Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c12.1.4

c12.1.4

Indeed, a school of psychologists, supporting the ordinary popular view, has strenuously emphasized on this function of music and some have gone to the length of declaring that music possesses an emotional power greater than that of speech itself and the expression of human emotion is its essential mission and glory. There is little doubt that music "can suggest and stimulate feelings akin to those produced by the vicissitudes of real life, and it can interest, fascinate, delight, or weary and displease, by what we can only call the purely musical quality of its sound patterns" (Vernon Lee). Musical experience has indeed proved to us that certain musical patterns, can well induce reveries peopled with a whole phantasmagoria of tender, weird, or alarming shapes,—reminiscences which one loves to recall, or shrink from recalling,—longings too unbounded to be called hopes—a submerged world of baffled endeavours, undirected passions, romances lived only in fancy. These take form again and again and become embodied in sound, emerging from the caverns of the mind where they have been biding their time of summons into the light of recognition. This phenomena of the evocation of human passions, sentiments and feelings (rasas in term of Indian aesthetics) is explained by psychologists by the theory of 'emotional memory'. As enunciated by M Ribot, this doctrine claims that emotional states divested of all their accompanying circumstances can leave behind them a memory of themselves.