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Because musicians and audience members each possess the same innate musical competence in terms of the sharedness of musical and emotional resonance, listeners will, in his view, ‘feel in their bodies what others [performers] felt’ in creating music. Current proponents of Blacking’s work, including Reily (2006), continue to understand resonance as the basis of audience–performer emotion–music connections, but directing special attention to the ways in which musicians sensually include instruments in their bodies in the course of performance might reveal important differences in audience and performer emotional experiences of music. Katz (1999) recommended that we do precisely this in order to avoid glossing over what might be the crucial differences involved in taking up an instrument in order to play, and taking a seat in order to listen. An analysis of music making that looks carefully at the embodiment of musical conduct and in particular at the sensual connections that musicians make with their instruments and with each other can make nuanced insights into the different relationships that are formed between performing and rehearsing musicians and their audiences, and the relationships each might have to police power.
With these important differences in mind I argue against Blacking’s (1984) notion that a decision to perform music can lead people to share emotion through their shared involvement in sequences of movement, including the beat or rhythm of particular musics. Band members feel a specifically performance-related meta-emotion that they call ‘the feel’ when they perform music. I argue here that listeners will not feel this same order of meta-emotion because they do not embody musicality when they listen. In my close attention to the structure of comportment in playing and listening, this book is written along lines similar to those advanced by Berger (2000), but, in comparison with Berger’s insights, it directs specific attention to music in the contexts of organizational culture and police power. Specifically, I draw attention to the idea that, where band members embody instruments and other performers as a result of sensually extending into these bodies to become emotional in performance, audience members sensually extend themselves into performed sonics to become emotional during performances of music. The latter is particularly susceptible to the kind of exercise of power conducted by the police via music, for the emotional contents of performed music may evoke particular situated experiences that are seamlessly integrated with sonic and visual images of police power during police band performances.