Saam Trivedi - Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study

Imagination, Music, and the Emotions

Imagination, Music, and the Emotions

A Philosophical Study

SAAM TRIVEDI

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Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

2017 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trivedi, Saam, 1968 author.

Title: Imagination, music, and the emotions : a philosophical study / by Saam Trivedi, State University of New York.

Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054531 (print) | LCCN 2017032652 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467184 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467177 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics. | Emotions in music.

Classification: LCC ML3800 (ebook) | LCC ML3800 .T75 2017 (print) | DDC 781.1/1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054531

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For Malcolm, Jerry, Tara, and Sarah

This book has been a long time in gestation. I first started thinking philosophically about music while studying musical composition in my late teens on a small Inlaks Foundation grant that took me to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and Dartington College of Arts, Devon, in 1985, exactly 300 years after the birth of J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti. On encountering ultraserialized avant-garde musical works by composers of the Darmstadt school such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, at some level I wondered if that was music; and if so, what made it music; what music is in the first place; what is its purpose; what makes a work of music good; and so on. These kinds of questions were all playing around at the back of my mind, even if they were not well-formulated, and I had no idea back then (and perhaps even today!) how to even begin to answer them.

However, it was not until a few years after these sorts of worries led me to philosophy (as they did also in the case of the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell) that I started thinking about musical expressiveness per se, when I wrote a short philosophy thesis on musical aesthetics at Oxford, and first came across the expression theory associated with Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood. But I was still more interested in musical meaning than in musical expressiveness. That changed as I went on to study, first for a year as a graduate student with Malcolm Budd at University College London, and then right after that with Jerrold Levinson, my doctoral adviser at the University of Maryland. Both of these philosophers made me realize the significance of the problem of musical expressiveness, an issue that has gripped me since then and happily taken up a lot of my time (despite some sleepless nights).

So, what is the philosophical problem of musical expressiveness, you might ask? I favor the formulation of this problem given by Peter Kivy consisting of sets or sequences of sounds) can be heard readily, immediately, and willy-nilly by many peopleboth musicians and laypersonsas sad or happy, etc. Note here that this problem, as stated, is more acute for pure or absolute or instrumental music without words than it is for music with words, or for music with a story or a program such as Beethovens Pastoral Symphony, No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68. For in the case of vocal and program music, it might be thought that the music derives its expressiveness at least partly from the accompanying words, or from the story or program associated with it. Accordingly, most of my examples in this book will be about both Western and non-Western pure music, which is the primary focus of the philosophical problem of musical expressiveness. The reader should bear in mind that this is the reason why many of my examples do not feature much vocal music and songs from more popular Western musical styles and traditions such as jazz, the blues, rock, rap, hip-hop, and the like, which I might add are all musical styles and traditions that I respect and enjoy greatly.

An alternative formulation of the problem of musical expressiveness comes from Derek Matravers. According to this formulation, the problem of musical expressiveness consists of finding a link between using emotion-terms to describe people, and using emotion-terms for artworks, including musical works.

As I hope will emerge, my solution to the problem of musical expressiveness answers to both formulations of the problem of the musical expressiveness, even though I favor Kivy and Daviess formulation, as stated above. Here, very roughly and in a nutshell, is my resemblance-plus-imagination or imaginationist (a term I will use for brevity) solution: sad (or happy) music is only imagined in various, not always highly conscious, ways to be sad (or happy), in virtue of various heard resemblances to sad (or happy) people, their vocal and behavioral expression, and the affective feel of emotions and other mental states. This solution is spelled out and defended in the six chapters that follow.

Before I set out briefly what the various chapters of this work try to do and then express my acknowledgments, a word about the very diverse influences that helped shape my solution. For some years, I was tempted by a kind of arousalist-projectivist solution, not too dissimilar from a view that .

Now on to what I set out to do in the six chapters of this book. against the formalism about music associated with Eduard Hanslick. I then briefly discuss some recent views of the emotions, as put forth variously by Martha Nussbaum, Paul Griffiths, and Jesse Prinz so as to situate my view in context. I conclude by conceding that it may be possible to reconcile a cognitive-affective view of the emotions with a somatic theory of the emotions, as Ronald de Sousa and Jesse Prinz have recently suggested.

In , I reject expression theories. These theories claim that to say the music is sad is to say only that it expresses the sadness of the composer or performer. Amongst other things, a basic problem for these theories is that it is just false that the composer or performer must necessarily be sad to create or perform sad music. I also discuss more recent expression theories, as advanced by Bruce Vermazen, Jerrold Levinson, and Jenefer Robinson, ones that do not tie musical expressiveness to particular historical acts of expression but instead posit an indeterminate, imagined musical persona, an agent in the music, expressing mental states through musical gestures, development, and such. Recently advanced versions of arousalism are also the target of this chapter. These theories claim, very roughly, that to say the music is sad is only to say that the music arouses or evokes or causes sadness in listeners; that the music makes us sad when we hear it. As opposed to strong or extreme arousalism, which faces many problems, various philosophers such as Aaron Ridley and Derek Matravers have advocated various versions of weak or moderate arousalism. These moderate arousalists rightly grant that one need not be aroused to sadness every time one hears music as being sad or as being expressive of sadness. However, these arousalists still face various problems, most notably that they conflate expressiveness with arousal, and that their view does not address the basic problem of how something inanimate and insentient such as music can be sad when they claim that to say music is sad is to say it is appropriate to be aroused to sadness when hearing sad music. I conclude the chapter by discussing the arousalist view of Charles Nussbaum.