British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 00 | Number 0 | November 2009 | pp. 1–5 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayp050 © British Society of Aesthetics 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org The Perception of Music: Comments on Peacocke Paul Boghossian I Christopher Peacocke begins his rich and fascinating paper ‘The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance’ ( BJA 49, 257–275) by noting that we ‘can experience music as sad, as exuberant, as somber.We can experience it as expressing immensity, identification with the rest of human- ity, or gratitude.’ This is interesting in that it claims that we not only hear music as expressing various properties and emotions, but that we hear music as having some of those properties and emotions. (We not only hear music as expressing sadness but as (being) sad.) He then notes: The foundational question of what it is for music to express these or anything else is easily asked; and it has proved extraordinarily difficult to answer satisfactorily. The question of what it is for emotion or other states to be heard in music is not the ques- tion of the causal or computational question of how it comes to be so heard. . . . It is the constitutive question, the ‘what-is-it? question, that is my concern here. It seems to me that two different constitutive questions are being conflated here. The first is about our perception of music: (Perception) What is it for us to hear music as being sad or as expressing sadness? The second is about music itself: (Music) What is it for music to be sad or to express sadness? Although Peacocke says that he is interested in the Music question, his paper is mostly concerned with the Perception question. This will be relevant later on. II On the Perception question, he has something very interesting to say, namely that we need to recognize that in hearing music we often enjoy experiences whose content is metaphorical. The basic thought here is reminiscent of an idea that I first encountered in reading Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music: To describe [music] we must have recourse to metaphor, not because music resides in an analogy with other things, but because the metaphor describes exactly what we hear, when we hear sounds as music. 1 1 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (OUP, 1997), p. 96. For discussion see my ‘Explaining Musical Experience’, in K. Stock (ed.) Philosophers on Music (OUP, 2007). The British Journal of Aesthetics Advance Access published November 30, 2009