A History of Emotion in Western Music

Abstract

This book is the first history of musical emotion in any language. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, it unfolds a history of musical emotion across a thousand years of Western art music, from chant to pop. It affords a new way of analyzing music, revealing the relationship between emotion and musical structure. The book also provides an introduction to the latest approaches to emotion research, as well as an original theory of how musical emotion works. The book is disposed in two parts. Part I (Chapters 1–4) comprises the theoretical foundation of the book. Part II (Chapters 5–9) provides an historical narrative from medieval to contemporary music. Chapter 1 summarizes contemporary theories of emotion in general, and of musical emotion in particular, bringing together seminal philosophers and psychologists. Chapter 2 contains the core of the book’s original thesis: that five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, tenderness, and fear) constitute five categories of musical emotion throughout the common-practice period. Chapter 3 outlines a variety of complex musical emotions, such as wonder, nostalgia, envy, and disgust. Chapter 4 explores the historiography of emotion, including the seminal writings of Elias, Rosenwein, and Reddy. Part II of the book (Chapters 5–9) explores a millennium of Western music in terms of shifting categories of emotion: from affections and passions through sentiments, emotions proper, to modern affect.