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ABSTRACT
Theorising the relationship between music and affect is nothing new; scholars have long engaged the ways music expresses and influences emotions and bodily intensities. Why is it, then, that (ethno)musicologists now find themselves following rather than leading a theoretical debate that adopts so many concepts we have used for generations: intensity, embodiment, performance, resonance? This Special Issue will draw on (ethno)musicological literature that anticipated the contemporary resurgence of affect theory, and also call for an intervention in which fine-grained, ethnographically informed analysis can newly invigorate theories about the inbetweenness and intensity of encounter. The interpositions we propose centre on three ethnomusicological concepts that complicate, nuance, and refine affect theory: interpretation, resonance, and embodiment. The introduction will explicate these theoretical propositions, and the following articles will ground those concepts in fieldwork and musical particulars. The broad-ranging articles will discuss electronic dance music in Berlin, nineteenth-century operatic voices in the USA, tambura music in the USA, and musical experiences of grief. These studies will investigate and critique both affect theory and ethnomusicological methods and analysis.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Ashley T. Thorne for copy editing assistance and to Hamline University's Anthropology Department for funding her position.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Katie J. Graber studies race and ethnicity in a variety of contexts, including Mennonite music, Western opera, music in the USA, and the history of ethnomusicology. She has taught courses on world music, globalisation, opera, African American music, and the discipline of ethnomusicology.
Matthew Sumera is a music and sound studies scholar who has published widely about the sounds and attendant uses of contemporary representations of war across a range of media. He is primarily interested in the interconnections between music, sound, affect, and American militarism. He is currently a visiting lecturer in sociocultural anthropology at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota
Notes
1 Seigworth and Gregg (Citation2010) make a convincing argument that the current resurgence of affect theory dates back to two important publications: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank's ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’ (Citation1995) and Brian Massumi's ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ (Citation1995).
2 We do not mean to imply that studies of music, sound, and affect are entirely absent. Important contributions include Thompson and Biddle (Citation2013); recent monographs by Gill (Citation2017), Goodman (Citation2012), Gray (Citation2013), and Kassabian (Citation2013); and a number of articles of note: Cusick (Citation2008), Gilbert (Citation2004), Guilbault (Citation2019), Qureshi (Citation1997, Citation2000), Hofmann (Citation2015b), and Sprengel (Citation2019), among others. Lawrence Grossberg's ‘Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life’ (Citation1984) is an early, foundational contribution. Relevant publications by contributors to this Special Issue include Garcia (Citation2015, Citation2016), MacMillen (Citation2019), and Sumera (Citation2013, Citation2020).
3 Segregating sonic and musical affect risks marginalising one of the key contributions of affect theory as applied to music, the focus on the material force of sonic stimuli. As Johnson and Cloonan usefully argue, we must begin with the sound of music first, understood in its rich materiality, before we can interpret what it may mean: ‘Our first affective response is to the character of a sound, upon which we then construct a culturally articulated interpretation’ (Citation2009: 140). Such an acknowledgment has been particularly relevant to scholars who have sought to explore the relationships between music and violence, connections often having less to do with the semantic content or purported meaning of music and more to do with how it is projected, at what volume, by whom, and under what conditions (see Cusick Citation2008; Goodman Citation2012; Volcler Citation2013; Daughtry Citation2015).
4 As Seigworth and Gregg argue, bodies are not defined ‘by an outer skin-envelope or other surface boundary but by their potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of affect’ (Citation2010: 2).
5 Inherent in this understanding is a critique of identity as coherent and fixed, an idea previously explored by Brubaker and Cooper (Citation2000) van Beek (Citation2000) and employed by many ethnomusicologists (see Rice Citation2010 for a critique of ethnomusicologists’ use of ‘identity’).
6 In the twentieth century, for example, philosopher-psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva played with words and linguistic structures – seeking gaps and instabilities – in order to understand emotions, desires, and embodied knowledge. Poststructuralists including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, among others, further probed the instabilities of meaning and interpretation.
7 Leys sums up her critique in this way:
In short, I propose that although at first sight the work of Tomkins – or Ekman, or Damasio – might appear to be too reductive for the purposes of those cultural theorists indebted to Deleuzean ideas about affect, there is in fact a deep coherence between the ideas of both groups. That coherence concerns precisely the separation presumed to obtain between the affect system on the one hand and intention or meaning or cognition on the other. (Citation2017: 315)
8 Leys critiques Massumi’s (Citation1995 and Citation2002) discussions of research in which children watched films about a snowman melting. He compared the children's descriptions with information from bodily sensors and made claims about the disconnect between language, affect, emotion, and intensity due to counterintuitive results: ‘matter-of-fact’ narration of the film caused more distressed responses, and those rated the saddest were also rated the most pleasurable. Leys argues that instead of using these results to focus on the ‘gap’ between ‘content and effect’, Massumi should have questioned the ambiguity of the survey or of language itself. Furthermore, Leys claims Massumi misunderstood physiological responses, identifying some as conflicting when original researchers did not see them as contradictory (Citation2017: 317–18).
9 The distinctions between feeling, emotion, and affect are contentious but most often describe a continuum of experience from the named and conscious to the non-/pre-conscious. For the purposes of this Introduction, the authors will adopt Shouse's useful definitions: ‘A feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labeled’; ‘an emotion is the projection/display of a feeling’; and ‘an affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity’ (Citation2005).
10 Keil wrote that ‘participatory discrepancies’ could be called ‘creative tensions’, ‘relaxed dynamisms’, or ‘semiconscious or unconscious slightly out of syncnesses’; he specifically notes the lexical or textual ambiguity of the term, since it is based in embodied performance rather than syntactic or semiotic score reading (Citation1987: 275).
11 Gray (Citation2013) and McCann (Citation2013, Citation2017) focus on genre; Qureshi (Citation1997, Citation2000) focuses on instruments; Tatro (Citation2014) and Hofmann (Citation2015a) discuss affective labour.
12 Thomas Turino also employs Peirce's semiotic theories, in his case to refine ‘phenomenological ethnomusicology’ (Turino Citation1999, Citation2014). While affect theory, and phenomenology overlap and challenge one another in intriguing ways, their history and analyses are beyond the scope of this Special Issue.
13 Several scholars have written about the sonic meanings of voice. Barthes describes the ‘grain of the voice’ as the ‘materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’ (Citation1977: 182). A current focus of voice studies scholars is the interaction between material and metaphorical meanings of voice (Eidsheim and Meizel Citation2019).
14 In addition to the other named authors in this section, an incomplete list of theorists who deploy ‘resonance’ in their analysis of affect includes: Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1987), Goodman (Citation2012), Massumi (Citation2002), Messeri (Citation2017), and Seigworth and Gregg (Citation2010).
15 While this article was being finalised, James (Citation2019) published a critique of resonance, neoliberalism, and white supremacy we have not yet had a chance to engage in depth. We are interested to see how her analysis of social context and power will affect future work on music and resonance.
16 See Sumera (Citation2020) for an exploration of sonic materiality and Bakhtinian chronotopes (time/space configurations) as they apply to the use of music in war and its representations.
17 As Ana Hofmann argues, some scholars have begun this work:
In most of the recent theoretical studies of the affective potential of sound and music … the analyses focus on sound as affective vibrational force. These approaches generally call for “sonic materiality” and focus on sonic affect as the “nonrepresentational ontology of vibrational force” (Goodman 2010: xv). (Citation2015b: 44)
18 In an especially evocative example, Altman gestures to the importance of this approach when he asks us to consider the fundamental differences in sound between three performances of Mozart in three different venues: ‘one in a well-upholstered salon, another in a large concert hall, and a third in a city park’ (Citation1992: 16). While he readily admits that we may be hearing the ‘same’ score three different times, he notes that how we experience each performance and how each may affect us will be radically different. Although ethnomusicologists may understand the logic of this example, we still too often write about sound as if it were homogeneously experienced.
19 Notably, Bourdieu's habitus and his approach to bodily hexis, especially the non-conscious aspect of habitus, predate the contemporary rise in affect theory. He writes,
if all societies … set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of culture. The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit. (Citation1977: 94–5 italics in original)
20 See Polak (Citation2000) for a fascinating study that explores the ways in which industrial changes to the materials used to create jenbes (jembes, djembes), as well as a concomitant increase in skin tensions of the drums, has resulted in the formation of ‘calluses all over one's palm, and eventually in permanent deformations of [a performer's] hand’, a profound example in which an instrument affects the body permanently (29). Such examples of instruments’ abilities to act on human bodies has enormous affective potential.
21 For a useful overview of the methodological and theoretical consequences of sensory ethnography, see Pink (Citation2015).
22 Greg Downey's ‘Listening to Capoeira: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and the Materiality of Music’ (Citation2002) is a prime example of the kind of attunement to bodily ways of being that we here advocate. See also Sumera this volume.