![]() The chief problem was that he identified emotional categories solely with melodic profile, whereas psychologists like Juslin have shown how they emerge from the interaction of many parameters (dynamics, tempo, texture, timbre, etc.). The tragedy was that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater: there had always been a grain of truth in Cooke’s insights. ![]() Whilst the book never found acceptance in mainstream musicology, it still enjoys a ghostly after-life in philosophical aesthetics as a convenient punching-bag, full of easily knocked-down straw-man arguments about musical emotion. Superficially, my book might remind you of Deryck Cooke’s 1959 effort, The Language of Music, the first extended essay at a cross-historical typology of musical emotions. It presents a history of basic and complex emotions in music from Gregorian chant circa 1000 through the great Western composers (Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, Josquin, Monteverdi, Bach to Boulez), including contemporary popular music and jazz (Radiohead, Muddy Waters, video-game music), in dialogue with the great philosophers of emotion (Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza), and framed by an original theory of how musical emotion works. As with the representation of human faces, the emotional character of musical material evolves, reflecting the mindsets, emotional communities and emotives of different historical periods. ![]() Similarly, the funk groove in Beyoncé’s ‘ Crazy in Love’ enacts what music theorists call a ‘participatory’ rhythm, which turns out to be typical of a lot of love music (it’s even found, once you translate between styles, in the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations). The best-known examples of such emotional icons in music are Adele’s much noted appoggiaturas (what Renaissance music called ‘ pianti’ ) the shark theme in Jaws, a figure of fear which also crops up in Schubert and Bruckner or the joyful trumpet fanfares in much Baroque music, such as the opening of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Musical language has an emotional character by analogy to, say, the expressions in the faces of Giotto’s angels or Michelangelo’s sculptures. The glory of music studies – compared even with literary studies – is music’s spectacularly technical, systematic, and precise language, notated in scores which have survived many hundreds of years. My hunch was that you could do this from the perspective of the musical language itself, what musicology calls ‘style’. ![]() To write a history of emotion, you would surely need to interview listeners who are no longer alive. Juslin contended that ‘historical changes in expression are mostly beyond the scope of a psychological analysis because we cannot collect empirical data from events that occurred in the distant past’ (p. The showstopper seemed to be an objection eloquently raised by another recent book, Patrik Juslin’s excellent Musical Emotions Explained (Oxford University Press, 2019). It’s such an alluring proposition, why had nobody ever done it? About ten years ago, when I began sketching the book which has just been published ( A History of Emotion in Western Music: A Thousand Years from Chant to Pop, Oxford University Press, 2020), I never imagined that such a project was feasible. I wanted to read a book which recounted the musical history of love of nostalgia, joy, wonder, jealousy, boredom, hope, rage, disgust, melancholy, depression, panic. They say you should write the book you want to read. By Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
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