The Oxford Handbook of WESTERN MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY
The Oxford Handbook of WESTERN
MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY
Edited by TOMÁS M C AULEY, NANETTE NIELSEN, AND JERROLD LEVINSON, with ARIANA PHILLIPS-HUTTON, Associate Editor
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PART I MAP PING THE FIELD
PART II HIS TORY
PART III P HILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS
Ariana
Charles O. Nussbaum 16.
PART
PART V KE Y CONCEPTS
Paul Boghossian
39. Mercy
Martha C. Nussbaum
Stephen Decatur Smith 41. Making Sense
Andrew Bowie
Michael Gallope
A ndrew Kania 44.
Christopher Hasty
PART VI C OLLISIONS AND COLLABORATIONS
Julian Dodd and John Irving
46.
47.
48.
Nick Zangwill and Stephen Hinton
Michael Spitzer and Derek Matravers
Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham
49. Expectations
Jenny Judge and Bence Nanay
50.
Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jerrold Levinson, with an introduction by Naomi Waltham-Smith
51a. Perception 1029
Christopher Peacocke
51b. Response to Christopher Peacocke: Perception 1057
Nicholas Cook
52a. Subjectivities 1065
Susan McClary
52b. Response to Susan McClary: Subjectivities 1075
Jeanette Bicknell Index 1083
Acknowledgements
This large-scale project has been under way for a number of years and more people have been involved at various stages than it is possible to recount here. Building on the rich history that we highlight in the Introduction, dialogue between musicologists, philosophers, and scholars in a range of related disciplinary areas has, since 2010, flourished at the particular meeting point that has been the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (RMA MPSG). It was at this group’s conferences, bristling with ideas, debates, and passion, that the initial seeds for the current Handbook were sown. All three of the main Handbook editors have been immersed in these events from the start: McAuley and Nielsen as founding RMA MPSG committee members, and Levinson as advisory board member and, in 2017, as keynote speaker.
We thus express our gratitude here to the institutions that have made these conferences happen, notably the Royal Musical Association, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Departments of Music and of Philosophy at King’s College London, but also the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Music & Letters Trust, the Mind Association, the University of Nottingham, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the University of Hull, Cambridge University (both the Faculty of Music and the Margaret Beaufort Institute for Theology), the University of London’s Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck, University of London. We are also grateful to the many associated groups that supported the conferences, whether by organizing individual panels or by collaborating on whole events. Amongst the numerous individuals whose work made the conferences possible, we thank our many previous co-organizers and colleagues—not to mention our successors—on the committee of the RMA MPSG, and offer particular thanks to Susan Bagust, John Deathridge, Víctor Durà-Vilà, and Michael Fend, whose encouragements formed the cornerstone of the group’s foundation.
That said, for all its historical, practical, and emotional roots in the RMA MPSG, this Handbook remains a free-standing project, one that reflects the collective goals, values, and aspirations of its individual authors and editors, rather than those of any particular organization. We also note appreciatively the work of music and philosophy study/interest groups in the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, and of the British Society of Aesthetics and the American Society for Aesthetics, which have formed natural homes for the work of many scholars represented in the pages that follow.
Given the wide scope of the present volume, we took the unusual decision to have its chapters peer-reviewed individually by readers expert in each given area. As such,
thanks are owed to a veritable army of anonymous reviewers, scholars who gave generously when their time was already significantly in demand. We are deeply grateful for all of the invaluable feedback and suggestions for improvements: the Handbook would not have reached its current state without them. Our work has been very ably supported by Rachel McCarthy and Anika Babel, who provided editorial assistance during the final months of the project, and by Oliver Chandler, who helped to set numerous music examples. A very special thanks goes to Ariana Phillips-Hutton, who started work on this project as an editorial assistant, but whose outstanding contribution to the project grew through its final years to a position where the title of Associate Editor seemed more fitting. Finally, none of the editorial assistance would have been possible without generous support from the University of Cambridge (Returning Carers Scheme), University College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. The editorial work of McAuley was itself generously supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Rowena Anketell, whose meticulous final copyedit improved the text in innumerable places, and to the dedicated staff at Oxford University Press, in particular to Suzanne Ryan, whose enthusiasm, encouragement, and wisdom allowed this project to happen, and to Lauralee Yeary, who answered more practical queries than was reasonable with patience and grace.
Many other individuals have offered invaluable encouragement and advice at various stages of the project, notably: Mark Evan Bonds, Andrew Bowie, Michael Gallope, Sarah Hibberd, Kathleen Higgins, Stephen Hinton, Julian Johnson, Frank Paul Silye, Elizabeth Swann, and Benjamin Walton. More essential still, though with considerable overlap, has been the outstanding work of our various authors, not to mention their patience in seeing the book into print. Finally, we note with appreciation that there has for some years now already existed a high-quality Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. Though the present book is significantly different in its aims, we share freely our admiration for that earlier project, and acknowledge with gratitude the role it has played in helping the field of music and philosophy to grow and to mature. We also thank Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, the editors of that 2011 volume—both of whom have generously contributed to the present Handbook—for their good humour and encouragement.
List of Contributors
Carolyn Abbate, Harvard University
Hanne Appelqvist, University of Helsinki
Jeremy Begbie, Duke University and University of Cambridge
Bruce Ellis Benson, University of St Andrews and University of Vienna
Jeanette Bicknell, Independent Scholar
Paul Boghossian, New York University
Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, University of London
Scott Burnham, City University of New York
David Clarke, Newcastle University
Marcel Cobussen, Leiden University
Sarah Collins, University of Western Australia
Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge
Ian Cross, University of Cambridge
Armand D’Angour, University of Oxford
David Davies, McGill University
Stephen Davies, University of Auckland
Joanna Demers, University of Southern California
Julian Dodd, University of Leeds
Andreas Dorschel, University of the Arts, Graz
Joseph Dubiel, Columbia University
Michael Fend, King’s College London
Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota
Theodore Gracyk, Minnesota State University, Moorhead
Gordon Graham, Princeton Theological Seminary
Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College
J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Royal Holloway, University of London
Christopher Hasty, Harvard University
Stephen Hinton, Stanford University
Simon Høffding, University of Oslo and University of Southern Denmark
John Irving, Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Freya Jarman, University of Liverpool
Julian Johnson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Jenny Judge, New York University
Andrew Kania, Trinity University
Ellen Koskoff, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University
Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford
Jerrold Levinson, University of Maryland
Tamara Levitz, University of California, Los Angeles
Derek Matravers, The Open University
Tomás McAuley, University College Dublin
Susan McClary, Case Western Reserve University
Matthew D. Morrison, New York University
Bence Nanay, University of Antwerp
Jean-Luc Nancy, The European Graduate School
Nanette Nielsen, University of Oslo
Christopher Norris, University of Cardiff
Charles O. Nussbaum, University of Texas at Arlington
Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago
Max Paddison, Durham University
Christopher Peacocke, Columbia University and Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ariana Phillips-Hutton, University of Cambridge
Alexander Rehding, Harvard University
Stephen Decatur Smith, Stony Brook University
Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California
Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
Paul Thom, University of Sydney
Elizabeth Tolbert, Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University
Gary Tomlinson, Yale University
Naomi Waltham-Smith, University of Warwick
Nick Zangwill, University College London
Introduction
Tomás M c Auley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson
Meeting Points
Among its many achievements, music has often been a catalyst for philosophical engagement and thought.1 Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, an idealized and idealizable creation, or the most embodied and humanly engaging sonic art form, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. The traffic, however, has never been one-way: philosophy has long provided a catalyst for musical engagement and thought. Musicians of all stripes have drawn on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement. Further, scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into both music and the worlds that sustain it.
One way to conceptualize this rich history is as a series of meeting points between these two overlapping yet distinct spheres of human activity. As a result of these meeting points, the scholarly community can today draw on a massive legacy of interaction between music and philosophy. The aim of this Handbook is to draw together and drive forward key debates at the heart of this legacy. In common with the aims of the Oxford Handbook series as a whole, each essay sets out to “evaluate the current thinking on a field or topic, and make an original argument about the future direction of the debate.” Naturally, each author has chosen to interpret this remit slightly differently, and so each essay finds its own place on the sliding scale between coverage and contention. Yet all essays exhibit something of both, and the purpose throughout remains not only to summarize debates, but also to move them forward.
The word “and” in the title of this Handbook is crucial to its dialogic aims. The “of” in the common phrase “philosophy of music” can suggest a certain sense of possession: music and its elements are seen as objects in need of definition from philosophy. The “and” in the title of this Handbook, by contrast, does not seek to exclude philosophical
insights into music, but allows equally for musical insights into philosophy, and avoids any connotation of a superior discipline. In so doing, it pays full respect to ongoing work in the philosophy “of” music—and seeks to represent that work to the fullest possible extent—yet sees such work as but one part of the broader interdisciplinary field of music and philosophy.
Beyond this broad orientation, we do not attempt to define “music and philosophy”: to capture its essence or to set its boundaries.2 Rather, we intend for the Handbook as a whole to provide—by implication and alongside its more explicit goals—such a definition, one comprising numerous perspectives and infinitely richer than a small team of editors could provide alone, even whilst it remains inevitably incomplete. That said, the shape of the final Handbook remains palpably tied to decisions that were made early on as to its structure and scope. With that in mind, what follows is an overview of the Handbook that attempts not to summarize each individual essay, but rather to share the reasoning behind the choices of topics and groupings that determine its particular topography.
An Overview of the Handbook
Mapping the Field: The Handbook starts with a set of five essays that aim to “map” the field of music and philosophy. They do so by introducing the topic from the perspective of the three main subdisciplines of music studies (with chapters on Historical Musicology, Music Theory, and Ethnomusicology) and the two main orientations towards contemporary philosophy (Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy).
We recognize that these divisions reflect historical tensions that are often specific to particular geopolitical regions, and that are increasingly being called into question. The distinction between historical musicology and music theory, for example, is characteristic of, though by no means exclusive to, North American music studies in particular, and even there belies often-fluid boundaries between these endeavours. The distinction between historical musicology and ethnomusicology, in turn, must answer to competing claims that either all music scholars (Cook 2008) or no music scholars (Amico 2020) could or should self-identify as practising some form of ethnomusicology.3 More disputed still is the division between analytic and continental philosophies, a division that, as many have pointed out, confuses methodology with geography. The result is what Bernard Williams once called, in a remark cited tellingly by Tamara Levitz later in this Handbook, “a strange cross-classification—rather as though one divided cars into frontwheel drives and Japanese” (Williams 1996, 25). One might also ask why work from (particular parts of) one continent should deserve the label “continental” any more than that from any other continent.
Yet for all their faults, these divisions continue to guide much current work in each discipline, as reflected in the departments in which different scholars work, the journals in which they publish, and the societies with which they affiliate themselves. Within a
North American context at least, the latter is perhaps the most straightforwardly revealing: for all their open-mindedness and attempts at rapprochement, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology remain three distinct bodies—as do the American Society for Aesthetics (broadly analytic in orientation) and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (devoted to continental philosophy). Rather than ignore these divisions, we chose to commission a set of essays that take a self-conscious and critical approach to each tradition and we are grateful to the authors of these essays for tackling their topics with such sensitivity and grace.
We also acknowledge that much relevant work comes from outside any of the subdisciplines of music studies and philosophy, whether from practising musicians who might eschew, or be denied the opportunity for, any kind of academic orientation, or from scholars in disciplines such as film studies, sound studies, media studies, art history, literature, cultural studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, sociology, performance studies, and intellectual history. Yet the five overlapping areas mapped here have nonetheless remained a primary focal point for a very significant amount of recent work.
History: If the Handbook started with a present-day road map to the field of music and philosophy, it now provides a different kind of road map, one that reaches back to the past, by charting the history of music and philosophy. This history, spanning more than two millennia, does not aim to be comprehensive, but rather seeks to highlight a set of key meeting points between music and philosophy through time. Some of these essays, namely those on Ancient Greece and The Middle Ages, follow cultural-temporal divisions that are common across all of this volume’s cognate disciplines. As this set of essays moves from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, however, they follow standard period divisions not of the European history of concert music, with its focus on Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, but rather of Western intellectual and literary history, with essays on The Early Modern Period and The Enlightenment. Its final two essays move to century periodizations—The Nineteenth Century and The Twentieth Century—yet do so again with the aim of drawing out key meeting points within these centuries, rather than seeking to construct narratives that start or stop artificially at the turn of each century.
Philosophical Traditions and Practices: Having begun with a set of essays highlighting the importance of disciplinary and subdisciplinary differences, the volume now continues with two sets of essays that highlight traditions and practices that, taken as a whole, bear no particular allegiance to any particular discipline, often cutting across or between them. The first, Philosophical Traditions and Practices, ranges from topics that might be seen as subdisciplines of philosophy (Epistemologies, Ethics, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics) to those that would more naturally seem to be approaches to philosophy as a whole, or perhaps even in some cases partner disciplines to philosophy (Phenomenology, Theology, Deconstruction, Posthumanism). Though some of these (say, Deconstruction) might seem to fall easily on one side of a perceived analytic–continental divide, others (say, Ethics or Ontology) represent topics that are, in
their own ways, equally central to both traditions. Others (notably Posthumanism and Hermeneutics) reach beyond this division to embrace the terrain of literary, cultural, and critical theory.
Musical Traditions and Practices: The second of these sets of essays shifts its focus from philosophical to musical traditions and practices. It starts with a quartet of essays on musical process and experience: Improvisation, Composition, Performance, and Listening. It continues with an overview of some key musical genres or approaches to music-making: Vocal Music, Electronic Music, Popular Music, Blacksound, Jazz, and Opera. To a large extent, these essays comprise philosophically oriented examinations of each tradition or practice. As such, this part might come closest to an overview of “the philosophy of music” as it is usually practised. Yet even here, the musical traditions and practices are frequently understood as sources from which philosophy might take inspiration, rather than simply as objects for philosophy to examine.
Key Concepts: In terms of sheer number of essays, the next part, Key Concepts, is the largest. It is also the most diverse. Many of these essays have a strong historical bent, yet bring the histories that they uncover into dialogue with more recent work (Absolute Music, Expression, Making Sense, Mercy, Nature, Society). Another (Evolution) extends its focus back further still to music’s prehistory. Several engage in particular the vexed question of music’s potential political power (Gender, The Ineffable (and Beyond), Absolute Music). Another focus is on interactions between music, philosophy, and the “hard” sciences (Consciousness, Evolution). An unintentional but fortuitous pairing is the inclusion of a pair of essays on Space and Time. In two cases (Meaning and Autonomy, Meaning and Scepticism), the focus is not on a single concept, but rather a pairing of concepts—though in reality, if not quite to the same extent, all of the essays in this part range beyond any single concept.
Collisions and Collaborations: This whole project is intended as a kind of dialogue. It deliberately sets essays from diverse disciplinary traditions alongside one another, in the hope that such collisions might inspire further collaboration. Yet the Handbook finishes with a set of essays that embody this purpose in an especially explicit way, in that they are all collaborative endeavours by two authors from differing disciplinary backgrounds. This collaboration takes a variety of forms. Several essays (Authenticity, Emotion, Expectations) are co-written such that they present a single joint perspective on their topic even whilst that perspective ranges more widely than would otherwise have been possible. Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham’s essay on Enchantment speaks with a single voice, yet notes at its outset the ways in which different parts of the essay highlight the contribution of each author. Two other pieces (Perception, Subjectivities) take the form of essay and response. Finally, one piece, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay on Galant Music, started as a solo-authored essay written in French, but involved an act of translation (by Naomi Waltham-Smith and Jerrold Levinson), to which was added a substantial introduction (by WalthamSmith), such that the final product seemed ideally suited as a contribution to this part of the Handbook.
Scope and Lacunae
We are conscious that we have attempted to cover a vast range of topics—a total of fiftytwo essays, involving sixty-two authors, and spread across all areas of music and philosophy. Yet the more comprehensive a volume like this is, the more glaring its omissions. For all our attempts at inclusion, in other words, we remain aware that the Handbook contains numerous lacunae.
One such lacuna that goes to the heart of the Handbook is the inclusion of the word “Western” in its title. This word was not, in fact, present in the initial proposal that we submitted for this project. That proposal was for, more simply, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy. Its proposed contents were broadly similar to those of the present volume, except that it included an additional part entitled “Geographies” that aimed to introduce the field of music and philosophy from the perspective of six different continents. As one of the anonymous peer reviewers of the original proposal correctly noted, however, the proposed volume still remained largely focused on Western musics and Western philosophies. As such, our attempts to provide a global perspective—wellintentioned though they may have been—risked tokenizing (or worse still, ghettoizing) the very perspectives they sought to highlight. Better, we thought, to be upfront about this; to admit that our own editorial expertise lay primarily in the musics and philosophies of the West; to avoid the pretence that the topics covered would be representative of music and philosophy everywhere; and to respect the uniqueness and complexity of alternate traditions by refusing to collapse them into a Western framework. We do this with the aspiration that future research in music and philosophy will continue to become more attentive to the unique worlds of non-Western musics and philosophies.
Except: non-Western? The very objectionability of this term—a term that suggests that a majority of the world’s cultures can grouped into a single whole and defined by what they are not—highlights issues of talking about Western music and Western philosophy, or indeed any kind of Western culture. The case against talking about “Western” culture has recently been made powerfully by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the final chapter of his widely read 2018 book The Lies that Bind, itself based on Appiah’s 2016 BBC Reith Lectures. Here, Appiah notes that the now-predominant conception of the West first emerged in the early years of the Cold War, in the form of a “Plato-to-NATO” narrative of Western culture. In this narrative, “Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific” (Appiah 2018, 201). As Appiah goes on to observe, however, these values are neither exclusive to “the West” nor ubiquitous within it. Indeed, notes Appiah, from a longer historical perspective, these values were, on the whole, entirely foreign to premodern Europe.
In our use of the term “Western,” then, we reject any sense that so-called Western values might be somehow superior to those of other cultures. On the contrary, a number of essays in this Handbook highlight the complicity of Western cultures with oppressive
and unjust regimes of power and of colonial power in particular. More fundamentally, we also reject any sense that any such set of uniquely Western values might exist in the first place. Rather, we use the term “Western” to refer to a broad and varied set of musical and philosophical traditions clustered historically around Europe and the North Atlantic.
With this in mind, we recognize that much recent scholarship has replaced talk of Western and non-Western with that of a Global North and a Global South. We note with appreciation that, in comparison to their forebears, these terms are both more inclusive and more attentive to the economic inequalities that have emerged in the wake of colonialism. Although almost all of the regions discussed in the present volume fall within the Global North, however, that term also customarily encompasses a number of regions that, for the most part, lie outside the remit of the present volume, notably Russia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Further, as Martin Müller (2020) has noted, this North–South division comes with its own exclusions, leaving too little room in particular for many formerly Communist countries. As such, we do not use those terms here. Ultimately, and in common with many areas of study in the humanities and social sciences, the field of music and philosophy has yet to develop a truly inclusive vocabulary for global comparativism. In the meantime, we use the term “Western” only with reluctance, and in full awareness that, the proclivities of Eurocentric map-drawers aside, no place on the planet is ultimately, in purely geographical terms, any further east or west than any other.
Within the broad, difficult realm of the “Western,” we have aimed for a diverse coverage of topics and approaches. In particular, we have taken care to avoid a volume that leans excessively on a small number of canonical composers of Western concert music. Rather, we have included essays on topics such as Jazz, Popular Music, and Electronic Music. Yet we have not sought to make canonical figures off-limits either; on the contrary, we have aimed to highlight their historical significance and ongoing influence. Michael Fend’s essay on Opera, for example, makes sure to include the likes of Wagner and Verdi; Christopher Hasty’s essay on Time pauses to dwell on the opening of one of Beethoven’s most temporally perplexing string quartets (Op. 132); and Scott Burnham and Gordon Graham draw their study of Enchantment together with an analysis of Chopin’s Prelude No. 7 in A major.
As with music, so too with philosophy. That is, we have taken care to avoid a volume that relies excessively on a small number of canonical thinkers. In particular, we have consciously avoided the common approach of dedicating whole essays to particular historical philosophers. Yet we have endeavoured nonetheless to include reference to vitally important figures such as Kant (whose critique of instrumental music is discussed in Max Paddison’s essay on Meaning and Autonomy), Schopenhauer (a foundational figure in Alexander Rehding’s critical introduction to Music Theory), Hegel (brought into dialogue with more recent theorists in Stephen Decatur Smith’s essay on Nature), and Derrida (central to Naomi Waltham-Smith’s essay on Deconstruction), even whilst placing these thinkers alongside figures, such as Du Bois (a key thinker in Michael Gallope’s essay on Society), who have remained for too long on the margins of both music studies and philosophy.
More importantly still, we have sought to include a variety of viewpoints on these issues. Matthew D. Morrison, for example, argues in his essay on Blacksound that the very concept of a musical work “was developed in relation to, not apart from, ideologies of race and racism that took hold during the three centuries of slavery that helped to construct Western empires and their cultural productions.” And Tamara Levitz opens her historical essay on The Twentieth Century by suggesting that a reliance on canonical works of philosophy “allows ‘great texts’ to float in an immaterial void that masks white privilege, structural inequality, and difference.” Yet in his essay on Gender, J. P. E. HarperScott argues with equal conviction that it is “only by a radical return to the canon that a progressive future for musicology can be carved out from the proliferating identitarian logic of capitalist postmodernity.” Our intention here is neither to privilege nor to censure any of these viewpoints; rather, our concern as editors is simply to note, with gratitude, that each of these essays—in common with all of the contributions to this Handbook—remains self-aware, self-critical, and an important milestone in pulling such debates together and propelling them forward.
Even amidst this diversity, however, we acknowledge wholeheartedly that the volume contains gaps. Notably, amidst the broad reach of “the Western,” the volume privileges dominant trends in anglophone scholarship, with a particular focus on English-, German-, and French-speaking musicians and philosophers. This bias is not, of course, the fault of any individual contributor. Nor is there any essay included herein that we would not gladly include were we to start this project from scratch. Yet, with hindsight, it remains a source of regret that, amongst much else, the Handbook does not include more coverage of thinkers from the critical perspective of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called “black study” (Harney and Moten 2013; see also, inter alia, Crawley 2017); that women composers are not more fully represented; and that Latinx scholarship does not feature more prominently. On all of these fronts, we hope that future work will take these lacunae as a spur to continue to build an ever more inclusive music-philosophical community.
Further, even insofar as the volume seeks to range across those troublesome divisions in music studies (historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology) and philosophy (analytic philosophy and continental philosophy), it does so with a certain unevenness. Within music studies, essays from historical musicology are in a clear majority, and the majority of philosophers with whom they engage hail from the continental tradition. Yet in terms of essays written by philosophers, these tend strongly towards essays by thinkers in the analytic tradition. This is perhaps not surprising: after all, the analytic tradition has made a significant contribution to music-philosophical discourse over the past half-century, and there is plenty of substance and inspiration to be drawn from that work.
Lest this Introduction seem in danger of going too far in the direction of self-criticism, let us conclude by stating clearly that we are delighted with the variety of approaches that are covered in this Handbook—and delighted in particular to be crossing those divisions within music studies and philosophy that have all too often splintered the field. We are also pleased with the balance we have struck between including well-established
scholars and upcoming thinkers of a younger generation. As such, we hope that the essays in this Handbook will, both individually and collectively, encourage further dialogue among all those interested in music and philosophy, regardless of their disciplinary background, career stage, or any other factor. We hope, in other words, that meeting points between music and philosophy will continue to prosper, to multiply, and to diversify—and that this Handbook might play a small part in that process.
Notes
1. For extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this Introduction, our thanks go to Michael Gallope and Ariana Phillips-Hutton.
2. It is worth noting that one of the editors has already published a short overview of various possible relationships between music and philosophy (Levinson 2009).
3. Among the many responses to these debates, see in particular those included alongside the original publication of Amico 2020, namely Fox 2020, Schulz 2020, and WalthamSmith 2020.
Works Cited
Amico, Stephen. 2020. “ ‘We Are All Musicologists Now’; or, The End of Ethnomusicology.” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 1–32.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2018. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Creed, Country, Colour, Class, Culture. London: Profile.
Crawley, Ashon T. 2017. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cook, Nicholas. 2008. “We Are All (Ethno)Musicologists Now.” In The New (Ethno) Musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 48–70. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Fox, Aaron A. 2020. “Divesting from Ethnomusicology.” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 33–38.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.
Levinson, Jerrold. 2009. “Philosophy and Music.” Topoi 28 (2): 119–123.
Müller, Martin. 2020. “In Search of the Global East: Thinking Between North and South.” Geopolitics 25 (3): 734–755.
Schulz, Anna. 2020. “Still an Ethnomusicologist (for Now).” Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1 (Winter): 39–50.
Williams, Bernard. 1996. “Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look.” In The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, edited by Nicholas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, 25–37. Oxford: Blackwell.
