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

Employing a conception of emotion as embodied sociality allows us to see that what cops are doing in their highly reflected upon physical practices is attempting to embody disconnectedness from the social body and that this experience is what Grayville cops refer to as professional police behaviour. This behaviour was vehemently objected to by the policed community in Grayville, to the point at which police capacity to effectively police was constrained, as Trueman observed in 2000 in the Police Journal, and so a solution was sought … and found.

A Musical Solution

The primary method of dealing with negative publicity has involved the Grayville police band in the role of a public relations unit. During the course of my fieldwork, it became evident that the members of the Grayville police department considered music to be, as one very senior officer put it, ‘the language of emotion’. The connection of emotion with music is one that has long been made in both popular and academic understandings of music (see Swain, 1997).⁶ Swain notes that the question to be decided when considering whether or not music is like a language is largely concerned with whether or not music is expressive of emotions or whether it is merely self-referential. Adherents to the latter position, including 19th century aesthetic theorists such as Hanslick, and 20th century figures such as Stravinsky, would hold that, for example, there is nothing natural or logical about the association of minor modes and sadness nor major modes and happiness. These associations, as Swain (1997) notes, are ‘merely conventional aspects of our particular culture, popular myths maintained by the incognoscenti’ (p. 47). Stravinsky (1936) himself argued that: