Estuary on Affect and Music

Music Soothes the Savage Beast
How do we measure the affect of a person and their work on people?
How did Mozart affect his generation and future generations?
What is Elvis’ affect?
Why is Taylor Swift so popular?

1. Music and affect
Read part of the article by Reimer.
“When I was sixteen, a junior in high school in Brooklyn, I auditioned for the City High School Band of New York and was placed as first chair clarinet. First rehearsal, a piece we played (I don't remember what it was except that it was new to me) had a long, melodic clarinet solo, with accompaniment. When we finished playing it the director stopped the band and said, "Very nice, first clarinet. Let's do it again, this time with more feeling."

Reimer, B. (2004). Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect. In Source: Philosophy of Music Education Review (Vol. 12, Issue 1). https://about.jstor.org/terms

1. What does it mean to “Play with Feeling”?
2. Which music has moved you? Was it how it was played, the person playing it or the music itself?
3. What sort of emotion did you feel when moved by music, can you label the emotion?

2. Mozart and Affect
Clip from Amadeus Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRened1Fik
0:00- 3:00 - 7:20- end

1. What were your impressions of the person of Mozart versus the music of Mozart?
2. What emotions were present in the room?
3. What context did knowing that Salieri was the court composer and the king himself playing the music have on the affect/feeling in the room?

3. Theories of The “Mozart Effect” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLASrOujkGw

a) Why do you think people thought Mozart made people smarter?
b) Has music ever contributed to better study or cognitive effects for you?
c) Why do we feel that classical music is more “virtuous” than pop or rock music?

4. Elvis - clip from a Ed Sullivan
Video 1: Ed Sullivan Performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNYWl13IWhY
Video 2: Cultural impact of Elvis’ performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLISRukZc10

1. What is the initial response to Elvis’ presence and performance?
2. What is the audience response to his introduction to the song?
3. What moral and cultural rules did Elvis break?

5.a Cardigan Music video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a8s8OLBSE ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a8s8OLBSE)

5.b Article

“We’re in a log cabin replete with open fire, the kind of warm Romantic environment
where one imagines Thoreau writing into the evening. On the wall hangs a faded portrait
beside an oil painting of a rustic country cottage. It’s early in the morning, or late at night,
and a singer, wearing what appears to be an antebellum nightdress, is serenading us on
a battered old piano, before suddenly she opens the top of the instrument and climbs in,
all the time enveloped in an enchanted golden powder. She reappears in a mythic forest
imbued with vivid green hues and vibrant, saturated moss. We’re watching the music
video for Taylor Swift’s first single “cardigan,” from her 2020 album folklore.1 Like Lewis
Carrol’s Alice or the children in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Swift opens the piano lid and enters
another world (Figure 1). The fantastical folkloric quality of this setting in the Arcadian
woods, what Vernallis would call the “implied geography of the video” (258), is rein­forced by emotive lighting and majestic waterfalls (Figure 2). Next, the piano stool acts as a portal, transporting Swift to sea, the instrument itself acting as life raft in a scene not unlike one from James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), before finally taking her home. The drenched protagonist comforts herself with the eponymous cardigan upon her return, in a significant teleological moment of audio-visual synchronization (Figure 3). What is being mediated here? Why this turn to folklore and indie-folk esthetics in Swift’s work? I suggest that this single and, indeed, the album folklore provide a peak example of a societal search for foundations during the pandemic”.

McGrath, J. (2023). The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Nostalgia, and Covid-19. Popular Music and Society, 46(1), 70–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2022.2156761

1. What is Swift evoking in her video? Do you agree with McGrath that she's evoking a sense of a more magical world?
2. Why do you think this song had such an impact during the pandemic?
3. Does Swift remind you of other artists or evoke another time that's nostalgic to you?

Afterparty

What is your favourite music?
Do you use music to soothe yourself or psyche yourself up to anything?
Think of powerful songs that have stayed with you for a long time. Why do you think they have stayed with you?