What music's expressive complexity does not teach

Jenny Judge (New York University, University of Melbourne)

Take a piece of expressive music: Bill Evans' version of ‘Some Other Time’, for example. What does it express? Sadness, maybe — but what kind? Regret, disappointment, loneliness? Come to think of it, might it be something more positive, like nostalgia? Tenderness? A quiet kind of bliss? Difficulties like these have sparked disagreements among philosophers as to what music is in general capable of expressing. Some (e.g. Kivy) think that music can express the ‘garden variety’ emotions: happiness, sadness and the rest. Others (e.g. Schopenhauer, Budd) think that music can only express the phenomenal character of emotions, absent the intentional contents that individuate them. Still others (e.g. Langer) think that all music can express is the way emotions change over time. There is no consensus. Still, almost everyone agrees on one thing: the lack of consensus here reinforces the commonly-held view that musical expression cannot be a species of representation. If a piece of expressive music were a representation, goes the thought, it would be clear what it represented. The purpose of this talk is to undermine this assumption.

I'll begin by discussing some recent work in the philosophy of pictures which has revealed hitherto unnoticed complexity in pictorial content. Specifically, I'll discuss John Kulvicki's suggestion that pictorial content is layered, with a basic layer of content grounding the rest. I'll argue that, if we suppose that musical expression is a matter of music's representing whichever affective states can be heard in it, and hence that whatever music expresses constitutes its content, the possibility emerges of applying Kulvicki's 'layered' analysis to the musical case. I'll show that this analysis not only fits, but also helps us to see that what seem like competing proposals as to what exactly music expresses are not actually in competition after all. In this way, I'll show that the complexity of musical expression can not only be embraced, but made sense of on a representational view — and hence, that music's expressive complexity is no reason to deny that musical expression is a species of representation.