Music and Humanism: An Essay in the Aesthetics of Music (review)

Music and Humanism: An Essay in the Aesthetics of Music. By R. A. Sharpe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [ix, 221 p. ISBN 0-19-823885-1. $35.]

In his extended essay Music and Humanism, R. A. Sharpe claims expressive descriptions of music are vital to our understanding and appreciation of music as a humanistic art. He argues that the use of expressive predicates to describe emotions and moods in music is bound up with judgments entangled within "broader questions of sincerity, authenticity and the ideology of the arts" (p. 180). Starting with the convention that music's nonrepresentational character sets it apart from literary, dramatic, and visual arts, he suggests music's limited capacity for representation is at odds with how it "moves us so profoundly" (p. 5). By taking a stand against a purely formalist perspective, the author seemingly intends to show how the gap between music's nonrepresentational character and its affective power might be bridged.

Sharpe proposes to account for our interest in music as humanistic by naturalizing it. If we are to relate music to our interests, "we need some explanation of its appeal in terms of a connection with human life" (p. 4). The author attempts to "naturalize" music's descriptive characterizations by taking up the cognitivist thesis that "our descriptions of music tell us what properties the music has, rather than how the music affects us or what the composer was expressing by means of it" (p. 9). This thesis contrasts with theories that identify expressive predicates with music's power to cause or arouse in us corresponding feelings or emotions.

In defending his thesis against the concept of music as an essentially formal art, Sharpe distances himself from the more conventional cognitivist filiation of this concept with music's value. The question of value is foremost in Sharpe's argument: as a humanistic art, music relates to "the life humans live" (p. 179) through the beliefs and ideas that affect our understanding and appreciation of it. The author's view that music's cognitive dimensions include its expressive function seems at odds with his reluctance to concede that formalism does not account for some of our most important critical assessments of music. Nevertheless, he holds to his thesis that it is the music itself that is sad (his example), and that music's formal apparatus does not exhaust its cognitive dimension.

Sharpe turns to rhetoric and oratory to establish a connection between expressive predicates and their humanistic content. Borrowing from Ludwig Wittgenstein, he claims our "primitive reactions" to music's emotive characteristics are "not mediated through convention" (p. 76) but are rooted in naturally inflected characteristics of speech. To justify the use of expressive predicates in terms of our natural reactions to rhetorically affective gestures and shapes, Sharpe appeals to the art of rhetoric. He argues that rhetoric offers formal models for holding the listener's attention while imposing unity because of "the primitive pleasure" we feel "in melody, timbre, and rhythm within a work of larger scale" (p. 76).

Sharpe draws a connection between rhetoric and oratory to introduce one of the most interesting insights of this book. Like a musical performance, oratory realizes a rhetorical structure in its delivery of a text. Oratory "cultivates the expressive possibilities of the human voice" (p. 79); musical performance interprets a work by re-creating its expressive character. To counter analytic philosophy's motivations for pursuing an ontology of the musical work, the author distinguishes between the work, the interpretation, and the performance. According to Sharpe, the conception of the work that this ontology articulates is mired in ideologies or belief systems it fails to acknowledge. By suggesting that we view performance as expression, Sharpe does not believe he has escaped the condition he critiques. Rather, he believes he has successfully situated the question of music's value into a context wherein the interpreter (i.e., performer) forms...