The Musical Representation

How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddleof long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers aphilosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musicalrepresentation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the humanmind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art musicsince 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition,emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rootedhuman ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic systemthat carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musicalrepresentation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competentlisteners. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history;relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which weare hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitivefunctions that underlie modern human cognition.

Charles O. Nussbaum is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington.