Is it not possible that the mysterious thing that Hanslick refers to is the emotional content that Kivy refers to? Granted, it is someone hard to believe that something like a willow tree actually contains sadness, but then it comes down to what exactly Kivy means by this, which isn't exactly clear. Does he mean that a willow tree contains the "essence" of sadness inside of it? I seriously doubt this, and I think it is foolish to take the concept that a willow tree "is" sad too far. This is not something which can be taken literally, for to do so is just being silly.
No, what I take from this is that the willow tree being the way that it is provokes a natural instinct within us that we thus conceive as sadness. Therefore, the willow tree naturally contains sadness within it to humans, and to make the argument that because it all rides on human perception is a factor is a good argument, but at the same time, humans are the only ones who attempt to perceive such notions in the first place. I have not heard of any bird philosophers, or tree philosophers, or anything of the like. Aesthetics is a purely human notion, and therefore the willow tree containing sadness is a purely human notion, but that does not dismiss the idea that it contains sadness within it.
True, that the willow tree has no intent of being sad, but because it provokes such an emotion it has a sad quality which makes it sad. Because humans can relate the willow tree to sadness going off of nothing besides looking at the tree, the willow tree, according to humans, is sad. And who can say this is wrong? Who has ever looked at a willow tree and not once thought that it looked sad? In this sense, we can take Kivy's notion of "emotional content" and say that is what Hanslick is refering to in that mysterious thing in music, for in this case, how is the willow tree different from music? If we cannot apply sadness to a tree, why not a song?
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