When the world doesn’t seem to make sense, many of us turn to music. Some philosophers see it as a contentless abstraction that simply elicits an emotional response in us. But music isn’t just beautiful noise. It carries with it meaning and significance that as listeners we’re always interpreting. Schopenhauer was right: music has a meaning that escapes ordinary language. It can connect us to the world and help us make sense of it in ways that no philosophical discourse can, argues Andrew Bowie.

One of the ways I have coped with the pandemic has been through listening ever more intensively to music. The piece I often returned to was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, not least because, like so much Beethoven, it makes sense out of adversity, in ways that just thinking about adversity as a philosopher often doesn’t.

The initial sense any music makes is inherent in the fact that it is not heard just as noise but engages us in specific ways that other sounds do not. Musical experiences enable us to connect with the world in new ways, by giving a unique quality to the experience of time, to shifts in mood and to the way patterns and forms relate to emotions.