Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical Roger Mathew Grant New York: Fordham University Press, 2020 pp. x + 168, ISBN 978 0 823 28774 1

Abstract

Authority emanates from Roger Mathew Grant ’ s Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical . From the back cover, readers learn that the monograph has garnered praise from leading literary critic Sianne Ngai and that Carolyn Abbate refers to it as a ‘ tour-de-force ’ . In the course of four chapters on operatic and instrumental music, Peculiar Attunements traces a central transformation in musical aesthetics, all while claiming to provide a new history of affect that places music at the centre of its discussion. First, Grant shows how early-modern and eighteenth-century music critics replaced the doctrine of mimesis – in which artworks produce human affects by imitating worldly things – with a concept that privileged an understanding of the individual body ’ s capacity to apprehend indeterminate reverberations. This is what Grant calls the notion of attunement. Second, the book discusses the persistence of eighteenth-century modes of musical attunement in affect theory today. Grant thus formulates his thesis as a critique, one that traces ‘ the structure of events in intellectual history that created these parallel historical turns away from representation and toward affect ’ (23). A self-avowed work of intellectual history, Peculiar Attunements surveys a combination of sources in aesthetic theory, canonical and otherwise