Peter Kivy (October 22, 1934 – May 6, 2017 ) was professor emeritus of musicology and philosophy at Rutgers University. He studied particularly the philosophy of music.

Biography

Kivy received a B.A. summa cum laude at the University of Michigan in 1956, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned an M.A. in philosophy in 1958 also from the University of Michigan, an A.M. in musicology at Yale University in 1960, and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966. He first taught at Brooklyn College from 1966–67, He then joined the faculty at Rutgers, first at the Newark campus, where he became full professor in 1976, and then in 1978 moved to the university's main campus, in New Brunswick. He taught there for the remainder of his career, except for one year as a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. His early work was on the 18th-century British aesthetics, primarily Francis Hutcheson. From the late 1970s on, he had been interested mainly in philosophy of music. His book The Corded Shell made him a central figure in musical aesthetics. One preoccupation of his had been the problem of what it means for instrumental music to "express" an emotion. His answer is that common emotions have physical behavioral expression in people that can be understood by appearance and imitated in music; thus, music cannot express more complex emotions that do not have an obvious behavioral expression. A similar position is developed independently by Stephen Davies. Some criticism of Kivy's ideas is available in Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (2007) by Andrew Bowie and ''Filosofía de la Música. Respuestas a Peter Kivy'' (2017, published in Spanish by Daniel Martín Sáez) by James O. Young.

Books