Consider the following list of familiar experiences: the feeling of being complete, there, out of control, isolated, connected to the world, at one with life. These experiences comprise a distinct phenomenological category that philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe (2005, 2008) describes as “existential feelings.” For Ratcliffe, existential feelings are not emotions, nor are they the autonomous, asignifying “intensities” that some theorists (e.g., Massumi 1995) understand as affects, and yet they come to form a distinct category of experiences that describe familiar ways of “finding oneself in the world.”

This paper explores the relationship between existential feelings and musical experience. While research on musical emotion has undoubtedly been productive for addressing the complexities of how music expresses and arouses emotion, I argue that its overall emphasis on so-called “basic emotions” (Ekman 1972; Tomkins 2008) overlooks other less immediate and consciously recognizable forms of musical experience. By contrast, affect theory’s corporeal-materialist emphasis on autonomous “intensities” that lie outside the scope of signification and meaning undermines music-theoretical approaches seeking to account for cultural specificity (Garcia 2020).

Addressing these issues, my talk navigates the space between emotion and affect to explore the nature of a specific existential feeling in musical experience—namely, a heightened sense of what Heidegger (1962) called “mood,” an immersive and intersubjective sense of “being-in-the-world.” After describing its experiential characteristics, I employ Arnie Cox’s (2011, 2016) mimetic hypothesis and Mariusz Kozak’s (2020, 2021) notion of kinesthetic knowledge to propose an explanation for how music might afford such an experience; I explain here that culturally specific enactments of kinesthetic knowledge (e.g., headbanging in metal) place the body of the listener in dialogue with the broader socio-cultural milieu implied by the musical text, so as to blur the boundary between self and other. To illustrate this claim, I conclude with a case study that examines kinesthetic styles of movement and feeling inscribed within the Arab milieu of “ṭarab culture” (Danielson 1997; Racy 2003).

Via the concept of topic, music theorists have illustrated that supposedly autonomous, abstract music in fact carries extroversive significance through its use of conventionalized musical gestures. They have rarely, however, conducted detailed analyses of genres such as dance and church music, which were written in order to perform a concrete functional role; indeed, Monelle (2000) and Mirka (2014) theorize topic such that functional genres may furnish topics to be used elsewhere, but do not themselves signify through topics. Conceiving of topic in this way thus paradoxically reinscribes the binary of functional and contemplative music and with it the aesthetic hierarchies of the canon, with contemplative genres on top. Examining functional genres in terms of topic not only corrects this imbalance, but just as importantly allows us to refine our conceptualization of topic itself and to explore further the ways in which it interacts with structural parameters—an interaction Agawu (1991) calls “play.”

I argue that Joseph Haydn’s Nelsonmesse (a work designed not to stand on its own but to complement the Catholic liturgy) demonstrates that Ratner’s (1980) characterization of imitative, contrapuntal writing as “learned style” is misleading—but that this shortcoming can be remedied by another of Ratner’s ideas: the distinction between type and style. I reframe the topic more broadly as one of “Learnedness,” which can manifest not just as a style but also as a type. Ratner applied the label type only to dances and marches, not to learned genres; the concept of the topical type, moreover, has largely been disregarded in topical scholarship since Ratner. I develop Ratner’s concept, provisionally defining types as invocations of a topic that carry not just semantic but also formal associations. Those formal associations, however, in turn allow types to have extroversive signification different from that of styles, for they interact with such parameters as structure, listener expectation, and other topics in ways different from that of topical styles, precisely because of their formal commitments. The concept of the topical type, therefore, allows us to examine another dimension of play between extroversive and introversive signification.

Much Italian music composed during the Fascist and post-WWII era has a political angle, whether it uses openly politically engaged texts or makes a more abstract aesthetic statement aligned with a particular political outlook. While studies focusing on music and politics in the works of the most outspoken politically committed Italian composers such as Dallapiccola and Nono abound, this paper presents a unified procedure to tease out the multiple layers of political meaning in contemporary Italian music from this period at large. The proposed analytical strategy, which has not been applied to this repertoire before, builds on Manabe (2015, forthcoming) and Turino (2008), and unfolds in two steps. First, I analyze the music through the lens of the second trichotomy of Peircean semiotics (Peirce 1955). That is, I identify the music’s icons (musical features that “resemble” things from the outside world or human experience), indices (musical features associated with particular extra-musical conditions because both are experienced together in real life), and symbols (musical features whose meaning is more abstractly linguistically defined). And second, I determine the political attribute(s) of each icon, index, and symbol, as applicable, to compare and distinguish how the compositions carry political messages. My examples are from works associated with pre-WWII fascist and post-WWII anti-fascist ideologies.

Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo’s music aligns itself, through its emphatically neo-romantic style, with the fascist aesthetics laid out in the 1932 “Manifesto of Italian Musicians for the [Continuing] Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Romantic Art.” I illuminate the symbolism of her style in “Cantare Campagnolo” (1939) on her own poetry.

Postwar communist Giacomo Manzoni’s 1956 setting of William Waring Cuney’s “Grave” portraying inner-city African Americans uses immediately comprehensible politically charged icons (e.g., “weeping” gestures) and indices (e.g., “fear”-invoking polyrhythms as subtext to the poem). The political meaning is defined by the text, but also resides in the work’s serialism, which in postwar Italy was an unambiguous symbol of anti-fascism (Samuel 2020).

Bruno Maderna’s Four Letters (1953), I, combines politically charged icons and indices with an unequivocally anti-fascist symbolism: the entire rhythmic and pitch structure is serially derived from a Partisan song melody (Verzina 2003).