ABSTRACT
Music can express emotions without the help of words or pictures. In the most striking case, the purely instrumental music in an abstract tradition, such as the classical symphonic one, can be happy or sad. This chapter considers whether musical expressiveness is subjective or objective. The evidence usually brought forward for the subjective nature of attributions of expressiveness to music draws attention to the lack of coincidence in different people's judgments about the expressiveness of individual pieces. If music is very fine-grained in its expressiveness, slight contrasts in the emotional qualities attributed to the music will be indicative of disagreement. The opposing position maintains that music expresses only broad categories of emotion, in which case there is no substantive difference indicated by judging variously that the music is sad, morose, grief-laden, gloomy, downcast, or miserable. The theories just considered seek an owner who feels the emotion to which the music gives expression—the composer, the listener, or a hypothetical persona.
