[Smt-talk] (no subject)

[Greg Karl]

On Oct 2, 2009, at 2:35 PM, MICHAEL MORSE wrote:


>  The problem with major=happy/minor=sad is not that it is difficult  
> to refute empirically (or through examples), but that it is  
> impossible to establish. The notion that affectivity in music is in  
> any sense reducible to such a simplistic binary pair of concepts is  
> grotesque and, if you please, hydrophobically anti-intellectual.  
> Even if we agree that music is often affectively causal--and that  
> is a fairly substantial "if"--there is no guarantee whatsoever that  
> any combination of words, much less adjectives, can encapsulate or  
> formulate the affective results of the listening experience.
>

I have another view of this issue. Composers have always found great  
utility in musical resources capable of dramatizing psychological,  
affective, spatial, cosmological and myriad other species of binary  
oppositions. Major/minor, fast/slow, high/low, disjunct/conjunct--in  
short, any salient perceptual contrast that is readily registered by  
listeners and which can be mapped onto textual oppositions, was  
inevitably called into service by composers setting texts of  
madrigals, art songs, arias, etc. Romantic instrumental music  
dramatizing aspects of internal life naturally latched onto these  
same kinds of oppositions. I agree "the notion that affectivity in  
music is in any sense reducible to such a simplistic binary pair of  
concepts is grotesque and, if you please, hydrophobically anti- 
intellectual," but I doubt that is what Christopher Buchenholz, for  
example, was attempting to do. Presumably, identifying which end of  
an affective continuum a particular passage's expressive qualities  
tend toward would just be a starting point in an interpretation of  
content in a given work. I think there is validity in the idea that  
certain broad categories of affective states tend overwhelmingly to  
be mapped onto either the minor or the major mode respectively, and  
that the business composers have traditionally attempted to transact  
depends on audiences being aware of such broad conventions of  
interpretation. Perhaps that is what Buchenholz was driving at?

Gregory Karl
New York, NY
curugroth at verizon.net