ABSTRACT
Reflecting in 2000 on the first forty years of the British Journal of Aesthetics, its then editor, Peter Lamarque, notes a remarkable growth in the number of submissions and printed papers on music, to the point where “the need has arisen to turn down papers on music just for the sake of balance in the journal. This growth of interest is noteworthy for it was not predictable twenty years ago” (Lamarque 2000: 15). “Twenty years ago” – that is, 1980 – saw the publication of several works that played an important role in awakening interest in the philosophy of music and in identifying key topics and positions. They were Peter Kivy’s The Corded Shell and my “The Expression of Emotion in Music,” which presented similar analyses of music’s expressiveness, according to which, like the face of the basset hound, music displays an expressive appearance rather than an experienced emotion; Jerrold Levinson’s “What a Musical Work Is,” which focused attention on questions of musical ontology, such as whether musical works are created or discovered; Thomas Carson Mark’s “On Works of Virtuosity,” which dealt with the nature and purpose of performance, and Malcolm Budd’s “The Repudiation of Emotion: Hanslick on Music,” which revealed Eduard Hanslick’s nineteenth-century formalist arguments as relevant to the contemporary debate. While such writings had predecessors and precedents to which I return below, Lamarque is correct to observe that the number and influence of these would not have led one to predict the expansion of interest in music aesthetics over the past three decades. (To give just one indication of this growth, recent years have seen five book-length introductions to the philosophy of music.)
