Music and the Emotions

The Philosophical Theories

Malcolm Budd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138134690
• eBook ISBN: 9781134882106
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

It has often been claimed, and frequently denied, that music derives some or all of its artistic value from the relation in which it stands to the emotions. This book presents and subjects to critical examination the chief theories about the relationship between the art of music and the emotions.

NOTES

I THE EMOTIONS

1 See Aristotle’s definition of the class of emotions and also his definitions of the individual emotions anger, fear, shame, pity, indignation, envy and emulation in his Rhetoric, 1378a19–22, 1378a30–2, 1382a21–2, 1382b14–6, 1385b13–6, 1386b11, 1387a9, 1386b17–20, 1387b20–2, 1388a30–4. His (rough) definition of the class of emotions involves a reference to pleasure and pain, and each of his definitions of the individual emotions involves a reference to a thought experienced with pleasure or pain.

2 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (London, 1962), pp. 71–2.

3 For the distinction between immediate and long-term wants see Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London, 1963), p. 124.

4 Compare R.G.Collingwood’s view that emotion can be a charge either on a sensum or on a mode of consciousness. See The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1960), p. 162, pp. 231–2.

5 See C.D.Broad’s definition of the concept of extensive magnitude in his Kant, An Introduction (Cambridge, 1978), p. 149.

II THE REPUDIATION OF EMOTION

1 Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (London and New York, 1891).

2 The thesis that the beauty of music is specifically musical does not follow solely from the thesis that musical value is unrelated to the emotions. For musical value might be related to some other extramusical phenomenon. But Hanslick believes that the most significant opposition to the view that the beauty of music is specifically musical stems from the idea that the musical value of a work is in some way a function of the emotions.

3 The Beautiful in Music, pp. 11, 18, 32f.

4 The Beautiful in Music, pp. 33–5.

5 The Beautiful in Music, p. 34.

6 The Beautiful in Music, p. 19.

7 The Beautiful in Music, p. 37.

8 See, for instance, The Beautiful in Music, pp. 37–8. This is also what Hanslick is concerned with in his discussion of music’s ability to depict other kinds of natural phenomena.

9 I am here concerned only with the matter of copying features of the emotions themselves and I am ignoring the possibility of copying features of phenomena other than the emotions but which are intimately linked to the emotions. For an excellent discussion of the possibility of copying features of the natural expressions of the emotions in bodily movement and the human voice, see Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London, 1880), Chapters XIV, XXI.

10 See The Beautiful in Music, Chapter VII. In one place Hanslick asserts that the ‘aesthetic inquirer’, confining himself to what the music itself contains, ‘will…detect in Beethoven’s Symphonies impetuousness and struggling, an unsatisfied longing and a defiance, supported by a consciousness of strength’ (pp. 87–8). But he fails to integrate this thought into his theory that the beauty of music is specifically musical, and that the most that music can do is to reflect the dynamic properties of feelings.

11 See Chapter V.

12 The Beautiful in Music, pp. 56f.

13 The Beautiful in Music, pp. 18–27, 107f., Chapter V.

14 See, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1960), p. 178.

15 Compare the argument developed in the fourth and fifth sections of Chapter VII.

16 I return to the issue of the musical arousal of definite extramusical emotions in Chapters IV and VII.

17 Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound.

18 Leonard B.Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956).

19 See Chapters IV and VIII.

20 The ascription to music of emotional qualities is an instance of a more general phenomenon: the ascription to music of essentially human or animal characteristics. To establish that the beauty of music is specifically musical it would be necessary to extend the account Hanslick advances of the ascription of emotional qualities to music to the ascription of any features that might be thought integral to the value of music and which apparently involve a reference to what are essentially human characteristics. It is clear that Hanslick insists on such an extension.

21 The Beautiful in Music, pp. 74–5.

22 But see the fourth section of Chapter III.

23 This is only one possibility. For others, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 129–41.

24 I.A.Richards, Practical Criticism (London, 1964), pp. 221–2.

25 See J.O.Urmson, ‘Representation in Music’ in Philosophy and the Arts, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 1971–2 (London, 1973). The only difference between this thesis and Hanslick’s position is that whereas the thesis is unspecific as to the kind of purely audible feature that emotion terms are used to attribute to music, Hanslick’s position maintains that they attribute dynamic features.

26 This claim is also a presupposition of Nelson Goodman’s theory of expression as applied to music. See ‘Some Notes on Languages of Art’ in his Problems and Projects (Indianapolis and New York, 1972). In my view there is no reason to believe the presupposition of the purely sensible description thesis that there must be some description in purely audible terms that is satisfied by each sad melody and by no non-sad melody.

27 See O.K.Bouwsma, ‘The Expression Theory of Art’ in Philosophical Analysis, edited by Max Black (Ithaca, 1950).

28 The denial of this possibility seems sometimes to arise from a conflation of the grounds of justification for the transferred use of the word with what is to be understood by the application of the word in the new context.

III MOTION AND EMOTION IN MUSIC

1 Carroll C.Pratt, The Meaning of Music (New York, 1931), pp. 157f.

2 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume III (London, 1856), Chapter XII.

3 The Meaning of Music, p. 184.

4 Even if movement need not be continuous—so that an object could change its position without tracing a continuous path between its different positions—an object moves from A to B only if it is first at A and then at B.

5 ‘…in addition to the purely qualitative pitch-character by which tones are readily placed with respect to each other along a scale there may be discovered an intrinsic spatial character in tones The Meaning of Music, p. 54.

6 Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London, 1880), p. 139..

7 The Power of Sound, pp. 139–40.

8 Differently coloured patches of paint on a canvas can be seen as at different distances from the plane of the canvas. But this does not imply that the experience of seeing colours does provide a proper parallel to the experience of pitch. For (i) the sense in which one colour can be seen as behind another colour is not the same as that in which one note can be heard as higher or lower than another, and (ii) difference in pitch is difference in distance and direction: difference in colour is difference in kind which may in addition involve perceived differences in distance.

9 There are many respects in which the analogy fails to hold. For example: more than one sound (with the same timbre) can have the same pitch at the same time but not more than one chair can occupy the same spot at the same time; two sounds of different pitch cannot change their distance apart unless one of them changes intrinsically (namely, with respect to pitch), whereas two chairs can change their distance apart without either of them changing intrinsically.

10 It will be clear from what I have said that the words ‘up’ and ‘down’, and their relatives ‘high’ and ‘low’ and the comparative forms of these words, are not needed in the description of the material of music. When the predicate ‘is higher than’ is used...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• I: THE EMOTIONS
• II: THE REPUDIATION OF EMOTION
• III: MOTION AND EMOTION IN MUSIC
• IV: SEXUAL EMOTION IN IDEAL MOTION
• V: THE WORLD AS EMBODIED MUSIC
• VI: MUSIC AS UNCONSUMMATED SYMBOL
• VII: MUSIC AS THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTION
• VIII: MEANING, EMOTION AND INFORMATION IN MUSIC
• SUMMARY CONCLUSION
• NOTES