ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF SOCIAL CRISES: POSTHUMANIST APPROACHES TO COLLECTIVE AFFECTIVE STATES IN WARTIME MUSIC

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Babeș-Bolyai University / Cluj University Press

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Traditional research methods often struggle to capture embodied, affective, and relational layers of experience emerging during crises such as war. Arts-based research and artistic research offer practice-led epistemologies aligned with posthumanist praxis. This article examines how artistic research can document and transform collective affective states in crisis, using the author’s composition Wartime Reflections II. Resonances as a case study. A practice-led inquiry integrates the score, composer’s notes, and documentary elements (voice messages, textual fragments). The analysis employs “musical lenses” (form, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, polyphony/harmony) and draws on theories of collective affect (Durkheim), anticipatory grief (Rando), resilience (Masten, Ungar), learned helplessness (Seligman), despair (Freud, Kierkegaard), communitas (Turner), and moral elevation (Haidt). The resulting five-part model—Premonition, Resilience, Exhaustion, Despair, Uplift—shows how music functions not only as representation but as method for structuring and sharing crisis experience.

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artistic research , arts-based research , posthumanism , collective affect , resilience , cultural trauma , wartime music

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14637/2483

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Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Musica

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