Anthony Newcomb Semantics

Sound and Feeling Author(s): Anthony Newcomb Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Jun., 1984), pp. 614-643 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343314 Accessed: 12-11-2017 12:10 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343314?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms

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Sound and Feeling

Anthony Newcomb

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound -WALLACE STEVENS, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" How so?

For centuries philosophers have searched for the source of sense behind music's sensual surfaces. Peter Kivy, in The Corded Shell: Reflections

on Musical Expression, has recently taken up the challenging question onc

more.' How is it philosophically possible to formulate and defend th

idea that music can express anything at all? is one aspect of this question How does the individual piece of music transmit its particular expressive message? is the other.

Professionally, at least, philosophers and musicians do not think about music in the same way. Though their words may sometimes b

similar, they are not asking the same questions, and they do not rest eas with the same answers. Philosophers try to formulate a theory accordin to which one can speak economically and consistently of music as a form of communication. Their answers are abstract, usually without referenc to any particular piece. Musicians-those who admit interest in the questio at all, that is-tend simply to assume that music can "express." They ask what a particular piece or group of pieces expresses, and in answering this question, the boldest of them may seek to put into words the particular Critical Inquiry 10 (June 1984)

? 1984 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/84/1004-0007$01.00. All rights reserved.

614

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means by which a piece expresses what they hear in it. Thus musicians often become impatient with the philosophers' concerns, thinking them to be far removed from the music itself. Philosophers, on their part, regard the musicians' talk as shaky stuff, naive and conceptually ill founded.

A number of recent studies show a welcome resolve to bridge this gap.2 After several decades during which most serious musical analysis was exclusively structural, avoiding altogether questions of expressive meaning or communication, a growing number of skilled analysts are once more asking questions about the communicative content latent in the structural idea, and they are looking to philosophy for help in guiding their thought. Similarly, a number of philosophers have concerned themselves with music, trying to formulate a coherent theoretical system in

which musical analysts could cast their questions and answers. Kivy's book is the latest (perhaps not any more) in a series of such attempts by philosophers and musicians. An intelligent and clearly written book that has already attracted a good deal of attention, Kivy's Corded Shell: Reflections

on Musical Expression offers a fitting occasion for reflection on the most significant essays in this field by philosophers and musicians to appear over the past fifteen or so years.3 I do not by any means wish to take on the philosophy or aesthetics

of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman's Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: (1) an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical work of art? (2) a taxonomy

of music, a categorical scheme for the basic and universal aspects of music; (3) a hermeneutics or semiotics of music, an answer to the question What, if anything, can music refer to? (4) an epistemology of music; (5) a theory of music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical work better than another? (6) the foundations of a social philosophy

of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion of Nelson Goodman's seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment

in the question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from

the nonaesthetic.

My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely, current theories of musical expression. "Expression" is not equivalent to

Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He is currently at work on a book on musicaficta, Understood Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony,

1450-1600, and on a study of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth-century music.

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616 Anthony Newcomb

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"meaning"; I understand and shall use the word "expression" to indicate a kind of meaning that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, "rather obviously, to express is to refer in some way to what is expressed."6 How this reference is made by the artwork in interaction with the listener, and what sort of

purpose it serves-these concerns will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter Faltin's careful arguments and from my own experience: there is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that operates without reference outside the internal operations or procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But though this may be ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most fundamental way for many listeners.

1

The primary works with which this essay is concerned can be divided into two groups. The first group, which includes the writings of Goodman

and Beardsley (together with Susanne Langer before them), occupies itself with the more abstractly philosophical side of the question. It asks

and tries to answer such questions as: How can music, an art without anything like a normal semantics, be considered to express anything at all? What are the general mechanisms involved? What are the abstract, philosophical arguments by which one can justify the abandonment of what Langer calls the "silly fiction of self-significance"?8 This is the most rigorously philosophical side of the spectrum. With the second group, we move toward the center of the spectrum. These works are concerned less with the formulation of original philosophical explanations for musical expression and more with the particular mechanisms for the transmission of expressive content in a particular style or piece. This is where we must locate not only recent books by musicians such as Wilson Coker (Music and Meaning) and Edward Cone (The Composer's Voice) but Kivy's book as well.9 Surprisingly for a professional

philosopher, Kivy is rather casual about the question of reference, the subject of much debate in recent years. The heart of his book is a demonstration that certain musical patterns and phrases, defined principally in melodic terms, are traditionally associated with certain expressive meanings (or, in philosophical language, with certain groups of expressive predicates, such as "is sad," "is angry," "is joyous"). In short, Kivy, like

Deryck Cooke in his much-cited Language of Music, gives us a mid-

twentieth-century version of baroque Figurenlehre.'1 At first blush, this may seem less ambitious than the radical concerns of the first group. On the other hand, while Goodman, Beardsley, and

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Langer entirely avoid such specific details of music in the Western tonal system as might help the listener (and the critic) decide what a given piece may be said to express, Kivy attempts to deal with precisely such details. We must admire the philosopher's courage in venturing into the messy area of musical specifics and in trying to bridge the gap between philosophical aesthetics and practical criticism. Since Kivy's book, in its brave involvement with both philosophy and music, touches on the most important problems of the area in which the two intersect, I shall summarize

its contents before returning to Goodman and Beardsley. Kivy's real area of concern, then, is music criticism, which he divides into four kinds: the biographical (Schumann, for example), the autobiographical (Berlioz), the emotive (Donald Tovey), and the purely technical (Joseph Kerman and Leonard Meyer are his examples here!). Like Stanley Cavell, Kivy deplores that "the musically untrained but humanistically educated seem to face a choice between descriptions of music too technical for them to understand, or [ones] decried as nonsense by the authorities their education has taught them to respect" (p. 9)." He wants to revivify what he calls the emotive style but regrets the lack of firm criteria for the application of its expressive predicates. Establishing the philosophical foundations for such criteria is his pressing concern. On the way to doing so, he will make some preliminary distinctions. One, borrowed from Alan Tormey's Concept of Expression, distinguishes "expressing" something from

"being expressive of" something.'2 A scream of anguish or a supremely caustic letter may, on two levels of artfulness, "express" the pain of a rejected lover, while the face of the Saint Bernard whose photograph figures as the frontispiece of Kivy's book "is expressive of" sadness, whether

or not the dog whose muscles had set those features when the camera recorded them actually felt sad at that moment. With the concept "is expressive of," there is no necessary or direct connection between the

mental state of the author of the action or artwork-at the time of creation

or, for that matter, at any other time-and the expressive meaning of the action or artwork itself. (Tormey's distinction is clearly different from

John Dewey's in Art and Experience between "expressing" and "giving vent to," where the scream of anguish gives vent to the pain while the caustic letter expresses it.) Kivy's intention is to construct a theory by which music can be expressive of "what we call 'emotions' and 'moods,' " without touching the question of whether it can be expressive of other things an unfortunate exclusion of significant areas of what could properly be

called musical expression (p. 15). In a historical summary, Kivy rejects the earlier idea that music

arouses or stimulates our emotions directly, espousing the later idea that we recognize emotional expression in music because the music bears some resemblance to the structure of our emotions. Langer extensively developed a version of this cognitive view in Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and

Form, but Kivy would like to go beyond Langer's adamant refusal to

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618 Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling individuate in words the emotional content of music. He would like to

view music as expressive of individual emotions -not strictly your emotions

or my emotions but emotions that can somehow be individuated, instea of Langer's emotion-in-general. We hear specific emotional content in music, he says, and to do so is to recognize specific properties in that music. The important matter, then, is to explore the path by which w move from the properties themselves to the expressive predicates tha we apply to the music. On this matter he develops his version of a theory of expression th has found many and various adherents in this century. I shall call it th "isomorphic" theory, although Kivy distances himself from what he se

as some undesirable implications of this word (see pp. 63-64). Mus

according to this theory, is expressive of our emotional life because i bears structural resemblances to that emotional life-or, in Kivy's particu version of this theory, to our physical manifestations of that emotion life. For example, we see the Saint Bernard's face as expressive of sadne because we see its features as structurally similar to the features of o own faces when they express sadness. Just so, music is seen (or heard as gestures in sound, which resemble some elements of our expressive behavior and act on our emotions because we recognize these resemblanc The elements of expressive behavior on which Kivy relies consistently

are facial expression, posture, and utterance-in his words, "attitud of face and body and voice" (p. 143).

Kivy rather skates over the objections that have been raised to th isomorphic theory of musical meaning, principally by claiming that be expressive of something is not a form of meaning at all; it is simp to possess certain qualities (see pp. 59, 61, and 118). A helpful summar of the isomorphic theory and the objections to it can be found in Vern

Howard's "On Musical Expression."'3 The principal objection is thi

"That two things are similar in some or even all respects does not impl that one is a sign of [that is, refers to] the other. Exact replicas of coi

or pieces of furniture are not usually thought of as symbolizing, signifying

or otherwise denoting each other" ("OME," p. 272). At the heart of th objection is the question of reference, that is, the question as to how t significance of the musical artwork extends outside itself-a question th is, in turn, at the heart of expression as conceived by Goodman, Beardsl and many other aestheticians.

Kivy tries to deal with this question through the concept of animation,

according to which the human being instinctively endows everything h

encounters with the qualities of animate life (see pp. 57-60). It is t

instinct that causes us to hear music as utterance or gesture and to jud its expressive content according to our own expressive behavior. Ther are two difficulties with this concept, beyond the general objection to isomorphic theory stated above.14 First, it seems to place the creation expressive meaning strictly in the mind of the perceiver, leaving no ro

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for intended expressive meaning on the part of the creator (see my section 3 below). The music only possesses certain properties; the listener,

through animation, creates the meaning (see p. 118). Second, some of the expressive qualities that we ascribe to music are not animate ones: for example, references we may commonly hear in it to water, glass, fire. We shall need to return to this entire question of reference. Presumably, Kivy skates over the question because he wants to get

to his prime concern in the book as a whole: how we can defend the application of particular expressive words to music. He has been working on this general subject for over a decade, and his thoughts on it occupy the remainder of The Corded Shell-roughly 85 of its 150 pages.'5 He sees the connection between musical properties and expressive words as gov-

erned by two forces, which he calls contour and convention, both of which operate through the concept of animation. Of these two forces, contour is the "natural" one, genetically at the root of almost all convention.

Thus rapid tempo expresses agitation or excitement through its contourthat is, naturally, through its intrinsic qualities-as does the falling half-

step the sigh. On the other hand, the minor mode expresses sadness through convention, since there is nothing intrinsically sad about it (see

p. 78). These last examples reveal the shaky nature of the dichotomy. It is possible to assert that the minor triad is intrinsically sadder than the major-it is at least intrinsically more dissonant. On the other hand, a sigh does not naturally take the form of a falling half-step any more than it does that of a falling whole step or minor third. By the end of Kivy's attempt to test the "naturalness" of contour by checking with music outside

our own culture, he has made the "natural" so dependent on the conventional at some level as to obliterate the dichotomy (see chap. 9). But I cannot see that Kivy's thesis requires a clear division between the two. The important matter is that, by some combination of the two (perhaps better viewed as poles of a spectrum), he will defend the connection between music and expressive words. On the way to doing so, he reviews both Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of criteria versus symp-

toms in the induction of mental states of others from their behavior and

Michael Scriven's "cluster concepts" for the definition of words, in which no single criterion is necessary or sufficient. Kivy's defense rests on the following important point: "the traditional emotive depictions [sic] of

music ... are really no more defective than our emotive depictions of

each other and the world around us, on which, according to the contour model, they are parasitic" (p. 149). This is the most convincingly argued conclusion of the book. We have long recognized that there exist public criteria for the recognition of emotional expressive states in other people through their external behavior-criteria that are not fully logical or verbally definable. Similar to these criteria and dependent on them, there exist public criteria for the recognition of musical expressiveness. This

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620 Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling means that the application of expressive predicates to music is in principle no more whimsical or less defensible than their application to hundreds of other situations in everyday life, where they are readily accepted. Although Kivy is persuasive in asserting that, in terms of the philosophy

of normal language at least, it is perfectly respectable to apply expressive words to music, he is considerably less successful when he tries to use

his concepts of animation, contour, and convention in doing so. His problems show up most clearly in the weak musical examples at the end of chapter 7, and in chapter 10, which deals with the relation between texts and music. In chapter 10 he asks whether music has independent expressive content, which may or may not be appropriate to the text set, or whether music has indeterminate expressive content, which is then completely defined by the text. The problem is that no musician seriously holds either view. The real question is one of degree and concerns the fineness of expressive distinction of which music is capable and the way in which fine shadings of expressive content are assigned to it by the listener. Yet Kivy's own conviction, which becomes quite clear in this chapter, is that, while "pure instrumental music is susceptible of certain gross distinctions," it is not capable of more (p. 95). As a result, its capacity

for "gross distinctions" is all he is concerned with demonstrating.

No doubt musicians will find this to be the most serious fault of the

book.'6 Kivy's arguments for the philosophical foundations of emotive descriptions of music lead, in his book at least, only to such trivial distinctions

as "good humor" versus "the darker emotions" (pp. 105, 104). Kivy's opinion of the power of music seems to have been indelibly marked by the tendency of aestheticians to discuss the expressivity of music only in simple, very general expressive predicates, like "sad" or "joyous." This, he has concluded, is about all there is to it. He concedes that some earlier aestheticians were "correct in perceiving some kind of expressive vacuum" in purely instrumental music (pp. 101-2). To fill this vacuum, we must turn to text, which supplies unilaterally any fine shadings to musical meaning.17 Thus Kivy gives us the inverse of Langer's position. While she was convinced of the depth and boundless richness of musical meaning, she refused to connect it with words. Kivy wants to solidify its links with

words, but the unspoken price is its limitation to the decidedly unrich repertory of basic expressive concepts which aestheticians are wont to

use again and again.

These are the general points covered by Kivy's book. Closely connected with it in subject matter is Jan Broeckx's article "De mythe van de specifiek

muzikale expressie."'8 Like Kivy, Broeckx takes as his point of departure Tormey's distinction between "expressive" and "expressive of," and avoids the issue of reference (in this case, by agreeing with Goodman). Broeckx's concern is to investigate what is typically artistic in artistic expression. He chides Tormey for trying to make artistic expression reside entirely in the artwork, since it is properly seen as an interaction between viewer

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and artwork.l9 Broeckx concludes that it is neither the kind of things expressed nor the general mechanisms of expression within the artwor that are distinctively artistic. It is rather the particular way in which meaning code, specific to a certain time and place, is applied to a given artwork in order to understand the expressively significant relations among

its perceived properties. The validity of these codes of interpretation not limited to artworks. Indeed, it cannot be if they are to function a they must to make specific properties of artworks part of expression,

which Broeckx assumes involves some sort of reference outside the artwork.20

Thus both Broeckx and Kivy, independently and by somewhat different routes, arrive at the same result concerning our application of expressive predicates to music. The criteria for choosing which predicates to apply to music (that is, for interpreting music verbally) are the same

as those for choosing which ones to apply to many other situations.

Broeckx proposes that only the way in which we apply them-what he calls "creative metaphor-making" (creatieve metaforiek)-is different. Unlike

Kivy, however, Broeckx does not give an example either of the cultureand time-specific interpretive codes of which he speaks or of the operation of such a code in practice. And the challenge that he lays down at the end of his article is not to discover how these codes operate but, rather, to discover if there is any general aspect of their operation in the case of music that might be said to be specifically musical. To me it seems that musical aesthetics ought first to be concerned with what these interpretive codes are and how they function. 2

Goodman's Languages of Art is one of the seminal works of midtwentieth-century aesthetics.21 While Goodman's dense book covers a great deal more than the theory of artistic expression, it makes an important contribution to that theory in its treatment of the concept of reference.22

"Semiotic Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education," an article by Beardsley, offers a summary of Goodman's general view of the artwork as part of a symbolic system; Howard's "On Musical Expression" gives a summary specifically of Goodman's theory of expressive reference in art.23 I shall give here an even more summary summary; it will necessarily be rather

dense. The fundamental terms of Goodman's theory are "reference," "denotation," and "exemplification," both "literal" and "metaphorical." Exemplification is the novelty here. Artistic expression is viewed as metaphorical exemplification. Reference is the broadest of these fundamental terms, ranging over the various ways in which things may symbolize, signify, or stand for one

another. Thus it covers both denotation and exemplification. The dis-

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622 Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling tinction between denotation and exemplification lies in the direction of reference. A linguistic label or set of labels (an expressive predicate is a linguistic label) refers to the things or class of things which it denotes or describes (that is, those things to which it can correctly be applied). The reference flows from label to thing denoted, not from thing to label; the thing or class of things does not denote the label. Likewise a pictorial label refers to the thing or class of things it denotes or depicts; the thing or class of things does not denote or depict the pictorial label. Music does not usually depend on sonorous labels-that is, it does not usually refer in the way that most poems or paintings do. Even in most Wagnerian

leitmotivs, the direction of flow is not so unequivocally away from the sign to the signified-in other words, the function of the sign is not so wholly absorbed in referring to the signified. In exemplification, on the other hand, reference flows both ways.

Goodman's example is a tailor's swatch of green cloth, an instance of literal exemplification. As it is presented, the function of the swatch of cloth is to exemplify a number of things, among them the color green. Thus, when it is presented, the swatch refers to the label "green," perhaps

with some appropriate adjective, such as "forest green." In addition, however, among the class of things to which the linguistic label "forest green" refers is the swatch of cloth. Thus the reference flows in two directions. The label refers by denotation to the swatch; the swatch by exemplification to the label. It follows that not everything that refers is a denotative label. While anything that refers is a symbol, not all symbols are labels; some are examples. Though music in its expressiveness refers, it does not denote; it exemplifies. This instance of the swatch of cloth is an example of literal exemplification-exemplification of a property literally present in the swatch of cloth. Music does not literally possess the property of sadness, however, although it is often said (especially by philosophers) to express sadness. In Goodman's theory, expressed properties are acquired from foreign realms of discourse by metaphorical transfer. Reference made to those properties (or labels -Goodman, for his own reasons, wants to stick with this word) is thus made by what he calls metaphorical exemplification, which is the particular mechanism of expressive reference. Goodman, like Kivy, stresses that the properties of a work that give rise to expressiveness are no less real than its literal ones (such as a rapid tempo). In his words, "the properties a symbol expresses are its own property. But they are acquired property," acquired by metaphorical transfer (LA, p. 86). Two further restrictions are placed on exemplification. First, "while anything may be denoted, only labels may be exemplified." Second, the denotation of the label exemplified "is regarded as having been antecedently

fixed" (LA, pp. 57, 59). This last may be seen as a problem for music, since, as I stress below, the expressive content of music is often not

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coextensive with any simple verbal label. Goodman's theory recognizes, however, that the expressive content of music (or any artwork) is in fact a complex combination and interaction of many literal properties with their metaphorically applied verbal labels. Even a single expressed property "need not coincide in extension with any easy and familiar literal description" (LA, p. 93). The principal area of difficulty in Goodman's theory involves the properties exemplified by an object, for an object does not exemplify all

the properties it possesses. The tailor's swatch, for example, though rectangular, is not used in its normal context of presentation to refer to the label "rectangular" and, hence, does not exemplify rectangularity. Exemplification depends to a large extent on the context in which the property is presented or displayed. Thus my car, for its original salesman

and some of his clients, exemplified Studebaker's particular shade of forest green; as it now stands on the street, however, this reference would occur to virtually no one. Much more likely would be reference by literal exemplification to such labels as "dented," "dirty," or "disreputable." One can also imagine it, as the principal element of the appropriate photograph-let us say, framed by abandoned buildings, surrounded by rubbish and torn advertisements, and probably now in harsh, high-contrast black

and white-as an exemplification of "despondent" or "dejected." Here

we enter the world of metaphorical exemplification and of artistic expression, for the Studebaker does not literally possess the properties of dejection

and despondency. The context in which it is presented brings them to it by metaphorical transfer of realm. The particular question as to which properties of a work of art are exemplified by the work (both literally and metaphorically) depends heavily

on the context of presentation. Beardsley has been occupied with this problematic area of Goodman's theory in a series of articles that, together with Goodman's answers to them, constitutes a searching study in finetuned philosophical aesthetics.24 I shall return to these articles in my discussion below of the critic's role in expressive interpretation. Goodman proposes his theory of exemplification as a replacement for the isomorphic theory of expression, espoused in various forms by Langer, Coker, Cone, and Kivy. Such a replacement is felt to be needed principally because when the isomorphic theory of musical expression says it achieves its reference by means of similarity of shape, it is saying in effect that music denotes (see "OME," pp. 271-73). For music, an important disadvantage of this view of expressive reference (beyond the standard question as to whether similarity alone can create reference) is the one-way direction of the reference, away from the sign to the thing denoted. It is probably more true of music than of any other art that the sign (if we conceive it as such) is not transparent-that is, the sign does not disappear in favor of its function as pointing to the signified.

The two-way reference posited by exemplification seems to fit much

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better the flow of reference back and forth between musical object and expressive meaning-between extramusical and intramusical patterns that is at the heart of musical expression.25

3

Goodman and Kivy concern themselves with two crucial issues in current philosophical thought about musical expression. The first is the question of reference (or exemplification) as a conceptual mechanism for moving beyond the internal system of the artwork itself, a move which is necessary for expression. The second is the question of criteria for the application of specific expressive predicates to music. Before formulating or criticizing any further ideas about musical expression, it will be helpful to clarify some distinctions between various things we might mean by the terms "expression" or "expressiveness" (here treated as equivalent) when we apply them to artworks. John Hospers proposes four versions of the meaning of "expression" in artworks.6 (1) Expression may be seen to emanate from the creator and reside in the process of creation itself, as when we say that the dance expresses the pent-up rage or the youthful vitality of the dancer, or when some critics interpret Jackson Pollock's action painting as a kind of physical

catharsis for the artist. (2) Expression may be seen as what the listener or viewer brings to and takes away from the experience; in this version,

there is no problem in considering a sunset or a natural landscape as expressive.27 (3) Expression may be seen as communication, as what goes from maker to perceiver, a version that stresses the maker's intended meaning and the means for assuring that this will be read unequivocally by the perceiver. (4) Expression may be seen as residing in the properties of the artwork itself, independent of the intention of the maker or the impression carried away by the perceiver. These versions (which do not exclude each other) offer a categorical

scheme in which to locate the theories of artistic expression already

advanced, and they may help to clarify my own position as I go on to present it. In "The Vacuity of Musical Expression," M. P. T. Leahy insists on a rather hard-nosed version of (3) above, in order to reject the entire idea of musical expression.28 Goodman stresses (4), insisting that expression is a function of the properties possessed by the artwork and that recognition

of expressive qualities is a form of cognition, not fundamentally different from our other interactions with the world (see LA, pp. 262-65). Kivy also insists on (4), but he tries to incorporate some of (2) as well, by investigating how the listener translates musical properties into the expressive predicates by which he locates his impressions. His division of "expressive" from "expressive of" is an effort to distance himself from (1) above. My own view of musical expression also joins (2) and (4), bringing to (2) a concern with the operation of what Broeckx calls "creative metaphor-

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making." As I see it, expressiveness results from the metaphorical resonances

or analogies that a viewer-listener-reader finds between properties that an object possesses and properties of experience outside the object itself. Thus expression results from intrinsic properties of an artwork but also from the metaphorical resonances these properties may have for the perceiver. Since these properties are (in the case of music) musical, not extramusical, properties, and their resonances are often broadly intersubjective, I propose neither an extramusical nor a purely subjective view

of musical expression. Expressive interpretation as I understand it is concerned with how the properties are connected to the resonances for a class of listeners-with the conventions of "creative metaphor-making"

of a class of listeners.

Expressive interpretation, in this view, must involve at its very basis some conceptual mechanism for moving from the work's intrinsic syntactic

relations to those relations with other aspects of experience that I assert lie at the basis of expression.29 The particular mechanism by which this move is made is thus all-important. The first argument in favor of Good-

man's way of conceiving it, through the concept of metaphorical exemplification, is the two-way reference discussed above. A second argument

involves the breadth of metaphorical transfer admitted. Because the basis for the metaphorical transfer of properties exemplified-for example, in the case of agitation in music-often lies in the similarity of kinetic shape between the literal properties of the music and our own physical symptoms when prey to agitation-rapid pulse, sudden gestures, and so

on-Goodman's theory often remains close in practice to the various

versions of the isomorphic theory. But Goodman's metaphorical exemplification permits a wider range of resonances. According to Goodman's theory, metaphors of all sorts may be presented and appealed to in proposing the relationships with those other aspects of experience in which expression

lies.

In a series of articles that comprise the most searching examination to date of Goodman's ideas on expression, Beardsley finds the principal difficulty with the theory of metaphorical exemplification to be the lack of rules for deciding which properties of a work are exemplified and hence expressive (see my note 24). As I have already remarked, an object does not exemplify all the properties it possesses. Although the context in which the tailor's swatch is presented, for example, determines which of its properties are exemplified, there is no such clear definition in the case of artworks. In linguistic terms, Beardsley asks: How can one understand the reference of a symbol without rules of reference? In an answer to Beardsley, Goodman insists that one cannot formulate rigid rules of reference for determining what properties are metaphorically exemplified by an artwork. And, like Kivy and Broeckx, Goodman finds this situation not limited to artistic expression. "If Beardsley is asking for general instructions how to determine what a work exemplifies, I shall defer my reply until he gives general instructions determining what a

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work describes or represents." Far from being a rigidly rule-governed process, Goodman asserts, "discovery of what a poem or painting [or composition] exemplifies may often, though not always, take time, training, and even talent."30

This crucial point in Goodman's theory locates an important role of the critic, in his function as interpreter or commentator. The critic brings

his "time, training, and even talent" to, among other things, the task of

deciding which qualities are exemplified and hence expressed by the artwork, and to the further task of bringing these qualities into the relationships and patterns that make the best argument for the work at

hand.3' These relationships may be purely structural; there are both critics and performers who tend to view artworks and their properties this way. But many critics and performers seek after properties and structural relationships that suggest resonances outside the particular artwork at hand-which is to say that they see the artwork as exemplifying

these properties, that they stress them in their interpretations, and that they organize them into structures such as produce the resonances that I call expressive. In the variety of properties that a work may be seen

by diverse interpreters to exemplify lies the richness of its range of meaning, what Cone calls its "expressive potential" (CV, p. 166). It is the function of the interpreter, be he critic or performer, to explore this variety and to organize it according to varying criteria, among

which may well be the kind of metaphorical resonance in which I (and Goodman) locate expressiveness. According to this view, indeed, the lack of strict rules of reference for exemplification lies at the very basis of the

richness of artistic expressiveness.

4

Besides the mechanism for conceiving of expressive reference, a second fundamental area of disagreement among aestheticians and musicians concerns the locus of expressive meaning in music-or, to adopt Goodman's terms, the place to look in music for the properties metaphorically exemplified. The fundamental division is between those who look for musical meaning (expressive or otherwise) in what we might call the individual musical image-the small-scale musical detail, be it interval, motive, theme, or phrase-and those who look for it in process or overall

form.

For most musicians, a major failing of Kivy's book will be his almost exclusive reliance on detail, usually melodic detail, as the seat of musical meaning. In this he joins the most famous recent English-language book on musical hermeneutics, Cooke's Language of Music. Cooke can propose a particular interpretation of the second movement of the Eroica Symphony

and then defend his interpretation by citing the first thematic statement

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of the movement, or by citing the succession of thematic sections, without apparently seeing anything questionable in his procedure.32 Kivy, I'm afraid, tends to do the same sort of thing. His concern is always with what he calls the individual attitude, gesture, posture, or utterance of the music. He never talks of an entire structure, and his examples sometimes

suffer from his failure to recognize their effect as terms in a larger structure (see the example on p. 70 from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). This restriction to detail is the main reason for the limitation to "gross distinctions" that he must place on musical expression. On the other hand, Langer has always insisted on structures, not images, as the seat of musical expression.33 Cone does the same: "So I come back to 'humanly expressive content': whatever of human importance a musical composition may express, not only through each individual gesture, but also through the totality of gestures that constitutes its form"

(CV, p. 165). Goodman never gets to the level of specificity that forces him to locate meaning in music. But Beardsley, in developing Goodman's views (and his own) in the series of articles referred to above (see my note 24), locates the expressive meaning of music in what he calls "modes of continuation," which are "general features of all experience." In a metaphorical exposition of what formal process in music might be seen to exemplify, he states that "music, we might say, is in essence continuation: the question

is always where it will take us next, and every happening is marked by the sense that possibilities are opening or closing, that there is development

or retrogression, that there is continuity or abruptness, doubt or decisiveness, hesitancy or determination, building or disintegration."34 There seems to me little doubt that the complex expressive resonances that we may, upon repeated listenings, come to hear in the finest music of the past two centuries especially has more to do with what happens to the material than with the affective quality of the material itself at first presentation. Expressive interpretation must then concern itself with the way the piece presents itself to the listener as successiveness, as a temporal unfolding, as a large-scale process.35

5

One last general question concerning the use of the word "expressive" seems to have called forth little disagreement in writing of recent years: If music is expressive, then who is expressing? The general agreement has been to separate the expressive content of the music from any direct connection with the mental or emotional state of the composer at the time of composition. The Kivy-Tormey distinction of "expressive" from "expressive of" was directed toward this separation. Leo Treitler's and Cavell's idea of intention in an artwork is expressly divorced from recovery

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of the artist's expressed intent as a piece of primary data.36 In a particularly

stimulating treatment of this question, Cone, in The Composer's Voice, isolates several expressive speakers in some nineteenth-century works without identifying any of these speakers with the expressive intent of the composer or of the piece as a whole. Even Cone's provocative attempt to interpret the expressive content of a Schubert Moment musical in autobiographical terms would not, I wager, be put forth by Cone as the final and definitive term in the assignation of expressive meaning to the piece or as the only correct interpretation of the meaning of that piece.37 Broeckx proposes that some works are expressive in what he calls a reflexive way-that is, that they express psychological states that the creator imagines but not necessarily that he experiences at the time of creation or has ever experienced.38 This is one way for returning some

element of "expressive," as opposed to "expressive of," to expressive meaning. Still, unless I misinterpret Cone's article "Schubert's Promissory

Note" and Broeckx here, neither of these possible relations between expressive content and the mental or emotional state of the creators would be proposed as a necessary component of artistic expression-a view far from the common nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century view, which tended to see the artwork as a direct expression of the artist's emotional experience, with the artist as "a kind of information-bureau, specializing in what is called 'the life of feeling.' "39 Even Langer still held to this view (see FF, p. 28, for example). It is a view that today's aestheticians hold no longer. The artist makes structures in the medium of his choice. To the degree that he tends to create expressive structures, he may, as he creates them, stand outside the structures and consciously or unconsciously test them on himself as

listener for what I have called their expressive resonances. But these expressive resonances may be quite distinct from the emotional state of the artist at the time of creation, even from any emotional state that the artist has ever experienced. And the expressive resonances that an artwork may legitimately have for a group of listeners-hence, the expressive properties of the work-may never have been isolated in the mind (that is, intended, or thought of as exemplified) by the artist. 6 Whenever we attempt to verbalize the expressive meaning of a specific

piece of music, we leave Beardsley, Goodman, and Langer behind and enter a realm of primary concern to Kivy, Cooke, Coker, and Cone. At the very entrance to this realm is the general question of intersubjectivity,

that is, of agreement among the independent verbalizations of various listeners. Kivy reminds us that lack of intersubjective agreement on the expressive meaning of music is one of the chief reasons given by such

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formalists as Eduard Hanslick and Edmund Gurney for the rejection of expressive meaning in music altogether. He goes on to point out, however, that Hanslick and Gurney really mean not that there is no intersubjective agreement but that there is not enough-without ever specifying how

much would be enough (see pp. 46-47).

Many modern aestheticians, whom we might call the strict constructionists, require a fairly strict musical semantics-that is, a strict set of rules of reference for going from the literal properties of a work to the verbalization of its expressive meaning-as a prerequisite for a proper theory of musical expression.40 Most then go on to despair of ever finding

such a rule-governed semantics, and hence they despair of a proper theory of musical expression. Cooke, deeply convinced of the validity

and importance of musical expression, takes the opposite tack. He is determined to find a rigidly consistent semantic relation between musical

properties-principally intervals in the tonal scale-and expressive

meaning. Both approaches are equally misguided. It is the requirement of a strictly rule-governed semantic that must go. Kivy demonstrates that the application of expressive terms to many of the situations which we meet in everyday life is no more and no less strictly rule-governed than the application of such terms to music, but such demonstrations go further than is necessary for the refutation of the strict constructionists. Disagreement on the application of interpretive terms is in principle no reason for rejecting the validity of the idea of musical expression. We

might just as well say that because a group of wine tasters (whether

experts or not is irrelevant) would probably write widely varying descriptions

of the taste of a fine wine, that'the wine has no taste, or (with Hanslick) that the taste may be there but is not an important component of the

wine. The situation is rather that our language is ill equipped to cope with the phenomena of taste. It is also ill equipped to cope with the phenomena of expressive meaning in music. This no more reflects on the existence of expressive meaning in music than it does on that of taste

in wine.

Cooke's attempt at a musical semantics in The Language of Music

makes the same mistake as the strict constructionists. Both assume that

there must be a preexistent meaning concept which the music sets out to translate, or to realize in its own "language" (witness Cooke's title). According to both, the task of musical interpretation is simply to find the proper system of links between the musical artifact and the meaning concepts which lie behind it and which it attempts to render in musical terms. (Both also assume, explicitly or implicitly, the third of the versions of the meaning of "expression" sketched in section 3 above.) This view misconceives the essential nature of musical meaning, which is created by music itself and exists in its own terms. Language may attempt to give an example of this meaning by bringing the structural patterns of

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music into relation with other aspects of our experience; this is the enterprise of expressive interpretation. But to do this is not to identify a preexistent verbal meaning, which music only realizes. The verbal conceptualization is secondary, coming after and illustrating the primary musical meaning. Hence to search for close intersubjective agreement

in such verbal descriptions is fundamentally mistaken. One can only expect agreement that a description is in some sense appropriate. Both Tormey and Cone deal well with the theoretical necessity for this variation in expressive interpretation.4' For Tormey, the expressive properties of a work, although wholly constituted by its literal properties, are not unambiguously so. A given set of literal properties may give rise to a wider range of expressive properties, and no strict rule can lead

from literal to expressive properties. This wider range of expressive properties lies within what Tormey calls the "range of compatibility" of the literal properties (and he sees it as the task of the critic, not the philosopher, to determine the actual membership of particular ranges

of compatibility-see my note 19). Cone develops a similar concept: "A piece of music allows a wide but not unrestricted range of possible expres-

sion: this is what I call its expressive potential" (CV, p. 166). (He puts this concept to the test with a particular piece of music, the Mozart GMinor Symphony, with results that I encourage the reader to look up for himself [see CV, p. 172].) Close intersubjective agreement, then, is not a proper requirement to make of interpretations of the expressive meaning of music, and, in this, music is not alone. Recent criticism has been making the same point about the interpretation of the expressive meaning of language. Jonathan Culler, in a stimulating summary of recent developments in semiotics, glories in intersubjective disagreement and sees in it a particular challenge to criticism: "Against anyone who maintained that a semiotics of reading is impossible because no two people read and interpret in the same way, one can reply that even when they reach different conclusions about the significance of a line, a stanza, or a poem, they are employing interpretive conventions that can be defined and which will make the relation between

their interpretive statements more comprehensible."42 Culler's subsequent defense of Stanley Fish's critical approach touches on many of the reasons why music critics, too, should not avoid closely argued expressive interpretations simply because of the lack of precise intersubjective agreement:

First, even if one were only to describe, as explicitly as possible, the

norms and operations on which one's own reading is based, the

results would be extremely useful, and others could judge where

these norms deviated from their own. But even in this case there

would be a large common ground, for the simple reason that learni to read [that is, to understand the meaning of] is an interperson activity: one sees how others respond, grasps intuitively or throu

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June 1984 631

explicit demonstration what kinds of questions and operations they

deploy. Second, variations in interpretation are not an obstacle;

they are rather the fact with which one starts. What one is attempting

to explain-and it is something which deserves detailed explanationis the fact that for any work there is a range of interpretations which

can be defended within the conventions of reading. We have little difficulty setting aside the idiosyncratic response whose causes are personal and anecdotal (simple discussion with other readers can

eliminate these). The problem is to make explicit the operations and conventions which will account for a range of readings and

exclude any we would agree to place outside the normal procedures of reading.43 I believe a similar challenge should be put to music criticism. In any case, the "interpersonal activity" of learning to hear and to understand music in expressive terms will go on whether or not critics choose to bless it. Why should it not benefit from their particular combination of (in Goodman's measured words) "time, training, and even talent"?

7 In the literature about the application of individual descriptive words to musical meaning, a good part of the haggling disagreement that brings confusion and even disrepute to musical hermeneutics lies in the lack of agreement on the meaning not of the expressive words we may apply to music but of certain oft used conceptual words. The word "expression" itself is an example that I have already mentioned. Arthur Danto in his foreword to Tormey's Concept of Expression, Tormey himself in his chapter

4, Goodman and Beardsley, and Leahy all entertain different notions of that word. Jacques Barzun, who chides expressive criticism for its lack of agreement on vocabulary, does a bit of unilateral lexicographical decree making on his own when he separates "expression" from "expressiveness" according to whether or not the expressive predicate has an intentional object (that is, whether or not one is, for example, angry at or about something in particular).44 The word "intention" raises similar problems. It is a crucial concept but carries different meanings for Tormey, Leahy, and Cavell, for example.45 The same is true of the pair of words "sign" and "symbol." Paul Tillich's and Raymond Monelle's symbol is rather like Coker's, Charles Sanders Peirce's, Charles Morris', and Frits Noske's iconic sign, in that it partakes of the properties of that which it represents. "Represent" is

another hornet's nest: compare Kivy (see p. 64) with Howard's "On Representational Music," Richard Kuhns' "Music as a Representational

Art," and Roger Scruton's "Photography and Representation."46 To wish

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away these variations of meaning would be hopeless and would belittle the disputes by which philosophy refines and redefines its concepts. But we must be aware of these ambiguities, and careful to establish what we or our author means by these terms, before we begin our debates or analyses. Nonetheless, the enterprise that lies at the base of Kivy's recent book, and the enterprise on which Cooke, Coker, and Cone have labored hard and effectively, involves not these general conceptual words but specific words describing expressive content. Here one of the primary causes of dissatisfaction is certainly the simplicity of the expressive predicates that are often used. Nearly every aesthetician who writes on musical expresson seems to see as the goal of his discussion the question whether or not the second movement of the Eroica Symphony is "sad."47 What virtue could such a one-word description possibly have as an interpretation of that piece, or of any other of similar richness? To struggle to give shape to a theory that permits no more than such a statement is like struggling to articulate a theory that permits us to do no more than call Paradise Lost sublime. In defending the idea of musical expression against a particularly outrageous formalist attack by Benjamin Boretz, Goodman writes,

"admittedly, saying that a musical work is sad-like saying that it is long or rather loud-is pretty vacuous; but this is because sadness, like length and loudness, is a commonplace, obvious, and general property, so that its ascription to a work provides little interesting information."48 And yet it is on this level that most writing on the philosophy of musical expression

takes place. Cooke struggles to demonstrate that certain melodic patterns have commonly been associated with such simple expressive predicates, and Kivy, although his philosophical foundations are better worked out, does not in practice get beyond Cooke in this matter.

The problem is by no means Cooke's and Kivy's alone. Howard,

who seems to be an intelligent and well-versed musician, falls into the same rut in "Music and Constant Comment," an article of 1978, where he attempts to demonstrate some degree of constancy between literal

properties and metaphorical or expressed properties in music.49 The evidence that he accepts-the consistent use of certain simple musical formulas in conjunction with certain broad classes of verbal ideas as cited

in Cooke's Language of Music, and certain experiments in perceptual psychology by Kate Hevner that demonstrate substantial agreement on the gross expressive properties of musical passages played-speaks only to the simplest generalities, and this is not the level on which anything significant about the expressive content of music can be said.50 Howard's (or, really, Cooke's and Hevner's) evidence demonstrates only that some musical configurations in isolation have certain general expressive tendencies. Not until they are combined and ordered do such things begin to form the kind of expressive meaning that makes some pieces memorable

and fascinating. Even Beardsley, probably the most musically informed

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of the aestheticians writing today, seems to me to make the same mistake when he assumes that a fixed, unequivocal reference (to an expressive predicate) is necessary or even possible for a single passage.51 Only complexes of passages can refer in the complex fashion that makes a fine work of art richly expressive to us. (This is another way of asserting that the fullest musical meaning is to be located in musical procedure rather than in the single short image.) And these complex passages are not likely to be open to only one structural interpretation. The expressive reference to be drawn from any structural interpretation is not likely to be verbally unequivocal-something that critics of the more representational arts have recognized for some time. Complex descriptions are necessary to give an example of the complex expressive potential of fine music. Some critics and aestheticians have been afraid of such interpretive descriptions mainly, I think, because they mistake what the descriptions claim-or should claim--to do. They do not claim to identify precisely the expressive content of the music, thus excluding contrasting interpretations and exhausting the expressive content of the music. They claim only to suggest in words one example within the range of expressive potential of the music.52 And the important

matter is not so much the expressive patterns suggested by the words chosen but the demonstration of how the processes of the music itself might be heard to have suggested the patterns suggested by the words. Recent examples of this kind of interpretive criticism, though rare, do exist. Although Cone is correct in chiding Coker's Music and Meaning for the generality of the expressive meaning that Coker draws from a lengthy description of the second movement of the Eroica Symphony, still Coker's two chapters on expressive meaning (chapters 10 and 11) offer a number of perceptive comments on how one interprets musical structure as expressive meaning.53 Cone's article "Schubert's Promissory

Note" is a superb recent attempt at the musically detailed expressive interpretation of an entire piece.54 Another weighty and striking recent

example is Peter Giilke's article on late Schubert.55 And there are a

number in Kerman's writings. I have tried my hand at such things in a

series of recent articles.56

Two important German writers of the early part of the century also did fine criticism of this sort. Ernst Kurth's analyses of Bruckner symphonies, although maddeningly redundant at times, are always musically detailed and full of insight, and never shrink from illuminating metaphorical interpretations of the musical detail. August Halm's interpretation of Beethoven's Sonata in D Minor opus 31 no. 2 is to me a model of its

kind.57 Although Halm thinks of himself as answering Paul Bekker's metaphorical blowsiness with hard-nosed technical analysis, what he in fact does is to match detailed technical analysis with a bold yet carefully justified expressive interpretation, whose verbal-conceptual patterns are appropriate in both content and complexity to the music they interpret.

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634 Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling In summary,- the powerful expressive reference of, especially, the music of the past two hundred years can be captured not by the single expressive adjective but only in complex conjunctions of words of all kinds, including words drawn from the whole lexicon of music's technical vocabulary. And no verbal attempt to capture the expressive resonance

of music, however complex, claims to be a direct equivalent in other terms for the meaning of the music; it is rather one example, in the terms of other fields of experience, of that meaning. To quote Cone, it is "an example of the kind of human content that can properly be associated

with the music; and by this exemplification [Cone's use of this word must

be distinguished from Goodman's] it can suggest a broad span of the entire range of expression available to that music.... Words, then, do not limit the potential of music; rather, by specification and exemplification,

they may render it more easily comprehensible" (CV, p. 167). Here lies a challenge and an opportunity for music criticism today. Expressive interpretation that is both historically and analytically informed

can bring into a close, actively engaged relationship with fine music a much larger audience than now really attends to it. Conversely, musical awareness might thereby become a less marginal area for the cultured person in our society. Philosophical aesthetics has given us a workable conceptual basis for this enterprise, and we should get on with it. 8

An objection of last resort often heard against the expressive interpretation of music is that it violates the nature of music itself to verbalize

about such things-that it is simply not "musical" to do so. Those who make this objection see the language of metaphorical interpretation when

applied to music as "a surrogate language of ignorance and personal affect, derailing attention from the music itself by virtually reducing its

complex structures to a kind of auditory Rorschach blot" ("OME," p. 270). Although some of these people do not deny expressive meaning

to music, they remain vigorously opposed to verbalizing it. Langer, for instance, is consistent and determined on this point. She devotes her book Philosophy in a New Key to an eloquent defense of the theory that music symbolizes emotional life, but she remains adamantly opposed to interpreting the musical symbol in words. Verbal interpretation

destroys the "ambivalence of content" in music (PNK, p. 206). Yet if we are to accept this objection, we must accept it for literature as well, which,

as we recognize more and more, has its own intense ambivalences-

especially where qualities expressed are concerned, as opposed to those represented or denoted. Much recent interpretation of literature, from William Empson to the deconstructionists, has been given over to a cel-

ebration rather than a destruction of the ambiguities in seemingly

straightforward discourse. Musical interpretation need be no different.

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It is true, as Langer says, that "music articulates forms which language cannot setforth" (PNK, p. 198).58 To assert that the import is finally ineffable,

however, is not equivalent to saying that language cannot and must not touch it. If the interpreter's proper concern is for what "makes the symbol effective," for "the import conveyed" (FF, p. 141), how is he to become skilled in discerning this import? Words are the primary means of communication

with others in our culture. Surely all people who treasure music-professional musicians and amateurs alike-at some time associate musical

meaning with other aspects of their life; some people do so as a regu adjunct to the process of listening to music and, even more often reflecting on it. To take Langer's position is to say, in effect, if you

not understand thoroughly and intuitively how one makes such association

then there is no hope for you; words cannot help. I see no justificati for this rather exclusive position. Just as we teach ourselves and oth through verbal examples to recognize the symbols and understand th meanings of various other systems, so we can do in the case of musi using both expressive and technical verbal interpretations, and with claiming to have thus exhausted the meaning of the composition more than we would claim this for our interpretation of the poem,

picture, the puzzling behavior of a friend, or even the experimen

situation in the laboratory. Furthermore, to admit that musical import is finally ineffable is n equivalent to believing that we somehow act improperly toward mus

in trying to write or talk about it. Hundreds of mystics have written abou

the ineffable mystic experience, and have treasured and learned from

the writings of other mystics about that experience, without either claimi

that their words offered a direct equivalent of the mystic experience refusing to write about the experience because words rendered its si nificance imperfectly. Should we musicians be holier than they? Many object to verbal expressive interpretation not only because falsifies the music but also because it "derail[s] attention from the m itself." This may, of course, be true of both expressive and structur interpretation-for example, if one reads the program notes (how technical, however good) instead of listening to the concert. But it n

not be true-especially in reflecting upon the music before or af

hearing it. In these circumstances, expressive interpretation, far fr leading us away from the essentially musical in music, may guide us new and richer relationships with it. To bring the perceived structu patterns of a piece into relation with other patterns of the listen experience-the very enterprise that I see as constituting the critic's the listener's part in musical expression-may well reveal new structu

patterns in the music as well.59 Goodman, in his response to Bor

observes that

to describe a work or passage [of music] as muscular, electric, spatial, curvilinear, brittle, or floating may be to describe metaphorically

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some recondite and highly important structural features.... New likenesses and differences, new relationships and patterns, are thus revealed, and are described by the metaphorical application of these alien terms. ... Only at the risk of overlooking important structural features of a work can a formalist ignore what the music expresses.60 Howard agrees that metaphors may instigate the perception of an important

new structure rather than just the relabeling of an old one and concludes that "replacing them [metaphors] with literal terms risks loss of the impetus

to insight they provide ... We are not eo ipso led away from the music by resorting to such descriptive devices and we may, in fact, be led anew to it" ("OME," p. 270). Expressive metaphors are often shorthand versions of structural insights-insights which subsequent analytical work may allow us to expand and refine. Formal and expressive interpretation are in fact two complementary ways of understanding the same phenomena. Neither is intrinsically closer than the other to the object. In doing formal analysis of a complex work, we do not list all its properties, point out all its relationships, organize it into all its possible structures. We select which of the properties strike us as important and bring them into convincing relationships with each other. In making this selection, we consciously or unconsciously experiment

with various constellations and weightings of important properties, both formal and metaphorical, trying out their resonances and configurations in expressive as well as structural terms. We do not first do a musical analysis of the piece and then set about deciding how to verbalize the metaphorical resonance that such a musical structure might be understood to have. The two modes of thought go on simultaneously. Nor can the two modes of thought be distinguished as objective and subjective. Formal properties and structures are not independent, objective

things, any more than expressive properties are. Both depend on the listener's analytical techniques and concepts, as well as his intuitive tendencies. Faltin, in "Musikalische Bedeutung," the most brilliant of recent justifications of the formalistic, "purely musical" approach to musical meaning, is properly circumspect about the claims to objective description made for structural or technical analysis. He reminds us that "structural analysis is not an 'objective' procedure that can derive meanings [he does not mean expressive meanings] exclusively from structure.... Analysis is not an anatomy of structure, but its phenomenology, which is concerned not with explaining the structure itself, but with finding in the structure

arguments that can explain why it was heard exactly as it was heard." In this search, Faltin goes on, structural analysis appeals to such conventional,

culturally learned concepts as contrast, motive, development, dominant chord, and so on.6' Analysis is thus an interaction of the properties of the work with culturally learned conventions brought to it by the listener-

interpreter, just like expressive interpretation. (And for many listeners,

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June 1984 637

the selection and weighting of formal properties, on which structural analysis depends, will in turn depend on the expressive resonances o these properties.) The ideal difference between expressive and structural interpretation is that the first goes beyond the second in pointing out, through metaphor,

relationships between the structures of the artwork and those of othe aspects of experience. In music more than in any other area of artistic appreciation, the "creative metaphor-making" of the listener-critic-inter preter must complete the metaphor implied in the artwork. The compose does no more than give the lead; nothing directs the listener unequivocall to the other term of the musical metaphor, as it does to that of th literary metaphor. This is an essential part of the fascination that music holds for us.62 One function of the critic as interpreter of expressive content may, then, be understood as showing by example how to engage more fully in this creative dialogue with musical structure. In this regard, it is important not to restrict those other aspects of experience that may complete the musical metaphor to forms of huma

feeling, as Langer does (see PNK, p. 188 and FF, p. 27 and the passag from p. 126 cited in my note 33), or to "what we call 'emotions' an 'moods,'" as Kivy does (p. 15). Goodman, as we have seen, casts his

metaphorical net much more widely-to physical properties ("brittle"), to plastic shapes ("curvilinear"), even to natural phenomena ("electric"). Coker's interpretation of the "Pas D'Action" from Stravinsky's Orpheu insists on the value of active verbs (see my note 53). Words borrowed

from the realms of other human structures, such as architecture, geometry,

or mathematics, are frequent and often illuminating in critical interpre

tations. We might also include here a kind of second-level expressiv

comparison: that with other pieces of music. I say second level because the first level of comparison concerns purely musical properties. The musical work itself first calls attention to and invites comparison with another passage in another work. The purely musical properties reveale in that comparison-the properties exemplified by the comparison, i

Goodman's terms-are then subjected to the metaphorical compariso

with other experience that lies at the heart of expressive interpretation There are good grounds, then, for the critic's use of wide-ranging metaphorical language in interpreting the expressive meaning of music

The only danger here is that the medium of the interpretation ma

swamp the music, especially in a culture much more adept verbally than

musically. The critic can combat this by returning constantly to the impetus for the particular metaphor in the musical processes themselves, by recalling

the two-way process of reference inherent in artistic expression, and by insisting that the verbal metaphor is only a secondary example from th range of expressive potential in the primary musical meaning. Raman Selden cautions the humanities (not for the first time) agains aping too closely the methods of the natural sciences. These latter are

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638 Anthony Newcomb

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"concerned with the intrinsic properties of the phenomena themselves, while the human sciences are concerned with the socially signifying aspects

of phenomena, with the social use of material objects, and therefore must distinguish between the objects themselves and the system of distinctive or differential features which give them meaning and value."63

What I have called the expressive resonances of a work-resonances founded upon its musical properties -are at least part of what gives music meaning and value for many listeners, including the most adept (and including many composers, if we are to believe their words). Informed

criticism is simply abandoning much of its audience to less informed criticism when it avoids entirely the attempt to interpret this aspect of musical meaning and to suggest how one comes to understand it as fully as possible from the music itself. Such interpretation is not a true-or-false demonstration of the unique meaning of the artwork. It is rather persuasion-an effort to convince the reader that to see (and hear) certain relationships is illuminating and meaningful. It is also the communication of one view of the expressive resonance of the artwork. All this is offered as part of the shared enterprise

that is culture, as a way of transmitting, changing, and adding layers to the meaning of the pieces which the critic (and, he hopes, his audience)

has found or will find valuable and meaningful. As he does this, the critic-if he does his work well-is also helping his audience to understand better the processes by which a piece of music may enter into relations with wider aspects of the culture of which it is part. For many people, these relations form the most powerful reason for their closer attention

to the music itself.

1. See Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression, Princeton Essays

on the Arts, no. 10 (Princeton, N.J., 1980); all further references to this work will be

included in the text.

2. See the appeals in Bojan Bujic, "The Aesthetics of Music-Some of Its Aims and Limitations," British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (Autumn 1975): 329-35, and Raman Selden, "Aesthetics and Criticism: Against a Division of Labour," British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (Winter 1975): 69-80. 3. I have seen four reviews of Kivy, The Corded Shell, all in English-language journals: Kingsley Price, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (Summer 1981): 460-62; R. A. Sharpe, British Journal of Aesthetics 22 (Winter 1982): 81-82; Christopher Hatch, Notes: The QuarterlyJournal of the Music Library Association 38 (Dec. 1981): 311-12; and Richard Taruskin,

Musical Quarterly 68 (Apr. 1982): 287-93. 4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical Quarterly 66 (Apr. 1980): 305. 5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis,

1968); all further references to this work, abbreviated LA, will be included in the text.

6. Goodman, "Reply to Beardsley," Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1 (Jan. 1978): 171; and see Edward T. Cone: "Expressive values in any art... cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for a work of

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Critical Inquiry June 1984

639

art to 'express itself,' then one must agree that expression, by its very definition, implies

a relationship between the work of art and something else; while analytical values are derivable purely from internal structure" ("Beyond Analysis," Perspectives of New Music 6 [Fall-Winter 1967]: 46).

7. See Peter Faltin, "Musikalische Syntax: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des musikalischen Sinngehaltes," Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 34, no. 1 (1977): 1-19, and "Musikalische Bedeutung: Grenzen und Moglichkeiten einer semiotischen Aesthetik," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 9 (June 1978): 5-31. 8. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite,

and Art (1942; New York, 1951), p. 201; all further references to this work, abbreviated PNK, will be included in the text. 9. See Wilson Coker, Music and Meaning: A Theoretical Introduction to Musical Aesthetics

(New York, 1972), and Cone, The Composer's Voice, Ernest Bloch Lectures, 1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974); all further references to this work, abbreviated CV, will be included

in the text.

10. See Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Cambridge, 1959). 11. See Stanley Cavell, "Music Discomposed" (1967), Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 185-86. 12. See Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression: A Study in Philosophical Psychology and

Aesthetics (Princeton, N.J., 1971), pp. 106-10. 13. See Vernon A. Howard, "On Musical Expression," British Journal of Aesthetics 11 (Summer 1971): 271-73; all further references to this work, abbreviated "OME," will be included in the text.

14. Price, review of The Corded Shell by Kivy (see n. 3 above), is particularly critical of this aspect of Kivy's book. 15. See Kivy, "Aesthetic Aspects and Aesthetic Qualities,"Journal of Philosophy 65 (Feb. 1968): 85-93; Speaking of Art (The Hague, 1973); and "Aesthetics and Rationality,"Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (Fall 1975): 51-57. 16. See Taruskin, review of The Corded Shell by Kivy, pp. 289 and 292. 17. Surprisingly, Kivy seems unaware of Cone's The Composer's Voice, for he rejects as inapplicable to music with text the distinction made by Tormey between the acts of expression

of the characters in a presentational artwork and the expressiveness of the artwork itself (see The Concept of Expression, pp. 135-36). Cone, on the other hand, demonstrates most convincingly that the music of a Schubert song may undercut what the protagonist of the text is verbally represented as expressing. 18. See Jan L. Broeckx, "De mythe van de specifiek muzikale expressie: Naar aanleiding van Alan Tormey's Concept of Expression toegepast op de muziek," Revue belge de musicologie

32-33 (1979-80): 232-50. 19. Broeckx is, I think, misinterpreting Tormey here. Tormey does not deny the

interaction; it is simply not his concern. In Tormey's view, the philosopher's proper concern

is to explain the component of expression residing in the work itself (and to explain how there can be such a thing), not to explain how it is interpreted, which is the province of the critic (see Tormey, The Concept of Expression, p. 134). As I have said, I find it harmful to insist on this separation of function, although philosophers usually do so (see Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind [London, 1974], p. 219).

20. See Broeckx, "De mythe van de specifiek muzikale expressie," p. 247, for his summary.

21. Goodman's Languages of Art has already been the occasion for symposia and has occupied entire fascicles of important philosophical journals. Jurnal of Philosophy 67 (Aug.

1970) and Erkenntnis 12, pts. 1 and 2 (Jan. and Mar. 1978) have come to my attention;

there are doubtless more.

22. Scruton, Art and Imagination is another important work dealing with the area of expressive reference (see pp. 221-26 for his discussion of Goodman's idea of expression

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640 Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling Unfortunately, I was able to locate a copy of this important work only when this essay was nearly completed, and it would be impractical to include it in my purview. On first consideration, I do not find Scruton's conceptual basis for expression to be as powerful as Goodman's and Beardsley's, but further months of reflection may change my thoughts about this. R. A. Sharpe's "'Hearing As'" (British Journal of Aesthetics 15 [Summer 1975]: 217-25) is a reaction to Scruton's book.

23. See Beardsley, "Semiotic Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education,"Journal of Aesthetic

Education 9 (July 1975): 11-13, and Howard, "OME," pp. 274-77. 24. See Beardsley, "Semiotic Aesthetics"; "Languages of Art and Art Criticism," Erkenntnis 12 (June 1978): 95-118; and "Understanding Music," in On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical

Perspectives, The Alvin and Fanny Blaustein Thalheimer Lectures, 1978-79, ed. Price (Bal-

timore, 1981), pp. 55-73. 25. See Raymond Monelle, "Symbolic Models in Music Aesthetics," British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (Winter 1979): 24-37. Monelle approaches this same problem from another angle. Using Paul Tillich's distinction between sign and symbol, Monelle proposes that music is more religious than linguistic symbolism, in that the symbol participates in the reality of its meaning, rather than standing conventionally for its meaning, as do linguistic

symbols (words), which are signs. "The trouble," says Monelle, "is that Langer's symbolic model, like [her teacher] Whitehead's, is linguistic. Music is not related to any object in

the way that a word is related to an object" (p. 27). According to Monelle, music is a transcendental symbol in that it manifests, not expresses: it partakes of what it is, which is present in it, not denoted by it. The two-way reference of Goodman's exemplification seems to me to accommodate Monelle's insight. 26. See John Hospers, "The Concept of Artistic Expression" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society 55 [1954-55]: 312-44), rpt. in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. Hospers (New

York, 1969), pp. 142-66; Hosper's essay is summarized in Broeckx, "De mythe van de specifiek muzikale expressie," pp. 233-34. 27. See Hans Tischler, "A Proposal for a Multi-relational Aesthetics," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 3 (Dec. 1972): 141-59. 28. See M. P. T. Leahy, "The Vacuity of Musical Expression," British Journal of Aesthetics

16 (Spring 1976): 144-56. 29. I purposely leave open the possibility that these "other aspects of experience" may include other works in the same medium- that expressive reference in, say, a Beatles song may be to a Beethoven string quartet, or in a Brahms piano concerto to one by Beethoven. Such references outside the work but within the realm of music, a rich source of all kinds

of musical meaning, have recently been discussed as a source of structural meaning (see Charles Rosen, "Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration" [Nineteenth-Century Music 4 (Fall 1980): 87-100], rpt. in On Criticizing Music, pp. 16-37) but remain virtually unexplored as a source of expressive meaning.

30. Goodman, "Reply to Beardsley," pp. 171-72 (see n. 6 above).

31. A performer, consciously or unconsciously, does the same thing when he prepares

a performance-at least a performance that has any "shape." This is what Cone points out in his dictum that "every good performer is necessarily a kind of critic" ("The Authority of Music Criticism," Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 [Spring 1981]: 5).

32. See Cooke, The Language of Music, pp. 19 and 29-30. 33. As Langer puts it: The essence of all composition ... is the semblance of organic movement, the illusion of an indivisible whole. ... This rhythmic character of organism permeates music, because music is a symbolic presentation of the highest organic response, the emotional life of human beings. A succession of emotions that have no reference to each other do [sic] not constitute an "emotional life," any more than a discontinuous and independent functioning of organs collected under one skin would be a physical "life." [Feeling and Form: A Theory ofArt (New York, 1953), p. 126; all further references

to this work, abbreviated FF, will be included in the text.]

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34. Beardsley, "Understanding Music," p. 70. 35. See my "Those Images that Yet Fresh Images Beget," Journal of Musicology 2 (Summer 1983): 227-45. 36. See Leo Treitler, "Methods, Style, Analysis," International Musicological Society: Report

of the Eleventh Congress, 1970 (Copenhagen, 1972), pp. 61-70, and Cavell, "Music Discomposed,"

pp. 198-99 and 202-5. 37. See Cone, "Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Musical Hermeneutics," Nineteenth-Century Music 5 (Spring 1982): 233-41. 38. See Broeckx, "De mythe van de specifiek muzikale expressie," pp. 242-44. 39. Louis Arnaud Reid, "Susanne Langer and Beyond," British Journal of Aesthetics 5 (Oct. 1965): 361.

40. See, e.g., Beardsley, "Semiotic Aesthetics," pp. 13-15; Faltin, "Musikalische Bedeutung," p. 19; and Leahy, "The Vacuity of Musical Expression." 41. See Tormey, The Concept of Expression, pp. 129-36, and Cone, CV, pp. 170-73. 42. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca,

N.Y., 1981), p. 78. 43. Ibid., pp. 124-25. 44. See Jacques Barzun, "The Groves of Academe (II)," Nineteenth-Century Music 5 (Spring 1982): 254. 45. See, esp., Cavell, "Music Discomposed," pp. 198 and 202-5. 46. See Howard, "On Representational Music," Nous 6 (Mar. 1972): 41-53; Richard Kuhns, "Music as a Representational Art," British Journal of Aesthetics 18 (Spring 1978): 120-25; and Scruton, "Photography and Representation," Critical Inquiry 7 (Spring 1981): 577-603.

47. See Sharpe, "'Hearing As'" (see n. 22 above), who rejects the expressive pretation of music because it is banal, requiring little leap of the imagination. Yet to have been hamstrung in his thought by the way aesthetics talks about music:

that most music has an unambiguous character," he says, then adds, "even tho much fine music does not." According to Sharpe, the application of such simple ex predicates as "joyful" or "sad," typical of writing on aesthetics, is problematic on

"some ambiguous music, like that of Mozart or Schubert" (p. 222)-a curious g

exclude from one's aesthetic theory! A wonderful quotation in Langer's Philosophy Key also displays Sharpe's mistake of using this particular failing of most verbaliz

music to condemn the entire enterprise itself: "'There are many musical work

artistic value, that completely baffle us when we try to denote by one word the m are supposed to convey. This alone suffices to make the conception of music as a sent art, or an art of expressing sentiments, quite untenable' " (F. Heinrich, quoted in

197-98). Langer sees nothing in this to disagree with. 48. Goodman, "Some Notes on Languages of Art," Journal of Philosophy 67 (Au 568; and see Benjamin Boretz, "Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art from a Music

of View" (Journal of Philosophy 67 [Aug. 1970]: 540-52), rpt. in Perspectives on Conte

Music Theory, ed. Boretz and Cone (New York, 1972), pp. 31-44. 49. See Howard, "Music and Constant Comment," Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1 (Jan

73-82.

50. Typically, Kate Hevner's psychological tests found that there was little variati among the intelligent, the unintelligent, the trained, and the untrained listener. How

this coincide with the claim of Howard's teacher Goodman that to discover what an artwork

exemplifies (and hence expresses) takes "time, training, and even talent" (Goodman, "Re to Beardsley," p. 172)?

51. See Beardsley, "Semiotic Aesthetics," pp. 13-15. 52. See also Schumann's idea of "polyphonic criticism," which explains why one the same of his own works might call forth different programs, or verbal interpretat from Schumann himself: see Lippman, "Theory and Practice in Schumann's Aesthet Journal of the American Musicological Society 17 (Fall 1964): 310-45, esp. p. 321.

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53. See Cone, "Schubert's Promissory Note," p. 234. Coker's passage on the "Pas D'Action" from Stravinsky's Orpheus seems to me especially fine and brings up the important

point that not only adjectives of emotion or mood but also active verbs are appropriate for the expressive description of music (see Music and Meaning, pp. 160-64). Coker's book

has been treated roughly in reviews-for its jargon-laden and turgid language, for its pseudoscientific claims of truth value for music, and for its naive acceptance of the applicability

of Charles Morris' theories of linguistic semiotics to music-but its chapters 10 and 11 remain good and stimulating ones for anyone interested in the methods of expressive interpretation of music.

54. I am less happy with Cone's final step. To take the meaning to the level of biographical specifics robs the interpretation of the appropriate universality-just as a program that is too specifically personal risks trivializing the music. Still, I have already expressed the doubt that Cone intends his biographical interpretation to be an ultimate one. It is presumably just one specific example that would fit his broader interpretation of the potential expressive content of the work.

55. See Peter Gilke, "Zum Bilde des spaten Schubert: Vorwiegend analytische Betrachtungen zum Streichquintett op. 163" (DeutschesJahrbuch der Musikwissenschaftfiir 1973-

1977 [1978]: 5-58), rpt. in Musik-konzepte. Sonderband: Franz Schubert (Dec. 1979): 10766.

56. See my articles on Schumann's Second Symphony (in Nineteenth-Century Music 7 [Spring 1984], on passages from Wagner's Ring (see n. 35 above), and on Schubert's Auf dem Flusse (in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch [Lincoln, Nebr., 1984]). 57. See Ernst Kurth, Bruckner (Berlin, 1925), and August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der

Musik (1913; Stuttgart, 1947), pp. 38-81. 58. This argument, a favorite of the early nineteenth century and the heart of Mendelssohn's famous letter of 1842, is partly truth and partly mystification and self-glorification

on the part of musicians. 59. In Cone's words:

The content of instrumental music is revealed to each listener by the relation betw

the music and the personal context he brings to it.... The capacity for seem perpetual self-renewal that characterizes the greatest music is only partially du the fact that we keep finding in it new patterns of structural relationships; in this is not always the case. But we do, continually though subconsciously, bring personal experiences to bear on it, finding in them new exemplifications of an widening range of expressive possibilities. [CV, pp. 170-71]

Again, this bringing of personal experiences to bear on music is a constitutive part o

I mean by understanding music expressively, and Cone is clearly saying here tha metaphorical application of such experience to structural relations in music causes u see in them new patterns, different emphases, and (to use Goodman's terminology) n exemplified properties. 60. Goodman, "Some Notes on Languages of Art," p. 568.

61. Faltin, "Musikalische Bedeutung," p. 30; my translation. Faltin develops this parti thought in more detail in "Musikalische Syntax" (see n. 7 above). His series of stimula interrelated articles on the relationship between musical process and meaning is the best examinations of musical semiotics; see also his "Widerspruche bei der Interpreta des Kunstwerkes als Zeichen: Drei monistische Modelle zur Erklarung der Bedeutung Musik," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 3 (Dec. 1972): 199"Semiotische Dimensionen des Instrumentalen und Vokalen im Wandel der Symph Archivfiir Musikwissenschaft 32, no. 1 (1975): 26-38; and "Musikalische Form als ein

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Critical Inquiry June 1984 643 chologisches und asthetisches Problem," Musikforschung 33 (July-Sept. 1980): 302-9. The final section of "Musikalische Bedeutung" makes clear that Faltin does not want to deny expressive meaning in music; he wants rather to right recent musical semiotics from what he sees as an excessive tilt toward the sociological interpretation of music. 62. It is also, I think, what Langer means by calling music an "unconsummated" symbol

(PNK, p. 204). 63. Selden, "Aesthetics and Criticism," p. 75 (see n. 2 above).

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