Being Musically Attuned

How does music change the way we feel? What is the quality or nature of the relationship between listening subject, environment, and acoustic signal that determines the rate or status of such transformation, and what aspects of music’s affective agency are involved in this process? These are the underlying questions posed by Erik Wallrup’s thoughtfully reflective new study. His monograph appears at a particularly prescient moment. In recent years, a large number of writers, from Tia de Nora, Nicholas Cook, and Eric Clarke to Peter Szendy and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, have offered substantial contributions towards a closer understanding of such questions from a diverse range of sociological, critical, and music-theoretical perspectives. The ‘affective turn’ in the Humanities more generally across the past two decades offers considerable potential for locating these discussions within a broader interdisciplinary context. The work of Teresa Brennan, Claire Hemmings, Lisa Blackman, and Brian Massumi, for example, has prompted new ways of thinking about the implications of embodied practice for artistic communication, and has energetically dismantled the ontological boundaries between subject and object, or self and world, that have traditionally predominated within musical research.

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