# Sonice Pictures **Abstract:** but perhaps expressive sound”—poses a distinctive problem for the philosophy of art: All of the other fine arts are, for the most part, arts with literary or representational content. And that content plays a major role in accounting for what it is in these arts that gives us such deep and abiding satisfaction. But absolute music does not possess such content. So it is a puzzle as to what it is in or about absolute music gives what appears, at least, to be the same kind of deep satisfaction that the other arts, the arts with content, give. That, in brief, is the “problem” of absolute music. (2011, 119) One obvious solution to the problem, “popular both in philosophical and musictheoretical circles,” is to contest appearances and “to deny that absolute music does indeed want for literary [or representational] content” (2011, 119). Following archformalist Eduard Hanslick, Kivy thinks such views are hopeless (2011, chaps. 3–7). Instead, he insists that a fully satisfactory account of the artistic and aesthetic satisfactions of “music alone” must—and can—be given without appeal to any sort of literary or representational content (1990; 2011, chaps. 8–11). In this respect, literature and absolute music are indeed “antithetical arts.”1 However, the same cannot be said of music in general. Despite his formalism, Kivy is deeply sensitive to the representational potential of music, which he explores at length in Sound and Semblance (1984) and Osmin’s Rage (1988). Focusing primarily on **Authors:** [[Leddington]]