Abstract
Aesthetic criticism develops a vocabulary for identifying everything worth discriminating in aesthetic experience, including hooks and their constituents, and it interrogates contexts and develops larger-scope appreciations so that we can say more fully satisfying things about the enlivenment we’re participating in. It will take us as far as the thought that a hook possessing brightness and coherence figures Good, or by darkness and disorder figures Evil. (Thanks to their hooks, the Sex Pistols figure good!) Richly funded hooks require extensively probing, metaphorically enterprising interpretation, as I illustrate with The Greatest Chord (in “Another Satellite” by XTC), The Greatest Line (in “Sail Away” by Randy Newman), and The Greatest Yeah, Yeah (in “Clash City Rockers” by The Clash). Art forms are differently rooted in mental and physical action and so tend to prompt metaphorical interpretation differently, supporting different main models (like riding for music, staging for drama, montage for cinema, and “the proposition” for literature), but for an enterprising hook interpreter no metaphor or model is alien to any of them.
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Notes
- 1.
I defer to Appendix B an example of multi-hook interpretation of a larger art work.
- 2.
In this inquiry, I pick out meaningful layers of art works in ad hoc fashion, but Nicolai Hartmann offers a comprehensive theory of the typical “stratifications” of aesthetic objects (ultimately grounded in the physical-organic-psychic-spiritual stratification of our existence) in his Aesthetics, trans. Eugene Kelly (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). For an exemplary application see his analysis of a late self-portrait by Rembrandt (pp. 179–181).
- 3.
The four sets of qualities overlap extensively, but unevenly; for instance, “bold” can be instanced in all four ways, but “exhilarating” is clearly rooted in audience experience, and the way in which a piece of music is “dissonant” is quite different from (though not ultimately unrelated to) the way in which an experience or the significance of an experience is dissonant.
- 4.
“Is Life Worth Living?” in The Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 61.
- 5.
See Appendix A.
- 6.
“Another Satellite” is actually a whole step lower, starting with Eb to Bb, but I use C as my home base in examples whenever possible.
- 7.
A to D-sharp is in fact the “Devil’s interval,” but I’m making a point of not characterizing it that way. The “exotic version of home” feeling is quite different from that of the evil dissonance in Petrushka or West Side Story.
- 8.
See Greil Marcus, Mystery Train, 4th ed. (New York: Plume, 1997), pp. 107–109.
- 9.
Marcus brings out this sense wonderfully.
- 10.
“Phoney Beatlemania” is a phrase from the later “London Calling” (1979).
- 11.
See Roger Scruton’s discussion of the metaphor of musical space in The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chs. 2 and 3.
- 12.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (Mineola: Dover, 2002), p. 21 (Chap. 5). Peter Kivy uses Helen as the mascot of the representationalist view of musical meaning, which he argues is inadequate, in Music Alone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), Chap. 4.
- 13.
The literature on models and metaphors starts with Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
- 14.
Moreover, I suggest that it’s because we ride the progression of musical events (or at least have a sense of someone riding) that we experience music as a mobilization of tones rather than merely a sequence of sounds. On the debate on the sense in which music moves see Andrew Kania, “The Philosophy of Music,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), sec. 4; https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/music/.
- 15.
See Langer, Feeling and Form, pp. 411–415, and Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (New York: Vintage, 2005), pp. 100–157.
- 16.
See Beardsley, Aesthetics, Chs. 8 and 9, on “artistic truth.” Because he holds fast to the logical conception of a proposition and is concerned here with the issue of truth value, Beardsley would rather say that an artwork shows things in a certain way than that it states a proposition.
- 17.
On the other hand, when we praise an utterance for graciousness we may be responding as much to its smooth execution as to its consideration for the addressee.
- 18.
Cf. Susanne Langer on “assimilation”: “When words enter into music they are no longer prose or poetry, they are elements of the music. Their office is to help create and develop the primary illusion of music, virtual time, and not that of literature, which is something else; so they give up their literary status and take on purely musical functions.” “When words and music come together in song, music swallows words; not only mere words and literal sentences, but even literary word-structures, poetry. Song is not a compromise between poetry and music, though the text taken by itself be a great poem; song is music.” “When a composer puts a poem to music, he annihilates the poem and makes a song.” Feeling and Form, pp. 150–153. Such swallowing of words by music can indeed yield great music—but it isn’t song in the preeminent sense.
- 19.
Some have thought that for words and music to work well together, the word content had better not be too strongly articulated; in Langer’s construal of the situation (Langer 154), the words compete and interfere with the music in what should be a musically dominated formation opportunity. To put the key point positively, what is essential is that the words be words someone would want to sing (to someone); and the tune should be one that someone would use to sing an utterance (to someone). Very commonly, the result is that the words by themselves, if they are really taken away from the feeling of the music, are not literarily very compelling, and the tune by itself, if really taken away from the feeling of the words, is not musically very compelling either; what makes both elements compelling is the song’s “commanding form.”
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Smith, S.G. (2023). Hooks in the Development of Aesthetic Interpretation. In: The Special Liveliness of Hooks in Popular Music and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23976-2_10
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