Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre

This concluding chapter places contemporary affect theory in conversation with the historical investigation outlined in the body of the book. It finds within recent affect theory a certain musicality and a tendency to rehearse dynamics that once played out within historical music theory. This final chapter closes with a call to restore diachronicity and movement to affect theory: to think affect historically, and to therefore pay close attention to the movements between the objects and subjects that have generated it.

Eighteenth-Century Opera and the Mimetic Affektenlehre

This chapter opens in the late seventeenth century, describing the stabilization of musical conventions that took place in the opera theatre. It examines the aesthetics of early serious opera—an often-tragic spectacle that united poetry with stage action and music to create an integrated series of mimetic representations for its audiences. Music’s affective power was clearly felt in this medium, though theorists around the turn of the century could only approximate its method of operation. Their efforts formed the mimetic Affektenlehre: a set of taxonomic music theory documents that attempted to codify the technical basis of opera’s multimedia representations in musical terms. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how theorists quickly realized that their efforts could never fully capture this system, nor would their account of it ever completely agree.

“Sonate, que me veux-tu?” and Other Dilemmas of Instrumental Music

This chapter explains the dilemmas that instrumental music created for eighteenth-century aesthetics. Since period critics already questioned the ability of music to function as a sign and to move listeners within the multimedia spectacle of opera, they were even more dubious about instrumental music. Lacking any clear mimetic capacity, instrumental music seemed to make its appeal directly to and only to the body of the listener, providing a mere corporeal tickle. Even worse, composers of instrumental music were slowly adopting techniques from comic opera, showcasing their ability to hybridize styles. Most critics found the result disorderly, confusing, and lacking in content, equating instrumental music to a performing body without a soul. Nevertheless, a small group of thinkers began to propose an alternative, cryptodualist solution: they posited that it was specifically music’s special material relationship with the body that made it so effective at moving the souls of its auditors to the affects.

Comic Opera: Mimesis Exploded

This chapter concerns eighteenth-century comic opera, which emerged as a metatheatrical commentary on the conventions of aristocratic, serious opera. In its mockery of neo-classical mimesis, comic opera forced critics to articulate what was new about its musical style. It therefore precipitated a huge pamphlet debate known as the querelle des bouffons, in which certain theorists began to understand music’s aesthetic appeal differently. These thinkers cleaved music’s affective power away from the operation of mimesis, offering instead a materialist account of vibrational attunement predicated on sympathetic resonance. The chapter concludes with a reading of Diderot’s contribution to the debate in his celebratedtext Rameau’s Nephew.

Introduction

This chapter 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. The chapter demonstrates the similarities between eighteenth-century attunement theories and contemporary affect theory, explaining how the peculiar problems of theorizing affect generate repeating patterns in the historical evolution of the concept. It also includes a discussion of the book’s methodology and a brief sketch of its contents.

The Attunement Affektenlehre

This chapter focuses on the theoretical texts of the attunement Affektenlehre. In the wake of debates surrounding both comic opera and instrumental music, theorists felt the need to offer a new explanatory mechanism for musical affect. They turned, in this endeavor, to the empirical phenomenon of sympathetic resonance, postulating a mechanical operation whereby the vibration of musical sound could stimulate the nerves of the human body; the interior of the listener was then said to be attuned to the affect through this non-representational, corporeal mode of transmission. Scrutinizing the details of these attunement theories, the chapter concludes with Hegel’s critique of sense-certainty.