'PERHAPS WHAT is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express)', wrote Wittgenstein, 'is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning'.' Wittgenstein's remark is a useful reminder to all who attempt to write about the nature and the value of art, for there our powers of expression often seem inadequate to the phenomena we aim to describe. In such cases it is natural to direct attention to the 'background' of aesthetic experience itself. In consequence, many philosophical elucidations of art works will make good sense only to whose who are already engaged with them on their own terms-engaged with their distinctive character and forms. That this is so is perhaps most evident when the philosopher's target is the art of music. Roger Scruton's latest contribution to philosophical aesthetics, The Aesthetics of Music,2 is guided by a deep appreciation of the background of musical experience, and he often allows music to speak for itself, through musical example and illustration. This study is exceptionally, if not uniquely, informed by a wide and thorough acquaintance with its subject matter, and it is commendably replete with references to, and music examples illustrating, specific compositions.3 For this reason, among others, it should appeal not only (nor even principally) to philosophers but to those whose interest in the philosophy of music arises out of the practice and analysis of music itself. The explicit shape of Scruton's study derives from its origins as a series of lectures, in which each chapter addresses an issue or issues raised by its predecessor. It is implicitly organized, however, around the four questions which have been the traditional focus of the philosophy of music. The first and most fundamental of these is the question of definition: What is music? (Chaps. 1-4). I say that this is the most fundamental question not because it is the one which philosophers have historically found most pressing (it isn't), or because it is the first which Scruton takes up (it is), but because it must be answered before conversation can proceed to any other. The second question is one of meaning: In what does the meaning or content of music consist? (Chaps. 5-8 and 11). Here, issues of the representational and expressive status of music are at the fore-issues which arise out of the common conviction that music is, inter alia, a mode of communication, coupled with the absence of common agreement about just what it is that music communicates. This leads naturally to the question of how it is that music conveys its meanings ('How does music mean?'), which involves the author in issues of musical form (Chap. 10), the merits of structural analysis and 'authentic' performance (Chaps. 13 and 14) and the status of tonality as a musical order (Chap. 9). Scruton's final question is a straightforwardly normative one: What determines the value of music? Or 'Why does music matter?' (Chaps. 12 and 15). Related, if subsidiary, questions appear under this head, including the question which most exercised Plato and with which the history of the philosophy of music