This chapter aims to initiate a tradition of philosophizing about expressive music performance, and to draw attention to the immense complexity of the phenomenon. After revisiting Carl Seashore’s definition of performance and teasing apart some of its conceptual and methodological aspects, the chapter discusses some of the epistemological premises that have pervaded psychological research on expressive performance. It then explores the connection between performance expression and emotional expression in an attempt to identify potential universals of expressive music performance. It is argued that the meanings emanating from the sounds of a performance are the reflection of non-sonic factors, of historical–cultural contingencies, and of complex social dynamics that have not been targeted by the mainstream of expressive performance research. Drawing examples from both western and non-western cultural contexts, the chapter argues for the inclusion of philosophical enquiry within the field, so that expressive music performance may be more fully understood.

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A B S T R AC T The involvement of the body in musical experiences is a phenomenon that has been noted since ancient times, and many authors have cited the organic rhythms of the body as providing the experiential basis for musical rhythm. The input of our bodily experiences to the comprehension of music has recently been investigated by various researchers in music theory. A similar interest in the bodily basis of music is also seen in studies of expressive music performance. Systematic -and experimental -research on the bodily dimension of musical experiences can be traced back to the 19th century. The rise of scientific psychology from within the experimental physiology of the period gave 19th century theories concerning the workings of the human mind a decisively embodied character. Hence, recent research on expressive performance is rooted in 19th century theories of music performance that employed bodily phenomena as models. This article provides a survey of these early performance studies in the light of 19th century psychology, and discusses rhythmic structure as the basis of a theory of expressive performance. 1

This commentary emphasizes empathy as a biologically and culturally embedded, dynamically emergent phenomenon, and critically evaluates its epistemic status in explaining human action.

The last decade has witnessed an increasing interest in studying music as it relates to human evolution, leading to the establishment of so-called evolutionary musicology as a new field of enquiry. Researchers in this field maintain that music indeed played as crucial a role as the development of language in the evolution of humankind. The most frequently cited musical phenomena in relation to various adaptive functions include rhythm, meter, and melodic contour. In this connection, the universal phenomenon of tonal organisation of pitch in musical systems received no attention. This article provides a hypothesis regarding the evolutionary origins of tonality as a system for the dynamic shaping of affect, and establishes further connections between music and affective states by proposing a link between the emergence of tonality and of the human capacity to regulate inter-subjective dynamics by shaping the course of affect towards stable states. The article also proposes that tonality provides an archetypal psychological space within which the human ability to shape different paths towards stable affective states could evolve. KEYWORDS: tonality, attraction schema, evolutionary musicology TONALITY AS A UNIVERSALTHE idea that there exist correspondences between the dynamic principles of heavenly bodies, of our subjective experiences and of music is a very old one, and not confined to the West. In the earliest accounts of human music and musicality within ancient mythologies of China, Babylonia and India (Lippman, 1992, pp. 3-9), the constitution of the cosmos, of humans and of music are integrally related; and the Pythagorean tradition originating in ancient Greece attributes the powerful effects of music to the harmonic principles it shares with cosmic order. The similarities humans observe between musical motion and physical motion, on the one hand, and between musical motion and "inner motion" or emotion, on the other hand, constitutes one of the recurrent themes in the history of Western musical aesthetics, and many non-Western cultures draw parallels between musical movement and the progression, regeneration and return perceived in the natural world as well as in psychological phenomena. Musical thought across different times and places appears to consistently attribute human musicality to something that goes deeper than the accidents of culture or nurture. Arguably the most significant development in contemporary music psychology has been the recognition precisely of this fact, that musical phenomena are indeed rooted in the hard-wired biological, i.e. perceptual, affective and motor, capacities of our species and not merely in the accidental features of cultural and historical circumstances.A landmark in this connection has been the publication of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, which identified music theory as an integral branch of cognitive science. Setting out to provide an account of human musicality by identifying the psychological principles und...