It sometimes seems that, through science, humankind has conquered the entire world: we have mapped the globe and the human genome and are bent on discovering whether there is life on Mars. What mysteries are left (such as, for instance, the reason the wave-form of a particle collapses when it is detected) seem so esoteric as to leave ordinary people quite untouched. It can come as a surprise, then, to realize that there are mysteries right under out noses that science has so far completely failed to explain. One such question is the reason why we dream; nobody has come up with a convincing explanation for this. Another great mystery is to do with music. Why do we find major chords happy and minor chords sad?
To clarify why this last question is such a puzzle, it is useful to put it in context. Theories of musical appreciation (I refer here to my Routledge Companion to Aesthetics) fall into a number of different camps. Expressionists hold that we value music because it expresses emotions. Arousalism, a type of Espressionism, holds that the emotions ‘in the music’ arouse corresponding emotions in the listener. Referentialism holds that music refers to emotions, ideas and situations present in the “extramusical world” (enabling us to perceive the sadness of a particular work without become sad ourselves).
Formalism is the antithesis of Referentialism. The Formalist believes that music does not relate to anything in the outside world; music is abstract, mathematical, apart from physical reality. It may stimulate emotions but these emotions are typically little more than feelings of anticipation and satisfaction, such as the feeling of release when a dominant chord returns to the tonic,
The problem with these perspectives is that, on a whole, they do not explain WHY we might hear emotions in music. The extreme Formalist holds that ‘pure’ music does not express emotion at all (although the weight of opinion is against him); the Expressionist, while arguing music can express quite complicated states of mind, has been unable to show how rhythmic patterns of aural frequencies can communicate these feelings. In 1989, P.Kivey stepped into the breach with a theory he termed the “contour theory”. In this view, music is not so much referential as mimetic. Happy music imitates the vocal inflections and body language of happy people, and sad music carries out the converse. In this way Kivy presents an empirical theory of music; our understanding of music is based on our observations of other people.
I read Kivy’s essay some years ago and the thing I remember particularly about it was its tentativeness. I think Kivy was right to be tentative: the theory seems to me quite implausible. For instance, his theory cannot explain why a minor chord should sound sad. However Kivy should be applauded for at least attempting to grapple with this mystery; few others have even tried.
Rather than confront the question of emotions in music head on, I thought I would take this opportunity to present an original theory on musical taste. To put it in context, I should say that it is a Formalist theory but treats taste as an acquired faculty rather than something innate.
We are surrounded by music from infancy. However, most people do not establish a personal taste in music until adolescence. As a teenager, one seeks to imitate one’s peers by liking the same genres of music that they like– I remember when I was about thirteen I made a conscious decision to like Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge groups because these bands seemed to appropriate to how I view myself. (Although I cold never like the Smashing Pumpkins because I disliked Billy Corgan’s voice.) Simply put, one forms one’s sense of taste first by emulating those whom we admire, those whom we believe themselves possess ‘good taste’.
Once we have established a ‘taste’ in music, this conditions our every encounter with a new song. We unconsciously compare new songs to the ones we know and like, looking for similarities and differences. In effect, we have memorized every song we like (and a good few we don’t), and have integrated their underlying patterns and salient features into out musical perceptions. It is these features that we look for in new music. Is this song, we ask ourselves, one that we can like? Is it novel and surprising and yet a natural extension of the kind of music I ordinarily enjoy? A resemblance to music one already likes can motivate one to pay attention to a new song for long enough for it to one to absorb it, assimilating it into ones internal database, altering how we hear music afterwards. For example, when I first hear Coldplay’s debut album, all I could hear was that they were influenced by Radiohead and Jeff Buckley and thought Coldplay a pale imitation; later on I came to appreciate their sound as something distinctive and original.
The theory I have sketched out above is only a partial theory. Musical taste is not entirely learned: I think there is some kind of innate component to musical appreciation as well, some rudimentary musical understanding which can be cultivated as we grow older. Has a cultural anthropologist ever played Beethoven to an isolated Papua New Guinea tribe to see what they think of it? Perhaps we are hardwired to hear major chords as happy and minor chords as sad. Perhaps human beings once communicated in music and the musical part of our brain has survived as a vestigial organ like the appendix. This is a pretty silly theory but not much more silly than Kivy’s.
A final note. I have been criticized for my use of the term ‘aesthetic’. Am I using it incorrectly? In my dictionary the adjective ‘aesthetic’ is defined as “concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art”. As a noun, “aesthetic” is defined as “a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty”. However, the term ‘aesthetics’ is also used to describe “the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty, and artistic taste.”
In her essay on “Taste”, Carolyn Kosmeyer says that, today, the term ‘aesthetic’ is “directed toward the experience of beauty and the unique experiences of emotive insight art can afford”. In his essay on “The Aesthetic” Alan Goldman suggests the broadness of the modern conception of “Aesthetic”; in his view, “it now qualifies not only judgements and evaluations, but properties, attitudes, experience and pleasure or value as well, and its application is no longer restricted to beauty alone.”
By using the term ‘aesthetic’ I am trying to talk about the experiences we have that are provoked exlusively by our encounters with art and literature. I assume that aesthetic experiences are qualitatively different from our experiences of the rest of the world. (One such difference being, for instance, that when we engage with stories we treat them as fictions rather than facts, suspending our disbelief.) This is one way of defining the aesthetic realm. To be honest, I am unsure if aesthetic experiences can in fact be easily separated from our more worldly experiences, but the assumption is useful to the kind of analysis I am performing.
Thanks for your feedback, by the way.