Introduction: Situating Musical Emotions

In a scene from Satyajit Ray’s classic 1958 film Jalsaghar (The Music Room), a group of men assemble to hear a performance of Hindustani music. The performance takes place in the home of a music connoisseur, in the music room that gives the film its title. The setting is opulent: the audience sits beneath a chandelier, on a large rug, surrounded by sculptures and fanned by servants, as they listen to a performance of semi-classical vocal music. A singer sits at the front of the room and is the main object of their attention. Three accompanying musicians sit to her left, playing the tabla, harmonium, and sāraṅgī. The singer is played (and voiced) here by the legendary singer Begum Akhtar, one of the most famous voices of the twentieth century; however, for most of the scene, the camera focuses on the audience. Reclining at the front of the room is the patron and host, also the protagonist of the film. He is a feudal landlord and therefore of a high social rank, although he is suffering increasing financial difficulties. His embodied behaviours highlight his intense engagement with the performance: he sits still, focusing his gaze on the soloist, giving the impression of a listener who is attentive and immersed in the music. Occasionally, he gracefully turns his head to share his delight with his friends. At the end of the scene, the camera zooms in and pauses on his face, his wistful expression suggesting a deep emotional connection with the music. In contrast, another character, who stands out from the rest of the audience, is also depicted here. He is wealthier than his host and socially ambitious, but his inability to listen correctly gives away his lower social status. He partakes enthusiastically of the trappings of the concert, extravagantly reaching over for a drink and taking nasal snuff, but the singer seems to leave him unmoved. Unlike his fellow listeners, he appears uncomfortable: he shuffles and looks around the room. The last thing he seems to be interested in is the music.

This scene gives a sense of the politics that can shape acts of engaging affectively (or not) with music. In it, the embodied emotional stance of two of the film’s principal characters as they listen to music offers viewers insights into their personalities and their social status. The scene locates the emotional intensities of musical performance within a particular culture of listening, in which ways of being affected by music, and the embodied conventions that accompany this, are tied to forms of elite male sociability.Footnote ¹ Moreover, musical emotions in this context are intertwined with ethics: the inability to be affected by music identifies one character as an outsider to this social scene, but also as shallow and unlikeable.

In this article, I examine some of the distant successors of these fictional historical listeners, exploring an ethnographic case study from contemporary India. I do this in order to theorize the affective intensities of musical performance: I suggest that this musical culture can contribute important new perspectives to discussions of music and affect across the musical disciplines. Specifically, I consider urban Indian audiences of Hindustani music in the early twenty-first century, especially a group of listeners who describe themselves as rasikas (enthusiastic expert connoisseurs of Hindustani music). Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic project on rasikas, I focus here on the affective dimensions of their listening practices: I am interested in the immediate, embodied, emotional intensities of the ways people listen to music and how they are intertwined with politics, ethics, and social status.

Today’s fast-paced global Indian cities offer a very different context for musical listening from that which is depicted in Ray’s film, set in a palace in the countryside. Moreover, Indian classical music has undergone significant changes since 1958, when the film was released, and even more since a few decades before that, when the film was set. Nevertheless, the listening culture that this scene dramatizes shares key features with the contemporary listening culture that is the subject of this article. Just as in the film, for the twenty-first-century listeners who participated in my research, musical emotions do not emerge solely out of the encounter between an individual listener and musical sound; rather, they are co-produced and shared between different audience members, while also being shaped by particular embodied and material contexts of performance. Moreover, among rasikas, musical emotions are also conditioned by a particular ideology of listening, such that the way someone is affected by music (or not) can reveal something about what kind of person they are: whether they are serious or superficial, whether they are sensitive, or whether they are closed-minded and overly judgemental. These distinctions in turn map onto social distinctions: ultimately, the affective orientations that listeners adopt in relation to music confirm their position in social hierarchies both within and beyond the musical event.

In what follows, I put rasikas’ listening practices into dialogue with theories of music and affect. Like other musical and sonic applications of affect theory, this research highlights the importance of accounting for how music and sound engender shared, embodied intensities that seem to evade capture by discourse and that seem to operate prior to, or even independently from, processes of social mediation. However, while much work on this topic to date has focused on the power of affect to transcend existing social structures, this article addresses the need for research to better understand the intersections between affect and structures of power: that is, for research that accounts for the immediate, embodied, co-produced, apparently non-discursive intensities of musical performance and listening while also understanding how those intensities can sustain particular ideologies and reproduce social hierarchies.

The ‘Affective Turn’ in Music Studies

Since the 1990s, scholarship across the humanities and social sciences has been undergoing what Patricia Clough has labelled ‘the affective turn’.Footnote ² Hailed as a major paradigm shift, this has involved an intensification of interest in questions of affect and emotion, as well as the emergence of radical new theories. Definitions of ‘affect’ differ; nevertheless, most theorists take affect to mean something like emotion, feeling, or intensity.Footnote ³ Theories of affect have thrown into question common-sense understandings of emotion. Much of this scholarship blurs distinctions between mind and body, pointing instead to the entanglement of psychological and embodied processes. A significant trend is to describe affect in terms of flows or circulation, pointing to how this problematizes the idea of the bounded subject.Footnote ⁴ For many prominent theorists of affect, individuals do not exist as self-contained receptacles for their own internal sets of emotions; rather, bodies are porous and people are immersed in a world of feelings that flow through and around them.Footnote ⁵ Theories of affect have been influenced by broader trends in posthumanist scholarship: as well as highlighting connections between (human) bodies, affect theorists have also pointed to the importance of diverse (non-human) materialities in ways of theorizing the world.Footnote ⁶ Affect theorists are interested in the fabric of experience, but they are also typically interested in bodies, space, objects, and technologies, and in how all of these things are entangled.

In music studies, the ‘affective turn’ has generated a diverse body of scholarship, including both ethnographic and purely theoretical discussions; in this work, scholars from across the music disciplines have shown, in very different ways, the potential of theories of affect to illuminate the embodied intensities of musical performance and listening.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, affect theory has proven especially well suited to accounting for musical experience. For example, theories of affective transmission are apt to capture the ways in which musical emotions can seem to be contagious, bringing together different listeners with the sense that they are participating in a shared affective experience.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, echoing posthumanist approaches in affect scholarship more broadly, theorizing musical affect has offered new ways of exploring the intertwining of human and non-human agencies, forces, and bodies in musical performance and listening.Footnote ⁹ A key intervention of work in this vein is the suggestion that although musical emotions may commonly be understood as occurring within individual listeners, they are better theorized as distributed across particular arrangements of body parts, physiological processes, objects, materialities, and physical spaces, throwing into question easy distinctions between what is human and what is not.Footnote ¹⁰

A key focus of discussion in theoretical work on affect (in music studies and beyond) has been the relationship between affect on the one hand, and on the other, language, signification, discourse, conscious reflection, and, by extension, processes of cultural and/or social mediation more broadly. Many scholars draw a distinction between affect and emotion, where affect has the additional connotations of being non-discursive, beyond or before language, unmediated, pre-conscious or non-conscious, embodied, encompassing physiological intensities (such as blushing or hair raising on the back of the neck), and characterized by the capacity to flow between bodies, including, in some accounts, non-human ones.Footnote ¹¹ For Brian Massumi, affect is (unqualified, impersonal) intensity, whereas emotion represents affect’s partial capture in language and individual experience: ‘An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.’Footnote ¹² Or, as Anahid Kassabian puts it, building on Massumi, ‘affect is the circuit of bodily responses to stimuli that take place before conscious apprehension. Once apprehended, these responses pass into thoughts and feelings, though they always leave behind a residue.’Footnote ¹³

Massumi’s theorization of affect has been subject to criticism from a variety of perspectives.Footnote ¹⁴ Across this body of work, various scholars have demonstrated that attempting to differentiate between affect and emotion is potentially misleading; they have argued that it is not possible to disentangle the domain of culture and discourse from embodied intensities. Sara Ahmed, on whose work I draw below, notes that Massumi’s model obscures both the mediation of affect (for example in the ways in which seemingly immediate sensations are in fact shaped by memories of past experiences) and also how emotions, for their part, ‘involve forms of intensity, bodily orientation, and direction that are not simply about “subjective content” or qualification of intensity’.Footnote ¹⁵ She writes of the difficulty of separating affect and emotion, since ‘they are contiguous; they slide into each other; they stick, and cohere, even when they are separated’.Footnote ¹⁶ Likewise, Margaret Wetherell has taken aim at what she labels ‘the rubbishing of discourse’ in prominent theoretical work on affect; she argues instead that affect is ‘inextricably linked with meaning-making and the semiotic (broadly defined) and the discursive’.Footnote ¹⁷ In making sense of the entanglement of affect with culture and discourse, Wetherell proposes understanding both affect and emotion in terms of what she calls ‘affective practice’: the sets of behaviours and habits through which affect is produced and circulates, as well as the discursive, ideological, and material contexts in which these behaviours occur. She writes, ‘an affective practice is a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning-making and other social and material figurations’.Footnote ¹⁸ By framing affect in this way, she invites attention to how affect emerges out of situated and discursively mediated social practices.

Scholars of music and affect have adopted various stances on the relationship between affect, discourse, and sociality, and the nature of the potential distinction between affect and emotion. For many, affect theory has appealed precisely because it offers a means of making sense of the vivid, embodied, immediate realities of musical experience, aspects of music-making and listening that can seem to bypass, or operate on a different level from, discourse and cultural mediation: that is, affect theory has offered a way of accounting for what Paul Jasen calls ‘the throbbing messiness of life’.Footnote ¹⁹ Jasen describes the inadequacy of ‘linguistic and literature-derived analytical models’ (which he associates with cultural studies and post-structuralism) to account for ‘non-discursive intensities’, such as those that he experienced ‘in the throbs of an East London dancefloor, where I found myself being roughed up by the most powerful sound system I’d yet encountered’.Footnote ²⁰ Describing a process in which his own previous understandings were unsettled by this musical experience, he writes, ‘as two dozen of us shimmered together in the dark, certain habits from cultural studies were also starting to shake loose’.Footnote ²¹ Like Jasen, other scholars, too, have turned to affect theory to understand qualities of musical experience that seem to occur prior to processes of cultural and social mediation. Michael Gallagher understands sonic affects as ‘a flow of raw vibration’, which then ‘accumulate layers of significance’.Footnote ²² For him, this makes new forms of analysis possible: ‘understanding sound as affect strips back the discursive and socio-cultural layers of sound to begin analysis at a more basic level, with the vibrational movement of bodies’.Footnote ²³ For scholars working along these lines, the theoretical distance between affect on the one hand and language and cultural mediation on the other is central to the potential of affect theory to suggest new understandings of musical experience.

By contrast, other scholarship in music studies, especially recent ethnographic and ethnomusicological research, has emphasized the intertwining of affect, discourse, and cultural mediation. For example, Marie Thompson takes issue with the theoretical ‘bifurcation’ of affect from what she calls its ‘others’, specifically ‘ideology, significance and meaning’. She writes that instead, the relationship between affect and its others is better understood as ‘co-constitutive and multidirectional’.Footnote ²⁴ Two recent special issues on music and affect, in Ethnomusicology Forum and Culture, Theory and Critique, both adopt a similar line. In the introduction to the former, Katie Graber and Matthew Sumera describe ‘intensities of affect that — yes — move around, under, and before interpretation, but that also lead into language, signification, cognition, and meaning’.Footnote ²⁵ Meanwhile, Anaar Desai-Stephens and Nicole Reisnour suggest the term ‘musical feelings’ as a way of moving beyond the sharp distinction between affect and emotion, arguing that ‘fully understanding how music shapes social worlds requires attention to the processes by which affects become tethered to particular narratives, identities, imaginaries and projects’.Footnote ²⁶ In ethnomusicology, there seems to be an emerging sense that it is less useful to separate affect from emotion than to consider the particular ways in which they intersect in different contexts. Many follow Ana Hofman, who argues that ‘the affective turn’s productive potential does not lie in abandoning the semiotic, representational and discursive paradigms, but in the production of meeting points for the semantic and affective dimensions/venues at the site of the sound experience’.Footnote ²⁷ In this article, I explore a case study that highlights the tension inherent in musical experiences that feel directed and immediate but which are nevertheless thoroughly intertwined with discourse and signification, as well as being embedded within a particular social and ideological context. In doing so, I focus on one element of the wider scholarly debate about the extent to which (and the ways in which) affect is mediated by culture and sociality: specifically, the question of the relationship between the ways affect operates when people listen to music together on the one hand, and on the other, the reproduction (or alternatively the transcendence) of existing ideologies and structures of power (e.g. social hierarchies or class formations).

Where it has considered the dynamics of live musical listening, much of the existing literature on musical affect emphasizes its power to unite people across social boundaries or to foster the emergence of new socialities, even if only transiently, in the moment of performance.Footnote ²⁸ Often, such accounts start with the feeling of how it is to listen to music with other people and the senses of connection that this can entail. Jasen expresses this powerfully; he continues his description of clubbing in East London cited above:

As he puts it, ‘when bass permeates and modulates, it binds bodies together (putting them literally on the same wavelength)’.Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, in his description of the ‘vibrations’ of affect in the context of dancehall nights in Kingston, Jamaica, Julian Henriques theorizes the way in which musical affect brings together individual listeners in ‘a shared social, collective and transindividual experience’.Footnote ³¹ He describes the audience or ‘crowd’ for this music as ‘an entirely corporeal, but at the same time, collective subject’, writing that ‘it is an individual entity that is not singular, but plural, or rather both at the same time, that is, the one-who-is-many and the many-who-are-one’.Footnote ³² Affect in this context is responsible for engendering this collective, non-individual subject, since it patterns ‘an entire field with intensities, passing through and within bodies, without respect for traditional epidermal — and indeed epistemological — boundaries’.Footnote ³³

Because of the capacity of musical affect to create powerful senses of connection between different listeners, affect theories have seemed to offer a particularly appropriate way of understanding musical scenes in which participants themselves construct utopian narratives about music (or musical affect) as a force for bringing people together. Thus Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta uses theories of affect to understand musical scenes (electronic dance music in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin) in which his interlocuters were themselves ‘culturally invested in sound as an affectively binding force: the “beat” or the “vibe” that is credited with bringing a dancing crowd into synchrony and solidarity’.Footnote ³⁴ Both in this article and in his later book, he analyses interviews with partygoers who ‘locate a sense of communion, convergence, and burgeoning collectivity in dramatic moments of affective intensity’.Footnote ³⁵ Drawing on their accounts, he highlights ‘the role affect plays in the process of social binding’, describing this process as ‘a thickening of the social, in which the circulation and intensification of affect adds density to an emergent-but-evanescent sense of crowd solidarity’.Footnote ³⁶ As he shows, these experiences help to sustain partygoers’ ‘utopian fantasy of universal togetherness’.Footnote ³⁷

Yet as Garcia-Mispireta’s work also reveals, focusing on the way in which musical affect generates social connections can disguise the exclusions that also occur when people listen to, and in this case dance to, music together. He writes, ‘the tricky thing about dancefloors is that they are places where both inclusion and exclusion happen’.Footnote ³⁸ He shows how, in the case of the musical scenes he investigated, a sense of universality and inclusivity is in tension with, and serves to hide, the ‘exclusionary practices’ (such as discriminatory door policies) that shape who is (and who is not) able to have access to these scenes.Footnote ³⁹ Likewise, other scholars in music studies have, in different ways, explored the tension between understanding affect as a force of transgression or liberation (with radical political potential) and seeing it as a force for reproducing existing hierarchies and ideologies. In the introduction to their early edited volume on sound, music, and affect, Thompson and Biddle describe contrasting understandings of affect: while, in certain circumstances, it ‘shakes up traditional political structures, redraws power relations and insists on the mutability of social relations’, this is not always the case, ‘since it is equally at home in the mundane as in the epochal’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Nevertheless, as Hofman has argued, there remains a tendency in affect theory to understand affect as a potentially transgressive force, able to transcend social distinctions or to engender new political formations. She critiques what she calls scholarship’s ‘romance with affect’ in relation to music studies: she understands the recent flourishing of scholarship on affect as a response to the desire among scholars to find ways of theorizing that might offer new potential for agency in the current (global) political context, which she characterizes in terms of crisis. She shows how scholars have turned to affect in part because of its apparently radical political potential: as ‘a force that can exceed power relations and break through them’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is what, in a different context, Thompson describes as the ‘optimism’ of affect.Footnote ⁴² As a result, Hofman writes, only ‘a relatively small number of works acknowledge or conceptualize affect as caught in power relations’.Footnote ⁴³ Yet, as both Hofman and Thompson argue, it is just as crucial to examine how affective politics are capable of sustaining existing structures and ideologies as it is to examine how they might transcend or escape them.

In this article, I explore the role played by musical affect in reproducing ideologies and existing social formations in the context of live performances of Hindustani music. I follow Margaret Wetherell in focusing on the affective practices listeners engage in in this musical scene, paying particular attention to what she describes as ‘the unevenness of affective practices’. She asks, ‘how are [affective] practices clumped, who gets to do what when, and what relations does an affective practice make, enact, disrupt and reinforce?’Footnote ⁴⁴ For Wetherell, exploring the unevenness of affective practices is crucial for understanding how ‘power works through affect, and affect emerges in power’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here, I build on Wetherell’s work to consider ways in which musical affect in particular is implicated in the maintenance of social hierarchies. Moreover, drawing in addition on work by Sara Ahmed, I go beyond previous musical scholarship by highlighting two mechanisms by which musical affect, in the moment of performance and listening, can contribute to the reproduction of structures of power: I argue that this takes place through both the uneven ‘affective economies’ of live performances and the ‘affective orientations’ that listeners cultivate and adopt in relation to music in performance.

Introducing the Case Study

In this article, I consider the affective practices associated with one particular culture of musical listening: the expert connoisseurship of Hindustani music. This research forms part of a broader project which focuses on enthusiastic lovers of Hindustani music, listeners who sometimes call themselves rasikas. The project is based primarily on ethnography and interviews with listeners and performers of this music during two fieldwork trips to Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune in 2014 and 2015.Footnote ⁴⁶ I also draw on my own experiences as a listener and student of Hindustani music since 2004. During my fieldwork, I spoke with people who describes themselves as rasikas, music lovers, music organizers, amateur and professional musicians, and music critics, categories that often overlap. In my interviews with these listeners, I asked about their listening experiences: I asked why they listen to Hindustani music, what roles this music plays in their lives, where and how they listen, and what it feels like when they are listening. These conversations usually focused on listeners’ experiences at live performances, since listeners typically state that they are the ideal contexts in which to engage with this music. Here, I use material from this wider project as a case study through which to explore the application of affect theory to music. This article therefore complements other outputs from this research, in which I consider these listeners from different perspectives.

This research addresses an important lacuna in scholarship on Hindustani music. Affect and emotion have been key themes in existing scholarship on it, but this work has tended to employ philosophical, empirical, or historical approaches, rather than ethnography among listeners.Footnote ⁴⁷ On the other hand, ethnographic scholarship on contemporary listeners and listening has focused on listeners’ embodied behaviours and their interactions with the musicians during the performance; this scholarship has not yet centred the affective or emotional dimensions of these listening practices.Footnote ⁴⁸ Where listeners’ emotions are discussed, it is most often in terms of ancient theories of rasa, the aesthetic theories underlying Indian classical arts, from which the term rasika derives.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, other than describing themselves as rasikas, the twenty-first-century listeners I interviewed only rarely described their emotional engagement with Hindustani music in terms of rasa theory; my ethnographic research suggests that such theories alone cannot capture the full picture of the emotions that are engendered by Hindustani music performances today.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, the lack of research on contemporary affective practices of Hindustani musical listening reflects a broader absence of scholarship on Hindustani music in the twenty-first century; this research therefore also addresses the need to understand the broader social and cultural work this music performs in contemporary India.

In what follows, I explore in depth the affective practices associated with expert ways of listening to contemporary Hindustani music. First, drawing on listeners’ own understandings of their listening experiences, I discuss ways in which affect is both co-produced by musicians and listeners at live performances of Hindustani music and is also shaped by the physical and material realities of the performance space; in doing so, I highlight important similarities between listeners’ accounts of their experiences and theoretical accounts of affect. Then I explore the ‘affective economies’ of these performance contexts;Footnote ⁵¹ as I demonstrate, affect circulates unevenly between different listeners and within the space of the performance, thus sustaining social hierarchies. Finally, I show how listeners adopt particular affective orientations in relation to this music, characterized by partial openness to being affected by the musical sound: they cultivate the capacity to be affected by music, but only by the right music and in the right conditions. This mode of listening is shaped by wider ideologies and is part of a distinct listening culture; in this context, the affective orientations that listeners adopt in live performance are a means by which they inhabit positions of virtue.

Co-Producing Affect

A defining characteristic of rasikas’ listening practices, and the focus of much of the existing scholarship on contemporary listeners of Hindustani music (see footnote 48), is the distinctive way in which these practices are embodied: when they listen to Hindustani music in performance, rasikas typically use their bodies and voices to respond in real time, making conventional gestures and comments that indicate their appreciation of the music. Listeners I interviewed understand these behaviours as the bodily manifestation of their inner emotional engagement with the music. Many stressed that their responses come naturally and seem to bypass conscious reflection. As Chirag, a retired concert organizer, put it, ‘if it affects my heart, “Ah!”, “Kyā bāt hai!” [“What a thing!”] or “Vāh!” [an expression of approval] will just come. It’s natural. That is the effect of music.’ Such comments resonate with scholarly descriptions of affect. They highlight the intertwining of embodied and emotional processes and point to bodily intensities that are experienced as ‘natural’, involuntary, and seemingly unmediated. As I explore in this section, the often close correspondences between listeners’ accounts and theories of affect highlight a key advantage of understanding listening in these terms: the ability to foreground shared, embodied aspects of musical experience that listeners themselves consider to be of the utmost importance.

When I asked rasikas about how it feels to listen to music at live performances, they typically emphasized the ways in which their own individual engagement with the music was embedded within a collective, shared musical experience. Rasikas told me about how what they feel when they listen is shaped by other participants in the event, situating their own experiences within a broader flow of energies between the performers and the audience. For example, Sumit, a music organizer and amateur performer, told me that the best kinds of performance involve a ‘give and take’ of ‘energy’ between the audience and the soloist:

In Sumit’s description, audience members’ embodied, audible responses to the music in real time facilitate the flow of intensities between the audience and the performers. Listeners’ embodied engagement with the music thus fuels an affective feedback loop with the musicians: affective intensities which are legible on listeners’ bodies can affect the musicians’ ‘energy’, which then ‘empowers’ the musician to ‘give it back’.Footnote ⁵²

Although framed from the perspective of a performer, Sumit’s description is typical of the accounts that rasikas gave of successful musical performances. Some rasikas spoke about a less tangible flow of energy in the performance, which occurs even when the audience are not visibly and audibly responding to the musicians. These descriptions evoke affective flows that can occur even without being grounded in listeners’ typical styles of embodied engagement with Hindustani music. As Suraj, a music organizer and performer, told me,

Arun, a music lover and patron, used the language of affective contagion to make sense of this dynamic, in a description that resonates with scholarship on music and affect. In describing his ideal performances, he said that the musician has to ‘transcend something to make it into an organic piece which will reverberate’. If that happens, and the musician enjoys themself, then ‘that thing is infectiously passed on’.

Listeners also discussed the ways in which embodied intensities can flow between fellow audience members. For example, Yavit, a prominent music patron, spoke about how sharing listening with others enhances the joy it affords:

Yavit’s description is an important indicator of the affective dynamics of musical performance: how feelings of joy can be magnified through their circulation among different participants at this musical event.Footnote ⁵³ As this description suggests, listeners typically do not consider their affective engagement with the music as taking place in isolation, but rather as part of a wider network, in which their embodied emotional experience of the performance is shaped not only by the music and the musicians but also by their interaction with other listeners who surround them. In descriptions such as these, rasikas understand their own musical emotions as part of multidirectional flows of feeling or energy; such descriptions evoke forms of affective contagion that occur among audience members and between the audience and the performers (and which echo descriptions in scholarship on music and affect).

Rasikas’ accounts also offer some support for theoretical approaches to musical affect that draw on posthumanism and that situate the affective power of music within a field or network that encompasses diverse materialities, including characteristics of the space in which music-making occurs, objects, technologies, and bodies.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rasikas typically told me that their most intensely affective musical experiences can only occur in certain types of performance space: small, intimate venues, especially private concerts in the homes of music lovers, in which the audience is well lit, seated on the floor (rather than on chairs), and in which there is as little technological mediation (by way of sound systems) as possible. As Yavit said, ‘if you want to experience music, then [the concert platform] is not the place. To experience music, it has to have that air of intimacy, informality, communication between the artist and the individual.’ He told me about his first main encounter with Hindustani music, at a performance he had attended in his youth; this profoundly affected him and set him on the path to becoming a passionate music lover and keen patron. The performance took place in a small, intimate venue, and Yavit believes that the specific physical characteristics of this environment contributed importantly to the powerful affective experience the performance engendered. He said that whenever he now organizes concerts,

Likewise, Arun discussed the benefits of sitting on the floor to hear music, saying that this is ‘far more evocative as a listening experience’ than sitting on a chair. He said,

In expressing these preferences for certain physical and technological performance contexts over others, rasikas highlighted ways in which the affective practices they engage in while listening are shaped by the materialities of the performance environment and the objects that exist within it. For these listeners, the affective magic of a successful performance is dependent on a delicate coming-together of component parts, both human and non-human, including other listeners, seating arrangements, chairs (or a designated space to sit directly on the floor), a particular kind and size of room, the musicians and their instruments, the musical sound, technologies (e.g. amplification) or their absence, and much more.

While listeners frame their discussions of different performance spaces in terms of practicalities, these discussions are also infused with broader significance. Small venues, as well as listeners’ preferences for sitting on the floor with as little technological mediation as possible, evoke past, aristocratic contexts for Hindustani music (as dramatized, for example, in the film scene discussed at the opening of this article). In describing their ideal listening environments, rasikas draw on discourses of authenticity and nostalgia.Footnote ⁵⁵ The listening environments they value exemplify what Inderjit Kaur (drawing on Steve Goodman) calls an ‘affective ecology’: ‘a nexus of sound, memory, objects, place, people and events that mutually construct an affective dynamic’.Footnote ⁵⁶ So while rasikas’ understandings support theoretical approaches that emphasize the materiality of the affective fabric of musical performance, they are also indicative of how, as Wetherell stresses, affective practices are ‘knotted and entangled’, entwining materialities with social meanings.Footnote ⁵⁷

As this section has demonstrated, there are powerful correspondences between rasikas’ accounts of their listening experiences and theories of music and affect. Rasikas’ accounts locate affect beyond the boundaries of the individual subject, emphasizing the ways embodied intensities can seem to flow between bodies; in doing so, these accounts resonate with understandings of affective transmission that have been central to the ‘affective turn’,Footnote ⁵⁸ as well as with theoretical work on musical affect in particular.Footnote ⁵⁹ Garcia-Mispireta observes that his research participants’ use of the language of ‘vibe’ constitutes a kind of ‘emic’ affect theory, a ‘capacious emic framework for discourse around affect in electronic dance music scenes’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Likewise, I suggest that listeners’ understandings of affective transmission at live performances comprise an emic affect theory. If we take rasikas’ words seriously, it makes little sense to understand the individuals in the room as having discrete interior emotions. Rather, individual listeners’ experiences of the music take place as part of a broader network, through which affect circulates and is intensified. Talking to rasikas about the way live performances feel reveals their listening to be a highly collaborative and situated affective practice, in which musical emotions are co-produced by musicians and audience members and are shaped by the particularities of the material and technological environments in which people listen.Footnote ⁶¹ At the same time, as I will show in the next section, the affective dynamics of live performances can also contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies, in ways that contrast with scholarship that construes musical affect primarily as a force for bringing people together.

The ‘Affective Economy’ of a Live Performance

Rasikas’ descriptions of the multidirectional flows of affect between and among musicians and audiences, explored in the previous section, often paint a picture of an egalitarian, participatory musical scene, in which anyone present can get caught up in and contribute to the affective intensities that circulate during a live performance. Indeed, as I discuss below, rasikas typically celebrate music’s capacity to build connections between strangers, with the potential to collapse social divisions; in doing so, they articulate values of inclusion, stressing the universality of music. Likewise, Hindustani music’s capacity to bring people together has been a recurring theme in scholarship. The ‘collective’ nature of affective practices of listening to Hindustani music is central to Tejaswini Niranjana’s important theorization of what she calls ‘musicophilia’ in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mumbai. She notes the diversity of listeners from the late nineteenth century onwards who came to develop a passion for Hindustani music (Mumbai’s ‘musicophiliacs’): ‘Internally fraught with divisions of caste, class, religion, gender, and language, the musicophiliacs — fixated on Hindustani music — could sidestep these distinctions to create a community of musical affect.’Footnote ⁶² Moreover, the ‘condition of collective listening enabled the formation of a new musical subject, the musicophiliac’, which she describes as a ‘subject forged in sociality, through the coming together of those similarly enchanted by music’.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, as Max Katz points out, scholarship on Hindustani music has tended to play into ‘a longstanding celebration of the tradition as a syncretic product of Hindu-Muslim cooperation and mutual respect’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He cites Peter Manuel, who describes Hindustani music as ‘a resilient island of communal harmony more or less impervious to the antagonisms polarizing society at large’.Footnote ⁶⁵ A sense of the universality of Hindustani music also shaped my own early encounters with the tradition; when I came to this music as a ‘foreigner’ living in Delhi and studying vocal performance full-time, most of the musicians and listeners I encountered seemed to welcome my participation, stressing that this is music for everyone. Sometimes, musicians told me about the intense affective reactions to their performances of audiences abroad, who may have never encountered Hindustani music before but who responded powerfully, including with physical responses such as tears; in doing so, they seemed to be letting me know that my own musical experiences, even as a relative newcomer, were legitimate.

These understandings of Hindustani music as a practice that can bring people together in shared affect parallel the tendency in theories of musical and sonic affect (discussed above) to emphasize the ways music can engender affective connections between different people, working unpredictably and across conventional boundaries, and ultimately fostering the emergence of new, albeit potentially transient, socialities. However, while metaphors of affective contagion can offer a powerful way of capturing the experience of such affective connections, this can also risk obscuring the unevenness of the affective practices that people engage in in the moment of performance, especially when those practices serve to reproduce exclusions and social hierarchies.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this section, I draw on work by Sara Ahmed to consider what can be revealed by exploring the details of this unevenness in the context of live performances of Hindustani music, highlighting in particular how this can be helpful for understanding how affect can be intertwined in structures of power.

In her theoretical work on affect in non-musical contexts, Ahmed has advocated considering affect in terms of ‘affective economies’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moving beyond models of affective contagion, which, as she notes elsewhere, ‘treat affect as something that moves smoothly from body to body’,Footnote ⁶⁸ she uses the idea of an ‘affective economy’ to analyse the specific ways in which affect flows within particular social and cultural milieus. She stresses the unevenness of this circulation, noting how affects ‘stick’ to certain people and objects, with the power to bring together some people while excluding others, thereby sustaining the boundaries of individual and collective identities. In this section, I take Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’ as a starting point for understanding musical performance.Footnote ⁶⁹ I do this in order to tease out the tension inherent in affect’s dual capacity both to bring people together and also to sustain social hierarchies and distinctions. In contrast with approaches that emphasize music’s ability to promote shared (affective) experience, I try to paint a more complex picture here, showing how flows of affect can both engender connections and also reproduce exclusions and social hierarchies. In understanding the workings of affect in terms of an ‘economy’, I consider what can be learned by tracking the unevenness of the affective flows that listeners describe at live performances of Hindustani music: I explore how, in particular, affect circulates at such performances, where it flows (and where it does not flow), where it sticks, how it attaches to particular objects and places (and ideologies), which individuals it draws together (and which individuals it does not reach), and what social connections and exclusions it (re)produces in the process. As this reveals, understanding the affective practices of musical listening as generative of ‘affective economies’ offers a way of illuminating how these practices sustain social hierarchies, reproducing structures of power and inequality.

When describing the particular affective dynamics that their listening practices engender, rasikas often focus on intimate moments of connection that emerge between different listeners (including between strangers) when they respond simultaneously to the same feature of the music. For example, Neeraj, an elderly music lover and organizer, said,

Anisha described something similar:

These experiences of shared listening are a key source of pleasure that rasikas seek in live performances of Hindustani music: they described how their affective experience of the music is intensified in these moments of shared emotion. For listeners like Neeraj, listening to Hindustani music involves a form of (affective) sociability that is centred on the shared experience of affective intensity.

These shared listening experiences can foster a sense of connection between listeners that extends beyond the performance space. Neeraj told me that he once let somebody sleep in his house, having previously only known him as a fellow listener at concerts. Before this, he said, they did not know each other’s surnames, but he felt close to him because their responses to music were similar. He said that even though they had known each other for twenty years, ‘our friendship was only listening’. In this case, particular affective listening practices during performances serve to align listeners with others who share their embodied responses to the music; these affective practices have the capacity to build a sense of closeness between strangers.Footnote ⁷⁰

What might it entail to understand such moments of connection as part of a wider ‘affective economy’, and what social, cultural, and ideological work are they performing? Although listeners typically frame these moments of connection as transcending politics and social hierarchies, understanding them as part of an ‘affective economy’ suggests that they are not apolitical, but rather that they are fully entwined with a particular ideology of listening and with the reproduction of existing social formations. For example, Neeraj was keen to highlight how the immediate, intimate connections fostered by shared listening enjoyment can span social divides. Illustrating this, he told me about how he had shared a moment of connection with a taxi driver when they both responded simultaneously to music that had been playing on the taxi’s radio; in telling me this anecdote, he drew my attention to music’s capacity to form connections between listeners who are similarly moved by its affective power but who belong to very different social groups. Yet even this statement is itself ideological; it is grounded in (and reproduces) particular ideas about the power of music and its role in unifying people across conventional boundaries. Neeraj’s comments were typical of the attitude of other rasikas. Likewise, Yavit emphasized that the people he invites to the concerts he organizes are mainly not his ‘closest social friends’ (most of whom are ‘not into music’); rather, they are people whom ‘I don’t know socially’ but who are ‘the kind of people who enjoy music’. He said:

In this description, Yavit alludes to transient forms of sociality that musical performances can engender, describing how potentially diverse listeners can be brought together in the moment of performance, purely because of their shared enjoyment of the music. For these listeners, affective practices of shared listening and emotion are meaningful well beyond the context of the performance: they serve to sustain a broader ideology of the universality of music, underpinning a world view in which music is a force for bringing people together. However, as Darci Sprengel has shown, discourses on the universality of musical affect can mask (and thereby strengthen) the ability of music to sustain social distinctions.Footnote ⁷¹ In the case of Hindustani music, despite many listeners’ (and musicians’) insistence that this music is for everyone, my ethnographic research suggests that experiences such as that of Neeraj and his taxi driver, where a shared emotional response to the music unites people from different social groups, are fairly rare; rather, at live performances, various factors ensure that these moments of affective connection most often occur between the ‘right’ people, sustaining hierarchies in the music world and beyond.

In Hindustani music, processes of exclusion shape who attends concerts. While Yavit stressed that his criteria for including people in the concerts he organizes are not social ones, he is not indiscriminate in choosing whom to invite. On the contrary, he discriminates along affective lines: he selects his listeners based on a shared passion for music (‘like-minded people, similarly driven to enjoying music’). I would suggest that such distinctions, made on affective grounds, can in fact discriminate along structural lines as well (and, indeed, similar to what Sprengel shows, can also serve to disguise the structural processes of inclusion and exclusion that shape people’s entry into this musical scene), even if listeners do not intend for this to be the case. When Yavit selects ‘the kind of people who enjoy music’, this occurs in a musical context in which being a good listener is an articulation of middle-class values and having a passion for this music is often the result of particular middle-class forms of musical education.Footnote ⁷² Moreover, as Rasika Ajotikar notes, the Hindustani music scene is also structured by exclusions along the lines of caste, despite what she calls the ‘stark invisibility’ of caste in this context.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, listeners’ insistence that only certain kinds of venues are suited to affective exchange, as discussed in the previous section, also raises issues of access. Small concerts are the most prestigious venues for hearing Hindustani music and take place in elite spaces, for example in the homes of patrons able to sponsor performances. So although listeners insist on the universality of Hindustani music, some of the most prestigious forms of concerts, and the concerts best suited to affective exchange between and among musicians and listeners, are open only to a very narrow group of ‘like-minded’ listeners. As a result, the affective practices that connect listeners (and even strangers) in moments of intimacy at live performances, experiences which listeners understand as evidence of music’s universality, can serve in part to cement a sense of closeness between people who largely come from a similar social background.Footnote ⁷⁴

Even within performances of Hindustani music, not all listeners have equal access to moments of affective intimacy with the musicians and with each other. Rather, affect is distributed unevenly within the space of the room and along lines of status and prestige. The unequal distribution of audience members within the room at performances of Hindustani music has been well documented: the space at the front of the room tends to be occupied by the people with the highest status — patrons, honoured guests, well-known listeners, and senior musicians.Footnote ⁷⁵ What I want to note here is that this has consequences in terms of the affective economy of the concert, since these seating arrangements shape the way affect seems to travel within the room in the moment of performance. As well as being the place where one might expect to find the highest-status listeners, or the ‘good’ listeners, the space at the front, closest to the musicians, is also associated with affective intensity. For example, Yavit told me that when he hosts concerts, he always reserves a space for himself at the front:

Likewise, Sumit told me:

Both Yavit and Sumit frame their discussions of seating arrangements in terms of affect. Yavit’s preferred spot is also where he is most able to be affected by the music (where it can reach him ‘directly’), while Sumit notes that listeners at the front are most able to engage in practices of affective exchange with the musicians. So the affective economy of Hindustani music is powerfully spatialized within the performance environment. A high social status is a prerequisite for access to the physical spots where affect is most intensely concentrated, with the result that flows of affect within the space outline differences in status.

Through being an audience member myself over the last fifteen years, I have experienced being on both the inside and the outside of the affective circuits generated by Hindustani music. As a newcomer to the scene, I was not part of the affective exchange I witnessed between musicians and prominent connoisseurs in the audience. Conditioned by norms of western classical-music listening practices (and my own shyness in a new environment), I tended to sit at the back and did not share my emotions while listening with other audience members or with the musicians. This situation changed as I got to know other concert attendees. When I attended concerts with friends (usually more experienced listeners), I started to be able to experience the pleasures of shared listening, for example sharing moments of eye contact at key points of affective intensity. Through my years of engaging with music and especially taking singing lessons, I have gradually and unconsciously learned a gestural repertoire through which to respond to music, allowing me to participate increasingly in the kinds of affective practices that rasikas understand as central to their listening experiences. When I went to India in 2014, on a research grant with funding to sponsor concerts and listening sessions, I was plunged into the centre of the action. In the role of patron and musicologist, I sat closer to the front, and I found myself being drawn into circuits of embodied affective exchange at live performances, both with musicians and with other listeners.

Taking Hindustani music as a case study illustrates the need for studies of music and affect to form more detailed understandings of the affective economies of live performances. Understanding performances in these terms highlights the unevenness of how affective practices are distributed between different listeners and within the physical space of the performance: in this case, (uneven) flows of affect unite and bring together certain listeners in intimate, shared experiences of emotional intensity while excluding others. The processes of inclusion and exclusion in which these affective circulations are implicated ultimately serve to sustain social hierarchies: they outline differences in status within the music world and they cement a sense of connection and togetherness between people who largely hail from a broadly similar background in terms of social class. Moreover, flows of affect have the power to generate social value. Those environments that listeners experience as the most affectively rich (especially small concerts with audiences of friends) are also the most prestigious and exclusive. Within performances, affective transmission conveys value, as affect circulates most intensely between audience members of the highest status. This musical culture illustrates what Ahmed calls the ‘stickiness’ of affect: ‘Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.’Footnote ⁷⁶ At live performances, affect is the glue that aligns certain (high-status) individuals with elite music, elite spaces, and the ‘right’ other people. Applying Ahmed’s insights to music highlights affect’s capacity to function not (just) as a force of radical freedom but rather (also) as a force that can sustain existing ideologies and social formations.

Affective Orientations

In an interview with Arun, a music lover and patron, we spoke about what it means to be a rasika. An important precondition, he stressed, was that the music ‘has to have some resonance for you’; he said, ‘you have to be open’. Arun’s description of what he called the ‘perfect’ listener of Hindustani music intertwined ideas about openness and sensitivity to music with conceptions of virtue: he explained that ‘most of the listeners of Indian classical music […] are basically decent human beings’ because, along with having attributes such as patience and expertise, to be a good listener ‘you have to be sensitive’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This is indicative of a broader ideology of listening, which shaped my conversations with other music lovers too. For many, like Arun, there is an ethics to being affected by music: being open or receptive to music’s emotional power is not only a sign that someone is a good listener, but also that they are a good person, while being closed or overly judgemental is a sign of bad character.

I have explored the ethical implications of the identity of the rasika and related discourses about what it means to be a good listener in greater depth elsewhere; in the context of twenty-first-century India, I argued that the ethical construction of the figure of the rasika embodies both middle-class values and wider anxieties about modernity and changing attitudes to time.Footnote ⁷⁸ Here, I examine how people come to a concert already inclined towards a particular affective engagement with music in service of that ethical project. I want to explore how that ethics feels, both in concerts and across a lifetime of listening.Footnote ⁷⁹ In this section, I draw on conversations with listeners to show how they navigate the ideological and discursive landscape of Hindustani music through their affective practices at live performances. In doing so, I build on Ahmed’s work on how people can be oriented within particular affective environments. As she argues, bodies ‘do not arrive in neutral’ when they enter a particular affective environment; rather, their emotional experience in that environment will depend in part on how they are oriented.Footnote ⁸⁰ Here, I show how certain listeners (actively) cultivate particular affective orientations in relation to Hindustani music in order to inhabit positions of virtue.

For Arun, the capacity to be affected by music is something intrinsic to a person, which has the power to say something about that person’s character. He considers sensitivity to music to be not only evidence of someone being a good person, but also something that is extremely rare and of great value. For example, he explained that he has tried to nurture good listeners during his time organizing musical performances in an educational institution, but ‘in my life, after spending thirty years there [in the educational institution], maybe I have been able to spot two children who were sensitive enough, who became good listeners’. For others, listening to music is itself an ethical practice, with the potential to make someone a better person. For example, Meghna, an amateur performer and keen listener, also explored the intertwining of affective openness with ethics:

Here, Meghna understands adopting a stance of affective openness (‘absolute surrender to something that is so powerful’) as an ethical practice, something that ‘takes you away from […] your base self’ towards something higher. Meghna’s comments demonstrate the affective intensity of this ethical position (it is ‘an amazing feeling’): the exhilaration of a good concert is intertwined with a sense that this is something that is good for one’s soul.

Meghna did not talk about how she came to (or learned to) adopt this stance of affective openness. However, in contrast with Arun and Meghna, other listeners spoke instead about affective openness or sensitivity not as an immutable personal characteristic, or as something that happens naturally in a good performance, but rather as something which it is possible to cultivate or which might develop over time. For example, dhrupad singer Ashish Dha told me about how his listening orientation had transformed when he was a student of Hindustani music as a teenager. He said:

Here, Dha described a shift in affective orientation: how he adopted a new way of engaging affectively with music (a new openness to being moved by the notes of the rāg and their interrelationships), which emerged as part of a dramatic change in perspective (‘a mental, emotional revolution within my own head’). In narrating this memory, Dha highlighted the importance of the particular ways listeners incline themselves to music in shaping their aesthetic experience.

Other listeners also described the very particular conscious ways in which they orient themselves towards music. For example, Sunny described how he changed what he called his ‘listening viewpoint’ as a consequence of listening to music together with a friend.Footnote ⁸¹ He told me how, in the music world, many listeners criticize musicians, as if ‘they are starting out with the premise that they don’t like the music’. On the other hand, his friend was ‘starting out with the premise: I like this music. And this is great! So he would listen. He didn’t care who it was. It was such a nice attitude! I thought: that’s really good.’ Sunny told me about how he changed his own ‘listening viewpoint’ to emulate that of his friend and how this change in viewpoint had allowed him to experience more intense emotion when listening. He spoke about one singer whom in his youth he had not liked, because his voice was too nasal and he sometimes sang out of tune. Now his viewpoint has changed; he said, ‘I was so stupid. Because now he’s like one of my ultimate favourites. Talk about emotion!’ For Sunny, adopting an affective disposition of openness was also about learning to listen past superficialities of voice quality and instead to hear (and be moved by) the emotional intentions of the performers. Put differently, what Sunny is describing is another kind of change in affective orientation, an orientation towards the emotional content of the performance and away from judgements about vocal timbre; like Dha, Sunny characterizes this in terms of developing a greater openness to being affected by the musical sound.

Likewise, Sumit spoke about how increasing musical expertise could get in the way of listeners’ capacity to be affected by music. Sumit told me about how his own listening had changed for the worse as he became more ‘critical’, saying that he now makes a conscious effort to avoid listening critically so as to enjoy the music more:

Here, Sumit talks of muting his own identity (‘who I am’) in order to engage better with music. This reflects a wider sense that being overly critical is in poor taste. As another listener told me, when people ‘dissect’ a performance instead of ‘enjoying the music’, this is ‘never in good taste’ and, indeed, is the behaviour of a ‘psychopath’.

In their discussions of their musical experiences, Dha, Sunny, and Sumit each highlighted listeners’ agency in choosing how to orient themselves towards music, for example by drawing attention to the differences between, on the one hand, listening that is geared towards enjoying the music and experiencing emotion, and on the other, listening that is trying to find fault. Their comments highlight ways in which listeners can intentionally adopt different affective orientations towards music. Moreover, the particular affective orientations that these listeners adopt are important from a sociological perspective: these listening practices occur against the background of an ideology of listening according to which the capacity to be affected by music is a sign of virtue, that is, of being a good listener and by extension a good person. For listeners like Dha, Sunny, and Sumit, developing dispositions of affective openness (openness to being affected by music’s emotional power) is thus an ethical practice, along the lines of the ethical listening practices famously theorized by Charles Hirschkind; it is a form of affective practice that is also a way of cultivating virtue.Footnote ⁸²

Still, although rasikas typically understand their listening orientations in terms of discourses of openness, and although they value openness highly, in practice they often do not approve of all forms of affective openness in relation to this music. As I have discussed elsewhere, rasikas stress that they are not affected indiscriminately by all of the music that they hear; rather, they state that they are unmoved by musical techniques that they consider to be crowd-pleasing ‘gimmicks’. Moreover, not all forms of embodied response to the music carry equal value: many rasikas are deeply critical of fellow audience members who respond with applause during the performance itself, instead of with gestures or vocalized expressions of praise.Footnote ⁸³ Different discourses on listening and affect are therefore in tension. To be affectively open is a sign of virtue; however, the virtue of affective openness nevertheless has its limits. To be open to the wrong kind of music or to embody one’s affective response incorrectly reveals a lack of expertise or taste. As a result, rasikas’ affective practices when they listen are informed by two contrasting models of bad listening, each with different implications in terms of the affective orientations they might adopt: in one model, the listener is too closed or judgemental and therefore forecloses their own affective engagement with the music, while in the other, the listener is affectively open, but in the wrong ways or to the wrong features of the music. My conversations with rasikas suggest that most set out to inhabit a position in which they evade both models of bad listening, resolving the tension by cultivating affective practices in which they are only partially or selectively open to being affected by the music they hear. When they listen, these rasikas adopt a listening disposition that they understand as geared towards being affected and expressing approval, but they are nevertheless also listening to distinguish good music from bad, and they remain ready to disengage emotionally if necessary.

Acknowledging the affective orientations through which listeners approach music therefore supports scholarship that has criticized understandings of affect as operating prior to culture and discourse, discussed above. It reveals some of the complexities of the particular ways in which affect can intersect with culture and discourse. In this case, listeners’ affective orientations are an important means by which processes of cultural and discursive mediation precede the embodied and seemingly unmediated operations of affect. Rasikas come to performances already inclined to being affected in certain ways; they come prepared to adopt particular affective orientations (characterized by partial openness) towards the music, and they do this in relation to broader ideologies of good listening, to inhabit a social identity that is shaped by discourses of virtue. Thinking in terms of affective orientations is therefore one way of incorporating into understandings of musical affect the insights of important literature in music sociology, which has shown how people can prepare to be affected by music or use music as an affective ‘resource’, with particular emotional ends in mind,Footnote ⁸⁴ as well as the insights of a growing body of research on listening, which has illuminated the array of techniques listeners cultivate in order to engage with music and/or sound, including, variously, Jonathan Sterne’s theorization of ‘audile techniques’, Deborah Kapchan’s concept of ‘genres of listening’, and Judith Becker’s important call to consider the ‘habitus’ of listening.Footnote ⁸⁵ This case study highlights the need for understandings of affect that can account for culture-specific listening practices.

Examining rasikas’ affective orientations also highlights the importance of the work that listeners do at the boundaries of the body and the ways in which the boundaries of the self are subject to negotiation in the moment of listening. A major contribution of affect theory has been to trouble the boundaries of the body, understanding bodies not as self-contained receptacles for emotion but rather as importantly porous.Footnote ⁸⁶ This work theorizes porousness as something essential about the way that bodies are. However, there is also sociological significance to the ways in which people construct bodily boundaries as porous (or not) in different circumstances. In her groundbreaking work with young performers of western classical music, Anna Bull puts theories of bodily porousness into dialogue with sociological theory about classed dispositions. She describes how young musicians intentionally cultivate dispositions of porousness, ‘leading them to be open to affecting others and being affected’, and how this in turn is linked to discourses on ‘emotional depth’, such that ‘those who can experience this “depth” are hailed as people who are worthy of access to classical music’s many opportunities, grand architecture, prestigious institutions, and the overwhelming approval that is available from adults’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ultimately, Bull shows how young musicians’ disposition of porousness is part of the means by which western classical music reproduces gender and class. As her work reveals, there is much to be gained by understanding bodily porousness as a sociological rather than an ontological reality: as something that people construct or cultivate in relation to particular discourses and as generative, with the power to sustain social distinctions. Likewise, the ways in which listeners orient themselves towards (and away from) different aspects of musical sound need to be understood as social practices. Taking Hindustani music listening as a case study highlights the complexities and variety of ways in which people can cultivate bodily porousness, as well as the wider sociological work this accomplishes. In this case, the partially porous body is the product of a particular affective practice, which is socially generative. By opening themselves up to being affected by prestigious music, while closing themselves to the potential affective power of certain musical features, listeners are able to inhabit positions of virtue.

Conclusion: The Sociality of Musical Affect

In this article, I have taken listening practices associated with Hindustani music as a case study through which to explore theories of music and affect. First, I explored the ways listeners characterize flows of affect during live performances of Hindustani music, showing how their understandings resonate strongly with theoretical accounts of musical affect. As listeners’ discussions suggest, musical emotions emerge out of real-time embodied interactions between musicians and audience members; they are co-produced by different participants in the music event and are shaped by the immediate, embodied, physical realities of the performance context. Second, I highlighted the affective economies of performances of Hindustani music; affect in this context flows unevenly and is unequally distributed within the space of the performance. While the affective dynamics of the performance sustain a sense for many listeners of the universality of Hindustani music, they also, paradoxically, play a role in reproducing social hierarchies. Finally, I discussed the ways listeners cultivate particular affective orientations in relation to Hindustani music. These orientations are socially efficacious, serving as a site for the reproduction of ideologies of good listening and a means by which listeners participate in a community of virtue.

I suggest that thinking about musical listening in terms of affective economies and affective orientations can help make sense of the complexities of the ways in which musical affect relates to sociality, culture, and discourse: it offers ways of understanding the tension between the seemingly direct and immediate ways affect seems to operate on the one hand, and, on the other, the ways in which affect is intertwined with social processes. In particular, I suggest that affective economies and affective orientations are two important mechanisms by which musical affect reproduces existing ideologies and structures of power. Understanding performances in terms of affective economies reveals the ways in which affect operates not only as a force for inclusion and for binding people together, but also as a force of exclusion: the unevenness of the affective flows that music engenders in live performances has the power to sustain social hierarchies, aligning certain people while excluding others. Considering the affective orientations that listeners adopt in relation to Hindustani music counters tendencies across the musical disciplines to characterize musical emotions in terms of the language of response, situating listeners in a passive role in relation to music.Footnote ⁸⁸ As their accounts of their listening experiences demonstrate, rasikas are not passive recipients of music’s affective power; rather, they come to performances already inclined towards certain forms of affective engagement with the music, actively cultivating socially meaningful affective orientations in order to engage with music. I suggest that there is much to be gained by taking seriously the care that listeners put into cultivating affective orientations in relation to music, as well as the wider possibilities of listeners’ affective practices in terms of the social identities and subject positions they make available. Examining listeners’ affective practices offers one way of exploring how it feels to participate in such social and ideological processes; this case study highlights the intensity and complexity of listeners’ musical feelings and how they matter both inside and outside the moment of performance.Footnote ⁸⁹

Overall, I make the case for scholarship across the musical disciplines to pay greater attention to the social and political work that is embedded in people’s affective engagement with music as they listen to it, and especially how listeners’ musical emotions are implicated in the reproduction of unequal structures of power: that is, for understanding affect as central to the political work that music performs. In many musical cultures, it is taken for granted that music moves listeners’ bodies and emotions and that this capacity is a principal source of its appeal. Yet people’s affective engagement with music is not ideologically neutral. Beyond Hindustani music, I suggest that there is much to be learned by probing the details of listeners’ affective engagements with music, examining the particular affective orientations people cultivate in relation to it, how it engenders uneven flows of affect between different people, how this serves to align certain people within affective communities while excluding others, and how the affective practices of listening to music can contribute to sustaining ideologies and social hierarchies. Such work can illuminate the complexities of musical emotions: how they are co-produced by musicians and listeners in the moment of performance, how they are embedded within particular material contexts, how they create powerful senses of connection between listeners, and how they take the form of embodied processes, which people experience as involuntary and unmediated, while also contributing to structures of prestige and power.