‘The only real magic’: enchantment and disenchantment in music's modernist ordinary

Abstract

Abstract This essay tracks a predominant fantasy of music in global liberal-capitalist culture: music as ‘the only real magic’. Although discussion of music's ‘magic’ has been characterized as a vestige of Romanticism, I argue that it became a cornerstone of ordinary/everyday music discourse circa 1900, around the time that sociologists defined modernity as mostly bereft of magic and configured the aesthetic as its remaining stronghold. Juxtaposing claims of magic in ordinary music discourse with a coeval archive of these ‘disenchantment’ narratives, I trace music's institutionalization as magic in the historical moment from around 1900 to the present. This history reveals that music remains commonly experienced as ‘the only real magic’ insofar as it offers deeply ameliorative forms of affective connection felt to be scarce in other domains. Accordingly, it indicates the immense healing power that music has accrued particularly over the last century while also adumbrating the conditions of scarcity from which this potency has emerged.

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