similar ways? Is it possible, not only to document music’s e ects, but to begin to explain how music comes to achieve these e ects? And, finally, what part does a focus on music’s mechanisms of operation form within sociology’s core and critical concerns with order, power, and domination or control? It is time to reclaim the matter of music’s powers for sociology.

Relations of music production, distribution and use

One of the first issues this project needs to face is the matter of how music is produced and distributed within environments – the who, where, when, what and how of sonic production and reproduction. This matter is critical in modern times where mechanically reproduced, mass-distributed music is as ubiquitous as temperature control and lighting. As Lash and Urry have observed (1994:54), the concept of ‘expert systems’ is applicable beyond the realms of social science, techniques of self-therapy and the environment. It applies as well to the aesthetic realm, where ‘the use of film, quality television, poetry, travel and painting as mediators in the reflexive regulation of everyday life’ is also pertinent. The salience of such systems can be seen perhaps most acutely in relation to particular social groups. During an ethnography of high street retail shops I was intrigued to learn that the larger of the national and global outlets not only play the same music at precisely the same times of day, but they do so in order to structure the energy levels of sta and clientele. In principle, one should be able to enter any one of these stores at any moment in any branch in the United Kingdom and the music playing should be (or at least is intended to be) identical. At a time when public spaces are increasingly being privatized, and when ‘people management’ principles from McDonald’s and Disneyland are increasingly applied to shopping precincts, sociologists need to focus much more closely on music’s social role. Here, the concern with music as a social ‘force’ – and with the relation of music’s production and deployment in specific circumstances – merges with a fundamental concern within sociology with the interface between the topography of material cultural environments, social action, power and subjectivity. This literature and the contribution it can make to socio-musical studies is discussed in chapter 2 and again in chapters 5 and 6.

Consider again the examples discussed so far. In one, an individual (myself ) replayed in memory a popular aria in a way that reconfigured the experience of a temporal interval. In another, a group of individuals on an aircraft are exposed to music chosen expressly for its perceived ability to promote a particular image and to structure social mood. In a third, a therapeutic client makes whatever ‘music’ he can while a music therapist

weaves that music into a larger musical tapestry and mode of interaction. In a fourth example, an individual engages in a kind of do-it-yourself music therapy, locating and listening to a desired recording as part of her everyday regulation and care of herself. In a fifth example, a karaoke host alters the energy levels and social inclinations in a pub by interjecting strategically chosen numbers of his own. In the final examples, transport stations and shops draw upon ‘expert’-designed music systems to encourage organizationally preferred forms of conduct. In all of these examples, music is in dynamic relation with social life, helping to invoke, stabilize and change the parameters of agency, collective and individual. By the term ‘agency’ here, I mean feeling, perception, cognition and consciousness, identity, energy, perceived situation and scene, embodied conduct and comportment.

If music can a ect the shape of social agency, then control over music in social settings is a source of social power; it is an opportunity to structure the parameters of action. To be sure, there are occasions when music is perceived as something to be resisted. The degree of participation in the production of a ‘soundtrack’ for ongoing (and future) action, the relations of music production, distribution and consumption, is thus a key topic for the study of music’s link to human agency. This hitherto-ignored topic is focused on the social distribution of access to and control over the sonic dimension of social settings.

The second topic for a sociology of musical power is less straightforward, despite the attention it has received within cultural theory. It concerns the matter of how to specify music’s semiotic force. In what way should we specify music’s link to social and embodied meanings and to forms of feeling? How much of music’s power to a ect the shape of human agency can be attributed to music alone? And to what extent are these questions about music a liated with more general social science concerns with the power of artefacts and their ability to interest, enrol and transform their users?

22 Musical affect in practice

analysis is semiotics, and the analyst’s task may be confined to the consideration of aesthetic forms; music’s users thus hardly need to be consulted. There is no need, in other words, for (time-consuming) ethnographic research. This semiotic conception of socio-musical analysis is what Bennett Berger (1995) (discussed in chapter 1) described as ‘culturology’. It also underpins Adorno’s way of working, and helps to explain why he felt qualified to disparage jazz, for example, and why he so exasperated Bertolt Brecht, who once observed, ‘he never took a trip in order to see’ (quoted in Blomster 1977:200). This semiotic protocol is prevalent in socio-musical studies. It is usually devoted to what is often referred to as ‘the works themselves’.

In what follows, it is argued that semiotic approaches, conceived in this manner, possess limitations. Their limits derive from a particular type of theoretical shortcut taken by semiotic analysts as they slide from readings of works to discussions of the social impact of those works. This shortcut uses the analyst’s interpretations of music’s social meanings as a resource instead of a topic. That is, they often conflate ideas about music’s a ect with the ways that music actually works for and is used by its recipients instead of exploring how such links are forged by situated actors (particular audiences or recipients as, for example, in Willis’s study of the bikeboys described in chapter 1). From the comfort of an ergonomically designed armchair, poised in front of a lap-top computer in an o ce with a view, the analyst duly ‘informs’ readers about music and what it will do

– for example, the forms of feeling it may engender, or the social structures to which it gives rise or from which it emanates.

To be sure, not all semioticians envisioned such analytical powers for themselves; as Barthes once observed, his own responses to Vivaldi might (but need not necessarily) align with the responses of others; they were ‘his’ responses, visceral, proximate, and bound up with the temporal weft of his being. In this sense, Barthes captures the way in which ‘good’ semiotics is akin to criticism and appreciation but may not have the power to tell us about how music works in social life. When it exceeds these bounds, semiotics risks a kind of covert objectivism, a presumption that music’s meanings are immanent, inherent in musical forms as opposed to being brought to life in and through the interplay of forms and interpretations.

This tendency – to hypostatize the meaning and social consequences of aesthetic forms, as discussed by Morley in relation to media studies (1980:162) – is deeply ironic given that semiotic work within the arts often aligns itself with ‘postmodern’ conceptions of meaning-as- constructed, meaning-as-emergent, and with deconstructions of

knower–known, subject–object relations. One of the hallmarks of these conceptions is the idea that the meanings of things are made manifest in and through attempts to interpret and describe them, in and through the ways actors orient themselves in relation to them. The ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury makes this point clearly when he says, ‘musicological discourse is not simply talk and writing “about music”, but is also constitutive of music’ (1991:201). He suggests that objects we describe may lend themselves to being framed in a variety of ways; describing or defining an object is therefore an act of selecting, honing and filtering a particular version of that object’s implications. The act of description thus co-produces itself and the meaning of its object. With regard to music, then, the matter of its social significance is not pregiven, but is rather the result of how that music is apprehended within specific circumstances. While these points are by now commonplace within literary theory, ethnomethodology and constructivist perspectives (as, for example, in science studies), they are curiously often abandoned when analysis is applied to art ‘objects’.

Within certain and more traditionally grounded segments of musicology, a concern with reception is often misconstrued as a disinclination to address music’s ‘intrinsic’ properties, whether these concern structures, values or connotations. For example, it is often suggested that by turning the analytical lens on to music consumption one abandons the ‘music itself’ (note again that phrase, ‘the music itself’, as if under the specialist’s analytical razor we would arrive at the ‘core’ or essence of music’s semiotic force). On the contrary, a reflexive conception of music’s force as something that is constituted in relation to its reception by no means ignores music’s properties; rather, it considers how particular aspects of the music come to be significant in relation to particular recipients at particular moments, and under particular circumstances. The point, then, to be developed below, is that music analysis, traditionally conceived as an exercise that ‘tells’ us about the ‘music itself’, is insu cient as a means for understanding musical a ect, for describing music’s semiotic force in social life. For that task we shall need new ways of attending to music, ones that are overtly interdisciplinary, that conjoin the hitherto separate tasks of music scholars and social scientists.

Popular music studies have always been concerned with the matter of how music is experienced by real people (see Frith 1990b). Indeed, the very reason pop music culture is, in Willis’s terminology, ‘profane’ is that it has traditionally been appropriatable, open to reinterpretation and determination in and through use; it has possessed all the attributes of the

24 Musical affect in practice

non-sacred (despite various attempts by fans and critics to canonize particular pop music works and performers, and to specify ritual appropriations). Because of this, the emphasis within popular music studies on the experience and appropriation of music has flowed more naturally (see Shepherd and Wicke 1997:18; Frith 1990b); such an emphasis has neither had to deal with, nor been regarded as hostile to, canonic discourse and the idea of musical ‘autonomy’, both of which are products of late-eighteenth-century cultural practice (W. Weber 1984; 1992; DiMaggio 1982; DeNora 1995b).

The project proposed here, in this chapter and beyond, di ers markedly from musicology’s traditional professional concerns. It is to conceptualize musical forms as devices for the organization of experience, as referents for action, feeling and knowledge formulation. Such a project begins with concerns outlined by thinkers such as Aristotle and Adorno and seeks to convert them into a set of researchable questions. This project di ers fundamentally from a concern with what music signifies, what it may inculcate. It also sidesteps the perennial wrangle, recently summarized adroitly by Shepherd and Wicke (1997), concerning whether musical meanings are ‘immanent’ or ‘arbitrary’. Drawing inspiration from recent work in science and technology studies and from socio-linguistic theory, it seeks to circumvent the dichotomous manner in which questions of music’s a ect have been posed (‘music’ on the one side, ‘a ect’ on the other) and to evade the various forms of reductionism these interrogative formulations presuppose of their answers (for instance, ‘music plays no role in determining a ect’ versus ‘music prescripts a ect’). For while music’s semiotic force can be seen to be constructed in and through listener appropriations, a focus on how people interact with music should also be concerned with, as I have already suggested, the role music’s specific properties may play in this construction process. Thus, even though they cannot be ‘read’ for the forms of social life that issue from or within them, music’s materials provide resources that can be harnessed in and for imagination, awareness, consciousness, action, for all manner of social formation.

To begin to illustrate this point I draw on Susan McClary’s classic discussion of Carmen (1991; 1992), which exemplifies the virtues of semiotic analysis but which also helps to bring into relief the point at which attention to ‘the music itself’ is insu cient as a means of accounting for music’s semiotic force, for its a ect and power in social life. McClary is by no means the only semiotician within musicology; there are many excellent works concerned with musical representation (for example, Charles Ford (1991); Lawrence Kramer (1990; 1997); Philip Tagg (1991); Gretchen Wheelock (1992)). Her work is dealt with here only because it