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The essays in this book cover a spread of topics in the philosophy of music: how music expresses emotion and what is distinctive to the listener's response to this expressiveness; the modes of perception and understanding that can be expected of skilled listeners, performers, analysts, and composers and the various manners in which these understandings can be manifest; the manner in which musical works exist and their relation to their instances or performances; and musical profundity. As well as reviewing the work of philosophers of music, a number of the chapters both draw on and critically reflect on current work by psychologists concerning music.

This book provides a contextualist ontology of musical works, distinguishing works for playback from ones for performance and, among the latter, studio from live performances. Works are variously thick or thin to the extent that they determine details of their faithful renditions. Through the element of interpretation, performances are richer in constitutive properties than are the works they faithfully present. Features of the musico‐historical context in which the work is created affect what the composer can make work‐determinative via the scores he issues as instructions to performers. Scores must be read in terms of the notional conventions and musical practices they take for granted. To be of a work, a performance must match its contents, must intentionally follow the work‐determinative instructions, and must be tied by a robust causal chain to the work's creation. Also, the performance must be at least minimally faithful, so the work can be recognized in it. Authenticity is a virtue in a performance, and only small departures from the ideal are acceptable when made for the sake of an interesting interpretation. Non‐Western music can remain authentic if it assimilates influences and changes in ways compatible with its traditions and values. Recordings simulate live performances or create virtual ones and, because the medium is not transparent, are to be understood and appreciated differently from live music‐making.

This book looks at the way music is used, characterised and understood in the work of Nancy, Labarthe and Badiou. Despite the differences in their philosophical-theoretical positions, they all invoke music – both directly and indirectly – to negotiate their relationship to ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. The book situates these texts in a longer genealogy of musico-philosophical interactions and also brings them into dialogue with recent musicological approaches, thus showing how an inherited idea of what music ‘is’ is often assumed rather than critically re-evaluated. It argues that though music is instrumentalized by progressive thinkers as a way of shifting theoretical/philosophical paradigms, it nonetheless does so in a way that has a strong sense of continuity with previous thinking on music. Secondly, the book highlights the way in which music in its metaphysical-ontological guise is often conceived as synonymous with Western high art classical music (which is itself constructed as absolute and transcendent, and ontologically independent of its means of (re)production or context) whilst non-literate, popular, folk and world musics – on the occasions that they are addressed and not simply ignored or denigrated – are notably considered almost exclusively in terms of their social-cultural or technological contexts. Finally, the book demonstrates that much of this takes place through a simultaneous instrumentalization of gender as an organisational category for philosophy, and one which all too often has the consequence of sending women – along with music – to the beyond of pre-, inter-, or post-signification.

This book is a critique of formalism in philosophy of music. Formalism is the view that music is appreciated as pure musical form: music is not about anything, it does not represent, and it has no content or, at any rate, no important content. According to the anti-formalist position defended in this book, many works of music, including some of the greatest masterpieces, are valued as sources of insight into the emotional lives of humans. Drawing upon the latest psychological and musicological research Chapter 1 argues that music is expressive of human emotions by resembling human expressive behaviour. Chapter 2 then argues that by being expressive of emotion, music is able to arouse ordinary emotions such as fear, joy, sorrow, and melancholy. Chapter 3 argues that by resembling human expressive behaviour, music represents such behaviour. Moreover, the power of music to arouse emotion makes possible the representation of emotion in music. Listeners gain insight into emotions by having emotions aroused in them. Chapter 4 argues that, contrary to what formalists have assumed, vocal music (including opera) and purely instrumental are appreciated in the same way. Chapter 5 argues that only by accepting that music is able to represent emotion, and by doing so provide psychological insight, can the profundity and full aesthetic value of music be explained. By representing both the expression of emotion and emotions themselves, music can characterize emotions (as, say, tragic, noble, or dignified) and thereby provide psychological insight.

This interdisciplinary study shows the extent to which literate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people considered music beyond its heard and performed aspects. It explains the remarkable range of ways in which they wrote about music and understood it to inform other endeavors, and how musical ideas were connected to other trends during an era marked by intellectual change. Music was considered both art and science, had a long-established place in many human enterprises, and inhabited the fluid conceptual space between abstraction and concretion. Music and musical terminology thus enabled explanation of complex ideas and provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning across audible, visual, literary, and performed media. Music and musical language also facilitated carefully coded approaches to some of the era’s most hotly contested topics such as religion and the rising domains of scientific inquiry. Such understanding, in turn, influenced ways in which sounding music was practiced, and its materials were created, marketed, and presented. Furthermore, reading, writing, and talking about music were valuable skills for a culture in which the subtleties of musical knowledge signified status, and in which gentlemen in particular fraternized through discourse as well as sociable practice. Yet no matter how esoteric reference to music became, there always remained something of its audibility and potential to affect the body, soul, and all five senses.