jemand den "Inhalt" eines Motivs namhaft machen, so muß man ihm das Motiv selbst vorspielen.“ See
Eduard Hanslick, Vom musikalisch Schönen, (Leipzig, 1854), 101.
11
„Componist dichtet und denkt … in Tönen.“ Ibid., 102.
 Sandler 7

Further he elaborates on the role of emotions in music. His main negative thesis is that

emotions are irrelevant for a scientific [wissenschaftliche] discussion of the beauty of a musical

piece. In other words, musical beauty is not contained in its ability to arouse emotions in us, but

in its structural properties. Certainly, he does not claim that emotions are an irrelevant part of a

musical experience: “The feelings, therefore, are of importance both before and after the

completion of the work...”,12 i.e. to the composer and to the listener, but not to the work itself. He

believes that emotions are an effect produced by the musical beauty, but in order to understand

why and how music is so effective in arousing emotions in us, one should address the musical

structure as their cause. Hanslick thinks that music can be emotionally moving just in virtue of

its interaction with our nervous system as a physical stimulus (and dismisses this part of musical

experience as unimportant), but mostly, similar to the rest of the arts, because it directly affects

our imagination:13 “An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not

our feelings, but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.”14 At the same time, “The

unartistic interpretation of a piece of music is derived, on the contrary, not from the material part

properly so-called, not from the rich variety of the successions of sounds, but from their vague

aggregate effect, which impresses them as an undefinable feeling.”15 He claims that musical

experience is too concrete to reduce it to the vagueness of emotive description, and only an

attentive listener who follows every single note in the piece will be able to understand and

appreciate what the composer wanted to “say.” Indeed, to illustrate this point one can think of a

12
Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. G. Cohen, (London, 1891), 99.
13
Although Hanslick uses the word Phantasie and not the Kantian Einbildungskraft, he is most likely to have taken
this notion from the Kantian aesthetics: “Our imagination, it is true, does not merely contemplate the beautiful, but it
contemplates it with intelligence, the object being, as it were, mentally inspected and criticised.” Ibid., 21. See n.6.
14
„Das Organ, womit das Schöne aufgenommen wird, ist nicht das Gefühl, sondern die Phantasie, als die Thätigkeit
des reinen Schauens.” See Eduard Hanslick, Vom musikalisch Schönen, (Leipzig, 1854), 4.
15
„Diese unkünstlerische Auffassung eines Musikstückes zieht nicht den eigentlich sinnlichen Theil, die reiche
Mannigfaltigkeit der Tonreihen an sich, sondern deren abstracte, als Gefühl empfundene Totalidee.“ See Eduard
Hanslick, Vom musikalisch Schönen (Leipzig, 1854), Textergänzung 4/1874, 73.
 Sandler 8

bad musician who has fallen into such a state of exaltation caused by what he imagines to be

beautiful music that his performance sounds absolutely excessive and is impossible to listen to.

All in all, Hanslick seems to imply that 1) experience of the beautiful is purely cognitive;

2) only beautiful works of art can affect our imagination; and 3) only attentive contemplation of

the beautiful can make our imagination work correctly. His main requirement for the correct

understanding of a piece is listening to music acutely.

I believe Hanslick is correctly identifying the source of emotions outside of the music

itself because, among other things, the emotiveness of a piece significantly depends on the

interpretation of performer. For instance, Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier for a

harpsichord, an instrument that does not allow for the execution of dynamics (variations of

loudness and timbre), so whenever his preludes and fugues are played on the piano, the musician

is free to use his or her own dynamic markings, which are considered to be important expressive

components of the work. Admittedly, there are established conventions as to how certain formal

parts are supposed to be played dynamically, but these are extra-musical elements, which

Hanslick also takes into account in talking about emotions. A beautiful work can be played by a

bad student in the wrong tempo and without any dynamics, but behind all this noise it can be

recognized as beautiful in virtue of its formal structure by a qualified listener.

To sum up, Hanslick believes that music, just like as all art forms, must be contemplated

through our imagination—that is how music gains all of its emotive power. Emotions should not

be a part of musical aesthetics, because they hinder correct understanding of musical works. He

thus divides an aesthetic experience into two stages: first comes the appreciation of the beauty,

and then the imagination restores the necessary bit of emotional excitement. He denies that

music can excite emotions directly, but he does not seem to have an answer to how exactly our

imagination transforms the sounds of beautiful music into emotions.

 Sandler 9

Chapter 2

IV. Kivy and Enhanced Formalism

1. Absolute Music

One of the fundamental distinctions that Peter Kivy makes in his philosophy of music is

that between “absolute” and representational music. Other phrases he uses to refer to the absolute

music are “pure instrumental music,” “music alone.” The concept of absolute music has a long

history, but it was used as a specific term in the mid-19th century by Richard Wagner, who

coined it to derogatorily refer to the music written by composers who intentionally wanted to

establish music as superior to and independent of other arts.16 Today “absolute music” generally

refers to the music of the Romantic period because of its composers’ obsession with this concept;

the concept denotes instrumental music that does not include any extra-musical content, i.e. to

understand this music one does not need to be aware either of the title, or any other information

about the piece (hence the “absolutists” from Meyer’s distinction), symphony being its

paradigmatic example. Hence, “absolute music” is non-representational in the sense in which I

defined it for Hanslick, that is why this term is often attributed to him. Since those are negative

definitions, Kivy attempts to define this concept positively, and he comes up with a formal

definition according to which it is “music for which only structural interpretations are

appropriate.”17 This is a definition in which he does not significantly depart from Hanslick,

because by structural interpretations he emphasizes that there is nothing to be heard in the music

except for the “tonally moving forms” [tönend bewegten Formen].18

16
As Carl Dahlhaus argues in his book The Idea of Absolute Music. See J. L. H. Thomas, “The review of The Idea
of Absolute Music by Carl Dahlhaus and Roger Lustig,” Music & Letters, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), 90.
17
Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford, 2001), 157.
18
Peter Kivy, “What Was Hanslick Denying?”, The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), 6.
 Sandler 10

However, in Kivy’s case there is another important factor to consider—composer’s

intentions. He argues that the lack of a composer’s intention to represent is a necessary condition

for music to be defined as “absolute,” although the presence of intention does not necessarily

make music representational.19 Representation for Kivy is a success-concept, i.e. something is

represented only when one can successfully recognize its object. Therefore, what is decisive in

this case, is our musical experience. In the process of attentive listening, one can detect the

“cues” of “absolute music,” so one does not need to resort to the extra-musical images to make

sense of the piece. Kivy shows it with regard to Beethoven’s String Quartet in F, Op. 18, No. I,

about which Beethoven wrote that it describes the vault scene in Romeo and Juliet. Kivy believes

that in this case the formal qualities of the genre (i.e. what makes it the string quartet) outweigh

the need for representational interpretation, so he concludes that we can disregard Beethoven’s

intention and treat the work as “absolute music.” Roughly, it seems that he would call “absolute

music” anything that cannot be rightly heard as anything else but absolute music. I am not

suggesting that this is a circular explanation, though, because the point of reference for the

listener is supposed to be his or her own musical experience, not some formal definition. At the

same time, Kivy seems to imply that this understanding would only be available to an

experienced listener, because only due to a certain background knowledge (e.g. that a string

quartet consists of four movements, the first of them is allegro, the second one slower, etc)

would he or she be able to identify the necessary formal cues. Additionally, Kivy does not seem

to acknowledge that this information is also extra-musical, and even listening to a piece of

“absolute music” one does (or should) make some references to the musical tradition and hears

formal parts and certain elements in the musical piece.

19
Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 213.
 Sandler 11

In this regard, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that we should recognize

the process of listening as an act of interpretation, and any interpretation brings about a certain

representation of its object, so we cannot talk about music or listen to music in any other way

than by having a certain representation of it. Kivy is to a great extent interested in the

representation of music we create through language, “To understand music, then, seems in

significant part to be able to describe it.”20

Furthermore, what Kivy calls the main object of his study—“the purely musical

experience” (or the experience of the absolute music)—should be understood

phenomenologically, i.e. what we experience when we believe that we are facing an instance of

pure music. The sole purpose of music alone, Kivy believes, is our enjoyment, and the object of

our enjoyment is nothing but its musical beauty. Therefore, the main problem for a philosopher

of music, according to Kivy, is to explain how we can enjoy something emotionally and

cognitively that has no proper meaning, that is no representational content.

Kivy concludes his attempt to provide criteria for the distinction between representational

and pure music with admitting a certain “impossibility” of pursuing this task on his behalf,

because the experience of absolute music is one of the paradigmatic artistic experiences: “For the

whole question of ‘defining’ music alone … is just a special case of a more general question in

the philosophy of art, namely, the definition of ‘art’ itself.”21 Kivy thus fails to clearly separate

abstract from representational music, and this reveals a significant weakness of his position,

since most of his theory of musical meaning is based on the possibility of a pure musical

experience.

20
Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 97.
21
Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 25.
 Sandler 12

Kivy’s comment strikes me as similar to the passage I quoted from Croce, in which he

compares art with music. Kivy realizes that in discussing absolute music he is touching upon one

of the main questions of aesthetics of art, namely the question of artistic expression. The

difference between a photograph on the vase packaging box and Picasso’s painting of a vase

would probably lie in that the latter expresses an artistic intention (Croce’s “intuition”) and the

former does not. So, Kivy’s inquiry directly concerns the question of musical expressiveness.

When Kivy elaborates on his doubt in defining absolute music, he means that art is not a matter

of a preconceived definition but something that is defined as art through one’s specific

experience of it. Consequently, to answer the question of what music alone is, we should answer

the question of how music affects us.

To sum up, in Meyer’s classification, Peter Kivy is a formalist, i.e. he thinks that music is

non-representational, and a referentialist, because at the same time he believes that sometimes

music can represent due to some extra-musical context (such as the composer’s intentions). We

have not yet covered Kivy’s views on emotions in music, so let me now turn to this question and

outline his theory of “enhanced formalism.”

2. Kivy vs. Hanslick

In the Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, Peter Kivy argues for a view he calls

“enhanced formalism,” a view that is grounded in the main premise of Hanslick’s formalism,

namely that music is an art with syntactic form but lacking semantic content. By “syntactic

form” formalists understand musical structure, which can be captured in notation and which is

roughly described as the “temporal patterns of sound,” such as an E-minor chord progression or a

G to C major authentic cadence. “Semantic content” would be, if we use an analogy with

language, what the musical passages mean, something that they refer to, or whatever they
 Sandler 13

communicate. Kivy holds that as listeners we do not try to understand what music is saying, but

rather we are observing and making sense of the musical events happening in the music form:

changes of the key, tensions and resolutions, rests and movements. Music is often metaphorically

compared to a Persian rug: it does not represent any specific objects, but it presents us with an

intricate geometrical pattern that has its own logic and structure. As listeners, we are only

interested in those things that we can hear, in the sonic qualities of the musical work and nothing

beyond them. Our enjoyment comes from engaging in the “game of question and answer” with

the piece, anticipating where the musical theme will go and how it will transform itself. The

questions we ask ourselves are much like those during our enjoyment of a novel: Is the character

going to reach his or her goal? Will the main enemy die at the end? But instead of the main

character, we follow the events “happening” to the musical theme. We take “pleasure in seeking

and finding the statements of the theme,”22 although we might not necessarily consciously

understand what formal elements are responsible for the changes happening to it, e.g.

modulation, inversion, imitation, etc.

Overall, formalists, Kivy included, deny that music has an “aboutness” of its own, but

they differ in how they respond to the commonsense belief that music somehow conveys

emotions.

Kivy is unsatisfied with Hanslick’s treatment of musical emotions. He argues that

Hanslick not only claims that the arousal of emotions is not the main purpose of music, but in

fact also implicitly denies that music can arouse, portray or ‘embody’ them in any meaningful

way.23 That is, Kivy thinks that Hanslick’s account of musical experience leaves no place for

emotions at all. Kivy believes that we cannot stick to this conclusion, because, since we do judge

22
Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 77.
23
Peter Kivy, “What Was Hanslick Denying?”, The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), 3.
 Sandler 14

music in emotive terms, we should justify why we are able to do so in a meaningful way. In

other words, Hanslick’s account denies the referential meaning of “melancholy” in the phrase “a

melancholy melody,” because melody, in Kivy’s interpretation of Hanslick’s view, cannot be

melancholy.

Indeed, Hanslick is not interested in the question why we talk about music in emotive

terms, rather he is interested in explaining why educated listeners should not do so. However,

based on my explanation in the previous part, I believe that Kivy has misunderstood the keystone

of Hanslick’s argument. Hanslick made a distinction between that which is relevant for the

discussion of musical beauty, i.e. all the formal features of a work that the composer employed to

make his or her music into a beautiful work of art, and its effect on the audience, where emotions

would naturally come into play as in any other artform, if the composer succeeds in making his

or her music beautiful. It is a question of another inquiry whether emotions are a necessary

component of the experience of the beautiful, but for Hanslick it is obvious that the

understanding of music should not be dependent on a correct understanding of the emotions

supposedly conveyed by it. Intellectual understanding comes first, followed by emotional

response. There are two separate questions, How can music be beautiful? and How does it move?

and they should have, in Hanslick’s view, two separate answers.

The first question is also a question about musical meaning, while the second one is about

our reaction to the perception of this meaning. For some reason that Kivy never explicitly

addresses, he thinks that music is special among other art forms in that emotions are a part of its

meaning. Hence his disagreement with Hanslick and his unusual solution. To understand how

Kivy believes he has modified formalism in order to provide the necessary answer to the

problem of musical emotions, I suggest looking at his explanation of what musical emotions are.
 Sandler 15

3. Musical Emotions

Music is an art form that resists description very strongly (and as I believe, this is what

makes it so puzzling for philosophers), in the sense that our language is scant of the words that

can literally describe our acoustic impressions, presumably because evolution made us rely

primarily on our eyes and only secondarily on our ears, and we did not develop such an elaborate

vocabulary for talking about things we hear as opposed to the things we see. That is why Kivy

seems to be most interested in how we can talk about or describe music, and his main claim is

that we can rightly talk about music in emotive terms, because there are actually emotive

properties in it. He wants to explain why our language represents correctly our musical

experiences and that our utterings about music are meaningful. Overall, I believe Kivy is thus

trying to justify his strong intuition that even if there were no humans left on Earth to listen to

music, it would not stop being sad or happy just in itself, and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, for

instance, would remain an exemplar of playful and cheerful music regardless of whether anyone

is there to experience it.

To do justice to Kivy’s self-identification, I should mention that he calls himself a

“musical cognitivist.” The “cognitivist” part refers to his attitude towards our experience of

musical emotions. Cognitivism in this area holds that when we talk about musical emotions, we

do not express feelings aroused in us by the music, but we refer to the emotions we recognize or

hear in the music itself. Emotivism, on the contrary, maintains the view that, for example, when

we call a passage “sad,” we mean that the passage makes us sad, i.e. it arouses in us the emotion

of sadness.
 Sandler 16

Kivy denies that emotions are contained in music as representational content24 and

instead argues that they are the “heard” or “perceptual” properties of a piece, in a way similar to

how greenness is a perceptual property of a leaf. He believes that the main problem with the

view that we perceive, say, joy in music in the same way as we perceive joy in a painting of a

happy man (that is, representationally), is that this view fails to capture our experience correctly,

because we do not first recognize that the music represents joy and then start hearing it as joyful,

but rather we hear it immediately as joyful. He notes further that it is impossible to positively

recognize that some purely musical passage represents a human joyful utterance, unless there is

some textual evidence given, while a pictorial representation of this kind is usually self-evident.

Kivy does not explain what he means by “recognize,” but I presume he means the recognition of

a resemblance between the original and the copy, which is the fundamental condition for

experiencing and understanding representational art, while there is no direct resemblance (i.e. no

sharing of features) to recognize between the human expression of emotions and music

supposedly representing such emotions. In his opinion, the kinds of arbitrary associations (such

as that “this piece represents an argument of two lovers” or “an amiable conversation of two

friends”) one may have listening to a musical piece have no aesthetic value and have nothing to

do with the music itself.

It is important here to understand the distinction that Kivy makes between “representing”

and “expressing.” Expressive properties of music for Kivy are matters of fact. So, our judgments

about them are certainly descriptive, and those judgments can be true or false depending on

whether they capture the emotion in the music correctly or not. We do not express our personal

24
However, elsewhere Kivy says that emotions can be successfully represented in music: “...music does not
ordinarily express them [emotions] (although sometimes it can and does).” See Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An
Essay on the Musical Emotions, including the complete text of The Corded Shell (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), 14.
 Sandler 17

attitude to music, when we say that it is happy, but we say something about the music.

Concerning the music itself, it cannot express emotions, primarily because music is not a

conscious agent who can express anything. Kivy suggests that we do tend to endow music with

human-like qualities, because, due to our evolutionary mechanisms,25 we tend to hear it as

animate, as if an agent is speaking through it;26 but to attribute those emotions expressed either to

the composer, or to the artist would simply be to violate the purity of the “purely musical

experience” that does not require any extra-musical context, and to avoid the question of how

exactly we come to hear those emotions.

To understand Kivy’s account of musical emotions, we should keep in mind that his

argument is explicitly based on a cognitive conception of emotions. According to such a

conception, our emotions involve our beliefs, and every emotion has an intentional object; that

is, every time one is angry, one is angry about something and because of something.27 It is

curious that applying the cognitivist account to the musical emotions, the difference between

how music can express and how it can represent seems to collapse. If music could express

emotions, they would always be about something other than themselves, which music being non-

representational cannot do. What, in Kivy’s opinion, can music do?

3.1. “to express X” vs. “to be expressive of X”

25
Kivy elaborates on this point at length in the Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia,
PA, 1989), 172—176.
26
In a similar vein, Jenefer Robinson and Robert Hatten suggest a theory of musical expression based on the
assumption that we hear music as if it contains an imaginary persona who is expressing complex emotions that
change over time. See “Emotions in Music,” Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2012), 71—106.
27
Additionally, Kivy holds that a cognitive conception denies that emotions can be expressed only through bodily
changes without any recognition of the emotions that caused them. For instance, low frequency sounds can cause in
us a certain physical anxiety, but the emotive cognitivist would not count this as an emotion, but rather as a passive
sensation, because we are not focusing our attention on this sound, but it affects us just as an outside stimulus. See
Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford, 2001), 100—101.
 Sandler 18

Kivy introduces another twist into his theory: he draws a further distinction between

“expressing X” and “being expressive of X.” The former is used to talk about people expressing

their emotions, for example, “Her face expresses sadness,” that is, her sadness (an inner state)

manifests itself on her face (an outer expression). The latter seems to denote a certain relation of

resemblance. Kivy’s example is a St. Bernard dog’s face that is “expressive of sadness.” When

we look at its face, we cannot fail to perceive it as sad because of its structural features which

resemble the features of a sad person: it has droopy eyes and cheeks, and the black patches

around the eyes make them look tired and weeping. We cannot claim that this face expresses

sadness, because the St. Bernard can actually then be happy and playful, but at the same time it

looks sad to us. Other examples of this kind that Kivy mentions in different places are a happy

theater mask or a weeping willow tree, i.e. inanimate objects to which we attribute human

qualities, in other words, personify them, in virtue of some of their observable qualities that

make us compare them with humans.

Similar to a St. Bernard’s face, Kivy says, “...there seems to be a direct analogy between

how people look and sound when they express the garden-variety emotions … and how music

sounds or is described when it is perceived as expressive of those same emotions.”28 He thinks

that emotive qualities depend on other structural musical properties, such as tempo, pitch,

tonality, etc, which in their turn can be used to describe expressive human behavior.29 For

instance, a jovial melody can be also described as quick, dynamic, loud, bright, etc, just like the

demeanor of a happy person. Kivy does not certainly mean that music literally resembles human

behavior, but we rather tend to perceive it as such.

28
Peter Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2002), 37.
29
Kivy writes, “Calling the emotive qualities of music ‘complex’ qualities emphasizes the fact that a passage of
music is cheerful, or melancholy, or whatever in virtue of other musical features that make it so.” See Peter Kivy,
Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2002), 35.
 Sandler 19

Kivy further specifies that music can be expressive only of simple emotions—he calls

them “garden-variety emotions”: anger, sadness, melancholy, restlessness, etc. These are

emotions that are not determined by a specific object of intention. Conversely, to be proud, one

can only be proud of something, or to desire, one needs to desire something. Kivy calls these

emotions that require an additional object to define them “intellectual attitudes” and argues that

we cannot hear those attitudes in the music.30

Another example that Kivy offers (and probably a more successful one with regard to

what he wants to convey) to illustrate his sense of musical expressiveness is the analogy with

color. Kivy wants to show that emotions are the “heard” properties of music in the same way as

“billiard ball possesses roundness and redness as seen properties,”31 so the relation between

emotions and music must be much stronger than simple resemblance (or appearance of

emotiveness) that follows from the St. Bernard’s case. Kivy uses the color analogy to explain

how, when we describe music in emotive terms, we speak literally, not metaphorically (in the

sense that music is not “as if” expressive of sadness, but is just sad). He suggests that sometimes

to describe a room with bright yellow walls we would say, “It is a cheerful room.” He claims that

we actually perceive the room as cheerful, because we tend to perceive yellow as a cheerful

color, but for us the room is yellow and cheerful at the same time. Kivy insists that cheerful in

this case is not a metaphor, but an actual property of the room. We use it to describe the room,

but the “cheerfulness” does not denote human cheerfulness, it denotes only a specific quality of

the color. Similarly, he says, in “tranquil music,” “tranquil” is not used to denote human

30
However, this claim does not deny that music, in appropriate contexts, can represent proudness. But then this
rather vague distinction between garden-variety emotions and intellectual attitudes is complicated by its dependence
on another unclear distinction, namely abstract vs. representational.
31
Peter Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2002), 89.
 Sandler 20

tranquility, but it only refers to the music directly, and we have no tranquil human in mind to

compare music with.

Despite the fact that emotive qualities depend on other more fundamental formal

properties of music, they emerge as new independent properties.32 For instance, Kivy describes

the opening of the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica as mournful, and he would say that

we hear it as a slow C-minor oboe solo accompanied by a march theme in the strings and we also

hear it as solemn and mournful. We can describe this movement without applying any emotive

properties, but it does not mean that we would not hear it as having some.

Therefore, as purely sensory qualities, emotions in music play the same role as other

heard structural qualities—the motifs and melodies we observe in the music. Eventually, Kivy

thinks that one can give a fully adequate account of a musical piece without using any emotive

terms, but he prefers to keep them to make a piece of absolute music accessible and

understandable to those who know nothing about theory of music, because anyone regardless of

their educational background can hear emotions in the music: “I might urge that he or she

observe the slightly melancholy theme that the composer combines with the more sprightly,

upbeat, happy one, going on to suggest that the musical structure of the piece is built upon, plays

with, these two emotively contrasted themes.”33 Precisely because those properties provide so

little meaning to the overall musical structure, Kivy thinks that he has managed to avoid the

mistake of saying that music is about those emotions: for him emotive properties have no

32
“They are also the kinds of quality that are sometimes called 'emergent', because they perceptually 'emerge' from
the other qualities that make them up." "Calling them emergent qualities emphasizes the fact that they are perceived
as distinct qualities in their own right, separate from the qualities that may 'produce' them." See Peter Kivy,
Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2002), 35.
Roger Scruton in a surprisingly similar vein suggests that emotive properties are “tertiary qualities” that supervene
on the “secondary qualities” but are perceived independently of them. See Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music
(Oxford, 1997), 160.
33
Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 182.
 Sandler 21

semantic value. That is why his formalism is enhanced—it is enhanced by the emotive properties

but not overdetermined through them.

3.2. Arousal of Emotions

Kivy denies—and this is one of the keystones of his philosophy—that talking about

musical emotions we express the emotions that we experience, simply because music has no

power to arouse garden-variety emotions in us. Kivy supports his contention with the cognitivist

theory of emotions: being non-representational, music cannot provide us with an object to be

upset/happy/angry about. He agrees that there is a tendency of sad music to make listeners sad,

but he does not think that it is always the case and that “arousing in us sadness” is what it means

for music to be sad, because otherwise, for instance, we would have no reason to enjoy sad

music. He has many more arguments to support his claim, but I do not think it is of relevance to

list all of them here.

However, music is capable of arousing in us one emotion—a “nameless emotion,” as

Kivy calls it.34 We are certainly moved by the musical beauty, which is the only object of our

emotion, and Kivy wants to emphasize that the feeling aroused by the musical beauty is a unique

emotion that cannot be experienced elsewhere. He believes that only beautiful music can move

us, so we should certainly understand or recognize it as beautiful in order to be moved by it. In

this question, he agrees with Hanslick who believed that feeling emotions is not a part of musical

understanding but immediately follows it.

To sum up our conversation about emotions, Kivy believes that he offers an account of

musical emotions compatible with the main thesis of formalism, i.e. that musical experience is a

purely cognitive process focused on the understanding of the syntactic musical events. He

34
Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford, 2001), 103.
 Sandler 22

assumes that if Hanslick had conceived of the possibility that emotions are simply heard

properties of music, he would have agreed with Kivy, because these emotive properties are

cognized and not felt, preserving musical experience as a purely intellectual pleasure. At the

same time, Kivy does not assert that music leaves us emotionally untouched.

4. Musical Representation

At the beginning of the paper I mentioned the distinction between absolute and

representational that is fundamental for Kivy’s philosophy of music. He maintains that music

with the help of some relevant contextual information can tell us about something, that is, music

can be representational. In Sounding Off, he provides a list of criteria that make musical

representations of various kinds possible:35

1) One must be able to “hear-in” the music the object of representation, i.e. unmistakably

name it;

2) When one understands music correctly, one hears exactly what was intended to be heard

by the composer;

3) One is aware not only of the object of representation, but also of the difference between

the object represented and the medium through which it is represented;

4) Music and the object represented can be described using the same words, i.e. they can

share features on the basis of the common description.

(1) emphasizes once again that representation is a success concept, that is, one has failed

to represent if nobody can recognize what is represented. But the “hearing-in” part requires more

explanation. It is the main condition for “pictorial representations in music,” as Kivy calls this

type of representation. Kivy draws a parallel with representational paintings. He believes that a

35
Peter Kivy, “Representation” in Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2012), 149—
153.
 Sandler 23

painting can represent only those objects that one can see in a painting, that is, what we can

recognize in virtue of its resemblance to the original and be aware that it is represented through a

certain medium, paint on canvas in our case. Thus, one cannot see chastity in Dante Gabriel

Rossetti’s Annunciation, but one can see a white lily and a dove that non-pictorially represent the

chastity of Mary. Similarly, pictorial representation in music would be that of a musical, “non-

dimensional,” object, as Kivy calls music. In this manner, music can represent different musical

genres or events, such as a funeral march or a folk song.

(2) says that representation is an intentional concept (unlike resemblance), and the author

of the representational work must have intended to represent a certain object. I talked about the

intentionality at length in the previous part of the paper, so I will not repeat those arguments

here.

(3) is more complicated. On first glance, it helps us to distinguish between an imitation

and a representation: when we listen to a man who is good at imitating birdsongs with his voice,

the difference between the medium of imitation (the voice) and the object of imitation (the

birdsong) is meant to be inaudible, while when we hear woodwinds representing birds in the

second movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, we are quite aware of the difference

between woodwind instruments and bird’s vocal chords as distinct sources of sound and cannot

mistake one for the other. With regard to this point, Kivy elaborates on Adam Smith’s

conception of artistic merit, which holds that a true work of art should not be too realistic, so as

not to become a mere copy of its object, and should not be too unlike its object, so that not to

hinder our understanding of the artwork. Kivy believes that Smith thus emphasized the

importance of the medium for a successful representation. The medium of representation (oil on

canvas, sound, marble) draws our attention to the difference between the artwork and its original
 Sandler 24

and makes the fact of representation apparent. Kivy argues that the more dissimilar the object

and the medium of its representation are, the more pleasure we take in the artwork, so evaluation

of the medium (music, in our case) and of its success in this particular representation is a part of

our aesthetic experience.

(4) is based on the fact that music is often described in terms of vocabulary that does not

directly come from the aural field (such as “loud” or “noisy”); music can also be bright, tough,

high, transparent, sweet, etc. Therefore, it can represent those objects with which it can share

“isomorphism of structure,” as Kivy calls it. For instance, music can represent harmony in

marriage, because musical harmony is ‘consonant,’ and harmonious marriage is also ‘consonant.’

4.1. Representation and “Free Associating”

Kivy suggests two ways in which music can represent—illustration and representation.

The object of illustration is recognized by anyone immediately and unmistakably without

additional clarifications. An appropriate example of illustration would be a musical reproduction

of a birdsong. Kivy’s criterion of identification for these cases is the “sounds like” relation. If a

certain sequence of notes sounds to us like a ticking clock or some industrial noise, we would not

fail to draw the connection between them and perceive this bit of music as illustrating the sound

of a clock or of a machine engine.

Unlike the case of illustration, Kivy argues, in order to correctly understand what a

musical representation is about, one needs “minimal information” that would provide the listener

with the descriptive context to direct his or her attention to certain features of the work’s musical

structure, because, as he argued at length, music itself does not possess any semantic content to

tell us what it is about. In the simplest instance, this role is played by the title. Just as Picasso’s

Guernica needs its title to inform us that it is a representation of a certain moment in the Spanish
 Sandler 25

Civil War, so Gustav Holst’s Planets needs its title to let us know that those pieces are meant to

represent the planets and their mythologies.

Talking about representation, it is important to go back to Kivy’s distinction between

absolute and representational music. He raises the objection that some people, listening to a piece

of abstract music, such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, claim to “hear” it representationally:

one might think that one hears “heroes and shipwrecks,” an adventure narrative, a hunting scene,

etc in the music. But Kivy dismisses this objection and calls these cases of “free associating” to

music and believes that this interpretation of one’s experience is false, because, according to his

criteria, there is nothing represented in this particular music: we have no evidence of

Beethoven’s intention to represent, no clear understanding of music as a medium, no transparent

perceived resemblance between the musical structure and the alleged object of representation. I

believe that the main difference between absolute and representational music that Kivy is trying

to capture but never quite articulates has to do with what the object of our attention is and what is

the medium, although he does talk about the medium at length. In the case of absolute music, we

do not perceive music as a medium; the medium in this case would only be a musical instrument

that produces the sound, which is the main and only object of our attention. In the case of

musical representation, say, Britten’s Sea Interludes, we hear-in the music the sea in its various

states, and music stops being the object of attention and becomes a medium telling us something

about the sea, and we cannot but listen to it in this way. Similarly, someone who enjoys Jackson

Pollock’s paintings does not consider colors and paint blots just a medium that helps him or her

to see a certain image on canvas, rather we would focus on them as the primary object of

attention.
 Sandler 26

Due to this factor—ultimately, the impossibility of making a true judgment about what is

represented in a piece of absolute music—Kivy deems “free associating” as irrelevant to our

aesthetic experience of it, because an aesthetic experience is only about the events contained in

the music itself. He seems to stick to Hanslick’s distinction between what beautiful music is in

itself and what our response to it consists in. He says that one can certainly listen to music like

this, but he strongly advises against that, because one would fail to hear what the absolute music

is about.

From everything discussed above, one can conclude that the biggest challenge for the

musical representation of something other than music lies in the limitations (Kivy calls them

“non-dimensionality” of the sound) imposed by the medium.36 Kivy believes that we admire

instances of musical representation so greatly, because it seems to us almost impossible to

represent a steam engine in musical form. Music requires a certain formal structure and it aims at

creating beauty, while the sound of the steam engine seems chaotic and ugly. In other words, the

seeming impossibility of the task of representing objects makes our experience of

representational music more valuable and pleasurable.

To sum up, Kivy’s main theses are: 1) musical experience is intellectual, although it has

nothing to do with concepts; 2) music is expressive and moving in virtue of its expressive

qualities that can be easily heard by the listeners; 3) we can make descriptive judgments about

musical emotions, because these qualities exist in the music; 4) music can sometimes be

representational due to its capacity to resemble other sounds and exemplify symbolic structures.

36
Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 101.
 Sandler 27

Chapter 3

In this chapter, I am going to indicate certain problems that Kivy’s view faces and

suggest some possible solutions. I agree with Kivy’s main thesis that understanding music is

primarily a matter of knowledge and only secondarily that of feeling, but I believe he should

make the distinction between the way we talk about music and the way we perceive it much

clearer than he does. Considering that music in our interpretation can mean such a multiplicity of

things, from the exemplification of some “metaphysical reality” to the expression of the

composer’s states of mind, we should look for something in the music that makes it so malleable

and prone to interpretation, because, if we adopt the formalist thesis about the non-

representability of music, anything we can say about music, apart from writing some formal

mathematical progressions, is in fact an act of interpretation.

Hence, I have two separate claims to make. First, our imagination is the crucial cognitive

capacity that helps us hear music as expressive of certain emotions. Second, we can rightly talk

about music in emotive terms, and the referent of these terms is not the music itself, as Kivy

believes, but the emotions that we experience as listeners in our imagination.

IV. Music and Expression

I will start, however, with evaluating and discussing some of the inconsistencies that I

find in Kivy’s theory of musical expressiveness. I believe that Kivy is right to take up the task of

investigating the way we talk about music, because Hanslick’s removal of emotive qualities from

informed discussions about music is only an avoidance of the question of why we consider music

to be emotive and how it comes to be such. However, I am unsatisfied with Kivy’s solution,

because of a conceptual impossibility contained in his view that makes his account incoherent.

He suggests treating emotive attributes as formal “objective” qualities, which I find impossible,
 Sandler 28

because emotions can only be recognized in a personified object. I will try to show further that

there is no expressiveness without the expressing, and to say that music “possesses” emotions as

perceivable qualities, one has to rely on the premise that we personify music in the first place.

Kivy, however, does not pay proper attention to the question of personification in music.

I want to look first at his concept of “expressive of” more closely. In my analysis, I will

attempt to persuade the reader that Kivy’s musical expressiveness is either redundant, because it

tells us nothing about the music, or upon a closer look is indistinguishable from his notion of

representation.

1. Resemblance and Representation

My first doubt concerns Kivy’s St. Bernard’s analogy. To recap briefly his argument: we

perceive emotions in music in the same way we perceive sadness on the St. Bernard’s face; the

dog does not express sadness, but we cannot fail to perceive it as sad in virtue of its resemblance

to a sad human face. If we follow Kivy’s logic, in saying that “music is sad” we mean (or at least

we should mean) exactly that “music is expressive of sadness,” so we should be able to make a

similar substitution in the St. Bernard’s case, but it does not look like we can.

We know that dogs do not express emotions on their faces the way people do (they use

body language instead). So, what we perceive on the St. Bernard’s face is not the dog’s

expression of sadness, but the specifically human expression of sadness that the dog’s face

resembles. There are two ways in which we can interpret the “sadness” of the St. Bernard’s face.

The first option would be that we see the dog and exclaim, “He looks so sad!”. Because a dog is

an animate creature, we are likely to personify it and judge its face as expressive of sadness, that

is, actually expressing sadness, and feel sympathy towards the dog. We would pat it and give it a
 Sandler 29

treat, which would be a natural empathetic response to a perceived emotion in this case. A part of

what it means to understand expression would be to react somewhat emotionally.

The second option is probably more likely to apply if we look at the St. Bernard’s

photograph. In this case, we may choose to say that its face is “expressive of” sadness, if we

want to emphasize those features in virtue of which it looks sad to us (i.e. those it shares with a

sad human face), and the emotion itself (i.e. its cause in the agent’s beliefs and intentions—what

makes “sadness” what it is) is not taken into account. We are not concerned with the

expressiveness of this photograph or this dog’s face, we are interested in the formal resemblance

between the two objects.

Arguing for the cognitive theory of emotions, Kivy himself mentioned that mere bodily

manifestations of certain emotions would not suffice to identify this state as an emotion. A face

that is expressive of sadness but not sad is a mask (either literally, or metaphorically)—its sad

expression is not enough to state that an emotion is being expressed. So, whatever Kivy

describes as “sadness” in the St. Bernard’s case is not an emotion, it is a manifestation or even a

symbolic representation that stands for an emotion in many cases. We understand that this

photograph does not represent a sad dog, but rather a dog that has similar features with a

paradigmatically sad person. I say “paradigmatically,” because everyone expresses sadness

differently, but there is a conventional depiction of what it means to look sad. The dog’s face is

thus compared to a conventional representation of human sadness, something like a tragic theater

mask.

Since Kivy denies the first option—because it implies that music is about sadness—what

Kivy is getting at with his example, I believe, is the difference between representation and

resemblance. In this case, resemblance is a representation without the intention to represent, a

 Sandler 30

sharing of the same features perceived. However, resemblance too requires a certain intention—

the intention of perceiver.

For instance, a cloud may resemble a dove, or a peculiar pattern on the bark of a tree may

resemble a face of a grumpy old woman, but this resemblance can only be discovered by the

observer. It is very likely that the observer will first be struck by the “grumpiness” of the tree

bark, and only after will be able to point at certain features which make this emotion possible

(this is similar to how Kivy describes our experience of the musical emotions). It is possible,

because the bark resembles an old woman’s face: furrowed surface as wrinkled skin, a twig as a

crooked nose in the middle, two tiny cracks as the eye sockets. This resemblance is objective, in

the sense that anyone who can notice those correspondences will not fail to perceive the face (as

we cannot for Kivy fail to perceive the musical emotions once they are indicated to us). But what

is crucial in this example is that only after the resemblance between the bark and a face has been

spotted, can one personify the object to give it expressive features of a human, “grumpiness” in

this case. One cannot perceive an emotion in an object that bears no resemblance to the human.

It is quite clear how a face can resemble the emotions of another face. But how can a

musical passage resemble an emotion? Surprisingly, the closest we can find to an explanation of

how music can resemble anything in Kivy is in his discussion of representation. Talking about

representation, Kivy mentions that music can illustrate not only sounds, but also more

complicated things—objects of the sight and even concepts. To understand how music resembles

emotions, it would be helpful to look at the second group.

Kivy thinks that music can also represent concepts. How does one recognize the

resemblance between the music and the concepts, that by definition cannot have any sensible

qualities? In the Chorale Prelude, “Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebote,” Bach illustrates God’s
 Sandler 31

ten commandments by repeating the first phrase of the chorale ten times. The resemblance is

perceived, and the representation is recognized (with the assistance of the text, admittedly),

because ten commandments and the music share the number ten in common. A slightly different

case is Part I of Handel’s Creation, in which Kivy finds the representation of God’s Light. In

Kivy’s reading, Handel uses the “brightness” of the C-major chord37 to represent the brightness

of God’s Light. So, the indicator of resemblance is the perceivable quality of brightness in both

the C-major chord and God’s Light. It is crucial for Kivy that representation and its object could

share the same description. Kivy writes, “…in all cases in which structural adjectives apply to

musical representations, there is an isomorphism between representation and object, regardless

of whether or not the adjectives are used univocally when applied both to the music and to the

object of musical representation.”38 By univocally, he means that the same adjective can be used

in two different senses with regard to the music and to the object, e.g. literally or metaphorically.

I will return to the analysis of metaphorical and literal meaning of emotive adjectives in the next

section.

In Kivy’s analysis of musical emotions, we can see that a similar isomorphism and a

common description are necessary. He writes, there is “…a direct analogy between how people

look and sound when they express the garden-variety emotions … and how music sounds or is

described when it is perceived as expressive of those emotions.”39 But to say this is very

different from saying that emotions are the heard properties of music, so Kivy seems to be

pushing in two opposite directions. At the same time, in the section devoted to musical

representation he insists that music does not represent emotions, that is, it cannot sound like a

37
C major is generally heard as the “brightest” key, because it uses no sharps or flats.
38
Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 75.
39
Peter Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 2002), 36.
 Sandler 32

gesture or bodily posture, but he does not seem to notice that his St. Bernard’s face analogy

suggests exactly this conclusion.

To reiterate my general point: Kivy wants to ground his comparison in the purely formal

features of an emotion without considering what the expression is of. To prove the same

intuition, I want to focus on Kivy’s specific wording. It seems quite puzzling to me that Kivy

often uses the verb “embody” to talk about musical emotions, considering the moderateness of

his claim about the mere “expressiveness” of music. In the St. Bernard example, it would be

erroneous to say that a dog’s face embodies sadness, because a part of what “sadness” means is a

certain feeling that a dog would probably experience if, for example, its owner left it alone for a

long time. To embody sadness means simply to express it. Kivy cannot claim that music literally

embodies sadness and at the same time say that it is a formal quality that has nothing to do with

the intentionality or a certain cognitive state behind the emotion. His understanding of emotions

in music is reduced to certain formal features of expressiveness which can signify to us the

presence of a certain emotion, such as a person’s facial expression. Again, according to a

cognitive conception of emotions, physical manifestation of an emotion is not enough to claim

that the emotion is present.

To sum up, according to his analogy, what Kivy says when calls the opening of Elgar’s

First Symphony (see Example 1) “dignified and stately,”40 is that there is a perceivable (but

unintended in the Symphony) resemblance between the formal qualities of the Symphony’s

opening movement and formal qualities of a conventional expression of dignity and stateliness.

The music has one of the most common time signatures of 4/4 emphasized by the downward

progressions of consecutive quarter notes in the bass, that is every beat gets a note, and the

40
Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 178.
 Sandler 33

melody has a regular pattern that repeats itself every couple of measures. The tempo is andante—

“walking” tempo. Only strings and woodwinds play in this section, so the sound is very light and

clear. But how do we get from this formal description to “dignified and stately”? We may

similarly imagine a dignified and stately person walking down the stairs (like a Queen coming

into the ballroom) step by step with a straight posture and with a pleasant impenetrable smile on

her face. Can this be the comparison or analogy we implicitly have in mind while listening to the

symphony? If this is the case, this analogy is too demanding for our imagination, because music

is constantly moving forwards and one cannot pause in front of it and think, as one can do with

an abstract expressionist painting, for instance.

I have noticed that to give an explanation of why a piece of music is expressive of this or

that emotion, one cannot help using musical notation as a point of reference, which, if we in fact

hear it as dignified, cannot be the case. We—those unsophisticated listeners whom Kivy finds to

be the main users of the emotive terms describing music—do not hear “quarter notes” or a “4/4

time,” but we already hear a step-by-step movement, and to use musical notation to support the

analogy would be to compare two modes of talking about the music and not describe our

experience of it. If the listener is a talented musician with perfect pitch, who actually can

immediately identify the key and the time signatures of the music, he or she would find it even

more difficult to hear the music as dignified; and one would have to use one’s formal

understanding to find the right word that describes precisely what one hears. Eventually, my

question is, Does Kivy’s resemblance theory capture what we experience when we hear music as

dignified?

2. Emotions and Colors

 Sandler 34

So, what does it mean for us to hear emotions in music? From my personal experience, I

find it extremely hard to give a precise description of a piece of music in emotive terms. It is

much easier to do so with a commercial jingle than with a complex sonata, because a commercial

jingle normally has very few structural properties to constitute the emotive description (it can be

simply happy or sad, but is not sophisticated enough to be “pompous” or “monstrous”), but at the

same time the more nuanced the piece of music is and the more instruments and voices it

employs, the more complicated it gets to find the right word to describe rightly what we hear.

And I tend to think that this is a certain skill we acquire through practice and reading texts about

music, but Kivy would in fact deny that it is a skill, because to him emotive terms precisely offer

a valid way of talking about music for the uninformed in musical theory listeners. However,

what everyone does understand, is how to use emotive terms to describe people or to express

one’s state of mind. In the next part, I will argue that what we refer to when describing music in

emotive terms, is our experience of it and not the music itself.

Before that I want to briefly return to another important distinction between music

arousing joy in us and music being joyful. Kivy admits that we do have a tendency to feel

similar emotions to those we hear in the music, that is, cheerful music tends to make us happier

and sorrowful music tends to make us sad, but he disagrees that “arousing in us sadness” is what

it fundamentally means for music to be sad. A beautiful piece of sad music can bring us joy (and

it does arouse in us only one emotion—awe of being moved by the beautiful music—according

to Kivy’s theory of musical beauty), because we enjoy beautiful things, so it shows that “sad

music” does not necessarily designate the music that makes us sad. Hence, my question is

whether it actually matters for our experience of musical beauty, if the music is happy, sad,

solemn, hopeful, etc? If, according to Kivy, we are moved by the music that is “beautifully sad”
 Sandler 35

or “beautifully somber,” what is the practical purpose of distinguishing between those emotions

in music? It would suffice to have only the formal structural qualities that constitute them and the

musical beauty, but for some reason, we do say that music can be sad or happy?

I suggest thinking about what we actually mean when we say, for instance, “The first

section from the Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words Op. 19 No. 4 in A major is serene”

(Example 2). If we follow Kivy’s logic, i.e. that music embodies emotions as heard properties,

this proposition would be analogous to an utterance describing a similar experience, “The stage

curtains in Symphony Hall are red.”

Imagine two people, George and Laura. Say, I went to Symphony Hall together with

George to listen to Mendelssohn, while Laura has never been to SH or heard Mendelssohn (but

she is in general an experienced listener of classical music). If I tell George, “The stage curtains

in SH are red,” he would get confused and probably assume that I am not talking to him but

describing the Hall to Laura on the phone, or that I want to elaborate on the overall aesthetic of

the Hall, my own impression of it, and not simply to assert what is a truism for both of us. If we

stick to Kivy’s analogy, then it would not make any sense for me to tell George, “The first

section of the Mendelssohn Song No.4 was serene.” However, I believe, George would not be

confused by this sentence. He would probably think that I mean, “The first section made me feel

serene.” He would not even think that what I am saying is similar to “The first section was slow,

piano, and legato,” although, according to Kivy, this (and some more properties XYZ) is what it

means for a passage to be serene. To make sure this is not the case, let us talk to Laura. If I tell

her that the stage curtains were red, she will accept it as a new piece of information about what

SH looks like inside. If I want to describe the music to her, I could say that it was serene, and the

way she would understand me would be something like, “Passage X was tonal, slow, probably
 Sandler 36

major, legato, without sudden interruptions and dynamic changes, etc,” or that I expressed my

feeling of serenity evoked by this passage. If she understood it in the former way, she would

indeed get some information about the formal structure of the Mendelssohn Song, but then it

seems that there is nothing distinct about the musical “serenity” that is being communicated,

apart from its being an umbrella term for all those qualities (which may vary from interpretation

to interpretation) I listed above. She would learn nothing about the content (in Hanslick’s sense

of the word) of the piece. I believe this is precisely how Hanslick saw emotive terms being

applied to music and therefore considered their use to be ignorant and faulty, because, in his

opinion, they muddied and flattened our musical experience.

In addition, my intuition is that describing music through its emotive qualities simplifies

our experience of it. I doubt that by saying that the opening of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D

Minor is ominous, for instance, we are saying something about the piece itself; rather, we explain

its relation to us and to human perception of it. However, our emotions are also often more

complex than a word can convey, and this is one of the reasons why there is a general agreement

that music can express human emotions much better than other representational artforms.

With regard to this, Mendelssohn remarked, “People often complain that music is too

ambiguous, … whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite… The

thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into

words, but on the contrary, too definite.”41 There seem to be two contrasting intuitions about

music: music as universal vs. music as particular. Kivy seems to be supporting universalism,

because he argues that emotions can be heard and identified by anyone who listens to music

41 Felix Mendelssohn, Letter to Marc-André Souchay, October 15, 1842, cited from Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis
1847 (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1878), 221; trans. from Felix Mendelssohn: Letters, ed. Gisella Selden-
Goth (New York: Pantheon, 1945), 313—14.
 Sandler 37

attentively and musical events can be generalized under certain expressive qualities. Hanslick, on

the contrary, believes that music is too concrete to be described in emotive terms

comprehensively.

3. Musical Expressiveness and Artistic Value

Despite the fact that Kivy incorporates emotions into his view of music, he deems

musical pleasure a purely intellectual business and he does not seem to have a satisfactory theory

of how music moves us. So, it looks as though the causal relation between the sensory intuitions

and the emotions is still not explained. For Kivy, the beautiful is something that moves us by

definition. His explanation of how music moves us roughly comes down to the idea that the only

emotion we can rightly experience with regard to music is admiration for its beauty, which is

basically indistinguishable from pleasure. But I think this cannot be the answer to the question of

how music moves us. It is merely a partial restatement of what it means to be beautiful: the

concept of the beautiful entails (but is certainly not reduced to) that its object is pleasurable. By

reducing musical emotions to the function of the structural properties, instead of saving music

from the merciless formalist grip of the cold intellectualist listening, Kivy has also inadvertently

emptied music of what gives it its primary artistic value. In Kivy’s taxonomy, the Star Wars

soundtrack will be indistinguishable from a Chopin Piano Concerto, because we can also

recognize various musical emotions in the soundtrack, in the same way as we can hear the CNN

news broadcast background music as impatient and anxious. Artistic expressiveness is what

distinguishes Chopin from TV-commercials jingles, and what elicits our empathetic response to

the musical piece. Expressiveness is a part of an aesthetic experience, as Kivy rightly points out

in response to Hanslick, but he does not give it enough credit as the main power in music to

move us.
 Sandler 38

My criticism, however, does not go as far as to claim as expressivists, whom Kivy is

attacking, claim that music is about emotions: emotions of the composer, or the musician, or the

listener. I want to emphasize that expressiveness is a concept that connects the artist and the

listener through the work of art, but it does not imply any “hearing-in” the music of whatever the

composer wants to express. In any work of art, there is an intention to express. Now I want to

look at the concept of expression differently.

Following Roger Scruton, who in his Aesthetics of Music suggests treating expressiveness

in its special “intransitive sense,” I believe that expressiveness plays a much more important role

in musical aesthetics than Kivy thinks it does. Based on Crocean aesthetics, Scruton claims that

there is no difference between expression, expressiveness, and “being expressive of.”42 He

argues that music, as any kind of art, is always expressive, and there is no need to specify what it

is expressive of. In his example, Scruton points out that when a music teacher says to the student,

“Play expressively,” it would be silly of the student to ask, “Expressively of what?”. Scruton thus

emphasizes that the expressive meaning of a piece is inextricably linked to our particular

experience of it. One single note played by a superb violinist can be heard as expressive,

although it would be impossible to describe, what it is expressive of: we just hear it as full of

feeling.43 So, in a performance of a larger piece, every single note must possess some expressive

quality, so that music could emotionally move us. Such expressive musical elements as

crescendo/diminuendo, ritenuto, staccato, indicating the way notes should be played, work on a

42
For Scruton, human expression is an act of communication of one’s state of mind. In the aesthetic context, it
oscillates between its intransitive and transitive meanings, its understanding is highly dependent on the context of
the perceiver, and it cannot be subjected to or reproduced according to some rules. See Roger Scruton, “Expression,”
in The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997), 140—170.
43
Kivy, describing a similar case, writes that when a note is played musically, “it is given a ‘life’” through a formal
structure that this gesture possesses, which we in our turn perceive and enjoy. He does not treat this gesture as
expressive of anything, he believes that we are moved, yet again, by its musical beauty. However, his “life” in
quotation marks seems to imply that he has some thought about expressiveness in mind. See Peter Kivy, Music
Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1990), 87.
 Sandler 39

much smaller scale than any emotion we can hear in the piece. For example, when Grieg in the

opening of his String Quartet G Moll (see Example 3) in six bars progresses from fortissimo to

pianissimo, it is a move that must be played expressively and meaningfully, but one cannot

capture this transition by referring to any of the “garden-variety emotions.” Thus, and Kivy

seems to forget this, every performance of the same musical work by a great musician would be

heard as emotionally different, and it may depend just on how a violinist holds his or her bow.

Furthermore, Scruton claims that expressiveness is a success concept, because human

expression is also an act of communication, which succeeds only when the feeling expressed is

understood by the interlocutor.44 Kivy’s notion of “expressive of” implies the lack of this

intentionality. Rather, he delegates the responsibility to perceive the expressiveness to the

listener. But the expressiveness perceived cannot compel us to an emotional reaction, since we

do not usually react emotionally to theater masks or people faking their emotions when we know

that they do, rather we remain absolutely indifferent to them or even feel indignation on their

“fakeness.” Only those expressive qualities that have profundity and depth, that is, those which

are perceived as if they are an expression of something, can make us empathize.

The main function of Kivy’s emotive qualities in music is theoretically supposed to

constitute a significant part of aesthetic experience, and partly because of those qualities music is

supposedly able to move us. But by reducing them to masks or mere resemblances without the

intentional core, he takes our empathetic response away from it. I believe (and I hope that this is

the case, because I cannot substantiate this claim with anything here but a commonsense

understanding of what it means to be human) that we cannot genuinely perceive emotions and

44
For Scruton, to understand music entails understanding it as expressive. See Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of
Music (Oxford, 1997), 168.
 Sandler 40

not respond empathetically. Art moves us because it is expressive and fundamentally individual,

not just because it is beautiful.

V. Music and Imagination

In this part I am going to discuss what I find to be the most significant drawback in

Kivy’s argument. I want the reader to follow the discussion keeping in mind what Hanslick said

about the role of the imagination as the main “organ” affected by music. I think that by

“imagination” he means a power to create visual images, which gives our perception a certain

dimensionality and credibility.45 So, in musical experience, where music does not have any

perceivable content, this will probably be the most important power to help us make sense of

what is happening in the music. Musical non-dimensionality, which Kivy identified as the main

limitation of the art form, must be compensated through transforming music into some kind of

representation, just so that we were able to talk about it at least metaphorically. To capture

musical structure, we use notation that we can reproduce, describe, and interpret. But the more

interesting question is to understand how we represent to ourselves what we hear, when we just

listen to music alone. We cannot talk about music in musical language, unless we try to “ta-ta”

the tune we have in mind, and this would probably be the most accurate “description.” Kivy is

correct when he says that the main question is to understand our musical encounter with a piece,

but I find that in fact he fails to explain our experience—although he gets very close to doing

so—precisely because he fails to account for the role of imagination.

As I mentioned earlier, in Crocean aesthetics imagination is the main condition of artistic

expression and of the creation of art in general. For Croce, imagination is synonymous with

45
Hanslick often talks about music in visual metaphors: “The word" Anschauung" (viewing, contemplating) is no
longer applied to visual processes only, but also to the functions of the other senses. It is, in fact, eminently suited to
describe the act of attentive hearing which is nothing but a mental inspection of a succession of musical images.”
Eduard Hanslick, Beautiful in Music, trans. G. Cohen (London, 1891), 21.
 Sandler 41

expression, and is treated as the main creative force. Expression in his view is inextricably linked

to artistic individuality, and in this respect it cannot be paradigmatic or faceless (in the same way

I found it in the St. Bernard’s analogy). I find it strange that Kivy seems to avoid openly talking

about such a “trivial” artistic notion as imagination, although his theory seems to imply a

conclusion similar to that of Hanslick. Kivy believes that absolute music is different from the

representational art in its capacity to liberate the listener from the everyday concerns of the world

we live in: “…music, alone of the fine arts, pre-eminently provides this liberation.”46 “Contentful

arts” (Kivy’s neologism) engage with concepts and objects and make us reflect upon the world,

while music in its non-representational quality offers us a world in itself. This world is injected

with beautiful emotions that we can listen to, contemplate, and enjoy. However, the question

how we can enter that world or how we can make sense of something that is of a different world

is not quite addressed in Kivy’s view. In my opinion, imagination is a plausible answer.

Imagination is the power to organize and translate those structured sensory inputs that music

brings about into the fundamental category of the world we inhabit—space.

1. Music and Metaphor

As a possible response to this unresolved question, I suggest looking at a theory of

musical representation developed by Charles O. Nussbaum in his book Musical Representation.

He supports his theory with research in cognitive psychology and the psychology of the

emotions, but I will not go into so much detail as to list all of his arguments here. Briefly,

Nussbaum’s main thesis is that we perceive music as motion in a certain imaginary “acousmatic

space,”47 so that when we describe music, we refer to its spatial representation created in our

46
Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford, 2001), 35.
47
Nussbaum calls the space “acousmatic” because, just like in our experience of the acousmatic sound, the source of
the sound is not contemplated as a part of the imaginary space. See Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical
 Sandler 42

imagination. For Nussbaum, this imaginary space is a nonconceptual mental model that helps us

map the purely musical narrative onto the relations existing in the real world.48 He argues at

length why we tend to perceive music spatially and how our imagined space corresponds to our

bodily experiences, but I cannot go further into his argument here.49

Nussbaum believes that Kivy’s literal treatment of musical emotions does not solve but

pose the problem: how can a sequence of sounds be, say, mischievous?50 As I pointed out in the

previous section, there is no direct resemblance between the musical movements and the

movements of a human in a certain emotional state. Nussbaum notes that because musical

language (in the way Hanslick described it as a self-contained semantic system that has no

referents outside of itself) and human expressivity belong to different semantic fields, there

cannot be a literal correspondence between them but only a metaphorical one. He writes, “...a

metaphor works or does not work, fits or does not fit, if and only if the mental models deriving

from one semantic field can model (via our reformed version of exemplification) those belonging

to another semantic field.”51 For instance, the sentence “She drowned in a sea of grief” is a

metaphor: the state of grief is implicitly compared to the sea where one can drown. A semantic

field is a set of words with related meaning. We have two semantic fields—emotive states and

liquids. We understand this metaphor, because we think we experience emotions as something

that fills us, as if we were an empty cup that is filled with water. Mental models set a framework

Representation (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 50. More on “acousmatic experience” see Roger Scruton, “Sound” in The
Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997), 2—3.
48
“What cannot be conceptualized … is what is represented by or ‘heard in’ the musical structures, namely virtual
musical space and its contents.” “Rather than seeing a musical episode as a symbol … I propose to construe it as a
representation with nonconceptual content, a pushmi-pullyu representation mandating construction of a model of a
virtual feature domain, through which the listener is able to move by following cognitive trails of experiential lines
of force through that virtual feature domain.” See Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation (Cambridge,
MA, 2007), 237.
49
See ibid., 49—66.
50
Ibid., 228—231.
51
Ibid., 231.
 Sandler 43

for our understanding of how the world works, e.g. game theory is a model explaining rational

decision making or the scientific worldview is a model of knowledge acquisition. Our mental

model explaining how the emotions work (in this case, our commonsense experience that they

affect our whole body) can accommodate our understanding of how water fills the glass. To

emphasize the negative effect of the emotion, we compare it to the sea because it is salty and

deep, and with drowning, because it is bad, and make it the case that we lose our control over the

emotion and this fact affects us negatively.

According to this explanation, metaphor is a sharing of features in virtue of some

commonality that can be discovered by the observer who invents the metaphor and that can be, if

properly explained when not clear immediately, also recognized by anyone else. But this is

precisely what Kivy is denying: he thinks that, unlike representation, emotions are the qualities

perceived directly, without any extra-musical reference. What Kivy might do in this case, is to

reject the St. Bernard analogy as misguiding, because it entails the conclusion which Kivy wants

to avoid. I believe he should focus more on the color analogy, because what Kivy really means to

say is not that “music is expressive of sadness” or “sadness is in the music” (what would be as

wrong as to say, “redness is in the rose”), but simply that “music is sad.” There is a difference

between “hearing sadness in the music” and “the music being sad,” and Kivy does often conflate

the two and uses them interchangeably.

Previously I provided some arguments supporting the view that the literal perception of

emotions as heard musical properties is impossible. But to establish a metaphorical

correspondence, as Nussbaum rightly points out, there must be another step to ensure that the

semantic field of music and of human emotions can share some features, because music, as

formalists (I believe, rightly) identified, is another semantic system, another “language.” Kivy
 Sandler 44

makes a similar claim talking about the musical representation; he says that as long as the music

and the object represented can share the same description, representation is possible. So, the

question once again comes down to how we can talk about music correctly at all and what the

correct referent of our description is. But it would be completely against the spirit of Kivy’s

inquiry to return to Hanslick’s denial of the importance of the emotive terms for our musical

descriptions, because, correctly or not, we keep understanding and experiencing emotions in

music. In my opinion, Nussbaum offers a compelling explanation and restores some missing

elements in Kivy’s theory of expressiveness and representation.

2. Simulation Theory

Nussbaum argues that an aesthetic experience in general involves responding to its object

in an empathetic way. We “mirror” or “simulate” the expressive qualities that we perceive in the

object either physically or in our imagination, that is, we “translate” them into the expressive

language available to us.52 An exemplary experience of this kind is reading a novel or watching a

movie, where we are clearly made to empathize with the characters by adopting their point of

view. Nussbaum describes our experience as oscillating between a first- and a third-person

attitude, when we look at the events either from the perspective of the character, or from the

perspective of the reader. A successful work of art invites us into this game and our musical

experience involves the same game, as Nussbaum thinks.53

Nussbaum, just like Kivy and Hanslick, describes our musical experience as attending to

the events in an acoustic narrative, but he suggests that the only way we can make sense of them

is by imagining them as having a certain expressive trajectory,54 or by constructing musical

52
“…it is we ourselves who take on with our own bodies the miming or charade-like activity…”. See ibid., 230.
53
He writes that we experience music as if the performer “were playing on us.” See Charles O. Nussbaum, The
Musical Representation (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 211.
54
Expressive in the sense of being necessarily experienced as expressive.
 Sandler 45

mental models that help explain to us why this musical event was followed by another one, and

responding to them directly empathetically. I think he implies that musical experience is a certain

dialogue with oneself, because the listener is aware of the fact that he or she is being affected by

the musical expressiveness, and at the same time the only person who is inhabiting the same

“acousmatic space” and with whom one can negotiate its internal logic is the listener herself.

Nussbaum seems to disagree with the version of the cognitive theory of emotions that

Kivy adopted, namely that it does not take emotions aroused by purely physical causes into

account.55 In Nussbaum’s view, precisely the bodily noncognitive response precedes

understanding of the events in the musical structure, on the grounds that music is “radically

animistic”56 and moves in time and in the imaginary space, but this response needs to be

cognized in order to be conceptualized as a certain emotion. As I attempted to show before, there

are two ways we can understand expressive terms: as a metaphor, i.e. through pointing to the

sharing of certain structural features, or literally, i.e. as an expression. Metaphor does not capture

our experience of musical emotions correctly, as I have argued. Kivy believes that we do

understand musical emotions literally, but his explanations do not quite support this conviction,

because, as I see it, he ends up supporting the metaphorical reading. As for the literal meaning,

music is also not an agent to express emotions. The only option left is to conclude that we refer

to the emotions we experience ourselves.

Let us look at a specific case of a musical performance. Musician is the first interpreter

and listener of the musical work, so he or she in a certain sense experiences music as if “living

55
“I endorse a view of emotion … holding occurrent emotions to be intentional… states with both mental and bodily
aspects.” See ibid., 192. Nussbaum believes that emotions are not only experienced within us, but that we perceive
the objects of our emotions as possessing certain emotive qualities too, “Rage is not experienced as a state within us,
but is projected onto the offending object, which is perceived as hateful.” See ibid., 193.
56
Ibid., 235.
 Sandler 46

through” it. For instance, Glenn Gould is playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His eyebrows

move together with all the upward and downward movements of melodic lines, he “ta-tas” the

leading voice, frowns when he plays in the lower register, etc. For Nussbaum, this is a

paradigmatic example of what a “mirroring response” to music means. His conviction is that we

do the same thing when we listen to music—mostly only mentally, but sometimes also

physically. That is, we locate musical movement in space, but not only in an imaginary

acousmatic space, but also in the real space we inhabit. This theory explains only the

expressiveness of the work, but it does not account for the musical beauty: “I submit … that the

expressive character of the work is founded on mirroring responses.”57

In the space we find ourselves in, neither do we consciously have to have a specific

object in mind, nor even an emotion, nor do we personify music and perceive it as a subject

expressing something. Everyone’s imagined space comes out as unique,58 because it depends on

how much imagination one further invests in the process of listening, and imagination here is

already involved in a process of conceptualization. When we look at music this way and leave

the conceptualization up to the listener and the listener’s understanding of what music can or

should mean, we can accommodate all the theories of music starting from Antiquity, Middle

Ages, Florentine Camerata, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and etc, because it explains the malleability

of music as a non-representational fine art.

This theory might seem to someone on first glance just another version of the arousal

theory that Kivy attacks, because it posits that music affects us primarily non-cognitively. But

Nussbaum points out that arousal theory assumes that music has a power to arouse in us specific

emotions depending on the formal qualities of musical works, which is not the case, in his view,

57
Ibid., 230.
58
“The ‘space’ of emotional experience is intensely self-oriented.” Ibid., 246.
 Sandler 47

because the musical representation is nonconceptual. To show that there is a significant

difference between them, I suggest looking at the following case:

Herr G., a music critic, is supposed to write a review of a new symphony that can be

described as bright and joyful. However, G. has just lost his wife and found out that his father is

gravely sick, so he feels hopeless and distressed. He wants to write a fantastic review, because he

finds the symphony truly beautiful, but he cannot help feeling pain listening to it, so he

eventually wants to avoid this experience altogether. Kivy’s interpretation would be that G. hears

joy in the music, and the object of his pain is this joyfulness. The reason why he feels pain is that

this joy reminds him of his own sadness and of the impossibility to be happy, similar to how we

feel irritated and want to avoid smiling faces and happy people when we are sad.

However, since the review has already been promised to the publisher, G. makes a

conscious effort (and I believe that it is possible) to stop hearing the music as joyful. One can

imagine a situation in which one can successfully resist being moved by or empathize with an

event or a person, for instance, when one who is ideologically opposed to giving alms walks by

an old disabled veteran begging for money on the street. One adopts an indifferent attitude to his

condition in order not to feel remorseful or upset. Similarly, the only solution for G. is to “close”

himself to the musical expressiveness. My intuition tells me that in this case he would also stop

hearing music as joyful. He could still classify music as joyful, using the word as an umbrella

term for all those structural qualities that we know from experience joyful music is meant to

possess. Being a music critic, G. knows how to listen to music “correctly,” he immerses himself

in the process with complete attention to the musical form, he cannot fail to hear musical events

in his own “acousmatic space,” but since he decided not to listen to the music expressively, that

is not to be moved by it, he would not hear any emotive qualities in it. This example shows, as
 Sandler 48

Kivy’s resemblance theory, in my opinion, also implies, that there must be an intention on behalf

of the listener to perceive music emotively in order to hear emotions in it. G. chooses to adopt

only a third-person perspective on the musical narration, so he never gets to recognize and

experience the emotions expressed through the musical work.

3. Imagination Rehabilitated

In this last part, I want to push back on Kivy’s distinction between the musical

representation and “free associating” to music. Musical representation is recognized only

because of the intention of the composer and some other extra-musical factors that help us

recognize it correctly. “Free associating” is a similar “recognition” of something that this music

only seems to represent to us. Let us examine the difference on the specific example.

Michael and Jane are listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Michael is an

experienced listener of classical music, but for some reason he has never encountered this piece

before. Prior to listening, he was not familiar with the name of the piece or of the composer, so

he initially thinks that he is about to listen to a piece of absolute music. The opening bars sound

to him very much like Russian liturgical music, so Michael’s mind begins to wander, trying to

make connections and understand whether it is his arbitrary association or this is what he is

actually hearing. Then he suddenly realizes that he hears something resembling the Marseillaise,

and the loudness of cymbals and canon shots closer to the end clearly sound warlike, and the real

church bells seem to make him think again about Russia. After that he is told what the piece was

and felt satisfied that he had guessed (correctly) so many things about what this piece represents.

Jane, on the other hand, is a rare visitor of classical music concerts. She has thoroughly

read program notes, and now she is terrified that she is not going to understand anything at all:

she has never heard Russian music before, she has no idea who Napoleon was and why he
 Sandler 49

invaded Russia, and she is not sure if she is even going to recognize the Marseillaise, given that

she heard it only once on TV. Trying for a while to hear all those things in the music, she gave

up and let herself listen to the music itself. Surprisingly, she started hearing a piece of powerful,

patriotic, military, triumphant music, with nuanced transitions, sometimes pleading in humility

and sometimes quietly merry. She could not hear anything in the music, because she did not

simply know how to do that and had no language no describe what she was hearing, but her

experience was fulfilling, and she enjoyed it.

I have two questions for Kivy’s view to answer. First, is Michael “free associating” to

music or hearing it correctly? Second, does hearing the musical representation make our musical

experience necessarily richer and better?

Addressing the first question, Kivy might say the following: Michael is hearing the

musical representation of the events that Tchaikovsky intended to convey, although he does not

have enough extra-musical context to know exactly all the nuances of what the music is about.

His recognition just proves that musical illustration is possible, and music can represent other

music directly. To incorporate Jane’s case, Kivy would say that Jane’s inability to perceive the

representation is similar to how a person who has never seen a pineapple is not able to recognize

a picture of pineapple, so he or she would certainly not understand the meaning of this picture.

The reason Jane hears all those emotive qualities in the Overture is because they are simply there

as heard properties, and, according to Kivy, we cannot fail to perceive them, and they serve as

the structural foundation making the representation possible. But without hearing the

representation she is not able to enjoy the piece as much as those who hear it do.

However, I suggest thinking about it differently. Michael, in my view, had a somewhat

impoverished experience, because he constrained his listening to guessing the cues of the
 Sandler 50

representations the music contains and missed the actual pleasure derived from the musical

experience as Kivy describes it for the absolute music, because he also had no way to prove that

what he thinks about the piece is true or not. In this respect, I believe Michael was indeed “free

associating,” or at least he himself believed he did, and he was trying to resist that.

Imagine now Michael* who was told before listening to the piece that it was written by

Tchaikovsky for the commissioned by the Tsar commemoration of the Russian victory over

Napoleon. His knowledge that the piece is representational is allowing him to forget about the

necessity to guess what it is about, but to give himself to the music and listen to the music itself,

like Jane eventually did. We cannot say that Michael and Michael* heard two different pieces,

because one knew its name and the other did not, but it is just Michael got confused by his rich

background in music which was not substantiated in this case by the minimal information.

According to my interpretation, the only difference between “free associating” and hearing

representation would then be in knowing whether the piece is intended to represent or not, and

this is not enriching our experience in any way, as we see in Jane’s case when she cannot

possibly recognize the representation but still gets a lot out of the piece.

Now imagine that Michael was wrong hearing all these representations in the piece and

connecting them in the unified narrative roughly about the war between the Russians and the

French, and in fact this music resembles all those melodies by accident. I personally keep

hearing a Russian folk melody in the horn solo of the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth

(see Example 4), just because this solo sounds to me like this melody and it accidentally in fact

resembles it in meter and melodic line if we compare their scores, that is, they structurally share

some features, and certainly, as an avid listener of the Russian folk music, I am more prone to

hearing those kinds of things than others. I hear this melody “in” the music in the same way as I
 Sandler 51

see an old woman’s face in the tree bark: I know that there would be no connection between

them if I did not notice it in the first place. What does it tell us again about the St. Bernard’s

analogy? Any time a certain analogy is made, I am using my imagination to complete the

analogy and to create a full picture that would also exclude those features that do not fit with the

analogy from the focus of my attention (in this case, the difference between the folk melody and

the horn solo). Those generalizations about the musical structure (either about what the music

represents, or about what it is expressive of) may certainly make us, as Hanslick observed, miss

something about the music what we should closely listen to. By focusing too much on

understanding representation, one forgets about the peculiarities of the purely musical events.

However, I certainly understand that what I hear cannot possibly be a representation, but

this fact of “recognition” amuses me and enhances my pleasure from the symphony. If one

follows the music closely, as a result one can say something like, “How curious! This passage

resembles X,” and it would not matter whether the passage does in fact represent X or not. Our

imagination would anyway complete the picture in a certain way so that we could decide for

ourselves what it means. I agree with Kivy that those moments of recognizing representation

make our musical experience richer, but it does not matter, whether what we hear are actual

representations (that is, they are intentional) or not. “Free associating” can be a valuable tool of

enriching our musical experience, given that it is grounded in the attentive listening and is not

concerned with the question of truth. Moreover, “free associating” is only possible as a

concomitant of the attentive listening. It is unlikely that someone who does not hear the events in

the musical structure can come up with any non-musical interpretation of them, because, if we

stick to the Nussbaum’s theory, it requires locating those sound sequences in space. Nussbaum

writes, “…there is only one way to move along the cognitive trails established by the composer.
 Sandler 52

In order to negotiate them, one must start the piece at the beginning and listen, seriatim, to the

end…”.59 Kivy believes that music is an especially liberating fine art, because it allows us to

break free from the concepts and objects of the real world. But music is then doomed to be

untranslatable and incommunicable, while through free associations it becomes filled with the

communicable meaning.

Conclusion

In this paper, I discussed Peter Kivy’s views on musical meaning and the expressive

potential of instrumental music. I attempted to show that Kivy’s theory of musical

expressiveness is unsatisfactory, because it does not capture our experience and our speech

correctly and fails to achieve its goal of explaining how we can rightly talk about music in

emotive terms and how music moves us. I suggested that Kivy overlooked two crucial

components of an artwork—the artistic intention to express and the work of imagination

necessary for the understanding of this expression. At the same time, I found that Kivy’s

mechanisms of the musical representation are valid and precise, although his view inadvertently

implies that all music is in some sense representational, and this is what I argued for in the last

part. I also suggested that the musical emotions can only refer to the emotions of the listeners,

and Nussbaum’s simulation theory supplies the missing element of the picture, namely it shows

that the musical experience has two stages: the first step is the noncognitive orientation of the

sounds in an imaginary musical space, the second step is the following of the musical expressive

trajectory through simulating empathetically the events we hear in the music. As I see them, the

first step is necessary for the appreciation of the musical beauty, while the second one concerns

59
Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 245.
 Sandler 53

only musical expressiveness and can be avoided in case one does not want to engage with music

emotionally. By positing emotions within the formal structure of the musical piece, Kivy ignores

the possibility of appreciating musical beauty without being emotionally moved, and at the same

time he loses the diversity of emotional responses available to us in the musical experience.

Although Nussbaum’s theory seems to solve certain problems that Kivy’s view encountered, it

certainly needs a much closer look than I managed to give here and asks for a detailed

evaluation.
 Sandler 54

Works Cited

1. Croce, Benedetto. The Essence of Aesthetic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London:

William Heinemann, 1921.

2. Hanslick, Eduard. Vom musikalisch Schönen. Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1854.

3. Hanslick, Eduard. The Beautiful in Music. Translated by Gustav Cohen. London: Novello

and Company, Limited, 1891.

4. Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1988.

5. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar.

Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Classics, 1987.

6. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer, and

Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

7. Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

8. Kivy, Peter. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

9. Kivy, Peter. New Essays on Musical Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

10. Kivy, Peter. Sound and Semblance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

11. Kivy, Peter. Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions, including the complete

text of The Corded Shell. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989.

12. Kivy, Peter. Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2012.

13. Kivy, Peter. “What was Hanslick Denying?” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, No. 1

(Winter, 1990): 3—18.

 Sandler 55

14. Meyer, Leonard. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1956.

15. Nussbaum, Charles O. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion.

Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 2007.

16. Robinson, Jenefer, and Robert S. Hatten. “Emotions in Music.” Music Theory Spectrum,

Vol. 34, No. 2 (Fall 2012): 71—106.

17. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World As Will And Idea. Volume I. Translated by R.B.

Haldane, and J. Kemp. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909.

18. Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

19. Thomas, J. L. H. “The review of The Idea of Absolute Music by Carl Dahlhaus and Roger

Lustig.” Music & Letters, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), 89—92.
 Sandler 56

Appendix

Example 1. Edward Elgar, Symphony No. 1, Op. 55

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Example 2. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Songs Without Words, Op. 19, No. 4

 Sandler 58

Example 3. Edvard Grieg, Quartet in G Minor, Op. 27

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Example 4. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in G Minor, Op. 125, II. Molto Vivace