Recent perspectives on the music-emotion relationship in 2 monographs and an edited collection

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Opening paragraph: As a constant within human experience, music and the emotion it both depicts and inspires has provoked scholarly interest throughout history, yet not without interruption. From the closing moments of the 1890s, the notion that music should be a slave to emotion began to fall into disrepute. In turning away from the conventional harmonic, rhythmic, and structural patterns that supported the expression of emotion throughout the Common Practice Period (c.1640-–1910), influential art music composers of the early to mid-twentieth century reflected and implemented changing world views. Prioritising democracy over hierarchy and reality over mystery, nineteenth-century sentimentalism was explicitly shunned. Composers devised new methods of organising musical material to create representational real-life soundscapes, or simply a series of beautiful sounds. In a tandem and related trend, it became unfashionable to discuss music and emotion in Western academies. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the dominance of the new music movement that spanned musique concrète, atonal, serial, aleatory and new complexity techniques waned, and the humanities pendulum also swung back to re-embrace emotion. Art music, like folk and popular music, could return to the deliberate expression of emotion on the composer’s option, and scholars could investigate music’s emotionally expressive properties with renewed vigour....

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