Subjectivity

Presumption of Objectivity in Determining Musical Standards

People often assume that a particular piece of music has some objective worth. For example, the 19th and 20th centuries saw the development of the Western canon of classical music, a sort of [Page 1082]shared agreement that particular works by great composers—the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—should be considered the pinnacles of music; musicologists often analyze such works with an implicit assumption of the aesthetic value of the music. Similarly, the latter half of the 20th century saw the development of the “rock canon,” typified by magazines such as Rolling Stone and Mojo, which often list the best albums of all time, usually focusing on albums from the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles. To what extent are such canons simply subjective judgments and to what extent do they reflect some objective reality?

Music has some important differences from other art forms that influence perceptions of subjectivity. First, music is often seen to be a form of interpersonal communication specifically related to emotion; second, musical symbols are ambiguous and nonreferential by nature. Western listeners, hearing a minor chord, will likely infer the presence of a negative emotion, but the nature and context of that negative emotion will be ambiguous.

Philosophical Views

The concept of subjectivity is intimately linked with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that analyzes how knowledge is formed out of the interaction between inner experience and external reality. Some epistemological theories, such as idealism, focus more on the internal experience, while other theories, such as empiricism, focus more on the external world. Any theories that assume people possess knowledge about music therefore have an implicit or explicit epistemology with assumptions about subjectivity.

One theory that explicitly linked epistemology with aesthetics is that of the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. The philosopher argues that our experience of the world is predominantly subjective, due to the presence of a priori categories (such as time and space) that we impose on objective reality. For Kant, it is not known how a thing actually is—the noumenon—it is only known how it appears to us—the phenomenon. His view of subjectivity lead to his aesthetics, in which, he distinguishes, among other concepts, between agreeableness and beauty. Kant argues that the agreeableness of an object to a particular person is subjective, based on sensory features. In contrast, beauty is a subjective universal based on formal structure. For Kant, beauty is a phenomenon based on a priori categories that are universal in human nature. The formal beauty of a Beethoven symphony may not exist in objective reality, but it is nonetheless universal and, in some sense, real.

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