New York

Forgive me for rolling my eyes, but I've been down this road a few million times, and I still don't know where it leads. Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others. Kingsley Amis actually went so far as to claim that "only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music." Catch me on the right day and I might well go along with Amis—but why? What is it about music that is capable of swaying human emotions?

To answer that question, you have to start by asking another one: What does music mean? We know what a pop song or an opera aria means because the words tell us—but how do we know what a symphony means? Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way. The philosopher Susanne Langer, for instance, defined music as "a tonal analogue of emotive life." Yeah, well, OK, but what does that mean?