In this blog post, we explore how the value of music can be assessed through a balance of emotional and cognitive judgment, subjective and objective factors.
What makes some music good and what makes some music bad? To answer this question, musicologist Ebrecht believed that there are two measures of judging or evaluating music: affective judgment and cognitive judgment. Affective judgment can be expressed through the language of emotional dimensions such as “good,” “bad,” etc. Cognitive judgment is the explanation of the rationale for emotional judgment, which is the theoretical explanation of emotional judgment.
Ebrecht believed that when listening to music, the proportion of affective and cognitive judgments can vary from person to person. For example, cognitive judgment is rarely utilized by untrained people, but with some training, cognitive and emotional judgment can influence each other. However, he believes that emotional judgment has a fundamental advantage over cognitive judgment. While emotional judgment is the first step in intuitively feeling the intrinsic beauty of music, cognitive judgment serves to analyze and logically support it. Therefore, emotional judgment elicits an immediate and instinctive response in the process of listening to music, which is closely linked to the emotional impact of music on humans.
While Ebrecht was concerned with the issue of emotional and cognitive judgment in relation to judging or evaluating music, Dalhousie was concerned with the issue of subjectivity and objectivity. He challenged the orthodox aesthetic view that aesthetic judgment is inherently subjective and does not require objective verification. Those who hold this view are merely following the majority, that is, blindly following the judgment of the group.
Dalhousie believed that the subjective judgments made in the process of judging or evaluating music come from group judgment. For example, a person’s opinion that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is good music is a reflection of the society’s collective fondness for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. While he does not deny the value of subjective judgments, Dalhousie advocates for “subjective judgments that are based on, but do not conform to, collective judgments,” which take into account collective judgments but magnify them enough to allow for individualized responses. In Dalí’s view, such judgment is what enables a correct aesthetic evaluation of aesthetic objects.
To this end, he advocated the need for objective judgment, which does not simply mean the exclusion of subjectivity, but functions as a tool to validate and examine subjective judgment. He believed that aesthetic evaluations of music must be based on a minimum of factual judgments if they are not to be unfounded. In his view, any judgment or evaluation of music should be based on a close analysis of the work itself. This approach is important in order to move away from evaluations based on mere personal taste, and to assess the structural integrity of a musical work, its historical context, and its cultural value.
Ultimately, evaluating the good and bad in music requires a balanced integration of emotional and cognitive judgment, and subjective and objective perspectives. Since music is a complex and multi-layered art in itself, it is essential to approach and evaluate it from a variety of perspectives. In this respect, the views of Ebrecht and Dahlhaus are complementary and offer important insights into music appreciation and criticism.
