In recent years scholarly attention has become attuned to the notion of the ‘beautiful’ in Mozart: studies by Scott Burnham, Mary Hunter and Maynard Solomon have drawn attention to passages of sumptuous beauty, a hallmark of the composer's style. The present study amplifies this concern by focusing on a characteristic Mozartian gesture, noteworthy for being at once prosaically functional and conspicuously, richly (over-)composed: a type of retransition procedure involving a contrapuntally braided linear descent over a dominant pedal. One of a family of ‘standing on the dominant’ techniques, the gesture is most distinctively found in slow movements, whose pacing allows the descent's tiny harmonic and contrapuntal jolts to resonate and be fully absorbed. In the context of Mozart scholarship, these underexplored sections are particularly sensitive, for they lie at the seam between art and craft: some of the most dazzling, memorable passages in Mozart, they are nonetheless grounded in everyday compositional procedures, markers of quotidian expertise. Using examples from the Piano Concertos in D (K. 451) and C (K. 503), the Piano Trio in B♭ (K. 502) and other works, this study elucidates the basic technical features of these passages. The aim is to place any more effusive discussions of Mozart's artistry on the firmest possible footing.

A number of scholars have suggested that the sudden harmonic shifts, remote tonal regions and discontinuity of gestures in Schubert's works can be rationalised through certain conceptions of musical unity. Yet what if we were to entertain the possibility that these musical gestures do not coalesce in a greater whole? What other options are available to us for understanding part-whole relationships? In this article, I suggest that the notion of Romantic irony might transform our understanding of the composer's music by providing an alternative to an aesthetic of unity. Using the Moment musical in A♭ major, D. 780 (Op. 94) No. 2, as a test case, this paper offers a view which resists the pressure to explain idiosyncratic musical events as contributing to a greater whole, demonstrating that conceptions of unity need not accompany tonal hierarchical systems; it also shows how Schubert's use of tonality and large-scale organisation can coexist with notions of conventional diatonicism and form and need not be understood either as derivative of these customary procedures or as independent of them, inviting us to reflect on larger issues of historical continuity with regard to tonal and formal practice.

Haydn's play on expectations and conventions and his deliberate grammatical mistakes are well-known. Yet one notable syntactic irregularity to be found in his music has been overlooked: the use of a sentential theme which lacks the first half of the continuation phrase (to use the terms of William E. Caplin's functional theory of Classical form). This type of theme moves straight from its presentation phrase to its cadential progression, so there is no pre-cadential section of the continuation phrase which expresses a specifically medial function. Moreover, the theme's dimensions are irregular: its second part is only half the length of its first. Most cases of the ‘missing middle’ occur in the main themes of sonata allegros, the middle being supplied later in the movement, usually in the subordinate theme. These points are illustrated by brief analyses of the first movements of Symphony No. 85 and the Sonata Hob. XVI:21, and a longer analysis of the first movement of the Sonata Hob. XVI:49.

When conceived as the presence of the past, memory can be said to pervade the music of Maurice Ravel. The number and range of these acts of musical memory – including pieces modelled on the medieval ballade, the Renaissance chanson, the Baroque tombeau, the Classical sonatine and the Romantic poème, among others – seem at first glance to testify to a uncomplicated relation between past and present which, upon closer review, is revealed to be problematic. One of the most complex and captivating artistic testaments to what Andreas Huyssen has called ‘twilight memory’– not only in Ravel's music, but in Western modernism as a whole – is the eighth and final waltz of his piano suite Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911). In this waltz, which Ravel entitled ‘Épilogue’, the hope of making the past present is reborn with each of its numerous thematic recollections, only to be dashed repeatedly by the melancholy knowledge of its impossibility. In the present study, affinities between the Épilogue's musical behaviours and philosophical accounts of memory by Bergson, Jankélévitch and Nora are explored, along with the compositional precedents established by Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy and others.

This study asserts that philosophical interest in the connection between music and the emotions lies in the light it could throw on the nature of expression. Expression in turn is interesting because of the light it could throw on the nature of understanding and of value. Three different sorts of theory are considered: those that rely on experienced resemblance, those that rely on some imaginative state and those that rely on an aroused feeling. It is suggested, following Malcolm Budd, that room might be found for all these accounts.

This study examines some of the ways in which it was possible to understand emotion in Lutheran church music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It suggests that emotion related to music more through association and contextual factors than through a fixed relationship, thus explaining the ways in which musical passages and techniques could be taken from a secular context to serve a sacred purpose. With these factors in mind, it is possible to suggest ways in which a listener's likely emotional association with music can be harnessed through particular compositional procedures. Schütz's setting of part of the Song of Songs may well engage with the listener's consciousness over time, stretching it and reinforcing the ‘useful’ emotional associations that the sacred context might bring. The opening aria of Bach's cantata ‘Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen’ achieves something similar over a longer span and with greater emotional intensity. Here there is the added sense of the believer finding, losing and then rediscovering the object of spiritual adoration. The music thus implies the potential alienation of the listener, something both supported and overcome through the very structuring of the music. Its repetitive ritornello process is sometimes hidden but always latent, thus playing on the potential for subconscious recognition. Together, these two examples suggest that music can be used as a powerful demonstration of the historical development of modern forms of consciousness as related to emotional states over time.

In this essay I explore the idea that musical passages which are particularly remarkable are so in part because of ways they correlate with the progress and change of emotions. Taking as my point of departure Susanne Langer's idea that music represents a kind of non-discursive knowledge uniquely affiliated with emotional life, I argue that recent empirical research on music and emotion has not provided a compelling model for the relationship between music and emotion and that Langer's approach, when refined through recent research on processes of analogy, provides a viable alternative. I apply this perspective to an analysis of Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata in A major, K. 208, with a special focus on passages which are typically regarded as highly expressive.

The Romantic and Modern reception and reinterpretation of eighteenth-century music stretches over a period much longer than that of the eighteenth century itself, in the process forming its own authenticity and norms. Modern editors of eighteenth-century music must occasionally grapple with musical texts which appear to violate either the earlier or later standards. A minuet whose text seemed ‘obviously corrupt’ to the official editors of Mozart's keyboard sonatas would probably have seemed highly artful yet utterly normative to Mozart or his audiences. A focus on the norms of musical phrases was proposed by the Victorian author Violet Paget, writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. Her immersion in eighteenth-century music at an early age, along with her training in the Italian tradition, gave her a unique position from which to comment on the differences between the musical culture of her own time and that of Mozart and his Italian models.

Theorists of music and emotion have come to recognise a wide range of aesthetic and non-aesthetic situations in which music serves as a vehicle, or a trigger, or a catalyst, for emotional experience. In this essay I focus on aesthetically warranted emotions (AWEs) as real, measurable emotions that are directly motivated by stylistically competent interaction with composed expressive trajectories (CETs). Through a close interpretation of the exposition of the second movement of Mozart's Piano Sonata in F, K. 533, I explore five central issues: (1) the role of marked musical gestures and stylistically unmarked alternatives in reconstructing and interpreting CETs; (2) the affordance of prior emotional experience for an individual's complete cognitive understanding of CETs; (3) whether or not one need actually experience AWEs in order to cognitively understand and appreciate CETs; (4) whether emotional engagement need always be congruent with, or isomorphically constrained by, CETs in order to qualify as AWEs; and (5) the status of AWEs, and our cognition of them, as multi-levelled and integrative, synthetic and emergent, and varying in intensity.

In his Odyssey, Homer described a particular kind of music-evoked emotion, a tapestry of wonder, dazzle, entrancement and enchantment which has been largely ignored in recent work on music and emotion. In this article, our work on the characterization and classification of music-evoked emotion, which allowed us to identify 45 emotion terms relating to emotive states typically and recurrently induced by music, will be recapitulated. A model with nine emotion clusters, sometimes referred to as the GEMS model, provides a higher-order representation of the interrelationships between these emotive states. Strikingly, the first of these basic music emotions, ‘wonder’, is akin to the emotion described by Homer 2,800 years ago. After elucidating the other primary music emotions, I will turn to the question of how emotions are elicited by music and will present our ‘induction rule model’ as an explanatory frame. This will be followed by a brief overview of measures of music-induced emotion, where I will present some new findings on the neurobiology of the GEMS emotions. In the final section these empirical findings will be contextualised within current psychological and philosophical views of music and emotion.

The aim of this article is threefold: first, to ask what we mean when we use concepts like imitation, representation and expression; second, to broaden the concept of imitation to take on the implications of the dynamic, historical and anthropological notion of mimesis as opposed to the largely static, ahistorical conceptions of mere ‘representation’ and ‘resemblance’ common to musicology and to analytic philosophy; and third, to show the dialectical relationship of mimesis to concepts of expression, construction, rationality and form in Adorno's later aesthetics and in his theory of musical reproduction. The concept of mimesis that is the focus of this article has as its key features embodiment, mimetism and adaptation. It is argued that concepts of expression are seen to retain features of mimesis, and that expression in artworks is a structural phenomenon. The claim is made that mimesis can be seen as an embodied impulse, a mode of ‘identifying with’ rather than primarily as ‘imitation of’ or ‘representation of’ something external to itself. The argument draws on anthropological theories of mimicking and miming, in particular those of Caillois and Benjamin, which had considerable influence on Adorno's thinking. It is argued that music (whether as musical work or as musical event) oscillates between its own internal rationalised constructional ↔ unrationalised mimetic moments, and that the experience of its expressivity arises from this tension.

This article analyses two works by Schubert, the first movement of his Unfinished Symphony and Der Erlkönig, in terms of the basic emotional category of Fear. Proceeding from the set of acoustic cues associated with the expression of Fear in musical materials, the article explores this emotional category both as an affective state and as a system of action tendencies enacted by the musical persona through a work's formal behaviours. Schubert's emotional processes are analysed from two standpoints: (1) as pathways through the affect space of Russell's circumplex model and (2) as ecological affordances of Öhman's fear-imminence trajectory. The article aims at a holistic approach insofar as it explores the continuum between empirical and aesthetic approaches to musical emotion: between psychological and physiological measurements of Fear evinced by sonic features, and philosophical concepts of Fear inherent in the musical sublime, as unfolded by substantial works of art music.

The present article provides an outline of the computational prediction of emotions expressed by music. A recent model based on the extraction of acoustic features derived from film music is used to demonstrate each phase of the model's construction, and the musical relevance and predictive accuracy of such models are discussed. This model, as well as a stylistically more appropriate model based on piano performances, is applied to a segmented analysis of Schubert's Lied Der Erlkönig. The predictions are compared to analytical insights provided by Spitzer in this issue. The two approaches, music analytical interpretation and computational analysis of expressed emotions, yield often coinciding emotional nuances, particularly when the stylistically appropriate computational model based on piano performances is used. The potential synergies, especially those related to a more comprehensive analysis of timbral characters via computer tools as well as the more refined interpretations that only a music analyst is able to draw, are discussed.

Leonid Sabaneyev attested that Skryabin's compositions contained within them ‘a science of tonal love’, and Skryabin himself described his two Op. 57 pieces –Désir and Caresse dansée– as ‘new ways of making love’. But what makes this music so erotic in nature? The composer theorised about the nature of desire and sexuality in his writings, but this discussion rarely spills over into analysis of his compositional system. Given that Skryabin was so steeped in psychology throughout his life, I appeal to the work of Freud and Jacques Lacan, and particularly to their distinction between drive and desire (essentially, the fundamental instinct of the id versus its imaginary representation), a distinction found in Skryabin's own philosophical writings. But the progression between these two states bears comparison with both his philosophy and his harmonic processes, and I thus focus on the function of the dominant chord, exploring ways in which it can replicate the structures of drive and desire. In so doing, I scrutinise several piano miniatures to show that part of Skryabin's method of embodying drive in music lays out ambiguous chord structures which bear simultaneous tendencies to move in a number of different directions, as multivalent as the drive in the human subject. Further, I attempt to show that, out of mystical sonorities, Skryabin temporally unfolds a dialogue of different dominant ‘drives’, and eventually selects and nurtures a single one at the expense of others, a motion equivalent to desire.

This article begins by arguing for the persona theory of musical experience, which claims that when we hear music as expressive of emotions, we have a sense of a persona that is in some way attached to the emotional state. The author argues that the sense of persona underlies a number of different accountsof musical expression and is generally supported by the essential experiential content of emotions. The author then explores the ways in which the listener's sense of a persona may be exploited to allow the expression of complex emotions, focussing on the emotion of jealousy and, to that end, examining two cases where the expression of that emotion has been attempted by Janáček and Piazzolla.

When discussing the essential characteristics of traditional Korean folk music, Korean musicians and scholars often refer to the emotional states of han and hŭng– forms of suffering and communally experienced joy, respectively. This article focusses in particular on hŭng (communal joy), exploring what this state involves, introducing the traditional performance contexts that are particularly associated with it and then investigating how musicians contribute towards its growth, via detailed analysis of a single case-study musical performance: the ‘Tale of the Three Young Brothers’, as sung by a (usually female) Korean shaman (mudang) to the accompaniment of a double-headed hourglass drum (changgo) and large gong (ching). Step-by-step analysis attempts to reveal the complex relationships among song text, rhythm, performative behaviour and emotions, showing how musicians and audience members work together to evince a dramatic transformation from a condition of oppression (han) to one of liberation.

This article proposes a new understanding of dramatic scoring by revisiting the sequence of the notorious first shark attack in the horror film Jaws (1975). The success of the sequence, it is argued, turns on a bold and sophisticated use of preparatory material in the minutes preceding the attack. It is also suggested that, during the attack proper, it is the role of memory and the limits of attention that underpin the viewer-auditor's response to John Williams's famous motive. Drawing on the work of Richard Wollheim on the phenomenology of painting, it is proposed that the spectator ‘hears-in’ the music, and to buttress this central claim various articulations of the notion of ‘hearing-in’ are offered in the course of the discussion. The article ends with a rebuttal of the idea that music is heard unconsciously or subliminally.

Music is commonly regarded as expressive of emotions that can be perceived by listeners. Nevertheless, the specific characteristics of this perceptual process are not well understood. This study aims to investigate the relationships between various features of musical structure and the emotions perceived by listeners, with a focus on the role of interactions among such features. Eight musical features (pitch, mode, melodic progression, rhythm, tempo, sound level, articulation and timbre) were systematically manipulated in a factorial design through synthesis. Ten musically trained listeners judged the resulting 384 pieces of music on five emotion scales. The relationships between musical features and listener judgements were modelled by means of multiple regression analysis. The results (1) confirmed empirically based predictions from previous post hoc analyses with respect to which musical features are associated with each emotion; (2) suggested that different musical features were important for different emotions; (3) indicated that some features (e.g. tempo) were more powerful than others overall; and (4) revealed that interactions made significant but small contributions to the predictive power of the regression models.