Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a version of 'formalism' about music. It begins with a critique of literalism about emotion descriptions. The book develops the view of music and musical experience roughly, that the essence of music and of people's musical experience lies in the aesthetic properties of sound and does not lie in emotion or meanings accompanied by a view of linguistic descriptions of music, which denies literal sense to the bulk of people's linguistic description of music. It says that sublimity in music is a kind of musical beauty. The core experience of music is the aesthetic experience of beauty, whether of absolute or nonabsolute music. A number of themes recur throughout this book: musical experience, metaphorical descriptions of musical experience and of the aesthetic properties of music, the privacy of musical experience, private aesthetic languages, ineffability, and subjectivity.