Jenefer Robinson

The Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music

This essay is about the relation between the expression and the arousal of emotion by music. I am assuming that music frequently expresses emotional qualities and qualities of human personality such as sadness, nobility, aggressiveness, tenderness, and serenity. I am also assuming that music frequently affects us emotionally: it evokes or arouses emotions in us. My question is whether there is any connection between these two facts, whether, in particular, music ever expresses emotion by virtue of arousing emotion. Of course, what it means to say that music expresses emotion is a contentious issue and I shall not be directly addressing it here, although what I say will have implications for any theory of musical expression. Nor will I be examining all the possible contexts in which music can be said to arouse emotion. My focus in this essay will be narrower. The question I shall try to answer is this: Are the grounds on which we attribute the expression of emotion to music ever to be identified with the arousal of that same emotion in listeners?

Music and Emotions

Ever since Plato people have thought that there is an especially intimate relationship between music and the emotions, but in fact there are several such relationships. In this essay I explain how music can express emotions and arouse emotions. And although strictly speaking, music cannot represent emotions, it can tell psychological stories that lend themselves to expressive interpretations. As a philosopher, my main aim is to analyze these different relationships between emotion and music, but I also illustrate my arguments with an array of musical examples. Some people have claimed that music can represent the passions. According to the Baroque doctrine of Affektenlehre, different movements of a suite or concerto should ›represent‹ distinct emotional states such as gaiety or melancholy. The emotion ›represented‹ was often a principal means of unifying the movement. Some Baroque composers also wrote ›character pieces‹ that portray different characters or temperaments, sometimes illustrating that of their friends or the notabilities of the day. But ›representation‹ in music is not strictly representation at all. A picture can identify a specific person or thing or event, but with some minor exceptions music without the aid of a title or program or the words of a song cannot do this. All it can do is present qualities, including emotion qualities such as »cheerful« and »melancholy«, that may or may not be attributed to or characterize some specific individual. In the Romantic era, it became a commonplace that music can express emotions, whether the emotions of a character or protagonist in the music or the emotions of the composer himself. Some theorists believe that musical expressiveness is a matter of the listeners experiencing music as resembling expressive human gestures such as vocal intonations and expressive movements and behavior. On this view when we say that a piece of music is expressive of sadness, we are not saying that there is anybody around who is actually expressing any sadness. Its just that the music is experienced as sounding like or moving like a person who is sad. Others believe that when we hear music as expressive of emotion, we hear or imagine an agent or persona in the music, the ›owner‹ of the states expressed. Even some ›pure‹ instrumental music – especially some music from the Romantic era – can be heard as containing a persona who is expressing emotions. My own view is that expressing emotion in music in the full Romantic sense should be thought of as in essentials very much like the expression of emotion in ordinary life: it is primarily something that a composer or a persona in the music does or achieves, rather than primarily something detected or experienced by listeners. Finally, I turn to the question of whether and how music can arouse emotions in its listeners. In Book III of The Republic, Plato argued that the musical mode known as the »Lydian« mode should be banned from the education of future governors of the state on the grounds that it makes people lascivious and lazy, whereas the Dorian mode should be encouraged because it makes people brave and virtuous. There is now ample evidence that Plato was right to think that music affects the emotions of its listeners. There are several ways in which it does this. As Peter Kivy has remarked, listeners often get pleasure from the beauty and clever craftsmanship of a well-constructed piece of music. Leonard Meyer has shown how having certain emotions is a mode of understanding certain music. Thus when listening to a piece in sonata form, we might feel anxiety at the delayed return of the tonic, bewilderment when the keys modulate further and further from the tonic and relief when finally the tonic returns. Another way in which music arouses emotions is by getting us to respond sympathetically to emotions expressed in the music by the composer, or his surrogate in the music. Finally, there is good evidence that music arouses emotions and moods in a more direct bodily way as well, influencing the autonomic system and the motor activity of listeners. These various mechanisms of emotional arousal often function simultaneously so as to produce powerful, complex, ambiguous emotional states.

Do all musical emotions have the music itself as their intentional object

Juslin & Vastfjall (J&V) think that all emotions aroused by music have the music itself as their “intentional object.” Some of the mechanisms they discuss almost certainly involve both cognitive appraisals and intentional objects. But some of the mechanisms are non-cognitive: they involve neither cognitive appraisals nor intentional objects. Partly for this reason they may produce moods rather than emotions proper.

Bob Solomon and William James: A Rapprochement

Bob Solomon used to inveigh against William James’ theory of emotions, but he eventually arrived at a rapprochement with James and James’s recent successors. In particular, James suggested that emotions are initiated by the “automatic, instinctive” appraisals that register important information in the body and are recorded by body-mapping brain areas. In recent work Solomon describes the judgments he thinks constitute emotions as felt bodily appraisals in similar fashion.

Sentimentality in Life and Literature

In his paper “In Defense of Sentimentality” in the book of the same name, Robert Solomon aims to rehabilitate the concept of sentimentality both in life and in literature, and to defend it against its many critics. He argues that the root sense of “sentimentality” is simply “an expression of and appeal to the tender emotions” and that the most common criticisms of sentimentality as a kind of emotional affectation, falsity, or self-indulgence fail. In this paper I argue that the critics are right to say that sentimentality in real life can be ethically problematic, but that Solomon is right to say that sentimental responses to sentimental literature are (usually) ethically harmless. It’s true that sentimental literature is not usually “great literature.” Its goal is usually pleasure rather than increasing our moral understanding, and partly for this reason it may not be as aesthetically valuable as the great realist novels of George Eliot, Henry James and company. On the other hand, Solomon is quite right to argue that sentimental novels serve an important ethical function in promoting what literary scholar Robyn Warhol calls the “effeminate” virtues of tenderness and compassion.

Bob Solomon’s Legacy: Introduction

When the news broke that Bob Solomon had died suddenly in Zurich in January 2007, The International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) went into mourning. There was a huge outpouring of grief and affection for Bob on the ISRE Web site. The reason is not hard to find. Bob Solomon was not only a towering figure in contemporary emotion studies; he was much beloved. Bob was, above all, the rare philosopher who lived his own philosophy. Philosophy for him was not simply an exercise in abstract rational thought. Bob was passionately committed to the idea that the passions are the bedrock of our lives, and he devoted his life to the great figures in philosophy who shared this conviction, especially his beloved Nietzsche. He brought passionate conviction to his study of the emotions, and his stance toward the world was by and large positively valenced: he loved ideas and arguments; he was happy when eating, drinking, and conversing with friends; and he seemed to feel awe and wonder at the marvelous multiplicity of the world. But he was also enraged by stupidity and saddened by world events. He enjoyed life and he lived it to the full, and he took seriously his own view (as he wrote in his breakthrough 1976 book, The Passions) that emotions embody our deepest values and give meaning to our lives. Bob rejected the idea of emotions as disturbances of equilibrium or rational thought, as primarily states of physiological upset, or as evolutionary remnants in individuals living in a savannah. He put them in phenomenological perspective, arguing, like Sartre, that emotions are not just feelings, a reflective awareness of one’s subjective state, but that emotions are the way we engage with the world, the meanings we find in our interactions with the world. Bob’s perspective on emotion had a central message that he got from his inspiration in phenomenology and existentialism: emotions start off from events and thoughts, but the resulting judgments are not fixed by those events or thoughts, or by the values that render those events personally meaningful. As human beings we can see the interaction of events and values from an encompassing standpoint. These events and values are in a world with limitless potentialities among which an individual is free to choose. One is not just stupidly forced by them. The judgments that emotions consist of can be revised, and events can be scrutinized, against the background of more and more encompassing values. This conviction led to Bob’s emphasis on choice and the freedom to choose, even among one’s judgments and thus one’s emotions. It is this conviction that makes Bob’s vision stand out in comparison to the rest of us philosophers and psychologists, and everyone else who seeks to deal with their emotions. Events happen. To a large extent, emotions happen in response to them. But the options for revision of judgment, and the selection in confronting events, render the individual responsible for his or her emotions. One may or may not agree with this vision, but it is certainly an entrance point to “emotion regulation” of a wider scope than anywhere else in the philosophy and psychology of emotion. Even if you don’t agree with Bob with regard to taking responsibility for one’s emotions, it cannot be denied that one does face the choices that Bob outlined. As a scholar, Bob’s achievements are extraordinary: over 40 books and countless articles, as well as lectures and talks all over the world. No-one is better qualified to write on “The Joy of Philosophy,” the title of one of his books. Renowned not only as a scholar but as a much-loved teacher, happily we can still see him in action explaining existentialism in the movie Waking Life, and we can hear him on the tapes produced by The Teaching Company, lecturing on “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition,” on existentialism and the meaning of life, on Nietzsche, and on the emotions. In addition to these interests, Bob wrote and gave courses on business ethics as well as on ethics more generally, and he wrote frequently about love. Bob’s conception of love goes deeper than the usual analyses. He saw the major aim of love as a search for a shared identity, an aim that is sometimes achieved. Love thereby leads to self-discovery— who one is, what one can do, what one can or cannot want—so that love of the kind he was concerned with may lead to mutually bringing out the best in the other. He evidently knew what he was writing about: the book About Love is dedicated “for Kathleen, my patient teacher.”

Syntax, Meaning and Context: A Reply to Keenan

In a recent paper,1 Michael Keenan makes two major objections to some remarks of mine2 about Austins distinctions among phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts.3 Keenan claims that I am wrong (1) to identify the phatic act as an utterance of a meaningful English sentence, and (2) to claim that the set of phatic acts is a subset of the set of phonetic acts. In this note I shall discuss briefly each of these issues in turn.