David Hesmondhalgh Why Music Matters (Aesthetics Week 4)

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The fact that music matters so much to so many people may derive from
two contrasting yet complementary dimensions of musical experience in
modern societies. The first is that music often feels intensely and
emotionally linked to the private self The second is that music is often
the basis of collective, public experiences. (1-2)
music provides a basis of self-identity and collective identity often
at the same moment. (2)
Especially complex today because the distinction between the public and
the private has never been so blurred and complex.
Hesmondhalgh offering a critical defense of music as an artistically and
socially valuable phenomenon in the face of the fetishization of
economic value that has emerged with neoliberalism. Value of art needs
defending in wake of austerity.
o However, other critiques of music (and art more broadly) have been
more valid Bourdieu et als suggestion that divisions between
high and low culture draw upon and reinforce patterns of social
inequality, and on how therefore the dominant ways of thinking
about beauty and pleasure in modern societies are deeply
compromised (4).
Value judgements re: aesthetic value and beauty are informed by existing
power relations such evaluations are surely connected to long histories
of inequality and violence. Gender and class inequality infect prevailing
judgements of aesthetic worth. (4)
Part of Hesmondhalghs defence employs Nussbaums conception of the
self and musics role in aiding personal flourishing; focusing also on
dancing and popular music, he suggests that at an individual level music
can contribute to revitalization and a healthy loss of self-consciousness.
(6)
Suggests that contemporary emphases on the role of music in everyday
life are often uncritical and overplay musics capacity to enrich peoples
lives (by overlooking the profound impact of social inequality etc., upon
human flourishing). (6)
o Competitive individualism as a (negative?) factor in peoples
relations to music (this could be useful)
So, a qualified endorsement of musics enriching potential.
Suggests that influential writings on music and community aspire to
impossible levels of communality and argues instead that we need to
look for beneficial experiences of sociability in life as it is currently lived.
(8) The need many writers feel for an ideal form of communitarian music
leads to many valuable collective musical experiences being overlooked.
Hesmondhalgh wants to reassert the liberatory potential of aesthetic
experience based on commonality across different communities in a way
similar to Ranciere and Garnham (in the face of thorough critiques by
Marxists, post-structuralists and social scientists.
o He sees the aesthetic-political value of music in the sociability that
musical culture, and the discussion and shared experience of
music, precipitates the sustenance of a public sociability, which

keeps alive feelings of solidarity and community. In this and in other

ways too, musical culture develops values and identities that feed
into deliberation, democracy, and politics in substantial but rather
indirect ways. (10)
Examines nationalism and cosmopolitanism.
o Finally, and more pessimistically, drawing on the work of
Paul Gilroy, I discuss how the inspiring cosmopolitanism of
Afro-diasporic music has been affected by
commercialization and globalization in the neo-liberal era.
Musics ability to unite people across space and time, and thereby
enable their collective flourishing, I conclude, is real, but specific,
and highly vulnerable to systemic changes, such as increasing
consumerism, commodification, and competitiveness. (10)

Feeling and Flourishing

In 19th C, aesthetic appraisals of music moved away from earlier concerns

with values and ethics [towards] a type of aesthetics that was centred
on the question of how form creates beauty. (12)
Subsequently, structure became privileged in analysis, and the imitation,
arousal and expression of emotion in music was primarily theorized in
terms of structured arousals of anticipation and deferral and the roles of
context and association of meaning in producing emotions in listeners
were sidelined. (12)
Affect theory pointed out that bodily and personal responses to (cultural)
experience are complex and go beyond the limitations of an excessive
focus on signification, meaning, and discourse (apparent in media and
cultural studies) (13).
The affective turn in cultural theory has the benefit of recognizing that
sensations, moods, and feeling are a key part of cultural experience
alongside emotion, and that there are important somatic dimensions to
affect. (13)
o Some theorists posit affect as pre-personal intensity, whereas
emotion is something owned and recognized although
Hesmondhalgh is way of this (ask about this)
Has been work (Gabrielsson) on cataloguing strong emotional responses to
music but Hesmondhalgh suggests that this is perhaps a distorted
depiction of musical experience. Instead, everyday musical emotions
ted to be of low intensity rather than high, to be mostly unmemorable, and
to be short-lived and multiple rather than sustained. Furthermore, they
often involve negative emotions and prioritize basic rather than complex
emotions. What is more, many everyday musical experiences are hardly
aesthetic experiences at all, in the sense of experience oriented towards
beauty, pleasure, and other forms of reward from the perceptions of
artistic objects. (14)
As such, affective states in music must be examined outside the narrow
remit of aesthetic experience; and understanding of musical affect needs
to be related to questions of value and ethics.
Nussbaum suggests emotions have a narrative structure as such,
narrative artworks are valuable in that they help people to comprehend
their emotional narratives. (15)

Music has less palpable narrative structures than other forms of art such
as the novel, cinema or theatre.
This ambiguity means that music more than other arts is more suited to
precipitating introspection, and interacts with less tangible aspect of ones
emotional palette: its semiotic indefiniteness gives it a superior power to
engage with our emotions. (16)
Musics power to elicit these responses is not natural or pure culturally
constructed. experience of such emotions depends on familiarity with
the conventions that allow them, either through everyday contact with
musical idioms or through education. (16-17)
Nussbaum helps us see that one important way in which music matters is
that it can provide its own version of the ways that stories and plays
potentially enhance our lives, by cultivating and enriching our inner world
and by feeding processes of concern, sympathy, and engagement, against
helplessness and isolation. (17)
Flourishing not synonymous with happiness associated, but other
aspects to flourishing (loyalty, courage etc) and flourishing has
connotations of activity, whereas happiness merely connotes a state of
mind. (18)
Flourishing and wellbeing pluralist but not relativist.
Thus, quasi-objective understanding required: and appreciation that
fundamental human characteristics and needs are widely shared, though
they may take very different forms in different societies. (18)
Hesmondhalgh, using Nussbaums scheme of basic needs, suggests one
which is particularly relevant to music: being able to have attachments to
things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for
us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience
longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having ones emotional
development blighted by fear and anxiety. (19)
Using Nussbaums earlier understanding of music as a valuable tool in the
comprehension and expression of emotions, a basic level of access to
music seems to be a requirement for flourishing.
Hesmondhalgh details further how music is fairly central to Nussbaums
theory of flourishing (see p 20)
Nussbaum overemphasizes high culture but her overall theory can be
applied to more popular forms as well. (21)
She tries to separate music as a specific force in inducing affect but in
reality, the experience of music is nearly always inseparable from [lyrics
etc] and other semiotic resources, and a consideration of the value of
music needs to understand that music takes many different forms in
modern societies, and that these different mediations interact in complex
ways. (22)
Music is always embedded within complex networks of meaning and
affect. (23)
o Popular song, with the centrality of lyrics, is therefore interesting as
it almost always embodies this complex network.
Hesmondhalgh suggests that tensions between liberation and repression,
obligation and freedom, suffering and enjoyment can all be found in Candi
Statons Young Hearts Run Free he suggests this is particularly

interesting as disco was a genre typically lambasted for its vacuous, and
hedonistic tendencies. (24)
Suggests that popular music without lyrics can still elicit complex
emotional responses (focusing on a jungle tune) the pleasure implied in
We are E (referencing MDMA; the energy of the tune) is juxtaposed with
its minor key, gunshot samples, its disorienting and frenetic composition.
A reflection of its urban and mixed setting hedonism but also confusion.
(26)
Nussbaums conception of music and its relationship with emotion and
flourishing could be interpreted as relying on the discredited concept of
culture and self-realization, a fundamentally naive and bourgeois idea
that conceives of individuals as oriented to self-realization, and thereby
excludes[s] most ordinary experiences of music. (26) Not sure where
Hesmondhalgh stands on this.
Hesmondhalgh points out that opportunities for emotional enrichment are
unevenly distributed (i.e. determined by social and economic position).
(27)
Is the very idea of a subject who develops herself through culture
compromised by its links to Western, bourgeois notions of selfhood and of
aesthetic canons? Might such a model as Nussbaums be guilty of
ethnocentrism and a submerged class politics? (27) This might be
useful
There have been leftist defenders of self-realization, too (Ryle and Soper)
who see self-realization through culture as having a potentially strong
social orientation, when it is combined with a more historical,
intersubjective and critically-honed sense of ones own identity and
society.
Ryle and Soper make a convincing case that the democratization of
cultural self-realization, especially through educational institutions, is not
only possible and coherent, but desirable, and that attacks on selfrealization based on excessive critique of subjectivity leave little ground
upon which to defend culture, or indeed the idea that people should live
their lives well. (28)
Ultimately though Nussbaum is reliant upon a contemplative individual
which Hesmondalgh suggests precludes engagement with other valuable
musical experiences that occur outside state of self-realization. (28)
Increasing amounts of study examine the more mundane uses people
make of music in everyday life which valuable moves discussion of
musics positive effects into the realm of mood and sensation. (28)
This work can be seen as complementary to Nussbaums combined, they
can serve to appreciate the somatic importance of musical affect as well
as the emotional (the dismissal of the embodied aspects of music has
generally characterized a great deal of musicology Hesmondhalgh
suggests that this might stem from the primacy that the mind has enjoyed
in aesthetics since Kant). (29)
Many people value music for the way it allows for aesthetic experiences
that combine bodily invigoration and emotional intensity. Paying proper
attention to this fact may take us more into the realm of the demotic, the

carnivalesque, the somatic, in ways that can complement Nussbaums

rather intellectualist focus on self-cultivation. (29)
Musical Aesthetics and Bodily Experience: Dancing

Compares dancing to flow centrality of a loss of self-consciousness, a

sensation of vitality, heightened physical awareness to the process,
sensual but deeply reflexive as well. This is often as much about order
and control as much as going wild. (31)
Dance is a form of play but it is also an aesthetic experience dance
provides musical experience of a bodily kind. (32)

Ask what the integrated subject means.

In line with American pragmatist philosophy, art (music+dance) is thus at

once instrumentally valuable and a satisfying end in itself. (33)
ASK ABOUT P 33
Art serves to heighten experience without precluding meaning and
reflection.
Some experiences invite an enjoyable and enriching lack of selfconsciousness (as in flow), while others have a puzzling quality which
invites us to reflect on what is valued. (33)
Hesmondhalgh suggests (but doesnt explain) that somatic aesthetic
experience is tied up with some of the most disturbingly instrumentalized
and commodified aspects of modern societies. (34)
***Suggests that aliveness as a quality is far from mystical and is instead
very ordinary and again hinges on a certain lack of self-consciousness
and/or the disappearance of otherwise often present existential fears and
questions (is my life worth living? etc) (34). Aivenes stems from being
with particular people, or doing something about which one is passionate
both of these can stem from music.
Difficulties can arise in this, however can preclude a degree of critical
thought necessary for aesthetic judgement in lieu of a mere socially
conditioned emotional response. (35)

Approaches to Music and Emotion in Everyday Life: Contributions and Limitations

For Adorno music could only contribute to bettering the world through
the coded language of suffering. (35)
A significant challenge for this book, then, is to produce a historically
informed, and critical, but non-Adornian, account of the relations
between music, power, subjectivity, and value, in the context of
ordinary experience of music. (35-6)
Hesmondhalgh considers music psychology which has, more than
aestheticians and philosophers, prioritised the quotidian interactions of
people with music.
However, he seeks to contextualise agency suggesting that for the
most part music psychologists underestimate the extent to which
social and psychological dynamics might limit peoples freedom to
act. (40)

Suggests good psychoanalyses still offer the most coherent accounts

of human subjectivity and its constraints, especially when combined
with insights drawn from philosophy and social science. (41)
Sloboda, DeNora and Finnegan (the 3 psycho-peeps that he refers to)
all risk downplaying various ways in which music may become
implicated in less pleasant and even disturbing features of modern life.
(41) THIS SECTION COULD BE USEFUL
Can music really be so autonomous that it floats free of social
forces? And, turning to self-identity, might not peoples
projects of self-creation (to use DeNoras term), and therefore
their uses of music as part of these projects, have some more
difficult and troubling dimensions than emerges in such
accounts? (41)
Hesmondhalgh seeks to provide a balanced critical account of the
place of the self in modern societies that shows how self-realization is
deeply compromised by certain conditions of capitalist modernity. This
allows us to build on the positive account of musical-aesthetic
experience based on emotion and human flourishing, by relating
aesthetic experience to historical developments in modern societies.
(42)
Post-60s, Capitalism has responded to what Boltanski and Chiapello
have termed the artistic critique of capitalism which stresses
capitalism as a sources of disenchantment and inauthenticity, and the
limits it places on freedom, autonomy, and creativity by providing
workplace situations that emphasise (and thus commodify) a form of
self-expression and individuality. This represents a form of commodified
flourishing where the self is an individual enterprise, and where
transitory relationships and commitments are considered more
legitimate than stable ones because rapidly changing ones
connections can supposedly lead to personal growth and greater selfrealization. (43)
Hesmondhalgh calls this a connexionist society.
This society -> increased depression, anomie, suicide etc.
In this context, the optimistic vision of self-realization via music put
forward by DeNora, Sloboda etc., is to some extent dubious.
Self-realization in a marketised sense also accommodates ideas about
hedonism. the tendency for leisure to be seen as a key means of
self-definition [does] not radically conflict with the needs of the
capitalist economy. Indeed these facets of modern societies have
become a productive force in their own right, in that they fuel cultural
consumption. (44)
This romantic idea of personal autonomy, which has been effectively
appropriated by capitalism, is not only largely impervious to musical
incursions it has also been constituted by music that has valorised it.
Jazz, hip-hop, soul and rock have all to some extent supported values
of rebellious creativity, but [have been] assimilated very quickly to
values of commercialism with unchallenging celebration of mobility
and unfettered individuality clearly bolstering the connexionism of
Boltanski and Chiapello. (45)

Difficulty comes from applying these historical metanarratives about

capital, culture, and music, to the everyday life that Hesmondhalgh is
interested in, without stripping individuals of any agency or autonomy.
See box 2.2 (46-8) for really interesting stuf about record collecting,
gender and music and emotion.
Competitive Individualism and Status Competition Through Music

Bourdieu singles out music from all other forms of culture in terms of
its power to act as a marker of class differentiation. (48)
Cas Wouters On status competition and emotion management
Decline of intrinsic status via birth or wealth (traditional means),
displays of the fact that one experiments with many lifestyles and an
awareness and knowledge of emotions have perhaps replaced
traditional markers of superiority music can be part of status battles
to show ones openness to a variety of lifestyle pleasures and ones
superior emotional range. After all, music has come to be linked,
perhaps more than any other cultural form, with the emotional
dimensions of ourselves. (49)
Equally, pressure to enjoy oneself publically and a certain duty to have
pleasure, the way modern individuals compete over who is having the
most fun, who is gaining most from life can be aided and underpinned
by musical experience.
o there are two ways in which music might be the basis of
status battles in modern society: in terms of the emotional
sensitivity of its consumers, and in terms of its basis for
hedonistic pleasures. (50)
PP 50 52 have personal examples of this.

Review
music can heighten peoples awareness of continuity and development in life.
It seems powerfully linked to memory, perhaps because it combines different
ways of remembering: the cognitive, the emotional, and the bodily sensory. (53)
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