Keywords

Economic value; Artistic value; Aesthetic value; Social value; Practical value; Instrumental value; Experiential value

JEL Classification Codes

Z00; Z10; Z13

5.1 Introduction

I here survey the kinds of value that music can have, or perhaps equivalently, the variety of ways in which music is rightly valued. For music is multiply valuable and that is the central theme of this chapter.¹

It is not uncommon for those who reflect on the value of the arts, from the perspective of either art makers or art appreciators, to propose that art is useless, and that it is precisely in being useless, or not satisfying any practical objective, that it is both most true to its nature and of greatest worth. It is not hard to understand the motivation of such an attitude toward art, sometimes described as ‘aestheticist’ or ‘art for art’s sake’. At bottom is the concern that art not be viewed in utilitarian terms, that it not be bound to the marketplace, that it not be rudely harnessed to social or political goals. For to treat art in such fashion would be at odds with the formal and expressive freedom that art must arguably be accorded if it is to achieve all that it might in artistic terms.

However, regarded soberly, the claim that art is useless is hyperbolic. It is true only in the limited sense in which usefulness is equated with the achieving of narrowly practical ends. However, the arts, and music among them, are certainly not, in the broad sense, useless. The arts answer to certain interests we possess, certain goals we entertain, and certain purposes that we embrace. They answer, perhaps, even to certain needs that we have, in the sense of goods without which our lives cannot fully flourish, even if we are not likely to actually perish without those goods.

Consider in this connection the well-known remark of Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Without music, human life would be a mistake’. This can, of course, like the claim that art is useless, seem somewhat exaggerated. For if Nietzsche’s affirmation is valid, then why not, ‘Without flowers, human life would be a mistake’? Or ‘Without tennis, human life would be a mistake’? Or even, ‘Without Coca-Cola, human life would be a mistake’? Clearly, music, flowers, tennis, and carbonated beverages are all, in their different ways, good things, but is there really something special about music, such that its absence from our lives would be almost tragic, whereas that would perhaps not be so were those other good things to be absent? I return to that question throughout this chapter.

5.2 Preliminary Distinctions

Certain preliminary distinctions regarding the value of music are in order at the outset of our inquiry.² It is convenient to distinguish, first, the intrinsic value of music from the instrumental value of music, where the former can be understand as the value of engagement with music for its own sake, whereas the latter can be understood as the value of music as a means to some good beyond that residing in the very engagement with music. Second, the artistic value of music, which includes its intrinsic value, but also arguably certain of its instrumental values, must be distinguished from its non-artistic values, all of which are instrumental; the artistic value of music should also be distinguished from its aesthetic value, which is a somewhat narrower notion than artistic value. Third, the value of music for an individual should be distinguished from the value of music for a group or community, or even more broadly, for humanity. Fourth, within the value of music for an individual we can distinguish between its value for someone as a listener, its value for someone as a performer, and its value for someone as a composer.³

Fifth, there is a distinction between the value of music or the practice of music as a whole and the value that attaches to individual pieces or occasions of music. Corresponding to that distinction are two questions that might naturally be posed about musical value:

The relation between these questions, however, is somewhat murky.

Could music as a whole be valuable if no individual pieces or occasions of music were valuable? That is hard to envisage, for the value of music as a whole seems to depend on the value of at least some such individual pieces or occasions. Could an individual piece or occasion of music be valuable even though music as a whole was not? That seems slightly easier to envisage, if still highly improbable, for the existence of even one valuable instance of music would surely point the way to others.

To frame the question somewhat differently: is music in general valuable because specific instances of music are valuable or are specific instances of music valuable because music in general is valuable? At this point we may begin to suspect that there is something unhappy about the very question, but if forced to choose it looks as if the first option is the better one, holding that the value of music in general must somehow derive from the value of specific instances of music.

Perhaps the best thing to say is this: that music as a whole is valuable insofar as it is possible for there to be valuable instances of music or occasions of music-making, where such instances or occasions may be valuable in different ways, and that a given genre of music will be valuable to the degree that valuable instances of music or occasions of music-making are possible within that genre.

At any rate, in this chapter I am primarily concerned with the value attaching to music or the practice of music generally, rather than with the comparative value of individual pieces of music or the comparative value of individual genres of music. That means that my discussion of the values of music will often situate itself at a fairly abstract level, seeking those musical values that are to be found, though of course to varying degrees, in music of just about any sort.

The social value of music provides a clear example of the divergence between a value of music in general and the comparative value of an individual piece of music. Let us understand the social value of music as consisting centrally in the opportunity that music affords to bring people together in a public context for shared experience, interaction, coordination, and mutual affirmation. So understood, social value does not serve to any extent as a differentiating value of individual pieces or occasions of music, since it is possessed by virtually all pieces or occasions of music and yet remains a value of music generally.⁴

5.3 Music’s Value for Listener, Performer, And Composer

It is helpful at this point to distinguish music’s value to listeners from music’s value to performers from music’s value to composers. These are, of course, different in theory, so it is hardly surprising that in practice they only partly overlap.⁵

Music can be more rewarding to listen to than it is to perform—perhaps it is technically too easy to challenge a player and yet manages to be melodically ravishing. An example that comes to mind is the Rodgers and Hart standard You Are Too Beautiful. Music can be more rewarding to compose than it is to listen to—perhaps involving ingenious solutions to problems in counterpoint that are impossible to audibly relish. An example might be Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet Spem in alium. Finally, music might be more rewarding to perform than it is either to listen to or to compose—perhaps interestingly challenging the performer without either calling forth anything new from the composer or especially captivating the listener. An example might be Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, which despite many virtuosic turns for the soloist, features far-from enthralling thematic material and in addition works its folksy closing theme to death.⁶

So a given piece of music can differ in value according to the role in the musical situation that one focuses on—whether that of listener, performer, or composer. Still, it seems as if the first of those, that of the listener, appropriately takes priority over the others. Why is that? The answer is that making music the heard experience of which is rewarding is the fundamental raison d’être of the musical enterprise, that by which success in composing and success in performing is ultimately to be judged. Basically, someone composes well if they compose music that rewards listening and performs well if they perform in a manner that rewards listening, whatever satisfactions may or may not accrue to the composer or the performer in the activities of composing and performing themselves. Another reason, often noted, is that composers and performers are always perforce listeners as well as composers and performers, and that their listening responses, at least in imagination, are integral to the successful pursuit of their composing and performing activities. The satisfaction that a performer takes in performing or that a composer takes in composing may be, in part, a matter of challenges met or problems solved in their respective arts, but in virtually all cases spelling out what that amounts to will acknowledge the goal of a good-sounding performance or composition—one that appeals above all to the ear of the listener and not only the mind of the composer or the body of the performer.

5.4 Manners of Musical Value

It will be useful as well to distinguish different manners in which music can be valuable in regard to a given desirable end. Doing so is essential if we hope to justify in some measure Nietzsche’s rather hyperbolic pronouncement about music’s importance.

The different manners I have in mind are as follows:

Clearly, the more values of music we can identify that are valuable in ways (ii)–(iv) of being valuable, the better position we will be in to justify the judgment that a world without music would be a vastly regrettable thing, which in more sober guise is the force of Nietzsche’s remark. I will be particularly attentive in what follows to values in categories (iii) and (iv) sketched above (i.e. ones that are arguably either distinctive of music or else unique to music). However, even those values of music that fall under categories (i) and (ii) above may enter into that justification, if substantial enough.

5.5 The Centrality of Music in Human Life

In a recent book on our subject, Peter Kivy, the dean of American philosophers of music, nicely poses a version of Nietzsche’s remark, though in the form of a question: ‘Does music strike deep enough into human bedrock that it can be seen as partly defining our lives’? (Kivy, 2002, p. 8). Kivy is pretty sure that it does, going on to observe that there has never been, anywhere, a culture without music.

Now the fact that music is ubiquitous in human societies is a striking one and suggests that music answers to some deep need or interest that we have, apart from those for food, drink, sex, shelter, companionship, and the like. However, noting music’s ubiquity does not of itself tell us what that need or interest is. Moreover, music is not only ubiquitous, but appears to play an irreplaceable role in the lives of most of us; it pervades our existence to such an extent that its disappearance would be immediately remarked, and with considerable consternation. However, the irreplaceability of music, like its ubiquity, is again at best a symptom of music’s importance and neither an explanation of nor a reason for that importance.

We could do worse at this point than quickly pass in review some well-known proposals as regards music’s special value that have been offered in the course of the last two centuries of philosophical reflection on music. I have in mind those associated with the names of Eduard Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Arthur Schopenhauer, Susanne Langer, James Sullivan, and Leonard Meyer⁷.

The idea of a specifically musical beauty championed by Hanslick, that of a deep-rooted and non-rule-governed musical impressiveness emphasized by Gurney, that of music as a supremely adequate reflector of emotional life advanced by Schopenhauer and Langer, that of music as a revealer of novel or unprecedented states of mind proposed by Sullivan, and that of music as a potential developer of personal character offered by Meyer, all seem to me of some merit. (See the Appendix for elaboration.) Suitably framed and qualified, they might well yield values that are either distinctive of or even unique to music. However, instead of assessing those suggestions as such I am going to explore, in my own fashion, some further suggestions regarding the special value of music, though ones in which can be heard echoes of some of the ideas just canvassed.

5.6 The Artistic Value of Music

As stated at the outset, the central theme of this chapter is how many and how various are the values that music possesses or how diverse are the sorts of value music has for us. That is, however, not to say that those values are all on a par. There are, rather, priorities and asymmetries among them. Some musical values are more important than others, and some musical values presuppose and depend on others.

Among the values that music can possess we must give pride of place to what one might label music’s musical value, or the value that music has as music. Since music is, in the primary sense, an art, the musical value of a piece of music is thus a species of artistic value. What exactly artistic value comprises is a difficult question, however, which I postpone for the moment. However, it will probably be agreed that the largest part of music’s artistic value is what we may label music’s aesthetic value (i.e. the value that music has as an object of aesthetic appreciation and which can be roughly equated with its intrinsic value for listeners).

However, what is aesthetic appreciation? Let us say that aesthetic appreciation is an engagement with an object in which its forms and qualities, and the relations among them, are registered and savored in their full individuality and for their own sake or, alternatively, for the experience that perceiving or contemplating them provides. Music’s aesthetic value, the core of its artistic value, is then the value that it affords us when we attend to it closely and appreciate it aesthetically (Levinson, 2009).

We can be a bit more specific than that if we allow ourselves an assumption about what listening to music with understanding centrally involves; namely, a kind of close tracking of music as it evolves in time, what we often call following music. Then we can say that the aesthetic value of a piece of music is given roughly by the value of the perceptual-imaginative-affective experience that the piece is capable of affording a prepared listener when the listener tracks or follows the music attentively and which thus amounts to aesthetically appreciating the music.⁸

So conceived, the aesthetic value of a piece of music is thus a kind of experiential value. Moreover, since the idea of appreciation implies finding something experientially rewarding and since this often, if not always, amounts to enjoying that something, there is no getting around the fact that music’s aesthetic value is typically reflected in the pleasure that it gives us when we attend to it aesthetically. So the aesthetic value of music is not only an experiential value, but often, quite plainly, a hedonic value.

Music is thus perhaps above all something designed to give pleasure, although of a special sort, to those who engage with it aesthetically. That has been taken as a reason, by those adhering to an ‘art for art’s sake’ perspective on music, for declaring music, in company with all the other arts, to be in effect useless or of no practical utility. However, something that is a reliable source of non-injurious, non-ruinous, highly repeatable pleasure should not, after all, be thought of as useless. Further, if one adds that music, in the course of giving us harmless pleasure, profitably exercises our perceptual, cognitive, affective, and imaginative faculties, the charge of uselessness appears even less well-founded.

Exactly what psychological benefits accrue to individuals who actively engage with music, especially though not exclusively in virtue of learning to sing or play music, is currently a lively area of research in the cognitive psychology of music, but it is clear that there are some such benefits, consisting most likely in the enlivening and sharpening of various of our mental faculties, such as those involved in spatial reasoning, arithmetical calculation, anticipating the future, remembering the past, coordinating motor activity, and empathizing with others.⁹ Instrumental benefits of an engagement with music such as these, it should be noted, are mostly of a remote and dispositional sort, and not something that one occurently enjoys or realizes. By contrast, the psychological benefits of musical engagement that I highlight later in this chapter are for the most part quite different, involving manifest and immediately experienced positive goods. Of course the case can also be made that engaging in musical activity proved directly adaptive for humankind in its prehistory, most notably by facilitating collective action, apart from any benefits that accrue to individuals now through such engagement.¹⁰ The jury is still out on the validity of evolutionary explanations of music’s origins, however, and whether such explanations are valid or not is, in any event, orthogonal to the concerns of this chapter, restricted to values that music incontestably possesses for us now.

I now return to the momentarily sidelined issue of music’s artistic value or, alternatively, its musical value or value as music. How might we delimit the scope of that? On the one hand, presumably not all the value that engagement with music can have for us is properly thought of as entering into its artistic value and detachable psychological benefits of the sort invoked a moment ago perhaps furnish a clear example of real, yet non-artistic, values of music. On the other hand, the artistic value of music is not exhausted by its aesthetic value, but arguably encompasses values of other sorts, so we cannot simply equate the two.

What are some values that music as an art can possess, and which are thus artistic values of music, but which go beyond its aesthetic value? Some plausible candidates are the accomplishment in a medium that a piece of music can represent, the originality of invention that a piece of music can display, and the positive influence on the course of future composition that a piece of music can exert (Levinson, 2006b). These seem clearly to be artistic values of music, internal to the musical enterprise, and not simply external fruits or side benefits of musical activity, such as a possible improvement in memory capacity. Yet, they are not aesthetic values in the sense earlier specified, since they are not as such experiential values, whereby music is of aesthetic value just insofar as it affords a listener intrinsically rewarding perceptual-imaginative-affective experience. The values of artistic accomplishment, artistic originality, and artistic influence do not primarily reside in the experience of those things. That is so even if, as can be argued, they must themselves ultimately be grounded in valuable appreciative experiences that they make possible (Levinson, forthcoming).

Assume, then, that music’s artistic value has as its core music’s aesthetic value, but is not exhausted by that. So, once again, how can music’s artistic value be circumscribed? Well, one way would be to conceive such value as residing in the capacity that music has to fulfill objectives or answer to purposes that are proper to music as an art. But what objectives or purposes are those?

One might be tempted at this point to offer a historical answer. That is, we might simply look to the objectives or purposes that music, practiced as an art, has traditionally aimed to fulfill. These would surely include the exploration of form, the expression of emotion, the exercise of imagination, the creation of tonal beauty, the embodiment of ideas in sensuous form, the elevation of the soul, the heightening of a sense of occasion, and so on.

The historical answer is good as far as it goes, but it seems both possible and desirable to supply another, more principled one. The issue, recall, is what counts as an artistic objective or purpose of music. Why do the objectives just mentioned qualify as artistic—exploration of form, expression of emotion, attainment of tonal beauty—whereas other objectives, such as the production of economic worth, the achievement of medical benefits, the acquisition of prestige, and so on, which might well result from musical activity, seem not to qualify?

A short answer is that something is an artistic objective of music when accessing the associated value requires adequate engagement with the music as music; that is, engagement in which the music is understood, its distinctive forms, qualities and meanings acknowledged and appreciated for what they are (Budd, 1995). A musical work’s aesthetic value, certainly, but also its influence value, originality value, and accomplishment value is inaccessible to someone who lacks an understanding engagement with the work, whereas its economic or medicinal or prestige value, by contrast, arguably are accessible without such engagement. It may suffice, to harvest the economic value, to just own the rights to some music; to receive the medical value, to audit it inattentively; to reap the prestige value, to simply have sponsored its composition.

5.7 Music’s Extra-Artistic Value

So much for music’s artistic value. It is time to state squarely that music has considerable value beyond its artistic value (i.e. its musical value or value as music). Most obviously, as just recalled in passing, music clearly has economic value as well, whether as a commodity, a service, or a skill. Many people earn their living, in whole or in part, from music and from many angles: some from composing it, some from performing it, some from publicizing it, some from marketing it, some from promoting it, some from criticizing it, some from engineering it, some from recording it, some from teaching it, some from analyzing it, and some, even, from theorizing and lecturing about it.

More generally, music has, or can have, various sorts of practical value. Notable among them would be social value, entertainment value, therapeutic value, distraction value, relaxation value, mnemonic-improvement value, mobility-enhancement value, seduction-facilitating value, and so on. There are, lastly, further sorts of value that some music may possess that are perhaps not purely practical, such as cognitive value and ethical value, but which we cannot uncontentiously range among the artistic values of music, though it is possible to mount arguments for so ranging them. The existence and the status of cognitive and ethical values in art is currently a lively topic of debate in philosophical aesthetics.¹¹

5.8 Music’s Aesthetic Value

Having acknowledged some of music’s manifold extra-artistic values, I now return to the most important of music’s artistic values (i.e. music’s aesthetic value). This, arguably the fundamental value of music as such, is the value of experiencing music’s patterns and qualities for their own sakes—a value that is accessed when we appreciate a piece of music for the distinct individual it is, formally, expressively, and in its specific fusion of the two (Levinson, 2009).

Schematically, we might say that with any music there is (i) how it very concretely goes—how sound follows sound, note follows note, chord follows chord, phrase follows phrase, and so on; then (ii) what it variously conveys—movements, gestures, attitudes, and emotions; and (iii) what it conveys in relation to and as embodied in how it precisely goes. It is that third thing, that specific complex of motion and meaning, that is likely most distinctive of a piece of music and that it is perhaps most rewarding to focus attention on (Levinson, 2006b).

Great music, especially, stands as an exemplar of the most concrete and indissoluble union of form and content, something absolutely wonderful in its unparaphrasability—more unparaphrasable even than great poetry, where poem and paraphrase are at least in the same medium. I recall here Mendelssohn’s celebrated remark that what music conveys, in its own fashion, is not too vague for words, but too specific for them; and Beethoven’s response to a listener who, having just heard him perform one of his piano sonatas, asked him what it meant, Beethoven’s response being to simply play the piece again. This, of course, is not far from what both Hanslick and Gurney proposed as most distinctively valuable about music.

The music theorist William Benjamin has offered a conjecture about the distinctive pleasure listeners take in following the unfolding of music that goes beyond what I have said so far, where the emphasis was on the indissoluble union of form and content in music and the consequent unparaphrasability of what it conveys. It is a conjecture that strikes me as having considerable explanatory power: ‘We find intensely pleasurable … a power we experience, the power to remember the sound of small sections of music and to reproduce them in our imaginations … because as we engage that power, we feel as if the music is emerging from within us, as if we were its virtual source’ (Benjamin, 2006).

Elaborating on Benjamin’s thought, we may suggest that part of the distinctive value of music is the ease with which it is internalized by us, so that we in effect possess it in auditing it attentively. Music enters into us and pervades us like no other artistic offering, whether film, novel, painting, or sculpture, which always remain to some extent outside us and at a distance from us. Music is in effect recreated within us each time we listen, by seconding its movement, for the most part involuntarily, in our aural imaginations, often anticipating each gesture of the music as if it were our own, as if coming from within us instead of from without.

5.9 Music’s Symbolic Value

I next draw attention to how music models in audible form myriad of ways of being, of moving, of developing, of unfolding and progressing (Beardsley, 1981). Its capacity to do so is rooted, to be sure, in its being a temporal art, but unlike, say, dance or film, which are equally temporal in nature, the abstractness of music imparts to such modeling a reach and a power beyond what those other arts can attain. Music, through the virtual movement that it delineates and the real movement that it induces, introduces us to possibilities of movement that would otherwise have remained closed to us, and to ways of inhabiting our bodies that we may never have suspected. Music provides, in its sounding form, a paragon and practicum of how to be, how to move, how to grow—in short, of how to go on (Levinson, 2006b). It’s not clear that anything else does that for us or at least not so vividly.

The medium of music is unparalleled for the virtually infinite possibilities that it represents or exemplifies and that on at least three levels:

This should recall, in some measure, what Langer and Sullivan thought worth underlining about the special value of music.

5.10 Music’s Self-Affirmation Value

Music also has undeniable value as a reflector of self and a definer of identity. This works differently, of course, for composers than for performers, for performers than for listeners, but it does work for them all, in one way or another. One’s involvement with music has the potential to be almost as absorbing and challenging as a relationship, amorous or otherwise, with another person, often leading to the same sorts of constructive self-questioning. Musical works arguably help to crystallize or constitute the self that attends to them, internalizes them, and identifies with them.

Moreover, the musical tastes of a listener are often taken to be a clear barometer of his or her personality, the sensibility of a performer is manifest not only in how he or she performs but in what he or she chooses to perform, and composers are often said to live in and through their music. One has the sense of Gustav Mahler the person, for example, more fully and vividly through his 10 symphonies and five song cycles than through the most detailed biography that might be devoted to him, and one suspects that the sense of the personality of Sviatoslav Richter emanating from his performances—one of massive strength, solidity, and self-reliance—is truer than what might be gleaned from newspaper or radio interviews with him. Moreover, there is probably no surer indicator of spiritual kinship between two persons than their sharing musical preferences and predilections.

That last point reminds us that music serves as a powerful source of group, and not just individual, identity. What music you favor often allies you with a given group, affirming your identification with it. As we all know, the musically inclined are not simply generic music lovers, but aficionados, variously, of Beethoven, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Baroque opera, Swedish fiddling, Arvo Pärt, punk rock, bebop, heavy metal, hip-hop, Javanese gamelan, and so on. Almost every genre of music spawns a community of appreciators of it who find in its sounds a special charm that makes that music—and by extension, them—stand out from the usual run of music and people.

5.11 Music’s Social Value

I come back now to music’s social value, probably the most important of its extra-artistic values. Music is of undeniable value as a sort of social glue and agent of solidarity, helping to create, maintain, and strengthen a sense of community. Music is notably more effective in this regard than almost any other art form. But why is that so? Comparing music with literature, painting, and film will bring out part of the reason.

The experience of a concert, of publicly performed music, is an especially communal one, with many people intently focused on and enjoying the same thing, in full awareness of the participation of others. Concert attending is rather unlike film viewing, which is communal but solitary and isolating, or painting viewing, which does not lend itself to doing communally, or most obviously, to the consumption of literature, normally a wholly private activity. Even a theatrical performance, though as communal an event as a concert, seems not quite as effective as a binder of persons as a musical performance, though that may just be due to the fact that in our culture audience response is normally a smaller part of theatre events than it is of musical events. If we shift our focus from the context of the modern concert, whether of rock, jazz, or classical music, to how music manifests itself in tribal and traditional cultures, the social affirmation-interaction aspect of music is all the more salient. We should also not fail to note, as part of music’s social value, occasions of public music as facilitators of human intercourse in the most ordinary sense, the conversing, gesturing, acknowledging, and exchanging that are the very fabric of social life.

A more specific aspect of music’s social value, and one which perhaps deserves its own designation, ecumenical power, is the ability of music to transcend cultural barriers, to disarm prejudices, to unite people simply as human beings, regardless of linguistic, religious, or ethnic affiliation. Of course its power to do this is not unlimited and may be greater for some genres rather than others, but it is noticeably greater than that of other artistic manifestations, which often struggle to export themselves outside of their culture of origin. This no doubt owes in part to the abstract, non-verbal nature of music, but perhaps also to its greater capacity to enter into us, to take hold of us, to set out bodies and souls in motion, almost without the participation of our wills (Bicknell 2009).

5.12 Music’s Idiosyncratic Value

I now put in evidence what one might call music’s idiosyncratic value. Music can have value for a given listener that need not be shared, or even shareable, with others. Music’s idiosyncratic value is a matter of the way some music speaks to someone in a completely individual way, resonating with his or her specific memories, associations, history, and physiology. Of course what I am calling idiosyncratic value, which is a cousin of sentimental value though not quite identical to it, can attach to anything—a dilapidated wall in one’s neighborhood, a piece of bottle glass found on the beach, the way one’s sister shakes her head—but music seems to have a particularly strong propensity to take on such value for us. This is the phenomenon of ‘just something about it’ or ‘je ne sais quoi,’ that strange appeal that resists explanation. Think of the ineffable charm that the ‘little phrase’ in Vinteuil’s sonata in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has for Charles Swann, whose model was possibly Gabriel Faure’s Violin Sonata in A major, the soaring main theme of which, consisting of a series of five-note motifs, squares well with Proust’s description of the Vinteuil. I suspect that music’s unusual capacity to take on idiosyncratic value of this sort has something to do with music’s so often striking us as a sort of veiled speech or opaque utterance, in which something is being said, something of significance, but which one nevertheless cannot quite make out or pin down.

5.13 Music’s Mood-Enhancement Value

Consider next music’s manifest value as an improver of mood and lifter of spirits. When one is down, there is almost nothing that works as well to bring one up again, or at least part of the way, as suitably chosen music. Even if the cheering effect of such music is transient, and cannot alone transmute unhappiness into its opposite, the cheering effect is undeniably real.

So, to which of my four categories does music’s mood-enhancement value belong? That depends on whether the music’s particular manner of bringing about the improvement of mood or outlook (e.g. through seductive timbre, rhythmic drive, melodic charm, or harmonic richness) is included in the effect achieved. If so, then such value figures in category (iii) or (iv), since reflecting a distinctive or unique capacity of music. If not, then at least in category (ii), reflecting a capacity that music displays to a notable degree, if not distinctively or uniquely.

Mood-enhancement value is a value of music in general—a marked potential that music possesses for quickly bringing about a lightening of spirits. Of course, however, not all music exhibits that potential. However, contrary to what one might think at first blush, it is not only music expressive of positive emotion that can serve to brighten one’s mood or alter one’s outlook for the better. For to hear one’s sadness mirrored exquisitely in sad music can be psychologically beneficial, affording the sense of being intimately understood and virtually empathized with that such music can impart.¹³

On the other hand, the possible effect of truly depressive music should not be overlooked, especially when coupled with a suitably pessimistic text. According to urban legend a song recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941 called Gloomy Sunday, based on a Hungarian original entitled The End of the World, was so convincingly despairing that it was credited with prompting hundreds of suicides and earned the song the nickname ‘the Hungarian suicide song.’ Moreover, it was also banned from broadcast by the BBC for 60 years.

5.14 Music’s Accompaniment Value

I lastly underline music’s obvious yet crucial value as an accompaniment to and facilitator of other activities, such as religious ritual, military parade, aerobic exercise, or dance in all its forms. With regard in particular to the latter, music is valuable for the spur and guide it affords to bodily movement of an organized, rhythmic, and fluid sort, the sort of movement that is experienced by almost everyone as unusually liberating, even those whose talent for dance is quite modest.

Music is, in fact, supremely fitted to accompany almost all the activities of life, rendering them more pleasant, more fruitful, more engaging, or just, in some cases, more bearable. The range of such activities is vast: not only marching and dancing, but working, dining, cooking, raking, washing, socializing, strolling, giving birth, making love, and so on. The products of other arts, such as painting, poetry, sculpture, film, do not lend themselves so well, if at all, to the accompanying role that music so effortlessly plays, for reasons too obvious to underline.

However, music is not only an ideal accompaniment to so many life activities. It is, for many of us, a kind of companion to life itself, without which we would often feel more isolated, more at odds with our surroundings, more closed up in ourselves. Yet music does more even than accompany so well so many of our daily activities and more even than offer companionship of a sort in what may sometimes seem an indifferent world. Music also energizes our lives and renders them more beautiful, investing them, if only in passing, with vitality, depth, and significance.

Appendix

References

1. Beardsley M. Understanding music. In: Price K, ed. On Criticizing Music: Five Philosophical Perspectives (Thalheimer Lectures). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1981;55–73.

2. Benjamin W. Music through a narrow aperture: a partial defense of concatenationism. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 2006;60:515–522.

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