Toward an anthropological approach to musical empathy

Abstract

This chapter proposes an anthropological approach to musical empathy, relying on Alfred Gell’s notion of agency. It is claimed that: (1) musical emotions are best approached as empathetic phenomena, as opposed to cognitive acts involving the decoding of a message; (2) it is possible to distinguish between different types of musical empathy, depending on the type of agency relationship: “empathy with the musical being,” “empathy with the artist,” “empathy with musical memory-images,” and “intersubjective musical empathy”; (3) the representation of a network of agency can reveal the role played by the performance context in the emotions attributed to music; (4) The notion of agency makes it possible to consider “personal” tunes as “distributed persons,” as opposed to signs of persons; (5) the highly ornamented de jale (“sorrowful”) tunes can be seen as “sonic agents,” or “sonic beings” arousing in the listeners feelings of attachment, rapture, and loss.