ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that debates in the psychology of emotion are perfectly compatible with a historically nuanced analysis of classical music, incorporating topic theory. One of the problems with Topic Theory is that it sidesteps a semiotics of musical emotion, opting instead for cultural units. Eric Clarke's assumption, that emotion is less pertinent to the perception of the Mozart quintet's musical structure, or indeed to eighteenth-century listening practice, can be contested. James Russell argues that a bipolar circular arrangement was a better reflection of how lay people categorized emotions: as combinations of pleasure and arousal; as polarized antonyms; and with overlapping 'fuzzy' boundaries. Igor Stravinsky's noisy, jagged, abrupt gestures are as expressive of anger as Mozart's, albeit worked out within a historical culture whose distinctiveness can hardly be gainsaid. The chapter explores the 'display rule' operant on Mozart's musical expression of Anger. Osmin's rage is the crux of the eponymous book by Peter Kivy.
