The DFF-financed research project "Slingrer ned ad Vestergade: Musico-emotional styles in Aarhus during the long 1970s" runs from 2024 to 2026.

Postdoc Silke Holmqvist is employed for the full period while Professors Bertel Nygaard and Morten Michelsen contribute at regular intervals. Stud. mag. Mette Marie Dissing Seerup is employed as a research assistant.

The project suggests and develops musico-emotional styles as a historical category. It explores the intense proliferation of emotional practices in Western pop and rock music culture during the ‘long 1970s’ as they emerged in particular, localized forms in and around the music venues of Aarhus, Denmark’s ‘second city’.

The project stands out from previous studies by analysing not just the music as such, nor merely discourses of music and/or emotion. Rather, it emphasises the ways socio-culturally shaped spaces (streets, buildings, interiors etc), rhythms (in musical practices, everyday life and the disruptions of social norms) and bodily practices (dancing, kissing, fighting etc.) merged in historical experiences of musico-emotional styles. At the same time, the project explores the ways musico-emotional styles negotiated social norms. Drawing on categories of musicking and emotional styles, the project intervenes in the history of emotions and music studies.

Read detailed project description.