Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo [Paperback]

Sense and Sadnessis an innovative study of music modality in relation to human emotion and the aesthetics of perception. It is also a musical story of survival through difficulty and pain. Focusing on chant at St George's Syrian Orthodox Church of Aleppo, author Tala Jarjour puts forward the concept of the emotional economy of aesthetics, which enables a new understanding of modal musicality in general and of Syriac musicality in particular. Jarjour combines insights from musicology and ethnomusicology, sound and religious studies, anthropology, history, East Christian and Middle Eastern studies, and the study of emotion, to seamlessly weave together multiple strands of a narrative which then becomes the very story it tells. Drawing on imagination and metaphor, she brings to the fore overlapping, at times contradictory, modes of sense and sense making. At once intimate and analytical, this ethnographic text entwines academic thinking with its subject(s) and subjectivities, portraying events, writing, people, and music as they unfold together through ritual commemorations and a devastating, ongoing war.

Preface

Telling history in motion
Dismantled machinery
Illusive empowerment

Part One
Modes of Thinking

Chapter I
Emotion and the Aesthetic

[Snapshot]
Emotion and the Economy of Aesthetics
The emotional economy of aesthetics
A living music
Central marginality
Music complexity
Mode as metaphor
Understanding through imagination
A dynamic outlook on method
[Snapshot]
A scholarship of emotion
Discursive subjectivities
Scholar(ship) and subject(s)
Situationality as liminality
Aestheticizing the emotional

Chapter II
Edessan Christians in Hayy al-Suryan

Unique sounds, against historic odds
Syriac liturgy and theology
Modern Christianity with ancient roots
Begging pardon:Shubqono
Forty times Forty Bows
Early asceticism fló&