This special issue focuses on the intersection of popular music and the notion of magic, offering a small but hopefully precise and enlightening cross-section of the many and various ways in which musicians, audiences and critics apply this notion to popular songs and music events. The term ‘magic’, in its adjectival or noun form, is often used as a catch-all synonym for admiration, creativity or success, and many studies have already insisted upon the ‘magic’ capacity of a performer to leave their audience spellbound (e.g. Looseley Reference Looseley2015, p. 116 on Edith Piaf; Nancy Guy Reference Guy2015 on Beverly Sills; there are too many to cite). This issue focuses rather less on the perceived magic (aura) of individual artists and more on the compositional and discursive processes that generate rare and intense connections between humans, and which practioners qualify as ‘magic’. Whether the term invokes a presumably lost sense of spirituality, a sense of intellectual bafflement, or yet something else, it hides assumptions and values that we propose to unravel.
Music and magic – a long and troubled history
There are many known historical links between music and magic since at least the Antiquity. Joscelyn Godwin's Reference Godwin1987 anthology still provides a useful survey of such connections, starting with the theory of ‘the music of the spheres’ or universal harmony (harmonia mundi). According to this theory, a universal system of coherence exists between the celestial and the human worlds, and as the planets’ rotation produces musical tones, so human souls resonate in harmony with what is around them.Footnote 1 Here, music provides a metaphor as well as a structure for understanding the analogy between the two worlds, and what is ‘magic’ about this theory is that outwardly different and distinct objects (a planet, a man, a soul, a crop) are thought to have an influence upon one another at a remove (Godwin Reference Godwin1987, p. 10). In the medieval period, God was believed to be at the origin of such patterns, but in 16th- and 17th-century Western Europe, with the early development of what came to be called ‘modern’ science, conflicts started to emerge among theorists about the value of ‘natural magic’, or the benefits of considering the world as ‘magically’ interlocked in a series of harmonious principles. Isaac Newton is one of the first scientists to, on the one hand, stay influenced by the theory of harmonia mundi, while on the other distancing himself from it when proposing mathematical formulae deduced from experience to explain existing relationships between sound waves, light, air and electricity (Gouk Reference Gouk2017 p. 36).
From the Early Modern period onwards, while men have continued to try and comprehend their place in, and connection with, their natural environment, older conceptions of magic have become gradually relegated to ‘entirely misunderstood hocus pocus’ (Henry Reference Henry2001; also Gouk Reference Gouk1999). This misunderstanding was compounded by widespread accusations of witchcraft, peaking in the 17th century across Russia, Western Europe and the United States, when any social misdemeanour could be interpreted as irreligious magic by accusers, thereby turning ‘magic’ into any number of legally available crimes (Bailey Reference Bailey2014; Huxley Reference Huxley1952; Kivelson Reference Kivelson2013). As modern music and acoustic science took shape, with a huge body of work published in the 19th century and since, so magic has become a byword for irrational, unscientific, as well as rare and unexplainable, phenomena. A Modernist binary now exists that artificially separates two different, yet one time overlapping, modes of knowledge of the world, and this division, for good and for bad, still shapes our understanding of both music and magic today.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the notion of magic became opposed to rational thinking and to a dominant, supposedly ‘scientific’ form of normality, the Romantics and their many avant-garde heirs often considered magic as a positive term, a welcome disruption of constraints or routine. Many musicians have expressed the view that certain kinds of music, thanks to their ‘magical’ properties of vibration in analogy with matter (human or otherwise), could grant a privileged access to ‘higher realities’, to ‘the world of the pure Imagination’, to ‘marvels and mysteries’; that music could reach, in the words of Robert Schuman, to ‘the Beyond’, and in those of Karlheinz Stockhausen, to ‘the other side’ (respectively Godwin Reference Godwin1987, pp. 15, 227, 230, 233 and 290). Today, many popular musicians and popular music fans reproduce this mystical understanding of the magic properties of music.
However, for many an influential thinker of the 20th century, from Sigmund Freud to Roland Barthes, magic has mainly been treated with contempt and suspicion as a form of intellectual laziness, psychological delusion or political docility. Essentially, the notion of magic identifies the perception that something or someone can have an influence upon another subject or object, without direct, visible or explainable contact. For Sigmund Freud, writing in Totem and Taboo in 1913, magic is a set of instructions or language that primitive men, young children and neurotics mobilise when they are confident that they can control the world – when they believe that their acts can, by a process of imitation, influence other persons or things. Magic, in this sense, identifies an immense belief in the power of one's wishes (Freud Reference Freud1975, p. 83). It refers to ‘the omnipotence of thought’ (p. 85), to ‘an unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world’ (p. 89). For Freud, for whom science and reason start when one accepts that the world is unknown (p. 90), such belief in magic, as well as in confidence and causality, is delusional.
Writing from the Leftist perspective of a sociologist, Roland Barthes (Reference Barthes1957) too finds a belief in, and acceptance of, magic, delusional today. Setting his analysis of cultural ‘mythologies’ in an Adornian, anti-capitalist framework, Barthes considers that contemporary publicists (and consumers) endow the goods they sell (and buy) with magical properties, attributing to them special powers unconnected to the objects per se. Thus buying a Citroën DS car, whose name is a homophone of the French word for ‘Goddess’ (déesse), allows the consumer to experience a feeling of smooth and shiny perfection, a sense of control over matter, movement and speed. Like the myths of the Antiquity, contemporary advertisements provide magical shelters for consumers: they give products a final, fixed and preferably ‘smooth’ meaning; they make consumers believe in the mastery of supernatural qualities, in the intelligibility of the world around them (Barthes Reference Barthes1957, pp. 18, 151 and 241).
For the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus, music could be defined as an enchantment and ‘a form of sorcery that raises no question’, a magical occurrence that fulfils the observer in no need of an explanation (in Godwin Reference Godwin1987, p. 22). In contrast, the same observation that magic ‘raises no question’ is a major intellectual weakness for someone like Barthes. The notion of magic, which he chronically opposes to terms like ‘reason’, ‘depth’ and ‘agency’, is for him used in the (usually capitalist and bourgeois) interest of depoliticising language, of shutting down people's critical faculties (e.g. p. 241). For Barthes doesn't want to transcend the Self or to forget how complex the world is, and doesn't want consumer goods to make you believe that you can, or should do so. He wants to confront social insufficiencies politically and critically, and to keep the mind alert to dissonances and asperities, famously by paying attention to the voice. For Barthes, this means deconstructing myths, and keeping magic at bay.
The problem with magic, then, is that it implies one's trust in, or acceptance of, order, determinism and causality. Whereas science builds upon hypotheses and theories, magic cannot cope with doubt (Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1961, p. 18). Consequently, those who do rate magic express a sense of satisfaction with what they perceive as a connection between two apparently distinct, separate or distant phenomena (such as between a car and one's power; between a song and one's emotion). Those who rate magic may also find pleasure in not knowing for sure how that connection happened. They are satisfied with, and sometimes awed by, the impossibility or irrelevance of explaining what they experience.Footnote 2 Turning to the vocabulary of magic thus provides, for them, an immediate sense of satisfaction, a liberation from perplexity, and generally provides a form of social stability that has its own merit (Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss1961).
As Freud (Reference Freud1975, p. 95) acknowledges, a belief in magic remains widespread in the Western world despite it being deprived of animism, and that is because ‘there is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material’. And so it is not just children, neurotics and savages who see magic around and possibly in them, but also artists and their potentially limitless public – all of us, really. For, says Freud,
Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects – thanks to artistic illusion – just as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the ‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. (Freud Reference Freud1975 p. 90)
Since art is everywhere and necessary to our societies, so is magic. And even if the word ‘magic’ reveals a certain poverty of language, being a mixed bag of multiple meanings, the notion encapsulates a host of perceived connections between art and oneself, and between oneself and others. Our special issue seeks to ‘speak with justice’ of this perception.
This special issue
When we released our call for papers for this issue, we did not anticipate that all our contributors would treat magic ‘positively’. We expected that some, like Freud or Barthes, would observe its occurrences in popular music discourse and practice, and stress its many shortcomings, dismiss its intellectual shallowness, or criticise its linguistic emptiness. Yet out of the more than 50 abstracts we received, and in the handful of authors we ultimately selected for their high level of precision, complementarity with one another, and originality in treating the subject, all opted to consider magic not only as a widespread notion, but also as a welcome and useful one in many ways. As a result, ‘magic’ in this special issue is mainly understood as a positive capacity to effect change; as such, it has little to do with an awareness or belief in occult forces. Rather, it is a term preferred against others (such as ‘coincidence’, ‘charlantanry’, ‘strange’ or ‘ominous’) to identify moments of rare, intense and direct interactions between individuals thanks to the binding power of music.Footnote 3 Magic is, in this sense, understood as a perfectly natural and plausible, and not supernatural, experience, even if its intensity and rarity in one's life makes it extra-ordinary.
Opening up this collection, Zachary Loeffler helpfully proposes various categories with which to understand the ubiquity of the notion of magic in 20th-century music discourse, especially in record and performance reviews. These include the capacity of music to connect isolated individuals, to provide intense emotions, to articulate one's desire to return to a presumably rawer time when experiences (including musical ones) were possibly more mysterious, and more satisfactory as such. Loeffler weaves these interpretations together through a critique of Max Weber's often misinterpreted theory of disenchantment, first formulated in 1918. Observing that ‘disenchantment’ literally means ‘songlessness’, Loeffler demonstrates that, like Weber did argue in fact, our modern and Western society is far from being devoid of ‘enchantment’, but rather saturated with songs and music which provide opportunities for connections between humans in still powerful, uplifting and transformative ways. In effect, the polyvalence of the notion of magic fills a gap in language by allowing the user to name any type of ‘special’ experience triggered by music, any moment when an alternative to our supposedly oppressive ‘reality’ arises. Because magic is, in this sense, akin to the notion of utopia, Loeffler makes the powerful conclusion that the widespread recognition of the occurrence of magic (at least in popular music discourse) reveals our common desire for social connections, and for kindness towards one another. Whenever the word ‘magic’ is uttered, the speaker abandons their individuality, leaves narcissism aside, and finds a welcome space for respite and strength in what is otherwise perceived to be a cynical and consumer-focused world.Footnote 4
Using a narrower, specific understanding of magic as performance or stage magic, Michail Exarchos compares the practice of stage magicians with that of sample-based composers in hip-hop. Both, he argues, are craftspeople who effect a degree of control over matter (control over the materiality of sound in the musician's case), and both have a playful attitude towards performance in willingly exposing certain tricks to the audience, only to retain the capacity to disguise others, and thus to surprise. Just as Thomas Edison was considered a ‘wizard’ for his ability to conjure the voices of absent bodies with his sound-recording machine, so musicians and, specifically, sample-based composers in the recording studio, can manipulate sounds that are simultaneously ‘there’ and ‘not there’, creating something out of seemingly nothing (for instance in a duet with a long-dead artist). Further, Exarchos ponders the pleasure that both stage magic audiences and music audiences find in being fed such an illusion. To experience magic, he argues, is to experience the impossible and to be satisfied with that illusion. As a result, and borrowing the notion of ‘alief’ (or non-belief) from Szábo Gendler and Jason Leddington, Exarchos contends that the experience of magic involves a conflict of belief, a form of cognitive dissonance on the part of the audience, whereby one observes something without endorsing it, or is no longer convinced by the knowledge they hold of that thing. In other words, a ‘magic’ experience amounts to enjoying one's own sense of bafflement, and sample-based music provides plenty of evidence of precisely that kind of pleasure.Footnote 5
Darci Sprengel unpacks the notion of magic through an analysis of DIY musicians in post-revolutionary (post-2011) Egypt. The young artists she has interviewed experience music subconsciously, embodying ‘magic’ precisely because of their affective state. Although the ineffable has become marginalised in contemporary Egypt (owing to modernisation in the West and/or in Egypt), and despite everyday politics failing to bring about promises of change, DIY music remains both ‘magical’ and ‘revolutionary’ for its practioners. Convincingly, Sprengel investigates this perception by arguing that music provides an alternative model of politics in today's Egypt, capable of entwining a number of ideologies and belief systems while at the same time disguising the very relationships of power that they enact. Music listening, too, occurs as a magical alternative to ordinary politics: by giving agency to the listener, music permits opportunities for advancing the needs of contemporary realities and for staking certain claims to power, even in the face of overwhelming powerlessness. Magic, therefore, is not a utopian ideal in Sprengel's analysis, but rather a tool for reinterpreting and explaining the complexities of revolution in a struggling, politically unstable society.
Pedro Silva Marra and Felipe Trotta analyse the workings of magic within the domain of football chanting, primarily (but not exclusively) in Brazil, demonstrating that the sonic qualities of chanting enable a sense of power and influence. Football supporters are introduced as magicians, their chants transforming them from passive spectators into active architects in a football win – or loss. The football stadium, likewise, is described as a sanctified space, where the magicians – the fans, as well as players and club managers – perform certain rites, and stage their positions of devotion or antipathy. As Marra and Trotta argue, it is the act of chanting that enables supporters to assume ritualised control over a game. Chanting endows them with the magical perception to influence reality at their command or want. Their chant becomes a self-empowering social process which, if successful (in the case of a goal), is able to manoeuvre perceived truths.
Erin Sweeney Smith explores the relationship between magic, Paganism and popular music by raising important questions about the role of popular culture in alternative religious and spiritual identities and practices. She indicates not only the ways in which Paganism carries strategies of magic, but also how popular music can adopt such strategies to attract both mainstream and Pagan audiences. Bat for Lashes and Florence + The Machine are offered as support. Both bands, she argues, use their cover artwork, song lyrics, music videos and stage productions to evoke the vibrancy of nature, mythology and mysticism. By tapping into fantastical, primal worlds, steeped in Pagan-inspired symbols and stories, the two bands represent popular music's on-going referencing of diverse ideological and alternative spiritual resources. Yet Sweeney Smith's close analysis also reveals the imbalances that emerge when the widespread appeal of magic is reproduced and marketed for commercial gain in songs. As such, Sweeney Smith presses us to acknowledge the interconnection of magic, Paganism and popular music, while remaining alert to their contradictions.Footnote 6
Finally, broadly conceptualising magic as an alchemical or transformative process, Owen Coggins develops the idea that certain kinds of music allow listeners to engage in a self-directed process of wellbeing, a spiritual path to development and personal empowerment. Surprisingly, he compares New Age music with extreme metal or ‘doom’ music, arguing that both are magic by virtue of being obscured by elite popular music tastes. Although the two genres take opposite directions when fetishising cleanliness (New Age) and dirt (metal), both are defined by their critics and fans as viable alternatives to a supposedly oppressive social order, understood as either (and respectively) overly chaotic or bland. For listeners then, both New Age and doom metal share a potentially disruptive power which they qualify as ‘magic’, and which enables them to experience an alternative sense of reality and of the self.
Together, these articles update our knowledge and understanding of the centrality of perceptions of magic in contemporary music culture. They demonstrate that magic is conceptualised in diverse yet compatible ways across a range of music genres (from opera and ‘classical’ music to pop, rock, metal, New Age and chanting), and across geographical settings whether they are located in the ‘West’ or not (from North America to Brazil, from the UK and Ukraine to Egypt and beyond). Taken together, these articles also provide an extensive and extremely useful bibliography on the subject, to which must be added the book review, in this volume, written by Giorgios Tsiris of Owen Coggins's recent monograph on mysticism in drone metal. Ultimately, it is in their multiple echoes and complementarity that these articles activate the magic principle of mutual influence. We hope that by reading them you will, too, be part of that affective and critical web.
