Conference Presentations
"'The Feeling of Being': Rethinking Musical Emotion and Affect through the Arab Concept of Ṭarab"
Consider the following list of familiar experiences: the feeling of being complete, there, out of control, isolated, connected to the world, at one with life. These experiences comprise a distinct phenomenological category that philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe (2005, 2008) describes as “existential feelings.” For Ratcliffe, existential feelings are not emotions, nor are they the autonomous, asignifying “intensities” that some theorists (e.g., Massumi 1995) understand as affects, and yet they come to form a distinct category of experiences that describe familiar ways of “finding oneself in the world.”
This paper explores the relationship between existential feelings and musical experience. While research on musical emotion has undoubtedly been productive for addressing the complexities of how music expresses and arouses emotion, I argue that its overall emphasis on so-called “basic emotions” (Ekman 1972; Tomkins 2008) overlooks other less immediate and consciously recognizable forms of musical experience. By contrast, affect theory’s corporeal-materialist emphasis on autonomous “intensities” that lie outside the scope of signification and meaning undermines music-theoretical approaches seeking to account for cultural specificity (Garcia 2020).
Addressing these issues, my talk navigates the space between emotion and affect to explore the nature of a specific existential feeling in musical experience—namely, a heightened sense of what Heidegger (1962) called “mood,” an immersive and intersubjective sense of “being-in-the-world.” After describing its experiential characteristics, I employ Arnie Cox’s (2011, 2016) mimetic hypothesis and Mariusz Kozak’s (2020, 2021) notion of kinesthetic knowledge to propose an explanation for how music might afford such an experience; I explain here that culturally specific enactments of kinesthetic knowledge (e.g., headbanging in metal) place the body of the listener in dialogue with the broader socio-cultural milieu implied by the musical text, so as to blur the boundary between self and other. To illustrate this claim, I conclude with a case study that examines kinesthetic styles of movement and feeling inscribed within the Arab milieu of “ṭarab culture” (Danielson 1997; Racy 2003).
"Ṭarab and the Kinesthetic Understanding of Arabic Maqāmāt"
Central to the emotional efficacy of Arab musical performance is a form of “musical ecstasy” known as ṭarab. Linguistically, the term ṭarab refers to a state of heightened emotionality, often translated as “enchantment,” “rapture,” or “ecstasy.” The term also describes the style of music and musical performance in which such emotional states are aroused in performers and listeners as both a compositional and a performative goal. Reaching its “Golden Age” across the Arab world (with Cairo, Egypt as its epicenter) in the mid-to-late twentieth century, ṭarab—as both a style and a mode of emotional engagement—relies on dynamic feedback processes, involving both performers and listeners, to help facilitate the ecstatic conditions that its performance seeks to achieve (Racy 1991). To heighten the emotionality of the musical discourse, for example, performers and listeners typically enact a variety of expressive physical gestures and verbal utterances to signal their approval of the performance. As such, ṭarab performances are organically intertwined with the interactive dynamics of the performance event itself, where “ṭarab” comes to gloss a highly intersubjective process—achieving what Alfred Schutz (1977) called a “mutual tuning-in relationship,” the experiential “we” established throughout the course of musicking. In this paper, I show how theoretical inquiries into such emotional processes can benefit from non-written modes of understanding. Within the context of ṭarab, I describe how performers and listeners understand Arabic maqāmāt (i.e., melodic modes) kinesthetically, bringing them into their lived experience with their gesturing bodies to create the ecstatic conditions that ṭarab performances rely on.
"Musical Affect and the Realm of (Emotional) Discourse"
Beginning with Spinoza (Ethics) and running through the work of Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) to that of Brian Massumi (“The Autonomy of Affect”), affect has purposefully evaded semiotic explication. Unlike emotion, affect in this philosophical tradition is understood as any stimulus (including music) that changes the body, an intensity or vital force, according to Massumi (1995), that resides outside the purview of signification. Emotion, on the other hand, is a stimulus that is named, owned, perceived, and situated within the symbolic order of words, texts, and discourses. This paper demonstrates that musical affect and emotion need not run on separate tracks of signification. Describing how affect interacts with our emotional understandings of music, I discuss a range of musical styles, including those typically understood to evade explicit emotional signification, to suggest how musical affect and emotion may be brought into productive alignment with each other.
"Who's Listening? 'Framing' Stylistic Competency for the 21st-Century Listener"
This paper examines the effects of genre on musical hermeneutics and emotion. We argue not only that generic expectations guide listeners toward some musical features and away from others, thus affecting their perception of which features are meaningful, but also that conceptions of genres may vary across listeners. In arguing for the importance of genre in the interpretation of musical meaning and emotion, we begin by defining genre in terms of its musical and non-musical aspects, showing how both affect a listener’s conception of a genre and any associated emotions. Second, borrowing a concept from music studies, we discuss these aspects of genre in terms of “stylistic competency” (Hatten, 1994, 2004). We describe how individual listeners may possess multiple competencies, discuss how these competencies may vary in degree from one listener to another (Echard, 2017), and examine briefly how the notion of stylistic competency may be affected by technologies of musical consumption. Third, we provide a hermeneutic model that accounts for listeners with varying degrees of competency in a genre or style. To do this, we draw from the literary genre theory of John Frow (2008), building on his metaphor for the framing function of genre. Here, we argue that listeners often go beyond associating emotions with musical features alone, claiming that emotions are inherent in a more holistic conception of genre. Finally, we discuss the pedagogical implications of our model for the twenty-first-century classroom.
"The Making of Ṭarab: Emotion as Temporal Disruption in Umm Kulthūm's 'Alf Leila wa Leila'"
In discussing music of the Arab world, the term ṭarab is used to describe the aesthetic phenomenon by which music produces intense musical emotions. In practice, the cultivation of ṭarab relies, in part, on rhythmic flexibility and variety to create aesthetically pleasing moments of disruption to the orderly temporal flow of the music. This paper provides a model that seeks to elucidate these expressive implications by tracking the movement between rhythmic modes (īqāʿāt) in Umm Kulthūm’s “Alf Leila wa Leila” (1969) using Toussaint’s (2013) method of mapping cyclical rhythms and De Souza’s (2017) notion of consistency and displacement. Then, by drawing on theories of phenomenology (Husserl 1990), temporality (Shannon 2006), and emotion (Juslin 2019), I suggest that larger degrees of displacement between rhythmic modes lead to the types of temporal disruptions and embodied interactions that are so critical for the expressivity and production of ṭarab in Arab music.
"Frisson, Emotion, and Synthetic Gestalts: The Emotional Implications of Expressive Meaning in Debussy's Cello Sonata"
Cognitive theorists have often used the colloquial term “frisson” to describe the cognitive-psychophysiological “thrills,” “shivers,” “chills,” and “gooseflesh” that one perceives while listening to a particularly expressive musical passage. In attempting to account for such passages, David Huron (2006) attributes the phenomenon to two primary conditions: “(1) loud passages, and (2) passages that contain some violation of expectation—such as an abrupt modulation.” Despite the validity of these structural parameters, this paper finds that in the opening four measures of Debussy’s Cello Sonata, L. 135 (1915)—which evokes a strong frisson-like response (in my experience)—our expectations for sudden dynamic and/or harmonic shifts, as prescribed by Huron’s hypothesis, would not be fulfilled. Thus, in order to fully understand the rich emotional potential of this passage, I contend that we must go beyond mere surface-level interactions, and account for its emergent expressive meaning. The proposed paper, therefore, provides a semiotic reading of the opening bars of Debussy’s Cello Sonata (mm. 1–4) in order to elucidate the multifaceted implications of expressive interactions, resulting in more complex emotional experience.
Using Kofi Agawu’s extroversive-introversive semiotic paradigm as a model (1991), this paper finds that the perceived emotions in the opening of Debussy’s sonata emerge from a series of rhetorical (topical) and structural (syntactic) oppositions that interact to form a “synthetic gestalt” (Hatten 2004). Specifically, I show how perceived emotions in this passage are formed by the synthesis of two pairs of oppositions: (1) a rhetorical opposition between two dialogically opposed topics and (2) a structural opposition between melody and harmony. I propose that expressive meaning in the opening bars of Debussy’s sonata hinges on both the confrontation and dependency between the two domains of semiotic analysis; it is precisely where rhetorical and syntactical oppositions interact and merge into a synthetic gestalt that expressive meaning becomes “emergent” (Hatten 2018). Finally, I argue that these meanings then become interiorized into an amalgam of thought and feeling, creating an emotional charge that is more than the sum of its parts.
"A Non-Convetional Act of Heroism: The (mis)Placement of the Second Theme in the First Movement of Sibelius's Second Symphony"
This paper is an analysis of Jean Sibelius’s Second Symphony, op. 43 and the misplacement of the first movement’s second theme. The symphony has received much attention due to its ‘fragmentary nature’ and ‘organic unity’ (Gray 1934). However, little has been written about the unusual design of the first movement. Borrowing analytical tools from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory, the paper finds that the exposition’s S1.1 theme does not return in a conventional manner. The once vulnerable S1.1 reemerges in the retransition of the development as the aftermath of the movement’s climax but fails to return in the more conventional recapitulation. Sibelius’s approach to sonata form has one foot in the 19th-century tradition and one in “a genuinely twentieth-century aspect of thought and feeling” (James 1983). Sibelius shows a commitment to the traditional norms of sonata form, in that most themes are intact, as well as the secondary key area being in the dominant key (A major). However, the premature return of S1.1 in the retransition of the development threatens the nationalistic idyll. Not only do texture, orchestration, and dynamics serve the success of the S1.1 theme’s return, but its placement at the end of the retransition as a blaring tag-along to the climax of the movement signifies its transformational journey and represents the nationalistic freedom that Sibelius and his nation both wish to attain.