Emotions and Emotional Nature

Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 played by Pau Casals

Our understanding of emotions is colored by Romanticism and its commercial use by Hollywood. Swelling violins, eyes overflowing with tears... when someone nowadays says "I'm feeling very emotional right now." It usually means they are on the verge of losing it, losing control of themselves. We confound emotion with passion, volcanic outbursts, operatic demonstrations.

But what about the emotion of tying your shoelaces? Of stepping outdoors in springtime from your room, or coming back into your room from the noisy streets? We often often have no words for these more ordinary, more intimate feelings, and for the same reason, it is hard for us to describe, for example, what emotion is expressed in Bach's First Suite for Cello. Maybe it is the emotion of walking around in comfortable shoes, or of cooking a full, satisfying meal for our friends.

Rather than seizing us in violent transports, these humble emotions bubble up in a stream throughout the day. Tenuous in themselves, they nonetheless point continuously to the our emotional nature. Perhaps before the advent of Romanticism, it was the constancy of this emotional nature, supported by our watery physicality, rather than the emotions themselves - differentiated into love, hate, anger, fear and other vivid, nameable forms - that was the proper subject of music, as it is of dance.

In Bach's Cello Suites, the most intimate turns and twists of the heart within the body directly correlate to the whirling of the cosmos. There is no need for the transcendent passions of Romanticism. Sliding our feet into a snugly fitting pair of shoes, we walk to the rhythm of stars. Thus Bach’s secular music moves beyond Christianity into a wider sense of the sacred. These allemandes, courantes and sarabandes must be what Davies had in mind when he wrote

Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be,
When the first seedes whereof the world did spring
The Fire, Ayre, Earth, and water did agree,
By Loues perswasion, Natures mighty King,
To learne their first disordred combating:
   And, in a daunce such measure to obserue,
   As all the world their motion should preserue.

Since when they still are carried in a round,
And changing come one in anothers place,
Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound,
But euery one doth keepe the bounded space
VVherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace:
    This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise
    For Dauncing is Loues proper exercise.

...

Behold the world how it is whirled round,
And for it is so whirl'd,is named so;
In whose large volume many rules are found
Of this new Art, which it doth fairely show:
For your quick eyes in wandring too and fro
    From East to West, on no one thing can glaunce,
    But if you make it well, it seemes to daunce.

(From Orkestra: A Poeme of Dauncinge)