What is music?

Music is a cultural practice and art form that consists of a combination of sounds and silences of varying duration. These sounds and silence follow a rhythm of necessity, which may vary according to musical style. Through their works, composers can convey various messages and thoughts to the audience. This is what turns music into a means of communication to the fullest.

The difference between musical genres

In order to distinguish between musical genres, several criteria must be taken into account.
The sound source is the most important criterion. Depending on the instruments present in the music, the use of the voice or the set of voices and/or instruments, the musical genre may differ.

The destination of music also helps determine its musical genre. For example, church music and a military march differ depending on the location in which they are played.

Song length is also important. specific characteristic. The national anthem does not last as long as a classical piece of music or music in an opera.

The social role of music facilitates the differentiation of musical genres. For example, religious, funeral, dance music, film music, computer games etc. have well-defined social roles.

Depending on the musical genre and perceptions, listeners experience completely different emotions. So we're going to look at how these emotions differ and how they are conveyed from a general point of view.

What emotions?

Emotion is a psychological and physical reaction to a situation, an internal or external stimulus. As René Descartes showed, there are different types emotions. According to Descartes, there are 6 primary emotions: admiration, love, hate, sadness, desire and joy. All other emotions that exist are made up of these primary emotions, or are some altered form of them. Meanwhile, the intensity of the emotions of one individual may differ from the intensity of the emotions of another, because all people do not respond in the same way to the same stimuli. Therefore, we will look at several common emotions and the moments in which we experience them.

Multiple emotions

Joy - positive emotion. Usually it means satisfaction with the situation in this moment, such as the joy of using one's own favorite dish or when you manage to succeed in something difficult. Physically, people experience joy by smiling and/or laughing. Joy is usually associated with hope and glee. Indeed, if we achieve a goal that we have been moving towards for years, then we are happy and feel joy.

Sadness ranges from mild malaise to deep depression, in which people have no desire and seem to be drowned in their emotions. Sadness is associated with despair, impotence and melancholy.

Delight- an emotion experienced in relation to what is great, beautiful or the actualization of an ideal. We admire someone we find to be the best in a certain area or in general.

Love- the emotion of attachment of sentimental and / or sexual attraction between people. More broadly, we may also like something abstract. Then we try to find spiritual, intellectual, physical or imagined intimacy with what we love.

Hatred- a deep and cruel dislike for someone or something. This emotion is the opposite of love. Therefore, we do not seek any intimacy with the person or thing we hate.

A wish- an emotion that implies the fact of wanting something. We always want what we don't have. Therefore, when we get what we want, we fill that gap.

Therefore, it is interesting to ask ourselves what is the relationship between music and emotion, and how does a musician convey the exact emotion through his work.

The relationship between music and emotions

Music has always been one of the main emotional vectors. As the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant said: “Music is the language of emotions.”
Meanwhile, people have different characters, are sensitive to different things and react differently to situations. Consequently, music also evokes different emotions and memories in every person. That is, people are not the same in relation to music. This explains why they don't like the same genre of music, the same tone of voice, or why some prefer one instrument faster than another. For example, a man may love a piece of music because he danced to it with his wife for the first time. Conversely, a person may hate and/or may be overwhelmed with sadness because they heard this music when they learned about the death of a loved one. These emotional associations reinforce the subjective evaluation of individuals and are the smallest part of our musical experience.

Similarly, musical works have a strong expressive structure that allows you to provide emotional states a large number individuals. That which makes it possible to obtain the strength of considerable social cohesion in different cultures. This social cohesion is carried out mainly during adolescence. During this period, music translates the emotional states experienced by adolescents. It also makes it easier to group according to musical preferences, so we find groups of rockers, rappers, goths. It also explains why, in the process of dating, a teenager most often asks about musical preferences. The fact of listening to a certain style of music allows teenagers to belong to something and have common points of view with other people. Emotional responses to music may change over the course of life, but they will remain a major focus during adolescence.

Music is also different from other art forms, because contrary to the painting, for example, where emotions are conveyed by sight, music conveys emotions only by hearing. Therefore, it requires the presence of sounds, exceptional and original ways in order for each piece of music to correctly convey the desired emotions.

In addition, music is an art form and, like any art, individuals can appreciate it in a voluntary way. Consequently, the audience listens to music willingly in order to experience pleasure. This pleasure can take many forms and depends mainly on what the listener has experienced, on his condition at the time of listening. For example, when a couple is left alone for a candlelit dinner, they would rather listen to romantic pieces of music to heighten the emotion of the moment than 130 decibel heavy metal.

So, we can conclude that music is dominated by 4 large categories emotions of music: joy, anger (or fear), sadness and calmness. An interesting fact is that even if the emotions are negative, the music is nevertheless pleasant to the listener. Hence, it is interesting to know how composers convey emotion through their works.

How to convey the exact emotion through music?

As said before, music has several characteristics such as scales, notes, silence, and more. Therefore, the musician must play and modify its characteristics as he pleases in order to create the desired piece of music, and thus the emotion he wants to convey.
However, there are a few rules to follow depending on the musical genre the musician wants to compose. The composer must carefully choose which instruments he wants to use and whom he will contact. The sound of each instrument is essential to get an overall complicity with the music.

Also, tempo can quickly define the genre of music. A slow tempo with a piano melody will make you feel sad or calm. Conversely, a fast tempo with appropriate melodies will communicate some joy. People are happy to listen and want to dance. However, only one tempo cannot convey a specific emotion. Therefore, each instrument is important and can change all music. Indeed, if the tempo remains fast, but there is an aggressive double bass, a heavy battery with a double pedal, the emotions will be completely different, like the dance. This is a rather crude example, but the same is true depending on where the note is placed. These little tweaks can absolutely change the music.

The composer may also use the normal hearing of the majority of the audience to enhance the conveyance of emotion. For example, sounds reminiscent of negative events will convey emotions with a negative valence (anger, fear, or sadness). Conversely, sounds reminiscent of positive events will convey emotions with a positive valence (joy, calmness).

Therefore, it is quite difficult to perfectly manipulate all the sounds in order to convey the desired emotion. It requires a lot of experience and mostly listening. The composer must be inspired by everything that surrounds him, that exists musically, in order to eventually create his own music.

The influence of music on the emotional sphere of a person

For the practice of aesthetic education, it is very important to find ways to form a high emotional culture in schoolchildren. Education of the ability to respond to the whole gamut of human experiences is one of the important tasks of musical education. To do this, a music teacher must have information on the basis of what patterns a person's emotions are reflected in music.

All existing music education programs and guidelines emphasize that music is a means of developing the emotional sphere of students, however, the proposed repertoire is built according to historical, thematic or genre principles. None of the existing programs of musical education failed to find the principles of selection musical works according to their emotional content, as well as those objective grounds on which this or that piece of music can be attributed to the expression of a certain emotional state. The musical programs say nothing about the connection between the value attitude to the object and the nature of the experiences experienced in this case. As a rule, it is stated that if a person loves something, then this should somehow excite him. The main issue is to identify the connection between the emotional sphere of a person and the patterns of its reflection in music, i.e. the translation of worldly emotions into aesthetic ones has not yet been fully disclosed in musicology.

The search for a solution to the problem under consideration has a long history. The ancient Greek philosophers, in whose works we find the development of the principles of the ethical impact of music on a person, proceeded from its imitative nature. By imitating this or that affect with the help of rhythm, melody, timbre, the sound of this or that musical instrument, music, according to the ancients, evokes in the listeners the same affect that it imitates. In accordance with this position in ancient aesthetics, classifications of modes, rhythms, musical instruments, which should be used to educate the personality of an ancient citizen of the appropriate character traits.

In the Middle Ages, this problem was studied in the framework of the theory of affects, which establishes a connection between the emotional manifestations of a person in life and the ways they are reflected in music. In this theory, the interaction of tempos, rhythms, modes, timbres in the transmission of emotional states, their effect on people with different temperaments was considered in detail, but a complete concept of modeling emotions in the theory of affects was never created.

From modern research, it should be noted the works of V.V. Medushevsky, who points out that "the principle of modeling implies the existence of a certain correspondence between the semantic structure of a musical work and our intuitive ideas about emotions."

Experiment: To identify the most significant parameters of emotion reflection in music, a group of five expert musicians were offered 40 pieces of music with the task of decomposing them according to the generality of emotional states expressed in them. It was required to differentiate musical works according to the parameters "anger", "joy", "sadness", "calm". As a result of the experiment, 28 works were selected, which were attributed by all experts to the expression of emotions of the same modality. The proposed model for categorizing emotions based on two parameters (tempo and mode) obeys the law of quantitative changes and their transformation into qualitative differences. The same melody, performed in a major or minor key, fast or slow tempo, will, depending on this, convey a different emotion. Therefore, if we set out to place various musical works in the proposed grid of coordinates, then some of them, depending on the intensity of the expressed emotion, will be located closer to one of the coordinate axes, while others will be further away. For example, very sad work will be farther from the y-axis than a work expressing a slight elegiac sadness.

As the practice of pedagogical observations shows, the above categorization of emotions based on two components of musical expressiveness is quite clearly manifested in the perception of music of the Baroque era (A. Vivaldi, J.S. Bach), Viennese classics (F. Haydn, W. Mozart, L. Beethoven ), romantic composers (F. Schubert, R. Schumann, F. Chopin, F. Liszt, E. Grieg, I. Brahms), Russian classical music(P.I. Tchaikovsky, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, A.K. Glazunov), contemporary music (S.S. Prokofiev, D.D. Shostakovich).

In works traditional in terms of musical expressiveness, the following patterns can be distinguished that should be taken into account when perceiving music in order to understand the emotions inherent in it:

1. Slow tempo + minor coloring of the sound in a generalized form model the emotion of sadness and convey moods of sadness, despondency, grief, regret about the past beautiful past.

2. Slow tempo + major coloring simulate emotional states of peace, relaxation, satisfaction. The nature of the musical work in this case will be contemplative, balanced, peaceful.

3. Fast tempo + minor coloring in a generalized form model the emotion of anger. The nature of the music in this case will be intensely dramatic, excited, passionate, heroic.

4. Fast tempo + major coloring simulate the emotion of joy. The nature of the music is life-affirming, optimistic, cheerful, joyful, jubilant.

Further analysis of the proposed model of emotion reflection in music showed that in its characteristics it is in some sense isomorphic to the well-known classification of temperaments proposed by Eysenck. But instead of the parameter "introversion-extroversion" in our model, the tempo is taken - slowly-fast, and instead of "stability-instability" - the parameter major - minor. In both models, to characterize both the temperament of a person and the mood of a musical work, it turns out to be sufficient to have indicators of two variables - the tempo (either mental activity, or a musical work) and the qualitative feature of emotional experience, disclosed in one case in the concept of "stability-instability", and in the other - major or minor fret. The main thing is that between the emotional life of a person and its manifestation in natural temperament, on the one hand, and the reflection of its features in music, on the other, there are certain dependencies and connections,

It is known that choleric and sanguine people are characterized by a fast pace of mental activity, while melancholic and phlegmatic people are slower. If melancholic and choleric people are distinguished by instability, mood instability, then phlegmatic and sanguine people will be distinguished precisely by stability, the general major emotional attitude.

In the theory of affects mentioned above, the proposition was postulated that listeners like music most of all, which in most matches their natural temperament. The task was to verify this position in the experiment. 58 schoolchildren of grades VIII-IX were asked to listen to several pieces of music expressing various emotions (sadness, joy, anger, calmness).

The participants of the experiment were asked to evaluate each of the listened works on a five-point scale - from -2 to +2 with gradations - "do not like at all", "do not like", "indifferent", "like", "like very much". It was also necessary to rank the listened works according to their degree of preference.

Eysenck's personal questionnaire "Extraversion-neuroticism" (form A) made it possible to identify the temperament of the participants in the experiment. During the analysis, eight questionnaires were excluded as unreliable, since the number of points on the "False" scale exceeded 5 units. Of the remaining 50 questionnaires, in 21 cases we obtained a match between the temperament of the schoolchild identified with the help of the questionnaire and the character of the music they liked the most. In 29 cases, schoolchildren liked the kind of music that did not correspond to the peculiarities of their temperament. Thus, the assumption that schoolchildren should like the music that best suits their natural temperament was not fully confirmed. We found that the preference for musical works, the mood of which corresponds to the peculiarities of the temperament of this or that schoolchild, is noted mainly among those who have little musical experience. Musically developed students, who react vividly to music, gave high marks to all the pieces they listened to and found it difficult to choose the one they liked the most. Such schoolchildren, as it were, departed from their natural preferences and could positively evaluate music that was different in comparison with their temperament. It can be assumed that the liveliness of response to musical works, different in nature, indicates the development of the emotional sphere of students. However, finding more subtle correlations between the level of development of the student's emotional sphere, the level of his musical responsiveness and the peculiarities of his natural temperament requires further study.

Musical education, offering students emotions of various modalities in the content of musical works, makes them at the same time more capable of experiencing those emotional states that are not included in the structure of emotions of their natural temperament, thereby expanding and deepening contacts with people around them and reality.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. EMOTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY TO MUSIC

A special place in raising the level of the moral and aesthetic culture of the younger generation belongs to music, which, actively influencing the consciousness of a person and his emotional sphere, is the most important, indispensable means spiritual development personality. Perception of the expressive meaning of the musical language, penetration into the content of the work, into its emotional meaning, is possible only if there is an ability to emotionally respond to music, therefore, educating children in love for music, the ability to empathize with the figurative-emotional meaning contained in it is one of the main tasks of musical education. children.

In psychology emotional responsiveness (susceptibility, sensitivity) is understood :

as a property of an individual to easily, quickly and flexibly respond emotionally to various influences - social events, the process of communication, characteristics of partners, etc.

as an emotional reaction to the state of another person, as the main form of manifestation of an effective emotional attitude towards other people, including empathy and sympathy;

as an indicator of the development of humane feelings and collectivist relations.

Emotional responsiveness to works of art is understood :

as the ability to respond to events, phenomena, works of different genres;

as the ability to empathize with the characters, to correlate literary facts with life experience;

as the ability of emotional empathy with music;

as an emotional response to works of art.

Emotional responsiveness is the starting point for the development of aesthetic feelings, relationships, needs, as well as aesthetic tastes and interests of the individual.

Aesthetic feelings and aesthetic emotions constitute the highest stage of development human feelings, are an indicator of the level of a person's spiritual life.

According to I. Kant, "emotional responsiveness is a catalyst for thinking (more precisely, intellect), since it initially ennobles the mind, aestheticizing it."

Preschool age is the period when sensual knowledge of the world prevails. It is at this age that it is necessary to teach the soul to work: to empathize with another person, his feelings, thoughts, moods.

Aesthetic education is aimed at developing the ability of preschoolers to perceive, feel and understand the beautiful, to notice good and bad, to act creatively on their own, thereby joining various types of artistic activity.

One of the brightest means of education is music. Emotional responsiveness to music is the basis of musicality. It is associated with the development of emotional responsiveness in relationships with people, with the development of such personal qualities as kindness, the ability to sympathize with another person (A.I. Katinene, M.L. Palavandishvili, O.P. Radynova).

Music is emotional knowledge. Therefore, the main feature of the musicality of B.M. Teplov calls the experience of music, in which its content is comprehended. “Since musical experience is essentially an emotional experience, and it is impossible to understand the content of music otherwise than by emotional means, the center of musicality is the ability of a person to respond emotionally to music.”

Fundamentals of musical psychology Fedorovich Elena Narimanovna

8.2. Musical emotions

8.2. Musical emotions

Any human activity is accompanied by emotions, causes an emotionally active or passive attitude.

Emotions play a dominant role in music. This role is predetermined by sound and temporal about and the nature of music, capable of conveying an experience in motion, in the process of development with all the changes, rises, falls, conflicts or mutual transitions of emotions. Music is able to embody a human mood that is not directed at any object: joy or sadness, cheerfulness or despondency, tenderness or anxiety. Music can convey the emotional side of intellectual and volitional processes: vigor and restraint, seriousness and frivolity, impulsiveness and resilience. Thanks to this property, music is able to reflect the human character. Music can express thoughts-generalizations that relate to the dynamic side of social and mental phenomena: harmony - disharmony, stability - instability, power - human impotence, etc.

The perception and performance of music has a strong emotional impact on a person due to the properties of sound. Sound carries a colossal amount of information for a person. A. Schnabel brilliantly wrote about this: “Life is given to sound in man; in him the sound became an element, an aspiration, an idea and a goal… It was revealed to a man that the sound created by him is able to quench his spiritual thirst and, obviously, is called upon… to elevate joy and alleviate suffering. Thus was born the destiny and desire of man to create from this transcendental substance, from this sounding vibration, with the help of his intellect, an ever-moving, tangible and yet intangible world ... The result of this creativity, which is nothing but a sequence of sounds, we call music ".

Music in human society is becoming an active and effective means of emotional communication. Music is able to reveal thoughts, feelings, experiences of a person, events public life and pictures of nature, evoke a variety of associations.

In other words, music embodies the infinite variety of human emotional experiences and all the wealth spiritual world humanity.

Sound properties such as timbre, register, loudness, articulation, direction of movement of the melody, its accentuation in combination with the tempo of movement are converted into musical intonation. It is no coincidence that B. V. Asafiev called music "the art of intoned meaning."

Properties musical intonation are similar to speech intonation, which conveys the meaning of the statement. However, feelings can be incomparably more fully expressed by means of music than formulated by words. Therefore, it is very difficult to translate the content of music into words. “This translation will inevitably be incomplete, rough and approximate,” wrote B. M. Teplov. The main difference between speech and musical speech is how the content, the meaning, is expressed. In speech, the content is conveyed through the meaning of the words of the language; in music, it is directly expressed in sound images. If the main function of speech is the function of designation, then the main function of music is the function of expression(B. M. Teplov). Similar thoughts are expressed by A. Schnabel: “Among all the arts, music occupies an exceptional and incommensurable position with other types. It is - everywhere - becoming and because of this it can never be "caught". It is impossible to describe it, there is no practical use; you can only experience it ... ".

Studying the issues related to the musical experience, B. M. Teplov draws the following very significant conclusions.

1. The experience of music is an emotional experience. and acts as a kind of non-verbal knowledge, as a unity of "affect and intellect" (L. S. Vygotsky). "One cannot comprehend the content of music in a non-emotional way." At the same time, the experience of music is connected with its understanding (i.e., forms, structures, structure of the musical fabric, etc.). That's why understanding music becomes emotional. “Music is emotional cognition” [ibid.].

2. Musical experience is an emotional and cognitive experience at the same time. You can learn music with the help of other methods and means of cognition: comparisons with other types of art, spatial and color associations, ideas, symbols. In combination with other non-musical means of cognition cognitive value music expands to the widest limits. At the same time, music deepens the existing knowledge and gives it a new quality - emotional richness.

B. M. Teplov considered a person’s ability to experience music as a sign of musical talent, musicality, but the core of musicality - "emotional responsiveness to music".

Musicians usually convey the sphere of emotions with various words used as synonyms: feeling, mood, feeling, affect, excitement, etc. The differences between them are manifested in the intensity of the manifestation of emotion: for example, sensation is weaker, excitement is stronger.

Or the differences become stylistic. "Affect" is used in relation to the theory of affects in the music of the 17th-18th centuries. ; "feeling" - in relation to the stylistic direction of sentimentalism in the music of the 18th century. ; "feeling, excitement, mood" - to characterize romantic music XIX century.

In addition, the emotional and suggestive impact of music is associated with temporal about and the length of the piece of music. The theory of affects in European baroque music is based on this relationship: one “affect”, one feeling is maintained throughout the entire work or its major part. This affect may increase or decrease, but it cannot change for another. So A. Kirchner in the work " Musurgia universalis” lists eight affects that music should evoke: love, sadness, courage, delight, moderation, anger, greatness, holiness. That is why the works of J. S. Bach, associated with the long development of one affect, make a deep emotional impression on the listeners.

The 19th century brought new discoveries: music, capable of conveying the inner world of a person, the development or transformation of his feelings, becomes the leading form of art, which literature, poetry, and painting strive to imitate. It is no coincidence that a variety of epithets, poetic images, program names that emphasize the nature of musical emotions are found in the works of F. Liszt, F. Chopin, R. Schumann, and Russian composers " mighty handful”, P. Tchaikovsky and others.

In the music of the 20th century, despite anti-romantic tendencies, the embodiment of new emotions continues: anxiety, anger, sarcasm, grotesque.

Summarizing the above, we emphasize that music contains a rich spectrum of different emotions, among which are: 1) vital emotions of the surrounding world; 2) emotions that are adequate to the emotions of other types of art; 3) specific musical emotions.

In this regard, the complexity of studying the problem of musical emotions and the lack of a developed theory become clear. Exploring Theory musical content, V. N. Kholopova offers the following classification the most important types musical emotions.

1. Emotions as a feeling of life.

2. Emotions as a factor of personality self-regulation.

3. Emotions of admiration for the mastery of art.

4. Subjective emotions of a practicing musician - composer, performer.

5. Emotions depicted in music (emotions of the image embodied in music).

6. Specific natural emotions of music (emotions of natural musical material).

Emotions in music retain a connection with life emotions, but are expressed in images of fantasy. At the same time, the dominant specific natural musical material, which include: a) motor-rhythmic sphere; b) singing or vocal sphere, transferred to the sound of the timbres of musical instruments; c) speech or declamatory sphere.

Motor-rhythmic sphere influences rhythmic periodicity, a variety of accents, melodic peaks and climaxes, the sound of harmonies and various gradations of sound power. This sphere has a universal effect on a person, up to immersion in a state of hypnosis.

Singing or vocal sphere includes the entire range of intonations of the human voice and is continuously replenished with intonations of the speech sphere.

Speech or declamatory sphere contains huge and very emotional material: intonations of request or complaint, fear or threat, delight or indignation, etc.

The specific natural emotions of music are interconnected with those depicted, that is, with the emotions of the image embodied in music. Emotions depicted are emotions artistic image, composer's intention. In comparison with the specific natural emotions in music, they are symbolic, conventional, have the character of an allegory, an artistic idea.

Thus, musical emotions represent "a hierarchy of human artistic reactions to different levels, from a transient mood, a local “affect” inspired by musical material (rhythm, melos), to elements of attitude, worldview, brought up musical art, his masterpieces. Music affects a person with the help of the emotional generalization that has developed in it for centuries, ”points out V. N. Kholopova. Emotional generalization embodies the aesthetic and ethical ideas of art. On the basis of emotional generalization in music, symbols appear that depict emotions. With the help of associations, allegories, the idea of ​​a feeling, affect or mood is suggested. Musical emotions are set artistic intent works and have an impact on human perception of the world. “Emotions in music are emotions-excitements, and emotions-ideas, and emotions-images, and emotions-concepts”.

4 Children and emotions What is really going on? It seems like it's time to confess. The title of this book - "The Secret of Happy Parents" - is far from reality! In the adult world, there is absolutely no happy people; I don't think anyone wants to be completely happy. So

Tip 24 Musical Instruments Even toy instruments will do Let's be clear right away: we do not call for teaching children music, and here's why. In tsarist times, children of the privileged classes were required to study music. Peasants with workers could about it