How can an abstract sequence of sounds so intensely express emotional states? How does music elicit or arouse our emotions? What happens at the physiological and neural level when we listen to music? How do composers and performers practically manage the expressive powers of music? How have societies sought to harness the powers of music for social or therapeutic purposes? In the past ten years, research into the topic of music and emotion has flourished. In addition, the relationship between the two has become of interest to a broad range of disciplines in both the sciences and humanities. The Emotional Power of Music is a multidisciplinary volume exploring the relationship between music and emotion. Bringing together contributions from psychologists, neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, and philosophers, the volume presents both theoretical perspectives and in-depth explorations of particular musical works, as well as first-hand reports from music performers and composers. In the first section of the book, the authors consider the expression of emotion within music, through both performance and composing. The second section explores how music can stimulate the emotions, considering the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie music listening. The third section explores how different societes have sought to manage and manipulate the power of music. The book is valuable for those in the fields of music psychology and music education, as well as philosophy and musicology

A critical study of the relationship between poetics and music theory in medieval culture and aesthetics. Musica Naturalis delivers the first systematic account of speculative music theory as a discursive horizon for literary poetics. The title refers to the late medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose 1392 treatise on verse writing, L'Art de Dictier, famously casts verse as “natural music” in explicit distinction to song, which Deschamps defines as “artificial.” Philipp Jeserich links the significance of the speculative branch of medieval musicology to literary theory and literary production, opening up a field of study that has been largely neglected. Beginning with Augustine and Boethius, he traces the discourse of speculative music theory to the late fifteenth century, giving attention to medieval Latin and vernacular sources. Ultimately, Jeserich calls for the conservatism of Deschamps’s poetics and develops a new perspective on the poetics and poetry of the Grands rhétoriqueurs. Given Jeserich's reliance on the intellectual inheritance of late medieval French poetics and poetry, this book will appeal to English-speaking specialists of Old and Middle French, as well as scholars of the French Renaissance. It will also interest English-language medievalists of several other disciplines: intellectual historians and specialists of English, as well as scholars of Italian and Iberian literature.

An account of developments in the aesthetics of music from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.

This volume draws on an interdisciplinary team of authors to advance the study of the religious dimensions of communication and the linguistic aspects of religion. Contributions cover: poetry, iconicity, and iconoclasm in religious language; semiotic ideologies in traditional religions and in secularism; and the role of materiality and writing in religious communication. This volume will provoke new approaches to language and religion.

The canon of Hispanic mysticism is expanding. No longer is our picture of this special brand of early modern devotional practice limited to a handful of venerable saints. Instead, we recognize a wide range of marginal figures as practitioners of mysticism, broadly defined. Neither do we limit the study of mysticism necessarily to the Christian religion, nor even to the realm of literature. Representations of mysticism are also found in the visual, plastic and musical arts. The terminology and theoretical framework of mysticism permeate early modern Hispanic cultures. Paradoxically, by taking a more inclusive approach to studying mysticism in its marginal manifestations, we draw mysticism---in all its complex iterations---back toward its rightful place at the center of early modern spiritual experience. Contributors: Colin Thompson, Alastair Hamilton, Christina Lee, Clara Herrera, Darcy Donahue, Elena del Rio Parra, Evelyn Toft, Fernando Duran Lopez, Piancisco Morales, Freddy Dominguez, Glyn Redworth, Jane Ackerman, Jessica Boon, Jose Adriano de Freitas Carvalho, Luce Lopez-Barat, Maria Mercedes Carrion, Maryrica Lottman, and Tess Knighton.