Music and emotion To counter the simple, perhaps naive view that music is valuable chiefly as a source of pleasure by appealing to structural complexity might be thought to construe music too abstractly. It is true that music can sustain intellectual analysis, but it also has affective properties that should not be ignored. To make structure the principal focus of critical attention is to leave out precisely what most people would suppose to be an essential element in music appreciation, namely, the ability to be moved by it. It seems possible that someone could analyse the form and structure of a piece of music and at the same time feel no sympathetic response to it. Such a person might have some understanding of the piece as a composition but could not be said to appreciate it as music, because what is missing from a purely analytic understanding is the very thing that most musicians and music lovers hold to be peculiarly valuable in music, namely, its emotional content.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 13:42:36 +0000
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