So the topic today is musical expression. And as with last week,
this raises a number of questions in that category of questions I mentioned
at the beginning as being one of the main types of questions and aesthetics,
namely questions pertaining to the understanding and the appreciation of works of art.
Expression has been fairly important category in aesthetics for at least the past hundred years or so,
and it's been standard to contrast expression since that time with representation.
So pictures on this view of things are representations of what they depict.
Likewise, the sculptures are representations of what they're sculptures of literary works.
I think it's standard to say as well are representational.
But there is another way in which Artworks can relates to things that aren't artworks.
And that is by expressing them, by expressing those things.
And in particular, this has been seen as a particularly important concept for our understanding of music.
Claim is not that representational works of art can't also express things, but that non-representational works of art.
Like many pieces of music, I stand in a different relation to reality than the relation of representing it.
Now it's an interesting question to what extent works of music can be representational?
So you think about certain works of music like the Flood of the Bumblebee, for example.
You might be inclined to say that those works of instrumental music can be representational.
But for the most part, I think a lot of works of music, it's standard to say at least do not represent things.
Rather, the main way in which they relate to reality, other things is by expressing things.
And so I'd like to begin with a few distinctions that are important to orienting yourself into the debate about musical expression.
One distinction is regarding the scope of what can be expressed.
So we might talk about not just expressing emotions but expressing, say,
the spirit of the age or as well or as a number of writers have suggested, some works of music can express qualities like silkiness.
You can get this in. Nelson Goodman, for example, talks about works of art, expressing heat fragility, things like this.
I'm going to be focussing on the expression of emotion,
mainly because that has been the most central topic in discussions of expression and because it seems
to be one of the least controversial examples of something that can be expressed by works of music.
And the expression of emotion and emotion generally in connexion with music raises a great many difficult questions.
So why we react so powerfully to instrumental works of music in particular,
has puzzled a lot of people why the sound of stringed instruments can cause people to cry.
It is a very standard philosophical puzzle in the philosophy of music.
Likewise, how it's possible for non-representational sounds to relate to reality in this way that we call expressing emotion.
How is it possible for the Ode to Joy to express joy and particularly and do so in such a particularly powerful way?
And when we're talking about the expression of emotion?
Another very important distinction to keep in mind is what I've described in the handout as the
distinction between expressing a kind of emotion and expressing a particular occurrence of that emotion.
So you might want to distinguish between work that expresses sadness and something that expresses my current sadness.
Some people draw this distinction by saying that there's a difference between being expressive of sadness and expressing sadness.
So being expressive of sadness is what I just described as expressing a kind of emotion and expressing sadness in this.
Way of describing it is what I just called expressing a particular occurrence of sadness, such as the sadness somebody is currently feeling.
Now, that's going to be important because as we'll see,
there is a deep question about the relation between expressing kinds of emotions and expressing particular occurrences of them,
whether one should be explained in terms of the other. And the last distinction I'd like to draw is the distinction between theories
of expression and what has come to be known as the expression theory of art.
So early in the 20th century, philosophers and writers such as Benedetto Crochet,
Robin Collingwood and the novelist Tolstoy presented views on arts according to which art is to be defined as expression.
That's not going to be our focus today. Next week, we're going to be discussing definitions of art.
Rather, what I'd like to focus on today is theories of expression, theories of expression.
Tend to attempts to answer either one or both of the following questions.
So first, what is it for an artwork to express an emotion?
What is it for music to be sad? For example, and the other question is, what is it for us to experience a work of art as expressive of emotion?
What is it for us to experience a piece of music that said.
Now, obviously, these are very closely related questions,
but I think it's important to keep this distinction straight in your mind and when you're reading the material on expression,
the philosophical literature on this, to remind yourself of whether the writer at any given point is trying to answer the first
question about what it is for something for a piece of music to be said or the second question,
what it is for us to experience it. As I said, as I mentioned, not all theory is attempt to answer both.
Some focus on one. Some focus on the other. And some do give answers to both.
OK. Now. Now, it's important to stress there's a really enormous range of theories of expression and aesthetics, particularly at the moment.
And so I've selected a few of the most prominent ones next term in my lectures on metaphore.
I'm going to be discussing some other ones that I won't be discussing today on the back of your handout.
I've given some references to readings that you can take a look at.
And the last two groups of readings are really relevant to theories that I won't be discussing today.
This is this is an area that is very messy. And it's interesting if you talk to people working in this area,
it's one of those unusual areas of philosophy where they're sort of willing to admit that they
really don't know whether any progress has made and how any progress is going to be made.
Some are willing to admit that or to say that. So if you're confused, you're not alone.
So it's worth, I think, beginning with what I've called the clarification theory of expression on the handout.
So this view of expression was presented by Robin Collingwood early in the 20th century.
And Collingwood claims that to express an emotion is to make clear what emotion one is feeling.
So Collingwood observes that we are often burdened by emotions whose nature is unclear to us.
And clarifying what we are feeling removes this sense of burden or this oppressive sense to the emotion.
And that's what Collingwood thinks artists do when they express emotions.
But a further point is that when an artist so in composing something, sculpting something,
painting something, when an artist clarifies their emotion by expressing it, the emotion is transformed.
So it's not a matter, in his view of of the artist finding a medium to fit a pre-existing inchoate emotion.
But in trying to clarify one's inchoate in definite emotions.
One transforms the emotion along the way. And this is an important claim for him because he thinks from this it follows that the
emotion expressed cannot be specified independently of the medium in which it is expressed.
So you can't say what emotion has been expressed without reference to the particular
medium in which it is expressed a particular form that the expression of its took.
And that's because that process of clarifying it transformed it into a distinct emotion.
This is supposed to be a virtue of Collingwood's theory because this is supposed to explain the sense in which form and content are inseparable.
It's often claimed about works of art, that form in which the ideas are presented or the emotions express is not
simply a vehicle that could be easily discarded in favour of some other form,
but that form and content in some sense or other are inseparable united.
And in Collingwood's view, this explains one way in which that is so.
A further implication he draws from this is that unlike the description of emotion, expression makes it clear how the art emotion differs from others.
So, as Collingwood puts it, description generalises. So if you categorise your emotion as sadness, you indicate how it's similar to other emotions.
Put it in the same category as other emotions. Whereas expression individualise is particularise is it?
And that's because of this tie between the emotion expressed and the particular medium in which it is expressed.
The form of expression. And he thinks another thing, that this aspect of history.
One thing, this aspect of this theory explains is why.
Just describing your emotions makes, for example, for bad poetry.
You're saying I am sad today or literal statements of emotion like that.
Collingwood thinks it's pretty theoretically obvious that that's not very satisfactory.
And this explains why that's merely describing rather than expressing.
That's categorising and generalising rather than individualising and particular rousing.
Now, there's a lot of controversy.
Well, love objections, I should say, about Collingwood's views.
One question obviously that immediately arises about this is in what sense is the artist discovering the nature of the original indefinite emotion?
If that emotion is actually transformed into something different in the course of it's being expressed?
It seems like if we're clear about anything, we're clear about the new emotion,
that the indefinite emotion has been transformed into rather than the original one.
But another concern is that it would seem to follow from Collingwood's view that, for example,
music could not be sad unless it was produced by somebody clarifying a sadness that they were feeling.
And that just seems wrong. We wouldn't say, OK, well, that piece of music is not sad if we were to discover that it was not produced by
somebody clarifying an indefinite feeling of sadness that they'd been feeling.
Now, of course, one way in which you might try and repair this is to say, well,
calling was just presenting a theory of what it is to express particular occurrences of emotions rather than kinds of emotion.
But it's not clear for me, to me, at least from reading Collingwood's text, whether that's consistent with what he says.
He says he's setting out to explain what people are talking about when they talk about arts being associated with expression.
So he pitches it in certain ways that I don't think leave this way of getting off the hook available to him.
OK. Now, I think another natural view, if you ask somebody what it is for a piece of music to be sad.
One answer I think you're likely to get is that what it is for a piece of music to be sad is for it's to make people sad,
to be such as to make people cry or otherwise feel something related to sadness.
And variations on this view are what are known as arousal, theories of expression.
And these are often just mentioned just to be knocked down again.
So the kind of crudest version of it, the emotion expressed by a piece of music is just the emotion that it arouses in its listeners.
And sort of textbook objection to this is, well, you can get something that expresses grief but doesn't cause us to feel grief.
It might cause us to feel tender hearted or sympathetic in response to it rather than actually feeling grief.
A recent defence of the arousal theory tries to get around these problems that's offered by Derek Travers,
and I've given the reference to his book on the back of the hand out there.
And I'll just describe his theory in brief before moving on to the next part.
So according to the Travaris, a more plausible version of the arousal theory is to say not that the emotion expressed is the emotion that it arouses,
but rather that we ought to distinguish, as is standard in the philosophy of emotion between emotions and feelings.
So feelings are just one component of emotions. Another component is a representational component, such as a thought or belief.
So fear, for example, is an emotion involving a representation of danger.
So maybe the belief that you're in danger and a feeling in response to that represents a danger.
And so in my travels, this view, a work of art, expresses an emotion e if it arouses a feeling in a qualified listener under normal conditions,
and that feeling is an aspect of an appropriate reaction to a person expressing E!
So in the case of the grief example that I mentioned just now.
Part of what makes it the case on the Travaris is a view that a work of art expresses grief is that its such as to arouse
in a qualified listener a feeling that would be part of an appropriate reaction to real expression of grief in a person.
So tender heartedness might be an example that you point to the feelings of the listener, namely the qualified listener, rather than their emotions.
And you ask, are those feelings part of what would be an appropriate reaction to a Real-Life expression of that emotion?
And on this version of the arousal theory that gets around. According to the Travaris, many of the standard objections to it.
However, I think it's fair to say at the moment,
one of the largest families of theories of expression are what we might describe as resemblance, theories of expression.
There's a number of forms. This can take, as I indicated there, on the handout.
According to one of them, for work to express that emotion is for it to resemble that emotion itself in various respects.
So in Carol Pratts well known slogan, music sounds as emotions feel.
And Malcolm Budd has recently defended a version of this view in his book, Values of Art, and on Bud's version of this view.
I should say he describes this as the basic and minimal concept of expression.
He doesn't think that we should regard expression as an entirely unitary phenomenon.
But he thinks this is one of the most basic aspects of this phenomenon.
This resemblance to emotion. And specifically, he argues that for a piece of music to be expressive of an emotion is for its to be correct to hear it
as sounding like the way that emotion feels or as experienced or for a full appreciation of the music.
To require this. And so naturally, natural question is, well, how is it possible for a piece of music to resemble a feeling,
to resemble an emotion in respect of the feeling? Well, Bud begins by indicating a number of the kinds of feelings that can be components of emotions.
So a number of the examples he gives are felt to desire and aversion.
This is a feeling that is a component of such emotions as envy, disgust, shame.
So, too, a feeling of distress in an emotion like fear or grief, feeling of pleasure and emotions like joy, amusement or pride.
And, of course, displeasure as well, especially the frustration of desire in emotions such as anger.
So bearing in mind the kinds of feelings that are components of emotions,
but says there's a natural correspondence between certain aspects of music and the feeling component of emotions.
For example, often in a piece of music,
there'll be a transition from sounds that require a kind of resolution to sounds that don't require a kind of resolution.
This, but says is resemblance resembles the way in which there are in our mental life transitions from states of desire to states of satisfaction,
or again, from states of tension to states of release and emotions that are characterised by feelings like this or emotional experiences that
are characterised by transitions of such feelings can be expressed by pieces of music that have these sound properties of this kind.
Another example he gives in filling out theory is two points to pitch rises in pitch.
Falling melodies. This sort of thing.
And he, like a number of authors on this topic, has argued that the dimension of pitch is like the vertical dimension of space.
And therefore, there is a resemblance between successions of notes, of different pitch,
duration and emphasis and upwards and downwards movements of various magnitudes or speeds.
And what this makes possible is a resemblance between changes of pitch and feelings of movement that are intrinsic to certain emotions,
such as acute anxiety, the feeling of the body trembling. For example.
So changes the pitch. Another way in which sounds can resemble emotions in respect of the feeling, component of the emotion.
So to strength of musical pulse or a degree of musical movement,
on the one hand betokens a certain level of energy and therefore can resemble the felt energy in certain kinds of emotion.
This is the sort of picture he has in mind to make this resemblance theory plausible.
But apart from the examples he gives and the filling out of the picture,
one thing a number of things he thinks count in favour of it are what it explains various mysterious aspects of our experience of music.
He takes to be explained by this view.
So one thing is that explains how it's possible to hear music as expressive of different emotions at one and the same time.
Explain this, because it's possible for the same piece of music to resemble different emotions at one in the same time in respect of their feeling.
And likewise, it explains what's true and the thought that in music we directly perceive the inner life of an emotion.
So it's not a sort of inferential thing in our experience of music.
We're tempted at least to say that we directly experience on emotion.
And this is explained by the fact that, well,
expressiveness is a function of resemblance to a feeling rather than to a manifestation of a feeling in, say, behaviour or facial expression.
It accounts for this directness component.
And likewise, he thinks it explains why there are great limitations actually on music's capacity to express emotions.
So we tend to use actually rather general terms when we describe the kinds of emotions that a passage expresses.
So joy, melancholy grief, things like this.
It's an interesting question, how specific an emotion or an experience could a piece of music express something like disappointment?
For example, doesn't immediately spring to mind how a piece of music might express that.
But regardless of where we draw the line,
there does seem to be a certain limitation on the extent to which music can express the full specificity, the rich variety of emotions.
And Bud thinks that his view helps to explain that, because in his view, it's a resemblance to the feeling component of the emotion,
not a resemblance to, say, the content of the belief or thought associated with the emotion constitutive of the emotion or the content of the desire.
If a desire is a constituent of the emotion, it can only resemble it in certain respects, in the respect of its feeling.
And that explains why its capacity to express is limited in the ways that have been observed.
OK. So now a number of objections have been raised. Bud's view as well.
Of course, Roger Scruton adapting an objection that Nelson Goodman originally made to resemblance theories of pictorial representation.
Says while music resembles a great many other things more than it resembles emotions.
And the implication seems to be, as it is in Goodmans analagous objection, why then doesn't express those?
Why then doesn't it express those other things?
Now, I think Bud has an answer to this, although it might well need to be filled out, so it just raises another question, namely that on his view,
the view is not just that it expresses something in virtue of resembling a feeling, but because it's correct to hear it as resembling a feeling.
So I think he can give that as an answer to this objection.
But of course, that then does raise the question what makes it correct to hear it as resembling a feeling?
So you might want further clarification of that, Scruton also raises another point,
and that is that expression is a kind of success in art, successful expression, something that makes artworks aesthetically valuable.
And so preceding it is to become, as he puts it, aesthetically affected by the work of art.
And this doesn't seem to be the case for perceiving resemblances between sounds and feelings.
You could observe that. I guess there is a resemblance point of likeness between this piece of music and some feeling, but not care.
It might not be interesting. You might not be affected or be involved with it.
That, Scruton thinks, is a big problem for any such theory of expression.
If it's possible to perceive the property they've identified with expressiveness without feeling aesthetically involved with it,
then that counts against the claim very strongly that they've identified a property that's identical with expressiveness.
OK. Well, one transition or one variation on these resemblance there is is to say was not a resemblance to the emotion itself,
but to other kinds of manifestation of this emotion, in particular vocal or behavioural manifestations or expressions of this emotion in people.
There's something attractive about the idea that we should tie what it is for music to be expressive, to what it is for behaviour to express emotions.
And that is a theory of that kind is part of Peter Kibbitz theory of musical expression.
And so, in Kinney's view, at least in many cases,
for music to be expressive of sadness is for the music to resemble behavioural expressions of sadness.
And and this is an important qualification for us to be strongly inclined to hear the music as a kind of behaviour.
And I'll explain why he adds that qualification. In a moment.
But first of all. OK, well, we want to know what kinds of resemblance can there be between music on the one
hand and behavioural or vocal expressions of emotion in human beings on the other?
Well, you points, amongst other things, to the example of rhythm. So rhythm on Kibbie gives.
You can enable music to be expressive of emotions by resembling the speed of movements that express those emotions.
So fast moving rhythm can express excitement, excited emotions.
And that's in virtue of a resemblance between the speed of the rhythm and the speed of certain kinds of behavioural expressions of excitement,
movements in particular. Rhythm seems to be one example on give his view.
Another example is, again, the rising and falling of pitch.
So as we saw with Bud,
Kivi also appeals to the notion that increases in pitch and decrease and falling of pitch betoken an increase or decrease in energy.
And this makes them like movements in which energy is required to raise your limbs.
Or conversely, if you have droopy shoulders, posture,
hanging your head low in an expression of sadness that involves less energy, letting the gravity sort of work on you.
And that's why these sort of falling melodies can be expressive of sadness on Kevin's view, in many cases at least.
So apart from these examples, what does Kivi offer in support of this claim?
Well, he thinks that it provides a more unified account of expressive phenomena in general, not just in the arts, but in other areas.
So the first point he makes is that sad music is in the way he puts it, expressive of sadness, but does not necessarily express sadness.
So that, again, that distinction between what I put by saying sad music can express a kind of
emotion without necessarily expressing a particular occurrence of that emotion.
Cavey puts it by saying sad music is expressive of sadness without necessarily expressing sadness.
And he says, well, what happens in other cases where we have this, where we have something that is expressive of sadness but doesn't express sadness?
Kivi gives the example of St. Bernard's sad looking face dog's face, as big as we've put it, hangdog expression on it.
And he looks sad. He says it's quite obvious why the St. Bernard's face is expressive of sadness.
Namely, it resembles certain things that express sadness, namely human faces that express sadness.
So St. Bernard. Not necessarily sad and probably not expressing it by his expression ever, but nevertheless it's expressive of sadness.
And that's because of a resemblance to genuine expressions of sadness.
So if music is like that, then we have more unified account of expressive phenomena in general.
However, and this was the important qualification, resemblance to sad gestures, behaviour, so forth,
can't be enough because of the points that I mentioned with reference to Scruton derived from Goodman,
namely, music resembles loads of things that it does not express.
So he says what else is needed is that we're strongly inclined to hear it as a kind of behaviour or as an utterance or as a gesture.
So Kivi says it's a well-established fact that we have a natural tendency to animate things that we see or perceive.
St. Bernard's faith is a good example. Suppose it's already animate.
We're humanising it there. The Kivi gives other examples in which, for example, we might see a spoon as a person or a stick as a snake.
And he says not only is it obvious that we do this, they're quite good, obvious evolutionary advantages to doing this.
If you're just generally inclined to see things as animate,
then that gives you a better chance of getting away from dangerous things that are animate.
In the struggle for survival. So we have this general tendency anyway.
And he thinks there's independent evidence that we also animate our perceptions of music.
So, for example, we describe parts in polyphony as voices or polyphonic compositions as voices.
Themes in music are often called gestures. Fugues are called statements that are answered cetra.
So he thinks his account of expressiveness is of a piece with what we're obviously doing anyway in cases of music,
that we're if we're hearing it as behaviour and it resembles a certain kind of behaviour that expresses an emotion,
then that's what enables it to be expressive of that emotion.
Now, Scruton, again has various objections to theories of this kind and to Kivi in particular,
he attacked some of Kev's examples, such as the stock of movement.
I'm not sure if this is quite a fair criticism of what Kivi says, but scrutinise stresses that you have.
You can't talk about music literally moving. There's no literal resemblance between musical movement and bodily movement.
And part of the reason I don't think that's quite fair is that Kivi stresses the point of
resemblance is the amount of energy manifested in musical movement and in bodily movement.
Point of resemblance is not the movement. That's the energy involved.
But it's worth reading Scruton discussion in his book, The Aesthetics of Music. So on the back of your hand.
OK. So that's Kev's version of Resemblance Theory. Now, he doesn't think this is can explain all expressiveness in music.
He thinks we also have to appeal to conventional associations with emotions.
So he thinks the minor key. For example, it tends to express sad emotions.
And likewise, the major key to express cheerful, positive emotions.
And he doesn't think this can be explained by a resemblance between the minor key and behavioural expressions of emotions.
He thinks here we simply have to appeal to a conventional association that we have
established between certain features of music like the minor key and certain emotions.
And he has an account of how these conventional aspects and these resemblance aspects interact in a piece of music to create expressiveness.
But that's all I'll say about the convention. Theories of expressiveness.
The last one that I'd like to take a look at is Gerald Levinson's view.
Levinson essentially says in response to Kivi, you don't need resemblance to account for expressiveness.
All you need is that second part of Carvey's resemblance theory, namely that you can hear it as a piece of behaviour that expresses an emotion.
And more specifically, his in its most recent version.
His view is for a passage of music to be expressive of an emotion is for it's to be readily heard
in its proper context by listener experienced in the genre as an expression of that emotion.
So a bit similar to Hume's account of true critics.
It's done with reference to experienced listeners. Someone who knows about the genre and has a certain level of musical understanding and competence.
It's readily heard by such a person in its proper context as a behavioural expression, a gesture, for example.
Then that's what it is for. It's to be expressive of that kind of emotion.
So he and he has a certain story of what it is to hear something as a gesture, as an expression of an emotion.
He thinks that we have to hear music as gestures and in particular, we have to hear or imagine in the music a persona.
And he says this on the grounds that you can't have expression without an express her.
So if you're going to hear music as expression, you have to imagine at least a very indefinite persona within the music.
And so to the point of saying that you have to hear a gesture in the music is on
the grounds that the primary vehicle of expression is gesture broadly understood.
And so he thinks this view commits us to saying that we're hearing these things in the music or imagining them in the music.
Now, Levinson's argument for this view is rather long,
and it's partly based on an elimination of other theories and on account of the desirable features that theory of expressiveness should have.
And if you're interested in looking at this, the place to look to begin with is his paper musical expressiveness on the back of the hand out there.
One controversial feature of this view, of course, is whether it really gets the experience right.
So the objection is that competent listeners don't seem to at least always be imagining a persona in the music or a gesture in the music.
Seems like Levinson were right. The experience of hearing sadness and music would be a lot different than it is to involve imagining these personas.
Levinson's reply to that.
I'm not sure I entirely follow this, but his replies that one may not always notice or acknowledge what is presupposed by one's hearing or imagining.
So you hear the expression and the music that presupposes a persona.
Since an expression requires and express her. But of course, what's presupposed by what you imagine may not itself be noticed or acknowledge.
So Levinson says, I'd have to think about it a little bit more, but I'm not really sure that works or much more to the point.
I'm not really sure I understand it entirely.
OK, so these this is, I hope, sufficient to give you a flavour of this debate and quite how various are the theories that have been offered.
And as I say, I certainly have not presented an exhaustive account of them.
Other theories worth just mentioning are include Richard Vole Hymes theory of perception as as of expressiveness,
the perception of what he calls correspondences. And I've given references to you there and Goodmans theory and the family of theories that draw on
considerations about the nature of metaphore in order to clarify the nature of expressiveness.
So a claim often made is that when we say the music is sad, we're using a metaphor,
and that if we get clear on what metaphor is involved, then we can get clear on what musical expression involves.
As I say, I'm going to discuss those next term in my lectures on metaphor.
I'm not going to do that here, but I'd like to conclude by discussing a little bit about the value of expression.
So remember, perhaps in the first lecture on Plato, when you're talking about what it is that makes the arts valuable?
One of the alternatives that was mentioned was the possibility that it's the fact that they can express things
that other things can't or can express things in a particularly clear or vivid way that other things cannot.
And this is certainly one thing that has been offered to explain why music is so valuable is to appeal to its expressive power.
Now, Tolstoy, for example, held that music can infect us with the emotion.
I think that's the term he uses. It can cause us to feel the emotion that it expresses and by expressing feelings that are worth having.
And to the extent that they're worth having, then the expressiveness is valuable.
So that's why expressive music can be valuable music. It's because it can cause us to have experiences that are valuable experiences to have.
Now, Bud, who has a particularly subtle discussion of the value of expressiveness in values of art.
It says that, well, at least on Tolstoy's view, it seems like it's possible to get the valuable feeling without the work of art.
Because on Tolstoy's view, the artist felt at first created a medium in which to transmit it.
And then ideally, the audience then felt it.
But if it's possible to have the valuable feeling without the work of art, then explaining art's value in these terms implies that,
at least in principle, if not in practise, the work of art is dispensable.
The work of art is just an instrument to producing this feeling.
But moreover. In principle instrument because you could get the valuable feeling without the work of art and on Budd's view,
any adequate account of the value of works of art like pieces of music ought not to imply that if we could get that experience in some other way,
then we could get rid of the work of art and get it in the other way that we'd have no special reason to experience that work of art.
And it does seem that Tolstoy's version of the expression theory has that implication.
Another possibility is the specificity with which works of art can express emotions.
So sometimes in the literature on this, there's a passage from a letter by the composer Felix Mendelssohn,
in which he talks about pieces of music expressing feelings that are too definite for other things to express.
Music can express feelings of highly specific kinds.
And part of the motivation for this is just the thought that, well, there is a sense in which two works of art can express the same feeling.
Namely, they can both express sadness or melancholy. But these are, as I mentioned earlier, very, very general kinds.
It's not possible for two works to express the very same specific kind of sadness that the other does.
It would be very implausible to think so. The argument goes that the very same specific kind of sadness in one work could be expressed in another.
And some people add, furthermore, works of music can express things that language cannot, at least non poetic language cannot.
Now, Budd's comment on this is that at least if you,
by his account of resemblance at as the basis of expressiveness and resemblance
in particular to feeling abundant of emotion as the basis of his expressiveness,
then it doesn't seem to follow that two works of art, or even to be plausible, the two works of art can't express the same specific kind of emotions.
So not all aspects of a work of art are relevant to its resembling or cause it to resemble a on emotion or the emotion that it expresses.
So you might play a different work with a different instrument,
but you might have the kinds of resemblances that Budd's points out, even with, say, a different instrument, a different vehicle.
Otherwise, the falling and rising of pitch, for example, Bud's own view.
This is the third one on the handout. Is that part of the reason why expressiveness is valuable when it's valuable?
Is that music of that kind can enable us to experience either imaginatively or really the emotional states that it expresses in a peculiarly vivid,
satisfying and poignant form.
And what and what he means by that is in first place, we can use the music to imagine emotions much more vividly than we would be able to unaided.
So if we let our imaginings of the emotion be guided by the music, for example,
if we imagine the music itself as an emotion developing in various ways, then our imaginings can be much more vivid than they otherwise could be.
And so to music can present satisfying resolutions of emotional transitions.
Things like this can create a kind of intelligible drama as it develops.
And this can be very satisfying to have these aspects resolved in a satisfying way.
And interestingly, he also mentions that he also argues that we can explain the value of expressiveness,
in part by reference to the value of community. So the listener is realisation that the music experienced, that the emotion experienced, rather,
is not his alone, but is open to others, and indeed that this emotion has been made available by someone else.
Namely, the composer encourages a sense of community that our own private imaginings would lack.
And this is one main reason on his view. Why expression is valuable.
Thank you so much.