ABSTRACT
Purely instrumental musical passages and works without words or an associated program or story are often experienced, by many laypersons and musicians, as being sad, happy, calm, angry, and so on. However, as something that has neither life nor consciousness, music cannot itself possess such mental states. And this leads to the philosophical problem of musical expressiveness, the problem of how something inanimate and insentient such as music can be, and be heard as, sad, happy, and the like; other formulations of the problem ask how music can be described as sad (Kivy 1989: 6–10), or how it can possess or have sadness “inhering” in it (Kivy 2002: 31–2), or how emotions could be expressed in it (Davies 1994: x, 2001: 169, 173), but let us focus on many people’s ready and immediate experience of music as sad rather than descriptions of this experience, though the positive view advanced in this chapter can also answer these other formulations of the problem, as we will see later.
