Abstract

A major premise of this dissertation is that traditional conceptions of "intelligence" and "feeling" are prejudicial to a satisfactory understanding of music and all the arts. Two major doctrines of the traditional position are specifically challenged: that intelligence or rationality manifests itself only in discursive reasoning, and that emotions are passive and irrational. ;The arguments presented are based upon psychological and philosophical literature investigating six areas: general theories of intelligence, general theories of feeling or emotion, general theories of the interaction between feeling and intelligence, aesthetic theories of intelligence in art, aesthetic theories of feeling or emotion in art, and aesthetic theories of the interaction between intelligence and feeling. ;The goal of this study is to provide an introductory account of how feeling is an integral part of musical intelligence. In chapter one reasons for the study are presented. In chapter two support is established for the claim that musical processing is intelligent according to well-established criteria. In chapter three evidence is presented for the claim that emotions are either a type of cognition or necessarily contain cognitive components. In chapter four it is suggested that neither intelligence or feeling can be fully explicated without reference to the other. In chapter five musical intelligence is compared to rational intelligence and similarities and distinctions are analyzed. In chapter six it is claimed that the role of feeling in art cannot be explained unless it is placed in the larger context of a theory of understanding art. Based upon several conceptions of the interaction between thought and feeling in art, in chapter seven I suggest that in art eleven cognitive processes operate on the basis of feeling: discriminations, comparisons, classifications, abstractions, weightings, schema-formation, problem solving, syntheses, judgments, intuitions, and interpretations. In chapter eight specific suggestions are made about the role of feeling in musical intelligence viewed as a composite thinking-feeling process. In chapter nine conclusions from the various literatures are drawn and applied to a sketch of a taxonomy of educational objectives for music education. Suggestions for further research are also provided