Royal Musical Association Music & Philosophy Study Group 2017 themed session: Feeling in Music and Sound: Atmosphere, Stimmung, Mood.
Whether sung or sampled, private or alien, composed, amplified, passed down, recorded or imagined, music and sound are operative forces for shaping feelings. It seems that wherever music resounds, feelings or moods are likely to unfold as perhaps vague, but nonetheless intrusive and pervasive atmospheres. A recurrent radio-tune, a symphony, a jarring sound, a call for prayer, a soundtrack, a marching band or the hoot of an owl may all evoke, embody, radiate, alter, narrate, intensify, subvert or diffuse a situational atmosphere or Stimmung. In turn, the phenomenal spheres of music and sound have been key to the various philosophical genealogies of Stimmung, mood, or atmosphere theories. German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (1978, 2014) invokes music as evidence for his redefinition of feelings as atmospheres; Gernot Böhme (1995) mobilises the musical instrument as a prime example of his New Aesthetics of atmosphere; and Timothy Morton (2007) turns to timbre and tone to elaborate what he terms “ambient poetics”.
Despite these fertile intersections of music and atmosphere, music scholarship has often referred to phenomena of atmosphere or collective mood only in passing. This contrasts with contemporary sound studies, in which notions of atmosphere along with ambience and affect have gained currency to investigate music and sound as phenomena of space and place. This panel thus invites papers that advance and challenge existing concepts of atmosphere, Stimmung or mood through music and sound. We welcome in particular contributions that go beyond a notion of atmosphere, Stimmung or mood as spatial intensity, and that widen the focus to include performance, process, duration, dynamism, tension, timbre, resonance, or rhythm. Furthermore, this panel seeks to foster dialogue between the burgeoning anglophone scholarship on atmosphere as grounded in affect theory and germanophone notions of atmosphere that bear on New Phenomenology.
