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Record W4367185498 · doi:10.1093/jaac/kpad026

Kant’s (Moderate) Musical Antiformalism: A Reply to Sousa

2023· article· en· W4367185498 on OpenAlexaffabout
James O. Young

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMusicology and Musical Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMusicalCriticismArt historyArtHistoryLiterature

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I thank Tiago Sousa for his thoughtful comments on Young (2020, 2021). I am grateful for the opportunity to revisit Kant’s thoughts on music, which I think I understand better now that I have read and responded to Sousa’s rejoinder. Before the end of this paper, I will concede what I take to be Sousa’s main point, namely, that there is a continuum from formalism to antiformalism concerning music and that Kant’s position is not at the strong antiformalist end of the spectrum. I must also concede that I was wrong when I said that Kant’s views on music are consistent. Before I make any concessions, however, I will argue that, even if Kant believes that instrumental music stimulates few aesthetic ideas, he was not a formalist in anything like the modern sense of the word. Evidence is available for the view that Kant believed that music is valuable as patterns of sound, evidence that neither Sousa nor Reiter (2021) marshals. I may seem to be making my case more difficult by drawing attention to this evidence, but bear with me and all will be revealed. The evidence to which I refer is found in passages from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and other early writings (Kant 2011). In a remark from circa 1769, Kant writes that “Architecture (in the general sense) (the art of horticulture, etc.) is a discipline, likewise music. For in the former it is a matter of pleasing relations in the division of space, in the latter with regard to time” (311). In another remark, from either 1769 or 1770, Kant writes that the “arts are either formative or imitative. The latter are painting and sculpture. They concern either merely the form or also the material” (319). In this passage, Kant does not mention music. He identifies architecture, landscape gardening and some others as formative arts, but he would likely have included music among the formative arts since in the previous passage he associates architecture, horticulture and music. He also states that the “object pleases immediately in the intuition if its form fits with the law of coordination among appearances and facilitates sensible clarity and magnitude. Like symmetry in buildings and harmony in music” (131).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.018
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.054
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.022
Threshold uncertainty score0.094

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0180.054
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.032
Scholarly communication0.0060.012
Open science0.0030.007
Research integrity0.0220.031
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.032
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.225 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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