Music expresses and causes tension, strain, yearning, through
its inner, its "absolute" nature. But it does more; it satisfies
these yearnings. It not only creates an expectation to satisfy
it, but the expectation itself is of a poignant, emotional,
personal character. What is the emotion that is aroused by such
a satisfaction?
The answer to this question takes us back again to that old
picturesque theory of Schopenhauer--that music is the
objectification of the will. Schopenhauer meant this in a
metaphysical, and to us an inadmissible sense; but I believe
that the psychological analysis of the musical experience which
we have just completed shows that there is another sense in
which it is absolutely true.
The best psychological theory of the experience of volition
makes it the imaging of a movement or action, followed by
feelings of strain, and then of the movement carried out.
The anticipation is the essential. Without anticipation, as
in the reflex, winking, the action appears involuntary.
Without the feeling of effort or strain, as in simply raising
the empty hand, the self-feeling is weaker. When all these
three elements, IMAGE, EFFORT, SUCCESS, are present most
vividly, the feeling is of triumphant volition. Now my thesis
is--the thesis toward which every though of the preceding has
pointed--that the fundamental facts of the musical experience
are supremely fitted to bring about the illusion and the
exaltation of the triumphant will.
The image, dimly foreshadowed, is given in the half-consciousness
of each note as it appears, and in that sense of coming
integration already recognized. The proof is the shock and
disappointment when the wrong note is sounded; if we had not
some anticipation of the right, the wrong one would not shock.
The strain we have in the effort of the organism to reach the
note, the tendency to which is implicit in the preceding. The
success is given in the coming of the note itself.
All this is no less true of rhythm--but there the expectation
is more mechanical, less conscious, as has been fully shown.
The more beautiful, that is, the more inevitably, irresistibly
right the music, the more powerful the influence to this illusion
of the triumphant will. The exaltation of musical emotion is
thus the direct measure of the perfection of the relations--the
beauty of the music. This, then, is the only intimate, immediate,
intrinsic emotion of music--the illusion of the triumphant will!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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