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.

Peak Music

Over at Digital Music News (hey, I read 'em all) there is an article about when people stop being receptive to new music: So, When Will YOU Hit Your Musical ‘Peak and Paralysis Age’?

When it comes to discovering music, most people eventually hit a point of “musical paralysis.”  In fact, researchers have now pinpointed the exact moment when it’s likely to occur.

Did you know that you’ll likely stop discovering music right before you turn 28?  The strange phenomenon is called “musical paralysis”.  And researchers have found that users, on average, stopped discovering new music at 27 years and 11 months.

The research, commissioned by the streaming music service Deezer, surveyed 5,000 adults from the UK, the US, Germany, France, and Brazil.

Researchers found that music fans will first hit their “musical peak” several years before entering into a “musical paralysis.”  During the ‘peak’ age, they’ll listen to ten or more new tracks per week.  Then, they’ll stop discovering new music altogether.

They then go on to give some details about differences between different countries. No information about how they gathered these statistics so we can't judge their validity. I have heard some people say that most people's musical tastes are fixed forever at around age 17, but no idea where they got that from.

This is all, loosely, in the area of what musicologists call "reception history" or how music is received by listeners, whether aficionados or the general public. Musicians have quite a different experience as they don't just listen to music, but produce it. For example, while my interest in unusual (to me) kinds of music ebbs and flows, overall it is a continuous process that involves listening to music usually considered great or important (just now I am working my way through a box of 160 discs of Haydn), but that also involves listening to music I have long been familiar with (Beethoven, Bach) that also includes pop music (The English Beat, Cream) and music that I am not familiar with from contemporary composers (Sofia Gubaidulina). It also involves listening to music from non-Western sources (most recently a number of discs of Ravi Shankar) and current pop music (recently some oeuvre of Kanye West). I honestly don't see this process ever coming to an end! So the idea that people, most people apparently, just stopping the discovery of new music seems very odd to me.

Of course, most of us are very weighed down with work and a multitude of responsibilities to the point that we have little focus or concentration available to listen to anything unfamiliar. I suppose this also explains the very modest attractions of television that seems to require a nearly brain-dead audience.

A few questions come to mind: the researchers are likely defining "new music" as simply music that is unfamiliar to the listener. But does this always mean that is it just unfamiliar music in a well-accustomed genre? In other words, if you know the previous songs of Taylor Swift, will her new song count as "new music?" What about a song by an artist you have never heard of? What about a song in a genre you have never experienced before? Yes, it seems as if all the forces of commercial music are rallied against the intrusion of any genuinely new genre or style, but still, some may occur from time to time!

And what about the possibility of something genuinely new and fresh? Steve Reich's music in the 70s was very much new and different from anything heard before, but he won an audience that included people at a variety of ages and even some who were mostly listeners to popular music. In numbers, of course, these listeners were statistically insignificant.

I wonder a couple of other things: what was the actual motive or purpose of this research? How is going to be used?

Speaking of Ravi Shankar, let's listen to some of his music. This is the album Three Ragas. The first one is Raga Jog and Maestro Shankar is accompanied by Chatur Lal, tabla and Pradjol Sen, tamboura:

Listening to Les Tendres Plaintes

I labeled this "reception history" even though it isn't quite that. Think of it as the first draft of a reception history. That term, by the way, refers to a way of doing musicology where you examine the history of how a piece or a style or a composer was received by audiences over time. It can be quite interesting. But it does raise the problem of understanding how people listen.

I've listened to a piece by Rameau, Les Tendres Plaintes, a few times recently for different reasons: it is on a recent CD of Grigory Sokolov, there are a couple of clips of it on YouTube and I was sharing them with a couple of friends and I just transcribed it for violin and guitar to see what that would sound like. So I noticed a couple of things about how I listen to it. By that I basically mean my moment to moment reactions which vary from occasion to occasion, of course.

Here is the clip I have watched the most:

Now I will try to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness account of my reactions:

...those trills! and then how silvery the ring of the melody...
...the trills in the melody and the accompaniment are offset, intentionally kept unaligned.
(there are actually several different kinds of ornaments I am calling "trills" here: Rameau has a table in the front of his book naming and describing them: the cadence is a trill from the note above and the pincé is to the note below. We tend to call them a trill and a mordent respectively. There is also a cadence apuyée, where the first note is held longer and the double cadence which is a cadence that ends with a turn.)
...he does just a hint of notes inégales in the bass line that connects the first two phrases...
...when he gets to the descending sequence that begins the 1re Reprise, it is so lovely that I just start swaying my head from side to side...
..that A major chord that ends the 1re Reprise is always a surprise... the piece is in D minor, but the 1re Reprise is in A minor...
...he handles the refrain so differently the second time: a crisper inégale in the bass with an added cadence...
...the 2de Reprise (in F major) is almost whimsical, but at the same time wistful...
...the last refrain is even more beautiful... the high A in the second phrase is I think the most delicate note I have ever heard from a piano--it is like a guitar harmonic or an orchestral bell hit with a feather...

Let me show you the score I have been looking at. These two pages are from Rameau's Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode by which he means that he has an explanatory preface about how to play them. The table of ornaments is from there:

And here is the score to Les Tendres Plaintes:

Click to enlarge

This is a very simple piece, of course. Just that theme in D minor which has two eight-measure phrases, the first ending on the dominant and the second on the tonic. Then another two phrases in A minor, then the theme again followed by the second reprise (or episode) in F major but this time both phrases end on the tonic, and finally the theme again. You just should bear in mind that Jean-Philippe Rameau literally wrote the book on harmony--it was his Traité de L'Harmonie of 1722 that formalized the theory of tonal harmony and the basic principles are still followed today.

Here is a portrait of Rameau done in 1760:

Two Beethovens--at least!

Reception history is an interesting field within the larger field of music history. What reception history does is look at how a composer was regarded at different times. One of the most interesting composers from this point of view is Beethoven because while he has been very famous and very popular ever since the latter part of his lifetime, say 1800 at least, why he has been popular and which works in particular were most appreciated has changed enormously over time.

At the present moment we are in perhaps the aftermath (hangover?) of the romantic myth of Beethoven. This is the Promethean myth of suffering and triumph and it is fed by a small selection of his works: the 3rd, 5th and 9th symphonies, Fidelio, and the Pathétique and Appassionata piano sonatas. During his own lifetime it was quite a different Beethoven that was admired; the works that were particularly appreciated were the Septet, Wellington's Victory and the second movement of the Symphony No. 8. This music is still around, but it is barely known and other of Beethoven's music, the whole divertimento repertoire, has been banished. From about the middle of the 19th century there was no longer a place for music with a divertimento character on the concert stage, not even in chamber music concerts.

As we are very familiar with the Promethean Beethoven--if you are not, then go have a listen to the first group of pieces mentioned above--let's listen to a bit of the other Beethoven. Here is the Septet in E flat major, op. 20 for violin, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon and horn:

The only reason I have any familiarity with this music is that in my first orgy of LP-purchasing around 1970 I picked up a box containing all of Beethoven's chamber music for winds, part of DGG's integral recording project for the Beethoven bicentenary. I know what you are thinking: "where is all the drama and suffering?" This sounds more like Haydn and Mozart than the Beethoven we are familiar with. Yes, exactly! But it was music like this that was the foundation of Beethoven's fame and he continued to write music like this throughout his life. Here is the second movement of the Symphony No. 8 for example:

That sounds more like Mendelssohn doesn't it?

My own history with Beethoven was heavily influenced by 20th century views. I came first to revere the late quartets. Why? Very largely because of the testimony of Stravinsky and others that this was perennially great music. The 19th century was a bit leery of the late quartets and they only achieved their full appreciation in the 20th century when they became the pinnacle of the repertoire in tandem with the 20th century rediscovery of the genre.

As for the symphony, Carl Dahlhaus makes the point that:

The history of the symphony [in the 19th century] looks almost like a history of the conclusions that composers were able to draw from Beethoven's various models of the symphonic principle: from the Third and Seventh Symphonies in the case of Berlioz, the Sixth in the case of Mendelssohn, and the Ninth in the case of Bruckner.

I have remarked before about how Bruckner seems to be always exploring the possibilities of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

I hesitate to deliver a tidy summing-up as Dahlhaus (in his Nineteenth-Century Music) also makes the point that the basic research into the details of the whole reception history of Beethoven has yet to be done, so I will just end with another of those works for which he was most famed during his lifetime, but which have been neglected ever since. Here is Wellington's Victory, op 91, celebrating the battle of Vitoria in Spain in June 1813, when forces commanded by Wellington defeated French forces commanded by Napoleon's older brother:

That is completely different from the aesthetic image we have of Beethoven but it was written in the fall of 1813, so certainly a product of his mature years, and a huge hit at the time.

Music and Life

The Guardian has a very odd essay up titled "Six Songs of Me: Just why music matters so much to us ..."  I say odd because it seems to promise a lot, "just why music matters so much to us" but really doesn't deliver much at all. For example, this is from the conclusion to the article:

There's nothing secret about music's power in our lives, even if we are still a long way from having a proper understanding of it, but there is something astonishing and transformative about music's grip on consciousness – and the sheer variety of musics, from every age and every part of the globe that can do that. 

I have no idea what the author, Eric Clarke, is trying to say here. I mean, I agree that there is something potentially astonishing and transformative about music's grip on consciousness--or I would if I knew what he meant by "grip on consciousness", but reading this is like eating meringue, all fluff and no substance. The article is combined with a survey, "Six Songs of Me" that I did not care to participate in. Perhaps the main reason for the article was to get people participating, upping page views, that sort of thing.

This kind of exercise falls in the general category of what musicologists call 'reception history' or how people respond to music. There were a couple of times in the 19th century when an opera sparked an actual revolution. Indeed, people's responses to music in the Romantic period were very strong and aligned with the powerful emotional texture of the music. An outstanding example of this is the Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869). The piece is a colorful narrative of the progress of an artist's obsessive love for an unobtainable woman. It was certainly inspired by an obsession Berlioz developed for an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson. Berlioz describes the music in this way:

The composer’s intention has been to develop various episodes in the life of an artist, in so far as they lend themselves to musical treatment. As the work cannot rely on the assistance of speech, the plan of the instrumental drama needs to be set out in advance. The following programme must therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera, which serves to introduce musical movements and to motivate their character and expression.

I'm not sure whether much work has been done on the reception history of this particular piece, but I wonder if it did not lead to a lot of others becoming obsessively fixated on a distant love object. When Goethe wrote his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, it became an important influence on the Romantic movement and led to a flurry of "copycat suicides".

The Symphonie fantastique is a very powerful piece of music for a lot of reasons. One is its astonishing orchestral palette. It became a model of how to write colorfully for orchestra for all subsequent composers. It also was innovative in other ways such as the detailed way the music follows the narrative of the program (which Berlioz wrote out and included in the score--see the Wikipedia article on the symphony I linked above for more on the program notes). Berlioz took a number of techniques used in opera and adapted them to symphonic narrative such as adding unusual wind and percussion instruments to the orchestra, using new instrumental techniques such as having the violins play col legno striking the strings with the wood of the bow, and most uniquely, the use of a musical motif, that Berlioz calls an idée fixe. Here is that long and rather operatic melody, which is heard throughout the symphony transformed in various ways:

Click to enlarge

Now let's hear the music:

I suppose what bothered me the most about the Guardian article was the sheer pollyannaishness of it: music is always a swell thing to accompany your life, which puts music a bit on the same level as a new sweater or perhaps a tranquilizer prescription. Yes, music can be powerful, but the corollary to that is that music can be dangerous as well. The author says:

for many people music is the source of some of the most powerful and significant experiences in their lives. In the 100 years or so since recorded music has been widely available, our lives have become suffused by it...

Now that I think about it, the mistake here is the same one I was talking about in this post about The Autobiographical Fallacy. Music is not the source of significant experiences in your life so much as it is a reflection on them. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique is about as autobiographical in its inspiration as a piece of music can be. And even then, as Taruskin notes in the Oxford History "the degree to which this program was truly autobiographical is of course unknowable and (many would say) irrelevant."

Music and life are different things.