GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919)

Band 22 Schwerpunkt: Epidemie und Emotion Herausgegeben von Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, Marina Hilber, Carlos Watzka für den Verein für Sozialgeschichte der Medizin Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2023 Creative Commons License: CC BY 4.0 197 GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919) Summary This project provides a comparative history of the imbrication of music in the emotional experiences of pandemics. It develops a conceptualisation and methodology for studying music and emotions across history, generates historical knowledge about music’s emotional dimensions in three major pandemics – the Bubonic Plague, Cholera and Spanish Flu –, highlighting both differ ence and continuity and provides a solid conceptual, methodological and historical foundation for comparative studies on music, emotions and pandemics across a vast range of disciplines. The results will not only be applicable in related historical settings but also enable a meaningful interdisciplinary discourse with the Social and Natural Sciences about music and emotions in pandemics, including Covid-19. Dieses Projekt untersucht die Rolle von Musik in der emotionalen Erfahrung von Pandemien im Rahmen einer vergleichenden historischen Untersuchung. Dazu entwickelt es Konzepte und Methoden für die Erforschung von Musik und Emotionen im Verlauf der Geschichte, erarbeitet geschichtliche Erkenntnisse über emotionale Dimensionen von Musik in drei Pandemien – der Pest, der Cholera und der Spanischen Grippe –, indem es sowohl Unterschiede als auch Kontinuitäten aufzeigt, und schafft eine solide konzeptionelle, methodologische und historische Grundlage für vergleichende Studien über Musik, Emotionen und Pandemien in zahlreichen anderen Disziplinen. Die Forschungsergebnisse sind nicht nur für verwandte historische Zusammenhänge relevant, sondern werden auch einen fruchtbaren interdisziplinären Diskurs mit den Sozialund Naturwissenschaften über Musik und Emotionen in Pandemien, einschließlich Covid-19, ermöglichen. Keywords Pandemics, music, emotions, 17th century, 19th century, 20th century, Western Europe, Vienna Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild * Article accepted for publication after internal review by the journal editors. 198 Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild Introduction Within days of Covid-19 reaching Europe in early 2020, music had emerged as one of the most prominent media for emotional engagement with the effects of lockdown, sickness and grief. Starting in Italy, musicians played from their balconies in shared solidarity; on YouTube, videos of digital choirs and orchestras went viral and moved thousands of viewers; and by the end of the year, Tiktok – built around shared sounds – had become the most popular new app on social media, connecting users who would otherwise have felt isolated. Although music culture, educa tion and economics had been heavily disrupted by closures and social distancing measures, the primacy of music for expressing, navigating and shaping emotional experiences of the pandemic was remarkable. Very soon, journalists showed interest in finding evidence not only for the role of music in past pandemics but also for continuities with today, while researchers gathered by Zoom to discuss the impact of music on emotional well-being during major health crises such as Covid-19. It quickly transpired, however, that both lacked an established research vocabulary, shared methodologies and sufficient historical knowledge to describe, evaluate or analyse the phenomenon adequately. Since September 2022, my research project “GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919)”, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), implemented at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) and conducted together with two Postdoctoral researchers and two PhD students, has started to fill this gap: We aim to provide both historical knowledge about the role of music during major historical pandemics since the seventeenth century and the development of an analytic vocabulary and a comparative methodo logy for the study of music and emotions throughout history, in pandemics and beyond. To make such a study possible, we will utilise the pioneering Bourdieusian methodology of Monique Scheer1 into the research of emotions, making no claim to recover them in their epheme ral nature but rather to build holistic and critical accounts of their embodied practice, and develop Scheer’s work further in a music-historical context. Alongside these main research aims, the project addresses three other understudied areas: first, it contributes substantially to comparative approaches within cultural history that, despite having come to prominence in recent years, lack any sustained engagement with the history of the emotional dimensions of music. Secondly, it extends work on the history of pandemics that has been largely confined to epidemiological or sociological research, and without sufficient interest in either the musical or the emotional. Thirdly, it follows the recognition in recent scholarship of the necessity for extending the study of music beyond composition and performance to encompass the full extent of its integration in everyday life as a social practice – a phenomenon described by Christopher Small as “musicking”.2 The project will, indeed, extend Small’s work even further to encompass sensual and experiential, embodied and emotional specificities of musicking in history. 1 Monique Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion: History and Theory 51/2 (2012), 193–220. 2 Christopher Small, Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover 1998). GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919) 199 Our research begins, therefore, with music as woven into ordinary life, from singing in church, school or while working in the fields, to playing or listening in the concert hall, the pub or the living room, to the ringing of bells or the discussion of the medical implications, theological dimensions and legal regulation of music-making. All these practices, in their renewed and altered potency during pandemics, deeply shaped the loneliness of quarantine, the feeling of solidarity and the fear of sickness and death. By working comparatively throughout history, we aim to highlight too that these represent not transhistorical continuities but phenomena that belong to specific times and places. Our hypothesis is that musicking in the plague-stricken streets of the 17th century was quite different – emotionally, socially and phenomenologically – from musicking during Covid-19 even if some practices can seem similar. Our approach thus stands in contrast to, for example, Michael Spitzer’s History of Emotion in Western Music which claims a “unitary paradigm of emotion” for Western music between the 17th and the 20th century.3 Instead, it builds on studies from both the Natural Sciences and Cultural History that suggest that both emotions and their relationship to music are wholly embedded in their socio-cultural environments.4 In order to work at historical depth, the project’s theoretical components will be complemented by three case studies that will start in 2024. They will most likely – but this is not set in stone yet – concentrate on a single, albeit exceptional city in the history of music, Vienna, working across three major historical pandemics, none of which, until now, has been studied in regard to the role of music and emotions: the last two outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague in 1679/80 and 1713/14, the first Cholera outbreak in 1831/32 and the Spanish Flu in 1918/19. Vienna, as the site of a lively musical culture, of major cultural and demographic exchange and rich historical documentation, provides excellent conditions for studying the highly localised interlocking effects of disease legislation, lockdown, new music and media practices as well as the globalised nature of disease in a city that has for a long time been highly networked – whether through the Habsburg empire, trade networks or the movements of musicians. Far from being of significance only to historians of Vienna, these studies will also provide a useful testing ground for approaches that may be adopted in other urban contexts. Our results will thus be applicable in other comparative historical settings of music, emotions and/or pandemics: The project aims to not only provide future music historians, (historical) music anthropologists and (medical) ethnomusicologists but also scholars of the History of the Emotions, the Senses, the Body and Medicine with both historical and theoretical knowledge and methodological tools for approaching their subjects in a wider interdisciplinary and historical context. At the same time, the project will offer a solid theoretical, methodological and historical basis for enabling a meaningful interdisciplinary discourse with scholars from Music Psychology, Music Therapy and Cognitive Science about music and emotions during the Covid-19 pandemic. 3 Michael Spitzer, A History of Emotion in Western Music. A Thousand Years from Chant to Pop (Oxford 2020). 4 See e. g. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made. The Secret Life of the Brain (New York 2017); Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, ed., Musik und Emotionen. Kulturhistorische Perspektiven (= Studien zu Musik und Gender 1, Stuttgart–Berlin 2020). 200 Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild Music and Emotions in Pandemics: What we know and what we do not know Studies that examine music in pandemic contexts can mostly be found in two areas of music research: the scientific and the historical. For scientific studies, encompassing quantitative and empirical approaches from Music Sociology and Ethnology, Music Psychology and Therapy, Cognitive Science and Neuroscience, the Covid-19 pandemic has been of immense interest. With its innovative cultural-historical approach, our project perfectly complements the scientific studies and at the same time addresses a striking gap in historical research into music and pandemics. Historical overviews of the Spanish Flu,5 for instance, rarely include reflections about music, while studies of music during World War I6 only now and then touch on the Spanish Flu. The very few music-related studies that explicitly focus on cholera are primarily limited to Fanny Hensel’s Cholera Cantata.7 More in-depth research exists for music during Plague outbreaks between 1300 and 1600 in Italy, most notably by Christopher Macklin8 and Remi Chiu, whose PhD thesis Plague and Music in the Renaissance considers a wide range of rich and exciting sources and offers fascinating insights into the role of music in medical and magical contexts as well as into social and musical practices related to the Saint Sebastian cult.9 Despite providing some fascinating glimpses into praxeological and phenomenological dimensions, both Chiu and Macklin ultimately aim for musical analyses of contemporary “pestilential” music that show intriguing aspects of both the compositions and how they might have been temporally or the mati cally connected to the Plague. As Chiu points out, though, it remains, “more often than not, speculative at best”10 whether the motets and madrigals he discusses – that have recently been edited in a song collection11 – were composed or used for, during or in direct reference to the pan demic. In several recent interviews12 and a journal article,13 Chiu also commented on the present pandemic, looking for structural similarities between musical practices during the 14th-cen tury Milan plague and Covid-19. Although he explicitly reflects about the challenges 5 See e. g. Laura Spinney, Pale Rider. The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World (London 2017). 6 See e. g. E. Douglas BomBerger, Making Music American. 1917 and the Transformation of Culture (Oxford 2018); William BrookS / Christina M. BaShFord / Gayle Sherwood magee, eds., Over here, over there. Transatlan tic conversations on the music of World War I (Urbana/IL 2019). 7 Edgar kellenBerger, Fanny Hensel und die Cholera-Epidemie 1831, in: Musik und Kirche 67/5 (1997), 295–303. 8 Christopher macklin, Stability and Change in the Composition of a ‘Plague Mass’ in the Wake of the Black Death, in: Plainsong and Medieval Music 25/2 (2016), 167–189; Christopher macklin, Plague, Performance and the Elusive History of the Stella Celi Extirpavit, in: Early Music History 29 (2010), 1–31; Christopher macklin, ‘Musica sanat corpus per animam’. Towards an Understanding of the Use of Music in Response to Plague, 1350– 1600, PhD diss. (University of York 2008). 9 Remi chiu, Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge 2017). 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Remi chiu, Songs in Times of Plague (= Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 172, Middleton/WI 2020). 12 See e. g. Ed prideaux, Stayin’ alive! How music has fought pandemics for 2,700 years, in: The Guardian (6 April 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/06/stayin-alive-how-music-fought-pandemics-2700yearsco ro na virus (last accessed: 20.04.2023). 13 Remi chiu, Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown. A Trans-Historical Perspective Across Two Pandemics, in: Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020), doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499. GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919) 201 of such a historical comparison, his work shows anachronisms similar to those of so many other recent discourses that posit parallels or continuities between music, emotions and pandemics throughout history. Thus, what we know about music in pandemics is – when history is concerned – almost entirely limited to the Renaissance or – in regard to Covid-19 – almost exclusively based on quantitative and empirical methods. We do not know about the cultural history of music in pan demics since ca. 1600, either in terms of compositions, discourses and practices or of music’s emotional dimensions, and nor do we know about trans-historical continuities, discontinuities, relationships or entanglements across times. The contrast between the prominence of and interest in music in the emotional experiences of Covid-19 and the lack of historical knowledge with which it may be compared clearly reveals that there is a dire need for a project that brid ges this research gap. Our project is set to do exactly this. It will do this, however, by shifting the focus beyond a perspective that focuses mostly on music compositions, the way they were designed, performed and received, towards the role of musicking in the emotional experience of pandemics and explicitly including the body and the senses into the examination. The Challenges of a Comparative History of Music, Emotions and Pandemics Since their earliest beginnings in the late 19th century, comparative studies have been a highly debated historical undertaking. With the cultural turn the tension between a solid analytical theory (which needs to be generally applicable in order to form a common point of reference for the comparison) and historical case studies (which in their socioand cultural-historical context withstand any generalization) has moved into the focus of criticism. Our research meets this challenge by a) ensuring constant reflection on how to bring the different theoretical, historical and comparative components together; b) informing its historical work with theory and its theory with historical work; and c) addressing not only differences and continuities but also relationships and entanglements between the different manifestations of the phenomenon in the different case studies, as the experience of one pandemic influenced how societies dealt with the next. With this approach, “[t]he point is no longer to search only for commonalities and differences within a chronologically ‘frozen’ configuration, but rather to track changes and their causes over longer periods”.14 Another challenge is that research of emotions in history has been both highly discussed and even skeptically-eyed. In response, the discipline has over the last two decades and more established a solid conceptual and methodological framework, developing concepts such as “emotives”15, “emotional communities”16, “affective spaces”17, “emotional regimes”18 and “emo14 Thomas WelSkopp, Comparative History, in: European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG) (Mainz 2010), http://www.ieg-ego.eu/welskoppt-2010-en (last accessed: 20.04.2023). 15 William reddy, Against Constructionism. The Historical Ethnography of Emotions, in: Current Anthropology 38 (1997), 327–351. 16 Barbara roSenWein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca–London 2006). 17 Andreas reckWitz, Affective Spaces. A Praxeological Outlook, in: Rethinking History. The Journal of Theory and Practice 16 (2012), 241–258. 18 William reddy, Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge 2001). 202 Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild tio nal practices”19. By contrast, studying emotions in music history has long been excluded from the traditional musicological agenda as well as overlooked by historians of emotions more generally.20 In reacting to growing scholarly interest, the methodological difficulties for musico logy have very recently still been called “so severe that any scholarly approach could be consi de red as futile”.21 The challenge for music historiography would be to „conceptually master the emotio nal dimensions of music”.22 We will face this challenge by building on a theoretical and methodological basis that I have found to be most promising for ensuring a sound theoretical, conceptual and methodological approach to both music and emotions in history. The Cultural History of Pandemics as “Emotional Epidemiology” Pandemics are situations of massive and sudden disruption that call for rapid responses by public authorities, citizens and other historical actors. They often bring to the fore social tensions and anxieties and have thus been called “seismographs of the social sphere”.23 We will explicitly address their history as “emotional epidemiology”24, placing a strong focus on perceptions and interpretations of diseases and thus complementing epidemiological findings.25 As “comparative emotional epidemiology”, the project follows Samuel Cohn’s ground-breaking transhistorical comparisons of the medical, social and cultural dimensions of different diseases from antiquity until today by explicitly studying their emotional dimensions and at the same time “challeng[ing] generalizations since the late enlightenment about the effects of epidemics and pandemics on collective mentalities”.26 Categories such as “emotional regimes”, “identity” and “space”, that have been used in other cultural-historical pandemic studies,27 are promising heuristic starting points for our project. Equally useful is the differentiation between the body social and the body personal that has often been made in the secondary pandemic literature when interpreting how historical actors identified threats and chose protection measu res in pandemics: In closing brothels, for instance, the medical, epidemiological and 19 Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice? 20 Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, Musik und Emotionen. Eine Einleitung, in: Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild, ed., Musik und Emotionen. Kulturhistorische Perspektiven (= Studien zu Musik und Gender 1, Stuttgart–Berlin 2020), 1–21; see also Laurenz lütteken, Die Botschaft der Tränen. Musikwissenschaftler wenden sich den Gefüh len zu. Doch lässt sich die emotionale Wirkung von Musik überhaupt denkend bewältigen? in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 76 (31 March 2021), N4. 21 See lütteken, Die Botschaft der Tränen, N4. 22 Ibid. 23 Malte thieSSen, Infizierte Gesellschaften. Sozialund Kulturgeschichte von Seuchen, in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 20/21 (2015), https://www.bpb.de/apuz/206108/infizierte-gesellschaften-sozial-und-kulturgeschichtevonseuchen?p=all (last accessed: 20.04.2023). 24 Danielle oFri, The Emotional Epidemiology of H1N1 Influenza Vaccination, in: New England Journal of Medicine 361 (2009), 2594–2595. 25 Jörg Vögele, Vom epidemiologischen Übergang zur emotionalen Epidemiologie. Zugänge zur Seuchengeschichte, in: Malte Thießen, ed., Infiziertes Europa. Seuchen im langen 20. Jahrhundert (= Historische Zeitschrift Beihefte N.F. 64, Berlin–München 2014), 29–49. 26 Samuel cohn, Social and Institutional Reactions to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–20, in: Medicine, Conflict and Survival 36/4 (2020), 315–332, here 315. 27 Cf. Bettina hitzer, Angst, Panik?! Eine vergleichende Gefühlsgeschichte von Grippe und Krebs in der Bundes repu blik, in: thieSSen, ed., Infiziertes Europa, 137–156; thieSSen, Infizierte Gesellschaften. GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919) 203 bodily aspects of pandemics were merged with the social, moral, legal and theological.28 Emotional experiences, when approached from a perspective within the History of Emotions, partici pate in both realms, the body social and the body personal, and are understood as pro-active com municative media, as connecting link between the two. The Cultural-Historical Study of Emotions Our research builds on an established analytical framework for studying cultures of emotions in the past and present (see above). While these concepts have been informed by theories from many disciplines, they have taken shape within the discipline of History. Since the History of Emotions as a whole has largely been wedded to traditional historical sources and approaches, it has almost invariably focused on discursive representation. “Consequently, in-depth studies of the arts – so often taken as a wellspring of emotional experience – have played a relatively muted role in the shaping of the history of emotions as a field”.29 In putting music at its core, the project takes this lacuna as starting point. However, instead of concentrating on “experience” – a term that has been highly controversially discussed across times and disciplines in regard to both its meaning and its historical approachability – we develop the theory of emotional practices. Since it was introduced in 2012, this concept has become one of the internationally and interdisciplinarily most acclaimed approaches to emotions in history. It implies “1) that emotions not only follow from things people do, but are themselves a form of practice, because they are an action of a mindful body; 2) that this feeling subject is not prior to but emerges in the doing of emotion; and 3) that a definition of emotion must include the body and its functions, not in the sense of a universal, pristine, biological base, but as a locus for innate and learned capacit ies deeply shaped by habitual practices.”30 With this, the History of Emotions becomes more than only “a history of changing emotional norms and expectations”.31 It rather shows that “[e]motions change over time not only because norms, expectations, words, and concepts that shape experience are modified, but also because the practices in which they are embodied, and bodies themselves, undergo transformation”.32 Music as Emotional Practice On the one hand, Scheer’s praxeological concept of emotions offers a highly suitable way to studying emotions in transhistorical comparison since it has change across time and space built into its skin. On the other hand, it provides a “rescue” to an otherwise “hopeless situation, collapsing the gap between […] expression and […] experience […] through practice theory”33. 28 See e. g. Sharon achinStein, Plagues and Publication. Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance, in: Criticism 34/1 (1992), 27–49. 29 Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild / Erin SulliVan, Introduction, in: Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild / Erin Sullivan, eds., Emotions, History and the Arts, Special Issue of Cultural History 7/2 (2018), 120. 30 Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?, 220. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Rob Boddice / Marc Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (= Cambridge Elements. Elements in Histories of Emotions and the Senses, Cambridge 2020), 31. 204 Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild I am convinced that it provides also a very promising approach to the emotional dimensions of music in history beyond emotional expression of music in performances, as Spitzer has limited it to, and towards emotional experience: in putting the body as “not [only] the locus of the compe tence, dispositions, and behavioural routines of practice, [but] also the ‘stuff’ with and upon which practices work”,34 into the centre of cultural-historical emotions studies, Scheer’s concept emphasizes the importance of considering the History of the Body and the Senses for the History of Emotions. I have many times argued for combining the Histories of Emotions and the Senses in exactly this way if we want to fruitfully approach emotional dimensions of music in history.35 In my ERC project, we aim to demonstrate this by transforming Scheer’s emotionsas-practices concept into the musical realm with its specific bodily and sensual modalities and characteristics and taking this as one of the main theoretical starting points for the development of the project’s concepts and methods. With this praxeological approach, our research follows Small’s powerful neologism “musicking” in understanding music as a social practice within the widest contextual realm. In adding approaches from the Histories of Emotions, the Body and the Senses to this socioand ethnomusicological concept, however, it goes beyond Small in understanding music not only as a social but also, and explicitly, as an embodied and emotional practice. This twofold shift towards the social and subsequently the embodied emotional dimensions of musicking has consequences for our approach to studying music in history: The first consequence is that, to paraphrase Scheer, music-related “emotions not only follow from things [that music does to us], but are themselves a form of [musical] practice, because they are an [music-related] action of a mindful body” that gives emotional meaning to the music in the very act of perceiving it in an embodied way. The second consequence is, thus, that musical composi tions that were written and/or used during, for or in direct reference to pandemics are just one small part of many other kinds of sources for our different historical case studies. At least as important are, first, any kind of music-surrounding sources that emphasise the social character of musicking, such as musical discourses, media and spaces with their material manifestations in written, audio and/or visual recordings, in musical, religious, medical or legal treatises, pamphlets, journals and books, fictional texts, musical instruments and other objects, technologi cal and communication media, pictures, buildings, cityand landscapes etc., that in their particular form always depend on the historical context of the case studies; and secondly, anything that emphasizes the embodied aspects of music as an emotional practice and thus offers insights into the historical body with its senses and perceptions, its sickness, health and gender, its his tori city and socio-cultural and phenomenological situatedness in time, space and sound. 34 Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?, 200. 35 See e. g. Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, Metapher und Mitvollzug. Zwei Ansätze zum Zusammenhang von Musik und Emotionen bei Plessner, in: Erik Norman Dzwiza-Ohlsen / Andreas Speer, eds., Philosophische Anthropologie als interdisziplinäre Praxis. Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner und Nicolai Hartmann in Köln – historische und systematische Perspektiven (Paderborn 2021), 283–302; Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, Musik und Emotionen. Eine Einleitung, in: herzFeld-Schild, ed., Musik und Emotionen. Kulturhistorische Perspektiven, 1–21; Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, Singen als emotionale Praktik des Erinnerns, in: ibid., 103–126; Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, Geschichte der Gefühle, in: Frank Hentschel, ed., Historische Musikwissenschaft. Gegenstand – Geschichte – Methodik (= Kompendien Musik 2, Laaber 2019), 273–283; Marie Louise herzFeld-Schild, MitLeidenSchaft. Emotion und Musik im Spannungsfeld von Leid und Leidenschaft, in: Carola Bebermeier / Evelyn Buyken / Gesa Finke, eds., Passions. Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld von Leid und Leidenschaft (Würzburg 2017), 15–33.