Emotions as aesthetic properties of absolute music

Abstract

This work studies the relation between emotions and music, the place that emotive properties occupy in it. I hold that music expressiveness cannot be explained appealing to what listeners or composers feel, but just to what we can find in the music-work. We hear emotions in music due to its power to exhibit the outer appearance of them, when they are expressed in ordinary life. But they supervene upon formal-structural musical features and the challenge is to explain how it happens and in virtue of which combinations we hear a music passage with a particular expressive character. I contend that detecting the relation of emotive properties of music with other phenomenal features, can contribute to understand how they work.On the other hand, I explain that music moves, but not necessarily to affective states related to the heard properties. Music is the intentional object of very deep ¿aesthetic emotions¿; but it also may elicit in us other non-full-blooded emotional affective states as mirroring responses to dynamic and feeling properties we perceive in music.