Once again: music and emotions
Bernd and Daniela Willimek provide a further attempt to explain the emotional effect of music with the striving tendency theory.
We still barely understand how music and emotion are connected. The scientific community does not even agree on what emotions actually are and how to classify their various manifestations. This means that individual studies on the emotional effect of music remain piecemeal. This preliminary groping in the fog opens up room for original and surprising suggestions as to how expressivity in music can be explained.
Bernd and Daniela Willimek are making an attempt with a "striving tendency theory", which is based on the ideas of music psychologists Ernst Kurth and Deryck Cooke, among others. "Emotions conveyed and evoked by music" are said to be explained by "identification with abstract volitional content". With reference to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the authors create a theory that is intuitively difficult to understand and rather unsystematically interspersed with metaphor (a major tonic represents a "person standing upright"). On the other hand, the two do not say a word about historically influential gestalt-theoretical approaches, which should explain the directional energies of tones much more plausibly and naturally than their own approach. The numerous individual musical analyses that can be found in their book Music and emotions - studies on the theory of striving are original and stimulating, but without really clarifying or supporting their theory. The same applies to the series of experiments that the couple carried out at grammar schools and German schools abroad. Obviously, they worked with a fairly homogeneous group of subjects with the same musical socialization, which in itself does not justify the universal claim of the theory in any way.
It cannot be ruled out that the striving tendency theory could make interesting contributions to explaining the expressiveness of music. However, it would have to be made much clearer and more systematic - docked to existing theoretical concepts and results of music psychology, with methodologically sound interfaces for experimental testing.
Bernd and Daniela Willimek: Music and emotions. Studies on the theory of striving, 125 p., € 20.00, Deutscher Wissenschafts-Verlag, Baden-Baden 2019, ISBN 978-3-86888-145-5
