Cognitively Complex
Emotions,
Without Appeal to the
Existence of
Musical Personae
In their article, “Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expression of Cognitively Complex Emotions”, Gregory Karl and Jenefer Robinson argue that, “if indeed we take into account the structure of an entire piece, it will sometimes be possible to detect the expression of cognitively complex emotions, and to detect them by identifying some significant part of their cognitive content.”[1] This is in direct opposition to Levinson’s view that music can express specific emotions “without actually having to represent cognitive content,”[2] a view that would require those emotions to be somehow expressed entirely through their noncognitive aspects. It seems at least a little bit unlikely, though, that music, or anything else, for that matter, is capable of expressing complex emotional content without any resort to the cognitive aspects of the emotions in question. Karl and Robinson agree that Levinson is overly optimistic in his evaluation of music’s ability to represent the noncognitive aspects of emotion, and they support their alternate claim with an interpretation of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony in which they attribute “the complex cognitive states characteristic of hope”[3] to the piece’s musical persona.
The authors admit that they leave unaddressed the question of how this persona might be identified within the music, but they say nothing explicit about the fact that there is also a question as to whether the persona exists at all. They presuppose that such a persona exists, and that it is capable of expressing emotions. It appears that, if music is expressive of certain emotions, those emotions must be the actual emotions of some entity. There are numerous cases in which the emotions music seems to express are not those actually had by the composer or the musician(s), so the only way to allow for such expression is to say that the emotions belong to some fictive persona within the music itself. I will let stand the claim that musical expression depends on the existence of musical personae. Additionally, I will not try to convince readers that musical expression does not exist. Instead, for the sake of argument, I will start with the assumption that musical personae do not exist. I will then try to examine the connection between music and emotion without resorting to notions of expression or personae. I believe it can be shown that music is capable of accurately representing or referring to specific, cognitively complex emotions, without necessarily expressing those emotions.
In Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer says that one of the more novel contributions Schopenhauer made was in his treatment of music as “a symbolism with a content of ideas, instead of an overt sign of somebody’s emotional condition.”[4] Langer seems to believe that music, rather than expressing emotions as belonging to a persona, merely symbolizes those emotions through its formal similarity to human emotions. She makes it clear that she is not talking about formal similarity with characteristic behavioral expressions of human emotion, a notion which has been entertained by numerous other philosophers, but rather with the emotional experience itself. This sounds somewhat like Levinson’s claim, even though Levinson is among those philosophers who prefer a behavioral approach to answering questions about the connection between music and emotions, in that both think music is related to emotion noncognitively. While Langer does not explicitly deny any complex cognitive content to the emotions symbolized in music, it is unlikely that such content can be found in the mere dynamic morphology of either music or emotional experience. She also says that music cannot represent emotions very specifically, because feelings of joy and feelings of sorrow may sometimes have nearly the same dynamic morphology, and thus a given musical passage may refer equally well to both types of emotional experience. If the only necessary connection between music and emotion existed in the formal similarities between the two, I would agree that music cannot very well represent specific emotions. However, I believe that complex cognitive content can be represented musically, even without being understood as the cognitive content any persona represented by the music, and therefore that music can pinpoint emotions far more specifically than either Langer or Levinson admit.
Take, for example, the emotion of hope, which Karl and Robinson claim is expressed in the third movement of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. If hope is not seen as being the emotion of some persona, fictive or otherwise, its cognitive characteristics cannot be as specific as those Karl and Robinson cite, all of which deal with the mental states of some person P. At the same time, the combination of these characteristics must to be just as unique to the emotion of hope as the combination of the characteristics they give. Hanslick, in the first chapter of On the Musically Beautiful, gives us a simpler and equally applicable description when he says, “The feeling of hope cannot be separated from the representation of a future happy state which we compare with the present.” He goes on to point out that the distinction between hope and melancholy depends entirely on whether the happy state is in the future or the past.[5] So if we can show that a part of a musical passage which represents happiness also represents the future, and that a part of the passage which represents sadness (or any other negative emotion) also represents the present, then we will have succeeded in showing that this passage represents hope, and thus that music is in general capable of representing hope. (Interestingly, if that happens, we will have used Hanslick’s own description of hope to disprove his claim that hope, along with most other emotions, cannot be represented musically.)
Before we can possibly “test” a given musical work in order to see if it represents hope, we must have a more rigorous description of what it means for part of a musical work to represent happiness or sadness, future or present. Furthermore, this description must not depend on the existence of any apparent musical personae. It is fairly easy to describe how music can represent such simple emotions as sorrow and joy. Slow passages in a minor key have long been associated with sorrow, while faster passages in a major key have long been associated with joy. When people are happy, they are likely to act faster and with more “bounce” than when they are sad. As far as mode is concerned, chords in a major key are more closely related to the sequence of partials than those in a minor key, so they naturally sound more consonant, due to the physical nature of the composite frequencies. A group of people expressing great sorrow (via weeping or wailing) will typically sound very dissonant when doing so. It is possible that the minor mode came to be associated with sadness as a more rigorous and stylized method of achieving the dissonance of a vocal expression of sadness. Regardless of how such associations originated, the fact remains that they exist today, largely independent of any (conscious) association with the ways people express the emotions of joy and sorrow. Therefore, we can safely say that these simple emotions can be represented in music entirely because of our culture’s musical conventions, without having to presume the existence of an entity to whom the represented emotions belong.
For part of a musical work to represent something temporal is more difficult to explain. To begin with, there are no established conventions for representing the future or the present. Additionally, it is not enough to say that a passage represents the present if it is happening right now, because then every part of the work would represent the present at some time over the course of any given performance. However, if we alter our description of hope slightly, the temporal side of the explanation becomes easier. Hope looks toward the future in a positive light, contrasting it with something negative that is closer at hand. For all intents and purposes, our present state is entirely determined by the sum total of past events. Therefore, hope can just as easily be said to deal with future happiness compared to past sadness, instead of future happiness compared to present sadness. (Similarly, we could say melancholy actually deals with a past happy state compared to the sad expected future.) For a particular passage to represent the past, it needs to be a recapitulation of some theme that was developed earlier in the work. To represent the future, it needs to be a “precapitulation” of some theme that is not fully developed until later in the work.
Obviously, if we take a passage in isolation, there is no earlier or later in the same musical work, because there is no full musical work under consideration, so none of these criteria would have any relevance. In order to avoid this, we have to look at the piece as a whole when we “test” to see if it represents hope. If the piece as a whole does not include passages at the beginning that represent sadness, along with passages near the end that represent happiness, then it is unlikely that any of the passages in the middle will represent hope. If the piece does have sad passages at the beginning and happy ones at the end, we need to look more closely at passages in the middle to see if any of them might represent both past sorrow and future joy.
At this point, what remains to be seen is whether a single section of a musical work can represent both of these emotions, along with temporal references. It would be possible, and not especially difficult, to simply list what characteristics such a passage might have, but an explanation without concrete examples would likely ring a bit hollow. Karl and Robinson, in their article on Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, were kind enough to quote several relevant parts of the score, so I think that this is as good a musical work as any to use as an example of how music can represent hope without being understood as an expression of hope. Before making a detailed investigation, we should note that the opening theme of the symphony’s first movement is slow and in a minor key, and that the final part of the fourth movement is a fast ascending theme in a major key. This means that passages at the beginning represent sadness, and passages at the end represent happiness, so the piece is a candidate for possibly representing hope.
In the middle of the symphony’s third movement, at rehearsal 114, the horn introduces a theme that does not appear at any earlier point in the symphony. This theme, in D-major, is repeated once more before the strings come in with a direct quotation of the symphony’s opening theme, which is in G-minor. Several measures later, at rehearsal 117, the horn theme occurs alongside the strings’ quotation of the initial motive of the opening theme, now in Bb-minor. The dissonance between the two modes is resolved when the strings go to a solid D-major triad a few measures later. Then the horn theme is passed to the upper winds, where it is greatly sped up and developed, always staying in a major key. In the fourth movement, after a fairly long and slow introduction, the theme reappears and develops into the “liveliest” passage the symphony has contained up to that point. (“Liveliest” is here used to illustrate the nature of the theme by analogy with human behavior, but only because there is not a satisfactory musical term for its quality, not because it should be seen as the expression of someone feeling “lively”.)
It should be noted, however, that Hanslick’s account of hope is perhaps not complete enough for our purposes. The fact that hope cannot be separated from future happiness and a present lack thereof merely means that these two are necessary conditions for the emotion of hope, not that they are sufficient. For instance, the contemplation of future happiness contrasted with the present situation may not count as hope, unless the act of contemplation itself contains an element of pleasure. While it may be difficult to imagine what the contemplation alone would be, if not hope, I think the passage we have already examined does in fact represent that element of pleasure. The section following rehearsal 117 involves representations both of past sadness and of future happiness, so it contains the necessary conditions for being a representation of hope. The contrast in this passage between Bb-minor and D-major is finally resolved into a D-major triad, which, as we already said, represents happiness by convention. In other words, this part of the passage represents happiness in the combination of past sadness and future happiness, so it can be taken as representing just that element of pleasure required for a true representation of hope.
The passage in the third movement, roughly between rehearsal 114 and rehearsal 118, therefore satisfies all the previously-defined criteria for a passage to represent hope. It contains some parts that refer back to the beginning of the symphony, which is slow and in the minor mode. Other parts refer to the end of the symphony, which is much faster and ends in a major key. That is, parts of the passage refer to the past and to sadness, while other parts refer to the future and to joy. At the same time, the section following rehearsal 117 represents the element of pleasure that is characteristic of hopeful contemplation of past sadness and future joy.
I believe at this point that I have shown music to be capable of representing the specific and cognitively complex emotion of hope, independent of the existence of any musical personae. However, I have not attempted to show that music can represent any other cognitively complex emotions as easily as it can with hope, and it is possible that no such representation is possible. Additionally, anyone who is predisposed to believe musical personae exist (for instance, anyone whose own theory of music and emotion relies heavily on personae) is likely to find many holes in my argument. Anyone who is predisposed to believe that music has no emotional content whatsoever is likely to find problems in all the places expressionists left alone. This is perfectly fine with me, as I am particularly bound neither to the idea that personae don’t exist nor to the idea that music has emotional content outside of what listeners tend to read into it. In writing this, I merely wanted to show that a position in the middle was at least plausible. If we are willing to admit that musical personae and the musical expression of emotions do not exist, we are by no means required to give up the idea that music has complex emotional content. At the same time, if we are willing to admit that music does have emotional content, we are by no means required to say that music expresses those emotions as being of some fictive persona within the music itself.
[1] Emphasis added. “Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony” Music and Meaning (1997 Cornell Univ. Press) p. 162.
[2] Ibid., p. 161. (Paraphrasing Levinson’s view from “Hope in The Hebrides”)
[3] Ibid., p. 163.
[4] Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1963 Harvard University Press) p. 219.
[5] Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Payzant (1986 Hackett Publishing Company) p. 9.