Introduction: Making a Space for Song

The topic of song, songs, and singing extends across a vast number of art forms and genres back into prehistory. It stands astride the high-low art continuum, ranging from classical music to popular and folk music. Unlike other art forms that include both high and low genres (such as movies and novels), song and songs have always had multiple functions other than being objects of aesthetic appreciation. The uses of vocal music range from the sacred (sung as hymns as well as heard as masses, anthems, and so on), to communal (campfire songs and soccer fans’ chants), to ceremonial (Jerusalem sung at public events, Barber’s Agnus Dei performed at memorials), to music for entertainment and for dancing; unlike other art forms, songs and singing play a role in everyday life. Ellen Dissanayake remarks that anthropological studies of “small-scale societies amply illustrate the ubiquity (and complexity) of communal singing during most daily activity.”1 When Dick Clark said, “Music is the soundtrack of your life,” he was undoubtedly referring to songs. Because of the universality and centrality to human culture of song, our topic is very different from other topics that have expanded the purview of aesthetics in recent years. Our topic is not a novel art form emerging from new technologies (video games, computer art), nor a new form emerging from popular culture (reality TV shows), and it is certainly far from a new avantgarde art form, such as conceptual art. On the contrary, vocal music is an ancient and familiar element of every culture and central to music itself. Yet song has been passed over by philosophers of art who otherwise have been intensely interested in both music and literature. Instead, philosophy of music has tended to limit its scope to a subclass of Western art music, largely focusing on issues concerning instrumental music. There are historical reasons for this tendency. One was the attraction of the concept of “absolute music” developed within nineteenth-century romanticism and idealism. This concept embodies the philosophically intriguing claim that the masterpieces of the emerging instrumental canon, such as Beethoven’s symphonies, possess a unique transcendence and profundity. Such claims directed attention away from vocal music forms and toward the problem of accounting for the meaning, emotional expressiveness, and value of purely instrumental musical works. When this was followed by twentieth-century modernism, with its focus on autonomous artworks and formal innovation, there was little reason to turn philosophical attention toward the less pure forms and multiple uses that populate the realm of vocal music.2 Indeed, a significant reason to broach the topic of song is that it highlights the narrowness of aesthetics as it was practiced through much of the twentieth century. Arguably, no artistic engagement is more commonly experienced than the experience of song, not only listening but also singing: individually or in groups, singing along with a singer on the radio or singing a song in one’s head. It is so fundamental to human culture that some hypothesize that singing predates or is coextensive with the origins of language.3 Speculation connecting the origins of song and language has always been rife.4 Given its prominent place in human society, it is not surprising that songs and singing have unique philosophically interesting features. For example, songs in performance can have referential dimensions that other art forms do not have (as Theodore Gracyk’s article in this issue shows). In what follows, we sketch the crucial ways that vocal music differs from most other art forms. These explain why, with the possible exception of