Classical music and emotions

[Daimonion]

Classical music, or at least some kinds of it, are quite often understood as expressing and/or evoking particular emotions.

1. Do you know any scientific researches related to this issue? (I would be grateful for references)

2. Could you list, as a kind of a survey, the pieces of classical music that most clearly (for you, of course) connect with particular emotions? (I am interested in all emotions possible for a human creature to feel, but mostly in peacfulness, serenity, sadness, melancholy, and depression)

All the best,

Daimonion

[Florestan]

peacefulness

http://www.youtube.com/v/koN9m0ltRFY

serenity

http://www.youtube.com/v/J8YfXTVV3G4

sadness

http://www.youtube.com/v/yUQJQ0QjQb0

melancholy

http://www.youtube.com/v/eolykko5eM0

and depression

Sorry, I have never experienced that when listening to classical music. 

[Daimonion]

The active participation of the listener is obvious. Still, however, the pieces of music differ between each other in their propensity to evoke this or that emotion.

Cf. both Manet and randomly chosen postcard from the nearest bookshop can evoke the feeling of watching something beautiful. The probability of this feeling being evoked, however, is much higher in the former case.

The very same thing refers to our life events. The winning in the lottery will much more often cause happiness than sadness.

[Daimonion]

Actually, it is an empirical claim. As such it does not have to be argued for or against (or believed in). We can just verify it empirically (ideally, it would be a well-designed research).

[mszczuj]

Music is sound, nothing more,

This is false as music is built with signs not with sounds. Musical signs are built with sounds but their content is much wider (in fact all the signs just mirror the whole universe but each one does it in its very special order).

and if you experience an emotion from listening to a piece of music, that is because of past associations you have made with that kind of music;

And this is true as this is the way all the signs work.

[Mirror Image]

I think Stravinsky was dead wrong when he said, and I may be paraphrasing here, that "Music expresses nothing but itself." I highly doubt composing music is a purely intellectual exercise for many composers. Maybe it was for Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Who knows the truth really, but I think emotion does play a role in music whether it's from the composer or the listener. Was the Largo movement in Shostakovich's famous 5th written with no feeling or emotion? I highly doubt it. Music is not about throwing a bunch of ideas together --- it's about an expression of emotions. If music is just sound, then what's the point of listening when I could just go listen to waves crashing upon a beach? No, I think that kind of mentality is just ignorant. What the music expresses, however, is completely subjective. This I agree with, but I don't believe for a second that at least some emotion doesn't play a role in music creation.

[Daimonion]

All you would demonstrate is that some people reacted to Work X by feeling Emotion A; others reacted with Emotion B, etc., and some did not associate any emotion to listening to the work.  None of this would prove that Work X, in fact, contained emotional content, which  no music does.  Music is sound, nothing more, and if you experience an emotion from listening to a piece of music, that is because of past associations you have made with that kind of music; not because the music contains emotional content that can be empirically demonstrated.

All of this would refer equally well to shouting and crying and laughing. Would you say that these don't express emotion (I don't want to insist on the notion of emotional content, because it is obscure to me. What I think is that music can express emotion).

One does not have to say "I am feeling sad" (which has a clear emotional content) in order to express emotion of sadness.

All you would demonstrate is that some people reacted to Work X by feeling Emotion A; others reacted with Emotion B, etc., and some did not associate any emotion to listening to the work

If it turned out that Work X consistently causes Emotion A (much more often than any other emotion) it would have to be somehow explained. And I cannot find any other way of providing this explanation than by pointing to some features of this work.

[Florestan]

All you would demonstrate is that some people reacted to Work X by feeling Emotion A; others reacted with Emotion B, etc., and some did not associate any emotion to listening to the work.

And you know this how? Have you conducted any such research?

All emotions experienced while hearing music are imposed upon the music by the listener and are not inherent in the music.

no music does [have emotional content].  Music is sound, nothing more

Then all Romanticism is just one big hoax and Berlioz, Schumann, Mahler and Richard Strauss are the greatest humbugs in the whole cultural history.

[Mirror Image]

And you know this how? Have you conducted any such research?

Then all Romanticism is just one big hoax and Berlioz, Schumann, Mahler and Richard Strauss are the greatest humbugs in the whole cultural history.

He doesn't know, Florestan. He only knows what Book A or Book B tells him. Music is much more than merely sound.

[Florestan]

The question is when you hear a piece of music do you in fact "feel sad"? 

Yes.

Instead what you experience is something quite different than the emotion of sadness.

I hope you won't sell us the theory that you, or Susan Langer or anyone else for that matter really know what goes in other people's minds when listening to music. I for one don't buy it.

  When someone is screaming at you it will in fact cause most people to experience a real emotion, fear or anger, to name two possibilities. 

But music won't do that

To you I'm sure it doesn't, but to extrapolate your personal case to all music lovers out there is meaningless.

[mahler10th]

Yes.

I hope you won't sell us the theory that you, or Susan Langer or anyone else for that matter really know what goes in other people's minds when listening to music. I for one don't buy it.

To you I'm sure it doesn't, but to extrapolate your personal case to all music lovers out there is meaningless.

+1 Florestan

[Florestan]

One could as well say that poetry is just words and painting is just colors, and whatever emotions are evoked by a poem or a painting are imposed by the readers / watchers and are not inherent in them.

What this theory amounts to is that art in general and music in particular is just an intellectual game whose understanding rests solely on cultural conditioning and as such has no general value and meaning; that is, there is no art at all.

[some guy]

All right, so we've succeeded in dividing into the usual two camps. Big whoop. This happens all the time. Or, at least every time we leave the topic to start talking about the participants.

Classical music and emotions.

Humans are emotional. They respond to everything emotionally, including online discussions.

Humans respond emotionally to music, to thunderstorms, to people yelling at them. Composers are humans, too. So everything about music is emotional.

Where are these emotions coming from? Not sure why that is such a burning question. Humans are emotional. Just about anything can trigger an emotional response. To what extent does the trigger "contain" the emotional information seems to me to be a futile question. Better (more accurate) to say that the situation will contain emotional content. Human + trigger = emotional responses.

Those responses will differ from listener to listener. That is, some will feel sad, consistently, at listening to a particular* piece. I, for instance, feel incredible melancholy emanating from a particular song in Prokofiev's Eugene Onegin. The song is the one in which Onegin is explaining how indifferent he is to women. Prokofiev used the same tune in his comic opera, Betrothal in a Monastery. There, the person singing is saying what a privilege it is to serve a beautiful woman.

Prokofiev, at least, did not think this tune "expressed" melancholy at all. And his ability to use the identical sequence of pitches in two different dramatic contexts means that that sequence does not "express" anything in particular and can be used in situations where different things are being expressed, in words.

Berlioz' music is full of examples like that as well.

And here, once again, is Berlioz writing (in words) about perceptions: "There is not a single production of the human mind, not one, you understand, that can command--I will not say the approval of all humanity, but even that of the infinitesimal fraction of humanity to which it is addressed.... Take four listeners occupying the same box at the same performance; the first is bored, the second entertained, the third is indignant, and the fourth enthusiastic.... Unless absolute beauty is that which at all times, in all places, and by all men must be acknowledged as beautiful, I cannot imagine what it means or where it might reside. And that kind of beauty I am sure does not exist. I believe only that there exist artistic beauties of which the appreciation has become inherent in certain civilizations...."

*These conversations would be a whole lot more insightful if we could all spend more time with particulars. Sticking with such a high level of generality as this topic has done only guarantees that we will all be able to yell at each other without actually disagreeing or agreeing either one. It is interesting to note that some of the more self-congratulatory expressions of disagreement with sanantonio's points actually just reiterate and validate those points.

[North Star]

I think Stravinsky was dead wrong when he said, and I may be paraphrasing here, that "Music expresses nothing but itself." I highly doubt composing music is a purely intellectual exercise for many composers. Maybe it was for Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Who knows the truth really, but I think emotion does play a role in music whether it's from the composer or the listener. Was the Largo movement in Shostakovich's famous 5th written with no feeling or emotion? I highly doubt it. Music is not about throwing a bunch of ideas together --- it's about an expression of emotions. If music is just sound, then what's the point of listening when I could just go listen to waves crashing upon a beach? No, I think that kind of mentality is just ignorant. What the music expresses, however, is completely subjective. This I agree with, but I don't believe for a second that at least some emotion doesn't play a role in music creation.

I think Stravinsky just meant that music doesn't express anything definite (like, say, Soviet tanks crushing a certain suburb somewhere in Hungary), and that it means different things to different people.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

[mc ukrneal]

I'm a bit confused. Let's say you are listening to a jig or some other lively music. As you are listening, you start tapping your feet and nodding your head to the rhythm. Next thing you know, you find you can't stop smiling. Isn't this somehow connected to the music? After all, before the music, you were just sitting on the hay stack, minding your own business.

[Daimonion]

Btw, I would be still very grateful if those of you who consider music as somehow (no matter how) connected with emotions answer my initial question

[Mirror Image]

I think Stravinsky just meant that music doesn't express anything definite (like, say, Soviet tanks crushing a certain suburb somewhere in Hungary), and that it means different things to different people.

I see, Karlo. Well that I agree with.

[Gurn Blanston]

Then all Romanticism is just one big hoax and Berlioz, Schumann, Mahler and Richard Strauss are the greatest humbugs in the whole cultural history.

I see you have finally come around to my way of thinking. Welcome aboard, Florestan.

[bhodges]

Btw, I would be still very grateful if those of you who consider music as somehow (no matter how) connected with emotions answer my initial question

Though I don't have time to do an exhaustive search (never mind reading the results) I just looked for "emotion in music: studies" and got a very healthy list of results. Here's a paper from 2010 by Gavin Ryan Shafron (UCLA), for example, that looks promising:

http://www.jyi.org/issue/the-science-and-psychology-behind-music-and-emotion/

(Just for the record, I'm more inclined to agree with Stravinsky's comment.)

--Bruce

[some guy]

The message I get from people who object to Stravinsky's comment is that music is not good enough by itself. It's only good if it can be all mixed up with all sorts of non-musical things, images, emotions, narratives, whatever.

Music is perfectly fine, in and of itself.