The Three Levels of Gesture in Music

To hear longing or anguish in music is to hear the music as if it were a sort of person. So they're almost treating the music as a person, he says. That I think gets at the specificity of the view that I defend. If we just say that music that's expressive of longing is music that induces people to hear longing in the music, well that's probably common ground between myself and various other philosophers of music.