listening to music together

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British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 4 | October 2012 | pp. 379–389 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ays038 © British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Listening to Music Together Nick Zangwill I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, which the issue of joint experience yields. I defend a radically individualistic view, while conceding that such a view, inspired by Hanslick, may have political ramifications. I have two arguments. The first is a principled argument against joint musical listening from the impossibility of perceiving the aesthetic properties of music. I connect this with the privacy of our grounds for aesthetic judgements about music. The second argument accepts that joint listening could in principle span different sense modalities, but draws attention to the fact that the experiences on which aesthetic judgements are based cannot be willed in a way they would have to be if there was joint listening. Lastly, I consider two phenomena, of making music together and dancing together, which seem to involve joint listening, but in fact do not. I end by drawing an individualist conclusion about the nature of musical experience. The Question of Joint Listening The standard model of aesthetic experience and appreciation that is in play in contem- porary analytic aesthetics is individualistic. We imagine one person contemplating some thing—a natural thing or work of art or person, which, on a good day, is a source of aes- thetic pleasure. But aesthetic life is not exclusively or usually like this. Consider the case of music. We often listen to music in groups, for example in a concert hall or club or church or sports venue. Solitary listening is now common, given recent technological inventions (in particular, the use of headphones). But this is a very unusual phenomenon if we take a longer view. For most of history, listening took place in a group and solitary listening was rare. Aestheticians should have something to say about this social aspect of musical experi- ence and appreciation. I shall focus on one issue about the social dimension of music and musical listening, one that I think has a certain fundamentality: the question of joint listening. Is there such a thing as collective or joint listening, where this would not be just the sum of many indi- vidual listenings but a collective activity? We engage in many joint activities. Consider the example of walking together. 1 When two people walk together, this is more than one person walking and another person walk- ing, roughly in the same place at the same time and in the same direction. It at least involves mutual awareness, in the sense that both people are aware of what the other person is 1 Margaret Gilbert, ‘Walking Together’, Midwest Studies In Philosophy 15 (1990), 1–14; see also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §172. at montclair state university on February 19, 2016 http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from

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Nick Zangwill, Philosophy of Music

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Page 1: Listening to Music Together

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 4 | October 2012 | pp. 379–389 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ays038© British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

Listening to Music TogetherNick Zangwill

I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, which the issue of joint experience yields. I defend a radically individualistic view, while conceding that such a view, inspired by Hanslick, may have political ramifications. I have two arguments. The first is a principled argument against joint musical listening from the impossibility of perceiving the aesthetic properties of music. I connect this with the privacy of our grounds for aesthetic judgements about music. The second argument accepts that joint listening could in principle span different sense modalities, but draws attention to the fact that the experiences on which aesthetic judgements are based cannot be willed in a way they would have to be if there was joint listening. Lastly, I consider two phenomena, of making music together and dancing together, which seem to involve joint listening, but in fact do not. I end by drawing an individualist conclusion about the nature of musical experience.

The Question of Joint Listening

The standard model of aesthetic experience and appreciation that is in play in contem-porary analytic aesthetics is individualistic. We imagine one person contemplating some thing—a natural thing or work of art or person, which, on a good day, is a source of aes-thetic pleasure. But aesthetic life is not exclusively or usually like this. Consider the case of music. We often listen to music in groups, for example in a concert hall or club or church or sports venue. Solitary listening is now common, given recent technological inventions (in particular, the use of headphones). But this is a very unusual phenomenon if we take a longer view. For most of history, listening took place in a group and solitary listening was rare. Aestheticians should have something to say about this social aspect of musical experi-ence and appreciation.

I shall focus on one issue about the social dimension of music and musical listening, one that I think has a certain fundamentality: the question of joint listening. Is there such a thing as collective or joint listening, where this would not be just the sum of many indi-vidual listenings but a collective activity?

We engage in many joint activities. Consider the example of walking together.1 When two people walk together, this is more than one person walking and another person walk-ing, roughly in the same place at the same time and in the same direction. It at least involves mutual awareness, in the sense that both people are aware of what the other person is

1 Margaret Gilbert, ‘Walking Together’, Midwest Studies In Philosophy 15 (1990), 1–14; see also Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §172.

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doing, and both are aware of the other’s awareness of what they is doing, and both adjust what they are doing in the light of what the other is doing. The exact analysis of joint action is controversial. But there is clearly an important and interesting range of phenomena here—one that is relevant to the general question about the social dimension of the expe-rience of music. The question is whether we can listen together as we can walk together.

The idea of joint activity also has application to the language we use to talk about music, for speaking and understanding words of any sort is itself something we do together. It is joint activity. The analysis of joint action should (obviously) be part of the theory of mean-ing for natural language.2 As a consequence, joint action is important in the philosophy of music insofar as we speak about music together. (Hopefully we do this afterwards, not during listening!) What is not clear, however, is whether musical listening itself—rather than talking about it—is an action that we can perform jointly.

In a recent paper, Tom Cochrane makes various claims about the phenomenon of joint musical attention.3 But he never argues that such a phenomenon exists. What Cochrane aspires to do is to use work in the psychology of perception to illuminate musical experi-ence. But this transfer is based on an unargued philosophical assumption about the nature of musical experience, an assumption that has no scientific basis, or at least none that has been given.4 It is not good science to adduce empirical information without showing how it bears on the conclusions we want to reach.5

In this article, I argue against the actuality and to some extent against the possibility of joint musical listening.

Adorno, and the Moral and Political Aspects of Musical Experience

While the social dimension of musical experience has not had much attention in analytic aesthetics, it had an important place—perhaps an overly important place—for writers in a ‘continental’ tradition that has its roots in German writers like Hegel and Marx. Most writ-ings in that tradition assume that music and musical experience must be understood in a social or political context. For example, in his writings, Theodore Adorno assumes that musical experience needs a social or political analysis.6 It is not merely the weak thesis that musical experience takes place in a social context and has social causes and effects. The idea is that music and musical listening itself has a social or political dimension. The problem, however, is

2 See David Lewis, Convention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).

3 Tom Cochrane, ‘Joint Musical Attention’, BJA 49 (2009), 59–73.

4 Cochrane also makes unargued claims about the existence of emotional content in music; but see Robert Kraut,

Artworld Metaphysics (Oxford: OUP, 2007), ch. 4.

5 This way of proceeding is quite common among those who work on the aesthetics/psychology interface. For

example, many writers proceed to transfer the empirical work on perception to musical listening, without

worrying about whether that step is legitimate. See for example Diana Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford, 1992) and Mark DeBellis, Music and Conceptualization (Cambridge: CUP,

1995). There is much of interest in these two books—in particular, interesting psychological research is reported

there. But whether that research illuminates musical experience is questionable.

6 For example Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1996), and Philosophy of Modern Music

(New York: Continuum, 2003).

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over what this could mean. (The problem arises when we consider music that is not accompa-nied by text. Obviously where there are words, they may have social or political themes. But there is also supposed to be a social and political aspect of music that lacks any text.)

How should we understand the thesis that social and political matters are somehow part of what musical experience is? Adorno gives countless descriptions of music in class terms—for example “Chopin’s music is aristocratic”; and we must “listen to Beethoven [to] hear the revolutionary bourgeoisie.”7 But he gives no basis whatsoever for this and it seems entirely arbitrary—as arbitrary as someone who describes music in terms of astrological signs. Adorno says that ‘the method of deciphering the specific social characteristics of music’ is to ‘develop a physiognomy of the types of musical expression.’8 But what that amounts to is just saying things like we ‘hear the petty bourgeois in Lortzing’. The disappointing truth is that Adorno is just reporting on his own idiosyncratic form of musical listening, one overlaid by extraneous ideologies. Devotees of astrology might with equal justification describe their musical experi-ence in terms of ‘Libra’ and ‘Scorpio’, as Adorno does in terms of ‘aristocratic’ and bourgeois’.

Adorno seems to think not only that musical listening has a social and political dimension but also that it should have the right kind of social and political dimension. Musical listen-ing should be ‘progressive’ rather than ‘regressive’, as he conceives of those.9 He connects this with his prescribing difficult modernist music and proscribing easy sentimental popular Jazz. Thus musical taste is supposed to connect with political ideals in a quite direct way. For Adorno, musical listening raises both an aesthetic and a political problem, and he wants people to listen in the right way. Adorno never seems to doubt that musical experience has this kind of social and political dimension. (In this respect his writing is strikingly unphilo-sophical.) But he has no coherent account of what that dimension might consist in.

The trouble—well, one trouble—with Adorno’s writings is that the way that music and musical experience have a social dimension is figuratively or vaguely described in many different ways.10 So it is difficult to find anything precise to focus the discussion. There is no clean target. His writing is like a gang of rioting youths, who are being chased by the police, and who melt away into the side streets when approached.

The flaws of Adorno’s writing and thinking are not very interesting. The point of men-tioning Adorno and his tradition—apart from that fact that some musicologists seem to believe that he has given content to these issues—is to underline the fact that we need some account of what a social and political conception of musical experience might be. Given that those in this neo-Hegelian tradition accept this idea, or something like it, one might have expected them to have something to say by way of illuminating the content of the claim. Sadly not. So we need to look elsewhere.11

7 Theodore Adorno, ‘Class and Strata’, 214–229 repr. in German Essays on Music, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael

Gilbert (New York: Continuum, 1962), 220, 221.

8 Ibid.

9 Theodore Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening’, and ‘The Radio Symphony’, in

Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

10 See for example Adorno, ‘Class and Strata’, for a veritable stew; there he writes for instance, ‘Intramusical

tensions are the unconscious phenomena of social tensions’ (227), which provides little help.

11 For a partially sympathetic discussion of Adorno on kitsch, popular music, and tonality see Roger Scruton, ‘Why

Read Adorno?’, in Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London: Continuum, 2009).

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Individualism, Hanslick, Norms and Politics

My view, contrary to both these trends of thought—the empirical-psychological and the neo-Hegelian—is that musical listening is essentially individualistic. And I add, perhaps paradoxically, in a sense, it also ought to be. By this I mean that listening that has a social or political aspect is not really musical listening at all, but another kind of a listening, or it is a mix of proper listening and something else. It is possible that there is nothing actually wrong with other modes of listening to music. We could allow a plurality of worthwhile modes of listening. The trouble—the essentialist individualist will say—is, first, that the pleasures and values of purely musical listening are not to be had from such socially and politically inflected experiences. And second, there is a danger of confusing these experi-ences of music with purely musical experience, which is essentially individualistic.

I should not have proceeded this far without stopping to pay respect to the great Eduard Hanslick, who brought so much light into musical aesthetics (even though it is a light from which many musicologists choose to avert their eyes!)12 Hanslick has a purist, individual-istic and in a sense formalist view of musical experience. Moreover he worries that other kinds of listening are problematically impure in such a way that there is a loss. Such musi-cal listening is relatively impoverished.

It is not that essentialist individualism has no normative consequences for musical lis-tening. It would have political consequences if social arrangements should be conducive to listening of the right kind. It may also be that the capacity to have this kind of pure musical experience is symptomatic of other virtues, individual and political—virtues which for want of a label, we might call ‘bourgeois’. Many suspect a conservative political dimen-sion in Hanslick’s purist formalism, by contrast with Wagner’s progressive romanticism. Perhaps. The political consequences arise from saying that something is beyond the politi-cal, which is indeed sometimes a conservative thought. This is not because musical experi-ence has political content but precisely because it does not have political content. This has political consequences. (It was castigated as ‘Bourgeois formalism’ by the Soviets in the 1930s.) Valuing purity in some domain of life (sex, food, not accepting bribes) is often politically charged. Similarly with the purity of musical experience.

Thus it is not that nothing political can be said about music and musical experience. Accepting essentialist individualism may have political consequences. But the political consequences arise from the apolitical nature of music and musical experience.

Joint Attention and Aesthetic Properties: A Principled Argument

One way—perhaps the most plausible way—to make tractable the issue of whether music and musical listening itself have an intrinsic moral and political dimension is to consider whether there can be joint musical experiences. I offer those of a ‘continental’ inclination this way of making sense of what it would be for music and musical experience to have a social or political aspect. I think that this is the best bet for a social theorist of music. But, as we shall see, even this is not available.

12 Eduard Hanslick, Hanslick’s Musical Criticism, trans. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1950), and On the Musically

Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986).

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Let us begin by asking how two listeners might converge on the same aesthetic proper-ties of music as the shared object of their musical experiences. How might they tune in, as it were, to the same aesthetic properties (beauty, delicacy, power, anger, balance, and so on)? Why isn’t joint listening a case of joint perceptual attention, which, if attention is something that we do, would be a special case of joint action?13 In a case of joint perceptual attention, each person attends to a thing with an awareness and of another person and of the physical situation within which the thing and the person are embedded. For example, two people might attend to a teacup with an awareness of each other. Where there is joint attention each of them is in addition aware that the other is also attending to the teacup. It is a presupposition of this account that both are aware of the other’s awareness of the teacup just as when two people go for a walk together, both are aware of the location and movement of each other’s bodies. There has been much empirical-psychological research on the topic of joint attention.14

However, it is not at all clear that this model applies to listening to music, where what we are listening to is music and its aesthetic properties, not just sounds.15 There can be joint attention to sounds; but what is controversial is whether there can be joint aesthetic attention to music. That is not at all the same thing.

In standard cases of joint attention, there is at least a shared perceptual awareness of physical objects and their physical properties. We attend to common objects and prop-erties and we are also aware of the other person’s attention to them. So there might be joint listening to sounds, where we see that others are listening to what we are listening to. But the aesthetic case is not like this since even though there is joint attention to the non-aesthetic properties of music—the sounds—the question is whether there is joint attention to its aesthetic properties. Of course, there must be real things to which we are both listening in the sense that they are the source of the sounds, perhaps a tuba or a loudspeaker. It is interesting that when we listen together, we often watch the musicians while we listen, which does give us a common object of attention. But our awareness is not merely of those public things and of the sounds emanating from them, but also of cer-tain properties of those sounds—their aesthetic properties.16 We hear the sounds together; but the crucial question is: when we both focus our attention on their aesthetic properties, is there any sense in which this is something we do together?17

I answer ‘No.’

13 See Gilbert, ‘Walking Together’, and Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency (Oxford: OUP, 2006).

14 Jerome Bruner, ‘Early Social Interaction and Language Acquisition’, in H. R. Schaffer (ed.), Studies in Mother–Infant

Interaction (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

15 See Sibley on the relation between these; Frank Sibley ‘Aesthetic/Nonaesthetic’, Philosophical Review 74 (1965),

135–59.

16 Perhaps there are aesthetic ‘tropes’; on tropes, see Jonathan Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology (Oxford: OUP,

2006).

17 Can we think together? Perhaps the wartime Los Alamos physicists were doing that? What about feeling together?

Is there such a thing? Perhaps empathy is feeling together. When Lady Diana died there was a bizarrely widely

shared feeling, which was more than many people feeling a similar way. The phenomenon of feeling together can

be powerful, and frightening.

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Aesthetic Properties and Perception

One principled reason against believing in joint aesthetic attention derives from the idea that it is not possible to perceive aesthetic properties because of the kind of properties that they are.

The argument, in brief, is this. (1) Phenomenology tells us that judgements of beauty and ugliness are made on the basis of pleasures and displeasures. (Plato, Aquinas, Hume, and Kant all agree on that.) (2) Pleasure is not perception. Further, pleasure is essentially different from perception. How so? One respect is this. Perceptual experiences ground beliefs, but not vice versa. But intentional pleasures, that is, pleasures in this or that, are grounded on beliefs, but not vice versa. So the rational norms characteristic of perceptions and pleasures are radically different; they are completely opposed, which shows that perceptions and pleasures have dif-ferent essential properties. Therefore, we may conclude from (1) and (2), pleasure in beauty and displeasure in ugliness are not perceptual experiences of beauty and ugliness.

The negative thesis, that aesthetic experiences are not perceptual experiences, is one that is central not only to Kant’s universal subjectivism, but also to the very different views of Hume’s sentimentalism and a certain kind of aesthetic realism, which we might call ‘Moorean’.18 All these theories agree that we do not perceive aesthetic properties.

If this is right, it has consequences for the issue of joint attention. Joint attention by a number of people to a common thing (object or property) is only possible if the people are perceiving that object or property. But if musical experiences of aesthetic properties are not perceptual, then we cannot listen to music together in the way that we can listen to sounds together. Joint attention by a number of different people to a common phenom-enon (objects or properties) is only possible if they perceive that object or property. But we do not perceive the aesthetic properties of music. So we do not listen together to music in the way we engage in many joint activities.

If aesthetic properties were perceptually representable properties, like colours, then there would be a common object of perceptual attention that might be shared among many people. There could be joint attention to such properties. But if aesthetic properties are not perceptible properties, then there is no joint perception of aesthetic properties. We are in aesthetic solitary confinement.

Privacy

That we are not perceptually aware of beauty follows from what Kant called the ‘subjec-tivity’ of the judgement of beauty. This subjectivity claim is connected with the distinc-tive privacy of the ground of the judgement of beauty. This ground—pleasure (in German, lust, gefallen)—is often ‘private’ in the later Wittgenstein’s sense of private. The idea of the privacy of some of our mental life has been unjustly dismissed in the post-war period in my view. Let us define a notion of privacy: a mental state such as a sensation is private in this sense, first, if a person who has it has special access to it, one that no one else has; one knows one has the sensation immediately—that is, not by observing behaviour or by

18 See Nick Zangwill, ‘Music, Essential Metaphor and Private Language’, American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011),

1–16.

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making an inference from observed behaviour. Second, others can know of such states only because the person who has it conveys that knowledge to them. So if a person decides not to let others know, they will in normal circumstances lack any other way of knowing. For example, thinking of a number is private in this sense. Others cannot know which number I am thinking of unless I communicate it to them. Similarly, some sensations are such that others cannot know that someone has these sensations by observing the person’s body and making an inference. (The sense of ‘can’ in play here is not that of strict meta-physical possibility but of nomological possibility, or possibility in a more everyday sense.) In this sense of the word ‘private’, it is clear that some but not all sensations are private.19 Note that this notion of privacy does not entail that only I can know whether I have these sensations or that I know what sensations in general are from my own case.

Aesthetic judgements are similar to judgements about our own sensations in that their subjective grounds are typically private in this sense.20 Because of this, aesthetic proper-ties are not publicly observable, as they would be if aesthetic judgements were ‘objective’. The basis of our ascription of these properties to sounds is a reaction in us when we hear sounds. And that reaction is typically private since we know about it in a distinctively first-personal way, and others can know that we have that reaction only if we communi-cate it to them. Sometimes we may not be able to resist shouting out ‘Bravo!’ or express-ing our reaction in facial gestures. But that is a very crude indication of my response. Even when the general feeling of liking or disliking is not private—because it is behaviourally expressed, and others can know that we have it by observing our behaviour—the more exact determinate response remains private.

It might be suggested that while the subjectivity and privacy of the grounds of aesthetic judgement distinguish it from ‘objective’ perceptual experiences, aesthetic experiences are like sensory experiences of taste and smell. It might be said that the unsociability of our experience of aesthetic properties (the lack of joint attention to them) is also true of these other sense modalities. We eat together, but we do not taste together. We may appear to taste together, but where one person has a different taste experience, due to illness perhaps, that appearance dissipates. What garlic tastes like, it might be said, is ultimately private.

Listening to music together is like eating or smelling together in that there is an illusion of sociability, of shared sensations, whereas in fact the sensations are usually private. The consequence of the fact that the grounds for aesthetic judgements are feelings of pleasure and displeasure is that we necessarily listen alone, and we cannot listen together. Musical listening is essentially individualistic.21

19 See Turk Saunder’s excellent but under-read paper, John Turk Saunders, ‘In Defense of a Limited Private

Language’, Philosophical Review 78 (1969), 237–48.

20 See further Zangwill ‘Music, Essential Metaphor and Private Language’.

21 I used to think that it was odd that Kant’s third critique contained a discussion of the privacy of sensations (the

title of §39 is ‘the communicability of sensation’); see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed

Meredith (Oxford: OUP, 1928). Now that seems quite appropriate. Issues about communicating sensations lie

next door to these central issues in aesthetics. Kant also discusses the social aspect of aesthetic experience in

Critique of Judgement, §41, and elsewhere.

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Sense Modalities, Cooperation and the Will

The argument above in the section, ‘Aesthetic Properties and Perception’, was for the very strong thesis that aesthetics properties are in principle imperceivable. I think it is a persuasive argument against the possibility of joint attention to music, but perhaps there are possible replies to it. A less-principled and less-ambitious argument is this. In the case of joint visual attention to public objects and properties, the people in question are also visually aware of the each other. By contrast when we listen to music, we do not hear the other people listening to the same music. One does not hear people listening; instead one sees them listening. But joint perception involves triangulation, in the same sense modality, on the objects of perception, and on the other person’ perception of that thing. Since we only see others listening, but do not hear them listening, there is no joint listening.

It might be replied that no reason has been given for thinking that joint attention has to involve the same sense modality. Why should there be a principled problem with joint perception that deploys different sense modalities? Perhaps people can perceive in one sense modality what is being perceived with another, and joint attention can occur as a result; it is just that information provided from one sense modality keeps the participants in the joint activity on track in their experience in a different sense modality.

Nevertheless, there is still a problem with joint musical listening. It is true that that I can see that someone is listening as I am, and perhaps from their face and gestures I can infer the aesthetic character of their experience. I may also infer that they are having a similar experience. But this just means that we are hearing in parallel not that we are hearing together. Similarly, although we can eat together, that does not mean that we taste together. When we do something together, including perceiving together, we deliberately alter what we do in a systematic way in order to bring our actions into line with what others do. This is what happens when we walk together. Joint activity may to some extent be repre-sented mathematically as a stable equilibrium state where there are mechanisms discour-aging divergence from the state and there are pressures for convergence on the state. But in joint activity this convergence is also deliberately achieved; that is, the participants aim to alter their behaviour so as to make it more likely that an equilibrium state is achieved. Thus convergence is aimed at and achieved by the participants so that stable, coordinated activity takes place. Not only are there symmetrical pay-off matrices in the mathematical representation of the situation, it is because of the awareness of the benefits and costs that there is deliberate cooperation, not merely coordination that admits of a purely causal explanation. Each party modifies what they do in a systematic way in order to engage in coordinated activity with the other.

In standard cases of joint perceptual attention, two people visually focus on a public object or property, and each person engages in physical behaviour and acts of attention in order to bring about acts of visual attention that are achieved as a result of mutually sensitive adjustments by the participants. But this kind of deliberate coordination is lack-ing where one person sees that another person is having musical experiences. It is true that people may express their aesthetic experiences in their behaviour so that their aesthetic experiences can be inferred by another person. Information may be transmitted. But we cannot deliberately make our experiences similar to those of another person. This is

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because we cannot will our aesthetic experiences. Attention—whether joint or not—is active; musical experience, by contrast, is passive, in the sense of not being subject to the will. Listening may be an active attention to sounds; but the musical experience that we have as a consequence of listening is not under our control. It is not willed. This is because of their subjective aspect, noted by Kant. In this respect musical experience is like believing. Although we may do things that bring about a change in belief, we do not and cannot directly decide what to believe.22 So we cannot believe together, only in paral-lel. Similarly, although we may do things that bring about a change in musical experience, we do not and cannot directly decide to react to music with pleasure or displeasure. This is why we cannot experience music together, only in parallel. For the same reason, we cannot taste food together, only in parallel.

In many musical listening traditions, there is joint awareness of bodily movement dur-ing listening—movement that expresses and conveys musical experience. There is move-ment in gestures, which lies on a continuum with dance. In the appreciation of ‘pop’ music and jazz, for example, the aesthetic response is usually more publicly available at the time than it is with Western classical music appreciation. The usual behaviour of those appreciating pop or jazz music means that their experience is publicly available to an extent. The behaviour communicates something of their inner experience. Still, there is no joining those inner experiences in a common activity of listening with other listen-ers. That is another matter. It is more obvious that concert-goers in the Western classical tradition are not listening together, even though they sit shoulder to shoulder. They may make facial gestures to each other during the performance. But this just allows the other to check how they are hearing, and whether or not they are hearing similarly. It is not deliberately to engage in joint listening.

Making Music Together and Dancing Together

There are two phenomena, which seem to invite a joint-listening account.Firstly, music making with others is a joint activity. Musicians playing together are sensi-

tive to what the others do, and they alter what they do—their own music making—in the light of what they hear the others do. There is coordination among the members of a music-making ensemble. But this does not mean that there is joint listening. The music making is joint activity, but the listening part of their joint music making may not be. It is true that part of the coordination involved in joint musical activity is listening to the music of others—to the aesthetic properties of the sounds that they make. Nevertheless, the listening is individualistic, in that its nature has nothing to do with anyone else. That individualistic musical experience is the basis for the socially coordinated musical behav-iour that ensues, and without individualistic musical experience there could be no socially coordinated joint musical behaviour. Coordinated musical behaviour in a group depends on similarity of musical experience. If members of a group of musicians hear very differ-ently, they will not be able to make music together. Their joint musical project will fail.

22. Bernard Williams, ‘Deciding to Believe’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: CUP, 1973).

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But they can play together without listening together. They need to hear similarly. They need not hear together.

Secondly, dancing is (usually) a joint activity. Dancing to music lies on a continuum with gesturing to music: both reveal musical experience and understanding. Dancing together is different from walking together. In both cases each person is aware of the other person’s body. But when two people dance together, both of the people listen to music, as music, not just as sound. And their movements in some way fit or express the music. One dances to the music, sur la musique, zu oder mit das musik. One can ‘dance’, in a manner of speak-ing, as a mere form of exercise, but that’s not really dancing, which should be to, with, on, music. One is not passive; the music does not dance us. One has freedom within lim-its. What needs highlighting is the fact that, like a metaphorical description, one’s dancing can express how one hears the music. One may choose to emphasize different aspects of the music in one’s dance (for example, rhythm rather than melody). Furthermore, every dance with every person is different. (I assume that we are dancing with another person, not solitary ‘free-expression’ dancing.) There are many different ways that two people can dance to the same music. How one dances depends not just on oneself and the music but also, to a greater or lesser extent, on the other person and how they hear it. On each occasion, even of the same couple with the same music, different dances may ensue. So one is hearing and thinking and expressing the music with a particular person on a par-ticular occasion. It is no exaggeration to say that dancing reveals aesthetic understanding. Without listening to the music, hearing it as music, dancing lacks soul; we might as well be doing exercise or sport. It takes three to tango: the two people and the music.

Do playing music and dancing together nevertheless bring us in some way near to lis-tening together? As we play music or dance together, if we hear differently, in the sense of have different aesthetic experiences (of the aesthetic properties of sounds), then we will fail to make music together or dance together. It won’t work. Nevertheless, aesthetic experience is not something we do together, instead similar aesthetic experience is the precondition of joint musical activities such as playing or dancing together. On occasion we may even invite or elicit a musical experience from another, which may or may not be forthcoming. Such musical experience is embedded in the larger joint activity of play-ing instruments or dancing. But it is not itself joint listening in the way that there is joint visual perceptions of teacups and in the way that there is joint activity in music making and dancing together.

Coda

People may listen to music in a group, but there is no joint musical perception. We listen alone—and are condemned to do so. We can listen to music together in the sense of going to a concert together, just as we can eat together when we sit down to a meal with each other. This is joint action. But we cannot listen to music together any more than we can taste food together.

This is not to deny that in some sense music is part of social life. We go together to places for musical experiences, and we describe and discuss musical experiences with one another after the fact. Nevertheless, musical experience itself is radically individualistic,

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and cannot be otherwise. Going together to some place where we listen to music is a group activity; but we do not and cannot listen to music together. We go to concerts together; but the musical listening we do when we get there is a solitary activity, perhaps even a lonely one. We do it alone.

Recall Adorno’s description of forms of listening as more or less politically ‘progres-sive’ or ‘regressive’. It is a consequence of what I am saying that there is nothing coherent that he could mean by this—or at least nothing interesting. I am inclined to say that insofar as musical listening has a moral, political or social aspect, it is not listening to the music as music. Either we are listening to the music itself, to the sounds and their aesthetic charac-ter, or we are distracted by matters, such as morality, politics or society, that are extrinsic to the music. In that case we are no longer fully attending to the music. Insofar as Adorno thinks that musical listening should be inflected with the right political character, the kind of listening that Adorno prescribes seems to me to be not properly musical experi-ence at all. There is something very wrong with Adornian musical experience.

There is something noble and heroic in our lonely experience of music. Listening to music is an isolated and lonely encounter with another world, a disembodied world of beautiful sound, far from the world of human life. In my view—and it is also Hanslick’s—seeing music as a human product, as people playing instruments, achieving goals, and as historically and politically situated, is all a misunderstanding and devaluation of the awe-some elevation that musical experience can be. My view is at a distance from the views of many analytic philosophers of music, such as Jerrold Levinson, who endorses a ‘situ-ated’ conception of music and musical experience.23 It is also at a distance from those of the neo-Hegelian school, whose figurehead is Adorno. Both get it wrong, I say. Only by receding away from the human world, from the Other, can we go beyond humanity, to a world of pure music. To humanize music is to desecrate it. Music is inhuman, and awe-some because of it, like stars in the night sky.

Although we are radically isolated in our musical listening, we seek somehow to share our experience—we talk about the music metaphorically, we make gestures concerning it, and we dance to it with others. Eye contact during listening, or conversation after-wards, consoles us for our temporary exile from community. But the attempt to publicize the private is doomed. We are like someone shouting or screaming in outer space: no one can hear us!24

Nick ZangwillDurham [email protected]

23 Jerrold Levinson, ‘Authentic Performance and Performance Means’, in Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1990).

24 This article was presented at the Tokyo University Aesthetics Department, where there was a wide-ranging and

interesting discussion. For comments, many thanks to Julian Dodd and a referee for this journal.

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