The Philosophy of Music (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views
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Kendall Walton argues (also with respect to tragedy) that sadness is not in itself negative. Rather, it is the situation to which sadness is the response that is negative.
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Tianna EWSIS on 11 Dec 09so true..so true...
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One obvious suggestion is that our negative emotional response is a price we are willing to pay for the other benefits of engaging with the piece in question, such as (but not limited to) ‘positive’ emotional responses. While this sort of reasoning may play a role, it cannot be a complete solution, since for most pieces that elicit negative responses there are many others that elicit fewer, or less intense negative responses for the same positive payoff. More sophisticated versions of the same suggestion argue for a more intimate link between the negative emotional response and the payoff.
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This is decisive if true, but there is plenty of room to quibble about our ability to test for the right kinds of imaginative activity, the selection of the subjects, and so on. A different kind of objection is that if the persona theory were true, expressive music could not constrain our imaginative activity in such a way as to yield convergent judgments of expressiveness among understanding listeners.
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The resemblance theorist must give some account of why the funeral march, and not the cup of coffee, is expressive of sadness, and not joy. Levinson claims that the obvious suggestion here is that the funeral march is ‘readily-hearable-as’ an expression of sadness. If this is correct, then the resemblance the music bears to emotional behavior is logically secondary — a cause or ground of its expressivity. The expressivity itself resides in the music's disposition to elicit the imaginative response in us of hearing the music as a literal expression of emotion. As a logical consequence, the imaginative experience prompted must include some agent whose expression the music literally is.
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We say that a piece of music is sad in the same sense in which we say that a weeping willow is sad (S. Davies 2006, 183). Such uses are no more metaphorical than a claim that a chair has arms.
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The central problem is the great disparities between language and music, in terms of the ways in which each is both syntactic and semantic.