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In Principle, This Positioning Of The Musician As A Vessel For Representing ...

In principle, this positioning of the musician as a vessel for representing beauty that is beyond the comprehension of the everyday mere glance, or more remote than the descriptive representations of real objects that could be found in much musical concern of the past, formed the foundation of the sublime in music and saw the beginning of the exploration of greatness and value. On the placement of beauty, and written in conjunction with Hume's notion of judgement as sentimental experience, Kant began his Critique of Judgement suggesting that,
‘If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation of it to the object by means of understanding with a view to cognition, but by means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with understanding) we refer the representation to the subject and it's feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgement of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgement, and so not logical, but is aesthetic - which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be' (Kant, 1978, p.41).
>From this reasoning we can see that Kant has put the emphasis of the evocation of beauty and the exploration of the aesthetic into the hands of the musician. For instance, unlike Hume's musician whose aim was to represent an object through the manipulation of sounds that accorded to the listener's limitations and values held within their mind, Kant's musician was one who must, through his or her imagination, draw upon the beauty of the object that is held subjectively in the listeners mind. In essence, the musician must appeal to the aesthetic judgement of the listener and not to the beauty held within the limitations of the listener's sentimental experience. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant concerns himself with the notion of greatness and begins the notion of genius. Focusing on the sublime as distinct from the beautiful, Kant noted that both agreed upon the notion of pleasure, or indeed displeasure which formed the essentialist judgements of both consonance and dissonance, on their own account. He also suggested that neither presuppose a judgement of sense or logic, but, unlike Hume, a judgement on reflection. This meant, among other things, that the delight that one feels from the beautiful and the sublime depictions within music are not understood from the objects agreeableness or derived from a pleasure of the mind that agrees upon the goodness of the acoustics they hear before them, but instead is understood through reason, by the music's representation in the minds imagination. However, Kant points out a fundamental difference between the two concepts.

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