Hamilton subsumes formalism, autonomy and acousmatic listening under the ‘abstractionist position’ (see chapter 3): ‘[t]his position detaches music from the world, making it the most abstract of the arts– a pure “art of tones”’ (2007: 95.) As mentioned previously, his use of ‘abstractionist’ parallels the meaning of ‘abstract’ in this thesis, referring to a domain that exists without a time or place. Scruton also endorses this view, where acousmatic listening is taken to be the perception of properties that obtain in an abstract domain, external to the listening subject. Such a view is partly a consequence of the assumption made by both that the pertinent properties are musical elements, bottoming out at the
level of tones (which are thus assumed to be abstract objects). However, I have made the contrary claim here that the acousmatic, and indeed a weak sense of formalism, should be understood as internalist and dependent on the act of perception.
On Hamilton’s view, the acousmatic and the formal can be cast as somewhat distinct expressions of the abstract model, and much literature since Walton can be seen to push back against this model to reaffirm music as a human artefact. The prevailing assumption that ostensibly intrinsic aspects of sound and tone are abstract forms may reflect the rise of the work-concept and the resultant idealisation of the score that took hold through the 18th and 19th centuries, as Hamilton notes (2007: 113.) Form is concretized by the score, allowing the artwork a definitive article to which all instances of performance and experience refer. It is the divorce from real world truths that bore the artwork that leads formalists and modernists alike to the significant claim of a distinct domain of relative autonomy. Music listening is described as engagement with a particular,
sui generis, set of rules and properties that do not extend beyond the musical.
The assumption that acousmatic and formal listening accords with an abstract model can be challenged by denying that the ostensibly intrinsic aspects of sound or tone evidence aesthetic-specific domains of sound or tone. Were it not for the Western propensity to think in terms of work-concepts, it may seem quite a leap to make this move from intrinsic qualities to abstract domains.
The comparison with words is instructive. A particular word has a particular meaning, a meaning that is shared amongst a people, that is not contained by the word itself but is referred to by it. I can only grasp this meaning if I have been informed of it: I could not work out the meaning of a word just from its appearance. Say the word is CAT; there is nothing in the placement of pixels on the screen that is shared with the appearance of a cat, nor is there anything in the sound of the utterance CAT that is shared by the sound of a cat. So to understand the word CAT I need to be acquainted with the meaning of the word and have been informed of the reference, where the meaning of the word is not contained in any locality but is independent of time and place, is abstract. But
this is not all there is to the word CAT because there is also the particular position of pixels on the screen. The type/token distinction was discussed in chapter 1, and it can be said that the particular pixels on the screen are a token of the abstract object (meaning) which is itself a type. However, this is inadequate since a token can only be understood in terms of a type, so to describe CAT as a token is merely to describe it as a concrete instantiation of a type. It seems there is something more to the word CAT than its role in referencing a meaning, since I can perceive the appearance of the word without considering its meaning. To deny this would be to deny that CAT has an appearance at all. If I can have an experience merely with the appearance of the word CAT, without considering its meaning, then I am engaged in perception without being acquainted with abstract objects. This should not be a major claim; it is just to say that I am able to perceive the appearances of things.
The meaning of the word CAT is to be understood as conceptual, while an experience with the appearance of the same word is to be understood as nonconceptual. There are no reasons to assume that an experience with the appearance of CAT is abstract: it is an experience that is realised by the act of perception, and is possible because we can perceive appearances independently of the meaning to which they refer. A phenomenal view construes the intrinsic qualities of sound or tone as a psycho-acoustic phenomenon that can be distinguished from the extrinsic qualities of sound or tone for being nonconceptual.
The experience of the intrinsic can be elucidated on the phenomenal view. Consider the following corollaries that reflect the desiderata set out above: (1) a central aspect of the musically aesthetic –musical movement– can be understood without presupposing the musically aesthetic– by reference to garden perceptual functions; (2) the musically aesthetic is determined by immediately perceivable properties, where these properties are understood as nonconceptual. But these have another significant consequence: the musically aesthetic, in being determined by nonconceptual perception, is experienced as intrinsic to music– as having no connections to things beyond itself. Insofar as an experience is
nonconceptual it will not present extrinsic connections to the experiencer; it appears as an experience of intrinsic qualities, such as ‘the redness of red.’ Without ascribing concepts to a percept, an experiencer cannot think about its relation to other things– i.e. she cannot bring to bear a language (a language of thought or a natural language, see chapter 1.) This feature of a phenomenal view can thus help explain why musical movement is explicable in non-musical terms while it is experienced as intrinsic.
A key advantage to the phenomenal view, then, is that it can satisfy both the intuition that aesthetic features are intrinsic to music and the explanatory goal to provide an account of the musically aesthetic in non-circular terms. In entailing nonconceptual perception, musically aesthetic experience represents nothing conceptually to the experiencer, revealing no relations with the non-musical. Conversely, the musically aesthetic is given a non-circular account on the phenomenal view by recourse to a psycho-acoustic conception.