Music, Meaning, and Emotion

Abstract

I. EMOTION AS MUSICAL MEANING lament. On the face of it, it is hard to see what might give rise to any such sense of mismatch Although the issue of the emotional significance other than the conviction that cheeriness or sadof music hardly exhausts the question of musical ness are (in some sense) no less features of the meaning as such, since music can clearly be jingle and the lament than irritation or hysteria meaningful in respects that have little to do with are states of this or that auditor. the expression of feeling, the conviction that That said, it is arguable that the wide divermusic has meaning at least partly by virtue of its sity of ancient and modem theories that have emotional associations remains compelling. The been advanced to explain the relationship prime source of this idea is surely the common between music and emotion is largely a consehuman experience of being moved by certain quence of tensions between these two basic kinds of musical productions: of being cheered intuitions. At one extreme, those theories that or uplifted by music that we are (perhaps place most of the weight on emotion as a perthereby) inclined to call joyful, gay, or witty, or sonal or subjective response to music, conexperiencing more melancholy or somber feelsidered as in itself no more than a feelingless ings in the presence of music we are prone to object or event, are inclined to regard the call sad. To be sure, this first thought is clearly music-emotion relationship as a purely causal too simple, insofar as it has been rightly or contingent one. Music arouses happy, sad, or observed that the feelings aroused by sad or other feelings, and has emotional significance, happy music are by no means themselves necesonly in the way that charging bulls arouse fear: sarily sad or happy.1 Indeed, many of us are indeed, since bulls are at least sentient whereas daily driven to extremes of annoyance or irritamusic is clearly not, it makes even less sense to tion by advertising or telephone queue-holding conceive of the music as actually sad or happy jingles that have quite the opposite of their than it does to think of the bull as fearful. Howclearly intended amusing or uplifting effect. ever, this view precisely attracts the objection If anything, however, this observation may that since we are often struck by the incongruity serve to reinforce rather than undermine a of feeling inappropriate emotional responses to second key intuition about music and emotion: music that we are otherwise inclined to describe that the emotional properties we are inclined to as sad or happy, it seems difficult to get entirely take this or that piece of music to express are away from the idea that the music is objectively nevertheless properties of the music rather than sad or happy, irrespective of how we happen to of our own mental states. If I am chased by a feel. bull in a field, I would not normally attribute At the opposite extreme, however, theories any terror I feel to the bull: but one powerful that try to explain why we regard emotional reason for ascribing the joy or sadness of this or qualities as inherent properties of the music are that musical work to the music rather than to often drawn toward some kind of representamyself may be the sense of incongruity I feel at tional view. It may also be that any idea that being irritated by that cheery tune or driven to music might represent or symbolize emotion extremes of helpless hilarity by that bagpipe derives some comfort from the thought that we

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.