There is much more to music than emotional expression, but music's emotional appeal is its greatest drawing card. One turns to music for pleasure at some level, and one does not experience pleasure unless one receives some sense of emotional well being from the music. Since the emotional make up of people differs and likewise the emotional needs differ as well, it is not surprising that there is a wide variety of musical styles which appeal to the emotions in an equally large variety of ways. Music that gives expression to highly painful emotions may repel some listeners but offer profound comfort to others. It is also quite possible for happy-sounding music to heighten the well-being of some while nauseating others. Sometimes music that clearly tries to express pathos falls into cliche and posturing to the point of provoking laughter. Some music that comes across to some as desiccated of all emotion will bathe others in a deep sense of contentment. The emotional response to music is, of course, complicated greatly by the emotional expression's involvement with the formal element of music, from which it cannot be separated.

The emotional qualities of music have a lot to do with why it has often been judged more of a hindrance than a help to spiritual growth. Much writing on spirituality has downplayed the role of human emotion in the journey to God. Strong emotions experienced in prayer are considered inferior to states that have little or no emotional content. Since emotions are rooted in the physical body, and the body is inferior to the other human faculties, emotions are inferior to the work of the intellect and the will. Emotions are notoriously difficult to control and thus they are judged to be roadblocks to spiritual maturity. Music that rises above emotional expression may be a helpful supplement to one's prayer life, but music that expresses passions such as anger or erotic longing can only tie one down from moving towards God.

These objections to human emotion are answered in Scripture. The acts of prayer in the Bible are not rarified and serene. Rather they are not only down-to-earth, they are downright earthy. Strong, bodily-based expressions of joy and of anguish characterize the psalms. St. Paul prays for his churches with "the bowels of compassion." Jesus, while being fully God, was fully human, which is to say that Jesus had (actually still has) a fully human body. Jesus himself experienced deep, bodily-based emotions of joy, such as when the secrets of God were revealed to the "little ones," and also sorrow, such as when he saw that the people were like sheep without a shepherd and when his friend Lazarus died. There are suggestions that some of Jesus' religious experiences were ineffable. The Transfiguration would be a particularly powerful example of that, but there is nothing of the narrative of the Transfiguration to suggest that it was rarified and void of emotional content, although it is possible that it was. Given these considerations, it seems that the downgrading of emotion is open to question in the biblical scheme of things.

Music can be intensely joyful, as in the joyful abandon of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or it can be intensely tragic, such as in the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony. Many times, however, music's intensity has little to do with such identifiable emotions. In such cases, the phrase "organic energy" can be helpful. Dvorak's "New World" Symphony is a highly energetic work, but the high voltage of energy does not come across as either joyful or sad. Many listeners experience a high emotional involvement with this symphony because of its energy, and yet there are no words pointing to specific emotions that fit the music's content. The works of Rachmaninoff are notorious for their emotional gush that enrapture many listeners and turn off others. Interestingly, it is particularly hard to define the actual emotions being expressed in his music. Is it romantic? Even erotic? Is it sad? Happy? By and large, the best one can say is that works such as the Second Symphony (like the Dvorak it is in E Minor) and the Third Piano Concerto are highly emotional. Period. Much the same can be said for the intensity of a rock group such as Smashing Pumpkins where the defining the intense emotion, again, is not easy. In contrast to most romantic symphonies, baroque concertos tend to aim at a much lower emotional arousal. The fast movements of J.S. Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto are upbeat but they cause a sense of relaxed contentment more than they convey happiness. Most of Igor Stravinsky's music is cool, aiming at the same calm level of contentment and pleasure at the musical design itself. The ballet score Agon is a particularly good example of this quality. The music of Palestrina, of course, aspires to lofty heights well beyond the normal vicissitudes of the human heart.

Since most people prefer to be joyful rather than despairing, one might think that, in general, people would avoid music expressing sorrow or despair and stick to music that is upbeat and happy. Some people do just that, but many people turn to music of a melancholy bent. The main reason we turn to music of this sort is because we experience sadness in life. As we experience emotional responses to life, we have to make decisions as to what we will do with these emotions. One of the instinctual ways of living with these emotions is to re-express them in forms that become artistic expressions. The psalms, for example, do just that. They do not moralize about what we should feel and not feel. Rather, they express the joys and the sorrows that are experienced in relationship with God and with our neighbors. Not all people can compose poetry or music for the purposes of expressing these emotions, but it is still possible to participate in their expression by others. Listening to poetry and/or music is still a creative experience as the attentive listener makes the poem and/or the music one's own. The great folk song "Waly, Waly" gives shape to the grief of a jilted lover. The degree to which we have each experienced betrayal and its accompanying sadness affects the way we experience the song emotionally.

One way that we try to cope with troubling experiences in life is to pretend that they did not happen or that they do not really trouble us. We may decide that people should be joyful in the Lord at all times and therefore feelings of sadness are automatically sinful. (During the days of the Soviet Union, the people were ordered to be joyful in the Proletariat State, thus outlawing sorrowful feelings.) Joy is defined as spiritual and sadness is not, therefore the spiritually mature person is always happy. (Does this mean that Jesus was spiritually immature when he cried out on the cross?) Or, we might find feelings of sadness sufficiently unpleasant as to try to pretend they are not there. Although one might, upon reflection, conclude that some emotions are self-centered and immature, for example being enraged that a faithful friend missed a visit one week, in dealing with these emotions, it does not help to pretend they do not occur when in fact they do. Given the occurrence of troubling emotions, it behooves us to listen to their reality. Although we may think we don't need any prompting to affirm the happy moments in our lives, the truth is that denial of our negative emotions of fear and anger lead to denial of all our emotions. If we won't face the truth of sadness when that happens to us, then we can't face the truth of joy, either.

There is more at stake, of course, than the individual listener and the music. Although we may, when possible, choose to listen to music that either matches a current mood or draws us to a mood we want to experience, we often listen to music that does not reflect either. In such cases, we are invited to appreciate the emotional experiences of other people besides ourselves, or to be reminded of moods we experience at other times. Listening to a variety of moods expressed in music has much the effect of praying the entire psalter, with its comprehensive spectrum of mods, on a regular basis. On days when we feel happy, we are still invited to sympathize with the anguish of others as expressed in the psalms. On days of anguish, the joyful psalms can give us hope. Music that deals with the passion of Christ, of course, tries to intensify our sympathy with Christ through the way Christ's suffering is depicted so that we experience something of that pain in our own hearts. Likewise, a musical outburst of joy, such as in the "Et Resurrexit" chorus in J.S. Bach's BC Minor Mass opens our hearts to the ineffable joy of the resurrected life. In the harrowing final movement of the Second Piano Trio, Dmitri Shostakovich depicts one of the World War II atrocities that was brought to his attention. A group of Jews who were captured by the Nazis were forced to dance on their freshly-dug graves until they collapsed and died. The anguish dance rhythms of this movement bring this tragedy deep into the listener's heart. What makes the listening experience bearable is the skillful musical shaping of the pain and the deepening charity extended to those who suffer. On a more positive side, the radiant nobility of Beethoven's "Archduke" Trio builds up the encouraging hope that such sentiments can find a home in the human heart.

Up to this point, I have stressed the tendency of music to mirror our emotions. We feel happy or sad, or content or despairing, and we find these emotions mirrored in the music we listen to. The psalms also have been called a mirror of the soul by many Christian writers. Again, our various experiences of living with God are mirrored so as to encourage us to come to terms with these experiences, the good and the bad and those in between. In actuality, however, we cannot separate the mirroring quality of music from its shaping quality. Our raw emotions are highly inarticulate in themselves. Indeed, the stronger the emotion, the less articulate it is. As I have already commented, our basic emotional vocabulary is equally inarticulate. If I feel desolate, part of what can make that emotion so overwhelming is that it is not intelligible in itself. When the emotion is unintelligible, it leads to fear, which makes the emotion even harder to cope with. If I say: "I feel desolate," I am saying something that is intelligible to myself and to others. This simple phrase gets something across of my mental state and it gives me a fundamental notion of what my emotion is and what it means. However, there is quite a range of inarticulate raw emotion that can be expressed by the phrase "I am desolate." Not much of the emotion or set of emotions has been expressed and little help for living with the emotion has been given. If I should say, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day," much more is being expressed. Not only the vocabulary itself but the sound of the words with the sharp assonance of "feel" and "fell" express the sense of desolation. Of course, when poetry is brought into the picture, it is the musical quality of language that is helping to shape the experience of desolation. I would argue that the opening line of this sonnet by Hopkins is not equivalent to the raw emotion of desolation. Rather, the line of poetry shapes the desolation and adds intelligibility to that emotion that was not there before. In music, the melodies of songs such as "Waly, Waly" or the Beatles' "Yesterday" shape the grief of loss so that the musical expression is not an equivalent to the raw emotion. If we find the desolation we experience from time to time mirrored in the slow movement of Schubert's B-flat Major sonata, our desolation is transformed by the musical shaping. The Fourth Symphony of Jean Sibelius probes a wide variety of emotional nuances that go with the word "desolation." There are also times when bad poetry is transformed into great poetry in music. A famous example is the aria Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbte Rücken in the St. John Passion by J.S. Bach. The libretto features the wretched suggestion that the wounds on Jesus' back are like the rainbow in the sky. The music to which the words are sung, however, captures the clumsily expressed paradox in powerful music that embodies both the sense of tragedy and the sense of glory in the text. What is highly inarticulate as an emotional state in itself, and not all that articulate in language except insofar as poetry is brought into play, becomes highly articulate and nuanced in its musical expression.

Emotion can be shaped in music in highly complex ways. I have already mentioned emotional ambiguity where we find the music emotional without necessarily knowing what the emotion is, at least not in words. The tendency of much music to build its structure through emotional contrasts leads to some complicated emotional trajectories in symphonic music and in some of the more elaborate works in rock and jazz. The Brahms Third Symphony, for example, begins with an assertive theme that has the word "heroic" written all over it. As is customary in classical symphonic form, this theme is contrasted with a much gentler subject. The development section reverses the emotional purport of these themes. First the gentle second theme is cast in distorted minor-key modulations of high intensity and this passage leads to a quiet, reflective development of the main theme that was so assertive in the beginning. The recapitulation, as usual, restores the initial character of these themes. Although Brahms does not usually recycle themes in subsequent movements, he does it in this symphony. After a highly intense climax in the finale, driven by the second theme of this movement, the "heroic" theme appears, again in a highly reflective, unassertive mood, leading to a quiet ending which is unusual in Brahms' large-scale works. Along the way of this trajectory, one may find a variety of human emotions mirrored, but the structure of the emotions in this symphony is a construct which orders these emotions in a way that may be congruent with experience (for example, exerting a heroic posture and then becoming more reflective) but is creating an articulate order that had not existed before the symphony was written. The form of theme and variations also lends itself to a complex emotional dialectic by transforming a theme into a wide variety of moods. J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations are great examples of this form.

The act of listening to an emotion gives us the opportunity to come to terms with that emotion and the events that caused that emotion. We all have experiences of feeling better about difficult events simply by speaking about them and being listened to. The same is true with our own feelings. Listening to a sad piece of music may not solve the problems revolving around that emotion in our lives, but there is comfort in the listening. Listening to music, then, is a means of listening to ourselves and it allows us to own these experiences. In this way, desolate music can be comforting through the way it shapes the desolation within ourselves. We cannot listen to an emotion within without transforming that emotion and the way we live with it. Likewise, when we listen to another person, our listening transforms the experience of that person as much as that person's expression of that experience.

Since music involves movement of some sort (even if at a snail's pace at times) the movement itself facilitates the emotion's movement within us and through us. Emotions, especially difficult ones, can easily become stuck somewhere inside us. This stuckness is felt very much in our bodies through such symptoms as the tightening of stomach or back muscles or constriction around the heart. Even a piece of music that begins and ends in despair can facilitate inner movement with the emotion as it gives us the opportunity to listen deeply to what is currently happening within us. The movement of music requires a letting go of one note so that the next note of the melody can sound. One chord has to give way to another chord. This movement of music, then, teaches us, in a highly visceral way, to let go of the emotions that we cling to. Sometimes we try to cling to happy moments, sometimes we cling to our hurts so as to feel superior to those who hurt us. If we allow music to help us process these emotions, the music will lead us to let go of these emotions as we let go of each sound to make way for the next sound. Of course, just as musical ideas keep coming back again and again in a piece of music, our emotions also keep coming back again and again. However, even in the case of problematic emotions, we can live with them much more constructively if they keep moving through us, the way a rondo in music keeps brings back the same theme after each wandering episode, or each stanza of a song returns to the beginning of the tune. This thought adds weight to the suggestion that we can cope with anything if we sing it and dance it.