1 The expression theory of art has assumed many forms. These changes of appearance have been necessitated by the inadequacy of its original leading idea. This maintains that the creator of a work of art undergoes an experience which he wishes to transmit or communicate to others. He wishes to communicate the experience to others in the sense that he wishes others also to undergo the experience; and to this end he creates or imagines an object which is or can be made perceptible—a painted canvas, a complex of musical sounds, a structure of words—and which is so designed as to make it possible for someone who experiences the object in the right manner thereby to undergo the very experience the artist intended to transmit. His experience is inside him; in order to make it available to others he must externalise it; and by expressing it he hopes to pass it on to others. To the extent that the artist is successful in his enterprise, and in so far as the experience he communicates is worth experiencing, the work of art he creates is valuable.
Tolstoy put forward a theory of just this kind in What is Art?:
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.1
Music as the expression of emotion
And for Tolstoy it is the best and highest feelings that are expressed in and communicated through the finest works of art: the better the feeling transmitted the better is the art that transmits it.
2 Whenever something is transmitted from A to B it must be possible to distinguish what is transmitted from its mode of transmission; if information is what is transmitted, the message is not the medium. An expression theory of art of the transmission kind is therefore committed to giving an account of what general kinds of experience are transmitted by the different art-forms and what more specific kinds are transmitted by the different works of art within these forms—an account which must fully characterise the intrinsic nature of the experience without reference to the medium or work of art by which it is transmitted.
3 It is usually held by adherents of such an expression-transmission theory that the experiences music transmits are moods, feelings and emotions. Accordingly, the composer is conceived as transforming his emotions into musical sounds which are transformed into patterns in a score which, in turn, are transformed back into musical sounds which, finally, are transformed back into emotions that the sympathetic listener experiences as he hears the music.
By far the most substantial version of the transmission form of the expression theory of music was constructed by Deryck Cooke in his The Language of Music—from which I have taken the preceding account of the process of musical communication.2 Deryck Cooke’s distinctive contribution to the expression theory of music was his attempt to analyse the elements of musical expression, and to establish the essentials of a musical lexicon which would specify the emotive meaning of the basic terms of musical vocabulary and by reference to which music’s ability to serve as a vehicle for the communication of emotion could be vindicated.
He tried to demonstrate (within Western tonal music since 1400) correlations between emotions and particular musical patterns of sound which have been used to express these emotions: the expressive meaning of such a sound pattern is constant—and the sound pattern therefore forms part of the vocabulary of music. Now the idea that music is a language of the emotions is often criticised on the ground that music lacks an essential requirement of a language: a syntax. A dictionary which defines the basic vocabulary of the supposed language of music by assigning emotions to primitive melodic phrases omits a necessary feature of a language—a feature without which the so-called ‘language’
Music as the expression of emotion
can say nothing—for it provides only a vocabulary and not rules which determine the meaning of a whole in virtue of the meanings of its semantic elements and their arrangement. Of course, if music is not a true language then it has no true vocabulary. And this is indeed the case; the
‘meanings’ of what are believed to be its basic terms do not need to be learnt in the way the meanings of the words of a language—which are conventionally determined—must be learnt; nor do they need to be remembered—as the meanings of words must be—in order to understand uses of them. Nevertheless, this criticism is misdirected if the idea of music as a language is intended only as a metaphor, the force of which is that music is a means of communication of moods, feelings and emotions.3 But the fact that this objection is misconceived does not put the theory of which Deryck Cooke’s version is the most distinguished representative in the clear. For the truth is that his version of the theory—
whatever its merits and other defects—inherits the critical weakness of all forms of the theory.
4 The fundamental error of the transmission form of the expression theory of music is its separation of what gives music its value—according to the theory, the experience it transmits from composer to listener—from the music itself. It represents a musical work as being related in a certain way to an experience which can be fully characterised without reference to the nature of the work itself. It therefore regards music purely as a tool:
the function of the tool is to arouse in the listener the experience the composer wishes him to feel. But the obligation to provide an independent description of the experience can never properly be discharged. For the theory misrepresents the nature of the value music has for those who appreciate it as music. It implies that there is an experience which a musical work produces in the listener but which in principle he could undergo even if he were unfamiliar with the work, just as the composer is supposed to have undergone the experience he wishes to communicate before he constructs the musical vehicle which is intended to transmit it to others; and the value of the music, if it is an effective instrument, is determined by the value of this experience. But there is no such experience.
If we suppose that there is such an experience we must, as we have seen, concede the possibility that the experience a particular work transmits—the transmission of which is its raison d’être—should be transmitted in some other way. But if the value of the music really were determined by the nature of this suppositious experience, we would have
Music as the expression of emotion
no special reason to listen to the music if this alternative mode of transmission were available to us. The music would be replaced by this other mode of transmission or by anything else which equally achieved the same end. But it is certain that we value music for its own sake and not merely as a means to some end that can be characterised without reference to the music. When we are eager to listen to Elgar’s Violin Concerto our reason is not that it happens to be the sole means available for producing in us an experience which does not itself involve hearing the music: we value the experience of the music itself.
5 The separation of what gives a musical work its value from the intrinsic nature of the work—a separation that is entailed by the idea of music as merely a vehicle for the transmission from composer to listener of something other than and independent of itself—prevents expression theories of the transmission kind from doing justice to the appeal of music in general and of music which really is expressive of emotion in particular. For even in the case of music which is expressive of emotion and which is valued for its expressiveness, the reason the music is attractive to us is not because it yields an experience which in principle could be detached from the experience of the music. In fact, music can be valued as music in virtue of its expressive aspect only if the experience of music as expressive of a state of mind is not thought of as a mere combination of experiences—an experience of the music which does not relate it to the state of mind and an experience of the state of mind—each of which would be possible without the other. For if someone’s experience of a piece of music is a compound of two experiences, one of which is an experience of hearing the music in which the music is not related to a certain kind of emotion, for example, the other of which is an experience of that emotion—the first experience giving rise to the second experience—then either the person’s experience of the emotion has the music as its object or it does not. But, to take the first alternative, if it does have the music as its object then the person does not hear the music as being expressive of that emotion or as possessing that quality of emotion: music that bores is boring and not thereby bored or expressive of boredom; music heard with admiration is admired and not in consequence admiring or expressive of admiration; music that arouses amusement is amusing and not in virtue of that fact amused or expressive of amusement. If, on the other hand, the person’s experience of the emotion does not have the music as its object then the reason he values his experience of the music—an experience compounded of two
Music as the expression of emotion
elements—will be (i) solely because he values its first element, or (ii) solely because he values its second element, or (iii) because he values each element, or (iv) because he values neither element in itself but only the two as so combined. But if (i) gives his reason for valuing his experience, he does not value the music as expressive of the emotion in question. If (ii) gives his reason, he does not value the music as music.
Now if (iii) gives his reason, he would value his experience if it contained only one or the other of the two elements. However, if to begin with it consisted of just the first element—and this is the only relevant case—
then although he would then value the music as music, the addition of the second element (as an effect of the first) would not make his total experience one in which he values the music as expressive of the emotion in question. For, as we have seen, when an emotion has the music as its object the experience of the emotion as an effect of the music is insufficient for the music to be heard as expressive of that emotion. And this conclusion holds with equal force in the case of an emotion that does not have the music as its object: music that saddens is not thereby sad or expressive of sadness.4 Finally, if (iv) gives the person’s reason for valuing his experience, he would not value his experience if it contained only the first element. And it is clear that the addition of the second element to the first is insufficient to constitute an experience in which the music is valued as music, and, moreover, as being expressive of the emotion it arouses. Therefore, as I claimed, music can be valued for its expressive aspect only if the experience of music as expressive of an emotion (more generally, a state of mind) is not thought of as a mere combination of experiences of the kinds indicated.
Hence what is needed from a theory of musical expression is a less external, a more intimate, connection between the experience of what music expresses and the experience of the music itself: it is necessary in some way to fuse the experience of the mood, feeling or emotion expressed by a musical work with the experience of the music which gives it expression, or to integrate the experience of what music expresses with the experience of the music. It is necessary to avoid the heresy of the separable experience.5
Now my interest here is not the expression theory of music itself but, instead, a correct theory of musical expression: a theory which explains what it is for music to be expressive of emotion, what it is for music to be heard as expressive of emotion and what kinds of value can attach to musical expressiveness.6 In what follows I explore the possibility that an accurate account of the musical expression of emotion should be based
Music as the expression of emotion
upon something which itself can be expressive of emotion: the human voice.
6 The natural model for a theory of artistic expression, if we take the term
‘expression’ seriously, is the expression of inner states in and by the human body: by facial expression, posture, gesture, movement, words and cries. It is in some cases easy to exploit this model by the construction of an artefact that can be imagined to stand—and which is intended to be experienced as though it stood—to an inner state in a relation similar to one or the other of the relations in which the real expression in and by the human body may stand to the state of which it is the expression.7 There are some works of art that can properly be experienced as if they were human expression. For example, there is a form of poetry—lyric poetry (in one sense of the term)—that consists in the representation in an arrangement of words from the point of view of the first person of someone’s outward verbal expression of his mental condition or of the internal counterpart of this. A lyric poem is a particular kind of verbal representation of a person expressing his thoughts and feelings in speech or a representation of his process of thought and feeling itself. A lyric poem can therefore be experienced as if it were the speech or internal voice of someone giving expression to others or to himself to some complex of thoughts, attitudes and emotions.
When we experience a poem in this way we imagine someone experiencing an emotion—I shall concentrate on this element—which he expresses in the words that compose the lines of the poem. But, as R.K.Elliott has insisted,8 when we experience a poem as if it were the human expression of emotion our imagination can proceed in one or other of two ways: we can experience the poem ‘from within’ or ‘from without’ (or we can alternate between these different imaginative modes).
To experience the poem from within is to place oneself, in imagination, in the situation of the poem’s ‘speaker’ and to experience the expression and the emotion expressed from that position. One identifies oneself imaginatively with the person whom one imagines experiencing an emotion and expressing it in the words which compose the lines of the poem. To experience the poem from without one does not place oneself, in imagination, in the situation of the poem’s speaker. One imagines someone giving expression to his emotion in the poem but one does not identify with him imaginatively.
Music as the expression of emotion
7 Let the emotional condition the poem expresses be E. Then if the poem is experienced from without it is unlikely that E will itself be experienced in the reading of the poem. If, for example, this emotion is grief then in the experience of the poem from without grief is unlikely to be experienced. If any emotion is experienced the emotion will not be grief but, perhaps, pity. If, however, the poem is experienced from within then E will be experienced. But even so, characteristically, it will not be experienced exactly as it would be if E were to be experienced outside the experience of art—just as in the experience from without pity will not be experienced as it is when it has a real object. To experience the poem from within one imagines, and so experiences in imagination, E (and the expression of E). But to experience E imaginatively or in the imagination is not the same as to experience E actually or in reality. Elliott, borrowing the terms from Edith Stein, distinguishes the experience of an emotion really from the experience of the emotion imaginatively by the use of the words ‘primordial’ and ‘non-primordial’. To experience an emotion through an imaginative assumption of another’s situation and expression—whether in a poem or in real life—is not to experience the emotion primordially; it is to experience it non-primordially. If I respond empathically to another person’s grief and feel his grief within me I cannot be said, unqualifiedly, to experience grief. Likewise, if I experience grief in experiencing a lyric poem from within the grief does not qualify me in the sense in which it would if it were really my own grief. In each case I experience grief only non-primordially.
8 Elliott suggests that—in a similar fashion to the way in which a lyric poem can be experienced as if it were the human expression of emotion—music can sometimes be experienced as, or as if it were, literally the expression of emotion. Such music is susceptible of each of the two modes of experiencing expression, from within and from without.
And when emotion is felt in the experience of the music it will be felt, characteristically, in the non-primordial manner.
9 Before examining the idea that some music can be heard as if it were the expression of emotion I want to consider further the matter of experiencing an emotion not really but through an imaginative assumption of the situation and expression of the lyric ‘I’. For Elliott offers no explanation of the distinction between experiencing an emotion primordially and experiencing it non-primordially. He merely provides labels for these two different ways in which an emotion can be
Music as the expression of emotion
experienced. And the nature of the non-primordial experience of an emotion is left in an obscure state: if a lyric poem expresses sadness then when I experience the poem from within I am supposed actually to feel
experienced. And the nature of the non-primordial experience of an emotion is left in an obscure state: if a lyric poem expresses sadness then when I experience the poem from within I am supposed actually to feel