Relating musical structure and content to aesthetic response: A model and analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 110

Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Volumn 130, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 74-118

  Ockelford, Adam ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 39749121492     PISSN: 02690403     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jrma/fki002     Document Type: Review

References (120)

1. William Kinderman, 'Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Amusic flat sign Major, Opus 110', Beethoven Forum, 1, ed. Christopher Reynolds, Lewis Lockwood and James Webster (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1992), 111-45 (p. 111).
2. Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994).
3. See, for example, Adam Ockelford, 'The Role of Repetition in Perceived Musical Structures', Representing Musical Structure, ed. Peter Howell, Robert West and Ian Cross (London, 1991), 129-60;
4. 'A Theory Concerning the Cognition of Order in Music' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1993);
5. The Cognition of Order in Music: A Metacognitive Study (London, 1999);
6. 'The Magical Number Two, Plus or Minus One: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Musical Information', Musicae scientiae, 6 (2002), 177-215;
7. 'On Similarity, Derivation, and the Cognition of Musical Structure', Psychology of Music, 32 (2004), 23-74.
8. Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. Patrik juslin and John Sloboda (Oxford, 2001).
9. David Temperley, personal communication, 2003.
10. Robert Gjerdingen, 'An Experimental Music Theory?', Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), 161-70 (p. 166).
11. Francis Sparshott, 'Music and Feeling', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52 (1994), 23-36 (p. 28).
12. Since, as Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley observe, survival often requires that, as sentient creatures interacting with highly complex environments that are ultimately irreducible to logical analysis, we gauge sensory input intuitively. Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 'Basic Emotions, Rationality, and Folk Theory', Cognition and Emotion, 6 (1992), 201-23 (p. 201).
13. Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda, 'Music and Emotion: Introduction', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 3-20 (p. 3).
14. See Jenefer Robinson, 'Introduction: New Ways of Thinking about Musical Meaning', Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer Robinson (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997), 1-20 (pp. 2-3).
15. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 8.
16. Nicholas Cook and Nicola Dibben, 'Musicological Approaches to Emotion', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 45-70 (p. 50).
17. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven.
18. See Adrian North and David Hargreaves, 'Experimental Aesthetics and Everyday Music Listening', The Social Psychology of Music, ed. David Hargreaves and Adrian North (Oxford, 1997), 84-103 (p. 84);
19. John Sloboda, 'Does Music Mean Anything?', Musicae scientiae, 2 (1998), 21-32 (p. 26).
20. John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin, 'Psychological Perspectives on Music and Emotion', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 71-104 (p. 81).
21. For example, Daniel Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York, 1971);
22. Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics, ed. Daniel Berlyne (Washington, DC, 1974).
23. See Patrik Juslin and Marcel Zentner, 'Current Trends in the Study of Music and Emotion: Overture', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 3-21 (p. 3).
24. See, for instance, Marco Costa, Pio Bitti and Luisa Bonfiglio, 'Psychological Connotations of Harmonic Musical Intervals', Psychology of Music, 28 (2000), 4-22;
25. Glenn Schellenberg, Ania Krysciak and Jane Campbell, 'Perceiving Emotion in Melody: Interactive Effects of Pitch and Rhythm', Music Perception, 18 (2000), 155-71;
26. and Alf Gabrielsson and Erik Lindström, 'The Influence of Musical Structure on Musical Expression', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 223-48.
27. Tia DeNora, 'Aesthetic Agency and Musical Practice: New Directions in the Sociology of Music and Emotion', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 161-80.
28. Isabelle Peretz, Lise Gagnon and Bernard Bouchard, 'Music and Emotion: Perceptual Determinants, Immediacy, and Isolation after Brain Damage', Cognition, 68 (1998), 111-41;
29. Isabelle Peretz, 'Listen to the Brain: A Biological Perspective on Music and Emotion', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 105-34.
30. Judith Becker, 'Anthropological Perspectives on Music and Emotion', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 135-60.
31. Klaus Scherer and Marcel Zentner, 'Emotional Effects of Music: Production Rules', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 361-92 (p. 380);
32. Daniel Västfjäll, 'A Review of the Musical Mood Induction Procedure', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 173-211.
33. Sloboda and Juslin, 'Music and Emotion: Commentary', 459.
34. Mitch Waterman, 'Emotional Responses to Music: Implicit and Explicit Effects in Listeners and Performers', Psychology of Music, 24 (1996), 53-67 (p. 66).
35. Sparshott, 'Music and Feeling', 24.
36. Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London, 1985).
37. Justin London, 'Some Theories of Emotion in Music and their Implications for Research in Music Psychology', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 23-36 (p. 25).
38. David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell and Raymond MacDonald, 'What are Musical Identities, and Why are They Important?', Musical Identities, ed. Raymond MacDonald, David Hargreaves and Dorothy Miell (Oxford, 2002), 1-20 (p. 11).
39. Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Oxford, 1959).
40. See, for example, Clive Gabriel, 'An Experimental Study of Deryck Cooke's Theory of Music and Meaning', Psychology of Music, 6 (1978), 13-20;
41. and Peter Hampson, 'A Naturalistic Empirical Investigation of Deryck Cooke's Theory of Music and Meaning', Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. Chris Woods, Geoff Luck, Renaud Brochard, Fred Seddon and John Sloboda (CD, Keele, 2000).
42. Karl Watson, 'The Nature and Measurement of Musical Meanings', Psychological Monographs, 54 (1942), 1-43.
43. Klaus Scherer and James Oshinsky, 'Cue Utilization in Emotion Attribution from Auditory Stimuli', Motivation and Emotion, 1 (1977), 331-46.
44. Watson, 'The Nature and Measurement of Musical Meanings'; Lage Wedin, 'Multidimensional Study of Perceptual-Emotional Qualities in Music', Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 13 (1972), 241-57.
45. William Thompson and Brent Robitaille, 'Can Composers Express Emotions through Music?', Empirical Studies of the Arts, 10 (1992), 79-89.
46. Ralph Gundlach, 'Factors Determining the Characterization of Musical Phrases', American Journal of Psychology, 47 (1935), 624-44.
47. Laura-Lee Balkwill and William Thompson, 'A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Perception of Emotion in Music: Psychology and Cultural Cues', Music Perception, 17 (1999), 43-64.
48. Watson, 'The Nature and Measurement of Musical Meanings'.
49. Gundlach, 'Factors Determining the Characterization of Musical Phrases'.
50. Sören Nielzén and Zvonimir Cesarec, 'Emotional Experience of Music as a Function of Musical Structure', Psychology of Music, 10 (1982), 7-17.
51. Patrik Juslin, 'Perceived Emotional Expression in Synthesized Performances of a Short Melody. Capturing the Listener's Judgement Policy', Musicae scientiae, 1 (1997), 225-56.
52. Leonard Meyer, 'Music and Emotion: Distinctions and Uncertainties', Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda, 341-60 (p. 342).
53. Justin London, 'Musical Expression and Musical Meaning in Context', Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. Woods, Luck, Brochard, Seddon and Sloboda.
54. Patrik Juslin, Anders Friberg and Roberto Bresin, 'Toward a Computational Model of Expression in Music Performance: The GERM Model', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 63-122.
55. Klaus Scherer, Rainer Banse and Harad Wallbott, 'Emotion Inferences from Vocal Expression Correlate Across Languages and Cultures', Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32 (2001), 76-92.
56. Klaus Scherer, 'Emotion Expression in Speech and Music', Music, Language, Speech and Brain, ed. Johan Sundberg, Lennart Nord and Rolf Carlson (London, 1991), 146-56;
57. 'Affect Bursts', Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory, ed. Stephanie van Goozen, Nanne van de Poll and Joseph Sergeant (Hillsdale, NJ, 1994), 161-96;
58. 'Expression of Emotion in Voice and Music', Journal of Voice, 9 (1995), 235-48.
59. Stephen Malloch, 'Mothers and Infants and Communicative Musicality', Musicae scientiae, special issue 1999/2000, 29-54;
60. Sandra Trehub and Takayuki Nakata, 'Emotion and Music in Infancy', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 37-61;
61. Colwyn Trevarthen, 'Origins of Musical Identity: Evidence from Infancy for Musical Social Awareness', Musical Identities, ed. MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell, 21-38.
62. Meyer, 'Music and Emotion', 342.
63. See London, 'Some Theories of Emotion in Music and their Implications for Research in Music Psychology', 24.
64. Carol Krumhansl, 'An Exploratory Study of Musical Emotions and Psychophysiology', Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 51 (1997), 336-52;
65. Peretz, Gagnon and Bouchard, 'Music and Emotion'.
66. Nazir Jairazbhoy, The Rāgs of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution (London, 1971). 28.
67. Kate Hevner, 'Experimental Studies of the Elements of Expression in Music', American Journal of Psychology, 48 (1936), 246-68;
68. Robert Crowder, 'Perception of the Major/Minor Distinction: III. Hedonic, Musical and Affective Discriminations', Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 23 (1985), 314-16;
69. Krumhansl, 'An Exploratory Study of Musical Emotions and Psychophysiology';
70. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (The Hague, 1905-10; repr. 1964);
71. summarized in Izchak Miller, Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 120ff.;
72. revisited in David Lewin, 'Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception', Music Perception, 3 (1986), 327-92 (pp. 329ff.).
73. See Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Cognition and Communication (Oxford, 1995), 118;
74. Emery Schubert, 'Correlation Analysis of Continuous Emotional Response to Music: Correcting for the Effects of Serial Correlation', Musicae scientiae, special issue 2001/02, 213-36.
75. On the basis of listeners' retrospective accounts, John Sloboda confirmed musicians' intuitive notion that melodic appoggiaturas are one of the features of Western classical music capable of triggering a marked emotional response. See Sloboda, 'Music Structure and Emotional Response: Some Empirical Findings', Psychology of Music, 19 (1991), 110-20.
76. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, MA, 1942; repr. 1957), 226ff.
77. Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London, 1920; repr. 1997). 54.
78. See Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), 118-19.
79. Reflecting further on the comparison with language, while it is the meanings of words that tend to elicit an emotional response, it is their syntactical structure and sonic qualities that induce the aesthetic component of our reaction to a text (beauty, felicity of expression and so forth). Repetition (the foundation of structure in music) sometimes plays a part: through rhyme, assonance, alliteration, anaphora and metre, for example. See Carlos Chavéz, Musical Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 39, 40;
80. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 147-8;
81. Ockelford, 'A Theory Concerning the Cognition of Order in Music', 168.
82. See London, 'Some Theories of Emotion in Music', 25.
83. See Douglas Dempster, 'Is There Even a Grammar of Music?', Musicae scientiae, 2 (1998), 55-65 (p. 58).
84. See John Rothgeb, 'Thematic Content: A Schenkerian View', Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven and London, 1983), 39-60 (p. 39): 'Music, lacking access to the kinds of direct association with the phenomenal world central to most other art forms, was able to satisfy the universal requirement of association only through the "likeness of itself" - through self-repetition.'
85. Also Basil de Selincourt, 'Music and Duration', Reflections on Art, ed. Suzanne Langer (London, 1958), 152-60 (p. 156): 'The value of repetition in music belongs of course to the peculiar inwardness of the art. A musical composition must be content to be itself. The reference and relations into which analysis resolves its life-current need point to no object, no event; they take the form of the creative impulse which is their unity and they repeat one another because iteration is the only outward sign of identity which is available to them.'
86. Edward Cone, 'On Derivation: Syntax and Rhetoric', Music Analysis, 6 (1987), 237-55 (p. 237).
87. Ockelford, 'The Role of Repetition in Perceived Musical Structures', 141.
88. See Ockelford, The Cognition of Order in Music.
89. See Lawrence Zbikowski, 'Metaphor and Music Theory', Music Theory Online, 4 (1998), vol. 1;
90. and Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York, 2002). Building on the work of George Lakoff, Zbikowski shows how such notions are underpinned by culture-specific conceptual metaphors, mapped onto the domain of music-space from our perception of the physical world.
91. Ockelford, 'The Magical Number Two, Plus or Minus One'.
92. See Eugene Narmour, 'Music Expectations by Cognitive Rule-Mapping', Music Perception, 17 (2000), 329-98 (p. 364).
93. A fuller discussion of key issues in zygonic theory, including what counts as sameness and similarity, and how these interact with the notions of salience, categorization and derivation, is to be found elsewhere. See Ockelford, 'On Similarity, Derivation, and the Cognition of Musical Structure'.
94. See Alan Garnham, Jane Oakhill and Philip Johnson-Laird, 'Referential Continuity and the Coherence of Discourse', Cognition, 11 (1982), 29-46.
95. See John Sloboda, 'Does Music Mean Anything?'
96. Cf. Meyer's reason for preferring the notion of implication to that of causation in music theory and analysis: that the former makes more sense in the context of uncertainty, which he holds to be the catalyst of emotional response to music, see, for example, Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology, Philadelphia, 1989, 84ff.
97. 'Music and Emotion, Distinctions and Uncertainties', 346-7. However, as I argue above, since informed anticipation appears to play a central role in musical affect, uncertainty cannot, and it is because relationships between objects in music are only metaphorical that the concept of implication is preferable to that of causation.
98. See also Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 72, who contend that 'for a representation to be amenable to logical processing, all that is necessary is for it to be well-formed' (rather than semantically complete - that is, representative of a state of affairs in a possible or actual world). In Sperber and Wilson's terms, logic in language (that is semantically complete, and therefore capable of being true or false) can be described as propositional, whereas logic in music would be considered non-propositional
99. (see also Dempster, 'Is There Even a Grammar of Music?', 61). In language, Sperber and Wilson contend (p. 84), 'logical implication' is a syntactic relation which holds purely by virtue of the formal properties of assumptions, involving no reference to their semantic properties. This supports the notion that logical implication - the keystone of zygonic theory - is applicable to music too.
100. A comparable line of argument is advanced by Bob Snyder, Music and Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 230: 'By causing musical events to "point to" other musical events, it connects those events in a relation of implication.... Musical linearity is like a metaphor of physical causation, and indeed linearity is an attempt to make musical events seem to cause each other. (Note that much of the linearity in verbal narrative structures is based on causation - events are connected to other events through earlier events causing the later events.)'
101. See also Fred Maus, 'Narrative, Drama and Emotion in Instrumental Music', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997), 293-303.
102. See Diana Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
103. Tim Horton, 'The Compositionality of Tonal Structures: A Generative Approach to the Notion of Musical Meaning', Musicae scientiae, 5 (2001), 131-56 (p. 143).
104. Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), 49.
105. Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition (London, 1967), 1.
106. Thus creating an effect in some ways comparable to that produced by the technique of photomontage when it is used to form the image of a human face from many smaller pictures of faces. The expressions (happy, sad, etc.) on these individual physiognomies need not correspond to those evinced by the single, larger face. Hence there could be a number of smaller, sad images coming together to make a happy whole. So it is with minor chords in a major context and vice versa: by focusing one's attention on the detail, a particular aesthetic response may come to the fore; by attending more globally, a different reaction may be engendered. In fact, it is likely there will be an interaction between the two: the effect of a major tonality will be coloured by the minor elements within it (and vice versa). In his Auditory Scene Analysis (Cambridge, MA, 1990)
107. Ockelford, Repetition in Music: Theoretical and Metatheoretical Perspectives, RMA Monographs, 13 (London, 2005).
108. See Schubert, 'Correlation Analysis of Continuous Emotional Response to Music', 216.
109. Richard Davidson, 'On Emotion, Mood, and Related Affective Constructs', The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, ed. Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson (Oxford, 1994), 51-5 (p. 52).
110. Cook and Dibben, 'Musicological Approaches to Emotion', 67.
111. See Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven: Die letzten Sonaten: Sonate in As Dur Op. 110 (Vienna, 1972). 17.
112. Summarized in Gabrielsson and Lindström, 'The Influence of Musical Structure on Musical Expression'.
113. For example, Eric Blom, Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Discussed (London, 1938), 230.
114. However, this is a typical feature of Beethoven's late style - see Martin Cooper, Beethoven: The Last Decade 1817-1827 (Oxford, 1985), 425 - and the opening sonority foreshadows greater extremes of register later in the movement; see, for example, bars 25-8.
115. See Timothy Maher and Daniel Berlyne, 'Verbal and Exploratory Responses to Melodic Musical Intervals', Psychology of Music, 10 (1982), 11-27.
116. See Cooper, Beethoven, 190.
117. Kinderman, 'Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in Amusic flat sign Major, Opus 110', 117.
118. Ockelford, Repetition in Music;
119. Rudolph Réti, The Thematic Process in Music (Westport, 1951).
120. Christopher Ballantine, Music and its Social Meanings (Johannesburg, 1984), 74.