This article examines the implications for aesthetic theory of using music as a model. It pursues the question of what would follow from using music as the paradigm of art in general. How would we project an aesthetics, so to say, if we used music as our model by beginning and ending with the perceptual experience of music? This would lead to rejecting an object-oriented aesthetics that joins with the subjectivity of experience and emphasizing, in contrast, music’s performative and embodied character, the ephemeral nature of the musical object, and engagement with music as a field experience that joins creative, focusing, appreciative, and performative features in a complex perceptual whole.