5 Read more at location 677
Note: 5@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ se la musica esprime le emozioni occorre una teoria dell espressione una teoria dell espressione è una teoria estetica anti realista: il bello nn è una proprietà degli oggetti ma un esperienza interiore. esprimere = comunicare l indescrivibile. es far capre cos è il sapore dolce rinviando chi ascolta ad una esperienza i 4 test: convenzione/esperienza...comprensione... valore... struttura la musica come metafora delle emozioni ci si esprime senza riferirsi ad oggetti ma x simpatia la relazione con l opera è una relazione umana x questo implica vizi e virtù la musica congiunge i soggetti che si comunicano ciò che nn si può comunicare l arte mette in relazione il ns solipsismo. è una prova che quando parliamo del colore blu parliamo della stessa sensazione Edit
This is the genius of Schubert, that he is able to express the whole range of human emotions, and to do so by `imprinting' those emotions `into the notes'.Read more at location 686
(1) The `semaphore test'. Musical meaning is not established by convention, assigning meanings to musical objects in the manner of a code of semaphore signals. The meaning of a work of music is given only in the aesthetic experience, and is not available simply by applying rules.Read more at location 689
The `understanding test'. The meaning of a piece of music is what we understand when we understand it as music. (This parallels a well-known thought of Frege's concerning the meaning of a sentence.) Most existing accounts of expression fail to pass this test-or at least, fail to show that they can pass it. We just do not know what is proved by them, or whether anything important is being said-for instance by Peter Kivy, when he points to the way in which the shape of a musical phrase may `resemble' the shape of an emotion.2 As I pointed out in Chapter 3, it was Wittgenstein's important insight that the key concept in the philosophy of music is not that of expression or meaning, but that of understanding.Read more at location 691
The `value test'. A piece of music expresses something only if it is expressive, and expressiveness is an aesthetic value.Read more at location 695
it seems quite possible to understand an expressive piece of music and at the same time to deny that it is expressive-or at least, to deny that there is anything, besides itself, that the music means.Read more at location 701
Secondly, and relatedly, we find it almost impossible, and in any case hardly necessary, to detach the meaning from the music and to give it a name. The meaning resides in the music,Read more at location 704
My contention is that, if we are to develop a concept of expression which passes those four stringent tests, and which also explains the two observations that I have appended to them, we must in the first instance remove our attention from the musical work and focus it instead on the response of the listenerRead more at location 707
It means only that understanding and describing are two different activities-just as they are in human relations (of which our relation to music is after all only a special case). Read more at location 712
The rightness of the description has to be heard in the notes.3 Read more at location 720
D. Inter-personal emotions are, or involve, complex forms of social adjustment.Read more at location 724
To put the point in another way: self-conscious subjects put themselves into their emotions, and express themselves through them.Read more at location 730
Hanslick regarded the intentionality of emotion as posing an insuperable objection to the expressive theory of music. Music could express an emotion, he thought, only if it could also depict the objects of emotion. But music is an abstract (i.e. non-representational) art-form, in which genuine depiction is impossible.Read more at location 735
When we respond to another's emotion we don't necessarily know anything about its object.Read more at location 737
If our responses to music are forms of sympathy, then Hanslick's objection is without force:Read more at location 738
As Adam Smith plausibly argued, sympathy lies at the heart of our moral nature, and is our primary resource in the regulation of social life.4 We are therefore alert to the corruptions of sympathy, such as sentimentalityRead more at location 741
Plato and Aristotle emphasized the character-forming nature of music partly because they thought of music as something in which we join. When we dance or march to music we move with it, just as we move with other people in a march or a dance.Read more at location 748
It will also explain the inseparability of form and content in music.Read more at location 756
Why is it that so many musical people deny the expressive character of music, and why is it that we find it difficult, and usually unnecessary in any case, to put the meaning of music into words-toRead more at location 758
When this recognition occurs listeners may have no words for what they recognize.Read more at location 761
You are not merely noticing analogies between the movement of the music and some state of mind: you are entering into dialogue with it, fitting your own emotions to the rhythm that it conveys, as you might when experimenting with inter-personal sympathies,Read more at location 765
This explains something which many people have found puzzling: the attribution of moral virtues and vices to purely abstract music. The `heroic' quality of Beethoven's Fifth, the `sentimentality' of Tchaikovsky's Sixth, the `narcissism' of Skryabin's `Prometheus' Symphony-and so on: all such judgements take on definite sense if we see them as reflections of sympathetic responses to musical movement.Read more at location 768
The invitation to sympathy that is uttered in the voice of pure music is one that we are eager to accept; but the slightest borrowing of some stock effect makes us doubt the voice's sincerity.Read more at location 771
In the second part of this book I hope to give some examples of what I have in mind.Read more at location 777
This paragraph points towards an anti-realist theory of aesthetic judgement. This is what I try to give in Art and Imagination, op. cit. That anti-realism does not imply that moral or aesthetic judgements are merely `subjective' is well demonstrated by Simon Blackburn in Ruling Passions, London 1997. Read more at location 781
