Music Emotions and Truth

Music, Emotions, and TruthAuthor(s): Elina PackalénSource: Philosophy of Music Education Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 41-59Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40327289 .

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MUSIC, EMOTIONS, AND TRUTH ELINA PACKALÉN University of Turku, Finland

Abstract: In this article Elina Packalén considers the notion of truth in connection with music. Her starting-point is the question of how music can be expressive of emotions; therefore she first summarizes some recent philosophical ideas of this issue. These ideas naturally raise the question of whether describing music in emotive terms has an epistemic end of being true. There is also another way for expressive music to be epistemically valu- able, namely being a source of the kind of knowledge that is related to our emotional inner states. Accordingly ', in the latter part of this article she presents the concept of truth about music and the concept of truthful music. Her conclusion is that strict objective truths about the emotional nature of music may not be attainable, but despite this outcome it is still possible that music yields some kind of ineffable knowledge about the experience of emotions.

My motive for this article has been the fact that both laymen and critics often describe music in exta-musical aesthetic terms: music can be lively and spirited, beautiful, serene, sad, joyful, and so on. Naturally, we also use literal or technical vocabulary, terms such as D minor, three-fourth time, and so on. However, I am going to focus on the extra-musical descriptions which for instance Frank

Sibley has stated play a significant part in understanding music. In fact, they

© Philosophy of Music Education Review, 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008)



42 PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC EDUCATION REVIEW, 16:1

seem to play an even more important part in understanding music than the ability to describe music in technical terms.1

I will confine myself only to one group of extra-musical terms, namely emotive predicates by which I mean expressions such as "joyous," "melancholy," "sad," and "anguished." The problem with these terms is that they refer to mental states, but we still use them in descriptions of music. Is it possible to fill the gap between the primary use of these terms for emotions felt by human beings and their secondary use in aesthetic descriptions of music? In other words, how do the primary and secondary uses relate to each other?

Expressing emotion in music has been the subject of several theories. In the first section of this paper I will briefly outline Derek Matravers', Peter Kivy's, and Laird Addis's theories of how music is expressive of emotions.2 These accounts represent the main types of expression theories, namely the arousal theory, the cognitivist theory, and the intentional or symbol theory, respectively. I will consider the central ideas of these theories and also point out some difficulties that their adherents confront.

In this paper these accounts of expression in music are presented with a view to examining a certain idea of epistemic justification: is describing music in terms of emotions justifiable in the sense that we have epistemic ends; that is, do we aim to express truths about music by these descriptions? Another viewpoint to epistemic justification for expressive music is to focus on the question of whether music can yield knowledge of emotions and whether an idea of truth related to obtaining knowledge is applicable to music and expression theories. In view of these questions I will in the second section of this article have a look at the idea of truth in music. Two ideas of truth will be presented, namely truth about music and truthful music; the latter of these notions is considered in terms of Jerrold Levinson's ideas of propositional truth and correspondent truth.3

THREE TYPES OF THEORIES OF EXPRESSION IN MUSIC Arousal Theories. The core of arousal theories is that music has properties

capable of arousing emotions or feelings in listeners. The arousal may take place because of some causal mechanism in which sounds and the dynamic properties of music affect the human body and mind, or the arousal may be a consequence of a sympathetic mechanism when the music reminds us of human expression of emotions. In either way, the adherents of this view claim, roughly, that music is expressive of an emotion when it arouses a relevant emotion or feeling in the listener.4

Rene Descartes seems to have been a supporter of this view. In Compendium Musicae he argues that slow music arouses quiet feelings such as languor, sadness, and so on, whereas fast music arouses such emotions as joy.5 In particular, Descartes' The Passions of the Soul, which was published in 1649, inspired those



ELINA PACKALÉN 43

who theorized about the affect of music in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. More recently, John Nolt, Stanley Speck, and Geoffrey Madell, for instance, have defended explaining expressiveness in terms of arousal.6 However, as an example of arousal theories I present here Derek Matravers' causal account of expressiveness in music.7

In Matravers' theory our experiences of expression in music must be related in some way to the central cases, that is, to the typical ways in which human beings express emotions. There must be this connection to the central cases, oth- erwise the emotion terms used in describing music would be ambiguous. According to Matravers, the crucial point in our reactions to other persons' expressions of emotions is that we do not merely form beliefs about their emotions ("That person is sad"), but that we also react emotionally, for instance by feeling pity for them. Whether we really always react emotionally to an expression is highly doubtful, because the reaction is certainly dependent on our relationship with the person, our own state of mind, and the context. Neverthe- less, Matravers insists on this kind of reaction. Even those who cannot allow any feelings to disturb their work, such as doctors who must perform painful opera- tions on their patients, have emotional reactions, which, however, they have to

suppress.8 The other important element in Matravers' account is the distinction

between emotions and feelings. Matravers has adopted a cognitive view of emotions, which means that an emotion always has cognitive components, for instance a belief about an object of danger and a desire to escape. However, an emotion also feels in some way; feelings are phenomenological objectless sensations based on some physiological changes in us. The characteristic feature of Matravers' account is that music does not arouse any emotions; instead, music arouses objectless feelings as can be learned from the following account of

expression:9

(E) A work of art x expresses the emotion e if, for a qualified person p experiencing x in normal conditions, x arouses in p a feeling which would be an aspect of the appropriate reaction to the expression of e by a person, or to a representation the content of which was the expression of e by a person.10

An experience of expressive music thus consists of the following events that

immediately follow each other ('a' -* V means 'a' causes V):

(E*) 'Person p listens to a work of music x' -* 'a feeling is aroused by x in p' ■* 'p believes that x is expressive of emotion e/11

For instance, it is appropriate to react with pity to another person's grief and if music arouses the feeling of pity, this feeling then causes the listener's belief that the heard music is expressive of grief.




The main critical point against this theory concerns the assumption that those listeners who hear music as expressive also always feel some related feelings. Nevertheless, Matravers emphasizes that even dry-eyed critics have an incipient feeling aroused by music.12 Moreover, Peter Kivy criticizes this theory on the basis of the relation between feelings and emotions: Matravers seems to assume that every instance of an emotion- of fear, for example- always feels the same, while different emotions such as sadness and joy never feel the same.13 However, Kivy argues that this kind of unambiguous relation is unlikely.

Kivy opposes arousal theories also in terms of the problem of negative emotions. According to this argument, music is often expressive of unpleasant emotions such as anger and sadness, and if an arousal theory were true, then these kinds of emotions would be aroused in listeners. In that case it would be preferable to avoid such music, but as it happens, we do not eschew music expressive of negative emotions and we even enjoy it; thus, music cannot arouse in listeners those emotions it is expressive of.14

In those accounts that I call cognitivist theories music expressive of negative emotions is not a central problem, because expressive properties of music are considered to be objectively perceivable and arousal of feelings is not a precon- dition for experiencing the expressive character of music. Kivy, for instance, only admits one type of aesthetically relevant emotion caused by music, namely the excitement or exaltation due to the beauty or excellence of music.15 This exaltation is a real emotion focused on the properties of music, its beautiful sadness, for instance, but it is noteworthy that even if the sadness of music may arouse this exaltation, the exaltation is not sadness or anything unpleasant. Consequently, listeners can enjoy music expressive of dark emotions without having any dark feelings.16

The problem of negative emotions may, however, be explainable also in Matravers' arousal view, because even if music causes related feelings, they are usually not strong feelings. Moreover, as Levinson argues, emotional response to music and emotions in life differ in that emotional music does not have life- implications, that is, music evokes the feeling, but there are no such demands and worries about how to go on living that are related to dark emotions in the real life. It is therefore possible to concentrate on the feeling of those dark emotions that music is expressive of and even enjoy them.17

Cognitivist Theories. Stephen Davies characterizes the emotions expressed in music as unfelt, necessarily publicly displayed, and objectless.18 In Davies' view, emotions expressed in music are thus different from emotions felt by peo- ple. There is however a secondary use of emotion terms that are used in descriptions of human behavior and that is similar to their use in descriptions of



ELINA PACKALÉN 45

music: when we say that a person looks sad, this does not imply that the person feels sad and when music is expressive of sadness, this music certainly does not feel sad and the listener is not expected to do so either.19 In cognitivist views

expressiveness of music is explained in terms of the experienced similarity between music and human expression of emotions.

As noted above, Kivy also defends this cognitivist account of expression.20 Music is thus expressive of emotions owing to those of its properties that in some

way remind us of human expression of emotions and not because it arouses an emotion or a feeling in us. If listeners have such aroused emotional reactions as sadness, these reactions are not of aesthetic relevance because, according to Kivy, their cause is the association of the music with certain events of their lives, not the aesthetic emotive properties of the music.21

What then are the aesthetically relevant expressive properties? The core idea of Kivy 's view, which he calls the contour theory, is that the sonic shape of music is structurally analogical to the heard and seen manifestations of human emotive

expression.22 In other words, music reminds us of, for instance, the soft tones and

slow, halting speech of melancholy persons and their drooping and faltering moving.23 A problem with this explanation however is that often music gives impressions of or reminds us of other phenomena than human expression, for instance of spring mornings or surging seas. Why do we still regard music as

expressive of our emotions rather than of these other phenomena? In addition, the contour theory seems to confront a difficulty with the impression of immedi-

acy in experiences of expressiveness, that is, it at least appears that we do not first

recognize the similarity between human expression of emotions and the contour of the music and after that infer from the heard similarity the emotion expressed in the music.24

In order to avoid these difficulties, Kivy suggests that while listening to music, we are not aware of the similarity between the properties of music and human

expression.25 Instead, we animate music subliminally and hear emotions in it in the way that we often animate non-living entities. For instance, we tend to see sticks as snakes and imagine things lurking in woods as animals, so why would we not, as a result of evolution and natural selection, hear emotions in sounds in order to anticipate possible dangerous situations?26

This enhanced form of cogniti vism, with reference to subliminal processes, succeeds in avoiding at least the critical charge according to which because experiences of expression are phenomenologically unified, they cannot merely consist of instances of recognition and perception of some properties at a certain moment of the experience.27 However, resorting to subliminal animation is not

in accordance with the cognitivist thesis about expression in music, which pre- sumes that the expressive properties of music are objectively perceivable.




Symbol Theories. The way in which we express our emotions in utterance and behavior is at least to some extent dependent on our culture, personality, and temper. Human ways of expression are therefore not an entirely reliable indica- tor of the experienced emotions, and accordingly, the relation between the sonic contour of music and human expression is not a reliable way of identifying emotions expressed in music. In his account of the relation of music to our conscious states, Laird Addis purports to reveal the intrinsic connection between music and emotions.28 Addis draws on Susanne Langer's view of music and feelings: if music has an emotional content, it has the content symbolically; music is not the cause or the cure of feelings, but their logical expression.29 It must however be noted that for Langer feelings expressed by art are something more abstract and general than particular feelings of sadness, for instance. Rather, a feeling expressed by art is a kind of sense of life: living is a process of continuous change, because if it stands still, its forms disintegrate, and the dynamic elements of art- dynamic accents in music, for instance- symbolize this permanent change.30 The forms of feeling communicated by art are thus "vital forms" that are significant to human beings because they are analogues of life as psychically experienced.31

To consider music a kind of symbol is, however, not unproblematic. When an object is used as a symbol, for instance a ring as a symbol for commitment, we do not pay so much attention to the symbolizing object, but to what it stands for.32 In contrast to these kinds of symbols, music seems to be the focus of our attention in itself, not in an instrumental way because of what it symbolizes.

Nevertheless, Addis suggests that "to be an artwork just is to be the sort of object or event that both symbolizes something and that is of interest itself."33 In order to understand Addis's theory of how music symbolizes emotions and other states of consciousness, we must penetrate his classification of three kinds of representation. In general, in Addis's theory a representation is anything that brings something other than itself to mind, in either conscious or unconscious aware- ness.34 An example of conventional representation is language where the connection between a symbol (for example, the word "red") and its referent (red objects) is not based on their inherent relation, on resemblance, or on the natures of the symbol and its user. Instead, the characteristic feature of conventional representation is that, in principle, the symbol that represents a certain object according to a convention can be changed by choice.35

By contrast, in natural representation there is no such possibility of change by choice, since a symbol that represents something naturally determines by virtue of its inherent nature that it is doing the representing and what it represents.36 The only form of natural representation is consciousness. States of consciousness- perceptions, imaginings, memories, and so on- are always of something and, consequently, we cannot describe consciousness itself; rather



ELINA PACKALÉN 47

descriptions of consciousness are always descriptions of what these states of consciousness are about.37 The entities of natural representation, that is, the states of consciousness, represent by their nature exactly what these states are about.38

In between conventional and natural representation there is quasi-natural representation and its paradigmatic examples are dreams and music. Addis mentions that given the nature of the human mind, music represents possible states of mind to the mind of the listener and these states may or may not also cause the listener to think of or to be in that particular state.39 In the case of dreams, the creator of dreams is the one for whom these symbols represent something because of what this person is like and what human beings are like in general. Similarly, music as the representing object represents states of consciousness for the listener who is able to understand the symbol, since the composer shares the same human nature. For example, some passages of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" are about excitement in this quasi-natural way.40

What then is this human nature on which quasi-natural representation is based? The human nature may not be reducible to the structure and composition of the human brain, but it is at least dependent on it. For instance, even if music in itself is not about anything and its aboutness completely depends on the

intentionality of human consciousness,41 Addis emphasizes that the structure of the human brain and the natures of human consciousness and musical sound limit those musical structures that can represent human inner states to us.42 Due to what human beings are like, music may nevertheless represent states of consciousness to human beings even in a law-like manner.43 Despite this strong connection between music and the human mind, this representation is not natural because quasi-natural representation, like conventional representation, is a three-term relation: in the case of musical representation the relata are the music that represents something, the content that is represented, that is, states of consciousness, and the human mind that understands the music and functions as an

intermediary link between the two former relata.44 Addis thinks that there is a certain isomorphism between music and our

inner life and that music can articulate something that is ineffable, namely the nature of having emotions, mood, and sensations.45 Also Langer emphasizes the

similarity between human life and music:

[T]here are certain aspects of the so-called "inner life"- physical or mental-which have formal properties similar to those of music- patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment, excitation, sudden change, etc.46

For Langer, both language and music are symbolic ways of understanding real-

ity, but language is discursive symbolism, whereas the meaning of music and other arts belongs to another kind of symbolism that can present forms of human




feeling and that Langer calls presentational symbolism.47 It is typical of such discursive symbolism as language that there are permanent units of meaning, that these units can be combined into larger units, and that meanings can be defined

by other symbols. In language meaning is denotation, which implies that a name, for instance, is coupled with a conception that fits one or several entities.

By contrast, presentational symbolism does not signify anything but only articu- lates and it speaks immediately and directly to sense: music, for instance, is a

purely connotational semantic, which means that music conveys meaning without attaching to any objects.48 In general,

[ajrtistic symbols, on the other hand, are untranslatable; their sense is bound to the particular form which it has taken. It is always implicit, and cannot be explicated by any interpretation.49

Presentational artistic symbols thus embody the meaning that cannot be trans- lated into language but that must be grasped directly. Addis's notion of

quasi-natural representation corresponds approximately to Langer's idea of presentational symbolizing. This mode of symbolism and especially Addis's

assumption that having emotions, moods, and sensations is ineffable in the sense that language cannot capture all the properties involved in these states will turn out to be crucial in the discussion of truthful music later in this paper.

TRUTH ABOUT MUSIC AND TRUTHFUL MUSIC Truth about Emotive Properties of Music. In this section, I consider two ways

in which the notion of truth may be related to music and these ways are

expressed as the notions of truth about music and truthful music, respectively. First, I focus on the notion of truth about music; herein I consider truth a corre-

spondence between propositions and possible states of affairs. I also assume that there is a reality independent of us, in which there are particulars, properties, relations, and so on, but I do not deny that facts about reality may be mind- dependent in some way. In particular, I do not think that truth is a mere coherent relation between propositions or that being true means in the postmod- ernist sense merely being accepted as true or being constructible among influential persons.

The notion of truth about music is quite graspable if we are told, for instance, that a certain sonata was composed in the eighteenth century, or that a composition is in the neoclassical style, or that certain scales are common in Indian music. If truth is a relation to reality, then we can check the corresponding states of affairs and ascertain for ourselves the truth-value of these statements. How- ever, the truth-values of emotive descriptions of music are open to discussion. How music is heard and experienced seems to be dependent on such extra-musi-



ELINA PACKALÉN 49

cal matters as the familiarity with the style of the music and personal taste and consequently we quite often disagree about the expressed emotions. Could there still be, despite this dependence on several factors, a correct way of listening that reveals to us the truth about the expressivity of music? As we have seen, Matra- vers and Kivy suggest that at least the basis of expressive qualities of music is objective, which supports the notion of truth in the connection of these accounts of expression.

Let us first focus on Matravers' account of our experience of expressive music (E*): music causally arouses a feeling fin a listener and f causes the listener's belief that music expresses an emotion e. What can be said about the truth-values of those beliefs about expression that are caused by the musically aroused feelings?

Matravers himself mentions that a qualified observer can correctly judge an expressive work to be, for instance, sad simply by experiencing it and that this judgment is true if something about the object is causing the observer's relevant experience under perceptually normal conditions.50 As seen in the first section in (E*), this judgment is based on two causal relations: both the first relation between the heard properties of the music and the aroused feeling and the second relation between this feeling and the belief about the expressed emotion are

governed by some laws. Because the basis of the heard properties consists of such structural basic properties as sounds, rhythms, and harmonies, it is difficult to formulate laws connecting basic properties, aroused feelings, and expressed emotions. Nevertheless, Matravers argues that there are such laws:

It is not that there is no set of laws governing expressive properties, but rather that it is seldom a single basic property which arouses a feeling. . . . [I]t is pri- marily the relations in which basic properties stand to each other that are significant. This means that the relevant aesthetic laws do not connect single basic properties with expressive properties, but rather groups of such properties with expressive properties.51

On the assumption that each non-identical group of basic properties instantiates a different set of relations each will fall under a different set of laws. The reason that we cannot formulate the laws underlying expression is not because they do not exist, but rather because there are too many of them.

That we usually cannot express the relevant laws is thus due to the complex- ity of the relations between the basic properties. Given that there really are such laws, statements about expression, for example "this music is sad," correspond to states of affairs and have truth-values, but of what form would these laws be?

They should be non-accidental generalizations about the basic properties of music, the feelings aroused by the music, and the listeners' beliefs about exprés-




sion. Moreover, if a generalization is to express anything relevant about the aroused feelings, for instance, the circumstances of the listening not to mention the background and the personality of the listeners, must be taken into account; Matravers notes these conditions by including a qualified person p and normal conditions in (E) in qualifications. These conditions C about the circumstances and the listener include such things as the appropriate place of listening, the ability of the listener to understand the music in question and her sensitivity to expressivity, the possible associations of the music to extra-musical matters, the standard of the performance, and so on.

The conditions C and also the basic properties of the music may however turn out to be so complex and specific that even if the generalization G in question expresses a truth about a single or few cases, it is doubtful whether G is a law. This uncertainty is due to an important requirement that in order for any generalization to be a law, it must convey a non-accidental, inherent connection between the properties in question. If there are only few cases that fulfill the generalization in question, it is uncertain whether this generalization supports the following counterfactual proposition about a person p that actually does not lis- ten to the music in question: "if p listened to this music and satisfied all the conditions C, then p would feel an expected feeling F." Accordingly, G does not seem to be a law that connects certain basic properties and circumstances inher- ently to the aroused feelings.

Thus, even if the basis of the beliefs about emotions expressed in music were the objective structural basic properties of music, Matravers' account allows this belief to be affected by the listener's personal features and the circumstances and furthermore the assumed laws that govern expressive properties are quasi-laws. We can thus hardly say that in this theory of expression there is a single objective state of affairs that corresponds to every listener's belief about the expressed emotions; consequently, descriptions of music in emotion terms have truth-values only in an attenuated sense.

As described in the first section, Kivy defends a cognitivist contour theory, but he also acknowledges that the expressiveness of music is partly a conventional matter: for some reason certain musical elements have been associated with certain things, for instance chromaticism with sorrow and pain. However, Kivy also suggests that musical features expressive by convention may once have been heard as resembling certain ways of human expression or they may have contributed to such resemblance because of the musical syntax.52 Thus, musical icons may in the course of time be transmitted to musical topics and we may therefore conclude that the basis of musical expression in this theory is the congruence of musical contour with human emotional life and its expression.

Naturally the ways in which human beings express their emotions may also



ELINAPACKALÉN 51

be to some extent conventional and relative to the culture. Moreover, even if there are typical outward manifestations of emotions, they are not without excep- tions. All in all, our ways of expression certainly do not arise from a global human nature and they are not governed by strict laws. About the objectivity of the expressive nature of music Kivy mentions that the sadness of music, for instance, is as objective a matter as the sadness of a person on the basis of her

expressive behavior.53 This objectivity is certainly not absolute but, nevertheless, the expressive character of music is still comparably objective given a certain culture and a style of music. If we thus really hear the contour of music as similar to the typical expressions of emotions, then the expressive features of the heard music may be regarded as the components of those facts that correspond to true

descriptions of music by emotive predicates. We however realized in the first section that in addition to this similarity, Kivy

has to resort to subliminal animation of music in order to explain our inclination to hear emotions in music. Furthermore, he has recently stressed the intentional nature of musical works: the listener's knowledge and experience about music affect the hearing of music; this information forms certain descriptions under which music is listened to.54 Consequently, if the same music can be a different intentional object to each of its listeners and if a part of the heard qualities of music are dependent on subliminal processes, descriptions of a musical work by emotive terms are not dependent only on its objective properties.

Truthful Music. The notion of truthful music is not concerned with any statements made about music; instead, it seems to suggest that music is about the

reality which it symbolizes in some sense. Music cannot, obviously, describe

objects in the way language does, because it is not a language: the syntactic com-

ponents of music do not have unambiguous meanings. Neither can pure instrumental music represent reality in the way that is possible for paintings, nov-

els, and plays. These forms of art may correspond more or less accurately to what

they are representations of. A painting, for instance, can represent its object truthfully by picturing it in every detail or by expressing the nature of the object successfully; a play or a novel may truthfully describe how human beings usually behave in certain situations.

Music, excluding program music and vocal music, does not usually refer to

objects outside it and it therefore seems that music cannot be true to reality either. However, as shown in the first section, music may have expressive content and this content is here considered from the point of view of being truthful. For

example, Jerrold Levinson defines two notions of truth for nonrepresentational artworks, namely propositional truth (PT) and correspondent truth (CT) and these notions match my idea of truthful music. The notion of propositional truth as applied to music stands for the following thought:




A musical work is "true" if and only if some proposition about the world which is suggested by the work is actually true.55

That music suggests a proposition does not mean that something about the actual world is stated in music; instead, music suggests propositions by bringing them to mind and the truth in the sense of PT is the actual truth of such suggested propositions.56 For instance, a work that expresses emotions (p and 0 in successive passages suggests that in the experience of a single individual the emotion 0 could naturally succeed the emotion (p.57 If we apply this interpretation of PT to the first movement of Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos, for instance, this music turns out not to be true, since such rapid changes of emotion

expressed in that movement are not likely to occur in real life. Nevertheless, in

my opinion not being propositionally true does not afreet the aesthetic value of the work at least in this particular case.

Levinson's notion of correspondent truth in nonrepresentational art is related to the relation between the content of music and reality and when applied to music this notion amounts to the following idea:

A musical work is "true" if and only if some aspect or feature of the work corresponds to or matches some aspects or feature of the world to which it is appropriately or standardly referred.58

Correspondent truth should not be mistaken for the correspondent account of truth in which truth is concerned with statements about states of affairs and which is the basis of the truth about music. Instead, when applied to theories of

expression of emotions in music, CT amounts to the relation between the

expression of an emotion and how this emotion is felt or what it is like in real-

ity.59 Another interpretation is that CT is the relation between the actual expression achieved by a work and the expression intended by the composer.60 In this paper however I confine myself to the former interpretation, that is, to the expressed emotions and their correspondents in reality. Matravers' theory of

experiences of emotive music may be regarded as truthful in this sense, since the way in which we learn about the emotions expressed in music is analogical to the way we become aware of the emotions expressed by human beings in reality.

In some cases it is possible to interpret CT so that music represents something, that is, that music presents something again and stands proxy for something extrinsic to the symbol. Kivy suggests that it is possible for music to represent something pictorially, for instance.61 When music represents something pictorially, we do not see the represented object, but hear it in some way in the music. Except such things as bird-song, unaided pictorial representation is however thought to be quite rare in music, but pictorial representation aided



ELINA PACKALÉN 53

by titles and texts is common: for example, Beethoven has represented pastoral atmosphere in his Sixth Symphony and Debussy's La Mer is about the impressions that can be sensed out at sea.

However, to regard the emotive character of music as representation of emotions is a more controversial matter. Kivy stresses that representation in music

implies the composer's intention to represent, but it is likely that the expressiveness of music is usually not intended and that it merely emerges.62 In addition, if

symbolizing implies representing and if music symbolizes the structure and form of feelings as Langer claims, or states of consciousness as Addis argues, then in order to appraise how well music symbolizes we should have an independent access to the structure of the symbolized and represented feelings and states of consciousness.63 How can we comprehend these structures independently? Nat-

urally, we may feel and experience emotions personally, but there does not seem to be any way of extracting emotions from our subjective experience and then to

compare them objectively with the expressive character of the music. The inward life of human beings is not easily expressible and communicable in the discursive form of language and, accordingly, these inner feelings appear to be

unspeakable, ineffable, and hard to comprehend. These feelings are thus difficult to attain except in personal experience and comparing the expressed content of music with some verbally formulated ideas of particular feelings or emotions is therefore not feasible.

That both Langer and Addis regard the content symbolized in music as ineffable appears thus to be inconsistent with the idea that music represents something. We must however remember that representation in the sense of

denoting or signifying something beyond works of art is not essential in Langer's or Addis's symbol theories of expressiveness; they both regard music as a presentational art, where the subject matter is not external to the work.64 As described in the first section of this paper, Langer stresses that symbolizing in music is connotational: music means something without denoting anything, since the

meaning is already in the music, not outside it. Addis, on the other hand, uses the verb 'to represent/ but quasi-natural representation typical of music does not

imply such direct intentional referral as conventional representation in lan-

guage, for instance. The quasi-natural representation of our states of

consciousness by music means rather that we, because of what we are like, only hear music as a presentation of those states. Music is thus another medium for

those states that are present to us when we feel emotions. One difficulty with symbol theories is that the idea of a presentational, non-

referring symbol appears as a contradiction: to be a symbol is to be a symbol of

something, and the notion of a symbol seems to presuppose that what is symbolized is extrinsic to the symbol, but being presentational and non-referring denies




this. On the other hand, as Langer notes, often the reason for using expressive forms as symbols is that the represented things are not perceivable or readily imaginable65 and this certainly applies to our states of consciousness. Let us thus assume that the concept of a presentational symbol is analyzable in a consistent

way; the relevant question with respect to the subject of this paper then is whether music can be true or truthful.

As a matter of fact, in both Langer's and Addis's theories the starting point is that music can be true or truthful in some sense. Addis, for instance, notes that the importance of music for us has to do with the connection between music and our emotions.66 This connection is due to the symbolization in which music

may, by bringing emotions to mind, be a source of knowledge of such subtle dif- ferences between emotions and sensations that language describes less

perfectly.67 Music may even present us with moods and emotions that no one has ever felt or that the listener has felt, but has not been able to name.68 Also Langer emphasizes the aspect of knowledge in connection with art and music: because art is a symbolic presentation and not a mere copy of feeling, there can be as much knowledge of feeling in different forms of art, music included.69 In particular, because of its ambivalence about content, music can be "true" to the life of

feeling in a way that language cannot.70

CONCLUSION We have now considered three different theories of expression in music from

the point of view of truth. To return to the question of epistemic justification that was introduced in the beginning of this article, do we have epistemic ends with emotion descriptions; do we aim for truth about music when we characterize it as melancholy or joyous, for instance? Or is music related to the idea of truth so that expressive music can be experienced as truthful to human inner life, that is, as matching to our states of mind, in particular to our emotions? Obviously, truth about music and truthful music are not entirely distinct ideas, because if a person experiences music as truthful to a serene state of mind, for example, she may well believe that the proposition "this music is serene" is a truth about this music. Nevertheless, truths about music are such descriptions of music that are based on the properties of music, whereas the truthfulness of music to human feeling is based on such experience of correspondence between music and feeling where the feeling may not be expressible by means of language.71

Despite the different viewpoints of Kivy's cognitivist theory and the arousal account by Matravers these theories have turned out to be quite similar with respect to the truth about emotion properties in music: the basis of expressivity is in the objectively perceivable structural properties of music, but the background and the personal features of the listener, the conditions of listening,



ELINA PACKALÉN 55

conventional matters about expression, and even cultural habits concerning outward manifestations of emotions may affect the way the properties of music are heard. Because many things affect the listener's experience of the expressive character of music and because it may be difficult to distinguish between those factors that are clearly the listener's features (for example, that she associates a certain composition with an unpleasant event in her life) and those factors that are features of the musical culture expected from the listeners (for example, that in Finnish music a certain hymn and references to it are associated with light and summer), it is not reasonable to consider only one view of the expressiveness of the heard music strictly true.

Even if it is not plausible that we express objective truths by emotive descriptions of music, it does not follow that these descriptions cannot be justified at all. Given either an arousalist or a cognitivist account of expressiveness, critics, lis-

teners, performers, teachers, and students of music can give reasons for their view of the expressiveness of music. Given an arousalist account, we can consider the aroused feeling and the features of music that may evoke the feeling- structural musical properties as well as those features of music that may affect listeners by virtue of adopted cultural associations; given a cognitivist account, we can look

at those properties in the contour and texture of music that may remind us of

human expressions of emotions and make us animate music subliminally. With

a view to impressive performances, realizing plausible reasons is important: those persons who work in view of performances- be they teachers or students

of music, professional performers, or amateurs- should have a comprehension of the expressive character of the music to be performed and of those properties of the music that probably yield this expressive effect.

The idea of truth about music was not looked at in connection with Addis's

symbol theory, because he does not consider the basis of expressive properties and such descriptions that might be truths about music. Instead, Addis argues that music is aural depiction of human inner states; these depictions, as such, are

neither true nor false, but music can depict an emotion better than language can

describe it.72 Music is thus considered truthful, or at least more truthful than lan-

guage, to our states of mind, in particular to our emotions.73 One critical point is

that Addis draws heavily on the idea of a general human nature: on the basis of

this human nature listeners are assumed to understand the import expressed in

music, but Addis does not explicate this idea enough and it remains vague. Nevertheless, if music can be experienced as a sounding image of human

mental states, then this similarity gives a reason for the importance of music in

our lives: by means of music we can experience objectified human feeling, that

is, such ideas of human feeling that are dissociated and distanced from the

stream of real life. In music these ideas can therefore be considered and they can




yield insight into our inner life. Both Addis and Langer refer to the knowledge of

feeling that is projected into music, but is it an exaggeration to call subjective experience of musical expressiveness knowledge of anything? If music does not assert anything and if it shows images of mental life and brings them into mind, then music does not still convey knowledge of truths, that is, it does not convey anything such as beliefs that can be either true or false. However, Langer refers to such knowledge that Bertrand Russell calls knowledge by acquaintance.74 Acquaintance is a relation between the mind and its objects and we have

acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware without intermediary truths or inference.75 There is accordingly knowledge by acquaintance of the contents of sensation, introspection, and memory: about data of senses, thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories of them, for instance.76

Surveying theories of knowledge and scrutinizing the significance of knowl-

edge by acquaintance would take us too far afield. In any case, for Russell, acquaintance is the foundation of all knowledge77 and in foundationalist episte- mology knowledge is generally dependent on such justificatory structures of reasons that are based on basic beliefs not in need of further justification. I therefore conclude that Addis's and Langer's ideas of musical expressiveness cannot be insignificant to any theories of human feeling.

NOTES !Frank Sibley, Approach to Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 151. 2Derek Matravers, Art and Emotion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Peter Kivy, The

Corded Shell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Kivy, An Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Laird Addis, Of Mind and Music (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

3Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

4Eduard Hanslick is one of the critics of the idea that musical arousing of feelings is aesthetically relevant (Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful trans. H. Payzant from the 8th edition (1891 [1854] (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986). Hanslick emphasizes that such feelings do not belong to aesthetics, since part of their effect is physical (ibid., 57). The real content of music is form, not feeling (ibid., 60), and the aesthetical side of music, namely its beauty, is understood by pure contemplation (ibid., 57). Hanslick does not however deny that music affects our states of mind. On the con- trary, the effect of tones is not only more rapid, but it is more immediate than in the other arts (ibid., 50), yet these effects do not belong to aesthetics (ibid., 57). Neither does Hanslick accept the idea that music represents feelings, since to "represent" something involves two separate yet related things, one of which is intentionally related to the other through someone's mental act (ibid., xxii). In particular, music cannot represent such specific states as hope, melancholy, or love, because the specificity of these states is in their conceptual essence, that is, in the thoughts about the objects of feelings, and such con-



ELINA PACKALÉN 57

ceptual thoughts are beyond the scope of music (ibid., 9). Nevertheless, Hanslick admits that music can present one moment of feeling, namely the dynamic that emotional states and music have in common: fast, slow, strong, weak, and so on. (ibid., 1 1). In this empha- sis Hanslick's thinking is quite similar to that of Susanne Langer.

5René Descartes, Compendium of Music (Compendium Musicae), trans. Walter Robert (American Institute of Musicology, [1618] 1961), 15.

6John Nolt, "Expression and Emotion," British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (1981): 139-150; Stanley Speck, "'Arousal Theory' Reconsidered," British Journal of Aesthetics 28, (1988): 40-47; Geoffrey Madell, Philosophy, Music and Emotion (Edinburgh: Edin- burgh University Press, 2002).

7Matravers, Art and Emotion.

8Ibid., 200. ^hat music arouses feelings and not full-fledged emotions is consistent with the

thoughts of some psychologists. For instance, John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin, Music and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93, suggest that our emotional responses to music are some kind of proto-emotions that may turn into emotions if they ob- tain some semantic content.

10Matravers, Art and Emotion, 146.

"Ibid., 149.

12Ibid., 201.

13Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 142-143.

HIbid., 127-128.

15Kivy, An Introduction to a Philosophy of Musicy 131-132.

16Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, 115.

17Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 324.

18Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135. Davies calls his view appearance emotionalism. Musical expressiveness is based on an experience of resemblance between music and the realm of human emotion, especially on the resemblance between the dynamic structure of music and human behavior related with the expression of emotions. Arousal of feelings is thus not a condi- tion of the expressive character of music, but Davies still stresses that listeners often react to music by emotional responses generated by the expressed emotions. See Davies, "Artis- tic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music," in Matthew Kieran, ed., Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 179-191 .

l9Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music, 135. 20 As the early pioneers of these kinds of thoughts about expressiveness Kivy (New

Essays on Musical Understanding, 95) mentions the eighteenth century composer and aesthete, Johann Mattheson, and philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, in whose meta-

physics music played an essential role.

21Kivy, An Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, 112.

22Ibid., 40.




"Ibid., 39.

24Matravers, Art and Emotion, 1 20.


26Ibid.

27Matravers, Art and Emotion, 1 20. 28 Addis, Of Mind and Music.

29Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 1951[1942]), 218.

30Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 66.

31Bennett Reimer, "Langer on the Arts as Cognitive," Philosophy of Music Education Review 1, no.l (Spring 1993): 59.

32Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 105.

33Addis, Of Mind and Music, 82.

34Ibid., 35.

"Ibid.. 39.

36Ibid., 36.

37Ibid., 42.

38Ibid., 43.

39Laird Addis, Natural Signs. A Theory of Intentionality (Philadelphia: Temple Uni- versirv Press. 1989). 32.

^Addis, Of Mind and Music, 22.

41Ibid., 100.

42Ibid., 77.

43Ibid.. 76. 44 Addis, Natural Signs, 32.


^Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 228.

47As a matter of fact, it is not accurate to describe this symbolism as presentational, because discursive language can be considered presentational with respect to possible states of affairs if the form of these states is regarded as consistent with the forms of lan-

guage. Yet, Langer s idea is that the forms of human feeling are not consistent with the discursive form of language but that forms of feeling can still be presented in non-discursive symbolism. Because Langer (Philosophy in a New Key, 97) calls this kind of symbolism presentational, I follow her practice.

48Ibid.,64, 101.

49Ibid., 260.

50Matravers, Art and Emotion, 204.

51Ibid.,212.

52Kivy, The Corded Shell, 82.



ELINA PACKALÉN 59

"Ibid., 148.

54Kivy, An Introduction to a Philosophy of Music, 8 1 .

55Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 281.

56Ibid.

57Ibid., 298.

58Ibid.,281.

59Ibid., 283.

«Ibid., 290.


62Kivy, The Corded Shell, 64.

63Budd, Music and the Emotions, 1 19.

64Wayne D. Bowman, Philosophical Perspectives on Music (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1998), 152.

65Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 20.

^Addis, Of Mind and Music, 5.

67Ibid., 80.

68Ibid., 112.

69Langer, Feeling and Form, 373.

70Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 243. 71 My idea of truthfulness corresponds to Langer's notion oí artistic truth, that is, the

truth of a symbol to the forms of feeling. Literal propositional truth has no degrees, but artistic truth has degrees according to their adequacy in conveying affective experience. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 262-263.


73Ibid.,81.

74Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 263; Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philoso-

phy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 25.

75Knowledge by acquaintance along with knowledge by description is knowledge of

things, but in contrast to knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge by description always involves some knowledge of truths as its ground. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 25.

76Ibid., 28.

77Ibid., 26.



Music Emotions and Truth

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