Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical by Roger Mathew Grant (review)

Roger Mathew Grant’s Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical dives into a problem that has been debated in music philosophy since before the eighteenth century: How does music affect us? Does it complement emotions we are already experiencing, or does it have the power to shape how we feel? Do our minds translate what we hear into particular affects, or are our bodies attuned to musical vibrations? Grant does not offer yet another “definitive” answer to these questions. Instead, he traces how conversations around these questions evolved over the eighteenth century, anticipating the evolution of present-day affect theory discourse. Grant weaves together a substantial archive of European music theories, once referred to as Affektenlehre (theory of affects), which theorized relationships between musical conventions and corresponding emotions. That these theories often contradicted one another has caused them to be written off as unworthy of academic study. Part of Grant’s project is to show that, despite the contradictions, these documents shared certain overarching principles that limn key developments in early music theory. Thus, music and musical treatises from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries trace a “mimetic Affektenlehre,” wherein music’s formal conventions were understood to encode particular emotions. The end of the century, by contrast, sees the rise of an “attunement Affektenlehre,” according to which musical sounds resonate directly with the human body, no longer relying on a principle of mimesis. The progression from mimesis to attunement, Grant argues, mirrors the ways in which contemporary affect theory has distanced itself from the object, focusing instead on affect as a transcendent mode.

Readers of Grant’s work will recognize in Peculiar Attunements a methodological principle that also informs his first book, Beating Time and Measure Music in the Early Modern Era (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014): the weaving together of a capacious and at times recalcitrant archive in order to trace the transformation of a concept over time. In Beating Time and Measuring Music, this methodology underwrites Grant’s successful efforts to fill in a gap in the history of music theory. As the eighteenth century inaugurated new ways of measuring and understanding time, musical meters proliferated even as overarching theories of rhythm were almost nonexistent. By gathering together and identifying the underlying principles behind these various systems for measuring time, Grant shows how the concept of “the beat” was, over the course of the eighteenth century, divided into multiple different senses. Peculiar Attunements is similar in its archival reach, yet instead attending primarily to “knowledge left unarticulated or barely written” (Beating Time, 8), Grant picks up on a once-prominent line of music history that has been forgotten—but that, in his reckoning, needs to be remembered. “The Affektenlehre was bigger and messier than we had previously thought, and it is now more pertinent to our contemporary discourse than we could ever have imagined” (3).

Across four chapters, Grant leads his reader through an evolving discussion about music and affect whose contours resemble present-day affect theory. Chapter 1 details the mimetic Affektenlehre, an “unstable consensus among theorists” that musical conventions and codes could “evoke specific affects in audiences” (29). This notion takes shape with the coalescence of predictable plots, formal structures, and musical conventions that emerged in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century serious opera. The practice of alternating between recitative and aria, for instance, became a template that allowed composers to foreground characters’ emotional responses to events in the plot. The rise of conventional forms, Grant argues, made it possible for composers to externalize emotional responses, linking those responses to particular harmonies, rhythms, and melodic lines. Typical of Grant’s work is his ability to toggle between carefully chosen examples (a musical close reading opens each chapter) and the general principles that they illustrate. For instance, he engages with the tradition of the operatic lament by showing how Dido’s famous lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), “When I am laid...