The Expression and Arousal of
Emotion in Music
Jenefer Robinson
Assumptions Robinson makes
• 1. Music frequently expresses emotional
qualities and qualities of human personality
such as sadness, nobility, aggressiveness,
tenderness and serenity.
• 2. Music frequently affects us emotionally: it
evokes or arouses emotions in us.
Topic question
• Are these two facts related?
• In particular, “are the grounds on which we
attribute the expression of emotion to music
ever to be identified with the arousal of that
same emotion in listeners?”
• For example, do we say a piece of music is sad
(expresses sadness) because it makes us feel
sad?
Kivy’s view
• There’s no connection between the emotions
a piece of music might express and the
emotions it might make us fee. Music
expresses emotion either
• 1) because it has the same “contour” as
expressive human behavior of some kind and
is thus heard as expressive, or
• 2) because of a convention which originated
in a version of cause 1.
Robinson’s response to Kivy
• Kivy’s account works for many examples of
musical expression. But, most of his examples
are music with text, a less controversial case,
since the text can specify the emotion (what
does she mean by “specify” here? Probably
that the music aims in a general direction, and
the text narrows it down?) Also, Kivy
discusses a limited set of examples, mostly joy,
sorrow or restlessness. His view doesn’t cover
enough cases.
Langer’s view
• No particular emotion can be expressed by
music, but “only the felt quality of our emotional
life and its dynamic development.”
• Musical meanings are rich and significant, but
can’t be linked to any particular words (or
emotions, I guess).
• Langer emphasizes the development of
structures of feeling through a long work (Kivy
ignores this). But Langer ignores the expression
of particular emotional qualities.
Walton’s view
• In listening to music we imagine ourselves
introspecting our own feelings. I.e., we
imagine that our awareness of the sounds is
an awareness of our states of mind. And it’s
not abstract; we imagine particular stabs of
pain, flashes of ecstasy, etc. But, it’s an
imaginary feeling, not a real one.
Robinson’s Critique of Walton
• 1) If someone says “That’s not what I do when I listen,”
how could you convince her she should be doing it,
that it’s the “right” or normal way to listen? The
similarity between listening to sounds and
introspecting emotional states is not that great.
• 2) We experience the sounds as coming from outside,
not from within.
• 3) Music might be able to portray a stabbing sensation;
but how can it distinguish a stabbing pain from a
stabbing pleasure, or one stabbing pain from another,
or my stabbing sensation from someone else’s?
Levinson’s view
(in “Music and Negative Emotion”)
• Levinson’s topic question: Why do people enjoy
music when it evokes negative emotions like
sadness? Levinson assumes that we recognize
emotions expressed in music, and that “we end
up feeling as, in imagination, the music does.”
This is like actually experiencing the emotion, but
it’s not exactly the same. “[T]he ‘empathic’
response lacks determinate cognitive content.”
You “hear sad music, begin to feel sad, imagine
that you are actually sad,” but have no actual
object for your sadness.
Levinson’s view (cont.)
• So, for example, if I recognized “unrequited
passion” (one of Levinson’s examples) in the
music, I’d have to imagine that I was feeling
unrequited passion, and experience the
physiological and affective components of
unrequited passion, but without actually
languishing for any one particular person.
Robinson’s critique of Levinson
• Levinson is right to stress a connection between emotion in
the music and emotion aroused by the music. And he’s right
to stress the role of imagination. But “the theory as it stands
will not do.”
• 1) The same emotion (e.g., unrequited passion) may have
differing physiological and affective components on different
occasions.
• 2) The same physiological and affective component may be
associated with different emotions.
• So those components aren’t enough to tell one emotion from
another.
Critique of Levinson (cont.)
• 3) What differentiates emotions is their
cognitive content. Levinson does not say how
pure music can be made to carry the amount
of cognitive content necessary for it to express
specific emotions like unrequited passion. L’s
essay “Hope in The Hebrides” goes only a little
way in the required direction, and does not
provide enough to say how you would express
unrequited passion.
Critique of Levinson (cont.)
• 4) Kivy correctly points out that you can recognize an
emotion in a piece of music without being made to feel
the emotion yourself (and presumably also without
imagining that you are feeling it). Also, music may
actually arouse emotion in you, in no etiolated
(washed out) or imaginary sense at all. Finally, the
emotion you recognize in the music may be different
from the emotion the music arouses. However, by
making these points Kivy has not shown that there is
never any connection between expression and arousal
of emotion in music. “Being moved” (his sample
emotion) is not the only one.
Robinson’s own view
• Music can directly affect our feelings, without
much or any cognitive mediation. This is
particularly true for the “more primitive
emotions aroused by music.” Examples are
surprise, excitement, calm, unease, tension
and resolution, etc.
Robinson’s view (cont.)
• By directly expressing and using these simple
feelings, music can imaginatively express more
complex feelings.
• So like Langer, Robinson focuses on the large
structure of musical pieces. By the expression
and arousal of a sequence of basic emotions it
builds a more complex picture (my analogy:
computer programming, from 1’s and 0’s to
much more complex content).
Robinson’s view (cont.)
• Unlike Langer, Robinson thinks that specific
emotions can be expressed in this way.
• The feeling expressed may not always be the
feeling aroused.
Robinson’s analysis of her imagined
piece (p. 188)
• It’s a piece in sonata form, in which theme A is lively,
theme B ponderous, and theme A is gradually
overwhelmed and dragged down by theme B.
• I feel increasingly nervous and tense as the music
progresses; the music expresses cheerful confidence
turned to despair.
• It’s by arousing those feelings in me through the course
of the piece that the piece is able to express its overall,
complex emotion. My feelings give me clues to what
it’s expressing.