Clearly, we need to view pleasure and pain more broadly. One way of regarding pleasure of any kind is to see it as inherent in the satisfaction of anticipations. This is a variant on what philosophers call "motivational" theories of pleasure. We've seen how our nervous systems forever model the world they perceive, spawning a flux of anticipations at every level of perception and action and understanding. Stress and anxiety occur to whatever degree reality collides with anticipations, making the brain struggle to quickly reassess the world in a way that makes sense (that is, in a way that can it be anticipated more successfully). Conversely, perfectly fulfilled anticipations are resolved without friction, and this resolution is what we call pleasure. Even "animal" pleasures like sex and eating fit this conception in that they are led by strong anticipations ("desires") that become intensely pleasurable upon their fulfillment.
This conception implies that pleasure is really no more than a retreat from pain, and so suggests that our lives must be pretty distressing for us to find so little opportunities for pleasure. On the surface, life's moment-to-moment pains don't seem so grand; but then neither do life's moment-to-moment pleasures. The world is an untidy place. Where we would like to find simple patterns and deep connections, we encounter complexity and conflict and confusion. And so all ordinary existence is accompanied by a certain amount of strain. When trains of anticipation go consistently well, we register pleasure of well-being. When resolution is consistently rocky, we register broad anxiety. Only in a handful of activities, including music and the other arts, do our minds partake of experience that is so perfectly organized that every anticipation is roundly satisfied, filling us with intense pleasure
The matter of pleasure and pain is complicated by the fact that most activities take place at many levels in the nervous system. Someone derives pleasure from cooking, but not from the sting of peeling onions. And the pleasure of cooking may be overshadowed if the cook had anticipated going to a party that night but had been disappointed. Similarly, in music we encounter pleasure or distress in the quality of a clarinet's tone, in the melody it plays, in the harmony that supports the melody, in the rhythm that drives it all along, and in many other factors we've touched on in earlier chapters. When we speak of "the" pleasure of music, we are actually referring to the sum total of all music's pleasures and disappointments, a sort of running average of the good and the bad.
From this standpoint, it's easy to see how we take pleasure in musical devices. As music's promises (anticipations) are fulfilled, we experience pleasure; as they are betrayed, we feel anxiety or worse. When skillful composition arouses strong, far-reaching anticipations, intense pleasure accompanies their fulfillment; by comparison, the weak anticipations generated by poor composition hardly touch us.
Yet the deepest pleasure in music comes with deviation from the expected: dissonances, syncopations, kinks in melodic contour, sudden booms and silences. Isn't this contradictory? Not if the deviations serve to set up an even stronger resolution. Banal music raises common anticipations that immediately satisfies them with obvious resolutions. There's pleasure to be had, but it is the pleasure of the bread roll, not of caviar. Well-written music tales its time satisfying anticipations. It teases, repeatedly instigating an anticipation and hinting at its satisfaction, sometimes swooping toward a resolution only to hold back with a false cadence. When it finally delivers, all resources of harmony and rhythm, timbre and dynamics, are brought to bear at once. The art in writing such music lies less in devising resolutions than in heightening anticipations to preternatural levels. If this process sounds as much like the recipe for good lovemaking as for good music-making, it's because the nervous system functions the same way in all its reaches. The same basic mechanism applies to all pleasures, artistic and otherwise, for the simple reason that this mechanism is pleasure.
Consider harmony. Once we've mastered the harmonic system of our culture and know how to follow tonal centers and anticipate harmonic resolutions, we bring a flood of anticipations to all our listening. Particular chords lead in particular harmonic directions, and so long as harmony travels in that direction we register immediate pleasure. Conversely, an inappropriate change of key can be quite jarring, even painful. However, carefully controlled dissonances are frequently employed to postpone the resolution of harmonic anticipations, and thus to make them larger, sometimes integrating many smaller anticipations into a towering hierarchy. Most such dissonances are related to the underlying harmony so that they will not be too jarring. They do not so much violate anticipations as reshape them.
Melodic pleasure arises in similar fashion, but through the anticipation of melodic contour. When contour rises and falls "naturally"—that is, in ways that we anticipate—we register pleasure; when contour wavers recklessly, we register distress as our brains struggle to make sense of the patterns before them. To some degree, melodic anticipations originate from the gestalt rules we considered in Chapter 3. But anticipations also arise from culturally acquired vocabulary of melodic devices.
The role of anticipation in rhythmic pleasure is equally clear. We enjoy meter by anticipating a train of pulses. Any sudden deviation in tempo, or in the number of beats per measure, sends our nervous systems reeling. But carefully controlled syncopations can set us up for a pleasurable reaccentuation of the underlying beat.
The rhythm of phrase is more elaborately constructed, relying on a panoply of cues that make us strongly anticipate phrase boundaries. Composers meticulously construct sequences of evolving phrases, each suggesting the next, but sometimes deviating toward the unexpected, then moving to reaffirm the overall form.
This way of thinking about pleasure may explain the surge we feel in the climax of a Beethoven symphony, but what of the "simple" pleasure we find in the individual sounds of instruments. Because the experience of music arises as our brains model hierarchies of relations among sounds—hierarchies that are "invisible" in the sense that they can't be readily shared with others, or even described to oneself—it's impossible to sort out the degree to which the pleasure we find "purely" in instrumental sound actually arises from surrounding musical relations. Any three notes on a viola can sound uninteresting when heard as the violist tunes up, yet might ravish us when they appear at the climax of a piece. Although pleasure appears to be embodied in the "sound" of the notes, it mostly resides in high-level relations that we keenly experience, but to which we bring little self-awareness.
Still, just a lone note from a viola can bring bliss to a keen ear. How is this possible? In truth, no one has a clue. But it's likely that, at the micro-scale of music cognition where auditory cortex assembles individual sounds, somehow anticipations are suggested and fulfilled, but too quickly to be consciously observed. Significantly, we find no pleasure in a pure-frequency tone generated by a computer. Lacking variation of any kind, such sounds have no basis for generating anticipations. As we saw in Chapter 2, musical sounds are complex, constantly changing entities of many undulating components. The architecture of such sounds varies with the skill of the musician. We celebrate a violist who "has good tone." Somehow, through years of practice, such a violist learns to tease sounds of a particular structure out of the strings. He does this without understanding how, just as we tie shoelaces without having to think about it. Conversely, a novice violist can torture a sensitive ear by producing sounds that are "grating"— that is, sounds broken into disconnected segments, where one moment does not lead to the next, where every nascent anticipation is foiled.
Music's large structures can as readily result in wincing pain. When a well-trained but overambitious composer generates strong anticipations and then fails to deliver on them, we're soon in agony. Most such music quickly disappears from the concert repertory. But new music often inflicts pain upon its audiences until they learn how to anticipate it properly—or until they realize that the fault is not theirs and that the composer has failed to achieve his aims.
We also experience pain in music—even very good music—when we apply the wrong vocabulary of devices to it and anticipate it wrongly. Thus one style of melody will be pleasurable to those who are well-acquainted with its twists and turns, but unpleasurable to those who bring to the melody a different style of anticipation that produces one jarring mismatch after another.
Such arguments may clarify how we derive pleasure from musical emotionality, but they don't explain why we seek out the experience of negative emotions in music, such as melancholy or grief or violence. After all, most of us prefer to avoid negative emotional states in our daily lives. But in music we somehow enjoy such experiences—and not as remote spectators, as one might view a Shakespearean tragedy, but by being made to feel melancholic or grief-stricken or violent, as if something unpleasant had happened to us.
In his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote:
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.
Wilde alludes to the reputed "meaning" of music that we considered in the last chapter. As we saw, most compositions lack a specific, agreed-upon reference to the contents of the world. But when we bring our own life situations to music, we make of what we will. Music idealizes emotions negative and positive alike. By so doing, it momentarily perfects our individual emotional lives. The "meaning" we feel is not in the music as such, but in our own responses to the world, responses that we carry about with us always. Music serves to perfect those responses, to make them beautiful. By so doing, music imparts dignity to experience that is often far from dignified. And by imparting pleasure even to negative emotions, music serves to justify sufferings large and small, assuring us that it has not all been for nothing.
Wilde could not be more wrong about how a man "who had led a perfectly commonplace life" would be propelled to such emotional extremes. Music most affects people who already have a deep emotional existence. It is the force of our own lives that drives musical anticipation, and our own joys and pains that are rewarded by musical resolutions.
- Robert Jourdain
