Exploring the universal appeal of music, a classical pianist shows the ways the great works of the classical canon can help us cope with grief, aid us in recovery from illness, inspire us to create, and give dimension to the mysteries of beauty and faith. Reprint.

Music is at the centre of what it means to be human – it is the sounds of human bodies and minds moving in creative, story-making ways. We argue that music comes from the way in which knowing bodies (Merleau-Ponty) prospectively explore the environment using habitual 'patterns of action' which we have identified as our innate ‘communicative musicality’. To support our argument, we present short case studies of infant interactions using micro analyses of video and audio recordings to (...) show the timings and shapes of intersubjective vocalisations and body movements of adult and child while they improvise shared narratives of meaning. Following a survey of the history of discoveries of infant abilities, we propose that the gestural narrative structures of voice and body seen as infants communicate with loving caregivers are the building blocks of what become particular cultural instances of the art of music, and of dance, theatre and other temporal arts. Children enter into a musical culture where their innate communicative musicality can be encouraged and strengthened through sensitive, respectful, playful, culturally informed teaching in companionship. The central importance of our abilities for music as part of what sustains our well-being is supported by evidence that communicative musicality strengthens emotions of social resilience to aid recovery from mental stress and illness. Drawing on the experience of the first author as a counsellor, we argue that the strength of one person’s communicative musicality can support the vitality of another’s through the application of skilful techniques that encourage an intimate, supportive, therapeutic, spirited companionship. Turning to brain science, we focus on hemispheric differences and the affective neuroscience of Jaak Panksepp. We emphasise that the psychobiological purpose of our innate musicality grows from the integrated rhythms of energy in the brain for prospective, sensation-seeking affective guidance of vitality of movement. We conclude with a Coda that recalls the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, which built on the work of Heraclitus and Spinoza. This view places the shared experience of sensations of living – our communicative musicality – as inspiration for rules of logic formulated in symbols of language. (shrink)

The vast majority of experimental studies of music to date have explored music in terms of the processes involved in the perception and cognition of complex sonic patterns that can elicit emotion. This paper argues that this conception of music is at odds both with recent Western musical scholarship and with ethnomusicological models, and that it presents a partial and culture‐specific representation of what may be a generic human capacity. It argues that the cognitive sciences must actively (...) engage with the problems of exploring music as manifested and conceived in the broad spectrum of world cultures, not only to elucidate the diversity of music in mind but also to identify potential commonalities that could illuminate the relationships between music and other domains of thought and behavior. (shrink)

Music theory of almost all ages has relied on nature in its attempts to explain music. The understanding of what 'nature' is, however, is subject to cultural and historical differences. In exploring ways in which music theory has represented and employed natural order since the scientific revolution, this volume asks some fundamental questions not only about nature in music theory, but also the nature of music theory. In an array of different (...) approaches, ranging from physical acoustics to theology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, these essays examine how the multifarious conceptions of nature, located variously between scientific reason and divine power, are brought to bear on music theory. They probe the changing representations and functions of nature in the service of music theory and highlight the ever-changing configurations of nature and music, as mediated by the music-theoretical discourse. (shrink)

In the final chapter of his Ineffability and Religious Experience, Guy Bennett-Hunter proposes that the ineffable may be ‘bodied forth’ through works of art and ritual, and hence engage with our lives. By way of supporting this proposal, this paper discusses some relationships between experiences of music and of natural environments. It is argued that several aspects of musical experience encourage a sense of convergence or intimacy between human practice and nature. Indeed, these aspects suggest a codependence between (...) culture and nature. The paper continues by proposing that a sense of this co-dependence fosters the further sense of cultural and environmental experience as an integrated whole whose ‘ground’ must be entirely mysterious and ineffable. It is concluded that, if this is right, then music and other cultural practices indeed bring the ineffable into engagement with human life. (shrink)

One of the prime characteristics of the increasingly technological and interconnected world is the disappearance of analogue experience in all aspects of life. Due to technological invention, we are exposed to a variety of news and information, checking emails in private and business accounts for a significant amount of time each day. Our information-driven minds are constantly occupied by the desire to seek out more information. The ways we engage in music also have changed. We now download mp3 files (...) and listen to music on iPods. People are used to web-based, digitalized music listening.1 It is in this context that many people in the modern world are turning to indigenous forms of music that allow them to.. (shrink)

In this article I consider the relationship between natural sounds and music. I evaluate two prominent accounts of this relationship. These accounts satisfy an important condition, the difference condition: musical sounds are different from natural sounds. However, they fail to meet an equally important condition, the interaction condition: musical sounds and natural sounds can interact in aesthetically important ways to create unified aesthetic objects. I then propose an alternative account of the relationship between natural sounds and music that (...) meets both conditions. I argue that natural sounds are distinct from music in that they express a kind of alterity or “otherness,” which occurs in two ways. It occurs referentially, because the sources of natural sounds are natural objects rather than artifactual objects, such as instruments; it also occurs acoustically, because natural sounds tend to contain more microtones than macrotones. On my account, the distinction between music and natural sounds is both conventional and vague; it therefore allows music and natural sounds to come together. (shrink)

In both Western and East Asian traditions, large claims have been made about the power of aesthetic experience, whether of art (especially music) or of nature, to foster a sense of transcendence. There are, however, important differences between the traditions and, in consequence, between the characters of these claims. After illustrating these claims, I identify and elaborate on some of their salient aspects. I then argue that East Asian traditions possess greater resources than Western ones for explaining or (...) accommodating these aspects, and hence for substantiating the claims about experience and transcendence. (shrink)

In this article, I first address the question of how musical forms come to represent meaning—that is, the semantics of music—and illustrate an important conceptual distinction articulated by Leonard Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music between absolute or intramusical meaning and referential or extramusical meaning through a critical analysis of two recent films. Second, building examples of scholarship around a single piece of music frequently used in film—Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings—I follow the example set by (...) Murray Smith in Film, Art, and the Third Culture and discuss the complementary approaches of the humanities, the behavioral sciences, and the natural sciences to understanding music and its use in film. (shrink)

Music, said Zen patriarch Hui Neng, "is a means of rapid transformation." It takes us home to a natural world that functions outside of logic, where harmony and dissonance, tension and release work in surprising ways. Weaving memoir, travelogue, and philosophical reflection, Sudden Music presents a musical way of knowing that can closely engage us with the world and open us to its spontaneity.Improvisation is everywhere, says David Rothenberg, and his book is a testament to its creative, surprising (...) power. Linking in original ways the improvised in nature, composition, and instrumentation, Rothenberg touches on a wide range of music traditions, from Rob Nachman's stories to John Cage's aleatory. Writing not as a critic but as a practicing musician, Rothenberg draws on his own extensive travels to Scandinavia, India, and Nepal to describe from close observation the improvisational traditions that inform and inspire his own art.The accompanying audio disc features eleven original compositions by Rothenberg, none of which have been previously released on CD. Included are a duet with clarinet and white-crested laughing bird, and another duet with clarinet and Samchillian TipTipTip Cheeepeeeee, an electronic computer instrument played by its inventor Leon Gruebaum. Also featured are multicultural works blending South Indian veena and Turkish g-clarinet with spoken text from the Upanishads; a piece commissioned by the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival with readings of texts by E. O. Wilson accompanied by clarinet and electronics; and improvisations based upon Tibetan Buddhist music, Japanese shakuhachi music, and the image of a black crow on white snow.Sudden Music is a concise and delicate work of beauty. It will help all readers experience the world as a musical place, full of wonderful events that come out of nowhere to create a strange and rhythmic harmony. (shrink)

The paper presents an account of the relevance of art music for the human form of life. In the first part it develops a theory of the human form of life by referring to central aspects of the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. The human form of life is reconstructed in terms of the classical conception of the human being as a rational animal, which is reformulated in the light of the neo-Aristotelian concept of living freedom. With Hegel (...) this conception is reformulated as a conception of the human being as an indeterminate living being, since human nature is concretized in different ways in the respective historical contexts. The second part then formulates a concept of the role of art in the human way of life, referring to Hegel and Adorno. The last part reflects on current discussions about the intermedial constitution of the arts which is then made productive for a concept of art music. (shrink)

During a period of political and social upheaval in China, the unconventional insights of the great Daoist Zhuangzi pointed to a way of living naturally. Inspired by his fascination with the wisdom of this sage, the immensely popular Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung created a bestselling Chinese comic book. Tsai had his cartoon characters enact the key parables of Zhuangzi, and he rendered Zhuangzi's most enlightening sayings into modern Chinese. Through Tsai's enthusiasm and skill, the earliest and core parts of (...) the Zhuangzi were thus made accessible to millions of Chinese-speaking people with no other real chance of appreciating this major Daoist text. Translated into English by Brian Bruya, the comic book is now available to a Western audience. The classical Chinese text of the selections of the Zhuangzi is reproduced in the margins throughout. Evoked by the translation and the playful cartoons is the spontaneity that Zhuangzi favors as an attitude toward life: abandon presuppositions, intellectual debates, and ambitions, he suggests, and listen to the "music of nature." With the writings attributed to Laozi, the Zhuangzi contributed to an alternative philosophical ideal that matched Confucianism in its impact on Chinese culture. Over the centuries this classical Daoism influenced many aspects of Chinese life, including painting, literature, and the martial arts. It had a particularly strong effect on Chan Buddhism. For this book, Donald Munro has written an afterword that places Daoism and the Zhuangzi in historical and cultural context. (shrink)

The Nature of Aesthetic Value proposes that aesthetic goodness, the property in virtue of which works of art are valuable, is a matter of their capacity in appropriate circumstances to give satisfaction. It inquires into the nature of this satisfaction, arguing that it consists of the extension and clarification of consciousness. This provides a basis for treatment of the ancient problem of the relation between cultivation of the arts and the pursuit and maintenance of the true and the (...) good. The book summarizes critics' judgments and arguments on literature, the visual arts, and music, testing the author's theory about the nature of aesthetic opinion. (shrink)

John Cage and Henry David Thoreau draw attention to the indeterminacy of wild nature and imply humans cannot entirely control the natural world. This paper argues Cage and Thoreau each encourages his audience to recognize their own human limitations in relation to wildness, and thus each helps his audience to develop greater humility before nature. By reflecting on how Thoreau’s theory relates to Cage’s music, we can recognize how Cage’s music contributes to audiences’ environmental moral education. (...) We can appreciate the role of music in helping audiences to develop values conducive to environmentally sustainable practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Nos faysoms contre Nature...”: Fourteenth-Century Sophismata and the Musical Avant GardeDorit TanayThe secular musical repertory of the late fourteenth century has been described in terms of unparalleled rhythmic intricacies, reflecting a conscious tendency to exhaust the scope of free play within the parameter of time in music. 1 Historians of music see in such musical complexity a case of a musical system in disarray, to be (...) explained by patterns that seem always adequate to account for phases of aberration from stylistic norm, such as the notions of mannerism or fin de siècle phenomenon, understood literally as well as figuratively. 2Current views seem to echo contemporaneous observations. The late fourteenth-century poet-musician Guido cast his critique on what he interprets as a shift towards chaotic musical expression, in a form of an introspective ballade:Or voit tout en aventure Puis qu’ainsi me convient fayre A la novelle figure Qui doyt a chascun desplayre; Que c’est trestout en contraire De bon art qui est parfayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. [End Page 29]Nos faysoms contre Nature De ce qu’est bien fayt deffayre; Que Philipe qui mais ne dure Nos dona boin exemplaire. Nos laisons tous ses afayres Por Marquet le contrefayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. L’art de Marquet n’a mesureN’onques rien ne sait parfyre; D’ansuir et de portrayre C’est trop grant outrecuidure Ces figures, et tout traire Ou il n’a riens de bon trayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. 3Curiously enough, Guido set his ballade to a melody that evokes some of the obscenities deplored in the poem. The musical text displays needless complication, being notated by deceitful figures that are willful, misleading, and difficult to decipher and follow. 4 The literary text, similarly, diversifies words in a vein of irony and ambiguity, clouding any indication as to whether the speaker is for or against the new style. In other words Guido’s esthetic position is sophistic, self-amused, and self-conscious.Since artistic expressions are generally conceived as reflecting their consumers, late-medieval chansons have been interpreted as a manifestation of the incredibly decadent yet sophisticated social milieu in which and for which the music was created. To ground further the argument for the correspondence between the countenance of the music and that of its audience, historians invoke the proximity in time and space between the evolution of the manneristic musical style, significantly in Avignon, and the Great Schism (1378–1417) that [End Page 30] followed the Babylonian Captivity. This famous crisis in the papal reign has been associated with a strong tendency to secularization in the papal Court, by which life styles became luxurious if not licentious. 5This socio-historical account is based on suggestive conjectures, comprising in part explanatory commonplaces. No direct relation can be established between the “Great Schism” or the specific social condition, of Avignon and the most refined music of the late fourteenth century. Furthermore, the claim of the above social account for a contextual approach is misleading. In fact no solid immanent relations are shown to exist between a complex, quasi-degenerate society on the one hand, and the intricate rhythms of the music on the other. The attribution of complexity in the broadest sense of the term does not satisfy our curiosity as to the possible interdependence between style and society. Interestingly enough, as far as late fourteenth-century chansons style is concerned, such an association can even be countered, considering the coincidental cultivation of the new simple style in the complex and decadent Burgundian courts of the waning Middle Ages. 6Here I propose to examine the late fourteenth-century musical style not on the background of social procedures but in the context of fourteenth century scientific thought, and to demonstrate immanent and structural cohesion between a compositional trend that features manipulations within the dimension of musical time and the sciences which investigate the properties of time qua continuum. This affinity concerns a parallel, yet not a completely overlapping, development directed towards the ultimate refinement of the notion of mensura. In other words we are dealing here... (shrink)

In this essay, Timothy Justus reviews the book Brain and Music (2012) by Stefan Koelsch, first providing a sketch of the book’s contents, including examples of Koelsch’s empirical work from four core areas (1) musical syntax, (2) musical semantics, (3) music and action, and (4) music and emotion. Justus then proceeds to discuss the continuous nature of cognitive domains and the continuous nature of mental activity.

This latest philosophical text by John Sallis is inspired by the work of contemporary Chinese painter Cao Jun. It carries out a series of philosophical reflections on nature, art, and music by taking up Cao Jun's art and thought, with a focus on questions of the elemental. Sallis's reflections are not a matter of simply relating art works to philosophical thought, as theoretical insights and developments run throughout Cao Jun's writings and inform many of his artistic works. Sallis (...) maintains abundant points of contact with Chinese philosophical traditions but also with Western philosophy. In these reflections on art, Sallis poses a critique of mimesis and considers the relation of painting to music. He affirms his conviction that the artist must always turn to nature, especially as reflections on the earth and sky delimit the scale and place of what is human. Full-color illustrations enhance this provocative and penetrating text. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the nature of Augustine's theological thinking. My thesis is that Augustine is an “improvisational theologian,” meaning his theology begins from the place that an improvisational musician's thinking does: attunement. In order to prove this thesis, I have three sections. The first is an analysis of the type of thinking that takes place in improvisational music, showing how it is predicated upon an idea of attunement. Second, I explore the improvisational nature of Augustine's (...) thought by seeing how attunement is also at work in his thinking. In order to do this, I show how he develops a musical worldview in De Musica and how this guides his subsequent thinking in De Doctrina Christiana and Confessions. I conclude by briefly pointing to different contemporary theological issues that this reading of Augustine can enrich. (shrink)

Son essence mysterieuse semble faire de la musique le langage meme de la nature. Revant de pouvoir agir sur elle a la facon d'Orphee, les compositeurs ne cessent de l'ecouter pour interioriser ses voix: ils s'emploient tour a tour a l'imiter, a reproduire ses mouvements, a peindre ses effets sur la sensibilite, a enregistrer et metamorphoser ses sons, ou a puiser en elle de puissants modeles formels.Des Quatre Saisons (Vivaldi) a La Mer (Debussy), de la Symphonie pastorale (Beethoven) au (...) Catalogue d'oiseaux (Messiaen) et a l'ecologie sonore, Emmanuel Reibel met ici en lumiere la facon dont les representations musicales de la nature se sont articulees a l'histoire de l'idee de nature.En traversant les saisons, les paysages et les jardins, parfois troubles par des tempetes, nous decouvrons ainsi comment la musique se nourrit de tout ce qui constitue notre environnement - mineraux, vegetaux, ou animaux, qui ont donne lieu a un foisonnant bestiaire musical - sans oublier les preoccupations les plus actuelles liees a la preservation de cette nature qui nous est chere. Emmanuel Reibel, maitre de conferences a l'universite de Nanterre et membre de l'Institut universitaire de France, est l'auteur de Les musiciens romantiques, Fascinations parisiennes; Faust, la musique au defi du mythe et Comment la musique est devenue romantique. (shrink)

For some forty years renowned philosopher Irving Singer has written on the nature and pursuit of love. His books include The Pursuit of Love; the monumental three-volume work, The Nature of Love; Mozart and Beethoven: The Concept of Love in Their Operas; and The Goals of Human Sexuality. Singer's approach to love in philosophy, literature, music, and psychology is classical throughout, inasmuch as it arises out of the distinction between eros and agape as conceptual forces that underlie (...) much of the Western tradition. Singer's explorations of Freud and Santayana guide his thinking. Both his historical analyses and his own philosophizing express an abiding respect for the play of imagination in science, literature, and art. (shrink)

It follows from the temporal nature of mind—the main concern of this essay—that mind functions are not localized in brain space.“ Time is extendedness, probably of the mind itself”, concludes Saint Augustine in Book XI of his Confessions (26.33), and, in our days, this extendedness can be made visible through an oscilloscopic “line” or trace of slow potentials. These graded, additive (not all-or-none) autorhythmic and seemingly self-generating potentials are primary events recorded at synapses. Autorhythmic brain structures (Zabara, 1973) appear (...) to be the source of time frames, while a change in time frames (as reflected in the EEG) leads to synchronization and desynchronization of brain structures respectively. Synchronization forms a homogeneous time domain, such as obtained during rhythmic exercises, chanting, listening to music and mental processes that are the hallmark of religious practices (Rogers, 1973). Desynchronization of brain structures on the other hand marks a functional independence of neuronal elements with each element available for separate channels of data processing, for example, during hallucinogenic drug-induced central sympathetic arousal, that is, a waking dream state (Fischer, 1979). (shrink)

Today the wood thrush returned to the Crum Woods. I have been waiting for this event for months. I moved to a house in the woods three years ago, and at that time I heard a strange and wonderful bird call in the forest. The song of the wood thrush is a melody unlike anything I had ever heard. Liquid, flute-like, perfectly pitched—the thrush vocalizes a kind of duet with itself in which it simultaneously produces two independent musical notes that (...) reverberate with one another. I have read that Tibetan monks can also sing two notes at the same time, a baseline and a melody line in contrapuntal balance, so now I think of the wood thrush as the singing monk of the forest.1In the spring and summer I wake up, and often .. (shrink)

Electronic music is advancing not only in the way it is being used in performance but also in the technological sense, due to software developers advancing the ability of the synthesizer to enable the composer to create newer sounds. The introduction of the amino acid and protein synthesizers from MIT is one such example, along with sampling sounds from interstellar bodies through the process of sonification in order to create presets as additional source material for the composer’s palette. The (...) creative process used in creating electronic music on a tablet computer introduces a new musical instrument to be used in live music performances. The fluidity and immediacy of how electronic sounds can be created with tablet computer synthesizers affords the composer to have a new behavioural sense of using them as a musical instrument that can be played intuitively. Exploring this new interface of musical composition is a subject this article will address as well as the psychological aspects pertaining to how an audience can relate to electronic music as an emerging art form removed from the classical music tradition. It will also discuss how the composer of electronic music can affect the listener’s ability to envision new conceptual landscapes, leading to experiencing new ideas and subjective fields of visionary understandings. The composer’s ability to use conceptual models, which influence the way sounds are made and how those sounds influence the listener’s experience, is an important focus of this article. (shrink)

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas about Klangfarbenmelodie (...) in the final section of his Harmonielehre. ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound. Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential. (shrink)

The aim of this special issue of Rivista di Estetica is to investigate the nature of the auditory object and its specific status as an object of perception. The investigation was carried out using different methodologies: 1) focusing on the auditory object in relation to its metaphysical dimension; 2) working on the comparison between auditory and visual perception; 3) finding similarities and differences between auditory and musical objects; and, finally, 4) focusing exclusively on the speci...

This article is devoted to Roger Bacon’s understanding of perspectiva as “the first of all natural sciences.” After considering a few alternative medieval definitions and classifications of this discipline – such as al-Fārābī’s, Grosseteste’s and Kilwardby’s – the author turns to Bacon’s arguments for according to perspectiva so exceptional a role. He shows that Bacon’s arguments are grounded in his peculiar understanding of the visual process: according to Bacon, vision is indeed the only sense in which perception takes place “by (...) reasoning”. The author argues that this theory of perception also lays the foundations for Bacon’s – prima facie amiss – claim that “concerning vision alone, and no other sense, have philosophers developed a separate science.” The author explores this point by contrasting with one another Bacon’s conception of perspectiva and of music, and closes with some more general remarks on the implications of Bacon’s account of the visual process for his theory of knowledge. Based on his theory of a “vision by reasoning,” the author concludes that Bacon came to reinterpret perspectiva as the organon of visual knowledge. (shrink)

From the moment Mary Poppins arrives at Number Seventeen Cherry-Tree Lane, everyday life at the Banks house is forever changed. This classic series tells the story of the world's most beloved nanny, who brings enchantment and excitement with her everywhere she goes. Featuring the charming original cover art by Mary Shepard, these new editions are sure to delight readers of all ages. Mary Poppins reappears just in time! According to her tape measure, Jane and Michael have grown "Worse and Worse" (...) since she went away. But the children won't have time to be naughty with all that Mary has planned for them. A visit to Mr. Twigley’s music box-filled attic, an encounter with the Marble Boy, and a ride on Miss Calico’s enchanted candy canes are all part of an average day out with everyone's favorite nanny. (shrink)

Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall articulate and defend a position according to (...) which an adequate phenomenology of auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of such events. (shrink)

Guy Rohrbaugh and Allan Hazlett have provided two arguments against the thesis that musical works are types. In short, they assume that, according to our modal talk and intuitions, musical works are modally flexible entities; since types are modally inflexible entities, musical works are not types. I argue that Rohrbaugh’s and Hazlett’s arguments fail and that the type/token theorist can preserve the truth of our modal claims and intuitions even if types are modally inflexible entities. First, I consider two alternatives (...) for the type/token theorist proposed in recent literature about the topic: the created types’ solution and the created abstract objects’ solution. I argue that none of them is attractive for the type/token theorist because they do not preserve the theoretical advantages of type/token theories to explain musical works’ repeatable nature. Then, I focus on the arguments’ common premise that musical works are modally flexible entities. A deeper analysis of musical practice will show that this premise is not true: our modal claims do not imply that musical works could have had different intrinsic but, instead, extrinsic properties. Finally, I show how the nested types theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact and how it captures the truth of our modal talk about musical works. (shrink)

How does the mind lend itself to artistic creation and appreciation? How should we study minds and arts in ways that transform our understanding of both? This book examines the concepts of art and cognition from the complementary perspectives of philosophy, the empirical sciences, and the humanities. Central chapters combine examples of visual art, music, literature, and film with the properties of cognition that they illuminate, including 4E cognition, predictive processing, and theories of affect and emotion. These aspects of (...) cognition are undergoing theoretical shifts that complicate established understandings of the mind and its encounter with the arts. As the book takes stock of recent developments in aesthetics that have incorporated empirical findings (Naturalized Aesthetics), it also envisions a new generation of cognitive science with robust ties to history and literature (the Cognitive Humanities). In this way, Cognition and the Arts can be seen as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. (shrink)

Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a 'post-natural' approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into (...) critical relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology. (shrink)

"Hooray! Professor Lucy Green's classic text is now available, in its second edition, to a new generation. The first edition contributed to the development of a new field, the sociology of music education. But the argument is of wider interest, and has been useful to me in better understanding the mechanics of the professional life as applicable to the working player." Robert Fripp, King Crimson RESPONSES TO THE FIRST EDITION OF MUSIC ON DEAF EARS: "This is a fine (...) book indeed. The clarity of mind shining through the text is apparent, and the concern with music, musical experience and the development of children in our schools is self-evident.. Musicians and educators would do well to reflect upon these ideas and the inherent challenges to our comfortable but essentially problematic ways of thinking about and responding to music." Keith Swanwick, Music and Letters "The argument, necessarily simplified here, is powerfully and cogently made. It not only impinges on educational practice but is one of the best general discussions of musical meaning and ideology I have read." Richard Middleton, Popular Music "This analysis has considerable explanatory power, especially in regard to the response of school pupils to various musical styles.. I recommend this interesting and uncomfortable book not just to music teachers but to all those musicians and music lovers who think at all about the nature of their art." Christopher Small, British Journal of Music Education. (shrink)

The last third of the twentieth century was a time of great change within the humanities, as new directions of study and intense interest in methodology challenged traditional approaches in even the most conservative fields and found practical expression in the growth of institutional structures intended to foster innovative and interdisciplinary approaches. One of the results of this academic self‐consciousness was an increased interest in the history of scholarship. Stephen Dyson has attempted to provide a history of classical archaeology as (...) it emerged in the United States, placing individuals and institutions in the context of American culture from the eighteenth century to the present. The aim is a good one, but the book is flawed in conception and execution.Dyson follows a generally chronological organization, at the same time stressing several major themes: academic and para‐academic programs and institutions, professional organizations, the practice of archaeological fieldwork, and museums. Each receives sharp criticism, for the most part based on accusations that the discipline is dominated by the “power brokers” of “the Establishment” , whose “elite private connections” enforce conservative practices and “stiffle [sic] intellectual innovation” .It is not clear for whom the book is intended. The professional audience is already familiar with the criticisms of its institutions and practices and has heard them voiced more convincingly. A subheading like “The Met Hot Pot and the Antiquities Trade” suggests that a more general audience is intended, but if that is so, the nonspecialist reader will be hindered by an insufficient explanation of the scope and aims of the discipline and by the absence of a key to the abbreviations used in the bibliography.Dyson cites some archival materials and has made extensive use of published sources such as diaries, reports, and obituaries. For the most part, however, his treatment seems to derive from secondary syntheses such as encyclopedias, institutional histories, and general accounts of historical periods. This reliance results in sometimes conflicting generalizations. The book lacks the kind of intellectual focus that characterizes, for example, Suzanne Marchand's Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 .The exclusive focus on the “ruling elite” in the archaeological United States leaves many questions inadequately discussed. For example, the relationship between science and the humanities is a central interest for our time, but the uneasy attempts by archaeologists to make their discipline “scientific” are only alluded to , and the discussion of governmental funding for archaeology by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities is cast in terms of the machinations of “the ruling elite in the humanities” .Dyson's approval is reserved for the “New Archaeology” of the late 1950s and for academic programs that favor its anthropological approaches and promote new methods in fieldwork instead of emphasizing excavation and the teaching of Greek and Latin . Yet the limitations of survey archaeology are a topic of current discussion; nor does it seem unreasonable that scholars of the classical cultures should be able to read the texts.The book is filled with small errors that cumulatively cast doubt on its reliability. For example: H. F. DeCou was murdered on 11 March 1911 on page 78, but on 10 March on page 79; “Eric Sjoqvist” and “Kurt Weitzman” ; Charles Waldstein “changed his name from Waldstein to Walton” and is inaccurately quoted. (shrink)

The aim of this contribution is to broaden the concept of musical meaning from an abstract and emotionally neutral cognitive representation to an emotion-integrating description that is related to the evolutionary approach to music. Starting from the dispositional machinery for dealing with music as a temporal and sounding phenomenon, musical emotions are considered as adaptive responses to be aroused in human beings as the product of neural structures that are specialized for their processing. A theoretical and empirical background (...) is provided in order to bring together the findings of music and emotion studies and the evolutionary approach to musical meaning. The theoretical grounding elaborates on the transition from referential to affective semantics, the distinction between expression and induction of emotions, and the tension between discrete-digital and analog-continuous processing of the sounds. The empirical background provides evidence from several findings such as infant-directed speech, referential emotive vocalizations and separation calls in lower mammals, the distinction between the acoustic and vehicle mode of sound perception, and the bodily and physiological reactions to the sounds. It is argued, finally, that early affective processing reflects the way emotions make our bodies feel, which in turn reflects on the emotions expressed and decoded. As such, there is a dynamic tension between nature and nurture, which is reflected in the nature-nurture-nature cycle of musical sense-making. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to put forward some aspects of the ethical relevance of two concepts of formal beauty today, which are of particular relevance for music and architecture, as these two arts are mainly non-representational. What concern me here are the two formal concepts of beauty, which correspond to two types of numerical ratios, the harmonic ratio and the ratio of self-similarity. In the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition these ratios have been explained by reference to perfect ratios (...) which exist in some other worldly realm. Many people today, including myself, no longer find such an explanation as plausible. Consequently, I am putting forward an evolutionary account of the relevance of these ratios whereby their ethical importance reveals itself. In this way the ethical relevance of these two concepts of formal beauty - when they turn up in works of art - also becomes clear. My analysis does not aim to present the final answer to the question of formal concepts of beauty, but hopes to be a basis for further discussions and investigations. (shrink)

Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could (...) cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are. (shrink)

MARGARET LYNN SCHABAS (Toronto, 1954) is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and served as the head of the Philosophy Department from 2004-2009. She has held professoriate positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at York University, and has also taught as a visiting professor at Michigan State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, CalTech, the Sorbonne, and the École Normale de Cachan. As the recipient of several fellowships, she has enjoyed visiting terms at Stanford, Duke, (...) MIT, Cambridge, the LSE, and the MPI-Berlin. In addition to her doctorate in the history and philosophy of science and technology (Toronto 1983), she holds a bachelor of science in music (oboe) and the philosophy of science (Indiana 1976), a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science (Indiana 1977), and a master’s degree in economics (Michigan1985). -/- She has published four books and over forty articles or book chapters in science studies. Some of the journals in which her articles can be found are Isis, Monist, History of Political Economy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Daedaelus, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her first book, A world ruled by number (1990) examines the emergence of mathematical economics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her second book, The natural origins of economics (2005), traces the transformation of economics from a natural to a social science. She also has two co-edited collections, Oeconomies in the age of Newton (2003), with Neil De Marchi, and David Hume’s political economy (2008), with Carl Wennerlind. She is currently writing a monograph on Hume’s economics, as well as articles on the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. She is currently president of the History of Economics Society. -/- EJPE interviewed Margaret Schabas at the University of British Columbia in March 2013. In this interview, she recounts her earliest foray into the history and philosophy of economics, the conceptual trade between economics and natural science, and her most recent undertaking: the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. (shrink)

The scientific investigation of music requires contributions from a diverse array of disciplines. Given the diverse methodologies, interests and research targets of the disciplines involved, we argue that there is a plurality of legitimate research questions about music, necessitating a focus on integration. In light of this we recommend a pluralistic conception of music—that there is no unitary definition divorced from some discipline, research question or context. This has important implications for how the scientific study of (...) class='Hi'>music ought to proceed: we show that some definitions are complementary, that is, they reflect different research interests and ought to be retained and, where possible, integrated, while others are antagonistic, they represent real empirical disagreement about music’s nature and how to account for it. We illustrate this in discussion of two related issues: questions about the evolutionary function of music, and questions of the innateness of music. These debates have been, in light of pluralism, misconceived. We suggest that, in both cases, scientists ought to proceed by constructing integrated models which take into account the dynamic interaction between different aspects of music. (shrink)

What are musical works? Are they discovered or created? Can recordings substitute faithfully for live performances? This book considers these and other intriguing questions. It first outlines the nature of musical works, their relation to performances, and their notational specification; it then considers authenticity in performance, musical traditions, and recordings. Comprehensive and original, the volume discusses many kinds of music, applying its conclusions to issues as diverse as the authentic performance movement, the cultural integrity of ethnic music, (...) and the implications of the dominance of recorded over live music. (shrink)

The _Xing Zi Ming Chu_ 性自命出 (_Nature Derives from Decree_) is one of the eighteen pieces that were recorded in Guodian 郭店 bamboo slips, which were excavated in 1993 and thought to be buried around 300 BCE. We can observe from this text detailed discussions surrounding terms such as _xing_ 性 (nature), _qing_ 情 (emotion), _xin_ 心 (heart-mind), and _yue_ 樂 (music), which played crucial roles in producing early Chinese philosophical discourses, particularly in the area of moral psychology. (...) Since its publication in 1998, this text has gained huge interest from Chinese scholars. This article illustrates how Chinese scholars, through their concrete studies, reveal the complicated textual nature of the _Xing Zi Ming Chu_ and its intricate relations to different philosophical streams which followed. This article also points out a problematic assumption that lies in the majority of Chinese scholarship and proposes a more sensible approach to examine this text. (shrink)

Professor Michael Edgeworth McIntyre is an eminent scientist who has also had a part-time career as a musician. From a lifetime's thinking, he offers this extraordinary synthesis exposing the deepest connections between science, music, and mathematics, while avoiding equations and technical jargon. He begins with perception psychology and the dichotomization instinct and then takes us through biological evolution, human language, and acausality illusions all the way to the climate crisis and the weaponization of the social media, and beyond that (...) into the deepest parts of theoretical physics - demonstrating our unconscious mathematical abilities. He also has an important message of hope for the future. Contrary to popular belief, biological evolution has given us not only the nastiest, but also the most compassionate and cooperative parts of human nature. This insight comes from recognizing that biological evolution is more than a simple competition between selfish genes. Rather, he suggests, in some ways it is more like turbulent fluid flow, a complex process spanning a vast range of timescales. Professor McIntyre is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS) and has worked on problems as diverse as the Sun's magnetic interior, the Antarctic ozone hole, jet streams in the atmosphere, and the psychophysics of violin sound. He has long been interested in how different branches of science can better communicate with each other and with the public, harnessing aspects of neuroscience and psychology that point toward the deep 'lucidity principles' that underlie skilful communication. (shrink)

A new theory of aesthetics and music, grounded in the collision between language and the body. In this book, Tim Hodgkinson proposes a theory of aesthetics and music grounded in the boundary between nature and culture within the human being. His analysis discards the conventional idea of the human being as an integrated whole in favor of a rich and complex field in which incompatible kinds of information—biological and cultural—collide. It is only when we acknowledge the clash (...) of body and language within human identity that we can understand how art brings forth the special form of subjectivity potentially present in aesthetic experiences. As a young musician, Hodgkinson realized that music was, in some mysterious way, “of itself”—not isolated from life, but not entirely continuous with it, either. Drawing on his experiences as a musician, composer, and anthropologist, Hodgkinson shows how when we listen to music a new subjectivity comes to life in ourselves. The normal mode of agency is suspended, and the subjectivity inscribed in the music comes toward us as a formative “other” to engage with. But this is not our reproduction of the composer's own subjectivation; when we perform our listening of the music, we are sharing the formative risks taken by its maker. To examine this in practice, Hodgkinson looks at the work of three composers who have each claimed to stimulate a new way of listening: Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, and Helmut Lachenmann. (shrink)

Leonard B. Meyer has proposed that when musical tendencies or expectations are inhibited by musical ambiguity or the unexpected, those inhibitions and their subsequent resolutions are likely to be provocative or engaging. Music, Tendencies and Inhibitions will explore the relevance of this theory to music and various other disciplines, and to psychological and natural processes. Each chapter consists of two parts: a presentation and consideration of an aspect of Meyer's theory, and a more associative or rhapsodic section of (...) "Reflections" on this aspect. The book will focus on Meyer's aesthetic rather than his music-theoretical proclivities, and is intended for academics and students in various fields as well as educated non-academics. The music scene is fluctuating, Meyer suggests, in that new and original styles or techniques are continuously emerging or developing on a small scale; it is static in that many of these developments seem unrelated, and are not likely to be grasped or progress as a whole. It will be posited that this theory foreshadowed and reflects important ideologies of contemporary culture, including postmodernism. (shrink)

Criticizing some psychological approaches that speak in too general terms about both music and religion, this article turns to a precise empirical observation and asks what psychology might possibly contribute to its understanding, after first necessarily questioning what terms such as ‘religion’, ‘religious music’, ‘religious experience’ encompass. Given the nature of the leading question, a cultural–psychological approach is chosen. After refuting a number of commonly heard assertions, and drawing on a number of psychological theories, the article then (...) discusses several empirical observations and argues that contemporary psychology has indeed achieved some progress in dealing with classical questions. (shrink)

Everyone, according to W.A. Mathieu, is musical by nature--it goes right along with being human. And if you don't believe it, this book will convince you. In a series of interrelated short essays, Mathieu takes the reader on a journey through ordinary experiences to open our ears to the rich variety of music that surrounds us but that we are trained to ignore; such as the variety of pitches produced by different objects, like glassware, furniture, drums--anything you can (...) tap; or sounds that hover on the border of music, like laughter, the clinking of glasses in a toast, or the unintentional falsetto produced by yawning. Along the way the author teaches aspects of music theory that nonmusicians might ordinarily shy away from. He reveals the way of music to be a profoundly spiritual path--one that is everyone's birthright. (shrink)

This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. These highly influential essays are essential reading for debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

There is a well‐established asymmetry in our judgments of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports and in other competitive activities. When an athlete is found using such drugs, it is a scandal that prompts public outrage, fan disappointment, and even loss of title. It seems that we judge enhanced results cannot be genuinely attributed to athletes. There is no similar reaction to use of PEDs in art, science, music, literature, business, and other human endeavors. The question I tackle in (...) this paper is whether this disanalogy is justified: Is there some underlying difference in virtue of which PEDs should be thus stigmatized in sports but not elsewhere? I survey a couple of potential justifications that I find lacking. I then consider the difference in our judgments of the participation of superman‐like characters in sports (which we censure) and in other activities (which we endorse). I argue that the fact that the athlete is human is relevant to the value of sports—and by extension, the status of the effort involved—while this fact plays no significant role with regard to the value of other activities and that this difference in the value of activities ultimately justifies our differing judgments here. I then return to my initial question and examine whether similar appeal to what is human can justify the varying judgments of the use of PEDs. I argue that it can but only under certain assumptions. I conclude by discussing wider implication of my suggestion. (shrink)

I develop Schopenhauerian musical formalism. First, I present a Schopenhauerian account of music with a background of his metaphysical framework. Then, I define meaningfulness as an analog to a Kantian notion of purposiveness and argue that, in light of Schopenhauer, music is meaningful as a direct manifestation of the universal will. Given the ineffable nature of what music points to, its form lacks any representation of meaning. Music is therefore the mere form of meaningfulness, and (...) it is precisely this mere form that gives rise to the infinite possibilities to ascribe it with a variety of musical meaning. (shrink)