Reading Guide for Langer,

1
Reading Guide for Langer, Feeling and Form
2
Music, the symbol of feeling

• According to Langer, Music is the tonal analogue
  of emotive life. In other words, music feels
  like life. Do you agree?
• Langer also says that the function of music is
  not to stimulate feeling, but to express it.

3
Music, the symbol of feeling (continued)

• Music does not necessarily express the composers
  feelings at the time rather, it expresses the
  composers knowledge of the inner life, a kind of
  knowledge that cannot well be expressed in words.
  It is a symbolic expression of the forms of
  sentience as the composer understands them.
• Note if you like, this can be an emotional
  understanding, one the composer could not well
  express in any other way than by writing music.

4
Music and language

• Music is like language. It has discrete parts
  that can be combined in a variety of ways to make
  new expressive wholes.
• Music is unlike language. The discrete parts of
  language (words) have fixed meanings assigned to
  them combining these meanings grammatically
  makes larger units of meaning. By contrast, the
  discrete units of music (tones) have no fixed
  meaning. Only when these units are combined does
  the result have meaning.

5
Music and language (continued)

• Because the parts of music have no fixed meaning,
  we are free to fill its subtle articulate forms
  with any meaning that fits them.
• So we do comprehend the processes of life and
  sentience through musics audible, dynamic
  pattern, yet a passage of music has no defined
  and specific meaning.

6
Langers thesis some test examples

• Listen to these pieces to see if you think what
  Langer says is true about them. Do they feel
  like life in any way? Are they structured in
  the way experience is emotionally structured
  through time? Is this what makes them work?
• Ravel Jeux deau
• Bach Toccata, adagio and fugue in C major
• Links to these pieces are at the bottom of the
  Course Guides page. If you like, just listen to
  the fugue part of the Bach piece it starts at
  11minutes 10 seconds into the piece and runs to
  the end.

7
Semblance

• Langer now develops her theory by elaborating the
  idea of image or likeness.
• She suggests that each art form creates a virtual
  reality of some sort in the images of objects
  that it produces.
• Painting, sculpture and architecture create
  varieties of virtual space. Music creates
  virtual time.

8
Virtual time and space

• What is the point of talking about virtual space
  and virtual time? After all, paintings,
  sculptures and buildings take up real space, and
  music takes real time.

9
Virtual time and space (continued)

• Langers answer the space in a painting is not
  the real (flat) space of the canvas, but the
  virtual or imagined space the viewer sees. The
  time in a piece of music is not the literal time
  it takes to hear it, but the virtual time into
  which the listener enters while hearing it.
• This time is created by rhythm, by harmonic
  movement, and by many other devices. It is a
  subjective time, the time of an imagined
  experience, or rather of what an experience feels
  like.