The British associationist Archibald Alison, as early as 1790, characterized aesthetic experience in general as the employment of the imagination in the creation of a train of ideas that must be "productive of emotions."
Problems arise immediately for this thesis, however. Some writers with "formalist" inclinations flatly reject it. Eduard Hanslick, for example, in his 1891 work, On the Musically Beautiful, denied both that the purpose of music is to arouse emotions and that feelings are in any sense the "content" of music. Moreover, it has often been observed that the reactive emotions of the audience are not always those it is most appropriate to say the work expresses. A tragedy expressive of love, jealousy, and hatred may, as Aristotle said, cause feelings of pity and fear in its viewers. Furthermore, it seems possible to recognize the expressive content of a work without undergoing that very emotion or feeling. A sad or elegant artwork need not make the perceiver sad or elegant.
By contrast, Jerrold Levinson (1990) and Aaron Ridley (1995) have argued that music can arouse a truncated version of the emotions it expresses; the emotions or feelings aroused by music lack their usual contexts and intentional objects.
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