A Hopeful Tone: A Waltonian Reconstruction of Bloch’s Musical Aesthetics Page 1 of 31 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 13 August 2019 Print Publication Date: Sep 2019 Subject: Music, Sound Studies Online Publication Date: Aug 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190460242.013.54 A Hopeful Tone: A Waltonian Reconstruction of Bloch’s Musical Aesthetics Bryan J. Parkhurst The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Volume 2 Edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen, and Martin Knakkergaard Abstract and Keywords Bryan J. Parkhurst uses contemporary analytic normativist aesthetics as a lens through which to view Leftist/Marxian normative aesthetics of music appreciation. In order to do this, Parkhurst situates the key theses of Ernst Bloch’s theory of utopian musical listening within the framework of Kendall Walton’s theories of musical fictionality and emotionality. The aim of this task is to make Bloch’s fundamental position perspicuous enough that it can be assessed and evaluated. Parkhurst concludes that Bloch’s contention that music should be heard as a utopian allegory, and that the distinguished office of (Western classi cal) music is to contribute to the political project of the imagining of a better, more hu mane world (a “regnum humanum”), faces difficult objections. Keywords: Ernst Bloch, Kendall Walton, music, aesthetics, normativity, allegory, imagination, utopia, Marxism, Theodor Adorno (p. 489) Introduction HERE are two similar-sounding terms: normative aesthetics and normativist aesthetics. The principal contentions of this paper are that (1) Ernst Bloch’s normative aesthetics of music and Kendall Walton’s normativist aesthetics of music both set out to address the re lationship between music and the imagination or, more broadly, between “musicking” (Small 1998) and the imagination 1 ; and that (2) Walton’s normativist theoret ical framework provides conceptual resources that are helpful for interpreting and cri tiquing Bloch’s normative claims. The first order of business, then, is to give a provisional explanation of the difference between normative aesthetics and normativist aesthetics. Normative aesthetic claims belong to the realm of the aesthetic “ought.” They concern what the aesthetic subject ought to do and how the aesthetic object ought to be. Aristotle speaks in a normative-aesthetic register when he states: