ABSTRACT

Descriptions of music in terms of emotion are metaphorical. Malcolm Budd claims that music sounds the way emotions feel. According to the Aesthetic Metaphor Thesis, emotion descriptions are used to describe the substantive aesthetic features of music that make it aesthetically good or bad. This chapter discusses in many respects, the precise role that emotion descriptions play supports the Aesthetic Metaphor Thesis over its rivals. The issue of negative emotion in music is in fact not just a problem that the Aesthetic Metaphor Thesis can overcome but something that weighs significantly in favour of the Aesthetic Metaphor Thesis and against emotion theories. Jenefer Robinson argues that some emotions, such as exhilaration and the startle reaction do not have intentional content, and she claims that music can provoke such contentless emotions. For the descriptions of those relations between music and emotion would be literal: they would describe a relation "expression, arousal, representation" that holds between music and real emotion.