Aesthetics and Music by hamilton, andy
Anthony Gritten · Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2011
Hamilton, Andy. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum, 2007, 256 pp., $130.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Aesthetics and Music makes several useful contributions to scholarship. It juxtaposes analytic philosophy and Adorno, it proposes a raft of revisions to Roger Scruton's aesthetics of music, and it puts rhythm at the forefront of philosophical thinking on music. Just as welcome is its tone: urbane, culturally informed, and often witty. Hamilton's attitude toward the subject (how to conjoin aesthetics and music) is that aesthetic experience is “essentially democratic [and] what it describes is ordinary and unmysterious: an attitude of intensified or enriched experience” (p. 1). It is not peripheral to more substantial philosophical concerns, though some of its more interesting issues are “relatively less abstract, less metaphysical ones” (p. 2). Hamilton seeks an aesthetic conception of music that avoids conflating “aesthetic” and “artistic”: “an art at least with lowercase ‘a’—a practice involving skill or craft whose ends are essentially aesthetic, that is, the enrichment and intensification of experience” (pp. 5, 52). His claim is that music should be conceived humanistically as “a special kind of thinking” (p. 6) and “a form that thinking takes” (p. 115). It is, he writes, “abstract in form, but humane in utterance” (p. 7).