The Feeling of Knowing Music

Abstract

What is the feeling of knowing music? Answering this question requires awareness of the values that subtend different epistemological orientations and their connection to feelings of mastery, the provisional, and collectivity. This chapter examines how settler colonialism and Indigenous epistemology inaugurate particular feelings of knowing music. Music scholarship exists in relation to an intractable problem: most people feel that they already know music very well. Against such feelings of intimacy, what do disciplinary practices of structural listening and positivist analysis have to offer? The chapter also examines the disciplinary affect through which music studies substitutes categorization for wonder, certainty for curiosity, and expertise for ambivalence by substituting disciplinary knowledge of music for a range of affective relations. This chapter addresses how listening positionalities orient Indigenous and settler structures of feeling musical knowledge and how listening otherwise might begin from sensory-formalist analysis that affirms nongeneralizable and idiomatic moments of feeling listening.