Music, Memory, and Affect Attunement: Connecting Kurdish Diaspora in Stockholm

Ulrik Volgsten,Oscar Pripp

doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1608144

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect. By combining and cross-fertilizing the concept of memory with that of affective experience, our aim is to take a new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory as well as the crucial role played by affect attunement. As examples, we use interviews and observations from an on-going research project on the role of music in ethnically-based associations in Sweden. In addition, we show how music often transgresses the categorical distinctions of collective memory. The main questions we ask are a) to the extent that there is a difference between music serving as a means for and as content of collective memory (what the memory is “about”), how can we account for and explain this difference? and b) how does verbally-narrated content relate to the sound of music when it comes to collective memory?

Highlights

This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect
By combining and cross-fertilizing the concept of memory with that of affective experience, we take a new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory as well as the crucial role played by affect attunement and the way the latter informs personal and collective identity
The culture specific codes of musical meaning lend themselves to verbal narration and as such coded phrases partake as powerful units in communicative and cultural memories, what we have described as the narrated content of collective memory

Summary

Introduction

This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect. We take as our point of departure Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the subdivision made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect (rather than cognitively encoded experiences of time). By combining and cross-fertilizing the concept of memory with that of affective experience, we take a new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory as well as the crucial role played by affect attunement and the way the latter informs personal and collective identity. José van Dijk summarizes the point well: “Shared listening, exchanging (recorded) songs, and talking about music create a sense of belonging, and connects a person’s sense of self to a larger community and generation” (van Dijk 2006: 357; see Anderson 2004 for more on private listening and re-collective practices)

Objectives

Conclusion