composer in the grip of an emotion during the process of composing.
Instead, a work of music is correctly said to express a certain emotion
E when and only when the contour or shape of the musical development
(melodic,harmonic,rhythmic,etc.)resemblesthecontourorshapeofthe
development of E in ordinary life. As Davies puts it,“the resemblance that
counts for musical expressiveness...is that between the music’stempor-
ally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behavior
associated with emotion.”^93 The theory is primarily cognitive in that this
relevant similarity in contour or shape is explicitly recognized by a suit-
ably attentive listener, but since this recognition takes place by way of
musicalexperience, the theory also incorporates a role for qualitative feel-
ing on the part of the listener. Against this theory, Jenefer Robinson has
objected that it has trouble accounting for complex overall patterns,
changes, and development in music, beyond the presence of simple con-
tours; a mere sequence or concatentation of contours is not enough to
explain our being moved by and absorbed in a piece of music, without
some account of how sequences of contours intelligibly“hang together”in
musical development.^94
Attempting to address this problem, Jerrold Levinson has argued that we
hear the development of musical contours as“hanging together”insofar as
we hear the development as theexpression ofa musical persona, that is, of an
implied agent who is the source of the arrangement of the contours.
“Expressing requires an expresser,”as Levinson puts it;“the listener is in
effect committed to hearing an agent in the music.”^95 This hearing of an
agent in the music further explains the value of musical experience.“The
music impresses us ultimately as if it were actually someone’s expression of
such-and-such emotion. This having occurred, it is open to us to identify with
that imagined act of expression and make it our own, to varying extents
rehearsing inwardly its gestures and experiencing through empathy its inner
aspect—all without losing touch with the specific twists and turns that make
(^93) Stephen Davies,“Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,”inContemporary
Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
pp. 179–91 at p. 181.
(^94) Jenefer Robinson,“Expression Theories,”inThe Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Music, eds. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 201– 11
at pp. 202–03.
(^95) Jerrold Levinson,Contemplating Art(Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 93.
Expression 105