Opening Address

The opening address will be given by Justine Kingsbury (Waikato) on the evening of Monday, 1 December, 7.00 - 8.30.


Musical Expressiveness Revisited

Whose sadness is the sadness of a sad piece of music? Not the composer's, nor the performer's - they may have been feeling perfectly cheerful at the time of composition and the time of performance respectively. Not the listener's - she too may quite properly, while being moved by the music and recognising its sadness, be moved to some emotion other than sadness. The sadness belongs to no-one. It is a property of the music itself. 

What is it, then, for music to be sad? Answers to this question are many and varied. Perhaps the music's sadness consists in its resemblance to some feature of human sadness - the way sad people sound, or the way sad people move, or the ebb and flow of human emotion more generally. Perhaps it is purely a matter of convention. Perhaps sad music is music that normal listeners under ideal conditions perceive as sad. Perhaps sad music is music that is apt for the expression of sadness.

Some of these (for example the response dependence answer) are likely true, but are thoroughly unsatisfying as analyses of the sadness of sad music. Others (for example the answer in terms of resemblance to human expressive movements) are much more interesting, but as is often the case with resemblance analyses, they are difficult to make precise, and furthermore they seem to cover only a subset of the cases of expressive music. In this paper I defend a version of the view that sad music is music that is apt for the expression of sadness. I also explore the relationships between the different analyses, suggesting that some of them complement each other rather than being competitors, and using the musical expressiveness debate as a case study to illustrate some more general points about types of philosophical analyses.

The opening address will be followed by a reception.