Fraught with Ought

Abstract

[1] Music theorists have been thinking for a while about the meaning, and meaningfulness, of the words people use to talk about music. Although Babbitt didn't begin the trend, (1) the way he framed the problem-polemically, with conspicuous musical erudition, and with the same philosophical self-assurance and sense of mission he found in the writings of neo-pragmatists like Quine and logical empiricists like Hempel-seemed especially urgent during an era when music theory was seeking to establish itself as "a research discipline, the scope of which would encompass all music and whose natural home would therefore be the university" (Peles 2012, 23).[2] Philosophy begins, one could impressionistically say, with Plato denying the rhapsodes admittance to an ideal polis on the grounds that their art is not "an undertaking that is serious or that has contact with the truth" (Plato 2004, 608a7-8). For its part, modern music theory begins similarly, with Babbitt excluding "unscientific" (2) musical discourse and its discussants from an ideal music department. (3) Although there are suggestive parallels between these inaugural exclusionary gestures, the analogy shouldn't be carried too far: Babbitt, after all, was a not a Platonist but a committed positivist. (4) In several seminal articles from the 1960s he articulated a music-theoretical program rooted in the Vienna Circle's familiar demands for falsifiability and public verifiability of theoretical statements. This passage, from "Past and Present Concepts of the Nature and Limits of Music," is representative:[T]here is but one kind of language, one kind of method for the verbal formulation of "concepts" and the ABSTRACT: In this paper I develop a theory about language and musical analysis. My project is to defend a thesis about the meaning of the linguistic building blocks of musical analyses, which I call "analytical utterances." The theory applies meta-ethical expressivism to the domain of musical aesthetics. I try to understand analytical utterances as expressing attitudes of approval or endorsement, rather than as, in and of themselves, issuing statements of fact.