ABSTRACT. Montague Lavy holds that listening to music as sound and utterance can evoke emotion by virtue of the acoustic properties of those sounds and utterances. Kramer states that Brahms’s German Requiem’s musical imagery combines sobriety with lyricism throughout, suggesting that tragedy can be confronted truthfully without losing the possibility of consolation. On Shepherd and Wicke’s reading, music is capable of evoking, in a concrete and direct, yet mediated and symbolic fashion, the structures of the world and the states of being that flow from them and sustain them. Butt states that musicology in the west has experienced a sea-change in attitudes towards the functions and methods of the discipline.