Going Viral: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679-1919)

Project Information

GOING VIRAL

Grant agreement ID: 101040297

DOI

10.3030/101040297

EC signature date 8 July 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 379,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 379,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT FUR MUSIK UND DARSTELLENDE KUNST WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GOING VIRAL (Going Viral: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679-1919))

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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, education and economics had been heavily disrupted by closures and social distancing measure, the primacy of music for expressing, navigating and shaping emotional experiences of the pandemic was remarkable. Journalists showed an immediate interest in finding evidence both for the role of music in past pandemics and 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. The study of music in times of pandemics, and especially of its emotional significance, is both underdeveloped and urgently needed – and has the potential to constitute a major new field in research on music, emotions and pandemics. GOING VIRAL is the first major study to provide a comparative history of the imbrication of music in the emotional experiences of pandemics. Its legacy will be both ground-breaking historical knowledge about the role of music during major historical pandemics since the 17th century and the development of an analytic terminology and a comparative methodology for the study of music and emotions, both famously challenging subjects of study, across time and space, in pandemics and beyond.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In our colloquia sessions that form the heart of the methodological workpackages, we have covered secondary literature that range in topics from race and music, hospital soundscapes, to climate disaster. This has replenished the interdisciplinary approaches of our team members, and also helped us to form key concepts to our collective theoretical and methodological approaches in GOING VIRAL. These include “dis-ease” (building on Boddice/Hitzer 2022) – this disrupts the traditional time periods and spatial demarcations under research (e.g. a specific pandemic’s time period or location), instead to focus on the diachronic and dispersed experiences of illness and emotions. We draw on Jacob Smith’s eco-critical research (Smith 2015) to formulate a theoretic framework of cross-historical comparison of different pandemics. We are continually influenced by “carnal” approaches towards musicology (Le Guin 2006) that foreground the fleshly/bodily dimensions of musicking. We have particularly focused on approaches on embodied memory in environments of trauma (Varwig 2020), cultural formations of air and atmosphere (Davies 2023), subjectivity and attunement (Born 2018). Theorising our positionality within the process of historiographical research has been guided by Erin Sullivan (2018) and Jacob Olley (2023). Most significant has been the shift from the History of Emotions to the History of Experience, with all this disciplinary manoeuvre entails.

Regarding the historical case study of the 1679/80 Viennese Plague outbreak, carnal musicology approaches have proven particularly relevant, forming the methodological basis for our research direction and initial findings. The case study on the Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-1919) in Vienna examined cultural and musical life through media representations and their societal implications, exploring the interconnected dynamics of media, memory, and music during this period. The case study on the Spanish Flu in Baku has examined how music, and in particular the increased visibility of women in these performances, served as a cultural expression and social cohesion, fostering resistance and resilience in Baku. These two case studies on the Spanish Flu have introduced new methodological and interdisciplinary developments, engaging with recent discussions in musicology on the relevance of boundaries between historical musicology and ethnomusicology.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Our achievements reflect a significant shift in our methodological and conceptual approaches. Initially, the project was grounded in the history of emotions, serving as the starting point for our work. However, after two years of research and considering our achievements, it has become evident that the emerging discipline of the history of experience opens up possibilities for music-historical approaches to emotions beyond the current state-of-the-art. This is partly due to the complex and ephemeral nature of emotional dimensions in music, which rarely allow for unequivocal attributions of meaning. Instead, our research engages with the nuanced atmospheres of being-in-the-world, altered through musical means. To capture these dimensions historically, we require less concrete emotional concepts and more exploration of the experiential worlds of historical actors, their acculturated bodies and their sensory perception.
This transition from the history of emotions to the history of experience also facilitates the integration of contemporary neuroscientific insights about emotional plasticity, embodiment and extended mind theory and muscle memory. The history of experience—especially in the context of our research on the early modern period—reveals a remarkable similarity to this recent research regarding their non-binary understanding of sentient body-mind entities. Unlike the history of emotions, the history of experience has re-engaged with discourses in the natural and life sciences, providing fresh conceptual directions for our research in the coming years.
While the connection between the history of emotions and musicology has been explored by few scholars, the emerging discipline of the history of experience has yet to be integrated into musicology. By shifting our focus toward the history of experience, we have achieved more innovative results than anticipated. Notably, the PI has observed that musicologists are increasingly open to the approaches of the history of experience compared to those of the history of emotions. Thus, this experience-historical approach, especially where it connects to musicological research in areas such as "carnal musicology" or "somatic archaeology," enhances the relevance and impact of our work.

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