Can music be a representational art? Discuss some views on this issue.

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Can music be a representational art? Discuss some views on this issue.

Of all the different forms of art, none are more problematic when dealing with the issue of representation than music.  When dealing with pictorial art it is common place to think that a painting of an object is a representation of it on canvas.  However when a piece of music is said to represent something, numerous problems immediately arise.  This is mainly due to the medium of music, sound.  This essay will discuss these questions using the views of Roger Scruton, Kivy and myself.

  Scruton makes his argument through five conditions but I will only deal with three of them here because they are specifically relevant to music. His general argument is that music can’t represent things and even if it could it would be irrelevant to the appreciation of the music. I’ll later show how Kivy defends against this and I will also introduce some arguments that Kivy fails to address.

Scruton’s three conditions concerning representation in music are:

1. To be a representational work, a proper understanding of the work demands that the observer gain, some awareness of what is being represented. While the observer might not completely understand what is represented, she must still have a sufficient appreciation of what the work represents.

2. Following from 1), the observer must be able to distinguish the medium of representation (e.g. pastels) from the subject of representation (e.g. a vase). If the medium and the subject are mixed up, then the conditions for a sufficient understanding of the representation are not fulfilled (and so condition 1 is not met).

3. To be a representation, the work must convey thoughts about its subject and to be interested in the work is to be interested in comprehension of those thoughts. By thoughts, I assume Scruton means, "the sense or content of a declarative sentence," which can either be true or false. A representational work must generate propositions with truthvalues, which are available to all those who understand the work: representation is therefore essentially propositional.

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  Criteria one is different from the second and third because instead of identifying whether something is representational, it places conditions for when representation is aesthetically relevant. This is when it is needed for a complete understanding of the work.

In the third criteria Scruton attempts to disregard musics ability to be representative because of its abstract nature. He argues it is not enough to bare resemblance to something that is supposed to be represented, but that it needs to be describable in words. He believes therefore that a context is needed which propositions can be made about. ...

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