Performing and listening to music occurs in specific situations, requiring specific media. Empirical research on music listening and appreciation, however, tends to overlook the effects these situations and media may have on the listening experience. This article uses the sociological concept of the frame to develop a theory of an aesthetic experience with music as the result of encountering sound/music in the context of a specific situation. By presenting a transdisciplinary sub-field of empirical (concert) studies, we unfold this theory for one such frame: the classical concert. After sketching out the underlying theoretical framework, a selective literature review is conducted to look for evidence on the general plausibility of the single elements of this emerging theory and to identify desiderata. We refer to common criticisms of the standard classical concert, and how new concert formats try to overcome alleged shortcomings and detrimental effects. Finally, an empirical research program is proposed, in which frames and frame components are experimentally manipulated and compared to establish their respective affordances and effects on the musical experience. Such a research program will provide empirical evidence to tackle a question that is still open to debate, i.e., whether the diversified world of modern-day music listening formats also holds a place for the classical concert – and if so, for what kind of classical concert.

Social experience is often considered to be a key motivating factor for engaging with leisure activities and attendance at music concerts is no exception. Despite this, until recently, there has been limited interest in measuring the collective or social experience of live concerts in a quantitative way. Therefore, we created and validated a new measure of the social experience of a concert. In a pilot study, 103 participants were recruited across two concert settings . An extensive list of 65 items was used to measure the social experience of a concert. Based on the results, the measurement scale was reduced to 22 items. In the main study, a further 113 participants were recruited at several concerts from a weekly series with a range of musical genres. Participants provided self-ratings of their social experience, emotional response (GEMIAC), enjoyment and demographic information in a paper survey. Based on the results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis we were able to reduce the number of items in the Social Experience of a Concert Scales (SECS) to 17 validated statements representing a five-factor model: Depth of Processing, Attention, Solidarity, Satisfaction, and Self-Definition. Using MANOVA, we tested the influence of these factors on the emotional response of participants to the music and found that they are not significant predictors; however, the social experience of a concert was found to be a significant predictor of enjoyment. We have developed and validated the first quantitative measure of the social experience of a Western art music concert. Our results also suggest that the emotional response to music and the overall experience of a concert are separate and that only the latter can be influenced by the social experience of a concert.

Recent research has explored the role of empathy in the context of music listening. Here, through an empathy priming paradigm, situational empathy was shown to act as a causal mechanism in inducing emotion, although the way empathy was primed had low levels of ecological validity. We therefore conducted an online experiment to explore the extent to which information about a composer’s expressive intentions when writing a piece of music would significantly affect the degree to which participants reportedly empathise with the composer and in turn influence emotional responses to expressive music. A total of 229 participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The experimental group read short texts describing the emotions felt by the composer during the process of composition. To control for the effect of text regardless of its content, one control group read texts describing the characteristics of the music they were to hear, and a second control group was not given any textual information. Participants listened to 30-second excerpts of four pieces of music, selected to express emotions from the four quadrants of the circumplex theory of emotion. Having heard each music excerpt, participants rated the valence and arousal they experienced and completed a measure of situational empathy. Results show that situational empathy in response to music is significantly associated with trait empathy. As opposed to those in the control conditions, participants in the experimental group responded with significantly higher levels of situational empathy. Receiving this text significantly moderated the effect of the expressiveness of stimuli on induced emotion, indicating that it induced empathy. We conclude that empathy can be induced during music listening through the provision of information about the specific emotions of a person relating to the music. These findings contribute to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie emotional responses to music.

Music education in the United Kingdom has long been centred on the study of historic European classical music. Many studies within the field of Music Psychology have investigated the various ways in which people respond to Western Art Music, and how those responses may differ in accordance with the listening context, but very few have examined the effect of music by specific composers. Bach’s music is still performed regularly around the world—arguably more so than any other composer—and continues to be regarded as essential repertoire by instrumental teachers across many disciplines. This study sought to investigate the potential reasons for this from the perspective of pedagogic value and listener response. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, incorporating semi-structured interviews with music educators alongside a listening experiment in which participants rated their emotional responses to a selection of pieces by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. A reflexive thematic analysis was used to present an apologia for the continued propagation of Bach’s music in mainstream education, and listeners’ emotional responses were measured using a standardised scale. Additional ratings for valence, arousal, familiarity and overall enjoyment were also gathered from each participant. Results indicate a statistically significant relationship between the music of specific composers and some emotion categories. These findings could lend support to the continued hagiolatry of J. S. Bach in music education, in spite of the welcome drive towards the diversification of the curriculum.