<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div style="FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma; DIRECTION: ltr; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">To the sources on music and emotion Nick Reyland has suggested, I would add Jenefer Robinson's book, Deeper than Reason, which deals with emotion in the arts generally but which has substantial treatment of music.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Josh,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Have you vetted your methodology for those devious gremlins Janet Levy referred to as "covert and casual values?" (See her illuminating "Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writings in Music," J of Musicology 5 (1987)). I ask because, while one can certainly get substantial intersubjective agreement among listeners in attributing human emotional qualities to musical passages, this does not mean the basis of the agreement actually resides in substantive or formally salient features of the music; it could just be that the subjects have all learned the rules to the same game, one grounded in casual values as pervasive as the air we breathe. That one of music's primary functions is expressing emotions, for example, is an axiom of popular musical aesthetics with which we have all been bludgeoned from birth, along with its crustier corollaries (e.g., "If you're gonna sing the blues, you gotta pay your dues."), and one can readily learn by peer consensus to apply one-word emotional descriptors to songs—it's a normal part of socialization. And those acculturated with Classical music have a more direct line to this "casual value's" roots in Romantic aesthetics. But why specific emotions rather than, say, the dynamic qualities of motion, dramatic action, gesture or posture? Is there really good reason to believe this conventional activity of emotional labeling is other than a diverting parlor game? Note: I am not suggesting that exploring this intersubjective agreement is not worthwhile; I'm just cautioning that one should not assume it has an especially meaningful relation to music's formal properties. </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A deeper and more pervasive value, this one in Levy's covert category, is the one lurking in the final sentence of your second paragraph. The phrase "musical structure contributes to emotional expression" conceals a covert ontological judgment: that objective, structural features, the ones we are comfortable describing in technical terms, are the real substance of the music, more fundamental than the expressive qualities that, secondarily, derive from them. It implies a clear division between form and content which may be unwarranted, especially in Beethoven. I would suggest, therefore, that one should try inverting the ontology for a change, to ask not how musical structure contributes to expression but rather, whether some of those intensely expressive passages in Beethoven's sonatas might signal a new resource Beethoven exploited for articulating structure—that coherence and disruption in the expressive unfolding might be a primary factor in musical organization. To use an anachronistic metaphor, I think those passages are evidence that Beethoven may have been exploring ways of embedding the structures' control points, at least partially, in the expressive domain. In sum: I believe Beethoven systematically used the simulation of coherent human expressive experience as a force for organizing musical structure. This notion is explored in detail in my analysis of the first movement of the Appassionata (Structuralism and Musical Plot, Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997)). If my testimony on the expressive qualifies of specific passages is the kind you might expect from your "panel of experts," then it can be found in this article.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Greg Karl</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Jay NY</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">On Feb 23, 2012, at 12:46 PM, Joshua Albrecht wrote:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">Dear list,</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Tahoma; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Tahoma; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">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.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Tahoma; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">Thanks again for your thoughts!</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Tahoma; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">Joshua Albrecht</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">School of Music</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Tahoma" size="4" style="font: 13.0px Tahoma">Ohio State University</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Tahoma; min-height: 16px; "><br></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 220); font-size: 12px; ">____________________________</span>ed 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.</div> <div> <div><br></div> <div>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.</div> <div><br></div> <div>Thanks again for your thoughts!</div> <div><br></div></div> <div>Joshua Albrecht</div> <div>School of Music</div> <div>Ohio State University</div> <div style="FONT-FAMILY: Times New Roman; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 16px"> <div> <div style="FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma; DIRECTION: ltr; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 10pt"></div></div></div></div></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Smt-talk mailing list</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:Smt-talk@lists.societymusictheory.org">Smt-talk@lists.societymusictheory.org</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org">http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org</a></div> </blockquote></div><br></body></html>