Introducing a psycho-historical approach to the study of emotions in music : the case of Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda

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 modern-day 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 different social-cultural factors influencing modern perception – enables the identification of which mechanisms are activated in modern perceivers. While the authors acknowledge that emotional responses to music are highly susceptible to a whole range of complex and dynamic socio-cultural experiences and different historical contexts, the research undertaken nonetheless enables the development of some parameters on which to build a modern-day performance that emphasises the mechanisms most likely to arouse affect.