Emotional Quality of Melodic Intervals

Just a few weeks ago, I was reading an online review about John Williams' music and the reviewer spent half the article "analyzing" his themes coming to the conclusion that he obviously has favorite intervals like the perfect fifth and major third and went on with sentences that go like "The fifth symbolizes stability and openness" etc.

With this analysis he was reproducing a century old musical stereotype that keeps popping up and is being reproduced over and over again. It is the stereotype that supposedly melodic intervals have a specific emotional quality that can be used to find underlaying meaning in existing music or as source for writing your own music.

Lists of what intervals do can be seen in the literature about music since the baroque up to books about film scoring and online sources like this, this and this. Supposedly there are also scientific studies that confirm these. I'm not entirely sure where this actually comes from but would presume it has its source in the musical symbolism of Baroque where certain musical structures were "code" for meanings - not in an emotional way but in a rational way as in: you would need to know that musical device x is the code for y.

Personally, in spite of the supposed evidence and long history of such lists, I would say that they are pretty much nonsense.

The biggest reason for why I think that is the lack of context in an observation like this. Presenting a listener with an isolated interval is similar to showing them an isolated color and ask how they feel about this. And lets say you showed them the color blue and their response would be "It feels cold, chilly, lonely" etc. So it would end up like this in a list about "The emotional response to colors". Sure that would possibly make sense but then you show them a picture of a tropical beach with big parts of the image being the blue water and the blue sky and none of that would feel cold for anybody.

Now while this comparison doesn't hold ground in every regard as visuals are way more concrete and associative than music it still has the same nonsensical approach to stripping something from context and observing peoples reaction to it.

But in such cases, context means everything. The surrounding interval structures, the register, the texture and most importantly the underlaying harmony can not be ignored in an observation like this and it beats me how anybody with just a basic musical understanding could take any of these lists seriously or even reproduce these in a review or anywhere else.

Let's just take the "heroic" and "powerful" interval of a perfect fifth of C to G upwards and underlay it with different chords. Even just a difference between putting a C major or C minor triad under it creates a radically different emotional expression. Now try Ab, F, Am etc. as chords under this interval and each and every one of them will hava a sometimes drastically different emotional quality. And this is just by putting different chords underneath. Now imagine placing this into a longer melody, shifting around the two notes on strong and weak beats, surrounding it with other melodic intervals and the variety of emotion is endless. Some solution won't even have a trace of heroism or power.

There seems to be however some truth to such lists because of course a lot of heroic themes have perfect fifths and fourths to them but even in such cases I would seriously doubt the cause and effect here. Sure, you could say because there are fifths in that melody it sounds heroic, that's why composers used this interval. But you could also say something like "Fanfares were traditionally played on brass instruments which back in the days didn't have valves so could only play notes of the harmonic series which favors fourths and fifths". So do we feel that fifths are heroic because this interval is inherently heroic or do we feel that fifths are heroic because our entire musical literature and history teaches us this connotation? And how about all these fifths in "non exposed motifs" in musical pieces that you can find practically anywhere and nobody would get the idea to get "superhero vibes" from each and every of them?

I can totally understand why it might be attractive to have such a list and use intervals almost like a cooking recipe to build the melodic structure that creates the emotion that you want. We generally strive to find structures and causes in chaos, this is just how our brain works. Truthful prediction is an essential factor for our survival and we feel pleasure if we feel like we understood the working principle behind a seemingly chaotic obersvation. So being able to structure music into its simplest forms and put it into nice boxes is nothing else but satisfying this desire. 

The reviewer that looked for recurring intervals in John Williams' melodies was probably very satisfied when he noticed that a few themes share perfect fifths in a way that he felt like he has decoded parts of Williams's success. But in my opinion none of that actually even scratches the surface of how his music works. Or how any music works. Yes, Williams often uses fifths, but that obervation is just as valid as saying Monet often used blue in his paintings. While the observation is truthful it does not mean anything at all. The meaning is created from the context. Sure, an isolated perfect fifth upwards might feel heroic and powerful but wait till you put it into a certain context and it suddenly might lose all of that.

And to hammer my point home here I'll end this with the famous Maria from Bernstein's master piece "West Side Story". A love theme where the leading and most exposed interval (at 1:00) is a tritone. So much violence, danger, tension, devilishness and fear - not.