MichaelSpitzer, A History of Emotion in Western Music: a Thousand Years from Chant to Pop, Oxford University Press, 2020, xi + 437 pp. £102.50 (hb). ISBN 9780190061753.

Music and emotion are so obviously related that it almost need not be said, yet the nature of this relationship is so theoretically contested that a scholarly consensus on how music and emotion mutually influence each other will probably never be reached.And a consensus may not even be desirable; so much depends on, and can be gained from, the different ways one defines the reality status of those concepts and on which units of analysis are employed.Is music a sonic-yet-quasi-metaphysical structure unfolding in time, something that continues to exist (for example, on a score, or in a listener's memory) even when it is not being heard, or a cultural activity made manifest through sound, bound and belonging to specific peoples and places, or both, or something else? Are emotions discrete entities marked by unique psycho-physiological affect programs of the body, or dimensional phenomena characterised in a circumplex model by varying intensities of valence and degrees of arousal, or embodied modes of engaging with the world, or something else?To what extent are emotions distinct from (musical) thinking?These questions are not easily answered, and they are all the more complicated for music scholars who seek to avoid infusing the study of the historical relationship between music and emotion with presentist assumptions, such as those which would overlook the fact that the English word 'emotion', imported from the French, could refer in the seventeenth century to physical agitations of any kind, including the rustling of leaves in the trees (Dixon 2012).From within this complex theoretical landscape comes Michael Spitzer's monograph A History of Emotion in Western Music: a Thousand Years from Chant to Pop, the first extensive history of musical emotion in any language and a book that places the techniques and materials of musical composition firmly at the centre of listeners' emotional experiences.It is an impressive study whose innovative approach positions emotion at the core of the concept of musical style, and as such it offers much to music analysts interested in understanding how analysis can be informed by research on emotion in various disciplines.This book is a welcome contribution to the larger and burgeoning field of the history of emotion, which has gained much traction since the publication of William Reddy's seminal The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (2001), but which has paid less attention to music's capacity to act as an historical technology of emotion than has been paid to other communicative media such as visual art and literature.Spitzer's book also advances the study of emotion from within historical musicology and music analysis, which, with Music Analysis, 00/0 (2025) 1