Sometimes it is claimed that the value of music is to awaken certain emotions. Evolutionary psychologists often claim that music is supposed to be a kind of superstimulus, like cheesecake. It is a byproduct of our linguistic abilities and acts as a kind of superstimulus of our language brain. This misunderstands the function of aesthetic judgment. We need *reason* to understand music. Just as we need reason to understand language, or the world indeed. To discern between good and bad in music, our emotions are as helpful as they are in science. Our feelings towards a particular theory has no relevance to whether it is true. Likewise, the emotions a particular music evokes do not tell us whether or not it is objectively interesting. In this short essay, I will assume there are objective values in aesthetics. That might be a bold claim for some! In a future post, I will argue that it is. But if we assume that for the moment, let's look at what it would mean.

1. Sad music does not make you sad

The overture to Tristan and Isolde is the saddest music ever written and it makes me profoundly happy.

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When we listen to sad music, it does not make us sad. If it would make us truly sad,  truly unhappy, we would turn it off. I do turn off music when I think it is boring. It can be boring and happy, sad, angry and all in between. But the boringness of the music makes me unhappy. I would rather have silence than listen to it. The reason why we want to keep listening to a piece of music has to do with whether we value it. Whether we think it is beautiful.

Good music makes us experience beauty. Is experiencing beauty an emotion?

2. If the value of music were about the emotions it stirs, the value would be random (and subjective).

Have you seen the guy who rides a crazy rollercoaster, totally stoic?

Emotions, and rather experiences as a whole are theory-laden. That's a piece of Popperian jargon which largely means, our prejudices about the world shape how we experience it. The guy in the video might have ridden that rollercoaster a thousand times. Now, it is a walk in the park for him (But the feat is quite impressive nonetheless). So even though all the people in that rollercoaster ride are having the same (roughly) experience. They experience it in their own way.

A piece of music will be different for different people. For some, it will stir emotions of reminiscence, for others anxiety, and yet others will think the music is sad, boringly so. The value of the music itself cannot be related to what a specific person happens to experience. Then the value would be as random as the weather.

3. Good music is interesting, but it is not obvious that it is.

There is a magical poem about what it means to be a human, written by Thomas Tranströmer. In the end, it goes like this:

Skäms inte för att du är människa, var stolt! Inne i dig öppnar sig valv bakom valv oändligt. Du blir aldrig färdig, och det är som det skall.

If you don't know Swedish, the experience of beauty in this poem is not available to you. You have to understand the words for the poem to make sense, otherwise, you would just listen to how the word sounds, rather than what they mean.

The same is true in music. It is not enough to just listen to a piece of music if you want to make a judgment about its value. If you don't know what a sonata form is, then you will miss a valuable part of the musical content of a Beethoven sonata. For instance, in his last sonatas, he takes the sonata form to its limits. In the op 109, he compresses the exposition into just one page of music, something which usually goes on for much longer. Yet it does not give the impression of being short. Without knowing what the sonata form is, that feat will not be recognizable.

So listening to a piece and deciding if we "like" it or not, without deeper understanding than hearing the sounds of the piece, would be like deciding the value of a poem in a language you don't understand. What you are referring to is how the words or the music sounds. But the sounds are only means to an end, in both language and music. The words are used to convey a specific meaning, in music it is not clear what the meaning is, but there is one.

I just touched upon a mystery of its own there, what is meaning in music? For another time.

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