Aesthetic properties

The aesthetic appreciation of music, like the aesthetic appreciation of art in general, consists at least in part in the attribution of aesthetic properties of various kinds. Prototypical aesthetic properties include beauty, elegance, gracefulness, balance, harmony, delicacy, loveliness, and unity, and their negative counterparts, for example, ugliness, clumsiness, and disunity. Less prototypical, perhaps, are powerfulness, vividness, and boldness, as well as properties referring to human moods and emotions, for example, being mournful, sad, angry, melancholic, brooding, passionate, and anguished. Similarly, properties connected with a work’s position in the history of art such as being original, derivative, influential, impressionist, and expressionist, are less prototypical, although some authors regard them as aesthetic properties. (For a survey of what are considered to be aesthetic properties, see De Clercq 2008.) Perhaps such properties are more appropriately labeled artistic. Whether this label carries any definite content, however, remains to be seen. The term “artistic property” has been used to designate a wide variety of properties, including, in addition to the aforementioned historical and stylistic properties, various kinds of representational and semantic properties such as being realistic, being about a certain person or event, and symbolizing the “cycle of death and creation” (Davies 2006: 56). None of these seems to stand out as paradigmatic among the artistic properties. Moreover, it is not clear whether they have anything significant in common except for being occasionally exemplified by works of art – a property they share with an even more gerrymandered set of properties. In comparison, the notion of an aesthetic property seems to be better understood and more likely to correspond to a real distinction.