Musical aesthetics, chemistry of concepts, and historical philosophizing in Human, all too human

Music is not only about hearing, but more importantly, feeling. However, many young people still lack the ability to appreciate music, and the aesthetic appreciation of music needs to be improved. Scholars at home and abroad have been devoted to the cultivation of youth music aesthetics, and have provided many effective solutions to this problem. This paper mainly discusses the existing problems of teenagers' music aesthetic, and how to solve these problems and how to cultivate teenagers' music aesthetic quality correctly and effectively. Through a variety of music courses and providing a good free atmosphere, students can improve their aesthetic level, develop creativity and expression skills, explore their interests and talents, build self-confidence, and form a positive self-identity. This can open up a broader artistic horizon for young people, develop a respect and appreciation for cultural diversity, and thus become better lifelong music lovers. In general, the cultivation of teenagers' music aesthetics is a complicated and important process. By providing diverse music experiences, encouraging participation in music creation, guiding deep thinking about music works, establishing music appreciation communities, and supporting and participating in family and education, the development of young people's music aesthetics can be effectively promoted. Further research will help to understand the formation process of teenagers' music aesthetics and provide more scientific and effective guidance for teenagers' music education.

The purpose of this study is to explore the integration of guzheng performance and music aesthetics, and to reveal the unique status and value of guzheng art in modern music aesthetics. Through the method of literature analysis and theoretical discussion, this study first sorted out the historical development of guzheng performing art, and analyzed its aesthetic characteristics and evolution process in different historical periods. Then, the research deeply discusses the basic principles of music aesthetics, including formal beauty, emotional expression, cultural connotation and so on, combined with the specific practice of guzheng performance, analyzes its embodiment and application in music aesthetics. In the process of research, through the aesthetic analysis of the classical works of guzheng, it reveals the unique expression of guzheng music in the aspects of sound beauty, structural beauty and emotional beauty, and discusses how these aesthetic characteristics can be conveyed and sublimated through the performance art. The results show that the performance of guzheng is the display of musical skills, and the concrete practice and embodiment of the principles of musical aesthetics. Through its unique timbre, playing techniques and cultural connotation, guzheng music shows rich aesthetic value and can occupy an important position in the modern music aesthetic system. The research also points out that the aesthetic value of the performance art of guzheng lies in the inheritance of its traditional culture, and in its innovative application in modern music creation and performance. Through the integration of guzheng performance and music aesthetic principles, this study provides a new perspective and method for the theoretical research of guzheng art, and also provides theoretical support for the development and innovation of guzheng performing art.

Musical aesthetics is developed from the development of aesthetics, musical historiography, music criticism and other disciplines. Musical aesthetics draws essences from such disciplines and also presents unique disciplinary characteristics. From such perspectives as philosophy, psychology, sociology and aesthetic meaning of musical works, musical aesthetics explores for the nature of music, functional pattern of music and value standard of music. Research object is served as the initial point of research of any discipline. Musical aesthetics specifies its research objects, and its research objects are enriched with changing times, promoting establishment and enrichment of the disciplinary system. In this paper, a brief introduction is made to research objects and basic principles of music. Besides, the author also lays emphasis on the ontology and disciplinary system. At last, a simple analysis is made on relations between experiences and existing way of basic principles of musical aesthetics. Musical aesthetics is an auditory-experience-based discipline of philosophy of art, which utilizes conceptual analysis, philosophical recognition and other methods to reveal universal laws for aesthetic establishment and practice of human music. Similar to common humanistic disciplines, chief issue of musical aesthetics is the object of research, which concerns both domain of discourse and research objective of musical aesthetics, and decides its disciplinary nature and development orientation. Musical aesthetics dates from the second half of the 19 th century. Through researches and explorations by numerous people, fascinating achievements are made in both theoretical and practical fields, promoting long-term development of musical aesthetics. In the process of document analysis, however, the author finds that there are still considerable different views for the cognition of research object of musical aesthetics. Therefore, the author arranges achievements and experiences of previous researches, combines actual conditions of musical aesthetics at present, and obtains the research object of musical aesthetics from the field of disciplinary system, which is helpful for deep development of this discipline.

The development of learning systems is of particular interest to the music educator and the ethnomusicologist. Furthermore, a society's construction of a world of musical sound is learnt by cultural insiders who identify with it, thereby contributing to their broader sense of cultural identity. This article looks at ways in which such musical worlds are constructed cognitively through social negotiation. This construction involves aesthetic choices, which in turn are derived from value systems that develop within the cultural environment. As environments change with time, so too do value systems and aesthetics, thus indicating a dynamic system of thinking, choosing, discarding and creating. The primary goal of this research endeavour is to develop a theory that can guide arts education and research, a theory which emerged from data extracted from ethnographic field work since 1993, informal surveys, reflective analysis and a broad literature review. The existing literature on societal music cognition and aesthetics in sub-Saharan Africa indicates general approaches and systems, although few pursue the actual construction of individual and social systems of thinking. Hence, based loosely on cognitive theory and ethnomusicology practice, the essay discusses a way in which indigenous sub-Saharan societies developed a system of musical aesthetics that instructed the youth in basic societal values, including encoded systems of knowledge which underlie the actual transmission of musical practice and dance. It then goes on to investigate tensions between musical traditions of the past and contemporary popular culture. Knowing as we do that traditional values are placed under severe stress in urban, modern or post-colonial environments, the intention is to explore whether popular culture contradicts or draws on earlier traditions. While focusing mainly on indigenous informal forms of learning (folklore), the essay addresses some of the value changes that lead to changes in musical aesthetics.

In his influential book, Vom Musikalisch-Schinen, Eduard Hanslick argued that it is impossible to represent the emotions in music because music cannot represent the "conceptions" or cognitive content which help to define the emotions. "The feeling of hope cannot be separated from the representation of a future happy state which we compare with the present; ... Love cannot be thought without the representation of a beloved person, without desire and striving after felicity, glorification and possession of a particular object."' Yet music cannot represent these ideas or objects; all it can do is to represent the "dynamic" aspects of emotional life. Hanslick's words have echoed down the years, influencing both philosophers of music and music theorists and critics. Among philosophers, Susanne Langer repeats almost verbatim Hanslick's strictures on emotional expression in music, claiming that music can represent only the dynamic aspects of emotional life, its patterns of motion and rest, tension and relaxation. On her view, music "reveals the rationale of feelings, the rhythm and pattern of their rise and decline and intertwining, to our minds ..."2 Unlike Langer, Peter Kivy believes that music can express particular emotions. In The Corded Shell he argues that some musical phrases mimic human gestures which are expressive of a particular state of human feeling, and other musical features are expressive of particular feelings by virtue of some conventional association. Music can sound like a person loudly lamenting or joyfully jumping; or it can sound sad just because music in a low register and the minor key conventionally signifies sadness.3 Significantly, however, virtually all the musical examples of expressive music which Kivy cites are confined to a very limited set of feelings, mostly joy, sadness, and restlessness. The vast majority are also accompanied by words, which, of course, help to establish expressiveness. In a more recent book on music, Music Alone, which deals with "pure" or "absolute" music, Kivy continues to maintain that music can express particular emotions, but he echoes Hanslick in arguing that the emotions which music can express are only those which need not be directed toward any kind of object. Music can be sad or joyful or restless without being sad, joyful, or restless about anything in particular.4 This requirement would seem to rule out the possibility that music can express cognitively complex emotions. Like Hanslick, Kivy seems to think that it simply cannot be done. Tendencies in twentieth-century music and music theory have helped to establish the notion that music cannot express complex human emotions. In the second quarter of the century, for example, Igor Stravinsky was at the forefront of a reaction against romantic music and musical aesthetics, claiming that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,"5 while cultivating a more reticent neoclassical style. Somewhat later, the serialists and advocates of aleatoric music began to experiment with mathematical procedures that increased the temptation to think of music in the medieval way, as belonging with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy in the quadrivium. More recently, the dominant theoretical systems, including Schenkerian theory and set theory, have tended to concentrate on what they take to be music's internal relationships, emphasizing rigidly recursive structural hierarchies and quasi-mathematical manipulations and terminology, respectively. In the last decade, however, a number of

The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 , by Alexandra Hui. Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. xxii, 233 pp. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener , by Benjamin Steege. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 282 pp. Let us imagine an aesthetics of music grounded in the notion of compression . Audio file-compression locates the point at which the granularity of the signal is of sufficient density to recreate sound, to give the illusion of an original indistinguishable from that of a higher-resolution reproduction. We might stipulate that the efficiency of perception is an aesthetic desideratum: the beautiful or well-formed is that which transmits musical information without waste, locates a “sweet spot” in the density of information. The flattened dynamics of commercial music could be said to be well formed, locating the ideal point in the dynamic range or the place of maximum efficiency. Should we be catholic in our definition of music, we could assert that the clarity of the cinematic soundscape (wherein everything is completely audible) is likewise efficient or ideal. From this a corollary: sound designed or rendered is to be preferred to “natural” sound. By extension, we might imagine a sociology, one wherein the beautiful is that which is coded by timbre or genre or the like so as to allow internal soundscapes to be optimized ; or to allow even for an optimized listening, one locating an ideal point between attention and disattention. What is interesting here is not the exercise itself (admittedly facile) but the almost automatic rejoinders it provokes. Rejoinders epistemological: Would not neuroscience, perhaps, provide a more solid ground for an aesthetics, one whose development rested less on suggestion and more on things empirical, testable? Rejoinders moral: Would not an aesthetics grounded in efficiency sacrifice a richness of experience? Is there not something important captured by lossless encoding, or vinyl? Rejoinders ethical or disciplinary: Given that the desideratum of such a theory would be a set of covering laws governing music, could the end result be anything but mechanistic, …

In musicology, music aesthetics is a fundamental discipline that highly summarizes musical art and uses it as a starting point to explore the laws and essence of music, providing guidance for musical art practice. With music aesthetics as the foundation, audiences can clearly grasp emotional expressions and performance styles in musical art practice, leading to a deeper understanding of musical works. The degree to which performers master music aesthetics can also be demonstrated through musical art practice. Music aesthetics and musical art practice complement and promote each other. Music is not only an art form but also a practical activity. Continuous innovation in theory within practical activities guides the activities of musical art practice. This paper aims to discuss the importance of music aesthetics and musical art practice for the development of music, their intrinsic connections, and the specific guiding significance of music aesthetics in musical art practice, hoping to provide theoretical support and practical guidance for music creation, performance, and education.

Preface - From Homer to Pythagoras and His Followers - Plato, Aristotle and the Decline of Pythagorean Influence - Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages - The Middle Ages - Controversies Surrounding the Ars Nova - The Renaissance and the New Intellectual Approach to Music - The Relation between Music and the Text at the Time of the Counter-Reformation - From Baroque Rationalism to the Aesthetics of Feeling - The Enlightenment and the Encyclop die - Romanticism - Music and the Fusion of the Arts - Positivism and other Reactions to Romanticism - Formalism in the 20th Century - Music Aesthetics and Italian Neo-idealism - Music Aesthetics and Sociology of Music - The Aesthetics of Twelve-note Music - Post-Webernian Aesthetics - What Does the Future Hold? - Notes - Bibliography - Index

In the era of rapid development of science and technology, the traditional music education mode can no longer meet the needs of the times. Therefore, the study introduces digital media technology such as virtual reality and augmented reality in the reform of traditional music course teaching and proposes a higher music education method based on digital media technology, with a view to promoting the current reform process of higher music education courses. Taking instrumental music performance and music aesthetics as examples, we study the teaching effect of the music teaching methods proposed in this paper. In this way, the advantages of digital media technology in the reform of the traditional curriculum of higher music are explored. Before the teaching experiment, the experimental group and the control group had the same level of instrumental performance and music aesthetics, with no obvious difference. After the teaching experiment, the experimental group made more significant progress in instrumental performance and music aesthetics, while the post-test instrumental performance and music aesthetics of the control group remained similar to the results of the pre-test, and the p-value of the post-test results of the two groups in instrumental performance and music aesthetics were all less than 0.05. This paper’s method of higher music education based on digital media enhances the sense of scene of the music curriculum through VR and AR technologies, which is beneficial to the students’ learning. The sense of scene is conducive to students’ better sense of presence and immersion in learning, mobilizing students’ learning enthusiasm, changing the mode of traditional music teaching in which students passively receive knowledge, which has an important role to play in promoting students’ music development, and also provides insights for reforming the traditional music education mechanism.

The aesthetic significance in the musical thought of ancient Greece was transformed through later philosophical thoughts and became an important source of Western aesthetics. The social and cultural background of this period also provided conditions for its unique musical aesthetics and gave rise to the initial form of music education. This article will focus on the musical characteristics of the ancient Greek period. By using the methods of literature review and musical example analysis, it will conduct a multi-angle analysis of the musical aesthetics in this stage and its influence on later educational thoughts. Through the study of ancient Greek musical thoughts, it will analyze the musical aesthetics within and the educational significance of ancient Greek musical thoughts, aiming to enhance musical aesthetics and improve modern music teaching. By exploring the musical aesthetics of ancient Greece and reviewing representative ancient Greek music, it is helpful to enhance musical aesthetics and musical literacy. Exploring its educational significance can critically analyze the deficiencies existing in current music education and put forward suggestions. Further promoting the development of modern music has a positive effect on modern music education.

This study aims to explore the influence and mechanisms of music aesthetics on emotion regulation. Through literature review and empirical research, the relationship between music aesthetics and emotion regulation is analyzed, and key mechanisms are identified. The results indicate that music aesthetics have a positive impact on emotion regulation, helping individuals better manage their emotions and enhance emotional experiences. The theoretical framework includes relevant theories on music aesthetics and emotion regulation, with research methods involving quantitative analysis and empirical investigation. The discussion section interprets the empirical findings and discusses the implications of the study for theory and practice, while also addressing the study's limitations and providing suggestions for future research.

En esta historia intelectual de la aparición de la estética musical global, trato del nacimiento de la estética como un campo filosófico moderno y la expansión de la historiografía musical hasta incluir el mundo entero. Estos momentos musicológicos globales son muy evidentes en los primeros escritos de Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), quien canalizaría y mantendría esa confluencia a lo largo de su vasta obra publicada. El título de este artículo procede de Herder, específicamente de los volúmenes que llamó Volkslieder (Canciones populares, 1778/79), en los que conecta sus escritos fundacionales sobre estética, Kritische Wälder (Selvas críticas), con el primer concepto integral de estética musical global. La historia de la recepción de Herder es en sí un hilo conductor crítico en la historia intelectual de la estética musical que conecta el siglo XVIII con el XXI. Sigo este hilo conductor hasta el sur de Asia en el siglo XVIII a la búsqueda de una moderna estética musical indú fundacional, particularmente en el género clásico kriti, del sur de la India, y el vasto dominio estético de la teoría de los rāga, que también dio un giro hacia lo moderno a finales del siglo XVIII. El artículo concluye volviendo al presente con ejemplos de principios estéticos de Herder aplicados a interpretaciones musicales en la actual crisis migratoria global. Es esa historia intelectual, con ejemplos del pasado y del presente, de la Ilustración en Europa y en el sur de Asia, especialmente sus dimensiones globales, la que da forma a la teoría de momentos musicológicos globales que constituye el núcleo de este artículo.

The aesthetic dimensions of music have attracted increasing scholarly attention due to their potential to enhance psychological well-being. This narrative review aimed to synthesize conceptual, empirical, and contextual perspectives on music aesthetics and mental health. Literature was collected from major academic databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed, using keywords such as aesthetic appeal, music therapy, emotion in music, and mental health. Inclusion criteria focused on peer-reviewed studies addressing the relationship between music and psychological outcomes, while exclusion criteria removed works unrelated to aesthetics or lacking empirical grounding. Both qualitative and quantitative studies were included to ensure breadth and depth. Findings revealed diverse conceptual frameworks, ranging from psychological and historical analyses to therapeutic models and cross-cultural interpretations. Empirical evidence demonstrated significant improvements in mental health outcomes associated with music engagement, with statistical data confirming the benefits of both active creation and passive appreciation. Paradoxically, even sad music was found to generate pleasurable and beneficial experiences, reflecting the complexity of emotional responses. Cross-national studies highlighted cultural variability, showing that aesthetic experiences are deeply shaped by social, economic, and institutional contexts. The discussion linked these findings to systemic barriers, emphasizing the need for more inclusive methodologies, cross-cultural research, and policy frameworks that support equitable access to aesthetic practices. Overall, the review confirms the therapeutic and social significance of music aesthetics while calling for greater inclusivity, methodological innovation, and systemic support. These findings suggest that advancing music aesthetics in research, education, and health services represents a crucial strategy for fostering psychological resilience and social cohesion.

The development of society requires higher and higher quality of talents, and the demand for comprehensive literacy talents keeps rising. And using music aesthetic education as a means to continuously improve the music aesthetic quality of a new generation of young people and establish the concept of music aesthetics is an important entry point to improve the quality of all people. The teaching of music in primary and secondary schools should take aesthetic education as the core, and improve the quality of music teaching as the key, and gradually take correct art and music aesthetics as the way to learn, and apply the knowledge learned to life and their own improvement and development, so as to realize the beautiful ideal of harmonious and stable development of human society. This is the need for aesthetic education, and it is an issue that should be at the heart of the current situation. Aesthetic education is a cross-cutting discipline between art and education, and it plays an important role in building an education system for comprehensive training, forming a noble sentiment and a sound personality in students, and promoting the improvement of aesthetic ability in music.

The purpose of this work is to reveal the natural principle of the precedence of the philosophy of music in music science, which removed musical aesthetics with its basis of the traditional philosophical and rationalist system of Cartesianism. ‘Culturologisation’ of modern musicology testifies to the absorption of non-logical properties of associative knowledge, which, according to Yu. Krysteva, is no longer rejected by science, being called the ‘hermeneutic-interpretive’ meaning of the object of the study. The methodological basis of the research is the intonation approach of the B. Asafiev school in Ukraine, as it was in the works of O. Zosim, O. Markova, O. Muravska, O. Kozarenko, Liu Bingjian, O. Roschenko with an emphasis on hermeneutic and stylistic-comparative analytical search engine. The scientific novelty of the work is due to the theoretical primacy in the musicology of Ukraine of the statement of the philosophy of music as a substitute for the sphere of musical aesthetics, which has prevailed since the 18th century, as a "speculative theory of music” relative to the traditional core of musicology, the theory and history of music. Conclusions. The movement of musical aesthetics into the bosom of the philosophy of music was carried out by the displacement, following practice, in musical science of the theatrical-secularised expression of general aesthetic antitheses in favor of the all-encompassing lyric as a specifically musical embodiment of beauty, and the dramatic and the comic appear in the degrees of incompleteness of the lyric presentation, which delimits the “aesthetic-sensual” in the musical sense. The focus of musical expressiveness on the aestheticism of the beautiful and lyrical in this approach generalises, despite its direct ecclesiasticism, the experience of spiritual music, for which the beauty of the lyrical, in the syncresis of the suprapersonal and personal, expression (compare with the “spiritual beauty” of music in Mikhail Psellus, 11th century) displaces meaningful antitheses, which theoretically coincides with the symbolism of Pythagoreanism-Neoplatonism in the philosophical-mental understanding of music as a touch to the Eternal.
 Key words: musical aesthetics, philosophy of music, traditional musicology, modern culture-oriented musicology, genesis of music science.