“the world-creating properties of music”: Viennese Balcony Concerts, Zeitgeschichte and Emotions as Musicological Method

On March 15, 2020, the day before the start of the first official covid-19 lockdown in Vienna, I took an evening stroll through the already quite empty streets of the urban third district. Almost back home, I passed an open window on the mezzanine floor of a Jugendstil House where a young woman was sitting on the windowsill, playing the guitar and singing. She seemed to just enjoy the calm and relaxed atmosphere in the twilight, so I didn’t give it much attention and kept on walking until – only a few blocks later – I again saw a musician playing in an open window. It was a saxophonist who was accompanied by a piano from inside the flat. This time I decided to stop, to listen for a while – and to take this picture:

 

Just a few steps away from me on the sidewalk, two other women were filming the scene with their cell phones; and when I looked up the house behind me, I saw a man and a little boy standing in an open window just opposite the saxophonist. The man was filming and the little boy was standing very still, just watching the musician and clearly completely fascinated by the situation. Next to the saxophonist, more windows had been opened, and when the music was over, I could hear applause coming from several different flats. Suddenly, the early evening setting felt no longer calm and relaxed. Instead, together with the strange curiosity about the imminent lockdown, it had condensed into a very special, weirdly tense and at the same time emotionally deeply touching atmosphere.

Only when I looked again at the picture of the saxophonist a few hours later, I realized that I had taken my walk at exactly six o’clock in the evening which meant that I had witnessed two of the first Viennese balcony concerts; concerts that, during the first wave of the pandemic, spread from Italy to both the balconies of many different countries and the social platforms of the Word Wide Web.

This evening’s experiences left a deep emotional impact and stayed with me for quite some time. As a cultural historian who is interested in the emotional practices of music, their spaces, styles and media, I wondered how I could describe and explain these experiences with as much theoretical reflection and methodological soundness as possible.

It is a well-known fact that the explanation of a phenomenon is closely related to the method that was chosen to approach it. This method defines not only defines the framework within which any evidence is found, but it also creates the possibilities of bringing these evidences together to create an explanatory narrative, a “story”. And with that we touch on another point that would (and still does) concern me for yet some time: Although I have read numerous articles on balcony concerts, watched videos and listened to interviews, it is still my own emotional and thus subjective experience of the Viennese balcony concerts what has been guiding my interest in the first place. Many academics, however, would not accept a subjective – let alone an emotional – experience as the starting point of a scholarly inquiry. Following a traditional view, this would not only threaten the objectivity but also the rationality of academic research.

This is where the following considerations set off. They will address two main questions: (1) How can our own subjectivity and emotionality as researchers be methodologically conceptualized and justified? (2) What are the results of such an approach for studying the musical phenomenon of the balcony concerts?

(1) Subjectivity, Emotional Experience and Historiography

Historiography became interested in the subjectivity of researchers in 1953 at the latest. That year, the German historian Hans Rothfels established Zeitgeschichte as an academic discipline¹ and defined it as both “the period that we live in and its academic examination”². With this definition, he emphasized the problem of the “specific historical affectedness”³ of scholars as well as the very specific methodological challenges it entails. These challenges take us right into the core of current methodological discourses on historiography in general, and of Zeitgeschichte in particular. In his article “The task of contemporary history” (“Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe”), Rothfels explicitly highlighted the specific involvement of historians in contemporary history (especially in Germany after the World War II) and concluded that the study of history will never be able to depict any historical reality in a purely objective way. There is always “a subjective factor” (Rothfels, Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe, 5: „Ein subjektiver Faktor“) to every act of historiography. Such considerations were by no means common knowledge in the 1950s, and in Rothfels’s argumentation they not only highlight the unavoidable socio-cultural dependency of every historiographical undertaking, they also aim to use this dependency in a productive way⁴.

Rothfels remained relatively vague about exactly what this might look like – and to this day there is neither disciplinary nor interdisciplinary agreement on how to deal with one’s own subjectivity in the process of research. In 2015, sociologist Jo Reichartz even speaks of a feeling of unease that he would face when trying to discuss this question with his colleagues⁵ of famous scholars, since they clearly show how strongly all of our research is guided by subjectivity. Reichertz suggests that even addressing such a question would obviously be considered a “no-go”⁶. And I would like to add that these might also be the academic disciplines that take a critical view on the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity, of ratio and emotio.

One of these fields is the history of emotions, and taking a closer look at it seems particularly relevant to me not only because of my own researcher subjectivity, but also because subjectivity and emotionality are at the centre of this academic field. This is precisely why the history of emotions has repeatedly faced accusations from the outside suggesting that it lacks scholarly rigour. From within, these accusations have been met with a constantly expanding set of rigorous analytical and methodological tools that are designed to make emotion cultures accessible for historical research according to academic standards. The underlying discussion about the specific – emotional – involvement of researchers, however, was for a surprisingly long time a “no-go” in the history of emotions as well. It was not until 2018 that it literally moved to centre stage. That year, Shakespeare researcher Erin Sullivan published an essay in the journal of the Society for The History of the Emotions that discussed “The Role of the Arts in the History of Emotions”, with the telling subtitle “Aesthetic Experience and Emotion as Method”⁷.

With its wide range of research subjects and questions, Shakespeare Studies touches on numerous areas of the broad field of cultural history and has in recent decades repeatedly played a pioneering role in methodological discussions, most notably in exploring the affective and emotional aspects of the arts. A particularly prominent example is the so-called “historical phenomenology” developed in 2000 by Bruce Smith⁸. Sullivan’s article stems from this methodological tradition. It is a passionate – and I think intentionally provocative – call for “emotional historians”. To justify this first “no-go”, Sullivan introduces a second “no-go”: She argues that the importance of establishing “emotional historians” is most clearly – though by no means exclusively – demonstrated by studying the history of emotions and the arts. These, however, have so far been significantly underrepresented in the history of emotions. Sullivan finds this fact surprising; not only because this discipline has been institutionally established over the past two decades and has developed an otherwise rigid corpus of sources and methods, but also because of the common (albeit debatable) belief that

[a]rt is – quite simply – the expression of emotion.⁹

According to Sullivan, the reasons for this underrepresentation of the arts lie in the all too prevalent “impressionistic” – and therefore commonly considered ” unscholarly” – use of artistic sources in cultural history in general, and in the history of emotions in particular.

The second part of her article is devoted to the special characteristics of artistic – and especially literary – sources and to what their examination can offer for the history of emotions. What seems to be of particular interest to me in this context is Sullivan’s definition of the arts as being both “world-reflecting” and “world-creating” (Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 120.).

The aim of [art] works is not just to mirror [i.e. a form and vehicle of] experience, but also to produce it in the minds of audiences and readers, and in this sense they go far beyond functioning as second-best repository for the scant-of-evidence.¹⁰

With this, Sullivan moves her focus on the participatory dimensions of the arts – and in doing so, she enters, albeit not explicitly, the realm of praxeology and in particular of Monique Scheer’s concept of emotional practices¹¹, which has recently become one of the most promising methodological concepts for the history of emotions¹².

According to Sullivan, the participatory character of the arts requires “emotional work”¹³ on behalf of all participants, including the scholars who study them. This is the case with any kind of research, but in the case of research on the history of emotions, it is an intrinsic part of the process, which takes on the form of “imagination”¹⁴:

[Works of art] invite researchers to imagine themselves into a more fully realised emotional world, helping to enrich and extend briefer glimpses found in some documentary texts.¹⁵

In parallel to other “work” on other historical sources, “emotional work” on pieces of art can thus provide insights that are qualitatively different, but by no means less justified. The goal is

not […] a historian who assembles a historical narrative solely through her own, present-day emotional response to sources, but rather one who allows emotional response to work in tandem with more traditional forms of scholarship, producing a reflexive partnership.¹⁶

Formal aspects of the arts may also be included in this “emotional work”, because:

Close engagement with an artful text’s formal construction helps unlock its world-creating potential, opening up realms of experience that are rooted in the past but have the potential to stretch through time to the present.¹⁷

That brings Sullivan to her third and most important point: a proposal for a better way to incorporate the arts into the history of emotions, with special attention to their specific methodological characteristics and challenges. This last part of the article is called ‘The Emotional Historian’ and is about nothing else than the methodological problems of – to speak with Rothfels – the specific involvement of “mitlebenden” (“co(n)-temporary”), and I would like to add: “mitfühlenden” (“co-feeling”), researchers. It is a plea for reflective and productive emotional work in historiography – for a historiography which would thus not get lost in the dualism between emotio and ratio. Sullivan is well aware that this proposal is by no means unproblematic:

Alarm bells may be ringing by now in the minds of fellow historians and for good reasons: the idea of participating in the emotive world of an artistic work, and of using that experience to try to understand the past, immediately raises concerns about subjectivity, bias, anachronism and, indeed – to return to the issue raised at the start of this essay – impressionism. It is one thing to position emotion as the subject of historical study, but quite another to deploy it as a method of scholarly inquiry.¹⁷

Yet, she continues,

finding a way to acknowledge and incorporate emotional experience – not just of the past, but also in the present – into the history of the emotion is, I think, an important ambition for our field.¹⁸

At the end of her article, Sullivan expands her call for the recognition of “emotional historians” to include not only the history of emotions beyond the arts, but also – fully in line with Rothfels – to historiography in general. Her argument is a simple as it is convincing:

For if emotions are an intrinsic part of judgement, imagination, reason and understanding, as a growing number of scholars in both the sciences and humanities believe they are, then they must also play a fundamental role in the perception and creation of history.¹⁹

 

 

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Sullivan repeatedly points out that despite its extensive tools, the history of emotions has so far lacked methodological approaches to dealing with the arts while taking into account their specific aesthetic modalities²⁰. Thus, developing new methods for the historical study of emotions and the arts is basically a precondition for the establishment of “emotional historians”. For her own part, Sullivan demonstrates her vision of an “emotional historiography” for the study of literature using the example of Shakespeare, and in doing so she makes a particularly strong case for imagination as method. In what follows, I will do the same from a musicological perspective and examine the potential of “emotional work” for music with its very own aesthetic modalities, and I will do so by examining the phenomenon of balcony concerts. This will eventually show the concept of “immersion” to be the musicological counterpart to Sullivan’s “imagination”.

 

 

(2) Balcony Concerts

My starting point is a phenomenological description of the specific “world” that the Viennese balcony concert with its “world-creating properties” created for me: It was an atmospherically extremely charged world within which I felt a strong community with the other people who witnessed the situation. Paradoxically, this was all the more powerful because they were all strangers and I couldn’t even see all of them. Mutually connected to this specific emotional community was how the space had been altered by the balcony concert: it was in fact an ordinary urban space that I was in – yet one that was strangely quiet in anticipation of the lockdown, deprived – as it were – of its urbanity; and which consequently no longer felt ordinary at all. Equally out of the ordinary was the fact that a musician filled this space with music while playing from the window. As the piano accompaniment played out of sight from inside the flat, the musical space was divided into a private interior and a public exterior; a division that was, however, at the same time dissolved by precisely this kind of music-making. The space that the music defined extended beyond walls, doors and windows, across the boundaries of flats, houses and even streets, and it thus united a variety of differently dedicated spaces within one sonosphere²¹. In doing so, it created an emotional space that united the listeners in an audience whose anonymity was to a certain extent also dissolved by this shared experience.

Thus, my “emotional work” results in two categories that are relevant for my purposes: “emotional spaces” and ” emotional communities”. Both belong to the core conceptual frameworks of the history of emotions and address how 1) communities or spaces are defined and given meaning according to so-called emotional regimes, and how 2) the emotional expressions of actors within these communities or spaces are shaped by this.²². For the purposes of my investigation, they both mainly offer ways of recognizing conceptual difference. Not only do I use the term “emotional communities” slightly differently than it was originally defined by Barbara Rosenwein. More importantly: In the context of the Vienna Balcony Concert, “emotional communities” and “emotional spaces” are not primarily related to emotional expression. They are directed to emotional experience: to the “world-creating properties” of music as a sound phenomenon, to the aesthetic space it constitutes by offering an opportunity for dwelling in a community and to the way in which this musical space provides opportunities for emotional experiences.

The “tandem” of emotions history and my own emotional work thus shows that, for a better understanding of the Balcony Concerts, I need to make a clear conceptual distinction between the expression and the experience of emotions. One consequence of this is, I believe, the need to reconceptualise the act of perceiving music: to resolve the oppositions that are so deeply ingrained in our thinking about music – especially those between a sounding object and a listening subject and between “expressed”, “induced” and “perceived emotions”. Such a conceptualising can lead us to an understanding of music that anthropologist Tim Ingold has described in the following way:

 

 

[Music is] neither mental nor material, but a phenomenon of experience – that is, of our immersion in, and commingling with, the world in which we find ourselves. [For music] is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in.²³

 

 

This would mean that we not only hear music, but that it also surrounds us completely – if we choose to fully immerse ourselves in it” – to use Ingold’s term of “immersion” as “diving into water”. When we are fully immersed in it, the water changes the familiar, everyday relation between our bodies and their surroundings. The same thing would happen if we were to engage with the “world-creating properties” of music: The familiar sounds, laws and conditions of our surroundings would suddenly be experienced in a very different way. Such a whole-bodily emotional experience would be characterised neither by the music in its specific form nor by the audience in its specific condition. Rather, this experience would be the result of a specific situation that changes the sensory attentiveness of the listeners within the medium of music itself²⁴. In this process, what is perceived in the music would create a new world in just this situation, and the act of being immersed in music would itself acquire “world-creating properties”. Every experience and every newly created world would be a different one, and this would also conceptually justify that of each individual researcher as being an academic starting point.

My own starting point – emphasising subjectivity and emotionality within the research process – already shows that I would not assume to have given the only true analysis of the Balcony Concerts; I have intentionally used the subjunctive above to show that I am by no means speaking of a universally valid conceptualisation of musical experience. Yet, for my purposes, this conceptualisation is particularly promising. I will thus now – in the indicative – return to the concrete example of the balcony concert, completing my subjective experience with insights from other sources, and for this I will work along the categories of emotional space and emotional community – but always based on an immersive, whole-bodily experience of music with its “world-creating properties”.

 

Emotional Space

My experience shows that it was my decision to immerse myself in a music-filled space that led to the constitution of its specific experiential qualities. The first musician I had passed by had already given a balcony concert and thus offered the experience of an emotional space filled with music. Yet I only joined in with the second offer – and from that moment onwards I had been creating this “new” world: I gave completely new meaning to the surrounding space and thereby also reconstituted its relations. Everything I perceived I did so in relation to the balcony concert: people turned into listeners, cell phones into recording devices, the motionlessness of the little boy at the window into fascination, the open windows into opportunities for listening. The silence before the lockdown – which had already before the balcony concert created a particular emotional soundscape – transformed into attentive tension, and my own lockdown anxiety into atmospheric melancholy. Countless other balcony concert experiences from the beginning of the first lockdown show how many people embraced the offer of a musical-emotional space and immersed themselves in it. Yet this certainly has not always been the case everywhere. Balcony concerts became less and less frequent as Lockdown fatigue grew; and even prior to that, not everyone was always open to immersing themselves in the musical offers of their neighbours – as we can see in this video, which went viral on the internet as “typical Viennese reaction” to a balcony concert:

Still, at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the balcony concerts seem to have struck a nerve, not only locally, but also globally and digitally. A follow-up question is to what extent the properties of musical space with its emotional experiential affordances change when shifting to the digital – where both the mediality of music and the bodily nature of experience is altered. The immersion concept seems to be particularly useful for an investigation of this question – it is, after all, currently the subject of much debate in the field of media studies.

 

 

Emotional Community

Besides the spatial experience, it was the sense of community with complete strangers that made the balcony concert particularly memorable for me. In my own experience, they explicitly became part of my “newly designed” surroundings. Within the medium of music, I perceived us as a community, and it was precisely the fact that we didn’t know each other what made this a particularly strong experience. The lack of familiarity was thus by no means disruptive of, but rather particularly constitutive for, the emotional community. This explains the community-building potential of balcony concerts especially in the digital space: This space is explicitly characterised by anonymity. It might even be that the community could be felt particularly strongly through sharing balcony concerts on social platforms, thus creating a global emotional community. It is precisely this proactive and creative character of balcony concerts that has been emphasised in numerous statements by musicians and listeners:

https://youtu.be/EBByYjjvNzs

 

If we understand the emotional experience of balcony concerts as an act of temporarily creating a new – a better? – world, then the significance of the “world-creating-properties” of music with their powerful imaginative and emotional effects becomes more than obvious, especially in the context of (beginning) collective crises.

 

 

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It was my aim to show how subjective researcher emotionality can be methodologically relevant to musical Zeitgeschichte. However, both Rothfels and Sullivan emphasise that all historiography is, or should be, characterised by subjective and emotional elements. And indeed: At one of the first digital meetings of the musicovid network launched by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in May 2020, music historian Remi Chiu pointed out that he was using the current situation to gain helpful insights for his research on balcony singing during the plague epidemics in sixteenth-century Milan²⁵ by means of “imagination”. Haven’t we all to some extent been using both subjective emotional components and our “imagination” when writing history? Our research results may therefore not necessarily be completely different if we consciously use “emotional work” as a method. Our research process, however, will certainly become a more reflective one – one that can eventually turn a scholarly “no-go” into a “go-on”.

 

 

1. The German Zeitgeschichte is very closely related to the French “histoire contemporaine” and the English “contemporary history”, although there has never been – neither within national nor international discourses – an agreement on the exact time period these historical disciplines do (or should) cover. For more detail see e.g. Gabriele Metzler, Zeitgeschichte: Begriff – Disziplin – Problem, Version: 1.0. In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 07.04.2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.14765/ zzf.dok.2.567.v1. I have decided to use the German term Zeitgeschichte since Rothfels’ definition (“Epoche der Mitlebenden und ihre wissenschaftliche Behandlung”) explicitly addresses the problem of the researcher’s subjectivity while other definitions only refer to contemporary history as covering “that within living memory”, see Peter Catterall, What (if anything) Is Distinctive about Contemporary History? In: Journal of Contemporary History 32/4 (1997), 441. [↩]
2. Hans Rothfels, Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1/1 (1953), 2: “Epoche der Mitlebenden und ihre wissenschaftliche Behandlung”. [↩]
3. Rothfels, Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe, 2: “spezifisches Betroffensein durch die Geschichte”. [↩]
4. see Andreas Wirsching, „Epoche der Mitlebenden“ – Kritik der Epoche. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 8/1 (2011), 150-155, DOI: https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-1666. [↩]
5. Jo Reichertz, Die Bedeutung der Subjektivität in der Forschung, in: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 16/3 (2015), Art. 33, https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-16.3.2461.)); an unease and a silence that would seem strangely at odds with “our own experience, gossip, anecdotes and biographies” ((Reichertz, Die Bedeutung der Subjektivität [↩]
6. Reichertz, The Meaning of Subjectivity.). He adds, however, that there seems to be some reflection on researcher subjectivity in those academic fields that are intrinsically aware of the socio-cultural dependence of all actions ((Reichertz, Die Bedeutung der Subjektivität [↩]
7. Erin Sullivan, The Role of the Arts in the History of Emotions: Aesthetic Experience and Emotion as Method, in: Emotions: History, Culture, Society 2 (2018), 113-131, DOI: 10.1163/2208522X-02010006. The relevance of her reflections was also demonstrated by the fact that her article was awarded the Philippa Maddern Prize by the Society for the History of Emotions [↩]
8. Bruce Smith, Premodern Sexualities, in: Publications of the Modern Language Association 115/3 (2000), 318-329, https://doi.org/10.2307/463453. [↩]
9. Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History, Oxford 2004, 13, quoted in Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 127. [↩]
10. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 120. [↩]
11. Monique Scheer, Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion. In: History and Theory 51/2 (2012), 193-220. [↩]
12. I have repeatedly discussed promising potential ways of applying the concept of “emotional practices” to musicology, see e.g. the introduction and my contribution “Singen als emotionale Praktik des Erinnerns” [Singing as an Emotional Practice of Remembering] to Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (ed.), Musik und Emotionen. Kulturhistorische Perspektiven (= Studies on Music and Gender 1), Stuttgart/Berlin 2020, 1-21 and 103-126. [↩]
13. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 121. [↩]
14. Sullivan’s methodological concept of “imagination”, which she explains and exemplifies in more detail in her book Beyond Melancholy: Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England, Oxford 2016, is closely related to Piroska Nagy’s “method of intuitive reading” and Nira Pancer’s concept of “introspective reading”, see Nagy’s talk Historians and Emotions: New Theories, New Questions, given at the international workshop “Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity” (October 23-26, 2008) at the University of Umeå (Sweden) and published under https://emma.hypotheses.org/147 [↩]
15. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 126. [↩]
16. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 129. [↩]
17. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 127. [↩] [↩]
18. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 128. [↩]
19. Sullivan, The Role of the Arts, 128, with reference to Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, London 2017. [↩]
20. See also Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild and Erin Sullivan, Introduction: Emotion, History and the Arts. In: Emotions, History and the Arts, Special Issue of Cultural History 7/2 (2018), edited by Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild and Erin Sullivan, 117-128. [↩]
21. The term “sonosphere” originates in Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres I: Blaasen, Berlin 1998. It is used to describe the space created by sound and defined by the range of perception. [↩]
22. A good introduction into the methods and concepts of the history of emotions can be found in Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl, Munich 2012, and Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions, Manchester 2018. It is characteristic for the field of the history of emotions that neither Plamper nor Boddice make a single reference to music. On the concept of emotional spaces, see also Andreas Reckwitz, Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook. In: Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 16 (2012), 241-258, and Margrit Pernau, Space and Emotion: Building to Feel. In: History Compass 7/12 (2014), 541-649, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12170; on “emotional communities, see Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca/London 2006; on emotional regimes, see William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge 2001. [↩]
23. Tim Ingold, Against Soundscape. In: Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. by Angus Carlyle, Paris 2007, 10-13. [↩]
24. See Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild, Musikalische Immersion. „Hörend Anwesenheit spüren“. In: Immersion. Grenzen und Metaphorik des digitalen Subjekts, Special Issue of Navigationen – Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften 19/1 (2019), ed. by Thiemo Breyer und Dawid Kasprowicz, 71-88, engl. translation: https://mdw.academia.edu/MarieLouiseHerzfeldSchild. [↩]
25. See Remi Chiu, Plague and Music in the Renaissance, Cambridge 2017 [↩]

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