Crying

[david medine]

So, here is my project proposal. If anyone has any comments, ideas or suggestions, please let me know. It concerns what one might call the "emotional cognizance of music." Music is often a primarily emotionally stimulating rather than intellectually stimulating. What does this say about the role of emotional experience in how we internalize or understand our experiences and react to them? To go further, what is the difference between "emotional" and "intellectual" stimulation in the first place? Is this potential discussion going to fruitfully touch these issues?

The idea is to send a survey out via e-mail (perhaps to all the grad students at UCSD, if there is a way for me to send a school-wide e-mail) which would introduce the topic and ask for responses to the questions. In order to stay focused, the questions would deal with an experience in which the survey-ee has cried having heard a musical performance, live or recorded. I want the questions to be framed in such a way so that people's responses will be most easily classifiable and interpretable. The written paper would be an analysis of people's responses that will (hopefully) indicate some identifiable trends, or at least something interesting enough to be worth writing about.

Below are some of my ideas for questions to ask. If anyone has a suggestion for a question or a better wording, I would love to have any input. Also, if anyone has any thoughts as to how to distribute this survey to a large amount of people or thoughts as to how I could ensure a timely response, again, any ideas would be awesome.

•Have you ever experienced a musical experience that brought you to tears? •How many times have you experienced this? •At what age? •What/How/Of what was the performance(s) or recording(s)? (or something along these lines) •Has a repeat experience of this same material evoked the same reaction? •Have you ever had a non-musical experience that evoked the same reaction?
 * Questions**

I am actually more interested in people's negative reactions to music because I think that they are more revealling of the nature of the "emotional cognizance of musc," etc. But I feel that asking people about their positive emotions is more likely to generate more sincere responses.

[danny] You may want to take a look at http://www.surveymonkey.com/ for an easy and possibly free way to distribute your survey questions.

[jerry] I think I'd be at least as interested in your own careful examples and analyses (however you want to carry them out) than substantially less careful, thoughtful answers to survey questions by others. What are examples of musical passages that have "moved" you (possibly, but not necessarily, to tears)? particularly ones that are able to do it repeatedly.

[david] you know, the usual...The "Heiliger Dankgesang" from Beethoven's op 132, especially at the end when the cello starts to play the repeated descending whole step culminating in an abrupt dynamic drop that leaves the first violin dangling on a high note (extreme dynamic activity and range of register). The clarinet duet in the third movement of the Brahms Piano Concerto #2. This passage is very delicate and close range-wise, and typical of Brahms, its emotion is very unhuman. The beauty of the passage is in its ethereal quality. The end of the concert version (not the one that goes into the ballet music or the opera itself) of the Tannhauser Overture, by Wagner always gets me, too. This one is also slow, but very, very heavy and thick. The part that really affects me is when the horn suddenly asserts itself with its counter-melody in the midst of the third part of the main theme (in the trombones). I am loath to write a kind of "personal essay," although I realize that this is in the spirit of self-experimentation. I just don't feel as if I have a lot to say on the subject. Any suggestions for a fruitful approach? Maybe I could try to recreate the experiment and try to carefully document my sensations and associations. Unfortunately I no longer have the copy of Tannhauser that I really love and it is out of print. It's from the DVD "The Art of Conducting." Fritz Busch is the conductor.

[jerry] I don't see a problem with using yourself as the main source of "data". As for an "approach" to "having things to say", here are two prongs: (1) Take some of your target passages that //do// evoke an emotional response from you and find superficially similar passages in other music that do //not// evoke such a response. The specific contrasts will add some texture to how you might choose to describe the passages that do work so effectively. (2) Review a couple of views from the literature on emotion in music (or in art generally), and see how well these grapple with what's going on in your chosen examples. A quasi-random article from the lit that I just ran across today is [|Sentimentalism and the Intersubjectivity of Aesthetic Evaluations] (must be on UCSD machine or use proxy server to get this); and also LE Meyer's //Emotion and Meaning in Music// is a classic in this area. There is some recent stuff in the journal //Music Perception// that I don't have the time to track down right now, but you might see what you can find there too.

[david] Thanks a lot, Jerry, I will check that stuff out. As for the first "prong" you suggested, it's one of those things: so obvious, but I never would have thought of it.

[david] So I had a notion as to how I might approach this paper and I thought that I should run it by the wiki-world. I want to write something kind of sexy and hopefully clever. Taking a page from Brian Gyson, I will borrow Tristan Tzara's famous "cut-up" technique (although use it in a much less abstract and arbitrary way than Gyson or Tzara. My paper will consist of three separate but interrelated approaches to the problem. 1. My own personal experience. 2. Literature from the scientific community. 3. Literature from the artistic community. I want to write a piece in which these separate angles can flow together, since I feel that all three are equally valid approaches. I justify this approach by pointing out that cognitive science, and indeed psychology in general, seems to have a great deal of crossover with the worlds of art, literature, and philosophy. Visual art is as much an exploration of visual perception as any scientific experiment dealing with vision is. Both are avenues of insight that can be equally helpful. In this spirit I am trying to construct a paper that utilizes these separate types of approaches. Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to write any vapid poetry or anything at all florid into this piece. Indeed I want to try to maintain as objective a tone as I can, but I do want to integrate these differing points of view in order to draw my conclusions...whatever they may turn out to be. Again if anyone has any suggestions, critiques etc. for me I would love to hear (so to speak [so to speak]) them.