Musical Expression

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So the topic today is musical expression. And as with last week,

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this raises a number of questions in that category of questions I mentioned

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at the beginning as being one of the main types of questions and aesthetics,

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namely questions pertaining to the understanding and the appreciation of works of art.

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Expression has been fairly important category in aesthetics for at least the past hundred years or so,

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and it's been standard to contrast expression since that time with representation.

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So pictures on this view of things are representations of what they depict.

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Likewise, the sculptures are representations of what they're sculptures of literary works.

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I think it's standard to say as well are representational.

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But there is another way in which Artworks can relates to things that aren't artworks.

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And that is by expressing them, by expressing those things.

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And in particular, this has been seen as a particularly important concept for our understanding of music.

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Claim is not that representational works of art can't also express things, but that non-representational works of art.

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Like many pieces of music, I stand in a different relation to reality than the relation of representing it.

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Now it's an interesting question to what extent works of music can be representational?

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So you think about certain works of music like the Flood of the Bumblebee, for example.

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You might be inclined to say that those works of instrumental music can be representational.

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But for the most part, I think a lot of works of music, it's standard to say at least do not represent things.

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Rather, the main way in which they relate to reality, other things is by expressing things.

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And so I'd like to begin with a few distinctions that are important to orienting yourself into the debate about musical expression.

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One distinction is regarding the scope of what can be expressed.

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So we might talk about not just expressing emotions but expressing, say,

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the spirit of the age or as well or as a number of writers have suggested, some works of music can express qualities like silkiness.

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You can get this in. Nelson Goodman, for example, talks about works of art, expressing heat fragility, things like this.

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I'm going to be focussing on the expression of emotion,

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mainly because that has been the most central topic in discussions of expression and because it seems

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to be one of the least controversial examples of something that can be expressed by works of music.

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And the expression of emotion and emotion generally in connexion with music raises a great many difficult questions.

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So why we react so powerfully to instrumental works of music in particular,

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has puzzled a lot of people why the sound of stringed instruments can cause people to cry.

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It is a very standard philosophical puzzle in the philosophy of music.

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Likewise, how it's possible for non-representational sounds to relate to reality in this way that we call expressing emotion.

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How is it possible for the Ode to Joy to express joy and particularly and do so in such a particularly powerful way?

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And when we're talking about the expression of emotion?

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Another very important distinction to keep in mind is what I've described in the handout as the

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distinction between expressing a kind of emotion and expressing a particular occurrence of that emotion.

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So you might want to distinguish between work that expresses sadness and something that expresses my current sadness.

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Some people draw this distinction by saying that there's a difference between being expressive of sadness and expressing sadness.

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So being expressive of sadness is what I just described as expressing a kind of emotion and expressing sadness in this.

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Way of describing it is what I just called expressing a particular occurrence of sadness, such as the sadness somebody is currently feeling.

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Now, that's going to be important because as we'll see,

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there is a deep question about the relation between expressing kinds of emotions and expressing particular occurrences of them,

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whether one should be explained in terms of the other. And the last distinction I'd like to draw is the distinction between theories

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of expression and what has come to be known as the expression theory of art.

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So early in the 20th century, philosophers and writers such as Benedetto Crochet,

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Robin Collingwood and the novelist Tolstoy presented views on arts according to which art is to be defined as expression.

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That's not going to be our focus today. Next week, we're going to be discussing definitions of art.

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Rather, what I'd like to focus on today is theories of expression, theories of expression.

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Tend to attempts to answer either one or both of the following questions.

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So first, what is it for an artwork to express an emotion?

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What is it for music to be sad? For example, and the other question is, what is it for us to experience a work of art as expressive of emotion?

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What is it for us to experience a piece of music that said.

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Now, obviously, these are very closely related questions,

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but I think it's important to keep this distinction straight in your mind and when you're reading the material on expression,

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the philosophical literature on this, to remind yourself of whether the writer at any given point is trying to answer the first

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question about what it is for something for a piece of music to be said or the second question,

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what it is for us to experience it. As I said, as I mentioned, not all theory is attempt to answer both.

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Some focus on one. Some focus on the other. And some do give answers to both.

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OK. Now. Now, it's important to stress there's a really enormous range of theories of expression and aesthetics, particularly at the moment.

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And so I've selected a few of the most prominent ones next term in my lectures on metaphore.

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I'm going to be discussing some other ones that I won't be discussing today on the back of your handout.

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I've given some references to readings that you can take a look at.

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And the last two groups of readings are really relevant to theories that I won't be discussing today.

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This is this is an area that is very messy. And it's interesting if you talk to people working in this area,

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it's one of those unusual areas of philosophy where they're sort of willing to admit that they

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really don't know whether any progress has made and how any progress is going to be made.

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Some are willing to admit that or to say that. So if you're confused, you're not alone.

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So it's worth, I think, beginning with what I've called the clarification theory of expression on the handout.

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So this view of expression was presented by Robin Collingwood early in the 20th century.

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And Collingwood claims that to express an emotion is to make clear what emotion one is feeling.

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So Collingwood observes that we are often burdened by emotions whose nature is unclear to us.

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And clarifying what we are feeling removes this sense of burden or this oppressive sense to the emotion.

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And that's what Collingwood thinks artists do when they express emotions.

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But a further point is that when an artist so in composing something, sculpting something,

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painting something, when an artist clarifies their emotion by expressing it, the emotion is transformed.

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So it's not a matter, in his view of of the artist finding a medium to fit a pre-existing inchoate emotion.

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But in trying to clarify one's inchoate in definite emotions.

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One transforms the emotion along the way. And this is an important claim for him because he thinks from this it follows that the

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emotion expressed cannot be specified independently of the medium in which it is expressed.

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So you can't say what emotion has been expressed without reference to the particular

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medium in which it is expressed a particular form that the expression of its took.

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And that's because that process of clarifying it transformed it into a distinct emotion.

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This is supposed to be a virtue of Collingwood's theory because this is supposed to explain the sense in which form and content are inseparable.

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It's often claimed about works of art, that form in which the ideas are presented or the emotions express is not

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simply a vehicle that could be easily discarded in favour of some other form,

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but that form and content in some sense or other are inseparable united.

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And in Collingwood's view, this explains one way in which that is so.

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A further implication he draws from this is that unlike the description of emotion, expression makes it clear how the art emotion differs from others.

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So, as Collingwood puts it, description generalises. So if you categorise your emotion as sadness, you indicate how it's similar to other emotions.

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Put it in the same category as other emotions. Whereas expression individualise is particularise is it?

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And that's because of this tie between the emotion expressed and the particular medium in which it is expressed.

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The form of expression. And he thinks another thing, that this aspect of history.

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One thing, this aspect of this theory explains is why.

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Just describing your emotions makes, for example, for bad poetry.

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You're saying I am sad today or literal statements of emotion like that.

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Collingwood thinks it's pretty theoretically obvious that that's not very satisfactory.

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And this explains why that's merely describing rather than expressing.

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That's categorising and generalising rather than individualising and particular rousing.

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Now, there's a lot of controversy.

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Well, love objections, I should say, about Collingwood's views.

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One question obviously that immediately arises about this is in what sense is the artist discovering the nature of the original indefinite emotion?

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If that emotion is actually transformed into something different in the course of it's being expressed?

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It seems like if we're clear about anything, we're clear about the new emotion,

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that the indefinite emotion has been transformed into rather than the original one.

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But another concern is that it would seem to follow from Collingwood's view that, for example,

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music could not be sad unless it was produced by somebody clarifying a sadness that they were feeling.

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And that just seems wrong. We wouldn't say, OK, well, that piece of music is not sad if we were to discover that it was not produced by

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somebody clarifying an indefinite feeling of sadness that they'd been feeling.

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Now, of course, one way in which you might try and repair this is to say, well,

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calling was just presenting a theory of what it is to express particular occurrences of emotions rather than kinds of emotion.

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But it's not clear for me, to me, at least from reading Collingwood's text, whether that's consistent with what he says.

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He says he's setting out to explain what people are talking about when they talk about arts being associated with expression.

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So he pitches it in certain ways that I don't think leave this way of getting off the hook available to him.

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OK. Now, I think another natural view, if you ask somebody what it is for a piece of music to be sad.

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One answer I think you're likely to get is that what it is for a piece of music to be sad is for it's to make people sad,

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to be such as to make people cry or otherwise feel something related to sadness.

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And variations on this view are what are known as arousal, theories of expression.

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And these are often just mentioned just to be knocked down again.

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So the kind of crudest version of it, the emotion expressed by a piece of music is just the emotion that it arouses in its listeners.

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And sort of textbook objection to this is, well, you can get something that expresses grief but doesn't cause us to feel grief.

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It might cause us to feel tender hearted or sympathetic in response to it rather than actually feeling grief.

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A recent defence of the arousal theory tries to get around these problems that's offered by Derek Travers,

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and I've given the reference to his book on the back of the hand out there.

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And I'll just describe his theory in brief before moving on to the next part.

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So according to the Travaris, a more plausible version of the arousal theory is to say not that the emotion expressed is the emotion that it arouses,

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but rather that we ought to distinguish, as is standard in the philosophy of emotion between emotions and feelings.

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So feelings are just one component of emotions. Another component is a representational component, such as a thought or belief.

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So fear, for example, is an emotion involving a representation of danger.

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So maybe the belief that you're in danger and a feeling in response to that represents a danger.

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And so in my travels, this view, a work of art, expresses an emotion e if it arouses a feeling in a qualified listener under normal conditions,

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and that feeling is an aspect of an appropriate reaction to a person expressing E!

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So in the case of the grief example that I mentioned just now.

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Part of what makes it the case on the Travaris is a view that a work of art expresses grief is that its such as to arouse

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in a qualified listener a feeling that would be part of an appropriate reaction to real expression of grief in a person.

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So tender heartedness might be an example that you point to the feelings of the listener, namely the qualified listener, rather than their emotions.

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And you ask, are those feelings part of what would be an appropriate reaction to a Real-Life expression of that emotion?

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And on this version of the arousal theory that gets around. According to the Travaris, many of the standard objections to it.

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However, I think it's fair to say at the moment,

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one of the largest families of theories of expression are what we might describe as resemblance, theories of expression.

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There's a number of forms. This can take, as I indicated there, on the handout.

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According to one of them, for work to express that emotion is for it to resemble that emotion itself in various respects.

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So in Carol Pratts well known slogan, music sounds as emotions feel.

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And Malcolm Budd has recently defended a version of this view in his book, Values of Art, and on Bud's version of this view.

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I should say he describes this as the basic and minimal concept of expression.

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He doesn't think that we should regard expression as an entirely unitary phenomenon.

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But he thinks this is one of the most basic aspects of this phenomenon.

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This resemblance to emotion. And specifically, he argues that for a piece of music to be expressive of an emotion is for its to be correct to hear it

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as sounding like the way that emotion feels or as experienced or for a full appreciation of the music.

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To require this. And so naturally, natural question is, well, how is it possible for a piece of music to resemble a feeling,

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to resemble an emotion in respect of the feeling? Well, Bud begins by indicating a number of the kinds of feelings that can be components of emotions.

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So a number of the examples he gives are felt to desire and aversion.

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This is a feeling that is a component of such emotions as envy, disgust, shame.

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So, too, a feeling of distress in an emotion like fear or grief, feeling of pleasure and emotions like joy, amusement or pride.

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And, of course, displeasure as well, especially the frustration of desire in emotions such as anger.

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So bearing in mind the kinds of feelings that are components of emotions,

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but says there's a natural correspondence between certain aspects of music and the feeling component of emotions.

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For example, often in a piece of music,

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there'll be a transition from sounds that require a kind of resolution to sounds that don't require a kind of resolution.

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This, but says is resemblance resembles the way in which there are in our mental life transitions from states of desire to states of satisfaction,

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or again, from states of tension to states of release and emotions that are characterised by feelings like this or emotional experiences that

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are characterised by transitions of such feelings can be expressed by pieces of music that have these sound properties of this kind.

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Another example he gives in filling out theory is two points to pitch rises in pitch.

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Falling melodies. This sort of thing.

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And he, like a number of authors on this topic, has argued that the dimension of pitch is like the vertical dimension of space.

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And therefore, there is a resemblance between successions of notes, of different pitch,

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duration and emphasis and upwards and downwards movements of various magnitudes or speeds.

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And what this makes possible is a resemblance between changes of pitch and feelings of movement that are intrinsic to certain emotions,

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such as acute anxiety, the feeling of the body trembling. For example.

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So changes the pitch. Another way in which sounds can resemble emotions in respect of the feeling, component of the emotion.

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So to strength of musical pulse or a degree of musical movement,

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on the one hand betokens a certain level of energy and therefore can resemble the felt energy in certain kinds of emotion.

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This is the sort of picture he has in mind to make this resemblance theory plausible.

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But apart from the examples he gives and the filling out of the picture,

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one thing a number of things he thinks count in favour of it are what it explains various mysterious aspects of our experience of music.

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He takes to be explained by this view.

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So one thing is that explains how it's possible to hear music as expressive of different emotions at one and the same time.

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Explain this, because it's possible for the same piece of music to resemble different emotions at one in the same time in respect of their feeling.

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And likewise, it explains what's true and the thought that in music we directly perceive the inner life of an emotion.

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So it's not a sort of inferential thing in our experience of music.

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We're tempted at least to say that we directly experience on emotion.

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And this is explained by the fact that, well,

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expressiveness is a function of resemblance to a feeling rather than to a manifestation of a feeling in, say, behaviour or facial expression.

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It accounts for this directness component.

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And likewise, he thinks it explains why there are great limitations actually on music's capacity to express emotions.

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So we tend to use actually rather general terms when we describe the kinds of emotions that a passage expresses.

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So joy, melancholy grief, things like this.

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It's an interesting question, how specific an emotion or an experience could a piece of music express something like disappointment?

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For example, doesn't immediately spring to mind how a piece of music might express that.

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But regardless of where we draw the line,

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there does seem to be a certain limitation on the extent to which music can express the full specificity, the rich variety of emotions.

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And Bud thinks that his view helps to explain that, because in his view, it's a resemblance to the feeling component of the emotion,

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not a resemblance to, say, the content of the belief or thought associated with the emotion constitutive of the emotion or the content of the desire.

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If a desire is a constituent of the emotion, it can only resemble it in certain respects, in the respect of its feeling.

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And that explains why its capacity to express is limited in the ways that have been observed.

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OK. So now a number of objections have been raised. Bud's view as well.

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Of course, Roger Scruton adapting an objection that Nelson Goodman originally made to resemblance theories of pictorial representation.

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Says while music resembles a great many other things more than it resembles emotions.

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And the implication seems to be, as it is in Goodmans analagous objection, why then doesn't express those?

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Why then doesn't it express those other things?

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Now, I think Bud has an answer to this, although it might well need to be filled out, so it just raises another question, namely that on his view,

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the view is not just that it expresses something in virtue of resembling a feeling, but because it's correct to hear it as resembling a feeling.

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So I think he can give that as an answer to this objection.

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But of course, that then does raise the question what makes it correct to hear it as resembling a feeling?

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So you might want further clarification of that, Scruton also raises another point,

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and that is that expression is a kind of success in art, successful expression, something that makes artworks aesthetically valuable.

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And so preceding it is to become, as he puts it, aesthetically affected by the work of art.

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And this doesn't seem to be the case for perceiving resemblances between sounds and feelings.

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You could observe that. I guess there is a resemblance point of likeness between this piece of music and some feeling, but not care.

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It might not be interesting. You might not be affected or be involved with it.

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That, Scruton thinks, is a big problem for any such theory of expression.

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If it's possible to perceive the property they've identified with expressiveness without feeling aesthetically involved with it,

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then that counts against the claim very strongly that they've identified a property that's identical with expressiveness.

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OK. Well, one transition or one variation on these resemblance there is is to say was not a resemblance to the emotion itself,

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but to other kinds of manifestation of this emotion, in particular vocal or behavioural manifestations or expressions of this emotion in people.

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There's something attractive about the idea that we should tie what it is for music to be expressive, to what it is for behaviour to express emotions.

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And that is a theory of that kind is part of Peter Kibbitz theory of musical expression.

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And so, in Kinney's view, at least in many cases,

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for music to be expressive of sadness is for the music to resemble behavioural expressions of sadness.

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And and this is an important qualification for us to be strongly inclined to hear the music as a kind of behaviour.

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And I'll explain why he adds that qualification. In a moment.

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But first of all. OK, well, we want to know what kinds of resemblance can there be between music on the one

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hand and behavioural or vocal expressions of emotion in human beings on the other?

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Well, you points, amongst other things, to the example of rhythm. So rhythm on Kibbie gives.

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You can enable music to be expressive of emotions by resembling the speed of movements that express those emotions.

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So fast moving rhythm can express excitement, excited emotions.

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And that's in virtue of a resemblance between the speed of the rhythm and the speed of certain kinds of behavioural expressions of excitement,

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movements in particular. Rhythm seems to be one example on give his view.

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Another example is, again, the rising and falling of pitch.

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So as we saw with Bud,

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Kivi also appeals to the notion that increases in pitch and decrease and falling of pitch betoken an increase or decrease in energy.

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And this makes them like movements in which energy is required to raise your limbs.

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Or conversely, if you have droopy shoulders, posture,

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hanging your head low in an expression of sadness that involves less energy, letting the gravity sort of work on you.

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And that's why these sort of falling melodies can be expressive of sadness on Kevin's view, in many cases at least.

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So apart from these examples, what does Kivi offer in support of this claim?

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Well, he thinks that it provides a more unified account of expressive phenomena in general, not just in the arts, but in other areas.

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So the first point he makes is that sad music is in the way he puts it, expressive of sadness, but does not necessarily express sadness.

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So that, again, that distinction between what I put by saying sad music can express a kind of

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emotion without necessarily expressing a particular occurrence of that emotion.

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Cavey puts it by saying sad music is expressive of sadness without necessarily expressing sadness.

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And he says, well, what happens in other cases where we have this, where we have something that is expressive of sadness but doesn't express sadness?

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Kivi gives the example of St. Bernard's sad looking face dog's face, as big as we've put it, hangdog expression on it.

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And he looks sad. He says it's quite obvious why the St. Bernard's face is expressive of sadness.

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Namely, it resembles certain things that express sadness, namely human faces that express sadness.

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So St. Bernard. Not necessarily sad and probably not expressing it by his expression ever, but nevertheless it's expressive of sadness.

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And that's because of a resemblance to genuine expressions of sadness.

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So if music is like that, then we have more unified account of expressive phenomena in general.

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However, and this was the important qualification, resemblance to sad gestures, behaviour, so forth,

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can't be enough because of the points that I mentioned with reference to Scruton derived from Goodman,

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namely, music resembles loads of things that it does not express.

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So he says what else is needed is that we're strongly inclined to hear it as a kind of behaviour or as an utterance or as a gesture.

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So Kivi says it's a well-established fact that we have a natural tendency to animate things that we see or perceive.

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St. Bernard's faith is a good example. Suppose it's already animate.

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We're humanising it there. The Kivi gives other examples in which, for example, we might see a spoon as a person or a stick as a snake.

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And he says not only is it obvious that we do this, they're quite good, obvious evolutionary advantages to doing this.

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If you're just generally inclined to see things as animate,

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then that gives you a better chance of getting away from dangerous things that are animate.

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In the struggle for survival. So we have this general tendency anyway.

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And he thinks there's independent evidence that we also animate our perceptions of music.

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So, for example, we describe parts in polyphony as voices or polyphonic compositions as voices.

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Themes in music are often called gestures. Fugues are called statements that are answered cetra.

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So he thinks his account of expressiveness is of a piece with what we're obviously doing anyway in cases of music,

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that we're if we're hearing it as behaviour and it resembles a certain kind of behaviour that expresses an emotion,

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then that's what enables it to be expressive of that emotion.

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Now, Scruton, again has various objections to theories of this kind and to Kivi in particular,

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he attacked some of Kev's examples, such as the stock of movement.

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I'm not sure if this is quite a fair criticism of what Kivi says, but scrutinise stresses that you have.

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You can't talk about music literally moving. There's no literal resemblance between musical movement and bodily movement.

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And part of the reason I don't think that's quite fair is that Kivi stresses the point of

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resemblance is the amount of energy manifested in musical movement and in bodily movement.

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Point of resemblance is not the movement. That's the energy involved.

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But it's worth reading Scruton discussion in his book, The Aesthetics of Music. So on the back of your hand.

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OK. So that's Kev's version of Resemblance Theory. Now, he doesn't think this is can explain all expressiveness in music.

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He thinks we also have to appeal to conventional associations with emotions.

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So he thinks the minor key. For example, it tends to express sad emotions.

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And likewise, the major key to express cheerful, positive emotions.

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And he doesn't think this can be explained by a resemblance between the minor key and behavioural expressions of emotions.

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He thinks here we simply have to appeal to a conventional association that we have

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established between certain features of music like the minor key and certain emotions.

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And he has an account of how these conventional aspects and these resemblance aspects interact in a piece of music to create expressiveness.

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But that's all I'll say about the convention. Theories of expressiveness.

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The last one that I'd like to take a look at is Gerald Levinson's view.

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Levinson essentially says in response to Kivi, you don't need resemblance to account for expressiveness.

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All you need is that second part of Carvey's resemblance theory, namely that you can hear it as a piece of behaviour that expresses an emotion.

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And more specifically, his in its most recent version.

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His view is for a passage of music to be expressive of an emotion is for it's to be readily heard

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in its proper context by listener experienced in the genre as an expression of that emotion.

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So a bit similar to Hume's account of true critics.

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It's done with reference to experienced listeners. Someone who knows about the genre and has a certain level of musical understanding and competence.

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It's readily heard by such a person in its proper context as a behavioural expression, a gesture, for example.

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Then that's what it is for. It's to be expressive of that kind of emotion.

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So he and he has a certain story of what it is to hear something as a gesture, as an expression of an emotion.

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He thinks that we have to hear music as gestures and in particular, we have to hear or imagine in the music a persona.

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And he says this on the grounds that you can't have expression without an express her.

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So if you're going to hear music as expression, you have to imagine at least a very indefinite persona within the music.

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And so to the point of saying that you have to hear a gesture in the music is on

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the grounds that the primary vehicle of expression is gesture broadly understood.

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And so he thinks this view commits us to saying that we're hearing these things in the music or imagining them in the music.

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Now, Levinson's argument for this view is rather long,

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and it's partly based on an elimination of other theories and on account of the desirable features that theory of expressiveness should have.

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And if you're interested in looking at this, the place to look to begin with is his paper musical expressiveness on the back of the hand out there.

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One controversial feature of this view, of course, is whether it really gets the experience right.

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So the objection is that competent listeners don't seem to at least always be imagining a persona in the music or a gesture in the music.

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Seems like Levinson were right. The experience of hearing sadness and music would be a lot different than it is to involve imagining these personas.

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Levinson's reply to that.

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I'm not sure I entirely follow this, but his replies that one may not always notice or acknowledge what is presupposed by one's hearing or imagining.

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So you hear the expression and the music that presupposes a persona.

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Since an expression requires and express her. But of course, what's presupposed by what you imagine may not itself be noticed or acknowledge.

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So Levinson says, I'd have to think about it a little bit more, but I'm not really sure that works or much more to the point.

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I'm not really sure I understand it entirely.

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OK, so these this is, I hope, sufficient to give you a flavour of this debate and quite how various are the theories that have been offered.

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And as I say, I certainly have not presented an exhaustive account of them.

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Other theories worth just mentioning are include Richard Vole Hymes theory of perception as as of expressiveness,

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the perception of what he calls correspondences. And I've given references to you there and Goodmans theory and the family of theories that draw on

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considerations about the nature of metaphore in order to clarify the nature of expressiveness.

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So a claim often made is that when we say the music is sad, we're using a metaphor,

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and that if we get clear on what metaphor is involved, then we can get clear on what musical expression involves.

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As I say, I'm going to discuss those next term in my lectures on metaphor.

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I'm not going to do that here, but I'd like to conclude by discussing a little bit about the value of expression.

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So remember, perhaps in the first lecture on Plato, when you're talking about what it is that makes the arts valuable?

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One of the alternatives that was mentioned was the possibility that it's the fact that they can express things

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that other things can't or can express things in a particularly clear or vivid way that other things cannot.

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And this is certainly one thing that has been offered to explain why music is so valuable is to appeal to its expressive power.

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Now, Tolstoy, for example, held that music can infect us with the emotion.

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I think that's the term he uses. It can cause us to feel the emotion that it expresses and by expressing feelings that are worth having.

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And to the extent that they're worth having, then the expressiveness is valuable.

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So that's why expressive music can be valuable music. It's because it can cause us to have experiences that are valuable experiences to have.

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Now, Bud, who has a particularly subtle discussion of the value of expressiveness in values of art.

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It says that, well, at least on Tolstoy's view, it seems like it's possible to get the valuable feeling without the work of art.

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Because on Tolstoy's view, the artist felt at first created a medium in which to transmit it.

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And then ideally, the audience then felt it.

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But if it's possible to have the valuable feeling without the work of art, then explaining art's value in these terms implies that,

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at least in principle, if not in practise, the work of art is dispensable.

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The work of art is just an instrument to producing this feeling.

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But moreover. In principle instrument because you could get the valuable feeling without the work of art and on Budd's view,

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any adequate account of the value of works of art like pieces of music ought not to imply that if we could get that experience in some other way,

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then we could get rid of the work of art and get it in the other way that we'd have no special reason to experience that work of art.

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And it does seem that Tolstoy's version of the expression theory has that implication.

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Another possibility is the specificity with which works of art can express emotions.

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So sometimes in the literature on this, there's a passage from a letter by the composer Felix Mendelssohn,

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in which he talks about pieces of music expressing feelings that are too definite for other things to express.

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Music can express feelings of highly specific kinds.

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And part of the motivation for this is just the thought that, well, there is a sense in which two works of art can express the same feeling.

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Namely, they can both express sadness or melancholy. But these are, as I mentioned earlier, very, very general kinds.

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It's not possible for two works to express the very same specific kind of sadness that the other does.

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It would be very implausible to think so. The argument goes that the very same specific kind of sadness in one work could be expressed in another.

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And some people add, furthermore, works of music can express things that language cannot, at least non poetic language cannot.

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Now, Budd's comment on this is that at least if you,

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by his account of resemblance at as the basis of expressiveness and resemblance

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in particular to feeling abundant of emotion as the basis of his expressiveness,

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then it doesn't seem to follow that two works of art, or even to be plausible, the two works of art can't express the same specific kind of emotions.

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So not all aspects of a work of art are relevant to its resembling or cause it to resemble a on emotion or the emotion that it expresses.

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So you might play a different work with a different instrument,

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but you might have the kinds of resemblances that Budd's points out, even with, say, a different instrument, a different vehicle.

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Otherwise, the falling and rising of pitch, for example, Bud's own view.

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This is the third one on the handout. Is that part of the reason why expressiveness is valuable when it's valuable?

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Is that music of that kind can enable us to experience either imaginatively or really the emotional states that it expresses in a peculiarly vivid,

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satisfying and poignant form.

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And what and what he means by that is in first place, we can use the music to imagine emotions much more vividly than we would be able to unaided.

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So if we let our imaginings of the emotion be guided by the music, for example,

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if we imagine the music itself as an emotion developing in various ways, then our imaginings can be much more vivid than they otherwise could be.

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And so to music can present satisfying resolutions of emotional transitions.

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Things like this can create a kind of intelligible drama as it develops.

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And this can be very satisfying to have these aspects resolved in a satisfying way.

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And interestingly, he also mentions that he also argues that we can explain the value of expressiveness,

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in part by reference to the value of community. So the listener is realisation that the music experienced, that the emotion experienced, rather,

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is not his alone, but is open to others, and indeed that this emotion has been made available by someone else.

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Namely, the composer encourages a sense of community that our own private imaginings would lack.

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And this is one main reason on his view. Why expression is valuable.

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Thank you so much.