Excerpt From The Principles of Art
by R. G. Collingwood, Clarendon Press, 1938
The artist’s business is–unlike a craftsman’s–not to produce an emotional effect in an audience, but, for example, to make a tune. This tune is already complete and perfect when it exists merely as a tune in this head, that is, an imaginary tune. Next, he may arrange for the tune to be played before an audience. Now there comes into existence a real tune, a collection of noises. But which of these two things is the work of art? Which of them is music? The music, the work of art, is not the collection of noises, it is the tune in the composer’s head. The noises made by the performers, and heard by the audience, are not the music at all; they are only means by which the audience, if they listen intelligently (not otherwise), can reconstruct for themselves the imaginary tune that existed in the composer’s head.
This is not a paradox. We all know perfectly well that a person who hears the noises instruments make is not thereby possessing himself of the music. Perhaps no one can do that unless he does hear the noises, but there is something else which he must do as well. Our ordinary word for this other thing is listening; and the listening which we have to do when we hear the noises made by musicians is in a way rather like the thinking we have to do when we hear the noises made, for example, by a person lecturing on a scientific subject. We hear the sound of his voice; but what he is doing is not simply making noises, but developing a scientific thesis. The noises are meant to assist us in achieving what he assumes to be our purpose in coming to hear him lecture, that is, thinking this same scientific thesis for ourselves. The lecture, therefore, is not a collection of noises made by the lecturer with his organs of speech; it is a collection of scientific thoughts related to those noises in such a way that a person who not only hears but thinks as well becomes able to think these thoughts by means of speech, if we like; but if we do, we must think of communication not as an "imparting" of thought by the speaker to the hearer, the speaker somehow planting his thought in the hearer’s receptive mind, but as a "reproduction" of the speaker’s thought by the hearer, in virtue of his own active thinking.
The parallel with listening to music is not complete. The cases are dissimilar in that a concert and a lecture are different things, and what we are trying to get out of a concert is a thing of a different kind from thoughts we are trying to get out of a lecture. But they are similar in this: Just as what we get out of the lecture is something other than the noises we hear proceeding from the lecturer’s mouth, so what we get out of the concert is something other than the noises made by performers. . . .
Everybody must have noticed a certain discrepancy between what we actually see when listening to music or speech and what we imaginatively hear. In watching a puppet-play we could swear that we have seen the expression on the puppets’ faces change with their changing gestures and the puppet-man’s words. Knowing that they are puppets, we know that their facial expression cannot change; but that makes no difference; we continue to see imaginatively the expressions which we know that we do not see actually. . . . When we are listening to a speaker or singer, imagination is constantly supplying articulate sounds which our ears do not actually catch.
