Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with an earlier affective turn that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. It offers a new way of ...thinking through affect historically and dialectically, drawing attention to repeating patterns and problems in affect theory's history.
Explains musical concepts in clear, accessible language without relying on technical jargon or notated musical examples.Provides a trenchant critique of contemporary affect theory through an ...investigation of an earlier moment in its history.This is the first book to bring together historical music theory with the new and growing domain of affect theory.
Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects-or 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 such theories, since it wasn't apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond 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, postulating that music's physical materiality as sound 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 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 gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects. Shows how the affective turn that has swept the humanities and social sciences has its origins in theories of music.
This book chronicles the shifting relationships between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. Writers on music have long grappled ...with the nature of meter, and throughout the history of Western music their formulations have continually evolved, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, this study illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time have mutually informed one another. The turning point of the narrative is a dramatic change in the conceptualization of meter that took place during the eighteenth century. This change in musical thought occurred within a broader shift in the construction of time. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding, first articulated in Newton's metaphysics, of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broad intellectual history of temporality, this book examines the theoretical apparatuses, timekeeping technologies, and musical materials that implemented this conceptual shift.
This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how ...music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through this historical antecedent, the essay argues for renewed attention to the objects in the world that generate affects in subjects.
The Paris Opera had been "profane," he satirically wrote, by "senseless laughter and indecent gaiety." As the home of sung French tragedy, or tragedie en musique, the Paris Opera was a most unusual ...place for comedy. A space for gods and heroes, for love and death and classical ideals, the opera treasured there was nothing to laugh about. But that summer a small traveling group of Italian opera buffa performers took up residency at the Opera, bringing to Paris for the first time a new form of comic opera that was slowly spreading across Europe from its origins in Neapolitan theatres. Here, Grant discusses comic opera's peculiar use of mimesis.
This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how ...music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through this historical antecedent, the essay argues for renewed attention to the objects in the world that generate affects in subjects.
Among the many characters the Parisian composer François Couperin animated at the keyboard, one was an amphibian. Published alongside several of his other short harpsichord portraits in the Pièces de ...clavecin of 1730, L’Amphibie is a musical shape-shifter. Like Rameau’s nephew, the piece trades in dissimulation. While at one moment it appears proud and grand, by the next it has already begun to sound flippant and jocular, like a comic opera character rapidly cycling through scenes. The piece is a distillation of several dilemmas facing instrumental music in the eighteenth century: How can music without a text signify what it
