The Aesthetics of Music
Sarah E. Worth · The review of metaphysics · 1999
SCRUTON, Roger. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xx + 508 pp. Cloth, $39.95--Roger Scruton has taken on a monumental task in his most recent book, The Aesthetics of Music. As one can see from the title, he has not attempted to work on one aspect of musical aesthetics, but takes it on all at once. Although he breaks the subject matter down into 15 separate sections, through these he attempts to get at the most fundamental questions in musical aesthetics. These are: the relation between sound and tone, the analysis of musical meaning, and the nature of the purely musical experience (p. vii). According to Scruton these questions have never been properly addressed in analytic aesthetics and it his stated task in this book to do so. The first sections of the book include some helpful introductory material on the nature of sound and tone. This material especially important for the reader somewhat new to musical aesthetics as it defines some basic concepts and explains some of the fundamental theories which Scruton uses to build his theories. For example, Scruton explains that sounds are not secondary qualities like colors, since sounds are not qualities of an object at all. Objects do not have sounds, they emit sounds. Also, to hear sound as music not merely to hear it, but also to order it and to hear it as music. He endorses the notion that music an intentional object that only exists in human perception. Further, Scruton explains the phenomenon of the musical gestalt. That is, what we hear in melody not just change but movement (p. 49). Scruton encourages the reader not to imagine the world of sound as organized in the same way as the world of space. The spatial metaphors that we use to describe the sound world are inhibiting us from understanding clearly what really going on. The spatial concepts used to describe music are only appearance. In the next sections, Scruton takes on the difficult topics of metaphor, ontology, representation, expression, language, and understanding. He comes to the conclusion that music not representational since it has no narrative content. Moreover, in order to understand a work of art as representational one must be able to grasp the represented content. Music has no such content to be grasped. Music is, however, what Scruton describes as a non-conceptual art (p. 159). He claims that it is able to present to us, in objective form, a direct picture of the will itself (p. 159). Music cannot be described through any medium other than music and thus the content of music real but ineffable. Scruton adamant in the chapter on language that music, although it shares certain qualities with language, can in no way be considered a language since it not used to convey information. …