Half life: reflections on music, grief, and affectivity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how affect and music connect through bodily engagement and what happens when such connections are altered by the permanent rupture of a life cut short. Through auto-ethnographic explorations of one experience of musical(ised) grief, I analyse how I learned to perform music with Matt Tracy (1972–2000), singer and guitarist of two of my college-era bands, and the ways that making music more than two decades later continues to connect me to our shared, affective practice. I argue that, in learning to create music with another, we adopt a variety of bodily movements that become sedimented through habituation, connecting our bodies (through processes of intercorporeality) to the bodies of our musical collaborators. Such connections linger, even after death, and I thereby theorise how musical ways of being in the world offer specifically musical ways of grieving and remembrance.