Abstract
Mechner’s advocacy of interrelating beauty, music, and behavior reunites themes from the earliest stages of the development of behavior analysis. This reunification occurs after a long hiatus during which molar behaviorism emphasized averaging over moment-to-moment behaving and deemphasized moment-to-moment behaving itself. Molar behaviorism cannot meaningfully address many of the musical themes Mechner analyses. Interpretations of musical behaving and other complex behaviors like volition in terms of average behavior encourages focusing on steady-state behavior and discourages focusing on shaping. The resulting problem is clear if we remember that we do not hear molar (average) musical behavior, so to examine the aesthetic qualities of molar musical behavior is conceptually impossible. The solution is to develop more powerful and more general shaping methods for moment-to-moment musical performance.