Overture and beginnings

Abstract

Philosophical reflection on music is more than two thousand years old but it is patchy. Beyond a handful of names, beginning, perhaps, with Plato and Aristotle and leaping two thousand years to Eduard Hanslick and Edmund Gurney, most of what has been written is only of interest to historians of ideas. But the past two decades have seen an extraordinary flowering in the aesthetics of music that has eclipsed earlier speculations. This philosophical activity has been predominantly analytic in style. It prizes and expects clarity and detail in argument. There are other philosophical traditions but I am not aware that there has been any sudden efflorescence in writing on the aesthetics of music in these other provinces. The newcomer to analytic philosophy may easily form the impression that a great deal of it is devoted to the invention and solution of rather arcane problems requiring considerable intelligence but rather remote from the rest of humanity and life as we know it. There is some substance in this but it is not an entirely just verdict. Analytic philosophy can have implications for our lives by making us reflect upon unconsidered presuppositions; sometimes it may lead us to reflect on our lives and our values and cause us either to value things differently or perhaps more directly to alter our conduct. If utilitarians persuade people that they should grade their actions solely on the principle of what maximizes happiness, then people will change.