Music and Humanism

"Robert Sharpe examines a series of fundamental questions about our understanding and appreciation of music, towards a reassessment of the conception of music that has been dominant in Western culture. He focuses on the problem of expression in music, and on the role of pleasure in aesthetic judgement. He argues against the view that music is expressive in as much as it causes certain states in us: this view underestimates the cognitive element in our response to music. Our beliefs about music are integral to our appreciation of it; and general ideas about music and its relation to its times - our ideologies - underlie our judgement. Differences in musical taste are not just primitive and irresolvable difference in sensitivity: they are the result of differences in circumstance and upbringing, of associations and ideology. The metaphor of music as a language has exerted a deep influence on the way we think about music and the way we hear it: we conceive of music as expressive and as something to be understood. These two ideas underpin the thought that it is a humanist art. Sharpe suggests that Western music may have entered a new period in which the language analogy and the humanist conception are becoming less and less appropriate."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.