A History of Ecstatic Listening: What Arabic Ṭarab Has Taught Me about Musical Emotion
Issa Aji Beginning in the late 1930s, the first Thursday evening of each month marked a special occasion for those within the Arabic-speaking world. On those evenings, which often turned into early mornings, millions planned on being within earshot of a radio. Taxis in Beirut, Lebanon would pull over to let nearby pedestrians gather around…
Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics and Embodied Music Cognition (Part II)
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…
Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics and Embodied Music Cognition (Part I)
Mariusz S. Kozak “Musical aesthetics ought to be the clue to the study of all other branches of art” (Vernon Lee, Music and Its Lovers, p. 23) The writings of Vernon Lee—the pen name of Violet Paget[i] (1856–1935), an English Victorian novelist, art critic, philosopher, and amateur psychologist—are enjoying something of a revival in music…
History of Music Theory 