Emotion in Music

In a very few days I will be off to Salzburg and while there you will get posts every day with comments on the city, the festival, the concerts, the food--the whole enchilada. Photos will be included! If you want to have a look at my last Salzburg excursion, just look in the sidebar archive for the posts in August 2019.

But I ran across an interesting post over at the new neo blog that you might find interesting: Emotion in Music. Neo has been running one of the more interesting blogs for years and years. She usually has an unusual take on the events of the day. Inexplicably she is also a huge Bee Gees fan, though not to the exclusion of other music. (Sorry, Neo!)

Among my drafts I have an enormous number of fragmented ones about the connection between music and emotion. It’s not something I really understand, but I keep trying to write about it nonetheless. I think some people are immune to that connection or at least less likely to be affected emotionally by music. But I certainly always have found music emotional, and some music far more emotional than other music.

By “emotional” I don’t mean a unitary thing, either. Happy, sad, excited, nostalgic, regretful, calm – those are just a few of the emotions music can stir. And I also have noticed that some music is what might be called Apollonian and some Dionysian, and that this distinction is present across and within many genres.

She embeds an interesting video of some scientific research into these questions with Oliver Sacks:

I find much scientific research into music to be just weird. Take this experiment for example: they take a somewhat random clip of Bach choral music and follow it with a somewhat random clip of Beethoven choral music as if randomly selected music by Bach and Beethoven were commensurable in some way. I think it is perfectly obvious that you could get wildly different results, perhaps specifically desirable results, if you simply chose different examples from the two composers. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Bach followed by the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven would surely get you utterly different results. Do scientists have no awareness of the specificity of different pieces of music? How about the Cello Suite No. 3 by Bach and then the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven?

I'm not going to do any confirming research, but I think that the Bach sample in the Nova clip was a chorale from the St. Matthew Passion and the Beethoven was from the Missa Solemnis. Correct me if I am wrong! Bach wrote probably the greatest religious music ever and he was a spectacularly wonderful writer for choir. Beethoven, not so much on either count! I have never liked his choral writing (or vocal writing generally) and he was an indifferent composer of religious music. But when it came to piano sonatas, string quartets and symphonies, he was incomparable. So yes, I suppose the brain scans were indicative of the samples chosen, but the samples chosen were a choice that proves nothing.

When it comes to music, science rarely tells us anything we don't already know.