Donald A. Hodges (2020)

from What Is Music Psychology?

Chapter 1 in Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology

I really love the Conclusion to this chapter, which is why I’ve decided to write about it here.

Firstly, Hodges outlines 3 interrelated roles which are included in the job of being a music psychologist:

1.  Doing research which is rigorously scientific, using the best methods available.
2.  Providing a context for their findings – how do they fit in with current knowledge?
3.  Weaving together new knowledge and information from all the different disciplines which make up Music Psychology

He then talks about how we might worry that we’ll lose the sense of magic in music if we study its psychological underpinnings is this rigorous and methodological way.

To reassure us, he shares a quote from Carl Seashore’s preface to Psychology of Music, a book which he published in 1938.

Upon invitation from my Alma Mater to give the so-called academic address at an anniversary celebration last year, I chose as my subject The Power of Music.

This had been the subject of my class oration when graduating from the academy fifty-one years before.

Half a century ago the adolescent lover of music began his oration as follows:

Music is the medium through which we express our feelings of joy and sorrow, love and patriotism, penitence and praise.

It is the charm of the soul, the instrument that lifts mind to higher regions, the gateway into the realms of imagination.

It makes the eye to sparkle, the pulse to beat more quickly.

It causes emotions to pass over our being like waves over the far-reaching sea.

 

That was what the music I lived in meant to me half a century ago.

It was the expression of the genuine thrill of young enthusiasm.

Considering what music meant to me then and what it means to me now after a life career in the science of music, there comes to me an analogy from astronomy.

Then I was a stargazer; now I am an astronomer.

Then the youth felt the power of music and gave expression to this feeling in the way he loved and wondered at the stars before he had studied astronomy.

Now the old man feels the same “power of music,” but thinks of it in the manner that the astronomer thinks of the starry heavens.

Astronomy has revealed a macrocosm, the order of the universe in the large; the science of music has revealed a microcosm, the operation of law and order in the structure and operation of the musical mind.

It is a wonderful thing that science makes it possible to discover, measure, and explain the operations of the musical mind in the same attitude that the astronomer explains the operation of the stars.

It is not easy to pass from stargazing to technical astronomy.

It is not easy to pass from mere love and practice of music to an intelligent conception of it.

To help the lover of music bridge this gap is the purpose of this volume.