Emotional Accounts of Musical Experience and Musical Object. On the Relationship between Music and Emotion

The relation between music and emotions can be analysed by looking at the usual characterisations of the components of the aesthetic episode which are the musical object and the musical experience. The musical object is what we hear when listening to music, that is, a specific music composition with its features; the musical experience is the experience that we undergo when listening to music. It is common to characterise musical experience and musical object by appealing to emotions, which is to say that: 1) when having an aesthetic experience of music, we might focus on the different ways in which music arouses emotions; 2) we could also merely focus on the way in which emotions reside in the musical object (by virtue of being expressed or represented in music), and on the way in which we recognize them. In this introductory chapter, I will provide an overview of the different accounts on the relation between music and emotions within the recent debate on the philosophy of music in analytic philosophy. I will classify them depending on where they locate the emotions: whether in the aesthetic experience, in the musical object or in none of them. I will propose a summary of the main views on the topic of music and emotions which serves as a starting point for the further scrutiny of specific arguments that each single view makes.