form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 25objective aspect is only made objective by reflection. In the life-world we
don’t start with something objective, we start with music which has to be
bracketed so that the merely objective sounds come to the fore. There
could be no music if whatever is heard as music were not always already
part of a pre-theoretically available world of human significances.
By enjoining one to hear any sounds in the life-world as music, John
Cage revealed the derivative nature of the conception of music as involv-
ing the imbuing of sounds which are mere frequencies (but which also
have life-world significances) with significance. If we were not always
already able to hear something as music we could not reflexively extend
this ability to ambient noise. There is, then, an interplay between the
two notional sides, which makes them impossible to isolate from each
other, not least because intersubjective means of communication and
articulation are themselves both objective – they exist as marks and
frequencies in the world – and ‘subjective’, in that they have mean-
ing for subjects. The mystery which results from the question of how
objective aspects of the world can give rise to emotions results because
one has separated the inner and outer worlds a priori, rather than see-
ing how most, though possibly not all, emotions cannot be separated
from intentional relations to an already meaning-imbued world. Bran-
dom sums up the essential point here when he rejects the subject–object
split, maintaining that in all areas of human practice ‘The way we under-
stand and conceive what we are doing affects what weare,infact, doing’
(Brandom 2002 : 15 ). When we think we are ‘doing music’ this affects
what we are actually doing.
Kivy argues that emotions heard as expressive properties of music
occur in much more overwhelming ways in real life. He therefore asks
why, if the emotions we purportedly experience when hearing music
were as real as those in everyday life, we would deliberately wish to sub-
mit ourselves to emotions of sadness, etc. Consequently people are sup-
posedly not saddened by hearing sad music. The opposite case of joyous
music already makes his position questionable: don’t many people often
feel real joy when they hear such music, and employ music to change
their mood? I do: try Wagner’sMeistersingerprelude before embark-
ing on something you are apprehensive about. Kivy again gets the
phenomenology of listening to and performing music wrong because
he fails to discuss the differing kinds of contexts in which the ques-
tion arises. He also relies on a conception of emotions as states that
can be given a name, rather than as processes with complex shadings
and transitions that may depend on the particular means via which we