A post by Giulia Lorenzi

What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a certain way, implying (often) specific types of sounds, and motivated by artistic and intellectual expressive reasons. So, it may seem that not much is left to imagining once perceptual entities, structure, intentions, and goals of an artistic expression are set. The creator (whether a composer or a performer-composer) can appear prima facie to have decided everything that could appear in a piece leaving no room for anything else.

In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.

Even if in a piece of music its structure, sounds, intentions, and goals are set there is something inherently puzzling in it: its message. What is that thing that the structure and sounds are trying to communicate? What should be the takeaway of a piece of music? When it comes to pieces of  so called “pure music,” namely pieces of music that do not have any lyrics or accompanying texts, these questions come across as both pressing and difficult to answer. What is a Beethoven symphony about? What is it conveying to the audience?

A possible reply here may concern emotions. A piece of music can be about the emotions that it is intended to convey. Yet, again, whose emotions exactly? When we say that a piece of music is sad or happy, we are not literally saying this in the same way in which we would say that one of our students is happy about having received a first in their assignment. The piece of music cannot feel the happiness that the student is invaded by in reading their positive feedback. The piece does not experience a phenomenological reaction of any sort. A piece cannot be literally happy or sad as a person may be. How can it be happy or sad then?

If there are views that suggest that the emotions we are talking about when we are referring to a happy or sad piece of music are actually emotions felt by the audience or the emotions experienced by composers or performers, namely emotions of real human beings, there are also philosophers that think that we just imagine emotions when we are enjoying a piece music. Someone, like Levinson for example, takes that musical pieces, with their structures, sounds and other perceivable qualities, are prompts for the imagination. In Levinson’s account we imagine some kinds of agent in the music experiencing those emotions that we would normally attribute to the piece. The musical piece, in this account, elicits a narrative where someone, a “persona, who is not the listener, the composer or the performer, feels the emotions (Levinson 1996). Someone else, like Walton (1988) for example, thinks of the imagination involved in perceiving emotions in music as a type of imagination that can be directed both inwards and outwards. He takes it that, in listening to music in some cases,  listeners “imagine themselves introspecting, being aware of their own feeling” (1988, p. 359). In other cases, he takes the audience listening to a piece of music as imagining someone else, another person, producing a certain vocal expression responsible for those emotions.

While the discussion of how music can convey emotions presents a variety of views where imagination plays a role of primary importance, this debate is not the only space where imagination appears in the philosophical literature on music. Scruton (1997), for example, does not just take imagination to be the responsible element of eliciting emotions in listeners. He, more radically, thinks of imagination as what allows people to perceive music at all. Scruton is interested in explaining what he refers to as the experience “of music as music”, namely the perception in musical sounds of dynamics, movements, and spatial elements. He identifies in this type of experience the unique auditory experience of music. He believes that the inability of a listener to experience dynamics and spatial elements in musical pieces precludes to the listener the opportunity to enjoy music as this unique type of art and expression. Yet, he then recognises, in the exercise of imagination as a rational human capacity, what allows for this experience to take place. Scruton believes that to experience music (as music – as implying dynamics and spatial features) a listener has to experience it under a metaphorical understanding. The listener needs to be able to perceive sounds metaphorically under spatial and dynamic descriptions in what he calls “a fusion” between sounds and movements that just imagination can allow to happen.

Finally, an underexplored domain in which the study of imagination in connection to music may be helpful to cast some light on this art and its philosophical aspects concerns musical production. Even if very few philosophical investigations have been conducted so far in this realm, it is intriguing to think about what happens in the mind of musical performers involved in the production of music. Do they imagine at all? And if they do imagine, what do they imagine? In a forthcoming paper, Morales Carbonell and I sketch a picture of what kind of imagination about possibilities and necessities may be involved in the preparation and delivery of a musical performance. We propose that musicians may be concerned about imagining possible ways of 1) interpreting a musical piece, 2) managing the acoustical, physical features of musical instruments and circumstances of production of the performance, and 3) moving their bodies to make the performance possible. Future research could carry this further considering what is implied in the imagination in a musical compositional context or in a musical perceptual one.

References

Levinson, J., (1996) “Musical Expressiveness”, in The Pleasures of Aesthetics, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press.

Lorenzi, G., Morales Carbonell, F., “Modalizing in Musical Performance”, in Mind and Language, forthcoming

Scruton, R., (1997) The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Walton, K., (1988) “What Is Abstract about the Art of Music?”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 351-364