Doctrine of the affections
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The doctrine of the affections (also known as the doctrine of affections, doctrine of affects, affect, and Affektenlehre) was a musical theory popular in the Baroque era (1600-1750). It is a theory of musical aesthetics, widely accepted by late Baroque theorists and composers, that embraced the proposition that music is capable of arousing a variety of specific emotions within the listener. At the centre of the doctrine was the belief that, by making use of the proper standard musical procedure or device, the composer could create a piece of music capable of producing a particular involuntary emotional response in his audience. But if, as musicians of the baroque believed, music was the physical embodiment of feelings, moods and emotions, then one musical idea ought to be linked to one emotion, and the Affekt could only be confused by filling a composition with too many musical ideas. Paramount it was, therefore, that a composition employ but one or two motives, and that it should explore many facets of the motive by expressing it in various forms.
These devices and their affective counterparts were rigorously cataloged and described by such 17th- and 18th-century theorists as Athanasius Kircher, Andreas Werckmeister, Johann David Heinichen, and Johann Mattheson. Mattheson is especially comprehensive in his treatment of the affections in music. In Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739; “The Perfect Chapelmaster”), he notes that joy is elicited by large intervals, sadness by small intervals; fury may be aroused by a roughness of harmony coupled with a rapid melody; obstinacy is evoked by the contrapuntal combination of highly independent (obstinate) melodies. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) and the Mannheim school were exponents of the doctrine.
There is no one writer credited for creating the doctrine of affections, but it has its roots in the ancient Greek doctrine of ethos, which stated that music had the power to alter moods, and René Descartes' treatise "The Passions of the Soul," which stated that emotions could be controlled.
People during the Baroque period believed in fluids in the body that created emotions.
Giacomini (Orationi e discorsi 1597) defined an affection as" 'a spiritual movement or operation of the mind in which it is attracted or repelled by an object it has come to know as a result of an imbalance in the animal spirits and vapours that flow continually throughout the body.'
The doctrine fell out of use in the classical era, when composers and theorists began to find it overly mechanical and unnatural.
"Affections are not the same as emotions, however they are a spiritual movement of the mind." (Claude V. Palisca, 1991)
