Before opening this book, it is worth pausing to consider what one might expect to find in a companion to philosophy and music, and what a musicologist might hope to see there. Such a volume might take three different forms. It could offer a survey of key themes within the analytical tradition of aesthetics, addressing issues such as musical ontology, value and expression in a manner familiar from the British Journal of Aesthetics or the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Alternatively, it might present a historical survey of philosophical reflections on music, or focus on key figures from Plato to Adorno. A further approach could be to explore key developments in contemporary continental aesthetics, championing innovative approaches or shedding light on neglected corners of the field. Musicologists, it is fair to say, would probably find the second or third of these putative companions distinctly more appealing than the first. From the perspective of musicology, the stimulating ideas and texts in aesthetics stem chiefly from the continental rather than the analytical tradition; most musicologists with an interest in current aesthetics, to put it bluntly, would far rather engage with Slavoj Žižek or Jacques Rancière than with Malcolm Budd or Noël Carroll. In spite of efforts to bridge the gap (such as the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group), the critical and contextual thrust of much recent work in our discipline predisposes musicologists to be unsympathetic – if not downright hostile – to the methods and concerns of analytical aesthetics. While such preconceptions are not entirely justified, it would be a remarkable companion indeed that could satisfy the demands of both these disciplines, and thus help bring them into closer alignment.

The present volume does not quite accomplish this feat, but it makes an impressive and rewarding move in its direction. For rather than taking just one of the approaches sketched above, it offers something of all three: a thorough grounding in general issues and concepts, an extensive coverage of key historical figures, and a surprisingly extensive exploration of productive new avenues. As a result, it is considerably more eclectic in approach and wide-ranging in content than other textbooks or edited volumes on the philosophy of music. Both ‘philosophy’ and ‘music’ are defined broadly, and the editors have clearly aimed to create a genuinely interdisciplinary volume: it is striking that over a third of the contributors are musicologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists, or sociologists rather than professional philosophers. And as one might expect from editors – both of whom have written extensively on rock – music from outside the Western classical tradition gets far more than the usual cursory nod.Footnote ¹

That being said, there are limits to the volume's eclecticism, and its point of orientation remains firmly that of analytical aesthetics. In spite of its compendiousness, there is no engagement with figures who, for musicologists, might seem an indispensable part of the current philosophical scene: not once over the course of its 56 chapters and 650 pages is there mention of Rancière, Žižek, Alain Badiou, Nicolas Bourriaud, or a host of other key names within contemporary continental aesthetics. Other notable absentees include Andrew Bowie, author of what is arguably the single most important book on music and philosophy that the twenty-first century has so far produced.Footnote ² Even some leading commentators on music from within analytical philosophy, such as Richard Shusterman, fail to get a name check. All of which is not that surprising to anyone approaching this kind of volume from a perspective informed by another absentee, Foucault. The aim of such doorstop textbooks, after all, is not merely to offer a passive reflection of a discipline but actively to shape and police it. In this particular case we see a discipline opening its doors to carefully vetted outsiders while ensuring that some of its own deviant family members (including those troublesome continental cousins) remain firmly locked in the attic.

So what exactly is the problem with analytical aesthetics, and is the musicologist's wariness towards it really warranted? The standard objections can be summarized as follows: analytical aesthetics (i) objectifies and universalizes concepts such as art, music, and the aesthetic; (ii) segregates the aesthetic from other spheres of experience, promoting a narrow conception of artistic meaning and value; (iii) relies on abstractions and first principles, ignoring empirical evidence; (iv) idealizes the values of Western high art and marginalizes musics which fail to conform with them; (v) disregards music's historical and cultural situatedness, diminishing its social and political dimensions; and (vi) assumes a privileged perspective, downplaying the interests and contexts which shape it and disdaining other forms of artistic discourse.Footnote ³ While there is an element of truth in all these objections, they neglect some key developments in the discipline over the last couple of decades. The last three in particular require revision, as is evident from the topics and approaches presented in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania's volume. The new importance of contextualism within analytical aesthetics, for example, can be seen in the chapters on ‘Ontology’ (Carl Matheson and Ben Caplan) and ‘Medium’ (David Davies), as well as in the extensive coverage of historical aesthetics. And while the predominant focus is on Western art music, there is little sense here that it is elevated as a transcultural norm. For the most part, too, the contributors avoid the authoritarian, ex cathedra pronouncements of yesteryear, while the structure of the volume as a whole emphasizes the value that insights from other disciplines can bring to aesthetics.

And yet aspects of the book's opening section may seem to justify at least some of these cavils. Several of the chapters make dubious universalist claims about music, or rely on a fluctuating or simply fuzzy conception of it. Alan H. Goldman's chapter on ‘Value’, for example, proceeds from the assumption that an interest in ‘organized tones for their own sake’ is ‘universal in the human race across times and cultures’ (155); not until eight pages later does it become explicit that ‘we are focused here on pure instrumental music, as we have been throughout’ (162). Such sly shifts from the global to the local go hand in hand with other universalizing tactics, such as the philosopher's ‘we’, as in ‘when we are completely engaged in the appreciation of a work of art, we seem to enter another world, divorced from the world of our practical interests’ (162). While Goldman's discussion of the ‘other world’ of music is rewarding, it assumes that the aesthetic attitude it describes is universally applicable. Moreover, it is not made clear why autonomy must result in an art that is ‘divorced’ from the practical world rather than simply distinct from it.

The limitations of the analytic approach are perhaps most apparent in James O. Young's chapter on ‘Appropriation and Hybridity’. On the face of it, the inclusion of an essay on this topic seems evidence of an engagement with issues relevant both to current musical practice and to (ethno)musicology. In addition, in confronting ethical as well as aesthetic issues, it may seem to illustrate the benefits of broadening music aesthetics to address the totality of ways in which music and philosophy intersect. But in practice, the chapter is strangely remote from musicological concerns and approaches. The problem is not a lack of expertise – Young has written a monograph on this topic – or of pertinent examples.Footnote ⁴ Rather, it is the assumption that common-sense definitions and careful reasoning obviate the need to contextualize the concepts or to engage seriously with anthropology, cultural studies, or ethnomusicology. The pitfalls of this approach are immediately apparent in Young's view of cultures (and for that matter, styles) as discrete and hermetic: bounded objects with clear insiders and outsiders.Footnote ⁵ From this perspective all appropriation is inevitably misappropriation, while hybridity is morally as well as aesthetically suspect: Young's treatment of orientalism as a guilty or not guilty issue is a case in point. His ultimate vindication of appropriation – on the basis that some of the profits inevitably trickle back to the source culture – is therefore all the more surprising (183). All in all, the musicologist may well conclude that the conceptual resources of analytical aesthetics are simply not up to the job of dealing with this topic.

Other chapters from the opening section offer a more rewarding account of the concepts they cover. Rafael De Clercq's essay on ‘Aesthetic Properties’ avoids the kind of accumulation of oppositions that its title suggests, giving an elegant and balanced account. His treatment of formalism is characteristically subtle: rather than simply endorsing or rejecting a formalist approach, he argues that it apprehends an object different from the musical work which is the ‘object of the more comprehensive mode of music appreciation’ (147). A similar reconsideration of familiar aesthetic oppositions can be found in Gracyk's chapter ‘Evaluating Music’. Here Gracyk avoids cut and dried distinctions between aesthetic and non-aesthetic forms of evaluation, and in the process provides a neat dismissal of the concept of functional music (174). More broadly, Gracyk's chapter gives a good example of how contemporary analytical aesthetics has moved on from the dichotomizing strategies and authoritarian pronouncements of yore. Although he scotches some of the familiar challenges to evaluative principles, he is sceptical towards the idea that they can be objective, or that they apply beyond a particular cultural context; such principles are ‘merely rough heuristics for evaluating partial aspects of works’ (173) and ‘have no prescriptive force unless they are relevant to the life projects of concrete individuals’ (174). While this is all well and good, Gracyk's conception of the cultural boundedness of evaluations points to problems similar to those in Goldman's chapter. Rather than relying on off-the-peg conceptions of culture, aesthetics badly needs to overhaul its conception of how cultures work and interact in the present.

The historically focused chapters in Gracyk and Kania's volume fall into two categories: those offering broad surveys and those exploring key figures. The survey chapters provide useful introductions to their topics, though the authors of at least two of them clearly had problems fulfilling their remit within such a confined space. Stephen Davies's ‘Analytical Philosophy and Music’ has the thankless task of ‘briefly reviewing what analytical philosophers wrote about music between 1900 and 1980’. As if this were not a tough enough assignment already, Davies compounds the problems by incorporating a potted history of Western musical aesthetics in its entirety (295–8). Tiger C. Roholt's chapter on ‘Continental Philosophy and Music’ takes a different tack, focusing on just three figures: Lydia Goehr (an odd poster child for continental philosophy), Pierre Bourdieu, and Thomas Clifton (author of the Heideggerian Music as Heard Footnote ⁶). This approach enables Roholt to probe as well as outline some of the key ideas of the thinkers he surveys. While the Bourdieu section functions effectively, it seems odd not to historicize his ideas or trace their subsequent mutation; thirty years on, Bourdieu's view of classical music as a marker of bourgeois taste looks decidedly outmoded, and current sociologists building on his ideas tend to identify such taste with cultural nomadism or omnivorousness.Footnote ⁷

The chapters on key figures in the history of music aesthetics have a more straightforward remit. Given that accessible recent texts on ancient Greek music aesthetics are fairly thin on the ground, Stephen Halliwell's lively and engaging introduction to Plato and music is particularly welcome, and is pitched at the right level for undergraduate use. Hannah Ginsborg's ‘Kant’ is also admirably clear, and again is probably the best short introduction to his music aesthetics currently available (although it seems odd to assess what a ‘Kantian philosophy of music’ (337) might amount to without engaging with the voluminous body of writings by contemporaries – such as Christian Gottfried Körner and Christian Friedrich Michaelis – who aimed to create exactly that). No less useful is Alex Neill's chapter on Schopenhauer, which takes a quite different approach. Aside from the first two pages, most of the essay is dedicated to picking apart the flaws and inconsistencies in Schopenhauer's view of music. This is the kind of close reading that analytical aesthetics can do very well, although it is a little disconcerting that Schopenhauer seems to be treated as if he were a contemporary.

The other figures accorded their own chapters are Nietzsche, Hanslick, Wagner, Gurney, and Adorno. The inclusion of Gurney among this company is puzzling, since the three items of further reading listed at the end of Malcolm Budd's essay scarcely suggest a figure at the heart of current aesthetic debate. It is good, however, to see Wagner being taken seriously as a contributor to (rather than just an influence on) the philosophy of music. Instead of focusing on one or two key texts, Thomas Grey's chapter presents an overview of the phases of Wagner's engagement with philosophy. Given this approach, the texts themselves do not receive the same level of scrutiny as is present in the chapters on Kant and Schopenhauer (just three paragraphs are devoted to the Zürich essays), although Grey writes engagingly about the problems generated by Wagner's convoluted prose. This lack of detail on the texts is more of a problem in Grey's chapter on Hanslick. If Hanslick had merely equated content and form, or ‘collapsed’ the one into the other (364), his significance as a writer on aesthetics – as opposed to a polemicist and critic – would surely be very slight. I'm not talking here about the idealist trappings included in the first edition of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful, but rather the carefully argued inversion of form and content at the heart of the treatise. No less problematic are Grey's concluding thoughts on Hanslick's supposed embrace of ‘cultural relativism’ (368). I've inveighed before against attempts to reinvent Hanslick in this manner (in reviewing Kevin C. Karnes's monograph Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History), so was alarmed to see that this standpoint seems to be gaining a broader currency.Footnote ⁸ In Grey's summary, Hanslick's reluctance to offer a more expansive codification of the musically beautiful stemmed from a growing awareness of ‘the impossibility of constructing a single valid aesthetic discourse of “music”, in view of the infinite contingencies of history, culture, and taste’ (367). This interpretation rests, presumably for Grey as for Karnes, on just two sentences in Hanslick's treatise:

This is in no sense relativism, but rather a Hegelian emphasis on the historicity of musical materials and their progressive development. Instead of presenting values as contingent, Hanslick goes on to expound the opposite point of view, arguing that works of genius are capable of riding the tide of this historical current and thus of having enduring worth.Footnote ¹⁰

Beauty's value, for Hanslick, lay in part in its remoteness from the political sphere. While this standpoint made him a bête noire to musicologists following the discipline's cultural turn, such aesthetic separatism has resurfaced in some recent texts. I'm not thinking here of the ‘new aestheticism’, or of Rancière's neo-Schillerian programme, but of James Currie's ongoing assault on ‘contextual politics’ within musicology.Footnote ¹¹ For Currie, the impulse to contextualize – that is, politicize – music is a kind of impotent wish-fulfilment, borne out of the sterility of contemporary political life and the discipline's desperate desire for street cred. All of which makes him a provocative choice as author for the chapter on ‘Music and Politics’. Readers familiar with Currie's ‘Music After All’ will recognize some of the basic moves as well as the attractive prose, but there are some changes too: instead of contextual politics, he uses the loaded but puzzling phrase ‘collaborative politics’, as if the act of contextualizing music makes musicologists pawns of the ruling order. A more significant difference is that in addition to probing context and imagining a music beyond politics, Currie explores music's capacity to critique existing society. This discussion serves to throw into relief Currie's earlier article, suggesting that, for all its surface radicalism, his project at heart affirms aesthetic autonomy and reiterates Adorno's view of avant-garde art as resistance. It will be interesting to see whether his new book, Music and the Politics of Negation, moves beyond this stance.Footnote ¹²

The other chapters in the book's final section present introductions to a range of fields contiguous with music and philosophy (music psychology, music sociology, and so on), written mostly by disciplinary specialists rather than aestheticians. This approach serves to emphasize the interdisciplinarity inherent to aesthetics, although in places it gives the impression of disciplines being juxtaposed rather than genuinely interacting. It is notable that while Diana Raffman's chapter on cognitive science makes plentiful reference to aestheticians' writings on music and emotion, the reverse is not the case: indeed, Derek Matravers's chapter on ‘Arousal Theories’ dismisses psychology out of hand. More generally, the brevity of the chapters precludes comparative encounters between different disciplines and discourses. A case in point is Peter Manuel and Stephen Blum's survey of Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern aesthetics. Manuel briefly discusses rasa theory, drawing attention to its parallels with Western aesthetics, but does not have the space to pursue them.Footnote ¹³ Given the importance of such comparative work to intercultural understanding, it does seem a shame that the volume's design gets in the way of it.

I have probably mentioned fewer than a third of the chapters in Gracyk and Kania's volume, and there are many other highlights (including Robynn J. Stilwell on music and dance, John Andrew Fisher on popular music, and Andy Hamilton's chapter on Adorno). Such monumental textbooks command a ready readership, yet while reading I sometimes pined for a more partisan and contentious approach to the issues: although the chapters make good introductions to their topics, they would not for the most part generate lively seminar discussions. Quite a few chapters, particularly those in the historical section, are accessible to music as well as philosophy students, and I will certainly be adding them to my reading lists. But it is as a showcase for (analytical) aesthetics that the volume stands or falls, and in spite of the criticisms made above, it offers a rewarding and impressive survey of the field.