# Do we hear the composers emotional intentions because we are told what we should hear



## EvaBaron (Jan 3, 2022)

I recently watched some of the Keeping Score documentaries including the one about Shostakovich’s 5th symphony. I was interested so later I looked it up and got some info on some other sites as well as this one. What I understand from the information, the west thought the finale of the 5th symphony was heroic and praising of Stalin and his regime until Solomon Volkov published his book after Shostakovich’s death titled ‘Testimony’. After that the sarcastic undertone was attributed to this symphony at least in the west from what I understand. It’s worth mentioning that we are not sure what is accurate and what is not in Volkov’s book, but the general consensus is that the book is at least not a 100% accurate. It at least got me thinking about composers emotional intentions. Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we’re being told it’s there? It’s a very interesting topic and I’m curious what do you think. Shostakovich’s 5th is a very good example of course, but feel free to talk about this subject in general.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Try listening to these, without thinking about the stories behind their composition:








Also, there's a similar topic;


hammeredklavier said:


> I agree with Eddie for the most part, however, with certain masterpieces, it's still interesting to imagine what was going on in the composers' minds, based on the circumstances they were facing at the time of their composition. For example, Schubert string quartet "Death and the Maiden" was composed in 1824, after the composer suffered a serious illness and realized that he was dying. Étude Op. 10, No. 12 (Chopin) appeared around the same time as the November Uprising in 1831. Upon the conclusion of Poland's failed revolution against Russia, he cried, "All this has caused me much pain. Who could have foreseen it?"
> 
> Also, speaking of requiems,
> "On the very eve of his death, [Mozart] had the score of the Requiem brought to his bed, and himself (it was two o'clock in the afternoon) sang the alto part; Schack, the family friend, sang the soprano line, as he had always previously done, Hofer, Mozart's brother-in-law, took the tenor, Gerl, later a bass singer at the Mannheim Theater, the bass. They were at the first bars of the Lacrimosa when Mozart began to weep bitterly, laid the score on one side, and eleven hours later, at one o'clock in the morning (of 5 December 1791, as is well known), departed this life.
> ...


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I first heard the Shostakovich Fifth when I was about 17, live in Symphony Hall. I knew nether the work nor the composer, and although I enjoyed it (esp the sardonic Mahller-iike scherzo), I thought then, and think still, that it was a parody of something Stalin would like. This was back in 1967 -- pre-Volkov -- so either I was prescient, or able to judge for myself. :=)


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

With some composers yes.


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## Ariasexta (Jul 3, 2010)

I can not be less interested in the emotional intentions in a classical music piece, your question is surprising in terms of reflecting upon ones own listening tendencies taken for granted. Yea, I even hate those works(both classical and rock) with too much common and apparent emotional reverbrations. I value elation in music more, like the sense of resilience and elasticity.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

EvaBaron said:


> Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we're being told it's there?


If you have to be told what the emotional content is then the composer failed, or the performer did, or maybe the listener just isn't able to receive the message. My wife is no classical nut, but every now and then she reacts to something she hasn't heard in a way that the composer intended - it's gratifying. Most recently I had the Prokofieff Romeo and Juliet on. After the closing scene she pops is and aksed "who died?" Very perceptive.


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## Tarneem (Jan 3, 2022)

Shostakovich is a very interesting figure in classical music. I remember that I used to adore his 9th symphony. and when I listen to its 1st movement I imagine campers cheerfully marching through mountains and forests. But when I realized that the symphony is a sarcastic comment over the "victory" that was achieved by Stalin in WW2. I stopped listening to it. it's too overwhelming and tragic.



EvaBaron said:


> Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we're being told it's there? It's a very interesting topic and I'm curious what do you think.


this is a very interesting question and cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. catching the "underlying emotional undertone" is a skill that can be got by experience and by research, but there is something that perhaps you need to keep in your mind that the early compositions of a composer tend to be straightforward. But the composer's late compositions tend to have multiple layers. listen to Brahms 1st and 4th symphony and hopefully you get what I mean lol


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

I don't care about anything the composer intended but the music itself, which does not and cannot contain emotions. My experience of listening to a piece of music undoubtedly features emotion very strongly, yet that is all coming from me and quite reflexively.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

I think Shostakovich is an infamous example of people really, really liking to read biographical details into his work, though quite a few things written about Beethoven symphonies have applied here. I generally try to avoid biographical-based analysis of art, especially since in a lot of cases (especially with Shostakovich) there is some disagreement over which aspects of the commonly held biographical wisdom are true.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

EvaBaron said:


> I recently watched some of the Keeping Score documentaries including the one about Shostakovich's 5th symphony. I was interested so later I looked it up and got some info on some other sites as well as this one. What I understand from the information, the west thought the finale of the 5th symphony was heroic and praising of Stalin and his regime until Solomon Volkov published his book after Shostakovich's death titled 'Testimony'. After that the sarcastic undertone was attributed to this symphony at least in the west from what I understand. It's worth mentioning that we are not sure what is accurate and what is not in Volkov's book, but the *general consensus is that the book is at least not a 100% accurate.* It at least got me thinking about composers emotional intentions. Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we're being told it's there? It's a very interesting topic and I'm curious what do you think. Shostakovich's 5th is a very good example of course, but feel free to talk about this subject in general.


Accuracy, whatever that means, isn't the issue with Testimony. The book is a fraud; Volkov's claim that it is a word for word transcription of Shostakovich's spoken words in conversation with Volkov has been demonstrated to be false. It's impossible to know which, if any, of the words in Testimony were spoken by Shostakovich. Nothing in the book can be assumed to be authentic unless it is corroborated in a reliable source.



Crudblud said:


> I don't care about anything the composer intended but the music itself, which does not and *cannot contain emotions.* My experience of listening to a piece of music undoubtedly features emotion very strongly, yet that is all coming from me and quite reflexively.


I don't know what you mean by contain, but nearly everyone in musical aesthetics believes it can express emotions or, more accurately, IMO, metaphorically exemplify them.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I think a large part of this is about what a composer is aiming at, in an aesthetic sense. As a listener, I'm often interested in what inspired them, what their goals where and how they worked to realise them.

The manner of emotional expression in music can be seen as moving along a spectrum, going from the subjective to the objective. Among composers of the 20th century, I think that Shostakovich, Rachmaninov and Schoenberg are more on the subjective side. I'd count Satie, Debussy and Stravinsky as being more on the objective side. Many composers are harder to place, and would be somewhere in between.

In a literal sense, music is just a series of sounds. However, music comes out of somewhere, it is part of something bigger - call it community, civilisation, culture - so considering things like aesthetics, biography and context is going to be part of how at least some listeners approach it.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I agree with Crudblud.

Unless there is a text, i.e. song, stage work, there is no meaning, emotional or otherwise, beyond the music.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> I don't know what you mean by contain, but nearly everyone in musical aesthetics believes it can express emotions or, more accurately, IMO, *metaphorically exemplify them*.


Would you explain this further? Are you saying that composers use certain musical formulations to explicitly represent emotions?

I had assumed that music has the capacity to prompt emotions in the listener, but that this capacity isn't fully understood. That is, crudely, we can be _induced _to have a sense of sadness or melancholy when listening to a minor key piece and happiness when listening to major, but we don't really understand much beyond that (such as "sardonic" as used by MarkW #3) and not everyone responds emotionally in the same way.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> I don't know what you mean by contain, but nearly everyone in musical aesthetics believes it can express emotions or, more accurately, IMO, metaphorically exemplify them.


I mean precisely that music can only communicate what it contains, which is music. Everything else is extramusical, whether it is the composer's own programme or recorded thought on a given piece, or my own or anyone else's reaction as a listener. Saying "this piece of music is sad" does not make it so, and indeed nothing can, because music can only be music, it doesn't have emotion to express, only we have that.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

It's typically impossible to know everything a composer intends with a piece, especially with something so personal and abstract as emotion. I suspect that when composers compose they may choose notes, harmonies, instruments, keys, etc. that provoke a certain emotional feeling in them, but how that translates to an audience is impossible for them to know or to dictate. A great example for me is the Moonlight Sonata, which got its name from a critic who associated the first movement with looking at a specific lake at moonlight. To me, that sonata has always been much more mysterious than that, and emotionally sits in this very alien space between melancholy, pensiveness, meditativeness, etc. without wallowing in any of them. What did Beethoven have in mind when he composed it? I have no idea, but I doubt seriously if it's the same thing I had in mind listening to it. 

As for pieces that have a more thorny or complex biographical or social context, it's certainly possible that our knowledge of that context can change how we react to a piece. Whether it should or not is, IMO, up to each listener. Some really like trying to understand art via biography and its socio-cultural context, while others prefer to experience it without such baggage. Personally, I like both methods: experience the work first without the baggage, and, if I'm interested, go back later and learn those kinds of details. If nothing else, I think learning the latter gives me a new and alternative way to experience the piece, or, at the very least, a differing perspectives. There are certainly even tonal features, like, eg, irony or humor, that can be difficult to pick up on if one is completely unaware of these contextual elements. Shotakovich has been mentioned, and he's a perfect example. Without the knowledge of the various socio-cultural context surrounding something like his 9th Symphony it's very easy to miss the irony in that piece and just hear it as a light romp.


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## Nawdry (Dec 27, 2020)

EvaBaron said:


> Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we're being told it's there? It's a very interesting topic and I'm curious what do you think. Shostakovich's 5th is a very good example of course, but feel free to talk about this subject in general.


Short answer: "only by listening to the music". I would be very wary of imputing political intentions or the composer's own immediate experience into the music. Of course, if it's a ballet, opera, theatrical drama, or explicitly programmatic symphony or other work, then one can imagine some relationship between contours in the musical flow and the specific, explicit theme. But in any case, great music would transcend this and communicate a far more abstract, universally valid spiritual journey.


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

The OP assumes one cares to ponder the composer's intentions. Meanwhile most listeners hear music as something to react to.

Even if you tell somebody the intentions behind a piece of music, such information is unlikely to override their instinctual reactions.

*Edit: *That being said, text sung over or to the music may elicit (even) very extreme reactions, and the music may interact with a text's message.


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## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist (Jan 13, 2019)

The older I get, the more I realize just how contrived so many of our seemingly innate emotional and archetypal inclinations can be. Modern society feeds us grossly sentimentalized and motivational narratives of morality, romantic affairs, heroism, sex appeal, underdog stories, etc. and like fools we let them silently creep into our own lives, convincing ourselves that they were just describing "natural" inclinations to begin with. For the vast majority of us, "natural" emotions and desires - if not entirely opaque - are shrouded, tainted by the artificial narratives of the modern world we live in. The same, I think, applies to emotions evoked by (classical) music.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> Would you explain this further? *Are you saying that composers use certain musical formulations to explicitly represent emotions?*
> 
> I had assumed that music has the capacity to prompt emotions in the listener, but that this capacity isn't fully understood. That is, crudely, we can be _induced _to have a sense of sadness or melancholy when listening to a minor key piece and happiness when listening to major, but we don't really understand much beyond that (such as "sardonic" as used by MarkW #3) and not everyone responds emotionally in the same way.


There's an enormous body of theory on musical expression and the mechanisms by which it works that's impossible to briefly summarize. Broad categories include expression by conventional associations, by isomorphism with human expressive behaviors including gesture, posture, and utterance, by systems of signification as defined by musical semioticians, … The only point I'd make is that those arguing that music cannot express emotion have likely read little or nothing of the copious literature on the topic.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> There's an enormous body of theory on musical expression and the mechanisms by which it works that's impossible to briefly summarize. Broad categories include expression by conventional associations, by isomorphism with human expressive behaviors including gesture, posture, and utterance, by systems of signification as defined by musical semioticians, … The only point I'd make is that those arguing that music cannot express emotion have likely read little or nothing of the copious literature on the topic.


Hmmm...well it's hardly surprising that they haven't, if my brief search for the meanings of terms like 'isomorphism' (as it relates to music) is anything to go by.

Surely you can offer some kind of simple statement and exemplify so that we can be clear what your position is? You're saying that music doesn't just incite our emotions, but that music actually has the capacity to express emotions? And, presumably, that if we can interpret the signals correctly, we can know what emotion is being expressed?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> There's an enormous body of theory on musical expression and the mechanisms by which it works that's impossible to briefly summarize. Broad categories include expression by conventional associations, by isomorphism with human expressive behaviors including gesture, posture, and utterance, by systems of signification as defined by musical semioticians, … The only point I'd make is that those arguing that music cannot express emotion have likely read little or nothing of the copious literature on the topic.


I would say that these studies are talking about something other than music expressing emotions. IOW, minor mode music often "sounds sad" - but it doesn't make you sad, in fact, music is usually something people enjoy. Who enjoys being sad? Well I guess some people do, but mostly so-called sad music doesn't make us sad.

When we cry at the movies what do these tears represent? Sadness? Hurt? Pain? Nope. We have a cathartic response to a dramatic scene that reminds us of something that we've experienced in the past. But the memory is not the same thing as the real emotional experience we had when we were truly hurt or sad.

Human emotions are inside of us, not the music. All we can say about the music is that it can trigger an emotional response.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> Hmmm...well it's hardly surprising that they haven't, if my brief search for the meanings of terms like 'isomorphism' (as it relates to music) is anything to go by.
> 
> Surely you can offer some kind of simple statement and exemplify so that we can be clear what your position is? You're saying that music doesn't just incite our emotions, but that music actually has the capacity to express emotions? And, presumably, that if we can interpret the signals correctly, we can know what emotion is being expressed?


Purcell: "When I am laid in earth," aria from Dido and Aeneas. Expression by conventional association: It was a convention in the Baroque that descending tetrachord ground basses in the minor mode, especially chromatic ones, express or signify lamentation and grief. The constant sighing motives in the other parts are isomorphic with (have the same form or contour as) human sighs, and thereby carry the same expressive significance.



SanAntone said:


> I would say that these studies are talking about something other than music expressing emotions. IOW, minor mode music often "sounds sad" - but it doesn't make you sad, in fact, music is usually something people enjoy. Who enjoys being sad? Well I guess some people do, but mostly so-called sad music doesn't make us sad.


No, they're talking about music expressing emotions.  Whether sad music makes us sad has nothing necessarily to do with whether a piece of music is expressing sadness. If one sees a person one despises crying and lamenting it might very well fill one with delight. They're still expressing sorrow.

Unsurprisingly, there's lots of writing on the difference between real world emotions and the fictional kind expressed in art. The last two essays in _Music and Meaning_ (ed. Jenefer Robinson, Cornell U Press, 1997) address this issue. They are: "Music and Negative Emotion" by Jerrold Levinson and "Why Listen to Sad Music If It Makes One Feel Sad" by Stephen Davies. Btw, the book also contains an essay on expression in Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony by yours truly and Ms. Robinson.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Purcell: "When I am laid in earth," aria from Dido and Aeneas. Expression by conventional association: It was a convention in the Baroque that descending tetrachord ground basses in the minor mode, especially chromatic ones, express or signify lamentation and grief. The constant sighing motives in the other parts are isomorphic with (have the same form or contour as) human sighs, and thereby carry the same expressive significance.


Film has something called the "institutional mode", which describes the conventions of how relatively abstract techniques become associated with specific storytelling techniques - for a cliche example, if you zoom in on a person's face, and fade to a de-saturated scene of that person doing something, we understand intuitively that we're seeing a flashback, because we've watched enough film to learn the language of the institutional mode.

So yeah, music can, via abstract means, express emotion by use of convention. That said, these conventions are exterior to the music, and culturally learned, so we can't still say that abstract music expresses emotion *inherently*.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Purcell: "When I am laid in earth," aria from Dido and Aeneas. Expression by conventional association: It was a convention in the Baroque that descending tetrachord ground basses in the minor mode, especially chromatic ones, express or signify lamentation and grief. The constant sighing motives in the other parts are isomorphic with (have the same form or contour as) human sighs, and thereby carry the same expressive significance.


Thank you. I understand that.

There seem to me to be two obstacles to this being an example of music "expressing" emotion. The first is that while those with knowledge of Baroque conventions might recognise the form, the convention and the intent, there is no guarantee that lamentation and grief will be induced in the listener. It may however signify to the listener that this is what the music is "about".

The second is that those with no knowledge of baroque conventions will be left adrift, not aware of the intent of the composer.

Unless what you're also implying is that Baroque composers were so clever that they knew their convention was based on the high probability that descending tetrachord ground basses in the minor mode are, by their very nature, designed to induce lamentation and grief.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

I think there *are* theories that, to some extent, "sad" or "mournful" musical conventions came about by the use of musical instruments to mimic human voices, but even this is applying a concrete framing to abstract technique.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

_I think Shostakovich is an infamous example of people really, really liking to read biographical details into his work..._

Perhaps but Shostakovich's friends knew all along what was going on -- well before us Westerners learned it in Volkov's book. The soprano Galina Vishnevskaya famously said the finale of the 5th symphony -- thought to be the heroic triumph of Russia over the Nazis -- instead depicted "the children of Russia being torn from the soil."

Plenty of other friends of the composer knew what was going on too. One of his pals says in the video Shostakovich Against Stalin https://www.amazon.com/Shostakovich...&sprefix=Shostakovich+Against+,aps,189&sr=8-1 that the 8th symphony is about totalitarianism.

As to Beethoven, it is clear he intended the Eroica symphony to be heroic; he so named it himself. He did in fact dedicate it to Napoleon -- he thought him heroic -- then withdrew the dedication when he learned Napoleon a tyrant. So there clearly is something to the music beyond the notes.

"Beethoven violently erased Napoleon's name from his manuscript-so forcefully, in fact, that he erased his way right through the paper, leaving holes in the title page," says a not very hidden story about the symphony. "So this revolutionary piece of music that was originally to be The Bonaparte Symphony became simply Eroica-the heroic."

Even so Toscanini famously said about the Eroica symphony, "To me it is allegro con brio."


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> No, they're talking about music expressing emotions.


These philosophers (?) have careers and have staked out an area of study about which they write. Fine. But like all philosophy, I don't think it is anything other than an intellectual word game. Just because there are books where these theories are expressed does not define reality. I'm also sure there are equally qualified philosophers who argue the opposite side of the issue. This is what academics do, their raison d'etre.

Music does not express emotions - it is sound. Music does have semiotic characteristics which as I said it can only trigger emotions, not express them.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> No, they're talking about music expressing emotions.  Whether sad music makes us sad has nothing necessarily to do with whether a piece of music is expressing sadness. If one sees a person one despises crying and lamenting it might very well fill one with delight. They're still expressing sorrow.


A person showing they are sorrowful is not the same as a piece of music "expressing" emotion. Are we differing over what the word "expresses" means?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> Thank you. I understand that.
> 
> There seem to me to be two obstacles to this being an example of music "expressing" emotion. The first is that while those with knowledge of Baroque conventions might recognise the form, the convention and the intent, *there is no guarantee that lamentation and grief will be induced in the listener.* It may however signify to the listener that this is what the music is "about".
> 
> ...


The expression is in the music and it's in no way dependent on whether or not a particular listener picks it up or understands it.

Yes. The conventions aren't arbitrary. Being dragged repeatedly and inexorably down into darkness is a pretty good metaphor for grief or lamentation and it is certainly why that kind of descending bass line acquired the conventional significance it has. Figures or musical elements that accrue conventional expressive associations are usually well-suited to the role due to their "isomorphism with human expressive behaviors" (The phrase is Peter Kivy's. It comes from his book _The Corded Shell_) or some other kind of metaphorical resonance.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

There is also no guarantee that a particular sentence in a natural language will be understood by every (or most) listeners/readers. That does not mean that a somewhat difficult, ambiguous or opaque natural language sentence (e.g. in poetry) does not have a meaning. Of course it does, completely independent of the probability of 8th graders not understanding it at first reading.

Bodily gestures and facial expressions are surprisingly culture-transcendent (a few are shared with great apes), but some are also conventional. That conventional signals express meanings or feelings is also not refuted by the possibility of not knowing or misunderstanding such meanings. (I cannot think of any but there are lots of funny anecdotes from earlier times with travellers going to exotic places and misunderstanding conventional gestures that had precise meanings.)


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

The v-sign is one that always trips people up. Quite a few cultures express "No" with a vertical head movement, too.


e) one of my favorites, which got brought up a few times when people talked about the objectivity of color- A lot of cultures consider blue and green to be shades of each other, in the same way that we consider, say, lavender to be a shade of purple.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

fbjim said:


> Film has something called the "institutional mode", which describes the conventions of how relatively abstract techniques become associated with specific storytelling techniques - for a cliche example, if you zoom in on a person's face, and fade to a de-saturated scene of that person doing something, we understand intuitively that we're seeing a flashback, because we've watched enough film to learn the language of the institutional mode.
> 
> So yeah, music can, via abstract means, express emotion by use of convention. That said, these conventions are exterior to the music, and culturally learned, so we can't still say that abstract music expresses emotion *inherently*.


If we use this logic then we couldn't say that language expresses anything either since it's also culturally learned. If we're going to go to that extreme, then what DOES express something? What is a form of expression that isn't culturally learned?


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> Music does not express emotions - it is sound. Music does have semiotic characteristics which as I said it can only trigger emotions, not express them.


The more I hear you (and others here) argue this, the more I'm drawn to thinking about language and what difference there is between the two in this respect. Once can say "language does not express emotions - it is sound" (when spoken of course). I'm on the fence about whether that statement makes sense, but I'm very curious as to what people are thinking of as an example of something that does express emotion and how that thing differs meaningfully from what music does (or what we do through music).


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> If we use this logic then we couldn't say that language expresses anything either since it's also culturally learned. If we're going to go to that extreme, then what DOES express something? What is a form of expression that isn't culturally learned?


This is going into places where you might actually have to consult anthropologists to see which universals exist in human speech and body language.

Also I would rather say that sound does not *inherently* express emotion (setting aside the question of how universal things like sobs, or laughter are), but language does. Our conception of emotion is human, all, and requires humans to generate and interpret sound to express it.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

If it helps, when I say "inherently", I mean - it has those qualities without a human to ascribe those qualities to it. Tea can be inherently healthy or nourishing to humans - it is not inherently delicious.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

And sorry for the triple post, but a lot of this depends on how many layers of abstraction are actually appropriate on a classical music forum. To put it another way, there are contexts where you would say "the world is round" and also contexts where you would say "the world isn't round, it's a slightly distorted spheroid with a bunch of ridges and peaks on it", depending on how appropriate it is to actually drill down into that level of precision.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

fbjim said:


> This is going into places where you might actually have to consult anthropologists to see which universals exist in human speech and body language.
> 
> Also I would rather say that sound does not *inherently* express emotion (setting aside the question of how universal things like sobs, or laughter are), but language does. Our conception of emotion is human, all, and requires humans to generate and interpret sound to express it.


We might also consult those anthropologists about whether or not such universals exist or can exist in music.

OK, but if the emotions language expresses are also culturally learned, then how does that differ from the culturally learned emotions of music?


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> We might also consult those anthropologists about whether or not such universals exist or can exist in music.
> 
> OK, but if the emotions language expresses are also culturally learned, then how does that differ from the culturally learned emotions of music?


Lemme put it this way - one could conceivably argue that music set to text has no inherent emotion because language itself is a cultural construct, and arguably be correct. I think the question at that point is less about correctness and more about whether or not peeling back that many levels of abstraction is really useful when discussing emotive aspects of music.

Arguably I'm waffling here but I think a lot of disagreement comes from a lack of consensus on where the baseline really is.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> The more I hear you (and others here) argue this, the more I'm drawn to thinking about language and what difference there is between the two in this respect. Once can say "language does not express emotions - it is sound" (when spoken of course). I'm on the fence about whether that statement makes sense, but I'm very curious as to what people are thinking of as an example of something that does express emotion and how that thing differs meaningfully from what music does (or what we do through music).


Well, no. There is a huge difference between music and language: along with sound, language is made up of words and sentences which carry explicit messages. Not so with music. Whatever meaning, or expression, we hear in music it is through associations which have been explicitly connected with some idea, emotion, or message, which is why some people assocaite atonal music with horror movies.

The example of "When I am laid" is not evidence of emotion being expressed in music, first, because there is a text describing a body being laid into a grave. This image conjures up emotions of sadness, grief, and everything associated with death and mortality. And yes, descending lines have been used with texts expressing negative emotions (by negative I mean sad or related) for a long time. Madrigals used this kind of thing a lot. It has been called tone painting.

This is the kind of association through convention that was mentioned in an earlier post.

AS I said music is semiotic and can point to ideas and emotions - but that is different than expressing them. For me the verb _to express_ emotion means more than merely pointing to it. Humans express sadness in a variety of ways, but first *we feel sad*.

Music doesn't feel sad.

But we often associate a piece of music with fear, love, sadness, irony, peace, humor, etc., because of how composers have used music to represent those emotions or concepts for hundreds of years.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> These philosophers (?) have careers and have staked out an area of study about which they write. Fine. But like all philosophy, I don't think it is anything other than an intellectual word game. Just because there are books where these theories are expressed does not define reality. I'm also sure there are equally qualified philosophers who argue the opposite side of the issue. This is what academics do, their raison d'etre.
> 
> *Music does not express emotions - it is sound*. Music does have semiotic characteristics which as I said it can only trigger emotions, not express them.


So you are saying the medium of sound (I presume you mean in the absence of speech) is not conducive to the expression of emotion? You haven't thought that one through. Sound is a very easy medium by which to express emotion. People do it all the time and people do it through music all the time. Dogs do it. Hamsters do it.

Most of the conventions concerning musical expression and the relation between musical figures and particular ideas or feelings were established by working composers, some of whom also wrote about them in didactic treatises for other composers. Philosophers have followed their lead and taken them seriously. Nothing particularly academic about it. Musicians developed whole catalogs of meaningful musical figures and expressive conventions without the assistance of philosophers and academics.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

Just for fun, here's some examples of conventions from working composers in the silent era of films...couldn't find the romance and sad sheets, but they exist.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> *The example of "When I am laid" is not evidence of emotion being expressed in music, first, because there is a text describing a body being laid into a grave.* This image conjures up emotions of sadness, grief, and everything associated with death and mortality. And yes, descending lines have been used with texts expressing negative emotions (by negative I mean sad or related) for a long time. Madrigals used this kind of thing a lot. It has been called tone painting.


The words are not necessary for any acculturated listener to recognize the emotion in the music.



SanAntone said:


> AS I said music is semiotic and can point to ideas and emotions - but that is different than expressing them. For me the verb _to express_ emotion means more than merely pointing to it.


Who's talking about pointing?i I'm talking about metaphorically exemplifying emotion in a system of metaphor readily and regularly learned by stylistically competent listeners



SanAntone said:


> But we often associate a piece of music with fear, love, sadness, irony, peace, humor, etc., because of how composers have used music to represent those emotions or concepts for hundreds of years.


Of course. That's part of how musical expression works and how conventions are established. Now you just have to understand the other mechanisms. 



SanAntone said:


> Music doesn't feel sad.


We recognize sad music by the same cues we recognize sad humans. You're moving slowly, you're drooping, you're speech is subdued and you keep sighing and moaning all the time, so I figure you must be sad. When music of a certain era does these things we recognize it as sad music. It's not complicated.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

But it's not that simple either. Most of the classical music that people here report listening to has a much more complicated emotional profile than was in your example from Purcell. We can all recognise the "sad" in such pieces, but what about, say, Shostakovich's 9th. It's just not that easy to decode the emotions therein...is it?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> We recognize sad music by the same cues we recognize sad humans. You're moving slowly, you're drooping, you're speech is subdued and you keep sighing and moaning all the time, so I figure you must be sad. When music of a certain era does these things we recognize it as sad music. It's not complicated.


It is also not an example of music expressing sadness. There is no sadness in the music to express, music cannot feel sad. We associate sadness with some music because of the history of how music has been used to represent sadness.

When we see a sad human, they are expressing sadness because they feel sad. It is not complicated.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

EdwardBast said:


> Unsurprisingly, there's lots of writing on the difference between real world emotions and the fictional kind expressed in art. The last two essays in _Music and Meaning_ (ed. Jenefer Robinson, Cornell U Press, 1997) address this issue. They are: "Music and Negative Emotion" by Jerrold Levinson and "Why Listen to Sad Music If It Makes One Feel Sad" by Stephen Davies. Btw, the book also contains an essay on expression in Shostakovich's *Tenth Symphony* by yours truly and Ms. Robinson.


I can imagine Shostakovich's Tenth being fertile ground for study, even from what I've read it contains such a rich layering of musical meanings: references to Mahler and possibly Liszt, the composer's DSCH motto as well as of Elmira (a student, his confidant at the time) and some of the usual dance elements like a gopak.

Shostakovich embeds meaning into instrumental music using techniques like these, and also quoting tunes from popular songs of the period and various dance forms. Similar collage techniques where used by others including Ives, and it would become popular with later composers like Schnittke and Berio. It could be argued that Shostakovich prefigured this sort of postmodern disintegration of the symphony.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> But it's not that simple either. Most of the classical music that people here report listening to has a much more complicated emotional profile than was in your example from Purcell. We can all recognise the "sad" in such pieces, but what about, say, Shostakovich's 9th. It's just not that easy to decode the emotions therein...is it?


I never claimed that emotions are "encoded" or that it's easy to describe emotions in music or outside of it. I'm just arguing against the proposition that music can't express emotion. It can. It does.



SanAntone said:


> *It is also not an example of music expressing sadness.* There is no sadness in the music to express, music cannot feel sad. We associate sadness with some music because of the history of how music has been used to represent sadness.
> 
> When we see a sad human, they are expressing sadness because they feel sad. It is not complicated.


Of course it is. It expresses the sadness of a fictional character. Instrumental music composed under Romantic-expressive aesthetics likewise expresses the affect of fictional personae. Just as the dialogue of fictional characters in a novel does.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> So you are saying the medium of sound (I presume you mean in the absence of speech) is not conducive to the expression of emotion? You haven't thought that one through. Sound is a very easy medium by which to express emotion. People do it all the time and people do it through music all the time. Dogs do it. Hamsters do it.
> 
> Most of the conventions concerning musical expression and the relation between musical figures and particular ideas or feelings were established by working composers, some of whom also wrote about them in didactic treatises for other composers. Philosophers have followed their lead and taken them seriously. Nothing particularly academic about it. Musicians developed whole catalogs of meaningful musical figures and expressive conventions without the assistance of philosophers and academics.


Music can _conjure_ these emotions in a listener as evidenced by film music - but it does not _contain_ the emotions inherently within itself, and can not express what it does not have within. But, I think we are defining the term "express" differently, and I brought this up in an earlier post, one I assume you did not address.

Because the manner in which you describe your claim that music "expresses" emotion is the same thing that I describe as music's semiotic* process which "points to" or communicates, or triggers, the related emotion in the listener.

______________________________________
* Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of sign processes (semiosis), which are any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

*Music semiology*

Signs, meanings in music, happen essentially through the connotations of sounds, and through the social construction, appropriation and amplification of certain meanings associated with these connotations. The work of Philip Tagg (Ten Little Tunes, Fernando the Flute, Music's Meanings) provides one of the most complete and systematic analysis of the relation between musical structures and connotations in western and especially popular, television and film music. The work of Leonard B. Meyer in Style and Music theorizes the relationship between ideologies and musical structures and the phenomena of style change, and focuses on Romanticism as a case study. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics and syntax.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Forster said:


> Shostakovich's 9th. It's just not that easy to decode the emotions therein...is it?


Bernstein: "This is Haydn-ish humor, replete with pert, piping little tunes, tricky accents, tipsy phrasing, all those delightful elements of surprise. He even uses a fairly standard Haydn(-ish) orchestration, adding only some trombones and percussion it's all in the cause of fun. I think this first movement is going to make you feel you're at a party- a surprise party."

6:20


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

EdwardBast said:


> *The constant sighing motives in the other parts are isomorphic with (have the same form or contour as) human sighs, and thereby carry the same expressive significance.*
> No, *they're talking about music expressing emotions. * Whether sad music makes us sad has nothing necessarily to do with whether a piece of music is expressing sadness. If one sees a person one despises crying and lamenting it might very well fill one with delight. *They're still expressing sorrow.*





EdwardBast said:


> *The expression is in the music and it's in no way dependent on whether or not a particular listener picks it up or understands it.*


Not that I disagree with anything you've said in this thread, but I'm just curious; how does all the things you've said in this thread tie in with these, (which you've argued many times on the forum) -
KevinW: "However, you can't find that much pessimistic elements in his music because his music always shows the optimistic side of his life."
EdwardBast (as a response to the above comment by KevinW): "Music in the minor mode just didn't sell as well in the Classical Era. That's why the ratio of works in the major mode versus the minor mode was about 8:1. Mozart was happy to and needed to satisfy popular tastes. Bach and Haydn didn't have to worry so much because they had permanent employment and patronage. Haydn happily wrote gloomy symphonies until his prince complained."
[from the thread <I don't believe music has ever been as pure as Mozart's>]
EdwardBast: "the minor mode was relatively out of favor for aesthetic reasons, with the result that, in the big instrumental genres, the ratio of major mode versus minor mode works is about 8:1. The root of this is that in the musical aesthetics of the High Classical era the connection between music and emotion was relatively weak compared to what it was in the Baroque or the Romantic eras."

So what do you make of stuff like this (a typical example of the stuff you've talked about in the above quotes), is it "not expressing sorrow"? Or "expressing it, but you're just not able to perceive it"?:


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Amen. Not an area of research that I know much about. But the idea that music represents or expresses nothing but itself is too dogmatic to be credible now.


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> I agree with Crudblud.
> 
> Unless there is a text, i.e. song, stage work, there is no meaning, emotional or otherwise, beyond the music.


That's pretty dogmatic
Where would you classify Beethoven's Sixth? There is no song or stage play but are you saying Beethoven's own descriptions of the movements are meaningless? Or Chopin's Preludes, composed in a drafty, deserted monastery in windswept Mallorca? You can't perceive any of that in the "Raindrop " Prelude? Or the dog barking and the winter rain in The Four Seasons? According to you, composers just have this irresistible urge to organize and notate sounds on paper or an iPad, and what results bears no relation to what they may have been thinking or feeling at the time?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Triplets said:


> That's pretty dogmatic
> Where would you classify Beethoven's Sixth? There is no song or stage play but are you saying Beethoven's own descriptions of the movements are meaningless? Or Chopin's Preludes, composed in a drafty, deserted monastery in windswept Mallorca? You can't perceive any of that in the "Raindrop " Prelude? Or the dog barking and the winter rain in The Four Seasons? According to you, composers just have this irresistible urge to organize and notate sounds on paper or an iPad, and what results bears no relation to what they may have been thinking or feeling at the time?


Composers have attempted to conjure narrative images with their music. This was very prevalent during the middle part of the 19th century from Liszt and continuing until the time of Richard Strauss. And film music is the inheritor of this methodology. This does not alter the fact that music does not contain any meaning other than itself. But music acts as a sign, communicating meanings or emotions that we attribute to the music, but in fact the music is triggering a response within ourselves.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Roger Knox said:


> Amen. Not an area of research that I know much about. But the idea that music represents or expresses nothing but itself is too dogmatic to be credible now.


It certainly doesn't apply to every piece of music written. One size fits all doesn't work with aesthetics, or other important aspects of any creative endeavor, because the artist will have his or her individual approach.

The _music is just music_ aesthetic was in vogue during the heyday of modernism, when composers sought to distance themselves from what they saw as the excesses of romanticism. Of course, someone like Stravinsky wouldn't have shared the same ideals as the likes of Shostakovich.

Critical opinion of Shostakovich was for a long time impacted by accusations of him being too much in the shadow of Mahler. Olin Downes and Pierre Boulez accused him of being a romantic throwback. Of course, audiences couldn't care less what the critics said, and Shostakovich has remained one of the most popular composers of his time. Like some other composers, he fell victim to his popularity with audiences. Many listeners liked his music for the same sorts of reasons that critics despised it.

Ultimately, its good to try and take each composer on his or her own terms. Some will gravitate towards the more objective side of the spectrum, and others will take a more subjective approach to expression. It makes no sense to argue that a universal rule should apply to any of this.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> I agree with Crudblud.
> 
> Unless there is a text, i.e. song, stage work, there is no meaning, emotional or otherwise, beyond the music.


I would think the above quoted statement might seem odd to a film music composer, and to his/her audience. The composer has to supply some sort of music to underpin a scene, and in my experience of watching films the composer proves rather successful, matching music to the action and/or emotional requirements of a scene. There must be some agreement amongst us humans as to what sort of music will allow for shared emotional reactions, or at least half of us should be laughing through a poignantly sad scene accompanied by poignantly sad, emotionally provoking, music. If the composer wants an audience to laugh through a "sad" scene, he will change the music to something that will allow the audience to experience the contradiction of the emotions, the sarcasm or whatever it is. Music is powerfully emotive, and a shared audience can agree. The closing movements of Beethoven's Fifth and Tchaikovsky's Sixth are emotively different, which is why sound designers who might select those works for certain scenes would hardly confuse the two. Neither will the audience. Music can and does communicate emotional meaning, and those who don't realize this have been missing out on a most wonderful aspect of listening tp and enjoying music.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Listen to the last movement of the Mahler 10th and tell me that you can't hear Mahler's emotions.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

SONNET CLV said:


> Music is powerfully *emotive*


I don't think anyone disagrees with this.

Lexico: "emotive"

_arousing or able to arouse intense feeling_

What is in question is whether the emotions aroused in the listener are somehow contained in the music itself which then "expresses" or communicates in the same way that a human being expresses emotion.

Or whether certain formulations of music _stimulate _an emotional response, whether because the formulations are guaranteed to have that effect intrinsically, or because they mimic recognisable human activity (dance, voice, bird call, storm, etc - as in Beethoven's Pastoral), or because they use tunes already recognisable to the listener and bringing some commonly understood narrative (folk tunes with nationalist meaning - common in Shostakovich, Dvorak etc).

The end result can indeed make it seem that the difference between these distinctions is so minimal as to be hardly worth bothering with.

What you say about film music is generally true - I regularly blub when I go to the pictures - but there can be such a wide variation in audience responses to films that doubts are inevitably raised about the extent to which the score can guarantee a particular emotional response. If it was all "in" the music which simply "expressed" the emotion, everyone would feel it...wouldn't they?

It's the _feeling _of the emotion that is important - not just some intellectual recognising of an emotion.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Forster said:


> It's the _feeling _of the emotion that is important - not just some intellectual recognising of an emotion.





Sid James said:


> Ultimately, its good to try and take each composer on his or her own terms. Some will gravitate towards the more objective side of the spectrum, and others will take a more subjective approach to expression. It makes no sense to argue that a universal rule should apply to any of this.


Good points. It troubles me when a person sometimes uses fancy words to pass off a blatantly personal opinion, for example, _"Baroque period music lacks emotional expression cause the use of dynamics is nil"_ as something academic, but other times, accuses others for "not being academic" in other cases. It just doesn't seem logically consistent.


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

SanAntone said:


> Composers have attempted to conjure narrative images with their music. This was very prevalent during the middle part of the 19th century from Liszt and continuing until the time of Richard Strauss. And film music is the inheritor of this methodology. This does not alter the fact that music does not contain any meaning other than itself. But music acts as a sign, communicating meanings or emotions that we attribute to the music, but in fact the music is triggering a response within ourselves.


Claiming that music doesn't have "any meaning other than itself" means as much to be as saying that letters written or typed are just letters, and don't have any meaning in themselves. Letters however are the building blocks of words, and words in turn are the building blocks of language. When we organize letters into language we are trying to communicate with our fellow humans. 
Music is also a language, one that deals with tones and sounds as it's primary communicative element. It can be combined with written text, or with action on a cinema screen, to enhance it's communicative powers, but that doesn't mean that it has no meaning or no communicative powers of its own.
Let's take Opera. Yes, the singers are singing words, but to a large degree the words are unintelligible. The language may be different from what the audience speaks. Even when it is the audience native language it can be difficult to actually make out the words due to composers demands on the voice, or the competition with the Orchestra. Yet it has been an enduring art form for centuries because the music itself can do so much to convey the meaning and emotions of what is occurring. An English Speaker doesn't have to be fluent in Italian or French to enjoy La Boheme


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

It might be relevant to point out that composers when composing will have a response to what they find. This response can be emotional, associative, extraneous, intellectual or any combination thereof. Even the coldest, most clinical workmanlike approach will be on the hunt for something it will only recognise via an internal response of some sort - a recognition, a sense of having found something.
The composer's reaction to material is key as it is a prime driver in how a work is instigated and continues.


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## justekaia (Jan 2, 2022)

SanAntone said:


> I agree with Crudblud.
> 
> Unless there is a text, i.e. song, stage work, there is no meaning, emotional or otherwise, beyond the music.


I think there are several layers to consider: - is the composer under any emotional/intellectual influence when he conceives or writes his work -does the composer have the intention to convey meaning or emotion to his work -does the public perceive any specific or meaning in the works -are there any written or spoken confirmations about the emotion/meaning contained in musical pieces.
On top of that there are hidden meanings in musical works.
Let us take a simple example: In Vain by Georg Friedrich Haas. If anybody tells me there is no meaning in this music, I will very seriously doubt his intellectual capacities.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> Well, no. There is a huge difference between music and language: along with sound, language is made up of words and sentences which carry explicit messages. Not so with music. Whatever meaning, or expression, we hear in music it is through associations which have been explicitly connected with some idea, emotion, or message, which is why some people assocaite atonal music with horror movies.
> 
> ...AS I said music is semiotic and can point to ideas and emotions - but that is different than expressing them. For me the verb _to express_ emotion means more than merely pointing to it. Humans express sadness in a variety of ways, but first *we feel sad*.
> 
> ...


I'm not denying that language can convey much more explicit, precise messages, but the method by which it does this is very much culturally learned. We grow up being taught what words mean either explicitly or because of the context in which we hear them. Anyone who's ever seen a young child curse when they're angry knows that they weren't explicitly taught what that word means, but they almost certainly saw someone else use that word when they were angry, and associated the emotion with the word. If that can happen in language I don't see what the difference is when it comes to music: music gets associated with emotions, this is culturally understood, and can therefor be used to express those emotions.

Now you're also trying to make a distinction between "pointing to emotions" and "expressing" them. I agree this is probably a distinction worth making, but again I'm not sure I see the difference between music and language. If anything, language seems less inherently expressive in this respect. If a person says "I am sad," under your distinction this is not expressing the emotion of sadness, this is pointing towards the emotional state of the person who said it. If someone wanted to "express sadness" in language, it would seem to require using language in a way that made use of things we typically think of as being sad (like the text of When I am Laid...) so that people would feel sad hearing it. Again, if this is the case I don't see much difference with music, and in fact it seems to me that music has a much easier time making us feel sadness than language does, even if it's by roughly the same associative, culturally learned mechanism.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> I'm not denying that language can convey much more explicit, precise messages, but the method by which it does this is very much culturally learned. We grow up being taught what words mean either explicitly or because of the context in which we hear them. Anyone who's ever seen a young child curse when they're angry knows that they weren't explicitly taught what that word means, but they almost certainly saw someone else use that word when they were angry, and associated the emotion with the word. If that can happen in language I don't see what the difference is when it comes to music: music gets associated with emotions, this is culturally understood, and can therefor be used to express those emotions.
> 
> Now you're also trying to make a distinction between "pointing to emotions" and "expressing" them. I agree this is probably a distinction worth making, but again I'm not sure I see the difference between music and language. If anything, language seems less inherently expressive in this respect. If a person says "I am sad," under your distinction this is not expressing the emotion of sadness, this is pointing towards the emotional state of the person who said it. If someone wanted to "express sadness" in language, it would seem to require using language in a way that made use of things we typically think of as being sad (like the text of When I am Laid...) so that people would feel sad hearing it. Again, if this is the case I don't see much difference with music, and in fact it seems to me that music has a much easier time making us feel sadness than language does, even if it's by roughly the same associative, culturally learned mechanism.


When someone is sad they express that in many ways, including language, and in language more than simply saying, "I am sad." Their inflection when they speak, their body language, the look on their face, sighs they might make, a slump of the shoulders. And in what they say, "Everything looks grey." "I get no joy from the things I used to like." "I can't help feeling like there's no point." "I think of the sound of her laugh, but she's gone."

Music is far less specific.

Hitler used music such as Liszt's _Les Preludes _to instill pride in the German army with films of their victories, this is a work written about this life being a prelude to the afterlife. Liszt wasn't trying to communicate anything to do with war. Music is not specific, but if a certain kind of music has been used to indicate certain emotions such as fear or hope, or national pride, then it will conjure those things in the mind of a listener even if the composer did not have those ideas in his head. I doubt very much if Rossini was thinking about the Lone Ranger when he wrote the William Tell Overture.

I do make a distinction between the expression of an emotion and a semiotic association of music with an emotion.

But really, this discussion was supposed to be about the composers intention to express an emotion and our ability to hear it without any help from notes telling us what the composer intended (at least that is the title). That I believe is much dicier since music can mean different things to different people, and as I have shown, can be used in a variety of applications to conjure other ideas or emotions than what we know were the composer's intentions.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Music can _conjure_ these emotions in a listener as evidenced by film music - but it does not _contain_ the emotions inherently within itself, and can not express what it does not have within. But, I think we are defining the term "express" differently, and I brought this up in an earlier post, one I assume you did not address.
> 
> Because the manner in which you describe your claim that music "expresses" emotion is the same thing that I describe as music's semiotic* process which "points to" or communicates, or triggers, the related emotion in the listener.
> 
> ...


The difference between signifying an affective state in the semiotic sense and expressing it or *exemplifying* it metaphorically is well rehearsed in musical aesthetics. You don't seem to grasp the distinction, as demonstrated by the definition you have offered for semiotics. Not everything that communicates something is a sign. A lime green color swatch communicates a possible color choice but it is not a sign. It's an *exemplar*.

A couple of good sources for learning the necessary distinctions in discussions of music are:

Anthony Newcomb. "Sound and Feeling." _Critical Inquiry_ 10 (1984): 623-41.

Robert Hatten. _Musical Meaning in Beethoven_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> The difference between signifying an affective state in the semiotic sense and expressing it or *exemplifying* it metaphorically is well rehearsed in musical aesthetics. You don't seem to grasp the distinction, as demonstrated by the definition you have offered for semiotics. Not everything that communicates something is a sign. A lime green color swatch communicates a possible color choice but it is not a sign. It's an *exemplar*.
> 
> A couple of good sources for learning the necessary distinctions in discussions of music are:
> 
> ...


I just don't agree with you or those scholars you keep suggesting whose views you share.

To my way of thinking

1) music is not specific in its meaning except in how it has been used repeatedly to represent certain emotions and which a listener naturally will make associations often unconsciously; and

2) that the same music can and has been used to represent different ideas or emotions.

But that's my last word here.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Becca said:


> Listen to the last movement of the Mahler 10th and tell me that you can't hear Mahler's emotions.


I'll agree that one can hear emotion, but what makes you sure the emotions are attributable to Mahler personally? I mean, even the characters described in autobiographies can't be assumed to truly reflect the nature and experience of their authors.  And in poetry it's commonplace to attribute what's expressed in poems not to their authors personally (unless there is compelling biographical evidence of it) but to a fictional speaker not necessarily or not fully equatable to the author. Edward T. Cone, in his book _The Composer's Voice_, suggests that we should observe this same distinction in music, attributing what's expressed in musical works to fictional personae inhabiting the works, not directly to their composers.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

EdwardBast said:


> I'll agree that one can hear emotion, but what makes you sure the emotions are attributable to Mahler personally? I mean, even the characters described in autobiographies can't be assumed to truly reflect the nature and experience of their authors.  And in poetry it's commonplace to attribute what's expressed in poems not to their authors personally (unless there is compelling biographical evidence of it) but to a fictional speaker not necessarily or not fully equatable to the author. Edward T. Cone, in his book _The Composer's Voice_, suggests that we should observe this same distinction in music, attributing what's expressed in musical works to fictional personae inhabiting the works, not directly to their composers.


While I haven't looked myself, I believe you will find some very relevant, personal comments written above those parts of the score.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Becca said:


> While I haven't looked myself, I believe you will find some very relevant, personal comments written above those parts of the score.


I'm not surprised and that's why I included the caveat about biographical evidence. Tchaikovsky, to cite another example, attested that the feelings embodied in some of his works were deeply personal and heart-felt. But I wonder, even in such cases, if the specific feelings composers claimed as of internal origin actually existed in concrete form before they were evoked by the musical phrases they composed. Certainly they identified strongly with the musical passages, but was the music a conscious attempt to capture the quality of a preexisting feeling or was it the music in the act of composition that defined the nature and quality of their internal experience for them. Seems like it might be difficult to sort out.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Triplets said:


> Claiming that music doesn't have "any meaning other than itself" means as much to be as saying that letters written or typed are just letters, and don't have any meaning in themselves. Letters however are the building blocks of words, and words in turn are the building blocks of language. When we organize letters into language we are trying to communicate with our fellow humans.
> Music is also a language, one that deals with tones and sounds as it's primary communicative element.


Music isn't a language in any conventional representational sense.

We spoke before we wrote, so we didn't put letters together to make words. Someone had the bright idea to write down what we were saying after we practised oral communication.

It's quite possible then that in the same way the range of grunts and hisses and clicks we put together to mean "Here, honey, I've brought you some sabre-toothed tiger for tea", musical tones could be put together by a composer to communicate exactly the same. But this is dependent on composer and receiver having a common understanding of the meanings of those grunts, hisses and clicks...and those musical tones.

Undoubtedly, in certain contexts, composers use aids to convey the meaning of their music, including the emotional 'content', some of which I referred to in a previous post.

But I still think the jury is out on the possibility that specific musical forms alone can be manipulated to guarantee that any receiving brain will release the appropriate hormone that generates the emotional response intended by the composer.



Triplets said:


> Let's take Opera. Yes, the singers are singing words, but to a large degree the words are unintelligible. The language may be different from what the audience speaks. Even when it is the audience native language it can be difficult to actually make out the words due to composers demands on the voice, or the competition with the Orchestra. Yet it has been an enduring art form for centuries because the music itself can do so much to convey the meaning and emotions of what is occurring. An English Speaker doesn't have to be fluent in Italian or French to enjoy La Boheme


Opera comes with a libretto. When most people go to opera, they already know the story and the emotions likely to be aroused as a consequence. In other words, the music has both a literary and a cultural context that give big clues.



Eva Yojimbo said:


> If that can happen in language I don't see what the difference is when it comes to music: music gets associated with emotions, this is culturally understood, and can therefor be used to express those emotions.


See my response to Triplets. Whatever cultural activities are going on in the learning of language, the fact remains that the words we use for language have specific representational meanings. Put together the letters 'l', 'o', 'v' and 'e' and you know what the word means. Which musical tones will you put together to convey the same concept?


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> I never claimed that emotions are "encoded" or that it's easy to describe emotions in music or outside of it.


Fair enough. The decode/encode idea was my formulation, but we're struggling to find the right way to describe the precise process by which the composer conveys emotional intent and content to the listener ("express" or "arouse" for example).

DSCH seems to me a great example of the problem of musical "decoding". Was he a suck-up or a cynic? What are we supposed to hear in his symphonies?

I think we also suffer from the modern tendency to scepticism. If only I wore a powdered wig and was sitting in the audience listening to Haydn's 94th, I'd have a much clearer sense of what I'm supposed to hear, feel, understand, because I'd be part of the club that knew the rules.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

I think you are demanding a level of precision that is certainly not intended or plausible. 
I don't think Edward Bast claims that music can so precisely express something that it could be translated into a natural language text and then the composer or some expert could assess if this was "correct". That's obviously not possible. One cannot even translate natural language poems very well in many cases without obvious losses. This does not mean that poems are pretty sounds or word spinning without meaning.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Kreisler jr said:


> I think you are demanding a level of precision that is certainly not intended or plausible.
> I don't think Edward Bast claims that music can so precisely express something that it could be translated into a natural language text and then the composer or some expert could assess if this was "correct". That's obviously not possible. One cannot even translate natural language poems very well in many cases without obvious losses. This does not mean that poems are pretty sounds or word spinning without meaning.


I'm not demanding...just raising objections to the idea that music is a language which can communicate emotion just as Shakespeare can.

Perhaps we should all just be content with the fact that music can make us happy, or excited, or melancholic and the process that does this is immaterial.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

But it is not the claim that music is pretty much like language. It's similar in some ways, rather different in others. 
(Some comparisons with language above were only to show that some objections put against this view about "musical meaning" could as well be raised against cases of meaning of natural language. It's also almost unavoidable to have such comparisons because obviously natural language is the system of meaning representation we understand best.)
That's part of the distinction Bast tries to point out. IMO it's shortsighted to claim that music can only (haphazardly because dependent on listener) *cause* some emotional states but not in some way exemplify them via similarities with e.g bodily movements (breathing, gestures, walking, marching, jumping, dancing). 
Nobody is of course obligated to try to get into such distinctions and discussions but to claim that they are just philosophical mumbo jumbo is lazy. The fact that music was understood as analogical to language for most of history by musicians themselves, not by some ivory tower eggheads, should lead to taking such attempts to understand how and what kind of "meaning" can be transported by music at least seriously. It might be in the end implausible or wrong but it's certainly not obviously so.


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## VoiceFromTheEther (Aug 6, 2021)

Forster said:


> raising objections to the idea that music is a language which can communicate emotion just as Shakespeare can.


To understand Shakespeare one needs to understand the language the text is published in, such as English. Otherwise 'mellow' could well mean 'pancake', and 'dread' could mean 'fish'.

Some music depends just as much on the cultural context (associations), some depends on it more (if its patterns are very far removed for everyday human experience), but also some is closer to human instincts, much like how a tearful delivery on stage needs no translation, even if a foreigner does not understand the root of the emotion.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> When someone is sad they express that in many ways, including language, and in language more than simply saying, "I am sad." Their inflection when they speak, their body language, the look on their face, sighs they might make, a slump of the shoulders. And in what they say, "Everything looks grey." "I get no joy from the things I used to like." "I can't help feeling like there's no point." "I think of the sound of her laugh, but she's gone."
> 
> Music is far less specific.
> 
> ...


We certainly agree that music is far less specific, but even with your examples of "expressing sadness" I'm not sure which of these you think is not culturally learned. To take an example "everything looks grey" can't express sadness without the cultural context of associating "grey" with sad things. Maybe certain aspects of body language are innately understood by us as markers of emotional states, but, as others have said, music can imitate many of these things, and because it's natural for humans to think in metaphors and relate things to our own experiences many of these common associations between music and emotional states probably aren't arbitrary.

We also agree that with music that's not specific it can be used for and associated with things that have nothing to do with their original intentions, especially if those intentions aren't specific. Still, I can't imagine Hitler or any military leader ever using a piece like Moonlight Sonata for instilling militaristic pride.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Forster said:


> See my response to Triplets. Whatever cultural activities are going on in the learning of language, the fact remains that the words we use for language have specific representational meanings. Put together the letters 'l', 'o', 'v' and 'e' and you know what the word means. Which musical tones will you put together to convey the same concept?


You can also see my reply to San Antone above where I think I covered this. Essentially, what you two seem to be arguing that music is not as specific as language, which is not a point I dispute. However there is a huge grey area between "super specific so that everyone understands what is meant" and "completely unspecific so that everyone can make up their own meaning and will react differently." Both language and music occupy much of this grey area, even if language is usually closer to the "specific" end of the spectrum and music closer to the "unspecific" end. There are undoubtedly pieces of music that are commonly associated with love. I've lost time of how many times I've heard the love theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet played over romantic scenes (though eventually it became more common to use it ironically). Sure, the music without its association with R&J and other romantic scenes might not express love, but this association alone is enough to create this kind of understood meaning, the same way that often happens with learning words merely by the contexts in which they're used; and there's probably a reason why it's easier to associate that kind of music with love as opposed to, say, most of Schoenberg.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> We certainly agree that music is far less specific, but even with your examples of "expressing sadness" I'm not sure which of these you think is not culturally learned. To take an example "everything looks grey" can't express sadness without the cultural context of associating "grey" with sad things. Maybe certain aspects of body language are innately understood by us as markers of emotional states, but, as others have said, music can imitate many of these things, and because it's natural for humans to think in metaphors and relate things to our own experiences many of these common associations between music and emotional states probably aren't arbitrary.
> 
> We also agree that with music that's not specific it can be used for and associated with things that have nothing to do with their original intentions, especially if those intentions aren't specific. Still, I can't imagine Hitler or any military leader ever using a piece like Moonlight Sonata for instilling militaristic pride.


My basic difference with everyone claiming that music _expresses_ emotion, e.g. sadness, is that for me one cannot express an emotion unless they are feeling it. This is a human trait not shared by inorganic phenomena like music.

Since music cannot "feel sad" it cannot "express" sadness. It can point to sadness because of conventional associations we as listener shave been taught to link. Composers have learned how to do this over hundreds of years. But the music itself does not contain sadness any more than a warning sign contains the danger.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> My basic difference with everyone claiming that music _expresses_ emotion, e.g. sadness, is that for me one cannot express an emotion unless they are feeling it. This is a human trait not shared by inorganic phenomena like music.
> 
> Since music cannot "feel sad" it cannot "express" sadness. It can point to sadness because of conventional associations we as listener shave been taught to link. Composers have learned how to do this over hundreds of years. But the music itself does not contain sadness any more than a warning sign contains the danger.


None of this is true. Actors express sadness all the time without feeling it. Fictional characters in literature express sadness, and not only do they not actually feel it, they don't actually exist. Likewise, the fictional personae whose experience music of certain eras embodies express sadness without feeling it and without "actually existing." They do so because music is fully capable of metaphorically exemplifying sadness. People have been writing about the musical materials by which this is accomplished since the Renaissance. That's how musical expression works. It's a system of metaphor that doesn't depend wholly on convention. Once again, it relies on isomorphism with human expressive behavior including gesture, posture, and utterance.

You might consider actually reading some musical aesthetics instead of just repeating notions no one in the field takes seriously.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> None of this is true. Actors express sadness all the time without feeling it. Music metaphorically exemplifies sadness. That's how musical expression works. It's a system of metaphor that doesn't depend wholly on convention. Once again, it relies on isomorphism with human expressive behavior including gesture, posture, and utterance.
> 
> You might consider actually reading some musical aesthetics instead of repeating notions no one in the field takes seriously.


You are confusing what I am saying which are my personal views with what a musical aesthetician writes about. I have no interest in that field, have no plans on reading those books, nor do I present my views within that context. I have said how I interpret the word "express" and don't share your usage of the term "express" vis a vis music, nor theirs as you have represented them.

It is of absolutely no concern to me whether you or anyone working in the field of musical aesthetics takes my view seriously. I am sharing them on this forum because I think they are a way of approaching this question that is valid.

Art is artificial. Whatever emotions art may represent, they are not real emotions, they are representations of the emotions. When we are with a friend who is grieving over a lost loved one, we share their grief, feel empathy and compassion but do not enjoy it. When we listen to a Mahler symphony we enjoy his representation of emotion - these are two very different experiences.

Mahler, or any composer, is not sad while composing, composing requires too much craft which must be done from a distance from whatever emotion, experience, or idea might have been the initial inspiration. There is no real emotion in a piece of music, real emotions are only experienced by sentient beings. If Mahler felt an emotion and later wished to represent that in his music, that is something else.

That's it, please don't quote anymore books to me.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Kreisler jr said:


> ..........
> .it's shortsighted to claim that music can only (haphazardly because dependent on listener) *cause* some emotional states but not in some way exemplify them via similarities with e.g bodily movements (breathing, gestures, walking, marching, jumping, dancing). Nobody is of course obligated to try to get into such distinctions and discussions but to claim that they are just philosophical mumbo jumbo is lazy. The fact that music was understood as analogical to language for most of history by musicians themselves, not by some ivory tower eggheads, should lead to taking such attempts to understand how and what kind of "meaning" can be transported by music at least seriously. It might be in the end implausible or wrong but it's certainly not obviously so.


Exactly. That's what I have been saying all along (https://www.talkclassical.com/47729-if-mozart-lived-longer-11.html#post2171098) about things like




and http://www.choirs.org.uk/prognotes/Mozart Cornonation Mass.htm "Even as early as the 19th Century the mass was already popularly referred to as the "Coronation Mass". The nickname grew out of the misguided belief that Mozart had written the mass for Salzburg's annual celebration of the anniversary of the crowning of the Shrine of the Virgin. The more likely explanation is that it was one of the works that was performed during the coronation festivities in Prague, either as early as August 1791 for Leopold II, or certainly for Leopold's successor Francis I in August 1792. (There is a set of parts dating from 1792, and the same parts were probably used the year before.) It seems that Mozart must have seen the chance to be represented at the coronation festivities in 1791, not only with La clemenza di Tito, but also with a mass composition: he wrote from Prague requesting that the parts for his old Mass in C be sent to him there. He was held in very high regard in Prague: The Marriage of Figaro had been a smash hit there, and they had commissioned Don Giovanni. It seems likely therefore that the city would have taken on the mass as its own, and the nickname would have grown from there. Certainly the music itself is celebratory in nature, and would have fitted a coronation or Easter Day service perfectly. Perhaps the most obvious reason for the mass's popularity in Prague in 1791/2 was the uncanny similarity between the soprano solo Agnus Dei and the Countess's aria Dove sono from Figaro which had been so successful there in the 1780's."


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

SanAntone said:


> ..Mahler, or any composer, is not sad while composing, composing requires too much craft which must be done from a distance from whatever emotion, experience, or idea might have been the initial inspiration. There is no real emotion in a piece of music, real emotions are only experienced by sentient beings. If Mahler felt an emotion and later wished to represent that in his music, that is something else.


Well, you don't know for sure that Mahler wasn't sad 'while composing'. And I don't know why people feel the need to explain that a piece of music 'has no real emotion' when what is meant is that a piece of music can be designed/composed to be interpreted as representing or provoking a particular emotion by many sentient beings.

I wonder how many people would figure out what this music represents without knowing the title?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

DaveM said:


> Well, you don't know for sure that Mahler wasn't sad 'while composing'.


It is a fact that while composing, or creating art in any form, the artist must be in control of his materials, have a clear mind about what he is doing, and it is hard work that must be done in a disciplined manner. This is done in a state other than under the influence of an emotion other than a serious concern with the craft of what he is about.

I explained why I consider it an incorrect idea that emotion resides within music. Music can remind us of an emotion but the emotion itself is not a part of the music. Music is made up of sounds.


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## Ariasexta (Jul 3, 2010)

Discussion heated, music certainly can emulate emotions, notice the word itself "*emotion*", it implies a certain type of motion in feeling, which can be say to have some vibrational patterns. Of course music can convey emotion to people by its own virtue of musical languages. Even we know that resonance can creat amazing effects, why object to the idea that music itself has powers, how good or bad, it is up to people who compose them and use them.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> My basic difference with everyone claiming that music _expresses_ emotion, e.g. sadness, is that for me one cannot express an emotion unless they are feeling it. This is a human trait not shared by inorganic phenomena like music.
> 
> Since music cannot "feel sad" it cannot "express" sadness. It can point to sadness because of conventional associations we as listener shave been taught to link. Composers have learned how to do this over hundreds of years. But the music itself does not contain sadness any more than a warning sign contains the danger.


So do you not think actors are expressing emotion even if they are not feeling it? Do you think you can reliably tell the difference? This also confuses me, because I never thought of expression (in general) as being something someone is only capable of doing as they're feeling the thing being expressed, nor have I thought of it as something that must be contained within the medium used to express it itself. Obviously the music itself is not, say, sad, but neither is the language we speak or write.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> So do you not think actors are expressing emotion even if they are not feeling it? Do you think you can reliably tell the difference? This also confuses me, because I never thought of expression (in general) as being something someone is only capable of doing as they're feeling the thing being expressed, nor have I thought of it as something that must be contained within the medium used to express it itself. Obviously the music itself is not, say, sad, but neither is the language we speak or write.


Acting is also artifice, and I make a distinction between an actor's portrayal of an emotional state and that same actor experiencing that emotion in response to a crucial life situation. An actor playing a crime victim, obviously, will not feel the same kind of fear as he would if his life were truly in danger. Acting represents emotional responses but it is a performance art, and actors also must remain in control of what they are about. I've heard that actors will draw on memories of past experiences in order to more freely elicit the appropriate acting emotion - but there is a difference: one is real and one is acting.

An actor playing a lover is not, in fact, in love with his co-star.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

SanAntone said:


> It is a fact that while composing, or creating art in any form, the artist
> 
> must be in control of his materials, have a clear mind about what he is doing, and it is hard work that must be done in a disciplined manner. This is done in a state other than under the influence of an emotion other than a serious concern with the craft of what he is about...


It is hard to believe that classical music works never reflect a particular emotion a composer was experiencing at the time. I've never heard that expressed as an incontrovertible fact...anywhere.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

DaveM said:


> It is hard to believe that classical music works never reflect a particular emotion a composer was experiencing at the time. I've never heard that expressed as an incontrovertible fact...anywhere.


Nevertheless, there is some truth to it Dave. A composer can also write happy music when feeling sad and vice versa. In fact when a composer is working, a cool head is the best way to control what may well be the most ardent passage in a piece in order to present it in its best light and do it justice.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

DaveM said:


> It is hard to believe that classical music works never reflect a particular emotion a composer was experiencing at the time. I've never heard that expressed as an incontrovertible fact...anywhere.


Classical works often take months, or longer to compose. Is it your belief that a composer sustains an emotion for weeks or months at a time? Have you never heard the expression "comedy is tragedy plus time?" IOW only after we distance ourselves from the event, or experience, can we turn it into an artistic expression.

I can't help but feel that some of you have an overly romantic idea of how a composer does his work.


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## verandai (Dec 10, 2021)

I would say that an inspiration can contain quite some emotions/impressions of that particular moment.

But as an inspiration is usually only a small part of a composition, it can evolve in different directions from there. 

At least that's how it works for me as a non-professional. I usually get most of the initial ideas when I'm en route in the nature (hiking, biking, etc). But when I don't record the idea fast, the inspiration is gone. Later when I'm back at home and try to elaborate the idea, I'm normally in another mood. But I can still make use of the inspirational moment, when I've recorded the idea.

I also want to try to compose something totally from scratch (trying to find an inspiration at home) - as an experiment and training. But I haven't started so far. I may not like the result, but at least I want to try it


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

mikeh375 said:


> Nevertheless, there is some truth to it Dave. A composer can also write happy music when feeling sad and vice versa. In fact when a composer is working, a cool head is the best way to control what may well be the most ardent passage in a piece in order to present it in its best light and do it justice.


The operative words in what I said were 'It is hard to believe that classical music works *never* reflect a particular emotion...' responding to a poster inferring that premise. I never said or implied that composers always have to write music that reflects their current emotional state. While I am not in a position to go back and do the research, I'm sure that any of us who have listened to classical music for a long time and have read composer biographies, a lot of liner notes on LPs and booklets in CD boxes have read of composers who wrote such and such music because something in their life had made them sad or happy and the music reflected it.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

DaveM said:


> The operative words in what I said were 'It is hard to believe that classical music works *never* reflect a particular emotion...' responding to a poster inferring that premise. I never said or implied that composers always have to write music that reflects their current emotional state. While I am not in a position to go back and do the research, I'm sure that any of us who have listened to classical music for a long time and have read composer biographies, a lot of liner notes on LPs and booklets in CD boxes have read of composers who wrote such and such music because something in their life had made them sad or happy and the music reflected it.


Yes, reflect an experience, an emotion (although emotions are usually fleeting) and idea. Of course these themes provide the impetus for a composer to "speak." However, what I've gotten from this discussion was where did the emotion reside? I maintain that there is no actual emotion within the music only signs that create the connection to an emotion a listener can relate to.

I also maintain that writing music is primarily a well-honed craft and in order for a composer to manage his materials in such a way to articulate that idea, or experience, or emotion, it requires a level of concentrated skill and not merely "emoting."

Try to imagine how you feel upon hearing of the death of a close loved one. How do you manage the grief? I don't think you would sit down and write a poem. You might do that days or weeks later. But finding the words to adequately express your grief is hard without it becoming maudlin or trivial.

Composers like all people, first feel something. But what separates a composer or artist or writer from the average man on the street is that we look to artists and composers to articulate those feelings we all share into music, or novels, or films, or paintings. It might be years later, before a composer can write something based on a memory of that feeling. Because like I said it can be hard finding the right words, or right notes, harmonies, rhythms, form, and develop them into a musical work that the composer feels he "got it right."


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

mikeh375 said:


> It might be relevant to point out that composers when composing will have a response to what they find. This response can be emotional, associative, extraneous, intellectual or any combination thereof. Even the coldest, most clinical workmanlike approach will be on the hunt for something it will only recognise via an internal response of some sort - a recognition, a sense of having found something.
> The composer's reaction to material is key as it is a prime driver in how a work is instigated and continues.


That makes sense, composers' responses to internal and external stimuli is what can be called inspiration. The unique ways they do this are integral to their own creative process.

Even though we might construct archetypes - e.g. let's say Stravinsky was the archetypal modernist composer - their experiences, inspirations and methods can only serve to illustrate what we mean by that in a fairly reductionist way.

On a related note, there might be archetypes of listeners, too. Its more speculative, because its easy to see listeners as being some big grey mass. This is where intersubjectivity, or shared meanings, come into the picture. What is happening when different listeners receive music? It's complex and subtle, a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic elements. The mix will be different, depending on what each listener brings to the experience.

A couple of people have mentioned Haydn. Melanie Lowe wrote a book on how audiences might have interpreted his music. She constructed archetypes of late 18th century listeners - e.g. nobleman, buisinessman, intellectual, military - and wrote about how they might have received the music of Haydn and Mozart when hearing it for the first time at a public concert.

A quote from the book, which speaks to this issue:

_"To speculate constructively about the meanings listeners, whether historical or contemporary, hear in a composition, we must consider not only the work's intrinsic musical aspects but also its musical, historical, cultural, aesthetic, social, and political situations, for a listening subject cannot divorce a text from its various contexts."_*

* Source and more quotes here: The meaning of musical meaning


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Kreisler jr said:


> But it is not the claim that music is pretty much like language. It's similar in some ways, rather different in others.
> (Some comparisons with language above were only to show that some objections put against this view about "musical meaning" could as well be raised against cases of meaning of natural language. It's also almost unavoidable to have such comparisons because obviously natural language is the system of meaning representation we understand best.)
> That's part of the distinction Bast tries to point out. IMO it's shortsighted to claim that music can only (haphazardly because dependent on listener) *cause* some emotional states but not in some way exemplify them via similarities with e.g bodily movements (breathing, gestures, walking, marching, jumping, dancing).
> Nobody is of course obligated to try to get into such distinctions and discussions but to claim that they are just philosophical mumbo jumbo is lazy. The fact that music was understood as analogical to language for most of history by musicians themselves, not by some ivory tower eggheads, should lead to taking such attempts to understand how and what kind of "meaning" can be transported by music at least seriously. It might be in the end implausible or wrong but it's certainly not obviously so.


This post is not the only one to suggest that because the ambiguity of language is in some way analogous to the ambiguity of musical 'language', it shows how music IS a language and can therefore carry the same level of representational meaning. I don't accept this. I recognise that language is open to confusion, ambiguity, misinterpretation, misunderstanding - and that can be due to both writer/speaker's poor writing/speaking as well as the listener's/reader's poor listening/reading.

But (let's stick with written) language starts with an alphabet, a vocabulary and a formal syntax which is broadly commonly understood. If it didn't, I couldn't possibly communicate anything to any reader on the forum. In fact, the obvious point to make here is that if you've ever been to a country where you don't know the language at all, communication is almost impossible.

This goes back to a point already established by EdwardBast and accepted by me (posts #22, #24, #29) (and others) that if both composer and listener recognise that certain formulations "represent" or "mean" certain emotions, it can be said that music can "express" emotions. Just a brief reading of extracts from Hatten's Musical Meaning in Beethoven and Lowe's Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony confirm the common sense that this is a reasonable stance. Lowe goes further (in the pieces I've read) though in recognising that once the listener does not "speak the language" - for example, a 21stC listener unfamiliar with the formalities of the classical symphony - the chance that the music will not be heard to "express" the emotion intended by, say, Beethoven, increases. This is no-one's fault, but it introduces the idea that while music _can "_express" emotion in some favourable circumstances, and usually does _arouse _emotion (well, adrenalin at least) in, say, a military march, the idea that emotion somehow _resides in _the music is questionable.



Eva Yojimbo said:


> You can also see my reply to San Antone above where I think I covered this. Essentially, what you two seem to be arguing that music is not as specific as language, which is not a point I dispute. However there is a huge grey area between "super specific so that everyone understands what is meant" and "completely unspecific so that everyone can make up their own meaning and will react differently." Both language and music occupy much of this grey area, even if language is usually closer to the "specific" end of the spectrum and music closer to the "unspecific" end. There are undoubtedly pieces of music that are commonly *associated *with love*.*


And therein lies the problem. How do we analyse that association and separate all the non-musical cues from the musical?

Just to confirm via a different example. I've played the _William Tell Overture _to classes of primary aged children (4-11 year olds) and they had no problem being so stirred by the gallop that the class could get out of hand. I'm pretty sure that few of them would have seen _The Lone Ranger_, so they were unlikely to be bringing that non-musical cue with them. They were responding directly to the obvious, simple emotional cues in the music. It's not a piece to play at the beginning of an assembly for collective worship if you're looking for quiet reflection!

So, yes, there are obvious examples of music's capacity for emotional expression, stimulated by, as EdwardBast noted, the mimicking of human movement and human vocalisations.

It's just that as soon as you move away from the obvious, music's capacity to express emotion in any guaranteed or universal sense is hampered (or helped) significantly by the non-musical context brought by the listener. Again, for clarity, EdwardBast confirmed that he wasn't arguing that musica always does, only that it can. I accepted that.



EdwardBast said:


> You might consider actually reading some musical aesthetics instead of just repeating notions no one in the field takes seriously.


Well we'll all just suspend discussion while we go away, purchase and read and come back again... 

The extracts from the Lowe and the Hatten I've read - quickly, for the purpose of trying to respond to others' posts sooner rather than later - seem only to confirm that there is a spectrum of opinion on this - not that the entirety of the literature holds a single unambiguous view as you seem to suggest.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Composers like all people, first feel something. But what separates a composer or artist or writer from the average man on the street is that we look to artists and composers to articulate those feelings we all share into music, or novels, or films, or paintings. It might be years later, before a composer can write something based on a memory of that feeling. Because like I said it can be hard finding the right words, or right notes, harmonies, rhythms, form, and develop them into a musical work that the composer feels he "got it right."


"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."William Wordsworth


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

DaveM said:


> The operative words in what I said were 'It is hard to believe that classical music works *never* reflect a particular emotion...' responding to a poster inferring that premise. I never said or implied that composers always have to write music that reflects their current emotional state. While I am not in a position to go back and do the research, I'm sure that any of us who have listened to classical music for a long time and have read composer biographies, a lot of liner notes on LPs and booklets in CD boxes have read of composers who wrote such and such music because something in their life had made them sad or happy and the music reflected it.


Oh yeah my bad Dave, I missed the finer point, apologies and agreed.

Generally speaking, it's not surprising that there are some misconceptions about composing because the relationship between technique, creation and emotion is very complicated and as Sid says above (post92), it is unique and personal. It's even mistyfying for the composer too at times.

A composer also needs to be led by the notes and what they imply and not by just the emotive content, which will look after itself more often than not if the technical side is looked after. At that point, the composer's mood may make him prefer phrases, chords, progressions etc. that reflect his/her feelings in so far as they hear/feel it, (or not). All of which depends on the piece, what its potential is telling the composer and the circumstances of its purpose for being written. Whatever the source of the notes, they still have to be subjugated to procedures in order to flesh them out.

Composer's will hunt for inevitability in the notes according to their particular aesthetic and/or technical disposition more so than any emotional state (although consistency in emotional mood can be a key aim as well as a decisive factor when deciding upon one direction out of an infinity of choice), and no two composers are likely to continue a piece in the same or similar way outside of maybe pastiche. The general direction of musical travel during the course of writing that is the result of inevitability from a more technical procedure - and one that might alter the emotional/musical course and impact - is always a possibility, an option even, that can spring from a mindset and way of working that's less "emotional".

The emphasis on the technical is to ensure inevitability more than anything else and consistency. Even the creative process itself and any emotional arc can have much in the way of ambiguity regarding its genesis during the course of writing a piece, but an equivalent emotional state to the music at hand is not necessary and can even be a hindrance to clear thinking. A balance is needed between differing ways of creating. Someone once said that there is no point in having a good idea (inspiration) if you can't dress it properly for its presentation (technique)...yep, that's about it. Also, (and I'm paraphrasing another composer here whose name escapes me), unless you open the door and make it welcoming (via technique), then inspiration wont be able to walk in and feel at home.

Here's some well known names on the subject of technique.

_Haydn: "If I found something to be beautiful, so that the ear and the heart could be satisfied, and I would have had to sacrifice such beauty to withered pedantry, then I would rather let stand a little grammatical slip."

Schoenberg: Being a musician consists of intellect, heart, and technique. Without intellect you will be a fiasco, without technique an amateur, and without heart a machine.

Schumann: "Do not be frightened by words like Theory, Thoroughbass, Counterpoint, etc. They can be your friends if you approach them in a friendly manner."

Brahms - "Without craftsmanship,inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind"_

Did I ramble a bit here? Composing like forum posting, can be a messy and emotional business so don't believe everything you read...


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> Acting is also artifice, and I make a distinction between an actor's portrayal of an emotional state and that same actor experiencing that emotion in response to a crucial life situation. An actor playing a crime victim, obviously, will not feel the same kind of fear as he would if his life were truly in danger. Acting represents emotional responses but it is a performance art, and actors also must remain in control of what they are about. I've heard that actors will draw on memories of past experiences in order to more freely elicit the appropriate acting emotion - but there is a difference: one is real and one is acting.
> 
> An actor playing a lover is not, in fact, in love with his co-star.


Yes, there's an entire acting school/method founded on the technique of actors feeling the emotions that their characters would feel so they are "reacting" more than "acting." Whether or not you think they actually are feeling what the characters feel I think it's silly to define expression in such a limited way that a person must be feeling whatever it is they're expression. One huge problem with that is you don't have access to anyone else's mind so you can never know what they're actually feeling. Further, a huge part of the issue is what is means to "express" something through any medium, whether that's written language, body language, spoken language, or, yes even music. To me, the latter is more to the heart of the matter. But I really don't think it makes sense to limit expression to something someone can only do if they're feeling the thing being expressed. Too many ambiguities there.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Forster said:


> And therein lies the problem. How do we analyse that association and separate all the non-musical cues from the musical?
> 
> Just to confirm via a different example. I've played the _William Tell Overture _to classes of primary aged children (4-11 year olds) and they had no problem being so stirred by the gallop that the class could get out of hand. I'm pretty sure that few of them would have seen _The Lone Ranger_, so they were unlikely to be bringing that non-musical cue with them. They were responding directly to the obvious, simple emotional cues in the music. It's not a piece to play at the beginning of an assembly for collective worship if you're looking for quiet reflection!
> 
> ...


Why would we need to? Again, the way many kids learn how to use language is by observing the context and emotions associated with a word's usage. We do not need to disentangle this from all of the non-linguistic cues to observe that this happens and how it happens. The point is that once it HAS happened that there is often a massive socio-cultural shared understanding of such associations. It's why almost anyone who would recognize the love theme from Tchaikovsky's Rome & Juliet would think of love, the same way anyone who's ever heard the word "damn!" would associate it with anger or frustration even if they've never looked up or been told the definition of the word.

I think we agree on the rest of your post.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Why would we need to? Again, the way many kids learn how to use language is by observing the context and emotions associated with a word's usage. We do not need to disentangle this from all of the non-linguistic cues to observe that this happens and how it happens. The point is that once it HAS happened that there is often a massive socio-cultural shared understanding of such associations. It's why almost anyone who would recognize the love theme from Tchaikovsky's Rome & Juliet would think of love, the same way anyone who's ever heard the word "damn!" would associate it with anger or frustration even if they've never looked up or been told the definition of the word.
> 
> I think we agree on the rest of your post.


George Burns had a great quote about how to succeed as an actor: "The main thing in Hollywood is authenticity. If you can fake that you've got it made."


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

While we can enjoy music just for the sounds it makes; the craftsmanship, and the way our bodies respond to it through dance or feelings; but I also think that music is a way of story-telling.

Program works such as Strauss' _Don Quixote_, Beethoven's _Pastorale Symphony_, and Berlioz' _Harold in Italy_ tell a story. Other works such as the before mentioned Shostakovich's _Symphony #5_ or Tchaikovsky's _Pathetique Symphony_ are a bit more enigmatic and the composer leaves it to the listener to find the true meaning. Was Shostakovich putting us on with the finale to the _5th_? I don't know. Was Tchaikovsky putting us on with the rousing third out-of-place movement in the _Pathetique_?

I loved the sad yet beautiful _Symphony of Sorrowful Songs_ by Henryk Gorecki when I first heard it on the radio and then on CD, and I didn't know a thing about the lyrics which were all in Polish. When I read the English translation I was deeply moved even more than before at how _Symphony of Sorrowful Songs_ describes the horror of war and the power of the mother-child bond.

While in college I fell into a very profound jazz phase as I loved the sounds of musicians such as Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, David Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sun Ra etc. But at the time, I was only interested in sounds. Later when I learned how jazz evolved from the African-American church music and in beer joints where the people there were gangsters, drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes; did I really find the essence of the stories that were behind the music. And then there were those great jazz standards that came from Tin-Pan-Alley and show tunes by the likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, and so on. I went to the music of crooners such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, as well as the Ella Fitzgerald _Songbook_ records, to learn the lyrics to the songs to which the great jazz musicians would improvise upon. And then I realized that when Stan Getz recorded _My Funny Valentine_ or when Red Garland _They Can't Take That Away From Me_ that there is a story behind the music even if the song is being played as an instrumental. _Somewhere Over the Rainbow_ has been covered by just about every major jazz musicians from George Shearing, the Modern Jazz Quartet, to Sun Ra; and each version somehow reflects the message and mythology that was first brought to the fore by Judy Garland and the _Wizard of Oz_ movie.

Similarly, I find the allure of country music to be in the story-telling. And while I came very late in life to being able to enjoy the Country music genre, I now find in the music of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, and Willie Nelson, a certain authenticity and sincerity in the art of story-telling when I hear songs such as _Sunday Morning Comin' Down_, _Poncho and Lefty_, and _Luckenbach, Texas_, especially when you learn that the background of Country Music nearly makes it the sister to jazz in that it was based in the Gospel music and was a music of poor people living in the southern part of the USA.

Music is all about story telling. It always has a message and a mythology behind it. I love symphonies because to me every symphony tells a story and it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; as with drama and movies where you have an introduction, and an exposition, a plot or conflict, followed by a resolution, a finale, and sometimes an epilogue. And if we are "told to hear it", that bit of context makes the music more meaningful and profound.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

mikeh375 said:


> Generally speaking, it's not surprising that there are some misconceptions about composing because the relationship between technique, creation and emotion is very complicated and as Sid says above (post92), it is unique and personal. It's even mistyfying for the composer too at times.


A quote which speaks to this is by Samuel Barber*

_"I can also tell you that one of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does is that I live mostly in the country. I like being surrounded by nature. I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens when I compose, I really haven't the faintest idea. The point is, I'm not an analyzer, and I don't surround myself with other composers."_



> … A composer also needs to be led by the notes and what they imply and not by just the emotive content, which will look after itself more often than not if the technical side is looked after...
> 
> Composer's will hunt for inevitability in the notes according to their particular aesthetic and/or technical disposition more so than any emotional state (although consistency in emotional mood can be a key aim as well as a decisive factor when deciding upon one direction out of an infinity of choice), and no two composers are likely to continue a piece in the same or similar way…


A good work to illustrate aspects of this is Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen. It's a piece which is virtually impossible to separate from the circumstances under which it was composed. Strauss wrote "In Memoriam" on the score but didn't say exactly who or what it was in memory of. He also said that he didn't consciously compose the piece, it just poured out of him.

It didn't come out of nothing, and his personal circumstances and the state of the world at the time shed light on this. Nor is it something that could be dashed off with little effort - a half hour piece interweaving extremely complex counterpoint and thematic development (two themes of three subjects each) where each member of a 23 piece string orchestra is also a soloist.

Strauss was at the stage of such a high degree of technical mastery, where his inspiration and technique somehow flowed as one.



Coach G said:


> …I loved the sounds of musicians such as Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, David Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, Dizzy Gillespie, Sun Ra etc. But at the time, I was only interested in sounds…I went to the music of crooners ...And then I realized … that there is a story behind the music even the song is being played as an instrumental.


That's a good point, and it applies to classical too (e.g. how the likes of Schubert, Mahler and Ives often incorporated tunes from their songs into instrumental pieces). It makes sense to try and know the words to the song.

On a related topic, as jazz started being taught at universities a line of thinking came about which saw the lyrics as extrinsic to the tune. I guess the trend developed post-bebop. Some theories of improvisation saw the lyrics of the song as impeding its purely musical content.

I don't think this way of thinking is prevalent now in jazz. The musicians you listed most likely wouldn't have seen any sense in it. Nevertheless, it goes to show the problems involved with attempts to separate the instrinsic and extrinsic elements of music.

* Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/03/...barber-been-where-has-samuel-barber-been.html


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Why would we need to?


Unless we are in the middle of a debate about which of the music, or the non-musical context contains the emotion, we don't need to. See my post #72.



> Perhaps we should all just be content with the fact that music can make us happy, or excited, or melancholic and the process that does this is immaterial.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> You are confusing what I am saying which are my personal views with what a musical aesthetician writes about. *I have no interest in that field, have no plans on reading those books,* nor do I present my views within that context. I have said how I interpret the word "express" and don't share your usage of the term "express" vis a vis music, nor theirs as you have represented them.
> 
> It is of absolutely no concern to me whether you or anyone working in the field of musical aesthetics takes my view seriously. I am sharing them on this forum because I think they are a way of approaching this question that is valid.
> 
> ...


I know of no one, let alone anyone conversant with modern musical aesthetics, who believes the things you're arguing against. Your opponents are imaginary and/or what you think people mean when they say music expresses emotion isn't what they mean.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> I know of no one, let alone anyone conversant with modern musical aesthetics, who believes the things you're arguing against. Your opponents are imaginary and/or what you think people mean when they say music expresses emotion isn't what they mean.


Then I have no idea why you appeared to be presenting a view of music expressing emotion as a form of countering my view throughout this thread, and to which I have responded. At one point I tried to be conciliatory by saying we might be using the phrase "expressing music" differently but actually hold same or similar ideas, but to that post you also found something to criticize and debate.

I'll ask you a simple question: do you believe that emotion is inherently within music?


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Forster said:


> Unless we are in the middle of a debate about which of the music, or the non-musical context contains the emotion, we don't need to. See my post #72.


It seems to me we're in a debate about whether music can express emotion, and I wasn't aware that expression required the containment of the emotion within the medium of the expression. I don't think this is how most people use or think of that term and, as I've said before, I see little difference between music and language in this respect beyond where they sit on the specificity spectrum.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> I'll ask you a simple question: do you believe that emotion is inherently within music?


Not real human emotion obviously. I don't even know what that would mean. The _expression of emotion_, not the emotion itself, is inherent in the music, but it's the expression (through an elaborate system of metaphor and convention) of the emotion of a fictional persona created by the composer. So if someone says to me: Clearly Beethoven was feeling existential terror and anguish when he composed the Appassionata, I would respond that the work might arguably express these things, but there's no reason to attribute the emotion to Beethoven and certainly no reason to believe he was feeling it while composing it (for reasons you stated), or indeed that he ever necessarily felt it in real life. To the extent the work embodies coherent sequences of mental states and so has a quasi-narrative expressive structure, it's a work of fiction - the metaphorical expression of fictional emotion, organized to unfold in a manner recalling the way real-life emotional episodes might unfold.



Eva Yojimbo said:


> *It seems to me we're in a debate about whether music can express emotion, and I wasn't aware that expression required the containment of the emotion within the medium of the expression.* I don't think this is how most people use or think of that term and, as I've said before, I see little difference between music and language in this respect beyond where they sit on the specificity spectrum.


I agree - and don't understand what such containment would even mean.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> Not real human emotion obviously. I don't even know what that would mean. *The expression of emotion is inherent in the music, but it's the expression (through an elaborate system of metaphor and convention) of the emotion of a fictional persona created by the composer. *


Do you believe that music has the wherewithal to express specific emotions?

I tend to think that the more specific an emotion a composer tries to express in music the more obvious (and as a consequence, less sophisticated) that music must become, e.g. film music to enhance a chase sequence.

What emotion is a fugue from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier expressing?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> It seems to me we're in a debate about whether music can express emotion, and I wasn't aware that expression required the containment of the emotion within the medium of the expression. I don't think this is how most people use or think of that term and, as I've said before, I see little difference between music and language in this respect beyond where they sit on the specificity spectrum.


Well, humans certainly experience the emotions within themselves they express. Which is why I find the use of the phrase "music expresses emotion" confusing and inaccurate.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Well whatever we mean...and we seem to become more confused with each clarification...we've not answered the OP's question.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Forster said:


> Well whatever we mean...and we seem to become more confused with each clarification...we've not answered the OP's question.


The OP's question assumes that a composer, (every composer?) has emotional content he intends to put into his music. The second part of his question assumes "we are told what we should hear" - by whom?

I certainly don't think all (or even most) composers concern themselves with communicating emotion with their music, and think that those composers who do concern themselves with this kind of thing (Richard Strauss, for example, said he could describe a spoon with music) are not among my favorites because I consider that kind of use of music to be superficial and in many ways cheap.

I also don't have a clue who the OP thinks is telling us what to listen for, unless it's an essay in a CD booklet - which I generally ignore anyway. I really don't like to be told anything about the music.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

^ Your lack of interest in that kind of music doesn't invalidate the OP's question, however, and it's a pertinent one in the case of Shostakovich.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Forster said:


> ^ Your lack of interest in that kind of music doesn't invalidate the OP's question, however, and it's a pertinent one in the case of Shostakovich.


Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers, but I don't ever think he is expressing specific emotions with his music, and find analysis that frames his works in that context to be a distracting bother., as well as superficial.

IMO one of the things Shostakovich wrote about was the resilience of the human spirit living under oppression - which is a general idea and not necessarily granular to the point of expressing specific emotions. He also used texts often, which link those works to specific ideas.

But instead of criticizing my posts, why don't you tell us your answer to the OP's question.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> Well, humans certainly experience the emotions within themselves they express. Which is why I find the use of the phrase "music expresses emotion" confusing and inaccurate.


Yes, but humans express those emotions through a medium, whether that medium is spoken language, written language, or body language. Language has no more innate emotion than music does; it's just a medium through which we come to associate with emotional states, either through explicit definition or through the context of their usage.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers, but I don't ever think he is expressing specific emotions with his music, and find analysis that frames his works in that context to be a distracting bother., as well as superficial.
> 
> IMO one of the things Shostakovich wrote about was the resilience of the human spirit living under oppression - which is a general idea and not necessarily granular to the point of expressing specific emotions. He also used texts often, which link those works to specific ideas.
> 
> But instead of criticizing my posts, why don't you tell us your answer to the OP's question.


I'm not "criticising" your post...at least, not any more than you're criticising mine.

I thought the last 8 pages in which both of us have been actively engaged in discussing the question was generally aimed at answering the OP's question.

The word 'emotion' has been somewhat misleading, given the OPs explanation of what they were asking. The question, IMO, is really whether you can tell _from the music alone_ and conclusively, whether Shostakovich was celebrating or criticising the Soviet regime.

My answer is, "No, I don't think you can, conclusively." But I like to think that it is reasonable to interpret some of his stylistic approaches as being critical, not celebratory. The air of gloom; the "bombast"; the frenetic passages; the wearying laborious passages (I have the 7th, 10th and 11th symphonies in mind in particular.)

It's difficult to unknow what one has picked up from sleeve notes, books and documentaries. They have certainly impinged on my listening and interpreting of his symphonies.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Yes, but humans express those emotions through a medium, whether that medium is spoken language, written language, or body language. Language has no more innate emotion than music does; it's just a medium through which we come to associate with emotional states, either through explicit definition or through the context of their usage.


The difference, one of kind not degree IMO, is that humans express an emotion they are experiencing which gives it specificity and truth. Music can only offer rather crude hints at an emotion, put there by a composer, which artificially creates in the mind of a listener an associated emotion. To equate these two is wrong, IMO.

And if this is what you actually think I hope I am never in your company when I have suffered a personal loss.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Forster said:


> DSCH seems to me a great example of the problem of musical "decoding". Was he a suck-up or a cynic? What are we supposed to hear in his symphonies?





Forster said:


> The word 'emotion' has been somewhat misleading, given the OPs explanation of what they were asking. The question, IMO, is really whether you can tell _from the music alone_ and conclusively, whether Shostakovich was celebrating or criticising the Soviet regime.
> 
> My answer is, "No, I don't think you can, conclusively." But I like to think that it is reasonable to interpret some of his stylistic approaches as being critical, not celebratory. The air of gloom; the "bombast"; the frenetic passages; the wearying laborious passages (I have the 7th, 10th and 11th symphonies in mind in particular.)
> .


Since you've mentioned this a few times, I'll just butt in to say that I think that we know a bit about what Shostakovich thought about politics from primary sources (not Testimony, but his letters for example). I touched upon this in detail here:

https://www.talkclassical.com/71916-prokofiev-khachaturian-during-stalin-2.html#post2121510

On that thread I discussed how events in Shostakovich's life, as outlined in his letters, point to sources of inspiration behind his String Quartet #8.

Shostakovich isn't really attempting to portray specific biographical events in his music, and to get those details one needs look elsewhere. However, contextual details can be useful if the listener wants to try to understand what events inspired him.

On a related note, although I think that context is important, too much can be made of Shostakovich's views of politics. His experiences under Stalin often overshadow everything else, yet apart from his earlier years when Lenin was leader, Shostakovich lived for ten years each under Khrushchev - whose reforms really changed the USSR - and Brezhnev. Even under Stalin, the two most crucial years for Shostakovich were 1936 and 1948.

Almost right from the beginning, I think that Shostakovich became a pawn in a tug of war between East and West. This only got worse with the onset of the Cold War.

A lot of the criticism coming out of the West at the time saw those quotations, songs, and the Mahlerian legacy as a deficit, his sense of narrative too literal. They sought to link these criticisms with Shostakovich's at times strained relationship with the Soviet government. In other words, his music wasn't really modern and highly compromised because of political restraints.

A more balanced way of seeing Shostakovich has developed since. Its now more common for writers to situate him within, rather than exclude him from, modern music. Shostakovich isn't as old school as the modernists thought, and he had things in common with other composers of the period, who incorporated the music and narratives of their own cultures, while making references to classical tradition.


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## EvaBaron (Jan 3, 2022)

Forster said:


> The word 'emotion' has been somewhat misleading, given the OPs explanation of what they were asking. The question, IMO, is really whether you can tell _from the music alone_ and conclusively, whether Shostakovich was celebrating or criticising the Soviet regime.
> 
> My answer is, "No, I don't think you can, conclusively." But I like to think that it is reasonable to interpret some of his stylistic approaches as being critical, not celebratory. The air of gloom; the "bombast"; the frenetic passages; the wearying laborious passages (I have the 7th, 10th and 11th symphonies in mind in particular.)
> 
> It's difficult to unknow what one has picked up from sleeve notes, books and documentaries. They have certainly impinged on my listening and interpreting of his symphonies.


This is exactly what I mean. Thanks for the answer and I agree with you. I just thought it was interesting because like you say it's difficult to unknow what one has picked up from sleeve notes, books and documentaries. It's also hard to tell which thoughts you came up with and which ones you read but forgot you read and now you think that you came up with it yourself


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> Do you believe that music has the wherewithal to express specific emotions?


Yes, sometimes, but when it does it generally requires a full formal and narrative analysis of a work to specify what is being expressed beyond general categories like happy and sad. It's not the sort of thing one is likely to hear in isolated passages at a first hearing. My ideas on musical expression are complicated and impossible to argue in short form, which is part of the reason I published them in journals and books. But, of course, you didn't want recommendations of any more books.  Nevertheless, given your interest in Shostakovich …

The most directly relevant essay is this, which argues for the expression of a specific emotion in a passage from Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony:

Karl, Gregory (aka Edward Bast) and Robinson, Jenefer. "Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions. In _Music and Meaning_. Ithaca New York: Cornell U Press, 1997, 154-78.

There is a more recent follow up responding to a critique of the above by philosopher Peter Kivy:

Karl, Gregory and Robinson, Jenefer. "Yet Again, 'Between Absolute and Programme Music'" _British Journal of Aesthetics_ 55/1 (2015): 19-37.

This one, while developing a theory of musical narrative, has a lot of specific things to say about the expression of emotion in the first movement of Beethoven's Appassionata:

Karl, Gregory. "Structuralism and Musical Plot." _Music Theory Spectrum_ 19 (1997): 13-34.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> The word 'emotion' has been somewhat misleading, given the OPs explanation of what they were asking. *The question, IMO, is really whether you can tell from the music alone and conclusively, whether Shostakovich was celebrating or criticising the Soviet regime.*
> 
> My answer is, "No, I don't think you can, conclusively." But I like to think that it is reasonable to interpret some of his stylistic approaches as being critical, not celebratory. The air of gloom; the "bombast"; the frenetic passages; the wearying laborious passages (I have the 7th, 10th and 11th symphonies in mind in particular.)


Do you know this essay? It's the most intelligent thing I've read about meaning in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. It's accessible to a general audience:

Taruskin, Richard. "Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony." In _Shostakovich Studies_. Ed. David Fanning. Cambridge University Press (1995): 17-56.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> The difference, one of kind not degree IMO, is that humans express an emotion they are experiencing which gives it specificity and truth. Music can only offer rather crude hints at an emotion, put there by a composer, which artificially creates in the mind of a listener an associated emotion. To equate these two is wrong, IMO.
> 
> And if this is what you actually think I hope I am never in your company when I have suffered a personal loss.


Does written language express emotion? If so then it would be the case that most authors are not feeling the emotion as they're writing the words. However, this also runs into the same issue I mentioned before about acting: in what way would the words/actions differ if the person was/wasn't feeling the emotions at the time they were writing them?

Personally, I've never thought as expression as being limited to something humans are only able to do as they're experiencing an emotion. We always have with us the emotions we've experienced in memory, and finding a medium that can convey those emotions and make an audience feel them is part of the "art" of art in general.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Does written language express emotion? If so then it would be the case that most authors are not feeling the emotion as they're writing the words. However, this also runs into the same issue I mentioned before about acting: in what way would the words/actions differ if the person was/wasn't feeling the emotions at the time they were writing them?
> 
> Personally, I've never thought as expression as being limited to something humans are only able to do as they're experiencing an emotion. We always have with us the emotions we've experienced in memory, and finding a medium that can convey those emotions and make an audience feel them is part of the "art" of art in general.


We look at this very differently: you appear to me to be analyzing this philosophically, cerebrally, and coldly. Whereas I look at the human aspect, how we respond to and express grief, love, happiness, sorrow, and how we are comforted or how joy is shared and experience becomes meaningful because of community and personal history.

Art is something else entirely. An artist or composer transforms experience (often a collage of experiences) into an artistic expression, and to the extent any emotion is expressed it is at at least one degree of remove, more often further removed than that from the actual experience(s). The primary emotion has become abstracted, manipulated with the artist's craft into something quite different from the original human experience of love, joy, grief, sorrow, nostalgia, e.g., and the artist is working from memory.

So this discussion has been somewhat frustrating for me since I see both you and EdwardBast approaching this in a manner foreign to my way of thinking and we have been talking past each other with much misunderstanding.

I will end my participation with my original statement: *music expresses itself (sound) and any emotional content a listener perceives is within his mind, not the music, but which has the power to trigger a sense memory of emotion through gestures we recognize and associate with certain ideas, memories, and experiences.*


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Do you know this essay? It's the most intelligent thing I've read about meaning in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. It's accessible to a general audience:
> 
> Taruskin, Richard. "Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony." In _Shostakovich Studies_. Ed. David Fanning. Cambridge University Press (1995): 17-56.


I don't think so. I've been trying to find it, but it seems it's only available on subscription - unless you know a website where it's readily available?

Thanks.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> I don't think so. I've been trying to find it, but it seems it's only available on subscription - unless you know a website where it's readily available?
> 
> Thanks.


Sorry, I don't. Might be accessible through a library?


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## souio (Dec 31, 2019)

By the logic of some of the comments here, it makes it sound as if we played Beethoven's Ode to Joy back to back with Chopin's Funeral March to someone who has never heard either of these and not telling them the titles, Funeral March could sound just as 'happy' as Ode to Joy while Ode would be just as melancholic as Funeral. 

Since music doesn't appear to express any emotion, without context they are both emotionless; therefore, without the titles, an unknowing listener would not realize Ode to Joy is meant to be happy and Funeral March is meant to be depressing and they would both be neutral and elicit the same emotion (or non-emotion), from the listener.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

souio said:


> By the logic of some of the comments here, it makes it sound as if we played Beethoven's Ode to Joy back to back with Chopin's Funeral March to someone who has never heard either of these and not telling them the titles, Funeral March could sound just as 'happy' as Ode to Joy while Ode would be just as melancholic as Funeral.
> 
> Since music doesn't appear to express any emotion, without context they are both emotionless; therefore, without the titles, an unknowing listener would not realize Ode to Joy is meant to be happy and Funeral March is meant to be depressing and they would both be neutral and elicit the same emotion (or non-emotion), from the listener.


An absurd misrepresentation of..."some comments here" (whose, we don't know: what, exactly they said, we don't know either).

It's plain that _some _music is _generally _accepted as "happy" and some as "sad", whatever the truth of the mechanism by which these crude emotions are perceived by the listener.

What is disputed is the balance of contributions made by the music itself; the "context" of the music (its style, traditions, extra musical information - anything and everything that might contribute to understanding that isn't the music itself); the "context" of the listener (their experience, background and music specific knowledge, emotional temperament, personal preferences etc); and the "context" of the listening (where, when, how, who with, - everything about the listening event).

Did I miss anything?

Yes. I should confirm that I've tried to represent the content of the various responses here to the OP. I've not, in this post at any rate, tried to get to the heart of the matter.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

SanAntone said:


> We look at this very differently: you appear to me to be analyzing this philosophically, cerebrally, and coldly. Whereas I look at the human aspect, how we respond to and express grief, love, happiness, sorrow, and how we are comforted or how joy is shared and experience becomes meaningful because of community and personal history.
> 
> Art is something else entirely. An artist or composer transforms experience (often a collage of experiences) into an artistic expression, and to the extent any emotion is expressed it is at at least one degree of remove, more often further removed than that from the actual experience(s). The primary emotion has become abstracted, manipulated with the artist's craft into something quite different from the original human experience of love, joy, grief, sorrow, nostalgia, e.g., and the artist is working from memory.
> 
> ...


I actually don't think we disagree on much given how you described what art does here. I think our only real disagreement is semantic: is what you're/we're describing with artistic expression a form of emotional expression.

I tend to rarely find that the "cold, cerebral" approach is actually at odds with any "human" aspects. The point of the former is that it is necessary when trying to understand anything that we make sure our ideas, hypotheses, and theories are coherent and consistent, that there aren't contradictions. So, eg, my inquiry about how music and language differs in terms of how they "express emotion" was towards the point of searching for consistency in the idea of what constitutes emotional expression and how, if, and/or to what degree they were similar or different.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Sorry, I don't. Might be accessible through a library?


I'm going today...in the meantime, Amazon have it to buy...

...for £104!


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## 4chamberedklavier (12 mo ago)

I think both sides are, to some extents, correct.

I'm of the opinion that certain arrangements of notes will trigger a certain emotional reaction independent of anything else because of how the brain is wired. Music that is closer to the harmonic series will be perceived as more 'positive' (I'm using this very loosely). The farther (or the more dissonant) it is, then it will be perceived as more 'negative'. Or how a sequence that rises in pitch is associated with increasing intensity & vice-versa.

However, I think that music's capacity to elicit certain emotions (or feelings?), on its own, is limited to those that are very general. More specific emotions are the ones that are brought about by associations with other things.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

souio said:


> By the logic of some of the comments here, it makes it sound as if we played Beethoven's Ode to Joy back to back with Chopin's Funeral March to someone who has never heard either of these and not telling them the titles, Funeral March could sound just as 'happy' as Ode to Joy while Ode would be just as melancholic as Funeral.
> 
> Since music doesn't appear to express any emotion, without context they are both emotionless; therefore, without the titles, an unknowing listener would not realize Ode to Joy is meant to be happy and Funeral March is meant to be depressing and they would both be neutral and elicit the same emotion (or non-emotion), from the listener.


Actually, and as with all forms of perception, we are hard wired to hear/see meaning in music. This can be influenced by what we expect or believe (which can be influenced by what others tell us) but is obviously mostly down to what the music is like - so lively music is always going to sound lively and our perceptual options are limited to what fits with that. For me the interesting thing is how performers can interpret a piece or a passage differently. And we can hear what they are getting at.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

it's very consoling at 2:35~6:55


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## justekaia (Jan 2, 2022)

We can only speculate on the composer's emotional intentions. Of course clues can be given by the composer or by critics who have known him/her. But neither of them are really reliable because they can tell us what they want us to believe.Of course when a composer writes a requiem for his husband/wife we understand that he/she is grieving. It remains a very general, not specific intention. Music is sound, therefore not carrying a clear emotional message.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

One element of classical music where we know the composer's emotional intent is lieder because there is poetry and words describing what the music is about. One of the more interesting in my experience is Schubert's _Ganymed_ from the Goethe poem.

If you don't know it Ganymed is a character name -- the object of the singer's love. Yet if you don't know German and heard the song accompanied by piano it doesn't sound like a love song. It never repeats, becomes highly dramatic, and sounds a lot different than love.

Yet when the singer is accompanied by full orchestra it sounds like what it is -- a song about springtime love..


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EvaBaron said:


> I recently watched some of the Keeping Score documentaries including the one about Shostakovich's 5th symphony. I was interested so later I looked it up and got some info on some other sites as well as this one. What I understand from the information, the west thought the finale of the 5th symphony was heroic and praising of Stalin and his regime until Solomon Volkov published his book after Shostakovich's death titled 'Testimony'. After that the sarcastic undertone was attributed to this symphony at least in the west from what I understand. It's worth mentioning that we are not sure what is accurate and what is not in Volkov's book, but the general consensus is that the book is at least not a 100% accurate. It at least got me thinking about composers emotional intentions. Do you think you can catch an underlying emotional undertone only by listening to the music or do you think people only heard it when we're being told it's there? It's a very interesting topic and I'm curious what do you think. Shostakovich's 5th is a very good example of course, but feel free to talk about this subject in general.





EdwardBast said:


> Do you know this essay? It's the most intelligent thing I've read about meaning in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. It's accessible to a general audience:
> 
> Taruskin, Richard. "Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony." In _Shostakovich Studies_. Ed. David Fanning. Cambridge University Press (1995): 17-56.


For a small fee I was able to obtain this from my local library (the fee was because the book had to be supplied from another, out-of-county library. I mention this to show that in the UK, local libraries don't hold a large stock of musical text books - perhaps not much in the way of academic texts of any sort).

The essay was indeed accessible, but it seemed to offer no convincing conclusion for any reader looking for a definitive interpretation. Indeed, Taruskin points out that



> this symphony is a richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively paraphrased.


 p29

Yet he also notes that the kind of analysis offered by Stravinsky (a 'not a joke' interpretation of the work as a 'Symphony of Socialism' p27) cannot be rejected without rejecting the music outright. (I'm not sure I fully understand this last point.) He then elaborates by reviewing four interpretations of the work (by Tolstoy, Orlov, Khubov and MacDonald) but likes none of them.

Taruskin explains that any analysis of the symphony's "meaning" must include a full understanding of the components that contribute to a construction of meaning (eg the 'syntactic vs semantic' referents, pp28-29). But since Taruskin says that this can (should) only be achieved in theory, not in practice, it seems to render the point meaningless. He nevertheless explores the music and its referents, showing DSCH connects more to Mahler and Beethoven than to folk tunes.

In fact, the closest he comes to any definitive point is when he says, somewhat incidentally, that



> the tendency to paraphrase [S's] works rather than listen to them was an old Soviet vice [...] but [...] it has infected and debased the reception of his music in the West as well.


 p55

This echoes an earlier point that Stravinsky's joke has been accepted because "we accept the notion that [S's symphony] not only invites but requires such an interpretation..." p28. In other words, we should perhaps question the notion that such an interpretation is required.

Perhaps we should just listen and enjoy (or not) and not fret about meaning, and certainly treat with caution, the kinds of meaning ascribed that relate to the idea that we can tell from the music whether DSCH was a Party adherent or a dissident.

I am unsure what this says about the wider question asked by the OP, except that I remain sceptical of the idea that any particular 'emotional nuance' (as opposed to the crude happy/sad) can be inferred from music.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Forster said:


> ... I am unsure what this says about the wider question asked by the OP, except that I remain sceptical of the idea that any particular 'emotional nuance' (as opposed to the crude happy/sad) can be inferred from music. ...


I appreciate your thoughtful response, and also your efforts in actually getting yourself a copy of the scholarly material and going over it yourself. I consider member EB to be knowledgeable and insightful in various topics, but there are indeed times he sounds unconvincing by saying "because some critic/author/academic said..."
For instance, there was this instance in the thread <The Beethoven-Brahms Paradox>,
/// EdwardBast: "Music's exalted position in the pantheon of the arts (many considered it the highest of the fine arts, as compared to the Classical Era in which music was considered the lowest) was due to its ability to capture internal life in a direct and palpable way unmediated by words or images."
hammeredklavier: "I've seen you claiming this in various threads, but composers such as Berlioz, Tchaikovsky thought the opposite (they thought the Classical period was an "improvement" on the previous periods, even in liturgical music, in terms of expression)."
EdwardBast: "Read Edward Lippmann's History of Western Musical Aesthetics. I've quoted it extensively before when arguing this point over many pages with someone no longer with us on the forum. I'm not interested in rehashing it." ///
Btw, I still haven't got a convincing response for what I asked in [Post#50] in this thread.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

hammeredklavier said:


> I appreciate your thoughtful response, and also your efforts in actually getting yourself a copy of the scholarly material and going over it yourself.


Thank you .


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I think you can't get away from the metaphysical aspects of Art and emotion on this topic. My thoughts on this: Emotion is something humans (and animals) feel. One aspect of Art is perspective especially in painting. It is bound to be subjective, unlike Science which is objective (even though contrary to a few comments I've read in this forum suggesting otherwise). 

Music is a form of Art but can have some scientific behavioral aspects, such as minor mode sonorities can elicit or suggest sad emotions (which I'm sure can be examined in studies). Music and Art is also a form of communication between the composer and the listener. It doesn't matter what the personal view of the composer is, he/she is writing for the listener, and as long as the listener picks up the idea, then that is all is necessary to say the music is sad. On Shostakovich's 5th, I recall he said the triumphant ending is forced, which supposedly anyone can or should be able to hear. I say I couldn't before in certain interpretations, but in Barshai's there was a certain sarcasm in the ending that is deliberate slower in pacing that does sound sarcastic (or else is badly performed triumphant music). 

Music is really just patterns in vibrations and waveforms in an objective sense. They carry no emotion or baggage in themselves.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> For a small fee I was able to obtain this from my local library (the fee was because the book had to be supplied from another, out-of-county library. I mention this to show that in the UK, local libraries don't hold a large stock of musical text books - perhaps not much in the way of academic texts of any sort).
> 
> The essay was indeed accessible, but it seemed to offer no convincing conclusion for any reader looking for a definitive interpretation. Indeed, Taruskin points out that
> 
> ...


Actually, Taruskin did a good deal of interpretation that you seem to have missed. What, for example, did you make of the part about the relationship of material in the third movement to Shostakovich's setting of the poem "Renewal" by Pushkin which was unpublished at the time of the symphony's premiere? The text of the poem describes a barbarian painter who throws paint across a canvas thus obscuring its subject. It says that with time the obscuring layer will fade and so later reveal the painting beneath. Taruskin also notes that the wind duets in the slow movement are reminiscent of traditional Russian funereal music. What if the finale is the obscuring coat of paint and the funereal third movement is the truth that its removal reveals? I'm pretty sure that's the interpretation Taruskin was hinting at and that he just didn't want to push it too hard. That interpretation accords well with the one "the author of Testimony" attributed to several Shostakovich symphonies, that it's a tombstone for the victims of the purges.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

While it is undeniable that with certain works a composer is attempting to express a set of emotions intimately involved with his life at the time of the composing, I think is a minority of the time. 

I think that for the most part composers compartmentalize their composing in a separate part of their mind and treat each work as a unique set of aesthetic questions, problems, and solutions, which are part and parcel of the conception of the work, all worked out in the writing of the music.

An example of this is Beethoven' 2nd symphony, one of his most upbeat works but which was written at the time he had come to fully appreciate the nature of his deteriorating hearing and the eventual deafness that would engulf him. He wrote a heartrending letter in 1801 (the very time of the 2nd symphony''s composition) about his hearing loss which he dated back to 1798. 

Obviously Beethoven was able to divorce the depression over his hearing loss and write the 2nd symphony which exhibits some of his happiest music.

The craft of musical composition is a complex business and to see it in the context of the OP is thinking of it superficially, IMO.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SanAntone said:


> While it is undeniable that with certain works a composer is attempting to express a set of emotions intimately involved with his life at the time of the composing, I think is a minority of the time.
> 
> I think that for the most part composers compartmentalize their composing in a separate part of their mind and treat each work as a unique set of aesthetic questions, problems, and solutions, which are part and parcel of the conception of the work, all worked out in the writing of the music.
> 
> ...


Why this insistence on music being the composer's expression? Most of the time music is a form of expressive fiction. The work captures the inner life of a fictional subject who inhabits it. Beethoven can imagine happy fictional personae just as easily as depressed ones, in the same way that depressed novelists can create happy characters. There's nothing remarkable about this.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

EdwardBast said:


> Why this insistence on music being the composer's expression? Most of the time music is a form of expressive fiction. The work captures the inner life of a fictional subject who inhabits it. Beethoven can imagine happy fictional personae just as easily as depressed ones, in the same way that depressed novelists can create happy characters. There's nothing remarkable about this.


*I agree with you*, and offered my own idea of how composers work: "I think that for the most part composers compartmentalize their composing in a separate part of their mind and treat each work as a unique set of aesthetic questions, problems, and solutions, which are part and parcel of the conception of the work, all worked out in the writing of the music."


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

EdwardBast said:


> Actually, Taruskin did a good deal of interpretation that you seem to have missed.


I didn't say he didn't do _any _ interpretation. I said that he offered "no convincing conclusion for any reader looking for a definitive interpretation" (particularly on the issue of his being a dissident or not).



EdwardBast said:


> What, for example, did you make of the part about the relationship of material in the third movement to Shostakovich's setting of the poem "Renewal" by Pushkin which was unpublished at the time of the symphony's premiere? The text of the poem describes a barbarian painter who throws paint across a canvas thus obscuring its subject. It says that with time the obscuring layer will fade and so later reveal the painting beneath. Taruskin also notes that the wind duets in the slow movement are reminiscent of traditional Russian funereal music. What if the finale is the obscuring coat of paint and the funereal third movement is the truth that its removal reveals? I'm pretty sure that's the interpretation Taruskin was hinting at and that he just didn't want to push it too hard. That interpretation accords well with the one "the author of Testimony" attributed to several Shostakovich symphonies, that it's a tombstone for the victims of the purges.


Well, rereading that section of the essay, and your points about it, I can only conclude that, in the context of the discussion in this thread, the allusions (musical and extra-musical) are so nuanced as to be unreadable through mere listening to the music. We even get into the problem of others' analysis having been based on a mistranslation of the Pushkin!

RT asks, "[...]whether the coda fails *on purpose *[...]" (my emphasis). How on earth is the listener supposed to read that? Fortunately, RT rejects such a reading, though not on musical grounds, but on historical: "There were no dissidents in Stalin's Russia."

He later reports that "sensitive listeners" will hear the "voice of the wounded" through the use of subjective emotion and not objective description. Setting aside the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy here, it is true that the overall tone of the symphony conveys subjectively the funereal, the torment, the anguish - the sad - and he is right to cut through the additional layers of interpretation applied by other readings.

What this essay confirms to me is that the very controversy of what the symphony "means" (intellectually or emotionally) illustrates that music only unreliably conveys emotion. It doesn't matter what Taruskin's _actual _reading of the symphony is: it is different from other readings and only adds to the noise surrounding the debate about Dmitri's intent.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> While it is undeniable that with certain works a composer is attempting to express a set of emotions intimately involved with his life at the time of the composing, I think is a minority of the time.
> 
> I think that for the most part composers compartmentalize their composing in a separate part of their mind and treat each work as a unique set of aesthetic questions, problems, and solutions, which are part and parcel of the conception of the work, all worked out in the writing of the music.


Have we acknowledged the problem of being able to separate any specific emotional 'message' that the composer may intend, from the signs of the personality of the composer already present in their works?

To give a simple example, Mahler and Shostakovich may be crudely characterised as 'miserable' symphonists. Is this because of who they are, or because of the subject matter they often deal with?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Forster said:


> I didn't say he didn't do _any _ interpretation. I said that he offered "no convincing conclusion for any reader looking for a definitive interpretation" (particularly on *the issue of his being a dissident or not*).


As you note below, he said there were no dissidents in Stalin's USSR, which sounds pretty definitive to me. 



Forster said:


> Well, rereading that section of the essay, and your points about it, I can only conclude that, in the context of the discussion in this thread, the allusions (musical and extra-musical) are so nuanced as to be unreadable through mere listening to the music. We even get into the problem of others' analysis having been based on a mistranslation of the Pushkin!
> 
> RT asks, "[...]whether the coda fails *on purpose *[...]" (my emphasis). How on earth is the listener supposed to read that? Fortunately, RT rejects such a reading, though not on musical grounds, but on historical: "There were no dissidents in Stalin's Russia."
> 
> ...


I agree with most of this. In another thread I argued that the debate about the sincerity of the finale is inevitably fruitless because there's no way to distinguish between sarcastic, over the top, pseudo triumph and craven overeagerness to provide a politically correct optimistic conclusion. Practically speaking, that decision is left to conductors. In this case, however, I'm not sure unreliably is the right adverb. Indeterminately might be better?

Taruskin does a good job of undercutting the revisionist interpretations of the symphony, especially MacDonald's, by showing that they don't account for the internal data of thematic processes. Perhaps he hinted at the Pushkin based interpretation just to demonstrate other kinds of data that should be considered? I might well have read too much into Taruskin's discussion of this.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Forster said:


> Have we acknowledged the problem of being able to separate any specific emotional 'message' that the composer may intend, from the signs of the personality of the composer already present in their works?
> 
> To give a simple example, Mahler and Shostakovich may be crudely characterised as 'miserable' symphonists. Is this because of who they are, or because of the subject matter they often deal with?


I think you make a good point, i.e. composers, like everyone, is bound to a great extent by his personality, character, and all the things which made him who his is. But I don't tend to think about the "meaning" of music, especially regarding emotional, sociological, or political content.

The way I listen is to follow the music as the composer develops his thematic material and the transformations that emerge. I suppose one could imagine a narrative or rhetorical context, but I normally don't do that. For me music is an abstract semiotic language unto itself, communicating itself.


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## Luchesi (Mar 15, 2013)

If I'm already partly drunk, my composing and my playing becomes overly emotional (I've been told).

I don't know about this with other musicians.


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## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

SanAntone said:


> I think you make a good point, i.e. composers, like everyone, is bound to a great extent by his personality, character, and all the things which made him who his is. But I don't tend to think about the "meaning" of music, especially regarding emotional, sociological, or political content.
> 
> The way I listen is to follow the music as the composer develops his thematic material and the transformations that emerge. I suppose one could imagine a narrative or rhetorical context, but I normally don't do that. For me music is an abstract semiotic language unto itself, communicating itself.


I don't listen to music in a vacuum. Music always "means" something to me besides a succession of notes, either because of my personal context - for example, my attitude to symphonic form which leads me to some composers and not others, or my emotional state at any given time of listening - or because of the extra-musical information I reflect on while listening.

I can't now undo the listening habits of a lifetime, nor the composing habits of the composers, who frequently declare what their aims are in composing (if not explicitly stating the "meaning" of any particular work).

Having said that, I'm not on some restless search for the meaning of DSCH's 5th - or anyone else's for that matter.


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## Luchesi (Mar 15, 2013)

Forster said:


> I don't listen to music in a vacuum. Music always "means" something to me besides a succession of notes, either because of my personal context - for example, my attitude to symphonic form which leads me to some composers and not others, or my emotional state at any given time of listening - or because of the extra-musical information I reflect on while listening.
> 
> I can't now undo the listening habits of a lifetime, nor the composing habits of the composers, who frequently declare what their aims are in composing (if not explicitly stating the "meaning" of any particular work).
> 
> Having said that, I'm not on some restless search for the meaning of DSCH's 5th - or anyone else's for that matter.


Sometimes I do, sometimes not, but I'm happy to know that all the reactions, from imagining a 'story' or analyzing how musical effects were achieved, to pondering the composers/ their composing conditions/their exposures, on and on, these are all available to me if I'm in the mood.


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