Review

Author(s): Kathleen Marie Higgins

Review by: Kathleen Marie Higgins
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn, 1994), pp.
472-473
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/432037
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 472 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ciations. Indeed, these may be the result of material
habits or the sometimes anachronistic residue of
now-abandoned usage.
Objects were also described as speech acts, perfor-
mances, historical events that persist into the present,
embodiments of perceptual universals, surrogate ex-
pressions of power, and devices for ordering con-
sciousness. Given such an array of alternatives, no
single mode of analysis could be adequate to their in-
terpretation. But might not several analytic approaches
be employed collectively? C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky,
former director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeol-
ogy and Ethnology at Harvard, suggests a sequential,
developmental understanding of the complex mes-
sages encoded in things that builds and depends upon
the cumulative nature of science and nature.
Nearly all the participants in this conference ad-
here to the assumption that human producers or soci-
eties of humans retain authority over the artifacts
they make. Only Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psy-
chologist, reverses that relationship, declaring that
objects have a life of their own and that, in their
successive generations, objects preempt human au-
tonomy and make us their slaves. Only through disci-
plined consciousness, he says, can we escape the tyr-
anny of objects over us and claim an independent
identity. Regrettably, no panelist responded to this
intriguing challenge, although several discussed back-
ward and forward linkage components that relate to
objects' origin and history of use as if these derive
from deliberate human intentions.
The breadth of knowledge and inductive skills
represented at this conference were quite breathtak-
ing and certainly suggest a promising future for such
interdisciplinary inquiry. I would like to see it aug-
mented, however, with more synthetic evaluation and
with some probing of the aesthetic and normative
questions that are raised only incidentally and then
left to the rumination of the imaginative reader.
HILDE HEIN
Department of Philosophy
College of the Holy Cross
KIVY, PETER. The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays
in the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993, x + 373 pp., $17.95
paper.
Peter Kivy's The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the
Philosophy of Music is a tour, in effect, of his think-
ing on music over the past thirty years. Those famil-
iar with his earlier work will revisit some of his most
important articles as well as the central themes that
have made his work in the philosophy of music so
distinctive. Those not previously versed in Kivy's
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work will find this an excellent introduction. Both
sets of readers, however, are likely to be intrigued, if
not perplexed, by the book's title. What does "the
fine art of repetition" mean?
Like many statements of a philosophical problem,
this formulation sounds a bit like a joke. In a society
that endorses artistic novelty and such maxims as
"familiarity breeds contempt," repetition hardly
seems a creative achievement. Kivy's title appears to
be a reductio ad absurdum. If repetition were all it
boasted, music would hardly seem an art at all.
The apparent joke is compounded by Kivy's thesis
in the essay that shares the book's title. Because clas-
sical music-at least in its instrumental forms
depends so heavily on repetition, it really is not a fine
art at all. "Fine art," a concept which Kivy traces to
the eighteenth century, is, he contends, essentially
representational. Instrumental music-or "music
alone" in Kivy's vernacular-is not. It has, in fact,
"no content," Kivy argues, primarily in opposition to
recent music theorists who have sought emotional
dramas or insights through music. The "fine art of
repetition" seems to self-deconstruct before our very
eyes.
Yet we should not, Kivy tells us, be upset by this
conclusion. The fact that instrumental music is not a
fine art, but instead an art of repetitive patterning,
does not demean music. Music is fine as the art it is,
if not itself a fine art.
The repetition that leads Kivy to reject the stan-
dard accounts of music as a fine art (the comparisons
of music, respectively, to a dramatic or literary work
and to a developing organism) is the recapitulation of
whole sections of instrumental music, most notably
in the sonata-allegro form. Kivy claims that the first
statement of a section and its recapitulation are the
same, in the sense of being tokens of the same type;
nevertheless, we should hear the two differently as a
consequence of their different locations. Fittingly,
then, the form of the book recalls these points about
structure. Involving in large measure the recapitula-
tion of previously published essays, we are led to
reconsider these essays' import in light of their new
context, as elements building to Kivy's surprising
conclusion that the classical music of the past few
centuries is a decorative art.
A general tendency in Kivy's essays is to defend
undervalued theories as possible sources of new in-
sights about music. In several essays, for instance, he
tackles what he sees as facile arguments against
musical Platonism. Kivy finds especially dubious the
claim that the apparent creation of music by com-
posers is a counterargument against Platonism, which
implies that composers "discover" their works. Kivy
contends that "discovery" is a good metaphor for the
composer's work, which does illuminate something
about reality, as the term implies.
 Book Reviews
On the other hand, Kivy is unsparing in his con-
tinuing campaign against popular theories about mu-
sic that he thinks are groundless. Among these, in
particular, are the views that music represents or
arouses "garden-variety emotions" like hope, fear,
joy, etc. Taking as his focus untexted music, Kivy
contends that these theories misunderstand, respec-
tively, the expressivity and the emotional impact of
music. Music is not usually imitating the garden-
variety emotions; instead, it possesses these emotions
as musical properties, much as the bloodhound's face
possesses (but does not represent or arouse) the
expressive property of sadness. Moreover, music does
not typically arouse the garden-variety emotions in
its audiences. Instead, its audiences are emotionally
moved by the beauty of the music. This emotional
experience, fundamental to the experience of classi-
cal music, is so engrossing that it can, in the case of
opera, create the illusion that characters have psy-
chological depth. This, Kivy explains, is what ac-
counts for our sense that Mozart's characters are
alive.
Another characteristic of Kivy's philosophical ap-
proach is to reach startling conclusions and to show
these to be the outcome of systematic logical reason-
ing. Like Sherlock Holmes-Kivy's exemplar of a
fictional character that is genuinely animated, not
merely characterized-Kivy unravels philosophical
problems in the fashion of detective work. Indeed,
one of the admirable features of Kivy's work is that
he directs attention to problems that others have
overlooked.
Particularly striking in this regard are Kivy's ac-
counts of why historical thinkers-such as Johann
Mattheson, Immanuel Kant, and Eduard Hanslick-
exhibited the tensions they did in connection with
music. Kivy sees Mattheson, for example, as his pre-
cursor in developing the theory that emotions are
"possessed" by music as inherently musical proper-
ties. Why, then, did Mattheson describe music as
morally edifying? Kivy sees this as a lapse into the
vernacular talk of the day, which presupposed the
"arousal" theory of emotion in music.
By contrast, Kivy sees Hanslick as right to reject
the views that music imitates or arouses emotion.
Nevertheless, Kivy argues, Hanslick did not fully
appreciate how close his own view of musical dy-
namics was to an account of how music could pos-
sess emotions. Kant, similarly, came a long way
toward a theory that Kivy could applaud when he
developed an account of artistic creation. This ac-
count might have suggested to him the idea of a
purely musical logic if only Kant had known more
about musical structure. Kivy suggests that Kant's
ignorance about music was a consequence of his
Pietist background, which would have discouraged
him from becoming educated about music.
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473
A further case of Kivy's sleuthing is his quest to
explain the popularity of what he calls "the Mozart
myth," the legend that Mozart was a preternatural
genius who envisioned whole works atemporally.
Kivy traces the hold this image has on popular imag-
ination to nineteenth-century aesthetic theories and
to enduring theological notions, such as the view that
God has an atemporal vision of the world.
Kivy gives the figures he considers consistently
charitable treatment, in accordance with the principle
of charity: "All things being equal, choose the inter-
pretation according to which the work you are inter-
preting is given the highest evaluation" (pp. 248-
249). Not surprisingly, Kivy evaluates more highly
those interpretations that yield theories he finds basi-
cally correct, although this might leave some readers
suspecting that they would wield the principle of
charity with different interpretive results.
Anticipating that some will find his attacks on
traditional defenses of music's value deflating, Kivy
accepts with some mirth the role of the debunker. In
the centuries-old debate over whether the words or
the music are more basic, Kivy gives considerable
status to language, calling language "a far more
potent emotive weapon" than music (p. 185). He
calls the opera character "a kind of musical con
man" (p. 175) and his own account of the nature of
classical music "the pitiful wallpaper model" (p. 333).
As one whose project involves cheerful demysti-
fication, Kivy resembles Arthur Danto, to whom the
book is dedicated. Both Kivy and Danto see the tran-
sition from the aesthetic values of the nineteenth cen-
tury to those of the twentieth as a loss of beloved
aspirations, but also as a source of exciting oppor-
tunities. For Kivy, these possibilities include the
prospects of formulating new accounts of why abso-
lute music has become so significant to us in the last
150 years and of reconsidering music's importance as
a "tribal" or "ritualistic" art that initiates us into our
cultural and human identity.
Kivy's book provides a new setting in which to
consider the central message of his whole career as
philosopher of music. We have trivialized music by
forcing it into the "fine arts" mold developed to
explain other arts. If we now consider it as a purely
decorative art, we will treat our tradition's music as
fine on its own terms-and we may for the first time
recognize it as the dazzling achievement it is.
KATHLEEN MARIE HIGGINS
Department of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
WOLLHEIM, RICHARD. The Mind and Its
Depths. Harvard University Press, 1993, x + 210
pp., $27.50 cloth, $14.95 paper.