Words are no more ornaments of thought than tears are ornaments of sadness or joy. (Stanley CavellFootnote 1)
For me, music is this magic acoustic element that makes perfectly rational people who have come to realize the unalterable fact that they are truly alone in the world somehow feel for fleeting moments that maybe they're not alone after all. (Billy JoelFootnote 2)
Words of magic have been an inconspicuous hallmark of music discourse in liberal-capitalist cultures since the turn of the 20th century, softly reverberating through all manner of their everyday music talk, from newspaper reviews and liner notes to Reddit posts and YouTube comments. For instance, a 2011 blogpost lauds the ‘spine-tingling magic’ of Beyoncé’s ‘world-class vibrato and trademark runs’.Footnote 3 A recent tweet by an English music therapist describes a ‘real magic moment at work’: ‘Shivers, tingles, can't describe it, but the power of music to connect us never ceases to amaze me’.Footnote 4 A 1976 obituary in the Chicago Tribune, a paper that has shown a healthy (but not atypical) predilection for the language of magic over the last century, extols the soprano Lotte Lehmann's ‘magical gift of communication’ – how ‘she becomes one with the music’, rendering her audience ‘spellbound’.Footnote 5 Movies like Music is Magic (1935) and There's Magic in Music (1941) celebrate music's redemptive power, its promise to emancipate listeners from whatever is miring their lives. A popular series of piano miniatures called The Magic of Music aims to, in the words of its author, inspire ‘that special feeling which occurs when a certain rhythm or a colorful harmony touches the heart of the player’.Footnote 6 A 1927 article in the North China Herald describes how ‘the magic of the [military] band’ makes ‘the feet of Shanghai … tramp in unison’.Footnote 7 MusoMagic, a corporate team-building workshop, claims it uses ‘the magic of song’ – ‘one of the most powerful and universal creative mediums’ – to ‘unif[y] people across age, culture, and distance’.Footnote 8 A Facebook community page called ‘Music is Magic’ rhymes, ‘Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest; heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul’.Footnote 9 And one of the almost 9000 Instagram posts hailing from all over the world that bear the hashtag #musicmagic includes this heartrending caption about music's ameliorative capacities amid conditions of scarcity impeding life's reproduction: ‘I went to a @thebandmosaic show and one of the songs really resonated with me and even tho i have completely isolated myself and lost my job and have been basically starving the past couple weeks while only eating beans and just giving into depression about to give up, i feel 5% better lol. Im still in the same life situation and i wanna die but i just feel a little better. #musicmagic’.Footnote 10
The literary historian Simon During has noted an explosion of the language of magic (‘magic’, ‘enchanting’, ‘bewitching’) in ‘popular culture’ around 1900, whereas the century before talk of art and magic in the West was affiliated with a more modest circle of ‘avant-garde’ artists and intellectuals turning away from the apostasies of the Enlightenment.Footnote 11 As the rich inventory above suggests, perhaps no tributary of ‘popular culture’ is now teeming with more words of magic than everyday conversations about music. After all, while associations of magic and many different types of media have been common since the early days of critical theory, music – celebrated since the late 19th century as the condition towards which ‘all art constantly aspires’, ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, ‘the art of arts’, intrinsically ethereal and imbued with ‘magical suggestiveness’ – is often lauded as ‘the strongest form of magic’ (an encomium the Twittersphere has surprisingly attributed to the provocative goth rocker Marilyn Manson).Footnote 12 This leads to the first of three mysteries: in light of During's observation, what does the surge and pervasiveness of words of magic in everyday music discourse from 1900 to the present reveal about how music has been experienced in this period? What are we to make of the fact that music commentators after 1900, many of whom see their lives as largely bereft of magic, so frequently turn to the language of magic to celebrate their musical experiences?
Some scholars have portrayed ‘magic’ as a highly subjective, almost private word – a term meaning something different to every individual and thus bearing no shared significance.Footnote 13 Others have assigned it a purely syntactic function, interpreting it as a placeholder with ‘zero symbolic value’ discharged in moments of tongue-tied befuddlement (when something is very difficult and thus inaccessible to a talker).Footnote 14 However, words of magic are also commonly said to convey something essential about the experience of music that cannot be communicated otherwise. Indeed, many lay listeners regard ‘magic’ as the ‘one’ or ‘only’ word through which their musical experiences can be expressed.Footnote 15 Considering the hashtag #musicismagic currently has about 20,000 mentions on Instagram while #musicissublime has none, it would seem that philosophy's traditional aesthetic categories are not (or are perhaps no longer) felt to be the principal means of fulfilling this task (‘love’ is a possible substitute for ‘magic’ that we will explore later). This brings me to a second but related mystery: if, as listeners contend, words of magic convey something essential about musical experience, then what exactly do they convey? Might their individual significations adumbrate some sensus communis?
The third and final mystery comes from the opening page of Gary Tomlinson’s Music in Renaissance Magic, where the musicologist informs his readers how infrequently the apparently erstwhile phenomenon of magic rears its head in their world: ‘We still hear, now and then, talk of the “magic of music”’ (italics mine).Footnote 16 I understand the adverb ‘still’ to indicate Tomlinson's sense of this talk's anteriority (perhaps his sense of its Romantic flavour) and the adverbial phrase ‘now and then’ to bespeak his apprehension that it is only occasionally heard in the book's present of 1993. If one accepts this reading and During's evidence of the proliferation of claims of musical magic since 1900, then Tomlinson's gambit can only be regarded as inaccurate. How might one explain how a scholar as discerning as Gary Tomlinson missed the staggering abundance of ‘magic’ in music discourse?
My approach to answering this three-fold mystery puts two contemporaneous archives into conversation: first, a diverse collection of everyday music discourse produced from the turn of the 20th century to the present, whose various component media, from newspaper reviews to Yahoo! Answers posts, have circulated and continue to circulate in disparate social worlds, documenting many different scenarios in which subjects of liberal-capitalist cultures use the word ‘magic’ to talk about music; and second, a coeval assortment of Weberian ‘disenchantment’ narratives that have wrestled with the fracturing of collectivity in ‘modernity’ through Neoplatonic and ‘primitive’ conceptions of magic. To briefly elaborate, around 1900 quickly expanding metropolitan newspapers – ‘the everyday transcribed’, as Maurice Blanchot once called such papers – first employed one or more full-time music critics, giving them far more column space than they ever had before.Footnote 17 Many of these critics couched their judgments in various forms related to the new genre of the personal essay, in which, according to Virginia Woolf, know-nothing music critics, spurred by growing access to education and mass printing, disseminated their ‘individual likes’ in the language of magic to homes across the world.Footnote 18 In other words, the turn of the 20th century witnessed the rise of what might be termed, in the parlance of so-called ordinary language philosophy, ordinary or everyday music discourse. Indeed, the roots of much of the social media cited above can be found here, in the emergence of mass-mediated publics of (mostly) non-elite listeners united by several commonalities: first, these listeners evidently enjoyed enough education, material resources and leisure time to write and read about the satisfactions of music; second, they shared a particular experience of music, exceeding any given musical event or object, that had to do with its unique effects on the sensorium and the attendant structural processes through and in which these effects came to be inculcated and articulated.
Along with changes in the ways people felt and talked about music, the turn of the 20th century also witnessed an ‘occult revival’ in Europe and the USA (especially among the experimental artists known as modernists),Footnote 19 as well as the rise of magic as a central object of study in the new academic disciplines of the social sciences.Footnote 20 Amid this vogue for magic, in 1918, the sociologist Max Weber put forward his enduring ‘disenchantment’ narrative, variations of which have been told by Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Starhawk, Charles Taylor and many others over the last century.Footnote 21 According to this influential narrative, we (the subjects of liberal-capitalist ‘modernity’, including those for whom life's bare necessities are not always certain) once lived in a magic world where everything was sensuously ‘welded’ together by virtue of the fact that an omnipresent supernatural force – pneuma, ether, spirit, mana – suffused all things, intimately linking them into a chain of occult correspondences in which they all ineluctably participated. However, owing to the alienating mechanisms of liberal-capitalist sociality, we now live in a magicless world where things feel oppressively disconnected. Nonetheless, magic persists in the ‘intimate’ and ‘personal’ realm of the aesthetic – ‘in pianissimo’, as Weber described this hushed domain of affective convergences – and especially in, at least according to some disenchantment narratives, music.Footnote 22 After all, ‘disenchantment’ literally means songlessness, a privation that of course only music can assuage.
The contemporaneity of my two archives – their joint emergence around 1900 and persistence from the heyday of industrial capitalism through the neoliberal present – offers the possibility of understanding claims of musical magic with some historical specificity. Talk of music often contains universalizing gestures, especially when magic is part of the discussion. Take the music historian Joscelyn Godwin, from the preface of his sourcebook on ‘music, mysticism, and magic’: ‘At the higher levels of music little changes: it is always the same vehicle for voyages to another world, the same revelation of divine and cosmic laws, the same powerful tool for self-transformation, as it was in ancient and even prehistoric times’.Footnote 23 As we will see, subjects in the extended historical moment I am tracking have good reasons for leaning on fantasies like Godwin's, which can provide a sense of continuity and a comforting ‘you are not alone’. Nonetheless, this paper endeavours to grasp the apparent explosion and continued profusion of claims of musical magic after 1900 in relation to their particular time and place.
One might suspect these two archives to be incompatible, perhaps imagining that a band of thinkers critical of capitalism would flatly reject everyday music discourse's ‘magic’, a term instrumentalized by the likes of Disney and McDonald's and carrying the strong scent of fetishization and reification. However, even Adorno, famous for his contempt of all things popular, wrote that to speak of ‘the magic of art’ is ‘trite’ and ‘cliché’, but also sort of ‘true’, at least with respect to the autonomous work. Adorno believed that the autonomous artwork's origins in ‘enchantment’ (Zauber in the original German) would never be destroyed by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and, furthermore, that this enchantment held the power to break the ‘spell’ (also Zauber in the original) that capitalism cast by ‘the overwhelming force of its spectacle and of commodity fetishism’.Footnote 24 Put differently, Adorno did not dismiss musical magic outright but instead distinguished between true/good magic and false/bad magic, that is, between the resistant magic of the autonomous work (of which Schoenberg's free atonal pieces were his prime musical exemplar) and the sort of disingenuous, consoling pleasure or ‘sensuous magic’ proffered by the culture industry so that the exploited might forget about their suffering long enough to endure more.Footnote 25 Notwithstanding Adorno's ethical commitment to a separate domain of existence where one might cultivate resistance to the violence of late capitalism, this essay does not adjudicate between authentic and spurious musical magic, which even in the hands of scrupulous dialecticians can lead to problematic binarisms (high vs. low, emancipatory vs. manipulative) that smack of the white patriarchal denigration of the feminized and racialized body.Footnote 26 Instead of judging good musical magic from bad, this essay seeks to understand the widespread perception that the whole of music is, in words often attributed to the late rocker Tom Petty, ‘the only real magic’ and, furthermore, to grasp what draws listeners back to this apprehension even if it harms them in the way Adorno suggests.Footnote 27
The talkers in my archives sometimes say that music is like magic, but they also employ a number of collocations that complicate this analogical relationship, such as the curiously pervasive ‘music magic’ (also hyphenated ‘music-magic’) and ‘musical magic’.Footnote 28 These dyads imply that music is not just like magic but that it is magic, a contention that, as previously noted, is often explicitly stated. Many commentators go a step beyond ‘music is magic’, saying that music is this world's ‘only magic’ or its ‘only real [true, pure, actual] magic’. They regard music and magic as equivalent (or nearly equivalent) terms, noting that only two letters distinguish them and that autocorrect frequently changes one into the other.Footnote 29
In order to better understand this fantasy, I explore a set of recurring themes orbiting around ‘magic’ in the aforementioned archives – connection, healing, transportation, transformation and utopia. These themes point to something shared within the archives’ disparate individual accounts: a collective sense of what life in the long historical moment under consideration has felt like in relation to music.Footnote 30 In other words, they suggest one possible solution to the first two mysteries of this paper's tripartite puzzle: the preponderance of magic in everyday music discourse betokens a persistent ‘modernist’ sensibility in which music is experienced as one of magic's remaining outposts, proffering listeners forms of connection felt to be distressingly scarce or tenuous outside musical domains of life. Put more schematically, this paper argues that while ‘magic’ may seem at first glance like a triviality with no shared meaning, the word typically appears in clusters of tropes central to modernist disenchantment narratives and, as such, can be understood to indicate a collective sense that music is ‘the only real magic’ insofar as it offers uniquely soothing experiences of affective connection – with others, with oneself, with an object or scene, with humanity's essence. Therefore, the pervasiveness of magic in everyday music discourse can be understood, first of all, as bespeaking an affective inheritance in which the intimacies of magical relationality are felt to be generally scarce; and second, as indicating that many people crave these supposedly scarce intimacies and often go to music to find them. That is to say, the omnipresence of magic in everyday music talk is, I argue, a sign that listeners share a craving to share in something, a desire for some mediation that can sustain ameliorative attachment, for something to hold on to that just might become a solidarity with others, for a track to follow. In short, this paper suggests, to adapt Wittgenstein, that magic is modernity's wish for music just as music is its wish for magic.Footnote 31
Magic is often relegated to an extraordinary, Edenic elsewhere diametrically opposed to domains for which terms like ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ are felicitous designations.Footnote 32 However, my argument destabilizes this traditional opposition, revealing magic to be, in fact, utterly ordinary in two related senses. First, as previously suggested, musical magic resides in the realm of existence constituted in what analytical philosophers call ordinary or everyday language. This claim furnishes one explanation for Gary Tomlinson's enigmatic gambit: perhaps Tomlinson missed the profusion of magic in music discourse because musical magic in its contemporary form lies largely outside the sphere of academic music studies.Footnote 33 Which is to say, he may not have missed it at all, if the pronoun ‘we’ in ‘we still hear, now and then, talk of the magic of music’ is understood as referring solely to present-day musicologists, for whom ‘magic’ is indeed a seldom-used term. Given the context in which this paper appears, one might say that musical magic is a ‘popular’ phenomenon, which is not to insinuate that it exists mainly in, as the scholar of music education Alexandra Kertz-Welzel recently suggested, talk of musics conventionally taxonomized as popular (as opposed to, say, classical). Rather, it is to suggest that it resides primarily in, to mention a few concepts Stanley Cavell sees as underwriting the sense of the ordinary he derives from J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the ‘common’, ‘familiar’, ‘near’, ‘low’ talk of lay listeners (including newspaper reviews and other forms of criticism/journalism written for non-professionals).Footnote 34
This first claim suggests that ‘magic’ describes the ordinary or usual (rather than exceptional) perception of music in the historical scene I am exploring. In other words, many listeners in my archives experience music first and foremost as magic. For example, when the British radio station Classic FM recently asked its 1.5 million Facebook followers, ‘What's the one word that sums up music for you?’, ‘Magic’ was among the top comments.Footnote 35 Of course this should not mislead readers into thinking music is not also sometimes irritating, annoying and, as we have learned from America's War on Terror, torturous.Footnote 36 Instead, one might say that magic is a hegemonic ideology – a prevailing structuring framework for apprehending music in the time and place under consideration in this essay, holding together a cluster of dominant fantasies that even tacitly power academic writing about music.
Second, one way of understanding the widespread perception that magic is generally scarce is that it exists in the flow of ordinary existence, where, in Lauren Berlant's and Kathleen Stewart's related accounts of ordinariness, what is encountered is not preserved by events but passed through as it resonates into atmosphere.Footnote 37 In other words, the forms of connectedness to which musical magic points often pass by unnoticed because they are not captured by their own events. As such, a magical experience of music can be understood as an evental displacement within the atmosphere of ordinary action that captures and extends these forms of connectedness. Thus, magic is not exactly the ordinary's other but a transformative impulse embedded within it, constituting the very core of music's modernist ordinary.
Disenchanted magic
In his 1918 lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, Max Weber made several now-famous proclamations about ‘the disenchantment the world’, including:
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the most sublime values have retreated from public life into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human contact. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.Footnote 38
This oft-quoted passage subtly exposes a central feature of the disenchantment with which Weber and his followers associated the foundational institutions of ‘modern’ society: alienation. Disenchantment has been linked to ennui and malaise, but here Weber aligns it with unweldedness, that is, disjuncture or disconnectedness.Footnote 39 To be sure, this mood suffuses much of Weber's writing about modernity, from his account of the attrition of shared values and meaning wrought by the triumph of science's relativistic agnosticism over religion's ‘final answers’ to his vivid, machine-like renderings of rational bureaucratic capitalism – an ‘unbrotherly’ system purged of any sympathetic impulse that might escape calculation, managed by ‘detached’ specialists acting ‘without regard for persons’, ‘without hate and therefore without love’.Footnote 40
This ‘disenchantment of the world’ passage also provides hints of how Weber viewed magic. Pneuma is a concept central to magical thinking in the West from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. It refers to a supernatural force like ether or spirit that was once believed to pervade everything in the cosmos, binding it together into a harmonic (musical) whole and establishing occult sympathies between even its most distant elements (a ‘musical’ whole to the extent that the cosmos was believed to be euphoniously arranged such that the concentric spheres supposedly bearing the heavens produced an inaudible music). For many theorists of magic in the West, such as the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, magic spells were thought to function through these sympathies.Footnote 41 Which is to say that for millennia magic has meant the actualization of latent sympathies, the bridging of spatial distances between objects, the making palpable of connections between things.
In particular, magic has long been associated with love, especially romantic love, which is often described as the apotheosis of human connection – a ‘non-rational’ attraction at the height of which ‘the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away’ and the lover declares “‘I” and “you” are one’.Footnote 42 For example, the Renaissance occult scientists Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno equated eros with magic, both means of spiritual manipulation or seduction through which the lover/magician could bind himself to others by altering his imagination and transmitting these changes to his objects of manipulation by virtue of the law of universal pneumatic sympathy.Footnote 43 As we will see, this association with eros is common in everyday music discourse, where the terms ‘magic’, ‘love’ and ‘eargasm’ can appear in close proximity: ‘Aaahhh … This musical beginning of “where the streets have no name” … I love it so much. This is eargasm and magic’.Footnote 44
In the years since Weber's disenchantment lecture, modernist theories of magic have proliferated and continually returned to the concept of sympathy and the related idea of participation. At the turn of the 20th century, around the same time that Weber made his declaration about modernity's magiclessness, the fledgling academic discipline of anthropology took ‘primitive’ magic as one of its central objects of investigation, often invoking vaguely Neoplatonic notions of sympathy in its disquisitions. One of the foundational anthropological studies of magic was Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, which eventually reached 12 volumes in its third edition of 1914. The Golden Bough traces all magic to the umbrella concept of ‘sympathetic magic’, because the particular cases of magic that Frazer pursues, hailing from ‘a ruder and earlier phase of the human mind’, assume that ‘things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether’.Footnote 45
Participation is an adjacent concept influential in early anthropological studies of magic. The concept comes from the ethnologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's discomfitingly ethnocentric Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), translated in 1926 as How Natives Think, which contends that ‘primitive mentality’ is governed by the law that all things ‘mystically’ partake of one another in visceral, sensuous ways.Footnote 46 According to Lévy-Bruhl, this law of participation, through which human beings are not sharply delimited from the world, furnishes them with ‘a direct and intimate contact with the essence of being’ – an experience of ‘ecstasy’ outside the realm of ‘intellectual activity’ and beyond anything modernity's ‘purely positive science’ can provide.Footnote 47
The modernist definition of magic in terms of sympathy and participation has hardly waned since the early 20th century. In 1981, the historian Morris Berman called for the world to be ‘reenchanted’, arguing that some form of the ‘participating’, ‘sympathetic’ or ‘holistic’ consciousness that defined the world before modern ‘disenchantment’ must emerge if humans are to survive.Footnote 48 In 1997, the scholar of Indian philosophy and theology Ariel Glucklich defined magic, largely absent from a ‘modern world’ whose ‘tools of technology’ and ‘glorification of the ego-centric worldview’ discourage interaction, as ‘the sensory experience of interrelatedness that emerges when individuals develop a unique intimacy with natural and social environments’.Footnote 49 And in 2009, the literary critics Joshua Landy and Michael T. Saler wrote that survival of magic in modernity requires that the world be re-imbued with ‘the promise of … a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself’.Footnote 50
As these examples suggest, modernist accounts of magic generally align universal or cosmic sympathy with ‘premodern’, ‘ancient’, ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ cosmologies. Such accounts typically grant sympathy access to modernity only via the related realms of moral philosophy and aesthetics. This modernist aestheticization of sympathy, where sympathy undergoes a process of internalization and comes to signify affective connection imbued with the magical sheen of its repudiated cosmic counterpart, can be seen in the commonly omitted twist of Weber's disenchantment story.Footnote 51 According to Weber, the ‘sympathy’ missing from modernity's bureaucratically organized social order endures ‘in pianissimo’ – in the ‘personal’, ‘intimate’ and even taciturn realm of aesthetic experience, in which artworks serve as palladia of magic lived as thick synchronicity.Footnote 52 This twist points to a tension in Weber's writing about modernity's cultural products, such as music and the law. On the one hand, his unfinished 1911 essay The Rational and Social Foundations of Music elaborates modern music's rationalization, which is a sort of synecdoche for disenchantment.Footnote 53 On the other, his oeuvre is peppered with claims like that about magic's endurance in the ‘pianissimo’ of aesthetic experience, another example of which is the following from the 1915 essay ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’: ‘[Art] provides a salvation … from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism’.Footnote 54
Many readers of Weber reduce him to a descendent of Friedrich Schiller, reading his theory of magic's persistence as Romantic nostalgia for a bygone world.Footnote 55 Weber is of course an heir to the Romantic tradition that equated magic with art. Yet in addition to Romantic nostalgia, his theory can also be understood as a modernist view of the aesthetic comparable with that of Ernst Bloch, wherein art is held to function not only as a source of phantasmagoric false consciousness but also as a container for the safekeeping of a critically inflected wish for intimacy in a time and place structurally antagonistic to it.
Connection
Since around 1900, claims of musical magic have been substantiated via claims of connection, a concept central to the Neoplatonic understanding of magic elaborated in Weberian disenchantment narratives. As noted above, Weber's account of disenchantment aligns modernity's magiclessness with impassive detachment and links ‘premodern’ magic with the ‘irrational’ realm of emotions (the sym-pathetic worldview presumes a world of pathos, after all). A number of his contemporaries sutured magic to emotion in similar ways, including R.G. Collingwood, who emphasized that the basis of all magic is ‘emotional’ rather than ‘scientific’ and, furthermore, that ‘[the disappearance of magic] in a given society would seem to indicate that … emotional vulnerability has been … overcome by the deliberate cultivation of a thick-skinned or insensitive attitude’.Footnote 56 Similarly, words of magic in everyday music discourse often indicate a pleasurable, enigmatic and transfigurative flooding, concentration or elevation of affect. I use ‘affect’ here because I am describing a structure that can take various experiential shapes, from a subtle thickening of serenity to a motivational ‘pumping up’ to sexual arousal to an altogether stronger experience redolent of delight, wonder and romantic love (but minus the disquieting infinitude most commonly associated in aesthetics with the sublime, the uncanny, ecstasy and sundry other forms of numinous awe or astonishment).Footnote 57 This experience of affective intensification can feel private (‘different for each of us’) and even autobiographical, sometimes plunging a listener into anamnesis (making ‘a fuzzy memory vivd & real’).Footnote 58 Much like Weber's account of magic's persistence, however, everyday claims of music-magic, even those where a single listener is responding to what they call a ‘personal’ experience, often point to scenes of affective convergence or ‘connection’:
Part of the E Street Band magic was feeling a personal connection to the band/music. Amazing how many people tweeting share that feeling.Footnote 59
The magic of music has helped me connect with others showing me that whatever I'm feeling I'm not alone.Footnote 60
If we let ourselves truly connect to what we're singing and the flow of that expression – those are times when true magic happens.Footnote 61
As these examples imply, talk of musical magic points to many different types of connection for which listeners employ a variety of interrelated terms. These types are related because they are generally described in affective (‘precognitive’, ‘prelinguistic’) terms – as connection of the ‘heart’ or ‘soul’, occurring at an ‘elemental’ level ‘deeper’ and more ‘direct’ than ‘mere intellectual involvement’.Footnote 62
One thing that ‘magic’ sometimes indicates in everyday music discourse is a sympathetic physical–emotional response to what listeners perceive as the performer's authenticating libidinal investment or injection of their ‘true’ feelings in(to) a musical object or event. This is a connection to the performer and/or their performance that mirrors the performer's deep connection to the music. For example:
Whenever I hear @reneeelisegolds [Renée Elise Goldsberry] singing as Angelica [Angelica Schuyler Church from the Broadway musical Hamilton] it gives me the chills. I can feel her emotion and that's the magic of music.Footnote 63
With every song @laporsharenae opens a scar on her heart and lets us experience happened at the moment. It's magic. @JLo #AmericanIdol.Footnote 64
A variation of this mirroring pops up in talk of music-magic where performers’ musical expressions of their ‘personal feelings’ are deemed also to capture listeners’ ‘personal feelings’ – moments of recognition, legibility and belonging when something that feels singular is raised to the level of generality. For instance:
We [the metal band Alaska] believe the feeling that a song has been written only for you is the true magic of music … [Our] songs belong to everyone who enjoys them and maybe connects to them. Nevertheless these songs still carry our personal feelings.Footnote 65
I just love how @nateruessmusic [American singer-songwriter Nate Ruess] can capture my exact feelings in every song. If that isn't the magic of music, I don't know what is.Footnote 66
Another form of connection to which claims of musical magic often refer is a shared mood that permeates the space where the experience of magic occurs, ‘encircling’ all interactants and binding them together.Footnote 67 Whereas the above examples involve both live and recorded music (and both group and individual musicking), this case is specific to live performances, or at least experiences in which more than one listener is physically present. For example, classical music critics often invoke magic in relation to the ‘hush’ that falls over an enraptured audience and holds them in ‘fascinated silence’, as one reviewer put it using a word with a magical history (‘fascinated’ once meant affected by magic spells).Footnote 68 Other critics have related the magic of music to an ‘electricity’ in the air,Footnote 69 ‘great vibes’Footnote 70 and various other experiences of attunement (‘unison’,Footnote 71 ‘community’,Footnote 72 ‘kinship’Footnote 73 and even ‘participation’Footnote 74) when ‘the magic in the hall’ is felt to ‘make everyone swing’Footnote 75 or bring everyone to their feetFootnote 76 or send everyone rushing to the stage to beg for encores (as was common in New York during the first decades of the 20th century).Footnote 77
An additional type of connection to which claims of music-magic frequently point is a sense of universality:
Music must carry with it the magic genius … They were of all races and nationalities who spoke different languages, but they had only one ear for the music being played … the language spoken only from men's souls … the universal language.Footnote 78
Music is Magic. The language of the heart, a universal language tht speaks to all pplFootnote 79
Indeed, claims of musical magic often appear in close proximity to claims of universality, rendering music magic to the extent that it is an affective idiom that transcends all differences of individuality or identity. Fantasies of universality are sometimes deemed exclusionary ethnocentrism or bourgeois ideology, but such judgments do not reveal much about listeners’ motivations for clinging to them. The above examples suggest a desire to be released from separateness into the generality of the sensorium, for what might be interpreted as a reprieve from aloneness.
Oneness is another genus of connection often referenced in talk of music magic. In 1983, the conductor Giora Bernstein told a critic from the Irish Times, ‘There are rare moments of magic, when the orchestra, the music and the conductor all become one. You cannot plan for them, but for these rare moments, it's worth being a conductor’.Footnote 80 Other listeners use ‘magic’ to describe immersive experiences of oneness in which they are physically alone: ‘When your body, breath, and heart become one with the music – that's when the magic happens’.Footnote 81 Some even employ words of magic to elaborate a oneness of sounds: DJ Cut Chemist recently informed a reporter that it ‘feels like pure magic’ when he and his partner, DJ Shadow, find ‘the perfect blend’ between records, when the records become ‘one’ and ‘connect unexpectedly’.Footnote 82
Finally (but certainly not exhaustively), individual performers and listeners frequently turn to the language of magic to declare their intimate, even ‘loving’ relationships to the music they play:
Impossible to overstate how much I love this album by [Corinne Bailey Rae]. Music is magic.Footnote 83
Do you ever hear a song and relate so well to it that you no longer feel alone? Music is magic.Footnote 84
This sort of bonding with a record or song calls to mind Arendt's version of Weber's disenchantment narrative – her ‘enchantment with “small things”’ – where our intimate relationships with our commodities evince the last remnants of the ‘care’ and ‘tenderness’ that once defined the ancient world (a ‘common world’ held together by the now defunct public sphere).Footnote 85
How exactly are these various types legible as a coherent phenomenon? In a 1938 essay titled ‘Art as Magic’, R.G. Collingwood set out to ‘rescue’ the word ‘magic’ from the ordinary/everyday speech in which it had, he argued, degenerated into a ‘meaningless term’ used without ‘definite conception of what it connotes’.Footnote 86 In contrast, Cavell famously argued in 1969 that even though we talkers often do not know and cannot say what we mean, ‘we “must” mean by our words what those words ordinarily mean’, since we who speak with one another are, as Cavell has often noted since his seminal essay, ‘attuned’ in speaking – sharing interests, tastes, desires, jokes, etc. Which is another way of saying that ‘language is an inheritance’ or ‘always already there for every human’, meaning ‘words are before I am’, hence ‘common’ or the stuff of ‘common [ordinary, everyday] life’ and, relatedly, somehow independent of our thinking and whatever autonomy it has.Footnote 87 The talkers cited above certainly seem to have a shared if capacious sense of what musical magic is, even if none of them can produce a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that define it perfectly. Indeed, their heterogeneous accounts of avowedly ‘personal’ experiences comprise an emergent constellation of shared significance, adumbrating a common world in which one thing that ‘magic’ undeniably means, even in seemingly inscrutable holophrases like ‘Magic!’, is magic in the enduring modernist sense of connection.
Like the modernist magic of disenchantment narratives, everyday music discourse's magic is, as we have already learned, felt to be scarce outside musical domains of life – ‘the ONLY magic left in the world today’, as a radio station in Malawi put it.Footnote 88 The recently departed Tom Petty once explained this feeling of scarcity – his experience of music as ‘the only real [or true] magic’ – as follows: ‘Most magic is a trick of some kind. But music is actually a healing thing. It has this power to heal and inspire and to lift you up’.Footnote 89 How does this healing power fit into the shared world constellated above?
Healing
Talk of musical magic often references music's ameliorative capacities – its power to heal, repair, palliate, relieve – configuring music as magic to the extent that it is ‘medicine’ employed to mitigate impairments and disorders of all varieties, if only for a moment.Footnote 90 As intimated in the last section, one impairment that music-magic is often said to ameliorate is a sense of aloneness or isolation that is perceived to dominate ‘modern’ life. Predictably enough, it is often reputed to allay this aloneness by sustaining experiences of connection like those referenced in the previous section, experiences that are commonly felt to be scarce outside musical domains of existence. For example, a 2010 lunchtime talk at the Paisley Museum in Scotland called ‘The Forgotten Power of Music’ explored the ways ‘music magic’ might provide ‘an antidote to our increasingly individualized society’ and ‘reconnect us with each other’.Footnote 91 Similarly, a recent podcast series about how people use music to manage their depression concluded with this summation: ‘Music is the closest thing that we have to real, live magic in our world. Some chords get played, some words get sung, and then something happens inside of you. It doesn't make any logical sense, but wow does it ever work’. The host then meandered to this dumbstruck peroration, which takes music and its magic as the foundation for a common world that, by virtue of its commonness, is a source of comfort: ‘I don't know, I mean this is the only world we have, right, the only life that we have to live, and it sounds like a cliché, but it's true: we're all in it together … We have each other, and we have music, which is nice’.Footnote 92 Likewise, a young man interviewed by the psychologist Alf Gabrielsson in the 1990s assiduously elaborated the ‘magical power’ of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel to ‘affect the environment around [him]’ such that existence became less meaningless, cold, burdensome, and parochial: everything ‘acquired a stamp of something universal and comprehensive … An object that perhaps isn't used so often … acquired in this rare moment a purpose, a meaning … All your irritation, all your fixed ideas and prejudices, etc., that you now carry with you, they just sink away. For a moment, existence gets a shimmering glow, and becomes a little warmer, lighter, and simpler’.Footnote 93 Along the same lines, a 1996 concert review entitled ‘It's magic when Itzhak Perlman plays his “fiddle”’ describes how the eponymous violin virtuoso provides the ‘real connection’ that ‘we need, and miss, so much in these stressful times’.Footnote 94 Finally, the epilogue to the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's book about ‘the magic of music’ ends with talk of music as a ‘healing force’ and ‘uniting force’, an ‘ancient’ power offering relief from a ‘hostile’ ‘modern Western civilization’ of ‘mass consumption’ by revealing ‘we are not so different after all’.Footnote 95
The widespread perception of music as magic to the extent that it ameliorates ‘modern’ separateness hews closely to disenchantment narratives. For Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘the vanquished primeval world and its imaginary happiness’ have given way to an ‘arid’ and ‘barren’ liberal-capitalist modernity characterized by ‘estrangement’ and ‘universal fungibility’, where subjects have been reduced to a ‘herd’ and even the intimacy of private life is split between ‘the sullen community of marriage and the bitter solace of being entirely alone’.Footnote 96 As Adorno sums it up elsewhere, ‘People no longer “live together” and know each other directly, but are related to each other through intermediary objectified social processes (e.g., exchange of commodities)’.Footnote 97 In many versions of the disenchantment narrative, artistic labour or, more broadly, the aesthetic (which Adorno so often described as a magical realm) is deemed a space where one might find some sort of immunity from the forces that have ‘damaged’ modern subjects, where one might even experience what Henri Lefebvre called ‘a productive form of labour freed from the characteristic of alienation’ – ‘a unity of the product and the producer, of the individual and the social, of the natural Being and the human being’.Footnote 98
The pervasiveness of this narrative extends into music therapy discourse, where musical magic is sometimes described as a balm harnessed to allay enervating separateness. For instance, a 1997 Newsday article details the way ‘melodic medication’ works its ‘magic’: ‘Bobby, a 13-year-old with a brain tumour, was emotionally isolated from his family owing to his illness. But after beating a drum to release tension and inventing songs on the piano about being in a box, he began to express his feelings and reconnect with family and friends’. The piece then cites Clive Robbins, who heads the Nordoff-Robbins music therapy clinic at New York University: ‘Music has a lot of universality. You bypass so many barriers to communication, and it seems to reach more of the child than anything else’.Footnote 99 Along the same lines, the celebrity activist and teacher David Lazerson often uses variations of the equation ‘Music = Magic + Mystery + Medicine’ in the context of discussions about music's power ‘to open a door’ inside children with disabilities. For example, this equation appears at the end of a book chapter on the ‘magic’ of group singing in ‘special needs’ classrooms, following an anecdote about ‘singing along, in unison’, with 20,000 people at a gathering for the Chabad movement that was attended by the former Prime Minister of Israel. This experience left Dr Laz ‘a changed person’, apparently by facilitating some sort of integrative self-overcoming: ‘It was a slow and incredibly emotional melody, almost a pleading that would reach crescendos that took your breath away. People rocked or swayed back and forth, as they seemed to lose themselves in the haunting, powerful refrain. I looked around to see that not only did the Rebbe [the spiritual leader of the Chabad movement] have his eyes closed, but so did [Prime Minister Menachem Begin] and the other 19,998 people’.Footnote 100
This brief foray into music therapy discourse suggests something surprising about the fantasy of musical magic to which so many of the preceding examples point: its promise of connection is viewed not only as a route to enjoyment as an end in itself but also as a means of therapy, both in the Paisley Museum's grand sense of mending disenchanted modernity (‘our individualized [fractured] society’) and in the more muted sense of managing pain or surviving as an alienated subject within disenchanted worlds. Which is to say that it reveals that subjects in the moment I am tracking often use musical magic to interrupt enfeebling modes of occupying their worlds, to transport or shift themselves.
Transportation/transformation
One way that musical magic can be understood to soothe the hurt that ‘disenchanted’ relationality inflicts upon some subjects is through the concept of transportation. In a 1915 San Francisco Chronicle review, the screenwriter Walter Anthony wrote of the ‘magic thrill’ of Fritz Kreisler's violin playing, noting how Kreisler ‘supplied the wings’ that carried listeners from ‘a world of chaos’ to ‘a world of beauty’ where ‘all your hopes were realized and all your hopes were given’.Footnote 101 Similarly, a 1929 concert review in The China Press, an English-language daily published in Shanghai from 1911 to 1949, lauded the ‘compelling beauty’ of Jan Kubelik's ‘magic violin’, through which the ‘charmed’ audience was made to forget the ‘drab ugliness’ of their urban surroundings and ‘to sense again the living poetry of purling brooks, mountain crags in sun-pierced mists, winds of the forests and all the rest of lovely nature in its more exalted moods’.Footnote 102 Along the same lines, the Chicago Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy described in 1946 how the pianist Dame Myra Hess, through ‘a kind of magic wrought of mind and heart and almost superhuman skill’, opened a door to the ‘inner citadel’ of the ‘Kingdom of music’, a heavenly (note the capitalized ‘Kingdom’) refuge offering its inhabitants the protection and community of an ensconced fortress.Footnote 103
Many other music commentators since the turn of the 20th century have mixed claims of magic with claims of paradisiacal transport, celebrating music's magical powers to weave listeners into a ‘paradise while it's hell on earth’ – a haven where one feels ‘free’, ‘at peace’, ‘in the moment’, where ‘everything is better’ and you can find relief from ‘the daily BS [you] go through’.Footnote 104 Sometimes talkers equate this relief with the experience of being carried ‘out of this world’ to ‘faraway’, ‘strange’ and ‘exotic’ places.Footnote 105 Here transportation implies a departure from the world as it is usually experienced, a vacation from what is sometimes called ‘real life’ or ‘reality’ (which in this language game I take to mean the drudgery of the workaday grind). Paradoxically, this departure to distant worlds is sometimes configured as a journey ‘home’ – to a place of comfort, security and warm fellowship, ‘to Christmas at my grandparents’ house, smell of pine, love’.Footnote 106 As this excerpt suggests, the journey ‘home’ can be understood to refer primarily to the ‘magical’ and ‘mythic’ family sanctuary of bourgeois folklore, not, say, to the prison- or straitjacket-like home evoked in some feminist accounts of domesticity.Footnote 107 Not always, however. For instance, a Palestinian commentator recently described her ‘magical’ experience of music as ‘[feeling] free, as if transported to another world’, presumably a world where she might ‘travel freely within [her] own territories’, as her account states just before it alights upon music's liberating power, that is, where she might feel at home in her homeland.Footnote 108 In any case, ‘home’ in the bourgeois tradition connotes a refuge that heals the fissures wrought by disenchantment with its emancipating and de-alienating love (a love once transmitted via the parlour spinet).Footnote 109
A number of disenchantment narratives have linked ‘modernity’ to a feeling of homelessness and described the ‘premodern’ world before disenchantment as ‘a place of belonging’ where humans felt ‘at home’.Footnote 110 According to Adorno, ‘dwelling’ or being ‘at home’ in modernity is ‘impossible’ insofar as ‘it is part of morality not to be at home’, not to be comfortable with the atrocities of late capitalism.Footnote 111 This gives the impression that musical magic's transport home is an irresponsible abandonment of things as they are, shuttering away their horror and leaving them unchanged.
However, many listeners, much like the modernists who used magic (the ‘science of metamorphoses’) to rethink mimesis, portray musical magic not just as an escape from ‘reality’ but also as a transformation, rearrangement, or shift within it.Footnote 112 Recall a few previous examples, such as David Lazerson's description of his ‘magical’ experiences singing with large groups: ‘you always left there somehow a changed person’,Footnote 113 and the psychologist Alf Gabrielsson's informant's take on music's ‘magical power’ to ‘affect the environment around [him]’.Footnote 114 Here is a final quotation that explains this transformative dimension of musical magic in the language of transport:
Music is magic … Enjoying music is cosmic connection … That's why we love, laugh, or weep to songs. Like magic, with music we connect with each other. Feeling the beat keeps us dancing and tames tensions. We remember what matters. Music has no prejudice of race, religion, culture, or age. It's our invisible, universal muse … Feeling music with our body removes the rust…and unlocks the grips of time from our heads … Every time we travel with music it's a quantum leap. There is a sudden reset of mood, frame of mind, ease of being. Music relaxes, inspires, refreshes, or recharges. Things are not the same.Footnote 115
According to this passage, ‘music is magic’ to the extent that when listeners ‘travel’ with music ‘things are not the same’. Here ‘magic’ implies a displacement or ‘leap’ that is felt to alter ‘things’, leaving listeners ‘refreshed’, in part by ‘tam[ing] tensions’ and releasing them from separateness into ‘cosmic connection’. To be sure, the transformation of individual affect does not necessarily mean, pace much liberal cosmopolitan thought, structural transformation. Indeed, the conditions of scarcity through which music has come to be regarded as a supreme magic remain relatively unaltered by this accumulation of affective potency. Nonetheless, remarks such as this evince a wish for some supraindividual change via music's magic that the pejorative ‘escapism’ does not fully account for. After all, everyday music discourse's words of magic imply a reprieve from ‘real life’, an ameliorative journey elsewhere, but the elsewhere is ‘home’, to use Wittgenstein's word for the ordinary/everyday.Footnote 116 Recall, too, that music is commonly regarded as the only ‘real’ magic, indicating that it is embedded within the same ‘real life’ from which it is purported to offer sanctuary. Sometimes the displacement to which musical magic points is not oriented towards a future but amounts to a momentary suspension within an overwhelming present, like binging on Doritos.Footnote 117 Other times, however, it points towards a future, to the possibility of a better hereafter.
Utopia
The ‘strange shrinking of the utopian consciousness’ that Adorno mentioned in a debate with Ernst Bloch in 1964 has, according to many authorities, continued unabated in the intervening decades.Footnote 118 The present epoch is often purported to be an ‘anti-utopian age’,Footnote 119 in which the resurgent concept of ‘modernity’ no longer asks, in an older and less optimistic Fredric Jameson's words, ‘the question of how we want to live together’ but now means ‘little else than economic and social adaptation to the supposed constraints of the global market’;Footnote 120 in which progressive politicians with utopian platforms are attacked as naive and quixotic; in which it often feels as though, in the words of historian Tony Judt, ‘our chief task is not to imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones’.Footnote 121 Yet while much of our political discourse suggests the death of utopianism writ large, words of magic in everyday talk of music tell a different story. Suffused with the language of connection and replete with talk of amelioration, new worlds and transformation, the phenomenon of musical magic indicates a thriving utopian impulse that parallels the modernist utopianism of the early 20th century.
Many social theorists have described magic as fundamentally reactionary, linking it to Nazism and fascism via irrationalism, superstition and barbarism; others have characterized it as inimical to sociality (as Durkheim famously emphasized, ‘There is no Church of magic’).Footnote 122 Echoing the liberal anti-utopianism mentioned above, Malinowski, in his final assessment, could only see in magic ‘the sublime folly of hope’.Footnote 123 Leftists have been comparably sceptical lately, describing magic as an expression of nostalgia aimed at restoring the immediacy and wholeness that modernity pilfered from experience by returning to an idealized, unhistorical past – what one journalist reporting on protests during national-anthem singing at football games (famous for inspiring ‘magic’ in the form of ‘patriotic unison’) called ‘an apolitical state of unity’, that is, a state without dissent or class struggle.Footnote 124 However, theorists have also noted magic's utopian dimensions: ‘its character of protest’ as well as its power ‘to stir up in everyone some hidden mental forces, some lingering hopes in the miraculous, some dormant beliefs in man's mysterious possibilities’.Footnote 125 In 1902, Marcel Mauss argued that magical beliefs in ‘modern’ societies are ‘the most alive, the most real indications of a state of social unrest and social consciousness, in which float a whole crowd of vague ideas, hopes, and vain fears’. ‘The world of magic’, Mauss wrote, ‘is full of the expectations of successive generations, their tenacious illusions, their hopes in the form of magical formulas’.Footnote 126
The utopian properties of magic are often on display in everyday talk of music. For example, an American Idol fan recently tweeted, ‘Music = magic/a door to utopia’.Footnote 127 More prevalent are celebrations of pop music festivals that mix the language of magic and invocations of utopia with talk of ‘positive synchronistic situations’, ‘acceptance’, ‘freedom’ and ‘love’ – intimations of, as one festivalgoer put it, ‘what our world could be’.Footnote 128 This admixture of music, magic and utopia permeates Ernst Bloch's philosophy of music, which occupies a central position in his first major book, The Spirit of Utopia, published in 1918 (the same year that Weber gave his disenchantment lecture). Bloch detected a utopian spirit in all art but saw it as ‘really central to the magic of music’.Footnote 129 He later described this utopian spirit as a ‘hollow space’ – a sense that ‘something is missing’ from the present – and portrayed music as a call to and reflection of the atmosphere fermenting within this space.Footnote 130 In other words, he saw music as a ‘critical’ structure, as a structure that expresses and nourishes a negating utopian consciousness (a sense that something is amiss, that things should not be as they are) and, relatedly, as a structure that builds hope (not ‘naive optimism’ but hope in the sense of a negation of that which makes the opposite of the hoped-for thing possible).Footnote 131
Something similar might be said about claims of music-magic, which can be understood as structuring gratifying experiences of connection within the realm of music while giving expression to dismay over the dearth of such experiences outside this realm, that is, to the conditions of scarcity from which music has drawn its connective powers. Filtering this observation through a younger and more sanguine Jameson's insight that ‘an ineradicable drive toward collectivity’ lies at the heart of utopian projection in mass art, one might say that listeners often describe musical magic as a structure that nourishes and preserves a utopian drive towards collectivity.Footnote 132 As the ‘Piano Man’ Billy Joel once said, to return to this paper's epigraph, ‘Music is this magic acoustic element that makes perfectly rational people who have come to realize the unalterable fact that they are truly alone in the world somehow feel for fleeting moments that maybe they're not alone after all’.Footnote 133 Generalizing this remark, one could say that music-magic is frequently seen as episodically negating the ‘unalterable fact’ of alienation by fostering and safeguarding, at the level of affect, a sense that things might be (and should be) different, a sense that listeners might be (and should be) more satisfyingly connected.
I am not arguing, to paraphrase Mladen Dolar, that unification and love are barred from having a murderous, reactionary underside or that something like the death drive that Freud opposes to eros does not have an important political function, ‘untying the glue of social bonds’ so that non-identical social relations might appear.Footnote 134 I am not even suggesting that enchantment does not foreclose demurral and so reproduce exploitation, or that fantasies of universality are not de-historicizing and homogenizing, or that we should feel no compunction about the suggestion that our love for our favourite recordings may be standing in for material and spiritual closeness to other humans. My point is this: while the mood of mainstream political discourse may seem anti-utopian (and thus at odds with modernist accounts of magic), the atmosphere of everyday talk of music – where musical magic has often been configured as an affective container for the safekeeping of a transformative impulse towards collectivity – is suffused with a modernist utopian spirit. The longing for political repair still exists, safeguarded, in no small measure, in music-magic.
Ordinary magic
In the preceding pages, I have offered some ideas about how one might understand the pervasive apprehension that music is ‘the only real magic’ by parsing claims of magic in everyday music discourse alongside the modernist disenchantment narratives with which they are historically imbricated. Bearing uncanny affinities with such narratives, everyday claims of musical magic often refer to a semantic field with what listeners frequently describe as a ‘rare’ form of ameliorative connection at its centre, bespeaking a shared sense that this connection is scarce and, relatedly, a shared craving for more of it. One effect of this exploration is the perforation of the line behind which many theorists quarantine magic from what ordinary language philosophers call ordinary or everyday life. Ordinary life is often reduced to the realm of necessity, humdrum life and other pejoratives that seem to leach magic out of all the usual things. In fact, Cavell has argued that in much orthodox philosophizing the ordinary is equated with Plato's cave – a prison of appearances that humans should endeavour to transcend so that they might enjoy true or real satisfaction and well-being.Footnote 135 A similar trend can be seen in much talk of magic, which is traditionally viewed, in Simon During's words, as ‘radically “other” to ordinary life’.Footnote 136 For example, an essay called ‘The Magic of Music’ by Robert H. Mounce (the former president of the Christian liberal arts college Whitworth University) reads, ‘Music [“the strongest form of magic”] lifts us out of the ordinary and allows us to experience reality on a distinctly higher level’.Footnote 137
These views of the ordinary as an un-extraordinary and perfunctory realm bereft of genuine magic highlight the sense of scarcity that permeates so many accounts of workday life in ‘modern’ liberal-capitalist cultures. However, they fail to also account for the ubiquity of phenomena like music-magic. Cavell has claimed that the ordinary constituted in ordinary speech may not be all there is, but it is certainly not the desiccated wasteland that words like ‘humdrum’ call to my mind: ‘Morality is in that world, and so are force and love; so is art and a part of knowledge (the part that is about that world); and so is religion (wherever God is). Some mathematics and science, no doubt, are not. This is why you will not find out what “number” or “neurosis” or “mass” or “mass society” mean if you only listen to ordinary uses of these terms’.Footnote 138 As we now know, ‘real’ magic is also there, filling every corner of the ordinary talk through which listeners so often share their experiences of music. That is to say, it is right here at ‘home’ (to once again invoke Wittgenstein's famous formulation of the ordinary/everyday), always close at hand for a bit of DIY therapy, offering relief and hope as it gives expression to the emotional distress that ‘modern’ listeners have long invoked in describing their historical presents.Footnote 139
Many accounts of ‘modernity’ posit privatization, self-interestedness, competition and profit maximization as, in the historian Ellen Wood's words, ‘the fundamental rules of life’.Footnote 140 Other accounts argue that everyday life in ‘modern’ societies needs ‘re-enchanting’, by which is meant, in the best-selling psychotherapist Thomas Moore's view, the abandonment of narcissism for some prior, more authentic state of connection.Footnote 141 This account of modernity and its persistence paints a different picture, where the connection to which musical magic points is, for better or worse, a foremost wish abounding in our modernist ordinary – ‘the garden of the world we live in’.Footnote 142
Acknowledgements
For their thoughtful feedback, I am grateful to Lauren Berlant, Patrick Fitzgibbon, Berthold Hoeckner, my dear ‘Chicago School’ friends (Elizabeth Hopkins, Tien-Tien Jong, Chaz Lee, Brad Spiers, Dan Wang and Lindsay Wright), the fellows at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the editors of this special issue, Barbara Lebrun and Nanette de Jong.
