Transcript Reading Guide for Dewey, “Art as Experience”

Reading Guide for Langer,
“Feeling and Form”
Music, the symbol of feeling
 According
to Langer, “Music is the tonal
analogue of emotive life.” In other words,
music feels like life. Do you agree?
 Langer also says that the function of music
is not to stimulate feeling, but to express it.
Music, the symbol of feeling
(continued)

Music does not necessarily express the
composer’s feelings at the time; rather, it
expresses the composer’s knowledge of the
inner life, a kind of knowledge that cannot well
be expressed in words. It is “a symbolic
expression of the forms of sentience as the
composer understands them.”
 Note: if you like, this can be an emotional
understanding, one the composer could not well
express in any other way than by writing music.
Music and language

Music is like language. It has discrete parts that
can be combined in a variety of ways to make
new expressive wholes.
 Music is unlike language. The discrete parts of
language (words) have fixed meanings assigned
to them: combining these meanings
grammatically makes larger units of meaning.
By contrast, the discrete units of music (tones)
have no fixed meaning. Only when these units
are combined does the result have meaning.
Music and language (continued)
 Because
the parts of music have no fixed
meaning, we are “free to fill its subtle
articulate forms with any meaning that fits
them.”
 So we do “comprehend the processes of
life and sentience through [music’s]
audible, dynamic pattern,” yet a passage
of music has no defined and specific
meaning.
Langer’s thesis – some test
examples

Listen to these pieces to see if you think what
Langer says is true about them. Do they “feel
like life” in any way? Are they structured in the
way experience is emotionally structured
through time? Is this what makes them work?
 Ravel: Jeux d’eau
 Bach: Toccata, adagio and fugue in C major
 Links to these pieces are at the bottom of the
Course Guides page. If you like, just listen to
the fugue part of the Bach piece: it starts at
11minutes 10 seconds into the piece and runs to
the end.
Semblance
 Langer
now develops her theory by
elaborating the idea of image or likeness.
 She suggests that each art form creates a
virtual reality of some sort in the images of
objects that it produces.
 Painting, sculpture and architecture create
varieties of virtual space. Music creates
virtual time.
Virtual time and space
 What
is the point of talking about virtual
space and virtual time? After all, paintings,
sculptures and buildings take up real
space, and music takes real time.
Virtual time and space (continued)
Langer’s answer: the space in a painting is not
the real (flat) space of the canvas, but the virtual
or imagined space the viewer sees. The time in
a piece of music is not the literal time it takes to
hear it, but the virtual time into which the listener
enters while hearing it.
 This time is created by rhythm, by harmonic
movement, and by many other devices. It is a
subjective time, the time of an imagined
experience, or rather of what an experience
feels like.
