Whose Feeling Is It? Musical Emotion and the Body That Produces It

Abstract ―​

Plato, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Hume each answer one question about music: where does the emotion it carries reside? Plato locates it in the listener’s soul, which music shapes toward virtue or vice; Tolstoy in the artist, who feels first and transmits that feeling to an audience that catches it; Nietzsche in a Dionysian force that runs beneath any single individual; and Hume in the private, taste-bound response of each listener. Set side by side, they seem to occupy the whole range of possible answers. This paper argues that they in fact share one premise: that emotion is something perceived or received after music has become sound, a content that travels either to or from a listener. Each theory even assigns a role to the person who listens to it– a citizen, a composer, an intoxicated participant, a listener. None of these theories assign this meaning to the performer, whose body makes the sound. Read through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of meaning as made in the act of expression rather than transmitted, that shared premise reveals its blind spot. Taking a wind performance as its test case, where breath becomes sound with no medium in between, the paper argues that musical emotion is not delivered but produced, especially in the very moment the four theories leave out.