Abstract
The essays in this book address topics such as the expression of emotion in music and the informed listener’s response, perception and understanding from the perspective of listener, performer, analyst and composer, the ontology of musical works, and musical profundity. All of these are threaded together neatly by Davies’ concern with the philosophy of music over a decade or so. While most of the essays are amalgamations or reworkings of previously published work, others appear for the first time in print, at least in English. This includes the centrepiece, from which the book takes its title. Where common themes occur across a number of essays, these are pointed out to the reader by means of cross-referencing. This adds to the cohesiveness of the book and allows the reader to track an idea over a series of writings.
In the opening chapters, Davies explores the notion of expressiveness in music. He uses the case of the informed listener to show how their response takes the form of ‘an experience of resemblance between the music and the realm of human emotion’ (p. 9). He continues with an exploration of music’s expressiveness as literal rather than metaphoric in nature. He intends literal to indicate a quality of immediate access – we encounter music’s expressiveness fully frontally (p. 12). In defending the literal and not metaphoric attributions, he notes the following:
if the musical property is possessed literally rather than metaphorically, what we need is a literal use of emotion words that preserves a connection with their application to felt emotions but extends that use to characterize qualities of non-sentient subjects. (p. 25)
This point about the literal and metaphoric meanings allows him to make an important distinction between primary and secondary meanings of words. He holds that a commonly used word, such as that denoting sadness, can have many meanings, each one distinctive yet closely related, as for example, when we say that a person cuts a sad figure, we are not referring to his feelings but to how he appears to us. Yet in order to understand the use of the word ‘sad’ in referring to someone’s gait, appearance or physiognomy, we must also have grasped the meaning of sad as a felt emotion and, to have chosen this descriptor above others, we must be able to distinguish its secondary from its primary use. It is not enough simply to apply a label such as ‘sad’ to music, and to assume a shared understanding of its meaning. This goes some way towards explaining why the listener may find it difficult to put into words what he knows or to show that he can follow music’s progress, a theme to which Davies returns later on in the volume of essays.
Nor is music universal in terms of its expressiveness. By looking at musical expressiveness as cross-culturally recognizable, he looks at the way in which people of all cultures regard music as expressive of emotion. He cautions against holding the assumption that there are basic affective states of individuals and that these can be found in the music of one’s own culture and recognized in the music of another culture.
In developing his argument that ‘music’s expressive properties are possessed independently of their effects’, in chapter 4 he considers the listener and the ways to describe the connection between listener and music which have included medical metaphors such as infection or contagion as if, somehow, emotion can be transmitted from music to listener. In a discussion of emotion and the performer (chapter 5), he dismisses both the expression theory and the arousal theory. Each in various ways involves the performer somehow taking on the mantle of the composer’s emotion and transmitting it or communicating it to the audience, so as to induce a similar response in them. There simply isn’t the time for the performer to attend to all of this in the course of a performance, he argues.
In the only co-authored essay (chapter 7), he looks at musical meaning in a broader perspective and, with Koopman, puts together an account of formal meaning, taking stock of personal musical meaning, or meaning for the subject and, more broadly, meaning for us as a social species. In chapter 13 he uses a chess game to describe the difference between profundity and emotion in music. Music is profound because of what it exemplifies and thereby reveals about the human mind, in the same way as, say, a chess game does.
The reader can judge the extent to which there is validity in his criticism of research in psychology which stems from a belief, misguided in his view, that emotional states are prosodic, that is, they can tell or communicate aspects of sadness, rather than physiognomic, by which he means that they are held in the music, much the same way as an expression is held on a person’s face or in their gait. Put simply, it is not the sadness which distinguishes Chopin’s funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica, but the musical means by which this sadness is given its embodiment. This brings into question the limitations of studies in which music is compartmentalized into sections for the purposes of investigating responses to music, or for the establishment of causal links between listener response and expressiveness in the music.
What matters is not so much the importance of finding ways to describe music, or to prove that it contains some ineffable truths, but rather to recognize that music does not communicate deeply important truths about human emotions. (p. 130). Neither does it possess a universal and unchanging essence, a point he makes in his essay on musical colors and timbral sonicism (chapter 11).
Unless we are deeply and systematically mistaken, musical works are not colorless sound sequences. Nor are they colored merely in that their sounds are of the specified instruments. In other words, the means of performance, as well as the sounds produced, are implicated among the identity conditions of musical works. (p. 176)
There are lessons here for the teacher, and for the teaching of performance in particular: ‘the education of the musician should focus more on technique, nuances of interpretation, and “authentic” modes of playing than on self-expression or on sharing the music’s expressive moods’ (p. 70).
There are many reasons to recommend this publication. Davies shares with the readers a notion of plurality in musical understanding, and uses this as a way to explore how some assumptions underpinning research and teaching might be challenged. In addressing a philosophical question – how can music express emotion when it is abstract and insentient? – the book provides a solid foundation on aspects of music and meaning, and would be very useful on a reading list for students across a range of courses on music, including those on performance studies and education, with relevance too for serious thinkers in philosophy and cultural studies. Those already familiar with the work of Davies will recognize the meticulous care with which he puts together each argument, skilfully weighing up all sides before offering his own. He has set himself clearly defined parameters, and in the main considers only instrumental music from the Western classical tradition, or ‘pure music’, defined as ‘stand-alone music played on musical instruments excluding the human voice, and without words, literary titles, or associated texts connected to it by its composer’ (p. 7). This does not detract from the scope or reach of the book, however, and he assumes no shared understanding about expressiveness, not least when exposing the extent to which attempts to explain music’s expressiveness can be connected to emotions felt by composers, listeners, performers, and analysts.