ABSTRACT
Roger Scruton's account of the nature of music and the musical experience foregrounds the imagination. It is a particularly interesting and promising nonrealist view in the aesthetics of music in the sense that it does not postulate aesthetic properties of music that people represent in musical experience. This chapter examines both Scruton's view and his main argument for it. Scruton's view is that musical experience is a kind of aspect experience, whereby sounds are represented in experience as falling under ordinary concepts, such as concepts of emotion, motion and height. The kind of mental state that one have in musical experience is imagination or imaginative perception. An aesthetic realist will say that emotion, motion or spatial descriptions of music are metaphorical descriptions of aesthetic properties of music. Scruton argues from the Aesthetic Metaphorical Thesis description to his aspect perception theory.
