ABSTRACT
Eduard Hanslick’s influential and no less controversial On the Musically Beautiful indicated with clarity that instrumental music does not contain and does not raise emotions, or at least not real cause-related emotions, and that music consists of “tonally moving forms”. Hanslick’s insight regarding the a-causal nature of the sensations triggered by music is also confirmed by recent research on music and emotions. The pleasure of the music listener, according to Hanslick, is to follow the rapid changes of the musical tones, which may be slow, strong, weak, rising, falling. The idea that music contains or raises emotions in the listener had been the stock interpretation of music aesthetics since the eighteenth century when the discussion on the nature of the arts was kindled by the philosophical developments of the time. Eighteenth-century thinkers who wrote about the emotional component of musical mimesis extrapolated Aristotle’s theory of literary mimesis to musical mimesis.
