Understanding Music Theory : Meaning, Self-conciousness, and Emotional Expressiveness

The author discusses some of the main positions in the debates about the experience of listening to music, and the dynamics and coherence of experience of listening to music, and the dynamics and coherence of musically-evoked emotion. The main objective of this book is to explore and describe the uniqueness of the musical listening experience (listening to the dynamics of musical structure and the nature of the experiences of the elements of music); the dynamic quality of emotional response to music and the exploitation of music's powers to facilitate social interaction; and the fundamental nature of emotional response to music. The author is particularly interested in exploring patterns in the musical evocation of emotion, aesthetical perspectives of musical meaning, and the dynamical process of listening to music's phenomenal developments. The theory that he seeks to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on music's efficacy in influencing the affective states of listeners, and on linguistic descriptions of music in terms of emotion.