When asked to describe what music means to them, most people talk about its power to express or elicit emotions. As a melody can produce a tear, tingle the spine, or energize athletes, music has a deep impact on how we experience and encounter the world. Because of the elusiveness of these musical emotions, however, little has been written about how music creates emotions and how musical emotion has changed its meaning for listeners across the last millennium.
In this sweeping landmark study, author Michael Spitzer provides the first history of musical emotion in the Western world, from Gregorian chant to Beyoncé. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, A History of Emotion in Western Music introduces current approaches to the study of emotion and formulates an original theory of how musical emotion works. Diverging from psychological approaches that center listeners' self-reports or artificial experiments, Spitzer argues that musical emotions can be uncovered in the techniques and materials of composers and performers. Together with its extensive chronicle of the historical evolution of musical style and emotion, this book offers a rich union of theory and history.
This landmark book not only offers the first account of the history of emotion in Western music, with a broad sweep from Gregorian chant to Beyoncé, but also lays out an original theory for understanding musical emotion that centers the work of composers and performers.
In this extraordinary volume, building on decades of research and music analysis, Michael Spitzer offers the reader not one but two books. He not only constructs a richer model for the staging and experiencing of musical emotion, but he also breaks new ground in demonstrating, from Hildegard of Bingen to the latest popular music, how music has its own history of changing emotional cultures, and the extent to which we can reconstruct what it was possible to feel or express in each era. It is thrilling to follow Spitzer's masterful arguments as he concisely dissects not only the speculative claims of philosophers throughout history, but also the theories and experimental results of psychologists of our own time, drawing out their positive contributions to forge a theory of breathtaking scope.
