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The Aesthetic Appreciation of Music
Jerrold Levinson

This essay offers a sketch of what aesthetic appreciation of music fundamentally consists in,
underlining both why such engagement counts as aesthetic and why such engagement counts as
appreciation, and emphasizing the role of perception of gesture in the grasp of musical
expressiveness. The analysis is illustrated by a piece of chamber music of Gabriel Fauré. In the last
section of the essay I address some remarks of Roger Scruton on the connection between music and
dance, ones whose relevance to the appreciation of music is clear.

Appreciation and Related Notions

In what does the aesthetic appreciation of music consist? A useful answer to this question
will require, at a minimum, some indication of how both ‘appreciation’ and ‘aesthetic’
should be understood in this context. So first, what is meant by the appreciation of music,
and second, what is added by specifying that such appreciation is aesthetic?
The notion of appreciation is a complex one. To appreciate something arguably in-
volves, on the one hand, perceiving, cognizing, or otherwise experiencing it, where
such experience may involve the imagination, and on the other hand, deriving satisfac-
tion from it or regarding it positively. In other words, appreciating something implies
both having an adequate experience of the thing, one that qualifies as acquaintance with
it, and as a consequence of that experience, being pleased by or taking a favourable
view of it. Briefly, in appreciating something one is experiencing it in a way one finds
intrinsically rewarding.
Appreciation thus contrasts with a number of other relationships a listener might have
to music. It is, most obviously, distinct from merely perceiving some music, which does not
imply a positive reaction to it, and to merely regarding positively some music, which does not
imply experience of it. Appreciation is also distinct from evaluation per se—that is, the activ-
ity of assigning or trying to assign a definite value to music heard, because evaluation misses
out the essentially sympathetic tenor of appreciation, which seeks to avail itself of what-
ever value some music has to offer, rather than to arrive at a precise assessment of that
value.1 Appreciation is, further, distinct from simply taking pleasure in hearing music, since
that might come about without one’s really listening to the music, but merely because the
music served to relax one while one lent it only half an ear.
So much for appreciation. How, then, does aesthetic appreciation of music differ from
non-aesthetic appreciation of music? Well, heard music might be appreciated for its soothing

1 See S. Feagin, Reading with Feeling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1996).

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49 | Number 4 | October 2009 | pp. 415–425 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayp043
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effect, or for its suitability as a background to socializing, or for its aptness as an accompa-
niment to dancing, or for its therapeutic powers. These would all be ways of appreciating
music, but presumably not ways of appreciating music aesthetically. Why not? Because the
focus of appreciation is not the music itself, that is, the music’s sonorous appearance as
such, but rather the uses to which the music can be put, or the consequences of listening to it.
Aesthetic appreciation of music is appreciation of music for its hearable form and content,
rather than for its instrumentality in relation to external purposes.
But we must be careful here. Excluding from the aesthetic appreciation of music the
appreciation of music for external purposes that it happens to serve does not mean excluding
from the sphere of aesthetic appreciation all consideration of music’s internal purposes,
or in other words, of its inherent functionality in virtue of being music of a certain kind.
On the contrary, much music has as part of its basic conception the fulfilling of certain
functions, such as religious, patriotic, celebratory, or memorial ones, and has clearly
been designed with such functions in mind. In such cases, proper appreciation of the
music as music, and thus, aesthetic appreciation of it, must involve some attention to the
manner and degree to which the music, through its formal, aesthetic, and expressive
properties, answers to the aims integral to the kind of music in question.2 One might add
that music’s functional aptness can be considered an aspect of its form in the broad sense,
dealing as it does with a relation between an internal aim of the music and its form in the
narrow sense, that is, its musical structure, and that so considered, it is a perfectly appro-
priate object of aesthetic attention to music, conforming nicely to the most traditional
conception of that.
Let that suffice for the general notion of aesthetic appreciation in its application to mu-
sic. We must now briefly consider, before proceeding, how the aesthetic appreciation of
music stands to related notions such as taking an aesthetic attitude to music, aesthetically
attending to music, deriving aesthetic satisfaction from music, and having an aesthetic experi-
ence of music.3
Begin with the first of those. How should one characterize the aesthetic attitude, in the
sense of a frame of mind or mental set conducive to, or possibly even prerequisite for, aes-
thetic experience?4 The notion of the aesthetic attitude has deep roots in the aesthetic
theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, figuring prominently in the philosophi-
cal reflections of, among others, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Kant, and Schopenhauer. With-
out attempting to review that long history, we can simply enumerate some of the features
that theorists have traditionally ascribed to this attitude.

2 For further discussion, see S. Davies, ‘Aesthetic Judgments, Artworks, and Functional Beauty’, Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 56 (2006), pp. 224–241.
3 There is a fair amount of scepticism in the aesthetics literature as to whether any non-trivial specification of the
aesthetic attitude or of aesthetic experience is to be had, reaching as far as outright denial that there are any such
things. I will not join this debate here, but will simply assume that the extreme sceptical position is unwarranted.
4 One characterization of the aesthetic attitude along those lines runs as follows: ‘Traditionally, the aesthetic attitude is
defined as an attitude or state of mind that is entered into, voluntarily and consciously, by an individual, making that
individual receptive to having an aesthetic experience’ (D. Fenner, ‘Aesthetic Attitude’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia
of Aesthetics, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford U.P., 1998), p. 154).
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Foremost among these is the feature of disinterestedness, by which is meant the disengag-
ing or sidelining of purely personal and narrowly practical concerns, so as to allow full
engagement with the properties of the object perceived. A second feature stressed by some
theorists can be labelled object-directedness, and amounts to a disposition to dwell on the
object perceived for its own sake, to surrender oneself to contemplation or delectation of
it. A third feature often proposed is that of cognitive freedom, or inclination to engage in
imaginative activities of discovery, exploration, and connection-making with the object
perceived, without confining oneself to conventional ways of classifying or categorizing it;
the activities of perceiving-as, perceiving-in, perceiving metaphorically, and perceiving
under a concept, that Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Roger Scruton and others have
done so much to bring to our attention, figure here centrally. A fourth feature sometimes
proposed, which one might label interpretive openness, and which might justly be considered
an extension of the third, is a disposition to interpret, that is, to look for meaning, signifi-
cance, or symbolic import in the object perceived. Finally, a fifth feature commonly thought
of as central to the aesthetic attitude is that of emotional receptivity, or readiness to register
and respond to an object’s expressive dimension, to be alive to its human content and not
simply a passive admirer of its formal design or technical ingenuity.5
Note that there is no conflict between this last feature, emotional receptivity, and that of
disinterestedness, properly understood: disinterestedness entails the putting out of gear
and out of mind, as far as possible, of distracting personal or practical concerns, but it in no
way entails the deactivation or disengagement of one’s sympathetic or empathetic capacity,
one’s willingness to enter into the life, the body and soul, the blood and guts if necessary,
of the artistic object—whether painting, film, symphony, or play—with which one is
confronted.
Whether these five features are present in every instance of an ostensibly aesthetic at-
titude toward an object, and whether these features as a whole adequately define a distinc-
tive and identifiable state of mind, is not entirely clear, but let us assume that there is
something that answers, more or less, to such a characterization, and proceed to address
the other notions listed above in which the concept of the aesthetic is crucially invoked,
those of aesthetic attention, aesthetic satisfaction, and aesthetic experience. An attitude, we
may say, is roughly a disposition to think, feel, or react in a certain manner, in short, a
disposition to experience things in a certain way. So an aesthetic attitude is thus a specific
readiness for or inclination toward experience of a certain sort. As such an aesthetic at-
titude or frame of mind cannot by itself constitute aesthetic experience, but only prepare
and shape its occurrence. The substance of aesthetic experience, so to speak, must rather
consist in various mental activities or processes of thinking, feeling, and reacting, all of
which require, preliminarily, attention. So in order to arrive at an adequate conception of
aesthetic experience we must now investigate this crucial middle term, namely aesthetic
attention.

5 For various of these suggestions, see J. Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1960); M. Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1982); T. Leddy, ‘Practical George
and Aesthete Jerome Meet the Aesthetic Object’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 28 (1990), pp. 37–53; R. Stecker,
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
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I have elsewhere suggested that aesthetic attention is roughly attention directed to an
object’s form and content and to the relationship between them. That is to characterize
aesthetic attention in terms of what attention is focused on.6 Another suggestion is that aes-
thetic attention is attention to an object that is not guided by any pragmatic purpose, but is
instead aimed simply at having as full and adequate an experience of the object as possible.
That is, to characterize aesthetic attention in terms of what motivates the attention being paid.7
These two ways of characterizing aesthetic attention are not incompatible, and can profit-
ably be conjoined in most theoretical contexts. Either way, aesthetic satisfaction from music
can then be characterized straightforwardly as satisfaction deriving from aesthetic attention
to music.
That leaves as requiring clarification only the notion of an aesthetic experience of music.
Let us simply say that an experience of music is an aesthetic one when it involves aesthetic
attention to, and aesthetic satisfaction from, the music. Saying that, of course, makes it
automatic that aesthetic experience is positive experience, that is, experience that is desir-
able, valuable, or to be sought. Now though it is not entirely incoherent to speak of aes-
thetic experience that is neutral or negative, that is, either devoid of aesthetic satisfaction
or else involving aesthetic dissatisfaction, a virtue of taking the positive notion of aesthetic
experience to be, as it were, the default notion is that we can then roughly equate, on the
one hand, aesthetically appreciating music and, on the other hand, having an aesthetic experience
of music. And so that rough equation will be assumed here.8

Principal Elements of the Aesthetic Appreciation of Music

With those preliminary clarifications accomplished we are now in a position to address the
primary concern of this essay, namely what the main elements are in the aesthetic appre-
ciation of music, and in particular, what the role is in such appreciation of music’s affective
or expressive dimension and of the listener’s response to that dimension?
Assume, then, that aesthetic attention to music is non-pragmatically driven attention
to music focused on its form, content, and the relationship between the two; that this

6 See J. Levinson, ‘What Is Aesthetic Pleasure?’ in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1996) and
‘Pleasure, Aesthetic’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). ‘Pleasure in an object is
aesthetic when it derives from apprehension of and reflection on the object’s individual character and content, both
for itself and in relation to the structural base on which such character and content rests’ (ibid.). See also R. Eldridge,
‘Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 25 (1985), pp. 303–316.
7 See G. Kemp, ‘The Aesthetic Attitude’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 39 (1999), pp. 392–399.
8 Some have suggested that the keynote of aesthetic experience is that it is experience that is valued for its own sake:
see G. Iseminger, ‘Aesthetic Experience’, in J. Levinson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford U.P.,
2003); G. Iseminger, ‘The Aesthetic State of Mind’, M. Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the
Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005; Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art). Two experiences may thus
differ, even if they have the same perceiving or registering at their core, if in one case the perceiving or registering is
valued for its own sake, while in the other case it is not; in the first case, but not the second, one has aesthetic
experience. This conception of aesthetic experience is entirely compatible with that sketched in the text, but I choose
not to adopt it here because of its reliance on the somewhat obscure idea of valuing something for its own sake.
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normally gives rise to some measure of aesthetic satisfaction, as well as to a positive estima-
tion of the music in question; and that together such attention, satisfaction, and estimation
amount to aesthetic appreciation of the music.
So apart from appreciation of music’s expressiveness, which will be our main concern
in what follows, what does the aesthetic appreciation of music involve? Or otherwise put,
to what does it attend? Here I can only lamely follow in the footsteps of the many distin-
guished musical commentators who have so ably charted this terrain—Aaron Copland,
Leonard Bernstein, Anthony Hopkins, Peter Kivy, and Roger Scruton, to name just a
few—and I will be mercifully brief.
First, there is appreciation of musical form, on the small and the large scale. On the small
scale, there is appreciation of melody, or movement in pitch space, involving awareness of
the components of melody, such as motifs and phrases. Next, though not really dissociable
from the preceding, there is appreciation of rhythm, the pattern of duration of tones and
distribution of accents. Next, there is the appreciation of harmony, or the quality of different
pitches sounding together, yielding intervals and chords, and the appreciation when present
of polyphony, or the simultaneous sounding of distinct melodies or melodic strands.
Completing this quick survey of the basic elements of music from the appreciative point of
view, there is appreciation of timbre or tone colour, the distinctive sound quality imparted to
music by instruments of particular kinds, and the appreciation of dynamics, or variations of
loud and soft over time. Awareness of the local unfolding of music in these respects, requiring
little more than moment-to-moment attention to music’s temporal evolution, constitutes the
core of musical appreciation on a concatenationist9 view of music. On the large scale, appre-
ciation of musical form includes awareness of melodic repetitions, of harmonic scheme and
harmonic rhythm, of sonata or other sectional form, of global balances and symmetries, and
constitutes the core of musical appreciation on an architectonicist10 view of music.11
So much for musical form as such. The next aspect of music that falls within the scope
of musical appreciation is musical motion or movement, which is, in complex ways, generated
for the most part by small-scale musical form. When we hear music as music we do not
simply hear changes in the basic musical parameters of melody, rhythm, harmony, dynam-
ics, and timbre. Rather, in virtue of such changes, we hear motion or movement, of an
imaginary or perhaps metaphorical sort, in music: we hear music rising, falling, soaring,
plunging, expanding, shrinking, advancing, retreating, rushing, lingering, trudging, leaping,

9 See J. Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1998).
10 See P. Kivy, Music Alone (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1990).
11 For debate on the pros and cons of a concatenationist versus an architectonicist view of musical understanding, see P.
Kivy, ‘Music in Memory and Music in the Moment’, in New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2001);
J. Levinson, ‘Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music’, Revue International de Philosophie, vol.
60 (2006), pp. 505–514. The latter references a number of recent studies in cognitive psychology of music, by E. Bigand,
B.Tillmann, P. Lalitte et al., that offer significant empirical support for a concatenationist model of musical comprehension.
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swelling, subsiding, and so on.12 It is scarcely possible to overestimate the importance of
the phenomenon of musical movement, without which much else of interest in music
would simply evaporate. Heard musical movement is the scaffolding for almost all that
engages us in music beyond the level of the basic parameters.13
This brings us to the next, intimately related, aspect of music that must figure in aes-
thetic appreciation of it, namely the impression music affords more broadly of agency, in
virtue of the movement we hear in it. This aspect of music can be epitomized under the
rubric of gesture. It is in virtue of musical movement of various kinds that music is heard as
pervaded by gestures of various sorts, such as sighing, caressing, threatening, questioning,
inviting, despairing, or rejoicing ones, and so as, in effect, acting or behaving in those
ways.14
Gesture in music serves as the crucial middle term between musical movement and
musical expression. It is because music often presents the appearance of gestures of various
sorts that it can be heard, by analogy with the role of physical gesture in behavioural
expression of emotion, as if it were itself an expression of emotion. Music’s readily lending
itself to such hearing—to hearing as expression—is at base precisely what music’s expres-
siveness consists in.
If music did not appear to move in a certain manner it could not appear to us as gestur-
ing in a certain manner, say, angrily; and if it did not appear to us as gesturing in that man-
ner, it would not readily be heard by us as if it were expressing anger, and hence, would not
be expressive of anger. In short, the picture is something like this: small-scale form in mu-
sic gives rise to musical motion of specific character; musical motion, together with other,
e.g. harmonic, features of music, gives rise to musical gesture; and musical gesture gives
rise to musical expressiveness, most notably emotional expressiveness.
Having arrived at the dimension of the aesthetic appreciation of music which is my main
concern here, namely, music’s expressiveness, I will shortly try to deepen our understand-
ing of what that involves. But before proceeding I briefly take note of three other aspects
that music may present for aesthetic appreciation, apart from those of form, motion, ges-
ture, and expressiveness.
One is that of non-expressive aesthetic qualities that music can present, which qualities
in the main supervene, as do expressive qualities, on its basic musical properties, those

12 For valuable discussion of the phenomenon of musical movement, see S. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1994); M. Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London: Penguin, 1995); and
R. Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997). Important earlier discussions include E. Gurney, The
Power of Sound (New York: Basic Books, 1966 [1880]); S. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953); and
D. Ferguson, Music as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960).
13 For different views on the nature and status of the motion heard in music, see S. Davies, Musical Meaning and
Expression (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1994); Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music; Budd, Values of Art, and most recently, the
enlightening exchange consisting of M. Budd, ‘Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors’, British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 43 (2003), pp. 209–223 and R. Scruton, ‘Musical Movement: A Reply to Budd’, British Journal of
Aesthetics, vol. 44 (2004), pp. 184–187.
14 See J. Levinson, ‘Sound, Gesture, Space and the Expression of Emotion in Music’, and ‘Musical Expressiveness as
Hearability-as-Expression’, both in Contemplating Art (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006). By ‘gesture’ is meant not only
gesture narrowly speaking, but facial expression, posture, gait, stance, and bearing.
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enumerated earlier under the heading of small-scale musical form. Non-expressive aes-
thetic qualities include higher-order perceptual qualities such as grace, delicacy, charm,
humour, menace, mystery, and so on, which do not, strictly speaking, connote psychologi-
cal states capable of outward expression, and so are not a part of expressiveness per se, but
which qualities clearly constitute an important part of the interest and appeal of music for
a listener.15
Second is that of narrative-dramatic content, exhibited by much if not all music, which presup-
poses content at the level of gesture and expression but goes beyond that, and which operates
over a more extended timescale, as befits meaning on the order of a psychological-emotional
tale, either recounted or enacted.16
Three is that of representational content, the sort of content exhibited most obviously by
programme music, though not restricted to that genre, whereby music, through its form,
virtual motion, and expressive colouration, succeeds in conveying to a receptive listener
an audible image of some object, person or event, a sonic appearance in which in which
such a thing can be aptly heard.17
Note that even though we can to an extent discuss separately the aspects of music on
which musical appreciation focuses, and have, of course, just done so, two points should
not be lost sight of. First, there are close, and in some cases conceptual, connections among
such aspects, so that even in thought these aspects are not entirely separable. Second, in the
actual experience of music these aspects are normally heard together, as fused with one
another, with higher-order such aspects, such as emotional expressiveness, heard as inher-
ing in and emerging out of lower-order ones, such as melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic
character.
Note also, as many writers on this subject have affirmed, that perceiving emotional ex-
pressiveness in music does not require feeling the corresponding emotion while listening,
or perhaps any emotion at all.18 What it normally does require, or so I have repeatedly
urged, is hearing the music as an expression of that emotion, or imagining the music to be an
expression of that emotion, or at the least, being disposed to so hear or so imagine.19 Nev-
ertheless, the aesthetic appreciation of music ideally involves not merely perceiving, recog-
nizing, or remarking the expressiveness of music, whatever the mechanism of that may be,
but responding emotionally to that expressiveness, whether empathetically, sympathetically,
antipathetically, or in some combination of those ways. Being moved in some manner by

15 For further distinctions and elaborations, see J. Levinson, ‘What Are Aesthetic Properties?’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society Supplement, vol. 78 (2005), pp. 211–227.
16 See F. Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 10 (1988), pp. 56–73 and J. Levinson, ‘Music as Narrative
and Music as Drama’, Mind and Language, vol. 19 (2004), pp. 428–441.
17 See P. Kivy, Sound and Semblance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1984).
18 See, among others, P. Kivy, Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1989); M. Budd, Music and the Emotions.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression.
19 See J. Levinson, ‘Music and Negative Emotion’ and ‘Hope in the Hebrides’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell U.P., 1990; , J. Levinson, ‘Musical Expressiveness’, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics; J. Levinson, ‘Sound,
Gesture, Space and the Expression of Emotion in Music’ and ‘Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression’
in Contemplating Art (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006).
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emotionally expressive music, at least on some occasions of listening, is arguably a sine qua
non of fully appreciating it.

Gabriel Fauré, Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 15, First Movement

I now offer a very selective tour of a movement from a piece of chamber music by Gabriel
Fauré, underlining its salient expressive moments and the musical motions and gestures
that importantly underlie that expressiveness. It goes without saying that an aesthetic ap-
preciation of this music requires sensitivity to such expressiveness, and to the motions,
gestures, and other musical features that are its foundation. The movement, marked allegro
molto moderato, exhibits a rather free, late-Romantic sonata form. The principal theme (A),
announced boldly by the strings with syncopated interjections from the piano, is character-
ized by a noble and restrained passion. After the full statement of theme A there is a climax
at measure 12, leading to a more relaxed second statement, an octave higher in the strings
and with less emphatic, more florid piano accompaniment. The second theme (B), at mea-
sure 37, has a contrasting character, though not sharply so, that can be characterized as
flowing and dreamy. The development might be said to commence around measure 48,
after a full statement of theme B. At measure 72 the principal theme undergoes transfor-
mation into a gentler form, a transformation reinforced by an added motif in triplet rhythm
which imparts a more supple feeling to the music. For the next fifty measures or so of this
leisurely development section the four instruments dialogue at turns in a gentle and wistful
manner, featuring mild variants of the A and B themes. The character changes somewhat at
measure 135, with the arrival of a passage with prominent pizzicati, leading to a second
climax with ascending octaves and tremolo strings at measures 152–157, which in turn
announces the recapitulation.
Throughout the largely tranquil middle section of this movement one is aware of the
noble passion of theme A ready to erupt anew, as it finally does at the recapitulation at
measure 158, a frisson-inducing moment, at least for this listener. Theme B returns only
returns at measure 194, with a shift to C major, in which key the music remains until the
end, featuring unusually gentle reminiscences of the principal theme beginning at measure
218, and capped off by six final measures of untroubled tonic harmony, devoid of melody.
I single out three points of special interest regarding the appreciation of the expressive
aspect of this music by an attuned listener. First, the sense of visceral excitement as the
music rises in pitch and volume, and whenever passages with strong rhythmic accents suc-
ceed more evenly flowing ones. Second, the peculiarly satisfying emotion, afforded by so-
nata form and other large-scale musical forms, of homecoming—the feeling of returning
to and regaining one’s foyer—a feeling that accompanies the restatement of the move-
ment’s principal theme in the original key. Third, the singular spiritual elation at the end of
the movement, and particularly its closing passages, which bring an unexpected shift from
minor to major. In each of these responses to the music the implication of movement heard
in the music is fairly evident, as the terms ‘rise’, ‘return’, ‘shift’ and ‘homecoming’ em-
ployed in the preceding description would suggest. One also has the impression, almost
throughout, of a kind of respiration, a musical breathing in and out, as the music rises and
falls, strengthens and subsides, inflates and deflates, but in a far from mechanical manner.
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And needless to say, a sense of the music as in motion is vividly implicated in such an im-
pression.
Three further observations on motion in music. First, one might say of certain musi-
cal motions that they act more or less directly to express—and potentially, to arouse—
emotion, through the expressive gestures that they partly constitute, and that this action
operates on the small scale, without connection to surrounding musical context. This
would be the case, for example, of a musical motion evoking the gesture of a vigorously
shaken fist, inducing one in turn to hear in that an access of anger. By contrast, one might
say of certain other musical motions, for example, the thematic-harmonic return at the
beginning of the recapitulation of a sonata movement, that they act indirectly to ex-
press—and potentially, to arouse—emotion, and that this action operates on the large
scale, as a function in part of the surrounding musical context, of which the practiced
listener will have a background awareness, even if the effect of that action is experi-
enced, as in the other case, in the immediate.
Second, it cannot be without importance that in listening to music one is often prompt-
ed to bodily movement, in corporeal echo or sympathetic vibration with what one is hearing,
the most adequate and satisfying form of which is, of course, dancing, as Scruton has justly
emphasized. Whether it is the head, the feet, the arms, the shoulders, or the hips that are
thus activated, what could testify in clearer fashion that there is in music movement of some
sort, to which it is almost impossible to keep oneself from responding, except by an artifi-
cial effort dictated most often by social constraints. And where there is heard movement,
heard gesture and heard action are often to be heard as well, and thus ultimately, emo-
tional expression.
Third, it cannot be without importance that the state or condition which consists in be-
ing moved by music—whereby a psychic motion, so to speak, is produced in us—and the
state or condition which consists in being made to move by music—whereby a physical motion
is produced in us—are closely linked. And this to such an extent that the former almost
never occurs without the latter, whether that be only in the form of a frisson running down
the spine, a sigh escaping from the chest, or a noticeable rise in heart beat. Without a
doubt, motion and emotion in music are indissociably intertwined, and the aesthetic ap-
preciation of music is necessarily centrally focused on both.

The Connection of Music and Dance

In this last section I briefly explore the special connection between music and dance, and
in particular, that which has been held to obtain by Roger Scruton between the under-
standing of music and the impulse to respond to music by dancing.20 I first recall some of
Scruton’s most pertinent observations on this score.21
In dance, Scruton affirms, gesture ‘moves of its own accord and unimpeded to its goal’.
But in music, gesture enjoys even greater freedom, ‘which excites us beyond anything we

20 I note that I have engaged with other issues in Scruton’s Aesthetics of Music in my critical notice of it; see J. Levinson,
Review of Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Philosophical Review, vol. 109 (2000), pp. 608–614.
21 All page references in parentheses are to Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music .
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can encounter in our own bodily movement’ (p. 340) The ancient Greeks, notes Scruton,
‘thought of music as something in which we join’ (p. 355). ‘When someone dances to
music, he responds to the way it sounds^.^.^. but he would be dancing to the music only if
his movements express his attention to the music. ‘Dancing to’ is the name of an aesthetic
response’ (p. 356). Scruton concludes that we should see the response of the attuned lis-
tener to music ‘as a kind of latent dancing—a sublimated desire to “move with” the music,
and so to focus on its moving forms’ (p. 357).
Put more prosaically, Scruton’s points about the music/dance connection seem to be
these. First, that musical gesture is somehow both less constrained and more potent than choreo-
graphic gesture. Second, dancing to music heard, and not merely as a result of music heard,
constitutes an aesthetic response to music, one that connotes and embodies some measure
of musical understanding. Three, apart from the impulse to actual dance which music heard
with understanding may inspire, musical understanding is itself essentially a kind of latent
dancing, whereby one moves with musical movement, but on a psychic or imaginary plane.
I recall these three points not so much to dispute them but because I find them
insightful and more or less on the mark. I nevertheless raise questions for each, with the
aim of suggesting modifications or qualifications that would render them more wholly
acceptable.
1. The freedom and power of musical gesture as opposed to bodily gesture. My questions
here are these: First, freer in relation to what? Second, more powerful in what respect?
We must ask whether the sphere of bodily gesture is really more limited than that of
tonal gesture. One might think it was well the reverse, given that tonal space, with its fixed
scales and standard rhythmic divisions by twos and threes, is not a continuum, whereas the
space of bodily movement, not being antecedently partitioned in that manner, effectively
is. And though it is true that there are clearly physical constraints on the sorts of motions,
configurations, and gyrations of which the human body is capable, whether within the
sphere of dance or outside of it, there are also physical constraints on the production and
reception of sounds by creatures such as us.
And is it really the case that musical gesture is invariably more powerful, more capable
of exciting us, than bodily gesture, at least of certain sorts, or in certain contexts? The
question is complicated by the fact that bodily gesture, including that comprised within
dance, has a more immediate and transparent significance than that which music presents:
the fist that is shaken in one’s face, the traveller collapsing of exhaustion at one’s feet, the
leap in air in defiance of gravity, the outstretched hand that invites an intimate uptake, are
hardly wanting in power, and are unmistakable in their import. Corporeal gesture is all the
more potent the smaller the distance at which one confronts it, as in the theatre if lucky
enough to have a seat close to the stage. And dance gestures observed that one emulates in
one’s own body have an effect even more pronounced on one’s mental state.
What, then, distinguishes musical gesture from bodily gesture, if not so much its greater
freedom or greater power? I would suggest that it is rather its greater subtlety and finesse.
That is to say, the nuances of musical gesture that we are able to discern, and to which we
can and do respond differentially, are notably finer, or finer-grained, than those of bodily,
including terpsichorean, gesture. And this leads, in many cases, to an experience that is
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richer and more complex than that to be had from responding, however sympathetically, to
observed bodily gesture. This is, of course, not a new suggestion; versions of it are to be
found in Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer, Gurney, Langer, and other theorists of musical
meaning.
2. The signalling or manifesting of musical understanding through a dancing response. My
question here is this: Should we not worry, on the one hand, that a given dancing response
to music heard may be too coarse to answer to all the gestural-kinetic-dynamic features of
the music? A dancing response might indicate some sort of grasp of the music’s grosser
aspect, but is not likely to signify a full comprehension of the music as the distinct indi-
vidual it is. And should one not equally worry, on the other hand, that a given dancing re-
sponse to music heard may be too elaborate or overdeveloped in relation to music that provokes
it, displaying features that do not correspond to the musical motions registered but going
beyond them, taking off from them and using them merely as a springboard? In such cases,
in other words, there is more, or extraneous, matter in the dance than is to be found in the
motional dimension of the music.
3. The understanding of music as itself a kind of latent dancing. This is a intriguing sugges-
tion, but once again, it prompts a doubt. Is the idea of ‘dancingly inwardly’ without actu-
ally moving, when one attends to music’s movement comprehendingly, anything more than
an extravagant metaphor for the familiar perceptual-cum-imaginative activity often called
following music? One might agree, but then note that the idea of following music is itself
irreducibly, if less blatantly, metaphorical. Fair enough, but at least its scope seems to me
larger than, and more adequate to a listener’s musical comprehension generally, than that
of inwardly dancing to music. In any event, as Scruton would be the first to insist, though
sober philosophical analysts may be tempted, in the interests of clarity and truth, to escape
the pull of metaphor, its hold on us is deep: if repressed in one place, it seems only to surge
up irrepressibly in another.

Jerrold Levinson
University of Maryland
august@umd.edu