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The Foundations of Musical Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Frank Howes
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Extract

The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 83 , 1956 , pp. 75 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1956

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References

1 Edited by William Elton, Blackwell, Oxford, 1934.Google Scholar

2 Musical Form and Matter (Deneke Lecture, 1934), reprinted in Essays and Lectures on Music, London, 1949, p. 160.Google Scholar

3 Theory of Beauty, London, 1952.Google Scholar

4 op. cit., p. 22.Google Scholar

5 Clive Bell, Old Friends, London, 1956, p. 72.Google Scholar

6 Aesthetics and Criticism, London, 1955., p. 66.Google Scholar

7 Quarterly Review, 1906. The argument of Music and its Lovers (1932) is a huge expansion of this short statement.Google Scholar

8 Two Cheers for Democracy, London, 1951, p. 125.Google Scholar

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