Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's opinion. It is the title of an essay by Ji Kang, written in the third century.
Ji Kang (223–262) was one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a great guqin player and a man who refused office under the powerful clan that ruled in his time. He was executed, and the story is that he asked for his qin and played one last piece before he died.
His essay is a dialogue between a guest from Qin, who holds the Confucian view that music expresses and shapes feeling, and a host who argues the opposite. The host's main points, as I understand them: sounds have their own qualities, harmonious or not, as tastes have sweet and bitter; sorrow and joy are already in the listener's heart, and music only draws them out. That is why the same tune can make one person weep and another laugh.
I recently learned that in Europe Eduard Hanslick made a similar argument in 1854. Music is "tonally moving forms", and the feelings belong to the listener, not the music.
Are these really the same position? I suspect not quite. Ji Kang seems to accept that music releases feeling, while Hanslick seems to want it kept out of the analysis entirely. I would like to hear from people who know either side better.