Rethinking musical cosmopolitanism as a visceral politics of sound

This chapter is about musical interventions in public space and their role in the visceral politics of collective life. The ubiquitous presence of music across the spaces and situations of everyday life makes it a fruitful terrain for exploring the constitution, maintenance and regulation of the nature of social situations. The chapter draws on the ongoing conceptualization of a ‘musical cosmopolitanism’ which has been debated considerably across the field of musicology, and puts it in relation with work in human geography which has engaged with music and sound from the perspective of Non-Representational Theory. This results in a rethinking of cosmopolitanism in relation to sound and music, which understands the political potential of music as realized within the mundane goings-on of everyday spaces through the concept of visceral politics, as one way that music might matter in the transformation of social situations.