Before Music Takes Shape: Atmospheric Knowledge and Musical Experience in Havana

Where is music located: in a score, in sounding performance, in listening, or in the relations that allow any of these to become musically consequential? This article develops that question through a dialogue between Antoine Hennion's sociology of mediation, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr's Atmospheric Knowledge (2025), and ethnographic materials from long-term research on art music in Havana. Atmospheric Knowledge offers a powerful account of how bodies know by being affected: through the felt-body, environmentality, inframodality, latency, and sonic multimodality. Rather than treating such concepts as a framework to be applied to Cuba, I use them to reopen ethnographic scenes in which music exceeds the sound presently audible. These include a Havana resident who described herself as "bathing in music"; musicians whose bodily responses to the sea migrated into performance and composition; collective taxis in which bass, engine vibration, heat, and street noise formed a shifting sonic field; power cuts and equipment failures that made the material conditions of listening perceptible through their disappearance; a broken double bass that a teacher refused to call an instrument; a conducting class in which sounding notes were judged as musically absent; and musicians whose bodies were moved by instruments that were not physically present. I argue that music takes shape through relations among sound, bodies, objects, infrastructures, institutions, memory, and anticipation, but that these relations also loosen, break, and reappear at other distances and times. "Before music takes shape" therefore names not a chronological stage prior to music, but an analytic position that delays closure long enough to notice what moves, stops, persists, and remains unformed around the moment in which something becomes recognizable as music.