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JENEFER ROBINSON

Music and Emotions

Ever since Plato people have thought that there is an especially intimate relation-
ship between music and the emotions. In Book III of the Republic, Plato argued
that the musical mode known as the »Lydian« mode should be banned from the
education of future governors of the state on the grounds that it makes peo ple
lascivious and lazy, whereas the Dorian mode should be encouraged because
it makes people – or more specifically, men – brave and virtuous. This idea that
music has the power to arouse listeners’ emotions survives to the present day and
has recently received empirical support.1 Other people have claimed that music
can also represent the passions. According to the Baroque doctrine of Affekten-
lehre, different movements of a suite or concerto should »represent« distinct
emotional states such as gaiety or melancholy. The emotion »represented« was
often a principal means of unifying the movement. Some Baroque composers
also wrote »character pieces« that portray different characters or temperaments,
sometimes illustrating that of their friends or the notabilities of the day.2 Finally,
in the Romantic era, it became a commonplace that music can express emotions,
whether the emotions of a character or protagonist in the music or the emotions
of the composer himself.3
In this essay I am going to explain how music can express emotions and arouse
emotions. And although strictly speaking, music cannot represent emotions, it can
tell psychological stories that lend themselves to expressive interpretations. As

1 See, for example, Krumhansl 1997, 336–352; Juslin 2001, 309–337; Scherer/Zentner 2001,
361–392; and Levitin 2006, chap. 6.
2 The New Grove Dictionary describes some of Francois Couperin’s harpsichord pieces as follows:
»La Garnier, in its apposition of dark-hued textures and expressive ports de voix, combining
solemnity with tenderness, conjures up a personality at once noble and sensitive. Forqueray, self-
assured and brilliant, is epitomized in a proud Allemande movement, a firmly treading bass
against an alert, driving treble. And turning to La Couperin [which ›may be a self-portrait‹ of the
composer], one may read into its spacious sequences, its firm linear quality and strong tonal
architecture a high seriousness and dedication to music«, Higginbottom 1980, 868.
3 I say »himself« because the great composers of the past have all been male. Why this is so is an
interesting sociological question. One of the main reasons is that women lacked the opportun-
ities – for conducting, for playing in an orchestra, for learning music theory »first-hand« as
a practising musician – that are necessities for the composer to attain any degree of competence
at all.
JLT 1: 2 (2007), 395–419. DOI 10.1515/JLT.2007.024
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396 Jenefer Robinson

a philosopher, my main aim is to analyze these different relationships between

emotion and music, but I will also be illustrating my arguments with an array of
musical examples.

1. The Musical Representation of Emotions.

Pictorial representation or depiction is usually taken as the paradigm of represen-

tation in the arts, but music does not function very well as a pictorial art.4 To rep-
resent something is to refer to or identify it: a picture is normally a picture of a
particular thing, such as a person, a scene, or an event: Napoleon at St Bernard’s
Pass, the cliffs at Etretat, the Battle of San Romano. But music is ill-equipped to
depict particular things. A very few things have a uniquely recognizable sound,
such as the call of the cuckoo or the chugging of a train; hence it’s possible to
identify the cuckoo or the train from its sounds alone. But with these exceptions,
music is by and large unable to refer to particular things or sorts of things.
A piece of music can have certain qualities: it can be heroic, serene, sad,
stormy, merry, dignified, pompous, light-hearted and so on. When a piece of
music is said to represent something, it is invariably in virtue of the fact that it is
being characterized in a certain way, via such qualities: it is being characterized as
serene, heroic, stormy or whatever. But it’s not the emotional quality that’s repre-
sented; typically the emotional quality characterizes something else. To this extent
music can »paint pictures« in sound. But what it is that’s being characterized –
the particular thing or event or type of thing or event – cannot usually be ident-
ified just by listening to the musical »description«. It’s just too general. Anything
serene or heroic or stormy has an equal claim to be »represented« by serene,
heroic or stormy music.5 We have to be told – by means of a title or some other
conventional tag – what is being identified. Once we know that the music is sup-
posed to represent a person, a country or a scene, then we can hear how it is being
characterized: as serene or heroic or stormy or whatever. But the characteriz-
ation alone is not normally enough to distinguish a specific kind of individual –
a man, a country, a scene – much less a specific individual – Nimrod, Finland,
the North Sea. Even a »descriptive« piece like Debussy’s La Mer could easily be a
description of different kinds of weather or different people’s temperaments
rather than different moods of the sea. By contrast, a picture of the sea is recog-

4 See Kivy 1984 and Robinson 1994.

5 Of course the word »representation« is often used more generally to mean any kind of symbolic
relation whatsoever, but it is confusing to use the term in this general way. It is best restricted to
the model of pictorial representation where it is confined to a relation between a picture and
some individual thing rather than a quality such as »red« or »sad«. Goodman 1968 makes this dis-
tinction very clearly, although his views on how to analyze what representation and expression
are have been subject to harsh criticism.
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Music and Emotions 397

nizable as being of the sea without any title, and even an expressionist or cubist
picture of a man (say) is recognizably of a man, even if we might need a title to
tell us which particular man is being identified (Kahnweiler or Vollard).
When the Baroque composers said that a movement »represented« a particu-
lar emotion, they were typically representing a particular »character,« in the
double sense of a certain type of person and a certain quality. Thus, C.P.E. Bach
produced »Character Pieces«, describing the indecisive person, the complacent
person and so on. His pieces describe a generic sort of person or character,
which are often emotional or quasi-emotional – the serene person, the irritable
person – but once again they do so by virtue of possessing certain emotional
qualities, not by referring to particular people. In fact, the composers of the Ba-
roque probably did not take very seriously the idea that they were »representing«
emotions; they use the term »represent« in this context more-or-less inter-
changeably with the word »arouse« or »evoke«.
There are some recent semiotic theorists, however, who take very seriously
the idea that music represents emotions.6 I shall take Susanne Langer as represen-
tative, even though she antedates today’s semioticians. According to Langer,
music »represents« emotional life, but not specific emotions such as joy and sad-
ness. Instead, she thinks that music represents »the morphology of feeling« (Langer
1976, p. 238). Joy and sadness, although different emotions, may have a similar
morphology, as in intense joy and intense sadness, or calm joy and calm sadness.
Instead of representing specific emotions, music provides a »formulation and rep-
resentation of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolutions – a »ogical pic-
ture« of sentient, responsive life …« (ibid., 222).
Music, she thinks, is a »presentational symbol«, i.e., it represents the patterns
of our emotional life by virtue of the fact that it shares those patterns.
[T]here are certain aspects of the so-called »inner life« – physical or mental – which have
formal properties similar to those of music – patterns of motion and rest, of tension and
release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment, excitation, sudden
change, etc. (ibid., 228)
By sharing their dynamic structure, music reveals »the rationale of feelings, the
rhythm and pattern of their rise and decline and intertwining« (ibid., 238). More-
over, music thereby takes on a special cognitive role, because the forms it articu-
lates are forms »which language cannot set forth.« (ibid., 233)
Many people with quite different views about emotions and music have
found Langer’s view attractive. The trouble is that although it sounds persuasive,
it is not clear what the theory is actually asserting. What exactly is »the morphol-
ogy of feeling«? My own suspicion is that Langer is talking about the phenomenol-
ogy of emotion, the way emotions feel, the inner experience of turbulence inter-
spersed with calm, or tense anxiety followed by the release of relief, and so on.

6 For example, Agawu 1991 and Hatten 1994.

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398 Jenefer Robinson

The trouble is that there is no good reason why we should interpret the patterns
she detects in music as specifically emotional. Just as a stormy piece of music can
represent anything stormy, whether it’s the weather, the sea, or a man’s fiery
temper, so music with a particular pattern of tension and relaxation is capable of
representing anything having that same pattern.
Despite the limitations of the theory, however, Langer’s emphasis on patterns
of human feeling, rather than on the simple character of a whole movement
is welcome. It is a nice aspect of Langer’s theory that because, in her view, music
articulates the dynamics of our inner life, it »reveals« not just isolated emotions
of this or that sort, but the way that our inner life unfolds over a period of time.
As we’ll see later, in a certain sense she’s right about this.

2. What Are Emotions?

There is currently some dispute about the nature of emotion. Different theorists
have argued that emotions are feelings or judgments or bits of behavior or physiological
changes or states of action readiness. However, in my view, emotions are processes that
involve all these things and others as well. (I am speaking here about emotional
episodes, not long-term emotional states, like long-term love or hatred or con-
tempt.) I don’t have space here to defend my view in detail.7 Suffice to say that
current evidence from psychology and neurophysiology8 suggests that typically
(but not invariably) what sets off an emotion process is a rough and ready affective
appraisal of the environment in terms of what’s good or bad for me, what’s a
friend and what’s an enemy, what’s a threat and what’s a boon, or perhaps even
what’s new and strange and needs further examination. When we respond emo-
tionally to something in the environment (whether »out there« or in our own
heads) it is typically because something important has happened that bears on
our interests or that of our »group«.
The »affective appraisal« immediately and automatically produces an emo-
tional response. This is the second stage of the emotion process. An emotional re-
sponse consists in changes in autonomic and hormonal activity, in facial and vocal
expression and in »action readiness«. Typically these responses are functional. An
increased heart rate and clenching of my fists prepares me for attack when I’m
angry; a decreased heart rate and cowering behavior prepares me for submission
in fear. On the other hand, responses that might once have been adaptive may no
longer be so. Clenching my fists and preparing to attack is not very appropriate if
I’m angry with my boss. Submissive behavior may fail to ward off a threat.

7 The view is summarized in Robinson 2004. It is laid out more comprehensively in Robinson 2005.
8 My view is indebted to many sources, prominent among which are James 1981, Damasio 1994,
LeDoux 1996, and Ekman 2003.
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Music and Emotions 399

Thirdly, after the immediate emotional response there is always »cognitive

monitoring« of the situation that confirms, rejects, or modifies the verdict of
the affective appraisal. Suppose, for example, that I come late at night and see a
shadow under the trees. I make a very quick affective appraisal that I’m under
threat and my body reacts immediately and instinctively to this appraisal, by pre-
paring to deal with the threat: increasing heart rate, sending extra adrenaline into
the bloodstream, and putting me into a defensive posture.9 But right after the af-
fective appraisal, cognitive monitoring kicks in, confirming the initial appraisal
(yes, it’s a mugger; I’d better run), or modifying it (That’s not a mugger; it’s be-
loved Joe home at last from the war), or aborting the emotion process altogether
(That’s not a mugger; it’s just the shadow of the trees).10 Since the initial appraisal
is crude, there is plenty of room at this stage of the emotion process to refine
one’s interpretation of the emotional situation. »Cognitive monitoring« includes
labeling the emotion as fear, delight, curiosity or whatever. It takes time to figure
out how I (instinctively) reacted. It is only after thinking about it that I can name
the emotion I am experiencing (and of course I can also mis-name it).
Emotion, then, is a process, in which there is a sequence of events. Fur-
thermore, the way that the process unfolds is modified by feedback from each of
the elements involved. I respond automatically and involuntarily to the shadow
under the trees, but then cognitive monitoring kicks in and tells me it is beloved
Joe, so my emotion changes from fear to joy. On another occasion, my facial ex-
pression of anger at your slight communicates to you that I am angry and so you
back away to propitiate me and my anger dissipates. Each emotional response is
part of an ongoing sequence of events, and one emotional sequence constantly
gives way to others as changes occur in each of the elements of the emotion pro-
cess. As the psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth (1994) puts it: our emotional life oc-
curs in »streams« which change all the time in response to ever changing evalu-
ations, ever evolving actions and action tendencies, ever changing bodily states
and feelings.

3. Animating Music: Musical Expressiveness as »Hearing-as«

For many people, to say that a piece of music »expresses sadness« simply means
that the music has a certain quality that is named by an emotion word: the music
»is sad«.11 Expression on this view is simply a matter of possessing expressive

9 If I were a big strong aggressive man, maybe it would put me into an attacking posture, but I’m
not.
10 If I discover that it’s beloved Joe, this will initiate a further affective appraisal and a different
emotion, such as joyous delight.
11 See e.g. John Hospers 1954–5.
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400 Jenefer Robinson

qualities, and expressive qualities are simply »aesthetic qualities« like any other.12
But music can be sad or jolly for many different reasons, some of which have
little to do with the expression of emotion. Some music is »jolly« by virtue of its
cultural associations: »Jingle Bells«, for example, is »jolly« largely because it’s as-
sociated with Christmas jollity. Other music is called »happy« or »sad« by virtue
of conventions. With some notable exceptions, if it’s in the minor key, it’s more
likely to be described as »sad« in our culture, and if it’s in the major it’s more likely
to be called »happy«.
A better idea is that music that’s expressive of an emotion, such as sadness,
sounds and moves like someone who is sad. Broadly speaking, this is the theory of
musical expressiveness associated with the names of Peter Kivy and Stephen
Davies,13 which I have elsewhere rather unkindly christened the »doggy theory«.
That’s because both theorists compare expressiveness in music to the expressive
appearance of a dog’s face. In The Corded Shell, Kivy compared the sadness in the
face of a Saint Bernard, with the sadness in music; one looks sad and the other
sounds sad. And in Musical Meaning and Expression Stephen Davies makes the same
point, using the example of the basset-hound: »the expressiveness of music«, he
claimed, »consists in its presenting emotion characteristics in its appearance«
(Davies 1994, 228). Just as the face of a basset-hound is called »sad« because
that’s the way sad people typically look when they are expressing their sadness, so
music is called »sad« because it sounds and/or moves like a person who is sad.
The point is that like sad doggy faces, sad music is called »sad« because it has
a sad appearance. We see the face as sad and we hear the music as sad, but nobody
is actually feeling sad. Music is expressive of sadness without being an expression
of anyone’s sadness, i.e., without revealing anything about someone’s actual state
of mind.
Emotion characteristics are attributed to the appearances people present and
not, as is true of emotions, to the people themselves. It is faces and the like that
are sad-looking. Faces do not feel emotions and do not think thoughts; they are
nonsentient (ibid. 223).
According to Kivy and Davies, we hear music as expressive of emotions be-
cause in listening to music, we anthropomorphize or »animate« it so that we hear it as

12 Goodman (1968) thinks that expression should not be restricted to psychological states. In his
view, works of architecture can express fluidity or weight; music can express glitter or water-
iness. In my view, however, it is incorrect to extend the term »express« to non-psychological
qualities. A piece of music that »expresses wateriness« is simply a piece that conveys how (some)
water sounds or moves. Better to say the music »sounds like water« or »conveys a sense of water-
iness«.
13 The theories were developed independently but were first published in the same year, 1980. See
Kivy 1989 and Davies 1994. Kivy has since rejected the position he defended in Kivy 1980 and
1989. See Kivy 2002.
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Music and Emotions 401

expressive of emotion.14 In calling music »sad,« we anthropomorphize the music,

just as we anthropomorphize the dog when we say he has a »sad« face. Both Kivy
and Davies also allow a role for convention in music, accepting that the »sad-
ness« of the minor key, for example, is not a matter of how people sound or
move when they are sad: it is unclear how a voice or gesture could be in the
minor key.15
Kivy called his version of the theory the »contour and convention« theory.
Some music is expressive of emotion by virtue of a cultural convention. But
more fundamentally, music is expressive of emotion by virtue of sharing the
»contours« of vocal or behavioral expressive gestures made by human beings
when in the throes of emotion. Thus Kivy emphasized the way a musical line,
such as the famous »weeping figure« that occurs, for example, at the beginning of
Arianna’s Lament in Monteverdi’s Arianna, can resemble the »contour« or inton-
ation pattern of a grief-stricken voice. Because of this resemblance, we hear the
music as expressive of grief.
For Davies, the experienced resemblance between music and vocal utterance
is less important than that between musical movement and expressive behavior,
particularly »the gait, attitude, air, carriage, posture, and comportment of the
human body« (Davies 2006, 182). Moreover, whereas in The Corded Shell Kivy
restricted his discussion to short snippets of music, Davies emphasizes extended
passages. »The resemblance that counts most for musical expressiveness […] is
that between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations
of human behavior associated with emotion« (ibid., 181). We experience move-
ment in music in terms of »progress from high to low or fast to slow«, but also
in »the multistranded waxing and waning of tensions generated variously within
the harmony, the mode of articulation and phrasing, subtle nuances of timing,
the delay or defeat of expected continuations, and so on« (ibid., 181–182).
Davies also thinks that »this movement is like human behavior in that it seems
purposeful and goal-directed« (ibid., 182).
To those who object that there is no greater »objective« resemblance between
musical movement and emotions than between musical movement and various
natural phenomena – the weather, the moods of the sea – Davies responds that
the degree of resemblance is beside the point: listeners simply do experience a
resemblance between the music and »the realm of human emotion«. Listeners
make the connection between music and emotion by »an experience of similarity«,16
not a mere recognition that there is a similarity. And our interests shape how we

14 Levinson 1996 points out that neither Kivy nor Davies is very clear about what they think musi-
cal expressiveness is. They spend most of their time explaining the grounds on which (they
think) we attribute expressive qualities to music.
15 But Kivy suggests that all expressive conventions may have originated in contours.
16 My italics.
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402 Jenefer Robinson

experience the world. As he says, we’re more likely to see a weeping willow as a
downcast person than as a frozen waterfall, even if the similarity between the
willow and the waterfall is no less than that between the willow and the droopy
person. That’s because in our experience of the world we unthinkingly anthro-
pomorphize the things around us, including the music that we hear.
There’s no doubt that the doggy theory successfully describes one way in
which we can hear music as expressive. Nevertheless, the theory has several im-
portant limitations. First, both Kivy and Davies think that music can express
only those emotional states that exhibit characteristic vocal intonations or ex-
pressive behaviors. But if music can express only those emotions that have a rec-
ognizable behavioral profile, then it’s hard to see how music can express patterns
of feeling, the way that hope builds and builds only to be frustrated, or the way in
which despair is with difficulty overcome and transforms gradually into resigna-
tion. Second, and relatedly, it seems to follow that cognitively complex emotions
cannot be expressed by music. There are no distinguishing vocal or behavioral
marks of hope or resignation, for example. Finally, the theory does not explain
why listeners are so powerfully moved by emotional expression in music. We are
not particularly moved (except perhaps to laughter) by the sad doggy faces of the
St. Bernard and the basset-hound. Why, then, should we be moved by the sad ap-
pearance of music?
Davies has tried to respond to all three of these objections. First, he has argued
that a pattern of feeling can be expressed by an appropriate sequence of musical
gestures. Thus, »just as music might present the characteristic of an emotion in
its aural appearance, so too it might present the appearance of a pattern of feel-
ings through the order of its expressive development« (Davies 1994, 263). But if
what we are listening to is a sequence of expressive »contours« without any
underlying psychological reality, there is no organic connection between one ex-
pressive »appearance« and the next: they are simply concatenated. It’s like watch-
ing a series of expressions moving across someone’s face. If there is a pattern,
it’s only because of the thoughts and desires and goals and so on that underlie
the sequence. If it’s just a series of facial contortions, why call this a pattern of ex-
pressions?
Secondly, Davies (1994) has defended the idea that music can express cogni-
tively complex emotions, arguing that a piece of music can express hope, for
example, if the »emotion characteristics in appearance« of a longish piece or pas-
sage of music are judiciously ordered. But again, a mere sequence of expressive
gestures is not enough to distinguish a cognitively complex emotion such as
hope, whatever the order in which these gestures occur. If all you have to work
with are expressive gestures, then the best you can do to express hope in music is
to have a cheerful passage followed by a sad one or a passage in which cheerful-
ness and sadness somehow intermingle or something of this sort. But the
expression of hope requires the expression of desires and thoughts. A hopeful
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Music and Emotions 403

person is one who wishes for something to happen that he construes as good.17
Hope cannot be expressed merely by a succession of bodily gestures and vocal
intonations.
More recently, Davies has conceded that only a few emotional types »can be
individuated solely on the basis of observed bodily comportment« (2006, 183).
His candidates for expressible emotions include sadness and happiness, timidity,
anger, »swaggering arrogance, the mechanical rigidity that goes with repression
and alienation from the physicality of existence, ethereal dreaminess, and sassy
sexuality« (ibid.). Notice, however, that apart from sadness, happiness and anger,
the rest of these examples are not strictly speaking emotions at all, but rather
behaviors indicative of emotions. As for more complex emotions, Davies is cau-
tious: »where deep sadness gives way gradually to joy and abandonment, it may
be reasonable to regard the transition as consistent with acceptance and resol-
ution« (ibid., 185). But notice here that »acceptance« and »resolution« are inner
states, requiring beliefs, desires and intentions. It’s implausible that the trans-
formation of a deeply sad appearance (like a grieving facial expression) into a
joyful appearance (like a smile) is capable of expressing a complex shift in one’s
inner states, involving thoughts of acceptance, an intention to be courageous, a wish
that things had been different conquered by a desire for the capacity to deal with
things as they are etc. In general, if all musical expression could be explained
according to the doggy theory, then music would be able to express very little
about our inner life.
The final problem concerns why expressive music should be moving, if the
doggy theory is correct. Here Davies relies on the theory of contagion that I’ll be
discussing later. As we’ll see, it’s true that music can indeed affect the motor sys-
tem and to some degree change people’s behavior and mood. But we are not
typically moved by an expression of emotion in a musical »appearance« in the
way that we are moved by an expression of genuine emotion. Even if I am af-
fected physiologically and motorically by a piece of expressive music, this does
not explain the power of our emotional responses to expressive music. After all,
I am powerfully moved not because my friend has a sad-looking face, but only
because that sad-looking face is a sign that she really is sad.18

17 See Karl/Robinson 1995 for a detailed discussion of this point.

18 I recently had an opportunity to see Bill Viola’s slow-motion video installation, The Quintet of Re-
membrance. Five actors perform different emotions (sadness, anger and so on) via gradually
changing facial expressions and gestures. The people in the group do not appear to interact, and
there is no hint as to why they are expressing the emotions that they do. Thus we have no idea
whether the facial expressions are mere poses or whether they reflect any psychological reality
and if so, what it is. I suppose the piece might be intended to be interestingly enigmatic, but I
found it at once lifeless and melodramatic. Yet this installation is supposed to get its expressive-
ness in just the same way as the doggy theory claims music does. (Interestingly, there is no music
accompanying the video.)
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404 Jenefer Robinson

Jerrold Levinson propounds a variety of the »animation theory«, which, un-

like the doggy theory, accepts that what we experience as musical expressiveness
is an experience as of someone genuinely expressing his or her emotions. In Le-
vinson’s formulation, »a passage of music P is expressive of an emotion E if and
only if P, in context, is readily heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in
question, as an expression of E« (Levinson 2006, 193; see also Levinson 1996). It
is crucial to Levinson’s view that expression »requires an expresser«. He believes
that when we hear music as expressive of emotion, we hear or imagine an agent
or persona in the music, the »owner« of the states expressed. Now, when we
listen to a lyric song such as »Gute Nacht«, the opening song in Schubert’s song
cycle Winterreise, we naturally hear it as emanating from a person or character in
the music who is expressing his gloomy state of mind. In Levinson’s view, how-
ever, we also hear all purely instrumental music (»absolute music«) that’s expres-
sive of emotion in the very same way, namely, as emanating from a persona in the
music, which may be a »character« or may be the composer himself or a persona
of the composer.
There is much to be said in favour of Levinson’s view. It allows for musical
expressiveness to be treated as the genuine expression of emotion. It permits us
to hear extended passages of music as expressing unfolding psychological states,
rather than as mere sequences of expressive »appearances«. Once we hear the
music as genuinely expressing a sequence of emotions, it is possible to find »pat-
terns of feeling« in the music as well as the expression of cognitively complex
emotions such as hope. If we hear a persona in the music, we can hear him as
seeking or striving towards certain goals (as fragments of a theme struggle to trans-
form into another theme with a different character), as desiring certain things and
rejecting others (as a sequence of harmonies yearns towards resolution but is
turned aside into an alien key which it then struggles to resist), or as remembering
past events with nostalgia or bitterness (as when an early sunny theme is recalled
later in a piece with reassuring or troubling effect).19 Emotion characteristics in
appearances do not strive or seek or desire or remember, but people do. Through
positing a persona in the music, Levinson allows us to hear the music as express-
ing the inner states of this persona. Finally, because it allows us to hear the music
as a genuine expression, it makes sense that we would be moved by music’s ex-
pressiveness.
Despite its many virtues, however, I do not want to endorse Levinson’s the-
ory because I think that in some respects it goes too far and in other respects it
doesn’t go far enough. First, Levinson means his theory to be a general account
of expressiveness in music. But there are many pieces which in common par-
lance are said to »express melancholy« even though we have no inclination to
posit a melancholy persona in the music. As we’ve seen, a piece can be »sad« or

19 See Karl/Robinson 1995 on Shostakovich’s Tenth.

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Music and Emotions 405

»cheerful« for diverse reasons: associations or conventions may play the major
role. Other pieces can be explained simply by reference to the doggy theory: we
hear a piece as sad because of its sad »contours«. Perhaps we should stipulate that
the term »musical expression« should be confined to those pieces that fit Levin-
son’s theory but then we need to know how to determine which those are.
This brings me to my second objection to Levinson’s theory: in some respects
it doesn’t go far enough. For Levinson, like Kivy and Davies, expression in music
is primarily something determined by the experience of listeners or audiences,
not primarily something achieved by artists. Now, it’s true that emotional ex-
pression in ordinary life is a means of communication – looking at your gait and
posture tells me how you’re feeling – but it’s also true that the reason why
expression is such a good means of communication is that, when it is sincere, it
accurately reveals genuine inner states. In other words, expression is primarily
something achieved by expressers, not something noticed or experienced by
spectators or audiences.20
In conclusion, there is much expressiveness that does not need Levinson’s
persona, and there is some expressiveness that does require the persona but
not merely as something imagined or postulated by listeners, but as a genuine
(dramatic) protagonist genuinely expressing his or her emotions.

4. Music as the Expression of Emotion: a Romantic Theory

The Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nine-
teenth centuries spawned the idea that one of the main goals of the arts is to
express the emotions of artists. Wordsworth famously described poetry in the
preface to the Lyrical Ballads as »the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings«
that are »recollected in tranquility«. And Beethoven is reported to have said to
Louis Schlosser that »stimulated by those moods which poets turn into words,
I turn my ideas into tones which resound, roar and rage until at last they stand
before me in the form of notes« (Morgenstern 1956, 87). In the wake of Ro-
manticism, many philosophers of very different stripes, including John Dewey,
Eugene Véron, and R. G. Collingwood, agreed that the expression of emotions
is the defining feature of all art. This view seems a bit stretched, however. Al-
though Western Romantic music and poetry may express emotions, Huichol vo-
tive bowls, Bauhaus architecture, and Op art paintings don’t seem to be mainly –

20 I am over-simplifying a little in this paragraph. Levinson, like Davies, is trying to analyze express-
iveness in music rather than expression. But, unlike Davies, Levinson analyzes expressiveness in
terms of what can be heard as an expression. In Robinson 2007b I argue that expression and ex-
pressiveness are »related but conceptually distinct phenomena« (ibid., 39), and try to show how
exactly they are related.
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406 Jenefer Robinson

if at all – interested in the expression of emotion. These »expression« theories

are better understood, in my view, as theories of artistic expression rather than of
art per se.
One of the most carefully worked out versions of the expression theory
comes from the philosopher R. G. Collingwood, a follower of the Hegelian phil-
osopher, Benedetto Croce. Collingwood acknowledged that there is much in
common between the expression of emotion in ordinary life and the expression
of emotion in artworks: in both cases there is someone who is actually in an
emotional state and who communicates that state to other people. However, that
being said, he thinks that there are at least three ways in which artistic expression
differs from what we call expression in ordinary contexts. To »express« an emo-
tion in real life means first that you manifest or show this emotion by means of
facial or vocal expressions, by the visible concomitants of autonomic arousal
(trembling, weeping, blushing), or through »action tendencies« (fist-clenching,
hiding, caressing). But Collingwood says that expression in music (and the other
arts) is quite distinct from displaying symptoms of emotion (as he calls blushing
and fist-clenching and so on). A flood of tears betrays an emotion willy-nilly;
a symphony that expresses emotion is an object intentionally constructed so as to
express that emotion.
Secondly, an artistic expression is distinguished from the describing or labeling
of an emotion: when I say »I love you«, that would seem to be a paradigm ex-
pression of love in ordinary life, but it is not an expression at all in Collingwood’s
sense, because describing my emotion as »love« generalizes it; my words do not
capture the specificity of my love for you and distinguish it from all other loves.
Artistic expression, on the other hand, individualizes an emotion. If the funeral
march of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony expresses sorrow, this is a quite distinct
sorrow from that expressed by the funeral march in Chopin’s B flat minor Piano
Sonata.
Thirdly, expression in art cannot be identified with the arousal of emotion in
audiences: an artist »proper« shouldn’t be aiming to arouse emotions in audi-
ences, because that would be manipulating other people’s emotions rather than
sincerely expressing his own. However, if a composer genuinely succeeds in ex-
pressing an emotion in a piece of music, then the audience should, as a kind of
by-product, be able to experience it for themselves.
What really makes the difference between ordinary expression and the ex-
pression of emotion in music and the other arts is that artistic expression is es-
sentially a cognitive process, a matter of articulating an emotion in such a way that
the nature of the emotion is clarified for the understanding. Here we see indi-
rectly the influence of Hegel who thought of the arts as a mode of understanding
distinct from both religion and philosophy. Collingwood’s main examples are lit-
erary: the poet who wants to express his emotions in a poem but doesn’t know
exactly what emotions he is feeling but who, in writing the poem, thereby comes to
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Music and Emotions 407

understand that emotion. In my terms, the finished poem is both the result of and
an embodiment of »cognitive monitoring«. An emotion that was unclear in the
poet’s mind is clarified once it has been articulated in a structure of words, im-
agery, rhythm, and other poetic devices. As for the reader, Collingwood claimed
that in order to understand what a poem expresses, the reader should experience
it for herself and come to grasp what is expressed by recreating in herself the
emotions of the artist that are expressed in the poem. So the poet is not aiming to
arouse our emotions, but if he does a good job, he will have created a poem that
will in fact enable us to recreate his emotions and feel them for ourselves. Thus
Keats’ »Ode to a Nightingale« expresses the poet’s longing for an unchangeable
world of art and beauty far away from »the weariness, the fever, and the fret« of
our mundane world, and as we read the poem, we imagine the poet’s situation
and come to experience the emotions with which he responds to it.
To my mind, it is very important to remember that the concept of art as a per-
sonal expression of emotion originated in Romanticism. Keats’ Ode is a para-
digm of expression because in it the poet – or rather his persona – is expressing
some complex emotional state that he is actually experiencing and in which there
is development in this emotional state from the beginning to the end of the
poem. This is what expression is in its fullest sense: an achievement by an artist,
not a mode of experiencing by a reader or listener.
Now, you might think it’s easier for poetry to express emotions in this way,
because the poet can express his thoughts and desires and intentions in the
words of the poem. But what about music? There are a number of ways in which
music can express emotions. The doggy theory rightly suggests that we can
experience music as resembling the vocal expressions and the motor activity –
including expressive bodily gestures and action tendencies – that characterize
particular emotions. We can also hear in it certain physiological changes, such as
an agitated heart-beat or irregular breathing or panting. But music can also to
some extent express the appraisals in emotion: we can hear in the music when
things are going along in a regular, pleasant way, and when they take a dive. There
are also many ways in which music can express desire, aspiration, or striving.
A theme may struggle to achieve resolution, fail, try again, fail again, try a second
time, and finally achieve closure. Or one theme may gradually and with apparent
difficulty transform into a theme with a different character.
The most straightforward examples of musical expression come from Ro-
mantic lieder (songs), where there are words that help to disambiguate what is
being expressed. It seems true to say, for example, that the protagonist of Schu-
bert’s »Gute Nacht« is expressing his unhappiness at having been rejected by his
beloved as well as a sense of defeat and abandonment. There are moments when
his mood briefly lifts, as he remembers his past hopes, but he always sinks back
into gloom. In the final verse, he bids a tender, nostalgic farewell to the beloved,
before descending once again into hopelessness. The Winterreise is of course
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408 Jenefer Robinson

both an actual and a psychological journey. But even this first song is a mini-
drama in itself: the wanderer’s emotions shift and change from beginning to the
end of the song. From the first bars, the funereal D minor harmonies, the de-
scending notes of the piano accompaniment and the harsh dissonance on the
penultimate harmony of the cadence express right away that we are in a dark cold
world both physically and psychologically. We hear the wanderer trudging along
in the repeated chords of the piano accompaniment, which continue throughout
the piece. The repetitive character of the accompaniment seems to mirror his
obsessive thinking about what he has left behind. (It is perhaps not unfanciful to
hear the accompaniment as expressing what’s going on in the protagonist’s sub-
conscious.) There is a momentary (watery) ray of sun when F major briefly ap-
pears and the melody begins to rise instead of fall as the wanderer remembers
happier days: »Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe, die Mutter gar von Eh’« (»The
maiden spoke of love, her mother even of marriage«). But then the minor tonal-
ity and the downward movement of the melody take over again. In the 4th and
final verse D minor changes to D major with the words »Will dich im Traum
nicht stören, wär schad um deine Ruh.« (»I will not disturb your dreams; it would
be a shame to spoil your rest.«) As Youens (1991) points out, much of the dream-
like magical quality in the effect comes from the fact that the half-step move-
ment from F to E, which is such an important feature throughout the song,
becomes a whole step F sharp to E once we move into D major. Suddenly a
hopeful vista seems to open that had been closed off before. The wanderer nos-
talgically recalls his beloved and in his imagination tenderly tells her that he will
not awaken her but will instead inscribe »Gute Nacht« on the gate, as he departs,
so that she will know that he was thinking of her. But as he repeats »An dich hab’
ich gedacht« (»I thought of you«) a second time, the piece sinks back into the
tonic D minor along with darkness and despair.
Collingwood claims that if a work of art expresses an emotion (in his quasi-
technical sense), it clarifies that emotion for the understanding. In this example,
there is a dramatic »speaker« of the words, and it is his emotions that are getting
clarified, although of course the protagonist could be a stand-in for the
composer himself. The words of the song express – articulate and elucidate – the
protagonist’s emotions in just the same way as the dramatic speaker of Keats’
Ode. But the music also makes its own powerful contribution to what’s ex-
pressed or articulated by the song.
Earlier I suggested that emotions are processes and that our emotional life oc-
curs in »streams«. It seems reasonable, then, to think that music, which is itself a
process or a series of processes occurring in »streams«, would be peculiarly well-
suited to mirror emotions. And in fact, as Langer was aware, music can indeed
mirror the »streams« of emotional experience: the various interrelated currents
that combine and separate, ambiguities between one emotion and another,
blends of emotion, and the way one emotion gradually or suddenly transmutes
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Music and Emotions 409

into another. Music can convey how our emotional reactions shift and change:
how things seem to be going from good to bad or from bad to good. And music
can convey a sense that desires have been gratified or disappointed, and a sense
that memories have engulfed a person or been swept away.
We saw how this can happen in our brief examination of »Gute Nacht«. There
we were able to detect various interactions between what the protagonist is ex-
pressing in words and what is being expressed through musical means. What’s
even more interesting, however, is that some »pure« or »absolute« music can ex-
press the emotions of a protagonist in a very similar way.
Music, says Edward T. Cone, has an »expressive potential« (1974, 171) able to
be realized in different ways in different contexts, but setting broad limits on
what a musical work can express. So, to use Davies’ example, the expressive po-
tential of a piece can be a movement from grief to joy, from difficulties which are
faced and overcome, or with a direful fate to which one becomes resigned. The
possibilities are extensive, but they don’t include just anything. In particular they
do not permit joy turning into grief, or a sunny life that turns sour.
But why should we interpret music as »mirroring« emotional processes rather
than processes in inanimate nature: clouds followed by the sun or a stormy sea
gradually calming down? In the case of »Gute Nacht«, the question is easily
answered: the poem is all about the protagonist’s emotions; he’s expressing them
in words and the music seems to reinforce or comment on what he’s saying. But
what about »pure« instrumental music? The answer is that in the nineteenth cen-
tury Romantic tradition, it was thought normal and reasonable for music with-
out words to express the emotions of characters or composers.21 Indeed, new
forms or adaptations of old ones – nocturnes, impromptus, tone poems and
program music of all sorts – were created partly in order to increase the possi-
bilities of emotional expressiveness. When Schumann wrote music expressing
the conflict between his two personae, Florestan and Eusebius, when Shostako-
vich imprinted his signature motif on symphonies and string quartets, when
Mahler composed symphonies that morphed into mini-operas or oratorios, they
are following a Romantic tradition of expressing the self (and its various per-
sonae) in their music.
Not all expressive music is populated with personae who are expressing their
emotions, however. If we’re listening to an Impressionist work of program music
(»La Mer«), we know we should not be looking for a persona in the music (al-
though one could interpret this piece as somebody’s impression of the sea, rather
than a straightforward pictorial characterization of the sea.) If we know we are

21 I am not arguing that all music, or even all expressive music, expresses the emotions of a protag-
onist in the music. The idea that music and the other arts are expressions of emotion in this way
is largely a creation of Romanticism, and the artistic expression of emotion »in the fullest sense«,
as I have called it, may be largely confined to the Romantic and post-Romantic eras.
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410 Jenefer Robinson

listening to a Baroque character piece (»La Superbe«), then it’s reasonable to hear
a particular type of person in the music, but not reasonable to think we are ex-
periencing an outpouring of emotion by that person. Sometimes, we’ll know we
are entitled to find a persona in a work of instrumental music because the
composer has given us an evocative title, such as Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. But
even where there is no special hint, it is reasonable to interpret certain kinds of
Romantic instrumental music as expressions of emotion in a persona, because
that was how composers of the time thought of (some of) their compositions.22
The Wanderer Fantasy is not the only late work of Schubert’s in which we
find the theme of the »wanderer«, who is an outcast from the world just like the
protagonist of Winterreise. Cone has argued that the A flat Moment Musical op. 94
no. 6 »dramatizes the injection of a strange, unsettling element into an otherwise
peaceful situation« (Cone 1986, 26).23 This idea has great »metaphorical reson-
ance« in Anthony Newcomb’s phrase, suggesting the idea of the stranger or out-
sider, the »Fremdling« of Georg Philipp Schmidt von Lübeck’s poem »Der Wan-
derer«, which Schubert set to music as a song that later he used as the theme
for the adagio of the Fantasy. The Schubert Song Companion describes the Fantasy as
working out in purely instrumental form »the prototype of the alienated man,
the refugee from life and fate, who is the central figure of the song cycles and
of so many songs of the last years« (Reed 1985, 138). This reading is not merely
derived from the association between the Schubert song and the Fantasy but
is given musical corroboration by the juxtaposition of the tonic C major in the
powerful, energetic first section of the piece with the extraordinary C sharp
minor of the »Wanderer« theme in the second section. Charles Fisk writes: »The
fantasy is an exuberant, virtuosic work under the spell of a melancholy song,
whose melancholy it ultimately overcomes« (Fisk 2001, 68).
Fisk has made a particular study of the »trope« of the wanderer or outcast in
Schubert’s late music. For example, in the first movement of the Piano Sonatas
D 960 in B flat there is a harmonic »outsider«, embodied in the strange trill on
G flat which interrupts the cheerful ambulatory music that opens the piece. Fisk
describes how the music seems to dramatize a search for reintegration of this
»alien« element, as the music wanders into far distant keys, and he tells a psycho-
logically convincing tale in which the wanderings are those of a persona, whom
he identifies for various reasons with the composer himself, who is seeking to be
integrated into the »normal« group. Fisk’s underlying premise is that there are
suggestions in Schubert’s cyclic forms and tonal structures of larger dramatic

22 For further discussion and defense of this view, see Robinson 2007. For excellent examples of
this type of criticism see Newcomb 1984 and 1997.
23 Newcomb has christened these kinds of story structures in music »plot archetypes.« They are
analogous to the somewhat abstract structures discovered by Tzvetan Todorov 1969 in his
examination of the plot structures of the stories in the Decameron.
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Music and Emotions 411

structures, in which there are agents or personae expressing complex desires

emotions and desires.
Once we hear the structure of piece of music as a psychological as well as a
musical structure, then we are able to hear in it patterns of feeling, as Langer
stressed. Moreover we can hear in it not only the effects noticed by the doggy
theorists but more complex emotions such as yearning, nostalgia, and resigna-
tion, all prime examples of Romantic emotions. And it is no surprise that we are
moved by such expressions, because they are not just appearances but have psy-
chological reality.24

5. How does Music Arouse Emotions in Listeners?

According to »reader-response« theory, the interpretation of a literary work is

in large part a function of the reader’s response to it. There are many varieties
of reader-response theory, not all of them having much to do with the emotions.
Elsewhere, however, (Robinson 2005) I have defended a version of reader
-response theory according to which there are at least some literary works that
cannot be properly understood unless we respond to them emotionally in an ap-
propriate way.25 I think the same thing is true much more generally of our under-
standing of music. As we’ll see shortly, having our emotions aroused in appro-
priate ways can help us to grasp both the structure or form of a musical piece, and
also what it expresses. The expression of emotion in music is particularly moving
because we don’t just recognize that someone is expressing melancholy or nostal-
gia, but are actually brought to feel something similar: music has direct effects
on our physiology and on our »action tendencies«. In order to show that this is
true, however, I must first make good on the claim that music can indeed arouse
the emotions of its listeners.
There are many different ways in which music arouses emotions and the emo-
tions aroused by these different mechanisms are not all the same. Indeed this
is probably the main reason why music is so often described as expressively
ambiguous: different emotions are aroused more-or-less simultaneously by dif-
ferent mechanisms.
One way in which music arouses emotions is by means of personal associ-
ations – the »they’re playing our song« phenomenon – but such associations
won’t be generalizable and hence are of limited theoretical interest.26 More inter-
esting are the emotions we feel when we are moved by the sheer beauty of a mel-

24 Even if the psychology is that of a fictional character such as the protagonist in Winterreise.
25 What »an appropriate way« turns out to be is of course a difficult question. See Robinson 2005.
26 There is, however, evidence that events memorized under the effect of a certain mood are
recalled more easily when that mood is evoked by music.
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412 Jenefer Robinson

ody or of a harmonic progression. Certainly part of our emotional response to

music is sheer pleasure at its beauty, its inventiveness, its »craftsmanship«.27
But there are many other ways too in which music arouses our emotions. In
his groundbreaking book Emotion and Meaning in Music, Leonard Meyer pointed
out that it is possible to understand a complex piece of music by having your
emotions aroused at the right times and in the right ways, even if you have no
idea how to analyze the piece like a trained music theorist.28 What he has in mind
is that the structure of a piece written in »classical« style (the best example is per-
haps sonata form) implies that certain events will happen in a certain order and
we become surprised, disappointed, anxious, bewildered, uncertain or suspense-
ful and even upset when things don’t go as we expect. Similarly, when everything
turns out all right in the end by means of some clever compositional devices
of the composer, we feel relief, satisfaction, contentment, calm. If we feel the
»right« emotions at the »right« moments during the unfolding of the music –
puzzlement when the key doesn’t change when it’s supposed to or bewilderment
when, as in the middle of the first movement of the Schubert B flat sonata D.
960, the key changes are so extensive and unpredictable that tonally we become
»lost«, or satisfaction when finally the tonic reasserts itself – then we have under-
stood the music even if we cannot verbalize our experience.
If Meyer is right, then feeling how the music shifts and turns as it unfolds is
a way of understanding musical structure. It is also a way of drawing attention to
important events in the music – those that puzzle, disappoint, surprise, or satisfy
us – in a bodily way: that’s what emotions do. So even if we cannot explain verb-
ally why we felt as we did, the emotions we experience in following the structure
of a piece alert us to what’s important. We can then go back and »cognitively
monitor« our experience of the piece and try to figure out (cognitively) why the
music made us feel the way it did. In other words, just as in reading a realistic
nineteenth century novel, such as Anna Karenina, our emotional responses high-
light important events and encourage us to reflect upon their significance in the
novel as a whole, so, in listening to Schubert’s last sonata, our emotional re-
sponses highlight important musical events and encourage us to reflect upon
their significance in the musical structure as a whole. It will probably be only
after repeated listenings that we come to grasp this significance, just as we most
likely don’t figure out the structure of Anna Karenina on a first reading.
Why is it that an unexpected key change or a prolonged excursion into keys
distant from the tonic should arouse emotions? We can relate to Anna and her
fate because she is a human being just like us in a difficult situation that we rec-
ognize as difficult. But why get upset when the tonic remains absent for longer

27 These are the only emotions Kivy thinks music can arouse. See Kivy 1990.
28 Like Wolfgang Iser 1980, Meyer is a reader/listener response theorist who seems to think that
there is in fact an »ideal« reader/listener whose (ideal) reactions give »the meaning« of the work.
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Music and Emotions 413

than we expect? The tonic is not a teenage son or daughter, out after »curfew«,
whose absence might well evoke powerful emotions. Nico Frijda’s theory of
emotion can help us here. He suggests that emotion is generated by appraisals of
match or mismatch with the agent’s goals or interests. The psychologists of
music John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin have taken up his idea, arguing that the
tonal system within which most of the composers of the Classic and Romantic
periods worked, provides »a set of dimensions that establish psychological dis-
tance from a ›home‹ or ›stability‹ point« (Sloboda/Juslin 2001, 92). Moving closer
to this »resting point« reduces tension and moving away from it in general in-
creases tension. So we get emotionally worked up when things don’t turn out as
we expect and we are emotionally satisfied when they do. As Ella Fitzgerald
sings: »How strange the change from major to minor!« When we have become
accustomed to going along in the major key and suddenly there is a shift into the
minor, we are shaken up emotionally: things are not going the way we’d been
led to expect, and what’s more, they seem to be moving into a darker realm.
Although in musical cases of this sort, the match or mismatch with our »goals
and interests« doesn’t matter very much to our well-being, we have learned to re-
spond in a similar way whenever our desires or expectations are thwarted and when-
ever they are satisfied. It is in general adaptive to be on the look-out when things
are not going as expected or as desired, especially when the change seems to
be for the worse. The reaction to unexpected events in music such as the shift
from major to minor is most likely a spin-off from a generally adaptive pattern of
response.
In my brief discussion of the emotions I noted that typically an emotional re-
sponse is the result of an »affective appraisal« of the environment: I’m afraid
when I’m faced with a threat, and angry when something offends me. I cheer up
when things are going well and I get sad when they aren’t going so well. In my
discussion so far about how music arouses emotions, I’ve been talking about our
reactions to the music: I get pleasure from its beauty; I’m surprised by its harmonic
changes; I’m satisfied when it returns »home« to the tonic; I feel momentary
alarm when it moves from major to minor mode. Of course, in order to experi-
ence these emotions I must have some grasp of the musical style in which the
music has been composed, otherwise I won’t be surprised or pleased by the
musical development. It’s only if I have some background knowledge about how
pieces of this sort generally unfold that my emotions direct my attention to cer-
tain aspects of the music.
But music also seems to arouse our emotions in a more direct bodily way. If a
piece of music makes me sad, it’s not because I’ve made an affective appraisal
that things in general are bad. Nothing bad has happened: my mother hasn’t
died; I haven’t lost my job. The only relevant change in the world is that music is
playing. We can explain some of these emotional effects as the result of »affective
appraisals« of the music itself in the way I suggested above. But there still seem
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414 Jenefer Robinson

to be direct physiological effects of music that can’t be accounted for in this way.
There is plenty of empirical evidence from studies of western music that sad
music makes people sad and happy music makes them happy; calm and serene
music calms people down, and edgy, restless music makes them edgy and rest-
less. Quite apart from evidence from people’s self-reports (which can’t be totally
reliable as we don’t have any incorrigible access to our states of mind), there is
evidence that different kinds of music produce different autonomic and hormonal
activity. And what about the effects of rhythm, which interestingly, seem to be
more widespread over different cultures than the effects of harmony, which tend
to be restricted to specific cultures with specific harmonic systems? It seems
clear from personal experience that music with different characteristic rhythms
produces different kinds of movement and »action tendencies« in its listeners.
Try dancing a jig to a funeral march or pretending to be a galloping horse while
listening attentively to a slow and graceful minuet. Recently the neuroscientist
Daniel Levitin has explained how the enjoyment of rhythm involves the cerebel-
lum in the »reptilian« brain, which is involved with timing and co-ordinating
body movements, but is also massively connected to emotional centres in the
brain, notably the amygdale and the frontal lobes. His results suggest that
rhythm and meter can be emotionally arousing in a direct way, which bypasses
the cortex.
If you spend time with a depressed person, you find yourself getting de-
pressed in a process of »emotional contagion«. You begin to mirror the person’s
posture, tone of voice, facial expression and so on, and without realizing it, you
yourself start to feel depressed. There is now intriguing evidence that so-called
»mirror neurons« respond virtually the same way when we see a facial expression
of a particular emotion and when we make that expression ourselves, when we
feel our leg being touched with a stick and when we watch someone else having
their leg touched with a stick. It seems that in cases of emotional contagion,
emotion is communicated via these mirrored bodily movements. These move-
ments are then felt as the corresponding emotion. This phenomenon helps to ex-
plain people’s capacity for empathy or feeling with other people. Music, however,
operates in a more immediate way. It directly affects the autonomic and motor sys-
tems, so that our bodies respond to the music of a funeral march or a jig, with the
physiological and motor activity characteristic of melancholy or cheerfulness.
There’s nothing to be melancholy or cheerful about: it’s not an appraisal of the
world that has made us sad or happy; it’s the direct effect of the music on our au-
tonomic and motor systems.
Indeed, numerous psychological studies of mood use music with a particular
expressive character to establish a mood before going on to measure the effects
of mood on memory and various cognitive functions, such as decision-making.
Only a few emotions or moods figure in this research: usually it is sad and happy,
anxious and calm that recur over and over again in the literature on music. One
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Music and Emotions 415

might wonder why being in a particular motor and autonomic state is automati-
cally treated as a mood state? After all, when one is tired or running a race or dig-
ging in the garden, one is also in a particular physiological state. Interestingly,
however, many of the »mood« studies that rely on music have shown that the
physiological states listeners find themselves in as a result of listening to music
with a particular character – happy, sad, restless, calm – do in fact have many
of the characteristic consequences of bona fide emotions. They have effects on
memory: an event memorized when one was in a certain mood is easier to rec-
ollect when music reflecting that mood is being played. They have effects on
behavior: decision-time, distance approximation, and writing speed (behaviors
believed to be affected by mood). They have effects on perception: happy (sad)
music makes people quicker to detect happy (sad) facial expressions in other
people and quicker to recognize words like »happy« (»sad«). So it looks as if
music doesn’t just affect our physiology and our motor systems; it really does
have the power to put us in certain emotional states. As William James long ago
suspected, and as Paul Ekman and others have recently established empirically,
altering the facial expression or posture or bodily movement or action tenden-
cies characteristic of some emotion seems to be enough to induce the emotion
itself, or at least that’s what the subjects of these experiments testify.29
Finally, we respond to music emotionally when we respond with understand-
ing to what it expresses. When I hear Schubert’s wanderer lamenting his lost
love, I respond to him as I do to a character in a novel or, better, a play: I am
moved by his sorrow and feel with him in his grief and sense of abandonment.
My reaction is emotional because my reactions to people in real life who are
expressing their emotions is also emotional, provided I sense that they are part
of my »group«. That’s just the way human beings are made. I may not actually
identify with the protagonist; perhaps I simply feel pity for him. And if, as I have
suggested, we hear at least some »pure« instrumental music as the wordless ex-
pression of emotion in a persona in the music, then it’s not surprising that we
respond to the music emotionally as if it were a wordless song: we respond emo-
tionally because we are responding to someone else’s expression of emotion
(even if it is only an imagined character in a sonata). We assume this person is
someone to whom we can »relate« because we find ourselves relating to him (or
her); we find ourselves reacting emotionally.

29 Among the evidence is Strack et al. 1988 and Paul Ekman 2003. James 1981 (1077–1078) fore-
stalls them. In Robinson 2005 I argue that more is required to turn a »mood« into an »emotion«
proper. I argue there that listeners interpret – they »cognitively monitor« – the situation they find
themselves in, which in this case is listening to music with a particular structure and a particular
expressive character, and they interpret the rather vague mood state they are experiencing as a
more specific emotion, in a way consistent with the overall musical context, including what the
music expresses, what emotions the structure of the music elicits, how much pleasure they are
deriving as well as any personal associations they may have to the music.
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416 Jenefer Robinson

Now, just as some readers are no doubt irritated by Anna Karenina instead of
compassionate towards her, no doubt some people simply feel annoyed by Schu-
bert’s wanderer: why doesn’t he just find another girl or drown himself in a mill-
stream and put himself out of his misery.30 However, it is very hard to sustain an
emotional reaction of annoyance when there is so much in the music that tends
to make us melancholy, if not grief-stricken. Much of music’s effect occurs below
the level of consciousness. First the rhythm: our motor systems respond to the
trudging music: it puts us in the state of mind in which one moves in this way.
I trudge when I’m gloomy and/or heavy-laden. Second, the harmony: the disson-
ances in the initial melody in the initial piano line are disturbing: they not only
grab our attention; they cause a frisson of unease: the smooth harmony has been
interrupted by something rough-edged and jagged-sounding. Finally the melody.
Here I think we have to be a little speculative. One of the important aspects of
emotion that I mentioned was »action tendency«, or, more generally, as Frijda
puts it, »states of action readiness«. In listening with understanding to Schubert’s
music, we hear the vocal melody moving downwards as if succumbing to some-
thing weighty; in verse three we hear the familiar melody in the voice turn and
move upwards at the end of the phrase, as though striving upwards for some-
thing, but in verse four (despite being initially in the major key) the melody re-
verts to the falling pattern, and in the final passage in the piano vocal melody and
harmony come together in the trudging D minor theme. It seems as if somehow
the movement of the melody reflects the movements of the wanderer’s state of
mind, and that this somehow imparts itself to us. We feel the way that the wan-
derer feels because the rhythm, the harmony and the melody all conspire to
make us feel the same way.
Earlier I noted that having our emotions aroused in appropriate ways can
help us to grasp the structure or form of a musical piece. I hope it is now clear that
it can also help us understand what it expresses. The emotions aroused by music
can alert us to important features of musical expression. But musical expression
is particularly moving because we don’t just recognize that someone is expressing
melancholy or nostalgia, but are actually brought to feel something similar: music
has direct effects on our physiology and on our »action tendencies«.
Neuroscientific research has shown that when people get »the chills« while
listening to their favourite music, the brain is in a very similar state to that of
a heroin high.31 Clearly music has powerful emotional effects on listeners. Part
of this is no doubt pleasure in the beauty, expressiveness and cleverness of the
piece. Part of it is due to the emotions we feel as we follow the structure of the
piece. Part of it is a result of feeling with what’s being expressed in a piece. But
one thing I haven’t so far stressed is that the various emotions aroused in these

30 See Schubert’s song-cycle Die Schöne Müllerin.

31 See Blood/Zatorre 2001.
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Music and Emotions 417

different ways may be all working together to intense effect. Alternatively they
may all be working in different ways and producing an ambiguous effect that is
overwhelming partly because we cannot grasp why it is that we feel so deeply.
In »Gute Nacht«, perhaps all the different mechanisms reinforce each other:
the falling melody, the minor key, and the trudging rhythm may make the listener
feel somewhat gloomy, while the protagonist’s predicament as expressed in the
song may arouse gloomy sympathy, and the dissonances may arouse feelings of
angst, so that the resulting emotion is, generally speaking, one of gloomy angst.
On the other hand, the various different mechanisms will typically arouse differ-
ent emotions. Indeed the typical emotional response to »Gute Nacht« is not in
fact one of unadulterated gloom: it also includes profound pleasure in the song’s
beauty and admiration for its well-crafted structure. Now, profound pleasure
in the beauty of a melody, anxiety at unexpected structural developments and
gloomy sympathy for a despairing persona, when experienced simultaneously, could
well induce a powerful but ambiguous emotional state, and perhaps this state is
particularly powerful just because it is so difficult for cognitive monitoring to
grasp its source.32
Jenefer Robinson
Department of Philosophy
University of Cincinnati

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