Musical Frissons

1 . Though the value of music goes beyond, in a number of respects, the pleasure it provides when appropriately attended to, the capacity to provide such pleasure is a significant part of that value.1 To be sure, there are values that attach to both individual pieces of music and music as a whole that do not cash out in terms of pleasures afforded listeners, but such values will not be the focus of my present reflections. Here and now it is the hedonic that will rule.

Preliminary remarks are in order concerning the sort of attention that should be understood to be involved when I speak of pleasures properly afforded a listener by music. Such attention is close and concerted; it is locally focussed, though global-context-sensitive.2 Such attention is aesthetic, or appropriate to music as art; that is, it carries to the role played by what is precisely heard in the music in the generation of any pleasure that ensues, so that the music serves, at least in part, as object of such pleasure.3 Finally, such attention is stylistically and historically informed, at least on a tacit level, allowing a given piece of music to be heard as such, each characteristic — formal, expressive, rhetorical, representational — being registered for what it is and not, as Bishop Butler put it, another thing.4

2. Let me signal at the outset some dimensions of difference among musical pleasures. Musical pleasures differ in how active, how intellectual, how essentially physiological or physiologically-centered they are. Musical pleasures differ with respect to intensity, e.g. they may be acute or mild; with respect to duration, e.g. they may be passing or long-lasting; with

64 N° 85 OCTOBRE 2000