Moved by the pervasiveness and insistence of political forces in social life, many scholars have been drawn increasingly to recognize the strands of the aesthetic that are woven into its texture. They have gone beyond dealing with the ways that the arts are used in political propaganda and for arousing patriotic feeling. The aesthetic has come to…[Read more]

In its search for universal knowledge, philosophy has usually been mired in its own presuppositions. Its illuminating principles have often turned out to be illusions, its eternal truths merely local knowledge, its moral imperatives the architecture of custom often disguising the interests of privilege behind the sanctimoniousness of ethical…[Read more]

This anthology brings together the titles of articles written about music by Arnold Berleant with citation and DOI information.

American music is as various as the great sprawling country in which it originates. Like New York, the United States’ largest city in which everything can be found, the very abundance of this music is overwhelming. Most non-musicians associate American music with its folk traditions and their derivatives. These include the regional music of the…[Read more]

Understanding performance can not only increase our theoretical grasp of music but reveal something of the general character of human experience. Performance evokes a condition that affects the fundamental aspects of experience: the perception of time and space, of the body and sensation, and of personal and social experience. A phenomenological…[Read more]

Music suffers in discussion more than most arts. The difficulties of grasping the workings of an art whose materials of sound are intangible, elusive, and ephemeral are increased by the usual practice of employing physical and other alien metaphors to convey the activities of musical creation and appreciation. It is common to hear even musicians…[Read more]

I begin by disclaiming any intention of implying, as the title of this essay may suggest, the same prognosis for music that Baudelaire made for love when, in “La Charogne,” he likened the future of his beloved to a dog’s decaying carcass. It is true, however, that what I have to say about music will perhaps appear quite as shocking to the…[Read more]

Music has a remarkable self-sufficiency. Faltering explanations such as language, symbol, emotion, or expression seem to reflect the preconceptions of the listener, the critic, or the theorist rather than the experience of the music. All claim to explain music in terms of something else. Where is the music in such explanations? Music loses its…[Read more]

Despite the serious obstacles that stand in the way of discussing such questions as what constitutes a piece of music, the papers by Miss Carpenter and Professor Crocker deal sensitively with the issue and make useful and important observations. My comments are intended to assist in clarifying and furthering these discussions. Let me proceed by…[Read more]

The experience of music offers powerful proof of the embeddedness of human being. It is environmental engagement at its highest pitch, and thus offers an eloquent argument for the full fusion of human being, a kind of reasoning I call the argument from experience. When Walter Pater observed that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of…[Read more]

Unlike the other arts, music has no direct connection with the rest of the human world. True, there are bird songs and natural “melodies” in the gurgling of brooks, but these are hardly the materials of music in the way that landscape can be the subject-matter of painting or the human body the material of dance. And no natural sounds can stand alo…[Read more]

It is a common assumption that Hanslick was the main spokesperson for “absolute music.” My research shows that Hanslick did not come to be associated with the term until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Around 1880, polemics about Liszt’s concept of program music used “absolute music” to designate program music’s opposite. But just as…[Read more]

An anthology of critical essays on aesthetics by Arnold Berleant. Includes citation and DOI for each article.

The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness has been a central concept in aesthetics since the late eighteenth century. This exchange offers a contemporary reconsideration of disinterestedness from different sides of the question.