Expressive Meaning and the Empirical Analysis of Musical Gesture

Abstract

Many investigations of the expressive meaning of musical works rely only on the musical interpretations and intuitions of the author. While invaluable, theorists’ analyses are often biased or contradict one another. This paper presents a novel empirical approach to analyzing musical expression, in which the interpretations of individual theorists are balanced with listener reception in a broader audience, in this case a group of 110 music students from two universities. This new paradigm, which I have termed “the progressive exposure method,” presents a larger excerpt in shorter discrete segments. An exploratory case study illustrates the progressive exposure method through an analysis of the expressive meaning of the second movement of Beethoven’sPathétiqueSonata. When the results are amalgamated, a diachronic portrait emerges of cognitively complex emotions blended together as they unfold throughout the movement. This article provides readers with a hands-on, interactive tool for examining all of the results of the study. By presenting short musical gestures to listeners, a bottom-up, data-driven analysis of the expressive meaning of musical gestures and topics in the movement is possible. The consequent analytical results intersect in unique ways with more traditional theoretical and analytical practices, illustrating original applications of empirical methods to existing theories of musical expression as a means of providing converging evidence for those theories. Specifically, the results of this intersubjective analysis are discussed in light of theories of musical meaning by Hatten, Meyer, Narmour, Huron, and Margulis, and the results provide a new opportunity to directly and empirically testing a number of these authors’ hypotheses.