PhD

“So, what was your PhD thesis about?” is a common question people ask me when they discover I’m one of the numerous Big Ideas folks who have one. I usually make a hash of answering it, and make it sound as if I didn’t really know what I was doing, which I didn’t, but that isn’t the impression I’m usually trying to give. So here’s what I’d say to someone fairly patient if they asked me and I had my wits about me.

My starting-point was the assumption that aesthetics is about value, and so in order to have an aesthetic theory of music you needed an account of how music can acquire value. I wrote a detailed transposition of Danto’s institutional theory of value into the musical domain (I was not the first to do this) and used this as the basis for a resolution of the two key ontological problems music throws up: first, how to differentiate music from mere sounds and, second, how to account for the relationship between a composition and its performances. These are classical problems in analytical aesthetics. I didn’t pretend to have resolved them once and for all (or perhaps I did; I was only twenty or so; but I wouldn’t be that presumptuous now). It did, though, at least give me a definition I could work with given my assumptions.

So far, so much analytical philosophy, although I do get a bit of Peirce in when talking about compositions vs performances (and recordings). The next step is to ask where the value resides. A lot of people say it has to do with meaning — that music’s value is that it communicates in some way or another. So I spend a very long chapter dismissing a succession of claims, mostly by musicologists rather than philosophers, about how and what music might communicate. I’m as satisfied now as I was then that music can’t do this in the ways musicologists have traditionally thought it can.

So then I’m stuck, because I’ve dismissed every theory of musical meaning I can find, yet I’m sure (a) that people really do describe music as meaningful, and (b) that these meanings must be intimately tied up with our ascriptions of value to music. Here’s where I take a leap and propose a theory, and also switch sides from the Analytic to the Continental side of the corridor.

My theory is this: contrary to Kant, music is best understood as something useful. It can serve all kinds of purposes: you can march to it, dance to it, be scared by it in a horror movie, annoy your neighbours with it, assert your membership of a group with it or even sit in a concert hall and listen to it as an aesthetic experience. I suggest we might look at all of these — including the last one — as uses, and value music in relation to its fitness for the purpose for which it’s being used.

This fitness isn’t objective, but is directly related to the expectations of the people involved. As I point out, if you want to dance, no music is more suitable than John Cage, because you can’t go wrong. There’s no intrinsic, physical reason to prefer music with a regular beat. We prefer it because it’s what we’ve come to expect; in other words, the use-values of various aspects of a piece of music in a particular context are based on tradition.

To thrash this out I primarily use two things: Heidegger’s theory of equipment from Being and Time and Adorno’s theory about classical music (which I mostly turn against him, despite the overall tone of my project being very Adorno-friendly). I also have a go at turning this into a proper semiotic theory using some bits of Griemas, although that’s inevitably a bit sketchy. I think I might be able to make it work, though, were it a project I was still interested in pursuing.

And that’s it. So in a nutshell my thesis argues that:

  • What counts as music is socially constructed, and there’s an “artworld” of more or less powerful people who play a larger role in it than you or I do.
  • Music doesn’t express emotions or communicate anything else — at least not intrinsically. We do, though, read meanings into it.
  • Music isn’t something that floats about on its own: it exists in a network of things that we use in order to get things done.
  • Those uses associate music with other things, and this is how music acquires meanings.
  • Those uses and meanings together are the basis for the values we ascribe to music.

And that, in a nutshell, is what my PhD thesis was about.