 A similar problem arises when we consider our responses to music. We sometimes talk of sad music making us sad, though the music does not provide us with any reason for thinking that something sad has happened (sad music sometimes reminds us of a sad event, but this is not a general feature of cases where sad music affects us). Here appeal to the imagination seems less helpful; unlike fictional narratives, emotionally affecting music does not usually provide us with the materials for imagining some sad event. Kivy has argued that sadness on the part of those who listen to sad music is, where it occurs, irrelevant to musical appreciation and will indeed not occur in episodes of listening which instantiate his preferred model of musical listening, one which requires exclusive attention to the structural, phenomenological, and expressive properties of the music (1990: ch. 8). Kivy does not deny however that musical listening can and indeed should be a deeply emotional experience; we may be overwhelmed by the compositional and performance qualities the work represents. Some attempt has been made to challenge Kivy on empirical grounds by presenting evidence that music does reliable engender the emotions or moods it expresses (Sizer 2007). But Kivy denied this possibility only for the case of canonical music listening, and says that there is no reason to think that subjects in the relevant experiments were listening in that canonical way (2007). Certainly it would not be easy to control experimental conditions so as to rule-out listening which is non-canonical in Kivy’s sense (see also Kivy 2006; Carroll 2003; Carroll &amp; Moore 2007). However, if experimental tests do consistently provide evidence of emotion-generation concordant with the emotions expressed by the music, it will not do simply to say that we have not yet tested the right listeners. The friend of Kivy will have to find robust instances of the sort of listening he approves of, and not depend merely on the personal testimony of those who favour his theory. We take it, after all, that Kivy’s ideal mode of listening is presented as a practically achievable goal. Zangwill 2004 represents a formalism that is less willing to accommodate the emotions; for a more limited defence of the formalist position see Cochrane 2021b.