CHAPTER 3

Attention and Value: Music Aesthetics as a “Science of Ought”

Benjamin Steege

Attention Implicates Valuation

Attention goes to what we value—which is to say, what we already value. Or so one might think. Is this not the basis on which one selects certain things and not others from out of the buzzing multitude? Yet at the same time, attending to something may uphold its given value, affirm it—and in that sense produce new value. What first draws attention is in turn invested with more robust presence, more robust significance, in the extreme arriving at a fetish object. “It is because millions of tourists have come to see the Mona Lisa that millions of tourists rush to see the Mona Lisa,” writes Yves Citton, maintaining that “value-creation strongly depends on the way in which we distribute our attention.”1 In a similar vein, music scholars have often noted how acquired ways of listening, and their correlate acts of aesthetic description, deepen the grooves of perception by fixing and amplifying certain features over others.2 It seems, then, that attention and valuation coincide, neither preceding the other, neither reducing to the other.

This chapter begins to consider the way the history of attention implicates the history of value, focusing on one extended moment in these interlocking developments. At the beginning of the period in question, in the 1880s, inevitably stands Friedrich Nietzsche, with his iconoclastic declaration of an imminent “revaluation” or “transvaluation of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte).3 With this quotable but ambiguous slogan, Nietzsche both pointed to the startling fragility of what had long passed for authoritative moral and aesthetic guardrails, and also launched an effort to understand what might emerge as a basis for the establishment of new values. In the generations succeeding Nietzsche, though by no means universally under his direct influence, a minor industry of value theory took off on both sides of the Atlantic, among other places, marked by sharp discontinuity from ancient or classical conceptions.4 By the end of this period, it had become mundane to find a broad range of intellectuals preoccupied with what the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler called The Place of Value in a World of Facts (1938).5

Intellectual history is the basic mode of this essay. But of course, intellectual history usually has a more presentist impetus. In this case, it is the ongoing liveness of anxiety about value in music scholarship of our own past quarter century. In relation to Western classical music in particular, to which North American liberal arts departments tethered themselves at the moment of their founding, proponents have long worried over an apparent decline in symbolic and cultural capital (not to mention financial capital), articulating their concerns in monographs such as Julian Johnson’s Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (2002) and Lawrence Kramer’s Why Classical Music Still Matters (2007).6 In the case of popular music, by contrast, one might suppose that twentieth-century uncertainties about intellectual and cultural value would have been essentially laid to rest by now-classic work such as Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (1996) and the roughly contemporaneous “arrival” of popular music studies within the academy.7 But another decade, and then another, passed with such worries popping up in monographs again and again, often in the form of either tacit or explicit concern that the comparatively robust market viability of popular dance music and song has continued to distract us, ironically, from perceiving their true worth.8 An even more recent, and indeed ongoing, index of the insistence on the “mattering” of popular music is the (highly engaging) “Music Matters” series from University of Texas Press, which launched in 2018 with Why the Beach Boys Matter and Why the Ramones Matter, and has since seen parallel titles on (in order of appearance) Karen Carpenter, Lhasa de Sela, Labelle, Solange, Bushwick Bill, Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith, Tammy Wynette, Mariah Carey, Willie Mae Thornton, and Sinéad O’Connor.9

We get it. Stuff matters! Indeed, lots of different stuff matters.10 I will not venture a theory as to why value discourse has crescendoed so volubly over the past quarter century or so. (What comes to my mind is as likely to come to yours: scarcity, precarity, the crisis of democracy, the slow ebb of religion, a fragmented and saturated cultural marketplace, eroding confidence in the societal contributions of the proverbial “neoliberal academy,” new moods toward “matter” and “mattering” more broadly, a schadenfreudig farewell to the perilous apathy of an aging Generation X for whom purportedly nothing once mattered, and so on.) This chapter has a much narrower goal, which is to highlight certain aspects of early value discourse that intriguingly do not figure so prominently in our most recent fretting about music’s worth. In particular, it identifies a historical position that might be described as asserting the obligatory character of attention to music, manifested here in two overlapping but contrasting varieties on either side of the Atlantic. Rather than quickly dismissing this sense of “ought” as a suspicious ideological trap, the following discussion pauses to wonder if it might in fact harbor certain possibilities worth becoming sensitive to.

The two cases on the table are, first, the little-known political economist and music scholar Arthur Wolfgang Cohn (1894–1920)—little-known at least in part because he died at the age of twenty-six, nevertheless leaving behind a substantial and thoughtful enough body of work to merit a reading today;11 and second, the far better-known philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke (1885–1954), sometimes referred to as “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, largely for his edited anthology, The New Negro (1925), a collection of essays, poems, fiction, artworks, and cultural criticism that remains one of the most iconic cultural documents of its milieu.12 Although their specific aims were far from aligned, Cohn and Locke maintained broadly similar thematic concerns.13

What provides the central motive for this essay is that they shared at a distance a distinctive twofold theoretical maneuver. First, both entered into early twentieth-century value discourse with the aim of overcoming a false choice, which they saw as a pernicious legacy of nineteenth-century philosophy and morals: a choice between, on the one hand, ascribing absolute and inherent value to things prior to any direct engagement with them, and, on the other hand, simply asserting that value is imported from the outside, arbitrarily projected onto otherwise neutral things according to the unaccountable desires or positions of individuals and institutions—in short, a choice between what they variously called objectivism and subjectivism, formalism and sensualism, realism and nominalism, among other binary formulations. And second, at the same time that they sought to set aside the malign ethics of evaluative absolutes, both Cohn and Locke nonetheless insisted on not just the possibility, but indeed the obligation to realize, to recognize, or to actualize the value of things, and specifically musical things—to participate in the coming to actuality of what, in the engagement with them, they are worth. This question of “should” or “ought”—Cohn refers to music aesthetics as needing to become a Sollenswissenschaft, a “science of ought”—is of historical interest precisely because it is so foreign to current ways of thinking and talking.14

What could it mean that these two figures, otherwise so different in orientation despite certain shared intellectual reference points, would both fixate on the imperative of value, and indeed more specifically, the imperative to cultivate a feeling of the value of musical things? Beyond theoretical concerns, moreover, what is at issue is a pragmatic orientation toward the material import of evaluation. Cohn and Locke are linked not only by a common investment in thematizing the theory of value, but also through parallel projects of world-building, which is to say, projects of care: the curation of a world to live in. The thematization of valuing in these cases, and the attentional practices that go along with valuing, are thus a matter of both letting things show up, and also of acknowledging a certain obligation or responsibility to that very event of appearance. And it is ultimately the character of that obligation to things that is of interest here, as an underappreciated problem in the study of attention.

There Is No Valueless World

One of the seminal articulations of the intuition of a value-laden world appeared between 1900 and 1920 with the emergence of the philosophical style that would become known as phenomenology. I hasten to insist that I am not interested in promoting an orthodox phenomenological approach in this context. Yet there are at least two good reasons to begin with this material. The first is that this was Cohn’s own point of departure. Cohn was among the post–World War I generation of younger German scholars and students for whom the conceptual resources of phenomenological teaching were taken as a sign of the imminent renewal of scholarly and ethical ideals.15 The second reason is that phenomenology put on especially vivid display the complexity of the relationship between the task of characterizing our attentiveness to things and the task of characterizing the way their value appears for us. Phenomenology was understood as offering a particular way of regarding the world, and while it did not in itself prescribe a specific attentiveness—after all, “attention” must surely name but one way of relating to things, whereas phenomenology was meant to enfold a virtually inexhaustible range of relational modes, including (as is far too often forgotten) nonperceptual ones—then it was certainly invested in thinking afresh through what attentiveness might be like in the first place. What is broadly of interest in the present context is phenomenology’s tendency toward description that seeks to identify the manner in which things are given to us as we inhabit the world. In fact, it is the very possibility of value’s being given in attention, of the possible givenness of value itself, that is the initial challenge entertained in the following reflections.16

The theme emerges nearly right away in a canonical passage early in Edmund Husserl’s introduction of a broad program for the redescription of consciousness and its relation to the constitution of the world: his Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy of 1913. Husserl (largely, though by no means solely, responsible for shaping the early trajectory of the phenomenological movement as such) is not normally associated with Nietzsche’s transvaluative project or its rhetoric.17 Yet in an obliquely related way, he also called for a radical “transvaluation” of the world. In fact, the characteristic launching point of Husserlian thought—the so-called “suspension” or “parenthesizing” (epochē) of the world that is supposed to lead eventually to a clearer appreciation for just how the world is constituted—is explicitly an act of “transvaluing” for Husserl, an Umwertung that reads as a more or less direct, and rather surprising, echo of Nietzsche. Beginning the work of phenomenology means adopting a “peculiar manner of consciousness” that approaches the everyday “natural” attitude toward the world and “revalues” or “transvalues” it. “This revaluing (Umwertung) is a matter of our utter freedom and stands in contrast to every manner of taking up a position in thinking.”18 The prefix um- in Nietzsche’s and Husserl’s usage means neither a simple inversion of value from positive to negative (or vice versa), nor a regression to a previous state, nor any kind of simple change in the perceived “worth” of things—hence translators’ irresolvable vacillation between the false equivalent “re-” and the etymologically remote “trans-”—but instead a radical putting in question of the status of worldly value and the act of valuing.

If Husserl presented his program as “transvaluative,” this raises the question of how our reflective consideration of the world relates to the constitution of value within it. From a phenomenological perspective, the world as it presents itself to us just is already saturated by value. Value is, in a word, given. Yet an acknowledgment of this givenness is not the end, but instead the beginning of the task of thinking. “The world,” as a foundational passage from Husserl goes, “is continuously ‘on hand’ for me, and I am myself a member of it.” Yet being “on hand” (vorhanden) is not just a matter of brute availability, a neutral thingliness which only acquires meaning and value in some unnoticed, secondary stage of awareness. From the outset, what distinguished phenomenology from most available styles of thought was the conviction that worldly presence always already entailed value qualities, without which in effect there would be no “world” properly so called.

This world is not thereby there for me as a mere world of things (Sachenwelt); instead, with the same immediacy it is there as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world (Wertewelt, Güterwelt, praktische Welt). Without further ado, I find the things before me outfitted with the make-ups of things but just as much with valuable characteristics; I find them to be beautiful and ugly, pleasing and displeasing, agreeable and disagreeable, and the like. Things stand there immediately as objects of use, the ‘table’ with its ‘books,’ the ‘drinking glass,’ the ‘vase,’ the ‘piano,’ and so forth. These valuable characteristics and practical characteristics also belong constitutively to the objects ‘on hand’ as such, whether or not I turn to those characteristics and to the objects in general.19

The conviction that there simply are no things that are not also things of some value lies at the heart of the phenomenological project. And, of course, “value” here means more than simply greater or lesser worth (practical, or monetary, or whatever), but also all conceivable shadings of those qualities that might make something worthy in the broadest sense, or indeed unworthy, understood as its own kind of value. Yet what could it mean for “valuable characteristics”—“value characters” or Wertcharakteren—to belong “constitutively” to something? The language of “constitution” is misleading when taken out of its original expository context. It was meant to suggest neither that we mentally “construct” something in a certain way, nor that something is “built” out of certain physical or psychological elements, but rather just that something shows up in such and such a way in our manner of relating to it.20 We are to infer that one may expect things to show up as valuable things, as a matter of how they are in the context of the world we share with them.

But, of course, Husserl does not think that it is not possible to make a meaningful distinction between something and its value. In fact, there is a subtle bifurcation here. And it is at this point that the action of attention comes into play more directly, in the context of a commentary on the particular act of noticing things:

In the widest sense of the term, apprehending (Erfassen) coincides with attending-to-something (Auf-etwas-achten), noticing it (Bemerken), whether as a matter of being especially attentive to it (aufmerksam sein) or merely paying notice to it in passing (nebenbei beachten). . . . That is to say, turning toward something (even if it be in fiction) is eo ipso ‘apprehension,’ ‘noticing.’ In the act of evaluating, however, we are turned toward the value, in the act of joy we are turned toward what is enjoyable, in the act of love we are turned toward the beloved, in acting toward the action, without apprehending any of that. . . . We are turned to some subject matter in the course of valuing something, that coentails, to be sure, the apprehension of it; yet it is not the mere subject matter but instead the subject matter of value or [simply] the value . . . that is the full intentional correlate of the act of valuing.21

In paying attention to something, you may attend to something you hold valuable even as its value as such escapes your attention. Indeed, Husserl is at pains to say that we do not “attend” to value itself, only to the valued thing. At the same time, there is a distinctive, non-attentional “turning toward” value that nonetheless resembles attention. Valuing and attending are described here as parallel species of orientation, which share a kind of loose morphology without collapsing into one another. Or to refine things further, it would seem that valuing depends on a broader category or moment of attending, which gives the valuation its general feeling of directedness without at the same time bestowing on the valuing act the characteristic sense of clarity and apparent presence that attention seems to have.

In fact, for Husserl, the multivalent nature of attention to valuable things is a matter of a fundamental doubleness:

In acts . . . of valuing, we thus have an intentional object in a double sense. We have to distinguish between the mere ‘subject matter’ (die bloße ‘Sache’) and the full intentional object and, correspondingly, a double intentio, a twofold way of being turned toward something. If, in an act of valuing, we are oriented (gerichtet) to some subject matter, then the orientation to the subject matter is a case of paying attention to it, of apprehending it; yet we are also ‘directed’ at—only not in the manner of apprehending—the value.22

We are always in a mode of valuing, simply because things are laden with value, or because what it means for something to be a worldly thing at all, something belonging to our world, is already to have some value. Hence what it means for them to be present for us, to be given, is to be valued, even if we are not paying attention to them. When we do specially turn our attention to something, that attention does not necessarily and immediately import a new value to the thing, yet it nonetheless seems to cast a new shadow on, or evoke a different resonance in, the value that was already latently there. So while attending for Husserl, as in other accounts of attention, may bring about a moment of change in its object, rather than merely fixing or stabilizing it, it is nonetheless essential that attention submits to a kind of thingly or worldly priority that pushes back on it and exerts a subtle pressure against it.23

Arthur Wolfgang Cohn: Musikwissenschaft Is a Sollenswissenschaft

The way music, specifically, might exert pressure on us, and hence demand something of us, was the preoccupation of the twenty-five-year-old Cohn as he began to sketch out the program for a new orientation in music scholarship in the months before his death. The son of a classical philologist in Prussian Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), Cohn was trained in law, musicology, and political economy, and had just attained the position of Assistent (roughly, assistant professor) in economics at the University of Frankfurt.24 His work on music, then, was developed not so much from the perspective of a parochial disciplinary insider, but from that of a more general theorist of value seeking orientation within the brand-new legal and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. His vision, as abstract, incomplete, and aspirational as it would remain, can best be appreciated in three essays from 1919–20 in the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, where Cohn, drawing liberally on phenomenological literature, attempts to characterize, first, what it means to “know” music, and second, how (from his perhaps overly optimistic perspective) the spirit of German musicology was beginning to manifest an ethical “awakening” that would turn it away from the limiting choice between psychologism and positivism that had blocked its progress prior to the war.25

The shift in tone is unmistakable right away in the opening of the first of the essays, which features some basic yet idiosyncratic definitional work. “‘Knowledge’ means: the being-concerned of a knower (the subject) with a circumstance (an object). Or the other way round: the coming-into-effect of the object through the subject.”26 This is a surprising formulation indeed. “Knowledge” is simply “being-concerned” (Befaßtsein)? Now, “to come into effect” (Zur-Geltung-kommen)—or, rendering Geltung more literally, “to come into validity”—self-evidently belongs to the realm of value discourse. And the formulation is also couched here in terms that could only come from someone immersed in the language of contemporaneous phenomenology. The characterization of “knowing” as a two-poled dynamic in which, from the one direction, the thing “grips” (befaßt) the knower, while from the other direction, it is only through the knower that the thing acquires its gripping power (any effect, or Geltung) in the first place: This characterization roughly reformulates in more casual terms the basic phenomenological dynamic of “constitution” from Husserl. In fact, the entirety of Cohn’s assessment of the state of German musicology circa 1920 rests on his Husserlian conviction that “what ‘appears’ (the phenomenon) is grasped as ‘self-given.’”27

But if Husserl is, today, the most recognizable presence in Cohn’s musical writings (the latter quoting extensively from passages discussed above, among others), another member of Husserl’s early circle, the ethicist Max Scheler, plays an equally prominent role, accounting for Cohn’s thematic drift not so much toward the analysis of consciousness per se and its relations to objects, as toward emotional life and the experience of value. Although the concern with “intentionality” is inextricably associated with the canonical Husserlian strand of phenomenology, in the same inaugural 1913 volume of the Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research in which Husserl’s watershed work first appeared, Cohn had discovered equally pathbreaking texts by Scheler as well as by the aesthetician Moritz Geiger, neither of whom had much use for the jargon of intentionality, and instead typically describe the fundamental manner of engaging worldly phenomena as a disposition of feeling.28 In Scheler’s work, which became the premiere oeuvre of value-theorizing in 1920s Germany, value emerges for us only through (quasi-intentional) acts of feeling, as if values exist in the world as latencies that radiate when touched, or as calls that emanate to us from the world.

Value’s “call” is exceptionally explicit in Scheler. No less explicit is the force with which it enjoins a response from us. A value, Scheler writes, is

for ‘me’ in the sense that there is an experienced reference to me which is contained [in] this good-in-itself, something that comes from this content, the experience of something pointing a finger at me, something that whispers, ‘For you.’ And this content places me in a unique position in the moral cosmos and obliges me with respect to actions, deeds, and works, which, when I imagine them, all call, ‘I am for you’ and ‘You are for me.’29

Scheler’s emphasis on an ethos of Weltoffenheit, or “openness to the world,” meant a readiness to receive such calls and an acknowledgment that the individual person is in effect a medium for worldly value: A being who, in loving the world as it is given, is responsible for bringing the value of that world into the sharpest possible clarity, precisely through love.30 Scheler, along with other phenomenologists in Husserl’s early circle, would refer to a kind of relation to things he called Wertnehmen, modeled on but distinct from the commonplace Wahrnehmen, “perception,” which had been the longstanding obsession of professional philosophers. If Wahrnehmen is typically rendered as “perceiving”—or, to capture the German more directly, “taking for true”—the untranslatable Wertnehmen (sometimes rendered unpalatably as “value-ceiving”) may be glossed as “taking for valuable” or, more vividly, “apprehending as value.”31

No less than Scheler’s far grander (and far more realized) philosophical project, Cohn’s incomplete music-critical project was to have hinged on such a modulation from Wahrnehmen to Wertnehmen. Yet, we must reiterate, for Cohn, to prioritize “valuing” was not to retreat to a position of subjectivism or perspectival aesthetic criticism. As far as he was concerned, the phenomenological priorness of value, its own peculiar “always already,” remained indispensable. This mode of thought pointed toward a way of valuing musical things without saying either that certain musical phenomena are inherently, absolutely, or “objectively” valuable on their own terms, or that value is only a matter of what is projected onto them by skilled hermeneutic writers or by especially sensitive empathetic listeners. In fact, as in Scheler, perception—and here, attentive listening itself—is defetishized and even decentralized in Cohn’s account, since what he envisions as a paradigmatic scholarly approach to music is a modality in which linguistic communication is used to reach out toward the potentially valuable in music, without insisting on the predominance of “facts” and “concepts.” Music is not to be approached in the guise of preexisting facts in the manner of empiricism, nor is it articulable only in terms of abstract concepts in the manner of idealism. Drawing on a formulation in Moritz Geiger’s contribution to the phenomenologists’ inaugural 1913 Yearbook, Cohn insists that proper phenomenological intuition “proceeds neither deductively nor inductively, pursues aesthetics neither from above nor from below.”32 (See Figure 3.1, a table in which Cohn positions “Phänomenologie” in line with the general category of “Intuition,” as distinct from those approaches typical of aprioristic “Deduktion” above and those typical of empiricist “Induktion” below.)33 That is, it does not argue for musical value from general principles any more than it builds up an appreciation for musical value from a series of discrete facts about musical things. Instead, musical knowing “finds” value in music, where Cohn’s verb vorfinden (faintly echoing the Husserlian adjective vorhanden) suggests an action neither of mere “discovering” (entdecken) nor, even less, “inventing” (erfinden), but rather of coming to settle upon something that is in some sense prior to the act and yet also only first constituted within it.34 It is “before” (vor) us both in the sense of preceding us and also of con-fronting us. As is characteristic of phenomenology as a whole, this line of thought is challenging: Value at once seems to precede the valuing and yet also to arise within the moment of the valuing act, and the trick lies in holding both of these elements in mind at once. The contribution of phenomenology on this score is to have shown that values are not simply “there,” but that they come forth, they show up.35 Cohn’s adaptation of this insight only began to make this clear.

Musical knowledge, then, which we have already seen Cohn define as a matter of being “gripped” and “concerned,” is, to be more precise, “just as much the esteeming of value (Wertschätzung) and summoning of value (Wertschöpfung) as it is research, wisdom, communication. Knowledge (Erkenntnis) in this sense, as a cultural realization of the idea of truth, is called science (Wissenschaft).”36 The move from Erkenntnis to Wissenschaft is a move from an individual moment of cognition and feeling to a broader, communal enterprise of shared understanding. Knowing is to be thought of not just as a clever personal ability, but as a “praxis,” a historically developed skill in the actualization of value. The “summoning” (Schöpfung) of value in this perspective is not a matter of fabricating something novel out of whole cloth, but instead of fulfilling of something latent.37 Aesthetics, which Cohn takes to mean extant and ongoing work in the contemporaneous German music criticism and scholarship he is surveying, just is the fulfillment of the value of the music under study.38 Writing, talking, teaching, reading—all manner of interpersonal linguistic communication: These forms, so often denigrated (or forgotten) as subsidiary or subservient to “actual” music-making, are instead to be celebrated for their crucial role in what Cohn calls Musikpflege, whose root is related to Pflicht (“duty” or “obligation”) and hence has a more tendentious connotation than the usual English equivalents, “musical training” or “cultivation,” might suggest. Indeed, Cohn is very explicit that the concept of musical “praxis” should be expanded to include not simply the production and performance of music, but also the many forms of activity with which performance is interwoven, so long as these are understood to traffic in the “valuable.” Musikpflege, he writes, “implies nothing other than a musically valuable doing (ein musikalisch wertvolles Tun), whether this means a bringing-forth or receiving, a creating, reproducing, or recording.”39 From this perspective, what some might dismiss as “mere talk,” for example, is not simply about value: it is the cultivation of value, its bringing-about. When Cohn conceives of an expanded cast stepping into the role of Pfleger—that is, those who are responsible for “caring for,” “tending to,” or indeed “attending to” music—he also expands the community of those held responsible for the preservation and continuance of value-laden worldhood. And this, Cohn tells us, bears the weight of an imperative mood not only through implicit obligation (the Pflicht that belongs to the Pfleger), but also through a more explicit necessity that is inherent to his theory of value. Cohn borrows a line from Scheler’s value ethics to the effect that an “ideal ought” leads to a worldly “demand,” which “is stressed by the inner command of a knowing-oneself-to-be-obliged.”40

Yet dangers lurk here. How are we to adjudicate the suggestion that we are in any way “obliged” to musical things? How do we know about this obligation? Or hear its call? Or learn what it requires of us? And here we run into a familiar trap in the flirtation with phenomenology: If you give givenness an inch, it will take a mile. So when Cohn winds up saying that what music aesthetics really needs to do is to declare itself a Sollenswissenschaft, “A Science of Ought,” in which the actualization of value is the participation in an already prescribed value system, it is difficult to know how to judge the proposition other than as an arch-conservatism that seems to hold little contemporary appeal.41 At best, we must attend to the value of music as its stewards; at worst, we are simply compelled to “observe” value in the dual sense Jonathan Crary wrought from this word: not simply “paying attention to” it but also “adhering to” its rule of conduct or disciplinary regimen.42 And while this may have been all very well for Cohn’s model in Scheler, for whom values are arrayed in a ranked series—with sensory values such as pleasure and pain ranked at bottom, followed by vital values such as health and well-being, followed by spiritual or intellectual values such as beauty and justice, followed at the highest level by sacred values or holiness itself—Cohn could by no means plausibly transfer such a hierarchy onto music aesthetics.43 Indeed, in the three value-theoretical essays of 1919 to 1921, he appears to have been unable or unwilling even to venture any specific value predicates for the musical repertories he had in mind, so general and “theoretical” was his basic disposition toward the material.

And what is the status of the “transvaluation” that would seem to have motivated the ferment in value theory in the first place? Scheler was called the “Catholic Nietzsche” for his dogged pursuit of the spiritual and emotional reawakening of values that would overthrow the joint dominions of Protestantism and Kantian rationalism in European thought.44 For Cohn, meanwhile, as for his phenomenologically minded contemporaries in music discourse, the demons to be cast out included naturalism, psychologism, and positivism—in short, the premature incursion of then current natural-scientific premises and attitudes toward a field of knowledge that seemed not yet to have fully exhausted its own local forms of knowing and valuing. Yet in contrast to the Nietzschean precedent, the gist of Cohn’s valuation seems to reduce too easily to an acceptance of things as they are, rather than a clear affirmation of new value principles.

Alain Locke: Transvaluation Is Imperative

How might we stake a claim for the obligation to attend, in terms that do justice to the reality of historical change and at least the real possibility of transvaluation? Alain Locke’s answer to this question was inflected by his thematic focus on an ongoing revaluation of a kind that was anything but theoretical—namely, what he referred to in 1925 as the “revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro.”45 The opening rhetorical gestures of “The New Negro,” his own introductory title essay from the landmark art and literature anthology he edited, narrate a sequence of historical transformations, all of which are to be understood as instantiating this “revaluation”: a “metamorphosis” of “stock figure” or “formula” into “human being,” “myth” into “man,” “shadow” into “personality”—in general, “historical fiction” into “realistic facing of facts.”46 This metamorphosis amounts to something more than the dismantling of stereotype (though it includes that). What Locke has in mind is the entrance into the space of public appearance of a cultural figure or persona that, it is argued implicitly and explicitly throughout, had not previously existed there.47 This is, needless to say, in large part a function of the massive demographic fact of the Great Migration, which Locke memorably described as the “wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers” and “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern,” a history that underlies the central editorial thesis of the volume as a whole: that “in the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is becoming transformed.”48 Locke’s introduction to his volume presents matters as a great American mass Bildungsroman, an economic and political event from which he derived an optimistic celebration of cultural advancement that would prove not uncontroversial from the moment of its publication.49

But alongside the sunnily liberal narrative of an achievement of “cultural recognition,” which would “in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further betterment of race relationships,” there is another story here.50 Although Locke was not by any means a card-carrying phenomenologist, the matter of the “revaluation” of a particular historical persona in his thinking is indis­solubly connected with his keen attunement to historical transformations in the fluctuating appearance of art forms—the manner of their public ­showing-up and demanding attention—and indeed of one especially significant genre in particular: the African American spiritual, or “Sorrow Song,” which had already loomed large in Black cultural theory at least since its prominent textual and rhetorical positioning within W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).51

“Recall how suddenly,” Locke observes, “the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for generations under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being natural brought them out—and behold, there was folk-music.”52 Locke, himself avowedly non-Christian (he was Baháʼí), deploys the mystical language of “revelation” advisedly. What is “Behold!,” in rhetoric as much as in actual effect, if not a quasi-biblical enactment of the secular command to “pay attention”? Compare this with the social-psychological register in which the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, in his own contribution to The New Negro, assessed Black Americans’ revaluation of the spiritual. Johnson emphasized instead the post–World War I shift from “an utterly conscious effort to forget the past” with its “memories of the painful degradation of slavery,” and hence an effort to “rule out the Sorrow Songs as the product of ignorant slaves,” toward the tendency now, “at a more comfortable distance,” to “find a new beauty in these heritages, and new values in their own lives.”53

In other words, the narrative emphasis in Johnson’s account falls rather more on the cultural strategies individuals (albeit as a group) fully intentionally undertake to adapt their attitudes to changing historical conditions. Locke’s view by no means rules out this more commonsense social perspective. But, as throughout his lifework as whole, his reflections also participate in a broader reflection on the constitution of value as such. There is a sense in which Locke sought not just to furnish an account of why the spirituals might have been—and in 1925 remained—historically valuable, or even to explain shifts of cultural value within Black communities, but also to provide a theoretical justification for the necessity of their transvaluation, “by white and black alike.” This is a more ambitious task, and one that cannot be read directly from Locke’s own contributions to The New Negro, but may be partially reconstructed in conjunction with his several value-theoretical publications.

With Cohn still in mind, it is hard not to be struck by the almost exact contemporaneity of a distinct but uncannily similar insistence on the place of an imperative mood in ethics, written by an American author who declared himself over and over to be not just a value pluralist, but an outright relativist.54 Like Cohn, Locke was a precocious polymath. Educated at Oxford University, the University of Berlin, and Harvard University, where he wrote a 1917 dissertation in philosophy on “The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value,” he published and spoke on value sporadically throughout his life.55

Yet Locke’s counterexample compels us to consider the question as to how an obligation to attend and hence to actualize value might play out in an overtly anti-authoritarian mode. For him, the world is no less value-laden than it is for Husserl, Scheler, or Cohn: “Man does not, cannot, live in a valueless world,” he insists.56 And similarly, the problem of how to analyze the undeniable and insistent presence of value, without rendering it absolute, guides his approach: “To my thinking, the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion.”57 But in sharp contrast to Cohn and his influences, for Locke, values themselves are mutable and fungible, and he would consistently characterize his theoretical preferences as “functionalist” rather than “realist.” A functionalist value theory, with its roots in American pragmatism after William James and John Dewey, regards values as arising within individuals’ interaction with the world.58 From this standpoint, values emerge as ethical norms that operate with all the force of imperatives. They are not simply “there” in the world at large, and neither are they arbitrarily projected onto otherwise neutral worldly affairs. Like the phenomenological approach, the functionalist one is neither objectivist nor subjectivist. Yet rather unlike the early stages of the phenomenological movement, this view tends to ascribe a dynamic and fluctuating role to values, and hence involves a certain historicist sensitivity to context.

Locke’s 1935 essay, “Values and Imperatives,” is of special interest, presenting the fullest published statement of his thinking in this area. Although the essay remains true to his dissertation’s explicit strategy of “classification”—that is, elaborating an ornate system of axiological categories—its main thrust in general terms is clear and can be presented in three basic claims. First, the error of previous theories of value lies in their conflating after-the-fact rationalizations of value with the reality of valuing itself. Schematic formulations of judgment are what tend to produce absolutes, which are effectively detached from the circumstances in which they arose and thus threaten a certain violence to the texture of reality. For Locke (as for Cohn), the act of valuing something is less like formulating a judgment and more like feeling. The folly of philosophy, he thinks, had been to make “truth too exclusively a matter of the correct anticipation of experience, of the confirmation of fact” (and here he includes even James and Dewey). By contrast, since “truth may also sometimes be the sustaining of an attitude, the satisfaction of a way of feeling, the corroboration of a value,” then value theory should involve itself with the exploration and understanding of those attitudes (and we should take careful note of Locke’s crucial hedges: “too exclusively,” “also sometimes,” etc.).59

Second, acknowledging that the world in which valuing takes place is itself dynamic and fluctuating, value theory should concern itself not simply with relatively stable forms of value, but even more with the ways in which one can observe values changing. Yet, third, acknowledging such flux does not mean that we should thereby resign ourselves to “value-anarchism” or “anarchic relativism,” but rather that we should in fact become all the more attuned to the possibility that we might feel ourselves obligated or compelled to respond to circumstances in certain ways, precisely because of the fluctuations in those circumstances.60

A distinctive and in this context particularly significant feature of Locke’s value theory is the way it incorporates what we might call a translational dimension to value change. Confronted with something new and unfamiliar, whose value for us is at first indeterminate, confusing, or alienating, we tend to transpose onto it feelings associated with an existing value, deriving from an earlier or more traditional context. The convergence of the old value-feeling and the new state of affairs then results in an altogether new evaluative complex, whose affiliation with its precursor tends to be effaced, such that we do not typically notice the transference.

The further we investigate, the more we discover that there is no fixity of content to values, and the more we are bound, then, to infer that their identity as groups must rest on other elements. We know that a value-genre often evades its definition and breaks through its logical barriers to include content not usually associated with it. The awe-inspiring scene becomes “holy,” the logical proof, “beautiful,” creative expression, a “duty,” and in every case the appropriate new predicates follow the attitude and the attitude cancels out the traditionally appropriate predicates. . . . We are forced to conclude that the feeling-quality, irrespective of content, makes a value of a given kind, and that a transformation of the attitude effects a change of type in the value situation.61

Locke went some way toward schematizing a typology of value-feelings in terms of their “modal quality” (see Figure 3.2). This would consist of, on the one hand, what he called “form-quality” (that is, a generalized affective structure belonging to one of the four categories, “exaltation,” “tension,” “acceptance or agreement,” and “repose or equilibrium”) and, on the other hand, “feeling-reference” (that is, the sense that feeling is oriented toward some domain, as captured here in respective variations on the Jungian binary of “introverted” and “extroverted”). These are further correlated with disparate but potentially overlapping fields of application, from religious to aesthetic.

In the flow of the text, Locke typically refers to these complex categories by the shorthand “form-feeling.” And it is worth noting simply that, in this theoretical conception, “feeling” in fact is a “form”: an organizing mode of our evaluative engagement with the world. On this score, Locke’s approach is quite different from the way Husserl, Scheler, or Cohn saw values as phenomena that might be activated in the world at the moment of an intentional act of feeling. In the phenomenological account, the word “feeling” refers to an act whose quality is determined in the moment that it is oriented toward something, whereas in Locke’s functionalist account, “feeling” refers to the formal structuredness a sense of value seems to have, even if it has been initially shaped in a context discontinuous from the one in which it is presently felt. If a logical proof appears “beautiful” to you, you are not about to claim that something in the proof inherently conforms to an aesthetic standard of beauty, only that there are certain qualities about it that you are prepared to appreciate in a manner that you have already developed in your experiences of the traditionally beautiful, and that this appreciation has a certain compelling character about it, even if nothing is thereby said about the actual validity of the proof.

Values here, as form-feelings, are thus dependent on contextual norms, yet nonetheless continue to exert pressure on us in a delicate balance of the contingent and the obligatory: “In de-throning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, that norms control our behavior as well as guide our reasoning.”62

True to the scholarly genre of his era, Locke’s writing on these topics is usually abstract, presented without extended examples. So, then, returning to this section’s starting point in the African American spiritual, where might we locate the pressure to attend to this repertoire—to respond to its historical imperative to “behold,” as Locke wrote in The New Negro’s introduction? The answer lies in first recognizing the role that art forms themselves play in providing a space for transvaluation. Kobena Mercer writes that a crucial premise in Locke’s writings on Afrodiasporic visual culture is that art should not be held merely to “reflect” or “express” identities, reducing it to a neutral conduit for the actual substrate of reality. Rather, “to say culture comes first in ‘producing’ the positions in which identities take shape is to argue—as Locke did—that culture is the realm in which value-laden racial attitudes can be shaken up and opened to change.”63 Locke’s position has been repeatedly contested, and this is hardly the occasion to retell that history.64 Yet there is no way to appreciate the imperative mood of his value theory without articulating this initial stance, according to which the space of aesthetic appearance is itself the central scene of negotiation over cultural value, even if not always in an explicit manner. On the one hand, we pay attention to music in the first place “because of the way it strives to be seen and heard,”65 because it is in the nature of sounding artworks that they demand attention within a public sphere—Scheler’s “‘I am for you’ and ‘You are for me’”—however limited, damaged, or distorted that public space may be (and however imbricated with private or counterpublic spaces). But Locke’s thinking on these matters suggests that there is an essential second moment, in which the initial value of music’s sheer presence also enjoins a modulation of value-feeling, a reshaping of its “form.”

Thus, on the one hand, Locke notes that in the period between roughly 1875 and 1925, when spirituals increasingly circulated within an expanding cultural marketplace in the form of concert-hall performances, sheet music arrangements, and finally records, this repertory “saved a folk art and preserved as no other medium could the folk temperament, and by maintaining them introduced the Negro to himself.” But, on the other hand, Locke does not end with the affirmation of a preservationist; he does not argue for a value-stabilizing outcome to this historical development. Instead, he points first to the awkward, possibly even cringeworthy stages of “valuing” in which already available feelings were yanked from the shelf, as it were, and clung to in order to make sense of an art form that had only partial precedents in the public imagination and hence confounded immediate judgment: “Still the predominant values of this period in estimating the Spirituals were the sentimental, degenerating often into patronizing curiosity on the one side, and hectic exhibitionism on the other. Both races condescended to meet the mind of the Negro slave, and even while his moods were taking their hearts by storm, discounted the artistry of genius therein. It was only as the musical appreciation of the Spirituals grew that this interest changed and deepened.”66 Sentimentality is a “form,” which may be learned and then adapted to unfamiliar things, especially things that do not otherwise offer us the kinds of affective affordances that aid interpretation and evaluation. Religious kitsch, the aesthetic commodity that wants to inspire feelings of piety despite the very fact of its commodified form, is a pertinent case in terms of its particular affective environment, and arguably traces its genealogy more or less to the beginnings of the time period in question. And as unappealing as you may find such responses—Locke himself is by no means celebrating them—his suggestion is that they can also function as cultural placeholders that make room for later developments in the possible forms of valuing available to us. Or here, rather, not simply make room for but, in “taking their hearts by storm,” effectively oblige.

It is the art-for-art’s-sake rhetoric, with its too optimistic hint of redemption and too explicit hint of transcendence, that usually puts people off Locke, then as now.67 That is fair. But without getting diverted by a separate (and already long, far-flung, and fiercely contested) debate, we can still train our focus on the force of transvaluation itself. The basic point for Locke is simply that we are able, and indeed are compelled, to move from something like a feckless sentimentality—even one weighed down by “hectic exhibitionism” and “patronizing curiosity”—toward something else. Whether you call that “artistry” or “genius,” and insist that the aesthetic merits of the object will eventually make themselves self-evident to all, is less interesting than the basic grasp of the valuational shift.

To put it simply: art obliges our attention because it needs us to become ready to change the way we value.

What, then, becomes of the spiritual? In fact, the more urgent question in Locke’s “The Negro Spirituals” is not so much, how has the genre been reevaluated since 1875? but instead, what should we expect of the prospective value of the spiritual as a genre in 1925 and after? And this naturally implies that the “thing” itself, the genre and its representative repertoire, has a certain instability that goes hand in hand with the instability of its evaluation. So it is not only that Locke wants us to appreciate how folk art, though “despised and rejected at first,” nonetheless, “generations after, flowers again and transcends the level of its origin” such that the “slave songs . . . have come to be recognized as artistically precious things.” And it is not only that it “still requires vision and courage to proclaim their ultimate value and possibilities,” although eventually those alive to such possibilities “will treasure the Spirituals for their true musical and technical values.”68

Unlike for Cohn, the point is not just to pay attention to what is valuable, to give value its due, to bring it to its clearest apprehension. Rather, the modernist Locke, no “salvage ethnographer,” is aware that he is not describing a tradition on the verge of fading away and in need of a retrospective (and hence conservative) appreciation, but one that is ongoing and continues to be woven immediately into his own cultural sphere. Thus he distances himself from the notorious negrophile writer Carl Van Vechten, who wants new arrangements and performances of spirituals to adhere to a simplistic folk ethos, and who therefore, with good intentions but misplaced motives, “insists in the name of the folk spirit upon his preference for the ‘evangelical renderings’ of Paul Robeson’s robust and dramatic style as over against the subdued, ecstatic and spiritually refined versions of Roland Hayes.” In doing so, Van Vechten “overlooks the fact that the folk itself has these same two styles of singing, and in most cases discriminates according to the mood, occasion and song type, between them. So long as the peculiar quality of Negro song is maintained,” Locke concludes, “there can be no set limitation.”69

And it emerges implicitly from this comment and more explicitly elsewhere, that as far as Locke is concerned, there really is no essential thing that can be characterized as “the spiritual.” Instead, he points to the way elements of the spiritual of the past and present are always held in potentiality. Neither the “folk” versions inherited from the mid-nineteenth century, nor the second-generation choral arrangements by groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, nor Harry T. Burleigh’s harmonically experimental settings with piano for living room and concert stage, nor indeed any of the growing number of recorded renditions from the 1910s and 1920s actually are the thing itself. Yet the genre somehow exerts a continuous pressure toward relatively open-ended revision and renewal: It “is at the very least potentially polyphonic,” “can therefore undergo, without breaking its own boundaries, intricate and original development,” and is in fact approaching the “line of advance in modernistic music.”70

To be described as “modernist” is high praise coming from Locke. As he would write in a talk on value delivered at Columbia University in December 1945, musical modernism (which for him at this point means things like Stravinsky and Hindemith as well as recent “good jazz,” and so forth) has been responsible for bringing about a set of “enlarged criteria of evaluative judgment” and a “widening of the range of appreciation and participation” in public life, all of which amounts to “as good an example as we can find of what democratization can mean in a value field.” And while there is, again, the appearance of an easy liberal idealization of mere “tolerance” for diverse expressive modes, I think we should take Locke at his word when he suggests that these virtues are the sort of things that are not just nice to have, in the manner of a self-satisfied aesthetic connoisseurship, but are in fact necessary for survival within a patently and pervasively conflictive midcentury environment: “I merely throw out the suggestion that through modernism and its enforced but not normatively chaotic relativism we have forged a psychological key for the active and simultaneous appreciation of diverse styles within our own culture. . . . In an approaching world interchange of culture it is just such widening of taste to a cosmopolitan range and level which seems most desirable, if indeed not imperative.”71

The “imperative” to value the post-Reconstruction spiritual is due to a multiplicity of overlapping factors: its inherent aesthetic qualities, the possible ongoing compositional uses one might make of it, its participation in the refinement of modern religious experience, what it does for the interests of racial progress and racial pride, and the way it might increase public awareness and recognition of the cultural contributions of Afrodiasporic folkways and African American composers and performers. All of these are motives, kinds of imperatives in themselves, and of course all for Locke are laudable. But also, more narrowly in the vein of the preceding discussion, we might note that the spiritual stands as a privileged example of an art form whose historical position enables it to exact certain ethical demands. It requires you to acknowledge and modulate among the range of conflicting values that it gathers together, whether or not they are claimed as your own: true religious feelings, deeply felt (even if misplaced) sentimentalisms, quests for authenticity, appreciations of abstract beauty, and so forth—all converge within what is otherwise a seemingly modest expressive form. The spiritual is important for Locke because it establishes the aptest available scene for a transvaluation that is both culturally plural and also, on account of that pluralism, imperative.

Conclusion

What do Cohn and Locke give us to work with? In some ways, it is a long distance from the all but explicit call of obligation to attend in the one, to the less explicit yet no less forceful sense of obligation toward transvaluation in the other. And the motives driving these two imperatives are clearly distinct. On the one hand, there is the phenomenological pressure the world places on us, merely by virtue of being world. For a phenomenologist, we are not neutral toward the world, nor it to us. “Attentiveness” in this perspective is only a special case of the otherwise generalized state of inherent interestedness that is living. And what, on the other hand, is attentiveness for Locke? It is more than a merely “appreciative” attunement to diverse aesthetic qualities, despite what his rhetorical self-positioning may at times suggest. The sheer fact of aesthetic appearances showing up for us continues to be as remarkable for Locke as it is for Cohn. Locke’s attention is not just the response to the shock of the new, but the response to the more easily overlooked shock of the newly valued. “Behold!” means not just, “Pay attention to this!” but also, “What are we to make of this?” Yet there is a more encompassing and fundamental imperative underlying and supporting these imperatives, which is that, insofar as all their various objects of attention are made objects, artifacts of a certain historical experience and of a shared persisting world, they enjoin our valuation because we need these cultural artifacts in order to renew the world.

Notes

1. 1.  Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (2014), trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), 1, 48.
2. 2.  Many of the contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), hinge on this dynamic, including, in an especially clear case, Thorau, “‘What Ought to Be Heard’: Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear” (207–28). A broader view of the issue, focusing on the juncture at which the distinction between market value and aesthetic value acquired a salience that has more or less endured to the present, is Nicholas Mathew, “Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 655–701.
3. 3.  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Michael A. Scarpitti (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Third Essay, Section 27, 142; as well as the unfinished work foretold there: Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti, ed. Hill (Penguin Books, 2017), whose subtitle was to have been “An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values.”
4. 4.  Relevant highlights include Christian von Ehrenfels, System der Werttheorie, 2 vols. (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1897–98); William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt, 1899); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900), trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004); Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (1913), trans. Manfred Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Alexius Meinong, On Emotional Presentation (1917), trans. Marie-Luise Schubert Kalsi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972); Wilbur Urban, The Intelligible World: Metaphysics and Value (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929); Wolfgang Köhler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright Publications, 1938); and John Dewey, Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
5. 5.  This is to say nothing of the partially overlapping body of specialist literature on economic value theory, which is at once narrower in scope and also more venerable, though it saw periods of reinvigoration with the series of economic and political crises beginning in the 1840s, which of course inspired Karl Marx’s watershed adaptation of existing labor theory of value. For an overview, one could do worse than revisit Robert L. Heilbroner’s 1953 classic, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 7th ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
6. 6.  Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Kramer, “Introduction,” in Keith Chapin and Lawrence Kramer, eds., Musical Meaning and Human Values (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 1–9.
7. 7.  Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). The International Association for the Study of Popular Music had been founded in 1981 (jointly by Frith and Charles Hamm), and its official journal, Tracking, launched in 1988, renamed Journal of Popular Music Studies in 1993.
8. 8.  Ralf von Appen, Der Wert der Musik: Zur Ästhetik des Populären (Bielefeld: Transkript Verlag, 2007); Theodore Gracyk, Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); David Hesmondhalgh, Why Music Matters (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013); and Alison Stone, The Value of Popular Music: An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Timothy D. Taylor, Making Value: Music, Capital, and the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024). And finally, with diametrically opposed titles that frame things as unmistakably as can be, see also Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno, eds., Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (New York: Routledge, 2004); along with John J. Sheinbaum, Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
9. 9.  Tom Smucker, Why the Beach Boys Matter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Donna Gaines, Why the Ramones Matter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Karen Tongson, Why Karen Carpenter Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019); Fred Goodman, Why Lhasa de Sela Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019); Adele Bertei, Why Labelle Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021); Stephanie Phillips, Why Solange Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021); Charles L. Hughes, Why Bushwick Bill Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021); Tanya Pearson, Why Marianne Faithfull Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021); Caryn Rose, Why Patti Smith Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022); Steacy Easton, Why Tammy Wynette Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023); Andrew Chan, Why Mariah Carey Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023); Lynnée Denise, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023); and Allyson McCabe, Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024).
10. 10.  The tendency is hardly limited to music studies: witness Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Wiley, 2008); Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and most recently, Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), all of which contrast sharply with an older skepticism toward the notion of “value” as such in literary theory and cultural studies, represented by, for example, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); not to mention the classic social theorization of value developed across essentially the entire oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu. For a general historical assessment, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values (1997), trans. Gregory Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
11. 11.  This includes two short monographs: Arthur Wolfgang Cohn, Das Tonwerk im Rechtssinne (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1917); and Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden? (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1920).
12. 12.  Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925).
13. 13.  In fact, Locke’s time as a student in Berlin in 1910 and his regular return visits for many years afterward put him at only one or two degrees of separation from Cohn in terms of social and intellectual circles. On Locke’s studies with Hugo Münsterberg and Georg Simmel and others at the University of Berlin (then Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität), see Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 91–99. Meanwhile, Tamara Levitz establishes Locke’s place within the larger context of transnational music-philosophical history in Levitz, “The Twentieth Century,” in Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Ariana Phillips-Hutton, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 225–62.
14. 14.  An exception that proves the rule, largely by virtue of its ironic frankness concerning the audacity of its central question, is Ted Cohen, “Liking What’s Good: Why Should We?,” in William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia, eds., Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 117–30. If an appeal to aesthetic imperatives seems both unfashionable and improbable in contemporary music studies, it is somewhat less so in environmental ethics, which is perhaps less remote from present concerns than one might think. See, for example, Holmes Rolston III, “From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics,” in Arnold Berleant, ed., Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 127–41; and the subsequent edited volume inspired by Rolston’s 2002 essay: Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, eds., Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
15. 15.  See Benjamin Steege, An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); on Cohn specifically, 61–66.
16. 16.  If the pursuit seems somewhat particular to its moment, note that similar thematics continue to appear as well in nonphenomenological literature: for example, Akeel Bilgrami, “The Visibility of Value,” Social Research 83, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 917–43.
17. 17.  But see Rudolf Boehm, “Husserl und Nietzsche,” in Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie: Husserl-Studien (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 217–36.
18. 18.  Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 1 (1913), “General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,” trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), §31, 54; original emphasis here and throughout, unless noted.
19. 19.  Husserl, Ideas 1, §27, 49.
20. 20.  The terrain can get uninvitingly technical around this matter, but see David Woodruff Smith, “Constitution Through Noema and Horizon: Husserl’s Theory of Intentionality,” in Jeff Yoshimi, Philip Walsh, and Patrick Londen, eds., Horizons of Phenomenology: Essays on the State of the Field and Its Applications (Cham: Springer, 2023), 63–80, at 71–72.
21. 21.  Husserl, Ideas 1, §37, 64–65.
22. 22.  Husserl, Ideas 1, §37, 65.
23. 23.  On attention as a moment of change, see Benjamin Steege, “The Problem of Attention,” in Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80–122.
24. 24.  Biographical information comes from Th. M., “Personalia,” Im deutschen Reich: Zeitschrift des Centralvereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 26, no. 10 (October 1920): 325–26; and Adolf Weber, “Zum Gedächtnis an Arthur Wolfgang Cohn,” in Cohn, Kann das Geld abgeschafft werden? (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1920), 141–42.
25. 25.  Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst. Gedanken über Begründung und Aufbau der Musikwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, no. 6 (March 1919): 351–60; Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik. Neue Bücher und Schriften,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1, no. 11 (August 1919): 669–79; and the posthumous Cohn, “Das musikalische Verständnis. Neue Ziele,” Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 4, no. 3 (December 1921): 129–35.
26. 26.  Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst,” 352. “‘Erkenntnis’ heißt: Befaßtsein eines Erkennenden (des Subjekts) mit einem Gegenstand (dem Objekt). Oder umgekehrt: Zur-Geltung-kommen des Objekts durch das Subjekt.”
27. 27.  Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 672. “Das ‘Erscheinende’ (Phänomen) wird als ‘selbstgegeben’ erfaßt.”
28. 28.  Max Scheler, “Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1 (1913): 405–565; and Moritz Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1, no. 2 (1913): 567–684. Scheler’s complete treatise, an extensive critique of Kantian ethics, was translated as Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
29. 29.  Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Values, 490; translation modified. Scheler writes, similarly, in a posthumous essay that “a value-signal experienced as coming from things, not from us, announces, as though with a trumpet flourish, that ‘Something is up!’” Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 98–135, at 101.
30. 30.  In some accounts, love is itself a kind of attention; as, for example, in Simone Weil, Waiting for God (1950), trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 2021), and especially the essay, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” 99–155. I thank my co-participants in the workshop that led to this volume for pointing out this resonance.
31. 31.  Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Values, 197. Cf. Adolf Reinach, Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1911); and Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Die Idee von der sittlichen Handlung,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 3 (1916): 126–252.
32. 32.  Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 672; “. . . erfährt weder deduktiv noch induktiv, treibt nicht Ästhetik von oben oder unten”; paraphrasing Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” 570–73.
33. 33.  The table appears in Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst,” 357.
34. 34.  Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 672. He refines the view somewhat in the 1921 essay, “Das musikalische Verständnis” (131), drawing a contrast there between “understanding” as a reflective disposition and more “spontaneous” dispositions, such as loving and hating, in which he thinks it clearer that value (or lack of value) does arise within the act.
35. 35.  Present throughout the literature, that insight is most fully developed recently in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. See, for example, Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kossky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
36. 36.  Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst,” 356. “. . . ebenso Wertschätzung und Wertschöpfung, als Forschung, Wissen, Mitteilung. Die Erkenntnis in diesem Sinne, als kulturelle Verwirklichung der Wahrheitsidee, heißt Wissenschaft.” In this context, “science” is the best we can do for Wissenschaft, which of course connotes a holistic sense of learning and study, rather than any particular program for (natural) scientific research.
37. 37.  Although Die Schöpfung (as in Franz Josef Haydn’s oratorio by that name) is indeed the term for God’s “creation” of the world as recounted in Genesis, the German verb schöpfen equally means “scooping” or “ladling”—as, for example, of water or soup—or, more generally, “drawing forth” (“pro-ducing”), and hence immanently deflates a pretense to generation of the radically new.
38. 38.  Cohn includes Karl Grunsky, August Halm, Hermann Kretzschmar, Ernst Kurth, Hans Pfitzner, Hugo Riemann, and Arnold Schering—in other words, a broad cast of the leading figures in German musicology circa 1920—as models for the incipient direction of scholarship. I am confining my discussion to an account of Cohn’s theoretical position without addressing the extent to which it is in fact born out in the models. I am skeptical, to say the least, that Cohn’s estimation of actual scholarly practice was correct.
39. 39.  Cohn, “Die Erkenntnis der Tonkunst,” 359. “. . . besagt nichts anders als ein musikalisch wertvolles Tun, gleichgültig, ob dies ein Hervorbringen oder Empfangen, ein Schaffen, Wiedergeben oder Aufnehmen ist.”
40. 40.  Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 678; quoting Scheler, Formalism in Ethics, 204.
41. 41.  Cohn, “Das Erwachen der Ästhetik,” 678.
42. 42.  Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 5–6.
43. 43.  Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Values, 105–110.
44. 44.  Scheler exercised an enormous influence on later Catholic philosophers, including most famously Karol Józef Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, who wrote his 1954 dissertation in theology on Scheler. See Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 80–100 (on Scheler), and 188–210 (on Wojtyła); and Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 116–47.
45. 45.  Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, 3–16, at 15.
46. 46.  Locke, “The New Negro,” 3–4.
47. 47.  For a related interpretation, see Leonard Harris, “Alain Locke and Community,” The Journal of Ethics 1, no. 3 (1997): 239–47, at 245, which in general also offers a succinct but substantive discussion of the interrelations among Locke’s theoretical approaches to value, race, and aesthetics.
48. 48.  Locke, “The New Negro,” 6.
49. 49.  It has been defended perhaps most influentially by Houston A. Baker, Jr., in Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 72–98. For discussion of its music historiography in particular, see Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 113–66; and Grant Olwage, “Listening B(l)ack: Paul Robeson After Roland Hayes,” The Journal of Musicology 32, no. 4 (2015): 524–57.
50. 50.  Locke, “The New Negro,” 15.
51. 51.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg 1903).
52. 52.  Locke, “The New Negro,” 4; emphasis added.
53. 53.  Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” in The New Negro, 278–98, at 297.
54. 54.  Locke, “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace” (1944), in Leonard Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 95–102.
55. 55.  Locke, “The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value or, An Outline of a Genetic System of Values” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1917).
56. 56.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives” (1935), in The Philosophy of Alain Locke, 31–50, at 34.
57. 57.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” 36.
58. 58.  For the relation to pragmatism, see Locke, “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy” (1942), and “Pluralism and Ideological Peace” (1947), in The Philosophy of Alain Locke, 51–66, and 95–102; and the assessment in Neil W. Williams, “Absolutism, Relativism, and Anarchy: Alain Locke and William James on Value Pluralism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 400–424.
59. 59.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” 37.
60. 60.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” 34 and 36.
61. 61.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” 40.
62. 62.  Locke, “Values and Imperatives,” 34.
63. 63.  Kobena Mercer, Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 5. Mercer writes further: “Locke’s core premise—that value is never intrinsic to objects or activities deemed to be socially important, but the outcome of acts of valuation that are historically conditioned and thus susceptible to change—led directly to his view that modern America’s racial identities were changeable, too” (2). This is fundamental, yet also omits the spotlight Locke places on value’s obligatory character, even amid historical change.
64. 64.  For broader background to Locke’s project, interpreting it as relatively “apolitical,” see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 129–55, at 147. For a recent defense of the continuing political promise of Locke’s aesthetic theory, see Michelle K. L. Rose, “‘His Is a Reverent Vandalism’: Alain Locke’s Aesthetics and Fugitive Democracy,” Political Theory 51, no. 4 (2023): 703–35.
65. 65.  Cecilia Sjöholm, “Arendt, Poetry and Music: On Sounding,” in Jonathan De Souza, Jessica Wiskus, and Benjamin Steege, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197577844.001.0001.
66. 66.  Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in The New Negro, 199–213, at 202–203.
67. 67.  The canonical counterpoint is Du Bois’s insistence that art perform the work of propaganda on some level. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 257–60; followed in the same volume by Locke’s response, “Art or Propaganda?” (1928), 260–61, which includes this representative formulation: “Negro things may reasonably be a fad for others; for us they must be a religion. Beauty, however, is its best priest and psalms will be more effective than sermons” (261).
68. 68.  Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” 199–200.
69. 69.  Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” 208. The point is reiterated in Locke, The Negro and His Music (Washington, DC: The Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 124. Locke quotes from Carl Van Vechten, “The Folksongs of the American Negro,” Vanity Fair (July 1, 1925): 52, 92, at 92. Van Vechten’s complaint essentially hinges on the thinly veiled suggestion that Hayes’s singing is “too white.”
70. 70.  Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” 209.
71. 71.  Locke, “A Functional View of Value Ultimates” (1945), in The Philosophy of Alain Locke, 79–93, at 91–92.