Wordless music isn’t about anything… right?

My dissertation, ‘Pictures of Feeling: Music, Meaning and Social Life,’ argues otherwise.

We use music to communicate with each other all the time. We share music with new friends. We labour over party playlists, eager to strike the right tone. A funeral without music would be, for most of us, unthinkable. And if a bride were to choose to walk down the aisle to Barber’s Adagio for Strings instead of the Wedding March, she would thereby say something very surprising to her guests. So far, so familiar.

But this all begins to look rather puzzling on closer inspection, because most contemporary philosophers of music think that instrumental music isn’t about anything. After all, a piece like the Adagio clearly doesn’t have informational content in the way that a story in the newspaper does. Nor does it present you with a scene in the same unambiguous way that a picture can. And even though music is obviously connected to feeling somehow — the Adagio is a ‘sad’ piece, for example — most philosophers agree that this connection has nothing to do with representation. Instrumental music doesn’t represent anything: it is, strictly speaking, meaningless.

Now, you can’t communicate with meaningless words. So why should you be able to communicate with ‘meaningless’ music? Our sense that we are ‘saying’ things to each other through music must be illusory. Right?

Wrong. My doctoral dissertation argues that music really does have meaning. Music is about things, as words are about things. And what music is about, what it represents, is feeling. But it does its representational work in a distinctive way. Unlike words like ‘melancholy’, which represent feelings by referring to them, music represents feelings by showing how they seem to the one undergoing them.

Two things follow. First, we really are saying things to each other through music. And secondly, what we are saying — conveying, grasping, coming to understand — concerns the felt character of our affective lives.

I defended my PhD in August 2022. Contact me if you’d like to read it.