Listening for affect: musical ethnography and the challenge of/to affect

ABSTRACT

Listening to music might make one tremble, cry or get up and dance in response. Musical feelings might spread from listener to listener in a hard to pin down but nevertheless palpable ‘emotional contagion’. While theorising emotion, feeling or sentiment in relation to the social life of music and sound is not new, for the most part, scholars in music and sound studies have been relative late comers to the contemporary conversation on affect theory. In this essay, I place two academic turns in productive alignment, an ‘affective turn’ and a turn in ethnomusicology, the anthropology of music and sound and the interdisciplinary field of critical sound studies to the study of listening and aurality. What might methodological approaches gleaned from the anthropology of music and sound lend to theorizations of method for the anthropology of emotion and affect? In what ways is affect rendered audible as an object of analysis in the process of doing ethnography? Focusing on analyses of select audio-visual field recordings, I ask, how can we listen for affect? And what theoretical and methodological considerations might emerge when we do?

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• technological mediation
• sound
• fado
• listening
• poetics

Acknowledgments

I thank the reviewers and special issue editors for their generous feedback. An earlier version of of this paper appeared on the panel ‘Researching Affect/Affecting Research: Empathy and Imagination in Anthropological Methods’, organised by Elizbeth Davis and Yael Navaro, at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in 2012. Some excerpts first appeared in my discussant remarks for the panel ‘Affective Politics—Politicizing Affect: Performance, Power, and Agency in Contemporary Europe’, organised by Alexander Markovic, at the AAA Annual Meetings in 2017 and on the roundtable ‘Acoustic Methodologies’, organised by Daniel Fisher and myself, at the 2015 AAA meetings. I am grateful to Willemien Froneman, Carol Ann Johnston, Louise Meintjes, Amanda Minks and Wim Jurg for their engaged listening at different stages of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For literature reviews on select work on music and affect from the perspective of ethnomusicology see Hofman 2015, and from the perspective of cultural and sound studies see Thompson and Biddle 2013. For a recent discussion of how ethnomusicology might contribute to affect theory and affect theory to ethnomusicology, see Garcia 2020.

2 Samuels et al. (2010: 339) encourage the discipline of anthropology to ‘consider its critical deafness to its own use of sound technology, to processes of acoustic mediation’.

3 The following understanding of ‘mediation’ is salient in this context: ‘Mediation is a structural relationship, the synthetic bringing together of two elements (terms, categories, etc.) in such a way as to create a symbolic or conventional relationship between them that is irreducible to two independent dyads’ (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 5).

4 An early televised performance of Osório singing this fado can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjR7oAvn8pw. A studio recording of him singing the same fado in 2004 can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TzmR1mKBb0. The full lyrics to ‘Fado da Meia Laranja’, in Portuguese and with my English translation, along with detailed interpretation, musical analysis and transcriptions of recordings of three performances by Osório, appear in Gray 2013.

5 A digitized version of this album can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHrJUk_Vy9E.

6 Blacking was likely taking the term ‘sonic object’ here from Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore (see Kane 2014) but inflecting it with a different meaning. In Blacking, ‘It is the human content of humanly organized sound that “sends” people. Even if this emerges as an exquisite turn of melody or harmony, as a “sonic object”, if you like . . .’ (1973: 34). I am grateful to David Novak for prompting me to clarify this point on the ‘Soundtable: Acoustic Methodologies’ roundtable at the 2015 American Anthropological Meetings.

7 I received verbal permission to publish this information based on my 2002 and 2003 interviews with José from Luís Osório (José’s son) in 2017.

8 ‘Music in Conflict and Reconciliation’. Conference funded by the Social Science Research Council, 9-11 January, 2004, John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC.

9 Fado lyrics to ‘Eu já não sei’, by Domingos Gonçalves da Costa and music composed by Carlos Rocha.

10 I am in alignment here with Emily Martin’s claim, ‘Anthropologists and sociolinguists have long found ways to address the entirety of social meanings of things that are repressed from speech or action but nonetheless contain powerful kinds of potentiality’ (Martin 2013: S156).

11 See also Cumming (2000) (for a musical theoretical/ philosphical perspective on musical signification) and Tomlinson (2016) (on inter-relations between biosemiotics, affect and ‘musicking’) with respect to Peircean semiotics.

12 Besnier stresses, nodding to Peirce (1974), ‘indexical vehicles only have meaning when embedded in a context’ (Besnier 1990: 429).

13 See Garcia (2020: 4) for an enumeration of multiple critiques of the ‘autonomy of affect’ from within affect theory itself.

Additional information

Funding

Research between 2001-2003 was supported by an IDRF grant from the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), and the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Area Study Program (FLAS). Research travel in the summer of 2008 was funded by a grant from the Luso-American Development Foundation. Follow-up research in 2017 was supported by a grant from Dickinson College.

Notes on contributors

Lila Ellen Gray

Lila Ellen Gray is a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist and is currently Associate Professor of Music at Dickinson College (Carlisle, Pennsylvania, USA). Her book Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (Duke University Press, 2013) was awarded the Woody Guthrie Award for Outstanding Book in Popular Music by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM US Branch) in 2015 and her article, ‘Fado’s City’ (Anthropology and Humanism, 2011) was awarded the Jaap Kunst prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her research interests include: sound, music, and affect; ethnographic poetics; urban ethnography; the senses, musical celebrity; tourism, gentrification, and the arts; gender and feminist theory; Portugal, the Lusophone world, and Europe’s South. She is currently completing a book for Bloomsbury Press on the Portuguese fado diva, Amália Rodrigues.