Kivy seems to propose that the subject of music is the emotional quality it brings forth in us. This seems to contradict Hanslick, who holds that only things we can voice in words are content and the emotional/aesthetic qualities of music do not belong in this.
Hanslick seems to imply, though, that there is something in music that we simply cannot put into words. What do you think this might be? Do you think he's right, that there is something mysterious and inaccessible to us in music? Does Kivy's proposal of emotional content hold against Hanslick's thesis?
I think Hanslick in right in this particular assertion. In most art, there is a distinction between form and substance. As artists will use form to enhance and attract the eye of the viewer, it is the substance within the art that conveys the subject of the painting.
"Wherever the "form" appears mentally inseparable from the 'substance,' there can be no question of an independent 'substance.' Now, in music, substance and form, the subject and its working out, the image and the realised conception are mysteriously blended in one undecomposable whole. This complete fusion of substance and form is exclusively characteristic of music, and presents a sharp contrast to poetry, painting, and sculpture, inasmuch as these arts are capable of representing the same idea and the same event in different forms" (Hanslick, 219).
Whenever we say that a painting conveys joy, we can point to the exalted faces of the people in the painting, or their upbeat body language. As for music, we may call it joyous, but how so? Hanslick suggests that the only reason today we assign terms and emotions to music, like 'joy' is because of ambiguity of what the subject and theme of music really is, and over time, the music that made us feel happy was called as such, and so on and so forth. Much like the way we assigned numbers to their lexical definitions of today, we have assigned emotive expression to music, and upon further inspection, cannot provide a proof for our reasoning, other than, the music simply makes us happy. As far as Kivy goes, I think he proves some very solid points. Kivy analyzes music and emotion from a different angle, which makes a convincing argument, in a different fashion. In a way, it almost coincides with Hanslick on some levels.
"Music is customarliy described in terms very similar to those we use to describe the motion of the human body under the influence of such emotions as melancholy and cheerfulness. Thus a musical phrase may leap joyously or droop or falter, like a person in motion. To put it more generally, music is customarily described in terms of motion; and so the same descriptions we use to characterize it are frequently the ones we use to describe the visible motions of the human body in the expression of the garden-variety emotions' (Kivy, 632).
If Kivy were, as we discussed in class, to make the distinction between temporal time, as it is in music, and spatial time, as it is for humans. Without this distinction, Kivy's argument does not carry as much weight as it could, although the concept of defining time as a representation of music, and applying that same concept of time to the movement of humans for specific emotions is a clever way to imply that these emotions music can impress upon us are in fact real, and not simply ambiguous, as Hanslick says. However, in his last page, Kivy raises many good questions to his thesis, and ends with suggesting that there is a "black box" containing the inner workings of music is, and is meant to stay, a mystery. While they do differ in opinions of music and how it conveys emotion and substance, both Kivy and Hanslick, be it ambiguity or mystery, comment on the certain grey area within music, that is not found in any other form of art.
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