The affective turn in ethnomusicology

Hofman, Ana

doi:10.2298/muz1518035h

Cited by 37 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…A key tension in theories of affect has been negotiating affect's supposedly pre-cultural, universalising nature but also its difference- and boundary-making potential (Hofman 2015). Scholars and activists who highlight the utopian nature of the ineffable often foreground its pre-cultural aspects by drawing from biological, textual and/or philosophical analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Space does not permit me to reproduce a thorough account of this debate here 1 . With most scholarly approaches viewing affect as either a pre-cultural or a culturally-situated phenomenon, there has recently been calls to consider how these two aspects are instead intertwined (Becker 2004; Hofman 2015; Gill 2017). For the purposes of this article, I define ‘affective magic’ as the political utilisation of the ambiguous space between the pre-cultural and cultural aspects of sonic experience.…”

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confidence: 99%

“… 1 These two approaches have been thoroughly examined elsewhere. For an excellent explication of this discourse as it relates to music see Hofman (2015). …”

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‘More powerful than politics’: Affective magic in the DIY musical activism after Egypt's 2011 Revolution

Sprengel¹

2019

Pop. Mus.

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With a return to authoritarian rule only a few years after the initially successful 2011 revolution, some Egyptian DIY musicians have made it a point to avoid the political. These musicians consider the ordinary politics of discursive critique and public protest to be ineffective and have opted to continue the revolution by appealing to the ineffable properties of listening as a less ideologically driven way to produce social change. This article explores how and why the sonic ineffable is believed to be a more utopian form of politics. It argues that mobilizing ‘magic’ is a particularly positioned solution to political failure that obscures the relations of power it perpetuates. Building from 30 months of ethnographic research conducted in Egypt among DIY musicians between 2010 and 2017, it avoids a romanticisation of the ineffable, showing instead how utilising the ambiguity between the conscious and subconscious aspects of sonic experience is a political tool not removed from power.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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‘More powerful than politics’: Affective magic in the DIY musical activism after Egypt's 2011 Revolution

Sprengel¹

2019

Pop. Mus.

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“…Since embarking on this project, we have invested considerable effort in establishing the field and opening new doors for all future research on soundscape in the former Yugoslav region (Cf. Atanasovski 2015Atanasovski , 2016Atanasovski and Hofman 2017;Hofman 2015;Dumnić 2016Dumnić , 2017Kovačič 2016Kovačič , 2017Medić 2016aMedić , 2016bMedić , 2017.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Years of sound living: Mikser festival in Savamala (2012-2016)

Medić

2017

Muzikologija

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This article deals with the soundscape of Mikser, an independent festival of contemporary creativity, established in 2009 in Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia. I focus on the years 2012-2016, during which Mikser was taking place in Savamala, an urban quarter in central Belgrade-which itself has undergone various urbanistic and cultural transformations in recent years. The creative team behind Mikser aimed to turn Savamala into a permanent fixture on the map of Belgrade nightlife and a tourist hotspot; the fact that they did not succeed was on account both of financial issues and conflicting top-down business interests. My conclusion is that the long-term survival of the festival is not dependent on its program or audiences, but on securing official support and infrastructure.

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“…4 References to music's special affective powers abound in global literature dating from ancient times to the present day, 5 although it is really only since the 'affective turn' in academic music studies c. 2000 that modern scholars have begun to focus on the link between music and emotions in a more systematic and sustained manner. 6 But affect has played a prominent role in the study of certain musical traditions long before this recent theoretical turn to musical emotions 7 -in particular, the rāga-based art-music systems of the Indian subcontinent that we now call Hindustani music in the North and Karnatak music in the South.…”

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Emotions in Indian music history: anxiety in late Mughal Hindustan

Schofield

2021

South Asian History and Culture

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Music’s ability to stimulate the emotions has long been fundamental to the aesthetics and reception of India’s elite rāga -based traditions. These emotions are generally studied aesthetically through the lens of ‘ rasa ’: the Sanskrit theory that proposes the musician’s role is to stimulate one of nine distilled emotional essences ( rasa s) that is ‘tasted’ by the audience. But here I ask the inverse question: what emotions arose when historical listeners were threatened with the loss of that crucial source of emotional stimulus; and how were those negative emotions expressed through historical texts? In this paper, I consider the Hayy al-Arwāh , a music treatise and tazkira (biographical collection) written by an ex-Mughal official from Delhi living in exile in Patna c. 1785–88, Miyan Zia-ud-din ‘Zia’. Zia-ud-din’s work reveals much about the emotions felt by musicians and music lovers affected by the violent political upheaval centred on late Mughal Delhi c1740–80 – but not in obvious ways. For such an emotional subject, his writing is curiously dispassionate. Nevertheless, I argue that his writing was impelled by one very powerful emotion in particular: anxiety. In order to approach the question I examine some alternative ways we might get at the emotional resonances of texts like the Hayy al-Arwāh : through genre, in this case the tazkira ; the etic observations of modern neuroscience; and a turn outwards to writings of more emotionally loquacious contemporaries, here the Urdu poet Mir Taqi ‘Mir’. I argue it is precisely Zia-ud-din’s detatched attention to detail, as he traced hundreds of lost and scattered musicians and listeners, that reveals the emotional driving force behind the writing of the Hayy al-Arwāh to be a deep and abiding anxiety engendered by the very real existential threat of war and exile to the music of late Mughal Delhi. In writing the Hayy al-Arwāh , Zia-ud-din acted as witness and record keeper for his community to insure against the potential loss of the music of his beloved homeland. At the same time, the work of gathering and reporting information acted to alleviate his anxiety over the threatened disappearance of what was to him a most important source of personal solace.

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The affective turn in ethnomusicology

Cited by 37 publications

References 32 publications

‘More powerful than politics’: Affective magic in the DIY musical activism after Egypt's 2011 Revolution

‘More powerful than politics’: Affective magic in the DIY musical activism after Egypt's 2011 Revolution

Years of sound living: Mikser festival in Savamala (2012-2016)

Emotions in Indian music history: anxiety in late Mughal Hindustan

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