Mechanisms of musical emotion transfer: insights from 22 composers and the musicological and psychological literature

Much psychological and musicological literature has been dedicated to the affective experience of music listeners, but considerably less attention has been given to the role of composers and their intentions in the process of conveying emotion in music. The present qualitative study sought to address this gap in the literature by seeking the perspective of composers in semi-structured interviews that probed their engagement with emotion during composition, the practical considerations shaping their deployment of musical elements, and their manipulation of those elements at a technical level to achieve the desired effects. We used flexible coding within a grounded theory approach to analyse a dataset of 22 in-depth interviews. Results showed that while contemporary composers predominantly conceived of their work in terms consistent with a primarily Western classical idiom, they differed considerably in their use of distinct musical elements to evoke affective responses in listeners, their approaches to listening to music qua composer versus qua listener, and the practical ways in which they differentiated affective reactions and cognitive emotion perceptions.