Musical expressiveness and listeners' emotional involvement.

This essay investigates the issues and arguments raised with regard to musical expressiveness and listeners' emotional involvement in music. It begins with an overview of the various perspectives advanced in regard to musical expression. Chapter I divides such views roughly into cognitivism and emotivism and outlines the main arguments of each position. Chapter I then presents the main issues and arguments of the current musical and philosophical scenes concerning musical expression. These issues and arguments include the following: the standard of emotive description and the range of emotions of which music can be expressive; the distinction between expression and expressiveness; being expressive of as a property of music; specificness of musical emotions; a resemblance between music and emotion; musical experience and arousal of emotion; the paradox of pleasant music and unpleasant emotion; and music and listeners' imagination. Chapter II carefully examines four music analyses written from distinctive perspectives under the assumption that they appropriately reflect listeners' musical experience. Chapter III presents my own analyses which demonstrate my argument concerning musical expressiveness and listeners' emotional involvement. In my analyses, it turns out that listeners' imaginings and emotional involvement play a crucial role in listeners' musical experience, making music perceived as expressive. From my analyses, it is also shown that emotional involvement and imaginings are an effective as well as characteristic way for people among scholars and laity to understand music. Chapter IV reviews the theoretical issues and arguments discussed in Chapter I in light of what the music analyses reveal in Chapters II and III. Throughout discussion, I claim that musical expressiveness should be understood in terms of listeners' emotional involvement and that it is listeners' imaginings which enable listeners to be involved in music emotionally. I argue that music is perceived as expressing emotions in virtue of listeners' imaginings while listeners are emotionally involved in music. Ultimately, this essay argues that musical expressiveness is achieved through a very complicated interplay of music and listeners in listeners' imaginings, which normally requires listeners' emotional involvement in music.PhDCommunication and the ArtsMusicPhilosophyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126126/2/3237934.pd