Expectation And Style

Leonard B. Meyer contributes a lot to modern musical aesthetics, whose thoughts and analysis methods have imposed great impact on the modern musicology. This dissertation focuses on Meyer's two main influential issues in musical aesthetics: expectation and style.After describing Meyer's life experiences and the background from which his ideas developed, the author briefly generalizes the typical features of Meyer's theories and concludes that expectation and style are the heart of his musical ideas. The study conducts the conceptual analysis of emotion and feeling. Comparing with Eduard Hanslick's and Susanne K. Langer's theories, Meyer's theory of musical feeling is based mainly on the non-referential musical experience of emotion. In restating the relationship between expectation and meaning, the author suggests that Meyer's musical meaning should be explored in terms of the syntactic values and aesthetic experience. Then, through the statement of Meyer's idea of style analysis, the study emphasizes the characteristics of style in terms of the combination of synchronic and diachronic styles, history and aesthetics. Stability and variability are two key issues in Meyer's style theory. With the analysis of the impact from romanticism on the change of style, the dialectical relationship between the stability and variability has been revealed in details. The morphological induction and explanation of stability of style contribute to the distinctive character of Meyer's theory. After analyzing the essential question in Meyer's formalism, the author elucidates the connotation of style in terms of aesthetic modernity, and indicates the immanent transcendental quality of style and the aesthetic tension of expectation and style. In conclusion, the author summarizes the theoretical and practical significance of the study and points out Meyer's achievements and limitations in his musical aesthetics. Meyer enjoys great reputation for his Expectation and Style theory in the history of modern western aesthetics of music. It seems that what his theory arises is much more valuable than what it has solved. His theory provides many insights not only for musical aesthetic researches but also for musical practices.