The Augustinian Ascent

This chapter explores different pre-modern models of emotion. It surveys the sweep of pre-modern Western music, from chant to Monteverdi, in terms of four “flavors” of emotion: the Augustinian ascent, the Thomist descent, Neoplatonism, and Epicurianism. Augustine’s philosophy of love, epitomized by affection, resonated with the surges of chant. Aquinas’s relational model of emotion, based on reciprocity, chimes with “contrapuntal” models of emotion. Neoplatonism, exemplified by Ficino’s theories, resonated with the pneumatic flow of emotion through the cosmos. Petrarchan Epicurianism is reflected in the atomism of emotion, from madrigals to early opera. All told, the history of premodern emotion illuminates the changing musical styles from Hildegard, Machaut, Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Willaert, to Monteverdi.

Concepts

After reviewing some recent writing by philosophers and psychologists of emotion (including Patrik Juslin and David Huron), this chapter proposes an “attitudinal theory” of emotion as “felt bodily stance,” grounded in Nico Frijda’s behavioral theory of “action tendencies” (or “action readiness”). It proposes emotional “attitudes” displayed within musical “personas,” following persona theorists such as Jenefer Robinson and Charles Nussbaum. It builds on Nussbaum’s model of the musical persona navigating a landscape of tonal forces, adjusting it so as to project discrete emotional categories. It reconciles Nussbaum’s ecological theory with Jenefer Robinson’s “process model” of emotion, arguing that musical emotion emerges gradually through a cycle of primary and secondary appraisals.

Introduction

The introduction asks the important question of why music studies have been left behind by the affective turn informing the humanities and social sciences. It outlines the main themes explored by the book’s nine chapters, and contextualizes the book within the author’s long-running development of a concept of musical style. The broad aim is to tell a history both of musical emotion across a thousand years of European music; and to unfold the genealogies of individual emotions, including emotions embedded within specific historical and socio-cultural contexts. The introduction also disposes of some early objections to writing a history of musical emotion. And it frames the enterprise within the resurgence of interest in Charles Darwin and of the impact of biology over the humanities.

Compounds

The major part of this chapter surveys how music expresses the ten complex emotions of wonder, the sublime, nostalgia, hope, pride, shame, jealousy, envy, disgust, and boredom. Building on the categorical theory of Chapter 2, it explores the extent that complex emotions compound basic ones, or whether they constitute essential emotions in themselves. The chapter considers issues such as display rules, the reality of basic emotions, and the relationship of emotions to topic theory. The survey of ten complex emotions includes a rehabilitation of wonder, and negative emotions that are normally considered nonaesthetic, such as jealousy and disgust. As in Chapter 2, each of the ten complex emotions is considered in relation to an analysis of music from the common practice period.

Categories

This chapter explores five musical emotions, describing their behavioral properties in analytical detail across Baroque, Classical, and Romantic styles. It begins by reconsidering the popular circumplex model of musical emotion. It then develops the attitudinal theory by bringing into play the notion of cognitive processing styles (after Galen Bodenhausen): the idea that emotions are also ways of thinking and hearing—indeed, that thinking and hearing are types of behavior. The major part of the chapter then uses these tools to analyze five musical emotions. Each section constitutes a “very short history of emotion” focusing on a basic emotional category (happiness, anger, sadness, tenderness, and fear) and ranging across analytical examples from the entire common practice period, in broadly chronological order.

Affects

This final chapter, a complement to Chapter 5, considers music “after emotion,” shaped by theories of affect. Affect attends to the microscopic nuances of feeling not captured by the “garden variety” emotional categories. I consider varieties of affect through stages of European modernism (from Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg to Boulez, Stockhausen, and Lachenmann), the neo-realism of “American Cool” (including Copland, Reich, and Cage), and then within a range of contemporary popular music (including Radiohead, Eminem, Beyoncé, and music for gaming). Regarding theories of affect, the chapter contextualizes these musical styles within two diverging “lines of flight” emanating, respectively, from the vitalism of Bergson and Deleuze, and the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. The chapter, and the book, concludes by asking why interest in musical emotion is so current.

Sentiments

This chapter reinterprets the Classical style in terms of eighteenth-century theories of sentiment, largely shaped by the novels of Richardson and Sterne, and the philosophical writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume’s distinction between passion and feeling sharpens the focus on the quality, or phenomenology, of emotions: on what emotions actually feel like, and for whom. In this light, emotion is predicated on the idea of the self as an empty placeholder, filled by a stream of impressions and ideas. These ideas help cast new light on the sentimental emotions of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. The chapter also reviews shifting models of “emotional suffering” (after Reddy), including notions of madness, cruelty, and the violence of glory in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.

Passions

This chapter begins that part of the book devoted to the period of “affective realism,” when the modern concept of musical emotion crystallized. Dedicated to the Baroque period, the chapter focuses on the four musical-emotional communities of Italy (Vivaldi), England (Handel), Germany (J. S. Bach), and France (Rameau). Arching over all four emotional styles is the dialogue between emotional models developed by Descartes and Spinoza; and, more broadly, the dialectic between “passion” and “action,” stemming from Aquinas. The chapter reviews Descartes’ theory of emotional expression, and Spinoza’s therapeutic model of emotion, especially his theory of Conatus. The prevailing idea of Affektenlehre is thereby placed into context. The chapter concludes with an extended consideration of Rameau’s opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in the context of Descartes’ theory of wonder.

Histories

This chapter proposes that the history of musical emotion pivots on a core period of “affective realism,” coterminous with the common practice period and the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Smith, Darwin, and William James. In this period of “affective realism,” emotion is objectified, individuated, mimetic of human behavior, and subjective. Prior to 1600, emotion, by contrast, is fluid, relational, transcendent, divine, and the province of theology. The main body of the chapter reviews the seminal work of three historians of emotions: Norbert Elias, Barbara Rosenwein, and William Reddy, together with their concepts of “civilizing,” “emotional community,” and “emotives.” The chapter concludes with a critique of performance theory, focusing on a performance analysis of a Bach violin sonata.

Emotions

Our modern scientific concept of emotion was invented in the nineteenth century in the wake of Darwinist psychology and physiology. This chapter considers this fact against the paradox that post-Kantian philosophy was essentially hostile to emotion, climaxing in the attitude of Hanslick. Musical emotion in the Romantic age is essentially dynamic, playing into the emergent paradigm of music as movement. It is also shaped by the maturity of Western models of subjectivity. These two elements put a historical gloss on the persona theory outlined more theoretically in Chapter 1. This persona theory is then refracted through the various emotional communities of Austro-German, French, Italian, English, and Scandinavian music. The chapter includes a discussion of Darwin’s influence on Gurney’s theory of musical emotion, as well as the writings of Kant, Baudelaire, Hugo, Mazzini, Wagner, and others.