Bernard Chasan wrote:

>...I would ask Chris and all the other deniers that music can express
>emotion:  what in tarnation DOES express emotion in your opinions? Can
>words? Gestures? Poems? All this is supports my theory that when people
>start (over)analyzing almost anything, emotion falls through the cracks.

Professor Chasan makes some excellent points that have caused me to think
further about this.  I agree that my notion of the difference between
"express" and "remind" was hasty.  After all, a piece of music that
contains within it the cues that will call to mind certain feelings and
sensations may be said to "express" them, with the acceptable definitions
of "expression." One has to be careful, though, because what constitutes
"meaning" in music has changed over time.  The Greeks believed that certain
modes or scale patterns, tunings, voice ranges, and so on had intrinsic
power to influence humans in various ways, but what you did in those modes
(the actual ordering of the tones) was less important than the mode and
the tuning in how it affected the listener.  I think it's also true that
for most of our history, high or rising inflections in pitch often are
associated with increased emotional tension.  At some point near 1700,
fixed instrumental forms began to give shape, structure, and the
possibility of creating larger idea-complexes in music that had no words.
It's probably not an accident that motivic development assumed greater
importance about the same time.  And over the next 150 years gradually
developed the idea of "pure" music, which freed from the shackles of
language could express, or come closest to expressing the sublime.  All
the tools were there:  an articulated structure, contrasting themes to
provide drama, sections of music that definite functions within the
structure--themes, transitions, introductions, endings.  In such music the
understanding of one segment depends on its perceived relation to the other
parts.  It's a different kind of logic than that of J.S.  Bach, who didn't
know sonata form.

Hanslick was the supreme proponent of what he called "tonend bewegte
Form"--for which Walter Meyer might have a better translation than I.
Something like tonally animated form, or form given life through tone.
We would probably see it as an extreme view today.  I think Stravinsky/
Craft owes a lot to Hanslick.  There didn't seem to be a lot of room in
Hanslick's aesthetics for the idea of feelings as states related to human
emotion, other than the feeling of the sublime.  I'm still not sure he
didn't have a point--but I also recognize the power of music to immediately
"express" a feeling, or more particularly (in the later 18th century) a
sudden dramatic shift in feeling, especially when supported by words.
Case in point:  what the orchestra does just prior to Dona Anna's sudden
realization that it was Don Giovanni who killed her father.  And any number
of film "underscorings" serve to illustrate the cues that are accepted by
most of us today.  But these things don't really help us come to grips with
a work like Beethoven's C Sharp Minor Quartet.  With that music you're in
a different realm.  Closer perhaps to Hanslick's ideal form, but maybe
that's only because Beethoven was entering a realm of feeling that most of
us never get to.  The paradox of the late quartets is that they are
hermetically sealed and seemingly revelatory at the same time.

One last point:  one must agree that the "feelings" one experiences
in music aren't the same as feelings one has as a result of real life
situations, yet they must be based on them or we wouldn't relate to them.
Perhaps as Langer suggested they are "memories" of real feelings and
experiences, given significance by being artfully deployed in a very
special way.

Chris Bonds