The unbearable weight of music: The intermezzo

Abstract

The affordances of musical experience, its capacity to become our mode of being‐in‐the‐world, especially in ritual situations, can be turned against us into an aversive sonic attack that bends the social arc into a liminality without end, a time in between that goes nowhere. And when this happens, we have entered the realm of music torture, a relatively recent innovation in that dark art that was ushered into the world in full force at the beginning of the 21st century. Music became part of a regime of no‐touch torture inflicted upon detainees in the ‘global war on terror’, itself a war without end. In this article, the author argues for an ontomusicology that understands music as ritual and ritual as music – in this case, ritual that inverts Victor Turner’s notion of communitas, with all of its attendant modes of being‐with, into a solitary mode of existence with no hope of escape, a musical ritual torture, a perpetual intermezzo.