Emotions and Musical Analysis After Meyer By Michael Spitzer

The first strand is a rising arpeggio, G-B-D, a feature which comes to the fore in the bridge in the stretto quasi-canonic entries of oboes, flutes, and bassoons; and in the cello and bass figures of the development. Indeed, Meyer observes that the ‘wrong’ 3/4 metre becomes confirmed in the development, subsuming not just the rising arpeggios but also the woodwind descending scales which answer them (Example 7):

The second strand, ostensibly a ‘bit-player’ in Meyer’s story, is really more important than it knows. It concerns dialogue, the nature of which will become one of the most pressing questions of my essay. Dialogue is crystal-clear in the development, between the rising arpeggios in the cellos and basses, and the falling scales/appoggiaturas in the woodwind. It is fainter within the respective canonic entries (oboes, flutes, bassoons) of the bridge, which is the development’s immediate model: faint because the arpeggio-scale/appoggiatura alternation is compressed within the single successive voices, rather than unfolded between these voices. The first oboe part is most pertinent here: an arpeggiation climaxing on the critical B-A appoggiatura, initiating the ^6-^5-^4-^3-^2-^1 descent prototypical of Gjerdingen’s ‘Prinner Riposte’ (2007, 45-60) (Example 9):

It is remarkable how all these elements – the scale to D; the changing-note figure; the rising triad; and its dialogue with the descent – sit together in such a deceptively simple opening gambit. In Meyer’s narrative of ‘latency to actuality’, the material has the potential to go in any of these directions. The delicacy of this potential would be destroyed were its ambiguity clarified. This cognitive openness is the correlative, I argue, to the emotional category of Tenderness. Conversely, Anger is constituted by the aggressive clarity of the Menuetto, whose driven tactus compels entrainment and narrows possibilities.

The hunt for Substanzgemeinschaft (thematic unity) is no longer fashionable in music analysis. Hence one of the surprises at the end of Meyer’s essay is its exploration of motivic similarities between the Trio and Menuetto (Example 10).
[Example 10 Near Here]
Meyer shows how the main motive of both movements consists ‘of a triad that begins on an upbeat’; and ‘part of the triad functions as a gap that is subsequently filled’ (123). His purpose, however, is not to celebrate the commonality between the two movements but the opposite: ‘motivic variation and transformation are important not primarily because they “unify” compositions but because motivic constancy makes differences in ethos more palpable’ (124). It is their very Substanzgemeinschaft which throws the contrasting emotional character of the Trio and Menuetto into sharp relief:
The delineation of ethos is also a matter of context. The serenity, grace, and simplicity of the Trio are especially apparent because they are in marked contrast to the dynamism, irregularity, and complexity of the Minuetto [sic] that precedes and follows. The Minuetto is in the minor mode, the Trio in the major; the Minuetto’s dynamics are generally forte, those of the Trio piano; the rhythm of the Minuetto is vigorous and syncopated, that of the Trio smooth and flowing; the Minuetto is largely contrapuntal, the Trio homophonic – and one could continue listing the differences (123).
One can indeed continue listing these differences where Meyer left off. The main ones are thrown into relief by the striking similarities of form, chiefly in that both movements have altered reprises. As we saw, the Trio’s tonic reprise is transformed by the horns’ ‘Pastorella’ counter-subject, and their involvement in the bridge. The changes are a lot bigger in the Menuetto, whose recapitulation is entirely re-composed. Moreover, the transformative effect of a new counter-subject is felt earlier than in the Trio, in the Menuetto’s development section. Again, as with the Trio, the heart of the matter is the implicative relationships between the start of the Menuetto and these two changes, respectively in the development and recapitulation. If the Trio’s ‘narrative’ is one of increasing clarification and individuation, then the process in the Menuetto runs in the opposite direction: beginning with a conflicted clarity whose tensions are gradually exacerbated, and whose transparency is clouded, leading to an explosion.

The Menuetto’s opening gambit – ‘a triad that begins on an upbeat’ – is blocked by a suspension on the Bb, a gesture with implications for both pitch and metrical patterns (Example 11).

Mozart disposes the theme in the reprise canonically between first and second violins, and with every single measure featuring a rising leap. The overlay of canonic entries projects a chain of leaps by covering the gap-fill motions, resulting in a perceived ‘disconnect’ between gap and fill (Example 13):

Metrically, too, mm. 28-36 constitute a climax: as a through-composed nine-measure phrase (in fact, the longest stretch of continuous music in the piece), it ‘completes’ the six-measure (3+3) pattern established at the opening of the Menuetto, while simultaneously dissolving its antecedent-consequent articulation. Cohn’s article details the astonishing complexity of Mozart’s ‘counterpoint’ between binary and ternary hypermetrical schemes. He indicates a shift from triple to duple hypermetre at m. 7, echoed by a similar metrical modulation at m. 24. The reprise, by contrast, effects not a shift but a co-existence between the two schemes: ‘The suggestions of both duple and triple hypermeter from the previous six-measure span are superimposed, creating a direct hypermetrical hemiola’ (Cohn, 22).

Altogether, the reprise produces an impression which is the opposite of clarity or indeed ‘resolution’ proper – an effect more in tune with the Kantian sublime, overloading the ear with superabundance. The listener is cognitively all at sea; the music stimulates our synthesizing faculty through its very fragmentation, while resisting it. If this conflict is already laid out in the Menuetto’s opening gambit, it is exarcebated ten-fold in the reprise. One must speak, therefore, not of clarifying an ambiguity (the Trio), but of magnifying an already apparent tension. Yet the process does not run cumulatively along a single track; to do fuller justice to the reprise’s Anger, we must unravel its paradoxical two-fold function as, simultaneously, a release of pent-up forces, and a destruction of pattern – both a discharge and a thwarting. It is difficult, in fact, to avoid the discredited ‘hydraulic’ model of musical emotion here, with its notion of ‘inner’ forces breaking through to the ‘surface’ – a model kindred with Meyer’s concept of ‘latency’. (The problem is that ‘depth’ and ‘surface’ collapse into each other on closer inspection).⁵ The paradox can be reduced to the dual nature of Mozart’s ‘pattern’ in itself. Its impulses – the beats of Mozart’s tactus – drive the Anger on, physically and cognitively entraining us to its regularity. At the same time, the beats themselves comprise isolated gestures, resistant of over-arching grouping within a simple metre.

I hear this ‘gestural atomism’ in the well-formedness of the opening three-measure gambit, its disguised repetition in mm. 4-6, and its extended repetition (to an eight-measure phrase) in mm. 7-14 (Example 14):

The phrase in mm. 1-3 is formally closed because of its I-V-I harmony, reworked in mm. 4-6 (compare this with the I-V V-I subject-answer dynamic of the Trio in mm. 1-4). Pace Cohn’s detection of a hypermetrical shift here, m. 7 marks the onset of a third statement, beginning with the G-Bb leap, but extended now from the expected three measures to eight via a series of cadential evasions. This cascade unfolds an octave transfer of Bb, repeated at m. 11 with a leap back up to the original register and a further descent. Hence Bb’s provocative role is intensified: a suspension at m. 1, and agent of the hypermetrical expansion, it becomes the ^6 apex at m. 7, whose registral transfer further extends the hypermeasure from three to five and then eight measures.

The exposition’s ‘gestural atomism’, as threefold repetition, weakens the cogency of its modulation to the dominant minor. As in the Trio, the modulation is achieved via a ‘Prinner Riposte’. But there are some instructive differences. The descent from ^6 in the Trio is hidden as an inner voice, covered by the ^7-^8 rise in the flute, and subsumed within the ascending harmonic 5^th cycle (G-D-A) of the successive instrumental entries – a ‘gradual crescendo’ effect which Meyer notes ‘creates a sense of destination’ (80). As important as its ‘gradual’ unfolding is the transition’s upwards trajectory, which enhances the positive character of tenderness. The ‘rising’ modulation follows through the contour of the ascending arpeggio idea. Perhaps modulations to the dominant intrinsically ‘rise’, given the metaphor of ‘rising tension’. Nevertheless, everything about the Menuetto’s own modulation seems to assuredly fall, in a cascade of cadential gestures (mm. 8-14), whereby the descent from ^6 is powerfully projected. But this impression is not quite accurate. Rather than a graduated modulation proper, mediated via a 5^th cycle, as in the Trio, we have a Rückung: an abrupt harmonic shift, pivoting on the reinterpretation of the Eb triad of m. 7 from VI of G minor to IIb of D minor. The naturalised F in the same measure introduces the new key, confirmed a beat later by the C#. The business of modulation is dispatched with fearsome efficiency: the subsequent cascade is technically post hoc and supererogatory; a series of rhetorical cadential flourishes, although the tonic resolution is deferred for six measures. We begin to see the connection in angry behavior between fragmentation and redundant repetition. The repeated cadential gestures attempt to retrospectively make good the elided transition, which breaks the exposition in two.

Repetition, then, is operative in the Menuetto both on the note level and the phrase level. It is hard to decide whether the music’s inability to properly move or change defines the anger or its cage. Motion begins with the descending third-cycle, Bb-G-Eb of the development, although the three-fold sequential repetition of the three-measure phrase is still mechanical. Motion is confirmed in the reprise’s formal continuity, especially in the motivic (regular, augmented, and diminished) fourth-cycle of the successive half-note entries: G-C-F#-Bb-Eb-A (Example 15):

Menuetto and Trio confront each other from opposite corners of emotional space (see Figure 3, above). The Trio’s ‘statistical parameters’ match Juslin’s expressive cues for Tenderness in most respects at least at the beginning. See its ‘low sound level’ (piano); ‘legato articulation’; ‘soft timbre’ (violins in mid-range); ‘soft duration contrasts’ (even quarter-notes). As for its ‘large timing variations’, I would argue that these can be heard in the metrical ambiguity we have explored, creating an unusually swift cycle of multiple retrospective reinterpretations. The chief difference is the Trio’s Allegretto tempo, which aligns it with the category of Happiness (‘fast mean tempo’). I will return to this problem in due course. By contrast, the Menuetto matches nearly all Juslin’s parameters for Anger: ‘high sound level’ (tutti and forte); ‘sharp timbre’ (high wind); ‘spectral noise’ (minor mode; chromaticism; complex textures); ‘fast mean tempo’ (Allegretto); ‘small tempo variability’ (driving tactus); ‘staccato articulation’ (bass m. 1ff; tutti mm. 11-14); ‘abrupt tone attacks’; ‘sharp duration contrasts’ (quarter-note, half-note, eighth-note differentiation); ‘accents on unstable notes’ (on Bb, yielding haemiola and hypermetre).

According to Juslin’s theory, these musical cues for Tenderness and Anger are consistent with (and possibly evolved from) vocal expressions of the two emotions. A more radical claim would be that musical expression was also congruent with musical form; in other words, that ‘designative’ behavior was isomorphic with the action tendencies of goal-orientated behavior. There is no reason why this should be the case; quite the contrary. With Anger, for instance, which is often linked to aggressive behavior, the ‘harsh, pressed voice quality’ (Ladd et al 437) of angry expression may admittedly be analogous to the force used to press the lips in facial expressions of anger (see Ekman 2003, 138). On the other hand,’ anger expression may prevent aggression’ (Izard and Ackerman, 259), or, as in a baby, can substitute for, or signal frustration at, the very inability to move or act (Lemerise and Dodge, 596).

Equally radical is the hypothesis that musical expression is congruent with differentiated ways of listening; that there are ‘tender’ and ‘angry’ modes of music cognition. Let’s review the case of Tenderness and Anger in Mozart’s Trio and Menuetto, by way of drawing the strands of this essay together.

Tenderness, sometimes called ‘Love’, is manifest in many of the Trio’s formal tendencies which I have earlier associated with the principle of ‘dialogue’. Beginning in a state of delicate ambiguity, where the musical strands are imbricated within each other, the material polarises into proper instrumental dialogue, achieving greater individuality and independence, before coming back together in renewed concord around the 3-2 4-3 changing-note schema, or ‘Pastorella’. This culminating concord, underscored by the schema’s pastoral connotations, is reminiscent of the codas in many of Mozart’s love duets (such as ‘Fra gli amplessi’, from Così).

Anger is epitomised in the Menuetto’s metrical conflict, which essentially interrupts the music’s kinetic drive. After being exarcebated in the development, this conflict erupts into expressive outbreak in the altered reprise, which discharges suppressed emotion as much as it breaks the original pattern all the more powerfully.

WAYS OF HEARING

The key attribute of a ‘tender’ way of hearing is a metaphorically ‘intersubjective’ dialogue between the listener and the music (‘metaphorical’, because literal intersubjectivity operates between people). The Trio invites attention on account of its pastoral sweetness, accommodates listeners through the openness of its ambiguity, and entrains them through the protean interplay of its patterns. The Trio’s metrical ambiguities, subject to retrospective reinterpretation, draw the listener into a dialogue: attending to the music, inferring a pattern, matching it with the musical reality, inferring a corrected pattern, and so on. A useful reference is the ‘happy protoconversations’ reported by Colwyn Trevarthen (1999-2000, 177): the ‘primary intersubjectivity’ enacted in mother and infant’s rhythmic turns of cross-modal dialogue.⁶ Despite mature lovers’ growing ability to integrate closeness and independence with age, psychologists of emotion agree that peoples’ love schemas ‘are shaped by children’s early experiences and are thus relatively permanent’ (Hatfield and Rapson, 656). The attributes, then, of a ‘tender’ mode of listening are: interest and attention to detail; openness to possibility; a yearning towards clarification of initial ambiguities.

By contrast, an ‘angry’ way of hearing entails cognitive dissonance, provoked by contradictory impulses in the music. The Menuetto implies goal-directed behavior through its kinetic rhythmic drive, yet blocks these goals; it stimulates the search for over-arching connections through its rhetoric of contrasts and fragments, while thwarting synthesis; it throws patterns into irresolvable stalemate; it eventually pitches the listener into a sublime storm of information. Entrainment here is coercive rather than seductive. The Menuetto enacts not a dialogue with the listener but a conflict. Driven by antipathy (not attraction), constrained by rigid regularities (not liberated by ambiguity), the ‘angry listener’ is driven along a pattern of repetition towards ultimate destruction.

These two listening types really emanate from two nuggets of ancient folk wisdom: the pleasures of unity, and our antipathy toward disunity. It is important to unpack their various entailments (respectively, as Tenderness and Anger) so as to deconstruct the erroneous opposition between cognition and affect. Emotions are not extrinsic add-ons to music cognition; they emerge in its course. Meyer taught us that. His project, nonetheless, was compromised by his tendency to think of emotion proper as a cultural – and therefore external – pressure-point acting upon more primal psychological principles. Adapting Juslin’s Brunswikian ‘lens model’ of expressive communication (Juslin, 324), I have reconfigured the relationship between what Meyer termed ‘ethos’ and ‘emotion’ (see Figure 4).
[Figure 4 Near Here]
The music’s perceived emotion results through intercorrelation between various cues. Whereas Juslin indicates only ‘expressive cues’ (corresponding to Meyer’s ‘ethos’), I have complemented these with a second box, for the music’s formal process (corresponding to Meyer’s Gestalt-driven ‘emotion’ proper). Expressive cues yield a ‘quick and dirty’ affective appraisal; formal process is perceived via a more reflective cognitive appraisal and re-appraisal.

It is essential to my argument that the Gestalt principles unfolding in this analysis do not comprise a generalised affect, shaped and differentiated into distinct emotions through the influence of ‘ethos’. On the contrary, they afford a Brunswikian ‘vicarious functioning’ of the expressive cues, conveying the same emotion, but over a greater stretch of time and in finer detail. Thus the Gestalt realm is not a kind of neutral plasma; it entails distinct emotional categories. This much was always suggested in Meyer’s talk of the surprise, bewilderment, relief, anxiety, and sheer pleasure elicited in the play of implications. Despite his commitment to the Gestalt principles of wholeness, Meyer never attempted to represent these emotions as holistic packages of parameters, nor to align them with specific strands of his analytic theory (ambiguity, pattern continuation, gap-fill, changing-note schemas, etc.).

A dividend of this two-stage model of musical emotion is that it gives space both to the normative shallows and artistic pinnacles of creativity – Mozart’s ‘simplicity’ as well as his ‘richness’. The emotions of the Menuetto and Trio are affordant at a musical glance, and don’t demand of the listener much learning or multiple hearings. Technically speaking, the information garnered through repeated listening is ‘redundant’, albeit beautiful in its finer-grained details.

It may be that the concordance between the ‘designative’ and ‘formal’ dimensions of musical expression is partly what makes music so special. It helps define musical emotion’s peculiar ontology. Another aspect of this ontology is musical emotion’s categorical character: expressive cues, designative of a particular emotional category, tend to be stable over the entire duration of a piece. And yet the protean and mixed quality of emotional experience has been celebrated at least as far back as Spinoza, who held that:

Mozart’s Trio seems to be regulated by the interaction of a Tenderness-Happiness pair. Note the ‘staccato articulation’ and ‘sharp duration contrasts’ (grace notes) at mm. 4-6, joined by the ‘high sound level’ (forte) and ‘bright timbre’ (oboes and flutes) at mm. 6-14, all of which comport with Juslin’s table. Happiness is latent at the start of the Trio, by virtue of tempo, and emerges to the surface as the movement progresses. Happiness, even more than Tenderness, expresses a cognitive openness to contrast; an ability to synthesise divergent materials within schematic patterns. The higher activation of Happiness, of course, is what links it to Anger, given that it is the Menuetto’s tempo which sets the pace for the Trio. Otherwise put, there is an aspect of exhilarating joy to Anger’s very activation. It is a fallacy that Anger is a uniformly negative emotion. As Lemerise and Dodge make clear, it can yield physical and social benefits as well: ‘Anger organizes and regulates internal physiological and psychological processes related to self-defence and mastery, as well as regulating social and interpersonal behaviors’ (594).

The Menuetto and Trio as a whole constitute an Anger-Tenderness pair. One could say that the Trio ‘comforts’ a distressed Menuetto. This is to challenge the popular theory of emotional ‘contagion’, which suggests an identification between expressed and induced emotion on the basis of physiological and mirror-neuronal sympathy (Robinson, 391-400). Thus a display of anger may not necessarily elicit angry feelings in the listener; he or she may equally experience fear, or even feelings of tenderness, as towards a distressed child. In this respect, the Menuetto implies the Trio’s response at a powerfully affective level. That the Trio in its turn implies a da capo of Anger only on the level of generic norm (i.e., what the classical style tells us should happen) compounds the pathos of the tragic shock.

The distinction between expressed and induced emotion takes us back to the problem of negative emotions. On this question, psychological research on Anger and Tenderness is strikingly polarised. Anger is the emotion which is easiest to recognise in every-day life (see Scherer et al 2001, 83-84), yet hardest to feel in music (Zentner 2008, 504). Listeners practically never report experiencing anger in music. Conversely, Tenderness (like ‘wonder’, ‘transcendence’, ‘nostalgia’, and peacefulness’) corresponds to that select group of intrinsically musical emotions: emotions typically evoked by music (see Zentner, 504). A number of lines of inquiry open up. Could it be that musical semiosis – music’s ability to signify expressive meaning – is dominated by negative emotions, because these are easier to objectify at a distance? This might explain Robert Hatten’s discovery that it is overwhelmingly the minor-mode piano sonatas in Beethoven’s oeuvre which have received expressive titles (‘Moonlight’; ‘Pathétique’; ‘Tempest’; ‘Appassionata’). Because of its rarity, the minor mode was semiotically ‘marked’ against the Classical style’s stereotypical horizon (Hatten 1994, 36). The correlation with Scherer’s experiments on vocal-expressive recognition is striking: ‘there was a considerable drop in recognition for joy. This result is mainly due to the frequent confusions of the joy stimuli with the neutral stimuli’ (Scherer et al 2001, 83-4).

The positive emotions’ expressive ‘neutrality’ is kindred with the privileged position they occupy in musical aesthetics. In this regard, Mozart’s Trio is privileged because it is possible for listeners to feel the same emotion they recognise: expressed and induced emotions coincide, promoting a phenomenal ‘bonding’ between music and subject, extremely suggestive of the mother-child primal scene signalled by the pastoral topic. Conversely, the Anger of the Menuetto is constituted by this emotion’s very distance from musical experience. In other words, one needs to work ‘harder’ to feel musical anger, to get past the hedonic thrill of its high activation. As Aaron Ridley reminds us, the fact that we need to understand (and to have once personally experienced) displayed musical emotions in order to even recognise them as such undermines the expression-induction opposition (Ridley 1995, 131). The elusiveness of felt anger is particularly well served by the two-stage model I have described. If Anger in the Menuetto is initially only expressed (by its ethos), then one of the functions fulfilled by cognitive (re)appraisal is to bring this emotion home to the listener. Anger falls at the very bottom of Zentner’s list of sixty-six possible emotions felt by listeners, below Sorrow and Depression (505). This disparity is eloquent witness to one of the disciplinary chasms between psychological and music-theoretical approaches to emotion. It also suggests that the kind of dedicated, reflective, engagement demanded of listeners by the richest artworks currently falls far from music psychology’s chief concerns. These are chasms, however, which we are beginning to bridge.

Finally, we are left with the suspicion that Tenderness (Love) and Joy, as well as comprising discrete emotions in themselves, also constitute a basal foundation for the kinds of cognitive principles Meyer investigated. It cannot be purely circumstantial that Meyer chose the Trio from K. 550 as the vehicle for his most sustained analytical exploration. Promoting interest and openness of outlook, Tenderness and Joy describe the ideal listening practice. To listen ‘mimetically’ with ‘exact imagination’, as a great German philosopher ostensibly very distant from Meyer’s world has argued, is tantamount to love.⁷ Love as the basis for Meyer’s theory of emotion? For a writer so strongly linked with tension and anxiety, and whose last major pronouncement on the subject picked out ‘cultural uncertainty’ as a chief aesthetic determinant (Meyer 2001, 357), that would indeed be a consummation devoutly to be wished.