Emotion is an integral aspect of musical experience; music has the power
to take us on an emotional and intellectual journey, transforming the
listener along the way. The aim of this book is to examine the nature of
this journey, using a variety of perspectives. No one discipline can do
justice to music's complexity if one is to have a sense of the whole
musical experience, even if one has to break up the whole experience
into various elements for the purposes of clarification. The issues
raised have some relationship to psychoanalytic understanding and
listening, as after all psychoanalysis is a listening discipline; its
bedrock is listening to the patient's communications. While of course
there are significant differences between understanding of, and
listening to, a musical performance and a patient in a consulting room,
the book explores common ground. Evidence from neuroscience indicates
that music acts on a number of different brain sites, and that the brain
is likely to be hard-wired for musical perception and appreciation, and
this offers some kind of neurological substrate for musical experiences,
or a parallel mode of explanation for music's multiple effects on
individuals and groups. After various excursions into early mother/baby
experiences, evolutionary speculations, and neuroscientific findings,
the book's main emphasis is that it is the intensity of the artistic
vision which is responsible for music's power. That intense vision
invites the viewer or the listener into the orbit of the work, engaging
us to respond to the particular vision in an essentially intersubjective
relationship between the work and the observer or listener. This is the
area of what we might call the human soul. Music can be described as
having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And, of
course, there is 'soul music', whose basic rhythms reach deep into the
body to create a powerful feeling of aliveness. One can truly say that
music of all the arts is most able to give shape to the elusive human
subject or soul.
