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about Music: the Art of Listening. Element 4 — Intensity (Part 2) Emotional Intensity and Content
Well, hello there! I’m Brian, and I’m back with more adventures into the world of music. Today I will continue with Part 2 of the topic of Intensity, but from a completely different perspective — Emotional Intensity, or more specifically, how Intensity is a specific compositional technique to create an emotion in the listener.
(And we indulge ourselves in the complete performance of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.)
We covered in the space of four episodes the four basic qualities of a musical sound, namely, pitch which is low or high sounds, duration which includes rhythm, timbre also known as tone colour, and intensity or loudness.
Towards the end of the previous article I spoke about another aspect to intensity, namely emotional intensity. This can also be described as the energy suggested by the music. Emotional intensity in music refers to the degree of emotional expressiveness or power that a piece of music or performance conveys to the listener. It can be described as the feeling that is communicated through the music.
Remembering the quotation attributed to Beethoven that to play without passion is inexcusable, perhaps we could also use the word passion to describe one aspect of emotional…
