Affect, language, race, voice: opera singers in nineteenth-century United States

Abstract

Affect has often been an overlooked factor in many music histories because it appears unavailable or superficially undecodable in linguistically based documents that form the primary source of data analysis in historical ethnomusicology/musicology. However, careful attention to words, linguistic structures, and surrounding social formations can reveal the spaces left by affect’s resistance to signs and representations. The words ‘sympathetic’ and ‘pathetic’ as descriptions of human singing voices in the late nineteenth-century United States provide a window into how sound, music, timbre, and affect interacted with ideas of race, class, and gender. Voices of Italian, German, African American, and other singers were described in different ways, determined not only by social assumptions but also by affective encounters between embodied subjects in concert halls. Using Edward Soja’s spatial geography, along with Deleuze and Guattari’s attention to structures of writing and other affect theorists’ attention to bodies in spaces, I challenge assumptions about the lack of affective encounters through linguistic documents and stretch ethnomusicological approaches to historical sources.