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This paper articulates a reaction to Malcolm Budd's book on Music and the Emotions.' It is not a critique of his argument, but responds to a general impression-perhaps a mistaken impression-of his strategy. This impression was that Budd's rebuttal of leading theories about the relation between music and the emotions was facile. Whatever theory was being considered, it could always be rejected on one of two grounds. Either one said that some key term was unexplained, or one pointed out that some phenomenon was not accounted for by the theory. Such a rebuttal is too easy because, in the first place, one can always find something in the use of a term that is unexplained, left to context or to the reader's experience. Otherwise nothing would ever get said. The objection is serious only if the lack of explanation results in some real and relevant ambiguity or obscurity; and this was not always shown. And, in the second place, no theory can explain "everything," not even everything within its purported scope. It is up to the reader to see how the theory functions, how one would apply and extend it to cover what is not mentioned, and where it fits in to other explanatory schemes. Problems arise only when a relevant phenomenon is such that one does not see how the theory could be extended or adapted to cover it. Budd's book seemed not to be using theories for the light they could shed, but to be seeking excuses for rejecting them totally. No wonder such a book ended by giving the impression that we lacked any theory of the relation between music and the emotions. Budd's book left the impression that the task of finding a satisfactory theory of the relation between music and the emotions remained to be carried out and was worth attempting. But his reader was left wondering what the criteria of acceptability for such a theory could possibly be. The function of the present paper is to suggest that there is no such task. There is much to say on the general theme of emotion and music; much that is of great value has already been said, some of it in the theories reviewed by Budd, much of it by Budd himself in his book, more of it in a continuing stream of work by our contemporaries.2 But none of it amounts to anything that could be usefully called a theory of the relation between music and the emotions. We do not know what such a theory should be and have no reason to seek such knowledge. Budd sets the problem up somewhat as follows. First, "Music is essentially the art of uninterpreted sounds," based on the human capacity to hear sound sequences without assigning meanings to them (p. ix); second, it is possible for specifically musical phenomena to be systematically related to non-musical phenomena; third, such non-musical phenomena include emotions. The task of the desiderated theory, presumably, would be to give a satisfactory explanation of what is related to what, and how the relations in question are established and controlled: "presumably," because Budd's formulations here are less explicit than they might be. One difficulty with this way of setting up the question is that, though a musical system as such is indeed an abstract formal system, and a musical work is an artificial construction of entities and relationships formally defined, and musicologists can discuss such works, no such art as Budd describes has ever established itself as a social or cultural practice outside the classroom, and one does not see how it could and why it should. Actual musical practices are integral to social practices. It is not the case that |
