Music's Arousal of Emotions

By music’s arousal of emotions I shall understand the arousal of emotions by music in the very act of listening to it (not in performing it, or dancing to it, for example). And by music I shall understand pure instrumental music – instrumental music that lacks a text, a dramatic context, a program that it seeks to illustrate, or anything else that might enable it to have a representational content that it would otherwise lack. Pure instrumental music undoubtedly has the power to arouse emotions in listeners. If ways that are irrelevant to appreciation of the music are not excluded, music can arouse emotions of every kind, including fear, anger, jealousy, hatred, despair, remorse, envy, patriotism, and embarrassment, for instance, rather than the relatively few emotions, such as joy, sadness, and excitement, that music is most commonly thought of as evoking. In fact, given any emotion and any piece of music whatsoever, no matter how poor it may be, that emotion might be elicited in someone by an appropriate relationship in which the listener stands to the music. This might be by means of a purely personal association or by some more general kind of association, a cultural one, perhaps, as with Elgar’s “once in a lifetime” tune (the Trio of Pomp and Circumstance March No.1) now tarnished by its regrettable association with hearty, feel-good English patriotism. But the musical arousal of emotions by associations that are not integral to the appreciation of the music is philosophically uninteresting. What I shall be concerned with is an aesthetic matter, the arousal of emotion in the appreciation of music as music, by the character of the music itself, not by the music’s being associated in the mind of the listener with something not in the music and irrelevant to its appeal as music, without which association the music would lack its power to excite the emotion. (This allows that associations of various kinds might well be exploited by composers – as often they are – and so be relevant to the appreciation of the musical works in question.) The crucial issue is what role, if any, the arousal of emotions plays 234in the understanding, appreciation, and value of (pure instrumental) music, and, in particular, what contribution, if any, it makes to the musical value of a piece. The important questions are these: Which emotions, if any, can music arouse in an aesthetically relevant manner? Why these and only these? In what way or ways does music manage to arouse them? What is the aesthetic significance of their arousal?