Emotions and Musical Analysis After Meyer By Michael Spitzer

1. The number and membership of the select club of basic emotions is controversial, particularly as regards music. I here follow Juslin (2001, 314). It is also notable that the chief felt musical emotions (including wonder, nostalgia, and transcendence) are not central categories in general emotion theory. I shall explore this issue at the end of my essay.

2. See also his comment in Explaining Music: ‘A more basic problem is that, in the absence of an adequate theory of ethetic change and transformation or without a text or program explicitly connecting the character of earlier events to later ones, it is difficult to explain the succession of characteristic gestures or the sequence of different sorts of feeling-tone’ (Meyer 1973, 246).

3. Hamlet 2.2.192.

4. Egon Brunswik (1903-55), like his contemporary James Gibson, was a pioneer of ecological perception. Although Gibson’s ideas became influential in music psychology (e.g. Clarke 2005), Brunswik’s approach is arguably better suited to emotion theory because it models the interaction of separate parameters: ‘A “Brunswikian” conceptualization of the communicative process in terms of separate cues that are “integrated” – as opposed to a “Gibsonian” conceptualization in terms of more holistic “higher-order” variables – seems to be supported by studies of the physiology of listening’ (Juslin 2001, 325).

5. For a critique of the ‘hydraulic model’ of emotion, attributed to William James, see Solomon (1993), 77-88.

6. Trevarthen sees protoconversation comprised of two elements: ‘(a) coordination between the various channels of expression and modalities of awareness of the infant’ with ‘(b) a mutual comprehension or empathy by means of which infant and partner improvise an integrated and patterned engagement or performance’ (177).

7. The philosopher is Theodor Adorno: ‘What is called intellectual is for the most part only what demands work and effort on the part of the hearing [Gehör], what demands strength of attention and memory, what demands, in fact, love’ (cited in Nicholsen 1997, 19).

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