Music, Emotion, and the Philosophy of Popular Culture

Peter Kivy's body of work across The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (1980), Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (1989), and Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (1990) frames the central dispute in the philosophy of musical emotion as one between "arousal theory," which holds that purely instrumental music can literally cause a listener to feel emotions such as sadness or joy, and Kivy's own preferred "cognitivist" or expression theory. On the cognitivist view, music is expressive of emotion — it "sounds sad" much as a basset hound's face looks sad — through a resemblance between the music's dynamic contour and the behavioral expression of emotion in human voice and movement, without the listener necessarily undergoing the emotion the music expresses.