Around the Table with Hume and Friends

When reading Isserlis’s comment about “telling the right story” 1 it made me think of Hume on aesthetic disagreement. What if two people have differing accounts of how a piece should be played and both think their story is the right one? I remember a video I watched where Barenboim describes two eminent pianists, both of whom he greatly admires, describing the same passage of music in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 7 in D major 2 . One was adamant he felt it was a tragic sounding passage whereas the other felt it expressed humour and saw a comical joke being expressed in the way a pattern of notes were disrupted by pauses 3 . So Barenboim concludes that ascribing adjectives to music is perhaps the most problematic approach! 4 He suggests we should “explain music through sound” instead 5 . Given this common type of aesthetic disagreement, I am inclined to agree with Barenboim. His example of difference in aesthetic judgement reminds me of Hume’s famous example of wine tasting in Don Q...

Carrying on from my last post, how can we apply Hume’s passages on emotion to aesthetics? In this post, I shall examine Hume’s essay ‘Of Tragedy’ 1 as well as narrow my focus to music. This means that the suppositions and judgements in question are aesthetic judgements and our feelings about the music and how it is being interpreted and conveyed relate to our individual aesthetic taste as well as a more general standard of taste. Hume’s essay ‘Of tragedy’ and the concept of how the passions, including tragic emotion and the emotion of beauty, impact on an audience Hume agrees with L’Abbe Dubos that passions in aesthetics are a good thing because: “nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence, into which the mind falls upon the removal of all passion and occupation.” 2 Hume adds to this positive view of the passions in aesthetics by adding that: “The view, or, at least, imagination of high passions, …. affects the spec...

I’ve been inspired by Steven Isserlis’s interesting and thought provoking Facebook post 1 to start writing about Hume and music because Isserlis raises key notions which, I think, Hume could shed light on in order to help us untangle the complex concepts we often use in the music world. I would like to do something a little different from Isserlis by philosophically analysing the deeper implications of the terms we use casually. In summary, I understand Isserlis as arguing against “the danger of pouring superfluous beauty” into music, conveying “false emotion” in the way a musician goes about playing a piece. He advocates “judicious” “choices” about how we play a piece to transmit the meaning and truth of the music. He concludes that we must “ensure we are telling the right story” through the music and warns that “it is all too easy to inflame an audience through false passions; but if we do that, we are distorting the truth. And reaching the truth of the music has to be our ulti...