Emozioak musika absolutuan

Abstract

There are two major explanations for the place that emotions occupy in absolute music. The first one appeals to the composer’s emotive state or to the listener’s emotive reactions while composing or listening to expressive music. The second one, formalism, rejects to host emotions as properties of music. I hold that a formalist notion of music is consistent with the view that emotions are aesthetic properties of absolute music. Assuming that emotions in music are heard before being felt, music expressiveness should be explained appealing just to what we find in music, and not outside of it. I argue that listeners hear emotions in music due to its power to exhibit the outer appearance of them when they are expressed in ordinary life, and to its power to embody the way emotions are felt. I take expressive properties as second-level aesthetic properties that depend on formal-structural musical features. After a short introduction to the origins of absolute music, I present the dilemma behind music expressiveness and give my account of music and emotions, which I think is consistent with formalism.