Historical changes in the emotions and imagery evoked by piano music: Schubert, Wagner, Liszt, Schoenberg

Are changes in musical structure (i.e. the progressive decreasing of tonal stability and increasing of chords’ unfamiliarity, dissonance and harmonic tension) accompanied by consistent changes in the emotion and associations that are typically evoked in communicating the musical experience? I focused on the historical trajectory connecting Schubert, Wagner, late Liszt and early Schoenberg. I first performed computational analyses of representative piano examples (or piano transcriptions), considering questions of structural continuities, transitions and breaks, both within and between the works of each composer. Second, I asked 20 musicians and non-musicians to rate each of the pieces in terms of the 1^st and 2^nd order emotion labels predicted by the GEMS multidimensional model of music emotions, and found that progressive variation of the combined effects of vertical (simultaneous) and horizontal (successive) tension along the proposed trajectory is related with the progressive increasing of emotional aspects like tension and surprise. Third, participants further described the repertoire in a free, native language interview – by indicating associations with emotions, imagery and gesture, as well as with other metaphors that came to their mind when listening to the music. The effect of new descriptors was explored, including living/non-living things, gesture (body, movement), personal involvement (positivity/negativity, motion/commotion, memories), space, time, outside world (social interactions, nature), senses different from hearing (bright/dark, soft/hard). To analyse empirical data, I mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods (grounded theory, correspondence analysis, analysis of variance, correlation analysis).

Keywords: computational music analysis - emotion - imagery - post-tonal music - influences

Erica Bisesi was born in Gorizia (Italy). She completed a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Physics at Udine University in 2007. She has taught acoustics and psychoacoustics at the Udine Conservatory from 2004 to 2006, and psychoacoustics and music cognition at the University of Graz from 2014 to 2015. Her career as a systematic musicologist began in 2007, first at the Centre for Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz, and then in several projects on the psychology of music, psychoacoustics, expressive music performance, music theory and analysis and music information retrieval, collaborating with the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, the Kunstuniversität in Graz, the Conservatories of Como and Novara, the Universities of Jyväskylä, Bologna, Padova, Udine and Montréal. In October 2009, Erica was awarded a Lise Meitner postdoctoral fellowship for a two-year project entitled Measuring and modeling expression in piano performance by FWF Austria. In December 2011, FWF funded her three-year Stand-Alone project Expression, emotion and imagery in music performance. Erica received her first music education at the age of five, and completed a M.A. Degree in Piano Performance at Trieste Conservatory in 1996. Over the following ten years, she studied with the conductor F. Mander, the pianists B. Canino in Milan, A. Delle Vigne in Salzburg, Florence and Rome, V. Krpan in Zagreb, A. Kravtchenko in Rovereto, and A. Woyke in Graz. She is now active as a soloist and in chamber music ensembles. Erica is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher at the KTH in Stockholm, and lecturer on psychoacoustics, music cognition, music expression and emotion at the Comenius University in Bratislava. Her research lies mainly in the area of computational musicology, music performance, expression and emotion, and music theory and analysis.