The Foundations of Musical Aesthetics
Frank Howes · Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association · 1956
The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.