| Abstract | This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collectivememory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicativeand cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understoodhere as the sonorous communication of bodily affect. By combining and cross-fertilizingthe concept of memory with that of affective experience, our aim is to takea new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory aswell as the crucial role played by affect attunement. As examples, we use interviewsand observations from an on-going research project on the role of music inethnically-based associations in Sweden. In addition, we show how music oftentransgresses the categorical distinctions of collective memory. The main questionswe ask are a) to the extent that there is a difference between music serving as ameans for and as content of collective memory (what the memory is “about”), howcan we account for and explain this difference? and b) how does verbally-narratedcontent relate to the sound of music when it comes to collective memory?
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