You raised some extremely interesting issues.  Let me give you a slightly
different perspective, not only from a music lover but as someone how
studies emotions.

Alan Dudley <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>There seem to be two different schools of technique in acting, or rather
>two extremes in a continuum.  One extreme says that the actor should
>immerse him/herself in the part to the extent that s/he actually feels
>the emotion s/he is trying to display, his/her natural reactions to this
>emotion taking care of the required vocal inflection, body language, facial
>expression, and so on required to convey the emotion.  The other extreme
>requires an actor to be familiar with the vocal inflexions, etc needed for
>various situations and to - cold-bloodedly - imitate these as needed.  It
>seems to me there may be parallels to this in music.

It is well established that face muscles, which are behind facial
expressions, can be divided into two groups:  a group under voluntary
control, and another group which we cannot voluntarly control, but are
handled by emotions.  This is why it is so difficult to voluntarly immitate
a genuine emotional facial expression.  A complete facial expression of a
specific emotion requires a genuine emotion in order to be accomplished.
I believe it is possibly to immitate to some extent external appearences of
emotions, but it would be still far from a genuine emotion.

>Do composers, for instance, need to feel sorrowful to write sorrowful
>music, festive to write festive music, or seeking for God to write
>seeking-for-God music? Many of the contributors this forum seem to think
>that they do.  I find it hard to believe.  So many compositions switch
>smoothly from one motion to another, that it seems most likely that
>composers are aware of the note sequences, rhythms, inflections and
>whatever else composers use, which convey different emotions to *those
>schooled in our type of music* and apply them as they believe suitable.
>Does what I call sorrowful music seem sorrowful to the inhabitants of the
>PNG highlands, I wonder? I know that what I call glorious music leaves one
>of my sons unmoved, or perhaps bored.

Composing (emotionally) can be thought as a reverse process of listening
to music and being emotionally affected by it.  Of course there are a vast
number of technicalities in music which do not seem to require emotional
feeling.  But in the core of the music composition (where pure criativity
lies), I believe that this two-way process can exist.  If a composer is
able to be emotionally involved in music listening, then he may need to
re-create within his mind emotions and feeling in order to be able to
express them musically.  It does not seem possible to go beyond technical
devices in composition, unless the composer gets emotionally involved in
the music.  It is essential to the composer that he pre-feels what an
audience will feel when hearing to his compositions.

>Similarly, do performers need to feel the emotions they seek to convey?
>I know that many of them appear to do so, but is this merely a device - in
>some of them at least - to reinforce the musical means they are using.  If
>it is a device of this kind, do they continue to use it in the recording
>studio? If so, is this force of habit?

That would be more far-fetched, since the music is already written.  Well,
not quite, since musical notation is very cold by nature.  A performer is
responsible for adding a substantial amount of emotional content to the
written score.  The performar has to guess what was in the "emotional mind"
of the composer when he wrote the score, in order to add that emotional
content, which cannot be written (as far as I know musical notation).

Cheers,

Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura <[log in to unmask]>
http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt/~yoda