Imagination, Music, and the Emotions

Saam Trivedi has been a prominent figure in the analytic philosophy of music for a number of years. In his recent book Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical Study, he offers a summary of his criticism of available views and puts forward an alternative proposal based on the idea that the experience of musical expressiveness centrally involves imagination. Most of the book is occupied by the careful examination and rejection of alternative views. Once Trivedi has cleared the ground from these competitors, he proposes his own positive view. His account is imaginationist, in that he holds the experience of expressive music to essentially involve the faculty of imagination, although it may do so in different ways. An aspect of the book’s review of the extant literature commends particular praise: Trivedi offers a review of current accounts of the emotions and imagination. The latter is especially welcome, as accounts of musical expressiveness which rely, or appear to rely, on imaginative processes do not always clarify the sort of imagination underlying their view.1 The other review, concerned with recent accounts of emotions, is also useful, although not unprecedented. Trivedi’s preference is for a cognitive-affective view of emotions that has place for both the intentional components of (some) emotions and phenomenological feeling-states

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Criticism · Epistemology · Feeling · Literature · Music and emotion · Music history · Musical · Pleasure · Praise · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• A Little Mood Music

  Open Access•Tatyana A Kostochka, Tatyana Kostochka•The British Journal of Aesthetics•2024

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