# Classical and emotion



## Daimonion (Apr 22, 2012)

Classical music, or at least some kinds of it, are quite often understood as expressing and/or evoking particular emotions.

1. Do you know any scientific researches related to this issue? (I would be grateful for references)

2. Could you list, as a kind of a survey, the pieces of classical music that most clearly (for you, of course) connect with particular emotions? (I am interested in all emotions possible for a human creature to feel, but mostly in peacfulness, serenity, sadness, melancholy, and depression)

All the best,

Daimonion


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Sadness: Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde movement 6, Gorecki's Symphony 3
Peacefulness: Satie's Gymnopedies
Joy: Mendelssohn's Italian symphony movement 1


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

A few emotions, one piece or excerpt each....

Humour: Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre
Happiness: *Sibelius's* 2nd symphony, 1st mvt
Love: Wieniawski's 2nd violin concerto, 2nd movement 
Anxiety: Bach conducted by Furtwängler
Yearning/longing: *Sibelius's* 4th symphony, 1st mvt
Annoyance/distress: Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1
Sadness: Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Victory: Recapitualion from the 1st mvt of Mahler's 7th


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

For #1, perhaps this is a start. The answer seems to be, we don't know, but maybe it's related to human movement.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-music-make-us-fe

_Human movement has been conjectured to underlie music as far back as the Greeks. As a hypothesis this has the advantage that we have auditory systems capable of making sense of the sounds of people moving in our midst - an angry stomper approaching, a delicate lilter passing, and so on. Some of these movements trigger positive emotions - they conjure up images of pleasant activities - while others might be automatically associated with fear or anxiety. (The sound of running makes us wonder what we're running from.)_


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## worov (Oct 12, 2012)

Melancholy :


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## BartokBela (Mar 12, 2013)

Anxiety: Shostakovich' s 8th String quartet
Depression: Wagners Parsifal Prelude
Sadness: Debussy Sonata for piano and cello
Melancholy: Schubert's SQ in D minor
Happiness: Dvorak Humoresque no. 7
Peacefulness: Schumann's Waldszenen (esp. Eintritt)
Serenity: Satie's Gymnopédie no. 1
Love: Schumann Carnaval no.11 (Chiarina)


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## arthro (Mar 12, 2013)

It's a well known fact that certain chord often evoke certain emotions. Major / minor and all that .. may be you can search under "nature of chords" or something like that.

I saw some time back that the Allmusic Guide had built a list of emotional categories which they then associated with music ... may be try their site?


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## arthro (Mar 12, 2013)

Seeing "Anxiety" there I thought of Bernstein's 2nd Symphony "The Age of Anxiety" ... you might find that certain pieces of music title themselves by the emotion they seek to express ... Another one "Valse Triste" by Sibelius. The nicknames for certain pieces may also be give-away ... Haydn's "Surprise" symphony. I'm beginning to think that this isn't such a serious question ... Nielsen's "The Inextinguishable": another one.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

I think we provide the emotion to music. It can't affect us if we're not susceptible to it. We bring ourselves in and music opens us up, but it isn't infallible that way. What makes one man cry may make another yawn. Music in itself isn't emotional - it's people who are.

It works suggestively, but a stream of musical notes isn't an emotion. It evokes something, sure, but metaphorically. For us to be affected, we need to suspend some critical faculties and accept the artifice as being something that's real. Sometimes expression can only be made real through art, anyway, but it's us as the receptors that provide the actual emotion.

Imho! :tiphat:


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## SottoVoce (Jul 29, 2011)

Everything: Schubert's String Quintet
Otherworldly (Mystical): Bach's Mass or the Art of Fugue
Wonder/Profoundity: Beethoven's 14th String Quartet
Joy: Beethoven's 13th String Quartet
Sublimity: Beethoven's 31st Piano Sonata
Peace: Mozart's Clarinet Quintet
Excitement/Ecstasy: Bach's Goldberg Variations
Love: Wagner's Rhine Journey 
Anxiety: Brahm's 1st Symphony, 1st Movement
Sensuous/Intimacy: Schoenberg's Piano Piece op 11
Ingenious/Clever: Webern's String Quartet

I know many of these wouldn't fit into the garden emotions, but these pieces have been important to me in these respects.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

One for sadness - Chopin Op 28 No 6 - the Prelude in B minor aka Tolling Bells which was also used at his funeral.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

BartokBela said:


> Depression: Wagners Parsifal Prelude


 I don't think that's what he was going for.

Strauss' _Vier Letzte Lieder_ is my vote for sadness.


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## oogabooha (Nov 22, 2011)

BartokBela said:


> Happiness: Dvorak Humoresque no. 7


I would place this as one of the most depressing pieces I've listened to. It screams to me with despair, and fits in perfectly with rain.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Rage (for most part): Dvorak Symphony no. 5 IV, Symphony no. 7 III


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## Daimonion (Apr 22, 2012)

Thank you for all these! Do you have anything for anxiety and/or inquietude and/or agitation?


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Taking Kieran's point that it may not be the music that is the source of the emotion, but the people themselves, I am provoked to extreme anxiety & agitation on listening to 'The Flight of the Bumble-Bee'. I'm phobic about insects.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Even in Beethoven's time, music was often spoken of as evoking a "state of mind," not an emotion.


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

KenOC said:


> Even in Beethoven's time, music was often spoken of as evoking a "state of mind," not an emotion.


I'm afraid the distinction escapes me.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Ingenue said:


> Taking Kieran's point that it may not be the music that is the source of the emotion, but the people themselves, I am provoked to extreme anxiety & agitation on listening to 'The Flight of the Bumble-Bee'. I'm phobic about insects.


That's the thing, the music isn't a bumble bee but it can definitely sting like one!


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## Daimonion (Apr 22, 2012)

An emotion is a kind of a state of mind. Isn't it?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

ahammel said:


> I'm afraid the distinction escapes me.


What's the "emotion" invoked by the Andante of Beethoven's 7th Symphony?


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

That's an interesting discussion: is an emotion a state of mind?

And in Beethovens time, as Ken was saying, what did this distinction mean, between music being a state of mind as opposed to being an emotion. I would read that as meaning that music conjured up an image of a thing - or emotion - without actually being that thing - or emotion - itself...


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I read it more as, music takes you somewhere else, a place unusual and new. It may make you sad, or happy, but that's not the primary point.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

It was the Baroque era which held to the conceit of the "Doctrine of Emotions." The 'Classical' era, and its composers, rejected it.

This developed as a set of ideas through the mid-to late renaissance, when 'word painting' was an affect in the writing of choral works and especially in the secular madrigals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_affections

_As with any of the other music associative 'doctrines,'_ whether it is: 
the ancient Greeks ascribing different modes with differing emotions or states of mind; 
those later composers who tried to decide the emotional / associative attributions of specific keys; 
or the 'real to the person with the condition' effect known to Synasthetes, i.e. color directly associated with pitch or key...

they are all empirically arrived at -- at best an insupportable conceit -- and there is nothing at all 'scientific' about any of it.

... a charming idea, of course


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Faux pas in posting, #438.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Ingenue said:


> Taking Kieran's point that it may not be the music that is the source of the emotion, but the people themselves, I am provoked to extreme anxiety & agitation on listening to 'The Flight of the Bumble-Bee'. I'm phobic about insects.


...and what, pray tell, might have been your reaction to exactly the same piece if it did not have anything in the title to announce or suggest insects? The hugely power of the suggestive word, i.e. the title, I bet has everything to do with your perception of that piece, via association with 'the word.' (A point I love to constantly make about words / music, and _how much of which is actually affecting you when you listen_.)


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

KenOC said:


> What's the "emotion" invoked by the Andante of Beethoven's 7th Symphony?


Grief or Despair.

Edit: eh, do you mean Allegretto?


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

PetrB said:


> ...and what, pray tell, might have been your reaction to exactly the same piece if it did not have anything in the title to announce or suggest insects? The hugely power of the suggestive word, i.e. the title, I bet has everything to do with your perception of that piece, via association with 'the word.' (A point I love to constantly make about words / music, and _how much of which is actually affecting you when you listen_.)


Oh, come along, PetrB  - The Flight of the Bumble Bee is obviously an insect buzzing. If I hadn't got a title, I might have thought it was something worse - a giant hornet, perhaps, the stuff of nightmares. However, I agree with your main point: Carolan, the 18th century Irish harper, wrote tunes that I find unbearably sad, but my emotions cannot but be affected by the fact that they're titled 'Laments'...


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

PetrB said:


> ...and what, pray tell, might have been your reaction to exactly the same piece if it did not have anything in the title to announce or suggest insects? The hugely power of the suggestive word, i.e. the title, I bet has everything to do with your perception of that piece, via association with 'the word.' (A point I love to constantly make about words / music, and _how much of which is actually affecting you when you listen_.)


But Ingenue has a point about anxiety. The theory is that from an evolutionary perspective, we have learned to feel anxious from fast sounds. Think of an animal running after us. So it's not the bees that make him anxious, it's the pace.


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## MichaelSolo (Mar 12, 2013)

Kieran said:


> ... Sometimes expression can only be made real through art, anyway, but it's us as the receptors that provide the actual emotion.


I see music (and art in general) as a language that is useful talking of things that really matter. Interestingly, I cannot name here those things because.. I do not use the right language for that. Those "things" belong to a different perception and existence realm, the one with true meanings and harmony expressed as harmony, not as a word.

But here, again, we go to mysticism and beyond; using mundane language quickly becomes hopeless..

P.S. Oh, I completely forgot about emotions-music link of this topic. Yes, the existence of this link is clear to everyone, though exact assignments are rather primitive when expressed outside the appropriate language.


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## Zabirilog (Mar 10, 2013)

Hmmm...
Happiness and humor: Probably Offenbach's can can or something from Die lustige witwe.
Sadness: Siegfried funeral march... or wait, maybe Chopin's one.
Victory: Cavaradossi's Vittoria from Tosca!
Love: Siegfried finale
Agony: Chopin's Revolutionary
Peace: Siegfried idyll


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Daimonion said:


> Thank you for all these! Do you have anything for anxiety and/or inquietude and/or agitation?


This, the 4th variation of Prokofiev's 2nd symphony:






But also the 5th variation (2nd part of this video) is like that, only on the tumultuous side.


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## ScipioAfricanus (Jan 7, 2010)

Spiritual- Bruckner Symphony no 5 2nd Movement
Sadness- Beethoven 7th, 2nd Movement 
Love- Mahler, Symphony 3, Last movement
Happiness- Mozart Piano Concerto 21 First movement
Seriousness- Brahms Piano Quintet 1st Movement
Contemplation- Sibelius Symphony 3 movement 2


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

Daimonion said:


> Thank you for all these! Do you have anything for anxiety and/or inquietude and/or agitation?


While I find all of these distinctions on what piece evokes _this_ emotion versus _that_ emotion to be entirely subjective, I would impress that the *Grosse Fugue* is a terrific example of anxiety or agitation. Beyond the mere dissonance and struggle to resolve, the _movement_ follows the most _sublime_ *Cavatina*, and an altogether rather halcyon and effulgent work (*Q. Op. 130*).

Also, though this is more anxiety and pain, *Mendelssohn's Q.6* is obviously morose in nature, given the circumstances in which he wrote it.

By the way, _love_ this topic.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Instrumental music evokes in us a whole range of non-specific _"feelings,"_ which are by their very _"non-narrative nature"_ fleeting, transitory, and ephemeral, unclear, evocative, vague, and indefinable (meaning non-narrative).

Still, this is not a requirement for music to be expressive of emotion or states of being. To take matters even further into the fog, when we get into more modern music, I think _"emotion"_ as a descriptive term begins to fail us. For example, in Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, the _"emotional gestures"_ expressed are so complex that we begin to experience them as _"states of being,"_ like anxiety, foreboding, fear, tension, awe, etc., creating in our minds, empathetically, a reflection of our own, and the artist's, "inner state of being."

Concerning modernism, it's true that in many instances the "evoking" of dramatic emotion, and dramatic gesture is absent (but certainly not always). Stockhausen evokes, for me, a sort of "Platonic classicism" in his Klavierstücke; with modernism, we must put aside our need for drama and overt emotion, and listen on the level of _"pure abstraction,"_ an enjoyment of color, sound, and timbre itself. In this sense, modern music is not "modern" at all; music has always been _"abstract expressionism"_ when divorced from drama and opera.

So, in a sense, this is an "internal narrative" we share with the composer, but indefinable in_ literal narrative terms,_ because these are _transitory, fleeting states _by nature; simply "_gestures_ of meanings."

So, we can conclude that music which seeks to "represent" or express feelings and emotions, however vague, is "representational" in the sense that it is not "abstract" and concerned only with its own formal characteristics, but seeks to "convey feelings and states of being."

Our general knowledge, and the historical context of a work can provide a source of "general narrative content" which can add greatly to the meaning of a piece, if only in our own minds. This always happens for me with Shostakovich (images of Soviet Russia) and with Webern's Op. 6 (Six Pieces for Orchestra), which always evokes in me grey images of Europe immediately preceding the World Wars. With Mahler, the Sixth Symphony snare-drum always evokes images of some malevolent military presence marching through our once-peaceful existence.

I think in many cases, the composer actually is composing with a specific narrative in mind, from his own emotionally-charged experience of events in his life, and then leaving it up to us to interpret it as we will; but we will never know for sure. _That's the beauty of poetry; it is open-ended in meaning. _

That's a useful distinction, I think; instrumental non-narrative music (containing "dramatic gesture") is more like poetry, whereas the explicit meaning and narrative of opera is like a story or novel.


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## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

Fulness : Beethovens 9th symphony
Intensity: Grosse fuge
Resistance: Beethoven's Moonlight sonata third movement& Appasionata third movement 
Grace: Beethoven's pastoral symphony
Sorrow: Beethoven's seventh symphony second movement
Confidence: Beethoven's Pathetique first movement
Melancholy: Violin concerto in d minor by Jean Sibelius first movement

I may add more later.


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## emotify (Mar 15, 2013)

In music emotion studies this piece is very popular for representing anxiety/fear: 

Holst, Gustav. The Planets, op. 32. Mars.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

From _Sound and Light, _ an essay by Kyle Gann which quotes La Monte Young:

"Each harmonically related interval creates its own unique feeling. By feeling, I do not mean states such as happy, sad, amorous, or angry, but rather the set of periodic patterns that is established in our nervous system, which is the representation of the air pressure patterns that couple with the ear."

Because the usual tuning of equal temperament is based on a half-step with a ratio of the 12th root of 2 to 1 (1.059463...:1), its ratios are all represented by nonrepeating decimals. Therefore, the amount of time it takes for the periodicity of an equal tempered interval to return to its original phase is theoretically infinite. This means that the ear can never truly measure the exactness of an equal tempered interval. More pertinently, an equal tempered interval does not stimulate a perfectly periodic impulse in the auditory nerve, because the phase relationship of the tones is never the same twice. In just intonation, however, an interval such as 7:4 repeats its phase periodicity quickly, and the ear, (with some familiarity or training, at least) can judge its exactness. Furthermore, because of the exact repetition of phase relationships, the continuous firing of identical neurons will create, according to Young's research, a more intense psychological state.

"Since intervals from the system of rational numbers are the only intervals that can be repeatedly tuned _exactly,_ they are the only intervals that have the potential to sound _exactly_ the same on repeated hearing. It is for this reason that the feelings produced by rational intervals within a gradually expanding threshold of complexity have the potential to be recognized and remembered and, consequently, develop strong emotional impact."

Thus, for Young, tuning is a physiological exploration of feelings. This view of music is slightly reminiscent of the doctrine of affectations first articulated in the Baroque era, and revived in various forms during the nineteenth century, according to which each melodic interval possesses inherent expressive content: e.g., a minor sixth evokes sadness, a major seventh yearning or aspiration, a perfect fifth calm or stability. In Young's case, however, the intervals are harmonic and simultaneous instead of (or in addition to) melodic and successive, and the feelings are not affects, but subtly distinguished psychological states.


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## userfume (Nov 21, 2012)

Apprehension: First minutes of the Rite of Spring
Melancholy/despair: Der Leiermann Schubert, parts of Fantasie in F Minor for Four Hands, The descending sequences of 1st movement Shostakovich 5th symphony
Triumph: Opening bars of Shostakovich 7
Joy: 1st Movement Mozart PC 23, 4th movement Dvorak American SQ
Agitation: Liebestod Tristan und Isolde
Bliss: Schubert String Quintet, 1st movement (2nd theme)
Longing: Ravel Piano Trio, 1st movement


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