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Western philosophers have long paid attention to the social nature of music, but in doing so the body has been silent. This shows in the lack of a connection of rhythms of repetitive and ritualistic action to musical performance. Classical Confucian philosophy, though lacking a strong critical apparatus, contains a conceptual vocabulary linking rites and musical performance together in the formation of bodily social life. Classical Confucians and today's Confucian-influenced theorists do well in showing that music is not simply a product of society, and instead that it produces sociality. This opens up novel directions for critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two kinds of musical interpretation will be explored in this essay: critical interpretation in the tradition of musical hermeneutics and interpretation as performance. Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy of music will also be discussed, specifically on how an idea in music is expressed. Richard Wagner's musical hermeneutic and performance interpretations will emerge from this background not as irreconcilable activities, but rather as the progression of an argument based on the illustration of tangible meaning in music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short essay has three objectives. The first is to highlight a distinction, grounded in common critical practice, between good music in general and specifically beautiful music, where the latter is naturally thought of as a subclass of the former. The second is to characterize the specificity of beautiful music in this restricted sense, partly through paradigm examples and partly through traits associated with or underlying what we regard as beautiful music. The third is to address the special value of beautiful music as opposed to that of good music generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an interdisciplinary approach involving phenomenology, musicology and cognitive psychology of music, this paper examines the following questions: how do listeners become aware of their musical perceptual experience as having a specific meaning? And, what are the main aspects constituting, within a particular context and a set of circumstances, the subjective meaning of a musical experience? Focusing on the way listeners perceive music, this paper aims to find the key elements that influence how meaning is shaped in everyday musical experience. The paper analyzes expectation, a cognitive process that is particularly relevant for the constitution of meaning during the unfolding of the perceptual act. Finally, a conceptual distinction is proposed between 'expectation' and 'anticipation', and it is argued that they make different contributions to the perceptual experience of music and, therefore, to the meaning music acquires for the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ontology of musical improvisation (MI). MI, as process in which creative and performing activities are one and the same generative occurrence, is contrasted with the most widespread conceptual resource used in inquiries about music ontology of the Western tradition: the type/token duality (TtD). TtD, which is used for explaining the relationship between musical works (MWs) and performances, does not fit for MI. Nonetheless MI can be ontologically related to MWs. A MW can ensue from MI and MI can be required for performing a MW faithfully. As performance on a MW, MI can offer versions of a MW, manifest a MW, and, especially, use it as one of its 'ingredients'. Recordings of MI present special challenges and an unexpected ontological revival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of music commonly distinguish performative from critical interpretations. I would like to suggest that the distinction between critical and performative interpretations is well captured by an analogy to legal critics and judges. This parallel draws attention to several features of performative interpretation that are typically overlooked, and deemphasizes epistemic problems with performative interpretations that I believe are typically blown out of proportion and ultimately fail to capture interesting features of performative interpretation. There is an important distinction to be made between critical and performative interpretation, but its source lies in a difference between the authority of critical and performative interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]