Peter Kivy and the Philosophy of

Music (1980–2002)
Jerrold Levinson

In the beginning—or more exactly, the seventies, when I was in graduate school at the
University of Michigan—was the void, and darkness was upon the face of the waters.
Philosophical reflection on the experience, meaning, and powers of music by analytic
philosophers was almost non-existent. And then, as the 1980s dawned, came Peter Kivy.
Suddenly there was light, and analytic philosophy of music was born. In this piece I summarize
the substance of the successive instalments in the astounding series of books on the philosophy of
music that Peter published between 1980 and 2002, allowing myself some critical reflections in
a few cases.

Chronology of Works to be Discussed

The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (1980)
Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (1984)
Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera (1988)
Sound Sentiment [The Corded Shell redidvivus] (1989)
Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical (1990)
The Fine Art of Repetition and Other Essays (1993)
Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (1995)
Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997)
New Essays on Musical Understanding (2001)
Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (2002)
It may fairly be said that Peter Kivy is the dominant figure in philosophy of music in Anglo-
American philosophy today. What can be said, without any hesitation at all, is that Peter has
written vastly more on this subject than any of his contemporaries, has had more influence
than anyone else in the field, and deserves the lion’s share of the credit for establishing
the subject as a substantial part of analytic aesthetics through the series of books in this
vein that he published in the eighties and nineties. What I will do in my part of this ses-
sion celebrating Peter’s philosophical career is to simply summarize the substance of the
successive instalments in the astounding series of books on the philosophy of music that
Peter published between 1980 and 2002, allowing myself some critical reflections in a few
cases.1 But I must forbear to address the most recent instalments in that series, published in
the last decade, representing two more collections of essays, Music, Language, and Cognition

1 This article originated as a contribution to a symposium in honor of Kivy that took place at the Eastern Division
Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Baltimore on 28 December 2013.

British Journal of Aesthetics DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayx017

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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2 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

(2007) and Sounding Off (2012), and a monograph attacking literary-narrative models of
musical understanding, Antithetical Arts (2009).2 Clearly, I will have more than enough to
deal with in confining myself to the ten books listed at the head of my essay. And in case
anyone is foolish to take me up on the wager, I would be willing to bet a significant sum that
Sounding Off is not Peter’s last published word on this subject that we are both devoted to,
and that there are other volumes to come. But such is not my concern here.

I 
Peter’s first book of musical aesthetics, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression
(1980) was a truly groundbreaking effort.3 The first monograph by an analytic philoso-
pher devoted exclusively to philosophy of music, it displayed the clarity of thought and
prose, the philosophical acumen, and the talent for fruitfully mining historical sources
for illumination on problems of current interest that have characterized all of Peter’s
subsequent books. Philosophically, The Corded Shell had the great merit of showing how
an account of musical expressiveness could be given that preserved its objectivity, was
applicable cross-culturally, yet did not reduce to facts about the emotional lives of either
composers or listeners.
The eminently plausible account of musical expression offered in The Corded Shell is
derived from a judicious review of several seventeenth and eighteenth century treatises
on musical aesthetics, including ones by Johann Mattheson, Charles Avison and Thomas
Reid, with a few assists from nineteenth and twentieth century sources. After distin-
guishing musical expressiveness—expression as a property of music—from the occa-
sional expressing through music of a particular individual’s emotion, and declaring the
former to be the object of interest, Peter begins to assemble the strands of the view he will
eventually endorse. The main theories concerning musical expression that he considers
along the way are the speech theory, the arousal theory, the isomorphism theory, and the
behavioural analogy theory. Peter denominates the last three, respectively, as a ‘physiol-
ogy’, an ‘iconography’ and a ‘physiognomy’ of musical expression.
According to the speech theory, first adumbrated by the theorists of the Florentine
Camerata around 1600, a musical passage is expressive of E in virtue of resembling the
inflections of speech characteristic of the expression of E. According to the arousal theory,
defended in various forms by many thinkers, a musical passage is expressive of E insofar as
it arouses E in listeners, different accounts being given of the mechanism by which it does
so. According to the isomorphism theory, identified with Mattheson in the eighteenth
century, Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century, and Langer in the twentieth, a passage
is expressive in virtue of resembling the shape or structure of particular emotions or of
emotive life in general. According to the behavioural analogy theory, a passage is expres-
sive of E in virtue of resembling the bodily behaviour—movement, posture, gesture,
visage—characteristic of the expression of E.

2 Peter Kivy, Music, Language, and Cognition: And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: OUP, 2007); Sounding
Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: OUP, 2012); Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between
Literature and Music (Oxford: OUP, 2009).
3 Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 3

Peter offers astute and helpful observations on these theories in the course of extract-
ing from them what he regards as valid. His critique of the arousal theory is familiar but
effective. ‘It is quite compatible with my perceiving the most intense and disquieting emo-
tions in a work of art that I not myself be moved in the least ....’4 Peter proceeds to make
clear the manner in which music can indeed occasionally evoke full-fledged emotions, that
is, through idiosyncratic association of the music with some past emotional experience of
a listener. Thus, all raising of emotion by music takes the form of revival of earlier life
emotion, for only in that way are the objects and belief contents essential to real emotion
supplied.
Peter’s own view of musical expressiveness now starts to emerge. Its core is the behav-
ioural analogy theory broadened to include verbal as well as bodily behaviour, thus pre-
serving what is true in the speech theory of expression. Music is seen by us as expressive
of E mainly because it resembles the behaviour, in body and voice, by which we express
E in real life. We tend to animate sounds as well as sights, Peter says, and we hear the
expressiveness of an aural pattern when we hear it as a vehicle of expression—as an utter-
ance or gesture.5
Peter heads off the objection usually raised against Langer’s theory of musical expres-
sion, namely, that if resemblance or isomorphism between A and B were sufficient for
A to be expressive of B, then a musical passage would not only be expressive of some emo-
tion whose behavioural manifestations it resembled, but expressive also of any other phe-
nomena of the world it resembled to the same degree. The answer to this is that structural
resemblance between A and B is not sufficient; in addition, B must be of the right ‘logical
category’ to be expressed—presumably, a quality, state, or the like—and there must be
a ‘psychological link’ between A and B, so that we are disposed to perceive B in A, or to
be put in mind of B by A.6 Thus we explain how, despite significant resemblance, music
is expressive of neither earthquakes nor bacterial growth, and neither grief nor melan-
choly are expressive of any passage of music. Peter also cautions his readers against taking
his proposal to be that music represents, as well as resembles, human expressive behaviour,
since representation requires conscious intent on the composer’s part, which is generally
lacking.
Peter next addresses himself to the fact that there are important factors in musical
expression that cannot easily be accounted for in terms of physiognomic resemblance
to expressive behaviour. Notable among these are melodic chromaticism, minor mode,
instrumental timbre, and certain cadences. His response is to widen the theory of expres-
siveness by adding to the physiognomic resemblance component already established a
component invoking ‘the customary association of certain musical features with certain
emotive ones, quite apart from any structural analogy between them’.7 Peter christens
the first component the ‘contour’ model, and the second the ‘convention’ model. It is
maintained that all central cases of expressiveness in music can be explained on one model

4 Ibid., 23.
5 Ibid., 58–59.
6 Ibid., 61–62.
7 Ibid., 77.
4 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

or the other and the expressiveness of the music in two arias of Gluck and Mozart is
convincingly explained by employing both planks of this programme. Tempo, dynamics,
‘sighing’ figures work by contour; major mode, diatonic melody, trumpet tone work by
convention. The expressive quality in context of certain chords (diminished triad, minor
triad) is interestingly accounted for in terms of a contribution to contour by way of syntac-
tic function (whether the chord is ‘active’ or ‘resting’), although in the case of the minor
triad, whose syntactic function has altered significantly since the seventeenth century,
its current expressiveness is largely a matter of deep-seated convention. Peter suggests
that all expressiveness by convention was originally expressiveness by contour, in either a
direct or indirect manner.8
I now offer some minor criticisms of The Corded Shell. Peter does not at the outset dis-
tinguish clearly enough between analysis of what attributions of expressiveness to music
mean, and an account of the grounds (or causes) of musical expressiveness. In his concern
to address the second, and clearly more interesting, issue he seems to have ignored the
first entirely. Goodman in Languages of Art, by contrast, devotes most of his attention to
the first and almost none to the second.9 Perhaps Peter thinks the analysis of ‘passage P
is expressive of E’ is an obvious one or perhaps he believes that one can only describe a
paradigmatic case, explicit analysis being somehow precluded. But if so we should have
been told that outright. One thing, at least, cannot be meant by ‘P is expressive of E’, and
that is this: ‘P resembles characteristic behavioural expressions of E.’ For then the ‘con-
tour’ component of Peter’s account of how music can be expressive would be trivially cor-
rect, and the ‘convention’ component entirely irrelevant. The analysis of what it means to
ascribe emotional predicates to music must not be conflated with an informative account
of what typically grounds the expressiveness that such predicates report.
A background motivation of Peter’s inquiry into musical expressiveness is defence of
the objectivity of emotive description of music and thus of its respectability as a tool of
musical criticism. He is to my mind successful in this, largely through the plausibility
with which he locates ‘contour’ and ‘convention’ as the primary, and readily recognized,
grounds of expressiveness in music. But I must take issue with a claim that Kivy presses
rather strongly in this connection, namely, that musical expressiveness is completely on a
par with the expressiveness of faces. The expressiveness of music may indeed be an objec-
tive matter, but it is not ‘as objective as’ the expressiveness of a face, whether human or
animal, if this means that it is as clearly determinable and as straightforwardly verifiable.
For a face, human or animal, to be sad is for it to have a look of the sort associated with or
characteristic of persons who are sad; what sort of look that is can be settled conclusively
just by inspecting a range of sad people. But for a passage to be sad is, in part, for it to have
a sound that notably resembles or is analogous to the look of a sad face, gesture, or bearing. Now,
the ways and means of resemblance are manifold and various, especially from one sensory
realm to another. The judgment that a musical passage resembles predominantly the typi-
cal visible manifestations of sadness—as opposed, say, to those of grief, depression, anger,

8 Ibid., 83.
9 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1968).
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 5

or contentment—is hardly as simple or as easily corroborated as the judgment that a face

belongs in the class of sad faces, whether worn by a man or a dog. The latter judgment
amounts to little more than classification with respect to a class whose general member-
ship is antecedently clear; the former involves a complicated and uncharted assessment of
significant similarity between rather different things. It thus seems misleading to say, as
Kivy does, that the criteria of musical expressiveness are exactly ‘the same as’ those of
facial expressiveness. The former in some measure involve and depend upon the latter,
of course, but it is in a somewhat perilous context of cross-sensory resemblances. It is
hardly a matter of criterial identity. In any case, it seems we can defend the objectivity of
emotional attributions to music without overstating the directness with which they are
anchored in human behaviour.
Despite the criticisms just expressed, it was beyond argument, even in 1981, that The
Corded Shell, in its clarity, boldness, and breadth, would take its place as a major work on
musical expression, one that was both historically well-informed and philosophically up-
to-date, and that would serve as a benchmark for future efforts in that direction. And as
I then affirmed, those who had been seeking to chart the murky waters of musical aesthet-
ics were thenceforth permanently in Kivy’s debt.

II 
An expanded version of The Corded Shell, entitled Sound Sentiment, appeared in 1989, con-
taining four additional essays responding to subsequent writing on music and emotion,
most of it provoked by The Corded Shell itself.10 This book, though new only in part, is
especially dear to me, for the following reason. Though the last additional essay, entitled
‘Formalism and Feeling’, is largely an attempt to rebut an essay of mine entitled ‘Music
and Negative Emotion’, which defends the reality and importance of bona fide emotional
response to music expressive of negative emotions, towards the end of his meticulous
rebuttal Peter compares me to Leibniz and himself to Voltaire, in virtue of parallels
between our debate on musical emotion and the debate between those great thinkers on
the problem of evil.11 For that outrageously flattering comparison I can forgive Peter any
amount of public rebuttal, whether justified or not!
The other additional essays are no mere addenda to The Corded Shell, but offer sub-
stantial amplification, clarification, and further defence of the positions staked out in
that book. Among the issues addressed are the considerations that tell against musical
emotivism, which is the thesis that music regularly evokes ordinary emotions in listen-
ers in aesthetically relevant ways and that such evocation is key to the expressiveness
the music possesses; what exactly is meant by saying, as the musical cognitivist does,
that emotions are heard in music as perceived qualities apart from any evocation of them
in listeners; the relation between local or small-scale musical expressiveness and global
or large-scale musical expressiveness; and the reasonableness or unreasonableness of

10 Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment [The Corded Shell redidvivus] (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
11 Jerrold Levinson, ‘Music and Negative Emotion’ in Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1997), 215–241.
6 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

narrative interpretations of musical unfolding. And among others who are engaged with
by Peter in those four essays, patiently but forcefully, are Donald Callen, Colin Radford,
Edward Cone and Anthony Newcomb, important contributors to philosophical debate on
the meaning and power of music.

III 
The Corded Shell was followed, in fairly quick succession, by Sound and Semblance (1984),12
Osmin’s Rage (1988),13 and Music Alone (1990),14 each of them concerned, as had been The
Corded Shell, with a major problem in musical aesthetics. Where The Corded Shell had
addressed the issue of expression in music, Sound and Semblance addressed the issue of rep-
resentation in music, Osmin’s Rage addressed the issue of the relation of music and drama
in opera, while Music Alone addressed an issue perhaps closest to Peter’s heart, namely
that of the nature of our core understanding of music as heard, that elicited by purely
instrumental music.
Sound and Semblance demonstrated the possibility of musical representation that goes
beyond the mere imitation of natural sounds, and outlined the far from negligible aes-
thetic importance of such representation. Osmin’s Rage sketched an account of how the
somewhat conflicting demands of musical and dramatic interest that opera entailed could
actually be reconciled, at least in operas composed along certain, roughly Mozartean
lines, such as that composer’s Abduction from the Seraglio. And Music Alone offered a rich pic-
ture of the listener’s ‘purely musical’ experience and of the roles played in that by formal
apprehension, emotional response, and specifically musical training. As with The Corded
Shell, in each of those books Peter’s reflections served to set an agenda for subsequent
discussion of the issue by other philosophers. I will shortly discuss Osmin’s Rage and Music
Alone in sections four and five respectively, while in the remainder of this section I focus
my attention on Sound and Semblance.
Sound and Semblance was a companion piece to Kivy’s first essay in musical aesthetics,
The Corded Shell. It was as such a worthy companion, and exhibited the same clarity, the
same straightforwardness, the same absence of jargon and unnecessary technicality, and
the same attention to historical views on the questions being surveyed, refreshingly mined
by Peter for valuable insights on which his own positive proposals were then based.
The topic of Sound and Semblance was musical representation, as that of The Corded Shell
was musical expression. Between them they would thus appear to cover the major part
of what one might call musical semantics—the theory of what music means or conveys,
and how it manages to do so. Whereas musical expression is the ‘meaning’ by music of
emotions and related states, musical representation is the ‘meaning’ by music of concrete

12 Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984).
13 Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama and Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1988).
14 Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990).
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 7

objects or events it may be said in some sense to depict or portray. Kivy was committed to
viewing the latter as a legitimate aspect of musical meaning, and his book was dedicated
to showing us the nuts and bolts of it.
After dismissing the idea that musical representation essentially is, or aims at, imitation
or replication of its subjects—which if true would restrict musical representation to the
realm of sounds—Peter proceeds to develop a rough distinction between two types of musi-
cal representation, which distinction forms a linchpin of the book as a whole. ‘Illustration’
is invoked at this point as naming the genus with which we are concerned, while ‘picture’
and ‘representation’ are employed to label the species of this genus. In this terminology,
the distinction is as follows. Musical pictures are musical illustrations that can be identified
immediately without verbal indications, ones whose subjects are recognized without an
assist, though in most cases this requires what Peter calls ‘the minimal information’ that
an illustration is intended, that something or other is being represented. Musical representa-
tions, on the other hand, are musical illustrations whose subjects can only be identified by
ear given verbal cues or titular promptings. Thus, Peter contrasts the ornithological pas-
sages in the Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ symphony and the locomotive evocations of Honegger’s
symphonic poem Pacific 231 (pictures) with the ‘fly-buzzing’ violin passages in Handel’s
Israel in Egypt, the ‘laughing’ musical figures in Bach’s Cantata No 31, and the ‘dawning’
section in Haydn’s The Creation (representations). Musical pictures generally depend cen-
trally on the ‘sounds like’ phenomenon—that is, they manifest aural resemblance. Some
musical representations do so as well, but it is a resemblance only noticed and enabled
after the verbal indication is given. Most musical representations work in virtue of more
abstract connections, such as analogies between musical patterns and natural phenomena
(for instance, the undulation of musical line visa vis that of waves), or the aptness of common
descriptions between musical gestures and worldly objects or events (for instance, the com-
mon applicability of ‘dense’ to musical texture and evening fog). Finally, in some cases the
basis of representation—if representation be admitted—thins out to merely conventional
or stipulative connections, such as operate with Wagnerian leitmotifs.
One is immensely grateful to Peter for his efforts at initiating a typology of musical
representations, amply decked out with examples. However, what is missing is a pre-
liminary discussion of the issue of what musical representation in general amounts to—of
what it means to say a passage represents such-and-such, whether in the picturing or
non-picturing mode. Peter does not tell us what conditions both Honegger’s locomotive
sound-picture and Bach’s mere representation of laughter apparently fulfil so as to count
as representations. He does not tell us what the success criteria are that make some-
thing a musical representation at all, of whatever kind. Thus given Peter’s discussion one
might thus be in a good position to venture what category of representation the evocative
music at the beginning of Mahler’s First Symphony would fall under if it were allowed
to be a representation, but one would not be in a good position to decide whether or not it
was representational. This problem is perhaps ignorable at the safe centre of the musical
picture group, but it looms larger at the more woolly peripheries of the category of non-
pictorial musical representations. The lack of a general analysis of musical representation,
and insufficient attention to the likely roles therein of composer’s intent and listener’s
response, is somewhat regrettable.
8 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

Peter next addresses the interesting question of whether terms used to describe music
drawn from other phenomenal realms—visual, emotional, geometrical—can be said to
apply univocally to both music and the home phenomenon. If so, then since this would in
effect grant that music and non-musical phenomena can share an important range of com-
mon properties, the case for the more indirect or subtle sorts of musical representation
would be strengthened. The most extensively discussed example is that of Haydn’s setting
of the phrase ‘and there was light’ in The Creation. Peter argues that sunlight and the full
orchestral C-major chord used by Haydn at that juncture share the property brightness—
that is, that ‘bright’ is univocal between chord and sunlight when predicated of them.
I confess I find Peter’s argument for this, based largely on the OED and the un-analys-
ability of simple perceptual properties, unconvincing, and what is more, unnecessary.
Light and a C-major chord can resemble one another, thus perhaps facilitating a certain
representation, without their literally possessing the same simple perceptual property.
They can resemble one another merely through their possessing simple perceptual prop-
erties which are themselves highly resembling. Thus, I would prefer to say that the ‘bright-
ness’ of a C-major chord in a given context is a different perceptual property from the
brightness of sunlight—one is visual brightness, the other auditory ‘brightness’—and
yet sunlight and the chord resemble one another in virtue of visual brightness resembling
auditory ‘brightness’. Of course there is a higher-order perceptual quality, what one might
dub sensory brightness—meaning something like vividness in comparison to other presen-
tations in a given sensory mode—of which visual brightness and auditory ‘brightness’ are
species. It is only that property, and not ordinary—that is, visual—brightness that light
and chord can have as common attribute.
The rest of this chapter, which offers a careful discussion of the role of structural iso-
morphism in the achievement of complex representation in music, is markedly more
successful. Peter here shows that isomorphism supplies a kind of resemblance between
musical and non-musical phenomena, whether or not the structural predicates shared
between them—such as ‘ascending’, ‘imitative’, ‘jagged’, agitated’—are judged univo-
cal. The punning character of certain musical representations is convincingly claimed
to derive from structural parallels manifested in terms applied from one context to the
other, such as when imitative counterpoint evokes imitative human behaviour. Peter
clearly establishes that music can indeed resemble its putative represented subjects even
when those are non-audible in nature.
The chapter that follows is the most enjoyable and original in the book. Peter’s merit
here is twofold: rare among current aestheticians, Peter has a knack for finding gold and
not just dross amidst the discards of historical aesthetic theorizing, and further, is adept
at refining and extending in new directions what he has uncovered. His booty here is a
thesis of Adam Smith’s, sketched in an essay entitled ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation
Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts’ (1795), of whose existence
I  was most happy to learn.15 In essence, Smith’s thesis is this: the merit of an artistic

15 Adam Smith, ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts’, in his
Essays on Philosophical Subjects, in W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (eds), vol. III of The Glasgow Edition of the
Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982).
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 9

imitation or representation is not a simple matter, but depends on a complex of three

factors: (a) the excellence or success of the imitation (b) the agreeableness of the object imi-
tated, and (c) the unlikeness of the medium to the object imitated. Peter’s reformulation
of this last point is to note that some media are naturally more recalcitrant than others for
certain representational purposes, the application to music in particular being this, that
for the non-dimensional medium of sound to manage at all to depict a three-dimensional
multi-modal worldly event is in itself a substantial accomplishment, one which already
tips the aesthetic scales in its favour, before even considering the interest of the subject or
the fineness of the rendition. ‘The appreciation of musical illustration, like so much else
in art, is the appreciation of obstacles overcome, difficulties circumvented, success over
external or self-imposed constraints.’16 Smith’s little-known essay serves well as pedagog-
ical counterweight to the more restrictive notions concerning the employment of media
expounded in Lessing’s earlier and better-known treatise, Laocoon (1766).17
In Sound and Semblance Peter also crosses swords with Goodman on the subject of musi-
cal notation. Peter takes it as his main task to show that notated music’s apparent lack of
syntactic density in Goodman’s sense does not prevent a musical work from being repre-
sentational. Peter does this by staying within the terms of Goodman’s charge, pointing
out that if the usual non-articulate dimensions of musical works, such as timbre, tempo
and dynamics signified by standard Italian markings, are allowed to count as constitutive
of works, as seems quite reasonable, then since these are dense dimensions in Goodman’s
sense, representationality in virtue of them would indeed be a potential for musical
works. Now Peter is right enough in this observation, but I prefer a more wholesale, less
accommodating repudiation of Goodman on the issue: Goodman’s claim that density is
prerequisite to representationality mistakes a typical feature of representational systems
for a necessary one, the enabling of a kind of perceiving-as experience. A musical work,
however articulate or ‘digital’ its defining structure, is not a description, but may be a
representation if it aims at and sustains a certain sort of hearing-as or hearing-in.
The final chapter of Sound and Semblance sketches a rough criterion of defensible as
opposed to indefensible representational identifications in music with well-chosen and
entertaining examples, this time from Haydn’s The Seasons and Bach’s Well-Tempered
Clavier. The relevance of artist’s intention to this topic is here finally acknowledged, albeit
belatedly and slightingly. Peter stresses that a representational reading of a work is most
justified when adopting such a reading either solves a musical problem in the music at hand
or allows one to reap aesthetic rewards from it that are otherwise elusive.

IV 
In his next book, Osmin’s Rage, Peter addresses himself to the philosophical problems
raised by the curious phenomenon of opera, in which human beings act out a story on
stage while also singing, often at the top of their voices, and accompanied by orchestral
music which is anything but retiring or backgrounded. Though Osmin’s Rage marks a turn

16 Ibid., 100.
17 G. E. Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
10 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

from instrumental music to vocal music on Kivy’s part, there is continuity with its pre-
decessor, Sound and Semblance, in that both are concerned with the representational, and
dare one say it, narrative potential of music.
After an especially thorough and wide-ranging survey of thought from both philo-
sophical and musical sources on how and why such a phenomenon as opera arose, Peter
formulates what he sees as the central intellectual puzzle about it, namely, how it can
manage to succeed in the two dimensions, musical and dramatic, that it must unite, and so
achieve both musical impressiveness and dramatic effectiveness. For in short, what makes
for convincing musical succession does not make for convincing dramatic imitation, and
vice versa.
Peter’s multidisciplinary approach to this problem, which is too complicated to sum-
marize here, involving pertinent digressions into seventeenth and eighteenth century
moral psychology, and turning on a pivotal distinction between drama-made-music and
opera-as-drama, is constructed with his usual careful attention to the musical constraints
involved in its resolution and the differing historical circumstances in which the problem
poses itself. For my part, I owe to a reading of part of Osmin’s Rage in manuscript much
of the inspiration for an essay of mine entitled ‘Song and Music Drama’,18 in which I for-
mulate my own solution to the problem of opera as epitomized in the very aria that gives
Peter’s book its name, that of the apoplectic harem guardian Osmin in Mozart’s Abduction
from the Seraglio.

V 
I come now to what is probably the central text in Kivy’s searching series of essays on
the philosophy of music, something like the cornerstone of the whole enterprise, namely
Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical (1990). This book is devoted to
illuminating the experience of pure or absolute music, to arguing for a certain view of
what its understanding consists in and where its proper pleasures and satisfactions lie,
and to charting the limits of the meaning attributable to such music. The appreciation of
music alone is shown to be an in-eliminably cognitive affair, at the heart of which is an
understanding of music’s form, as manifested most clearly in the ability to describe the
formal features of the music one has heard. Peter emphasizes the structural role played
by the emotional qualities of music alone, and acknowledges that grasp of that role enters
into the understanding of such music, while denying that arousal of the corresponding
emotions need be involved.
In defending his broadly formalist view of music’s nature and content Peter here fur-
thers his lifelong battle against the excesses of biographical, pictorial, narratological,
and depth-psychological approaches to music appreciation, as well as the excesses from
another direction of music-theoretic approaches to music that stress unhearable and phe-
nomenologically inaccessible aspects of musical form. The book closes with a staunch

18 Jerrold Levinson, ‘Song and Music Drama’ in his The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (London: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 42–59.
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 11

defence of the profundity of some music as lying wholly within itself, as concerned with
the inexhaustible potentialities of musical sound rather than with the metaphysics of the
external world or the recesses of the human spirit.

VI 
Music Alone was followed by The Fine Art of Repetition (1993), which departed from its
predecessors in being a collection of essays, but one having several clear foci of impor-
tance, among them the definition and the ontology of music.19 The three essays devoted
to the metaphysics of musical works, and which defend a strong Platonism about them—
for example, that they are non-creatable—are an undeniable contribution to that topic,
though as the primary critical target of those essays it is not surprising that I dissent from
their conclusions. Related to the three essays on musical ontology narrowly speaking are
two essays on what one may call the ethics of performance, a theme that was to be taken
up fully in Peter’s next book, Authenticities.20
The title essay, ‘The Fine Art of Repetition’, foregrounds the fact that repetition plays
a very central role in most music, to a degree that would be found unbearable in almost
any other art, which seems to support a view of music as more decorative and ornamental
than narrative and discursive. This theme is taken further in the provocatively titled ‘Is
Music an Art?’, whose aim is to call into question whether music, given its most distinc-
tive formal features, fits comfortably under the historically notion of the fine arts. And
that is not all, for this very rich collection also contains essays extending and deepening
Peter’s earlier inquiries in The Corded Shell and Osmin’s Rage into the complicated relations
of music and emotion and the enigmas of successful music drama.

VII 
What followed ‘The Fine Art of Repetition’ signalled a return to the monograph form.
For my money Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (1995) is likely
Peter’s most sheerly impressive accomplishment in monograph mode, for the comprehen-
siveness and clarity of its treatment of its topic, the beauty of its architectonic structure,
and the depth of its engagement with an issue that is of as much or even more concern
to practising musicians as to philosophers of music, namely the nature of authenticity in
musical performance and the desirability or undesirability of different varieties of it.
The many different, equally legitimate senses of performing authenticity are here given
a thorough exploration, touching on authenticity as honesty, as integrity, as individuality,
as truth to a work, as truth to oneself as a performer, and as truth to a performing tradi-
tion. As Peter puts it with characteristic punchiness, in his preface to the book, ‘we shall

19 Peter Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition: And Other Essays in the Philosophy of Music (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
20 Peter Kivy, Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1995).
12 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

see that being authentic is not being one thing: it is being four things, at least … and we
shall learn that we cannot be all of them at once’.21 In addition to engagement with his
usual opponents on these matters, Stephen Davies and myself, there is in this book some
spirited engagement with the prominent musicologist Richard Taruskin, whose hasty
scepticism about the reality and nature of composers’ intentions regarding performances
of their works is rightly taken to task.

VIII 
Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (1997), another collection of closely related
essays, centres on aesthetic issues raised by literature as well as music, and was aimed at
illustrating concretely the benefits to philosophical aesthetics of a focus on individual arts
in their individuality, rather than a focus on highly abstract issues that address themselves
only to the arts as a whole.22 And though the essays concerned with literature outnumber
those concerned with music, the two essays devoted to the art closest to Peter’s heart
and to mine are both singular contributions to the subject. The first, entitled ‘The Quest
for Musical Profundity’, is a stinging rebuke to those who claim to locate profundity in
instrumental music in other than its profound exploration of its own medium, such as the
music of Bach or Mozart or Beethoven may sometimes have attained. These opponents,
here Aaron Ridley and myself, are shown to be on rather shaky ground in their attempts
to locate something for music to be profound about except itself, and specifically their
proposals for how music manages to be profound about its putative extra-musical subjects.
The second, entitled ‘The Liberation of Music’, is largely a witty and searching examina-
tion of what may be right in Schopenhauer’s metaphysically loaded but deeply insightful
view that music may be our most effective means of at least temporary liberation from the
burdens and botherations of earthly existence.

IX 
Yet another collection, New Essays on Musical Understanding (2001), devoted exclusively to
music, includes vigorous, even heated, critical dialogue with those who toil in the same
philosophical vineyard.23 I am the wincing target of one of the most substantial of the
essays in the volume, devoted to an extensive rejoinder to my 1998 monograph on musi-
cal understanding, Music in the Moment, in which Peter staunchly defends his architectoni-
cist view of musical form against the concatenationist view that I there advocate. But at
the heart of New Essays on Musical Understanding, whose title I take to allude to Leibniz’s
Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, itself a reply to and commentary on Locke’s Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, are three related essays on what has been one of Peter’s
central concerns in writing about music philosophically from the outset, namely, the
nature of the emotions that may be evoked by music and their relevance or irrelevance

21 Ibid., xiii.
22 Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
23 Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
 JERROLD LEVINSON | 13

to the appreciation and evaluation of music. I am a target of one of those essays as well,
but Stephen Davies, Colin Radford, and Derek Matravers also come in for a hefty dose
of critical scrutiny, so there is in fact a lot of wincing to go around. And the musicologist
Susan McClary merits some searching examination in another of the essays, aimed at one
of Peter’s favourite topics, the errors of narratological-sociological approaches to purely
instrumental music.

X 
I come finally to Peter’s Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (2002).24 There is little need
for me to summarize this, as it itself stands as a concise summary of the issues that exer-
cised Peter in the twenty-two year span I have been examining, with welcome reinforce-
ment of some of Peter’s signature positions. Among the issues addressed are these: the
concept of music, the relation of music to emotion, the expressive qualities of music, the
nature of musical beauty, the theory of musical form, the representational powers of
instrumental music, the relation of music to text in opera, and the ontology of musical
works and performances. All these topics are treated in a lively and accessible way suitable
for readers coming to philosophical reflection on music for the first time, but without a
trace of dumbing-down. There are currently a few other introductions to the philosophy
of music on the market, but there is no question that Peter’s is the best—both as philoso-
phy and as an introduction to this rather specialized domain.

Coda
When Peter published his introduction, about ten years ago, I remember remarking that
there was then no one better positioned to pen such a book than he, and perhaps no one
keener to read it than I, with whom Peter has so often engaged in friendly dispute.25
Whether agreeing with him or not, we who work in this area must surely acknowledge
Peter as ‘the father of us all’.
I would be remiss at this point if I did not step back from the detail of individual books
in my appreciative survey and take a moment to underline the singularity of Kivy’s way
of doing philosophy of music: straightforward, conversational, accessible, historically-
minded, and with absolutely nothing swept under the rug.
Peter has characterized his own position in the philosophy of music as a whole as
‘enhanced formalism’. While denying neither the importance of certain emotional
response to music nor the direct and visceral pleasures of music, Peter has striven, in
his picture of the appreciation of music, to put the accent on our grasp of music’s formal
features—among which he in fact counts its expressive features—and on the importance
of grounding such appreciation in historical and technical knowledge of music. But Peter’s
broadly formalist position has shown itself to be an evolving one, one he defends flexibly

24 Peter Kivy, Introduction to the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).
25 Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
14 | PETER KIVY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

and resourcefully, often in dialogue with other writers active on these topics, such as
Roger Scruton, Malcolm Budd, Stephen Davies, Jenefer Robinson, Aaron Ridley, Kendall
Walton and myself. Even ‘enhanced formalism’ gives only a partial idea of the powerful
and powerfully unified perspective on the philosophy of music that Kivy has constructed
and championed over the past thirty years. For Peter’s formalism is not, so to speak, just
‘formalism with flourishes’. It is, rather, a cognitivist-expressivist-platonist-architectoni-
cist-anti-narrative-anti-literary-pro-beauty-and-pro-being-moved-formalism!
Probably no one now working in philosophy of music enjoys or merits a higher reputa-
tion than does Peter Kivy. This is due in part to the extent and breadth of his contribution,
but even more so, to its quality, honesty, and penetration, and to its skilful and inimitable
synthesizing of philosophical, psychological, musicological, and historical perspectives in
search of the truth on the many, many questions about music and its place in our lives that
Peter has made central to contemporary discussion. One stands in awe of an output that is
as protean and prodigious as it is provocative and perspicacious, as humbling and elevating
as it is elegant and humane. Du holder Kunstphilosoph, Ich danke dir dafür.26

Jerrold Levinson
University of Maryland
august@umd.edu

26 The two lengthiest discussions in this essay, those devoted to Peter’s first two books, The Corded Shell and Sound
and Semblance, were largely drawn from reviews of those books originally published in the journal Canadian
Philosophical Reviews.