24 music, philosophy, and modernity
music ‘arouses’ emotions.^6 It seems obvious to me that there is no gen-
eral answer to this question. Some people may become unbearably sad
when they hear the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth, others may hear
it as sad, but be more interested in its structural features. If they heard
it with no emotional awareness at all it may, though, be worth asking if
they could be said to be hearing it as music. The question is a norma-
tive one, but that does not mean that the claim that they are failing to
hear it as music could not legitimately be made. The main point is that
nothing is gained by advancing a general philosophical theory which
ends up attempting to tell people that they don’t really feel what they
may actually feel. Once one drops the idea of a subject confronted with
an object called music, and sees the issue in such a way that subjects
are affected by their relations to the object, and vice versa, this whole
debate starts to look redundant. Why can there not be an indefinite
number of ways in which people relate to music? The phenomenology
of these ways is an important topic of discussion, but the participants
in the analytical debate still seem largely unaware of the existence of
phenomenology. The point Kivy should be making is made by Merleau-
Ponty ( 1945 ), who rejects the objectifying language of perceived prop-
erties in favour of the idea that the perceived world, including music, is
already full of meanings. These are of a kind which cannot be reduced
to being ‘perceived properties’ because what theyaredepends both on
the context in which they are encountered and on those encountering
them.
The subjective need for expressive means is, then, itself inseparable
( 1 ) from the repertoire of possible means (a repertoire to which the
subject can add), ( 2 ) from the objective possibilities offered by those
means, and ( 3 ) from the need for both intersubjective, and individual,
acknowledgement of the value of such means. If subjects are thought
of as always already in a world to which they relate in affective ways, the
‘objective’ world affects the subject’s emotions: hence, of course, one of
the roles of music. Subjects can, though, in turn, use objects to articulate
their emotions, so changing the nature of the objects, as in the case of
the sounds in music, which are something else when heard as music,
rather than as mere noise. However, the important point concerning
what can be understood both as a series of noises and as music is that the
6 This chapter was initially written before Ridley ( 2004 ), in an admirable act of self-criticism,
announced his rejection of this whole approach. Those requiring more detailed argu-
ments against the analytical approach are referred to Ridley’s outstanding volume.