ABSTRACT
Psychology can investigate the relation between buses and emotion. Perhaps brain science could investigate brain activity when people think about different sorts of buses in different situations. The claim that music has essentially to do with emotions or politics is as absurd as the claim that buses essentially have to do with emotions or politics. Some people are afraid of music. Music can stand in various relations to emotion, and it can play various political roles, just as buses can. Aesthetic experience of music is the experience of aesthetic properties of music. This chapter discusses formalism in terms of a realist commitment to aesthetic properties of music and the experience of aesthetic properties. Realism goes well with formalism, although the two are not necessarily connected. Understanding music at a very general level is not completely isolated from more practical issues.
