[Smt-talk] Beethoven's Sonatas

[Joshua Albrecht]

Dear list,

Perhaps I should post some clarification.  A number of you have responded to my question about the emotional expression of excerpts from the Beethoven sonatas with concern about the subjective nature of any response you could give, paired with some suggestion for approaching the question from within a given theoretical framework.  In actuality, I am interested in your subjective experience of Beethoven, because what I'm really curious about is how to look at subjective experience more objectively.  What I'm really after is a set of excerpts that have the potential to be strongly evocative of different emotions for a range of listeners.  The research indicates that despite the individual differences between listeners in how they approach an excerpt, there is quite a lot of agreement about the emotional expression perceived in a given excerpt.  In order to study this more in depth, I'd like to get a number of excerpts from a limited repertoire (in this case Beethoven sonatas) that cover a broad range of emotions.

One way of doing that would be to randomly sample excerpts from all of Beethoven's piano sonatas.  The downside to this approach is that I may not get a lot of variety in the emotions expressed.  In other words, many of the excerpts could express the same emotions (or worse, not be particularly expressive at all).  Another approach (the one I'm using) is to ask a panel of experts about what excerpts are particularly evocative of various emotions.  Getting a pool of excerpts would allow me to actually test any number of theories about how musical structures contribute to emotional expression in Beethoven's sonatas.

Thanks again for your thoughts!

Joshua Albrecht
School of Music
Ohio State University
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