The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being by Penelope Gouk James Kennaway Jacomien Prins Wiebke Thormahlen

Author:Penelope Gouk,James Kennaway,Jacomien Prins,Wiebke Thormahlen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781351674980
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Music, Mind and Emotions

In relation to where the different views locate the emotions when focusing on the musical experience and the musical object, we can have two groups of theories: those that claim that the place of emotions is in the music; and those that argue that it is in the listener (Kania, 2017; Lentini, 2014). When emotions are in the music, they are usually identified with its content and they are required to be merely recognised by a listener, without her/him necessarily feeling them. When the emotions are located in the listener, in contrast, it means that the connection between music and emotions lies in the fact that music has the ability to make people feel emotions – music’s special status would consist in this specific ability.

The difference between these two views has also been discussed in terms of the distinction between cognitivism and emotivism. Kivy (1990) states very clearly the terms of the debate between the two groups of theories:

An “ancient quarrel” runs through the philosophy of music. It concerns the relation of music to the emotive life and I will characterise it here as the quarrel between musical “cognitivists” and musical “emotivists” […]. Those I am calling musical emotivists believe that when, under normal circumstances, musical critics, theorists or just plain listeners call a piece of music (say) “sad,” it is because it makes us sad when we listen to it; and what they mean by “sad” music, I will assume, is music that normally arouses sadness in the normal listener. The musical cognitivists, like the emotivists, believe that it is proper sometimes to describe music in emotive terms. But unlike the emotivists, they do not think that sad music is sad in virtue of arousing that emotion in listeners. Rather, they think the sadness is an expressive property of the music which the listener recognises in it, much as I might recognise sadness as a quality of a dog’s countenance or even of an abstract configuration of lines.

(Kivy, 1990, pp. 146–147)

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