Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

The experiences of both police officers and police band members point to the central role that emotion has in connecting individual bodies to form social bodies. The specific musical–emotional experiences of band members invites an analysis that problematizes the thesis that audiences will feel what musicians felt in creating music, based on common participation in the sequences of movement suggested by a particular music. Their experiences call instead for a nuanced account of the connection between emotions and the specific multisensual activities and relationships in which the body is involved, in order that the social relationships such connections facilitate might be fruitfully explored. The difference between audience and performer emotion in particular is fertile ground for the exploration of the exercise of a subtle contemporary police power that operates in musical and emotional form.

An Emotional Problem

Grayville police band musicians and the police institution to which they ‘belong’ are here shown to be related by a complex, taut and sometimes fraying thread of emotion. At one end of this thread there lies a knotty problem: the problem cops have with their image as unemotional subhuman or even nonhumans in the public perception. At the other end lies the musical solution, and in the middle lies a tangle of multisensual activity generated from the embodiment of musical instruments. This complicated tangle goes unnoticed, unknown, by the Grayville police department proper, even though within its folds and loops is contained rich and inflammatory commentary and action that might undermine subtle (musical and emotional) exercises in police power. If these knots are to be found nestled quietly within one of the branches of the Grayville police department, in the musical activity and even the performance-related emotions of the Grayville police band members, then they may well be disguised elsewhere—in audiences of police band music, for example–as hidden resistances tend to be. Here, as elsewhere, power does not run straightforwardly in one direction. Instead, the multidirectionality of emotional and musical powers is ironically and deeply vested in the very police institution that would seek to wield these subtle powers directly against ‘the policed’. I explore this irony throughout this book.