What Kind of Experience is Musical Experience? (sobre N. Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality: formalism and the limits of description)

Abstract

What kind of experience is musical experience? is is the central ques- tion in Zangwill’s book. e author premises his answer to this question on two foundations: Formalism and Aesthetic Realism. e former is a thesis concerning the value of music (as well as an evaluative thesis about the nature of music) and the latter a thesis concerning what grounds our attributions of aesthetic qualities to objects and events, what explains the seemingly norma- tive character of such attributions, and what exactly do our aesthetic predicates describe, if they are at all descriptive. Zangwill warns us that the formalism he endorses is not to be understood in terms of the contrast form vs. content in literature, since form in this sense is always the form of some given content; but the content of music, according to his formalist stance, is no other than “tones and their artistic combination”, in Hanslick’s phrase. at music is to be understood on its own terms and that whatever non-musical values or functions it may sustain it can only do so because of its primary musical value: such is what is meant here by formalism. But what exactly is such value?

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21836892/fil32a11