Mariusz S. Kozak
[…] Continuation of Part I […]
In the previous post I showed that Vernon Lee’s theory of musical emotions—dramatic emotions and aesthetic emotions—was based on a sophisticated understanding of how bodies respond to the “paces and rhythms” of sonic stimuli. The language might be different, but there are striking parallels between Lee’s account of empathy and how mental processes are considered by twenty-first century embodied cognitive science. In recent work, including my own, there is a growing interest in a dynamic reciprocity between bodily actions and cognition.[i] According to this view, the mind is not confined to a brain, but encompasses the entire body and even its environment. We make sense of this environment by perceiving and exploring its opportunities for action, or what ecological psychologists call “affordances.” In the case of music, these affordances include opportunities to move in certain ways, and such movement can then shape our emotional response.
However, Lee’s understanding of musical experience doesn’t end there, and her essay exposes a number of dichotomies, bivalences, and juxtapositions that might be difficult to square with our own intellectual milieu.
On the one hand, Lee brings in Nietzsche’s Dionysus, whom she finds incarnated in Wagner’s bloated musical dramas, eliciting basic, narcissistic responses and appealing largely to those who merely “hear” music. As the sounds awaken in us emotional memories through extra-musical associations, we feel joy, sadness, anger, tenderness, surprise. But, critically, these memories lead us away from music and toward our own internal experience. Such “imperfect listening” is “favored by nervous excitability, weakness of attention, and the presence of vague feelings of self, in fact, by inferiority, momentary or permanent, of psychic power and organization” (“Riddle,” p. 225). Hearing is merely passive compliance with music’s power to “enervate” and “demoralize,” consisting primarily of “emotional and imaginative daydreams.” These are the “dramatic,” quotidian emotions—low-hanging fruit that gives listeners little reason to engage with music on a deeper level.
On the other hand, Lee contrasts these Wagnerian excesses with the crisp, clean forms of 18th century music, which for her invite an “Apollonian” hearing: “they discipline, restrain, and purify the listener” (“Riddle,” p. 226). Musical form in and of itself awakens “impersonal” activities that resemble mathematics, such as measurement, comparison, combination, division, and so on. This process leads to the projection of formal qualities “away from ourselves onto the foreign existences and qualities (so that we think, not ‘I like this,’ but ‘this is good)” (“Riddle,” p. 225). The process of externalizing the source of pleasure is of special importance because it allows the listener to contemplate the world outside, rather than the state of their inner life. It leads to the arousal of higher “aesthetic” emotions. Articulating a viewpoint that art can’t be appreciated merely for its own sake, Lee argued that Apollonian hearing, through attention to form, turns personal enjoyment from a narcissistic act into one that attains significance in the real world. One listens to musical form, engaging in “intellectual and aesthetic activity of a very intense, bracing and elevated kind” (Music and Its Lovers, p. 33).
In the distinction between hearing and listening, between Dionysus and Apollo, between dramatic and aesthetic emotions, we find the most radical expression of Lee’s uncompromising commitment to Hanslick’s music formalism. Echoing Hanslick, Lee writes that just about anyone can have an emotional experience to music simply as a consequence of sound stimulating the nervous system. Musical sound has the potential to invade “the privacy of the human soul;” it can “penetrate and violate our innermost secrets” (“Beauty and Sanity,” p. 138). More than that, “music, by the mere action of sound, has got the listener in its clutches, is isolating him from his everyday life and making him for the moment its creature” (“Riddle,” p. 213). Mere “half-attentive and self-engrossed” hearing capitulates to music’s power, but through listening we can mount a resistance. A rigorous training in formalist listening can lead to an appreciation of music’s structure and prevent musical sounds from assaulting one’s soul.
Lee’s embodied approach to musical understanding was not ethically neutral. If anything, the body for her needed to be transcended—Apollo, whom she closely associated with the logos of speech, hence with the apex of human rationality, must overpower Dionysus in order to discipline “our confused emotional states” and bring the mind in contact with the “objective existence of actions.” Indeed, if the body participates in an aesthetic experience, it does so by constituting a foundation for an intellectual engagement with music. Or, as Lee put it, aesthetic emotions demand from the listener “a braced heightening of nervous tone, a resistance to random stimulation, a spontaneity and steadiness of attention, a forgetfulness of self and interest in the not-self, in fact, a vigor and organization of soul approaching to the magnificent wealth and unwavering self-forgetfulness of all spiritual creation” (“Riddle,” p. 225). Yes, the body is still there, at the center of the experience, but it’s there in a state of absolute immersion and unbroken focus on music’s form.
Lee’s writings on music enjoyed modest recognition in the first half of the 20th century. After receiving a favorable review in the New York Times for Music and Its Lovers, she’s included, for example, in James Mursell’s 1937 comprehensive review of literature in music psychology. Even as late as 1956, Leonard Meyer mentions her in Emotion and Meaning in Music, albeit fleetingly and—in a rather egregious example of epistemic erasure—omitting her from the bibliography. I say egregious because Meyer’s notes show close engagement with Lee’s texts, and it’s hard to miss the link between Meyer’s theory of emotions and Lee’s pronouncement that musical rhythm works by “awakening, fulfilling, or baffling our expectant attention, and in so far exciting emotion” (“Riddle,” p. 212).
After Meyer’s book, however, Lee seems to disappear from the literature on music theory and music psychology. Only recently has she resurfaced in the writings of Robert Gjerdingen.[ii] This is in contrast to her enduring presence in literary studies. Granted, the psychology she draws on has been supplanted by more sophisticated theories, and her ethical admonitions and unabashed aesthetic conservatism are manifestly out of place in today’s intellectual climate. Yet there is good reason to return to the basis of Lee’s psychological aesthetics, which is a conviction that music can do very real things to us—that it’s more than a stimulus for passive, self-absorbed enjoyment, but a phenomenon that carries weight in our daily lives and hence requires active participation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caballero, Carlo. 1992. “‘A Wicked Voice’: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music.” Victorian Studies 35(4): 385–408.
Cox, Arnie. 2016. Music and Embodied Cognition. Indiana University Press.
Dauriac, Lionel. 1904. Essai sur l’Esprit Musical. Alcan.
De Souza, Jonathan. 2017. Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition. Oxford University Press.
Franseen, Kristin M. 2023. Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Clemson University Press.
Gjerdingen, Robert O. 2010. “Mozart’s Obviously Corrupt Minuet.” Music Analysis, 29(1/3): 61–82.
Kozak, Mariusz. 2020. Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music. Oxford University Press.
Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget). 1906. “The Riddle of Music.” Quarterly Review 204: 207–27.
________. 1909. “Beauty and Sanity.” Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life. Bodley Head: 115–160.
________. 1932. Music and Its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music. Allen & Unwin.
Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Phoenix Books.
Mursell, James. 1937. The Psychology of Music. Johnson Reprint Corp.
Peak, Anna. 2016. “The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship.” Victorian Literature and Culture 44(2): 423–437.
Peritz, Jessica. 2022. “The Castrato Remains—or, Galvanizing the Corpse of Musical Style.” Journal of Musicology 39(3): 371–403.
Ribot, Thèodule-Armand. 1905. La Logique des Sentiments. Alcan.
Riddell, Fraser. 2022. Music and the Queer Body in English Literature and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press.
Towheed, Shafqat. 2010. “‘Music is not merely for musicians’: Vernon Lee’s Musical Reading and Response.” The Yearbook of English Studies 40(1/2): 273–294.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M. 2017. Foundations of Musical Grammar. Oxford University Press.
[i] For example Kozak (2020), De Souza (2017), Zbikowski (2017), Cox (2016).
[ii] Gjerdingen (2010).