the same emotion that is portrayed (we hear a cry of pain; we feel sympathy,
not pain). This is “cognitive speech theory” applied to music. Differing from
Langer, Kivy says “music is expressive of individual, specifiable emotions.” Put
to the hard test of finding examples to demonstrate all this, Kivy has been
unconvincing to many readers. For one thing, he is a theologian rather than a
philosopher: one who begins with a belief and goes on to prove it true. He has
no philosophic doubt that music can be “sad”—indeed much of the book is
about sadness in music. How does it express sadness? By weeping figures,
falling lines, “restless elements” like diminished triads, chromaticism, and
above all by the minor key. These ubiquitous features take him only so far,
however, and he has to grant that “a great deal of music bears no recognizable
expressive character at all.” Is the whole problem “trivial,” in philosophic
terms? One wonders, reading that “a musical composition can be expressive
and bad, inexpressive and good.” Numerous insights spark the volume, but
there are many quirks to balance them, such as the finding of “brutality” in
Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,then “vitality” or “energy” in it, and then “awesome
angry beauty.” [Not in minor, it cannot also be sad.]
A lengthy review of Kivy’s ideas on musical representation: Douglas Demp-
ster, “How Does Debussy’s Sea Crash? How Can Jimi’s Rocket Red Glare?
Kivy’s Account of Representation in Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism52–3 (Fall 1994): 415–428. Dempster is looking at Kivy’s earlier
book on the topic, Sound and Semblance(1984). He finds that despite “trou-
bling counter evidence and vague formulation,” Kivy in that book “has
pointed us in the right direction.”- Kivy, Peter. Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera, Drama, and
Text.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1988. xii, 303p. ISBN 0-91-07324-4.
ML3858 .K53.
An absorbing effort to draw connections between opera in the 18th century
and some psychological/philosophical texts of the period, in order to “provide
new understanding” of Mozart and Handel. There are also new ideas on opera
aesthetics, “new in the sense that they give us some new reasons to think those
[previous] beliefs are true.” Thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, and Girolamo Mei
are applied to the work of the Camerata. Robert Donington’s analysis of Mon-
teverdi (#1245) is strongly disputed. Handel, in the da capo aria, represented
the notion of obsession—the repetitions are not realistic in terms of the way
people speak, but they convey the emotional idée fixe. The concept of realism
cannot be taken, in opera, as meaning that operatic actions resemble ordinary
human behavior or speech. But the da capo aria was replaced when psycholog-
ical emotion-theory moved from Descartes (hard-wired, finite, fixed emotions)
to associationism (fluid, rapidly changing). It was Mozart who replaced it,
with the finale-ensemble. Mozart wrote for types, not characters: for sonori-
ties, to be mixed like instruments of the orchestra. There is no use looking for
emotional depths, however: “what music can’t do, opera can’t do.” What
music can do, and does do in opera, is take over the tensions of the text (which,
as referring to the real world, are inherently unsolvable) and resolve them: this
is the sense in which music serves the drama.
88 Opera