Deniz Peters
Whose Bliss, Whose Anguish? Musical Expression, Hermeneutic Models, and Emotional Individuation

Martha Nussbaum in a recent essay writes that “The music of [Cherubini’s] aria [in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro] […] communicates, well beyond words, the young man’s delicacy, vulnerability, and sheer kindness […]. Here, if anywhere, Mozart’s music moves well beyond Da Ponte’s text” (in John Deigh [ed.], On Emotions, 2013: 42–43). How can music do this? What does it mean, exactly, to say that music transports tenderness, “delicacy, vulnerability, and sheer kindness”? My aim in this talk is to think through listeners’ experiences of the music as having psychological content – better put: their hearing emotions and other psychological phenomena in music and, by way of music, their arriving at certain psychological states – from sonic properties, over aesthetic properties, to their imaginative interpretation. My main idea is to not take specific emotions a work supposedly expresses as my starting point, but instead to draw on the much wider phenomenology of psychological experience related to music, its making and its appreciation, thus open the view up to the experiential horizon within which subjective emotion may individuate, given certain intersubjective interpretive frames. The reason for this approach is that I am seeking to articulate a concept of musical expression that is non-objectifying, that lives up to the hermeneutic richness and ambiguity of musical experience. I revise the understanding of musical expression as being interpersonally found, rather than as being crafted by one person, contained in a work, and handed over to another person. My argument shall draw on musical examples from Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Gubaidulina, and Liza Lim, amongst others.