On Affect in Millennial History’s Musical Journalism

On Affect in Millennial History’s Musical Journalism

This research essay was written by Sofia Chionidou, as the research component of her internship with Gaudeamus Music Festival, in the context of her studies in the MA Arts and Society at Utrecht University.

This research was initiated in the context of a festival dedicated to innovation in contemporary music, happening in the midst of an era of transgressing boundaries, both in academia and in the arts. In the field of the humanities, boundaries are being crossed between academic disciplines, between the concepts of the academic mind and the non-academic body, between artistic practices and research, and more. Part of these transgressions is the introduction of the notion of affect as a critical tool in the humanities. Affects can be roughly defined as the embodied, nonlinguistic sensations which underlie all subjective experience. The introduction of affect theory to the disciplines of sociology and history, in particular, has brought enriched with emotions and bodily feelings accounts to what was up till now considered a very rigid and disembodied academic field. On the other hand, artistic practices nowadays are becoming increasingly involved with academic discourses and research, thus introducing the latter to the realm of the aesthetic.

The podcast Millennial History by Andrea Voets, as well as the artistic practice of musical journalism that she has invented, are a direct result of the above-mentioned phenomena.

Musical journalism, according to Voets, is a combination of in-depth social journalism and layers of original music, which aims to address what she calls emotional blind spots in society. By emotional blind spots she refers to social issues that affect people’s lives greatly, often in a negative way, but which cannot be easily detected. In the case of Millennial History, this takes the form of a series of podcasts which address “impactful moments in recent European history through the eyes of millennials who were there when they happened” (“About Us - Millennial History” n.d.). This series of podcasts questions the widespread notion of millennials as a spoiled generation that has had an untroubled life. To create it, Voets conducted interviews with millennials who experienced significant historical events during their childhood, discussing the way they perceived them and how these events shaped their lives thereafter. Following that, she and her collaborator and composer, Luke Deane, combined excerpts of the interviews with multiple layers of music, to “carry the listener through and enable these bold and meaningful talks” (ibid).

Thus, it is made evident that Voets’ practice of musical journalism combines historical and sociological elements with the artistic creation of sound and music. This research focuses on questioning how her practice bridges the affective dimensions of history and sociology and the affective capacities of sound in the case of the Millennial History podcast series. In the process of answering this, I question how these academic disciplines and sonic practices have incorporated affect theory, how Voets combines elements of history and sociology with her musical practice in the case of Millennial History and, finally, how musical journalism in this case showcases the

affective capacities of art. On a practical level, this research process entails the first-hand listening of the podcast series, the study of published material on both Millennial History and, generally, musical journalism, as well as a discussion with Andrea Voets, focused on the process of creating the podcasts, their music and sound design and the motivation behind her artistic choices.

To outline this essay, this introduction is followed by a brief presentation of affect theory, its incorporation in the humanities and its relation to sound. Next, a description and analysis of the Millennial History podcast is presented, highlighting the interviewing and music making parts of the creative process. This is followed by a reflection on the affective and expressive capacities of artistic works, with regard to their impact on the audience, especially in socio-political terms.

Finally, this essay concludes with a reflection on this research approach and suggestions for its expansion.

Theoretical Framework Affect theory is an approach to social phenomena which emphasizes their non-linguistic or noncognitive aspects. The term affect has always been ambiguous. Borrowed from the field of psychology, where affect refers to “the qualitative expression of our drives’ energy and variations” (Hemmings 2005, 551) that underlies our subjective experience, affect has been defined and developed in two different directions upon its introduction to the humanities. The first direction, elaborated in the works of Gilles Deleuze and then Brian Massumi, views affect as a primary bodily sensation, distinctive of “the unpredictable autonomy of the body’s encounter with the event” (ibid). The other line of thought in affect has been elaborated mainly by Silvan Tomkins and then Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, who see affect as “the felt emotional textures structuring our embodied experience” (Schaefer 2019,1). While the first approach focuses on the autonomy of affect, emphasizing its unpredictable and often inexplicable nature, the second foregrounds affect’s intersubjectivity and social significance. Sedwick presents affect as the key to a textured understanding of the intertwinement of individuality and community, as a qualitative response to the inability of quantitative approaches and textual analysis to “account for the fullest resonance of the social world we wish to understand” (Hemmings 2005,548).

As a result, affect has been largely incorporated in the studies of social phenomena, as a means of understanding experience in a non-representational way. Two important precursors to the affective turn, which has been taking place in the humanities since the 1990s, have been the focus on the body, particularly within feminist theory, as well as the exploration of emotions, within queer theory in principle (Ticineto Clough and Halley 2007, Foreword). Both branches of affect theory have been employed in the critical analysis of social phenomena. An extensive collection of such studies can be found in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley’s book, The Affective Turn (2007), which brings together a collection of essays from the fields of sociology, women’s studies and cultural studies that employ affectivity as a critical tool, showcasing the vast range of research in this area. The study of affect was also introduced in the field of history, this

time a while later than in the social sciences (Lewis 2020, 122). Many historians have researched affect in the sense of emotion, to the point of creating a new field, the “history of emotions” 1.

The academic study of an ambiguous concept such as affect is not straightforward. As Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage poignantly note in the introduction of their book Affective Methodologies, it is a huge challenge to “identify affective processes and discuss their social consequences [...] if affect is bodily fleeting and immaterial and always in between entities or nods” (Knudsen and Stage 2015, 2). Most affective methodologies, as a result, have focused on ways to pursue affective research, to formulate research questions, to generate relevant data and identify the traces of research processes in empirical material (ibid, 3). On the contrary, they have not elaborated on ways to convey the affective social, historical or cultural dimensions of the phenomena which are studied. As a rule, academic research, including affective types of research, are expressed in writing. And while there have been explorations with regard to the writing style of academic texts, as in the case of autoethnography2, media other than text, which could evoke affect in richer ways, are not being extensively employed.

This does not signify that there has not been an extensive study of media and their affective capacities. Particularly in the field of art, there have been numerous studies on the affective qualities of different media 3. Due to the scope of this research, I will briefly touch upon the affective study of sound as a medium. While the affective turn might have given a new rise in the combined study of affect and music, this relation has been prevalent in the analysis of music since antiquity (Thompson and Biddle 2013, 12). As Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle mention in the introduction of Sound, Music, Affect (2013), “sound has an integral role in shaping the affective contours of our day-to-day lives” (ibid, 10). In fact, we use music consciously for its affective capacities, to create a specific moods or atmospheres. In the above-mentioned publication, numerous essays have been gathered which analyse the affective capacities of sound and music, addressing both the embodied and social elements these entail. Affect is now being used as a hermeneutic strategy for the analysis of music as something else than a representation or semantic text. It addresses the question of what music does, rather than what music means (ibid, 19).

Relevant writers and books are: Massey, Douglas S. 2002. “A Brief History of Human Society: The Origin and Role of Emotion in Social Life: 2001 Presidential Address.” American Sociological Review 67 (1): 1. https://doi.org/10.2307/3088931. , Plamper, Jan. 2017. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Translated by Keith Tribe. Emotions in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , Stearns, Peter N. 2017. Shame: A Brief History.

1st ed. University of Illinois Press. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252041402.001.0001.

2 For an elaboration of the writing style of evocative narrative and its use in autoethnography, see: Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. 2011. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 36 (4 (138)): 273–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23032294. , Ellis, Carolyn, and Art Bochner. 2000. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research (2nd Ed.), January, 733–68. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/91.

3 Some examples are: Breger, Claudia. 2020. Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. , Campt, Tina M. 2019. “The Visual Frequency of Black Life.” Social Text 37 (3): 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-758503. , Vila, Pablo, ed. 2017. Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America. Music, Culture, and Identity in Latin America. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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Millennial History Andrea Voets defines herself as the world’s only musical journalist. She is the artistic director of Resonate Productions, “a Dutch cultural foundation (with the) aim is to create, perform and promote all outings of ‘musical journalism’”(“About - Resonate Productions” n.d.). She has a background in classical music (harp) and philosophy. Voets invented her own practice of musical journalism as a personal response to the canonical setting of music performance, wishing to shift the focus from the performer (her) to a greater cause. In the case of musical journalism, this cause lies in the social issues which are revealed through the testimonies of her interviewees.

Identifying the most appropriate format for each issue discussed, musical journalism usually takes on the form of performances, and sometimes of podcasts, films, workshops or combinations of them. However, it always entails a combination of interviews and layers of original music, with the aim of unearthing social issues which are not being explicitly addressed in the public sphere.

Millennial History, is a series of eight musical journalism podcasts, created in the period between 2017 and 2022 by Andrea Voets and Luke Deane. The Mafia in Sicily, the Children of the Decree 4, the Troubles in Ireland and the German reunification after the fall of the wall make up the themes of the podcast episodes. Millennial History shares creative insights into the “deep stories” of the interviewed millennials relating to the major historical events they experienced. Voets borrows the concept of “deep story” from sociologist Arlie Hochschild, to refer to the narrative of a situation as it was felt by a person (Hochschild 2016, 22). By foregrounding the interviewees’ “deep stories”, Voets and her collaborators bring to life these historical events in a personal, emotional and deeply political way. Summarizing the core of the podcast series, Voets locates Millennial History’s premise in the following sentence, starting with a quote from interviewee Michael from Ireland: “You need to overcome yourself and overcome an impossible situation in order to create something entirely new” and, in order to do that, we will fight for each other with lots of love and care” (Andrea Voets, personal communication, 17 June, 2023).

To identify how musical journalism in Millennial History expresses affective dimensions of history and sociology, we need to look into its creative process and its two main elements: the interview process and the musical curation.

Voets’ selection of the interviewees and conduction of the interviews was anthropocentric. Even in the cases where the topic was chosen before the interviewee, her interview approach was focused on their subjective experience of the relevant historical event as a part of their childhood and the way they were shaped by it. According to her, it was very important that these conversations were open-ended, in terms of both content and duration, creating the space for a deep personal conversation without any agenda. The above, as well as the fact that the interviewees came from her wider social circle, testify for her personal investment in the interview process.

Throughout the interviews, Voets’ approach is centered around the discovery of the interviewees’ “deep stories”. It is not coincidental that this term was coined by Arlie Hochschild,

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This refers to the generation of children born in Romania due to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decree against abortion.

an academic who has studied the sociology of emotions throughout her career 5. In her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Hochschild introduced the concept of “deep story” to study the complex of emotions which underlined the political stance of a right-wing community in Louisiana. Voets, in her adoption of the term and its connotations, uses it to highlight the validity of the subjective emotional experience of the interviewee and bring it to the fore, leaving traditional sociological and historical analyses in the background.

The interview process was followed by the development of sound and music for the podcast. Part of the music heard during the podcasts is created by Luke Deane and Andrea Voets. However, a big part of the music of Millennial History was donated to the artistic team by musicians coming from the same areas as the interviewees, and who have a shared experience and conception of the historical event discussed. Part of the creation was also the processing of the interviews, reducing their length from 40 hours in total to 4 hours of podcasts. After hearing the interview material again and again, detecting and organizing the themes in it, the editing process and the choice of segments or quotes of an interview which would structure the corresponding episode were completed. They were then combined with the layers of music, in a way that the testimonies and music interchangeably prevail in the listening experience of the podcast. In many ways the relation of music and spoken word resembles the sound design of a movie, in which the sonic element is used to evoke a certain mood. However, in the case of Millennial History, music and spoken word attain an equal status, and are intertwined in a way which makes one indispensable to the other.

The way the music and sound design was executed relied on Voets and Deane’s artistic decisions.

While musical journalism entails heavy research and is developed in many stages through a long line of well-thought decisions, the creative process does not rely on logic for its development, as much as on affective judgements. The background on music and composition that Voets and Deane respectively have, enables the manipulation of sound in order to foreground the testimonies’ emotional, subliminal qualities and to support the heavy topics presented in them.

Presenting the creative process of the series, Voets explains: “Music is very helpful because we are not proving a point (or) making a logical line of arguments. For you (the interviewee), this was reality. (It is up to us to) honor that experience and transform it into something new.” (Behind the Scenes 2022, 15:15, edited). This way, through music, Millennial History invites the audience, not only to learn about the interviewees and their “deep stories”, but to also identify with them and share their experience.

Overall, the creative process of musical journalism behind the Millennial History podcast series includes open-ended interviews, focused on the interviewees’ “deep stories”, followed by the music creation and assembly, and, then, the sound design, combining testimonies and music.

This process is research-heavy, elaborate and systematic, yet it does not attempt to build logical argumentation. It is focused on the emotional dimensions of the testimonies and expressed through the affective qualities of music and sound. The transition between the two is subjective and relies on the musical expertise of the creative team. Its result is a moving sonic experience, See: Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1975. “The Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities.” Sociological Inquiry 45 (2–3): 280–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1975.tb00339.x.

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which merges the interview segments and the music on equal terms, putting to use the affective capacities of sound and music mentioned in the Theoretical Framework.

Art’s Affective Capacities In his seminal article, “The Aesthetics of Affect” (2001), art theorist and practitioner Simon O’ Sullivan builds his argument on the affective nature of artworks. He identifies the aesthetic as the domain of artworks, and interprets it through the notion of affect. One of his points which is relevant to the study of musical journalism in Millennial History, is the conception of affect as an effect or happening rather than writing, opposing the deconstructive approach to the analysis of artworks as cultural texts (O’ Sullivan 2001, 127). With this switch to doing instead of knowing, O’ Sullivan frames art’s main function as the transformation of “our sense of ‘selves’ and notions of the world” (ibid, 128). Therefore, he showcases the capacity of art to provoke social change and to move us “beyond the already familiar (the human), precisely a kind of overcoming” (ibid, 129). Touching upon his theoretical elaboration, I recognize in his writings the additional nondiscursive element of the recent historical events portrayed in Millennial History, attained through their transformation into an artwork. What is more, O’ Sullivan’s analysis fits the artwork’s affective ability, not to inform its audience of these historical events, transferring the relevant knowledge, but to move the audience to a new affective understanding of them. As he eloquently puts it, “you cannot read affects, you can only experience them” (ibid, 126).

The study of affect within academia, then, arises as problematic. While affect has been incorporated as a subject of research in many academic disciplines, and relative methodologies have been introduced to enrich the forms and qualities of input this research has access to, there is still a gap in the discussion around the format of this research’s output. Addressing this gap, Ben Highmore, a Culture Studies academic, advocates for the further incorporation of aesthetics to the formulation and communication of research results in the humanities. He pinpoints the application of aesthetics in “freer” forms of writing which have started gaining prominence in the field, in order to match its “ambition and desire for a distinctive engagement with the world” (Highmore 2018,2). Despite his allusion to other forms of artistic expression, his argument still remains in the sphere of writing, proposing an aesthetic writing practice as “the best route to engaging with the world in the most direct and most material way” (ibid, 22).

Following the analysis of Millennial History, I locate its ability to bridge the affective dimensions of history and sociology and the affective capacity of sound in the space between the abovementioned discourses. These discourses are the capacity of artworks to transmit affects without changing their nature from happening to knowing, on the one hand, and the aesthetic negotiation of expressive tools for the humanities, on the other. Millennial History expresses the affective dimensions of recent European historical events through sound and music, using the methodological tool of “deep story” interviewing, found in the academic discipline of sociology, to access the testimonies’ affective qualities and the creative tool of music making and sound design to express them. Naturally, this proposition steers away from the logical and linguistic methods of academic research and is not expected to be perceived in its current context as epistemically valid. However, the question remains open, as to how far the limits of the

expressive means employed to present academic research will stretch from rigid academic writing forms, in their attempt to convey affect.

Reflections Due to limitations in the availability of other works and in the scope of this research, this study of musical journalism only looks into the case of the Millennial History podcast series. As already mentioned, musical journalism can take various forms, from performance and podcast to films or workshops. In fact, Millennial History itself already exists in the format of a multi-media performance, which combines all the different historical topics and corresponding testimonies.

The study of the podcast form, specifically, apart from the fact that it constitutes the original version of this artwork, has allowed this research to look into the affective qualities of sound as a medium, independently of the visual, performative and scenographic properties which the other formats entail.

On the other hand, these properties also have a strong affective influence on the audience which would be interesting to study. Further research could be conducted in the direction of a comparative analysis of the different formats of Millennial History, as a podcast series and as a performance, in order to trace how the different artistic tools can convey different affects to the audience. Furthermore, a systematic analysis of the different forms of musical journalism and other similar transdisciplinary 6 artistic practices could shed more light in the ways different artistic expressive means are used to convey different types of affects to their audience.

Reference List “About - Resonate Productions.” n.d. Accessed August 19, 2023. https://www.resonateproductions.com/Foundation.html.

“About Us Millennial History.” n.d.

Accessed https://www.millennialhistorypodcast.com/about-us.

August

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Hemmings, Clare. 2005. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19 (5): 548–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365473.

Highmore, Ben. 2018. “Aesthetic Matters: Writing and Cultural Studies.” Cultural Studies 32 (2): 240–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1298641.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Angern and Mourning on the American Right.

The New Press.

By this I refer to artistic practices that employ academic research methodologies or findings and express them through artistic means.

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https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uunl/detail.action?docID=4549514.

Knudsen, Britta T., and Carsten Stage, eds. 2015. Affective Methodologies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483195.

Lewis, Joanna. 2020. “Emotional Rescue: The Emotional Turn in the Study of History.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 51 (1): 121–29. https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01522.

O’ Sullivan, Simon. 2001. “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation.”

Angelaki 6 (3): 125–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987.

Schaefer, Donovan O. 2019. The Evolution of Affect Theory. ‫הארץ‬. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108765343.

Thompson, Marie, and Ian Biddle. 2013. “Introduction: Somewhere between the Signifying and the Sublime.” In Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle.

Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501382871.0006.

Ticineto Clough, Patricia, and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social.

Durham & London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30789-9_3.