What is the relationship between music and emotion?
Music can transport a spirit from surly to joyful. It can bring a concertgoer to unexpected tears. But the details of how that connection between performance and emotion works remain largely mysterious.
Solo
A new study helps alleviate the ways a composer can deliberately bring grief into the lines of an orchestral work. Here's an idea: it doesn't cost much. The solo player turns out to be an important element of the kind of songs that tightens our throats and makes us look for a midperformance in the fabric, found a study led by Niels Chr. Ohio State University Hansen. Orchestral passages with sad features are twice as likely to have solos, found the study, which appears in the journal Music Perception.