ABSTRACT
What do we evaluate when we evaluate music, and for what purpose? Philosophers generally agree that, apart from other value music has, music is composed and performed for the purpose of providing listeners with a valuable experience, most often a pleasurable one. (It seems wrong to describe the tragic shock that one feels at the end of a good performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly as a feeling of pleasure. Nonetheless, it is rewarding.) For those with sufficient leisure and training to partake of such experiences, the experiences themselves are an independently valuable end that can only be obtained from music. This value is often identified as music’s intrinsic value. Strictly speaking, however, only the experience possesses intrinsic value, whereas the music is instrumentally valuable for providing that experience. This approach is normally called the aesthetic evaluation of music (Davies 2003; Walton 1993). A piece of music can be evaluated from other points of view, each of which may assign a different level of merit. Evaluated aesthetically, John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Love Me Do” is a weak song. Nonetheless, it is of some historical interest as their public debut and its copyright has considerable financial value. In contrast, evaluating it aesthetically involves calculating its capacity to provide pleasurable or otherwise rewarding experiences to appropriately knowledgeable listeners who attend to its musical individuality. Although there is considerable debate about why other factors ought to be excluded, I will begin by focusing on the aesthetic evaluation of music.
