(rhythmic and melodic), harmonic structures, voicing, rhythmic/melodic packaging and chunking, genre. Observing them at work over forty-five minutes shows how music is much more than a mere accompaniment to aerobic movement, how it is constitutive of aerobic agency. To the extent that musical figures can be seen and documented, in real time, as configuring aerobic agency, music may be understood as having active, structuring properties on and for the body. Within an aerobic workout, music disciplines the body’s performative character, configuring and transfiguring the body over the course of a session. Musical materials may, on the one hand, a ord aerobic order, that is bodies that are aerobically disciplined, entrained, meditative, motivated and energetic, or, on the other hand, they may a ord aerobic disorder, where bodies are undisciplined, unentrained, fatigued and unco-ordinated.

As a primary and predominant aesthetic material, music may be conceived, following Ehn’s (1988:399) discussion of Weizenbaum (1976), as a ‘prosthetic technology’. Prosthetic technologies are materials that extend what the body can do – for example, steam shovels, stilts, microscopes or amplification systems enhance and transform the capacities of arms, legs, eyes and voices. Through the creation and use of such technologies actors (bodies) are enabled and empowered, their capacities are enhanced. With such technologies, actors can do things that cannot be done independently; they are capacitated in and through their ability to appropriate what such technologies a ord.

Music prosthetic technology and daily life

Neither aerobic workouts nor life in a neonatal intensive care unit are ordinary circumstances. Both are totalizing. The aim of aerobics is to inculcate a high degree of physical and emotional conformity. As in ballet or in a military parade, aerobics’ parameters of experience are globally imposed. Body discipline in aerobics is stringent. In neonatal ICUs, bodily order is also globally imposed through a range of medical technologies that modify and substitute for normally autonomous bodily processes. Music’s role in the ICU is to a ord state organization, to provide a ground against which embodied awareness, orientation to and entrainment with the environment may occur.

Most of everyday life and its scenes and situations resemble neither aerobics classes nor intensive care units. None the less, music can be seen to function as a prosthetic device, to provide organizing properties for a range of other embodied experiences and in ways that involve varying degrees of deliberation and conscious awareness on the part of music’s conscripts. One of the most interesting areas here involves music’s role in

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the world of work. To be sure, music’s role at work has changed under industrialization, and this is a crucial issue for critical sociology. (These critical issues are discussed in the next chapter.)

Music has, historically, been deeply implicated as a way of specifying not only the time it takes to conduct work processes, but also in profiling the physical manner in which tasks are executed. Examples of music’s role in relation to daily tasks abound in non-Western cultures. For example, Nkeita (1988 (see also Gregory 1997:125)) describes the way in which Ghanaian grass cutters work to musical accompaniment. There, music actually enhances the speed with which the work is accomplished. In Western culture, one of the best examples of music’s prosthetic capability can be found among Hebridean weavers. On the isle of Harris, music was clearly an instrument of tweed production in so far as it was used to regulate production processes (Lomax 1968; Nettl 1990:67). Socalled ‘waulking’ songs, for example, were sung while going through the motions of hand-shrinking the cloth, a process that involves pulling and beating the cloth, moving from one end of the bolt to the other. As in aerobics, repetitive movements are inserted into a larger rhythmic structure, a structure that, potentially, can diminish the weaver’s perceived e ort and also helps to organize production’s schedule (how long to handle the cloth for, the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of handling). There are numerous waulking songs in the Hebridean repertoire (far more than there are songs for other stages in the tweed production process, such as raising the pile of the wool). The volume of songs is related to the weavers’ belief that imperfections would result if the same song were sung twice over one piece of cloth. While this belief is often regarded as mere superstition, there may also have been practical reasons for the custom. The songs not only governed the time it would take to deal with a whole piece of cloth but also profiled bodily motions; the music profiled the rhythm and style of movement over the length of the cloth. Altering the song for each repetition back along a length of cloth would ensure that the strength, pace and distance of the moves were varied, that hands did not simply repeat their movements in reverse along the cloth. Varying the songs thus provided a way of distributing movement over the cloth and hence ensuring an even texture in the finished product. In this way, music a ords both production and skill; the worker is able to constitute herself as an embodied, productive agent and to engage in the skilled production of her work in and through reference to the music and the way in which it a ords these things.

Another area of traditional work where music can be seen to provide a prosthetic technology is on the high seas. ‘To the seamen of America, Britain, and northern Europe’, writes Stan Hugill, ‘a shanty was as much

a part of the equipment as a sheath-knife and a pannikin’ (1961:1). Shanties were used for a variety of specialized tasks on board a ship – hauling sails and heaving heavy weights such as the anchor. As with weaving and aerobics, these songs mapped or profiled bodily movement so as to entrain the physical process of work. (‘Blow the man down’, for example, is composed of alternating solo and chorus lines. During the solo line, the crew rested. They pulled or hauled as they sang the refrain, thus engaging in ‘strength’ moves while exhaling.) Hauling songs, such as ‘Blow the man down’, were set traditionally in 6/8 time, whereas heaving songs were typically in 4/4 or marching rhythms. Songs with longer verses, such as ‘Shenandoah’, were used for lengthy tasks. Here, too, superstitions abounded; there were traditional prohibitions against singing these songs on land. Again, there may have been practical reasons for this prohibition; perhaps, sung too frequently out of the physical context of ship work, the songs might have been altered and their a ordances compromised. Perhaps, too, their motivational force would have been numbed through over-familiarity.

As an interesting aside, and in light of the aerobics songs, it is worth mentioning that many of the shanties had ribald lyrics (especially on cargo ships where the consideration of passengers or troops was not at issue – or after passengers had been landed). These works have been described by one folklorist as ‘jovial, forthright, almost wholesome obscenity’ ( Joanna C. Colcord, quoted in Hugill 1961:33). It is interesting to speculate on the interaction between lyrics and music and the e ects of this interaction on generating motivation to keep moving. To be sure, these were no more lewd than the lyrics to many aerobics numbers, whose quasi-pornographic titles are legion. Certainly, both in aerobics and on the high seas, it would seem that music’s role as a prosthetic technology involves much more than rhythm and physical entrainment, much more than the synchronization of movement. To say this is to suggest that bodily agency is not purely physical or mechanical; arousal, motivation and emotional orientation are all crucial to physical agency. Thus music a ords bodily agency in at least two ways. First, particular types of movement are a orded by music’s ‘primary significations’, as Middleton terms it (discussed above), through the musical structures that profile movement and lodge it within larger structures that in turn may also a ord pleasure in their completion and that help actors to locate their movements within wider schemes. An explanation for this is that this more overtly physical level applies to the neonatal infants discussed in the first part of this chapter. Secondly, music also a ords subject positions, and so generates emotional stances and scenarios associated with particular physical forms – sentimentality, romance, anger, rage, calculation and so

emotional agency as it is configured and reconfigured within these enclaves as di erent states of being (throughout the aerobic grammar, as illustrated in these quotes describing di erent modes of military agency) is by no means atypical of the way in which agency is configured across social time and space in many less formal settings. Music’s role just happens to be made more overt in aerobics and in some aspects of the military where its use is deliberate and in the foreground. But the aesthetic flexibility involved in both these settings can be found in many of the settings of modern life as individuals pass through varied relations and circumstances in institutions, organizations and encounters. Indeed, the aesthetic configuration of subjects is what gives the scenes and occasions of daily life their specificity, their particular forms of order, composed and sustained by acting subjects, whether these be weavers, sailors, soldiers, those taking part in aerobics, or other sorts of social actors.

In chapter 3, the ways in which individuals configure themselves as subjects who act and feel things in relation to music, how music is a resource for producing and recalling emotional states, were considered. In this chapter, music’s link to the body, its role as a prosthetic device of bodily order, has been considered. It should be clear at this stage that these two matters are interlinked. On the one hand, music is a prosthetic technology of the body because it provides a resource for configuring motivation and entrainment, enabling the body to do what, without music, it could not do. On the other hand, the bodily movements that music profiles may lead actors to identify, work-up and modulate emotional and motivational states. For example, marching music may put listeners in mind of bodily states, and in mind of the movements profiled by that music, even when they remain seated. It may, in other words, rouse them because of the movement it implies and, more fundamentally, because it is doing movement in a similar manner, because the materiality of how notes are attacked and released, sustained and projected partakes of similar physical movements and gestures. In music therapy, for example, a therapist may structure group music-making so as to quiet the group and encourage them to listen to and pay attention to each other, deliberately playing with tempo, slowing down and speeding up a drum beat or instigating imitative games to get clients to focus on the movements and musical expressions of others.

Music’s role as a resource for configuring emotional and embodied agency is not one that can be predetermined (because it is a resource that must be appropriated by music consumers). Music is not an objective ‘force’ or a ‘stimulus’, but it is real in its e ects and its specific properties provide mechanisms for achieving those e ects. Music not only a ects how people feel emotionally; it also a ects the physical body by providing

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a ground for self-perception of the body, and by providing entrainment devices and prosthetic technologies for the body. How, then, are these structuring properties of music appropriated within institutions, organizations and situations so as to have organizing e ects on social and embodied action? And how does music work at the interactive level where institutions, organizations and occasions are sustained and reproduced over time? These issues are explored in the following chapter.