<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>One curious discrepancy to keep in mind. As Jonathan observes, human emotions are startlingly complex, and can be bafflingly difficult to categorize and pin down in meaningful ways. (Which is why people keep writing novels, plays, films—telling new stories about how we interact and the emotional benefit and damage we bring to each other.) But the category words for emotions are relatively few in number—in English, only a few dozen, perhaps a hundred or two at the very most—on a completely different scale from the range of emotions themselves. Each individual word, e.g. "sad", "happy", "grieving", "ecstatic", is nothing more than a starting point for trying to understand an emotional state. The only way that we really come to grasp or (dare I say it) understand emotions is by telling stories...</div><div><br></div><div>Pieces of music display an equally bewildering number of "emotional" profiles, for lack of a better term. Each is unique and special, just as each person we encounter has a unique emotional profile at any given moment. Perhaps we can understand pieces by telling stories about them. Perhaps this is, in the end, all that music theorists actually do—tell stories about pieces, some of them highly technical, some of them not so technical.</div><div><br></div><div>But applying emotional category terms to pieces can't be more than a starting point, and not even a particularly interesting starting point at that. Given the virtually unlimited emotional range and potential of music, and given the paltry emotional vocabulary available to us, how could it be otherwise? Any sad piece is SO much more interesting in its detail than the simple ascription of the single emotional term would suggest...</div><div><br></div><div>CS</div><div><br></div><div>PS A further question: when I describe a passage as sad, am I stipulating a property of the music or a property of my reaction to it? Probably everyone who reads this list knows of Nelson Goodman's unpacking of this distinction in his <i>Languages of Art </i>of 1968, but in case this now almost-50-year-old-book (my emotional state on realizing this is but dimly and feebly captured by a statement that I am "shocked"!) has dropped below today's radar, let me call attention to it.</div><div><br></div><br><div><div>On Feb 23, 2012, at 10:08 PM, Dunsby, Jonathan wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"> <div fpstyle="1" ocsi="0"> <div dir="ltr" id="idOWAReplyText26293"> <div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" size="2" face="Trebuchet MS">I wish I truly knew what you mean by 'emotion.' Human feelings seem to be incredibly complex. How do you know you're even asking meaningful questions about what happens when people need music?</font></div> <div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" size="2" face="Trebuchet MS"></font> </div> <div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" size="2" face="Trebuchet MS">Pinning a word to an abstracted musical object seems, well, doubly, utterly weird, although music-cognition people do it all the time. I personally think they are fantasizing, but there we are.</font></div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS"></font> </div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS">You carry on. Who knows what you may discover?</font></div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS"></font> </div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS">You might find Naomi Cumming's <em>The Sonic Self</em> interesting, in its warnings about mentalist preconceptions?</font></div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS"></font> </div> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Trebuchet MS">Jonathan</font></div> <div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" size="2" face="Trebuchet MS"></font> </div></div> <div dir="ltr" id="idSignature95864"> <div re=""> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Consolas; FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt">______________</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Consolas; FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">Jonathan Dunsby</font></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Consolas; FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">Chair, Music Theory Department</font></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Consolas; FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">Professor of Music Theory</font></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Consolas; FONT-SIZE: 10.5pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">Eastman School of Music</font></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div re=""> <div re=""> <div re=""><a href="https://webmail.ur.rochester.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.ithaca.edu/music/mtsnys/officers.html" target="_blank"><font face="Times New Roman">http://www.ithaca.edu/music/mtsnys/officers.html</font></a> <div re=""> <div re=""><pre></pre></div></div></div></div></div></div></div> <div dir="ltr"><br> <hr tabindex="-1"> <font size="2" face="Tahoma"><b>From:</b> Joshua Albrecht<br><b>Sent:</b> Thu 2/23/2012 11:46<br><b>To:</b> smt-talk<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Smt-talk] Beethoven's Sonatas<br></font><br></div> <div dir="ltr"> <div style="FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma; DIRECTION: ltr; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 10pt"> <div>Dear list,</div> <div><br></div> <div>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 <i>am</i> 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.</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"><span style="BORDER-COLLAPSE: collapse; FONT-FAMILY: arial,sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(34,34,34)" class="Apple-style-span"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div> _______________________________________________<br>Smt-talk mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Smt-talk@lists.societymusictheory.org">Smt-talk@lists.societymusictheory.org</a><br>http://lists.societymusictheory.org/listinfo.cgi/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org<br></blockquote></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++</div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div>Charles J. 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