Hello everyone, since this is my first time posting on this forum I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Daniel and I am an undergraduate musicology student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. My main interests are musical instrument (particularly brass) history and development, composers and mental illness, research methods, opera history and development and philosophy and aesthetics. I have presented work at an undergraduate research conference about composers and mental illness (my paper "Did Richard Wagner Have Borderline Personality Disorder?), spent a semester as an Undergraduate Research Assistant, and am spending the rest of my undergraduate career as an Undergraduate Research Associate, another program in which I am receiving funding to complete my Senior Assignment (on philosophy, social surroundings, and historical events in opera.)

I developed an interest in aesthetics because I started thinking about why I, throughout my entire life in music, responded more acutely to certain chord progressions than others. I started thinking about whether it was some kind of property in me that causes it, or if it was something inherent in the progressions themselves. Learning about Lipps Empathy Theory and Aschenbrenner's "tendative powers" theory has allowed me to learn about two widely opposing views, and I am a "fence-sitter" at this time, not knowing which position I'd like to follow. Studies like that done by Blood and Zartorre for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicate that there are definite neurological reactions to music that we experience "chills" (their term) listening to, but I don't find that it explains "why" this happens. Is it something in the person, or something in the materials?

On a side note, (which I'd be happy to explain in more detail) I then became acquainted with George Birkhoff's aesthetic equation (M=O/C), and realized that it is not "designed" to determine emotional value of the music, but instead what I call "architectural dimensions" of the music itself.

Has anyone thought about whether or not emotional responses to music are caused by "imbuing our spiritual vitality", or "kinesthetic strivings" (phrases I have seen used to describe Lipps' empathy theory) into the music, or if they are caused by the materials themselves (particularly their contextual, comparative, and tendative relations as described by Aschenbrenner)?

Sorry for the length, but I wanted to introduce the issues sufficiently to facilitate discussion.

Thanks!
Daniel John Carroll
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

I think it's simply a matter of humanity's love of seeing tension resolved. Just as any good story sets up a problem and then resolves it (these types of stories being the most relatable), so too do people appreciate a B7 chord resolving to an Em. People like to see the overcoming of struggles in any story, whether it be literary or musical, as it offers them hope of doing the same.

Wish I knew more about this topic; this is an amazing post. At the risk of you already knowing the stuff I'm going to refer to, here's a link to something relevant to your interests: plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/#3

Yes, the resolving tension idea seems tenable to me, too. In addition, I have contacted aesthetics specialists and psychologists about this issue, and they believe that it has something to do with deviating from our expectations of functional harmony. So it could be resolving tension when they progress back to the tonic, but also a response could be elicted by deviating from what we would expect to hear come next. For instance, I have composed a short piece for strings that contains some of these favorite progressions of mine. In the first four measures, I have a two measure melody and harmony that is repeated in the next two measures. While the first two measures proceed as I-V, the second two are I-bVII, and then back to I.

If you listen to (and the score indicates this as well) the ending of the first movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Tuba Concerto, the final three measures proceed as I-VII-I. Also, the opening measures of the movement "See the chariot at hand here of love" from his cantata "In Windsor Forest" progress in the same way. Had he stuck with I-V-I progressions, it would be the more conventional method, but it would not, to me, have produced the same response as the I-VII-I that occurs instead.

Another example which I just remembered occurs in the second movement of Brahms' German Requiem. During the line "Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras", the tonal center is Bb minor. During the following line, "und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen", it begins in Bb minor again, but then makes an unexpected tonicization (a change of tonal center that is not long enough to be considered a full blown modulation) to Cb Major. A while back I played bass trombone in an orchestra for this piece, and that was hands-down my favorite part of the whole work. I still remember just how much I enjoyed that progression; the bass trombone part proceeds from an Ab to a Cb in that change to Cb major, and being on the bottom of that progression was really something. I attribute my enjoyment of it to the fact that it was an unexpected twist in Brahms's harmonic scheme; he could have continued it in Bb minor, but he didn't.

Aschenbrenner, in his book The Concept of Coherence in Art, had the idea of "tendative" power (I've seen it spelled "tendative" and "tendentive"), the natural ability for one element to lead to another (the ability for one to "gravitate" to the other. As far as I am concerned, the bVII or VII chords, being "leading tone chords", lead into the tonic more effectively than a dominant chord can, even though the dominant leading to the tonic is a standard procedure. Perhaps the level of response to the progressions has something to do with the level of tendentive power in that progression?