The entry on the Aesthetics of Music in The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Craig, 2005) (RR 2006/011) states that “the aesthetics of music comprises philosophical reflection on the origin, nature, power, purpose, creation, performance, reception, meaning and value of music”. This is a useful starting point for understanding where and how philosophy/aesthetics and music/musicology interact with each other. Other disciplines crowd in as well (or are affected by this relationship) and these include sociology and history. The companion addresses and examines all these, applying them generously to music of all types and periods – world music and some non‐Western music, from ancient and classical times up to modern sub‐cultural rap and rock.
As the editorial foreword makes clear, the “and” is important in the title – “due to both the necessity of grounding musical aesthetics in a thorough knowledge of music, and the interest of musicologists and other scholars in aesthetic issues”. Topics like harmony and melody and rhythm, and an essay on Wagner, are clearly musicological, as are chapters on theory and analysis, composition and ethnomusicology. Other topics come at the conjoint subject field from a clearly philosophical angle – for example, discussing the ways in which philosophers like Plato and Rousseau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche approached and analyzed music and what they said about musical forms, composition and reception, and on its purpose and value. This work, then, is not “the philosophy of music” (on which much has been written, many key works noted here) and certainly not “the music of philosophy” (which might even be an area too transcendent or illusory to write about altogether).
The series in which this new companion appears is by now well‐established: some ten have been published so far (on subjects like aesthetics, philosophy and film (RR 2009/183), philosophy of psychology (RR 2009/260), and epistemology) and several more are in the pipeline (including phenomenology, the philosophy of language, and social and political philosophy). Each in its way sets out to capture current thinking in their (cross‐disciplinary) field, and the book under review here is no exception. The two editors are well‐known for work in philosophy and music: Gracyk is professor of philosophy at Minnesota State University and has written on the aesthetics of rock and the politics of identity, while Kania is an assistant professor of philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio and writes on philosophy, music, literature and film. They have assembled a strong team of international scholars as contributors, including Stephen Davies (whose work on musical performance are memorable (Davies, 2001, 2003)), Malcolm Budd (author of books on music and emotion, values in art and other topics), and Allan Moore (editor of the journal Popular Music).
The companion is organized into six major sections, starting with General Issues (like silence and sound, rhythm and melody, improvisation, notation, performance, music and the imagination, style, value and instrumental technology). It moves on to emotion (expression, arousal, resemblance) and then to history (aesthetic traditions in India and China, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the modern period, including continental philosophy, and modern analytic approaches). Section four looks at figures from Plato and Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and gratifyingly highlights the importance in this field of Hanslick and Gurney. The final two sections deal with kinds of music (popular music, commerce and craft, rock, jazz, song and opera, music and film, music and dance and, visual music and synaesthesia, from shaped scores and performance pieces to cross‐overs in sensory reception by, among others, children); and lastly music, philosophy, and related disciplines (a collection of useful essays on musicology, composition, ethnomusicology, sociology and cultural studies, music and gender, phenomenology and music, cognitive science and psychology, and education). The last section offers historiographic summaries and will be of interest to those approaching “philosophy and music” from that direction.
As a whole the companion succeeds well in catching the wide‐ranging strands of musical theorising and thinking, and performance, and an understanding of the various contexts in which all this takes place. Earlier discussions range confidently across genres and composers/performers as different as Boulez and Coltrane, Debussy and Brubeck, Schoenberg and Herbie Hancock, bringing into view mainstream philosophical applications in music as what it is, what it is for, is it just form, is it just emotion, what is authentically music when improvisation and interpretation and recording are so widely used, and what is it value (and by extension what criteria do we use, and why, to evaluate music say as good or bad, classical or popular/populist)?. Explaining emotion, using three major theories (such as whether music is essentially expressive, or whether reception of music is driven by arousal), follows naturally from that. Later chapters (such as the one at the end on cognition) connect up with that section on emotion (there are cross‐references in each essay), helped by a comprehensive index at the very end of the book.
Intellectually and editorially, the challenge of creating and organizing this companion cannot have been straightforward. Inevitably, one has to be eclectic to remain relevant, and this is certainly so in the sections on history and on figures. Throughout, however, it is clear that contributors have kept their eye on the brief and not strayed self‐indulgently into related fields or digressions. By that token, the historical section offers useful coverage of “philosophy and music” across history (early interest in music and the cosmos, the mystery of its structure, music as a type of wisdom, the appeal to the senses, how musical fashion forms part of the history of taste, and the fusion of ideas about the will, from Schopenhauer and Wagner, and the harmony and structure and effects generated in and by music). In the same vein, the material on, say, Kant is harnessed to the major task of illuminating the theme of “philosophy and music” (for instance, with discussion of subjectivity and objectivity, and of our response to the sublime and the rationality of aesthetic/artistic ideas). Important issues surface, too, in the sequence of essays on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wagner, and take us on to Adorno and his well‐known critique of the culture industry. His dialectic between modernism (in Schoenberg) and reaction (in Stravinsky) echo a larger dialectic – repose and arousal, consonance and dissonance, feeling and analysis – that characterizes a well‐informed response to music itself, whether one is a philosopher or musicologist, or not.
The two essays on Eduard Hanslick (1825‐1904), the music critic whose work, on absolute music and analysis of emotions as the basis for evaluating music, has historical importance today, and on Edmund Gurney (1847‐88), whose study The Power of Sound (1880) suggested that music was presentation rather than representation, and was abstract in form but understood through the emotions, helped to shape cross‐disciplinary comment afterwards – both these are well‐chosen by the editors and, for newcomers to the field, will offer an unexpected, and unexpectedly rich, pleasure. Being a companion, the book as a whole provides generous and topical bibliographies at the end of each essay. As was said above, the essays in the final “disciplinary” section provide useful insights into the current historiography, picking up on numerous leads (like Rameau on harmony, Babbitt on musical discourse, and the impact of Deleuze and Guattari on today's debate about culture and truth). This final section also applies ideas and this is likely to help students using the book as a way in – how one might look at meaning in Shostakovich, what we mean by creativity in performance and interpretation, the relationship between composer and audience say in a Schubert song cycle or a negro spiritual, whether music is also political and how, what seems to happen cognitively when music takes place, and whether music and musicology have been dominated by men.
An objective essay on Adorno asks us to consider not only the implications of the culture industry but what art is actually for, and whether commercialization takes the truth out or makes it more real. Post‐Derrida, the very criteria for autonomy, presumed by Adorno, have now been deconstructed, and yet, paradoxically, Beethoven remains popular and remains authentic (in the autonomous intrinsic sense that Adorno argued for). Originality and authenticity have other dimensions, too, complicated by globalization and world music and widespread borrowing and bricolage in popular electronic music: behind all such phenomena lurk issues of ontology and epistemology, of identity and value, structure and emotion. These themes are drawn out well in the companion, and deserve to be, and help to sustain the claims the editors make that the companion really will help students, lecturers, and researchers, opening up new connections, reminding them of texts to be read and ideas to be linked and applied, and the state of current inter‐disciplinary research.
Feeling sad when we hear Barber's Adagio for Strings will never be the same for anyone well read in this field: but then, the first time round, if we had put our knowledge and feelings into good order, it may never have changed at all. Aware of this dialectic in ourselves, this is a mature contribution to its field. More might have been made of music that presents cultural and aesthetic challenges, like on first being exposed to twelve‐tone methods or Villa‐Lobos, rap or John Coltrane, and on finding that Deleuze is really, really not at all easy to harness to a practical interpretive task, and one or two essays could get to the point more readily, and performers might well want more about how (as Brendel noted) your own stance changes: but these merely cavil over a product that has magisterial qualities.
