The ‘emotional turn’, which has shaped historical disciplines since about the year 2000, has so far had surprisingly little impact on musicology. Talking about emotions, especially in music-historical contexts, is still a bold endeavour – attempts are often met with one version or another of the Hanslickian claim that ‘emotions have nothing to do with music’. For the few of us who study music and emotions in history, however, these two phenomena clearly have something to do with each other; the question is not whether but rather how they can be adequately studied. In addition, there is a certain lack of clarity about the basic assumptions behind what we are actually looking at: what are ‘emotions’, what do we mean when we talk about ‘music’ and what do we mean when referring to the connection of ‘music and emotions’? Where are these music-related emotions? Are they in the music, and what would that actually mean if they were? Are they to be found in the people who are musicking (playing, listening, dancing and so on)? Or are they somewhere in between? Are they represented, expressed, perceived or induced by a certain kind of music, or are they rather experienced relatively independently of the specific music, depending more on the individual's musical history, the socio-cultural context and the situation in which the musicking actors find themselves? Are we interested in emotions that people feel today, and what would that actually mean? Or are we looking for emotions that people have experienced in history? Depending on our questions, our disciplinary perspectives and our aims, each approach will be different and the results will differ accordingly.

Given the apparent complexity of the study of music and emotion in history, one might wonder whether it is necessary, fruitful or even possible to write a history of emotion in Western music beyond more than a few years. Spitzer has chosen to do so: his history spans a thousand years of emotions in Western music, which is a bold claim – even if it is only ‘“a” history, not “the” history’ (1). He wrote ‘the book [he]’d like to read’ (1) himself: a score-based approach to emotions in Western music that ‘proposes nothing less than a new way of analyzing music’ in order to ‘discover musical emotions in the techniques and materials of composers and performers’ (1). The book only touches on the emotions of people who are musicking as a secondary consideration, and, when it does, it asks primarily about ‘us’ – that is, presumably, people in the twenty-first century.

Spitzer's approach thus reveals an immediate tension with the discipline of the history of emotions, and this is important to note considering that the book's title suggests otherwise. This tension runs through the entire volume and is evident whenever theory meets history. Although Spitzer's book cannot ultimately resolve this tension (more on this below), it nevertheless succeeds marvellously in presenting the connection between music and emotions in all its theoretical and historical complexity. It leads us through the thicket of music-psychological and music-philosophical approaches, makes the severity of the challenge clear and at the same time offers a way of analysing music that is fascinating, but also raises more questions than it can answer.

This weighty book of over four hundred pages is divided into two parts, one theoretical (‘The Theory’, chapters 1–4) and one historical (‘The Narrative’, chapters 5–9). In the opening chapter Spitzer discusses music-psychological and music-philosophical concepts of the connection between music and emotions, from the Stoics to Schopenhauer and up to the present day. Developing his own theory in the process, he combines aspects of appraisal theory with persona theory and links them to ‘Hegel's theory of Entäusserung’ (40) in order to understand how emotions are realized in music. Chapter 2 takes a closer look at individual categories of emotion in music such as ‘happiness’, ‘anger’, ‘love’ and ‘fear’, while chapter 3 extends this to compounds including ‘wonder and the sublime’, ‘nostalgia and hope’ and ‘disgust and boredom’. Finally, the last chapter of the first part summarizes the basic approaches from the established discipline of the history of emotions and relates them to music.

The second part, ‘The Narrative’, offers a series of case studies that focus on specific pieces of music and aim to trace musical emotions by analysing scores in the light of contemporary theories of emotion. In doing so, Spitzer divides ‘a thousand years from chant to pop’ into three historical periods. The first, ‘Before Emotions’ (chapter 5: ‘The Augustinian Ascent’), begins with medieval chant and then analyses excerpts from famous works by composers such as Hildegard of Bingen, Machaut, Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin, and finally Monteverdi as the historical turning-point. His second historical period, ‘The Age of Affective Realism’ (chapters 6 to 8), is concerned with works dating from the period between around 1640 and 1910, the ‘common practice period’, and, at the same time, the era in which ‘musical emotions are “realistic” . . . mirror[ing] emotions in everyday life’ (145). This age of ‘affective realism’ is itself divided into three emotional paradigms: ‘Passions’ (chapter 6), covering the period from Descartes to Rameau; ‘Sentiments’ (chapter 7), ranging from Hume to Beethoven; and ‘Emotions’ (Chapter 8), which refers more to idealistic and romantic concepts of emotions after Beethoven, such as Innerlichkeit and Gemütlichkeit, and paints with a broad brush over works by such composers as Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner and Mahler, rather than delving deeper into individual works. The last of Spitzer's three historical periods, ‘After Emotion’ (chapter 9), deals with ‘affects’ from 1910, combining analyses of ‘atonal’ and ‘serial emotions’ in Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Webern with analyses of works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Lachenmann, Copland, Cage and others. It concludes with the categorization of specific musical emotions in the music of Radiohead (happiness), Muddy Waters (sadness), Beyoncé (love), Eminem (anger) and Periphery (fear).

Spitzer's book deals predominantly with white male composers from the world of art music, and his ‘narrative’ essentially follows the history of Western art music's traditional master narratives, narratives that cultural studies, feminist musicology and, more recently, decolonial movements have sought to deconstruct. Even with a score-based approach, such new narratives would have been possible. Spitzer has chosen not to do so. Furthermore, his method is clearly aimed at people who are highly familiar with Western art music and have been trained in hearing and reading this kind of music analytically. Both in its theoretical development and its analytical practice, Spitzer's method only works within the sphere of musical expertise. Relatively few would be able to recognize works from the very first notes, to comprehend the ‘Entäußerung’ (realization/externalization) of the musical material by ear, to classify the composition in terms of its stylistic history and to follow all of this in a score. It appears that Spitzer has chosen to write as a twenty-first-century music expert for other twenty-first-century music experts. Throughout the book, his point of reference for tracing musical emotions across history is a contemporary, somewhat undefined ‘us’ – a rather atypical approach for historians of emotion, who are usually much more concerned with how something felt to historical actors in the past.

After making one's way through the book, one is left in a sense of awe at the impressive wealth of theoretical and historical knowledge and with tremendous respect for the author, who has tackled this important and difficult subject with so much passion and courage. If one identifies particularly as a cultural historian of music and emotions, however, some questions remain open which the book only deals with in passing, if at all. One of those questions concerns the historical periodization: on what basis does the author define and, more so, unify the years between 1640 and 1910 into a ‘common practice period’? Both the history of music and the history of emotions have come to suggest a different and much more nuanced historical periodization. Another issue concerns Spitzer's decision to develop his method of analysis by assuming the existence of a musical persona without explicitly discussing this decision in detail, and without subjecting persona theory to the same rigorous scrutiny that he affords other emotion theories from music psychology and music philosophy. In the absence of a more detailed explanation of and justification for this decision, the reader is left without a clear theoretical orientation and cannot help but repeatedly raise well-known objections to persona theory: how, for example, can Spitzer actually speak of a ‘musical emotion’ when music itself is obviously incapable of feeling? Can what he calls a ‘musical emotion’ therefore really be found in the ‘techniques and materials of composers and performers’ (2), or is it not rather something that is experienced in the bodies of the musicking actors, who then may (or may not) attribute these emotions to a persona that they assume is acting through the music? Such questions immediately throw the reader back to Spitzer's first chapter and, ultimately, to the core of this book, namely his new way of analysing musical emotions.

Finally, from my perspective as a historian of music and emotions, the aforementioned tension between an ahistorical theory of musical emotions – which is developed from a present-day categorization of emotions and their styles – and an application of this theory to the history of music must be addressed again: it is unclear why Spitzer only deals with ‘histories’ in the last chapter of his theoretical section instead of placing the history of emotions at the very beginning of his ‘history of emotions’, thereby using it to inform and shape the entire discussion of other theories. Admittedly, in the opening pages of his book, Spitzer refers to William Reddy, whose book The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) – along with the work of other scholars discussed in chapter 4 – has contributed enormously to establishing a theoretical framework for the growing discipline. Twenty years later, however, the theoretical tools of the discipline have expanded considerably, and it is particularly performance theory and praxeology that have made possible the long-sought shift from emotional expression to emotional experience, which has thus also expanded the corpus of possible sources from purely language-based ones to encompass non-verbal sources as well. Most relevant in this context is Monique Scheer's concept of embodied emotional practices. It seems that Spitzer has not fully realized the radical implications of this concept, and has therefore profoundly misunderstood its value for musicological research. To a certain extent, this is not surprising, given Spitzer's interest, aims and approach; nevertheless, it seems to be a missed opportunity.

In summary: Spitzer's book is extremely courageous because it gives the importance of emotions in music history a big stage. Indeed, it deserves high praise for tackling the complex subject of music and emotions on such a large scale. However, this expansive scale is also the book's Achilles heel: in contrast to its broad theoretical and historical framework, both its narrative and its analytical method are rather narrow. Moreover, Spitzer's method of analysis is based on theories that themselves stem from specific, historically situated discourses and are therefore not readily transferable to other historical contexts. In my opinion, it is neither possible nor really necessary to provide a single method of analysis for a thousand heterogeneous years of equally heterogeneous emotions in equally heterogeneous Western music. This leads me to a final conclusion: if the book is read as a thousand-year history of emotions in Western music, many theoretical, methodological and historical tensions arise. If, however, it is read as a proposal for a method of analysing a thousand-year history of Western music through the lens of a present-day theory of emotions, it is a fascinating book and highly recommended for anyone who wants to delve into the vast sea of music and emotions, past and present.

This review is part of the GOING VIRAL project, funded by the European Research Council under the European Union?s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101040297).