The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

At one extreme, there is Stravinsky’s famous dictum that ‘Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’; at the other, Aldous Huxley’s oft-repeated quote that ‘Music is what feelings sound like’. The question of whether, at an objective level, music is capable of expression is one that has preoccupied philosophers, aestheticians, composers and musicians down the centuries. It came to the fore again recently with reports of a study by academics at Western Sydney University in Australia that looked at ‘how pitch and harmony affect our emotions’ – a carefully-worded formulation which recognises that, while music can undoubtedly influence our emotions, it cannot (whether as dots on the page or sounds emanating from an instrument) express anything itself, not being an independent conscious entity.

Of particular interest are the ways in which major and minor chords and scales – commonly held to express ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ emotions respectively – are perceived by listeners familiar and unfamiliar with the sounds of western music. Those who most strongly associated major and minor keys with these emotions were musicians based in Sydney, while those with only ‘sporadic experience’ of western music were much less likely to associate major keys with happiness: ‘They’re just as likely to choose the minor chord or scale as being happier than the major,’ said one of the study’s authors. That such associations are culturally determined, whether by ‘mere-exposure’ (major-key music being more common than minor-key) or by ‘associative conditioning’ (e.g. Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ with weddings, Chopin’s Funeral March with funerals) will come as little surprise. Yet such tenacious connections make the relatively rare exceptions more interesting. Consider, for example, the monumental closing slow movement to Mahler’s Third Symphony, cast in D major but suffused with a pained intensity which is only finally laid to rest by one of the composer’s most insistently forceful endings, with two sets of timpani pounding out tonic-dominant-tonic under a long-held D major chord. Then again, what about the jazzy A minor central episode of the sonata-rondo finale to Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, one of the snappiest and most toe-tapping passages to come from his pen?

Perhaps it takes a genius of the stature of Beethoven or Mahler to go against the grain of common association. And clearly the associative power of music depends not just on which key it is cast in, but its context, tempo, scoring, texture, tessitura, meter and rhythmic patterning. More typical of Beethoven is the use of minor keys for some of his boldest, most dramatic, tragic or intense musical pronouncements – surely influenced by Haydn and Mozart, whose relatively few minor-key works invoke the world of Sturm und Drang emotional turbulence. Yet the association of minor keys with sad, tragic or intense emotions was a relatively late development, traceable to the high Baroque when the doctrine of the Affekts was at its peak. Before that, for example in the consort music of John Jenkins, works in the minor mode easily outnumber those in the major, a consequence of the early development of diatonic tonality from the medieval and Renaissance modes. Indeed, when J.S. Bach penned the great exercises in ‘speculative’ polyphony of his later years – the Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue – it was in minor keys that they were cast, a clear nod to the minor mode’s earlier primacy.

Further back still, both major and minor chords would have been regarded as aberrations by medieval musicians, for whom the interval of a third (fundamental to diatonic tonality) was a dissonance. If our Australian researchers had been able to travel back in time, they would have collected a very different set of results. But the ways in which listeners tend to perceive music have changed not merely over the course of history. They change during the course of our lives too. If our responses are culturally conditioned, they are capable of changing sometimes quite radically over our lifetimes, depending not just on which cultures we are exposed to, but how our own tastes are shaped (by others and by ourselves), our own prejudices reinforced. Some years ago, I played a challenging piece of modern ensemble music to a friend’s young children: music that would normally raise hackles brought out the broadest of grins, laughter, and then dancing around the room. Here were two pairs of ears who hadn’t yet been spoilt by notions of what did or didn’t, should or shouldn’t constitute ‘music’, who hadn’t even yet decided which style or type of music they would follow. And the piece to which they were spontaneously dancing (Harrison Birtwistle’s Secret Theatre) is prefaced with a quotation from Robert Graves, which concludes with the lines ‘we mount the stage as though at random, / boldly ring down the curtain, then dance out our love...’.

Perhaps a further area for academic investigation would be reactions to a range of atonal music (or, indeed, pre-Baroque music), from people not just of different cultural backgrounds but of different age groups. To what extent do our tastes and prejudices develop and change over the course of our lives. Do prejudices harden or soften with age, and are such changes universal or culturally specific? Are there simply too many variables to make such a study viable? How do our perceptions of consonance and dissonance (harmony and discord) differ not just from one culture to another but through time? And would the results tell us more about the music ‘itself’ (whatever that might be) or about ourselves?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/30/what-makes-a-song-sound-happy-it-depends-on-your-culture-study-finds