Review Of Peter Kivy’s Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections On The Purelv Musical Experience

Peter Kivy is a contemporary American philosopher. Music Alone:Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience is his fourth in a series of books on philosophy of music and he discusses different kinds of listeners’ experience on pure instrumental music. This book in which Kivy’s formalism is different from Hanslick’s deals with philosophical themes of musical perception, cognition, understanding, emotion... This thesis mainly comments on Kivy’s views of musical experience and emotion, characters of demonstration and academic value of the book. Kivy does justice to the laymen’s musical experience and surports the variety of musical enjoyment, and furthermore he puts a reasonable interpretation of the ancient quarrel on emotion. Kivy displays solid grounding in philosophy and musicology while dissecting musical examples in this original book which has a plain style of writing, particular treatment of demonstration. His theory and analytical methods influenced by Analytic Philosophy will benefit our recent philosophical research of music to some extent.