ABSTRACT
An arousal theory of expression is one that analyses the expressive qualities of a piece of music in terms of the feelings aroused in listening to the music. The theory flows from three springs. First, it accounts for expression using only elements that are present in the listeners’ experience: the music and aroused feeling. Second, and relatedly, it has a pleasing simplicity: it posits nothing metaphysically dubious (such as hypothetical personae in expressive music) and there is no need (at least at first) for risky philosophical moves. Finally, it answers to a common intuition: that hearing the emotion in the music has something to do with how it makes us feel. The theory surfaces often in discussions by the philosophically unsophisticated, and is occasionally defended by the more philosophically sophisticated. The arousal of emotions by music is of increasing interest to psychologists, but the theory has never gained wide acceptance in philosophy; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that it is usually regarded as crude and naive. Nonetheless, discussion of the theory, or variants on the theory, emerged in philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s (Mew 1985; Speck 1988; Ridley 1995; Matravers 1998) and more recently (Robinson 2005; Nussbaum 2007). As is usual in discussions of expression, I will confine my discussion to (so-called) Western art music, that is, instrumental music of the period from around 1430 ce to the present day.
