2024/10/19 by Peter J. Varga, Brian Parkinson · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Diverse Music Education Insights #Music Therapy and Health #Neuroscience and Music Perception
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09298215.2025.2481852
openalex publication_date 2024/10/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Much psychological and musicological literature has been dedicated to the affective experience of music listeners, but considerably less attention has been given to the role of composers and their intentions in the process of conveying emotion in music. The present qualitative study sought to address this gap in the literature by seeking the perspective of composers in semi-structured interviews that probed their engagement with emotion during composition, the practical considerations shaping their deployment of musical elements, and their manipulation of those elements at a technical level to achieve the desired effects. We used flexible coding within a grounded theory approach to analyse a dataset of 22 in-depth interviews. Results showed that while contemporary composers predominantly conceived of their work in terms consistent with a primarily Western classical idiom, they differed considerably in their use of distinct musical elements to evoke affective responses in listeners, their approaches to listening to music qua composer versus qua listener, and the practical ways in which they differentiated affective reactions and cognitive emotion perceptions.