6 Expression

I have argued that music is not a representational art, since it has no narrative
content. It will at once be said that the meaning of a work of art is never reducible
to its narrative content in any case. Figurative paintings and novels are
representations: but their significance does not reside merely in the story, which
might have been told in other and less artistic ways—indeed, in ways that are
artistically meaningless. (Think of the difference between one of Hesiod's
narratives of the gods, and the equally informative entry in a dictionary of
mythology.) Even a work of belles-lettres, which feeds us with information, means
something more than information.

Hence there arises the belief—expressed in many ways—that works of art have
an 'aesthetic' meaning over and above their representational content. Following
Croce, it is normal to use the term 'expression' as a name for this aesthetic
meaning. Maybe there is more to aesthetic meaning than expression. But a
theory of expression would explain the impact of art, and its place in the lives of
moral beings like us.

The present chapter is largely negative: the purpose is first to introduce the
concept of musical expression, and secondly to clear the ground for the theory of
content developed in Chapters 10 and 11 .

The Term 'Expression'

The term 'expression' has been used to denote several features of works of art,
only one of which concerns me. The term figures prominently in eighteenth-
century aesthetics; but its centrality is due to the distinction, made categorically
for the first time by Croce, 1 between expression and representation. The
distinction has been taken up by almost every subsequent writer in the field. But
it is a distinction made at the theoretical level and aesthetic theories are as
various as their authors. We should not assume, therefore, that it is one
distinction, or that we can understand what a writer means by it in advance of his
arguments.

In particular, we should not assume that 'expression' always denotes a relation

between a work of art and a state of mind. It is natural to use the term in this
way; but because the term is so frequently made to bear the full burden of
aesthetic meaning, philosophers have extended its range. Nelson Goodman, for
example, whose radical nominalism provides him with a short cut to a complete
theory of aesthetic meaning, argues that works of art can express any property
(or 'predicate'). 2 A work might express sadness, joy, or adoration. But it can also
express blueness, solidity—maybe even grueness. For Goodman, a work of art
expresses P by 'metaphorically exemplifying' the predicate 'P'. This intriguing
suggestion has given rise to considerable controversy. But an example will help us
to see the point of it. Consider the lovely moonlight sequence from Smetana's
'Vltava' (Ex. 6.1). This is not a representation of the Vltava in the moonlight, for
reasons that I have already given. But it wears a certain expression, and
predicates like 'shining', 'silken', 'shimmering' suggest themselves as an apt
description of it. It is fairly obvious that these predicates are applied
metaphorically; it is Goodman's contention that the music also exemplifies them,
in the way that a tailor's sample exemplifies a pattern. It does not seem strained
to suggest that Smetana's music expresses the shining and silken qualities that we
hear in it, just as the opening chords of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in G
major, Op. 58, express a tranquil gratitude. Smetana's music is not literally shining
or silken. But its expressive power is revealed in its ability to compel these
metaphors from us, and to persuade us that they fit exactly. Of course, it is a
mystery that they fit. But the mystery is immovable. Every metaphor both
demands an explanation and also refuses it, since an explanation would change it
from a metaphor to a literal truth, and thereby destroy its meaning. The mystery
therefore lies equally in my description of the Beethoven.

The burden of Goodman's theory does not lie in the claim that aesthetic meaning
is identified through metaphors: this, I shall argue, is true. Rather, it lies in the
theory of exemplification, according to which we learn from works of art in
something like the way we learn from colour charts. In opposition to the Kantian
tradition, which explicitly distinguishes aesthetic from cognitive interests,
Goodman assimilates them. And this assimilation forms the background to his
generalized semantic theory of art, of which his concept of expression forms a
part.Goodman's approach has considerable appeal—not least because it promises
a method for identifying the content of works of art. One critic 3 has relied upon
it in order to attribute the most adventurous metaphysical meanings to various
works of Beethoven, largely because he finds himself using complex Heideggerian
metaphors when describing them. The promise, however, is illusory. Nothing that
Goodman says enables us to determine when a work of art exemplifies the
predicates that we metaphorically apply to it. And, as a licence to elevate every
metaphorical description of a work into a revelation of its meaning, the theory
does a disservice to criticism.

I shall return to Goodman, whom I mention here only because of the broad
domain that he ascribes to the relation of expression. Other philosophers restrict
the domain to states of mind, either treating works of art as expressions of
emotion, or, like Croce, inventing a special mental category as the subject-matter
of art. Croce believed that works of art express 'intuitions'—a term that he took
from Kant, and to which he gave sense, like Kant, through a distinction between
intuition and concept. An intuition, for Croce, is a preconceptual mental
particular, an apprehension of reality in its uniqueness. About intuitions as they
are in themselves nothing can be said: to describe is to generalize, and so to
replace intuition by concept. But intuitions can be communicated by expressing
them in artistic form. The uniqueness of the work of art is then explained by the
uniqueness of the intuition that is expressed by it: these two forms of uniqueness
are one and the same phenomenon, seen now from within, now from without.

Having launched himself on this path, Croce has no difficulty in proceeding to his
desired conclusions: first, that the meaning of a work of art can be captured in no
other way, since it resides in this particular work, and is understood through this
particular experience (the intuition). Secondly, that form and content are
inseparable, since each intuition corresponds to one and only one expression.
Thirdly, that no two works of art mean the same thing. And finally that the
interest in a work of art is an interest in the work itself, for its own sake, and not
as a means to an end. Although I am interested in a work on account of the
intuition that it expresses, this intuition is not something separable from the
work, and not something to which the work is a means. Hence art is an end in
itself, and each work of art is appreciated as the unique individual that it is. Every
work has a meaning; but no work can be severed from its meaning, and no
concepts can capture what it means. Aesthetic meaning is real but ineffable. To
attempt to make it effable, is to reduce expression to representation, and
therefore to lose sight of the essence of art.Three important ideas remain with us,
as the legacy of Croce's Aesthetic:

1 The distinction between representation and expression.

2 The term 'express'—with its implication that artistic meaning is to be

compared with the communication of our states of mind.

3 The suggestion, which tends in an opposite direction, that the meaning of

a work of art is, after all, ineffable, and in any case available only through its
particular expression in the work of art.

(2) suggests that aesthetic meaning is a relation; (3) suggests that it is not. A
similar tension seems to arise in other theories of expression, and one merit of
Croce's account is that it brings the tension so vividly to the surface, forcing us to
confront the question whether expression really is a relation, and if so, what are
its terms?

Elementary Errors

There are three theories of expression which are so evidently erroneous that it
would be pointless to refute them, were it not for the fact that all three have
been advocated in recent literature. I shall therefore quickly dispose of them, for
clarity's sake.

1. The biographical theory. According to this view, a work of art expresses a state
of mind because the artist 'puts his state of mind into' the work. In understanding
the product, we recuperate the mental state that went into making it.
In everyday life we use the verb 'to express' in two quite different ways: to refer
to the revelation of a mental state in behaviour, and to describe a particular kind
of action, in which a person does not merely reveal his mental state, but also
draws attention to it. The first case is sometimes called 'evincing'; 4 it is
something that we share with the animals, and has nothing to do with artistic
expression. The second case is more interesting, since it looks very like a case of
meaning something. You might even propose to analyse it in the manner of Grice:
5 in terms of the intention to communicate something through the recognition of
intention.

No theory of expression will be adequate that does not make the connection
between artistic expression and the expression of feeling in everyday life. For how
else do we understand this word, if we break the connection with its central use?
Nevertheless, we should not attribute the expressive content of a work to the
artist who created it. Mozart was deeply unhappy when he wrote the 'Jupiter'
Symphony, K. 551; but what higher expressionof joy than the last movement of
that work? Mozart disappears behind his work, as every artist must disappear
when the work is judged aesthetically. What we find in the 'Jupiter' symphony we
find in it, without enquiring into the biography of its composer.

It does not follow that we are indifferent to the composer's intentions. On the
contrary: works of art are saturated with human intention, and are understood as
intricately purposeful. But the intention is revealed in the work, and is sealed off
from the artist's biography. If we are to create a bridge to the artist's real
emotions, it will be possible only when we have first understood the work in its
own terms, as containing its expression. 6

2. The evocation theory. Turning away from the artist, one may attend instead to
the audience, and identify the emotion expressed by a work with an emotion
induced in the listener. Hence someone may argue that to say that the Mozart
Masonic Funeral Music, K. 477, expresses grief is to say that I feel, or ought to
feel, or would ideally feel, grief in response to it. (The very real distinctions
between those ways of formulating the theory do not matter for present
purposes.)
Again the theory has a point. For if we did not respond in some way to works of
art, why should we trouble to describe them in these terms: as expressive,
moving, troubling, and so on? Surely, the 'recognition of expression' in art is not
the dispassionate diagnosis of another person's feeling, but involves a
sympathetic response to it. But that shows precisely what is wrong with the
evocation theory. To respond sympathetically to grief is not to feel grief:
sympathy has a logic of its own, and does not imitate its object. Moreover, how
can I respond sympathetically to the grief in the Masonic Funeral Music if I do not
attribute grief to the music? That question shows the evocation theory to be
incoherent.

It is important to distinguish the meaning of a work of art from its associations.

We do not always do this, since we are not always concerned to distinguish the
meaning of a work from its meaning for me. Nevertheless, to say that a work of
music is associated for me with certain feelings, experiences, memories, etc., is to
say nothing about its musical character. Expression, by contrast, belongs to the
aesthetic character of a work of art if anything does. And this is borne out by an
interesting distinction: you can appreciate theexpression of a work only by
attending to it, and hearing the emotion in it. Turn your attention away and the
experience vanishes. But you can appreciate the associations of a work of art long
after you have shut your mind to it. They are 'triggered' by the aesthetic
experience, but linger beyond it.

Sometimes an association seems to fuse with the aesthetic experience. When you
hear the opening of Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony you are likely to think of
the English landscape: and this thought is one in which the uncritical listener
might wallow unscrupulously, since it is the occasion of so many comfortable
emotions. For such a listener, the music is an excuse for his own emotion, a
means to reverie. A more critical listener may also be reminded of the English
landscape: but he will think of it only in so far as the thought involves attention to
the music. The evocation fuses with the musical experience, and association then
becomes expression. This passage from evocation to expression lends force to
Goodman's idea, that any property, and not just states of mind, can be expressed
by a work of art. For certainly, there are no obvious limits to what a work of art
may evoke, and if evocation can pass into meaning, meaning too should not be
limited.

The contrast between evocation and expression can be observed in critical

discourse. The critic for whom the evocation of the English landscape is part of
the expressive content of Vaughan Williams's movement will 'write the meaning
into' the work. He will show how the precise character of the evocation is
determined by the music, and can be understood only through attention to the
music. Those pastoral horn chords, for instance, calling from far away, with the
seventh sounded in the bass, suggesting the flattened leading-note of English
folk-music; the pentatonic melody on the violins, with its folkish phrases, and
spacious intervals, recalling the slow-moving clouds in an English sky. (See Ex. 9.3
.) The attempt to make the description 'stick' to the music also accords to the
purely musical processes an indispensable role in defining the content of the
piece. Evocation becomes expression only by becoming a property of the musical
surface. Here we see the point of Croce's intuition, that expression and form are
in the end inseparable—whether or not ineffable. And we see too how important
the critical sense becomes, in identifying the content of a work of art. Does
Vaughan Williams really succeed in expressing the heartfelt but undemonstrative
love of the Englishman for his native landscape? Or is the music just a little too
banal, too much dependent on worn-out pastoral gestures from which the
realities of country life in the modern world have been expurgated? Arguing in
this way, you could come to the conclusion that the music is evocative, but also
inexpressive, since the evocation is no part of its musical sense.

3. The resemblance theory. This tells us that expression in music is founded in

analogy or resemblance between a piece of music and a state ofmind. In saying
that the music expresses the state of mind I am simply drawing attention to the
resemblance. The theory 7 parallels the attempt to derive a theory of musical
representation from the 'sounds like' relation. Indeed, it is the same theory in
another guise, and not only is it insensitive to the distinction between
representation and expression, but also, like analogy theories generally, it
confuses expression with the route to it. When I say that the last movement of
the 'Jupiter' expresses a radiant joy, I am using 'express' in the same way as I use
it when I describe Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur' as expressing a profound death-
wish. But poetry does not resemble what it expresses.

Nor, of course, does music. Consider, for example, the slow movement of
Beethoven's String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132—the 'Heiliger Dankgesang'.
Beethoven gives us a very precise description of a state of mind by way of preface
to the movement: the sacred song of thanksgiving of the convalescent to the
Godhead. We may disagree with this description (after all, the composer is only
one critic among many). Nevertheless, suppose it to be right. Is the piece of music
in any way like this state of mind? If you say that the sounds and the state of
minsounds as emotions feel.) 8 If you say that what you hear in the sounds
resembles the state of mind, then that may be true: but only because you hear
the state of mind in the music. And what does that mean? Surely, that is precisely
what we have to explain.

Some Crocean Thoughts

Before returning to the resemblance theory, we should briefly examine the

origins of the concept of expression, in the writings of Croce and his disciple
Collingwood. 9 Although both philosophers set the concept of expression within a
discredited metaphysical framework, they begin from certain intuitions about the
work of art and its significance that we should do well to respect, even if we
cannot endorse them entirely.

It seemed clear to Croce that the kind of meaning for which he reserved the term
'expression' is grasped in and through the aesthetic experience: it could be made
available in no other way, and certainly not by some biographical study of the
artist, or by decoding the work according to the imagined rules of its construction.
Moreover, he believed expression to be an aesthetic value—indeed the aesthetic
value, the single criterion of aesthetic success.
Croce and Collingwood designed their theories of art so as to vindicate this
intuition. But we do not need to accept their theories in order to see the point of
it. For there would be no reason to accord such prominence to expression, if we
did not think of it as central to aesthetic interest. And there may be a truth too in
the suggestion that it is only through aesthetic experience that expression can be
grasped: this kind of expression at least. (Consider again the discussion of
Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony above—the shift from evocation to
expression occurs precisely when the evocation fuses with the musical
experience.)

Croce's intuition therefore suggests a useful test that any theory of expression
ought to pass: the 'value test', as I shall call it. When we say that a piece of music
has 'expression', we mean that it invites us into its orbit. Expression is intrinsically
an object of aesthetic interest. It does not follow that expressive works of art are
by nature beautiful or good. The unctuous narcissism of the César Franck Piano
Quintet is certainly an expressive feature: but not a virtue in the work that
possesses it. Nevertheless, it is part of the power of this work, that it so
successfully conveys this somewhat disreputable state of mind.

Croce and Collingwood believed representation to be of no aesthetic significance;

in their view successful representation could accompany aestheticdisaster, and
the pursuit of representational accuracy or completeness was a derogation from
the aims of art. They were no doubt wrong in that, although right in the weaker
claim that representation can be the object of non-aesthetic interests, and valued
in non-aesthetic ways. Their concept of 'expression' was designed, by contrast, to
pass the value test: expression was to be an intrinsic object of aesthetic interest,
and one that could be understood in no other way. For Croce and Collingwood
the aesthetic experience is nothing more nor less than the 'recognition of
expression'.

We see here another weakness in the theories that I briefly dismissed in the
preceding section. For example, those who argue that musical expression is a
matter of 'analogy' or 'resemblance' to human states of mind, must face the
objection that you could, in that case, notice the expression while being
aesthetically unaffected, and that a successful expression may be an uninteresting
piece of music. But if that were so, what remains of the idea that the expressive
properties of a piece are part of its meaning as music?

Someone might propose an amended version of the 'resemblance' theory,

arguing as follows. When we refer to analogies between music and our states of
mind, we do not imply that these analogies can be noticed and appreciated
independently of the musical experience. Music does not languish in the way that
people languish; it does not droop, revive, palpitate, and strain in the fashion of a
human gesture, but in its own fashion. It is only through the musical experience
that these features can be grasped. You have to hear the emotion in the music,
and that means attending to the music, in an act of aesthetic interest.

As we have seen, however, the reply is also a capitulation. For it amounts to

saying that the features we notice in expressive music are precisely not those that
we observe in the human psyche. If they were the same features, then we should
not need this quite special experience (the appreciation of music) in order to
notice them. We must hear these features in the music, by an act of musical
understanding. And it is precisely this capacity, to hear emotion in music, that
needs explaining. To say that we 'hear resemblance' is either false (if it implies
that the expression could be grasped without the aesthetic experience), or empty
(if the resemblance has to be described in terms of the experience it was
supposed to explain).

Expression and Ideology

By way of further clearing the ground, we should notice a use of terms like
'expression' in the sociology of art, which is sometimes confused with their use in
aesthetic judgement. When a sociologist describes Heavy Metal, for example, as
expressinimport. If the grounds for making it, however, make no distinction
between the expressive and the inexpressive, ignore all issues of musical
competence, and are based on the role of Heavy Metal in general, in the lives of
its followers in general—as in Robert Walser's study 10 —then we cannot take the
description as an aesthetic judgement at all. It has become a sociological
hypothesis, concerning the state of mind evinced by a style of music, regardless of
whether any of its instances succeed in giving real expression, in the aesthetic
sense, to that state of mind or to any other.

The influence of Adorno and Critical Theory has led to much sociological criticism
of this kind. The goal is usually to expose the 'ideological' content of a musical
style—its function in endorsing and stabilizing the power-relations that require
just this kind of music. Even tonality itself has been described in these terms, as
an ideological instrument, of no more permanent significance than the
'bourgeois' class whose musical image it is. 11 Susan McClary, for example,
describes tonality as 'a set of structural and syntactical procedures that emerged
in Western music during the course of the seventeenth and that underlies the
concert music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . . . The social values it
articulates are those held most dear by the middle class: beliefs in progress, in
expansion, in the ability to attain ultimate goals through rational striving, in the
ingenuity of the individual strategist operating both within and in defiance of the
norm.' 12 The term 'articulates' belongs with 'expresses', as part of the language
of aesthetic judgement. But McClary is not making an aesthetic judgement. What
she says, if true, applies equally to Beethoven and Leopold Mozart, to Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Arthur Sullivan. It has no bearing on the expressive content
of any particular work of music, and neither affirms nor denies the judgement
that the Eroica Symphony really does articulate the striving of bourgeois man, in a
way that the feeble symphonies of Leopold Mozart, or the piano concertos of
Hummel, do not.

Exactly what should be made of this kind of sociological criticism and the theory
of ideology that goes with it, are questions that I shall consider in later chapters.
For our present purposes it is important to remark only on their irrelevance.g the
alienation and frustration of modern youth, this might sound like an aesthetic
judgement—and perhaps one with a positived resemble each other, then you
must also admit that they resemble each other less than the sounds resemble
other things—and other states of mind. So why is this resemblance so important?
In any case, what does 'resemblance' mean? If you say that the music 'sounds like'
a state of mind, then that too is nonsense: how do states of mind sound? (Cf. the
pithy observation of Carroll Pratt, that music

Form and Content

Croce had another intuition about expression, and one to which I have already
referred. He supposed that the expression of a work of art is integral to the form
in which we discover it: indeed, that it is not detachable. If a painting represents a
landscape with cows, then I could describe its representational content in words,
as I have already done in part. But any attempt to translate the expressive
meaning of a work of art, Croce thought, would detach it from the artistic form in
which it lives, and therefore detach it from itself. Expression must be grasped in
the particular experience of the particular work, if it is to be grasped at all. In
which case, the only way to identify what is expressed by the last movement of
the 'Jupiter' Symphony, is to play the last movement of the 'Jupiter' Symphony.

This intuition corresponds both to Hegel's view that in art 'form' and 'content' are
inseparable, and to the attack on the 'heresy of paraphrase', mounted by Cleanth
Brooks and the New Critics in America. 13 As I have already suggested, however,
it is in tension with the belief that expression is a real relation. To allow no other
way of referring to the content of a work of art than by pointing to the work that
'expresses' it, is to demote expression to a pseudo-relation, and to lose the idea
of an aesthetic content. Much of Hegel's aesthetics is vitiated by this; and much of
Croce's too. Hegel's description of art as the 'sensuous shining of the Idea' strikes
a chord. But when it transpires that the same Idea shines through all works of art,
and that its individual versions are inseparable from the sensuous forms which
express them, we feel cheated. On the other hand, the desire to speak in this way
is so firmly established in critical practice, that we must at least find an
explanation for it, and try to accommodate it within our theory.

There is another thought that emerges from the study of idealist aesthetics. It is a
fundamental contention of Hegel's philosophy of mind, that the inner life comes
into being through successive 'realizations'. States of mind that are otherwise
inchoate and embryonic, come to full reality by achieving objective expression in
the public realm. The process of expression is largely a matter of appropriating
the outward forms of public discourse, and making them one's own. The state of
mind precedes this process only in the way that the Aristotelian potential
precedes its actualization. The emotion comes into being through its
objectification (Entäuβerung) in social life, and the emotional dialogue with the
Other. 14 On this view, the expression of emotion is also the creation of emotion:
or at any rate, its transformation into something known, conscious, and part of
the discourse of social life.If this were true, then we should be inclined to say that
an emotion is indeed inseparable from its expression—even in everyday life—
since we could not identify the emotion prior to its successful realization. We
should not therefore be surprised that emotion and expression are also
inseparable in art: for this is merely the special case where our most difficult and
elusive feelings are captured and transfixed in symbols, so falling from the airy
sphere of potentiality into the really real. (Collingwood used this thought as the
premiss for his distinction between art and craft, and for his original explanation
of the nature of art as an 'end in itself'.) 15 Such an Hegelian view of expression
would not only explain the value of art; it would also give grounds for a fully
cognitive theory of aesthetic interest. For it would imply that we are interested in
works of art because they are the realizations of our mental potential. Through
them we come to understand what we could understand in no other way:
namely, the actuality of those states of mind which we otherwise sense only in
their latent forms. This is a very attractive suggestion. Art becomes the mirror in
which we confront ourselves, not as we are, but as we should be if our nature
were fully realized.Unfortunately, however, the theory depends upon something
that has never been provided: namely, a criterion of identity, that would permit
us to say that an artistic expression of feeling is the realization of that very thing—
an emotion—which in another and more inchoate form motivates our daily
existence. Without that criterion, the description of a work as an expression
remains empty—since there is no answer to the question 'expression of what?'.

The Language of Emotion

The strength of Croce's theory lies in its ability to explain certain enduring
intuitions, such as the ones I have briefly reviewed. That is why the term which
Croce (and following him Collingwood) made central to aesthetics has been so
widely adopted. Before committing ourselves to the concept of expression,
however, it is well to look at the other ways in which the relation between art and
the mind is described.The term 'expression' suggests a connection between music
and the emotions; but this connection can also be made in other ways, none of
which seems forced on us: 1 Directly, when we apply mental predicates to
art. For instance we may describe a piece of music as sad, brooding, angry, joyful.
We all understand these descriptions, even if we can give no theory of their
meaning.2 By the use of 'affective' terms, such as 'depressing', 'moving',
'uplifting', which refer to the mental effect of art.

3 By the use of quasi-relational terms, such as 'evocative', 'expressive',

'atmospheric', 'resonant', 'suggestive'. The choice of term here may very well
seem arbitrary: though it ought not to be arbitrary, given the evident distinctions,
in normal usage, between expressing and evoking, meaning and suggestion,
content and atmosphere.

It is a remarkable fact about the recent literature on musical expression, that

writers almost invariably assume that they must use this term, if they are to
capture what they mean. And this assumption is made even by those who
recognize that the term is borrowed from another context, and used obliquely to
capture a phenomenon which no one has yet identified. However, maybe the
term is not necessary at all—a relict of Crocean aesthetics, which could be
discarded with the rest of Croce's theory.

Kivy, who does not clearly distinguish the first and the third kind of description,
proposes a version of the similarity theory in order to explain what they mean. 16
We call music sad, he suggests, because it moves slowly, stumbles, droops, and so
on—just as sad people do. But these are not real analogies, since music does not
literally droop or stumble, any more than it is literally sad. The 'analogy' is simply
the substitution of one metaphor for another. As I argued in Chapter 3 ,
metaphors do not have to be grounded in similarities; nor do they merely
compare things. Their sense can be described only by reference to the literal
meaning of the terms deployed in them; and their point is captured by the
experience that leads us to adopt them: the experience of 'fit' between two
mental contents. What, in the present case, would such an experience be?

The difficulty here should not be lightly dismissed. For one thing, it rules out the
possibility of giving clear-cut definitions of the terms used to characterize works
of art. The language of aesthetic description is (to use a metaphor) shot through
with metaphor. Almost every term deployed in describing the aesthetic character
of something (its character as an object of aesthetic interest) is transferred from
some other context. This is true too of the term 'expression'. To give a definition
of the term in this use is to break the connection with its central use, and so to
undermine the metaphor.

This observation leads to another: namely, that a certain kind of 'realist' or

'cognitivist' theory of aesthetic description becomes untenable. Someone might
argue that the sadness that we hear in music is a property of the music, in just the
way that the blueness of a shirt is a property of the shirt. We hear the sadness by
hearing that it is there. This combination of realism and cognitivism has been
endorsed in later writings by Kivy, and moreambivalently by Sibley, in a well-
known series of articles. 17 But it is open to a serious objection. If we say that the
Countess's aria 'Dove sono' from Le nozze di Figaro actually possesses the sadness
that we hear in it, we face the question whether this sadness is the same property
as that possessed by a sad person or another property. It surely cannot be the
same property: the sadness of persons is a property that only conscious
organisms can possess. But it cannot be another property either, since it is
precisely this word—'sad'—with its normal meaning, that we apply to the music,
and that is the whole point of the description. To say that the word ascribes, in
this use, another property, is to say that it has another sense—in other words
that it is not used metaphorically but ambiguously. If that were so, we could
equally have used some other word to make the point, and someone could be an
expert at noticing the property we describe as musical sadness, even though he
vehemently denies that music can be sad. (He might even say that it makes no
sense to describe music as sad.) But that is surely absurd: if he refuses to describe
the music as sad, then he has not noticed the sadness. It follows that the word
'sad' attributes to the music neither the property that is possessed by sad people,
nor any other property. It therefore attributes no property at all.
That argument is by no means the last word. But it provides part of the motive for
the anti-realist and non-cognitivist account of aesthetic judgement which I shall
defend in later chapters. Another motive is provided by the affective terms (case
(2) above). These are not metaphors; but nor are they plain descriptions, either of
the listener's emotion or of the thing that causes it. When I describe a work as
moving, I do not mean merely that I am moved by it: I am also recommending my
response. Otherwise there would be no disagreement between us, when you
maintain that the work is not moving at all, but merely sentimental. Whatever
these affective terms mean, they are used in a kind of open-ended dialogue,
whose purpose lies in our attempt, as rational beings, to achieve some
coordination in our responses. Why we should make that attempt, and whether
success can ever attend it, are questions of the greatest importance in aesthetics.
I shall therefore return to them in the final chapters.

Some affective terms are applied to aesthetic objects only in the context of
aesthetic approval: 'exciting', 'stirring', 'moving'. Other terms, similarly, are
negative or ambivalent: 'depressing', 'sickening', 'disturbing'. A work can express
depression, of course, like the finale of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony in B minor,
Op. 74, without being depressing: even if this verymovement has led critics to
wonder whether depression is an emotion that art should try to express.
Depressing music is not normally depressed, and muzak in a restaurant is
depressing largely because of its asinine cheeriness.

Expression and Structure

Granted that we spontaneously extend our mental predicates to music, what

need have we of the term 'express'? Is there any difference between the
judgement that a work is sad, and the judgement that it expresses sadness? Both
of these descriptions are metaphorical: hence we can use them to make the same
point, or different points, depending on context. Nevertheless, the use of the
term 'express' seems to imply human agency of some kind, and also the attempt
to articulate something. (There are sad landscapes, sad colours, and so on: but
only of human artefacts does it make sense to distinguish their being sad, from
their expressing sadness.)

Hence it is quite reasonable to distinguish an empty work of music (the choruses

from John Adams's Death of Klinghoffer, for example), from one that expresses
emptiness, like the prelude to Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde, or a jolly work, like
Grainger's Shepherd's Hey, from one expressive of jollity, like the overture to The
Bartered Bride. An expressive work does not merely possess a certain
atmosphere: it has a content, upon which it meditates, and which it sets before us
in articulate form. Hence the plausibility of Goodman's suggestion, that an
expression of sadness is not merely (metaphorically) sad, but stands in a semantic
relation to sadness: the relation that he calls 'exemplification'.

And he adds:

whatever you may enjoy or miss in the Eroica, remember this cloud: it leads
eventually to one of the most astonishing and dramatic strokes in all music.

Tovey is here referring to the reappearance of the main theme at the end of the
development, where the C sharp (all of modern music is contained in that C sharp,
said Wagner to Cosima 19 ) is used to throw the music out of the orbit of E flat
into F major and thence into D flat, before the home key of E flat triumphantly
reasserts itself. The implication is clear: the emotion belonging to the 'cloud' is
part of a musical process, which captures our attention and our sympathy, leading
us by musical means to see an entirely unexpected meaning in the hesitation
from which it began. The meaning of the 'cloud' is provided by the great arch of
musical argument that subsumes it.

Tovey gives only a rudimentary description of the 'content' of Beethoven's

movement. What is important, he implies, is the musical process, the alchemy
whereby something is first given in the music, and then worked out, through a
magnificent structure of paragraphs, until its character is shown in all its inherent
richness and all its comprehensive humanity. To describe the process in
emotional terms is far less important than to identify the crucial transitions. At
the same time, the success of the first movement is in part a dramatic success. It
consists in the utterly unforced and sincere manner in which the little cloud of
doubt is worked into the joyful dynamism that precedes it, and gradually taken
through its musical paces, until finally hesitation is swept away and the seed of
doubt proves to be a seed of triumph.

This suggests another test that a theory of expression must pass: the structure
test, as I shall call it. A theory of expression must show how the organization of a
work of music sIt must show how an emotional demand can be resolved by a
musical argument. Croce's theory, which makes the content of a work dependent
upon every detail of its form, does pass this test: but only by throwing the idea of
content into doubt. In so far as we have any intuitions here, they prompt us to
believe that expressive music is expressing something other than itself, but
through a purely musical process, a process that must be understood as music,
and not merely as some kind of code. (Nelson Goodman's theory fails as it stands
to pass this test, since clearly a piece of music could be sad, and could also
exemplify sadness, even though the musical structure has nothing to do with the
exemplification.)

Expression, Expressing, and Expressiveness

The reader will have noticed the ease with which I have substituted the phrase 'is
expressive of' for 'expresses' in the previous section. This reflects a general
observation concerning artistic expression. In everyday life people often express
themselves in inexpressive ways: indeed, the decline of popular culture leads
precisely to an impoverishment in the means of expression, with the result that
ordinary emotions are crusted over with a stagnant film of cliché. In such
circumstances people cease to be transparent to each other and to themselves;
emotion persists in an inchoate and disordered underworld, seldom shining forth
in speech or step or gesture. Maybe one of the purposes of high art is to preserve
the memory of something better: of that absolute giving of the self in speech or
song that we find in Shakespeare and Mozart.
In any case, we certainly do not allow to art the licence that is seized by modern
life: the licence to express inexpressively. If a work of art is inexpressive, then we
decline to say that it expresses anything. Expression and expressiveness here
coincide—an interesting fact that tells us something about our interest in
expression. For expressiveness is a kind of success: a success in communication.
The expressive word or gesture is the one that awakens our sympathy, the one
that invites us into a mental orbit that is not our own. If we think that all artistic
expression is also expressive, that is surely a fact about how we respond to
expression in art. It is plausible to suppose, therefore, that a theory of expression
must incorporate a theory of our response to it.

I remarked earlier that there are two ways in which the verb 'express' is used in
ordinary life: to describe a kind of behaviour (the evincing of mental states), and
to describe a kind of action (the communication of mental states). There is also a
use of the noun 'expression' which is not cognate with these and which is of some
importance. We may speak of the expression on a face, without meaning to imply
that there is any particular state of mindthat is evinced by it: it may be a purely
'physiognomic' quality of the face. In this case the term 'expression' is used, so to
speak, 'intransitively', without implying that the expression is an expression of
some state of mind.

There is also a transitive use of the noun, according to which the expression on a
face is expressing something: an emotion, say. To be an expression, in this sense,
is to stand in a certain relation to a state of mind: it is to be part of the process of
evincing or communicating something. An expression in the intransitive sense
might also be an expression of something: a state of character, for example, or an
emotion. And the two may diverge in interesting ways—as when a person,
expressing his grief, adopts a jocular expression. As that example shows, we may
describe the character of an expression in the intransitive sense in terms of a
state of mind, without implying that it is an expression (in the transitive sense) of
that state of mind.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that we attribute expressions to
entities which could never really express anything in the transitive sense. For his
groom a horse wears a certain facial expression: his lips smile and his eyes dance.
But horses express nothing through their faces, and if they sometimes evince
their primitive emotions, it is largely through their ears and their tail. Our habit of
seeing expression where there is none (in the transitive sense) is irresistible, and
we extend it to the whole of nature: to fish and plants, to clouds and trees and
landscapes. And it is not implausible to argue that it is expression in this
(intransitive) sense that we hear in music.

Certainly, when we consider the use of the term espressivo in a musical score, we
are inclined to believe that we are dealing with the intransitive concept. The
pupil, asked to play with more expression, may ask 'More expression of what?'
But he has no right to an answer; nor would he necessarily be helped by one. We
understand the difference between playing with expression and playing in a
wooden or inexpressive way, and the difference between the right and wrong
expression, without even thinking about a content which is to be expressed.

This does not mean that the expression cannot be described—as we would the
expression on a face. But an expression can be described as cheerful, lugubrious,
and so on, without implying anything about a state of mind that is being
expressed through it. On the other hand, such descriptions may, at times, seem
entirely inappropriate to us. We may wish to say that a piece of music expresses a
'quite peculiar' emotion: an emotion that we cannot put into other words, but for
which we need no other words, since this—the song—is its exact expression.
(Wittgenstein calls this use of 'peculiar' or 'particular' also an intransitive use.) 20
It is tempting to say that when aphilosopher writes in such a way, the use of a
transitive concept of expression is really a pretence, and that what he has in mind
ought to be captured in the intransitive idiom. For what is the difference between
saying that 'x is an expression of y', and 'x has a particular expression', when y can
only be defined in terms of x?

It seems to me, in fact, that we use both concepts in describing works of art, and
with good reason. We might attribute to a passage of music a certain atmosphere
without implying that it is really articulating anything: and then we use the
intransitive concept of expression. (For instance, the atmosphere that attaches to
a Debussy prelude: which can certainly be described (as the titles indicate), but
which is not an expression of the state of mind that may be implied in the
description.) But we may also attribute expression in the transitive sense to a
work of music, even when we find ourselves at a loss to identify the content. We
have the sense that an emotion, a character, a conception is being articulated
through the musical argument: as in the example, from Tovey, of Beethoven's
Eroica Symphony. And, even if we find no words to describe it, this does not
destroy our sense that there is a meaning to this music, which relates it to things
other than itself.

The oscillation between transitive and intransitive uses of 'express' and its
cognates seems natural, almost inevitable. The fact that we are intuitively pulled
in these two conflicting directions is also something that a theory of expression
must explain. It is a defect of Goodman's theory that it not only does not explain
this fact, but also renders the intransitive use of 'expression' quite mysterious. If
Goodman's theory were correct, we should be tempted to describe a work of art
as expressive only in those circumstances where the predicate is available to
identify exactly what it is expressing (the predicate that is 'metaphorically
exemplified'). Far more usual, however, is the encounter with an expressive work
of art whose meaning remains allusive and elusive, resisting any attempt to
convey it in words.

And so we arrive by another route at Croce's intuition: that the content of a work
of art is real but ineffable. Croce's theory offers an explanation, therefore, of our
constant retreat from the transitive to the intransitive use of the term 'express'.
Equally interesting in this regard is the theory propounded by Schopenhauer in
The World as Will and Representation. According to Schopenhauer, music is a
direct presentation of the will. The will, as thing-in-itself, is not knowable through
concepts, and nothing therefore can be said about it: we can speak only of its
'representations' in the world of appearance, in which the will is portrayed
indirectly, and through a resisting medium. Music, however, is a non-conceptual
art, and is able to present to us, in objective form, a direct picture of the will
itself. Yet what it presents to us cannot be described, nor presented in any other
medium. The content of music is again real but ineffable.I shall return to
Schopenhauer's theory in Chapter 11 . Like Croce, Schopenhauer leans on Kant's
transcendental idealism to resolve the paradox of musical meaning—the paradox
that music means or refers to something other than itself, but that there is no
access to this 'other' thing through concepts, and therefore no answer to the
question what music means. Here is a sublime metaphysical explanation of the
fact that the term 'expression', applied to music, tends towards both a transitive
and an intransitive grammar. It is not an explanation that I shall endorse. But it is
one that should be taken far more seriously, I believe, than is customary.

Tertiary Qualities and Tertiary Objects

Schopenhauer and Croce seek to explain the ineffability of musical meaning by

referring to that which cannot be conceptualized, either because it lies beyond
the empirical world (Schopenhauer), or because it is bound up with a form of non-
conceptual awareness (Croce). These Kantian ideas provide short cuts towards
theories that explain our intuitions, only by demanding precarious metaphysical
commitments. In what follows I shall try to explain those very intuitions, but in a
more plausible way.

A few pages back I sketched an argument against any realist interpretation of

emotional and affective qualities in works of art. Even if we do not accept that
argument, we must recognize, I believe, that these qualities are of a very special
kind. The sadness of a piece of music is certainly not a primary quality of anything.
Nor is it a secondary quality. If it were a secondary quality, then any creature with
the requisite sensory powers could discern it. But surely, although animals may
perceive the redness of a flower, the loudness of a sound, the bitterness of a leaf,
they do not hear the sadness of a melody. To hear such a quality you need not
only sensory capacities, but also intellect, imagination, perhaps even self-
consciousness. This is what I mean by describing the sadness of a song as a
'tertiary' quality.
Tertiary qualities are peculiar in several respects. For one thing, we can be argued
into and out of perceiving them. I can describe a piece of music in such a way that
another person, following my argument, comes to hear it as serene rather than
tragic, as obsessively destructive rather than life-affirming (for instance, Don
Giovanni's 'Finch'han dal vino'). This fact is of immense importance in aesthetics.

As with aspects, which are paradigms of tertiary qualities, the experience of

perceiving them may be subject to the will. I can (within limits) choose what to
hear, when hearing emotion in music. Consider 'Good Night', from the first book
of Janá ek's On an Overgrown Path. Attend to the triadic harmony and the
innocent C major melody, and you will probably hear a serene tenderness, as the
title suggests. Attend to the constant downwardshift from C major to B minor, the
inner voice sounding a sixth below the melody at the climax, the pulsating
heartbeat of the semiquaver figure, and you will hear an apprehension that wipes
all serenity away (Ex. 6.3). To hear such a piece as it should be heard, you must be
able to shift at will between these contrasting aspects; and it is part of Janá ek's
genius that he makes the choice so natural, and each interpretation so
compelling.

In Chapter 1 , I argued that sounds are secondary objects—analogous to

secondary qualities, in the sense that they are really there, but that their nature is
given by our way of hearing them. The primary object is the vibration in the air,
which (unlike the sound itself) could be perceived without hearing it. The sound
does not feature in the theories of physics: which is not to say that it is unreal, but
only that there are more objects in the world than are featured in the book of
physics (the book which explains the world). I went on to suggest that tones are
not to be confused with sounds. Tones are what we hear in sounds, when we
hear sounds as music. They have properties that no sound could have: for
example, they occupy positions in an acousmatic space; they attract and repel
one another; they point towards and away from one another, and carry the
mysterious movement that flows through music.

We might say that a work of music is a tertiary object, as are the tones that
compose it. Only a being with certain inIt is not only in the aesthetic context that
we encounter tertiary qualities. The expression (intransitive) in a face is such a
quality. No animal has the power to perceive facial expressions—even if it can
perceive the features in which those expressions reside, and even if it is able to
glean from them reliable information about the identity and state of mind of their
owner. When an animal recognizes a person, it is not by recognizing his
expression, but by interpreting primary and secondary qualities (shape,
movement, smell, etc.) in the normal way.

The example points to another peculiarity of tertiary qualities, namely their

supervenience. The expression in a face is supervenient upon its primary and
secondary qualities: it is not something 'over and above' those qualities, which
could be added to or taken away from them without any other change. A rule for
the reproduction of all the primary and secondary qualities of a face, would
automatically reproduce the expression, even though it makes no mention of the
expression. Conversely, if two faces differ in their expression, they must differ in
some other respect as well. Supervenience is a widespread phenomenon, and has
been used to support antirealist theories of moral qualities, as well as physicalist
theories of the mind. 21 It certainly seems to me that the three features of
tertiary qualities that I have just outlined tend to support the antirealist argument
given earlier.

The supervenience of expression (in its intransitive reading) implies that 'likeness
of expression' is not reducible to likeness among primary and secondary qualities.
When I say of a face that it has the same expression as my father's face, I do not
mean that the two faces express the same thing. A face with just this expression
could belong to a person whose states of mind never coincided with my father's.
This 'likeness of expression' can exist, even though there is the greatest physical
disparity between the faces, while two faces that are almost indiscernible may
nevertheless wear entirely different expressions: one small blemish, one extra
wrinkle, one lock of hair can totally transform an expression, like the tiniest
moustache painted on the Mona Lisa. Likeness of expression is not secured by any
rule.
This phenomenon carries over into music. For instance, we recognize a similarity
between the climactic passage of Beethoven's Eroica, first movement, and a
passage in the first movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements,
despite radical disparity in the sounds (Ex. 6.4). Conversely, the smallest
difference in sound may lead to a complete transformation or evenloss of
expression. Consider the theme of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' (Ex. 6.5). Often one
may hear the twelfth and thirteenth bars hummed or whistled as on the lower
staff: a very small change, but one that destroys the expression entirely. The
'uplifted heart' of the tied note is replaced by a vulgar jollity.

Such examples illustrate two important points: first, the extreme sensitivity of
expression (in the intransitive sense) to the surrounding context, and secondly,
the impossibility of providing rules of expression, in the sense of inThe only
conceivable rule is that which reiterates the supervenience relation: which says,
reproduce all the features of Beethoven's theme, and you will reproduce its
expression. But that is not a rule for producing other works with the same
expression. Expression is tied to the particular work, and the sharing of expression
is a creative outcome that cannot be foreseen.

Consider the 'Todesklage' from Wagner's Ring (Ex. 6.6). This theme contains a
tense, tragic, and yet questioning expression. It is a normal exercise of the critical
intelligence to look for the features which are responsible for so powerful an
effect: the accumulated suspensions, and the final Neapolitan cadence finishing
on a seventh chord, with its 'unsaturated' and yearning character. Remove the
suspensions, and the tension goes (Ex. 6.7). Alter the final cadence and we have
(with a slight change of rhythm) the serene introduction to Mendelssohn's
'Scottish Symphony' in A minor, Op. 56 (Ex. 6.8). But could one really have
predicted that expressive transformation outside the context provided by
Wagner's (and Mendelssohn's) melody? And could one have known, in advance of
the particular case, that, in removing Wagner's suspensions, one would arrive at
an effect of serenityrather than insipidity, or that in adding suspensions to
Mendelssohn's theme one would arrive at an effect of tragic tension rather than
cluttered portentousness? These are surely idle speculations: all we can know is
that, in context, the suspensions contribute to the tragic expression. But the
context includes everything else that might be heard as part of the musical
Gestalt.

Hanslick's Objection

Hanslick made a famous objection to the theory that music can 'represent'
emotions. 22 (This pre-Crocean use of the term 'represent' should not mislead us;
he meant 'express'.) What, he asked, are the objects of the feelings expressed by
music? Most forms of art said to express emotions are also representational: they
describe, depict, or refer to a fictional world. It is at first sight difficult to see how
emotions can be expressed in the absence of representation. For every emotion
requires an object, and any attempt to distinguish emotions from one another,
whether in general or in the particular instance, is doomed to failure if we cannot
identify either the intentional object or the characteristic 'description under
which' the object is conceived. It would seem to follow that an artistic medium
which, like music, can neither represent objects nor convey specific thoughts
about them, is logically debarred from expressing emotion. If people have so
frequently doubted the expressive potential of music, it is largely on account of its
narrative incompetence. When the objection is made, that the feelings conveyed
by music can never be put into words, and therefore that no serious agreement
can ever be reached as to their nature, the point in mind is usually Hanslick's: that
without the object, the feeling cannot be identified. To say, as Mendelssohn did,
23 that musical emotion is indescribable because it is too precise for words, is not
to answer Hanslick's objection. Precision of emotion is always and necessarily
consequent upon precision of thought—such is the lesson of literary criticism.
Precise emotion requires a preview—espoused by Mahler when he asserted that
the need to express himself in music, rather than in words, came only when
indefinable emotions made themselves felt 24 —risks once again a return to a
purely intransitive notion of expression. For how can we distinguish an
indefinable expression, from the expression of an indefinable thing?

There is a response to this objection that I should like to dismiss immediately—

the response typified by Suzanne Langer in her writings on this subject. 25 It
might be argued that really emotions have two parts—the direction outwards
towards the object, which indeed could be captured only if the object could also
be portrayed, and the inner movement of feeling, which has a form and structure
that can be comprehended without reference to its intentionality. It is this form
or structure that is mirrored, symbolized, or 'presented' by expressive music,
which gives the dynamic movement of our feelings, while leaving their
intentionality unexplored.

I reject that view for several reasons. First, it seems to reflect a Cartesian
conception of the inner life. Three massive and powerful arguments have been
levelled against any such conception. First, there is the Wittgensteinian argument
against the very idea of an 'inner' realm—an argument rooted in the proof of the
impossibility of a 'private language'. Secondly there is the Hegelian argument that
our 'inner' life is realized in, and constituted by, its Entäuβerung in social life.
Finally, there are the arguments of Brentano, Husserl, and their followers for the
conclusion that intentionality is not an addition to a mental state, but a part of its
structure. It seems to me that a philosopher who had worked through those three
impressive contributions would find it impossible to describe mental states as
Langer does.

Secondly, Langer's theory makes extraordinary claims about the nature of

emotions—claims reminiscent of the speculations of nineteenth-century
psychologists. The emotions are portrayed as sensations might be portrayed: as
consisting of crescendos and diminuendos, surges and releases, tensions and
plateaux; and these peculiar 'formal' features are then isolated as the things that
matter in our emotional life. As though loving someone mattered because of
those inner rushes of blood to the heart (if that is how it feels) and not because
the person himself matters a million times more!

Thirdly, Langer seems set on a futile path, towards some version of the
resemblance theory (which is indeed where she unknowingly ends up). 26For she
is trying to extract from emotions the features that might be imitated in music, by
virtue of a correspondence between structures.
In Chapter II I shall show why Hanslick's objection is not as devastating as it might
appear. But it is important to counter it in part, before summarizing the argument
of this chapter. First, we should remind ourselves of the many contexts in which
the object of musical emotion is defined—by the text of a song, by the action of
an opera, by a title, or by a perceivable custom. Surely the objection falls to the
ground, if we can show that music is sometimes used—as in a song—to express
emotion towards some object that the song also describes? Nor do we need
words to complete the reference. A certain use of the voice—as in the polyphony
of Palestrina or Victoria—automatically transports us into the religious context.
We hear the God-wards intentionality in religious music, just as we see it in the
upturned face of the sculpted saint. And the example is all the more telling in that
God cannot be represented, except in forms that misrepresent him. He is always,
from the point of view of representation, 'off-stage'.

Secondly, we should remind ourselves that emotions are not identified only
through their objects, but also through their subjects, and the behaviour whereby
a subject expresses them. Suppose you are walking in a quiet place; turning a
corner, you come across a woman who sits on a bench, head in hands, quietly
weeping. Your heart goes out in sympathy towards her emotion: you know
nothing of its object; but you have a strong and immediate sense of its
intentionality—as you might see an arrow pointing, without knowing where. The
release of sympathy here is not irrational or confused: it is a clear response to a
clear situation.

Suppose now that you are studying a fresco of Masaccio. One of the figures is
looking out of the picture to the right, his hands raised in astonishment, and his
face radiated with emotion. Here you know that the object is 'off-stage', and
unknowable. But you can respond to the emotion portrayed, and once again you
have a clear sense, through the subject and the way that he is presented, of its
intentionality.

Something similar may occur in poetry, as in these lines by Paul Celan:

Fahlstimmig, aus

der Tiefe geschunden:

kein Wort, kein Ding,

und beider einziger Name

fallgerecht in dir,

fluggerecht in dir,

wunder Gewinn

einer Welt.

(Fallow-voiced, lashed out of the depth: no word, no thing, and the unique name
of both, ready for falling in you, ready for flying in you, wound-winning of a
world.)Celan gives us an intense emotion, but with only imprecise indications of
the object. Yet we know that the object is precise—unbearably so: it is as though
reality itself had crowded into the poet's feeling, and blotted out its name.

If there is expression of emotion in instrumental music it should perhaps be

likened to those cases: we hear the emotion in the music, even though we can
identify neither subject nor object, but only a wordless intentionality—a bridge
between these absent things. How we do this, and why it should so deeply
interest us, are questions to which I return.

Expression and Understanding

In the last chapter I argued that music is not representational, because that is not
how we understand it. The considerations that I presented against
representation, would weigh against expression too, if we could not show that
expression must be understood by the one who understands music. An example
will, I hope, illustrate the importance of this point.
Suppose John and Henry live at either end of a railway tunnel, and, sharing an
interest in trains, send messages to each other about their common hobby: When
a train enters the tunnel at John's end, he fires a semaphore rocket, so that Henry
can prepare himself for the train that will soon emerge. This is an act of
communication, like the game envisaged in Chapter 5 , which also has the
structure made familiar by Grice: 27 John intends Henry to understand that a
train has entered the tunnel, by recognizing that this is John's intention.

The game develops to the point where Henry can deduce from the height,
trajectory, colour, etc., of the rocket, a wealth of information about the expected
train. Henry watches with awe and wonder as the rocket explodes in mid-air,
showering the countryside with its multicoloured sparks. His pleasure in watching
this performance is, we should be inclined to say, an aesthetic pleasure: its object
is the appearance of the exploding rocket, contemplated for its own sake.
(Whether this is an entirely accurate delineation of aesthetic pleasure is a
question that I must here postpone.) But Henry also feels a pleasure of
anticipation: soon, he has deduced, a passenger express will hurtle from the
tunnel in the vigorous way that always surprises and delights him. The two
pleasures are in principle separable, and Henry might have enjoyed one without
the other. Furthermore, Henry interprets the rocket: he assigns to the explosion a
meaning. This meaning is constituted independently of the aesthetic pleasure,
being equally apparent to John, who takes no aesthetic interest in the rockets
that he fires. Furthermore, the aesthetic experience is available both to Henry
and to hisneighbour Jane, who, not being part of the game, has no awareness of
the meaning.

A theory that assigned meaning to music as Henry assigns meaning to John's

rocket—without reference to the aesthetic experience—would not be a theory of
musical meaning, and therefore not a theory of expression. The expression of a
piece of music is part of its meaning as music—which means, as an object of a
particular kind of aesthetic experience. To grasp the meaning of a piece of music
is already to respond to its quality as music. Hence a theory that succeeded in
providing rules of syntax and semantics for music would not yet be a theory of
musical meaning. It would have to be shown that these rules were active in
producing the aesthetic experience, and that the aesthetic experience was
involved in applying them.

The thoughts that I have just adumbrated will become clearer in Chapter 7 . But
already we have the idea of a further test that a theory of expression must pass.
Any theory that severs the connection between the understanding of expression
and the aesthetic experience should be rejected. This means that a theory of
expression which attaches expression to rules that may be understood by the
person who has no appreciation of music, is not a theory of musical expression.

The meaning of a sentence is what you understand when you understand it.
There are ways of attaching meaning to any object (pebbles on the seashore,
scratches in a tree-trunk, constellations of the stars). But these do not tell us what
the object means. (Imagine someone who reads a text of Arabic from left to right,
and succeeds in deriving a semantic theory that coherently interprets it in
accordance with such a reading. He would not be understanding the text, for his
theory is not a theory of the language in which it is written.) To put the point
directly, and in terms made familiar by Dummett in his commentaries on Frege,
28 a theory of musical meaning is a theory of what we understand when we hear
with understanding.

Since expression is held to be part of the meaning of music, expression too must
be something that is understood by the one who understands a piece of music.
Any theory of musical expression which allowed musical understanding and the
grasp of expression to diverge, so as to become related only accidentally, would
not be a theory of expression.

Summary

Many questions have been raised in this chapter, and few answered. However,
we are in a position to define the concept of expression, not positively, but
negatively, in terms of the tests that a theory of expression must pass. A theory of
expression must explain or justify all of the following claims:cise situation:
without it, there is no focus to what we feel. And the complementarystructions
which, if followed, will infallibly produce the same expression.tellectual and
imaginative capacities can hear music, and these are precisely the capacities
required for the perception of tertiary qualities. The mystery of musical meaning
lies partly in this: that it is a tertiary quality of a tertiary object. No wonder that
people are tempted to deny that musical meaning exists.erves to articulate the
emotional content.er reason for rejecting the three primitive theories dismissed
at the beginning of this chapter. The expression in Beethoven's 'Heilige
Dankgesang' does not arise simply through evocation, or through the fleeting
resemblance (whatever that might be) with a state of mind. The expression
penetrates the musical structure, and is worked out through it. In hearing
expression in music, we are hearing a distinctively musical process: a kind of
musical interrogation of human feeling, and not the feeling itself. Tovey begins his
account of the first movement of the Eroica in the following way:

After two introductory chords, the violoncellos state the principal theme. It is
simply the notes of a common chord, swinging backwards and forwards in a
quietly energetic rhythm. Then, as the violins enter with a palpitating high note,
the harmony becomes clouded, soon however to resolve in sunshine [Ex. 6.2 ]. 18

1 Expression is (in the normal case) an aesthetic value. (The value test.)

2 Expression and expressiveness coincide.

3 The term 'expression' vacillates, in the aesthetic context, between

transitive and intransitive uses.

4 Expression is a tertiary quality, and therefore supervenient.

5 There are no rules for expression.

6 Expression is developed through a musical argument. For a work of music

to be expressive, it must provide a musical articulation of its content. (The
structure test.)

7 Music cannot acquire expression merely by convention, or by being put to

a semantic use.
 8 Expression is part of what is understood, when a piece is understood as
music. If a piece of music is expressive, then this must be understood by the one
who hears with understanding. (The understanding test.)

Those intuitions provide strong constraints on a theory of expression, as I shall

show. But before returning to this topic in Chapter II, we need to make an
extended detour. In the four chapters that follow I hope to give a theory of
musical understanding which will show just what we understand, when we
understand music as expressive.