How music redefines aesthetic experience

In a 2012 essay that appeared in this journal, the author explored the experience of music by focusing on its intrinsic features rather than by resorting to simile or metaphor—a common tactic in writings about music.

Now he pushes the inquiry further. What if music served as the paradigm for art in general? How would aesthetic theory change if we began and ended with the perceptual experience of music? Accepting music as the model demands abandoning an object-oriented aesthetics tied to subjective experience. In its place, music emphasizes a performative, embodied character, the fleeting nature of the musical object, and an engaged field experience that merges creative, focusing, appreciative, and performative aspects into a complex perceptual whole.

Arnold Berleant, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Long Island University and the founding editor of the online journal Contemporary Aesthetics. He has published eight books and three edited volumes, and his work has been translated extensively. A past president of the International Association of Aesthetics, he continues to write on aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, the arts, ethics, and social philosophy.

1. Introduction

Most accounts of aesthetic appreciation treat the visual arts as the standard model. A painting or graphic object sits before a viewer, who gazes from a respectful distance, contemplating it disinterestedly—following Kant—for its own sake alone. The viewer brings art-historical knowledge to bear, interpreting the work as representation, social record, abstract arrangement, or something else entirely. Embedded here is a familiar dualism: the viewer as subject and the painting as contemplative object.

That model carries over uneasily to other arts. Literature gets mistaken for the printed page; sculpture, in practice, is often reduced to a two-dimensional exhibit mounted against a gallery wall; architecture is considered a mere visual play of forms, ripped from its physical and functional setting.

Music resists such dematerialization. Its body lies in the texture and mass of sound. Its temporality is multidimensional—music moves forward, yet polyphony and inner voices can coexist simultaneously. Past sound lingers; the present contains auditory anticipation. Trapped inside visual-art vocabulary, we search for an object, a perceivable distance, a supplied meaning—none of which naturally belongs. Music therefore demands its own ontology.

If we reverse the usual direction and use music as the paradigm for aesthetic appreciation, what emerges? Language itself conspires against us, leading with metaphors tied to sight and space. Still, let us try to sketch this out.

2. The musical occasion

We must begin—and end—with sound as it is perceived. Although acoustics and auditory psychology matter for science, the listener pays them little heed. Plain language for auditory experience is scarce; metaphor rushes in to fill the gap. What would a literal description look like? Sound never subsists in isolation. It arises on an occasion, within a situation.

Every musical occasion requires four functions: an originator, an activator, acoustic phenomena, and a listener. In a singer or jazz improviser, these can combine in one person. In a classical concert, separate individuals perform them. Together they constitute what may be called an aesthetic field.

Within this field, no function stands alone. The listener cannot be separated from the sound, nor the performer from the composer. The analytic-synthetic distinction disappears; the perceiver-object division vanishes. Questions about identity, style, and originality must be answered in relation to the field as a whole. As Justus Buchler observed, there are no simples, only complexes.

Take this model to the other arts, and many phenomena become clearer. What exactly constitutes aesthetic appreciation? In what ways do the arts resemble and differ from one another? Perceptual analysis brings richness and resonance to our understanding of artistic value.

Through its powerful sensory presence, music returns us to perceptual experience. It contradicts cognitive accounts such as Kant's, in which cognition underlies the experience of beauty. Concepts and distinctions remain useful, but they must grow out of perception—they cannot dictate what is perceived. Dewey's philosophical fallacy looms: the temptation to believe the world is controlled by cognizing it.

Seeing aesthetic experience as a complex field reveals the inadequacy of disinterested contemplation. Because all four functions of the field intertwine, no listener or viewer is separated from any object. The proper term for this activity is aesthetic engagement—full perceptual engagement with the occasion.

3. A perspective on perspectives

This insight—though not yet widely accepted—has been explored from many angles over the past century. In "Reverse Perspective" (1920), the Russian scholar Pavel Florensky argued that traditional linear perspective does not render visual perception as it really occurs. Instead, it presents one symbolic scheme among many, abstracted from actual seeing. "A perspectival picture of the world is not a fact of perception," he wrote, "but merely a demand made in the name of certain considerations which, while they may be very powerful, are absolutely abstract." Single-point perspective is just one of several linear methods (two-, three-, and four-point perspective exist). Aerial perspective works through tone, hue, and clarity; isometric perspective—common in Asian art—keeps proportions equal without distortion.

"Leaving aside the olfactory, gustatory, thermal, aural and tactile spaces that have nothing in common with Euclidean space," Florensky added, "we cannot overlook the fact that even visual space, the least removed from Euclidean space, turns out on closer inspection to be profoundly different from it." In multiple ways, visual perspective is an abstraction, not a literal recording of experience.

This principle holds for every art. Each prioritises certain sense modalities, but the full range of sensibility participates. In music, appreciation involves the whole body: heartbeat, muscle tension, proprioception, aural perception, and sometimes visual and haptic modes.

With its four components—originative, performative, perceptually focused, appreciative—every musical event forms a field. As sound moves forward, the performer follows and recreates the composer's path. The active listener does both at once: empathizing with the performer while following the composer's design. No component operates independently.

Music takes place in this complex situation, the aesthetic field. Asking about the music, performer, or appreciation in isolation breeds insoluble problems. The sound originates with the composer, re-originates with the performer, and is re-embodied in the listener's immediate auditory experience. When everything comes together in living presence, as Glenn Gould once said, it is ecstasy: "a delicate thread binding together music, performance, performer and listener in a web of shared awareness, of innerness."

4. Music as exemplary

Taking musical experience as a model reshapes our understanding of the other arts. The most striking consequence is recognizing performance as central. Music must be performed, whether by a live musician or by someone activating a playback device.

Yet every art requires some activation to be experienced. Grasping painting visually demands an active eye—noting details, tonalities, movement. The viewer changes posture, distance, angle; the body responds in tone, tension, orientation. Art-historical or technical information also shapes what is perceived. Sculpture demands physical engagement with mass, space, volume. Approaching sculpture is a somatic event: the viewer participates by circling in front of and behind the piece, by moving nearer and farther, and by feeling the body respond to its heft and surfaces. All this constitutes the engagement I have called aesthetic engagement, the activation of art in appreciative experience rather than through distanced, disinterested contemplation.

Locating a performer in literature seems harder at first—until we realize that the material of literature is not words but the imaginative experience they evoke. Through linguistic sound, meaning, and action, the story lives. The reader performs the text, giving it sensible substance through active imagination. Sensory modes may be visual, but they can also include sound, touch, bodily tension, respiration, and movement. In every artistic mode there is a performative function that demands active engagement, not passive reception.

The musical object is elusive too. Though some aestheticians try to ontologize music into an object that can be appreciated and judged, such fabrication has no basis. There is no object. Musical sound stakes its reality in the multi-faceted experience of active listening. Every appreciative occasion has a perceptual focus, which need not be embodied in a specific object. Focused experience is the core. And such focusing involves the whole person—a bio-cultural creature embedded in society and history. The disinterested contemplation described by Bullough as psychical distance is unsatisfactory. It psychologizes experience into something purely mental, ignoring bodily contributions, the setting, and the broader circumstances that shape appreciation.

The appreciative occasion is better described as one of engagement. That might suggest there is no object at all in any art—the painting must be seen to be appreciated; otherwise it is merely a physical surface with pigment. The same holds for sculpture, theatre, film, architecture.

Literature offers a parallel. Is the printed text the literary object? The poem on the page? The book in the hand? The aesthetic focus must be the experience of literature—the movement of the text as it is read and lived, the narrative flow of sound, image, meaning, and evocation. The musical model applies here as well.

Just as with music, the aesthetic occasion for literature involves an interplay of creative, performative, and appreciative functions. All fuse and operate relationally, as an activity of human sensibility in full perceptual engagement.

On this account, music becomes truly exemplary. It frees us from misleading questions and inherited presuppositions. Living in the sound is living in perceptual experience. It is the exemplar of every art and the true substance of appreciation.

John Dewey, Later Works, 6:5, cf. 1:51. See Gregory Pappas, John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy As Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

This is developed in my book, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991) and elaborated in subsequent writings. Cf. “What Is Aesthetic Engagement?” Contemporary Aesthetics, 12 (2013); Aesthetics in Action, International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol. 2014, pp. 17–19.

Florensky’s studies centered on Russian icons but also included Renaissance painting. See Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision, Essays on the Perception of Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).

Ibid., p. 250. [A perspectival artist] “is an observer who brings nothing of his own to the world, who cannot even synthesise his own fragmentary impressions, who, since he does not enter into a living interaction with the world and does not live in it, is not aware of this own reality either, although in his proud seclusion from the world he imagines himself to be that last instance. Yet on the basis of his own furtive experience he constructs all of reality, all of it, on the pretext of objectivity, squeezing it into what he has observed of reality’s own differential. This is precisely how the world view of Leonardo, Descartes, and Kant grows out of the soil of the Renaissance; this is also how the visual art equivalent to this world view—perspective—arises.”

Ibid., p. 264.

“…physiological space cannot be made to fit within it [a Euclidean schema]. Leaving aside the olfactory, gustatory, thermal, aural and tactile spaces that have nothing in common with Euclidean space..,

we cannot overlook the fact that even visual space, the least removed from Euclidean space, turns out on closer inspection to be profoundly different from it. And it is in fact [visual space] that lies at the core of painting and the graphic arts….” p. 266

Ibid., p. 266.

Glenn Gould, quoted on Kultur DVD #D2822.

“What Is Aesthetic Engagement?”, Aesthetics in Action, ed. Krystyna Wilkowszewska. International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol. 18/2014 (Libron: Krakow, 2015), pp. 17–19. Also downloaded on academia.edu and ResearchGate.