Music, Affect and Atmospheres:
Meaning and Meaningfulness in Palauan omengeredakl
Birgit Abels
(University of Göttingen)
Abstract
In this article, I explore facets of the complex musical experience afforded by
omengeredakl, a genre of traditional vocal music from Palau, Western
Micronesia. The concept of atmosphere will lead me to propose a conceptual
distinction between musical meaning(s) and musical meaningfulness as well as
enable an integrated analysis of both. With this, I am pointing at weaknesses in
some of the recent ethnomusicological literature on atmosphere: atmosphere
should not be identified with affect, or looked at as part of a two-stage process in
which affective experience is followed by reflective interpretation. The potential
of atmospheres for the study of music lies precisely in that the concept enables us
to transcend this and other pairs of opposites. Overcoming this binary will allow
us to draw closer to the efficacy of music: after all, the proverbial ‘power of
music’ exceeds the impact of affective experience and discursive meaning.
Introduction
It was a cool and quiet February afternoon in Melekeok,1 with a soft breeze from the east
coming in from the sea. We were sitting under the palm trees, shaded from the sun, and like
all the other women around, 82-year-old Victoria2 was chewing betel nuts. She was pondering
how to respond to the question I had just asked her: How would she describe the musical
genre I had come to research, omengeredakl? A well-known omengeredakl singer, she clearly
did not find it an easy question. I was expecting to hear about the omengeredakl songs she
liked the most, and perhaps the vocal qualities and musical skills she was looking for in
fellow singers, but she had something else on her mind. ‘You know,’ she said slowly after a
while, ‘in omengeredakl, there’s the esbe [a solo part in the vocal ensemble performing the
omengeredakl]. The word esbe is related to mengesb, and it has to do with that lunar
constellation when the moon stands right in the center of the sky. We call [that part of the
vocal ensemble] esbe because its sound is almost like the moon up there…,’ – while talking,
Victoria had begun to wave her left hand in a semicircle, slowing down the gesture and
pointing to the sky as her hand reached the highest point – ‘…and we’re down here.’ Her
hand dropped in her lap again. She continued to chew her betel nut, and, nodding slowly, after
a while she added: ‘But really, we’re all the same.’ A number of the women sitting around us
nodded approvingly, but I was a little puzzled at first by Victoria’s response. Later on, we all
engaged in a conversation about specific omengeredakl songs, talking about the lyrics and
how the voices were supposed to blend in with one another at times but remain discernible at
other times. I asked a couple of questions about the individual parts of the vocal ensemble,
trying to identify the rules for individual voices, and the women answered them patiently for a
while. However, at some point, 80-year-old Oribech seemed to feel that I was completely
missing the point. With a wave of her hand, she laughed and said, ‘Look, [when you’re
singing omengeredakl] you simply know how it’s supposed to feel. Everybody knows. And
when you know that, it’ll make a lot of sense to you. You’ll know what to do.’
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The scene I just described took place at the Melekeok Senior Citizen Center in Palau, Western
Micronesia in 2005. Six women from Melekeok, the Palauan state situated on the eastern
coast of Palau’s ‘big island,’ Babeldaob, had come to talk to me about traditional Palauan
singing groups’ repertoire. They were elders, aged between 70 and 89, and known for their
knowledge of traditional Palauan songs. We listened to historical recordings from the 1960s3
and talked about them. Then, the women would perform a number of songs for me to record,
explain the repertoire they chose, and tell me about the individual songs. Several of the
women made a comment about omengeredakl similar to that of Oribech’s in the previous
paragraph: While they all agreed that its characteristic musical structure and the musical
responsibilities of individual singers were of course central to omengeredakl as a musical
form, omengeredakl performances were supposed to have a certain ‘feel.’ That feel, to them,
was constitutive of omengeredakl as a genre. In other words, the women suggested that the
whole omengeredakl is much more than the sum of its (musical) parts. The ‘indeterminate
quality of feeling poured out into space’ (Böhme, 1995, p. 27)4 that, to Victoria, Oribech, and
the other women, was so crucial to omengeredakl was what made performing it so
meaningful.
This notion of meaningfulness, which is not normally distinguished from ‘meaning’ in music
research, is crucial to the argument I will be presenting below, in which I analyze the layered
meanings my interlocutors found so essential to omengeredakl. I derive the term
meaningfulness from the work of New Phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (cf. Schmitz et al.,
2011). When it comes to music, neither meaningfulness nor meaning are intrinsic to music.
Rather, the experience of either is one way to relate to music. Meaning has been the subject of
a great number of long-standing discussions against the backdrop of a range of intellectual
traditions, including structuralism, semiotics, discourse analysis, and hermeneutics. These
discussions all consider meaning but are subject to a highly restrictive discourse that regards
music as interpretive (e.g. Kramer, 2011, pp. 65ff.): meaning, then, can be hermeneutically
specified, circumscribed, or even described, if only to a certain degree (cf. Goehr, 1993;
Chapin and Kramer, 2009; Kramer, 2001; 2011). Having said this, I do not intend to
essentialize the complex history of theories about musical meaning in music studies and
beyond. But for now, I want to sidestep this history in order to cast light on another facet of
the meaning (i.e., meaningfulness) of music, which does not feature in any of the discussions
of meaning I am familiar with. This meaningfulness, according to new phenomenologist
Hermann Schmitz (2011), manifests atmospherically and as a corporeal impression. In other
words, the musical event’s sonic materiality is transduced, via the felt body, into the shared
feeling usually called an atmosphere. Schmitz characterizes meaningfulness as ‘internally
diffuse’ or ‘manifoldly chaotic’5 (Schmitz, 1990, p. 19). Meaningfulness consists of a ‘whole
gathering of meanings,’ but these meanings are not, or not necessarily, individually
identifiable or describable except in metaphorical terms. Instead, they may be experienced as
atmospheres or themes. Meaningfulness, then, refers to loaded impressions of a whole,
according to Schmitz. These impressions are loaded because they communicate more
meaningfulness than people can ‘tease out using language’ (Schmitz, 1990, p. 19)—in other
words, meaningfulness goes somewhere words cannot follow. We are dealing with
‘something manifold which is tersely closed and detached on the one hand, and
peculiarly internally diffuse on the other: The situations in question are not all
discrete, and hence they cannot be specified, for in the way they relate to one
another it is not always clear which is identical with which and which is different
from which’6 (Schmitz, 2005, p. 104).
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I will explore the philosophical context of this notion of meaningfulness in greater detail
below. Here, it is important to note that meaningfulness is by no means an opposite of
‘meaning’ but one possible manifestation of the meaning of music. If in the North Atlantic
Academy the ‘mind/body problem’ (Crane and Patterson, 2000; Leys, 2011) is still prevalent,
then ‘meaning’ has been associated with ‘mind.’ Meaningfulness, however, leaves the ‘mind’
part of the dichotomy; if we consider the felt body (Leib) to be the nexus between an
atmosphere and an individual, then the felt body is located in between the body and mind and
relates to both. This in-between space is where atmospheres do their work (cf. Vadén and
Torvinen, 2014). Music’s internally diffuse meaningfulness may at times present itself as an
atmosphere that will be experienced with the felt body, leveraging both affective and
interpretative frames but exceeding both by way of its primarily corporeal experiential
quality. The corporeality of atmospheric experiences is contiguous to any contingent
historical and culturally specific interpretative frames. It cannot, however, be equivalent to
affectivity or necessarily occur prior to any and all interpretative frames, as McGraw (2016)
suggests. This highlights an issue with the few texts that have proposed the concept of
atmospheres for use in music studies: the notion of atmosphere has too quickly been conflated
with affect. I believe this issue must be addressed if atmosphere is to become a productive
concept in the study of music. McGraw (2016) suggests that we first process atmospheres
affectively, then interpretatively, implicitly referring to Massumi’s ‘missing half second’ (e.g.
Massumi, 2002, p. 222).7 Both affect and interpretively qualified emotion are involved in
experiencing atmosphere. But I contend that atmospheres refer to an entirely different
dimension of human experience: one that points to the felt body as the site at which musical
meaningfulness is both produced and experienced. This occurs in a way that goes way beyond
affect and interpretation because meaningfulness only comes about in the interaction with
both, as I will argue below. The idea of the autonomy of affect (Massumi, 1995) hinges on the
assumption that external stimuli are experienced in a two-fold process in which content and
intensity are processed separately and successively. For Massumi, they belong to different
orders. While content is linked to a signifying order and hence allows for the verbalization of
the experience, intensity causes bodily reactions (Massumi, 1995, p. 85) that cannot be
articulated in language and remain unactualized. Intensity, for Massumi, is material and
impacts on the narrativization of content but remains obscure itself. In this way, it does not
create meanings but is capable of modifying meanings (ibid.). Intensity, which for Massumi
equals affect (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. xvi), is processed faster than
signified content. Affect, for Massumi, is pre-personal. The distinction between the
materiality of affect and the non-materiality of discursively rendered meaning has led a
number of affect theory scholars working on sound to conclude that sound, and by extension
music, belongs in the order of the affective, and only in that order (e.g. Gilbert, 2004; Shouse,
2005, pp. 5, 12–13; Cox, 2011, p. 157). The striking return of the mind/body divide in these
debates has been critically addressed before, most notably perhaps by Ruth Leys (2011).
Atmospheres can help transcend this rather limiting binary, which does not do justice to the
lived reality of musical experience, as I will show below. McGraw points out important
opportunities that arise when thinking about atmospheres, especially when he speaks about
atmospheric sociality (cf. Abels 2013; 2016) and how the notion of atmospheres ‘holds the
potential for immanent play prior to the comprehension of […] categories [including race,
sexuality and class]’ (McGraw, 2016, p. 142). But atmosphere offers more than just another
twist on the opposition of affect and interpretation. Implicitly addressing a much broader
discourse straddling psychology and philosophy, it has the capacity to open new ideas about
how music can mean things to certain people because it has ‘no object other than the
situation’s own intensity’ (McGraw, 2016, p. 142). In situations characterized by musical
atmospheres, very disparate layers of meaning and meaningfulness coalesce in the experience
of sound.
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The potential for analysis of atmospheres in music studies, then, is that the term allows
scholars to better understand music’s meaningfulness as a specific, and specifically musical,
way in which music means. The value of this lies in that musical atmospheres are indeed the
link to ‘something beyond the representational’ (McGraw, 2016, p. 126) but to some extent
encompass the representational at the same time. The question, then, is not so much what a
particular atmosphere, musical or otherwise, is, but rather what it does, and how we can study
what meaningfulness suggests in a way that is methodologically sound. One thing that makes
atmospheres both notoriously difficult to handle and tremendously interesting for music
research is that there is barely anything predictable about the effects of musical atmospheres.
In the present article, I will attempt to sketch the potential value of atmospheric theory in
music studies. Rather than making a primarily theoretical argument supplemented by
ethnographic vignettes (like McGraw 2016), I choose to discuss that potential in terms of
some of the ethnographic material I have collected in Palau over the course of nearly ten
years, asking what dynamics account for the shared character of the sensation that my
interlocutors reported when we were talking about omengeredakl.
Palau: Palauan Chants as Signs of History
Situated some 800 kilometers southeast of the Philippines, Palau is currently home to a
population of about 21,000. Long before Europeans first discovered the Palauan islands in
1522, Palauans were part of an inter-island trade and communication network, especially with
the islands of Yap, according to linguistic and archaeological evidence (Abels, 2008). In
1686, Francisco Lazcano seized the Palau islands for the Spanish crown, terming them ‘the
Carolinas’. Spain took virtually no action to actually colonize her newly acquired territory,
and missions were not significantly successful until the late nineteenth century.
In 1783, Captain Henry Wilson and the Antelope made the first thoroughly documented
contact between Palauans and Europeans. The Antelope shipwrecked on August 10 that year,
just off Koror Island, which remains the center of the island nation. The Palauans helped
Captain Wilson to build a new ship, named Oroolong, with the Antelope’s remnants. Ever
since the Antelope incident, Europeans maintained a relatively constant presence on the Palau
islands, but did not affect Palauans’ everyday life to any significant degree. This situation
changed when Germany bought Spain’s Western Carolina territory for a bargain in 1899 and
immediately established a colonial government on neighboring Yap with outposts on Palau.
In 1914, at the outset of WWI, Japanese forces displaced the militarily unprepared German
administrative staff in Micronesia and occupied all of Micronesia except Guam. Until WWII,
Japan had been allotted a Class C mandate by the League of Nations. The Japanese presence
profoundly changed Palauans’ lives. A Japanese educational system was implemented, and
Koror, which remains the most populated area of Palau, became not only the administrative
headquarters of the Japanese Pacific territory but also a small metropolis with paved roads,
electricity, movie theaters, and geisha houses by 1940 (Parmentier, 1987; Rechebei and
McPhetres, 1997).
WWII brought massive violence to Palau. The United States had suspected that military
fortifications had been developed in Japanese Micronesia since WWI but did not go on the
offensive in the Southwest Pacific. In 1944, three years after the traumatic experience at Pearl
Harbor, the US Airforce began attacking Japanese military bases and industrial sites in
Micronesia. The Japanese government formally surrendered in September 1945, and the US
Navy became the interim administrative authority until 1947, when the United Nations and
the US signed the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which gave the US full power and
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authority over, among others, the Palauan islands. In the final quarter of the twentieth century,
when the Trust Territory became its present political organization, tiny Palau opted to reestablish her political independence instead of joining the Federated States of Micronesia.
This political status was eventually achieved in 1994, putting an end to nearly a century of
Spanish, German, Japanese, and US colonization––or so the official story goes.
This historical narrative is only one of several stories, for the traditional Palauan
understanding of history is consciously self-referential and all-inclusive. The past is not
different from the present per se; events largely follow a ‘replaying pattern well documented
in myths, chants, and narratives’ (Parmentier, 1987, p. 3). History therefore consists of stories,
and the past may at times be as much a part of the present as the other way around. A number
of traditional musical genres, including omengeredakl, are considered olangch (Pal.
‘mnemonic marker’; ‘external sign’), a part of these stories. Olangch is a complex Palauan
term that semiotician Richard Parmentier translates as ‘signs of history’, further qualifying it
as those ‘representational expressions which, through their iconic, indexical, and residually
symbolic properties, record and classify events as history, that selective discourse about the
diachrony of a society’ (Parmentier, 1987, p. 11). Oral signs of history, including
omengeredakl, have an ‘aura’, argues Parmentier. This aura, which is ‘[…] derived from their
contiguity with the original context [, …] makes these objects appropriate signs of history’
(Parmentier, 1987, p. 3). As such, they are ‘frequently considered to be concrete embodiments
or repositories of the past they record, that is, to be endowed with the essentialized or reified
property of historicity’ (Parmentier, 1987, p. 12). The historicity of signs of history resides in
their specific materiality, and, according to new phenomenologist Gernot Böhme, in the
atmosphere that emanates from that materiality (Böhme, 1995). In the case of omengeredakl,
then, singing is ‘aesthetic labor’ (Böhme 1995, pp. 35ff.), a process in which spaces, people,
objects, and, in this case, cultural practices are given qualities that make them exude
something through their specific material form––something vague and unspecific, perhaps,
but something nonetheless. My analysis of omengeredakl therefore needs to begin with the
intertwining of the sonic materiality and atmosphere in the song. After all, this was what
made Victoria, Oribech and their fellow singers immediately think of grander schemes within
which current musical practices ‘made sense’, as they put it, on that February afternoon in
Melekeok.
In the following, I will determine how omengeredakl, and more specifically, the musical
structures of omengeredakl, produce an atmosphere of historicity. After fleshing out details of
the transductive process in which a material sound event becomes a shared feeling loaded
with meaningfulness, I will take a closer look at the neo-phenomenological notion of
meaningfulness and its usefulness for the study of traditional musics.
Olangch: Omengeredakl’s Suggestions of Motion
Omengeredakl is a group chant.8 The word omengeredakl implies that something is sung in a
loud voice, and it means ‘to begin a song’ in the context of music-making. One singer in the
group inserts spoken interfaces between the formal units of an omengeredakl, usually by
clapping their hands at a certain point, and underlines the lyrics through gestures and dance
movements. Other singers may join in by clapping their hands. While gestural dance may play
a considerable role in the performance of omengeredakl, its importance varies in
contemporary performances. My interlocutor Riosang, who was in his sixties at the time of
our conversation, described the genre as follows:
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[Omengeredakl] are sung by a group: the leader explains the verses, and one person
‘deviates’ from the group, keeping the rhythm. The leader starts the chant, the
‘paddlers’ continue the chant—[the ‘paddlers’ are] the crowd, at least four people—and
then there is the person who departs from the main melody.9
There are Palauan terms for the vocal parts Riosang describes. The melemotem prompts or
‘explains’ the song’s lyrics between the formal parts of the omengeredakl. The meruchodl is a
solo singer who commences the sung section of an omengeredakl. The esbe is the
‘counterpart’ singer (the person who ‘deviates’ from the group’, as Riosang put it).10 The
melikes is the leader of the chorus, and the rokui—Riosang calls them ‘the crowd’ here—is the
chorus itself.11 Melemotem, meruchodl, esbe, and melikes are referred to as the lebuchel, or
the ‘leaders’ (Palau Society of Historians, 2002, p. 21). The primary function of the
melemotem is to remind audiences of the lyrics, which may be lengthy. In omengeredakl, the
lyrics are recited in full by the melemotem between the formal units, before they are sung by
the chorus. Recited and sung lyrics may slightly overlap. The melemotem performs these
lyrics in a number of ways, from ordinary speech to parlando singing. He or she is followed
by the meruchodl, who starts the sung part of the omengeredakl. Melikes means ‘to speak
(i.e., words of song which others will sing in response)’ (Josephs, 1977, p. 163). This word
primarily means ‘to pole (a canoe)’. This metaphor neatly illustrates the function of the
melikés: to guide the ‘crew’ or chorus through the ‘water’ or music.
As mentioned above, esbe, which is related to the Palauan word mengesb, refers to a lunar
constellation in which the moon is positioned in the center of the sky.12 The word esbe also
means ‘to sing “with an especially high-pitched voice” as the only person in the group’
(Josephs, 1977, p. 179). The esbe is an important part of the omengeredakl; it significantly
shapes the musical form and functions as a marker of form in the musical texture, as shall be
seen. If the esbe does not function successfully, however, the piece is still distinguishable to
the Palauan listener as omengeredakl.13 Rokui simply means ‘all of them.’14 In the context of
omengeredakl, it refers to the chorus. The choristers usually join in un à un, as there is no
clear ‘chorus entry’ that demarcates the formal units. Given the tonal characteristics of the
chorus part, this leads to gradual building of a frequency band rather than rapid entry. Across
Micronesia, canoeing metaphors are a popular means to describe the social dynamics of group
actions, and Riosang’s comparison of the rokui with paddlers is revealing in this regard: every
paddler’s position has an important role in safely navigating the canoe, yet the overall safety
of the journey entirely depends on how the group interacts.
In terms of musical form, omengeredakl consist of a flexible sequence of four roughly
standardized structural units and interpolated spoken or recited melemotem passages. These
five elements can be interpreted as the building blocks of omengeredakl. The melodic
progression of the four units (A, B, C, and D) generally follows a scheme that is roughly
uniform throughout the same piece but may differ to some degree among different
performances. In any case, the contours of the phrases are recognizable across different
performances.
Listen to sound example 1
As can be gleaned from the sound example, a very characteristic feature of the tonal language
of omengeredakl is the rendition of the chorus’ part. While the main melodic line serves as a
point of reference for all singers, only one singer typically follows it. The remaining singers,
except the esbe, perform slightly higher- or lower-pitched variations of that line, typically
close to either the main melody’s pitch or a fellow singer’s intonation of the same line. The
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musical result is a thick texture that can be described as a frequency band. The esbe, entering
either roughly on beat with the chorus or with a slight time displacement, adds another vocal
part to the thick musical texture, which usually commences on a pitch spectrum above that
employed by the rokui. In the following, the esbe melody slowly descends in pitch towards
the phrasal ends, while the chorus remains around the established frequency band. Within a
phrase, the esbe and chorus parts slowly converge. As the esbe part draws nearer to the rokui
throughout the course of the musical phrase, it evokes a frequency band with narrowing upper
contours. Usually, two descending melodic esbe phrases occur in each formal unit. In this
regard, the esbe part may be viewed as a quasi-diminution of the chorus’ part, which occurs
solely on the level of musical form and does not affect the (inner) tempo. The end of the first
esbe phrase is an interior phrase conclusion. The final movement of the phrase differs from
this conclusion as the rokui narrows the frequency band. An interior phrase conclusion in
omengeredakl can therefore be identified by the convergence of the contours of the frequency
band and concurrent maintainence of tonal friction generated by a frequency band with stable
contours. In the concluding part of the phrase, the frequency band appears to be narrowed to a
width that is perceived by the listener as a distinct (and consonant) pitch, not a dense
frequency band. In this way, the development of tonal friction serves as a marker of musical
form as it defines the shape of those musical phrases that involve the rokui. Figures 1–3
illustrate this concept, showing the development of spectral density over the course of three
rokui phrases in one omengeredakl recorded by Barbara B. Smith in 1963.15
Sound example 1
Figure 1: Spectrogram of phrase 8 of recording Smith I-2 (sound example 1).
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Figure 2: Spectrogram of phrase 9 of recording Smith I-2 (sound example 1).
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Sound example 2
Figure 3: Spectrogram of phrase 17 of recording Smith I-2 (sound example 2).
All three spectrograms clearly illustrate the final narrowing of the frequency band, which, by
establishing a small plateau of a narrow frequency range at the phrasal end, brings the phrase
to its conclusion. This final narrowing begins around 17’’ in Fig. 1, around 10’’ in Fig. 2, and
around 12’’ in Fig. 3 and sound example 2. The spectrograms also illustrate something else:
the structural parameters that singers focus on in the rokui parts in order to make the
omenegeredakl feel ‘how it’s supposed to feel,’ as Oribech put it. First, there is the
considerable spectral friction within the frequency band that builds up to the final plateau at
the phrasal end. In the case of sound example 2 and Fig. 1, this creates a single suggestion of
motion that lasts for the whole phrase. This suggestion of motion can quite literally be
described as roughly 11 seconds of contraction followed by about 2.5 seconds of expansion.
At 14’’, a brief increase in spectral friction marks the end of the phrase and the suggestion of
motion. In Fig. 2, we can see roughly 10 seconds of contraction followed by about 2 seconds
of expansion, and in Fig. 3, there are 11 seconds of contraction and 3 seconds of expansion.
This process of contraction and expansion is a tangible manifestation of the way in which
individual voices behave both towards another and together. It brings into existence the rokui
(lit. ‘all of them’), the key auditory body of the performance. The emergence of the rokui
requires all singers to contribute to a musical event that occurs only inbetween the vocal parts.
It therefore cannot be analyzed in terms of individuals’ parts. This also explains why Victoria
and Oribech did not deem it relevant to explain the rules for the melodic progression of the
individual vocal parts’ to me. It did not make sense to them to elaborate on that because they
found that clearly, the music could not properly be described in these terms.
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The rokui phrase suggests motion, musically conveying that thickly textured relationality is
the primary structural element in the performance and does not serve as a metaphor but as an
atmosphere. According to Schmitz, it modulates the singers’ and audience’s vital drive with
its continuous oscillation between contraction and expansion, which responds to a stimulus
beyond affect and perception. Paraphrasing anthropologist Charles Hirschkind,16 this
suggestion of movement stirs up ‘latent tendencies of […] response sedimented within the
mnemonic regions of the flesh’ (Hirschkind, 2006, pp. 82f.). Here, the mnemonic regions of
the singers’ felt bodies resonate and remember the Palauan concept of community, which was
developed when the gods created the islands and their societal hierarchy. As mechas (a
respectful Palauan term for elder women, who are considered culture bearers), omengeredakl
singers often consider it their responsibility to pass on the experiential knowledge about such
traditional key concepts through song. As Oribech said to me in a conversation a few weeks
after the one I described at the beginning of this article, ‘we can only sing [to the young
people]’. With that, she meant that some traditional values cannot be fully translated into
words. They require a different medium, in this particular case omengeredakl and the
encompassing felt-bodily experience of Hirschkind’s responsiveness they afford. The
particular notion of community that, as the mechas suggested during our conversations, is
embodied by the rokui, can be traced all the way to the gods and is present throughout
Palauan oral history and mythology. By modulating the felt body’s rhythm of contraction and
expansion, the rokui’s suggestion of motion causes the felt body’s knowledge of this origin
and cultural history of the notion of community to resonate in a diffuse way with the musical
experience of singing omengeredakl. If the musical texture of the rokui phrase exudes a sense
of community, as my interlocutors kept emphasizing, then the spectrograms above show how
this happens: primarily through a modulation of the rokui’s frequency band and its internal
tonal tension. This modulation is a suggestion of movement that, in omenegeredakl, resonates
with Palauan notions of societal structure, community values, spiritual obligations, social
responsibility, and historicity. This resonance is possible because of the confluence of two
historicities: the historicity of these notions themselves and the historicity of a musical genre
that is olangch and as such capable of resounding these notions: omengeredakl. The
materiality of the latter suggests movement. In a traditional context, Palauan listeners’ felt
bodies powerfully experience these suggestions of movement as an atmosphere that is
inseparable from the affective and emotional qualities of the former. This is also why
omengeredakl items will be performed during official events of political nature, if at all
possible: to evoke that shared feeling of belonging to one and the same community.
The esbe part is illustrated as a clearly discernible, two-part melodic line that is ‘poured’ on
top of the rokui’s frequency band. In sound example 2, located in Fig. 3, one can see those
two parts from 2–8’’ and 8–12’’, including the melodic arch of the second esbe part, which
commences around 8’’ and reaches its highest pitch at around 10’’. The women’s use of the
esbe to refer to ‘the moon up there’, together with Victoria’s hand gesture, seems to become
self-explanatory: the uplifting melodic movement that reaches beyond the upper contours of
the frequency band suggests a spatial expansion that links the rokui to a wider sonic space.
But that is not all there is. Beyond the isomorphic metaphor, the esbe further reinforces the
felt bodily experience of the grander frame of reference, that is, the Palauan concept of
historicity that is closely linked to spirituality. This is why the structure of omengeredakl
simply ‘make sense’, in the words of my interlocutors. Palauan spiritually is deeply
intertwined with cosmology and its coming into existence. Throughout Palaun mythology and
oral history, the moon is a central luminary both mythologically and spiritually. Accordingly,
the lunar cycles are the primary markers of time, and these cycles at the same time explain the
structure of Palau’s divinely created societal hierarchy (cf. Parmentier, 1987, pp. 134ff.).
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There reference to the moon in the word esbe, then, is a reference to one of the guiding
principles in the Palauan traditional worldview.
Loudness, related to the modulation of spectral friction, can also be observed in the figures.
Generally, harmonics—appearing in the spectrograms as horizontal lines—tend to have
comparatively constant frequencies, but as can be gleaned from the spectrograms, their
loudness increases proportionally more than that of the lower frequencies. Hence, there is a
greater concentration of acoustic energy in the higher band of the spectral envelope. Due to
the frequency band’s continuous movement of internal pitches—voices constantly shift within
a very close intervallic range—the acoustic result of the phrase is complex, constant
modulation between brighter and darker timbres. These oscillations form another suggestion
of motion that is much quicker and more varied than the suggestions brought about by play
with spectral friction and the distribution of the esbe’s phrases across the rokui part. They also
cause the part preceding the final plateau to become louder, while the final plateau itself,
featuring many fewer oscillations of this kind, is quieter. This emphasizes the largest
suggestion of motion in the rokui phrase: the one marked by spectral friction, which creates
the impression of a frequency band shaped like a melodic arch. In this way, a hierarchy is
established between the various suggestions of motion that unfold simultaneously: the
suggestion of motion brought about by tonal friction marks the formal parts of the
performance, whereas the other suggestions of motion shape the phrase’s inner gestalt.
These musical suggestions of movement (and others) comprise a musical event, the diffuse
meaningfulness of which is made up of layered felt bodily sensations (such as expansion in
space) and remembrances (such as experiencing through the felt body the specifically Palauan
notion of community). It is only through the encorporation of suggestions of motion in the
musical experience of singing omengeredakl that the full meaningfulness of omengeredakl
became tangible to Victoria, Oribech, and their fellow singers. This is why they suggested
they would not be able to ‘explain’ and I would just have to learn (with my felt body) how it
was supposed to feel. As Oribech said, sometimes one can only sing.
Meaningfulness
What, then, is the analytical merit of the term meaningfulness here? New phenomenologist
Hermann Schmitz’s notion of meaningfulness hinges on the definition that feelings ‘are
atmospheres poured out spatially that move the felt (not the material) body’ (Schmitz et al.,
2011, p. 247). Feelings are ‘out there’, in other words, and as atmospheres, they the capacity
of drawing in people who happen to be located in the place inhabited by these feelings. With
this, Schmitz takes a tough stance on what he calls the ‘psychologistic-reductionistintrojectionist objectification’ prevalent in North Atlantic philosophy, which, according to
him, results in ‘the consequent dogma that man consists of body and soul’ but ‘fails in that the
relation of the conscious subject to their private inner sphere cannot be adequately
characterized, even though a number of suggestions are in place’ (ibid.). Trying to overcome
both intellectualistic and mentalistic approaches, Schmitz argues that the felt body (Leib) is
that which a person can sense of herself within the sphere of her material body (Körper),
without falling back on the five senses (cf. Kazig, 2016, p. 3). Looking at the various ways in
which the felt body affords corporeal sensation and, with this, corporeal dynamics, Schmitz
directs his analysis toward the (felt) bodily practices involved in humans’ interactions with
the world. He thinks of the human condition as one that is centrally driven by the ‘vital drive’
(‘vitaler Antrieb’ in the original German). This vital drive involves corporeal ‘expansion’ and
‘contraction’:
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11
‘[…T]he often non-specific, diffusely localised corporeal feelings operate most of the
time in the form of a pulsating rhythm in the felt body constantly oscillating between
corporeal expansion and contraction, regularly at work in breathing. […] Corporeal
expansion is a marked widening of the felt space in the rgion of one’s body, most
notably occurring in states of relaxation. […] The opposite pole of corporeal contraction
is a marked narrowing of the felt body, often in states of sudden, unexpected change to
one’s bodily orientation––such contraction occurs in states of shock, in panic or
moments of great focus and concentration. Usually, expansion and contraction are
dynamically related’ (Schmitz et al., 2011, p. 245).
The felt body, to Schmitz, is highly sensitive to the space around it, and especially to the
spatially ‘poured out’ feeling usually called atmosphere. Its involvement with its surroundings
is ‘both realized and mediated by corporeal feelings that in turn make manifest (disclose)
goings-on in the environment’ (Schmitz et al., 2011, p. 245). These corporeal feelings react to
the environment’s suggestions of motion by expanding or contracting vis-á-vis the world.
This is an immediate, pre-reflective way of intermingling with the world that Schmitz calls
‘self-consciousness without identification [… I]t can be characterized further by noting the
irrevocable ‘mine-ness’ that is stamped upon every experience of a conscious subject’
(Schmitz et al.. 2011. P. 245).
Suggestions of motion, according to Schmitz, are ‘pre-figurations of motion of figures that are
either in repose or motion, or of motions; [these pre-figurations] always exceed the scope of
the motion that may actually be executed’ (Schmitz, 2014, p. 76; translated from the original
German). Suggestions of motion serve as a bridge (Ger. Brückenqualitäten). This facilitates
encorporation and is thus the key to understanding how a specific atmosphere’s musical
suggestions of motion are capable of completely taking hold of people and making them want
to dance and sing along; or, in the case of omengeredakl, of suggesting to them an
encompassing sense of belonging. To participate in this way is a manner of knowing and
relating to the world with the felt body, ‘a mode of thought, already in the act’ (Manning and
Massumi, 2014, p. vii) that takes place in the felt body. Atmospheres do not dictate feelings;
rather, they are spatially present feelings that activate modalities for the (felt) body to align
with the world. These modalities are experienced as musical meaningfulness: the sensation of
everything making sense the omengeredakl singers in Melekeok referred to.
Meaningfulness in music, then, may be experienced as atmospheric suggestions of motion.
This is what happened in the case of the omengeredakl I have discussed above. The key
difference between musical meaningfulness and musical meaning(s) is that the latter are the
result of interpretive techniques attributing meaning, whereas meaningfulness emerges from
their specific forms of articulation (here, omengeredakl singing) and manifests as a corporeal
experience. Still, meaning and meaningfulness are not entirely separate because the
attribution of meaning is always taking place vis-à-vis the (felt) body, as I have shown above.
Their relationship is one of both tension and simultaneity. This is what makes culturally
specific atmospheres such as the atmospheric historicity of omengeredakl possible.
Meaningfulness, then, highlights other facets of the complex ways in which music means:
those that the felt body immediately tunes into and resonates with but that escape interpretive
techniques. The moment music becomes manifest as an atmosphere, it charges situations with
complex meaningfulness. This happens through the experience of music’s distinctive
aesthetics, as Victoria, Oribech, and the other women suggested when they said, ‘[And] when
you know [how you’re supposed to fill in your vocal part], it’ll make a lot of sense to you.
You’ll know what to do’. This statement aligns with anthropologist Karen Nero’s observation
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12
that in Palau, as in much of Micronesia,
‘[…] aesthetic emphasis is on the perfection of the performance rather than the
creation of a lasting object. When perfection is achieved, the thrill of recognition
in the audience fulfills local sensibilities, but translates poorly into academic
discourse’ (Nero, 1999, p. 257).
Conclusion
Like music, atmospheres are a process, not an effect. In experiencing an atmosphere, the felt
body reaches out into its environment and towards other human bodies through the
contraction and expansion of the vital drive, which exceeds the clear-cut boundaries of the
physical body. Therefore, when experiencing a musical atmosphere, felt bodies interact with
the world, which makes the mind/body dichotomy useless as an interpretive tool. Not only do
atmospheres, according to Schmitz, act as a bridge that emphasizes the fleeting connection
between the body and its environment but also they show how the distinction between
attributed meaning and felt experience may well be analytically useful at times, but ultimately
falls short of addressing the lived experience. Lived experience is characterized by the
inseparability of the experiential intensity of discourse and the discursive dimension of feeling
in music. The meanings of suggestions of motion are internally diffuse, many and ambivalent.
Through musical suggestions of motion, some of these meanings resonate with the social and
cultural configurations they encounter; others do not. In order for felt bodies to react to
suggestions of motion, they need to be responsive to them. Whether or not felt bodies are
responsive depends on the social and cultural configurations that are inscribed in them and
within which they move. This emphasizes once more just how deeply intertwined atmosphere
and discourse are in the musical experience. It also underscores that the analytical merit of
atmospheres for music studies is not in the general and the theoretical; atmospheres only
become useful vis-à-vis the particular and the ethnographic.
In the case of omengeredakl, the social and cultural configurations inscribed in the felt bodies
that were responsive to the music’s suggestions of motion included a set traditional values, a
distinctly Palauan notion of history and how it is constituted, and an equally distinctively
Palauan sense of community. The meaningfulness Victoria, Oribech and the other women
found in chanting omengeredakl came about in the resonances between the suggestions of
motion and these various frames the suggestions of motion encountered. These resonances
enable the discursive description of an atmosphere, in this case identifying an atmosphere as
olangch, as well as an experiential qualification of that discursive meaning. The atmospheres
of omengeredakl in general, and of specific omengeredakl performances in particular, have
multiple meanings both for individuals and between individuals because atmospheres are
always internally manifold. To describe the atmosphere of omengeredakl as one of olangch or
even historicity is to single out one of the possibilities afforded by the song. Individually felt
experiences of an atmosphere are always already in conversation with several experiential,
interpretive and affective frames at the same time.
These atmospheric effects resonate in felt bodies as meaningfulness. There, in felt bodies,
meaningfulness emerges from interacting with competing local discourses of musical
meaning and the sensation of affect, thus coming about in between experiential, interpretive
and affective frames. This emergence yields an effect of both intensity and meaning that goes
way beyond the effect these respective frames could possibly yield by themselves. This is
what makes musical meaningfulness a true ‘in-between phenomenon’ (cf. Vadén and
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13
Torvinen, 2014, p. 3). Neither meaning nor meaningfulness are an either/or phenomenon, one
representative and the other not, one material and the other immaterial, one signifying and the
other asignifying. Here, thinking through music with atmospheres can substantially further
important earlier work on (a) musical semiotics (e.g., Turino 2014) by transcending Peircean
categories of signification; (b) entrainment (Clayton et al. 2004), which focuses primarily on
cognitive processes while encorporation describes a type of corporeal communication that
becomes actualized as felt-bodily experience; and (c) music as an affective and aesthetic
agent in everyday life (DeNora 2000), to which it adds a more encompassing perspective.
Atmospheres point us to how the felt body thinks and the mind feels, how thought is affected
and how affective experience reasons. This itself has been amply theorized upon in various
branches of philosophy, most notably perhaps in Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist
somaesthetics (2008). But atmospheres offer a number of concrete analytical tools to us music
scholars, as I have shown above. With this, the notion of atmospheres allows us to draw a
little nearer not so much on what music means to whom, but why and how it means so much
in a specifically musical way.
What thinking with atmospheres offers to music studies, then, is a layered account of meaning
and meaningfulness that cuts across taken-for-granted binaries such as the body (which feels
sensations) and mind (which attributes meaning), or affect and discourse. Atmospheres do not
primarily account for what (all) music may mean to whom, nor do they account for the
intensity with which someone experiences a musical performance. Instead, they allow for an
exploration of the workings of musical meaning(fulness) that sensitizes us to the spectrum of
ways in which music means, and the varying intensities with which meaning may be
experienced. Thinking about atmospheres invites us to look at music-making as cultural
knowledge in action in the sense of Manning and Massumi (2014): as a specifically musical
mode of knowing in which musical experience converges with thinking and feeling. This
occurs in the case of omengeredakl, where chanting amounts to pinpointing what it means to
‘simply know how it is supposed to feel’.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Patrick Eisenlohr for his incisive comments on an earlier version of this
paper, and Barbara B. Smith for her continued support over the years.
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14
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1
February 18th, 2005. In this article, I am drawing on fieldwork I performed in Palau from 2005–2008 and in
2014. All interviews quoted were conducted in Palauan, and all translations are mine.
2
In order to protect their privacy, I refer to my interlocutors by their first name only, foregoing their hereditary
titles.
3
From the Barbara B. Smith collection, a part of which has been published (Koch and Kopal 2015).
4
In the original German, ‘[...] eine unbestimmt räumlich ergossene Gefühlsqualität.’
5
‘Binnendiffus’ and ‘mannigfaltig chaotisch’ in the original German.
6
‘[M]an hat es also mit einem Mannigfaltigen zu tun, das prägnant geschlossen und abgehoben ist, aber doch
eigentümlich binnendiffus: Die vorschwebenden Sachverhalte usw. sind nicht alle einzeln und lassen sich
deshalb auch nicht aufzählen, weil in ihrem Verhältnis zueinander nicht oder nicht in allen Fällen feststeht,
welche mit welchen identisch und welche von welchen verschieden sind’ in the original German.
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7
For a related critique of this division based on empirical evidence, see Sperber and Mercier 2017. Critiquing
the notion of a two-step process in which affect is followed by reflection as outlined above, cognitive scientists
Sperber and Mercier propose instead the idea of a continuum of inferences straddling perception, intuition and
reasoning. Intuitions, for them, are metacognitive: their content is conscious but ‘there is no awareness […] of
the inferential processes that deliver an intuition […] Intuitions are not, however, experienced as mere ideas ‘in
the air’ or as pure guesses. They come with a sense of metacognitive self-confidence that can be more or less
compelling: intuitions are experienced as weaker or stronger’ (p. 66).
8
For a more in-depth description of the genre of omengeredakl, see Abels (2008).
9
Personal communication, 15 February, 2005.
10
There seems to be a tendency in Palau to assign the esbe part to exceptionally high-pitched male voices.
Although there are few such voices, these men are highly sought after. David, personal communication, 19
January, 2006.
11
Osamu Yamaguti in 1965 recorded a slightly different Palauan terminology. According to him, the mesuchokl
prompts or ‘explains’ the lyrics between the formal units of the omengeredakl; mengíder is the ‘start-off’ that
commences the bóid; the meliikes is the leader of the chorus; and the mengesbch is the ‘counterpart singer’ (see
Yamaguti 1967). This terminology was not approved of by my interlocutors in 2005 and 2006, and they
proposed the one I give here instead.
12
In English, the term also means ‘to sing out of tune,’12 but in Palauan it does not have this negative
connotation, as will become evident in the description of the omengeredakl’s tonal language I am giving below.
13
In contemporary omengeredákl, the esbe part is sometimes omitted, typically for lack of skilled singers.
14
See Josephs 1977, 190, 293.
15
Barbara B. Smith performed fieldwork in Micronesia, including Palau, in 1963. Her recordings are stored at
the Pacific Collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Library. A copy is held by the Belau National
Museum in Koror, Palau. Parts of the Smith recordings have been published as a CD (Koch and Kopal 2015).
16
Charles Hirschkind refers here to the affective intensities of the body rather than the responsiveness of the felt
body. In keeping with the discussions of affect presented by Deleuze/Guattari, Massumi, and others, McGraw
(2016) and Torvinen and Vadén (2014) assume that affect is sensed before interpretive frames are leveraged. I,
however, contend that both processes may happen at the same time and interrelate.
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