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Excerpt from The Role of Expectation in Music a Study in the Psychology of MusicOnly a very few of those who show skill, or even attain celebrity, in...
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any form of art arc expert students of the psychology of the art they practice, or of aesthetical philosophy in general. All artists are, of course, conscious of certain judgments and feelings which impel and guide their practical achievements. They may also suspect certain undefinable instincts and obscure impulses which cooperate to the same end. But they have never collated and analyzed or attempted to evaluate, the various phases of their conscious experience; even less have they uncovered the variety, force, and related influence, of the mental processes that hover about the borders of the conscious mental life, or belong to the sphere of the properly so-called "subsconscious." As to the metaphysical ground of the whole experience and of the whole realm of aesthetical endeavor and achievement in its relation to the world of reality, they have little interest. Indeed, they may regard such quest for the foundations of reality in man's artistic life and work as unworthy of serious study.On the other hand, only a few of those who have written and taught the psychological theory or metaphysics of any form of art, or of aesthetics in general, have been of marked artistic temperament, or have attained remarkable skill in any form of artistic achievement. Their psychology is rather a matter of remote inference, than of near and immediate experience. But the science of the aesthetical is not like the sciences of the physical or chemical order. Nor can it in all its most important and interesting phases be treated experimentally.The greatest interest, as well as the greatest value, then, belongs to the opinions of those who are both artist and psychologist, in dealing with the psychology of any kind of art. And, on the whole, this would seem to be most emphatically true of the art of music. This is …
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