Listening to Music Together

NickZangwill

The Question of Joint Listening

The standard model of aesthetic experience and appreciation that is in play in contemporary analytic aesthetics is individualistic. We imagine one person contemplating some
thinga natural thing or work of art or person, which, on a good day, is a source of aesthetic pleasure. But aesthetic life is not exclusively or usually like this. Consider the case of
music. We often listen to music in groups, for example in a concert hall or club or church
or sports venue. Solitary listening is now common, given recent technological inventions
(in particular, the use of headphones). But this is a very unusual phenomenon if we take a
longer view. For most of history, listening took place in a group and solitary listening was
rare. Aestheticians should have something to say about this social aspect of musical experience and appreciation.
I shall focus on one issue about the social dimension of music and musical listening,
one that Ithink has a certain fundamentality: the question of joint listening. Is there such
a thing as collective or joint listening, where this would not be just the sum of many individual listenings but a collective activity?
We engage in many joint activities. Consider the example of walking together.1 When
two people walk together, this is more than one person walking and another person walking, roughly in the same place at the same time and in the same direction. It at least involves
mutual awareness, in the sense that both people are aware of what the other person is

1 Margaret Gilbert, Walking Together, Midwest Studies In Philosophy 15 (1990), 114; see also Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 172.
British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 4 | October 2012 | pp. 379389 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ays038
British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is
joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us
little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might
be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, which the issue of joint experience yields. I
defend a radically individualistic view, while conceding that such a view, inspired by Hanslick,
may have political ramifications. I have two arguments. The first is a principled argument
against joint musical listening from the impossibility of perceiving the aesthetic properties of
music. I connect this with the privacy of our grounds for aesthetic judgements about music. The
second argument accepts that joint listening could in principle span different sense modalities,
but draws attention to the fact that the experiences on which aesthetic judgements are based
cannot be willed in a way they would have to be if there was joint listening. Lastly, I consider
two phenomena, of making music together and dancing together, which seem to involve joint
listening, but in fact do not. I end by drawing an individualist conclusion about the nature of
musical experience.

380 | Nick Zangwill

Adorno, and the Moral and Political Aspects of Musical Experience

While the social dimension of musical experience has not had much attention in analytic
aesthetics, it had an important placeperhaps an overly important placefor writers in a
continental tradition that has its roots in German writers like Hegel and Marx. Most writings in that tradition assume that music and musical experience must be understood in a social
or political context. For example, in his writings, Theodore Adorno assumes that musical
experience needs a social or political analysis.6 It is not merely the weak thesis that musical
experience takes place in a social context and has social causes and effects. The idea is that
music and musical listening itself has a social or political dimension. The problem, however, is
2 See David Lewis, Convention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
3 Tom Cochrane, Joint Musical Attention, BJA 49 (2009), 5973.
4 Cochrane also makes unargued claims about the existence of emotional content in music; but see Robert Kraut,
Artworld Metaphysics (Oxford: OUP, 2007), ch.4.
5 This way of proceeding is quite common among those who work on the aesthetics/psychology interface. For
example, many writers proceed to transfer the empirical work on perception to musical listening, without
worrying about whether that step is legitimate. See for example Diana Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford, 1992)and Mark DeBellis, Music and Conceptualization (Cambridge: CUP,
1995). There is much of interest in these two booksin particular, interesting psychological research is reported
there. But whether that research illuminates musical experience is questionable.
6 For example Theodore Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1996), and Philosophy of Modern Music
(New York: Continuum, 2003).

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doing, and both are aware of the others awareness of what they is doing, and both adjust
what they are doing in the light of what the other is doing. The exact analysis of joint action
is controversial. But there is clearly an important and interesting range of phenomena
hereone that is relevant to the general question about the social dimension of the experience of music. The question is whether we can listen together as we can walk together.
The idea of joint activity also has application to the language we use to talk about music,
for speaking and understanding words of any sort is itself something we do together. It is
joint activity. The analysis of joint action should (obviously) be part of the theory of meaning for natural language.2 As a consequence, joint action is important in the philosophy
of music insofar as we speak about music together. (Hopefully we do this afterwards, not
during listening!) What is not clear, however, is whether musical listening itselfrather
than talking about itis an action that we can performjointly.
In a recent paper, Tom Cochrane makes various claims about the phenomenon of joint
musical attention.3 But he never argues that such a phenomenon exists. What Cochrane
aspires to do is to use work in the psychology of perception to illuminate musical experience. But this transfer is based on an unargued philosophical assumption about the nature
of musical experience, an assumption that has no scientific basis, or at least none that has
been given.4 It is not good science to adduce empirical information without showing how
it bears on the conclusions we want to reach.5
In this article, Iargue against the actuality and to some extent against the possibility of
joint musical listening.

Listening to Music Together | 381

7 Theodore Adorno, Class and Strata, 214229 repr. in German Essays on Music, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael
Gilbert (New York: Continuum, 1962), 220,221.
8 Ibid.
9 Theodore Adorno, On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening, and The Radio Symphony, in
Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
10 See for example Adorno, Class and Strata, for a veritable stew; there he writes for instance, Intramusical
tensions are the unconscious phenomena of social tensions (227), which provides little help.
11 For a partially sympathetic discussion of Adorno on kitsch, popular music, and tonality see Roger Scruton, Why
Read Adorno?, in Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London: Continuum, 2009).

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over what this could mean. (The problem arises when we consider music that is not accompanied by text. Obviously where there are words, they may have social or political themes. But
there is also supposed to be a social and political aspect of music that lacks anytext.)
How should we understand the thesis that social and political matters are somehow part
of what musical experience is? Adorno gives countless descriptions of music in class terms
for example Chopins music is aristocratic; and we must listen to Beethoven [to] hear the
revolutionary bourgeoisie. 7 But he gives no basis whatsoever for this and it seems entirely
arbitraryas arbitrary as someone who describes music in terms of astrological signs. Adorno
says that the method of deciphering the specific social characteristics of music is to develop
a physiognomy of the types of musical expression.8 But what that amounts to is just saying
things like we hear the petty bourgeois in Lortzing. The disappointing truth is that Adorno
is just reporting on his own idiosyncratic form of musical listening, one overlaid by extraneous
ideologies. Devotees of astrology might with equal justification describe their musical experience in terms of Libra and Scorpio, as Adorno does in terms of aristocratic and bourgeois.
Adorno seems to think not only that musical listening has a social and political dimension
but also that it should have the right kind of social and political dimension. Musical listening should be progressive rather than regressive, as he conceives of those.9 He connects
this with his prescribing difficult modernist music and proscribing easy sentimental popular
Jazz. Thus musical taste is supposed to connect with political ideals in a quite direct way.
For Adorno, musical listening raises both an aesthetic and a political problem, and he wants
people to listen in the right way. Adorno never seems to doubt that musical experience has
this kind of social and political dimension. (In this respect his writing is strikingly unphilosophical.) But he has no coherent account of what that dimension might consistin.
The troublewell, one troublewith Adornos writings is that the way that music
and musical experience have a social dimension is figuratively or vaguely described in
many different ways.10 So it is difficult to find anything precise to focus the discussion.
There is no clean target. His writing is like a gang of rioting youths, who are being chased
by the police, and who melt away into the side streets when approached.
The flaws of Adornos writing and thinking are not very interesting. The point of mentioning Adorno and his traditionapart from that fact that some musicologists seem to
believe that he has given content to these issuesis to underline the fact that we need
some account of what a social and political conception of musical experience might be.
Given that those in this neo-Hegelian tradition accept this idea, or something like it, one
might have expected them to have something to say by way of illuminating the content of
the claim. Sadly not. So we need to look elsewhere.11

382 | Nick Zangwill

Individualism, Hanslick, Norms andPolitics

Joint Attention and Aesthetic Properties: APrincipledArgument

One wayperhaps the most plausible wayto make tractable the issue of whether music
and musical listening itself have an intrinsic moral and political dimension is to consider
whether there can be joint musical experiences. Ioffer those of a continental inclination
this way of making sense of what it would be for music and musical experience to have a
social or political aspect. Ithink that this is the best bet for a social theorist of music. But,
as we shall see, even this is not available.
12 Eduard Hanslick, Hanslicks Musical Criticism, trans. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1950), and On the Musically
Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986).

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My view, contrary to both these trends of thoughtthe empirical-psychological and the

neo-Hegelianis that musical listening is essentially individualistic. And Iadd, perhaps
paradoxically, in a sense, it also ought to be. By this Imean that listening that has a social
or political aspect is not really musical listening at all, but another kind of a listening, or it
is a mix of proper listening and something else. It is possible that there is nothing actually
wrong with other modes of listening to music. We could allow a plurality of worthwhile
modes of listening. The troublethe essentialist individualist will sayis, first, that the
pleasures and values of purely musical listening are not to be had from such socially and
politically inflected experiences. And second, there is a danger of confusing these experiences of music with purely musical experience, which is essentially individualistic.
I should not have proceeded this far without stopping to pay respect to the great Eduard
Hanslick, who brought so much light into musical aesthetics (even though it is a light from
which many musicologists choose to avert their eyes!)12 Hanslick has a purist, individualistic and in a sense formalist view of musical experience. Moreover he worries that other
kinds of listening are problematically impure in such a way that there is a loss. Such musical listening is relatively impoverished.
It is not that essentialist individualism has no normative consequences for musical listening. It would have political consequences if social arrangements should be conducive to
listening of the right kind. It may also be that the capacity to have this kind of pure musical
experience is symptomatic of other virtues, individual and politicalvirtues which for
want of a label, we might call bourgeois. Many suspect a conservative political dimension in Hanslicks purist formalism, by contrast with Wagners progressive romanticism.
Perhaps. The political consequences arise from saying that something is beyond the political, which is indeed sometimes a conservative thought. This is not because musical experience has political content but precisely because it does not have political content. This has
political consequences. (It was castigated as Bourgeois formalism by the Soviets in the
1930s.) Valuing purity in some domain of life (sex, food, not accepting bribes) is often
politically charged. Similarly with the purity of musical experience.
Thus it is not that nothing political can be said about music and musical experience.
Accepting essentialist individualism may have political consequences. But the political
consequences arise from the apolitical nature of music and musical experience.

Listening to Music Together | 383

13 See Gilbert, Walking Together, and Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency (Oxford: OUP, 2006).
14 Jerome Bruner, Early Social Interaction and Language Acquisition, in H.R. Schaffer (ed.), Studies in MotherInfant
Interaction (New York: Academic Press, 1977).
15 See Sibley on the relation between these; Frank Sibley Aesthetic/Nonaesthetic, Philosophical Review 74 (1965),
13559.
16 Perhaps there are aesthetic tropes; on tropes, see Jonathan Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology (Oxford: OUP,
2006).
17 Can we think together? Perhaps the wartime Los Alamos physicists were doing that? What about feeling together?
Is there such a thing? Perhaps empathy is feeling together. When Lady Diana died there was a bizarrely widely
shared feeling, which was more than many people feeling a similar way. The phenomenon of feeling together can
be powerful, and frightening.

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Let us begin by asking how two listeners might converge on the same aesthetic properties of music as the shared object of their musical experiences. How might they tune in,
as it were, to the same aesthetic properties (beauty, delicacy, power, anger, balance, and
so on)? Why isnt joint listening a case of joint perceptual attention, which, if attention is
something that we do, would be a special case of joint action?13 In a case of joint perceptual
attention, each person attends to a thing with an awareness and of another person and of
the physical situation within which the thing and the person are embedded. For example,
two people might attend to a teacup with an awareness of each other. Where there is joint
attention each of them is in addition aware that the other is also attending to the teacup.
It is a presupposition of this account that both are aware of the others awareness of the
teacup just as when two people go for a walk together, both are aware of the location and
movement of each others bodies. There has been much empirical-psychological research
on the topic of joint attention.14
However, it is not at all clear that this model applies to listening to music, where what
we are listening to is music and its aesthetic properties, not just sounds.15 There can be
joint attention to sounds; but what is controversial is whether there can be joint aesthetic
attention to music. That is not at all the samething.
In standard cases of joint attention, there is at least a shared perceptual awareness of
physical objects and their physical properties. We attend to common objects and properties and we are also aware of the other persons attention to them. So there might be
joint listening to sounds, where we see that others are listening to what we are listening
to. But the aesthetic case is not like this since even though there is joint attention to the
non-aesthetic properties of musicthe soundsthe question is whether there is joint
attention to its aesthetic properties. Of course, there must be real things to which we
are both listening in the sense that they are the source of the sounds, perhaps a tuba or a
loudspeaker. It is interesting that when we listen together, we often watch the musicians
while we listen, which does give us a common object of attention. But our awareness is
not merely of those public things and of the sounds emanating from them, but also of certain properties of those soundstheir aesthetic properties.16 We hear the sounds together;
but the crucial question is: when we both focus our attention on their aesthetic properties, is
there any sense in which this is something we do together?17
I answer No.

384 | Nick Zangwill

Aesthetic Properties and Perception

Privacy
That we are not perceptually aware of beauty follows from what Kant called the subjectivity of the judgement of beauty. This subjectivity claim is connected with the distinctive privacy of the ground of the judgement of beauty. This groundpleasure (in German,
lust, gefallen)is often private in the later Wittgensteins sense of private. The idea of
the privacy of some of our mental life has been unjustly dismissed in the post-war period
in my view. Let us define a notion of privacy: a mental state such as a sensation is private
in this sense, first, if a person who has it has special access to it, one that no one else has;
one knows one has the sensation immediatelythat is, not by observing behaviour or by
18 See Nick Zangwill, Music, Essential Metaphor and Private Language, American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011),
116.

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One principled reason against believing in joint aesthetic attention derives from the idea that
it is not possible to perceive aesthetic properties because of the kind of properties that theyare.
The argument, in brief, is this. (1) Phenomenology tells us that judgements of beauty and
ugliness are made on the basis of pleasures and displeasures. (Plato, Aquinas, Hume, and Kant
all agree on that.) (2) Pleasure is not perception. Further, pleasure is essentially different from
perception. How so? One respect is this. Perceptual experiences ground beliefs, but not vice
versa. But intentional pleasures, that is, pleasures in this or that, are grounded on beliefs, but
not vice versa. So the rational norms characteristic of perceptions and pleasures are radically
different; they are completely opposed, which shows that perceptions and pleasures have different essential properties. Therefore, we may conclude from (1) and (2), pleasure in beauty
and displeasure in ugliness are not perceptual experiences of beauty and ugliness.
The negative thesis, that aesthetic experiences are not perceptual experiences, is one
that is central not only to Kants universal subjectivism, but also to the very different
views of Humes sentimentalism and a certain kind of aesthetic realism, which we might
call Moorean.18 All these theories agree that we do not perceive aesthetic properties.
If this is right, it has consequences for the issue of joint attention. Joint attention by a
number of people to a common thing (object or property) is only possible if the people
are perceiving that object or property. But if musical experiences of aesthetic properties
are not perceptual, then we cannot listen to music together in the way that we can listen
to sounds together. Joint attention by a number of different people to a common phenomenon (objects or properties) is only possible if they perceive that object or property. But
we do not perceive the aesthetic properties of music. So we do not listen together to music
in the way we engage in many joint activities.
If aesthetic properties were perceptually representable properties, like colours, then
there would be a common object of perceptual attention that might be shared among
many people. There could be joint attention to such properties. But if aesthetic properties
are not perceptible properties, then there is no joint perception of aesthetic properties.
We are in aesthetic solitary confinement.

Listening to Music Together | 385

19 See Turk Saunders excellent but under-read paper, John Turk Saunders, In Defense of a Limited Private
Language, Philosophical Review 78 (1969), 23748.
20 See further Zangwill Music, Essential Metaphor and Private Language.
21 I used to think that it was odd that Kants third critique contained a discussion of the privacy of sensations (the
title of 39 is the communicability of sensation); see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed
Meredith (Oxford: OUP, 1928). Now that seems quite appropriate. Issues about communicating sensations lie
next door to these central issues in aesthetics. Kant also discusses the social aspect of aesthetic experience in
Critique of Judgement, 41, and elsewhere.

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making an inference from observed behaviour. Second, others can know of such states
only because the person who has it conveys that knowledge to them. So if a person decides
not to let others know, they will in normal circumstances lack any other way of knowing.
For example, thinking of a number is private in this sense. Others cannot know which
number Iam thinking of unless Icommunicate it to them. Similarly, some sensations are
such that others cannot know that someone has these sensations by observing the persons
body and making an inference. (The sense of can in play here is not that of strict metaphysical possibility but of nomological possibility, or possibility in a more everyday sense.)
In this sense of the word private, it is clear that some but not all sensations are private.19
Note that this notion of privacy does not entail that only Ican know whether Ihave these
sensations or that Iknow what sensations in general are from my owncase.
Aesthetic judgements are similar to judgements about our own sensations in that their
subjective grounds are typically private in this sense.20 Because of this, aesthetic properties are not publicly observable, as they would be if aesthetic judgements were objective.
The basis of our ascription of these properties to sounds is a reaction in us when we hear
sounds. And that reaction is typically private since we know about it in a distinctively
first-personal way, and others can know that we have that reaction only if we communicate it to them. Sometimes we may not be able to resist shouting out Bravo! or expressing our reaction in facial gestures. But that is a very crude indication of my response. Even
when the general feeling of liking or disliking is not privatebecause it is behaviourally
expressed, and others can know that we have it by observing our behaviourthe more
exact determinate response remainsprivate.
It might be suggested that while the subjectivity and privacy of the grounds of aesthetic
judgement distinguish it from objective perceptual experiences, aesthetic experiences
are like sensory experiences of taste and smell. It might be said that the unsociability of
our experience of aesthetic properties (the lack of joint attention to them) is also true
of these other sense modalities. We eat together, but we do not taste together. We may
appear to taste together, but where one person has a different taste experience, due to
illness perhaps, that appearance dissipates. What garlic tastes like, it might be said, is
ultimatelyprivate.
Listening to music together is like eating or smelling together in that there is an illusion
of sociability, of shared sensations, whereas in fact the sensations are usually private. The
consequence of the fact that the grounds for aesthetic judgements are feelings of pleasure
and displeasure is that we necessarily listen alone, and we cannot listen together. Musical
listening is essentially individualistic.21

386 | Nick Zangwill

Sense Modalities, Cooperation and theWill

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The argument above in the section, Aesthetic Properties and Perception, was for the
very strong thesis that aesthetics properties are in principle imperceivable. Ithink it is a
persuasive argument against the possibility of joint attention to music, but perhaps there
are possible replies to it. Aless-principled and less-ambitious argument is this. In the case
of joint visual attention to public objects and properties, the people in question are also
visually aware of the each other. By contrast when we listen to music, we do not hear the
other people listening to the same music. One does not hear people listening; instead one
sees them listening. But joint perception involves triangulation, in the same sense modality,
on the objects of perception, and on the other person perception of that thing. Since we
only see others listening, but do not hear them listening, there is no joint listening.
It might be replied that no reason has been given for thinking that joint attention has
to involve the same sense modality. Why should there be a principled problem with joint
perception that deploys different sense modalities? Perhaps people can perceive in one
sense modality what is being perceived with another, and joint attention can occur as a
result; it is just that information provided from one sense modality keeps the participants
in the joint activity on track in their experience in a different sense modality.
Nevertheless, there is still a problem with joint musical listening. It is true that that
Ican see that someone is listening as Iam, and perhaps from their face and gestures Ican
infer the aesthetic character of their experience. Imay also infer that they are having a
similar experience. But this just means that we are hearing in parallel not that we are
hearing together. Similarly, although we can eat together, that does not mean that we taste
together. When we do something together, including perceiving together, we deliberately alter
what we do in a systematic way in order to bring our actions into line with what others do.
This is what happens when we walk together. Joint activity may to some extent be represented mathematically as a stable equilibrium state where there are mechanisms discouraging divergence from the state and there are pressures for convergence on the state. But
in joint activity this convergence is also deliberately achieved; that is, the participants aim
to alter their behaviour so as to make it more likely that an equilibrium state is achieved.
Thus convergence is aimed at and achieved by the participants so that stable, coordinated
activity takes place. Not only are there symmetrical pay-off matrices in the mathematical
representation of the situation, it is because of the awareness of the benefits and costs that
there is deliberate cooperation, not merely coordination that admits of a purely causal
explanation. Each party modifies what they do in a systematic way in order to engage in
coordinated activity with theother.
In standard cases of joint perceptual attention, two people visually focus on a public
object or property, and each person engages in physical behaviour and acts of attention
in order to bring about acts of visual attention that are achieved as a result of mutually
sensitive adjustments by the participants. But this kind of deliberate coordination is lacking where one person sees that another person is having musical experiences. It is true that
people may express their aesthetic experiences in their behaviour so that their aesthetic
experiences can be inferred by another person. Information may be transmitted. But
we cannot deliberately make our experiences similar to those of another person. This is

Listening to Music Together | 387

Making Music Together and DancingTogether

There are two phenomena, which seem to invite a joint-listeningaccount.
Firstly, music making with others is a joint activity. Musicians playing together are sensitive to what the others do, and they alter what they dotheir own music makingin
the light of what they hear the others do. There is coordination among the members of a
music-making ensemble. But this does not mean that there is joint listening. The music
making is joint activity, but the listening part of their joint music making may not be.
It is true that part of the coordination involved in joint musical activity is listening to the
music of othersto the aesthetic properties of the sounds that they make. Nevertheless,
the listening is individualistic, in that its nature has nothing to do with anyone else. That
individualistic musical experience is the basis for the socially coordinated musical behaviour that ensues, and without individualistic musical experience there could be no socially
coordinated joint musical behaviour. Coordinated musical behaviour in a group depends
on similarity of musical experience. If members of a group of musicians hear very differently, they will not be able to make music together. Their joint musical project will fail.

22. Bernard Williams, Deciding to Believe, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: CUP, 1973).

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because we cannot will our aesthetic experiences. Attentionwhether joint or notis

active; musical experience, by contrast, is passive, in the sense of not being subject to the
will. Listening may be an active attention to sounds; but the musical experience that
we have as a consequence of listening is not under our control. It is not willed. This is
because of their subjective aspect, noted by Kant. In this respect musical experience is
like believing. Although we may do things that bring about a change in belief, we do not
and cannot directly decide what to believe.22 So we cannot believe together, only in parallel. Similarly, although we may do things that bring about a change in musical experience,
we do not and cannot directly decide to react to music with pleasure or displeasure. This
is why we cannot experience music together, only in parallel. For the same reason, we
cannot taste food together, only in parallel.
In many musical listening traditions, there is joint awareness of bodily movement during listeningmovement that expresses and conveys musical experience. There is movement in gestures, which lies on a continuum with dance. In the appreciation of pop
music and jazz, for example, the aesthetic response is usually more publicly available at
the time than it is with Western classical music appreciation. The usual behaviour of
those appreciating pop or jazz music means that their experience is publicly available to
an extent. The behaviour communicates something of their inner experience. Still, there
is no joining those inner experiences in a common activity of listening with other listeners. That is another matter. It is more obvious that concert-goers in the Western classical
tradition are not listening together, even though they sit shoulder to shoulder. They may
make facial gestures to each other during the performance. But this just allows the other
to check how they are hearing, and whether or not they are hearing similarly. It is not
deliberately to engage in joint listening.

388 | Nick Zangwill

Coda
People may listen to music in a group, but there is no joint musical perception. We listen
aloneand are condemned to do so. We can listen to music together in the sense of going
to a concert together, just as we can eat together when we sit down to a meal with each
other. This is joint action. But we cannot listen to music together any more than we can
taste food together.
This is not to deny that in some sense music is part of social life. We go together to
places for musical experiences, and we describe and discuss musical experiences with one
another after the fact. Nevertheless, musical experience itself is radically individualistic,

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But they can play together without listening together. They need to hear similarly. They
need not hear together.
Secondly, dancing is (usually) a joint activity. Dancing to music lies on a continuum with
gesturing to music: both reveal musical experience and understanding. Dancing together
is different from walking together. In both cases each person is aware of the other persons
body. But when two people dance together, both of the people listen to music, as music,
not just as sound. And their movements in some way fit or express the music. One dances
to the music, sur la musique, zu oder mit das musik. One can dance, in a manner of speaking, as a mere form of exercise, but thats not really dancing, which should be to, with,
on, music. One is not passive; the music does not dance us. One has freedom within limits. What needs highlighting is the fact that, like a metaphorical description, ones dancing
can express how one hears the music. One may choose to emphasize different aspects of
the music in ones dance (for example, rhythm rather than melody). Furthermore, every
dance with every person is different. (I assume that we are dancing with another person,
not solitary free-expression dancing.) There are many different ways that two people
can dance to the same music. How one dances depends not just on oneself and the music
but also, to a greater or lesser extent, on the other person and how they hear it. On each
occasion, even of the same couple with the same music, different dances may ensue. So
one is hearing and thinking and expressing the music with a particular person on a particular occasion. It is no exaggeration to say that dancing reveals aesthetic understanding.
Without listening to the music, hearing it as music, dancing lacks soul; we might as well
be doing exercise or sport. It takes three to tango: the two people and themusic.
Do playing music and dancing together nevertheless bring us in some way near to listening together? As we play music or dance together, if we hear differently, in the sense
of have different aesthetic experiences (of the aesthetic properties of sounds), then we
will fail to make music together or dance together. It wont work. Nevertheless, aesthetic
experience is not something we do together, instead similar aesthetic experience is the
precondition of joint musical activities such as playing or dancing together. On occasion
we may even invite or elicit a musical experience from another, which may or may not
be forthcoming. Such musical experience is embedded in the larger joint activity of playing instruments or dancing. But it is not itself joint listening in the way that there is joint
visual perceptions of teacups and in the way that there is joint activity in music making
and dancing together.

Listening to Music Together | 389

Nick Zangwill
Durham University
nick.zangwill@durham.ac.uk

23 Jerrold Levinson, Authentic Performance and Performance Means, in Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990).
24 This article was presented at the Tokyo University Aesthetics Department, where there was a wide-ranging and
interesting discussion. For comments, many thanks to Julian Dodd and a referee for this journal.

Downloaded from http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/ at montclair state university on February 19, 2016

and cannot be otherwise. Going together to some place where we listen to music is a
group activity; but we do not and cannot listen to music together. We go to concerts
together; but the musical listening we do when we get there is a solitary activity, perhaps
even a lonely one. We do italone.
Recall Adornos description of forms of listening as more or less politically progressive or regressive. It is a consequence of what Iam saying that there is nothing coherent
that he could mean by thisor at least nothing interesting. Iam inclined to say that insofar
as musical listening has a moral, political or social aspect, it is not listening to the music as
music. Either we are listening to the music itself, to the sounds and their aesthetic character, or we are distracted by matters, such as morality, politics or society, that are extrinsic
to the music. In that case we are no longer fully attending to the music. Insofar as Adorno
thinks that musical listening should be inflected with the right political character, the
kind of listening that Adorno prescribes seems to me to be not properly musical experience at all. There is something very wrong with Adornian musical experience.
There is something noble and heroic in our lonely experience of music. Listening to
music is an isolated and lonely encounter with another world, a disembodied world of
beautiful sound, far from the world of human life. In my viewand it is also Hanslicks
seeing music as a human product, as people playing instruments, achieving goals, and as
historically and politically situated, is all a misunderstanding and devaluation of the awesome elevation that musical experience can be. My view is at a distance from the views
of many analytic philosophers of music, such as Jerrold Levinson, who endorses a situated conception of music and musical experience.23 It is also at a distance from those of
the neo-Hegelian school, whose figurehead is Adorno. Both get it wrong, Isay. Only by
receding away from the human world, from the Other, can we go beyond humanity, to
a world of pure music. To humanize music is to desecrate it. Music is inhuman, and awesome because of it, like stars in the nightsky.
Although we are radically isolated in our musical listening, we seek somehow to share
our experiencewe talk about the music metaphorically, we make gestures concerning
it, and we dance to it with others. Eye contact during listening, or conversation afterwards, consoles us for our temporary exile from community. But the attempt to publicize
the private is doomed. We are like someone shouting or screaming in outer space: no one
can hear us!24