4. MUSIC and EMOTIONS PHILOSOPHY.
As I already told in the introduction, it was the philosophical approach to emotions the one that really caught my attention. Although philosophers of Ancient Greece had already assumed a close relationship between emotions and music, the most important texts appear from the 16th century onwards, first with Galilei and the Camerata Fiorentina, but especially with Descartes' Passions of the Soul. I should mention the works of Schopenhauer and Hanslick in the 19th century, as well as Susanne Langer's and Leonard Meyer's in the 20th century. However, in this research, I will compare the points of view of three philosophers who tried to answer the same question: What is it about music that touches us? Or, in other words, how does music touch us? Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, and Peter Kivy interacted in the last decades of the 20th century with different proposals about this topic.
A) Jerrold LEVINSON: a matter of imagination.
Jerrold Levinson (1948-) offers his Hypothetical Emotionalism theory, where he explains that a piece is expressive, and then possibly touching, when it can be heard as the expression of the emotion of a hypothetical agent or imagined persona (Collins, 2021, p. 71). Peter Kivy (2005, p. 140) refers to it as a version of an 'empathy' theory, where imagination plays a crucial role. Thanks to the expression of this evoked image, ordinary and typical emotions could be felt, much as if we empathized with a fictional character. Levinson recognizes that the emotions felt are not always the same as those expressed by the musical fragment or passage: the personal associations drive these emotional responses (Levinson, 2016, p. 2). In other words, the expressiveness of the music does not always match with the emotionality. Beyond this appreciation, Levinson does not pay more attention to this relevant dissociation between both.
TWO CONSIDERATIONS: On the one hand, there could be one music-specific sort of emotion, in which the music itself directly enters into the emotion experienced while listening to it thanks to a double intentional object: the evoked image and the musical or sound structures accompanying it (Levinson, 2016, p. 2). I will come back to this idea of music-specificity later. On the other hand, Levinson defends his main theory with the mere notion of expressiveness, which comes from expression, which is primarily a matter of an agent's inner state (Collins, 2021, p. 76). If it is a psychological state, a psychological agent is needed.
GESTURES: Taking by reference his formula, “A passage of music P is expressive of an emotion E if and only if P, in context, is readily heard, by a listener experienced in the genre in question, as an expression of E”, he adds that music should be heard as an expressive act, that means, to imagine a persona that could be responsible for it (Levinson, 2006, as cited in Collins, 2016, p. 77). But if expression is the externalization of the internal psychological state through a behavior or gesture, it would be enough to imagine this gesture to experience music as expressive. For David Collins, this version leads to quite a 'conducive' understatement of music: "conducive to being a 'soundtrack'" (p. 78). Indeed, this Levinson's imaginary agent does not need to be clearly defined. Only one characteristic is needed: the emotion or gesture it has/makes.
'FULL-FLEDGED' EMOTIONS? Levinson acknowledges that the emotional responses to music are not as strong as ordinary emotions. The imaginative mode in which his theory develops could weaken or inhibit the respective behaviors of each (musical) emotion (Levinson, 2016, p. 6). This fact or doubt is included in the 'paradox of emotions caused by fiction', which seems to be quite similar to Levinson's approach to the emotional reaction to music (Kivy, 2005, p. 143-144) . We can feel emotions empathizing with fictional characters or situations, despite knowing these are not real. But are these truly emotions? As soon as we are (again) aware that those actions/characters are not real, these emotions almost disappear. As it is a similar process, we could say that the musical emotions in terms of Levinson's 'Hypothetical Emotionalism' are quasi-emotions, or as Kivy (2005, p. 147) writes, 'not full-fledged emotions'.
MUSIC-SPECIFICITY. Since emotions are felt in relation to/coming from/inhering in the musical passage, Levinson (2016, p. 5-11) tries to demonstrate the validity of this proposal by analyzing the characteristics of emotion: the intentional, evaluative, actional, physiological, and affective components. Regarding the intentional element, the aforementioned duality of intentional objects could be music-specific, as well as the psychological component, since a micro-reaction ensemble (based on tension/relaxation) runs while listening to a musical passage. In the same way is the actional function music-specific, since the rhythmic entrainment and the subvocalization are inherent to the musical listening. Lastly, the affective component could also be explained from the music-specificity look, through two routes. The first one makes use of our recurrent tendency to express or refer to specific emotions with musical pieces or fragments, as there were no words that could define such feeling better. In this notion already taken into account by several philosophers in the past, the individuality and the ineffability of music play a huge role. The second route is a more empirical one. Levinson calls it the sonic-emotive feel, in which the direct sonic feel (in other words, how music itself sounds) and the generic emotive feel (what the listener feels) merge.
Levinson believes his idea of music-specificity could work beyond a musical passage. A determined (or, of course, specific) succession of emotional responses to a sequence of musical passages is only possible with the same sequence (Levinson, 2016, p. 13). We could talk then about the music-specific emotional experience of a piece.