On Music

What is music for? Is it the same in a Haydn symphony, the jazz fusion of Jaco Pastorius, a raga by Ravi Shankar, and an improvised song of grief in Papua New Guinea? This extremely concise book offers an opinionated and example-filled survey of some fundamental and longstanding debates about the nature of music. The central arguments and ideas are presented with the goal of making them as accessible as possible to general readers who have no background in philosophy. The emphasis is on instrumental music, but examples are drawn from many cultures as well as from Western classical, jazz, folk, and popular music. The views of historical figures--Plato, Kant, Hanslick, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein--are compared with the views of leading contemporary philosophers of music--Stephen Davies, Peter Kivy, Kathleen Higgins, Malcolm Budd. Together, the four chapters in On Music show that music is a human universal that is culturally tailored to perform many different communicative functions. Performances of music are physically-embodied manifestations of human agency. Some performances express emotion. Some performances convey the mystical. Some just move our feet for dancing. But in every cas