Introductory Note
Introductory Note

Summary/Abstract: The first question that may come to the minds of those who, for the first time, stumble upon a stack of writings on the “philosophy of music” might, quite expectedly, be the following: “what is the philosophy of music?” A question that will unavoidably be bundled with this other one: “why does it matter?” And an answer to these will vary, with the same degree of expectedness, in accordance with the practitioner’s own view of what philosophy itself is. But whatever that may be, it will definitely include questions such as “what is music?”, “what is a musical work?”, “what kind of value does music hold for us?”, “can music represent non-musical things?”, “what does it mean to say that music is expressive of something?”, “what is it to listen to a musical sequence with understanding?”, etc., and so, provisionally, we can then say that “philosophy of music” is what happens when, somehow furnished with one or more questions of that kind, one endeavors to answer them – an effort which invariably comprises imagination, reasoning, argument, thought-experiment –, though shared across the several nuances in the understanding of what we are doing when we do philosophy of music is the fact that such answers cannot be decided empirically, be it in the way of the sociologist, the psychologist, or the historian.

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