‘Something of You that You Couldn’t Tell Me with Words’: Music, Affect, and Social Change in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star and Emma Trevayne’s Coda
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/pecl2015vol23no2art1115Keywords:
music, affect, social change, Coda, Emma Trevayne, Gregory Maguire, I Feel Like the Morning StarAbstract
‘Music’, laments eighteen-year-old Anthem in Emma Trevayne’s Coda (2013), ‘used to be a voice against injustice. And now it is the injustice’ (p. 89, emphasis in original). The capacity of music to change people’s psychological and physiological states is a major part of how the dystopian authorities in the post-disaster society into which Anthem was born keep control over their citizens. This ability that music has to influence people individually or as a group is also an important mechanism, however, in the overthrow of those same authorities. Music as a tool for facilitating action against injustice is also explored in Gregory Maguire’s I Feel Like the Morning Star (1989), from which the quotation in the title of this paper is taken. Various real-world examples also show how music has been closely entwined with social revolution, such as in the overthrow of British monarch James Stuart in the seventeenth century (see Harol 2012, p. 583), the twentieth-century civil rights movement in America (see Friedman xv), the 2011 toppling of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and also the removal from authority of Husni Mubarak in Egypt (see LeVine 2012, p. 794). Anthem’s statement about music as a voice against injustice invites the reader to see the young man’s struggle against the repressive Corporation as part of a long line of revolutions in which music has played a major role. Both I Feel Like the Morning Star and Coda show how tonal-rhythmic patterns coded by a given culture as ‘music’ (see Elliot 2000, p. 85) can inspire social and individual change by bringing people closer to a sense of who they intuit themselves to be and by facilitating intrapersonal and interpersonal communication at a level deeper than words, which positions those involved to challenge the stultifying and life- threatening dystopia in which they live.
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