Ideas from 'Representation in Music' by Roger Scruton [1976], by Theme Structure

[found in 'The Aesthetic Understanding' by Scruton,Roger [Methuen 1983,0-416-36160-9]].

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21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 4. Art as Expression
Reference without predication is the characteristic of expression
                        Full Idea: Characteristic of expression is the presence of 'reference' without predication.
                        From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.71)
                        A reaction: This echoes (in linguistic terms) Kant's thought that art is 'purposive without purpose'. The remark is comfortable in an essay on music, but it gets more tricky when the topic is literature, or even representational painting.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 5. Art as Language
If music refers to love, it contains no predication, so it is expression, not language
                        Full Idea: If a passage carries a reference to love, we are not told what it says about love. And to speak of language with 'reference' but no predication is simply to misuse the word. We leave the realm of representation and enter that of expression.
                        From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.63-4)
                        A reaction: This is a beautifully simple objection to the idea (associated with Nelson Goodman) that art is a language. Though what an 'expression' of something amounts to I am not quite sure.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 8. The Arts / a. Music
Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to it
                        Full Idea: Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to the understanding of music.
                        From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.74)
                        A reaction: I would not have thought that many people thought music was representational, but Scruton particularly mentions passages in opera that seem to pick up aspects of the story. Do even bell sounds not represent bells?