navindra
Well the question of emotion in music came to interest me. I was working on the Mozart Rondo in A minor, K 511.. A friend suggested that it sounded like it "seemed to be about grief, or had grief in it." That seemed in the right ballpark so to speak but it didn't feel quite right either. How does music have emotion in it. The notes C-G-F sharp don't have an emotion in them. I was interested in the idea that the music behaves the way grief behaves. It keeps circling back to the painful spot. (Of course it is a rondo). Does this still hurt? Yes, it still hurts. There is an excursion into A major that doesn't seem to provide any real lightening of the mood. So, what am I supposed to do as a performer with this grief? Do I feel sad myself and try to express my feelings as i play. I don't think so. It seems to me the task of the performer is to speak the syntax of the music. It's internal logic and structure as best i can. I then have to trust 1) that the music will have its effect if i can do that and 2) the audience may (but may not) receive it. The emotion is in the audience, in the listener, is evoked in the listener. It is not "in" the music at all. To think of another example, the Chopin F minor Ballade ending to me is the purest evocation of catastrophe I know in music. I didn't used to hear it that way. It was beautiful thrilling pianism, which I still hear. When I did not hear it that way was the emotion "in" the music? Not for me at that time in my life. I'm just kind of rambling here. To return to the Mozart, I performed this at a recital. My teacher wants her students to play every 6 months. Me and the 9 year olds. This performance was unusual for me in that I had absolute technical command of the piece, very little in the way of nerves. I entered a kind of flow state, paying very close attention to what i was doing and "speaking the syntax" of the music. It was a kind of ecstatic experience, a powerful aesthetic emotion. But grief was not any part of it. So here's a whole lot of stuff I'd love to hear others' take on.