When asked to describe what music means to them, most people talk about its power to express or elicit emotions. As a melody can produce a tear, tingle the spine, or energize athletes, music has a deep impact on how we experience and encounter the world. Because of the elusiveness of these musical emotions, however, little has been written about how music creates emotions and how musical emotion has changed its meaning for listeners across the last millennium. In this sweeping landmark study, author Michael Spitzer provides the first history of musical emotion in the Western world, from Gregorian chant to Beyoncé. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, A History of Emotion in Western Music introduces current approaches to the study of emotion and formulates an original theory of how musical emotion works. Diverging from psychological approaches that center listeners' self-reports or artificial experiments, Spitzer argues that musical emotions can be uncovered in the techniques and materials of composers and performers. Together with its extensive chronicle of the historical evolution of musical style and emotion, this book offers a rich union of theory and history.
"This book is the first history of musical emotion in any language. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy and cognitive psychology, it unfolds a history of musical emotion across a thousand years of Western art music, from chant to pop. It affords a new way of analysing music, revealing the relationship between emotion and musical structure. The book also provides an introduction to the latest approaches to emotion research, as well as an original theory of how musical emotion works. The book is disposed in two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) comprises the theoretical foundation of the book. Part 2 (chapters 5-9) provides an historical narrative from medieval to contemporary music. Chapter 1 summarizes contemporary theories of emotion in general, and of musical emotion in particular, bringing together seminal philosophers and psychologists. Chapter 2 contains the core of the book's original thesis: that five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, tenderness, and fear) constitute five categories of musical emotion throughout the common-practice period. Chapter 3 outlines a variety of complex musical emotions, such as wonder, nostalgia, envy, and disgust. Chapter 4 explores the historiography of emotion, including the seminal writings of Elias, Rosenwein, and Reddy. Part 2 of the book (chapters 5-9) explores a millennium of Western music in terms of shifting categories of emotion: from affections and passions through sentiments, emotions proper, to modern affect"--
Juxtaposing artistic and musical representations of the emotions with medical, philosophical and scientific texts in Western culture between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, the essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which emotions have been variously conceived, configured, represented and harnessed in relation to broader discourses of control, excess and refinement. Since the essays explore the interstices between disciplines (e.g. music and medicine, history of art and philosophy) and thereby disrupt established frameworks within the histories of art, music and medicine, traditional narrative accounts are challenged. Here larger historical forces come into perspective, as these papers suggest how both artistic and scientific representations of the emotions have been put to use in political, social and religious struggles, at a variety of different levels.
How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.
Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, or an inescapably embodied human practice, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. In turn, musicians of all stripes have called on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it. In this Handbook, contributors build on this legacy to conceptualize the rich interactions of Western music and philosophy as a series of meeting points between two vital spheres of human activity. They draw together key debates at the intersection of music studies and philosophy, offering a field-defining overview while also forging new paths. Chapters cover a wide range of musics and philosophies, including concert, popular, jazz, and electronic musics, and both analytic and continental philosophy.
This book explores the ways in which four visual artists make sense of referentialism and emotion in music. By listening to five art songs by Schubert, Strauss, Fauré and Berlioz they were inspired to create new artworks as a result of their understanding of the meaning of the art songs. This was done without an understanding of the text, and the artists had to rely on referential meaning in music as well as the perceived or evoked emotions elicited by listening to the art songs. The artworks created as a result of this project were exhibited at the Aardklop National Arts Festival, entitled Nagmusiek. This was a multi-modal exhibition featuring music, art and text. This book employs Artistic Research and Phenomenology in order to understand this phenomenon, as I explored the artists’ creative processes, experiences and the tacit knowledge embedded in their artefacts. This book would provide readers access to 20 new artworks, each created as a result of the artists’ interpretation of the meaning they ascribed to art song. Their creative process is also examined and synthesised with existing literature on emotion and referentialism in music.
"Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects (composers, musicians, listeners) in the long European seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon early-modern bodies, described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, miraculous, and encompassing "the circulation of the humors, purification of the blood, dilation of the vessels and pores. In asking what this all meant at the time, the author considers musical scores and their surrounding texts as "somatic scripts" that afford a range of somatic actions and reactions and can give us a glimpse into the historical embodied experience of organized sound. Starting from the Lutheran hymns and their accompanying intellectual traditions and ritual practices in German-speaking lands, the book moves with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, domestic and public settings in order to sketch a "physiology of music" that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performing practices and that sheds unprecedented light on how subjectivity was embodied through sound in early-modern Europe"--
Roma Music and Emotion is an important work of scholarship at the intersection of ethnomusicology and anthropology, combining long-term field research with hypotheses from the cognitive sciences to illustrate the musical world of the Roma of Transylvania and, in so doing, propose a groundbreaking anthropological theory on the emotional power of music.
Explores the use of music as therapy and shows how it operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, undergoing change in response to broader cultural and religious movements.This book explores connections between the physical care of the sick based on the study of medicine, concepts of healing founded on religious thought, and the practice of music at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito (Hospital of the Holy Spirit) in Rome. The hospital was a unique institution that was regulated by the Roman Catholic Church but simultaneously reflected the significant shifts in scientific thought emerging during the period that coincided with post-Tridentine reforms in the church.The volume discusses the hospital''s foundation, architecture and links with the papacy. It also reflects on the then acceptable "ways of knowing" informed by religious concerns and medical traditions. The tripartite relationship between religion, medicine and music within the institution was complex. At times they existed side-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web. Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which engage defensive reflexes); tension responses (where uncertainty leads to stress); prediction responses (which reward accurate prediction); imagination responses (which facilitate deferred gratification); and appraisal responses (which occur after conscious thought is engaged). For real-world events, these five response systems typically produce a complex mixture of feelings. The book identifies some of the aesthetic possibilities afforded by expectation, and shows how common musical devices (such as syncopation, cadence, meter, tonality, and climax) exploit the psychological opportunities. The theory also provides new insights into the physiological psychology of awe, laughter, and spine-tingling chills. Huron traces the psychology of expectations from the patterns of the physical/cultural world through imperfectly learned heuristics used to predict that world to the phenomenal qualia we experienced as we apprehend the world.
