Passion

Summarising the thinking of his time in his Musical Lexicon towards the end of the 18th century, Heinrich Christoph Koch wrote that “The expression of passionate feelings is the main object of musical art.” Almost 200 years later, the composer Wolfgang Rihm made a speech entitled “What does music ‘say’?”, and stated that “Asking what music ‘says’ necessarily means that we treat music as one of those events that expresses itself in a world that has already been interpreted. Could it not also be that music exceeding a certain dynamic limit, is above all simply there, for no apparent reason, as if it does not refer to precognitions, whose confirmation it expresses?” On the other hand, contrary to this interpretation, there is the idea of a “new complexity” that composers espoused during the 1980s. They interpreted a piece’s statement as a complex interaction between different processes that simultaneously took place on multiple layers of the musical material. The complexity of human perception is thus reflected in the complexity of musical structures. This harks back to the 18th century, because Koch also believed that the “expression of passionate feelings” took place on differing musical levels. Though, according to Koch, on closer consideration its variety can indeed be reduced to individual phenomena: “At first glance, the study of the emotions appears so highly inclusive and complicated, the quantity of individual passionate movements of the soul so large and incalculable […]. By simply continuing to consider the matter, however, one soon realises that – ignoring the great diversity of lively emotions – a small number of simple emotions can be determined and described, from which most of the passions arising are merely mixtures […].”

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