Does listening to pop music make you emotional?

[Roasted Swan]

I can remember listening to the Everly Brothers' 'Dream' sometime around 1960 in a fairground, and was so smitten with emotional longing that I could hardly bear it, even though I was only 13 years old. That's the earliest example I remember, and since then I've always valued music for the emotional experience it can provide. Of course the range of emotional states music can evoke is enormous, and impossible to define. I think the kind of emotion induced by classical music may tend to be different. All of my own experiences, however, to a greater or lesser degree, seem to involve a sense of longing. And again, the question of what one is longing for is curiously difficult to pin down.

But I have been in tears or close to it when listening to Elgar's violin concerto, Benny Goodman, Bobby Vee, Mike Oldfield, Handel, the Beatles, Bob Dylan ... and as I'm writing this grotesquely incomplete list, I notice that I don't seem to want to separate the classical from the pop.

The philosopher Suzanne Langer considers works of art (including music) to involve the construction of 'symbols of feeling'. So on Langer's model, the artist creates the piece of music as a symbol which we can contemplate in order to experience something of the feeling involved in its creation. It may or may not be good philosophical thinking, but as a rule of thumb I've found it quite helpful to suppose that I'm sharing something resembling the emotion felt by the artist, when I listen to the music.

Anyway, if that's the case (and I concede it's a big if), I see no reason why pop music shouldn't elicit emotional response in the way any other music can do? Meanwhile, I shall continue to go all gooey when I listen to Bobby Vee, Mike Oldfield, Handel or Elgar, and be grateful for it.

Absolute agreement - I actually find it a strange question to raise as if any genre of music could not create a strong emotional response assuming that the listener in question engages with that genre in the first place.  For me just about the main reason to listen to music is because of the response (varied, not always the same even with the same piece/song) I have to it.

[Elgarian Redux]

Absolute agreement - I actually find it a strange question to raise as if any genre of music could not create a strong emotional response assuming that the listener in question engages with that genre in the first place.  For me just about the main reason to listen to music is because of the response (varied, not always the same even with the same piece/song) I have to it.

That issue you mention, of the varied response to the same piece, is one of the reasons why - although I do think there's something worthwhile in it - Suzanne Langer's 'symbol of feeling' doesn't seem quite enough to explain what's going on. And yet often it's very easy to believe that, in the height of the emotion, one is responding as the artist hoped his listeners  might. Also, whether one is actually in the process of being overwhelmed by Wagner at the end of Gotterdammerung, or of being lost in insatiable longing while listening to 'Dream' in a fairground, the emotional experience is everything, and theories about it seem laughably irrelevant. The experience is the thing; theories about it are mere thin gruel.

[Karl Henning]

That issue you mention, of the varied response to the same piece, is one of the reasons why - although I do think there's something worthwhile in it - Suzanne Langer's 'symbol of feeling' doesn't seem quite enough to explain what's going on. And yet often it's very easy to believe that, in the height of the emotion, one is responding as the artist hoped his listeners  might. Also, whether one is actually in the process of being overwhelmed by Wagner at the end of Gotterdammerung, or of being lost in insatiable longing while listening to 'Dream' in a fairground, the emotional experience is everything, and theories about it seem laughably irrelevant. The experience is the thing; theories about it are mere thin gruel.

Rem acu tetigisti, to borrow a wheeze from Jeeves.

[Elgarian Redux]

Rem acu tetigisti, to borrow a wheeze from Jeeves.

Nice, thanks. I sometimes feel that what I usually manage is to hit the nail very squarely on the thumb.

I'm reading quite a bit of Wodehouse these days. Is there a thread somewhere devoted to him, Karl?

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Some jazz/R&B songs, as well as Japanese pop songs, do to me. For instance, Etta James' At Last, and I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good. Weird, I am not a very emotional person. (Some classical works like the famous adiagietto in Mahler 5 does too!) 

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Some jazz/R&B songs, as well as Japanese pop songs, do to me. For instance, Etta James' At Last, and I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good. Weird, I am not a very emotional person. (Some classical works like the famous adiagietto in Mahler 5 does too!) 

At Last is a great song and rendition!    Don't know the other song.  Will play it later.

PD

[Madiel]

Yes, absolutely, I can feel a great deal when listening to my favourite pop music. Pop music has made me cry. Pop music has made me feel exhilarated.

I really wish some classical music lovers who don't enjoy pop music wouldn't feel quite such a need to stomp all over it, or make sweeping claims about its structure, harmony, style etc etc that are on a similar level to asserting that Bach, Gounod and Xenakis are all much the same. There is a vast variety of musical grammar within pop music just as there is within classical.

Some of my favourite pop artists don't even stick to quite the same musical grammar from album to album, which is one of the reasons I personally like them. I've even had a chance to talk about this with probably my favourite pop musician, Tori Amos, whereupon she got quite excited that I'd got how she was making these changes from one era to the next and gave me a hug.

[foxandpeng]

Music of all types has the capacity to sway and alter mood - alpha waves and all that. I don't think it matters to me whether it is classical music or other genres. Rock, metal, hymns... I don't really tune in so well to lyrics, but when I do, I guess that capacity is there too.

[Pohjolas Daughter]

Yes, absolutely, I can feel a great deal when listening to my favourite pop music. Pop music has made me cry. Pop music has made me feel exhilarated.

I really wish some classical music lovers who don't enjoy pop music wouldn't feel quite such a need to stomp all over it, or make sweeping claims about its structure, harmony, style etc etc that are on a similar level to asserting that Bach, Gounod and Xenakis are all much the same. There is a vast variety of musical grammar within pop music just as there is within classical.

Some of my favourite pop artists don't even stick to quite the same musical grammar from album to album, which is one of the reasons I personally like them. I've even had a chance to talk about this with probably my favourite pop musician, Tori Amos, whereupon she got quite excited that I'd got how she was making these changes from one era to the next and gave me a hug.

[/b]I agree.  It must be very frustrating for musicians to always be asked to play the same pieces of music (and also in exactly the same way that they recorded it first).  I may not always like or be particularly into all of the new styles or genres that they are embracing/experimenting with over the years, but I do appreciate that they are artists and like to try new things/grow/experience new things in life and that effects how they view things or what they can relate to.  In the end, it's all good in my book! 

And great story; so glad that you had a chance to meet her and to have a conversation with her.  I have about a half a dozen albums by her and greatly enjoy them.

PD

[71 dB]

I associate this song with the Vietnam War and loss:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wIEpKZLH1GY

Never heard* of this artist or song (famous?). I like it. Writers include Burt Bacharach. 


* I haven't explored 60's pop music almost at all.

[71 dB]

A U.S. pop "standard" in the mid-1960s.  More famous version by Dionne Warwick (1966).

Okay. One of the many areas of music I know nearly nothing about...

[pjme]

"Music of all types has the capacity to sway and alter mood" - I concur with that statement.

[Scion7]

Occassionally, yes it does.
When I hear the American 'singer' Taylor Swift, I am overcome with rage and a desire to toss her off a 16-story building.
Afterwards, I feel better!   

[Madiel]

Occassionally, yes it does.
When I hear the American 'singer' Taylor Swift, I am overcome with rage and a desire to toss her off a 16-story building.
Afterwards, I feel better!   

Your emotional problems are entirely your own.

[staxomega]

This is my favorite TvZ album. Have you heard Sun Kil Moon?

[geralmar]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbujalk8b_g

(1958). I was nine visiting my grandparents in a dusty little train crossing in the panhandle of Texas when this was heard regularly on the table radio.  I would always weep, identifying with the sense of isolation and loss.