Jenefer Robinson Quotes

Because people's experiences differ, what they hear in the music will be different, and how they relate it to broader life experience will also be different.
Furthermore, idiosyncrasy in musical interpretation is something to be celebrated rather than condemned. [...] [W]e should think of the score not as the work itself but rather as a useful tool to help us arrive at our individual interpretation of a piece.

When feelings are made available to us isolated, backgroundless, and inherently limited in duration - as they are through music - we can approach them as if we were wine tasters, sampling the delights of various vintages [...]. We become cognoscenti of feeling, savoring the qualitative aspect of emotional life for its own sake.

Many listeners have the experience of sharing the feelings that seem to be expressed by a piece of music[.] [T]he listener mirrors the feelings expressed by the music.
[...] The problem is that if listeners mirror the negative emotions they hear in music, then we seem to be landed with a paradox; [...] the "paradox of tragedy[.]" [P]eople apparently take great delight in watching and hearing about people in hideously unhappy situations and undergoing terrible suffering. [...] The musical version of the paradox is this: If people actually feel sad when they listen to sad music, why do they go on doing it? All they have to do is leave the room or flip the switch, and the music would vanish, along with the pain it causes. Yet people continue to listen, apparently complacently, to the most anguished and wrenching strains. [...] There must be some value to experiencing the sadness in sad music, or otherwise people would not do it; but what value can it have?

Deep emotional response to music typically arises as a product of the most intense musical perception. It is generally in virtue of the recognition of emotions expressed in music, or of the emotion-laden gestures embodied in musical movement, that an emotional reaction occurs.

The undistracted experience of affects of just about any sort, when free of practical consequences, appears to have intrinsic appeal for many of us.

When we identify with music that we are perceiving - or perhaps better, with the person whom we imagine owns the emotions or emotional gestures we hear in the music - we share in and adopt these emotions as our own [...]. And so we end up feeling as, in imagination, the music does.

[L]anguage cannot match music's subtlety and preciseness of expression.

What we seem to perceive influences what we feel, and what we feel influences what we say we perceive