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Material memories are not only visually apprehended but can also be sonic. What happens when police bodies, material memories that have lodged in them the conservatism of a law enforcement past and present, utter the sonic material memories of romantic tunes? And how might such a combination work in the interests of the maintenance of state power? Following Qureshi’s (2000, 2002) insights into the relationship of music to power, this book, in teasing out the relationship between emotional musical discourse and power, focuses on and argues for the effectiveness of nuanced forms of power, wielded via emotional and musical means. As Qureshi (2002) notes, the forms of power marshalled to maintain state power are subtle and in this case take musical and emotional forms, rather than, or at least as well as, the more Weberian mainstays of evident power and prestige. But why is music so effective and so frequently involved in the exercise of coercing people into the relationships of power? According to many theoreticians, as well as the Grayville police, the answer begins with the capacity of music to forge connections between persons.
Musical connectivity has been primarily understood in the terms of intersubjectivity, and in the terms of relationships between performer and audience bodies. It was in 1951 that Alfred Schutz penned Making Music Together in which he described the ‘mutual tuning in relationship’ that he considered took place between people making music together. This happens, said Schutz, when each person engaged in the act of making music together shares of the other’s flux of experiences in so-called inner time. It is the process of sharing in the flux of experience that subjectivity becomes intersubjectivity, and it is intersubjectivity that Schutz saw as the remedy to the impasse of the objective/subjective divide. But Schutz’s idea about the flux of experience in inner time went further than attempting to account for the experiences of musicians mutually ‘tuning in’ to each other; audiences, in Schutz’s view, also participated in intersubjective musical experience. And music was not the only circumstance in which subjectivity could be shared. Schutz used the musical implications of mutual tuning in rather metaphorically and understood that intersubjectivity was a feature of all human activity involving others: dancing, making love, marching—some of the very activities I explore in this book.