Nadezhda Zubova

The article revives the notions of thaumaston and thaumasion from Aristotle’s Poetics to study surprise in music perception. A detailed analysis of these terms reveals a previously unrecognised distinction between the potentially and the subjectively surprising, referring to the disposition to surprise and to its subjective experience, respectively. This distinction resolves important problems: if the experience of surprise is subjective, what does it mean when we attribute the quality of surprising to the musical event itself? And why does the same musical event elicit surprise in one listener while leaving another indifferent? The article furthermore studies the conditions of both types of surprising with particular attention to influencing factors such as expertise and purpose of listening. Thus, by analysing surprise in music, we discover a necessity and a way to bridge ancient and contemporary philosophy, reaching a deeper understanding of surprise and demonstrating how ancient concepts may enrich contemporary aesthetics.

The current article is dedicated to the emotion of surprise in music. It is a part of a wider research on the musical surprise and its role in the aesthetical perception. The main aim of this work is to explore the origins of musical surprise with the purpose of developing a typology of this emotion in organ music. Based on the analysis of harmony, melody, rhythm, and dynamics of some musical compositions, an attempt is made to distinguish the features of the musical text that contribute to the arousal of the emotion of surprise. Furthermore, we inquire into the emotion of surprise induced in the studied cases and conclude that there exist three types of musical surprise.