Music and the Emotions--by Malcolm Budd

Book Review---Music and the Emotions--by Malcolm Budd
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley

Emotions----Chpt 1
Emotions have intensive magnitude and lack extensive magnitude.
An emotion is not itself assigned a location in the body, but only any bodily change that is felt when the emotion is experienced
Emotions can have opposites
A person's emotions can be mixed
An emotion need not be manifested
Person's emotions can be misdirected, unfounded, unreasonable, amenable to reason, excessive or of insufficient strength.
A person's happinness is a function of the kinds of emotion that fill his life

(I DON'T AGREE WITH SOME OF THESE)

The Repudiation of Emotion
There are two aspects to the listener's attitude to music. Firstly, the listener listens to music. He He does not merly hear the music while he is engaged in some other activity that occupies all or part of his attention and which the music is an adjunct or stimulus to or a distraction from or an enhancement of- as when music is danced or marched to or accompanies rhythmical labour or provides a background to a social gathering or is used to induce a mood appropriate to a ceremony. The listeners attention is focused on the music. Secondly, the listener listens to music in the knowledge or hope that he will find the experience of the music intrinsically rewarding and not solely with some other end in mind.

A piece of music can be related either to an instance of a certain general kind of emotion or to the kind itself. It can be connected with a particular incident in the history of the world - or with the kind of emotion of which this is one instance. There are three significant instances of emotion with which a piece of music might in some way be connected: the emotion the composer experienced when he composed the work, or which he experienced on some other specific occasion in his life, the emotion a performer experienced when he performed the work, and the emotion a listener experienced when he heard a performance of the work. But instances of emotion of the first two kinds are irelelvant in themselves from the point of view of music as something to be listened to for its intrinsic rewards. When someone listens to music in this manner there is never any reason for him to be concerned whether the composer felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion at a certain time or the performer feels or felt a certain emotion when performing the work. The fact that the composer or performer of a musical work experienced a particular emotion on a certain occasion might be relevant instrumentally to the character the work or the performance possesses and the listener must grasp if he is to appreciate what he hears is an audible character the work or the performance has in itself and which the listener can take in throughhis attention to the performance. And the emotion the composer or performer once felt is not a feature of what the listener hears and that he can perceive in the music.

If music can move us without arousing a definite extra-musical emotion, its abstract purity will not be compromised by the possibility of an aesthetic response of an emotional kind.

Music possesses an emotional quality.
Words higher and lower stand for relations between the pitch of notes. Tones differ not only in duration, timbre and loudness, but also in another respect, which exhibits a one-dimensional ordering that can be marked, for example, by the use of the terms higher and lower.

Characteristically sad music is slow, quite and low in pitch and sad people move relatively slowly and speak bith softly and low in pitch. Now this allaged correspondance might be intended to provide the outline of a casual explanation of the fact that the term sad is used to stand for a certain purely audible feature, or it might be intended to provide a justification for this use.

Motion and Emotion in music -- cnpt 3
What a person experiences as outside his body is for that person objective and that what he experiences as belonging to or or inside his body is for him subjective. By this criterion moods and emotions are subjective for the person who feels them: what someone feels when he feels worry, anxiety, uneasiness, fear and joy belongs to or lies within his body. An emotion is subjective in the sense that waht is felt is located within, rather than outside, the subject's body. When a person experiences an emotion he feels the contraction of his brow, the tention of his muscles, the pounding of his blood, or some other happenings, in or to his body. But moods and emotions are sometimes spoken as f though it were thought that they could be properties of phenomena that are for each person objective -inparticular, as though they could be properties of music. Yet it can not be literally true that music embodies emotion, for it is not a living body which feels its own bodily processes.
If someone who listens to music is so powerfully affected by the music that he comes to think of it as animate and to perceive it as something which is in an emotional state then this falseness in his consciousness is an instance of the pathetic fallacy: the stregth of the feelings has led him to project the emotion that he feels into the music. However, if the fact that music arouses emotions in the listener it is hard to see how he could be genuinely under the impression that the subject of the emotions he feels is the music and not himself.
Perhaps, then, the emotive description of music is merely a fanciful manner of speaking in which the emotion apparently attributed to the music should be understood as felt by the listener, so that what the listener means by what he says may be true eben though he expressses himself in a misleading manner. (DO NOT AGGREE)
When the terms high and low are applied to tones they are used metaphorically and spatial metaphors are used to describe differences of pitch because by certain associations differences of picth remind people differences of height.
A musical instrument usually emits both high and low notes from the same place, so that in listening to a musical instrument the condition under which, high notes are heard from coming from higher position.
When a note is followed by another note do we always experience the succession merely as a tone at one position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position of the scale followed by a tone at a higher or lower position? Isn't it sometimes the case that we hear movement within the dimension that pitch provides, so that a later note is heard as the end of an upward or downward movement? The idea of movement that can be heard in music is problematic, as we have seen, because not only is there nothing that moves from the position of one note to the position of a succeesing note but there is not even the apperance or illusion of something that moves between positions.
Physical movement is change of spatial location.
The experience of movement in music is not a form of perceptual illusion. When we speak of an ascending phrase all we mean is that later notes of the phrase increase in pitch.
When we experience an emotion or are subject to a mood what we feel are processes which involve movements of or within our body. Now if a movement, or an inclination to movement, is involved in a certain psychological state there will be a character of the movement which we feel when we are in that state.
When someone is in agitated state he is liable to behave agitatedly, and if he does behave agitatedly he feels the agitated movements that his body makes. Id someone feels restless he does not feel at rest. He feels such things as an inability to keep still and increased rate of breathing and heartbeat. Much the same kinds or aspects of movement can be found in music:
Reason musical phrases can contain movements which possess the character of indecision and vacillation is that they can have the sme character as a bodily movement which is part of a subjective state that is apprpriately described as indecisive and vacilating.
Music can be agitated, restless, triumphant or calm since it can possess the character of the bodily movements which are involved in the moods and emotions that are given these names precisely because it is this character of the bodily movements which is felt when the mood or emotion is experienced.
Emotion, therefore, is nt really experienced as embodied in music. Its apparent embodiment is explained by two facts: that musical movements have properties very similar to characteristics of felt bodily movements, and that emotions are described by terms for these characteristics because they include movements with these characteristics and it is these movements which are felt when the emotions are experienced. There are characteristics of musical movement that bear a close resemblance to certain features of bodily movements.
Music embodies not psychological conditions but the characters of the bodily movements (feelings of) which are included in or compose psychological conditions.
In these works there are embodied, reflected, expressed, symbolised or in some other way presented phenomena that are integral to human life: we recognise moods, feelings, emotions, attitudes and various other states and activities of our inner life manifested in such a way that, if we are sensitive to their presence and responsive to the manner in which music makes them present to us, we value these musical works because of their essential human reference.
Aesthetic experience consists in disinterested contemplation to the assertion that aesthetic experience is free from emotion would be liable to make itself felt particularly strongly in the case of music because of the manifest emotionality of much musical experience.

Music As the Expression of Emotion---Chapter VII
The creator of a work of art undergoes an experience which he wishes to transmit or communicate to others. He wishes to communicate the experience to others in the sense that he wishes others also to undergo the experience; and to this end he creates or imagines an object which is or can be made perceptible- a painted canvas, a complex of musical sounds, a structure of words and which is to designed as to make it possible for someone who experiences the artist intendent to transmit. His experience is inside him; in order ot make it available to others he must externalise it; and by expressing it he hopes to pass it on to others. To the extent that the artist is successful in his enterprise, and in so far as the experience he communicates is worth experiencing, the work of art he creates is valuable.
Tolstoy-The better the feeling transmitted the better is the art that transmits it.
Music can sound like the vocal expression of emotion. But even when it does it doesn't sound very much like the vocal expression of emotion. the difference between our reaction to such music and to the real vocal expression of emotion is partly a function of the perceived differences in the sounds.
We can derive satisfaction from the ways in which emotions naturally discharge themselves in non-linguistic forms of behaviour or kinds of bodily process. A natural outlet for our grief is tears, for our anger blows, for our joy bodily movement. the stronger the emotion the more difficult it is to inhibit its natural expression in the body. And if the emotion pursues its natural course and issues in overt bodily activities which express it they can provide a satisfaction that is forgone if the emotion's natural expressions are repressed.
We hear in the music a variety of feelings, moods, emotions, and qualities of mind and character: emotional turbulence, exquisite tenderness, mounting excitement, exstatic release, passionate release, passionate regret, sincerity, wistfulness...and these features of mind, character and feeling are integral to the value the music has for us:our response to the music is a function of the psychological states and processes it contains. Much expressive music is heard as containing states of mind that create the impression of a personality whose depth or shallowness of feeling, vitality or torpor, sincerity or insincerity, warmth or coldness attracts or repels. And the fact that our ordinary human sympathies and antipathies are engaged by expressive music is dependent not merely on our being made aware of a state of mind by the music, but on our entering imaginatively into that state of mind or on our experiencing imaginatively a sympathetic or antipathetic response to that state of mind. Hence it is indeed true that we can experience the state of mind a musical passage expresses, and this experience can be an experience from within or from without. Nothing less than this can explain the power of expressive music to move us in the manner it sometimes achieves. What we lack is a satisfying account of how music can be a humanistic art.
A composer can consider his work from the point of view of the listener in the act of composition itself-he can imagine how his work will sound and he can intend that it should be heard in a certain manner. Hence, there is possibility of musical communiaction. For a composer can create something that he intends should sound a certain way and that he intends the listener to hear in a certain manner; and if he succeeds in his intention, the listener understands his work and undergoes the experience the composer intended. And if the listener undergoes the experience the composer imagined, and intended the listener to undergo, the composer has communicated that experience to the listener.

Conclusion
The value of music is intrinsic, not merely instrumental: the listener values the experience of a musical work in itself; the experience he values can be specified only by reference to the music that is experienced in undergoing the experience; the experience is not repaceable by a different experience that offers the listener exactly what he values in the original experience - for it is the experience itself, not some separable component or effect of the experience, that is valued. It is the failure of the transmission form of the expression theory of music to meet this requirement that diqualifies the theory.
Music is not restricted to outer world of the expression of emotion but reaches as far as the inner world of emotion itself. The value of a musical work is dependent upon the music's power to generate a certain intramusical emotion in a listener who understands the absolute meaning of the music. This theory appears in two forms:
-The emotion specific to music is a quality of emotion that nothing other than the experience of music can be clothed in.
-Intramusical emotion is emotion that is differentiated from other emotion only by the fact that it involves the awareness of music as its stimulus.