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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/vjdt-jg82
The Aesthetics of Music
An Anthology of Essays
by Arnold Berleant
1. Embodied Music DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M68W3825B
Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Art and Environment, ed. A. Berleant
(Ashgate, 2002), pp. 143-155.
ABSTRACT
The experience of music offers powerful proof of the embeddedness of human being. It
is environmental engagement at its highest pitch, and thus offers an eloquent argument
for the full fusion of human being, a kind of reasoning I call the argument from
experience. When Walter Pater observed that "All art constantly aspires towards the
condition of music," he may have been extolling music at the expense of the other arts.
But perhaps he recognized that music achieves human embodiment with unusual
forcefulness, directness, and immediacy. Yet every art, or rather, every appreciative
engagement with art, does something of the same thing, each in its own way. Art thus
offers us what philosophy has no language to express directly: the unity of human being
and the continuity of our multiple dimensions. By making this aesthetic fusion explicit in
aesthetic experience, we can begin to reveal art's ways, perhaps the closest we can
come to expressing the unsayable.
2. Music as Sound and Idea DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/hmmr-9n82
Current Musicology, No. 6/l968, pp. 95-l00.
ABSTRACT
Despite the serious obstacles that stand in the way of discussing such questions as what
constitutes a piece of music, the papers by Miss Carpenter and Professor Crocker deal
sensitively with the issue and make useful and important observations. My comments
are intended to assist in clarifying and furthering these discussions. Let me proceed by
identifying and then applying two demands that this sort of question calls forth, the first
conceptual and the second substantive. There is opportunity here to develop only some
conceptual suggestions, and I shall merely be able to indicate the direction in which a
substantive contribution might proceed.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/vjdt-jg82
3. Musical De-Composition DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/1jse-nv63
What Is Music? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, edited by Philip Alperson
(New York: Haven, 1987), pp. 239-254.
ABSTRACT
I begin by disclaiming any intention of implying, as the title of this essay may suggest,
the same prognosis for music that Baudelaire made for love when, in "La Charogne," he
likened the future of his beloved to a dog's decaying carcass. It is true, however, that
what I have to say about music will perhaps appear quite as shocking to the traditional
lore of aesthetics as the poet's song did to that of love. But it is my intention to carry the
comparison no further and to offer, not a romantic apostasy of love but what might rather
be regarded as a romantic affirmation of art. In any event, my interest here is not in
biological degeneration but in artistic generation, and I hope to suggest that in the case
of music and, (mutatis mutandis), the other arts, some common ways of regarding the
creative process are as misleading as they are misapprehended. More positively, I shall
offer an alternative that may grasp more successfully something of the nature of the
creative factor in musical composition.
4. Musical Generation DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/7z3p-dn10
Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 132-150.
ABSTRACT
Music suffers in discussion more than most arts. The difficulties of grasping the
workings of an art whose materials of sound are intangible, elusive, and ephemeral are
increased by the usual practice of employing physical and other alien metaphors to
convey the activities of musical creation and appreciation. It is common to hear even
musicians speak of constructing a composition, as if music were an object to be
structured by joining together tones, chords, or melodic elements and arranging them in
acceptable order by conformity to established metrical and formal patterns. The very
word for the creation of music, compose, incorporates the same mythical assumption of
the musical work as a thing, a piece that is put together out of pre-existing materials.
The creative process, difficult to understand in any art, is even more recondite in the
musical one.
5. Ruminations on Music as an Exemplary Art DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/gjse-af81
Composite version developed from two papers published in New Sound: "Ruminations
on Music as an Exemplary Art," New Sound 40/2 (2012), 201-8; and "Further Ruminations on
Music," New Sound, International Journal of Music, Issue 50, 2017, 129-137.
ABSTRACT
Music has a remarkable self-sufficiency. Faltering explanations such as language,
symbol, emotion, or expression seem to reflect the preconceptions of the listener, the
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/vjdt-jg82
critic, or the theorist rather than the experience of the music. All claim to explain music in
terms of something else. Where is the music in such explanations? Music loses its
integrity through translation into similes, metaphors, or its accompanying effects. How,
then, can we explain the fascination that music continues to exert on us?
6. What Music Isn't and How to Teach It DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6DN3ZW0S
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 8/1 (April 2009), 54-65.
ABSTRACT
Unlike the other arts, music has no direct connection with the rest of the human world.
True, there are bird songs and natural “melodies” in the gurgling of brooks, but these are
hardly the materials of music in the way that landscape can be the subject-matter of
painting or the human body the material of dance. And no natural sounds can stand
alone as quasi-artworks the way that the deeply eroded limestone blocks from China’s
Lake Tai can be admired as abstract sculptures. Music demands to be understood on its
own terms. This is not a new requirement, for others, from Hanslick to Copland, have
urged us to focus on music as experience that is intrinsically and only musical. Still, false
analogies are convenient, none more so than the platitude, “Music is the language of
emotion.” Music as emotion that is linguistically structured! What happened to music as
its own intrinsic, full experience—auditory, somatic, multi-sensory, sensible experience?
7. Notes for a Phenomenology of Musical Performance DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ttp9-jr44
Philosophy of Music Education Review, 7, no. 2 (Fall 1999), pp.73-79.
ABSTRACT
Understanding performance can not only increase our theoretical grasp of music but
reveal something of the general character of human experience. Performance evokes a
condition that affects the fundamental aspects of experience: the perception of time and
space, of the body and sensation, and of personal and social experience. A
phenomenological description of performance from within the situation reveals a
transformation of ordinary experience. Time and space are transfigured, body
awareness and the sensory system are intensified, the dynamic character of musical
experience is heightened, and its personal character is enlarged to encompass both
audience and tradition, as the listener becomes an active participant in this process.
8. Some Observations on American Music Today DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/2h4q-ay94
New Sound, International Magazine for Music, No. 12 (1998), 23-26.
ABSTRACT
American music is as various as the great sprawling country in which it originates. Like
New York, the United States' largest city in which everything can be found, the very
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/vjdt-jg82
abundance of this music is overwhelming. Most non-musicians associate American
music with its folk traditions and their derivatives. These include the regional music of
the Appalachians and the Southwest, work songs, political songs, marches, patriotic
music, the musical, and especially the Negro spiritual, the blues, and the many phases
in the evolution of jazz. Of all these, jazz is probably this country's most original
contribution and has had the greatest influence in the international musical scene on
both popular and art music. It is not wise to attempt to judge these diverse practices but
better only to acknowledge their influence. Probably the best course as a commentator
is to mention some present trends and how I would like to see them develop, as we
begin a new century with its psychological impetus to a fresh start.
9. The Music in My Philosophy DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6Q52FC4C
ASA Newsletter, 2012.
ABSTRACT
Music has not been as prominent in philosophy or as influential in aesthetics as the visual arts,
at least in the Western tradition. Reflecting on my years of experience as both a philosopher
and a musician, I am increasingly intrigued by speculating if and how today’s aesthetic
discourse might have taken a different direction if music been its central focus. It is tempting to
wonder whether, in some cases, the musical art may indeed have had an influence, even if less
conspicuous than some other arts.