Understanding Music Theory: Meaning, Self-conciousness, and Emotional Expressiveness

184 Pages·2010·3.106 MB·English

by  Ion Oltețeanu

Understanding Music Theory:
Meaning, Self-Consciousness,
and Emotional Expressiveness

The author discusses some of the main positions in the debates about the
experience of listening to music, and the dynamics and coherence of
musically-evoked emotion. The main objective of this book is to explore and
describe the uniqueness of the musical listening experience (listening to the
dynamics of musical structure and the nature of the experiences of the
elements of music); the dynamic quality of emotional response to music and
the exploitation of music’s powers to facilitate social interaction; and the
fundamental nature of emotional response to music. The author is par-
ticularly interested in exploring patterns in the musical evocation of emotion,
aesthetical perspectives of musical meaning, and the dynamical process of
listening to music’s phenomenal developments. The theory that he seeks to
elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on music’s efficacy in influencing
the affective states of listeners, and on linguistic descriptions of music in
terms of emotion.

ION OLTEŢEANU, PhD
Lecturer in music at Spiru Haret University, Bucharest

Understanding Music Theory:
Meaning, Self-Consciousness,
and Emotional Expressiveness

ION OLTEŢEANU
Lecturer in music at Spiru Haret University, Bucharest

ADDLETON ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS • NEW YORK
Addleton Academic Publishers
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ISBN 978-1-935494-16-4
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and anonymized refereeing by two international scholars.

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Produced in the United States of America
CONTENTS

1.
The experience of listening to music
and the dynamics and coherence of
musically-evoked emotion [1]

2.
Patterns in the musical evocation of emotion:
aesthetical perspectives of musical meaning
and the dynamical process of listening to
music’s phenomenal developments [31]

3.
Music’s efficacy in influencing the affective
states of listeners: linguistic descriptions of
music in terms of emotion [58]

4.
The uniqueness of the musical listening experience:
listening to the dynamics of musical structure and
the nature of the experiences of the elements of music [87]

5.
The dynamic quality of emotional response
to music and the exploitation of music’s powers
to facilitate social interaction [115]

6.
The fundamental nature of emotional response to music [143]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ion Olteţeanu is a lecturer in music at Spiru Haret University, Bucharest. He has
authored numerous books and academic papers on music history, music theory, and
ethnomusicology. He has presented several papers at IDB conferences organized in
New York. He develops, coordinates, and teaches courses on music theory at under-
graduate level.

Ion Olteţeanu is an active researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in
Humanities and Social Sciences (New York), at the Advancement of Scholarly
Research Center-Contemporary Science Association (New York), and at the Center for
Music Research-Addleton Academic Publishers (New York). He serves as a peer-
reviewer for six international academic journals.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers commissioned by Addleton
Academic Publishers to comment on earlier drafts, and to the editors and publishers of
several recent papers for permission to reprint material which has some recognizable
connection with chapters of this book.

vi
1.
The experience of
listening to music and
the dynamics and
coherence of musically-
evoked emotion

Minsky holds that our culture has a universal myth in which
we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect.
Emotions, by their nature, draw attention, while the processes
of reason must be private and work best alone. Music theory
has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals. We find
some almost universal practices in every musical era (they
might show no more than what composers then felt should be
universal). Kunst maintains that musical style is a both re-
stricted and elaborated special variant of perceptibly “normal”
behaviour. Composers’ systems are mainly systems for self-
manipulation, and their influence on musical styles and sys-
tems in the world remains to be seen. Kunst contends that a
composer working out and making known his own style
1
creates in his listeners the knowledge of his own relative
normality. Music is not the property of musicians only, but the
common property of the cultural community. A composition is
an action on the part of the composer.1 Cross states that both
cognitive science and neuroscience have focused almost en-
tirely on the processes involved in individual western musical
cognitions. Music is being addressed as auditory pattern of
which the primary “musical” features are constituted of com-
plex pitch and rhythmic structures. Music appears to be con-
ceived of individual responses to complex sonic pattern. Cross
and Woodruff explain that music, as an expression of emotion,
reveals to a listener qualities of the music’s producer that are
necessarily concomitant on the nature of the signal. Music is
experienced as having consistent emotional significance for
listeners. A close relationship can be postulated between the
motivational states of listeners and the global structural char-
acteristics of musical sound.
Zbikowski distinguishes two different approaches to met-
aphor: the first involves the role of figurative language in
literature (metaphor is one of a number of rhetorical figures to
be used in the service of argument, persuasion, illumination,
and entertainment); the second approach to metaphor involves
the use of linguistic constructions to refer to things or events in
the world. Conceptual metaphor theory (i) assumes a prag-
2