family, and while listening to music. The least promising environment was at
school, with teachers, while performing. The individual stories graphically
revealed the kinds of anxieties and humiliations man ychildren were made to
suffer in relation to music b yinsensitive adults or through insensitive educa-
tional practices. These acted as strong disincentives to further engagement with
music and seemed to block the possibilit yof making links between emotions
and the intrinsic characteristics of music.
A similar lesson emerges from a recent stud yof leading American concert
pianists b ySosniak (1989). None of those in her sample showed exceptional
promise as a child, but in ever ycase their earl ylessons were associated with
fun and exploration, rather than with practical achievement. It seems that, at
least for the crucial earl ystages of musical development, there is no special
strateg ywe should recommend to educators, other than to stop worr ying about
particular apparent skill deficiencies and concentrate on not getting in the way
of children’s enjoyment and exploration of music. In such contexts, children
become natural experts who spontaneousl yseek what the yrequire to bring
their expertise to bear on particular practical accomplishments.
24.6 Musical Structure and Emotion
The final question I wish to raise in this chapter concerns the precise nature of
the structure–emotion link: What structures elicit what emotions, and why?
Although musicologists have long debated this point (e.g., Cooke, 1959; Meyer,
1956), there have been remarkabl yfew attempts to collect empirical data on
it. A few physiological studies (e.g., Goldstein, 1980; Nakamura, 1984) have
shown that reliable changes in such indices as heart rate and skin conductance
can be shown as people listen to specific pieces of music. But such studies gen-
erall yhave not involved subjecting the music itself to detailed structural anal-
ysis. A particular characteristic of emotional responses to music is that they
often change in nature and intensit yover the duration of a piece and are linked
to specific events (rather than being a general ‘‘wash’’ of a particular mood).
In this respect, the yare similar in nature to emotional responses to drama or
fiction. To m yknowledge, no published studies provide data on the specific
points in musical compositions at which intense or peak emotional experiences
take place. One problem is that it is difficult to get intersubjective agreement on
how to characterize these experiences. Some of m yown research entails an at-
tempt to circumvent this problem b yasking people to report (retrospectivel y, at
this stage) on the locations in musical compositions at which the yreliabl yex-
perience direct physical manifestations of emotion (e.g., tears, shivers). A sig-
nificant minorit yof subjects have been willing and able to do this and have
provided a corpus of some 165 ‘‘moments’’ of reliable emotional response. Full
details of this stud yare reported in Sloboda (1991). An anal ysis of the subset
comprising classical instrumental excerpts has revealed three clusters of struc-
tural features associated with three different types of responses. These are sum-
marized in table 24.1. This pattern requires confirmation with other types of
music and also b ydirect observation in experimental situations. If confirmed, it
will show that man yof the emotional responses to music require that the lis-
578 John A. Sloboda