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

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain how representations are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful.

Cet essai propose une esquisse de ce en quoi consiste fondamentalement l’appréciation esthétique de la musique, soulignant à la fois pourquoi un tel engagement compte comme esthétique et pourquoi il compte comme appréciation, et mettant en avant le rôle de la perception du geste dans la saisie de l’expressivité musicale. L’analyse est illustrée par une pièce de musique de chambre de Gabriel Fauré. Dans la dernière section, je fais écho à quelques remarques de Roger Scruton sur la connexion entre musique et dance, dont la pertinence est évidente pour l’appréciation de la musique.

In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845.