Emotion in Musical Meaning: A Peircean Solution to Langer's Dualism

Abstract

&• 1854, the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick1 sparked a controversy about the meaning of music that has shaped the terms of the issue to this day. In his On the Beautiful in Music (Vom Musikalisch-Schonen), Hanslick argues that musical meaning consists entirely in tonally moving forms (tonend bewegte Formen). Musical meaning is entirely autonomous; it is constituted by the relationships among tones in the musical work, and it signifies or refers to nothing outside itself and its musical properties. Hanslicks purpose in developing this formalist account of musical meaning is to refute the commonly held stance that the aim of music is to represent emotions. Hanslick rejects both the view that the purpose of music is to arouse emotions in the listener and the position that its aim is to express the emotional content of a composers extramusical lived experience.2 Ever since Hanslicks time, musicologists and aestheticians have struggled with the question of what role emotion plays in the experiences of performing and listening to music, and, more specifically, in the understanding of musical meaning. I propose to address this question by critiquing Susanne Langers account of musical meaning through a Peircean lens. Langer maintains in Philosophy in a New Key that the purpose of music is to offer a formal representation of human emotions, not to express emotions directly or to bring about emotive responses in listeners. In arguing thus, Langer, despite her intention to secure a place for emotion in accounting for musical meaning, perpetuates the dualistic assumptions concerning the relations between reason and emotion that have tended to dominate musical aesthetics since Hanslick. But Charles S. Peirce s concept of the emotional ?nterpretant, along with his suggestion that a piece of music is the quintessential example of a sign that is interpreted by