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Music and the Emotions. Historical Review. A special connection between emotions and music, beyond any other arts. 1. The Myth of Orpheus.
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Music and the Emotions Historical Review
A special connection between emotions and music, beyond any other arts.
1. The Myth of Orpheus • Ancient Greek legendary hero, the son of a Muse, whose singing and lyre playing were so beautiful that animals and even trees and rocks moved about him in dance. • He saved a shipwreck from the seductive music of the Sirens (cf. Debussy’s Noctures) by playing his own, more powerful music.
Orpheus: Music & Emotion • His new wife Eurydice was killed by a snakebite, and he ventured himself to the land of the dead to attempt to bring her back to life. His music and grief so moved the king of the underworld that Orpheus was allowed to take Eurydice with him back to the world of life and light. • There’s one condition, however: upon leaving the land of death, both Orpheus and Eurydice were forbidden to look back. The couple climbed up toward the opening into the land of the living, and Orpheus, seeing the Sun again, turned back to share his delight with Eurydice. In that moment, she disappeared…
2. Plato & Aristotle (5–4 BC) • Theory of Ethos: each mode imitates or represents certain human expression and is capable of arousing appropriate emotion or state of character in listeners.
Plato, Republic (c380 BC) • From Speech to Song: The specific mental characteristics that assign a person to a given sort find expression in corresponding patterns of thinking; these patterns achieve utterance in characteristic forms of poetical speech, and such formal speech evokes a fitting melodic and rhythmical accompaniment. • Mimesis: To hear, and especially to perform, the resulting music will tend to re-create the originating mental characteristics, so that the student performer becomes the same sort of person as his composer-teacher. • Ethos theory: In this Platonic version of the ethos theory, the expressiveness of music reflects that of an actual or possible poetic text. This answers to the Greek practice of teaching gentlemen to accompany themselves on plucked strings, leaving wind instruments generally to low-born professionals.
Plato & Aristotle: Mimesis (imitation) • Plato stressed in the Republic the educational values of the Dorian mode (strong and virile) and warned against the softening influence of the Lydian mode (intimate and lustful). • Aristotle in his Politics suggested that music represents not the expression of emotions but emotions themselves. (cf. Schopenhauer)
3. Effect of Platonism: The Camerata (17th c.) • Florentine society of poets and musicians whose theories and musical experiments led in 1597 to the composition of the first opera, Dafne.
Effect of Platonism: The Camerata (17th c.) • They attempted to revive ancient Greek drama, in which, they felt, music and poetry were closely united. • Their efforts were important for the evolution of monody, expressive solo song with simple chordal accompaniment.
A Dispositional Theory of Musical Expressiveness Music “possesses” emotive properties to arouse emotions in listeners A Sympathy Theory of Emotive Arousal Listeners are aroused to a certain emotion by “identification.” The “Arousal” Theories
4. René Descartes (1596–1650) • French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. • Called the father of modern philosophy, he began by methodically doubting knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, then found certainty in the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the famous statement "I think, therefore I am." (“cogito, ego sum”) • Descartes attempted to unify all knowledge as the product of clear reasoning from self-evident premises.
Descartes: Physiological Psychology • A Physiological Theory of Emotive Arousal • An alternative to the sympathy theory • The Passions of the Soul, 1649 • Vital spirits, a fluid medium connecting the brain with the senses of the body, configured to arouse the six basic emotions (wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness). • Composers write music that match the physiological mechanisms of the human body will thereby arouse the corresponding emotions in the listeners.
Descartes: Physiological Psychology • The Passions of the Soul, 1649 • Vital spirits, a fluid medium connecting the brain with the senses of the body, configured to arouse the six basic emotions (wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness). • Composers write music that match the physiological mechanisms of the human body will thereby arouse the corresponding emotions in the listeners.
A Dispositional Theory of Musical Expressiveness Music “possesses” emotive properties to arouse emotions in listeners A Sympathy Theory of Emotive Arousal Listeners are aroused to a certain emotion by “identification.” A Physiological Theory of Emotive Arousal Listeners are aroused to a certain emotion by physiological mechanisms The “Arousal” Theories
5. Major Breakthrough: Emotions in the Music • Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 1819 • Science, which investigates this world, cannot itself penetrate the real world behind appearances, which is dominated by a strong, blind, striving, universal cosmic Will that expresses itself in the vagaries of human instinct, and in the wild uncertainties of all animal behaviour.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) • German philosopher, often called the "philosopher of pessimism.“ • Important as the exponent of the irrational impulses of life arising from the will. • His writings influenced later existential philosophy and Freudian psychology.
Schopenhauer: Emotions in the Music • Above all arts, music is a representation, a “direct copy,” of the cosmic Will and human emotions. • The emotions music is heard to be expressive of, move from the listener into the music, as representational properties. (cf. Aristotle) • From “pleasant sound” to “the will”: Music, pure instrumental music, is thus elevated from the lowly status of the 18th century to the Romantic art in the 19th century.
Romantic The word romantic derives from the romance [Fr. roman], a long narrative in prose or verse that arose in the Middle Ages and was the principal antecedent of the novel. Having no counterpart in Classical literature, the romance remained free of the limits and rules imposed on most literary genres with the revival of the Classical literary tradition in the Renaissance. Romantic thus came to signify freedom from the Classical tradition and, in its place, the uncontrolled play of the individual creative imagination, with resulting connotations of the highly idiosyncratic and even the fantastic.
