In the world of instrumental music, the absence of a text requires composers to find various means of expressing emotion in an abstract language. This task, perhaps surprisingly, was often much easier than one might expect. In the Baroque era, for instance, the doctrine of affects placed aesthetic merit on works that concentrated on a single sentiment. To facilitate the compositional process, theorists wrote treatises that linked specific musical features to emotive qualities...

ANDREW SCHARTMANN'S MUSICAL TIDBITS

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC