The Felt World: Musical Experience, Emotion, and Meaning

Abstract

. . . Is music known through the intellect, or felt through the senses, even the soul? In other words, does the cognitive understanding of music or the emotional feeling dominate musical experience? Or, perhaps more importantly, does a piece of music even express emotions, move the listener in the first place? Another way of asking this question is: what about musical experience is meaningful? I will argue that musical experience does consist of emotional, felt experiences, and that these experiences constitute a meaningful musical experience. Moreover, these emotional experiences need not be divorced from intellectual understandings of music. Finally, musical experience will be argued to be constructed of non-musical stimuli as well: our memory, and the disposition and mood we are in when perceiving the musical stimulus. Ultimately, I will argue that emotion need not be at odds with formal, musical process, or a cognitive understanding of music. First, Leonard B. Meyer's account of the process of emotional arousal will be described through a discussion of expectations of particular musical tendencies in stylistic frameworks. Next, support will be provided for Meyer's view by Deryck Cooke, who argues that the fundamental elements of music have been used in many of the same means throughout history. Finally, Arthur Schopenhauer's views of the metaphysics of music will be related to these more contemporary accounts of musical emotion. [From Prelude]