has been done intentionally and attentivelywithinitiating motives–“not
something else, such as the composer, performer, or listener, or an imagined
personal in the music”^104 that has expressive and affective qualities in just
thisparticular way. Hence overall, while musical motives and contours and
theirinitialprovocations of aspect do matter to expressiveness, as do the
compositional processes that work with these motives, so too does the formal
quality of what results from compositional processes.^105
Mitchell Green has developed a general account of how expressive qual-
ities can be present in nonsentient objects, including works of art, and in
addition has suggested how such qualities can beintentionallyproduced in a
work. In general,“an object O possesses affective or experiential quality
E just in case O is a potential source of knowledge of E–either by showing
how E characteristically appears, how E characteristically behaves, or how
E characteristically feels.”^106 In particular, as psychological research has
shown, for listeners and viewers, aural phenomena and abstract painterly
phenomena canmatchemotions in virtue of suggesting particular locations
on three scales: intense/mild, pleasant/unpleasant, and dynamic/static.^107 For
example,“anger is intense, slightly unpleasant, and highly dynamic.”^108
Listeners or viewers might likewise characterize an experience of an object,
including a piece of absolute music or an abstract painting, as intense,
slightly unpleasant, and highly dynamic, and hence as angry. The showing
of qualities along these scales can take place in a variety of ways: by making
perceptible or showing the characteristic look or sound of an emotional state,
by demonstrating or giving evidence of having been made in an emotional
state, or by showing how an emotional state feels by representing someone or
something as in that state.^109 Importantly, the emotional states thus shown
are both objects of knowledge for attentive experiencersandpotential objects
of attention during compositional processes. That is, composers, painters,(^104) Saam Trivedi,“Music and Imagination,”inThe Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Music, ed. Gracyk and Kania, pp. 113–22 at p. 118.
(^105) For a general account of how absolute music can be both something generated by and
addressed expressively to subjectivityandan object of formal interest, where these two
aspects are bound up with one another, see Hegel’s analysis of absolute music in Part II
of hisAesthetics. See also Richard Eldridge,“Hegel on Music,”inHegel and the Arts, ed.
Stephen Houlgate (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 119–45.
(^106) Green,Self-Expression, p. 195. (^107) Ibid., pp. 201–02, 179.
(^108) Ibid., p 179. (^109) Ibid., pp. 194–95.
108 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art