Abstract
After OUP’s recent publications of two rather large volumes on music and emotion – Juslin and Sloboda’s (2010) Handbook of music and emotion and Gabrielsson’s (2011) Strong experiences with music – I was curious to learn what new insights another volume published so soon afterwards could possibly offer to readers interested in the psychological mechanisms of emotional responses to music. The editors show sensitivity to this issue of multiple, music-and-emotion-related publications in the recent past, not only in books and book chapters but also in journal articles, and argue credibly from the start that any concern of reaching repletion in this field is unjustified. Indeed, what makes this volume fundamentally different from its predecessors is its focus on performers’ and composers’ view of music and emotions, as well as a large section on the history of music and emotions and the use of music’s emotional power in different societies. Whereas multidisciplinary perspectives are also part of the Handbook of music and emotion, the chapters of the present volume go into greater depth, providing a fascinating insight into topics that aren’t usually on a music psychologist’s reading list. What follows is a brief and highly selective overview of chapters that struck me as particularly relevant for the work of music psychologists. For a much more detailed review, see van der Schyff (2014).
The volume is divided into three sections: 1) Musical expressiveness, 2) Emotion elicitation, and 3) The powers of music. The first section deals with perceived emotion or expressivity in music from a wide range of perspectives. Chapter 2, by Michael Spitzer, is an analysis of Schubert’s ‘Trockne Blumen’. Although choosing a traditional score-based approach for his analysis, Spitzer identifies connections to music psychology and opens up his study to empirically testable hypotheses. Such an approach is laudable because it presents an invitation to music psychologists to engage critically with his work and to take the analysis a step further. Unlike Spitzer’s score-based approach, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s study of the emotional power of musical performance (Chapter 4) is a strong case for studying musical sound rather than musical text. He argues convincingly that expressivity in music can only be studied by looking at, or rather listening to, musical performances. His account of the changing style of Schubert song performance is not only a solid demonstration of how musical taste changes (rapidly) but also an apt reminder that findings from psychology need to be interpreted within its social and historical context. Staying in the realm of performance, several chapters of the first section are devoted to highlighting performers’ and composers’ perspectives on music and emotions. Specifically, this is achieved by interviewing composers (Chapter 3) and opera singers (Chapter 5). Whereas Cochrane’s conversations with Jean-Claude Risset, Brian Ferneyhough and Carter Burwell provide a glimpse of the diverging views these composers have on affective qualities of music, Scherer, having interviewed a number of opera singers, argues that ‘emotion theatre’ (i.e., the staging of emotions) is something displayed not only on stage but very often in real life situations as well. He suggests that emotions are convincing if they can be described as ‘natural, genuine, authentic, uncontrolled, spontaneous and credible’ (p. 67) – whether they occur in a real life scenario or on stage. In Chapter 6, Tom Cochrane describes how constraints of the instrument affect expressivity in musical performances and introduces one of his own inventions, the mood organ. This system takes as input physiological signals (e.g. heart rate or muscle tension) from a performer and maps them onto various emotion dimensions such as power or valence. These are then used, in turn, to manipulate musical parameters. This approach is fruitful because it highlights the role of the performers’ experienced emotions during musical performance – a topic that is still underrepresented in the research literature. Finally, Christine Jeanneret’s chapter on ‘Gender ambivalence and the expression of passions in the performances of early Roman cantatas by castrati and female singers’ (Chapter 7), is the first of several historically informed chapters on the emotional power of music, and together with Claude Victor Palisca’s ‘The ethos of modes during the Renaissance’ (Chapter 8) concludes the first section.
The second section offers many fresh insights into felt musical emotions with contributions from philosophers, psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. While the reader is provided, above all, with a highly valuable review and update on theories of music and emotion, it also shows some of the areas for potential (cross-disciplinary) misunderstandings. For example, discussing Juslin and Västfjäll’s emotion induction mechanisms (Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008), Scherer and Coutinho (Chapter 10) criticize their ‘complete absence of multilevel appraisal’ (p. 132), while Davies (Chapter 13) grants that Juslin and Västfjäll ‘identify emotions as involving appraisals and objects that are appraised’ (p. 169). This discrepancy is revealing because it demonstrates the challenges of a multidisciplinary endeavour and shows the importance of cross-talk between disciplines to further the common cause. In this sense, Robinson’s contribution (Chapter 12) is very useful because she reviews three main theories of emotions and creates links to the study of musical emotions. Krueger’s developmental account (Chapter 14) and Colling and Thompson’s action-based perspective (Chapter 15) on musical emotion are highly relevant contributions too, since they stress the role of the body in music cognition and emotion – a topic that has attracted much attention recently. The last two chapters of the second section, written by Trost and Vuilleumier (Chapter 16) and Koelsch (17), provide intriguing discernments of the neural mechanisms of musical emotions and demonstrate how a huge network of neural circuits is involved in the processing of musical emotions.
The third section, entitled ‘The powers of music’, provides primarily a historical analysis of music and emotions. It is this section that makes The emotional power of music most distinct from other music-psychological publications on music and emotions. While the perspectives provided in the seven chapters of this last section raise some important issues about the social embeddedness and historicity of the emotional power of music, this section also proves to be a real challenge for all music psychologists and non-historians who aim to engage critically with this kind of work. The topics covered are fascinating indeed and include the use of musical metaphors in non-musical domains such as medicine (Chapter 19), music and affect in medieval and Renaissance periods (Chapters 20 and 21), music as a means of social control (Chapter 22), a historical analysis of music therapy in the 18th century (Chapter 23), the emergence of nostalgia and its relation to music (Chapter 24), and finally a critical reflection of the effects of copyright on individual and collective identities (Chapter 25).
After such a diverse and rich discussion of music and emotions from multiple angles and with various methodological approaches, the volume ends with a short Coda, in which the editors summarize the significance of this strand of research and delineate paths for future inquiry. Undoubtedly, this volume highlights impressively the richness that studies of music and emotion offer to the vast field of music research. At the same time, it is a reminder that there is no shortcut to real progress in the field if we are to understand the phenomenon of music and emotion as a whole.