I want it...I want it...I WANT IT!!!!"

HERE is Leonard Bernstein taking the bull by the horns and trying to explain meaning in music. I suspect that this clip of that obsessive, yearning melodic sequence from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony was probably preceded by Bernstein talking about something more graphically referential, maybe a Strauss tone poem or “La Mer” or the storm scene from the Pastoral Symphony.

But here he’s attempting to convey to his young audience—I could have been one of those kids in the audience had I been living in New York in 1960—something less tangible. He is touching on that mysterious essence of the musical experience that has had psychologists and theorists (not to mention writers of sonnets and great novelists) spinning their wheels since time immemorial. That is, simply put, how and why does music convey emotion? And not only how and why, but also what does it convey. Here Bernstein has decided that Tchaikovsky’s repeated, insistent melodic gesture signals some kind of obsessive need.

“I want it, and I WANT it….but I WANT IT!!!”

There is no way to prove Bernstein either right or wrong, because emotion is subjective, particularly when it is stimulated by art. But once you’ve heard it the way he describes it, it’s hard not to agree. Of course it’s not just the persistent pounding home of that motif that creates this particular emotional state. Tchaikovsky is supremely manipulative in his way of moving a melodic fragment around the harmonic sphere, jacking up the tensions, falling back, then going further with it until it finally explodes.

But then…perhaps Bernstein was wrong and Tchaikovsky wasn’t saying “I want it.” Maybe the music is saying “I’ve got it…. I’ve got it…. and I won’t give it up!”

Could be. This is the problem with trying to be specific about emotional responses to music.

Leonard Meyer, who wrote a book called “Emotion and Meaning in Music,” talked about the contentious divide between those who say that meaning in music is strictly contextual (i.e. germane only to the individual musical structure and not transferable to another piece); and those who believe that music also communicates meanings which in some way refer to the extramusical world of concepts, actions, emotional states, and character. He calls the first group the “absolutists.” The second group, those who, like Bernstein, would intuit “I want it!” from a passage in Tchaikovsky, Meyer calls “referentialists.”

Here is the famous quote we all know from Stravinsky’s autobiography: “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music.”

Is Stravinsky an “absolutist?” I guess (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) it depends on what “express” means. It’s hard to believe that Stravinsky, the composer of Symphony of Psalms or of the slow movement of the Concerto for Piano and Winds, could deny that there is meaning in what he’d written. As an “absolutist” he could perhaps say that the only meaning that can be drawn from his piece is confined strictly to what is contained within the work itself, in other words the relationships set forth within that particular piece. How would Stravinsky react to Bernstein’s intuitions about Tchaikovsky? Would he, as a longtime admirer of Tchaikovsky, be appalled at the temerity of a conductor trying to find “code” in what is ultimately an abstract grouping of intervals and harmonic cadences?

In fact Stravinsky later clarified this statement, saying that he was reacting against the idea that there could be fixed, universally agreed-upon relationships between musical ideas and emotional states. He did not deny expressivity as such, but rather he confirmed his “absolutist” position by saying “today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”

Leonard Meyer nonetheless thought that Stravinsky in his emphatic denials of music’s potential to express emotions, was overreacting to what he felt was a blight of referential signals in much late Romantic music. Certainly Stravinsky must have seen himself as the antidote to Richard Strauss’s extravagantly wide-screen narrative tone poems and his luridly referential motifs, harmonies and gestures in Salome and Elektra.

Stravinsky reacted against what he felt to be an overemphasis upon referential meaning. Meyer says that having denied the possibility or relevance of any emotional response to music, he and other “formalists” ended up embracing an “untenable position partly because they have confused expressionism and referentialism.”

Leonard Meyer, whom I first read while still in high school, may by now be old hat. I don’t know—his work has doubtless been superceded by cognitive specialists like Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, whose work “A Generative Theory of Tonal Music” is influenced by the path breaking discoveries of Noam Chomsky. But their stuff is hard to read, couched in specialist jargon that you have to parse laboriously to draw…. well, to draw MEANING from.

Two other observations in the very first chapter of “Emotion and Meaning in Music” are worth pondering. One has to do with the Holy Trinity of errors that, according to Meyer, have plagued studies of the psychology of music. And those would be hedonism, atomism, and universalism.

Hedonism, atomism and universalism. Sounds like something from the medieval church, maybe the marching orders for the Spanish Inquisition. But no…

“Hedonism” in this context means the mistaken confusing of the aesthetic experience with that which is pleasurable. That would be a form of inquiry into the meaning of music based on the degree of pleasurable sensation the listener experiences, in other words a theory of aesthetics based on likes and dislikes. This proves, according to Meyer and his mentor (and author of “Philosophy in a New Key”) Suzanne Langer, an inadequate mode of inquiry.

Atomism is “the attempt to explain music as a succession of separable, discrete sounds.” Gestalt psychology was very effective in demonstrating the tunnel vision of this kind of approach, although I can imagine it being integral to a larger mode of inquiry.

Then there is the third mortal sin, Universalism. That would be “the belief that the responses obtained by experiment or otherwise are universal, natural, and necessary. This universalist approach is also related to the time-honored search for a physical, quasi-acoustical explanation of music experience—the attempt, that is, to account for musical communication in terms of vibrations, ratios of intervals, and the like.”

I confess to having been lured up this primrose path in my thinking about tonality. And I still tend to believe certain—what shall we call them?—hardwired biological reactions to dissonance and consonance are part of our human makeup. I cannot believe that clashing overtones, particularly at high decibel levels, do not cause just enough physical pain to produce emotional response. Perhaps a feeling for tonal center is not “universally” felt by all humans, but I can’t help noticing that about 99% of the world’s music (that which isn’t purely percussive) is organized and felt according to tonal principles.

Finally, I like how Meyer distinguishes between “mood” and “emotion.” He describes “mood” as a “relatively permanent and stable” state. A raga or a movement from a Baroque dance suite or perhaps a piece of classic minimalism like “Drumming” would be a good example—or even a good jazz number for that matter. The listener hears the music and feels a general mood—melancholy, breezy, angry, whimsical, or whatever. What’s important is that the mood is stable and long lasting.

“Emotion,” on the other hand is temporary and evanescent. It’s a stronger sensation, arising out of the “mood” but having a more powerful effect on the psychological responses of the listener. A profound musical experience can involve only the subtlest of emotional responses. One doesn’t need an eighty-minute Mahler symphony to get the job done. The art is in setting the mood and then being able to express the emotions, be they grand or intimate.