Music Is Not an Emoticon. Against a Reductionist Account of Musical Expressivity

In this chapter, I will argue that listeners’ emotional resonance is important for recognizing musical expressiveness. I will achieve this by criticizing Marta Benenti’s and Cristina Meini’s (Benenti, Meini 2017) attempt to update the Contour Theory of musical expressiveness (CT). According to CT, musical expressiveness depends on the resemblance between perceptible musical features and the appearance of ordinary expressions of emotions. However, the perception of resemblance between music’s expressive features and human expressive behavior seems to be an effect, rather than a condition, of the perception of music as expressive. Therefore Benenti and Meini attempt to provide a corrective to CT, arguing that musical expressiveness does not depend on the similarity between musical and behavioral perceptive patterns, but on perceptual features that can belong to the pattern of emotions independently of their being instantiated by human beings or pieces of music. Unfortunately, this proposal does not sufficiently overcome CT’s flaws and only offers a “shallow” explanation of expressivity modelled on that of visual static emoticons. I will therefore suggest that instead other approaches to the question of the relationship between music and emotions, like the enactivist proposal recently developed by Schiavio and colleagues 2016, are better suited to account for the real affective experience of musical expressiveness.