Where exactly is Emotion found in Music?
The immediate answer to this question is: in the Melody, something which is clearly evident in all music from the most ancient time when melody was the only element of music which existed. It is from this fact that the definition of Music evolved among some 2,000 years of ancient philosophers was, that Music is a Special Language for the Communication of Feeling and Emotion.
A new emphasis in the purpose of music becomes evident during the Renaissance Period when the meaning becomes more important than technique. This recognition that melody is synonymous with emotion, made melody the fundamental element with the beginning of opera in 1600 by composers who wanted to create a large-scale stage medium which emphasized the emotions, a departure from the then traditional tedious performances of long spoken poems in Latin. By the nineteenth century, even though all the elements of music had been highly developed, the central feature was clearly the representation of the emotions. This definition was documented in a famous discussion by Mendelssohn.
People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear music is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too, seem to be so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.1
The range of emotions now associated with Music was very broad, as one can see in a description by Richard Wagner in a comment on his conception of his opera, Tristan and Isolde, which he wrote for a performance of the Prelude of this opera on 2 January 1860.
A tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living—longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption—death surcease, a sleep without awakening.
Some thoughts on Emotions in Melody
I believe it is reasonable to conclude that when a composer creates a melody the very act of creation has as its origin some emotional feeling based on their past experience. It seems impossible to me to imagine a composer just putting notes on paper without feeling. Deryck Cooke, in his historic study of emotion and notation, The Language of Music, a book from which we have been thoroughly inspired, believed that the creation of melody had as its origin some unconscious memory of specific melodic fragments previously known and remembered by the composer.2 I prefer to describe the origin as genetic, although what is genetic no doubt contains some memory of all music the composer has ever heard. Cooke gives here as a perfect example of the union of feeling and melody the beginning melody of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which does perfectly provide the listener with the feeling of one leaving one’s residence, stepping outdoors and being overwhelmed with the joy of the first day of Spring.
I might add here, from my own experience as a composer, that one is almost intimidated by wondering if it is possible to create an original melody out of the only same seven notes which have been used by every composer for the past five centuries. The fact that there seems no end of the possibilities of melodic invention with only seven notes lies in the fact that it is the personal association with the emotion felt by the composer which is by its very nature original and cannot be duplicated by the life experience of another composer.
Another characteristic of the composer’s original idea of a melody is that it must come to them not as mere melodic notes but as notes already moving in time, for indeed the basis of any emotion includes motion, the feeling of a living emotion moving through Time. Here is a good place to point out that the word “emotion” has only one alphabetical difference from the word “motion.” The concept of an emotion existing only in the literal present tense, with no past association and no question of moving forward is impossible. Melody must be synonymous with movement. Other labels which are used with regard to the movement of melody though time, such as rhythm, and meter, refer to the division of movement but rarely alter the basic emotion involved.
On Harmony and the other Elements of Music
It is my view that harmony rarely plays a fundamental role in the expression of emotions. First of all, its internal components are somewhat contradictory: a minor key includes several major chords and a major key includes several minor chords. Second, harmony very rarely comes as an original inspiration, as is the case with melody. Usually it has to be appropriately worked out and as Cooke observed, “there is always something intellectually calculated about it.”3 In my view the fundamental role of harmony has more to do with creating movement in music rather than in emotional meaning, as in the case of a chord which by its very technical nature requires the following chord.
A subject which follows here is the question of what do we mean by the “technique” of composition? In the composition of aesthetic music the role of the composer’s technique is found in their continued effort to define and develop their creative expression. The historic model of this definition is found in the sketchbooks of Beethoven. There one can see where an original inspiration is notated, followed by sometime pages of refining and manipulating this melodic idea in order to find its perfect form to be used in a composition.
Technique has its place in the beginning composition course but in the role of creation of an actual score it should not have an independent identity. Certainly the technique of just adding notes on paper will not result in anything of value.
In this regard let me give an illustration from my own experience. I decided to begin composing for the first time at age 50, following the strong recommendation by my friend Fred Fennell that given the significance of this number everyone should do some one thing new or different after the age of 50. I was confident that I was capable of composing, since the first Minor of my Ph.D. program was Theory and it was clear to me in advance that I did not want to imitate the typical idioms of band music. But when I sat down at the piano and began improvising I found I was playing notes with no meaning. I eventually realized that the meaning had to come before the notes so I left the keyboard and sat in a comfortable chair for some days just thinking about emotions until an emotional inspiration regarding “what I wanted to say” came to me, and from that point on the notes came by themselves.
Thoughts on Content and Form in Music
“Content” is a word which has no meaning other than the sum of the musical elements in a passage of music. “Form” is a label created in order to attempt to describe for the listener the organization of the continuous development of the musical experience. However, in the academic environment “form” is sometimes made to seem more important than the content.
In the process of discussing form the student is sometimes given unusable information. A case in point is the classroom presentation of the Sonata form. The teacher writes at the top of the blackboard, “Sonata.” Then below it they write the names of the three sections of the sonata form:
Exposition — Development — Recapitulation
This and the following discussion of these three sections is all true information but it is also unusable information. It is unusable information because neither the composer, the player nor the listener ever perceives the music from this perspective, like standing at the side of a barn. What the listener actually perceives is equivalent to standing at the beginning of the word “Exposition” and looking across the blackboard, perceiving the music as it occurs through time to the end of the movement. This would result in usable information as it corresponds with the listening experience itself. Furthermore, the composer would have been very much aware of the phenomenon that as Time recedes into the past it becomes foreshortened in the memory of the listener. Consequently the composer will often make changes in the recapitulation, shortening it so that for the listener this statement will match their memory of the original statement, now recalled as something in the past. Another example which comes to mind is in the Rondo of Mozart’s Symphony Nr. 40 where he notates the Primary statement as AABB but in its return later it is AB. The teacher may be likely to point to this as an example of an incomplete return, however, on the contrary, for the listener it is the experience of a complete return for it now matches the original AABB as it is now recalled in their memory. If Mozart had repeated AABB here the listener would probably feel it was unnecessarily long.
I might add that these familiar characteristics of repetition in Music are something which is found as satisfying in the right hemisphere of the brain of the listener, much as the pleasure in seeing an old friend after a period of time. But nothing like this exists in the left hemisphere of the brain. Can you imagine having read a book to the end and then finding an instruction, “Go back and reread the first five chapters.” What could be less satisfying?
Finally. the perception of music moving over these long formal periods is crucial to solo performers and conductors. Eugene Ormandy had a unique gift in this regard, as I was once able to observe when studying with him. At that time the Philadelphia Orchestra performed under very strict limitations relative to the duration of time during its performances, as required by the musicians union. If the performance exceeded the established limit for a concert’s duration, the pay of all 100 musicians was greatly increased, much to the distress of the management. Therefore the length of applause had sometimes to be ended in order to meet this time barrier. To manage this problem Ormandy kept a notebook in which his assistant recorded the length of time during rehearsal and concert of every movement of every composition in order that in preparing new programs he could be careful not to select music which exceeded the performance time allowed. The occasion I observed involved a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony Nr. 4 and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, to be performed by a lady violinist from Russia whom no one knew.
She only appeared for the final rehearsal and she immediately set a tempo far slower than the standard performance of this concerto. The orchestra and soloist ran through the composition without stopping, after which Ormandy came down into the hall where I was sitting with the assistant conductor with his stopwatch. Ormandy immediately asked, “How much over is it?” The assistant conductor replied, “Five minutes, sir, what will you do?” Ormandy thought for a moment and replied, “I will take five minutes off the Bruckner.” I consequently brought my stopwatch to the first public performance and I was astonished to find that indeed the Bruckner was five minutes shorter than it had been during the previous five days of rehearsal. The impressive thing was that Ormandy had such a gift for time over this long period that he was able to take off little quantities of time here and there in such a logical manner that I am sure no orchestra member was aware of this change in his interpretation!
Thoughts on the Role of Emotion in Aesthetic Composition
The following is a consideration of the composition of aesthetic art music. We omit here the composition of functional music as well as popular music and entertainment music, all of which have goals apart from the communication of pure music to the listener.
To begin a composer must have something of themselves to communicate. It is unthinkable that a composer would just begin writing notes without feeling or purpose. They must write notes which respect their relationship with the acoustical rules of music, but in composing they must be the master of these rules and not their servant.
But first and foremost the composer must understand that in aesthetic music “meaning” is synonymous with emotion expression and, respecting the most important advantage Music has over the other art forms in that it brings the listener into direct contact with the mind of the creator. If the expression is to be genuine the composer must feel this emotion before they begin to compose. We recognize that the urge to communicate these emotions in music comes to the composer first in the form of an inspiration.
On Inspiration
The inspiration the composer has must be based on their own feeling and experience, which sometimes comes from a spiritual source which the composer themselves may find difficult to identify. Mendelssohn, in a letter to his family,4 observed that inspiration “just comes into our heads.” Aaron Copland, in his book, What to Listen for in Music5 called it “a gift from Heaven over which the composer has no control.” And William Byrd, in the 1610 edition of his Gradualia, in discussing religious texts, explained,
“I have learned from experience that there is a secret hidden power in the texts themselves; so that to one who ponders things divine and turns them over carefully and seriously in his mind, in some way, I cannot tell how, the appropriate music occurs of its own accord.”
It becomes a matter of the composer’s creative imagination to turn the inspiration into living music and they do this primarily by making the inspiration synonymous with their melody. Because the basic emotions are universal, if the composer is successful they have reason to expect their communication will have universality. This is exemplified by a comment which Beethoven added to his manuscript of his Missa Solemnis, “From the heart – may it go back to the heart of the listener.”
If the composer’s technique is employed without this purpose, then their music will convey nothing to the listener.
Regarding the Listener
The listener of a performance of Music has a unique and priceless advantage over the observer of any other art form because they have an immediate and personal connection with the mind of the composer, for whom feeling came before the notation of the music. An observer of a painting, on the other hand, has to first view and understand the elements of the picture itself before they can then contemplate on what the artist may have been thinking or feeling. The painting itself stands between the observer and the painter.
This aspect of listening to Music is a very important characteristic of Music itself. Because the basic emotions are universal in general, the more refined emotions of the composer will have the effect of “educating” the listener, raising the understanding of the basic emotion of the listener to a higher level. Because of this important potential in adding to the listener’s experience it is important that the observer listens with the right hemisphere of their brain and not the left, making no effort to hear and recognize the technical elements of what they are hearing but rather to just let the music flow over them and absorb the emotional experience alone. Because of the importance of this I have heard it observed that a degree in music ruins a person as a listener.
In addition, since the basic emotions are universal the listener will by nature be able to understand the emotions of the music. No listener would ever confuse a happy musical experience as being a sad experience. This universal quality of the basic emotions also plays an important role in how the music reaches the listener. As Wagner once pointed out, first, you have the composer, then the performance during which the players attempt an accurate rendition of the composer’s intent. But then the music takes flight out into the audience where each and every listener takes in the emotion they hear and then sifts it through their own bank of experience, their right hemisphere, where they will experience the emotions of the music on a personal level. Thus, in an audience of 300 listeners, while all will connect with the basic emotion of the composer, each will have an individual understanding of that emotion based on their own past experience with that emotion—300 different perceptions. In another place Wagner was thinking of this distinction when looking at two members of the audience listening to a performance of his music, a distinguished elderly general who had tears running his cheeks and next to him his wife who was in the last reaches of boredom!
Notes
- Letter to Marc-Andre Souchay, Berlin, 15 Oct. 1842. ↩︎
- p. 186 ↩︎
- p. 193 ↩︎
- 2 August, 1829 ↩︎
- Chapter 3 ↩︎
READ NEXT: Chapter 5, Toward a New Philosophy of Music Education
