Why do we value music? Many people report that listening to music is one of life's most rewarding activities. In Critique of Pure Music, James O. Young seeks to explain why this is so. Formalists tell us that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. On this view, listeners receive pleasure, or a pleasurable 'musical' emotion, when they explore the abstract patterns found in music. Music, formalists believe, does not arouse ordinary emotions such as joy, melancholy or fear, nor can it represent emotion or provide psychological insight. Young holds that formalists are wrong on all counts. Drawing upon the latest psychological research, he argues that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. By resembling human expressive behaviour, music is able to arouse ordinary emotions in listeners. This, in turn, makes possible the representation of emotion by music. The representation of emotion in music gives music the capacity to provide psychological insight-into the emotional lives of composers, and the emotional lives of individuals from a variety of times and places. And it is this capacity of music to provide psychological insight which explains a good deal of the value of music, both vocal and purely instrumental. Without it, music could not be experienced as profound. Philosophers, psychologists, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers will all find something of interest in this book.

1. Music and Expressiveness 1

Connections Between Music and Emotion 1

The Resemblance Theory 11

Convention and Emotion 26

2. Music and the Arousal of Emotion 35

Could Music Arouse Emotion? 35

Does Music Arouse Emotion? 44

How Music Arouses Emotion 58

Which Emotions Can Music Arouse? 66

Puzzles for the Arousalist 72

The Formalist's Last Ditch 76

A 'Special' Emotion 79

3. The Content of Music 87

The Concept of Representation 87

Representation in Music 97

Anti-formalist Objections 112

Formalist Arguments Against Representation in Music 117

4. Music and Lyrics 125

Music and Lyrics: Allies or Antagonists? 125

How Literature Works 132

Music and the Arousal of Emotion, Again 137

Music Plus Lyrics Equals Music Drama 143

5. The Value of Music 150

The Value of Musical Form 150

The Heresy of Substitutable Experience 154

Sensory Pleasure and Valuable Emotions 158

Profundity and Purism 167

Music and Insight 174

Envoi 182

Bibliography of Works Cited and Consulted 185

Index 197

James O. Young is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Global Anti-realism (Avebury, 1995), Art and Knowledge (Routledge, 2001), Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and more than fifty articles in refereed journals. He is the editor of Aesthetics: The Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2005) and (with Conrad G. Brunk) The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

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