Schedule, Speakers, and Abstracts

Schedule

Saturday, October 26 | 9 AM–4 PM

9:00–9:20  Gathering for coffee and pastries

9:20–9:30 Opening Remarks: Eben Graves, Thomas Marks

9:30–11:00  Session I: Tim Carter, Juliane Brauer, Roger Mathew Grant

11:00–11:30  Break

11:30–1:00  Session II: Thomas Marks, Bettina Varwig, Monique Scheer

1:00–2:00  Lunch on your own

2:00–3:00  Session III: John Corrigan, William Reddy

3:00–4:00  Closing roundtable discussion with all participants


Speakers and Abstracts

Music and the Emotions? A Response to Thomas Marks

Tim Carter (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

In his position statement of 28 August 2019, Tom Marks raised important questions about how historians might pay attention to music (and to musicologists); about what I will call Historically Informed Listening; and about sacred and secular ontologies and their potential intersection. I shall suggest some answers, drawing on specific music examples from Italy around 1600: a motet by Giovanni Gabrieli, a sacred contrafact of a secular madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi, and another piece by Monteverdi that I think gets to one heart of the matter—playing with time.

Music as emotional practice. A theoretical approach of studying music as source for a history of emotion

Juliane Brauer (Center for the History of Emotions, Planck Institute)

The presentation based on the assumption that music is embodied experience and memory. Contrary to a claim widely held among psychologists of music, music has no universal meaning. Rather, it acquires meaning through the concrete situations in which it is performed. This process is dependent upon multiple factors, including the individual experiences, perceptions, and needs of listeners and performers. The presentation offers an approach to analyze and describe the ways in which the practices of meaning-making of music and human feelings are interdependent in concrete historical situations and how we can explain change. For that, it’s necessary to focus on practices of making and perceiving music in history as emotional practices which are guided by embedded knowledge, expectations, memories, and emotions, and in which emotion work takes place.

Affect Theory after the Affektenlehre

Roger Mathew Grant (Wesleyan University)

In this talk I demonstrate how our current notion of affect was made possible through eighteenth-century aesthetic debates about music, representation, and imitation.  In the early modern era, the affects were important components of an elaborate semiotic system that sought to explain the impact of art.  Today, by stark contrast, affect is often explicitly opposed to theories of the sign and of representation; theorists describe affect as corporeal and immediate, working on our autonomic systems.  But the movement from representation to corporeal immediacy is not an innovation of contemporary affect theory.  Rather, it arose as an option within the turbulent theoretical development of the musical Affektenlehre, or doctrine of affections.  At first, theorists in the Affektenlehre tradition—like Heinichen and Mattheson—supposed that music had the ability create representations as the other arts do, through the imitation of the natural world.  But slowly theorists turned away from this view, unsatisfied with the taxonomic descriptions and explanations in music theoretical texts.  These writers—Diderot, Planelli, and Engel among them—postulated that music did indeed hold the ability to arouse affects in listeners, but it did not accomplish this through the traditional structure of imitation.  Instead, they held, it bypassed that representational framework through sonic vibrations of the nervous system, thereby sympathetically attuning the soul of the listener.  Music aroused the affects in a completely corporeal, immediate, non-discursive fashion.  It was this moment within the Affektenlehre tradition—much neglected in current scholarship—that generated the late eighteenth-century discourse on affective attunement [Stimmung] still with us in the present day.

The Art of Sighing, the Art of Dying: Expressive Ends in Early Modern Lutheran Funerary Compositions

Thomas Marks (Yale ISM)

For Lutherans in early modern Germany, the art of dying was a scripted affair. Armed with a repertoire of prayers they had spent their entire lives memorizing, Lutherans on their deathbed fought to die a “good death,” remaining steadfast in their faith even as physical and spiritual tribulations were heaped on their expiring bodies. Music played an important part in both pre- and post-death rituals—hymns were often sung bedside, and specially composed occasional works were performed at funerals in honor of the recently deceased. This paper considers the affective dimensions of a particular set of sacred funerary compositions that were all titled Seufftzer or suspiria (sighs). Of what significance was the sigh in Lutheran death rituals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what might the musical works that reference this gesture suggest about the affectivity of music and dying in the early modern world? Examining contemporary funeral sermons and prayer literature, I suggest in this paper that these compositions (re)present the last “heart-sighs” of the dying in a sonic medium, discursively constructing through sound an ideal image of death in which affective communion with God through the sigh was a crucial part of the soul’s passage into the afterlife.

Feeling Bach

Bettina Varwig (Emmanuel College, Cambridge University)

This paper explores a few examples from the output of Johann Sebastian Bach in order to consider how music might serve as a uniquely revealing source for a history of (early modern) emotions. It proposes that a conception of music not as aesthetic object but as performative process or practice promises the most productive insights in this regard, combined with a commitment to historicizing the (composing/performing/listening) bodies of those engaged in those practices. Such an approach, I argue, allows us to move beyond the engrained notion that the affective potential of Bach’s music resided primarily in its representational qualities, and encourages us to consider these early modern musicking practices instead as processes of corporeal-spiritual attunement and transformation.

German Protestants, Music and Kultur: Debates over Emotional Practices

Monique Scheer (Univeristy of Tübingen)

Drawing on ethnographic material from my research in mainline Lutheran and Charismatic congregations in a southwestern German city, I would like to discuss how performance and repertoire of the music in church services is key to understanding the specific emotional practice of these two different Protestant groups. For both, music is essential to their worship and they have strong opinions about its proper practice. When debating these points, music is inevitably linked not only to moralizing stances on emotions but also on ‘culture’, both of which seem to be the source of deeply felt meaning.

Emotion and the New England Regular Singing Controversy

John Corrigan (Florida State University)

In the 1720s the Massachusetts churches engaged in spirited debate about whether congregations should adopt a New Way of singing by note, then known as regular singing, or remain committed to the Old Way of lining out, a style that left much of the melody, time, and even words to individual initiative as members sang together. The clergy’s promotion of the New Way, while influenced by developments in England, had much to do with British colonists’ efforts to distinguish themselves from Native Americans, and especially from the brute emotions of Indians as colonists had constructed them. Regular singing excluded the trillings and ululations, the “hideous howling,” that colonists took as markers of the immature and undisciplined emotionality of the Indians.  This took place at a time when New Englanders worried that they were slipping into habits – into savagery – learned from their Indian neighbors.  

The “Psalm-Singers”: Emotion and Faith in the Calvinist Theology of Music

William Reddy (Duke University)

Song is often deployed intentionally to have emotional effects. But Calvin’s notion of faith endowed song with an even greater impact. Music could open the soul to divine influence. This paper will consider a case, then, where the local understanding of emotions was that they could carry messages or influences from outside the self.