Welcome everyone! With this first blog-post I begin to introduce my new "Big Theory of Music"--a new moral science of music. I've been working on it for about 15 years, and the theory is finally complete and ready to publish. But I am only putting some teaser-posts here on my blog--the rest of the theory will be shared with subscribers. So please join the discussion and get the inside scoop; be the first to hear these new ideas by joining today.
The Problem of Musical Emotion
A central problem of the esthetics of music is the question of emotion. We say this piece of music is joyous and that one melancholy. But what does that mean? What is our basis for such identifications?
To put the question more broadly: What is the nature of musical expression? What is the nature of man's response to music and in what way does it involve emotion? What does music do to man's consciousness to make him identify it as joyous or sad? What does it mean to say that music arouses emotion?
A normal emotion, unlike a musically aroused one, is a response to some object in the world which one estimates as being beneficial or harmful to oneself. Suppose a man starts his own business and is successful at it, and feels joy and pride in his achievement. If he asks himself why he feels that way, introspection tells him that the cause of the emotion is his awareness of his real, tangible success, which he rightly estimates as being a result of his good qualities and as being a tremendous value and positive improvement of his life.
Or, suppose a man hears the news that a loved one died, and then feels grief, pain, longing. If he asks himself why he feels that way, introspection tells him that the cause of the emotion is his awareness of the fact that he suffered a real loss with the death of the loved person; he knows that since the person is no longer part of his life, his life is diminished.
But if you listen to the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, and feel its joy, and ask yourself: "Why do I feel joyful?" the only answer is: "The music made me feel it." If you listen to Chopin's Funeral March and ask yourself where the feeling of solemn grief comes from, the only answer is: "It comes from the music." Unlike normal emotion, introspection does not reveal the cause of musically aroused emotion.
Musically aroused emotions are different from normal ones in that they are not the result of benefit or harm to one's values in the world. A joyful piece of music does not evoke joy by making the listener into a successful businessman or by making the woman he loves accept his marriage proposal. A somber dirge does not evoke its emotion by causing the death any of any loved one, nor does it cause the loss of any other value in your life. To hear a piece of music does not alter one's career, or spouse, or friends, or hobby, or anything else in the world that one cares about.
But if music does not do that, then how can it possibly arouse emotions, which are value-experiences? If musical perception is not a response to some particular value or disvalue, to some real benefit or harm to one's life, then how on earth does it make us feel anything at all? If musically generated emotion is so crucially different from normal emotion, what basis do we have for regarding it as emotional at all?
What, in the first place, is the basis for subsuming under the same concept on the one hand the experiences of normal emotions – responses to the actual benefit or harm of one's values in the world – and on the other hand musically-aroused emotions, which are neither a cause, nor an effect, of changes to the listener's existing values? Why do we refer to both experiences as "emotion"? Why do we name as "joy" both the inner experience one has when life is going well, and when one hears the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite? The two experiences seem to be irreducibly different in kind.
The dilemma or paradox of this question led to the school of esthetic thought called Formalism, which concludes that there is no valid application of the concept "emotion" to music after all. Formalism holds that musical emotion is a sort of lowbrow, common-man's oversimplification or prejudice which flies in the face of science and logic. Since musical emotion, in this view, is nothing more than a tradition based in ignorance, it must be thrown out as arbitrary - as Subjective.
But is it true that emotion is no feature of man's response to music? Our inability to explain the experience doesn't mean that it isn't there.
We need not throw our hands up and declare the problem insoluble. Rather, we need to discover what is objectively common between normal and musical emotions.
To put the question more broadly: What is the nature of musical expression? What is the nature of man's response to music and in what way does it involve emotion? What does music do to man's consciousness to make him identify it as joyous or sad? What does it mean to say that music arouses emotion?
A normal emotion, unlike a musically aroused one, is a response to some object in the world which one estimates as being beneficial or harmful to oneself. Suppose a man starts his own business and is successful at it, and feels joy and pride in his achievement. If he asks himself why he feels that way, introspection tells him that the cause of the emotion is his awareness of his real, tangible success, which he rightly estimates as being a result of his good qualities and as being a tremendous value and positive improvement of his life.
Or, suppose a man hears the news that a loved one died, and then feels grief, pain, longing. If he asks himself why he feels that way, introspection tells him that the cause of the emotion is his awareness of the fact that he suffered a real loss with the death of the loved person; he knows that since the person is no longer part of his life, his life is diminished.
But if you listen to the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, and feel its joy, and ask yourself: "Why do I feel joyful?" the only answer is: "The music made me feel it." If you listen to Chopin's Funeral March and ask yourself where the feeling of solemn grief comes from, the only answer is: "It comes from the music." Unlike normal emotion, introspection does not reveal the cause of musically aroused emotion.
Musically aroused emotions are different from normal ones in that they are not the result of benefit or harm to one's values in the world. A joyful piece of music does not evoke joy by making the listener into a successful businessman or by making the woman he loves accept his marriage proposal. A somber dirge does not evoke its emotion by causing the death any of any loved one, nor does it cause the loss of any other value in your life. To hear a piece of music does not alter one's career, or spouse, or friends, or hobby, or anything else in the world that one cares about.
But if music does not do that, then how can it possibly arouse emotions, which are value-experiences? If musical perception is not a response to some particular value or disvalue, to some real benefit or harm to one's life, then how on earth does it make us feel anything at all? If musically generated emotion is so crucially different from normal emotion, what basis do we have for regarding it as emotional at all?
What, in the first place, is the basis for subsuming under the same concept on the one hand the experiences of normal emotions – responses to the actual benefit or harm of one's values in the world – and on the other hand musically-aroused emotions, which are neither a cause, nor an effect, of changes to the listener's existing values? Why do we refer to both experiences as "emotion"? Why do we name as "joy" both the inner experience one has when life is going well, and when one hears the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite? The two experiences seem to be irreducibly different in kind.
The dilemma or paradox of this question led to the school of esthetic thought called Formalism, which concludes that there is no valid application of the concept "emotion" to music after all. Formalism holds that musical emotion is a sort of lowbrow, common-man's oversimplification or prejudice which flies in the face of science and logic. Since musical emotion, in this view, is nothing more than a tradition based in ignorance, it must be thrown out as arbitrary - as Subjective.
But is it true that emotion is no feature of man's response to music? Our inability to explain the experience doesn't mean that it isn't there.
We need not throw our hands up and declare the problem insoluble. Rather, we need to discover what is objectively common between normal and musical emotions.
To find out more about MZJ's theory of music, subscribe to the CTA Forum.
RSS Feed