emotions as aesthetic properties of absolute music

177 Pages·2017·1.16 MB·English

E A
MOTIONS AS ESTHETIC
P A M
ROPERTIES OF BSOLUTE USIC
Ana Agirrebaltzategi Azkarate
Supervisor:
Dr. Kepa Korta Carrión
Donostia, 2017

EMOTIONS AS AESTHETIC
PROPERTIES OF ABSOLUTE MUSIC
Ana Agirrebaltzategi Azkarate
Supervisor:
Dr. Kepa Korta Carrión
Donostia, 2017
(c)2017 ANA AGIRREBALZATEGI AZCARATE
Table of contents
0.Introduction ....................................................................................... 1
1.The puzzle of expressiveness in music ............................................. 10
1.1. Emotions in ordinary life and emotions in music ................................ 10
1.2. What are emotions? ............................................................................... 11
1.3. Emotions and music .............................................................................. 17
1.4. Whose emotions? The composer, the persona and the audience ....... 19
1.4.1. Expression theory ........................................................................................ 20
1.4.2. Persona theory ............................................................................................ 24
1.4.3. Arousal theory ............................................................................................. 27
1.5. Music cannot express emotions: pure formalism ................................ 34
1.6. Conclusions ........................................................................................... 38
2.A cognitivist approach to music expressiveness .............................. 39
2.1. Formalism revisited ............................................................................. 40
2.2. The uses of “expression”, and expressiveness in the arts .................... 43
2.3. Music exhibits emotions ..................................................................... 46
2.4. Literal or metaphoric? .......................................................................... 48
2.5. “Hearing” emotions .............................................................................. 52
2.5.1. The redness of the apple ............................................................................ 52
2.5.2. Emotions in music ...................................................................................... 55
2.6. Which emotions? .................................................................................. 59
3.Aesthetic properties of artworks ..................................................... 64
3.1. The boundaries of aesthetics ............................................................... 64
3.2. Roots: aesthetics and taste .................................................................. 66
3.3. Philosophy of art and aesthetics .......................................................... 70
3.4. Aesthetics’ close friends ....................................................................... 72
3.5. Sibley’s heritage .................................................................................... 73
3.6. A classification of aesthetic properties ................................................ 78
4. Expressive and other aesthetic properties of music ....................... 86
4.1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 86
4.2. Music alone and its descriptions ......................................................... 87
4.3. Classification of the aesthetic properties of music ............................. 91
4.3.1. Primary musical components and first-level aesthetic properties of
music ............................................................................................................................ 93
4.3.2. Second-level aesthetic properties of music .............................................. 96
5. Emotions in music ........................................................................... 101
5.1. Introduction ......................................................................................... 101
5.2. Music and its emotional machinery ................................................... 103
5.2.1. The concept of “form” in music theory .................................................... 103
5.2.2. Form and music expressiveness .............................................................. 104
5.2.3. Syntactical-structural events and their sensuous properties ................ 106
5.3. How do we hear the emotive properties of music? ............................ 108
5.3.1. A resemblance account of music expressiveness .................................... 108
5.3.2. Facial, vocal, body expression and music expressiveness ...................... 110
5.3.3. Resemblance of expression of emotions and music expressive features 111
5.4. Some objections and problems ........................................................... 115
5.5. Music and conventions ........................................................................ 117
6. Responses to aesthetic experience and affective reactions to
absolute music ........................................................................................... 119
6.1. The fiction paradox ............................................................................. 120
6.2. The fiction paradox transposed to music ........................................... 125
6.2.1. A narrativist account of music .................................................................. 128
6.2.2. Advantages and problems of a narrativist account of music ................. 130
6.2.3. Conclusions ............................................................................................... 133
6.3. My picture of emotions in the listener ............................................... 137
6.3.1. “Aesthetic emotions” in music .................................................................. 138
6.3.2. Other affective responses to music .......................................................... 141
7. Conclusions ..................................................................................... 154
References .......................................................................................... 163
For my father
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank so many people for helping and supporting me, that I am
afraid I will never end. So, let me start before it is too late. First, to my thesis
supervisor, Kepa Korta. Less than four years ago, he encouraged me to work on
this PhD project. Knowing that my situation was not going to be ideal, but over
the years, through many ups and downs, he has never given up on me, and has
kept me positive and confident all the time. Without his support, when things
seemed practically impossible, there is no way I could have done this. I will be
grateful to him all my life.
Then I want to thank my ILCLI colleagues: Aida, for her smart suggestions
and help; Yolanda, for her thorough work and for transmitting calm until the
last minute; to Margarita, Zvonko, Eros, Joana, and with all my heart, to Josu
and Paul. I have no words to describe what we lived in the final hours, days and
nights. Their help has been fundamental for me. It is not an exaggeration to say
that without them I would have missed the deadline. They kept me awake,
worked with me and for me until the last minute, in such a disinterested way
that I feel right now deeply moved.
I would also like to thank Javier Aguirre, who pushed me to continue with
this research; to Josune, my friend who pushed me forward. To The
Northagirres, my band, who have dealt with my stress and rushing around so
many times.
Finally, to my family, to Xabier, my life companion, who has often paid the
price for the damage. To my dear brother, Iñigo, and, very especially, to my
mother and my father, for being there all my life.
0. Introduction
There be none of Beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charmèd ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming
And the lull’s winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight moon is waving
Her bright chain o’er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant’s asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer’s ocean.1
Beautiful verses have been dedicated to our special Goddess, those by Lord
Byron and many others. I am talking about music, or as Greeks thought of it,
the art of the Muses (Mousikē). Music seems to have been there, long before
Ancient Greece, next to us, accompanying humans throughout the ages,
1 Poem by Lord Byron, an ode written to music, whose title is in fact “For Music” (Byron
1919 [1901]: verse 598).
1
probably since the very beginning of humanity. It inspires poets, artists and
simple listeners; it takes infinite forms and serves a great variety of purposes.
The voice of music embraces the listener with its arms, its magic makes us bow
before it, we let ourselves dream with it and as Byron says, it invades us with “a
full but soft emotion” (Byron 1919 [1901]).
It is commonplace to describe music in emotive terms, to say that we
hear melancholy in one song, or that another raises our spirits. It is also claimed
that music is essentially emotional, that there is no good music devoid of
emotion, that this quality makes music so special and that it is there where its
magic resides. Probably it is not gratuitous to label music as “the language of
emotions” (Cooke 1959), and regardless of whether it is a proper language or
whether genuine emotions are involved in music, emotional properties are
somehow detected in music and humans are often affected as a result of
musical experiences.
The relation of music to the emotions is interesting to many disciplines
and from different standpoints. Philosophers, musicologists, evolutionary and
experimental psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists… all investigate
and discuss the connection of music with the emotive life. My interest here
focuses mainly in what music itself has to “tell” us about its relation to the
affective realm, or broadly speaking, to what is taken as expressive and
“emotional.” I point to what is in music, discover the aspects, elements or
properties that make a piece of music melancholic or cheerful, or at least that
lead it to be heard as such. In other words, define the nature of music, find an
explanation for its expressiveness and also see how those properties prompt us
to react in particular affective ways.
There is an aspect in music that I would also like to mention in this
preface. There is something about music, that moves and enthralls the
susceptible listener with special power, fully and deeply, an intrinsic force that
Kivy calls “the mystery of music” (2009: 205-213). I discuss whether music moves
the listener, as a result of valuing and appreciating the work and its aesthetic
2