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extending bodily capacities. There, too, di erent types of music enable di erent relocations and levels of awareness, heightening and suppressing bodily energies and capacities, modes of attention and feeling. In the examples where actors used music to facilitate concentration, to vent unpleasant emotions, to manage and modulate emotional states, and to relive past emotional states, we can see music getting into action in ways that elide conscious reflection. In the retail realm, where music is used to instigate modes of orienting to goods, actors also enter into musical moods and rhythms. In these examples, music is much more than a model, much more than an object upon which to reflect and from which to get ideas or take inspiration. Rather, music can be seen to place in the foreground of perception an ongoing, physical and material ‘way of happening’ into which actors may slip, fall, acquiesce. This passing over into music, this musical mediation of action, is often observable, often known to self as a feeling or energy state. It is also a local phenomenon, something that occurs in the here and now of action’s flux, as actors interact with music’s presence in an environment or social space. This aspect of music illuminates the body as an entity configured in relation to its mate- rial-cultural environment. It speaks directly to medical and physiological concerns.

Musical power and its mechanisms

There is little evidence in favour of a behaviourist conception of music’s powers in respect to agency, though, as discussed in chapter 2, it is perhaps to be expected that certain, to some degree predictable, associations between music and action have come to be established and maintained to varying degrees. Arguments such as those advanced by Aristotle or the Parents’ Music Resource Centre, that certain melodies are ‘conducive to virtue’ or destructive of well-being are non-explanatory; they do not o er any account for the mechanisms through which music comes to produce its alleged e ects. On its own, music has no more power to make things happen than does kindling to produce combustion. In both cases, certain catalytic processes need to occur. Theorizing the catalyst that conjoins music and human being is, however, no easy task.

One entry to this topic can be found via the concepts of embodied awareness and latching, as described in chapter 4. These terms were used in relation to non-cognitive, non-conscious, embodied engagement with music that is the first step to becoming a musically enlisted, musically animated agent. Latching, which is a kind of musical version of Callon’s interessement (1986), is always a local process; it occurs in relation to music as it is encountered in the here and now of social life. The simplest

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example of such latching involves movement to music, whether toe tapping or finger snapping, or more complex movement styles that merge into what we would normally refer to as dance. In these examples, the body actually engages in movements that are organized in relation to, and in some way homologous with, music’s properties, its ways of happening, such as tempo, rhythm or gestural devices, and so becomes entrained with the music. Certainly, no music will reliably move all listeners. But for particular listeners and perhaps types of listeners, certain musical figures, devices, genres, forms or works may serve as triggers or latches that draw music’s recipients into the process of entrainment and hence into particular modes of agency. ‘Juicy chords’, cha-cha-cha rhythms, slow ‘smoochy’ vocals, biographically significant pieces, formal developments – features such as these were able to move particular actors in or on to particular states or trains of feeling, moving and acting. These features will be significant for actors; they will stand out in some way.

Tuning in to music also involves a kind of identification, a recognition, at a sympathetic and embodied level of the various shapes and textures of ‘happening’, of, as discussed above, the body in music (in Barthes’s terminology, the ‘grain of voice’ (1977)) and of the ways in which music handles itself. Perhaps music has the capacity to be socially powerful as a resource for agency because, as a way of happening that moves through time, it allows us, should we latch on to it, to engage in a kind of visceral communion with its perceived properties. We can imagine and ‘feel’, for example, the close-knit texture of dissonant polyphony, or the ‘wide-open spaces’ of fifths and fourths, or the ‘depressed’ character of the minor triad. Perhaps the clearest and most dramatic example of this process can be found in medical-based music therapy, where music is employed as a template for bio-feedback, where one may, in and through identification with particular musical properties, alter physiological and emotional states and bodily awareness. Under such circumstances, music can be said to reformulate parameters of embodied experience, to alter pulse or breathing, for example, to diminish awareness of pain. One’s pulse ‘becomes’ – is modified in relation to – that of the music; one’s pain ‘replaced’ by the state of music. Examples such as these, where music is employed deliberately so as to reformulate embodied agency, show music’s formative powers in relation to agency across the flux of social existence. Music’s recipients may not become the music per se, but they become music filtered through themselves and it is this that should be meant by the concept of music’s powers to mediate and to inform.

In all of these examples, articulations are made, within the web of daily existence, between musical procedures and social and social psychological ones; in all of these examples, music serves as a medium in, through

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and against which feeling, perception, attention, consciousness, action and embodied processes are produced. At times, actors may engage in this appropriation process with deliberation, knowing how certain music works on them from past experience. But at other times, music may take actors unaware. The matter of how music is distributed is thus inextricable from concerns about social control, from the matter of how a citizenry or a workforce is constituted, and from the issue of how desire may be manufactured.

Politics of music in the public space

In his pioneering history of background music, Joseph Lanza quotes Howard Martin, a researcher at the forefront of background music design, who, rather alarmingly, compares music to a drug (and so echoes Jimi Hendrix’s view that ‘music is . . . a safe kind of fix’):

He is among a new generation of thinkers interested in advancing the background music philosophy further: ‘People will start to look at music the way they used to look at dope. They will see music for its specific psychological e ects. Music has the power to change moods and attitudes. Using music with these applications makes more sense now with the time crunch everyone’s in.’ (1994:231)

Lanza goes on to report on recent trends in Japanese o ce music providers who have now expanded the concept of muzak to the total o ce environment – ‘Sense Business’ or ‘New O ce’ – dedicated to creating ‘the good human environment of sound, vision, and aroma’ (1994:231), reviews the dis-utopian objections to such a vision but concludes that:

A world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors (and those who take it for granted) could ever realize. This is because most of us, in our hearts, want a world tailored by Walt Disney’s ‘imagineers’, an ergonomical ‘Main Street U.S.A’, where the buildings never make you feel too small, where the act of paying admission is tantamount to a screen-test – and where the music never stops. (1994:233)

In this passage, Lanza glosses over a key issue, one that lies at the heart of why music is, more than ever, a topic for sociology. If music is a medium for the construction of social reality, then control over the distribution of the musical resources in and through which we are configured as agents is increasingly politicized and the movements, such as Pipedown in the United Kingdom, against piped background music, have been spawned in reaction to what is perceived as the commercial dominance of the public sonic sphere.

At issue here is the matter of consciousness itself and how actors come to connect with the musical resources which are agency’s building

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materials and how this process transpires across a variety of social scenes and settings. There is a significant di erence between employing music that one makes oneself (performing or composing) for this purpose and employing music that just happens to occupy a social setting; that di erence consists of the degree to which one may negotiate the aesthetic parameters of action. As was described above, there are times when the ability to control one’s aesthetic environment is crucial to individuals – in intimate settings, at times of stress, to a ord concentration, to vent aggression, to avoid painful music. To the extent that music can be seen to get into or inform subjectivity and action, then, the issue of aesthetic control and its relation to the constitution of agency is serious, particularly as organizations and marketeers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their deployment of music. Further explorations of music as it is used and deployed in daily life in relation to agency’s configuration will only serve to highlight what Adorno, and the Greek philosophers, regarded as a fundamental matter in relation to the polis, the citizen and the configuration of consciousness; namely, that music is much more than a decorative art; that it is a powerful medium of social order. Conceived in this way, and documented through empirical research, music’s presence is clearly political, in every sense that the political can be conceived.