Affiliation:
1. University of Southampton , UK
Abstract
Abstract
Like many recent aestheticians, I find the standard account of what songs are—a simple conjunction of words and music, the former functioning in a purely literary way, the latter in a purely musical way—unsatisfactory. Also like them, I prefer a more holistic account, one that understands the relations between words and music as far closer than the conjunctive model can capture, and which therefore construes the value of an individual song as deriving from more than a mere matching (or productive mismatching) between its verbal and musical components. Here, I defend one version of holism—I call it ‘strong’ holism—against several of the weaker varieties to be found in the literature, and suggest that only the strong version is able to do justice to the character and value of song as a whole.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford