The secret diaries of a music lover: associating emotions to music

Abstract

When trying to describe the relation between music and passion so that an interest in the passion will ipso facto be an interest in the music, one should avoid what Malcolm Budd calls “the heresy of the separable experience”: “the separation of [the experience] of what gives music its value (...) from [the experience of] the music itself.” (Budd 1985, p. 123) Or as Richard Wollheim puts it, it is hard to accept an explanation of art that places its essence outside the object of art itself. A heretical description “represents a musical work as being related in a certain way to an experience which can be fully characterized without reference to the nature of the work itself.” (Budd 1985, p. 123) Some emotional responses are more prone to this heresy than others. In order to avoid the heresy, one needs an explanation of the listening experience that keeps unified the expressive and non-expressive aspects of it so that they are the objects of one single act of attention. Also, throughout the listening process, listeners are engaged in trying to make sense of the unfolding and progression of their musical experience. Those who can make sense of the progression of the experience correspond to what Leonard Meyer (1956) describes as the listener who is capable of understanding the style of the music. According to Meyer, hypothetical and evident meanings are formed by “purely musical events” and these don’t include expressive musical events. Expressivist philosophers of music, of course, disagree and argue that one you cannot entirely grasp the ‘purely musical’ without grasping the expressive. The “purely musical” is often modified by the expressive, which is demonstrated by the performance of “excerpted chunks of music”. Philosophers tend to believe that what causes our emotional reaction to music falls under one of at least five main categories. They shall be considered respectively.