Objective and Subjective Emotions in Music

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music.” This oft-quoted statement from Igor Stravinsky’s 1936 autobiography Chronicles of My Life remains hotly debated. It seems to fly in the face of intuition, which automatically senses in music a definite emotional quality. Postmodern deconstructionists have taken Stravinsky’s statement to its extreme, discounting an essential relationship between music and emotions, and arguing that music can only express musicality itself. Nonmusical associations—emotional, symbolic, and visual impressions—have nothing to do with music per se, but instead prove the human tendency to endow everything in our environment with animate qualities. Advocates of this view, like Peter Kivy and Malcolm Budd, agree especially with the second part of Stravinsky’s statement: “If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention—in short, an aspect we have come to confuse, consciously or by force of habit, with its essential being.”

Stravinsky’s words might confound listeners of his music, which elicits a range of deeply emotional responses. However, his comment speaks more to process than impact. It articulates a formalist position, wherein music’s meaning is determined by form. Music invariably produces emotions, but it does not embody them. This viewpoint marked a shift from nineteenth-century romanticism, which valued irrationality, spontaneity, and transcendence over Enlightenment ideals of reason, order, and materiality.

Importantly, 1936 was the middle of Stravinsky’s neoclassicist period, bookended between a Russian “neo-primitive” period (1907-1919) and a period of serialism (1954-1968). Neoclassicism was a return to compositional attributes favored in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including light textures, conciseness, conventional forms (dance suites, sonata forms, etc.), and tonality (more a reaction to modernism than to romanticism). It was not simply an imitative movement: “neo” denotes both return and innovation. Even Stravinsky’s dry and Bach-like Octet for wind instruments (1923)—an early effort dismissed in the press as a bad joke—bears the composer’s signature.

Stravinsky clarified his rejection of romanticism and its “supernatural muse” in Poetics of Music (1947): “Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find.” Fellow twentieth-century composer Aaron Copland saw in Stravinsky’s approach the beginnings of objectivism, which came to dominate concert music as the twentieth century marched toward the twenty-first.

Unlike the overly expressive music of the Romantics, which expands harmony, dynamics, and form to transmit intensely personal sentiments, Classical and modern works, while sonically light years apart, share an air of impersonality. Construction precedes and produces expression, rather than the other way around. Thus, as Copland wrote in The New Music, 1900-1960, there is “no need, therefore, to concentrate on anything but the manipulation of the musical materials, these to be handled with consummate taste and craftsmanslike ability.”

Viewed in this light, Stravinsky’s provocative stance on music and emotion really answers a question of style: Should emotions drive composition (Romantic-subjective) or derive from it (Classical-objective)? The broader issue of whether feelings originate within musical sounds or are grafted onto them seems almost moot. Not to sidestep the debate entirely, but the experience remains emotional all the same.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

 

Hybridity

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

No culture is an island. The mirage of pure and “uncorrupted” languages, rituals, recipes, beliefs, and bloodlines evaporates on closer inspection. Human beings are genetically inclined toward interaction, cooperation, and mimicry. As big-brained social animals, we constantly absorb, transmit, and reconfigure concepts, behaviors, and technologies. The greater the contact, both within and between cultural groups, the greater the mixing, both culturally and biologically. Beneath the veneer of pristineness is an accumulation of elements, often with roots reaching beyond the scope of memory.

Such hybridity is a musical norm. Virtually everywhere and at every time, internal and external forces have accelerated or decelerated the pace of assimilating forms, styles, patterns, and instruments. Periods of heightened cross-cultural exposure, such as migrations and the Internet age, can both magnify hybridity and heighten the impulse for preservation. But, even when cultural walls are erected, influences inevitably seep through. Moreover, periods of intense hybridization are often followed by periods of stability, in which the new hybrids become “mainstreams” or “traditions.”

On an individual level, the process of musical creation is, almost by definition, an act of hybridization. Consciously and subconsciously, composers and performers mediate between diverse and sometimes divergent influences, intentions, methods, and emotions.

Intentional cross-cultural hybridity has a long history in the Euro-American classical tradition. For instance, Antonín Dvořák originally billed his New World Symphony (1893) as incorporating tunes from spirituals and Native American songs. He later clarified that the music contains “original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music” (emphasis mine). Either way, it is a hybrid. The same goes for composers like Bartók, Copland, and Shostakovich, who meld folk, folk-style, and popular sounds with orchestral techniques.

Perhaps less obvious today are the eclectic tendencies of J. S. Bach. Part of his genius was incorporating sounds from disparate sources: North Germany, South Germany, France, Italy, ecclesiastical chant, etc. Hubert Parry notes in his classic biography, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Story of the Development of a Great Personality (1909): “[I]t must be recognised that the principles of Italian art, in its broader and more substantial aspects, influenced [Bach] considerably; and in the first few years at Leipzig he endeavoured to accommodate his church cantatas to the prevailing taste in Leipzig.” Among other works, this yielded Cantata 174 (Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte, 1729), which, like the earlier Brandenburg Concertos (1721), showcases Bach’s sophisticated take on Vivaldi’s formal and stylistic signatures.

The dissection of any music—folk, classical, pop, and otherwise—discloses similar eclecticism, varying in degree. These, too, can be self-conscious, like Afro-Cuban or jazz-rock, or masked, like American fiddle music and rock ‘n’ roll. Usually, the amalgamated sounds are not easily picked apart. The organic fusion of elements, whether musical, linguistic, culinary, biological, or otherwise, rarely reveals its seams.

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Is Anything Frivolous?

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

From the critic’s perspective, the world of music consists of three parts: art, folk, and popular. This distinction is sometimes shortened to “serious” (art music) and “popular” (popular and folk). Precisely what makes some music “artistic” and other music something else is not always well defined, but minimum requirements usually include the use of written notation and sophisticated structural and theoretical considerations. The borders are blurred in some technical forms of jazz, and reinforced when classical composers adorn folk tunes with orchestral arrangements (as Aaron Copland did), or when pop musicians conspicuously quote classical repertoire in their songs (as Frank Zappa did). These combinations are appealing largely because they represent an almost taboo juxtaposition.

However, the aesthetic divide between serious and popular is not simply a question of musical attributes. It concerns the values ascribed to the respective music. Sociomusicologist Simon Frith sums up the underlying assumption: “Serious music matters because it transcends social forces; popular music is aesthetically worthless because it is determined by them.” In other words, art music stands apart from our basic human needs, thereby attaining sacredness, whereas popular music reflects everyday life, thus reaffirming mundaneness. The book from which Frith’s comment derives declares his position on the issue: Taking Popular Music Seriously.

An even stronger defense is found in Johan Huizinga’s classic tome, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, published in 1950. Huizinga sees play as simultaneously superfluous and necessary. Superfluous because it is irrational and entails a stepping out of “real life,” and necessary because it gives meaning to human existence.

Huizinga does not distinguish between types of play—games, sports, arts, entertainment—nor between its forms—professional, amateur, individual, group. He avoids equating “only pretend” with frivolity, noting that players can engage in the activity with utmost sincerity and determination. Most provocatively, he characterizes religious ceremonies as obligatory play. Like a game of soccer or hide-and-seek, a sacred ritual is a temporary and repeatable departure from ordinary life that operates according to its own guidelines. This is not meant to belittle religious rites, but rather to emphasize the potential for seriousness in all play.

Music, as a type of play, resides outside of normal time and space. It abides by its own logic, and the enjoyment of it makes it a human need. The labels “serious” and “popular” have little bearing on the experience itself, which can be taken lightly or seriously. As Huizinga reminds us, “The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid.”

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Nature’s Soundtrack

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Art is conventionally portrayed as a reflection of life. This is understood both in the inward sense of expressing an artist’s feelings, and in the outward sense of depicting the world in which the artist lives. No matter how abstract the design, art is thought to be an analog of reality. This conception has obvious limits. While it is true that the creative process is frequently sparked by life situations and environmental influences, momentary concerns and artistic output are not always in alignment.

In his 1937 essay, “Fictions That Have Shaped Musical History,” Alfred Einstein deconstructed the old canard that art must mirror life. Art, he reminded us, is just as likely to reflect the times as it is to flee from them. He proved the point with Renaissance music, which exudes an aura of balance and harmony without any trace of struggle or discord. It is easy to forget that this musical style developed against the backdrop of an agitated world—a Europe that saw feudalism give way to the middle class, religious reformations and counter-reformations, and political powers vying over the New World. Rather than record this unrest, Renaissance polyphony projected a mood of order and peaceful resolution. It was an artistic ideal fundamentally at odds with reality.

Einstein tied this phenomenon to painterly portrayals of the natural world, which typically imbue the environment with an idealized essence. Our view of nature is powerfully and unconsciously shaped by such art. Rembrandt’s attention to half-lit rooms heightens our focus on the half-lit rooms around us. Constable’s English landscapes inform how we see real-life countrysides. Einstein went so far as to claim, “We become aware of natural things only when a great artist has first seen them for us and has given them the form that we see” (emphasis added).

This observation is, one would hope, overstated. We assume we can appreciate nature without the guiding brushstrokes of the painter. Still, we cannot deny art’s potential to color our vision.

Musical examples of this are plentiful. Generally, nature-inspired pieces translate stereotyped features of the natural world into abstract sounds. Sometimes, the impressionistic tones become so ingrained that gazing upon a scene brings the music to mind. Sunrises stir the “morning” theme from Rossini’s William Tell Overture. Falling snowflakes evoke Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Snowflakes.” The American wilderness conjures passages from Copland’s oeuvre. Flowing rivers call up Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz” (as do floating spaceships, thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey). Likewise, hearing these pieces can immediately trigger the associated images.

Importantly, such music is, by definition, additive: it does not actually exist in the phenomenon it depicts. Thus, more than simply mirroring reality, it sways our perception of it. In this subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) way, our awareness of nature is at least partly in the hands of artists.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Concentrated Feelings

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

In one of his famous Harvard lectures, Aaron Copland drew a distinction between the “gifted” (trained and literate) listener and the average auditor. While the expert is busy classifying sounds, determining styles, noting key and tempo changes, evaluating techniques and critiquing the performers, the novice receives the music with less discerning ears and is freely moved in this direction or that. Yet, despite divergences in background and approach, both species of listeners are initially drawn in by music’s emotional force. To quote Copland, music involves everyone on this “primal and almost brutish level.”

Of course, the type and intensity of emotional processing varies depending on one’s level of interest and education. Listeners might detect a general feeling, like joyfulness, or more nuanced shades, like whimsical joy, hesitant joy or effervescent joy. But the fact that emotions are triggered is what unites us all. As Copland put it, “That is fundamentally the way we all hear music—gifted and ungifted alike—and all the analytical, historical textual material on or about music heard, interesting though it may be, cannot—and I venture to say should not—alter that fundamental relationship.”

Still, the question remains: Why are we enticed by musically expressed emotions? We clearly gain something from the experience, but what? One answer comes from Jeremy S. Begbie, a systematic theologian who specializes in the interface of theology and the arts. Despite the relative narrowness of his field, Begbie’s comments apply to music across contexts and genres. And though his theory is but one of several non-mutually exclusive explanations—all of which are provisional—it goes a long way to elucidate our musical affinity.

Begbie contends that emotions sensed in music are less convoluted than those that arise in actual life. At any moment, we might be consumed by a surge of unfiltered emotions. More often than not, these sensations are tangled, transient and confused. Whether they are positive, negative or a mixture of the two, they give us little of the certainty we crave and an abundance of the messiness we don’t.

Herein lies the value of musical expression. Begbie posits that music offers a condensed and concentrated emotional experience. Whereas feelings excited in a given day tend to be unfocused and cluttered, musical passages provide clarity. This is accomplished through three interacting qualities: purity, or the absence of extraneous or distracting sounds; compression, or the focusing of attention on a single activity; and specification, or the elimination of alternative sensations. Begbie likens these three elements to the movements of a dancer, whose gestures are pared down (purity), focused (compressed) and typically unambiguous (specified).

According to some theorists, such bodily behavior is organically embedded and subconsciously perceived in musical phrases. Melodic shapes, appoggiaturas, suspensions, ascending and descending lines, harmonic tensions and resolutions, and other devices represent stereotyped physical movements that correspond to emotional states. The main difference being that musical tools concentrate emotions in a cleaner—and thus more satisfying—way than those experienced in real life.

Critics might object that concentrated emotions are not universally present in music, or that some pieces display waverings and complexities that leave listeners unsettled. A counter-argument would be that emotionally vague music usually lacks wide appeal, and therefore supports rather than challenges the concentration theory. Moreover, Begbie concedes that his analysis is open to revision and does not pretend that it is the only possibility. In any case, the effect is apparent enough to warrant our consideration.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Music Non-Lovers

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Aaron Copland wrote a brief and candid article for the music industry magazine Billboard in February of 1964. In it, he explained the dilemma of the modern symphonic composer, whose livelihood is built on commissions, royalties and rights collected for public performances. It is a ruthless system that grants few successes, partly because there aren’t many places or productions that pay well for original works, and partly because of something Copland was brave enough to admit: “Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.”

Sitting through an orchestral performance is not something most people were born to do. Patient reception of drawn-out passages and serene acceptance of slowly developing movements are virtues obtained through discipline, education and cultural training. Even some classical musicians will confess—usually off the record—that lengthy performances can be less than tolerable. Copland found it refreshing whenever people told him they cared little for orchestral fare. He knew that as a composer and music educator, he could drift out of touch with the average listener.

There is one instructive exception to this orchestral rule. Composers have a firm and steady place in movies and television. Anyone who has watched an anxious or action-packed scene with the sound turned off realizes that it is far less anxious or action-packed without the frantic strings, blaring horns and penetrating percussion. The ears are more emotionally attuned than the eyes. Visuals attain their full effect through the aid of the score.

The cinematic example is reflective of how humans have utilized music since the dawn of the species. Music’s original and still overwhelming purpose is as an accompaniment to other things: teaching, storytelling, dancing, healing, praying, relaxing, eating, competing, warring, rejoicing, socializing, driving, watching, shopping, napping, waking. Listening to music for its own sake is a recent and largely Western phenomenon, and the amount of people for whom absolute or “for itself” music has any real appeal is so small as to be statistically insignificant.

A multitude of musical functions might be simultaneously present in a given context. For instance, melodies sung and played at a religious service establish sacred time, foster cohesion, encourage introspection, enliven texts, guide choreography, focus concentration, recall memories, inspire sensations, affirm heritage, facilitate moral instruction. The list could go on, and similar lists could be devised for other musically aided events.

It is difficult to imagine just how impoverished a service would be without its musical component. If melody were eradicated, attendance would surely diminish and would probably disappear altogether.

This returns us to Copland’s observation. It is certainly the case that not everyone is a music lover. The pure musical experience removed from any practical purpose is a learned and essentially artificial activity. Yet, it is also true that human beings are music “needers.” Whether we are conscious of it or not, we rely on musical sounds to support, assist and enhance all sorts of endeavors. This is what Austrian-Jewish musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl meant when he penned these dramatic yet hardly exaggerated words: “man without music is not man and a world without music is not our world.”

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Less is More

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

There is an old opera joke that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds, while Puccini’s music sounds better than it is. The humor of this quip lies in the absurdity of judging music—the audible art—apart from how it sounds. It lampoons the elitist’s assertion that accessible music is almost definitionally inferior to more esoteric works, regardless of what our ears tell us. Whatever truth there may be in this musicological system of merits and demerits—and whatever influence such assessments may have—it nevertheless highlights distinctions between listening and evaluating, and between scholars and ordinary folk. It is the difference between experiential knowledge—“I know what I like when I hear it”—and analytical discernment—“I discern its value when I measure it.” These divergent modes of apprehension help explain the often-wide chasm separating popular musical opinions and the rarified views of music critics, theorists, historians and other professionals. “The expert knows best,” so says the expert.

None of this is meant to negate the worth or even accuracy of musical criticism. When a musicologist or respected composer extols or disparages this or that opus, we should probably pay attention. But even the specialist will admit that too much information tends to tarnish the musical experience. What is primarily a medium of emotional expression becomes the subject of cognitive probing.

There is a standard line of thinking in the philosophy of aesthetics that visceral reactions to art are most intense in an art form other than one’s own. For example, a painter will have a primitive rush of emotions when standing in a Gothic cathedral, while the architect next to her closely examines the stonework of the clerestory, the dimensions of the fan vault and so on. The painter excitedly declares, “This place is awesome!” The architect replies, “Did you notice the design flaw in that section of the ceiling?” Similarly, an architect seated in a concert hall will surrender himself to the mass of sound, while the musician sitting beside him busily scrutinizes melodic contours, harmonic density, tonal color and so forth. The architect blurts out, “This is marvelous!” The musician responds, “Trivial rubbish.” The first is wrapped in sensual pleasure; the second is absorbed in adjudication.

It is sometimes said of the music theorist that he has a refined appreciation of the analytical and abstract, but a cultivated disregard for the affective and aesthetic. This “spiritless” perspective was articulated by seventeenth-century philosopher Marin Mersenne, who believed music to be “nothing more than the movement of air, and thus amenable to mechanical and mathematic treatment.” Of course, expertise in the science of music does not in itself preclude musical enjoyment. It is, after all, the musical expert who is most interested in and enthusiastic about musical history, variety and subtlety. But, as the aesthetician readily acknowledges, interest and experience are not the same thing. To paraphrase Aaron Copland, the “gifted listener”—i.e., the musically educated—may hear more in a performance, but as the listener’s knowledge expands so does her distance from the “primal and almost brutish level” of musical emotions. Again, this is not necessarily good or bad; but it does account for the disconnect between the novice’s professed love for this or that conventional fare and the critic’s supercilious remark that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

Goethe’s famous saying has relevance here: “Doubt grows with knowledge.” If we replace “doubt” with “critical analysis”—which is the essence of Goethe’s phrase—we begin to recognize how difficult it is for the knowledgeable musician to replicate the relative simplicity and abandonment of the average person’s musical encounter. Proficiency in the art tends to impede purity of experience.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.