One of the things that has particularly struck me about Roger's philosophy of music is his analysis of the way music holds together. And he talks about two things: "virtual causality" and "double intentionality". The way that a succession of elements of music hangs together — not in a cause and effect way, not in the way that the sounding of the violin produces the sound that people hear and respond to — is to me the perfect model of human action. It's closest, most obviously, to dancing. But to me it's the model of any kind of action. Double intentionality means that you perceive a piece of music, but you also perceive what's in the music. This again is a model of so many aspects of uniquely human consciousness. 

So music is important to me because in practice it overwhelms me, but also in theory because it does seem to be a beautiful paradigm of something very distinctive in human consciousness. And that's why, like the other arts, it's a model of our freedom. Because it is the most pure expression of how we act as relatively free agents in a causally closed world.

RS: I would put things a little bit differently. I'm closer to Schopenhauer here — what we hear in music I wouldn't call the will, but it is as though we are, when engrossed in music, within another person's first-person point of view. We all see the world from the first-person point of view. There is a point on the edge of things where I am, from which I embark on free projects of my own. And the same is true of you. But we see other people in a different way, as things in the world. When we listen to music, what is going on we know is not going on in the world. When melody begins in music, nothing begins in the world of sound, which consists only of sequences. But when listening to music we hear things begin and strive and come to a conclusion. That's something like the way we experience our own life, and we know that this thing into which we have been invited by the music — this movement and tension and striving — is not really part of the material world.