What is Music?

Philip Alperson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. He is editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and The Philosophy of the Visual Arts (1992).

“The essays in this volume address fundamental questions about the ontology and meaning of music, about composition, performance and song; they range over problems in the evaluation of music and of the place of music in history and culture, generally. The list of contributors is most impressive. Alperson begins his very comprehensive and clear introduction with a historical overview of philosophical reflections on music and argues for the necessity of a distinction between a normative aesthetics of music which takes as its focus music in the fine arts tradition and the philosophy of music, a larger inquiry, which takes as its object the entire range and significance of music as a human practice. What is Music? reflects this distinction.”—British Journal of Aesthetics