# Musical Expressiveness **Abstract:** This article assesses the current state of the philosophical debate regarding the expression of emotion in music, or expressive properties of music. It defines the question, explores a few false-starts and then considers the solution that expressive properties are a matter of a certain ‘way of appearing’ of the music. This solution is associated with Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson, whose work is discussed. It is argued that work in this area has reached an impasse, and it is not clear where we should go next. There are a number of questions that philosophers can ask about music: what kind of entity is a musical work (that is, to what are we referring when we refer to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony)? What are we claiming when we claim to understand a musical work? What is the difference between a collection of sounds that is music, and a collection of sounds that is not? The question that has concerned philosophers most in recent times concerns the relation between music and the emotions. It is thought by many that music is the most expressive of the arts. To take some paradigm examples, the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony and the final movement of the Seventh Symphony express sadness and joy respectively. I shall begin with a word about examples, before going on to state the problem more precisely, and then considering some attempts at solution. Consider a song that fairly drips with sadness and regret: Tom Waits’s ‘Martha’ (especially as performed by Tim Buckl **Authors:** [[Derek Matravers]]