Hartmut Rosa 2019. Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press.
Hartmut Rosa 2024. Akselerasjon og resonans. Artikler om livet i senmoderniteten. Cappelens upopulære skrifter.
Music, Resonance, and the Good Life
At the previous European music therapy conference in Aalborg a few years ago, I picked up Hartmut Rosa's book "Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World." In the weeks after returning from the conference, I found myself reading this extensive book for several hours each day. I was, as Rosa would say, touched by the book. It created a resonance within me. I continued to work with Rosa's ideas and incorporated them into my understanding of the connections between music and quality of life. The book changed my view of the value of music; it offered a societal understanding of art's potential to give us a good life. Now, some of Rosa's essays and articles have also been published in Cappelen's unpopular writings.
Hartmut Rosa has described in his analyses of societal development how accelerating developments in economy and technology create a frenzy and stress in the population, which easily leads to poorer quality of life. Societal development creates conditions that, in other words, contribute to cutting us off from the opportunities to live a good life. As a sociologist, he sheds light on structural and socially created conditions while showing how this can affect existential conditions for creating a good life.
What Rosa calls "dynamic stability" is about us needing to increase our resources, grow more, to keep up with a development aimed at creating stability in the economy. Things are supposed to go faster and faster. We always have to do a little more than the previous year. It's like walking down an escalator going up that gets a little faster every year. If we stop for a moment, we're back to the starting point. The key is to keep up. This increasing acceleration occurs both economically, socially, technologically, and culturally. Rosa describes a logic that shows that growth requires more growth and that we are caught in a kind of loop where we are forced to increase the pace, produce more, live faster, etc. This creates a form of alienation, an experience of never quite measuring up, it sets the stage for burnout.
Acceleration is a characteristic of modernity – faster transportation, communication, and production tools, more frequent cultural changes characterize modern society. We talk about time pressure and multitasking. Constantly evolving technological advancements mean you have to stay updated all the time. New apps, new ways to buy tickets, banking services, word processing programs, vital services that require you to be on your toes. Instead of prioritizing what we consider most important, we do first what is most urgent. The faster we live, the less time we feel we have.
A high pace is not inherently negative, says Rosa, only when it leads to alienation. This increasing acceleration creates alienation. This is experienced as a relation to the world that is silent, cold, rigid, and where we fail to establish a connection. Alienation involves a harmful experience of being separated from individuals and situations. These thoughts are well described in the articles reproduced in the recently translated "Acceleration and Resonance" (Rosa, 2024), which also contains a well-written and informative introduction by Aurora J. Evenshaug.
The answer is "resonance" If acceleration is the problem, then the answer is "resonance," Rosa writes right at the beginning of the book with the same title. Resonance occurs when a vibrating object causes another object to vibrate, but at its own frequency. For Hartmut Rosa, resonance is a form of 'relationship to the world,' where the individual and the world meet and transform each other. This happens through being affected and touched by what meets us. The response we give is based on the individual's inner interests and expectations of being able to influence the encounter.
Resonance is not something one can bring about by will, something one can order; the phenomenon is not instrumental. Rosa says that a characteristic is uncontrollability (German: Unverfügbarkeit). Resonance is thus about something unpredictable. I am reminded of Martin Buber, who speaks of a "encounter" (with art or other people) that comes to us "by grace."
Three axes
Rosa distinguishes between three "resonance axes" or "connecting lines" to the world. He also calls these "resonance spheres" that create relationships to the world. The first axes or connecting lines are horizontal and concern resonance possibilities related to family, friends, and politics. This concerns human relationships, experiences of community. Here, our sociability is given a voice, the importance of meaningful relationships that arise in interaction with other people. Without such, human life would be incomprehensible and without solidarity and identity.
The next resonance axis is diagonal, and here we find objects, work, school, sports, and consumption. These form a connection between horizontal and vertical lines by pursuing purposive practices. The relationship is particularly evident by acting in a goal-oriented manner. Here, it is the objective world of "things" that 'finds a voice.'
Examples of the vertical axes are found in our relationship to religion, nature, art, and history. These have a status as "higher" and transcendent spheres of engagement. This, for example, in relation to God(s), the cosmos, time, or eternity. Here, our specific longings for something offering transcendence in everyday life are expressed.
Resonance in music
Rosa gives music a central place in the resonance sphere of art, nature, and religion. In contrast to many previous sociologists within the critical tradition (Frankfurt School), he does not create a distinction between classical music and other genres. For Rosa, all genres are equally important in creating a resonance within us.
Now, prolonged interest does not necessarily entail fully positive experiences of resonance. Rosa sees a danger in becoming too preoccupied with increasing our resources, so that this becomes a goal in itself. Or there is a danger in our interests becoming instrumental, devoid of intrinsic value, but cultivated only to achieve completely different goals.
Many music therapists have surely had a shifting relationship with their own instrument. I myself developed ambivalent feelings towards the piano, especially related to studies leading to becoming a piano teacher. Becoming a piano pedagogue was for me a means to earn money to complete studies in psychology. It required many hours of practice every day for several years. A very instrumental approach, a tough teacher, an exam to certify, a limping motivation. Such conditions are not conducive to creating resonance. Instead, one is in danger of cutting out an axis that does not provide an answer, is silent, does not offer dialogue.
Such an instrumental attitude is a form of resource maximization that is not always for the best. When this becomes a goal in itself, it can hinder a good life. So, it's not important how much one masters, how much money one has (beyond a certain level), how many friends or grandchildren one has, how many TV series one manages to consume, how skilled one is in others' eyes, etc. Rosa is good at describing how a modern life easily creates a situation where maximizing one's own goods becomes a goal in itself. Something that easily creates a feeling of always wanting more, always being dissatisfied, with the risk of experiencing a lost relation to the world.
I most enjoyed accompanying others, or the interaction and friendship in a recorder quartet I participated in for several years. To become a piano teacher, I had to play classical music and had poor socio-musical prerequisites for immersion in this genre, even though I had great experiences listening to especially Brahms, Debussy, J.S. Bach, and Stravinsky.
But I was most drawn to jazz, had friends in the musical world, played in bands, and listened to jazz since I was fifteen. It was and is within jazz that I have the strongest resonance axis. It is here that I have invested most time, money in records, CDs, and downloads, mostly of jazz piano trios. This means that such genre specialization, which is surely not uncommon, is a good investment in creating a strong resonance string.
In high school, I enjoyed playing chord games and dreaming of a life as a lounge pianist. I gradually liked free improvisation. The encounter with music therapy, Paul Nordoff, and Clive Robbins, opened up access to the vertical and horizontal resonance spheres anew. Like many other music therapists have told, the relationship with music took on another relational dimension in the encounter with music therapy. In choosing the profession of music therapist with improvisation as a working method, I found new joy in freely improvising on the piano with children. The work could become a new resonance sphere.
Conclusion
Personally, we should consider what strengthens the resonance axes, identify them, deepen them, invest in them, set aside time - and consider that time is an important factor along with engagement. Rosa's book Resonance is full of examples of activities from the three resonance axes that offer resonance. For music therapy, this theory opens up for a deeper and sociologically anchored application of music to promote meaning and quality of life.
This text is a reworked version of a presentation I gave at the conference "The Good Life" organized by Marie Skånland at Ansgar University College in 2022. Rosa's theory also had an important place in the book "Towards a Sociology of Music Therapy: Musicking as a Cultural Immunogen" from 2020.
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