The effects of expert musical training on the perception of emotions in Bach’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin No. 1 in G Minor (BWV 1001).

Abstract

The subject music and emotion has been relatively neglected in current musicology and music theory, compared with the huge attention granted music's formal and topical aspects (Spitzer, 2010). Leonard Meyer is the best known theorist to have studied musical emotion (Meyer, 1956; Spitzer, 2009). Nevertheless, his writings focused on undifferentiated core affect, as expressed by the tension and resolution melodic processes, rather than on plural, discrete categories. By contrast, such a plural approach to musical emotion is standard in the annals music perception and the psychology music. Conversely, psychological studies music and emotion rarely adopt an historical perspective; or engage with complete works art-music in analytical detail. Hence, in both respects, the present article comprises a fresh departure.A conceptual starting point for this study is the gap between emotions communicated (or intended to be expressed) by the composer and the emotions perceived by the listener. Whereas, in the music psychology literature, many studies have focused on listeners' perception emotion (e.g., Coutinho & Dibben, 2013; Fritz, Jentschke, Gosselin, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2009), on induction emotion (e.g., Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006; Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2011), and some on the interrelationship between the two (e.g., Evans & Schubert, 2008; Gabrielsson, 2002; Kallinen & Ravaja, 2006), much less has been written about the communicative level, partly because the fallacy- the misconception that an artwork necessarily expresses the feelings or intentions the artist (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946). (The classic refutation the intentional fallacy in music is the ostensibly happy symphonies, Nos. 39 and 41, that Mozart composed in the summer 1788, which was one the most difficult and unhappy periods his career [Abert, 2007, p. 1115]). A relevant comparison is Juslin's Brunswikian lens model communication, by which a performer encodes and a listener decodes emotions by means a set acoustic cues (Juslin & Timmers, 2010, pp. 471-73), although this model is orientated toward the performer rather than the composer.By emotional communication in music, we mean the composer's choices musical materials that he or she knows have a particular affective character, just as a painter selects colors or a sculptor a type marble. Philosopher Peter Kivy's felicitous term, of, is pertinent here: the music may be semiotically of an emotion, just as the apparently sad face a St Bernard dog may be expressive sadness (the dog is not necessarily sad itself), rather than transitively expressing the composer's personal emotion (Kivy, 1989). The composer manipulates the signs sadness: slow tempo and drooping melodies are just as semiotic as the sad face pulled by a trained actor. A pertinent comparison, in the history art, is Charles le Brun's late-17th century treatise, Caracteres des Passions, essentially a set templates for budding artists to represent the basic emotions, or passions (Le Brun, 2010). Each plate portrays a face contorted by the expression a different passion: Sorrow, Love, Sadness, Anger, and many others. Exactly analogous pedagogical exercises feature in baroque compositional treatises, such as Fridrich Erhard Niedt's Musicalische Handleitung 1706; and Johann David Heinichen's Der General-Bass in der Composition 1728 (Niedt, 1706; Heinichen, 1728; Lester, 1992). The student is presented with a melody or harmonic skeleton, and asked to clothe it in figurations appropriate to express texts differing affect. The step, then, from a le Brun plate to a Rembrandt portrait, or from a Heinichen exercise to a Bach aria, is fairly direct.This is where expert analytical knowledge can play a part: the analyst knows, through immersive study historical musical style, the character compositional materials for contemporary listeners-a character which was often highly conventionalised. …