IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER WE HAVE seen that individuals
differ significantly in what music means to them and in what
they get out of it. The classification of these differences into
types of musical responses at once raises the question as to their
relative aesthetic values, whether any one type can be said to
constitute the musical response more so than any one or all of
the other types, and the basis of the differences, whether they
are due primarily to some factors of native endowment or arise
mainly as a result of training and experience. On this problem
we have some views from writers on musical aesthetics and
some data from experimental investigations.

The two outstanding works on the aesthetic phase of music
versus its technical and scientific side are Hanslick The Beau-
tiful in Music and Gurney The Power of Sound.

Hanslick is concerned entirely with combating the widespread
notion that the significance of music lies in its power for emo-
tional expression. This he calls a false assumption which has
misled musical aesthetics into describing the feelings which
music arouses instead of inquiring into what is beautiful in
music. The task of aesthetic investigation, he holds, must be the
beautiful object, and not the perceiving subject. And he com-
plains that, apparently, it is only in music that this objective
approach is lacking, so that the emotions are still as much as
ever viewed as the only aesthetic foundation of music and
looked upon as defining its scope and function.

The view that the aim and object of music is to arouse
pleasurable emotions, or that emotions are the subject-matter
which musical works are intended to express or convey, Hans-

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