Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table of Contents]

Authors

Roger Mathew Grant

Comments

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Disciplines

Intellectual History | Music Theory | Philosophy | Theory and Philosophy

Abstract

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music. These theorists postulated that it was music’s physical materiality as sound that vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to our contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Recommended Citation

Grant, Roger Mathew, "Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table of Contents]" (2020). Philosophy & Theory. 23.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/philos/23