Affect and embodied understanding in musical experience

Abstract

This essay undertakes an autoethnographic excursion into the body to illuminate the power of affect as bodied forth in and as musical experience. My journey is guided by the assumption that to underplay the significance of the body in our efforts to account for the power of music does a great disservice to our knowledge of ourselves. Two questions spur the study. How might music and affect be profitably articulated across mind and body, across time and space? Limited as we are by language, what would it mean to describe the experience of music as an embodied practice? By attending to the embodied, performative practice of ethnography, I suggest openings for deeper and more multiperspectival narrative analyses that, in turn, allow for an articulation of music and bodies across lines of individual and social identity, across boundaries of culture and difference.

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