Introducing a Psycho-Historical Approach to the Study of Emotions in Music: The Case of Monteverdi's 'Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda'

Abstract

This essay addresses the challenges of reaching a historically informed understanding of the emotional experience of seventeenth-century musical performance by applying a recent theoretical account of the psychological emotion mechanisms that underpin music perception. A short work by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) is taken as a case study, to investigate the ways that structural elements of the music engage emotion mechanisms. Since modern-day listeners also draw on emotion mechanisms, a modernday exploration of behavioural responses to the historical work – albeit performed and perceived through different personal experiences and perhaps with different emphases according to the many differ..