Some dozen years ago, I was riveted by a report in the press about the findings of a study that investigated what male Americans enjoy most in their lives. As best as I can recall, the candidates included work, family, sex, and music. The winner, hands down, was music. But why was this the case? What is distinctive about the musical experience? The study in question was predictably silent on these matters, but the English philosopher Roger Scruton is not in his important new work, The Aesthetics of Music.[1] This book is aptly described on its cover as “the first comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy, and the only treatment of the subject to be extensively illustrated with musical examples.”

But what exactly is the “aesthetics of music” as a field of study? In Scruton’s view, it amounts to an investigation of what makes music special as a human endeavor, that is: what are the defining properties that make music music? His book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this question. But surely there is another equally important question lying at the heart of musical aesthetics, one going back to the original insights of Plato and his colleagues: what makes a particular composition especially beautiful? Why at the deepest level is it that people obtain such great pleasure from compositions by Bach or Beethoven, or songs by Bob Dylan, when measured “objectively” on an applause