Donald Satz wrote:

>...  In the realm of music composition, excessively emotional composers
>tend to write in an exaggerated fashion for the sake of exaggeration;
>the over-wrought musical passages do not have any reasonable foundation
>or make any sense.

Arguably, all composers are emotional.  Why else would they be moved to
write music? Listen to Bach's "Dorian", and tell me the man was involved
in nothing more than an excerise in mathematical composition.

You might want to distinguish between emotional and passionate.  We are all
emotional (leaving aside the DSM-VI entry for "sociopath"), but we vary in
how passionate we are, and how we express our moods.

You do single out OVERLY emotional types.  But even that "overwroughtness"
(is that a word?) might more reflect the temper of the times or national
humors than individual personality.  Was Borodin or Moussorgski really any
less passionate than "Sailor Pete" Tchaikovski?

How about Wagner? Passionate? Emotional? Pathological? Or just out of
control?:-)

To me, there is as much mood to Debussy's La Mer as there is to
Tchaikovski's 4th; just expessed in different ways.  I mean, if classical
music didn't affect us -- or would that be AFfect us? -- we wouldn't be
listening to it, would we?

[log in to unmask]